Chinese Print Culture Research Articles

Muslim Printing in Late Imperial China: Woodblocks, Networks, and Creation of Chinese Islamic Knowledge

When books existed mainly as manuscripts in the Islamic world, Muslims in late imperial China were making use of woodblock printing to publish their Islamic translations and treatises written in the Chinese language. In that way, they developed their own Chinese Islamic canon of texts—Han Kitab. Contemporary scholars have been exploring how Han Kitab reconciled Confucian and Buddhist ideas with Islamic teachings. Nonetheless, the social aspect—whether and how those works made real impact among Muslims in Chinese society—is yet to be examined. This paper argues that it was owing to Muslims’ active participation in the bourgeoning Chinese print culture that Han Kitab was able to be widely published and circulated across the Chinese territory. Through networks of Muslim authors, publishers, merchants, and officials, etc., many Han Kitab were printed, reprinted, and carried around. Some were gradually received as authoritative, serving as the cornerstone on which particular “Chinese Islamic” knowledge was established. Printing thus allowed dispersed Muslims in China proper to have shared knowledge, discourse, and memory, and contributed to a rising sense of collectivity among them.

A LOCALISED BOUNDARY OBJECT: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WESTERN MUSIC THEORY IN CHINA

In 1685, the Portuguese Jesuit Thomas Pereira was ordered by the Qing Kangxi emperor to write books on Western music theory in Chinese. Presented in the books were seventeenth-century practical and speculative music theories, including the coincidence theory of consonance. Invoking the concept of ‘boundary object’, this article shows that the cultural exchange, which gave rise to new knowledge by means of selection, synthesis and reinterpretation, was characterised by a lack of consensus between the transmitter and the receivers over the functions of the imported theories. Although the coincidence theory of consonance could potentially effect the transition from a pure numerical to a physical understanding of pitch, as in the European scientific revolution, it failed to flourish in China not only because of different theoretical concerns between European and Chinese musical traditions, but also because of its limited dissemination caused by Chinese print culture.

Chinese Reading Rooms, Print Culture, and Overseas Chinese Nationalism in Colonial Singapore and Malaya

While recent research has given deeper understanding of libraries, the print culture ofo the English-speaking residents of colonial Singapore and Malaya, the majority, non-English-speaking population, has been largely neglected. To give a more complete and nuanced understanding of the role that libraries and reading and writing cultures played in colonial Singapore and Malaya, this paper will situate the three aspects among the overseas Chinese community in pre-war Singapore and Malaya. It will demonstrate that Chinese reading rooms, along with Chinese print culture, had a major role in shaping overseas Chinese nationalism in colonial Singapore and Malaya. They were important avenues for the Kuomintang to propagate ideologies that helped fostered an imagined community: a sense of nationhood among the overseas Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, whose loyalty lay with China and not the British. This was unacceptable to the British, who responded with surveillance, suppression, and censorship to contain the threat to their rule.

Selling Scandal in the Republican Era: Folk Opera in Performance and Print

The publication of vernacular texts in regional languages is a vibrant but relatively little-known niche in the history of Chinese print culture. This study will draw from extant opera texts (tanhu...

A short history of written Wu, Part II: Written Shanghainese

AbstractThe recent publication of the novelMagnificent Flowers(Fan Hua繁花) has attracted attention not only because of critical acclaim and market success, but also because of its use of Shanghainese. WhileMagnificent Flowersis the most notable recent book to make substantial use of Shanghainese, it is not alone, and the recent increase in the number of books that are written partially or even entirely in Shanghainese raises the question of whether written Shanghainese may develop a role in Chinese print culture, especially that of Shanghai and the surrounding region, similar to that attained by written Cantonese in and around Hong Kong.This study examines the history of written Shanghainese in print culture. Growing out of the older written Suzhounese tradition, during the early decades of the twentieth century a distinctly Shanghainese form of written Wu emerged in the print culture of Shanghai, and Shanghainese continued to play a role in Shanghai’s print culture through the twentieth century, albeit quite a modest one. In the first decade of the twenty-first century Shanghainese began to receive increased public attention and to play a greater role in Shanghai media, and since 2009 there has been an increase in the number of books and other kinds of texts that use Shanghainese and also the degree to which they use it.This study argues that in important ways this phenomenon does parallel the growing role played by written Cantonese in Hong Kong, but that it also differs in several critical regards. The most important difference is that, to date, written Shanghainese appears almost exclusively in texts that look back to “old Shanghai” and/or to traditional alley life in Shanghai, and that a role of the type written Cantonese has in Hong Kong is not likely to be attained unless or until Shanghainese texts that are associated with modern urban Shanghai life, especially youth culture, begin to appear.

