Lawrence Zhang is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and author of Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China, published by Harvard University Asia Center and recipient of the 2024 AAS Joseph Levenson Prize (pre-1900) honorable mention.
To begin with, please tell us what your book is about.
The book studies the system of juanna, which I call office purchase. It allowed individuals to buy appointments and titles in the Qing government, many of whom went on to serve in those positions. By using a combination of government documents, a buyers’ list of over 11,000 individuals, family genealogies, and other local sources, I argue that purchase was an integral part of elite status preservation strategy. Families with official backgrounds tended to pursue multiple avenues for securing positions for their children, and purchase was an important component of this process. The academic discourse on personnel selection, at least for the Qing, has been overly focused on the civil service examinations. Our discussion of ideas of social mobility and meritocracy for this period is largely a product of the debate coming out of Ho Ping-ti’s seminal book Ladder of Success in Imperial China. Scholars have focused on the implications of his study, which only looks at examination candidates, while I think we are missing the bigger picture by only talking about the exams as they constituted a minority of the total population of Qing officials.
What inspired you to research this topic?
I was a second-year grad student looking for a topic, and while discussing some ideas with my advisor Philip A. Kuhn, he suggested I go read this book from a scholar I had never heard of titled Qingdai juanna zhidu (The system of office purchase in the Qing dynasty). I read it that day, and was astonished that I know next to nothing about this institution. At first I thought I was alone in this, but then in conversations with others it turns out that almost everyone know very little about it—vague ideas, misconceptions, etc. It didn’t help that the book I had read was the last monograph published on the subject—and it was from 1950. As something that cut across so many layers, I felt that this was a topic worth investigating, and it turned into my dissertation.
What obstacles did you face in this project? What turned out better and/or easier than you expected it would?
Sources were a major issue. They were both abundant and scarce at the same time. Abundant in the sense that they are everywhere, scattered in the historical record so that wherever I looked there are traces of purchase. However, to combine them into a coherent whole was more difficult, as it also lacked a central repository of documents—the bureau responsible for conducting sales had a fire in the late Qing, which may have destroyed a lot of the documents. The archives, for example, ended up being less useful than I had hoped but I was lucky to find other things that took its place.
What is the most interesting story or scrap of research you encountered in the course of working on this book?
So there are two of these in my book. The first one is that little kids had offices bought for them by their parents or grandparents—the book cover is an example. In my data there are little children as young as one year old having offices purchased for them, and it wasn’t out of place at all for a toddler to hold an office higher than, say, a county magistrate. This seems absurd now, but as I argue in the book, it made sense in their context.
In one story there’s also a sense of desperation, since these sales of offices were conducted in rounds that had cutoff dates. Missing it meant getting in line for the next date, which would set you back in the queue for offices. So in one case an official asked his subordinates for loans so he could pay for an office for his son to make the deadline. Asking for loans from a subordinate was against the rules, but he risked it to try to secure the position for his son. I think in many ways parents today can probably still echo the desperation he felt.
What are the works that inspired you as you worked on this book, and/or what are some other titles that you recommend be read in tandem with your own?
I already mentioned Ho Ping-ti’s work, which in a way I’m responding to. There’s also a rich literature of exam-focused books that deal with issues with the institution’s relationship with meritocracy, such as Benjamin Elman’s two books and Iona Man-Cheong’s work.
Finally, what has captured your attention lately—as a reader, writer, scholar, professor, or person living in the world?
After having spent more than a decade on this topic, I have been working on a project wholly unrelated to Qing government documents—a study of the transformation of the tea industry in Taiwan over the course of the twentieth century, with a focus on skills and technical knowledge transmission. I do, however, plan to continue working on aspects of office purchase that I didn’t have time/space for in one book. There is still a lot that have not been researched or discussed, so I look forward to doing that as well hopefully in the not so distant future.