This collection includes over a thousand letters from the Qing legation in London to the British Office from 1876 to 1901. It was published by the Shanghai guji chubanshe in 2020. 

 

I came across these documents in the summers of 2016 and 2018 at the National Archives in Kew. In my research on Qing Travelers to the Far West, I had read some correspondence between Qing ministers stationed abroad and the foreign offices of European countries, but like most historians of Qing diplomacy, I had only seen a few of them reprinted in various places or in sporadic mentions in memoirs and biographies written by contemporaries of Qing diplomats. These letters have almost never been used by historians in a systematic way. I wondered how many of them still exist, and what they can tell us about the nature of Qing legations. From 2018 to 2020, I transcribed and organized all letters I could find from the FO 17 originating from the Qing ministers abroad.  

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It made sense to me why these letters had remained neglected. The Archive’s search engine gives little indication of their existence. Tucked into envelopes and glued onto the inner leaves of FO binders, these letters were stored in an offsite facility and were available to the public only on microfilm, where lines of characters were frequently skipped, overexposed, or simply unreadable (the recent digitalization efforts made them more accessible). 

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These letters suggest that the scope and importance of Qing legation work exceeded our previous understanding. To place these documents in the context of existing archival materials on diplomatic history, our current understanding of Qing foreign affairs is primarily based on several bodies of sources: (1) archival documents stored in Beijing and Taipei (taken by the Nationalist Party when they fled there in 1949) pertaining to the activities of the central apparatus of the Qing government; (2) documents and recollections of foreign diplomats and officials who worked with the Qing government; and (3) scattered letters and accounts from the private collections of Qing officials and diplomats.​ While these sources cover much of the Qing’s diplomatic activity, we have very limited knowledge of how Qing legations and consulates stationed abroad communicated with foreign governments, diplomatic communities, and overseas Chinese populations.

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For a study of the diplomatic function and language used by the Qing legation based on these documents, read my article "Mediating Sovereignty" (click to download pdf). ​

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For a table of contents and an excerpt from this collection, click here. 

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