Wenxian tongkao: Chinese History Geek Note

"Da Qin" (Rome?) in the Wenxian tongkao

I had an encounter with the Wenxian tongkao at reading group last week. HJ, who seems to have really been animated by our readings from the 1602 Ricci map of the world, was looking into the mention of a certain class of people known as 'dwarves' in the Shan hai jing, who have their own land south of the region of Da Qin -- which reference point said in later sources to be Rome, but in the Shan hai jing it is the land west of the western ocean which borders the central continent (zhongzhou), following the older Chinese notion that the landmass was surrounded by all sides on water, and all resting on the back of a turtle, I believe.

Anyway, the map says somewhere (sadly I forget where) that a certain dwarf people live in caves to take refuge from large predatory birds. They attack the birds nests themselves in the spring, destroying the eggs. The business of predatory birds, and the defensive and offensive strategies against the birds, appear in the Shan hai jing and many, many later sources which tell upwards of a dozen variants of the story in as related in the commentary to the Shanghai guji edition. HJ also supplemented a single line from the Wenxian tongkao, a fairly important historical work of the Northern Song (1224) -- see Endymion Wilkinson page 526, Table 33, item 8, please. The page now stored in my email also includes a long and fascinating entry on "Da Qin," below which comes the entry on the dwarves, which variant of the original description also says that the Da Qin people protected the little dwarves from the predatory birds.

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Mencius was a Racist

King Zhuang: Chineseness, ho! Giddee-yup! This is from the "State of Chu" Theme Park at Mo Hill, Wuhan. Pic from this person's blog

One other thing I did today: finished revising my summary of another paper for the upcoming conference at my university. If you are interested in the perspective of a progressive Confucian on nation and ethnicity, check out the story of of certain Chinese scholars, by all means, read on...The ‘Nation’ Philosophy of He Xiu (129-182 CE)


Professor Huang begins his essay by saying, “Since ancient times, our country has been a collective body of many nations (minzu), with both elder brother nations and younger brother nations that are organic parts comprising the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu). As early as the Warring States era (5th-3rd centuries BCE), Xunzi (ca. 312–230 BCE) had already said, ‘All within the four seas is like one family.’”

He Xiu (129-182 CE) also believed that following the progress of society, all non-Chinese “barbarians” would become one with the Chinese. When these barbarians eventually occupied equal positions among each other, and had peaceful and good relations with each other, helping each other in need, then the attachments between nations would be as one family under Heaven. In He Xiu’s work we have thus the first theory of mixing between nations and the unification of the nation-as-family (guojia). Professor Huang points to this achievement as an important sign of progress in Chinese history.

He Xiu was a Confucian scholar of the Eastern Han dynasty (25 - 220 CE) whose main focus of study was the canonical Confucian historical text The Spring and Autumn Annals, and especially the Gongyang Commentary. The Gongyang Commentary is one of three ancient and canonical works that provide expositions on each entry of the Annals; the plan of the Gongyang Commentary is to analyze each event and figure of the Annals by identifying who deserves praise and blame. Professor Huang’s thesis is that He Xiu’s metacommentary to the Gongyang Commentary inherits the true position of Confucius regarding non-Han barbarians. Like Confucius, Huang’s understanding of the concept of ‘nation’ (minzu) predicts progress towards the Great Unity (da tong).

1. The Historical Origins of “Distinguishing Barbarian and Chinese.”

The ancient events recorded in The Spring and Autumn Annals demonstrate that from the earliest times Chinese rulers sought to govern not only the Chinese people, but also various types of non-Chinese, who are called collectively the yidi (“the barbarians of the east and the barbarians of the west,” hereafter “the Barbarians”).

Confucius himself believed that the Collective Chinese (zhuxia) represented civilization and progress, while the Barbarians represented wildness, barbarity (yeman) and backwardness. Confucius believed it was the mission of the Collective Chinese to gradually reform the Barbarians and bring them up to the level of progress of the Collective Chinese, with the final goal of realizing the ideal of the Great Unity.

In the Analects, Confucius said, “The Barbarians’ have their rulers, unlike Collective China, which is without.” As Zhu Xi’s (1130-1200 CE) commentary emphasizes, there is no sense of superior or inferior here, because Confucius allows that the Barbarians at least have rulers, and it is possible that the Chinese might lose good rulership.

The Analects also has an anecdote that goes, “The Master wished to live among the nine barbarian peoples of the east. Somebody said, “But they are filthy, how could you go?” The Master said, “When the Superior Man lives among them, what filth will there be?” Zhu Xi’s commentary explains that the Superior Man will transform the barbarians, thus removing any “filth.” Following Zhu Xi, Professor Huang says this proves that Confucius thought the Barbarians could become civilized, and therefore closer to a Chinese state. Chinese people, on the other hand, were also vulnerable to retrogression back into Barbarians again. Both could change. Thus we see even more clearly Confucius’ attitude of acceptance towards others, says Professor Huang.

But Confucius was not entirely accepting. Inasmuch as the Barbarians were an obstacle to the development of the Chinese civilization, the two groups could never have equal positions. The Barbarians could at best be open to transformation, but the Barbarians could never be allowed to transform China. (Professor Huang notes here that his use of the term “China” refers to an ancient concept of place comprising the lower and middle drainage basins of the Yellow River. When he says “China” throughout this essay, he means this ancient concept, and not the modern nation-state.)

Confucius reveals the attitude known as “Respect the King; Reject the Barbarians” in his comments about Guan Zhong (725-645 BCE), general and chief minister to Duke Huan of Qi (d. 643 BCE). “The Master said, ‘Guan Zhong was the chief minister to Duke Huan. The Duke became hegemon over the feudal lords, bringing unity to all under Heaven. The people enjoy his gifts down to the present day. But for Guan Zhong, we should now be wearing our hair unbound, and the lapels of our coats would button on the left side.” Confucius clearly characterizes the Barbarian practices (unbound hair, lapels folding over on the left) of daily living as backward.

This contradictory stance produced what Huang calls a “doubled” influence on later Confucians. The more progressive Confucians such as the Gongyang School allowed for the mutual transformation of the Chinese and the Barbarians and so emphasized the slogan “Change the Barbarians with Chinese” to advance their plan for working together to realize the Great Unity. Others held closely to “Reject the Barbarians” and worked only to sever relations, to deepen enmity, and to create a strong sense of “self-enclosure” (ziwo fengbi) among the Collective Chinese. Professor Huang calls for readers to spurn this attitude, for it actually obstructs common progress toward the Great Unity.

