Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age by Helen Dunstan

Author:Helen Dunstan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

5. The Early Qianlong Liquor Prohibition

Texts 5.B to 5.E present dissenting views about a piece of well-intentioned classicism (advocated in Text 5.A). The famous Neo-Confucian scholar Fang Bao (1668–1749) was moved by scriptural precept, historical precedent, and the economic problems of his day to argue for a ban on distilled liquor preparation in the greater part of northern China. His paternalist concern was that “wasting” grain by turning it into spirits aggravated the risk of famine. In 1737, the Qianlong emperor accepted his ideas and promulgated such a ban, which he later supplemented with a ban on yeast-making. The provincial governors-general and governors generally reported favourably on their endeavours in implementing these new measures, while Fang Bao pressed for their extension. The implementation reports are, of course, revealing about the political culture of the early Qianlong period, but they are somehow less interesting than the criticisms of those who were dissatisfied with Fang Bao’s antiquarian common sense.1 In particular, the protests of Sun Jiagan (Texts 5.B, 5.D, and 5.E) are remarkable for the originality with which they mix expressions of market consciousness with conventional rhetoric about the risk of petty tyranny by civil service underlings.

Prohibition of liquor distillation was not an entirely new policy when the recently acceded Qianlong emperor decided on firm action. Already in 1641, before the conquest, the Manchus had enacted a rule against liquor sales in time of dearth. Subsequently, distillation bans, applying to the Shengjing area and/or parts or all of Zhili, were reasserted several times, especially in bad years, before and after 1700. There is some evidence that the Yongzheng emperor was interested in extending prohibition to other provinces, while text 5.A (c. 1720) mentions a “comprehensive ban on wine distilled from glutinous setaria.”2 While the position immediately before 1737 was probably that liquor distillation was theoretically illegal, even in years of good harvests, what seems to have been lacking was determination to enforce perennial prohibition rigorously.

This was what dismayed Fang Bao. Probably in c. 1720, this moralist from Central China, aged about fifty and a scholar in residence to the Kangxi emperor, wrote a letter (Text 5.A) to the Manchu Xu’yuanmeng (“Xu Dieyuan”), president of the Board of Works. Xu’yuanmeng was wont to consult Fang about the explication of the three canonical books on ritual (Yili, Zhouli, and Liji), which were Fang’s special field as a scholar.3 In Text 5.A, Fang gave his pupil all the scriptural grounding he could have desired for the policy initiative of totally prohibiting all private liquor manufacture. He cited The Officers of Zhou (i.e., the Zhouli, “The Rites of Zhou”) three times to justify the idea that preparation of the small amount of wine required for ritual purposes should be a state monopoly, that the state itself should distribute wine to the population, and that less wine was actually needed for ritual purposes than was commonly assumed. Besides three further allusions to The Book of Rites, Fang also quoted the line from the Mencius about the sage’s role of making pulse and grain “as freely available as fire and water.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.