Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples: A Cultural Cartography of Empire

In 1751, the Qianlong emperor commissioned an illustrated roster of some 300 ethnic groups living around the periphery of his direct rule, including those as far away as Switzerland and England and a couple of hundred living in places that are parts of today’s China, such as Gansu, Guangdong, and Yunnan Provinces. He viewed them as tributaries, peoples who bowed to the universal moral authority of the Chinese ruler. This beautiful book, skillfully translated from a set of scrolls in the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, reproduces extraordinary color portraits of a male and female figure of each group in native costume and provides a short description of each group’s distinctive way of life. The A’zhe Luoluo from Yunnan Province, for example, “are foolish, but diligent. . . . Men go barefoot. Women wear shoes. At weddings they use cattle as bride price. The groom carries the bride home on his back by himself.” Implicitly indexing the groups as more or less acculturated into Han Chinese culture, the scrolls expressed the assimilating mission of Confucian China as it gradually absorbed most of the groups into the dominant Han ethnicity. Today, China has only 55 officially recognized “national minorities,” including the Tibetans and the Uyghurs, and it is working hard to eliminate what remains of their distinct cultural identities.