The Beautiful Bureaucrat

By R.Z. Sheppard

EMPEROR OF CHINA

by JONATHAN D. SPENCE

217 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

Near the end of his reign in 1722, the Chinese Emperor K'ang-hsi again turned to his copy of the I Ching. Nothing he found under the entry for "Retreat" seemed to apply to rulers. "There is no place for rulers to rest," he told his followers in a valedictory address. "Bowing down in service and wearing oneself out," he concluded, "indeed applies to this situation."

But what a way to go. For 61 years K'ang-hsi ruled China, an area larger than Peter the Great's Russia. To 150 million Chinese, this Manchu monarch was lawgiver, supreme judge, jury, protector and executioner, and one of the busiest executives in history. He supervised a vast civil service meritocracy laid down on Confucian principles that recognized society as a hierarchy of intelligence over ignorance. Like Confucius, K'ang-hsi viewed statecraft as applied knowledge in the service of the governed, and he worried about his people before they worried about themselves.

In addition to running the world's largest country and fathering 56 children with 30 consorts, K'ang-hsi found time to write the equivalent of 16,000 Western printed pages. Official documents, letters, memoranda, verse and private thoughts were collected as the Venerable Record. In Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence, professor of Chinese history at Yale, has pruned and selected this record. In the tradition of Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, he has created what he calls an "autobiographical biography." But it is more than that. From the Emperor's resplendent portrait on the dust jacket to the small ink drawings scattered throughout, the book is both an object of careful craft and a most imaginative example of low-profile scholarship in which Spence's obviously immense efforts scarcely show.

Like an Oriental scroll painting that sees the light only when its owner wish es to enjoy it, K'ang-hsi's words and sentiments have hardly faded with the years. A man achingly alive to art and nature, he wrote of the exhilaration of fine horsemanship and of his prowess with the bow and fowling piece. He combined his travels and hunting with military exercises, forging a large, disciplined army of mounted archers that proved itself in the rebellion and civil wars that plagued the middle years of his reign.

As a victor, K'ang-hsi tempered justice with shrewd compassion and love of discrimination. He changed a horse thief's sentence from beheading to exile, since "the nation was at peace and horse theft was therefore not so serious as it would have been in time of war." His dealings with the West were open and generous, yet appropriately wary. He allowed selected Jesuits to preach their faith in China and introduce scientific and technical learning. But when the Pope sent a sort of watchdog emissary to keep an eye on his Jesuit scholars, K'ang-hsi threw him out.

In an ancient civilization that had occasionally seen Emperors step aside for men they considered worthier than themselves, this Emperor strove to be come a model of excellence. "All the Ancients used to say that the Emperor should concern himself with general principles, but need not deal with the smaller details," he wrote. K'ang-hsi dis agreed: "Failure to attend to details will end up endangering your greater vir tues." It is still excellent advice, for pipe fitters as well as Presidents with an imperial bent.

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