Early Qing China Research Articles

State of the Field Report XV: Contemporary Chinese Studies of the Scholastic-Aristotelian Soul in Late-Ming and Early-Qing China

AbstractThe Jesuit China mission coincided with a sophisticated attempt to place Chinese and Western concepts of human nature in dialogue with Confucianism. The Jesuits believed that they could facilitate evangelization by drawing upon Confucian concepts to explain the soul. In so doing, they and their Chinese collaborators also pioneered a genre of hybrid philosophical texts, which used Aristotelian conceptions of the soul to critique and supplement autochthonous Chinese conceptions of human nature. These texts are not just of significance for Chinese Christian theology, but also anthropology, psychology, and even medicine, given the role played by the soul in both Chinese and Western conceptions of human physiology at the time. Until recently these texts have been little studied except by missiologists who were more interested in their relevance for mission history than for comparative philosophy. Scholarship has perhaps also been hampered by the immense linguistic demands of studying texts that sit between the Chinese and Western intellectual traditions. Recently, however, a number of Chinese scholars have turned their attention to these texts, intrigued by novel philosophical ideas contained therein and their complex relationship to both the Western and Chinese intellectual and religious traditions. Since many of these Chinese-language contributions are published in volumes which are not easily accessible outside of China, they have not enjoyed great visibility in Western-language scholarship. This article will review the major developments in Chinese scholarship and will conclude with suggestions for future research.

Digital Trans-Pacific Silk Road and Phases of China-Latin American Connectivity: From Silver to AI

In this paper, we aim to document and analyze the long arc of connectivity between China and Latin America. First, using analytical international trade and economic tools, we provide a new economic perspective of the First Globalization–-the Ming and early Qing China’s economic and business links with Latin America and Europe. Second, due to U.S. government trade policies toward China in the 1990s, the Second China’s Globalization was ushered in with its entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO). During this second phase, China exchanged manufactured goods with minerals and resources from Latin America. Finally, the tough technology and trade stance by the Trump and Biden Administrations prompted China to intensify the third phase of China interaction with Latin America. For the 2020s and beyond, one important pillar of the Third China-Latin America-Europe Globalization is heightened efforts for China to increase its digital-AI, telecommunication and platform business presence and access into the Latin American markets. To enrich our analysis, we will provide Chinese-style digital-AI business and economic models to help illustrate our discussions. Throughout our paper, we want to point out that government policies were instrumental in bringing forth these Three Globalizations that involve China-Latin America-Europe.

Building Communities through Rituals: Glimpses into the Life of Chinese Christian Communities in the 17th Century

As central agents in the cultural dialogue between China and Europe in the 17th century, Christian Chinese communities represent a rich and fascinating source, offering a unique intercultural perspective on the intellectual, cultural, and religious world of late Ming and early Qing China. What did these communities look like? How did they come into being and maintain their significance as a community? By utilising stories depicting scenes of Christian ritual practices in local Chinese contexts between the 1620s and 1640s, collected by a late Ming Christian convert from Fujian, this article delves into the life of Chinese Christian communities, specifically focusing on the dimension of ritual practice. It shows how rituals played a key role in the formation of these communities, not only in keeping them alive, but also in continually redefining their significance for their members.

Reshaping Abraham’s Image in Early Qing China: A Comparative Study of Catholic and Jewish Interpretations

In the early Qing dynasty, the Jesuit missionary Louis de Poirot’s (He Qingtai 賀清泰, 1735–1814) Chinese rendition of the Bible, Guxin Shengjing (The Ancient and New Testament) (古新聖經), reshaped the figure of Abraham. Contrary to the depiction by Chinese Jews of the era, de Poirot portrayed Abraham as a sage, resonating with the traditional Chinese concept of the “five cardinal relationships” (rulers to subjects, fathers to sons, husbands to wives, among siblings, and between friends), and an exemplar of virtue and faith, devoid of human flaws. Key differences emerged in translating Abraham’s name, religious stature, and national identity, influenced by distinct belief systems, attitudes towards Confucian culture, and political dynamics. Analyzing these Catholic and Jewish perspectives on Abraham enhances our understanding of the Bible’s contextualization and informs contemporary religious localization.

