Sixteenth-Century China Research Articles

Revitalizing medical schools in late sixteenth-century China: Lü Kun and the medical reform program in his Shizheng Lu.

This article takes a glance at the medial reform program recorded in the book Shizheng Lu (Records of Practical Policies for Governing) by Lü Kun, a scholar-official from Ming China who was active more than 400 years ago. The Shizheng Lu is a compilation of varied policies and plans designed by Lü Kun as a local official to restore and improve administration of civic affairs. A sub-chapter in this book is devoted to the subject of public health service. Analysis of this text yields knowledge of how the local public health system in Ming China was supposed to operate, pivoting on the key role of medical schools and highlighting the severe malfunction of this system in Lü Kun's time. The same text also sheds light on a handful of popular medical books from the era that could have been used for medical education.

Human Trafficking and Piracy in Early Modern East Asia: Maritime Challenges to the Ming Dynasty Economy, 1370–1565

AbstractThis study asks how human trafficking in Ming China (1368–1644) became enveloped in the emerging global economy of the sixteenth century. Utilizing theoretical insights from the model of “slaving zones,” the essay examines recorded incidents of human trafficking along China’s littoral from 1370 to 1565 and contends that its presence and persistence were intertwined with the Ming court’s economic policies and problems. Here the history of human trafficking in early-to-mid-Ming China is viewed from the perspective of a series of challenges to the country’s economic well-being but also to its power to govern according to its own laws and norms. These challenges include the Ming regime’s efforts: to eradicate piracy and smuggling through their integration into the lawful framework of tribute trade; to support provincial requests for extra revenue to promote military security; to acquire Japanese silver but deny Japan mercantile access to China; to profit from Portugal’s Southeast Asian and Japanese commercial networks. This study argues that the increasing prevalence of human trafficking along China’s coastline was the result of competing forces anxious for power and riches that fused into the thrust of sixteenth-century China’s expanding economy, as well as the adaptability of those in authority to ignore the consequences of allowing safe havens for persons bartering and selling human beings. These factors turned the status of Ming China’s littoral from a “no slaving zone” into an “imperfect no slaving zone.”

Heroic monks and villainous pirates: an inquiry into monastic Buddhist warfare in sixteenth-century China

ABSTRACT This article explores the involvement of Shaolin monks in military campaigns against the so-called ‘Japanese Pirates’ (wokou) in 1550s Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. While previous scholarship has only touched briefly on the course and scope of the campaigns, this contribution analyzes the military training, fighting tactics, and actual warfare of Shaolin (and other) monks in the course of these conflicts. Drawing on late Ming historical evidences from chronicles, pen notes, local gazetteers, and previously untouched material, I demonstrate that the monastics in question possessed both outstanding individual fighting skills and above-average military knowledge. Employing strategic formations, battle tactics, and professional modes of warfare, the ‘monk soldiers’ (sengbing) were able to immortalize themselves as brave and righteous patriots. The article thus digs deeper into the entanglements of military and religious circles in late imperial China, a topic that needs to be explored in future scholarship. Ending with a brief excursion to sixteenth-century Korea, the article concludes that comparative research yields important insights of how to better understand Buddhist involvement in military actions in premodern East Asia.

The Lady Vanishes: Religious Conflict and Premortem Enshrinement in Sixteenth-Century China

The Lady Vanishes: Religious Conflict and Premortem Enshrinement in Sixteenth-Century China

Four Seasons: A Ming Emperor and His Grand Secretaries in Sixteenth-Century China By John W. Dardess. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. 287pp. $42.00/£32.00 (Paperback). ISBN: 978-1-4422-6559-2

Four Seasons: A Ming Emperor and His Grand Secretaries in Sixteenth-Century China By John W. Dardess. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. 287pp. $42.00/£32.00 (Paperback). ISBN: 978-1-4422-6559-2 - Volume 20 Issue 1

From Tradition to Community: The Rise of Contemporary Knowledge in Late Imperial China

This article examines the emergence of a new emphasis on contemporary specialized knowledge in sixteenth-century China. During this period, sources of authority such as antiquity and the court came to lose their elevated status. As a result, scholars increasingly saw the expertise of a contemporary disciplinary community as a superior standard for validating knowledge. This trend appeared in scholarly collaboration and the citation of contemporaries, as well as new kinds of paratextual materials such as lists of works cited and literature reviews. These findings on new intellectual communities in the sixteenth century call for a reassessment of the better-documented shifts in East Asian intellectual culture from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality by Ling Hon Lam

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...

Four Seasons: A Ming Emperor and His Grand Secretaries in Sixteenth-Century China, written by John W. Dardess

Four Seasons: A Ming Emperor and His Grand Secretaries in Sixteenth-Century China, written by John W. Dardess

Far and Near: A Parallel Study between Lorenzo Valla and Li Zhi

Abstract The fifteenth-century Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) and the Chinese philosopher of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602) are both famous for their rebellion against the mainstream culture of their respective nations and times. A parallel study of the writers allows us to consider fifteenth-century Italy alongside sixteenth-century China, and vice versa. The similarities and differences provide perspective on both cultures, and on the reciprocal influence between philosophy and social development.

