Slaving and Trafficking in Ming China

In the fifteenth century, Chosŏn Korean clothes were exported to the Jiangnan (江南) region in Ming China and became very popular among wealthy Chinese people. This was the so-called “Petticoat Fever”. This horsehair petticoat (Mamigun 馬尾裙) gave the wardrobe a fashionable silhouette by supporting and fully spreading the outer skirt. Literati wore them, too. Mamigun fashion, which once enjoyed great popularity in the Jiangnan area, disappeared after it was prohibited during the Ming period due to a change in power and a transition in policymaking. On the other hand, this study is also significant in that it corrects errors in the study of art history in Ming Dynasty. This study analyzed in detail "Ming Emperor Xianzong's Tour of the Lantern Festival(明憲宗元宵行樂圖)" in the collection of the National Museum of China. I argued that the picture was not a royal court painting (宮中畵), drawned in Beijing, but a piece painted in the Jiangnan area of the Ming dynasty. The artist adopted the mamigun fashion widely enjoyed in the region at the moment in order to express the most splendid and glamourous adornments one could imagine in the place of entertainment for the emperor during the Lantern Festival. "Ming Emperor Xianzong's Tour of the Lantern Festiva" is a clue to the customs and fashion culture of the Jiangnan area of Ming Dynasty in the 15th century. Many works of scholarship in Korea-China relations have tended to argue that culture and trade between Chosŏn and Ming Dynasties in the 15th century were exchanged only through envoys between Seoul of Chosŏn and Beijing of Ming. Mamigun is an interesting topic that gives us insight into the cultural exchange between the Chosŏn and Ming and can also be described as an episode that involves Cheju Island of Chosŏn and Jiangnan region of Ming, both regions that were marginal within Korea-China relations. This study will contribute to extending the scope of the history of exchange between Chosŏn Korea and Ming China by taking a broader perspective.

INTRODUCTION: SPECIAL ISSUE ON REGIONAL LANGUAGE AND PERFORMANCE TEXTS IN THE QING CATHERINE SWATEK AND MARGARET WAN University of British Columbia and University of Utah This special issue grew out of the panel “Exploring the Linguistic Landscape in Early Modern Chinese Literature,” sponsored by CHINOPERL and presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in . The panel, organized by Han Zhang of the University of Chicago, responded to Shang Wei’s examination of the relationship between “vernacular Chinese” (baihua 白話) and written as well as spoken forms of Chinese in his seminal article “Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China.” The panel consisted of papers by Han Zhang, Patricia Sieber, Margaret Wan, and Bingyu Zheng. Intrigued by this important and understudied topic, the editors began planning this special issue in March . We quickly secured relevant articles-in-progress from Wu Cuncun and Catherine Swatek. Shang Wei’s discussion of the written representation of Chinese regional dialects touches on many of the landmark works for these issues: Yuan drama, Ming collections of popular songs like Mountain Songs (Shan’ge 山歌) edited by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (–), and the late nineteenth-century novel The Flowers of Shanghai (Haishang hua liezhuan 海上花列傳). The earliest clear examples are the sixteenth-century publications in Minnanese, the language of southern Fujian. By the turn of the nineteenth century, many genres of regional performancerelated literature were produced in quantity, including drum ballads (guci 鼓詞) in the North, lute ballads (tanci 彈詞) from the area around Suzhou, and in the far South, Minnanese ballads (gezaice 歌仔冊) in Fujian as well as Chaozhou ballads (Chaozhou gece 潮州歌冊) and wooden-fish books (muyushu 木魚書) in Guangdong. One reason that early dialect literature remains understudied may be that it tends to be strongly connected with performance genres, and with particular local performance genres not seen as central to our understanding of Chinese “literature.”  Shang Wei, “Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China,” in Benjamin Elman, ed. Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, – (Leiden: Brill, ), pp. –.  For a translation and study of Feng Menglong’s collection of shan’ge, though not of their use in drama, see Ôki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo, Shan’ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’: Love Songs in Ming China (Leiden: Brill, ).  For a convenient survey of Minnanese literature, see Piet van der Loon, The Classical Theatre and Art Song of South Fukien (Taipei: SMC Publications, ).  Wilt Idema notes that most histories of Chinese literature in China and the West omit prosimetric and ballad literature or only mention it in passing. See Yi Weide 伊维德 (Wilt L. Idema), CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature .  (July ): –© The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc.  The same processes that Shang Wei discusses in regard to defining “vernacular” as a standardized, national language in early twentieth-century China also worked to marginalize regional and dialect literature in that period and thereafter. This also created difficulties of access for later scholars. Performance-related texts were often treated as ephemera and were rarely collected by libraries in China (with some important exceptions); several important examples survive only in Japan (Yuan printings of zaju) or Europe (Fukienese art songs). Often these texts also have been the last to be cataloged or reprinted. Despite this, the sheer number of texts in any particular tradition can be daunting. For example, one catalog lists over , known titles of drum ballads. Study of southern dialects—Cantonese, Taiwanese, Minnanese, Hakka, and Wu dialects—has been largely the preserve of linguists and ethnomusicologists, though mention has already been made of Piet van der Loon’s study of Minnan dramas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of Ōki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo’s translation and study of shan’ge. A few recent studies, many by linguists, have focused on the textualization of these dialects, noting their close link to performance “Yingyu xueshuquan Zhongguo chuantong xushishi yu shuochang wenxue de yanjiu yu fanyi shulüe” 英語學術圈中國傳統敘事詩與說唱文學的研究與翻譯述略 (A brief survey of the study of China’s traditional narrative ballads and prosimetric literature in English scholarship), trans. Zhang Yu 張煜, Jinan xuebao 暨南學報 , no.  (): –. Notable exceptions include several essays in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. Victor Mair (New York...