Cultural Allusions and Humorous Effects of Occult Depictions in Night Ferry

??? Yehang Chuan ‘Night Ferry’ is an encyclopaedic masterpiece and the chef-d’oeuvre of ?? Zhang Dai (circa 1597-1689), an illustrious historian, poet, dramatist, essayist, aesthete, musician and gastronomist in late Ming and early Qing China. Night Ferry cumulates more than four thousand entries and encompasses a veritable cornucopia of topics in an elephantine range. In this research, I investigate Chapter Twenty ?? Fang Shu ‘Alchemy and Sorcery’ of Night Ferry, which comprises Section ?? Fu Zhou ‘Amulets and Incantations’ and Section ?? Fang Fa ‘Prescriptions and Practices’. Both sections abound with depictions pertaining to occult acts and paranormal forces, the vast majority of which embody cultural allusions concerning religion, divination and patriarchy. Furthermore, Chapter ‘Alchemy and Sorcery’ is featured by humorousness, though Night Ferry is not a dedicated jestbook. The humorous effect in Night Ferry is not attained via sarcasm or homo-/hetero-erotism, as manifested by derisive and prurient jokes compiled in a renowned pre-modern jestbook entitled ????Xiao Lin Guang Ji ‘A Collection of Classic Chinese Jokes’.

From Jiao You Lun to Qiu You Pian: Jesuits’ Discussion on Friendship and A Comparative Study with Traditional Chinese Theories

This article makes an analysis of Matteo Ricci’s Jiao You Lun (On Friendship) and Martino Martini’s Qiu You Pian (On Making Friends) starting from the theory of the interaction and communication framework of contact between cultures. The analysis shows that Ricci’s text has a characteristic of convergence and integration of Sino-West traditions which paves the way for culture creation; while Martini introduces the concept of “love” --- the core concept of the Christian doctrines, makes a distinction between Confucian and Christian treatment on disputes, and clarifies the strategy of complementing Confucianism with Christianity. Their introduction of the western theories on friendship is a catalyst which accelerates the modernization of the concept of human relationships among the Chinese literati in late Ming early Qing China.

Franciscan spiritual literature in Early Qing China: Pedro de la Piñuela's Moxiang shengong (1694) and its Western sources

Franciscan spiritual literature in Early Qing China: Pedro de la Piñuela's Moxiang shengong (1694) and its Western sources

淸初 州縣 行政과 幕友 - 黃六鴻의 『福惠全書』를 중심으로 -

淸初 州縣 行政과 幕友 - 黃六鴻의 『福惠全書』를 중심으로 -

The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko

Reviewed by: The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko Craig Clunas The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 315. $45.00 cloth. The entanglements of gender and material culture have been central to the work of Dorothy Ko; this focus is obvious even from her first book, through its engagement with late Ming women and their books, paintings, and embroidery, as well as their writings.1 Her subsequent work deepens this engagement through two works: one is a catalog of a major museum collection, dealing with the culture, material and nonmaterial, of footbinding in the late imperial period.2 But whereas shoes for women's bound feet have long been an object of fascination [End Page 366] and prurience for Western private and institutional collectors—no museum with a Chinese collection is without them—the objects that form the topic of her outstanding new book, inkstones, are notable by their absence from the category of Chinese decorative arts; indeed, only one of the stones shown in this effectively and richly illustrated volume is in a museum in the West. This piece, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York, bears the signature of Gu Erniang 顧二娘 (fl. 1700–1722), the enigmatic, Suzhou-based female maker of inkstones. Inkstones are objects that lay at the heart of constructions of elite male subjectivity in the early Qing, as they have been at least since the great Song calligrapher and painter Mi Fu 米芾 (1051–1107) made them the subject of a discourse of connoisseurship in his Inkstone Chronicle (Yanshi 硯史). That the most famous maker of inkstones should be a woman and that the Met example should have no more chance of being "genuine" than the many other works that bear her signature are only two of the enigmas teased out in this text. Ko's book, in its reach and ambition, manages to make inkstones diagnostic of, among other things, "the state of politics, art, and manufacture" and "contending knowledge cultures, entanglements between words and things, as well as sensitivities about gender and embodied skills" (p. 5). In fact, following the methodology of the anthropologists Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai (whose seminal collection The Social Life of Things is referenced in the book title), Ko uses a close reading of the biographies of certain key things to give us here no less than a 360-degree conspectus of early Qing China, from the agency of emperors to the margins and beyond.3 The "material turn" in Chinese studies has some interesting ancestors, and indeed Ko cites one of them in the form of Robert van Gulik, the subject of an earlier essay of hers (p. 242n7).4 But another methodological point of reference that anchors this book is the concept of "human–thing entanglement," derived originally from the actor–network theory of Bruno Latour (who is cited in Ko's book) and [End Page 367] subsequently developed by archaeologists and art historians such as Ian Hodder and Caroline van Eck.5 Important to Van Eck too is the idea of the "excessive object," which chimes closely with Ko's discussion of Gu Erniang as a "super-brand," in the sense not just of a brand that is very famous but one that is dispersed to the point where vast numbers of artifacts are believed to be her products, irrespective of their diversity and variety (p. 123). It is worth noting that this study of objects that never find their way outside China (they are far too precious within the Chinese art market) runs counter to some recent studies in Qing material culture that stress themes of contact, encounter, and the transnational. But, like the calligraphy that they are principally designed to produce, inkstones have not been part of a global story and certainly have not formed part of Western constructions of Chinese decorative art. It is good to be reminded (in the words of Sanjay Subrahmanyam) both that "not everything is connected and not all of the time" and also that what mattered most to constructions of...