The Gongyang Commentary inherits this bifurcation. It stands for strong defense against the Barbarians and opposes any transformation to the Chinese by the barbarians. Professor Huang provides a few examples to this effect; this translator will point out the example of Duke Huan of Qi, whose minister Guan Zhong was celebrated by Confucius (see above):

莊公三十年
The Spring and Autumn Annals, entry for the 30th year of Duke Zhuang of Lu (664 BCE):

...The Man of Qi invaded the Hill Rong.
齊人伐山戎

The Gongyang Commentary says,

“The Man of Qi invaded the Hill Rong.” Here it refers to the Marquis of Qi, so why does it say “a man?” To blame him. And why does it blame him? Zisi Sima said, “I think he was moving against them too quickly.” This was most likely a war, so why does it not say “war?” Because in the Annals enemies speak of war to each other, and the Duke of Qi’s actions against the Rongdi was only an expulsion, nothing more.

齊人伐山戎。此齊侯也，其稱人何？貶。曷為貶？子司馬子曰：“蓋以操之為已蹙以矣！”此蓋戰也，何以不言戰？《春秋》敵者言戰，桓公之與戎狄，驅之爾

Professor Huang says the tradition interprets the commentary to be in praise of Duke Qi of Huan based on its argument that the affair was not a “war,” which would mean between equal parties, but just an “expulsion,” which means that the Barbarians are not equal to the Chinese. This manner of aggrandizement of nationalist figures and events is very common in the Gongyang Commentary.

However, the basic element of civilization is not to be determined by race, but by certain teachings. The most important of these teachings is that of “humaneness and morality” (renyi daode). As another example from the commentary shows, the Chinese can lose their humaneness and morality, while the Barbarians have the ability to gain humaneness and morality:

宣公十二年
The Spring and Autumn Annals, entry for the 30th year of Duke Xuan of Lu (597 BCE):

Summer, in the sixth month on Yi Mao, Xun Linfu of Jin lead his forces in war against the Prince of Chu at Bi. The Jin forces were routed.
夏六月乙卯，晋荀林父帅师，及楚子战于邲，晋师败绩。

The Gongyang Commentary says,

High ministers do not make enemies of the ruler. So how is it that the men named here made an enemy of the Prince of Chu? We must say here that proper ceremony was observed not by Jin, but by Chu.
大夫不敌君，此其称名氏以敌楚子何？不与晋而与楚子为礼也。

Chu originally was a Barbarian state, but they demonstrated over these years their humaneness and morality. Here, they defeated the Jin forces but went on to release and return prisoners from the war. Therefore it is Chu that observes proper ceremony, and so must be taken as Chinese. Jin on the other hand is an ancient member of the Collective Chinese, but they hoped to strike at Chu when Chu was at its weakest. Thus they demonstrate a lack of humaneness and no concern for proper ceremony. They were the Barbarians. There are more examples of this self-criticism among the Gongyang historians, which makes more evident their belief that another nation could become Chinese, and conversely, Chinese kingdoms could stray from the Way.

However, a major Confucian tradition throughout this period held just the opposite view. Thinkers like Mencius thought that the Barbarians could never be changed (which makes Mencius narrow-minded and prejudiced, in Professor Huang’s opinion). This distinction based on race and geography continued under the Han, we can see Mencius’ influence in the “debates on salt and iron” for example. (Huang here refers to the gathering of experts to discuss the state monopolies on salt on and iron in 81 BCE.) The Han historian Ban Gu (32–92 CE) famously wrote in his Discourses in White Tiger Hall that “The Barbarians are not born of China. They are not transformable by the rites. Consequently, they are no subjects of China.” This view today, says Prof. Huang, deserves the strictest criticism.

2. “Progressive Barbarians”

Such is the context for He Xiu’s agenda, which is to oppose the perspective tied to race and place and instead advance the ancient Confucian wisdom that the Barbarians could have a role in the Great Mixing (da ronghe) of Chinese nations. This early theorizing now deserves to be celebrated as exemplary, says Huang. As before, it is a two-sided, contradictory theory, one that both maintains a firm difference between Chinese and Barbarian, and yet provides a mechanism for both sides to change. As the saying goes, “The Barbarians will become Earls.”

Professor Huang provides several examples from He Xiu’s metacommentary to the Gongyang Commentary that shows he retains a firm nationalism that advocates strong defense against the Barbarians. But that does not subtract from his confidence that one day, through gradual progress into Chinese culture, the Barbarians would merge with Collective China:

It is because the earth had not met with great cities and great masters that they must be rectified by means of the Middle Kingdoms (Zhongguo). These Middle Kingdoms are the kingdoms of justice, and of proper ceremony. Those who hold them, govern the patterns that lie behind all civilization (wen). The Superior Man cannot govern with justice and proper ceremony by means of a system lacking in justice and proper ceremony; consequently, he absolutely never says “hold.” “Rectifying them,” we speak of as “attack.” The High Minister who ‘holds’ the Son of Heaven and so rectifies using these Middle Kingdoms, and ‘holding’ the Middle Kingdoms is not possible, so how much less is a High Minister who ‘holds’ the Son of Heaven! This is the reason why to downgrade the Barbarians and to respect the Son of Heaven is a proper way to speak.

因地不接京帅，故以中国正之。中国者，礼义之国也。执者，治文也。君子不使无礼义制治有礼义，故绝不言执。正之，言伐也。执天子大夫而以中国正之者，执中国尚不可，况执天子之大夫乎！所以降夷狄，尊天子为顺辞。

He Xiu believed that the Barbarians were “born of Heaven and Earth” as much as the Chinese, and that their backwardness was only a temporary phenomenon. He thus changed the position on Duke Huan of Qi’s attack on the Hill Rong from “praise” to “blame,” because Duke Huan’s methods were unnecessarily violent, and even lacking in humaneness.

He Xiu felt that whenever the Barbarians showed any interest, Collective China must welcome them with open arms of encouragement and support. The main figure to demonstrate this interest is King Zhuang of the Chu, whose armies defeated the Jin in the Battle of Bi in 597, as we mentioned above. King Zhuang’s reign was marked all over by transformation of his kingdom into something more civilized, and more powerful. There is a line in the Annals from the 18th year of Duke Xuan of Lu (591 BCE) that says very simply, “On the day Jia-xu, the Prince of Chu passed away.” He Xiu remarks that this death was recorded here because the king’s conduct was worthy. The Barbarian had indeed become an Earl.

In other parts of his metacommentary, He Xiu realizes that with the passage of great amounts of time, cultures that were once perceived as “Barbarian” could become indistinguishably Chinese. Again, Chu provides the model example, from the time of King Zhuang, the same intrepid “Prince of Chu” who defeated the Jin at the Battle of Bi (see above), the Kingdom of Chu became more and more Chinese; by He Xiu’s lifetime, it was fully a part of Collective China. Professor Huang provides other examples here as well.

Finally, Professor Huang admires how He Xiu is able to hold to a vision of the Great Unity that ought to drive forward the progressive connections between Barbarians and Chinese, despite the preponderance of failures in the historical record. For He, this is only reason to continue work for the ideal, “to employ the mind ever more deeply, and in more detail. Consequently we must worship humaneness; we must mock that there are two names [“Barbarian” and “Chinese”].” 用心尤深而详。故崇仁义，讥二名

For Professor Huang, He Xiu’s vision is worthy of consideration as one of the most outstanding examples of in the early developments of a Chinese theory of “nation.”

