Today’s Communist Party sees value in presenting itself as heir to a uniquely wise—and distinctively Chinese—civilisation that can be traced back 5,000 years
Chaguan was surprised, then, to hear an official historian praise Qianlong in terms that would make a Politburo member blush. The scholar, Wang Xudong, heads the Palace Museum in Beijing, as the Forbidden City is formally known. During a government-organised press tour, Mr Wang described past emperors as hard-working statesmen who “wanted their empire to be stable and prosperous”.
Tributes to favoured emperors are not new. As the party replaced Maoist fervour with Chinese nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s, Qianlong was rehabilitated as a nation-builder. Through a mix of diplomacy, wars and campaigns to crush far-flung rebellions, Qianlong added vast territories to his empire, notably in Tibet and Xinjiang.
On August 24th Mr Xi, the party’s supreme leader, visited a site dear to Qianlong, an imperial summer retreat at Chengde, in cool, wooded hills north of Beijing. Mr Xi toured Puning Temple, a Buddhist complex built in a mix of Tibetan and Han Chinese styles. That architecture celebrates Qianlong’s crushing of a revolt by Mongol nomads who practised Tibetan Buddhism.
Chaguan visited the museum a few days later. It presents Qianlong as the epitome of a virtuous, Chinese ruler, whether that meant honouring ancestral rites by holding autumn hunts, or introducing policies to “unify all ethnicities”. There are reproductions of his Mandarin-language calligraphy and images of him in Chinese imperial robes. In fact Qianlong was a member of the Manchu nationality, like all Qing emperors. The Qing won the throne by toppling a Chinese dynasty, the Ming.
The exhibit in Chengde is a puzzle. Important enough to draw Mr Xi, it rests on easily debunked history. The solution lies in another wall sign, which praises Chengde as a monument to the Qing dynasty’s “historic feats” of “pacification and consolidation of the border regions”. Two intensely political ideas lurk in that scholarly statement.
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