"Mirror image of the late Qing Dynasty Officialdom"
Author: Qiu Jie
Edition: Social Sciences Literature Press
May 2021
Tribute
In the archives of the History Department of Sun Yat-sen University, a rarely asked diary is stored. Its owner, Du Fengzhi, a prefecture and county official in the late Qing Dynasty, only began his career at the age of 50, and for more than ten years, he truly recorded the official situation in the late Qing Dynasty from the private perspective of a local bureaucrat. Qiu Jie had a unique insight, and after a long period of in-depth reading, he fully excavated the value of this diary. Why did local officials in the late Qing Dynasty often deviate from the royal law to make judgments? How do officials interact on a daily basis, top to bottom? Is "imperial power" "not down to the county"? In view of this series of important issues, "Mirror Images of The OfficialDom of the Late Qing Dynasty" fills in many key facts and details that have not been fully paid attention to by predecessors on the basis of existing research on the history of the political system and legal system of the Qing Dynasty.
We salute Qiu Jie, who used his wisdom to contribute valuable new historical materials and new perspectives to an important field of historical research, and even more to pay tribute to him as a historian who practiced the research spirit of "sitting on the bench for ten years", and poured nearly twenty years of painstaking efforts into a work. We pay tribute to "Mirror Image of the Late Qing Dynasty Officialdom", which is a micro-knowledge, and uses the vivid daily life of grass-roots officials to reflect the political ecology of the late Qing Dynasty and its hidden worries. It looks at the living people in the abstract system and writes a "living institutional history", which shows a strong humanistic care.
Thank you
I am grateful to learn that this book won the "2021 Beijing News Annual Reading Recommendation". To a certain extent, this book is a by-product of my annotation of Du Fengzhi's diary. The diary has many details of the operation of the late Qing Dynasty officialdom that the academic circles did not pay much attention to in the past, and I wrote down these details or stories by hand, and later wrote this book. After the book was published, it was encouraged by many colleagues who studied Qing history and modern history. Several well-known book reviewers have made very professional and pertinent reviews. Someone also pointed out some of the things that needed to be improved in the book, and I thanked and admired it.
The publisher's editor told me that the book had been reprinted twice since it was published. Not many academic works were reprinted twice in the year of publication, and many people were willing to read the books I wrote, and of course I was happy as an author, but I also knew that maybe not because of the good writing, but because the content of Du Fengzhi's diary was really attractive. I hope this book will remind more researchers to pay attention to Du Fengzhi's diary.
--Qiu Jie
Edited | Wang Qing
Proofreading | Xue Jingning