청대 서양인의 입국과 광동ㆍ마카오 간의 문서 행정

초록

During the Qing Dynasty, Westerners, whether individuals or diplomatic missions, generally entered China through Macau. Western individuals entered with the purpose of spreading Catholicism, but the emperor treated them as bondservant(包衣). Diplomatic missions aimed for equal diplomatic relations, but the Qing Dynasty viewed them as tributary missions offering official document(表文) and tribute(貢物) presented by a subject to the emperor. In this process of entry, many official documents were exchanged. However, the documents did not directly pass between the Westerners and the Qing government; instead, the Procurador of Macau acted as an intermediary to transmit them. The Procurador of Macau would first report the Westerners' intention to go to Beijing to the Governor-General of Guangdong-Guangxi Province. The Governor-General of Guangdong-Guangxi Province would then write an official document granting permission to go to Beijing and send it back to the Macau Procurador by obtaining the emperor's permission. Macau can be considered an international gateway city, as it was the place where Westerners waited to enter China and the first city they visited on their way to Beijing. Since Western individuals and diplomatic missions were not inlanders, the Qing dynasty had to handle their entry into the country as a diplomatic matter. Their entry documents also had to reflect diplomatic relations. However, the Qing dynasty maintained the principle that Macau was its own land, which it had leased out for rent, and therefore it ruled over the Portuguese living there. Therefore, Macau was not recognized as an entity with which to establish diplomatic relations, but rather as a local administrative unit belonging to Xiangshan County, Guangzhou Prefecture, Guangdong Province. Furthermore, documents sent by the Macau Proculador were treated as reports submitted by a subordinate to a superior(稟). Since Portugal's expectation of the Qing Dynasty was to allow its citizens to continue residing in Macau, it did not raise any issues regarding this ‘unequal’ treatment. By limiting the documents exchanged with Macau to domestic administrative documents rather than diplomatic documents between countries, the Qing dynasty achieved two effects. One was that it avoided the hassle and difficulty of translation. The other was that official documents sent from Macau had to be reported to the emperor one by one and obtain his approval, but by omitting some of the procedures, it was possible to save time and simplify the process. Official documents related to entry were exchanged much more frequently between local officials in Guangdong and the Macau Procurador than between the Governor-General of Guangdong-Guangxi Province and the emperor in Beijing. It was not uncommon for official documents to undergo changes in form and content during the process of being passed down. This was because lower-level officials exercised their discretion to change the content and form of the documents to match their own areas of responsibility. It is clear that the simplification of official document exchange procedures was achieved by replacing diplomatic documents with administrative documents of the Qing Dynasty. However, in the actual process of Westerners entering the country, Guangdong provincial officials maintained cumbersome procedures for entry by interviewing applicants in person to ascertain their intentions for entering the country and determining whether to grant permission. This duality of simplified official document exchange and cumbersome control over human traffic reflects the two contrasting characteristics of openness and closure inherent in Macau, an international gateway city.

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