The frontier expansion of the Qing Empire: The case of Kavalan subprefecture in nineteenth-century Taiwan

This study is about the colonization of space in nineteenth-century Kavalan, a subprefecture of the Qing dynasty in northeastern Taiwan. During the early nineteenth century, the Qing administration was beginning to pursue a more aggressive policy of frontier expansion and Chinese literati were developing a colonial consciousness.; The dissertation is divided into two parts. Part one deals with the historical contingencies and institutional contexts of incorporating Kavalan into the territorial organization of the administrative state. I try to show that although the imperialism of the Qing Empire was often aggressive and even destructive to its neighbors, its expansion was constrained by its limited financial and administrative capacity to incorporate new districts.; The second half of the dissertation investigates the discursive practices of locality formation in three areas: customs (fengsu), geography (dili or fengshui), and landscape ( fengjing). They are all intimately related to the discourse of imperial government. A magistrate investigated the customs to understand the mores of a community and the effect of his rule (chapter 4); he studied wind and earth to evaluate the geographic formation and living condition of a district (chapter 5); and he discovered beautiful landscape and identified them as the famous sites for local literati to assemble and inspect (chapter 6). Customs, geography, landscape were all moving and shifting spheres of interface between geography and humanity. They reflected the state of civilization in a district and displayed patterns of regularity for literati to inscribe and comprehend the local differences.