The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko

The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko

From the Jesuits’ treatises to the imperial compendium : The appropriation of the Tychonic system in seventeenth and eighteenth-century China

La réception du système tychonique en Chine à la fin de la dynastie Ming et au début de la dynastie Qing est une question importante à la fois dans l’histoire de l’astronomie chinoise et dans celle des échanges scientifiques entre l’Est et l’Ouest. Dans cet article, une nouvelle exploration complète de ce processus historique est présentée. Les Traités d’astronomie calendaire de l’ère Chongzhen ( Chongzhen lishu ), qui présentent les méthodes de Tycho Brahe, ont été révisés à plusieurs reprises lors de la réforme astronomique de la fin de la dynastie Ming. L’examen attentif de ces traités révèle qu’ils contiennent différents types d’erreurs et d’incohérences. Les astronomes du début des Qing se sont efforcés de résoudre ces problèmes et d’améliorer la théorie tychonique quand ils ont étudié les Traités d’astronomie calendaire de l’ère Chongzhen , et certains d’entre eux ont réussi à proposer des procédures améliorées. Plus tard, dans le but de mettre fin à la dépendance à l’égard des Jésuites en matière scientifique, l’empereur Kangxi a ordonné la compilation d’un nouveau traité d’astronomie. De nombreux résultats obtenus par les savants chinois ont finalement été incorporés dans ce nouveau traité, l’ Examen complet des phénomènes astronomique composé par l’empereur ( Yuzhi lixiang kaocheng ).

Science Fictions: Early Modern Technological Change and Literary Response

Inspired by the imaginative experiments in fiction undertaken in response to scientific developments and technological change in the seventeenth century, this essay seeks to use science fiction's investment in speculative departures and hypothetical worlds to develop a new method for comparative analysis of the early modern world. This essay takes a new approach to the question of a global history of science fiction as a genre, proposing a triangulation among early Qing China, seventeenth- century England, and the present, rather than a teleological account of generic development from early modernity to the present. This model is elaborated through a comparative study of literary responses to new telescopic lens technologies in Li Yu's Shi'er lou (1658) 十二樓 (Twelve Towers), Margaret Cavendish's A Blazing World (1666), and global science fiction today. The aim of this essay is largely methodological, seeking to demonstrate what is to be gained through comparative studies of the early modern world and how we might go about writing them.

The Jesuit Heresiological Discourse as an Enlightenment Project in Early Modern China

Refutations of Buddhism, Daoism, and various Chinese popular cults formed a vital balance to the gestures of cultural accommodation attempted by the Jesuits in late-Ming and early-Qing China. Yet this heresiological discourse remains largely invisible in the prevailing historiography, which prominently features the accommodating Jesuit bent on forging synthesis between the East and West. This article seeks to address such neglect by centrally engaging this discourse and arguing that the Jesuits and their Chinese converts, in their consistent stress on reason and (Aristotelian) science as a basis of their criticisms of Chinese religion, articulated a hybrid notion of heterodoxy that anticipated in significant ways post-Enlightenment conceptions of superstition. Thus the article offers a case study in support of the emerging revisionist scholarship that interprets the European Enlightenment as a multi-stage historical process originating at least partially outside Europe in the sites of cross-cultural encounters during the Age of Discovery.

Fiction and History: Polarity and Stylistic Gradience in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

In late Ming and early Qing China (1550-1700), unofficial historical narratives were extremely popular.1At the time, a variety of historical and semi-historical genres flourished, including yeshi 野史 unofficial or wild histories, novels on historical events, and dramas on historical events.

