Emperors, empresses, kings, and queens all need homes, servants, and spending money. Early modern history provides many examples of the institutional arrangements devised for these purposes-British, French, Japanese, Swedish, Austro-Hungarian, Thai, Ottoman, Vatican, and Russian. In eighteenth-century China, such supporting functions were performed by a single institution, the Imperial Household Agency (Neiwufu), the subject of Making the Palace Machine Work.The Imperial Household of the Qing dynasty was a large and wealthy organization built on earlier foundations, headquartered in Beijing but with operations that stretched across an expanding empire. Veiled by the quasi secrecy associated with royal security, this powerful agency has been poorly understood and largely ignored by modern historians. Although the treasures of the Forbidden City and summer palaces have been examined by art historians, only in the 1990s did newly opened archives make clear that voluminous documentation for the workings of the Imperial Household had also been preserved. This book reflects the first phase of their scholarly exploration.
展开▼
