Then, despite a document submitted to him signed by the 148 most senior government officials in Beijing calling for Zeng to be immediately put to death by the unspeakably horrific method of slicing, the emperor proceeds instead to give him gifts of money and clothing, and finally orders his immediate release.
He then has all his thoughts on the affair printed together with long extracts from Zeng's outrageously insulting original letter, plus his subsequent retractions, and orders the resulting 509-page book distributed to officials throughout the empire. Instructions are appended to print further copies locally, and for these to be sent to every school and private scholar in the land.
This is the famous Awakening from Delusion, a book that emperor Yongzheng's successor, Qianlong (乾隆), banned, ordering all the huge number of copies by then in existence to be destroyed.
Spence's marvelous book inevitably puts the reader into an investigative state of mind, and implicitly invites him to pursue his own private line of inquiry. A close perusal of its notes, sources and bibliography reveals that Spence's interest in the case was first aroused by a PhD thesis at Princeton University by one Thomas S. Fisher, completed in 1974. This material has subsequently been expanded by Spence through a close study of the very substantial surviving documentation that the case gave rise to.
Spence is a master of digesting complex scholarly material and then regurgitating it as a compulsively readable popular narrative. This act of imaginative, but meticulously fact-based, re-creation puts Treason by the Book on a par with other best-selling works that have brought off similar feats of historical reconstruction such as Maurice Collis's Foreign Mud, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou and Dava Sobel's Longitude.
Spence's decision to use the present tense throughout, never an easy option to sustain, pays off. Eighteenth century China springs to life, and though some of the by-ways explored in the third quarter of the book are perhaps presented in too much detail, throughout most of the narrative the momentum never flags. Locations shift back and forth as in a movie, character sketches are made using minute shreds of evidence, and the final conclusion is as much of a shock as in the most suspense-filled novel.
Many of the letters that form the basis of the narrative are given in full, translated into modern, almost colloquial, language. But Spence, who clearly has the best instincts of the popularizer, cuts the longest of them short just at the moment when tedium might have threatened.
Spence thanks many people, but they are almost all librarians, curators and fellow scholars, with a poet and an archaeologist thrown in for good measure.
Taipei is an important source for much of Spence's material, as he makes clear when he thanks the Academia Sinica, "home of so many major scholars," and the National Palace Museum where he was given the "unforgettable opportunity" of holding and reading Zeng's handwritten letter to the emperor thanking him for his gift of 1,000 taels of silver.
Additional information on Academica Sinica's archive can be accessed at http://saturn.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~mct/newpage1.htm. 'Treason by the Book' is published by Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 289 pages.
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