The most controversial emperor in the history of the Qing Dynasty, the Kangxi of the "Inner Saint" and the "Outer King"

The Kangxi Emperor was the emperor who left the most personal opinions in Chinese history. (Schematic/Academy)

The Kangxi Emperor was the emperor who left the most personal opinions in Chinese history. There are many of his annotations in various chapters, sometimes written in Manchu and sometimes in Chinese.

Manchu was his native language, and Chinese was what he learned later, so he was particularly concise and straightforward when using Chinese, no rambling, no nonsense, and no polite decoration. Whether it was the Kangxi Emperor himself writing the imperial approval, or someone else transcribed it for him, it was easy to judge whether it was his own opinion from the tone alone.

The sinologist Jonathan D. Spence 1936-) has a peculiar book called "Emperor of China", in which the Chinese emperor is Kangxi, and the most peculiar feature of this book is the use of the first person, "I" from beginning to end.

Is this "I" Shi Jingqian? No, it was the Kangxi Emperor. So is this book a novel? Otherwise, how could he resurrect the Kangxi Emperor and write in the first person? Shi Jingqian was not the Kangxi Emperor, and from a historical point of view, how could he write a book with the Kangxi Emperor as a first-person account?

Normally not, but Shi Jingqian's record highlights what makes the Kangxi Emperor most unique from the perspective of historiography and historical materials. Almost every paragraph in the book does have the Kangxi Emperor's first-person historical data as a basis, not out of Shi Jingqian's speculation or imaginary fiction. What Shi Jingqian did was to classify and unify these complex and rich historical materials according to Kangxi's life.

The first chapter of the book is "Travel", which is mainly about safari, which has a very important position in the life of the emperor, because it is necessary to maintain the national style from the northeast, and it is also closely related to military training and military operations. The second chapter goes on to describe how the Kangxi Emperor ruled substantively and interacted with his ministers. The final chapter explores and presents his relationship with many of his sons, which is related to the succession of the throne and power.

It is difficult to find how many historical figures, let alone emperors, can be presented in the first person in such a way, clearly showing how rich the relevant historical materials of the Kangxi Emperor are. And to cut into his life so closely, it is even more convincing to see that he had a sincere passion for knowledge and a far greater interest in the learning of the sages than the Confucian lecturers who taught him.

This was important for the rule of the Qing Dynasty, and by extension, the tradition of the Chinese scholars. The core spirit of the modern political concept established since the Song Dynasty is to distinguish between "political unification" and "Taoist unification", with emperors and dynasties inheriting "political unification" and scholars undertaking "Dao unification". The most special thing in the politics of the Song Dynasty was that the "political unification" recognized that it needed the support and assistance of the "Taoist system" in order to constitute a legal and complete ruling mechanism.

However, in the Ming Dynasty, there was an imbalance between "political unification" and "Taoist unification". The values of the "Scholar's Day" are still there, and the scholars generally have the belief in "Taoism", but the "political unification" on the emperor's side not only ignores "Daoism", but also raises "Political Unification" to a high level in the operation of realpolitik, and the status of "Dao unification" is relatively low. As a result, the original belief that "Taoism" should be used to assist or even guide "political unification" could not be implemented.

By the time of the Kangxi Dynasty, there was a further distortion between "Taoism" and "Political Unification"—the two categories of "Inner Sage" and "Outer King" were integrated in the Kangxi Emperor. Readers who were supposed to represent the "Taoism" by mastering the knowledge of the sages, who could surpass the emperor and guide the emperor in the category of "inner saints", were obviously compared in front of the Kangxi Emperor.

Of course, they are inferior to the emperor in terms of power in the "political system"; and the trouble now is that even in the knowledge and practice of the "Taoist system", they are inferior to the emperor. The emperor valued the knowledge of the sages higher than these scholars, and the emperor's understanding of the knowledge of these sages was higher than that of the person who should have been his teacher. The emperor explained Zhu Zhu's notes, the lecturer could only listen silently, could not say a word, the teacher-student relationship was obviously reversed, and the leadership of "political unification" and "Taoist unification" was in the hands of the emperor.

Incredible energy and curiosity

The Kangxi Emperor had an incredible amount of energy. He appointed Nan Huairen as the deputy superintendent of the "Qin Tianjian", and Nan Huairen essentially became the emperor's astronomy teacher. The emperor was not concerned with the calendar, but with the principle of fixing the calendar. In correspondence with these Jesuit monks from the West, the Kangxi Emperor further gained insight into the geography of the world, and spent ten years measuring the longitude and latitude data of more than 640 places throughout China, and completed the earliest longitude and latitude map of China, the Imperial Public Opinion Overview Map. Latitude and longitude are also mentioned in the Kangxi Dynasty's edicts, and the latitude and longitude are used to indicate the records of Chinese territory.

The Kangxi Emperor also had a math teacher, Mei Wending. Draft History of the Qing Dynasty. Mei Wending's biography records that he went to Beijing in the twenty-eighth year of the Kangxi Dynasty to visit Li Guangdi, who had become popular in front of the emperor before the accident. Mei Wending told Li Guangdi that the calendar and almanac had made great progress in this dynasty, but the Confucian students who generally read the scriptures had no concept of this aspect, so he specially wrote a book equivalent to an introduction to the calendar. The book is called Questions of Almanac and consists of three volumes.

Later, Li Guangdi left Beijing with the Kangxi Emperor and went to Dezhou, and the emperor who loved knowledge asked his teacher for books to read, and Li Guangdi did not bring other books, so he handed over the "Questions of Almanac" that he was reading. The emperor found it interesting when he saw the title of the book, and said, "I am usually interested in almanac, and I can help you see if this is a good book." It means that the emperor knows that Li Guangdi's degree in almanac is far inferior to his own.

Two days later, the emperor made a judgment, and he told Li Guangdi that the author was very hard and his argument was fair, and he should take the book with him first and return to the palace to read it carefully. By the spring of the following year, when it was another tour of the south, the emperor returned the carefully read book to Li Guangdi, with a circle of smears and signs and affixes. Li Guangdi asked: Are there any problems or shortcomings in this book? The emperor's opinion was: there is no big problem, it is that some of the equations are incomplete. It turned out that Mei Wending's book was not written according to his original idea, but was actually read by the emperor.

Mei Wending's family learning spread to his grandson Mei Wancheng, and the emperor let Mei Wancheng enter the inner court to study, especially the "borrowing root square" method, that is, Western algebra. Draft History of the Qing Dynasty. It is mentioned in the biography of Mei Zhencheng that the Kangxi Emperor once gave Mei Yancheng a book for him to study, saying that the book was named "Arge bada" (that is, algebra "algebra"), which originally meant "the law of the east". So this is what Westerners learned from the East and is now passing back to the East.

It can be seen that the Kangxi Emperor also had a certain influence on the development of Chinese mathematics.

He was energetic and had great achievements not only in the "Wen" aspect, but also in the "Martial" aspect. In Shi Jingqian's book mentioned earlier, the first chapter of the book focuses on the "Wu" section, and in addition to the annual hunting patrols, he also inspects and supervises the military preparations of the Manchurian nobles from time to time. Moreover, his hunting activities are not superficial rituals, and he has encountered real dangers many times, which shows his personality tendency to pursue novel adventures.

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