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The Public Sphere in China

Hanjiang Road, Hankou (Thanks, wikicommons)

Rowe, William T. "The Public Sphere in Modern China." Modern China, 16:3 (July 1990): 309-329

What makes modern society so different from ancient societies? Is it just that we have new ways of working in groups on larger, more complex projects than before? Does having ways of working in groups make us any better at communicating with each other, or at fighting for the rights of the weak and injured in the world?

Writing just after the translation into English of Jurgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, historian William Rowe reviews 1970s and 1980s work to analyze Chinese social structures in terms of the growth and decline of a “public sphere.” Most scholars answer the first question above with an affirmative to the second question: modernity is about the growth of long-distance trade, which necessitates new social structures such as newspapers, coffee houses, popular literature, trade guilds, neighborhood elites, and street repair teams. Habermas’ work specifically laments the transformation of the public sphere of the European bourgeoisie into a place where mass opinion is manipulated by large corporations, mass media, advertising, the ideology of social rights, an enormous bureaucracy, mass political parties, and highly-organized interest-group politics.



The work of China scholars, however, does not always lament. Research on 18th- and 19th-century Chinese social structures often celebrates attention to the “public” (gong) as a class of citizens, in contradistinction to “private” (si) concerns that were negatively encoded in the tradition for their exclusion of anyone outside the family; gong was also most often distinguished from “official” guan, which according to ancient ideals was a support to the larger community, but which was notorious for serving its own needs as a larger, more malevolent version of “private” actors. “Public” social structures included gongjian, special offices “authorized for use on local community projects such as road and irrigation work repairs.” These kinds of local elite structures continued to evolve through the early 20th century, when they began to realize that they were more effective at management than the imperial system.

Rowe admits frankly that the accounts available by 1990 had not developed the history of how this locally-based “public sphere” was “foreclosed” by the expansion of the “official” (guan) sphere under the late Qing, then Yuan Shikai, and then the KMT. The question, “Did an autonomous public sphere disappear in twentieth-century China, and, if so, at what moment?” remains intriguing and incompletely answered. Now that the Chinese government has scaled back from the peak of its intrusion into the intimate sphere, the question of both the intimate sphere and the non-governmental public sphere have become active topics for discussion again.

Rowe suggests that Habermas has “much to say” for students who would write the histories of “domesticity, friendship, and intimacy in China,” but leaves this aspect of history mostly outside the scope of his article. I take away a number of points, however, which I believe are applicable to my work so far (against my better judgment, I first put these down as a list, because they are still so fragmented in my mind):

“Why” attempt to find an analogue to “the public sphere” in Chinese history? Because we are looking for the opportunities that life offers for criticism. In doing this we follow the tradition of the Frankfurt School. between “public” and “gong” in Chinese history?

We are interested in the historical changes to people, and their values. Where Habermas studies the creation of the bourgeois (burgerlich) class which at first imposed its will on what was to become the notion of the “public sphere,” in China we must follow along the local elites who so often took responsibility for mass communication, education, and even repairing the roads.

For Yang Yinhang, a crucial component to popular sovereignty was the rule of law and an independent judiciary. I wonder how contemporary readers, intellectual or otherwise, understand Yang’s values, and his disappoinments?


My own focus on a woman who seeks only to remember her most personal and intimate relationships at first seems to put the economic origins of the local elite class out of my scope. But this is not quite the case; Yang Jiang remembers the centers of wealth in her own clan, in the Qian clan, and in the people she knew as a child in Shanghai. Uncomfortable feelings about one extremely wealthy family in Shanghai helps us to understand how Yang Yinhang and his family distinguished its own modesty and concern for social justice. The contrast of Yang’s more open and progressive home from the Qians also highlights the diversity of approaches to the tradition and such matters of public taste as “elegance” (ya).

Wuxi, with its dialect, its customs of teasing, it’s strong local community, makes it an ideal place for Yang Jiang. The influence of Qian’s Bofu, and the Wuxi teahouse culture, on him is directly connected to his production of a novel in Yang Jiang’s formulation.

Yang Jiang’s own practice is characterized as an appeal to public opinion. There is a basic faith that public opinion has not degenerated wholly into mass opinion. Yang Yinhang’s older and undeveloped view that an informed reading public could help in the creation of an informed and influential public opinion lives on in Yang Jiang.

There is a centuries-old war of the word “gong” in China -- does the responsibility of the public interest lie in the central government, or in the hands of its private citizenry? If self-interest (si) could be understood as crucial components of public interest (gong), then gong and si need not be opposed. This tradition is what Yang Jiang is trying to describe in her own family.

We can see this idea at work in Yang Yinhang’s dedication of his home to an elite activist from the late Ming. Yang Yinhang at the time had hope that an elite-led local public sphere might still be a force for political good using tools like the newspaper and the legal office.

The form of the essay lends itself to combining social comment with the deeply personal and subjective, with making symbolic the details of everyday living. In doing so, it shows itself a proper form to inherit the old tradition that would make gong out of si. No wonder it remains the major form for so many Chinese readers.
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Pleasure Reading: Memoirs of Hadrian

Antinous, from the statue at Eleusis

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian. Translated by Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar. New York: Farrar Straus and Young, 1954. The Emperor Hadrian is near his death, about 138 AD, and decides to write the story of his life, how he became emperor, and the great (queer, pederastic) love affair of his middle age (which in the ancient world counted old age; Hadrian died at 60).

I just finished this book and was mightily impressed. I can't help but compare it to a couple of volumes of American fantasy genre lit (Sir Apropos of Nothing comes to mind) and this comparison makes the French historicist Yourcenar seem even more powerful -- almost god like in her ability to weave fantasy. To readers and writers like Peter David: here is what I mean when I say I want to read fantasy.



First, Yourcenar's imagination channels the voice and persona of man unlike any a modern reader has ever met, but which must be familiar to any who study the classics: a ruler and egoist of the ancient world. This ruler persona sketches in adventures in a world of battles, political intrigue and affairs of the heart and we gladly travel along so that we can imagine ourselves taking on great power, or accepting the pains and pleasures of great passion. More importantly, we learn something of the layers and masks of any powerful ruler, of the many kinds connections he forms with other people, and we sense that a certain richness immanent in his identity is after all not that different in any modern identity:

Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment's rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor's table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some external hum of a bee. But little by little a newcomer was taking hold, a stage director and manager. I was beginning to know the names of my actors, and could arrange plausible entrances for them, or exits; I cut short superfluous lines, and came gradually to avoid the most obvious effects. Last, I learned not to indulge too much in monologue. An gradually, in turn, my actions were forming me.

