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Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Episode 302, Palace of Mirrors

Today we begin in a new chapter of our exploration of Qing China under the Qianlong Emperor,

a ruler who, by the second half of his reign, was not merely defending a dynasty or overseeing a government.

He was designing his legacy with eternity as his intended audience.

In the aftermath of the major conquests that had marked the first two decades of his rule,

including the extermination of the Jungar Confederation in Central Asia, Tianlong turned his attention

more inward. His vision of Empire had never been solely military.

Even in the midst of his grand campaigns, he'd been planning something far more ambitious

to establish an all-encompassing architecture of power, one that fused ideology, culture, ritual,

administration, and memory into a single, coherent image

of Qing supremacy. By the 1770s, Chen Long's empire was the largest centralized polity

on earth, as population, already spiraling to over 300 million, surpassed that of all of Europe combined.

Its court was the most elaborately bureaucratized in Chinese history, and at its helm

set an emperor who believed that he had achieved and must now immortalize a moral order

unmatched in human history. What would come to pass over the course of his later decades of rule

was not simply the continuation of good governance. Rather, it was something closer to a campaign

of symbolic consolidation, a bid to define what China was, who it belonged to, how it remembered its own past, and what it would permit

going into the future. We'll now explore the beginnings of this project, a campaign not

of swords and soldiers, but of scholars and scrolls, and maybe even more dangerous for exactly

that reason.

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