《乾隆皇帝谕英王乔治三世敕书》与有关传统中国对外关系之观点在20世纪早期的形成

The Qianlong Emperor's Letter to George III and the Early-Twentieth-Cen-tury Origins of Ideas about Traditional China's Foreign Relations

本文对乾隆皇帝回应1793年马戛尔尼访华使团要求的"谕英王敕书"予以考察,该敕书常被解读为是清王朝无知和狭隘的象征。基于更为广泛的档案史料阅读分析,敕书中那段广为引用的引文并不代表乾隆皇帝对英国使团的真实反应,乾隆主要是把此次事件看作一种安全威胁,而不是18世纪英国所担忧的礼仪问题。当该敕书在20世纪早期开始广泛流传时,英国人的观点又影响了中国和西方的学者。本文的考察主要集中在陈垣、沈兼士、许宝蘅和其他那些利用清宫档案编辑出版了《掌故丛编》第一卷的学者身上,以及利用这些档案资料创造了具有持久影响力的清朝叙事的蒋廷黻、邓嗣禹和费正清。考察该敕书是如何被解读的,显示了档案工作者作为历史共同创造者的作用,同时也展示出我们今天关于清史的许多观点在多大程度上仍然受到20世纪初中国政局动荡的影响。

This article examines the famous edict in which the Qianlong em-peror responded to the British embassy led by Lord Macartney to China in 1793,which has often been interpreted as a symbol of the Qing dynasty's ignorance and narrow-mindedness.An examination of a wider range of archival documents sug-gests that the quotation does not reflect the Qianlong emperor's response to the British embassy,which was primarily to see it as a security threat,but rather eighteenth-century British concerns with protocol and their influence on Chinese and Western scholars in the early twentieth century,when the letter first began to circulate widely.The focus here is on Chen Yuan,Shen Jianshi,Xu Baoheng,and other scholars who edited the first volumes of published materials to emerge from the Qing archives,as well as Jiang Tingfu,Deng Siyu,and John K.Fair-bank,who used these materials to create a lasting narrative of the Qing.Looking at how the letter has been interpreted illustrates both the role of archivists as co-creators of history and the extent to which many of our ideas about Qing history are still shaped by the tumultuous politics of China's early twentieth century.