Here the trappings of fantasy literature -- "the privations of war," for example -- are forged in tandem with a more universal experience of maturing. The vision of a "young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark" brings a wince and a smile to this reader, who sees in the line someone very much like himself, observant and interrogating by mind but nevertheless and after all limited by self-absorption in the end. This is meta-fantasy: the emperor figure in the fantasy is also admittedly a fantast, and points the way for the reader to realize that we are all always already pretenders.

Of course, lurking behind all this is Yourcenar the researcher and reader, a personality one of my teachers described as "creepy." I think the novel is at its weakest when this persona shines through with its eccentric and vaguely elitist tastes, and for me at least this seemed to happen more often in later passages of the novel:

...among the ancient poets Antimachus especially won me: I liked his rich but abstruse style, his ample though highly concentrated phrases, like great bronze cups filled with a heavy wine. I preferred his account of Jasno's expedition to the more romantic Argonautica by Apollonius: Antimachus understood better the mystery of voyages and horizons, and how ephemeral a shadow man throws on this abiding earth.

As the last sentence indicates, this is part of a longer passage describing the progress of Hadrian's mourning, but too often Yourcenar is not able to achieve the pathos either of grief or of true love -- both fold back into artfully fluffed-up reading notes that reveal nothing to me so much as the writing subject ensconced for emotional and social reasons behind the covers of old books. This is also revealed in scene after scene that should be charged with overt eroticism, but ends up a sketch completed with only to broad a brush. The best passage describing Hadrian's lover Antinuous seemed a great start:

If I have said nothing yet of a beauty so apparent it is not merely because of the reticence of a man too completely conquered. But the faces which we try so desperately to recall escape us: it is only for a moment ... I see a head bending under its dark mass of hair, eyes which seemed slanting, so long were the lids, a young face broadly formed, as if for repose. This tender body varied all the time, like a plant, and some of its alterations were those of growth. The boy changed; he grew tall. A week of indolence sufficed to soften him completely; a single afternoon at the hunt made the young athlete firm again, and fleet; an hour's sun would turn him from jasmine to the color of honey. The boyish limbs lengthened out; the face lost its delicate childish round and hollowed slightly under the high cheekbones; the full chest of the young runner took on the smooth, gleaming curves of a Bacchante's breast; the brooding lips bespoke a bitter ardor, a sad satiety. In truth this visage changed as if I had molded it night and day.

Still, we can tell from the opening of the passage that our author does not really want to dabble to much in erotica (that job of examining the scenario with a stronger magnifying glass perhaps falls to another writer!), and this impressionist sketch really is just as much of boy beauty as we ever get to see. More often it comes in tiny fragments weighted with bland words like "beauty."


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Reading: A Conference Article

Mary Lyon, educator. Founder of Mount Holyoke in Massachussetts. AKA 梨痕女士. Since Mary remained single her whole life, I wonder if queer history buffs claim her. But in China, she was once promulgated as a mother figure.

Judge, Joan. "Mediated Imaginings: Biographies of Western Women and their Japanese Sources in Late Qing China." In Qian, Nanxiu, Fong, Grace and Richard J. Smith, editors. Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008.

I suppose that its characteristic of conference volume articles that they have the flavor of simple lab reports, with a structure something like this: Topic A is of interest. Set S of texts is related to topic A. Set S, described. Conclusion.

In this short paper, Prof. Judge states very simply that biographies of Western women such as Joan of Arc and Mary Lyon were popular in very early 20th-century China, and not coincidentally these biographies were mostly translated and adapted from Japanese accounts. There is a simplicity and elegance to the report that makes it a joy to read, footnotes and all. But the young and unsure scholar sits back in the end and says to herself at once two opinions: 1. "So, that's enough for an article. Yay! I can write tons of articles." and 2. "That's enough for an article? Isn't it a bit thin? And why is any of this information important? How does it inform the larger story of China? Why would anyone give anyone a grant to study something like this?"

I suppose it is another characteristic of conference reports that the questions attitude no. 2 brings up are not addressed -- Judge was fashioning a report to other professionals, and simply stuck to the story. Stating what's at stake is the job of the volume's editors in their introduction to the whole volume. On p. 17 of their introduction, the editors here re-use Judge's term "mediation" to describe the fact that biographies of Western women were written up in Japan and taken over to China afterward, changing along the way. This shows us "complex processes of mediation and accommodation." Reading as if I were a grant-giver, though, I'm still not satisfied as to what the point of all this is. Note that I'm not saying there is no point: I'm saying no point is being overtly and clearly made. A.'s requirement of "clear and present relevance" is not being met.

I suppose that I am reading too harshly. For a conference volume, one must read as a fellow professional, with a strong sense of the states involved already established. Still, it strikes me as dangerous to assume this of the reader. Isn't it all too easy to become disengaged with the basic motives for doing historical research? To spend your grant counting names, matching kanji with hiregana, and identifying some text's source in another, earlier text? I get a kind of Borges-ian sense of joy, but also malaise, at the thought of publication histories, translation analysis, pinpointing of influence, and other stories that can go on forever and ever without ever asking, "why"?

So let's make something up. Let's conjecture that the fact that Joan of Arc and Mary Lyon had cultural currency in 1900s China was important? How so? Well, younger men and women read these biographies and were changed by them -- Judge mentions Qiu Jin at one point, who obviously saw herself as a Joan of Arc figure at times. So the importance seems to be in the fact that the image, once there in the cultural politics, propogates along and causes changes to the identity formation of readers. But this part of the story is entirely neglected in this particular report. I suspect, further, that it is a part of the story that is much more difficult to tell. Easier to just consider that one text is a translation of another text, with some differences.

A few additional notes, in bibliographic form:

Judge, Joan. "Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century." in Fong, Grace S., Qian, Nanxiu and Harriet T. Zurndorfer, editors. Beyond Tradition & Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004. On female exemplars. Perhaps this is the larger, more expansive article that I wanted the one I just read to be.

Judge, Print and Politics. biographies of Western men don't change Chinese men's identities as much as women's biographies do.

Davis, p. 148. "women worthies" in the West. In Scott, Joan, ed. Feminism and History. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hu, Ying. Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.
, pp. 6-8. Why do they always criticize potential late Imperial exemplars?

Qian Nanxiu, 2001 (Chinese article.) and Qian Nianxiu in 2004, pp. 60-101. 外國烈女傳. This one didn't come from Japan, but also didn't have as much influence.

Pollard 1994. Chinese of those days mainly translated from Japanese, sometimes English and rarely French.

Judge in Fogel, 2001. Translating Japanese textbooks.

Songwei Yang'er. Mme Roland, from Japanese journal to Liang Qichao's biography.

女子新讀本, 1904,1905. Yang definitely uses Zhao's translation of Japanese sources. notes 21, 23 gives transliterations of many women's names. Also a song and two articles in 女學報. [What's at stake in a publication history?]

中國新女界雜誌 and other journals exhibit the influence of Nemoto Shō's text. Notes 31 and 32 have more transcriptions of names.

