Qishao Shu: Frontier Life and National Loyalty of an Exiled Scholar in the Qianlong-Jiaqing Era

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-432-7_34How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Qishao Shu; Exilic Literature; Frontier Subjectivity; Confucian Patriotism

Abstract

During the Qianlong-Jiaqing era (1736–1820), Shu Qishao, a disgraced magistrate from Zhejiang, was exiled to Ili (1797–1805) for alleged negligence and corruption. His exile writings—including occasional poems and documentary verses—captured the Western Regions’ cultural geography, frontier governance, and exiled communities’ daily realities. These works also illuminate how censured Qing literati psychologically adapted to disgrace while engaging in borderland cultural initiatives. Shu’s poetry, guided by a “self-soothing” ethos, employed understated language to process trauma and reassert agency. Unlike contemporaries who emphasized resentment, his introspective verses transcended the “disgraced official” identity, blending personal healing with observations of frontier life. This corpus provides critical micro-historical evidence for studies of Qing border administration, Silk Road logistics, and exile psychology, Shu’s works thus exemplify how marginalized elites negotiated loyalty and self-representation within the empire’s punitive systems.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Yining Ma
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/06/22
TI  - Qishao Shu: Frontier Life and National Loyalty of an Exiled Scholar in the Qianlong-Jiaqing Era
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 4th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 300
EP  - 306
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-432-7_34
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-432-7_34
ID  - Ma2025
ER  -