PING-CHEN HSIUNG. A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 351. $70.00.

Abstract

For the past twenty years, Ping-chen Hsiung has been studying and publishing pioneering Chinese-language studies on childhood in China. She has now assembled eight English-language essays on children and childhood in late imperial China (roughly 1600–1900), taken from conference papers and lectures she has given in the recent past. The resulting book sheds much new light on this important subject. In her introduction, “Children and Childhood in Traditional China,” Hsiung places her work within the framework of Western studies of childhood, starting with the classic work of Philippe Ariès. She notes that the Chinese case calls into question Ariès's assertion that the very notion of childhood is a modern invention. From at least the Southern Song period (1161–1279), pediatric medicine became a specialized field in China, and Neo-Confucian philosophers paid systematic attention to the education and character formation of the young. By the sixteenth century, both these trends, in medicine and philosophy, were widely popularized by a rapidly growing publishing industry. Hsiung concludes her introduction by listing the variety of sources available for the study of children and childhood in late imperial China, including didactic works such as ritual texts, family instruction books and children's primers, chronological biographies and autobiographical memoirs, personal diaries, letters, poems, genealogies, pediatric texts, paintings, children's books, woodcuts, and woodblock prints. Her book draws on all these sources and is graced with forty-seven well-chosen black-and-white illustrations, mostly of Chinese paintings of children in many different circumstances, but also of didactic texts, woodcuts, and woodblock prints. Hsiung also points to other sources, as yet mostly untapped, which could provide a still more complete picture of children and childhood in China, including legal documents, government policy documents, and material objects of all kinds relating to children.