Reviewed by: The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China by Ying-shih Yü Gilbert Z. Chen (bio) Ying-shih Yü. The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China. Translated by Yim-tze Kwong. Edited by Hoyt Cleveland Tillman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 328 pp. Paperback $34.99, isbn 978-023-155-360-5. Ying-shih Yü's 1987 study of the impact of Chinese religions on the economic behavior of the merchant class during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1912), Zhongguo jinshi zongjiao lunli yu shangren jingshen, translated here as The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China, is an indisputable classic in early modern Chinese history. Although it has exerted tremendous influence since its original release more than three decades ago, the book hitherto has been inaccessible to the English-language reader. This translation thus represents a welcome, albeit belated, effort to introduce this work to the Western scholarly community. The central agenda of Yü's book is to investigate the relationship between the traditional religious ethic and the indigenously developed commercial activities prior to the importation of modern Western capitalism into China since the late nineteenth century. In the process of addressing the inquiry, Yü tackles head-on two then-dominant theories. The first is Marxist historiography, which insists that capitalism is an essential stage of Chinese historical development and that the underlying economic infrastructure determines political and cultural superstructures, not vice versa. This theory rules out a priori that any cultural factor such as religious teachings could exert any influence over economic development. In contrast to the rigid economic determinist theory of Marxism, Weberian-influenced historians do not assume that the development of Chinese history mirrored the West's. In addition, they propose a more nuanced interpretation by arguing that the rise of modern capitalism in the West cannot be explained solely by a set of economic factors as Marxist scholars have insisted. Max Weber maintains that cultural factors played an intrinsic role in propelling (or thwarting) such transformation. Given that modern capitalism first developed in the West, Weber insists that indigenous cultural elements in non-Western societies such as early modern China were responsible for the failure to develop a capitalist economy in those societies. As a prominent intellectual historian, Yü unsurprisingly finds the Weberian approach more convincing than the Marxist one. Nevertheless, he disagrees with Weber's conclusion that traditional Chinese culture was always antithetical to capitalism. Instead, Yü argues that early modern China witnessed the emergence of a new "inter-worldly" religious ethos, which facilitated, rather than undermined, commercial activities. In this regard, this line of intellectual development was akin [End Page 153] to the Protestant ethic identified by Weber. But what distinguishes Yü's book as a masterpiece is that it is not only concerned with the development of new ideas among a selected group of intellectuals, but also with the impact these ideas had on the collective behavior of a specific group of people in real life. In this regard, Yü's work represents a valuable attempt at connecting intellectual history with social history. Yü traces the origin of the new religious ethic to Chan Buddhism, which first emerged during the Tang dynasty (618-906). This newborn school of Buddhism embodied paradigmatic shifts that would transform Chinese intellectual and social landscapes in the following centuries. It first redirected Buddhism from world renunciation to inner-worldly asceticism, emphasizing the positive contribution of this world to one's obtainment of enlightenment. Yü maintains that Chan Buddhism was thus comparable to Protestantism in the sense that both recognized the possibility of achieving transcendence through engaging in this world. This inner-worldly direction, furthermore, inspired, or even galvanized, its long-time competitor Daoism to reconfigure its teachings in a similar vein. Various schools of new religious Daoism emerged during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as the Complete Truth sect (Quanzhen jiao), which not only departed considerably from the older forms of religious Daoism which placed great emphasis on occult arts, but also advanced a step further than Chan Buddhism to promote the ideal that fulfilling one's duties in this world was the only guaranteed...