Contributors

Other| November 01 2018 Contributors Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (2018) 5 (2): 438–440. https://doi.org/10.1215/23290048-7481583 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 1 November 2018; 5 (2): 438–440. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23290048-7481583 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Chinese Literature and Culture Search Advanced Search JING CHEN is an instructor and a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on pre-1900s Chinese poetry and poetics, traditional Chinese literary thought, and print culture in late imperial China. She recently completed her dissertation titled “Remaking Early Poetic Culture: Publication and Reception of Ancient-Style Poetry Anthologies in Late Imperial China.” By employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this dissertation examines the practices of compiling, publishing, and reading ancient-style poetry anthologies in China from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.TIMOTHY CLIFFORD is a Taiwan Fellow and Fulbright postdoctoral researcher at Academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology. His research focuses on late imperial Chinese literary history, the sociology of literature, and the history of the book in East Asia. His recent publication “The Rules of Prose in Sixteenth-Century China: Tang Shunzhi (1507–1560) as an Anthologist” discusses... Issue Section: Contributors You do not currently have access to this content.

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.

Four Seasons: A Ming Emperor and His Grand Secretaries in Sixteenth-Century China. By John Dardess. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. 287 pp. $38.00 (paperback).

Four Seasons: A Ming Emperor and His Grand Secretaries in Sixteenth-Century China. By John Dardess. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. 287 pp. $38.00 (paperback).

Reinventing the Pre-Tang Tradition: Compiling and Publishing Pre-Tang Poetry Anthologies in Sixteenth-Century China

Abstract This article examines how the making of pre-Tang poetry anthologies in sixteenth-century Ming China led to a reinvention of the pre-Tang poetic tradition. From the Zhengde period 正德 (1506–21) well into the Wanli reign 萬曆 (1573–1620), the compilation and publication of new pre-Tang poetry anthologies saw a dramatic increase, making the anthologizing practices in the 1500s crucial to understanding the pre-Tang tradition. Through a study of paratextual elements (book titles, tables of contents, prefaces, postscripts, etc.) in twenty-two pre-Tang poetry anthologies compiled in the 1500s, this article identifies three types of anthologizing practices. By employing quantitative and network analysis, the author hopes to historicize these practices, investigate the motivations for the anthologies, and explore their citation networks. These anthologizing practices, I conclude, gradually transformed the classification principles of previous anthologies, expanded the scope of canonized anthologies, and established a distinct pre-Tang tradition by the end of the sixteenth century.

A Fur Headdress for Women in Sixteenth-Century China

The subject of this paper is a style of fur headdress for women that became fashionable in the sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth, in late Ming China. It has hitherto received little scholarly attention. In Chinese, it is called wotu’er and this can be translated as ‘crouching rabbit’, ‘crouching cottontail’ or ‘crouching lapin’. We know that it was one of the luxury goods of its day, worn as a mark of high social status and wealth. This essay examines the shape of the headdress and how it was worn, as well as its material and price. How long was it in fashion and why did it become fashionable in the first place? The relevance of nomadic dress in influencing women’s garments in the sixteenth century will also be considered, as will the shift in the use of fur from functional to decorative.

Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East, by Mary Laven

In the past year, no fewer than six books have been published in English, Italian, French, Chinese, and German on Matteo Ricci, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of this famous Jesuit missionary and pioneer in the cultural encounter between sixteenth-century China and the West (in the interests of full disclosure, one of these is authored by this reviewer). Laven’s work is the latest addition to this growing scholarship. Eschewing a standard biography, she offers the reader only the barest chronological scheme of Ricci’s life, choosing to focus instead on the cultural encounter between the Jesuit mission and Late Ming society. Accordingly, the six chapters are organised around themes. In Chapter One, Laven narrates the earliest history of the China Mission in Zhaoqing, and rightly concentrates on explaining the important role played by Ricci’s senior colleague, Michele Ruggieri, whose contributions were forgotten by previous generations of historians, and on the patronage of mandarins. She uses Ruggieri’s manuscript memoirs to good effect, while ignoring the pioneering studies on Ruggieri by Joseph Shih and Albert Chan. Gift-giving is the central theme of Chapter Two, as Laven ponders the significance of a Jesuit list of proposed gifts for the emperor. Her insights into material culture (glass, silk, brocade, clocks, books) East and West represent some of the best parts of the book. Equally engaging is Chapter Three, in which Laven follows Ricci’s career in the late 1590s, as the Jesuit was then established in Nanchang, and enjoyed greater social success. Using Ricci’s treatise On Friendship as a fulcrum, Laven deftly analyses Ricci’s attachments to family and friends, Italy and China. Chapter Four, ‘Heavenly knowledge’, traces Ricci’s further ascent on the ladder of success in élite society, and introduces to the reader, in succinct and delightful prose, a diversity of subjects: the imperial civil service examination, western astronomy, printing and book culture in Ming China, etc. Especially original is her comment on the alchemical and possibly magical uses of the glass prism, a not extraordinary object in Italy, but a prized exotic item in Ming China, which helped to open many doors in Ricci’s advancement. Here, Laven’s training as a scholar of early modern Italy pays off handsomely. Launching his journey on the Grand Canal northward to Beijing in 1600, Ricci fell into the clutches of Ma Tang, an avaricious and powerful eunuch. The opposite twins ‘Jesuits and Eunuchs’ form the main theme of Chapter Five, in which Laven has given in to the Orientalist temptation to discourse at length on castration, eunuchs, and on the latter’s nefarious impact on Ricci and Late Ming society. In Chapter Six, the best known work by Ricci (not necessarily his most significant), the Tianzhu shiyi (True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven) is analysed in detail. In conclusion, Laven quite rightly points out the self-aggrandising stance of Ricci’s writings, the bias toward male élites in the story of cultural encounter, and the reality of the attractions of Christianity to the common folk, which consisted of healing (physical and spiritual), and of rituals, symbols, and senses.

