Making a Place for Meaning in Early Qing Yangzhou

Abstract

Making a Place for Meaning in Early Qing Yangzhou * Tobie Meyer-Fong (bio) During the Kangxi period (1661–1722), the poet and writer Dong Yining, who was at least an occasional presence on the Yangzhou literary scene, commented on the ways in which places acquired significance through famous individuals: The fame of mountains and rivers is mostly due to outstanding people. Before Su Shi’s excursion, the Red Cliff was just another stupid rock. Since Su Shi toured it, although the terraces are ruined and the pavilions are damaged, Red Cliff is still a famous mountain. 1 While visiting Red Cliff, Dong paid his respects to a portrait of Su Shi (1037–1101) and read the poems by Su inscribed on the cliff. He even timed his visit to correspond to the season of Su’s famous “Red Cliff Record.” Clearly it was through Su’s presence, and his creative legacy, that the place had significance for Dong Yining. As Craig Clunas has argued, the fame of a garden does not derive from “enduring intrinsic features of the site,” but rather from literary and artistic representations of the property, and especially the reputation of the producer of those representations. 2 While Clunas limits his discussion to gardens, his point can easily be applied to all famous sites. Fame and its transmission were crucial in the determination whether or not a site was significant, and both required the continuous intervention of literati [End Page 49] patrons either to create or uphold the legacy of the place. 3 Indeed, written by the appropriate person, a prose record could legitimate even a humble wineshop, lending it prestige and respectability in the eyes of literati tourists. 4 The “outstanding people” referred to by Dong Yining were not necessarily figures from the ancient past, as he himself knew. While special weight was given to sites linked to men like Su Shi and Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), similar importance accrued to sites associated with contemporaries who were portrayed as analogous to (or incarnations of) their predecessors. Such an individual’s power to consecrate a place derived from a potent combination of political and cultural authority, and of course, consensus by the literati community that he possessed such talent and authority. 5 While the practices associated with the consecration of place and the characteristics of the consecrator remained relatively constant, the meanings and identities they engendered changed according to historical context. During the second half of the seventeenth-century, the consecration and maintenance of famous sites by literati patrons enabled elites to articulate new social and cultural identities in reaction to the social flux and political crises of the late Ming (1368–1644) and early Qing (1644–1911). The association between officially sanctioned cultural figures and famous sites marked a reassertion of centralizing political values and a rejection of the social confusion of the late Ming, even as personalities left over from the pre-conquest generation retained their cultural weight. Dong Yining would have been well aware of these developments, for he was associated with a literary network involved in the cultural (re)construction of Yangzhou. That literary network was at least nominally centered around Wang Shizhen, a young official from Shandong and an early Qing incarnation [End Page 50] of the model cultural figure. Wang Shizhen’s activities in Yangzhou gave new significance to a site, Red Bridge, and to the city itself, even as the bridge and the city enhanced the mythology that developed around Wang himself. In this article, I examine the processes through which Red Bridge acquired a position in the pantheon of sites significant to China’s transregional elite, Wang Shizhen became a model figure, and the city of Yangzhou gained new importance as a destination for literati and offical travelers. The literary construction of city, site, and man converged in the gatherings organized by Wang Shizhen at Red Bridge in 1662 and 1664. Wang Shizhen used these occasions in order to construct and define himself in the image of prominent cultural figures of the pre-conquest generation, who in turn used the bridge and its environs to reimagine the urban landscape of the late Ming. There are poignant and sometimes cynical...