事件是如何生成的？—道光的日常与“鸦片战争”作为事件的形成

借助相对更接近历史现场的《起居注》，从道光十二年闰九月观察道光十八年到二十二年，看这几年的经历如何生成为“鸦片战争”的“历史叙述”。拉长镜头，尽可能贴近其中一个现场，顺时而观，从经历，到散落在时序中的记录，到秘密编纂的分类事务（夷务），到事件，再到划时代的事件。对照清朝自身的“事件”生产机制，可以看清在不同目的的驱使下，时人的经历与处置、事后诸人的思考、外人的叙述如何交汇，时人如何“失语”，后人如何控制了历史叙述，“事件”如何从经历中脱颖而出、意义又是如何被不断增添、改变与筛减的，“事件”形成后又如何变为重返历史现场的一层障碍。了解这些，我们便有可能从更多的角度去重新发现这段历史，并对“事件史”的意义与局限有更真切的认识。

How an Event Was Produced

Through the Court Dairies of the Daoguang period, which is much more close to one of the original historical sites, we could see how the rich court affairs between 1838 and 1842 documented in it were selected and compiled as the lean narratives tabbed as the Opium War eventually by taking the Court Dairies of the intercalary month of 1832(Sep.) as a mirror. We will also make clear how the ruling group’s efforts finally has been transformed into an epoch-making event through a series steps from scattered and trivial matters on Sino-British battles due to opium trades kept in archives, then to the classified affairs (Barbarian matters) compiled secretly in 1850’s under Xianfeng’s decree, and to an event, by returning to the past along time sequence and close to one of the historical sites as much as possible. Comparing to Qing Empire’s own event-producing mechanism, we could distinguish how those contemporaries’ experiences, the recalling from people afterwards, and the narratives coming from later generations and outsiders combine together, how the contemporaries fall into the victim of aphasia finally, how the later generations dominate the voices of historical narratives, how the event was made depending on contemporaries experiences, how the significances has been added, distorted, and reduced interrelatedly and constantly, and how the event becomes a kind of hindrance for posterity if we want to return to the original historical site after the production of the event as a story. Understanding all of these, we could rediscover the history of these years from more diverse perspectives, and know much about the implications and limitations of the history of events as a way of thinking.