Joan of Arc. Cf. Hua Mulan, fame and use of this character. Seen as nationalist, not a saint. Chinese readers dismiss the "voices" (and one author condemns the gender inversion).

Mary Lyon. Overlook that she is single; make her into a nurturing mother.

Judge, Joan. The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008.

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Sima Qian's Bibliography of Sorrow

Sima Qian, Historian. And, apparently, part monkey.

In the end portion of his "Letter in Reply to Ren An," Sima Qian creates an entire history of personal expression. For me, this establishes the potential scope of Chinese life writing; indeed, it is the scope of Chinese literature more generally:

古者，富貴而名磨滅，不可勝記；唯倜儻非常之人稱焉。蓋文王拘而演《周易》；仲尼厄而作《春秋》；屈原放逐，乃賦《離騷》；左丘失明，厥有《國語》；孫子臏腳，兵法修列；不韋遷蜀，世傳《呂覽》；韓非囚秦，《說難》、《孤憤》。《詩》三百篇，大抵賢聖發憤之所為作也。此人皆意有所鬱結，不得通其道，故述往事，思來者。

In-progress and very literal translation and a brief supplemental bibliography:

Among the ancients, those who gained wealth and nobility and yet still saw their names tarnished and erased cannot be completely recorded; only the untrammeled and unusual person is called to it [being recorded]. Hence King Wen was captured [at Yuli] when he expanded upn the Zhou yi; Zhong Ni was in danger when he wrote the Springs and Autumns. Qu Yuan was exiled, and so came to rhapsodize in Li sao. Zuo Qiu lost his sight, and only then was there a Guo yu. Sun Zi was stripped of his feet, thus was the Bing fa revised and complete. Buwei was exiled to Shu and yet passed down to the world the Lülan. Hanfei was imprisoned in Qin: "The Speaking on Difficulties," "Lonely Indignation." Of the Three Hundred Poems, a majority are works meant to express the frustration of worthies and sages. These men all had something dense and knotted in their intents, and so were unable to pass through along their own paths; consequently they narrated past affairs and thought wistfully of the future.

Primary Secondary Sources and Translations of Works Sima Qian Cites Above:

Rutt, Richard. The Book of Changes (Zhouyi): A Bronze Age Document. Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 1996. The former Bishop of Leicester (see this review) demonstrates the effectiveness of a hobbyist Sinologist. I've always seen this on the shelf, but never read it.

Legge, James. The Chinese Classics: With a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes. 2nd ed. Hongkong: Hongkong Univ. Press, 1960. Volume five of seven translates in entirety "The Ch'un Ts'ew with the Tso Chuen." I love this big old book, its tiny double-columned print sprinkled with Chinese terms and phrases. I tried to read it in earnest back in 2003, summer I think, but I I've never finished it.

Hawkes, David. The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. This one is an easy choice.

Schaberg, David. Foundations of Chinese Historiography: Representation in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1996. I looked at this once, but don't remember anything from it now, except that it was a very scary PhD dissertation.

Sunzi. Sun Tzū, on the Art of War, the Oldest Military Treatise in the World. Translated from the Chinese with Introduction and Critical Notes by Lionel Giles. London: Luzac, 1910. Believe it or not, I've never studied this most famous of Classical Chinese texts. Just as with my teachers, I have a feeling that the text is simply too popular, and thus slightly tainted. However, I'm sure that Giles's version is up to snuff, and it is available everywhere online (here, for example).

Lü, Buwei. The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. I don't know a thing about this text or what is clearly the definitive edition. Shame, really. I do know from Wikipedia that it is an eclectic mishmash of texts, characteristic of the Chinese language and stuff from the ancient world (is that redundant?).

Han Fei. Han Feizi: Basic Writings. Translated and edited by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. I looked at this once, too, but can't really remember much, other than the Mizi Xia story, of course. There was a complete translation by somebody named Tsai, but I couldn't force my way even through a single chapter of it. (That might have been my fault, admittedly.)

Waley, Arthur. The Book of Songs. Edited and with a Postface by Joseph Roe Alen. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Aw, it's Joe's baby, how could I choose anything else? My PhD oral exam proved I didn't read the "Postface" carefully enough, though.

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Why Sima Qian did not commit suicide

Sima Qian, 2nd century BC. Taken from a mainland China website

Seeing that one of my students can read classical Chinese well, I felt a burst of jealous competitiveness. I determined to finish going over the "Letter in Reply to Ren An" by Sima Qian to help get my chops back. The draft of my own translation, along with many notes, continues to evolve here.

Today, I got up to the climax of the letter, where Sima Qian talks of his own personal troubles and excuses himself at length for not committing suicide. Any man should have died rather than suffer the punishment of castration, but he accepted it and lived on miserably so that he could finish writing his history of China.

Some thoughts on this part:


It's a grand act, strangely self-centered and self-immolating at the same time, summed up in what is currently my favorite sentence of the letter:

The reason I bear it all in hiding, eeking out my miserable life, that I dwell in the dark solitude of dirt, and shit, never taking my own leave, is that I hate that my inner heart has something that isn't over with. I am loath to leave the world and not express it in written style for later generations.

所以隱忍苟活，幽於糞土之中而不辭者，恨私心有所不盡鄙陋，沒世而文采不表於後世也。

After that part of the letter, Sima Qian goes on to describe a tradition of literature that is the product of expressing indignation. I'll write an entry on that next.

Notes on comprehension so far: Sima Qian's Chinese is undeniably difficult, with much special vocabulary that even the commentators see fit to explain at times. I think what most takes getting used to, however, are his complex sentence structures. Often there are more than three clauses strung together with very definite relation. Examples:

If a man cannot early on resolve himself outside of the constraints of the law, his degradation increasing by degrees, when it reaches the point that he's between the whip and the lash, then to want to draw on honor [commit suicide], isn't the situation too far gone already?

夫人不能早自裁繩墨之外，以稍陵遲；至於鞭箠之閒，乃欲引節；斯不亦遠乎？

It is human nature always to love life and hate death, to think of one's mother and father, to care for one's wife and children; only a person struck by higher principle could do otherwise, then there is something one cannot avoid.

夫人情莫不貪生惡死，念父母，顧妻子；至激於義理者不然，乃有所不得已也。

Note the 至 ... 乃 pattern which is very clear in the Chinese but difficult to translate literally. I consider that a good lesson for today. Also note the aphoristic opening to the thought, which to me shows us Sima Qian's encapsulating, generalizing mind at work nearly all the time. Perhaps that's over-reading, though.

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Theory: Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye, 1912-1991. A Canadian, actually. His "Anatomy of Criticism" is less difficult and more entertaining than I expected.

I want to begin making some very broad connections between features of Chinese life writing across the ages, which has driven me towards both history texts and literary theory. It's always a surprise to see how these two types of writing interrelate. Professor Wakeman's article had a reference to Northrop Frye intriguing enough for me to pursue the connection.

Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. 
Professor Frye throws his mind against the literature of "Western" and "Classical" ages. He comes up with a set of "modes" that broadly matches against certain stages of history -- the classical era, the middle ages, the Renaissance, the 17th through 19th centuries, and the 20th century. Overall, for example, literature has tended to become more and more ironic, which is to say in its most basic sense less and less concerned with the Gods and more and more concerned with humans and their foibles.

My notes for the first essay turned out roughly structural, reproducing Frye's own roughly three-part division of his discussion into the tragic, comic and thematic modes of literature down through the ages.

As with so much literary criticism and theory, this is also in part a vast reading list that I intend, somehow in my own feeble way, to pick at.

The last great threat to the establishment of Qing rule did not come from Ming loyalists such as Wan Shouqi, but from Wu Sangui, Shang Kexi, and Geng Jingzhong, the Chinese generals who had been allowed to establish three privileged quasi-independent regimes (on the Fukienese and Cantonese coasts and along the border with Annam and Burma) in return for having conquered South China in the name of the Manchus. In 1673, when the independence of the Three Feudatories was challenged by the young and vigorous Kangxi Emperor, the generals rose in rebellion. Many Chinese turncoats joined them, but two critically important Han banner leaders refused: in Fujian, Governor-General Fan Chengmo rejected Geng Jingzhong's invitation to join the rebellion, and he was thrown in jail; in Guilin, Governor Ma Xiongzhen was also imprisoned when he insisted on remaining loyal to the Qing dynasty. Their ensuing martyrdoms were truly tragic acts -incongruous and inevitable, heroic and ironic-that were dramatic preludes to the neoclassicism of High Qing during the following century. (See the discussion of tragic modes in Frye 1969:39-42)-Frederick Wakeman, Jr.

First Essay

Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes

Fictional Modes: Introduction

The elevations of characters, inspired after Aristotle's Poetics:

1. myth: stories of gods. e.g Teutonic myths

2. romance: superior men, in degree. prodigies of courage and endurance. knight-errantry, saints. (thaumaturgic prophets of Israel.)

3. A Leader: hero that Aristotle had in mind. High mimetic mode. Drama, particularly tragedy

4. a sense of common humanity, our own experience; Vanity Fair, "novel without a hero." Low mimetic mode. Middle class. Defoe.

5. inferior to ourselves: ironic mode. 20th century.

An overpacked statement (both mistaken and not, blunt and not):

Oriental fiction does not, so far as I know, get very far away from mythical and romantic formulas.

naive and sentimental; tragic and comic



Tragic Fictional Modes



1. Dyonysiac. dying gods. Orpheus, Jesus. the "solemn sympathy" of nature. Ruskin's pathetic fallacy thus a proper thing, not a fallacy. The Dream of the Rood. Kingsley's ballad.

2. Romance. the hero is still half a god. elegiac. hybris and harmatia. Beowulf, Passing of Arthur by Tennyson.

3. High mimetic tragedy. mortality. social and moral fact. catharsis. Angst. the marvellous; Queen Mab. Pity and Fear, pillars that can become mixed: Othello, for example. The "flaw" harmartia can be circumstantial only. The Mirror for Magistrates.

Tragedy belongs chiefly to the two indigenous developments of tragic drama in fifth-century Athens and seventeenth-century Europe from Shakespeare to Racine. Both belong to a period of social history in which an aristocracy is fast losing its effective power but still retains a good deal of ideological prestige.

4. Low mimetic tragedy. sensations of pity communicated externally. Pathos. Little Nell's death. Clarissa Harlowe, Hardy's Tess, James's Daisy Miller. inarticulateness of the victim. Wordsworth sailor mother, flat, dumpy style.  "The Sailor's Mother." failure of expression, Swift's memoir of Stella. tear-jerking. the terrible figure: SImon Legree. inner/outer life: Bovary, Melville's Pierre, Lord Jim, Ibsen's Brand. "The type of character involved here we may call by the Greek word alazon, which means impostor, someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is. The most popular types of alazon are the miles gloriosus and the learned crank or obsessed philosopher." Tamburlaine, Othello. Faustus. Tartuffe. Browning monologue. Synge's playboy, Shaw's sergius. Gothic thrillers, dark hints of interesting sins.  "The result as a rule is not tragedy so much as the kind of melodrama which may be defined as comedy without humor." Coen bros' Blood Simple, for example.

The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong. Hence the central tradition of sophisticated pathos is the study of the isolated mind, the story of how someone recognizably like ourselves is.

5. Ironic.

The conception of irony meets us in Aristotle's Ethics, where the eiron is the man who deprecates himself, as opposed to the

alazon. Such a man makes himself invulnerable, and, though Aristotle disapproves of him, there is no question that he is a pre-destined artist, just as the dazon is one of his predestined victims. The term irony, then, indicates a technique of appearing to be less than one is, which in literature becomes most commonly a technique of saying as little and meaning as much as possible, or, in a more general way, a pattern of words that turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning. (I am not using the word ironic itself in any unfamiliar sense, though I am exploring some of its implications.)

possibly no hamartia: just gets isolated from her society.

Thus the figure of a typical or random victim begins to crystallize in domestic tragedy as it deepens in ironic tone. We may call this

typical victim the pharmakos or scapegoat. We meet a pharmdkos figure in Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, in Melville's Billy Budd, in Hardy's Tess, in the Septimus of Mrs. Ddloway, in stories of persecuted Jews and Negroes, in stories of artists whose genius makes them Ishmaels of a bourgeois society. The pharmakos is neither innocent nor guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes, like the mountaineer whose shout brings down an avalanche. He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence. ...The pharmakos, in short, is in the situation of Job.

incongruous and inevitable, opposite poles. Kafka, Trial. failed Prometheus. Kafka and Joyce's Shem, mythic. Also Henry James, see the story "The Altar of the Dead."

These references may help to explain something that might otherwise be a puzzling fact about modern literature. Irony descends

from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily towards myth, and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear in it. Our five modes evidently go around in a circle.

Comic Fictional Modes



1. The Apollonian, the hero accepted into society.

2. "idyllic" (corresponding to "elegiac" above), pastoral. idealizing a simplified life in the country or on the frontier.

3. High mimetic: Aristophanes old comedy. Menander->Low. Plautus, Terence. low bias. social comedy. sympathy and ridicule, corresponding to pit and fear. The Birds: balance the heroism and irony.

4. New Comdedy: young people who want to marry. Prospero, a rare character. Domestic comedy. Pamela's virtue rewarded. rarely any sexual energy. Balzac or Stendal: moral ambiguities. the alazon or picaro may win.

5. ironic comedy. driving out the pharmakon: Jonson's Volpone, Tartuffe, Falstaff, certain scenes in Chaplin. thepederasty of Cleisthenes. The Clouds a counterpart to Plato's Apology.

