This dissertation explores Chinese discourse on loyalty during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as it was produced in the contexts of Confucian revival, foreign conquest, and Manchu-Chinese dynamics. The aim of my thesis is a contextualization of the complex of ideas surrounding loyalty as exemplified in the fall of the prominent literatus Qian Qianyi (1582–1664), who cooperated with the Manchus during the Ming-Qing dynastic transition. This discourse on loyalty, I argue, evolved from historical and literary tropes into an ethical standard manifested in storytelling, history writing, and censorship. Subject to contention, these ideas were first employed by Chinese literati as an expression of their indigenous cultural identity and subsequently utilized by Manchu rulers in imperially commissioned historiography as an argument against collaboration with new conquerors. This study allows me to shed new light on the convergence of preexisting Chinese cultural values with the rationale of Qing imperial ideology. Loyalism, originally an anti-Manchu sentiment, ironically had been turned into a tool for the political consolidation of the Qing rulers’ control over the literati.

The introduction looks into issues that surrounded the nuances of loyalty in late imperial China and it also analyzes the reception of Qian Qianyi in modern scholarship since the early twentieth century. Chapters One and Two examine Qian Qianyi’s life during the Ming in terms of his achievements in scholarship, his political activism, and his involvement with courtesan culture. Chapters Three and Four situate Qian’s life within the early Qing sphere of Ming loyalism and its impact on some aspects of the system of values, history writing, and religion. Chapter Five analyzes the available political options and historical contingencies during the early period of Qing takeover. Chapter Six describes early Qing remembrances of the late Ming, especially the changing attitudes toward Qian Qianyi’s reputation in different sources. Chapter Seven explores how ideas about loyalism circulated in between collective memory and historical records, and how they were taken over by the Qing rulers in the new historiographical category of Erchen zhuan (Biographies of twice-serving ministers) to condemn their Chinese collaborators at the beginning of the Qing.