A Complete Account of the Management of Barbarian Affairs

CORE DEFINITION

The Chouban Yiwu Shimo, compiled in the Qing dynasty, is an official documentary collection of memorials, edicts, and correspondence on foreign affairs, spanning the Opium War through the late nineteenth century; its companion the Chouhai Tubian is a Ming-era illustrated treatise on coastal defense. The core proposition for a modern reader is methodological: the compilation preserves the full sequence from intelligence gathering through deliberation to decision and outcome, so the reasoning behind each choice can be examined against what was known at the time. The key qualification is that the documents reflect the imperial court's own framing, including its Sinocentric categories, and must be read as evidence of that perspective rather than as neutral history.