“No Such Portents under This Dynasty”: Reinventing Wonders in High Qing Institutional Historiography

This article traces the documentation of wonders (wuyi 物異) in trans-dynastic institutional historiography, specifically the High Qing sequels to the Wenxian tongkao 文獻通考. It demonstrates that the long-standing tradition of recording cosmic anomalies in Chinese historiography received severe criticism in the Qing court’s profiling of its own institutions. The truncated and chronologically ordered section on Qing wonders reveals a crucial facet of High Qing political culture, which posits that portents could not have taken place under its enlightened rule. Furthermore, the Qingchao Wenxian tongkao 清朝文獻通考 provides new frameworks to interpret wonders as truly outstanding phenomena that could be neither managed via disaster prevention and relief nor explained along any known correlative schema of the Five Phases. The continued importance of Heaven-humanity resonance in the High Qing era thus exemplifies the complex interplay between politics and intellectual debates of the day.