Huang-ch’ao ching-shih wen-pien

The Huangchao jingshi wenbian (Collected Essays on Statecraft Under the Reigning Dynasty) was published in 1826 by Wei Yuan, a historian and geographer of the Qing dynasty. Wei Yuan was a leader of the Statecraft school, which aimed to blend traditional scholarship with practical experience to address governmental issues in China. This work was a study of political and economic problems and inspired similar collections of officials' ideas on governance. Wei Yuan's broader work, the Haiguo tuzhi (Illustrated Gazetteer of the Countries Overseas), published in 1844, was the first to utilize Western sources and proposed that China learn from Western technology to better engage with foreign challenges.1