Wei Yuan’s Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Countries

China’s defeat in the Opium War shook some officials and thinkers, who began to study world affairs and foreign history and geography in search of ways to resist. During his anti-opium and anti-British work in Guangdong, Lin Zexu took care to “gather information on the foreigners,” had foreign books and periodicals translated, and compiled the Gazetteer of the Four Continents, earning him the name of the first person in modern China to “open his eyes to the world.” Wei Yuan (1794–1857), from Shaoyang, Hunan, was a friend of Lin Zexu. In 1841, when Lin was dismissed and exiled to Ili, he met Wei at Zhenjiang and gave him the Gazetteer and other materials. Wei gathered much more material and in 1842 completed the Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Countries (Haiguo Tuzhi) in 50 juan, later expanded to 100. It describes the history, geography, politics, economy, religion and science and technology of countries around the world, with many maps and drawings of ships and cannon. In its preface he wrote that the book was compiled “to use barbarians against barbarians, to deal with barbarians through barbarians, and to learn the barbarians’ superior skills in order to control them.” He held that the West’s “superior skills” lay mainly in warships, firearms and methods of raising and training troops, and urged learning advanced Western military technology and setting up shipyards and arsenals. This idea broke with the traditional notion of China as the “Celestial Empire,” began modern China’s learning from the West, and influenced the later Self-Strengthening Movement and reform thought. The book drew little attention at home, but was reprinted many times in Japan, where it had some influence on the Meiji Restoration.