Literati Culture Research Articles

Being a Commodity

The qin 琴, a seven-stringed plucked musical instrument, occupies a unique status in Chinese cultural history. By the time it was established as the musical embodiment of classical tradition and literati culture in the Song dynasty, it had become an exchangeable commodity. While literary writings composed before the Song rarely focused on its monetary value, the unprecedentedly vibrant commercial world recast the qin, hitherto an aristocratic or scholarly pursuit, as a commodity that affected the life of the literati. This article examines how the literati worked through the conflicting values brought by the commodification of the qin to create and reinterpret its new meaning as an object with both cultural and monetary value. The commercial mechanism that the literati took part in also brought about changing characterizations in the connoisseurship of the qin. The astute perception of sound was no longer the sole criterion for appraisal, which now included familiarity with the qin’s physicality and knowledge of its craftsmanship. Behind the ostensible monopoly of the literati discourse on the qin, there was an economic and social network in which different groups participated—groups that together defined the cultural and commercial values of the qin.

Tracing the Image of the Stringless ‘Qin’ in Buddhist and Literati Writings in the Song Dynasty (960–1279)

Abstract: This article delves into the religious, philosophical, and poetic connotations of the stringless qin during the Song dynasty, particularly its significance in Chan Buddhism and literati culture. For Chan monks, it analogously represented the transmission of unspoken teachings and the urgency of transcending intellection and language. Simultaneously, Song literati wove the stringless qin into diverse narratives, reflecting both their philosophical explorations and Tao Qian’s influence. By tracing its historical trajectory both within and outside the soteriological context, the study sheds light on the dynamic interactions and shared influences between literati and Buddhist monks.

Enriching Song literati culture: With an emphasis on the four treasures of the study (Wenfang Sibao) of the Southern Tang

Enriching Song literati culture: With an emphasis on the four treasures of the study (<i>Wenfang Sibao</i>) of the Southern Tang

蔣廷黻 󰡔中國近代史󰡕(1938)의 재검토

This paper examines the perspectives, narratives, and arguments in the Chinese Modern History(1938) by Jiang Tingfu(1896-1965), a Chinese historian and diplomat. By doing so, I would like to explore problems such as how this book, which has many limitations, can be read from the perspective of today and what this book can mean if it is still meaningful today. This book was written in a specific political situation as a high-ranking bureaucrat within the Nanjing Nationalist Government right after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Containing a clear perspective and message, and thus very controversial, this book, although it drew much attention since its publication, has been virtually forgotten in mainland China since the establishment of the People''s Republic of China. However after Post Mao China, this book has been reevaluated in the process of seeking the possibility of a new historical interpretation to more adequately explain the changed reality along with the decline of the socialist revolutionary ideology and the rise of China as s G2 superpower. This article was developed in the manner of a detailed review of Jiang Tingfu''s book, and the narrative structure of his book was reviewed in three aspects: modernization, nationalism, and literati culture. As a result, it can be seen that this book provides a wealth of thought in the arena of today''s history education and in relation to narrative strategies that drive readers’ perception of history. By relying on his problem consciousness and perspective raised by this book, we can use it as an opportunity to newly reflect on the old issues of the study of modern Chinese history.

Review: The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography, by Brian R. Dott

Review: <i>The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography</i>, by Brian R. Dott

Life of an Exile

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; What kind of impact did social networks of Song literati have on their lives in exile? This paper focuses on Sun Di 孫覿 (1081–1169), a prominent literary figure in the Northern to Southern Song transition, and studies his epistolary writings in connection with his banishment to Xiangzhou 象州 in the years 1133 and 1134. Through an in-depth analysis of the contents of his letters, the paper shows how Sun Di established ties with officials in different localities and how he responded to the humiliation of banishment. I argue that Sun Di’s reputation as a literary stylist among his contemporaries helped him to develop a good rapport with local officials, particularly in the Guangnan West circuit, which was essential to creating a relatively comfortable exile journey and a pleasant life during his confinement. This study highlights the value of letters as historical sources pertaining to Song political and literati culture and sheds light on literati responses to life’s many challenges.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

