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fashion. These elements included aspects of Confucian philosophy and
historiography as well as less orthodox geomancy (fengshuior, more
precisely,kanyu).^9
Hanspace was never authoritatively systematized or consistently
transmitted. Moreover, the Qing dynasty devoted much effort to banning
and eliminating texts that expressed Hanspace oppositionally. A repre-
sentative outcome demonstrating the equivocal Manchu response to Han-
space is the fact that some authors were honored. The eminent Zhejiang
literatus Hu Wei, for example, found a distinguished place in the Qing
canon ofSiku quanshu, and the noted historian and scholar-official Zhao
Yi’s essays were preserved in the important statecraft workHuangchao
jinshi wenbian. In contrast, works of dissident Han such as Lü Liuliang
were banned–and destroyed where possible–by dynastic authorities
under the notorious Qing literary inquisitions. Thefengshuiauthor Shen
Hao openly referred to the inhibiting effects of the inquisitions on trad-
itional Hanspace cartomantic practices of celestial patterns (tianwen) and
terrestrial principles (dili) in his 1712 work.^10 Still other works remained
unpublished or underground. Wang Fuzhi’s, for example, did not begin
to emerge until the mid–nineteenth century.
These facts are certainly testaments to Hanspace’s significance but
often render the extant record vague and incomplete. It is difficult to
determine Hanspace texts’ precise content, extent, and influence,
although many prominent thinkers were clearly aware of them. At the
same time, ambiguity provided an opportunity for a much wider range
of reception that accounts for the dichotomous responses to these texts.
Han elite constituencies could thus be mobilized to support, or oppose,
the imperial conquest state.
A relatively consistent reception along these lines emerges from the
“Han-barbarian discourse”(Xia-yi lun), deployed by Chinese intellectuals
throughout the imperial period.^11 This discourse, formed long before the
onset of the post-Tang conquest dynasties, was generally predicated on
making rigid, naturalistic, and hierarchical distinctions between the two
groups. Consequently, this discourse does not encompass strong accom-
modationist perspectives such as those more publicly visible and legitimate
in the Qing. Indeed, it is precisely the emergence of conquest dynasties that
expanded and altered this discourse so radically, which drove its chauvinist
manifestations underground or, in many cases, eradicated their texts. The
Han-barbarian discourse also does not center on relations between space
and ethnicity, although some elements of these relations are certainly
present. For these somewhat contradictory reasons of both wider
Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 25
