SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to grasp the status and significance of the Xiyang people (the people referred to using the ethnonym ‘Xiyang’) in the context of the early Qing Empire beyond the East (China)-West (Europe) or foreign relations frameworks. The temporal focus is on the period from 1644, the year of the first official encounter between the two, to 1724, a watershed in the history of Christianity in China. The research behind this thesis is driven by the question of what it meant to be ‘European’ in the early Qing Empire. In other words how were people perceived who had arrived from the westernmost parts of the Eurasian continent, in an empire that had been embracing diverse elements of populations from Eurasia for many centuries? Was there an official Qing policy in order to determine their ethnicity and their potential for integration into a multiethnic, but predominantly Chinese empire? And, finally, in this process of essential definition, what role did the Christian religion play and what were Qing society's responses to it? In order to reflect on these questions, the dissertation has been subdivided into two parts: one that analyses how the Qing Empire’s heterogeneity influenced the Xiyang people’s presence in it; another that addresses how the Xiyang people’s presence in the Qing Empire influenced the Qing heterogeneity, particularly the relations between the Manchu and Han peoples. The dissertation will lead the reader to understand how the Qing rulers attempted to make the Xiyang people one of the Qing constituencies and, along the way, how the Xiyang people awakened Han Chinese people’s ‘Hua-Yi’ discrimination and, eventually, their anti-Manchu sentiments.