Imperial Guest Ritual

James L. Hevia

In the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), Guest ritual (binli) was a body of codified practices involving the procedures and protocols for dealing with an embassy from a foreign kingdom. Guest ritual was one of five categories of imperial rites along with Auspicious rites, Felicious rites, Martial rites and funerary rites. Beginning in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). the practice of the five types of rites cnstituted Imperial rulership.
From the Grand Sacrifices to the Cosmos, Earth, Ancestors and and Soil and Grain, through the mundane routines of state such as Guest ritual, the Qing imperial order was continually reproduced in ritual action, intimately linking the world of human beings to the realm of the invisible. Moreover, higher-order rites, such as the winter solstice sacrifice to the Cosmos on the round altar outside the southern wall of Bei Jing, provlded a pattern for the organization of other imperial rituals. For example, they embodled coherent logics governing the temporal sequences of rites and the spatial deployment of people and ntual objects. This was also the case for ancestral sacrifice or other forms of worship held in temples Moreover, the physical structure of temples varied little from halls used for the many kinds and levels of imperial audience, of which Guest ritual was a part Finally, Grand Sacrifice established principles of hierarchical-precedence duplicated throughout imperial ritual. north was superior to south, east to west, and high to low.
The structural affinities, and redundancies among the five rites place in the foreground the fact that was in and through the performance of an annual ritual cycle that the emperor and his court solidified a dynasty’s claim to the Mandate of Heaven (tianming) and produced imperial virtue (de). This virtue not only served to order the empire but emanated outward in the world, attracting other princes to the court of the emperor. It was the capacity to configure the world in this way, to connect the Cosmos to the local and the global that formed the basis of an emperor’s claim to be both Son of Heaven and supreme lord (huangda). Because of the many connectlons, both metaphoncal and metonymic, that can be discerned among the impenal rites, distinctions between sacred and secular seem somewhat misplaced for Chinese ritual practice Instead, Imperial guest ritual seems to have extended the link fashioned by emperors in Grand Sacrifice to other kingdoms, constltuting a cosmo-moral order of global proportions.
Each dynasty tended to produce its own ritual manual, one that drew upon and altered the rites of previous dynasties. Such manuals were sometimes reedited several times during the reigning dynasty. The last imperial court in Chinese history, the Manchu conquest dynasty called the Qing, was no exception. Their ritual manual was entitled the Comprehensive Rites of the Great Qing (Da Qing tongli, hereafter cited as comprehensive Rites) and was originally promulgated in 1756 during the reign of the Qianlong emperor and reedited in 1824. It is from the latter edition of the Comprehensive Rites that the following translation is made.
In the ritual manual of the Tang dynasty (Da Tang Kaiyuan li (c. 732), Guest rites were defined as the ceremonies appropriate to meetings between an emperor and a foreign prince. The rite included the reception of the prince and/or his embassy, the offering of local products by the prince to the emperor, and audiences, feasts, and rewards bestowed on the prince by the emperor. During the embassy, all the needs of the visitors were taken care of, including food, housing, entertainment, sight-seeing, and travel conveyances. Embassies were generally allowed to remain a certain amount of time in the imperial capital (usually a few weeks or months) and then were ordered to return to their own kingdoms.
Although Guest ritual in the Qing followed the general form of the Tang, a number of changes in procedure were made and, perhaps more importantly, the category itself was expanded. Apparently in accord with their understanding of guest ceremonies in the Rites of Zhou (ZhouIi) (compiled in the third or second century B.c.E.) of the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1027-256 B.c.E.), Qing editors made a number of additions in the two chapters devoted to Guest ritual in the Comprehensive Rites. These included a section on the dispatching of an embassy to enfeoff a foreign prince; protocols for visits between imperial princes of the blood and foreign nobles graded into five ranks; visits among capital officials; and visits between capital officials and provincial officials, among provincial officials, and among commoners. These additions signified a general trend in the Qianlong reign to transcend the practices of previous dynasties and to recover the spirit, if not the exact form, of the rites of the Zhou dynasty.
