Treason by the Book

Shortly before noon on October 28, 1728, as General Yue Zhongqi, governor-general of the provinces of Shaanxi and Sichuan, surrounded by his retainers, is being carried in his sedan chair back to his office in Xian, a strangely dressed man runs toward him and tries to present him with a letter. General Yue orders the man to be seized. The letter is addressed to "The Commander in chief deputed by Heaven." When he gets to his office, Yue tells his staff to leave him alone. He tears open the envelope and reads the first few lines. It is as he guessed and feared. The contents of the letter are undiluted treason.

Treason by the Book investigates the attempted rebellion that "Summer Calm," the writer of the letter, was trying to persuade Yue Zhongqi to lead. Jonathan Spence, now regarded as the leading historian of China writing in English, has recovered the evidence of the case and reconstructed its course in a book of complete originality that has the pace and twists of a thriller.

At its center in Beijing sits the enigmatic figure of Yongzheng, third of the Manchu emperors, ruthlessly gathering information; issuing precise, demanding, and absolute instructions; constantly surprising those who serve him. It is one of Spence's most brilliant depictions. Yongzheng is surrounded by a host of civil servants, generals, scholars, and courtiers who in their interaction during the case allow us an extraordinarily detailed picture of the way in which the Chinese state was run.

It was astonishingly modern -- complex, efficient, highly centralized. Yongzheng and his officials could track down rumors and investigate dissent with a thoroughness that would impress those running twentieth-century police states. They expected to control not just actions and expressions but minds too: in a recantation of which Stalin would have been proud, Zeng Jing, the central figure in the conspiracy, comes to realize his errors and likens himself to "an ant who cannot see the size of the sky." What he cannot foresee is how the emperor will choose to defy those who surround him when his fate is decided.

Yongzheng pursues the traitors, uncovering lead after lead, and Spence is never more than a few paces behind him, recovering the lives and thoughts of those caught up, sometimes unwittingly, in the conspiracy. Against a background of lament for the passing of the Ming dynasty, the low and the great are paraded equally before us, until at the end we come to the true identity of the mysterious figure who called himself Wang Shu, from whom everything originated and who died penniless by the roadside. It is an outstanding piece of scholarly reconstruction, and one of the most astonishing of all Jonathan Spence's books.