But the element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important

theme of ironic comedy. Even in laughter itself some kind of deliverance from the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be very important.

The irony of the contemporary detective story. Sherlock Holmes. v. Crime and Punishment, for example.

In the growing brutality of the crime story (a brutality protected by the convention of the form, as it is conventionally impossible that the man-hunter can be mistaken in believing that one of his suspects is a murderer), detection begins to merge with the thriller as one of the forms of melodrama. In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.



We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there.

seeing it as a symptom of society's own viciousness. Graham Greene novels. (Se7en is what I think of). parody: ridicule. parody of tragic irony, as in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. Huxley, Those Barren Leaves.

Even popular literature appears to be slowly shifting its center of gravity from murder stories to science fiction or at any rate a rapid growth of science fiction is certainly a fact about contemporary popular literature. Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us as technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.

[Pause. romantic v. realistic.

If we take the sequence De Raptu Proserpinae, The Man of Lmv's Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, Pride and Prejudice, An American Tragedy, it is clear that each work is "romantic" compared to its successors and "realistic" compared to its predecessors. On the other hand, the term "naturalism" shows up in its proper perspective as a phase of fiction which, rather like the detective story, though in a very different way, begins as an intensification of low mimetic, an attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic of that attempt, in pure irony. Thus Zola's obsession with ironic formulas gave him a reputation as a detached recorder of the human scene.

Hence, perhaps, the reputation among some that Yang Jiang is a detached writer of baogao wenxue. ironic tone v. ironic structure. the reader invited to share. Dickens, for example. Elitism's risk: a moral value-judgment disguised as critical. Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we

must then learn to recombine them.Canturbury Tales: low mimetic with irony techniques. don't oversimplify. the mimetic tendency itself as a pole. mythos. the constructive principles of story telling remain the same, either way. Tom Jones, Moses, linked by birth. displaced myths. mythoi. plot formula. towards verisimilitude, then, with irony, beginning to move back. [I'm really on to something with yuan'er bu nu]



Thematic Modes

Aristotle: melody, diction, spectacle; mythos or plot, ethos (characters and setting), dianoia or "thought"

When a reader of a novel asks, "How is this story going to turn out?" he is asking a question about the plot, specifically about that crucial aspect of the plot which Aristotle calls discovery or anagnorisis. But he is equally likely to ask, "What's the point of this story?" This question relates to dianoia, and indicates that themes have their elements of discovery just as plots do.

the hero, the hero's socity, the poet, the poet's readers --

There can hardly be a work of literature without some kind of relation, implied or expressed, between its creator and its auditors. When the audience the poet had in mind is superseded by posterity, the relation changes, but it still holds. On the other hand, even in lyrics and essays the writer is to some extent a fictional hero with a fictional audience, for if the element of fictional projection disappeared completely, the writing would become direct address, or straight discursive writing, and cease to be literature.

on allegory: genuine allegory cannot be added by critical interp alone. Western v. classical. epigrams, eclogues, ridicule....Ovid and Snorry, "educational" value for collecting stories by theme.



2. Episodic and encyclopedic. [cf. the distinction between memoir and autobiography] ecstatic, ollaves of the Celtic world: killing with satire. the encyclopedic form: cf. Yokai. episodice forms. Isaiah, Koran. Hesiod: king's and tribes to remember. Gower of the Cursor Mundi, Malory, catholicity, Widsith or wandering minstrel. nomadic satirist. [cf. Blogs, 赋, Knechtges, Frye's book itself an example]. The Inferno



3. High mimetic. The Faerie Queene, The Lusiad, Jerusalem Delivered, Paradise Lost....Pilgrim's Progress. Cynosure or centripetal gaze. Devotion. look on the lady, the soveriegn. Crashaw. Herber. "temples"

4. Low mimetic: Icelandic sagas, Orlando Furioso. Romanticism. Hyperion vs. Pride and Prejudice. Romantic agony. Faust. the self. Egotism, subjective mental state. Rousseau, the Prelude. [node here]

5. symbolism. craftsmen. anchorite. Flaubert, Rilke, Mallarmé (Shi Zhecun). temps perdu. big works with a sense of contrast between the course of a whole civilization and the tiny flashes of significant moments which reveal its meaning. : Finnega's Wake, The Waste Land, Between the Acts. the craftsman becomes once again oracular. the idea of a return. Nietzsche's new divine power vs. identical recurrence. Joyce's theory of history. Romantic provincialism is still around. Eliot's royalism, fascism of Pund. how tradition reappears! "existential projection." philosophy, soitical meliorism, metabiology: literature a "shadow" onto philosophy, not terribly sophisticated.



Coda: plato's contradictions on poetry. paranomasia. the Longinian v. catharsis. aesthetic distance, intellectual detachment, emotions purged, penseroso. ecstasis or absorption. Lycidas, Samson Agonistes.



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Article Notes: Wakeman's Romantics, Stoics and Martyrs

Mao Xiang (1611-1693), one of a group of men who witnessed the Ming-Qing collapse and lived to reflect on it.

Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. "Romantics, Stoics, and Martyrs in Seventeenth-Century China." The Journal of Asian Studies 43, no. 4 (1984): 631-665. Professor Wakeman delivers a report on the consolidation of Qing rule up to roughly 1683 via the lives of a number of different men of letters who all followed roughly parallel and related paths of writing, working, and living (or dying, in a few cases of suicide).

Sundry notes, in order of their occurence in the paper and in a rough bibliographic format:


Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. "Romantics, Stoics, and Martyrs in Seventeenth-Century China." The Journal of Asian Studies 43, no. 4 (1984): 631-665.




The Peach Blossom Fan, Kong Shangren. 1976. The relationship between plays and life writing -- hm! The early Qing: satrapies, Three Feudatories (三反), 1673-1681. Take over Koxinga in 1683. 1684, consolidate control. Maunder Minimum theory of global climatic change? "The distinction drawn in the title of this article between the three groups of that seventeenth-century elite is, to a certain extent, heuristic."



Spence and Wills 1979 -- background on the early Qing to 1683, 三反. From Ming to Ch'ing



Haydn 1950, 638 "philosophies of desperation" The counter-Renaissance‎ - Page 638Hiram Collins Haydn - History - 1960 - 705 pages



Xie Guozhen, 1982, 南明史略 "moral courage" of late ming figures like Chen Zilong; his stoical self drowning, 50-52. Qian Qianyi, "the leading romantic" sybaritic laxity, "In the late Ming, terms like fengliu (style-flowing) were attached to the poetry of untrammeled lyricists such as Zhu Hao and Li Yingzhen, who were admired for their spontaneous expression of "native sensibility" (xingling) (Lynn 1975:239; Murck 1978:87-89; Yoshikawa 1970:18-21; Zhu Tan 1930:532)." also Liu Zongzhou, starved himself to death by way of protest. (on p. 640 of this paper)



Birch, Studies in Chinese Literary Genres. Liu, J. J. Y. 1974, heroic temperaments in poetry



Owen, Readings : Wang Shizhen (1634-1711) shen yun and xiong hun; Qian Qianyi was xiong-y; which one was Yang Jiang? Qian Qianyi, Li Mengyang (1472-1529), Wang Shizhen (1526-1590) classmate Li Liufang of Jiading (1575-1629), disciple of Gui Youguang (1506-1571), 



(Ch'en 1961) the three Yuan brothers (Zongdao, Hongdao and Chongdao) "flow out fresh from the heart and soul" gongan school. iconoclast Li Zhuowu (1527-1602), Wang Yangming Confucianism. Cheng Jiasui (1565-1643)...

