The Chinese Communist Party’s model emperor

WHAT WITH his dozens of concubines, his obsession with collecting precious jade and his penchant for inscribing his own (not very good) poems onto ancient paintings, the Qianlong emperor makes an unlikely hero for the Communist Party of China, especially one led by Xi Jinping, a stern ascetic. Qianlong was a man of formidable intellect and will, whose long reign from 1736-95 marked a high point of the Qing dynasty. But he was also a conservative aristocrat, from his passion for genealogy to his love of bowhunting on horseback, an archaic pastime even then.

Chaguan was surprised, then, to hear an official historian praise Qianlong in terms that would make a Politburo member blush. The scholar, Wang Xudong, heads the Palace Museum in Beijing, as the Forbidden City is formally known. During a government-organised press tour, Mr Wang described past emperors as hard-working statesmen who “wanted their empire to be stable and prosperous”. Unbidden, Mr Wang denied that the geomantic design of the Forbidden City, with a hill behind it and a river in front, is a form of superstition. Feng shui is a commonsense tradition, he argued: everyone wants shelter from the wind and sustaining water nearby. As for palace temples devoted to ancestor worship, “China is a country devoted to families,” he soothed, as if duty-bound to...