Emperor Qianlong’s Poetical Memoir of Taiwan
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Emperor Qianlong (乾隆) of the Qing Dynasty (1711–1799) had written a great many of poems describing his ruling of Taiwan. In my research they are generally divided into four main categories: Works in the first category demonstrate the emperor’s earnest concerns about lives of the Taiwanese locals, especially of those who lived near the areas where his troops were fighting the insurgents. In the second category the emperor shows his weariness of and worries about the progress on the battlefields and the fluid outcomes of those battles. Poems of the third category specifically illustrate his close personal involvement in devising and managing the battle plans before he sent off the commanding generals to the island of Taiwan. In the last category Qianlong shared his enormous joys with the news of a series of decisive victories over the rebels, an outcome he had been expecting since the beginning of the war. Many of those poems implicitly reveal the emperor’s emotional nuances behind the facade of the historical events. This paper will discuss the stories and nuances of those historical events in order to provide a different perspective of Qianlong’s real character and his dealings with Taiwan.