The "Ancestors' Family Instructions": Authority and Sovereignty in Song China

The "Ancestors' Family Instructions":Authority and Sovereignty in Song China Deng Xiaonan, Christian Lamouroux, and Luo Yinan New Appreciation Deng Xiaonan and Christian Lamouroux, "The 'Ancestors' Family Instructions': Authority and Sovereignty in Song China." JSYS 35 (2005): 79–97. This article presents a new interpretation of the Song literati's culture of practice, which was constituted by their conviction that they preserved the memory of the imperial "Ancestors' Family Instructions," their self-identity as the guardians of these "Instructions" in court politics, and their performative interactions in various historical contexts guided by these imaginative roles. Professors Deng and Lamouroux therefore challenge commonly-held views that take the competition amongst various political actors such as emperors, factions, and bureaucrats as the major theme of Song political life. Instead, the authors successfully revealed the constitutive power of political culture that shaped the content of elites' competition; it also points to the role of culture in directing the changing trajectory of Song elite politics. Deng and Lamouroux's new picture of Song political life portrays literati not as self-centered players of politics who were devoted to pursuing personal goals that were shaped by material interests and beliefs regarding ideal order. Rather, the conflicts and compromises of literati reflect their common recognition of the same cultural framework, known as the "Ancestors' Family Instructions," through which they understood themselves and others. The authors' research therefore reveals these "Instructions" as the hinge on which political life became practical. Even though political life appeared to revolve around personal interests and beliefs, it nevertheless hinged on processes of intersubjective imagination, in which political participants integrated their discrete personal experiences and perceptions with the cultural framework that bestowed meanings upon both the self and other interacting human subjects. Within this new picture, the recurring tensions and conflicts amongst Song literati did not foretell the disintegration of the literati community. On the contrary, it reflected a collective literati imaginary that was shaped by the same cultural framework that coordinated the meanings, norms, and justifications for their actions. This article inherits the academic tradition of Chinese historiography, a tradition that gained prominence in the first half of twentieth century, thanks to such great Chinese historians as Chen Yinke 陳寅恪, Qian Mu 錢穆 and [End Page 133] Deng Guangming 鄧廣銘, who believed that historical research should be an endless intellectual odyssey in which scholars strive to understand different worlds of meaning: not only those of the research objects, but also their own. Moreover, it also establishes a common ground between Chinese historiography and the ontological tradition of European social theory, which views the area of politics not simply as the aggregation of the behavior of individuals who are conceived as bounded and purposive actors, but the processes through which interrelated agents unfolded their understandings of the existential world. After its publication, this work has paved way for a great number of succeeding studies in both Chinese and Anglophone scholarship that have been continuously reshaping the landscape of Song political history. A new way of "understanding" Song history has emerged among Song scholars, who can imagine historical agents' life-streams as flowing side by side with their own, enabling them to search for a Song history that is meaningful to their own age. [End Page 134] luo yinan 羅禕楠 peking university What constraints existed on the power of the emperor in premodern China? This is a question of interest to historians of China as well as our colleagues in other fields, and we offer this research report, a partial translation of an article published in the French journal Annales—Histoire, Sciences sociales in 2004,1 as a preliminary answer. We focus on the development of the concept of the "Ancestors' Family Instructions" (zuzong jiafa 祖宗家法 or zuzong zhi fa 祖宗之法) during the Song dynasty—widely acknowledged to be both the beginning of autocratic rule and the birth of the bureaucratic state. First, we would like to present some definitions of the concept, and then we will locate it within three different historical contexts: the political, the ideological, and the administrative. We conclude with some observations on the role played by the "Ancestors' Instructions" in the making of the bureaucratic state. Many Song texts mention "Ancestors' Family Instructions." The...

The Courtesan as Famous Scholar: The Case of Wang Wei (ca. 1598-ca. 1647)

Abstract This article examines the life and poetry of Wang Wei, one of the most distinguished courtesan poets of the Ming dynasty. Through an examination of her courtesan career, her friendship networks in literati circles, and her adoption of multiple identities such as xianren (person of leisure), daoren (person of the Dao), and shiren (poet), it seeks to illustrate what I believe is an important explanation for the flourishing of late Ming courtesan and literati culture. The rising prominence of learned and literary courtesans was strongly connected to a new social formation of nonconformist literati, the “men of the mountains” (shanren). These nonofficial urban elites of the prosperous Jiangnan region fashioned themselves as retired literati, devoting themselves to art, recreation, and self-invention, instead of government service. In constructing an “artistic and hedonistic counterculture,” they encouraged the involvement of both courtesans and literary women of the gentry class.

Chan Buddhism in Literati Culture During the Song Dynasty

Chan Buddhism had become a reinvented popular Buddhist school of the Song dynasty, and it had also integrated with the indigenous culture of Song China. It had become an inseparable part of the indigenous Song culture of China and had exerted direct or indirect influence upon Chinese culture and even the mentality of most of the Chinese population.Thus, this paper taken Chan Buddhism in Song dynasty literati’s culture as its objects of research; in the paper, the research will be approached by focusing on four aspects: 1) the tea ceremony (chadao), 2) Chan poetry, 3) Chan painting, and 4) the art of calligraphy (shufa yishu).