In the early modern era China witnessed an explosive growth in discourse regarding things known as bowu. In some ways resembling the study of natural history in Europe, it was oriented toward the strange and exotic. A renowned bowu master, Xie Zhaozhe left behind prolific writings on the subject, recording not only the natural historical knowledge he amassed but also how he produced that knowledge. Using Xie as an empirical case, this article proposes a model for an “infrastructure of science making” with which to conceptualize early modern Chinese science as a situated knowledge. It explores the profiles of Xie’s book learning, of his real-world encounters with natural phenomena through praxis, and of his collaboration and exchange with other members of his discursive community. An in-depth examination of these parameters in his knowledge infrastructure raises some salient points for understanding the broader trends in natural studies in early modern China and the wider early modern world.

This chapter examines how women’s authorship in music prints were presented and canonised through carefully constructed editorial rhetoric in early modern China. The presentation of such authorship was a way of tackling dispute and doubt about female authorship in songwriting and music publication among elite male writers and critics. The chapter explores, in particular, how the Chinese women’s song anthology, the Collection of Elegance (1667), can be seen as a patchwork of late Ming culture and gender dynamics in the public distribution of female-authored song. It focuses on the female editor Wang Duanshu (1621–c.1701) and her editorial approach of holding on to the late Ming (1573–1644) music legacy as self-expression of editorial authority. Drawing on materialist methodology from literary historians in print culture studies of both early modern England and China, this chapter offers a close reading of the text and paratexts of the Collection of Elegance, as edited by Wang. It deals in some detail with the material design and conceptualisation of authorship, and offers new ways of thinking about material histories of music-textual production in early modern China. The chapter examines the collection in detail, tracing structural, ordering and editorial strategies, and seeks to understand how those strategies relate to broader cultural-historical trends in the period.

China's social history offers vivid confirmation of the insights of David Brion Davis, Orlando Patterson, Eric Foner, and others that the existence of an ancient, stable, conceptually absolute institution of “slavery” is a powerful impetus to the production of an equally absolute conception of “freedom.” Although a wide spectrum of unfree labor, dependency, and coercion is discernible in Asian history generally and in China particularly, there is no precise parallel to the Roman legal construction of slavery. In China the absolute legal definition of slave status, or the associations with race and culture that might have inspired an equally absolute ideal of personal or national freedom, never emerged. On the other hand, influence of Roman legal dichotomies of slave and free in the shaping of European and American scholarship on coercion need not so obscure our view of other traditions that slavery is not plainly visible to the modern eye. The cognates of many forms of European slavery persisted in China for millennia. They left a wide trail in law and in the popular lexicon. They also supplied a dimension to modern notions of ethnic identity. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China was conquered and then governed by the Qing Empire, which survived until 1912. The empire was initiated in 1636, at what is now the city of Shenyang in the province of Liaoning, but at the time was territory wrested from Ming China by the founders of the early Qing Empire.

