Images of War: The Cultural Construction of Qing Martial Prowess

Forthcoming July 2025

Ya-chen Ma, translated by Elizabeth Smithrosser

The mechanisms by which the Manchu rulers of Qing dynasty China maintained their hegemony over a vast empire have long fascinated scholars, with New Qing History models challenging older Sinicization models in recent years. This book adds a new dimension to these debates, from an unlikely source: art history. Two seemingly disparate fields of enquiry are brought together in this innovative work, its English translation long-awaited. Ming and Qing painting and visual culture and Ming and Qing history, especially military history are brought into dialogue here. Supposedly marginal works, commemorative images of war, are brought to the centre and offer a fresh new way of understanding the establishment and operation of imperial Qing cultural hegemony. 

This book interprets Manchu rule over China proper through the lens of how the Qing emperors modified Han scholar-officials’ culture to construct imperial power. Manchu military culture, in particular, is re-examined by investigating the history of the visual commemoration of military accomplishments. While images of war have long been a marginal topic in the history of Chinese art and politics, government officials’ military achievement pictures featured in numerous literati writings of the Ming dynasty. Their popularity was not confined to circles of Han elites but also took on commercial potential, and went beyond Chinese borders including influencing Manchu leaders, later to become Qing rulers. This trajectory of development took such images from celebrations of individual deeds and personal accomplishments to manifestations of the military might of the Qing empire and revealed that martial ethos and its expression was not a static part of the Manchu formula. Rather, much of the military culture of the Qing empire was appropriated from Han elite culture. This is an innovative work of disciplinary boundary-crossing.

“This important and innovative study of the visual culture of war and its commemoration in the Ming and Qing broadens the framework in which such images should be understood. In doing so, it makes a major contribution to also broadening our understanding of the role of images in the construction of power and authority. It raises a rich range of questions which everyone interested in Chinese art and culture of the later imperial period will want to consider.” -- Craig Clunas, University of Oxford

Ya-chen Ma is a professor at the Institute of History, National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.

Elizabeth Smithrosser is a translator and intellectual historian of pre-modern China.

Publication Year: 2025
428pp / 235 x 187mm
108 b/w images, 8pp colour section
Paperback
ISBN: 978-981-325-212-7