In 1840, Lin Zexu completed the feat of "selling cigarettes at Humen", and then Yilu led the British army to capture Dinghai, Zhejiang, and reached The Mouth of Tianjin Dagukou. The Daoguang Emperor, who had been fighting the main battle, was frightened, and asked the people around him with a little surprise: "Where is The British?" How big is it? Does it border Russia? Is there a dry road to Xinjiang in China? ”
The lack of geographical knowledge has reached such a level as the head of a country, and it is conceivable that ordinary people have a level of understanding of world geography. Without further ado, today we will discuss and analyze what the world looks like in the eyes of the Qing Dynasty.
Let us start from the perspective of a Qing Dynasty person, starting from the east, south, west and north of the Qing Dynasty's territory, and maybe we can outline the world in the eyes of people in that era.
The first is the north. The Manchus originated between the White Mountains and the Black Water, south of the Waixing'an Mountains, and the vast area containing the Heilongjiang and Ussuri rivers was a familiar road. After the signing of the Treaty of Nebuchu, the Kangxi Emperor ordered people to go deep into the north to draw a detailed map, so the entire northeast region was still relatively familiar to the Qing Dynasty. The Mongolian steppe, west along the Waixing'an Ridge and south of the Segeleng River, was also the inner courtyard of the Qing Dynasty.
Further west is the vast region of Xinjiang, where the Qing Dynasty's familiarity with the Xinjiang region skyrocketed after the battles of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong dynasties against the Dzungars. It was not until the encounter with the natural barrier tianshan mountains that the geographical cognition of the Qing dynasty people came to an abrupt end. For the Qing Dynasty, in addition to the above-mentioned areas, further north is the cold desert that is not worth mentioning, and these places, all in the hands of Tsarist Russia, are neither necessary nor reasonable to explore them again.
Then there's the West. Since the ninth year of Shunzhi, when the Dalai Lama V entered the Hajj, the Qing Dynasty people's understanding of tibet has increased, and the implementation of the tea horse ancient road and the toast system has made exchanges between the two regions more and more frequent. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Qing dynasty people's understanding of the west was Tibet east of the Himalayas, and there was no other world.
To the south, is Yunnan, which is full of barbarians. The Qing Dynasty used the system of exile officials and toast to operate for a hundred years, and only then did it increasingly enrich its understanding of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. The qing dynasty people's cognition followed the Nu River, lancang river, Jinsha river, all the way south, until it encountered Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and other small Southeast Asian countries, and these countries were either friends of the Qing Dynasty or vassal states of the Qing Dynasty, paying tribute every year and coming to the dynasty every year, and the Qing Dynasty was also content to maintain the image of the heavenly kingdom and no longer cared about what else was in the south of these small countries.
Yunnan enters Guangxi to the east, and in front of the Qing Dynasty is the boundless sea. Although the Qing Dynasty people more or less knew that there was a continent on the other side of the sea, they preferred to regard those as barbaric places, after all, how could the sea places have territories worth caring about?
Finally, there is the East. To the east, Korea was a vassal state of the Qing Dynasty, and Japan further east of Korea was always looking for trouble, so for the Qing Dynasty, the east was nothing more than an honest neighbor and a nasty neighbor, in addition to that, it was still an endless sea.
The above is almost the whole world that the Qing Dynasty people knew. The Imperial Public Opinion Map, surveyed during the Kangxi Dynasty, represents the limits that the Qing Dynasty saw—that is, the rough territory of the country; the Qianlong Neifu Map of the Inner Provinces drawn during the Qianlong period represents the limits that the Qing Dynasty heard about—encompassing the area from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south, and the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Baltic Sea in the west, and its range is roughly the Asian continent.
And all this is the limit of the Qing Dynasty's geographical cognition. Further west, the European powers are already unfamiliar, not to mention the unheard of African continent and the American continent, as for the Arctic and Antarctic, which are places that the Qing Dynasty people cannot understand no matter how they imagine.
The Qing Dynasty people did not have the opportunity to understand the world, and the missionaries led by the Kangxi teacher Nan Huairen brought a lot of knowledge about the world, but they were strongly opposed by the Qing intellectuals. Yang Guang, the Qin Tianjian, objected to the geocentric theory, believing that if the earth was round, the person would definitely fall; xu Tong, the minister of power, did not believe that there were such strange countries as Spain and Portugal in the world; and the literary and historical people Ping Buqing thought that the word "Asia" was an insult to Asia where the Qing Dynasty was located.
The limitations of cognition greatly limited the imagination and curiosity of the Qing dynasty people, who did not believe that there were equally powerful countries besides the Qing Empire, and the dream of the heavenly kingdom made them disdain to understand the strangers they regarded as barbarians.
Even though the Portuguese had arrived in Taiwan early, the French had already extended their tentacles to Yunnan after passing through Vietnam, and the British Empire, which had swallowed the whole of India, had already looked at itself with a tiger's eye, and the Qing Dynasty still did not squint, and looked at the ground under their feet.
The world in the eyes of the Qing Dynasty people is only the place they can see, and the place outside the eyes is a darkness. Throughout history, the expansion of horizons has brought about the progress of the thinking of those in power, and only by knowing where friends, opponents, and enemies are, what kind of life they live, and what kind of situation they are facing, can they occupy a favorable position in foreign exchanges. The ultimate failure of the Qing Dynasty happened to be their ignorance of the world, and with this as a lesson, we should have more curiosity and expectations for the whole world.