This paper uses three maps of Beijing from the sixteenth century to explore the range and variation of interests and agendas involved in the production of cartographic images of urban space in early modern China. One is a map from an official gazetteer, the second accompanied a privately produced guidebook/description of the city, and the third is a single broadsheet with a mix of cartographic and pictorial imagery aimed at a more popular audience. The treatment of the Imperial City and the Imperial Palace, known as the Great Within, is different in each map, from near complete obscurity to a rich and fantastic image of the emperor at work in his study. These maps illuminate the diversity of production in a period of rapid development in print publication and circulation.

Books about things - the literature of Ming connoisseurship ideas about things - themes in Ming connoisseurship words about things - the language of Ming connoisseurship things of the past - uses of the antique in Ming material culture things in motion - Ming luxury objects as commodities anxieties about things - consumption andclass in Ming China. Appendix: Selected prices for works of art and antique artifacts c1560-1620.

In addition to their judicial functions, local magistrates in imperial China had to perform many other tasks, without specializing in any one field. In order to ensure that these officials would have the necessary expertise, handbooks were compiled.The «Shih-cheng lu» («Record of practical government»), a manual edited in 1589, contains sections that offer an extremely realistic insight into the functioning, difficulties and shortcomings of local judicial administration during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). These sections – guidelines for surveillance officials – point out the many problems that surrounded local magistrates in Ming China: the constant threat of unfavorable evaluations, the continuous pressure of investigation deadlines, a large caseload, underpaid staff who did not hesitate to abuse their authority, and liability for punishment if they made wrong judgments. Lü K’un, the author of the manual, does not address these problems without advising magistrates on how to avoid them. By translating sections from the original classical Chinese text, and by situating them in the social and legal context of the Ming dynasty, we discover the motives and the – sometimes conflicting – ideals of the author of this important work in the legal history of China.

There is plenty of evidence that, during the Ming dynasty in China, the enjoyment of the fruits of commerce was not so frowned upon as the texts of orthodox morality and political economy might imply. The enormous quantities of surviving Ming material culture, which are continuously being augmented by archaeology (since people were buried with goods for use in the afterlife), range from secular and religious buildings, the paintings and calligraphy produced and consumed by the elite, through printed books, furniture, metalwork, textiles, jewellery, carving in a variety of materials from jade to bamboo, and ceramics to weapons and tools. What we find in Ming texts are ways of talking about what we now call ‘consumption’ in ways that are either negative or positive, but which are never detached from a discourse of morality, of good (or bad) governance, and ultimately of a universal order that links humanity and its actions to wider cosmic matters of harmony or disjointedness. This article discusses splendour and excess in Ming China.

Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status. The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue duree in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.

Since ancient times, local histories have been the necessary heirlooms for historical and political records in various places. After the emergence of printing, the two forms of copying and carving coexisted in the compilation process of local records. In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the economy of the southeastern region prospered, and the development of printing technology matured, and the printing industry ushered in the peak, and the traditional copying was gradually replaced by the high-quality carving. This paper reflects the specific period of printing transmutation and the fluctuation of the book market in the Ming Dynasty by studying the data of local history editions in some areas of the southeast during the Ming Dynasty and explores the social reasons behind the change and its influence on the future generations, in order to provide strong conclusions for the history of the development of China's printing and publishing industry.

Contrary to the long-standing idea of a scientific failure in early modern China as compared to Europe, some recent work has emphasized the existence of a tradition of ‘evidential’ research in the natural sciences, antiquarianism, and geography, especially during the Sung, Ming, and Qing periods. This article seeks to develop this new perspective by offering a comparative history of the genres of travel writing and ethnography in early modern Europe and Ming/early Qing China. We argue that there were qualitative as well as quantitative differences in the way that these genres functioned in each cultural area. Even when we find apparent similarities, we note different chronological rhythms and a different position of these genres of travel writing within a wider cultural field—what we might term their ‘cultural relevance’. The specific nature of Chinese state imperialism—or, conversely, the particular nature of European overseas colonialism—played a role in determining the type of ethnographic approach that came to predominate in each cultural area. These parallels and differences suggest a fresh perspective on the cultural origins of the ‘great divergence’.