Translated here is the first of the two chapters of Guest ritual, which itself is divided into two parts. The first deals with the reception of an ambassador from a foreign kingdom (fanguo); the second with the dispatching of imperial envoys to enfeoff the successor prince of a foreign kingdom. Throughout the translation I have placed headings and subheadings to aid the reader; some are actually in the manual. Subheadings are consistent with the more fully elaborated sections of imperial audience and feasting found in the Felicitous rites section Comprehensive Rites. The first chapter of Guest ritual (chapter 45) is prefaced by comments about the rite, which help to locate both the editing project at work in the creation of this text and the context in which guest rites were placed. Refering to the Rites of Zhou, rather than the more elaborate ritual manuals of the Tang or Ming (Ming jili, 1530), the editors begin by noting that everything outside the nine provinces that made up the Zhou domain was considered foreign. The text does not explain what the relation between the Zhou kingdom and foreign lands might have been. It suggests, however, that for the Qing the relation being organized through imperial Guest ritual was one between the Manchu emperor as Huangdi, the “supreme lord (the “lord of lords,” the “paramount king”) and the princes of foreign kingdoms (the multitude of lords in the world) as lesser or inferior lords. As such, the text indicates an imagining of the world in which the position of a paramount ruler or overlord was established through the submission of other princes to him.
The paramount king received lesser lords in audience, and the latter brought “most precious things” (guibuo) of their kingdom and “offered’ them up (zhi, Comprehensive Rites 45:la) to their acknowledged superior.]
Let us take up these two images in turn, the coming ofibreign princes or their embassies to the court of Huangdi and their precious offerings. The Qing emperor was designated as Huangdi in a variety of court audience situations. Guest ritual is only one of these and, in part, appears to be organized with reference to other occasions of court assemblage. In the Comprehensive Rites, imperial assembly or audience is placed among the Felicitous rites (chapters 18 and 191, where it is divided into Grand audience (dachao) held on the first day of the year, the winter solstice, and the emperor’s birthday; regular audience (changchao), held two or three times a month; and the rite for “attending to the affairs of the realm” (tingzheng), held several times a month for the purpose of presenting memorials to the court and for the dissemination of imperial edicts. In the case of Grand or Regular audiences, provisions were made for the participation of foreign princes or their ambassadors. Chapter 45 of the Comprehensive Rites frequently refers readers back to the Felicitous rites chapters for information about placements of people, regalia, and other necessary preparations for audience and feasting.
In all forms of audience, the emperor addresses the imperial domain and the world at large by instructing, admonishing, cherishing, and rewarding his servants, including foreign princes. All of these imperial attributes are associated with the emperor as the south-facing king. They derive their coherence from his prior act of facing north as the primary sacrificer to Heaven as the Son of Heaven and to his ancestors as a filial son.
By the end of the reign of the Qianlong emperor (17961, the foreign princes in question had come to include a vast host, many of whom received titles of noble rank from the Manchu court. First and foremost among those so entitled by the Qing were the many Mongol groups of northern and inner Asia. Also included were the various kingdoms located along the silk route through Xinjiang, Moslem kingdoms of Inner Asia, the kingdoms of Korea (which is distinguished from other kingdoms in the Comprehensive Rites, see especially the section on personnel designated imperial envoys to other cours), the Ryukyu Islands, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Siam, Nepal, the island kingdoms of Southeast Asia, the kingdoms of Breat Britain, Holland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain as well as the Papacy. As the preface indicates, for over one hundred years these domains had sent embassies at one tinme or another to the Qing court, and many retuned in 1796 when the Qianlong emperor abdicated in favor of his son.
We might well ask why they came to the Qing court, why foreign kings sent embassies sometimes over great distances and at great rish and hardship. Why did they present valuable gifts to Qing emperors and presumably accept a position of inferiority to th at of the Manchu Overlord? The answer given in the preface is that foreign princes have heard and recorded the "enunciated teachingsof the imperial family" (guoja shengjiao). While the text does not provide further elaboration on what these teachings might entail, I believe that they refer to the sagely and virtuous attributes of previous Qing emperors. These enunciations move outward to encompass the whole world (siyi, the foour directions) reorienting other lords and attracting them to the imperial court. Put another way, the powerful ideological formation implicit in this imagining of the world locates the Qing kingdom as the central domain (Zhongpa); all others ought to position themselves with respect to it. The princes of other kingdoms should, therefore, be desirous of submitting to the emperor by acknowledging his superiority. This desire is frequently presented in a variety of sources as “the sincerity of facing toward transformation” (xianghua zhicheng). For their part, the emperor and his court are said to “cherish men from afar” (huairou yuanren), that is, to reward them for their sincerity.