Connoisseurship in the monastery: Discerning a distinctive identity for Jin elites in sacred precincts

Historians of both literati culture and art history have long been aware that Buddhist monasteries served as sites for appreciation of the visual arts. This study examines the role of the appreciation of art, particularly painting and calligraphy, in Buddhist monasteries during the height of the Jurchen Jin 金 dynasty (1115–1234). The identity of civil elites in northern China during this period drew on multiple cultural precedents, including primarily the Liao and Northern Song, each of which provided a model of lay elite involvement in Buddhist monasteries. By their society’s period of greatest prosperity and creativity in the late twelfth century, Jin elites had created a new repertoire of practices that adapted elements of both traditions while adding innovations that would then inform Chinese society under Mongol rule and in later periods. The detailed account provided by the diaries of Wang Ji 王寂 (1127?–1193) allows careful extrapolation from the briefer, more fragmentary writings left by other Jin literati, offering some indication of what types of paintings and calligraphy, by what artists, might have been found in what types of monasteries, in what condition they might be, and how literati visitors might respond to them in those settings.

Digital Humanities for the Education of Confucian Literati Culture

Digital Humanities for the Education of Confucian Literati Culture

Contemporary Chinese ink paintings: The dawn of a rock renaissance

Abstract This article focuses on eight contemporary Chinese ink artists who paint scholars’ rocks. Their interpretations of the rock demonstrate the diversity of their perspectives and talents. Although each artist has his or her unique interpretation of the rock, they are united in their desire to revitalize ink painting and its associated literati tradition. This article will first present a brief introduction of the history of collecting and painting rocks in literati culture. This will be followed by discussions of the work of each of the artists in question. It shall be argued that while these artists use the rock – a traditional object of scholarly contemplation – and brush and ink as their main point of reference, they are actively engaged in bringing their work into the present. The work of these artists demonstrates that image and technical skills do not need to be entirely novel to be contemporary.

Records of a Minor Historian: Lu Xun on Zhang Taiyan

Lu Xun, nearing his death, wrote two essays commemorating Zhang Taiyan. Both are rather unconventional eulogies, which engage the style, themes, and conventions of traditional biographies. Keenly aware of the depictions of his teacher as a conservative Confucian scholar and a political reactionary, Lu Xun provides a counter image. By associating his teacher with prominent revolutionaries and framing his idiosyncratic behaviors and political choices in later life as the product of failed ambition, Lu Xun harks back to the figure of the “mad genius” lauded as exemplars in the classical literary tradition, an image that resonates as well with the gallery of “modern” misanthropes and madmen in his short stories. Cast within a lineage of awakened eccentrics often deemed insane in their own times, Zhang emerges in Lu Xun’s essays as a revolutionary par excellence: an outspoken rebel who, after the founding of the Republic, remained a fearless critic of the establishment; an uncompromising radical at heart, who remained committed to the ideals of a true social transformation long since forgotten by those around him. In making the “worthiness” and relevance of Zhang Taiyan as a historical figure legible to modern readers through his engagement with traditional biographical conventions, Lu Xun also affirms the value of a traditional literati culture which continued to structure his worldview as a modern intellectual and writer. For his portrait of the “master of classical studies” as a radical revolutionary, however partial, was an attempt to ensure that Zhang’s name would remain relevant to posterity, leaving open the possibility that his teacher’s “precious records” might also be transmitted and still find knowing readers in later ages.

“I SLICED MY FLESH INTO PAPER, AND GROUND MY LIVER INTO INK”: WANG CIHUI’S (1593–1642) SENSUALIST POETRY AS AN ALTERNATIVE ROUTE TO SELF-REALIZATION

Wang Yanhong 王彥泓 (zi Cihui 次回, 1593–1642) was active in the last decades of the Ming. Because of his particular interest in representing erotic and amorous experiences with women in rich and sensual detail, his poetry was controversial and condemned by those who upheld a Confucian poetics in which poetry was meant to express the poet’s moral intentions and social criticism. This paper is the first attempt to translate Wang’s poems into English and to closely examine them in the contexts of Chinese poetic tradition and late Ming literati culture. I argue that his “decadent” aestheticization of his amorous and emotional experiences with women was related to his identity as a “loser” who failed in the civil service examinations but sought in writing poetry an alternative path of self-realization. His poetics served to fulfill his ambition to become a poet of extraordinary creativity and aestheticism, even as it reveals his sense of self as an “invalid” member of his society.