Reviewed by: The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality by Ling Hon Lam Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen THE SPATIALITY OF EMOTION IN EARLY MODERN CHINA: FROM DREAMSCAPES TO THEATRICALITY. By Ling Hon Lam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 360 pp. Ebook, $59.99; Hardcover, $60.00. Emotion is a seemingly inseparable, self-evident element of literature. In recent decades, new insights of affect have been explored in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, cultural studies, geography, psychology, philosophy, gender studies, and sociology. Along with [End Page 498] scholars' increased interest in theorizing the affective logic, emotion also has become a major concern in literary study. How does drama provide readers insight into the ways emotions are produced, experienced, and judged in history? How can emotion link to other conversations happening in the humanities? How would the rethinking of emotion shed light on theatre studies beyond the script and the written text? How could it advance a consideration of the performing and spectating movement, the staging, the atmosphere, or the space? In The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality, Ling Hon Lam challenges the assumption that emotion is an interior state of mind in response to external factors. Lam proposes a radical rethinking of emotion in terms of space. Instead of taking the external space as a projection of people's feelings or treating emotion as prior to the "realm," Lam argues that "emotion per se is spatial" (p. 4). By reconceptualizing emotion as not a state of mind within oneself but as a spatial structure Lam suggests this structure undergoes and indexes significant historical changes. He concentrates on a specific spatial structure of emotion—theatricality—pertaining to Chinese society during China's early modern period. Theatricality, according to Lam, refers to "an early mode of spatiality in which emotion is not interior to oneself but performed by others" (p. 6), and conversely, it was conceivable only as exhibited to an audience. The historical peculiarity of theatricality, however, must be understood in the sedimentation of earlier modes of spatiality—namely, "dreamscapes"—from which theatricality emerged. Lam offers a new account of the term "emotion-realm" (qingjing) which centers on the idea of emotion as space. In the Chinese language qingjing describes the relationship between a subject's feeling and the object's reality, situation, or circumstance. This book focuses on how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century China. Through figuring out the genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps China's moral, theatrical, and knowledge production histories. These histories converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined by Lam as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality. The first chapter "Winds, Dreams, Theatre: A Genealogy of Emotion-Realms" looks into one of the most well-known Chinese drama, Mudan ting (The Peony Pavilion, 1598). Lam provides a revisionist history of emotion in Chinese literature and culture. Reading The Peony Pavilion in this "archaeological" way, Lam looks into the subtle transformation of Chinese theatre and subject formation. He explores the multiple layers of dreams and dreamscapes in the play by examining [End Page 499] the realization of dreaming after awakening, dreams shared between the two leading characters, and the projection of the heroine Liniang's dream in film. Lam believes that if The Peony Pavilion is the romantic play par excellence in early modern China, it is not because it celebrates emotion as the innermost essence of a liberated individual; rather, it is because the play eloquently encapsulates the three major historical regimes of the spatiality of emotion—winds, dreamscapes, and theatricality. In early modern China, "theatricality emerged as a new spatial mode of emotion following the ancient and medieval topoi of winds and dreamscapes" (p. 46). Incorporating these regimes, this play has deployed them in an anachronistic juxtaposition, obliterating their timeline and structural differences. In Chapter 2 "The Heart Beside Itself: A Genealogy of Morals," Lam looks into the different relationships to theatre in The Water Margin and The Journey to the West; the former "derives the motifs of playacting from Yuan drama," and the latter "departs...

The porcelain production centre of Jingdezhen (southern China) produced fine ceramics both for the emperor and his court and for the market by employing large numbers of skilled and unskilled, free and unfree labour. Conventionally, the imperial kilns of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties have been held up as examples of exploitative systems that prevented the development of capitalism. In this chapter, I explore evidence from the sixteenth-century Chinese centre of ceramics manufacture to suggest the presence of a form of capitalism in early modern China. The chapter covers a brief background of the production system in Jingdezhen and then turns to some specific issues in the central government’s management of labour force, to return to some question of capitalism towards the end of the chapter. Overall, the chapter reveals sophisticated labour-management policies, waged free labour, and production for global markets, pointing to a capitalist environment.