Fiction and History: Polarity and Stylistic Gradience in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

In late Ming and early Qing China (1550-1700), unofficial historical narratives were extremely popular.1At the time, a variety of historical and semi-historical genres flourished, including yeshi 野史 unofficial or wild histories, novels on historical events, and dramas on historical events.

南京을 재현한 明末淸初 山水版畵와 繪畫

南京을 재현한 明末淸初 山水版畵와 繪畫

The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko

The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko

The Constitutional Debate in Early Qing China

Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies Vol.13 No.2 © 2013 Academy of East Asian Studies. 149-168 email of the author: john.delury@gmail.com 149 Constitutional Debate in Early Qing China China in the early Qing period witnessed a remarkable outpouring of critical political thought, led by two of the “great Confucians” (da ru) of their generation— Gu Yanwu (1613-1692) and Huang Zongxi (1610-1695). Gu and Huang, along with a host of now lesser-known thinkers, produced landmark “statecraft” (jingshi) writings that were constitutional in nature, in the sense that they grappled with the fundamental principles involved in ordering the state (De Bary 1967; Kuhn 2002; Schrecker 2004; Rowe 2012). They argued with one another at a system-level over how legitimate political authority ought to be constituted, and left a fascinating trail of political discourse. The richness of this early Qing moment in critical political discourse was inspired by the liberating effect that the structural failures and acute collapse of the Ming Dynasty exerted upon the political imagination of Chinese intellectuals. Similar to the profound intellectual reverberations of the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, the demise of the Ming caused leading thinkers to question basic elements of the imperial system (Song 2011). This liberation was not only a mental one. In material ways, too, literati discourse networks were liberated by the fall of the Ming from the homogenizing orthodoxy of patronage by a well-centralized state, at least In the first few decades of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), Chinese political thinkers engaged in a seminal debate over how to redesign the basic “constitution” of imperial authority. The pivotal figure in this rich argument was Gu Yanwu (1613-1682), who proposed a “mixed model” approach that would combine the strengths and counteract the weaknesses in the two rival systems for constituting political authority—the decentralized fengjian system versus the centralized, bureaucratic junxian system. This article reconstructs the main arguments in that debate, looking at how mixed model advocates differed from fengjian revivalists, focusing on the role and ideas of Gu Yanwu, but also drawing attention to their shared goal of using reform to strengthen the imperial state and the authority of the emperor. The concluding section shows how the consolidation of Qing ideological authority by 1680 brought a close to this constitutional debate, leaving it to be rediscovered during the crisis of the 19 century.

Courtesan Editor

This article focuses on female editorship and sexual politics in late Ming and early Qing China, using Hua suo shi, an anthology edited by the courtesan poet Xue Susu, as a case study. It traces textual production and transmission, and reconstructs the literary and cultural contexts of this work to explore the courtesan’s editorial gaze and representation of gender through a close reading of it. The analysis of its two main themes—women as commodities, and women as agents—shows how the courtesan editor re-imagined China’s cultural landscape from her point of view. New examples of female agency are discovered in analyzing the cultural process of editing as a “web of discourses,” providing a window on the emergence of a new female editorial voice in early modern China’s cultural discourse. Cet article se concentre sur le rôle éditorial des femmes et sur les politiques sexuelles en Chine à la fin des Ming et au début des Qing. Une anthologie éditée par la courtisane et poétesse Xue Susu, le Hua suo shi, sert d’étude de cas. Le processus de production et de transmission textuelle est examiné et le contexte littéraire et culturel de l’ouvrage restitué, permettant d’explorer le regard éditorial et le jeu de genre de la courtisane à travers une lecture serrée du texte. L’analyse des deux thèmes dominants — la femme comme marchandise, la femme comme agent — démontre la façon dont la courtisane éditrice ré-imagine le paysage culturel chinois de son propre point de vue. D’autres exemples d’intervention féminine se révèlent lorsqu’on analyse le processus culturel d’édition en tant que “réseau de discours”. Ainsi s’ouvre une fenêtre sur l’émergence d’une nouvelle voix éditoriale féminine au sein du discours culturel chinois au début des temps modernes.

The Chaste and the Licentious: Female Sexuality and Moral Discourse in Ming and Early Qing China

Previous articleNext article No AccessForum: Sex and the Early Modern WomanThe Chaste and the Licentious: Female Sexuality and Moral Discourse in Ming and Early Qing ChinaWeijing LuWeijing Lu Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Volume 5Fall 2010 Published for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/EMW23541507 Views: 38Total views on this site © 2009 Center for Renaissance & Baroque StudiesPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.