Short Prose Forms in a Global Sixteenth-Century Context

This paper explores analogies between three varieties of short non-fiction prose that flourished in sixteenth-century China – the xiaopin, the sanwen, and the suibi – and the Western essay genre as exemplified by Michel de Montaigne's Essais. These several genres resemble one another in their rambling, scattered quality, their encyclopedic scope, and their inconclusiveness, features that combine to produce a situation in which readers must actively wrest elusive meaning from slippery texts. Through etymological readings of the terms “essay,” “xiaopin,” “sanwen,” and “suibi,” this paper suggests that these short non-fiction prose forms and the responses they stimulated in readers resonate with large-scale social and economic changes occurring in sixteenth-century China and France.

Sound, Space and Moral Soundscapes in Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan

AbstractThis paper employs methods from phenomenology, anthropology and literary criticism to theorise the deployment of sound in two early works of erotic fiction from sixteenth-century China: Ruyijun zhuan ([The tale of ] The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction) and Chipozi zhuan (A tale of an infatuated woman). After assessing the significance of the two novels in relation to problems of gender ideology in the period, as well as the treatment of sound, noisiness and gender in two Tang dynasty works, the paper demonstrates how almost all occurrences of non-verbal or involuntary sounds in the novels are attached to the moral positioning of their women protagonists in relation to gender norms. While not performing a full content analysis of the novels' soundscapes, moral or otherwise, a select number of examples are used to illustrate how a focus on sound, as a sign of both external moral threat and the inner person, adds to our understanding of erotic fiction from the late Ming (1520-1644). While they employ aurality in radically different ways, the two novels show how aural events share a similar function in governing women's sexuality.

Technique in exile: The changing perception of taijiquan, from Ming dynasty military exercise to twentieth-century actor training protocol

This article describes the development and emigration of a Chinese military exercise complex called taijiquan. It traces the genealogy of this practice from sixteenth-century China to twenty-first-century North American and European professional and university theatre programmes. It provides a systemic description of the protocols of taijiquan training in order to analyse its advantages and limitations in the contexts of contemporary actor training. Finally, by offering concrete examples of its application by different theatre artists, it presents a portrait of both its current use and future potential as a major component of actor training.

Oral vaccination: where we are?

As early as 900 years ago, the Bedouins of the Negev desert were reported to kill a rabid dog, roast its liver and feed it to a dog-bitten person for three to five days according to the size and number of bites . In sixteenth century China, physicians routinely prescribed pills made from the fleas collected from sick cows, which purportedly prevented smallpox. One may dismiss the wisdom of the Bedouins or Chinese but the Nobel laureate, Charles Richet, demonstrated in 1900 that feeding raw meat can cure tuberculous dogs – an approach he termed zomotherapy. Despite historical clues indicating the feasibility of oral vaccination, this particular field is notoriously infamous for the abundance of dead-end leads. Today, most commercial vaccines are delivered by injection, which has the principal limitation that recipients do not like needles. In the last few years, there has been a sharp increase in interest in needle-free vaccine delivery; new data emerges almost daily in the literature. So far, there are very few licensed oral vaccines, but many more vaccine candidates are in development. Vaccines delivered orally have the potential to take immunization to a fundamentally new level. In this review, the authors summarize the recent progress in the area of oral vaccines.

INTRODUCTION

The three papers appearing in this special issue of Ming Studies were presented at the conference “The World of Wang Shizhen: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in Sixteenth Century China” in Leiden, the Netherlands, June 13–14, 2003. Four other papers from this conference were previously published in Ming Studies 53 (Spring 2006). The conference was organized by the International Institute for Asian Studies, with Marloes Rozing managing the myriad details of logistics and funding with consummate skill and grace.