The capacity of imperial enunciation to reorient lesser princes was made manifest through the presentation of offerings by these princes in a proper sequence at court. At the correct time of year (or in some cases every few years), the princes or their ambassadors come to court to present petitions and offer the most precious things of their domain to the emperor. These valuable offeringswere further glossed in the Comprehensive Rites as local products (jungwu). They are, in other words, those things produced in the foreign kingdom and may be understood as things specific and unique to the hngdom of the prince who sends embassies to the imperial court. The court, in turn, incorporated the power of inferior princes into the rulership of the emperor by granting audience, bestowing precious things of its own on the embassies, and dispatching embassies to enfeoff successor princes.
The ideology of Guest ritual suggests, therefore, that Qing imperial sovereignty was constituted through the submission of foreign princes. The emperor accepted the sincere and humble prostrations of other powerful rulers and incorporated their strength into his own rulership. In turn, the emperor also accepted responsibility for the well-being of his loyal inferiors. Implicit in this version of sovereignty is an assertion that the lordship of the foreign prince is somehow linked to the moral authority of the Qing emperor as Huangdi. The proper way of establishing the relationship between the paramount king and the many lesser lords of the world was in and through imperial Guest ritual.
The translation of Qing Guest ritual provided here might best be read as a recipe rather than as stage directions, as the making of something rather than the acting out of a script. In this regard, a few general principles are useful in understanding the many references to placement, positioning, movement, and actions of participants. First and foremost, all dwections are organized from the point of view of the emperor sitting on a throne at the north end of an audience hall facing south. Left and right are his left and right; high and low, closer and farther all relate to his position. Second,with the exception of the initial audience that takes place in the Board of Rites, the right or west side of halls, courtyards, and stairs are reserved for the guest. The west is also the martial or military side (wu), as opposed to the east or civil (wen) side of halls. In other words, the guest is placed among the Manchu Banners and other military officials of the Qing empire. Third, prostration in the form of kneeling and bowing the head to the ground occurs numerous times throughout the rite. Fourth, the center space of halls or courtyards running from the imperial throne south (and including the central space of other official halls as well) is reserved for the emperor and for tables upon which documents to or from the emperor are placed.
Finally, the Chinese language text of Guest ritual and the translation provided here understate the spectacular scope of ritual evident in some participant accounts and court pictures of imperial audience. More elaborate directions for the setting up of imperial regalia banners. flags, chariots, and so on) and for the establishment of places for people and thngs can be found in the Comprehensive Rites, chapters 18 and 19; also see chapter 40 on banqueting. In addtion, it is helpful to consult pictures or diagrams of audience halls (see the Diagrams of the Collected Statutes of the Great Qing (Da Qing huidian tu), chapters 19-21). Since the emperor and his court arrayed themselves in robes appropriate to imperial audience, all such occasions would also have been a visual feast of color (the imperial regalia displayed in the paintings of the Guangxu emperor’s wedding is similar to that found in Grand Audience).
Throughout the translation there are a number of offices and titles related to the Qing administrative structure. The text indicates that responsibilities for embassies were divided among the Board of Works, the Board of Revenue, and the Board of Rites, with the bulk of the duties falling on the last of these. The Department of Ceremonies, the Banqueting Department, the Reception Department, the Guest Hostel, as well as announcers, translators, and ushers were all affiliated with the Board of Rites. The Court of Ceremonial, a unit revived during the Qianlong reign and given various responsibilities for embassies, including the staffingof the Guest Hostel, was separate from the Board of Rites. Guard officers and guards were from the Imperial bodyguard.

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