Domesticating Romantic Love during the High Qing Classical Revival

This study examines the Heming ji (Collection of singing in harmony), which comprises the sometimes surprisingly intimate poetic exchanges between the woman intellectual Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851) and her husband Hao Yixing (1757-1829), both renowned in their lifetimes as classical “evidential research” (kaozheng) scholars. The paper seeks to demonstrate the transformation of the cult of qing (romantic love) in the High Qing period. It argues that, as the centrality of courtesans in literati culture died out with the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, gentry women came to represent the positive cultural values of qing through the increasingly fashionable idea and practice of companionate marriage. In this process, the cult of qing that characterized the subversive late Ming literati culture, of which courtesan culture was an important part, was not obliterated by the High Qing classical revival as is often assumed; rather, it was domesticated, ritualized, transformed into conjugal love, and arguably, integrated into the High Qing “familistic moralism.” The paper also explores how the concept of qing, in the narrow sense of love between man and woman, was expanded into this couple’s shared passion and ambition to serve the state and empire.

Poetry and Painting in Chinese Literati Culture

Poetry and Painting in Chinese Literati Culture

The Fu-Ji(扶乩) Ritual and the Literati Culture in China

The Fu-Ji(扶乩) Ritual and the Literati Culture in China

The Woman Who Discovered Printing by T. H. Barrett (review)

Book Review 119 Journal of Chinese Religions 36 (2008) The Woman Who Discovered Printing T. H. BARRETT. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. xiv, 176 pages. ISBN 978-0-300-12728-7. US$25.00 hardcover. The extent to which China could once boast the world’s foremost culture of books has in recent years become increasingly apparent, as scholars have built on the pioneering work of Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien (Written on Bamboo and Silk),1 vastly expanding our knowledge of the history of printing and the book trade, especially for late imperial and early modern China.2 The Woman Who Discovered Printing is an ambitious foray into the first two centuries of printing in China, the seventh and eighth centuries, in search of the elusive first spark that made the subsequent history of printing possible. At the heart of this book is a story, rich in personal psychology and happenstance, pieced together from scattered passages in a variety of sources, that leads us ultimately to the woman in the book’s title: Empress Wu (Wu Zetian 武 則天). The story runs as follows: in the seventh century, Empress Wu, familiar with stamps on paper used for administrative purposes in the Tang court, and troubled by the appalling acts of violence she had employed to secure power, determined to make up for her past actions by distributing hundreds of thousands of small stupas, each containing a spell printed on paper. Though she died before completing the project, the eminent monk and eventual patriarch of Huayan 華嚴 Buddhism, Fazang 法藏—himself wracked by guilt at having betrayed his former patron Empress Wu when she fell from favor—carried out this project after her death, in this way demonstrating the value of wood-block printing and inspiring the development of printing in the centuries that followed. The evidence for each of the elements of this account is scant: Did the Empress in fact feel remorse at the murders she ordered in her ascent to power? One recently uncovered text suggests the possibility, but it is formulaic rather than specific—a general “confession” for any bad karma she might have picked up along the way rather than a genuine expression of guilt for particular acts. Did Fazang really betray her, and, more importantly, did he in fact carry out her vow to print hundreds of thousands of spells on her behalf? No printed spells or miniature stupas from the project have been found and identified as such. Nor is there a clear link between these supposed events and the later history of printing. In short, it is far from 1 Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 2 For instance, Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th -17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Print Capitalism 1876-1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004); Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book. Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006); and Cynthia J. Brokaw, The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 120 Journal of Chinese Religions certain that Empress Wu was in fact the woman who invented printing. Barrett is well aware that his narrative is stitched together with speculation, and argues, reasonably, that just this sort of informed speculation is necessary if our understanding of the murky early days of printing is to advance, at the same time lamenting, in the final pages of the book, the dearth of researchers in the field of the early history of Chinese printing who might prove or disprove his hypothesis. Barrett is equally aware that in the end no one person can be credited with “discovering” printing. After all, the idea of seals goes back to very early times in Chinese history. And in fact, much of the book is taken up with examining the evidence for forms of printing in the century before...

A Social History of the Chinese Book. Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China

A Social History of the Chinese Book. Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China

WANG SHIZHEN AS PARTISAN: THE CASE OF YANG JISHENG

In the past ten or fifteen years scholars have developed new perspectives on political conflict in early modern China that elucidate the roles played by groups within the world of literati culture and official bureaucratic life. Moreover, they show that such collectivities often sought to advance agendas which combined policy views and personal ambitions. Works such as Lin Manhong's study of monetary policy in the early nineteenth century and Jie Zhao's studies of contending groups during the early Wanli reign have specifically addressed the nature of “factionalism.” Arthur Waldron's study of the Great Wall and the debates about managing the relationship with Inner Asian nomadic peoples and Alastair lain Johnston's work on Ming military policy are major expositions of the conflicting views of border defense which concerned generations of officials in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. William Rowe's book on Chen Hongmou has done much to demonstrate the ways in which one prominent official in the High Qing pursued policies in a variety of situations which embodied a consistent perspective on the problems of provincial administration. These and other works have begun to unpack the complexities of conflicts between individuals and groups over real issues of government policy and administration, as well as the use of networks of contacts and connections to advance the career goals of group members.