The Rules of Prose in Sixteenth-Century China: Tang Shunzhi (1507-1560) as an Anthologist

AbstractThis paper examines the role of the anthologist in late imperial Chinese print culture. Specifically, it focuses on the sixteenth-century anthologist Tang Shunzhi. Tang’s first place finish in the 1529 metropolitan examinations came at a pivotal moment. As commercial anthology printers responded to an expanding reading public by applying readers’ aids such as punctuation and commentary to increasingly diverse textual corpora, Tang’s distinctive method of annotation was used to ‘reveal’ the rules of Ming examination prose operating universally across a seemingly endless variety of texts. At the same time, Tang’s own belief in universal rules of prose was the product of an educational movement to supplement the narrow and monotonous examination curriculum by providing students with anthologies of ancient literature. These two Tangs—one revealing uniformity within diversity, the other revealing diversity within uniformity—highlight contradictory trends toward both stereotypy and diversification within sixteenth-century print culture more broadly.

The Dance of "Old" and "New" in Chinese Print Culture, 1860s-1955.

Argument Scholars of modern Chinese publishing and book culture focus on the dramatic transformations that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the new technologies that enabled "mass" printing and the development of "modern" genres of print. They often neglect the fact that xylography remained a working technology through much of the Republican period and even into the People's Republic of China. Here I examine the continued use of woodblock printing and the continuing popularity of "traditional" textual genres from two perspectives. First, from a "bottom up" perspective, I examine the production and sale of woodblock texts in rural markets, often in the face of efforts by both the Republic and the People's Republic to prohibit their use. Second, from a perspective from the top, I consider the deliberate choices made by the government, some elite book collector-publishers, and Daoist and Buddhist devotees to print certain works xylographically.

《中華女子修身教科書》與民初女子教育

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 在古代中國社會裏，不論出嫁前或出嫁後的女性最重要的事務不外乎是：一、操持家務和專心紡織；二、生兒育女和相夫教子，一生擔任著“賢妻良母”的角色。及至近代中國，出現“三千年未有之大變局”，西方觀念不斷傳入，女子教育受到關注，新式女學堂如雨後春筍般紛紛出現，女子的角色愈來愈顯得重要。加上，隨著西方先進出版技術的引入，傳統的印刷效果得以改良，此舉迅速地提高了出版的質量和數量。爲了配合新式學制，不少出版商紛紛編著多種專門爲女子而設的教材。本文欲以中華書局在1914年出版專爲高等小學課程而設的《中華女子修身教科書》（1—3册）爲例，欲透過它的内容，探討民國時期作爲形象塑造者的教科書如何教育女子，女子形象怎樣在官方的標準下而被“國家化”。希望藉此了解在近代社會生活中，女子如何游走於“家庭”與“社會”兩種角色之中，並闡釋近代中國女子教科書所發揮的功能和特性。
 In the imperial China, women, no matter got married or not, were used to be educated as a model of “perfect wife and good mother”. They were dedicated their whole life in (1) handling household and spinning duties, (2) assisting husbands and bearing children. But there was a dramatic change in the modern era, once western thoughts and knowledge were introduced into China, the right of women tended to be a great concern in society. Female education gained much attention. Higher rates of schools among women led to increase their role and status in the whole community. In addition, the western printing technology pushed the Chinese traditional printing industries to make innovation in terms of quality and quantity. In order to fit the new-style education system, modern female textbooks became the focus in the Chinese print culture. In 1914, Textbook on Moral Education for Chinese Women (volume 1—3) was published by Chung Hwa Book Company and was tailor-made to advanced primary school curriculum. This paper attempts at exploring how the textbook as image-maker under nationalization gives impacts on female daily practice. What are the appropriate female images—traditional, westernization or hybridization being created for the needs of new era? What are the female roles in family and society in the modern social life? All these concerns shed the light on the function and the meaning of textbook in Chinese female moral education.

Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 (review)

Reviewed by: Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 Anne Reinhardt (bio) Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. By Christopher A. Reed. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+391. $85/$29.95. The Chinese invented wood-block printing during the Tang dynasty (618- 907 C.E.) and enjoyed a sophisticated print culture well before Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press in Europe. In the nineteenth century, Westerners seeking profits and converts in China brought with them print technologies descended from Gutenberg's press. Christopher Reed's book examines the confrontation between these two print traditions in China's treaty ports during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Resisting the assumption that European-style printing presses would inevitably replace wood-block techniques, he investigates the accommodation [End Page 411] and adaptation of these technologies into a particularly Chinese form of print capitalism. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, Shanghai's printers adopted mechanized printing and modern organizational practices that allowed them to distribute new-style journals, newspapers, and textbooks to ever expanding audiences. The values and aesthetics of traditional Chinese print culture, however, significantly shaped their choices of technologies and techniques, and continued to exert an influence over Shanghai's printing and publishing, even into the twentieth century. Reed contends that Chinese print capitalism therefore represents a case distinct from both conventional histories of Western print capitalism and the best-known accounts of its development in non-Western contexts such as Benedict Andersen's Imagined Communities (1983). Reed first lays out the process through which Western print technologies were transferred to China. Western missionaries introduced a considerable range of such technologies to port cities in the early nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1870s that Chinese printers in Shanghai began to view the printing press as a plausible alternative to wood-block printing. At this time, Chinese printers found lithographic printing techniques best suited to reproducing calligraphy and reprinting traditional books in greater quantity and at lower cost than wood-block printing. By the late 1890s, these printers had begun to adopt letterpress printing to satisfy a rising demand for the quick delivery of news. By the first years of the twentieth century, Chinese-owned machine shops could repair and reproduce lithographic and letterpress printing machinery, breaking Shanghai printers' former dependence on foreign equipment and facilitating the diffusion of these technologies throughout China. Reed analyzes the social and institutional features of print capitalism that emerged among Shanghai's printers and publishers: the cooperation between reformist literati and industrial entrepreneurs as well as publishers' embrace of the trade association, the joint-stock firm, and intellectual property as ways to protect their investments in modern print technology. Finally, Reed examines the heyday of print capitalism in Shanghai through the activities of and competition among three of the largest publishing firms of the 1920s and 1930s. The focus on the technological, social, and business history of Shanghai's printing and publishing industries distinguishes Reed's book from a recent wave of studies of modern Chinese publishing that tend to focus on the cultural contributions of particular periodicals. His study is extraordinarily rich. Reed skillfully employs anecdote, fiction, and memoir to evoke the beliefs and dilemmas of those participating in Chinese print capitalism at all levels. Intertwined with his main argument are other narratives that underscore the ways in which the publishing industry was indeed a significant hub of multiple aspects of Chinese modernity. He considers, for [End Page 412] example, the significance of place in Chinese print capitalism by tracing the development of Shanghai's "Culture Street" (wenhua jie), where booksellers and publishers concentrated their businesses. He also traces the development of class polarizations in the printing industry, from evidence of exploitative relations between masters and apprentices in the early print-machine industry which anticipated the polarization of class relationships and the subsequent radicalization of print workers. One issue that is not fully addressed in this study is the relationship of Shanghai's print capitalism to the highly politicized terrain of Chinese capitalism under semicolonial conditions. Reed notes that publishing was the third largest area of Chinese investment after the cigarette and brocade-weaving industries...