Qian Qianyi made his own contribution to this amalgam, especially after he had given up his position as a Hanlin compiler after 1610 to return to Jiangnan to mourn the death of his father. He was known for his love of luxury and connoisseurship, and during the following decade he began to gather around him the most talented young poets and painters of the lower Yangzi delta. In his own writings on literary criticism, Qian argued not only that authentic feelings had to be experienced in personal relations connecting one individual to the next but also that the foundation of all great poetic expression was an appreciation for material substantiality, for sensually experienced "things" (wu)

The poet Mao Xiang-one of the Four Lords (Si gongzi) of the lower Yangzi, along with Fang Yizhi, Hou Fangyu, and Chen Zhenhui-has left an intentionally idealized account of a Mid-Autumn Festival banquet in 1642, when he was reunited with his concubine after she had braved river bandits in order to reach the safety of Nanjing. At Nanjing on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the fellows of our literary society from various parts of the country . . . invited us to a banquet which was spread in a pavilion at Peachleaf Ferry (Taoye shuige). Among those present were Madame Gu of Meilou and Madame Li of Hanxiuzhai, my concubine's near relatives, who had come to offer their congratulations upon her success in uniting with me. On that day the play [by Ruan Dachengi entitled The Swallow Letter ( Yanzi jian) was newly performed, full of sweet and loving pathos, and when it came to the most touching point describing the separation and reunion of the hero and the heroine, my concubine wept and so did Madame Gu and Madame Li. The meeting of a crowd of scholars and beauties amongst towers and pavilions amid a scene of smoke and water and in the bright moonlight, with melodious dramatic songs cheering up one's senses, was something to be remembered forever.

(Mao 1931:31-32)1"

Mao Xiang's concubine, Dong Xiaowan, whom he first met in 1639 when he went up to Nanjing to take the provincial examinations, was one of the most accomplished courtesans of the Qinhuai quarter; she had been trained from the age of seven by her mother in music and drama, needlework and cuisine, poetry and calligraphy. She was also one of the most beautiful women in China, so contemporaries claimed, and when Mao Xiang (whom courtesans called "the handsome shadow" txiuyingl) reached the southern capital, Fang Yizhi tried to introduce his friend to her. But Dong Xiaowan, tired of the life of a courtesan and longing to marry an accomplished gentleman, had left the carved, belanterned balustrades of Qinhuai to return to Suzhou with her mother. Mao Xiang went to see her there, but left, and for a brief period he was infatuated with another famous beauty, Chen Yuanyuan, of whom he wrote:

Nonchalant but charming,

she walked with a graceful

gait as if wafted by the wind.

Dressed in pepper

silk, she frequently

turned around

to look at her flowing skirt.

Her elegant appearance closely resembled

that of a lone phoenix fluttering

behind a screen of mist. (Mao 1931:10-11)

Chen Yuanyuan, however, was not to be his.

Qian Jibo 1935, 明代文学. Lynn (De Bary, ed. Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, 217-269) 1975 and other sources: Shen yun and xiong hun



Dennerline 1981, THe Chia-ting Loyalists. personal experiences of a Huang Chunyue, tutor in Qian estate.



Mao 1931, The Reminiscences of Tung Hsiao-wan. Wakeman's edition of Mao Xiang. [Reminiscences of the convent of shadowy plum blossoms, written "in memory of his concubine, Dong Xiaowan"]



Peterson 1979, 142. Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih Was Mao Xiang an indulgent escapist?



Hegel 1981, 175. The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China. The caizi and the jiaren. Qian Qianyi and Liu Shi. lambencies in a brilliant, shimmering age that was slowly losing its glow. 637: Qian's story, cf. Idema and Grant.



Birch 1972, 134. Wu Weiye's nostalgia, in play form? Anthology of Chinese Literature, vol 2. a reclusion pattern: initial refusal to serve. Grand Secretary Chen Mingxia. "an ambivalent decision." Ma 1935 Buddhism, the monk HOngchu, "Three Phoenixes of the Left Bank of the Yangzi"



Stoics



Wan Shouqi, at Princeton's Sackler, a hybrid figure, also Wan 1967, and again, 4:6b. cf. Tang Yin. Ideenverbindung. 节 to regulate or moderate -- great discussion of the term here. 桊 juan, caution -- another important term. Notice structurally, Wakeman's brief notes on tradition here. writing lesson for you.

The romantic idealists preferred Tang and Song expository prose models; stoical rationalists like Chen Zilong or Zhang Pu chose instead complex medieval modes of discourse (Qian Jibo 1935:66-69).



641: Seventeenth-century Confucian stoics were often both men of
letters and warriors. Yan Ermei, the popular Xuzhou poet, was as at
home on horseback as he was at the banquet table, and he served the loyalists as an officer in the military secretariat of Shi Kefa, the defender of Yangzhou.

(Pirazzoli and Hou 1973, 157-58) Wang Shouqi, cf. Tao Yuanming. Un Rouleau de Wan Shouqi: une peinture pour un poème" A scrool by Wan Shouqi: A painting for a poem. La Revue du Louvre et des musées de France. Wan Shouqi is reminiscent of Sima Qian:

His travels, which carried him back and forth across the Yellow River many times, made him unusually sensitive to the tremors of a dying empire. He saw in the river's constant flux a promise of eventual continuity with China's past:

Here divine Yu knew he held the Mandate

Once he'd seen the dragon's undulating coils.27 (Yan 1967, 5:3a)

Shi Kefa, Yangzhou, irredentist policy

Peterson, 1968, THe Life of Ku Yen-wu, HJAS. p. 149-150. Gu Yanwu's personal sense of grief. Liu Zongzhou, starved himself to death by way of protest. cf. the Qian Zhongshu preface, "On Shame."



Yan 1967, 9:29b. Yan Ermei by contrast, bedded and boarded, brittle evanescence

Wan Shouqi, who had been captured and thrown in prison at the time of the 1647

Songjiang uprising, was just such a person. After he escaped from prison, Wan

returned to Xuzhou to find his family's mansion in ruins (Yan 1967, 5:47b). He tried

to sell what he could of the few stony fields that had not been occupied or seized by

conquerers and collaborators, but got very little money from his property. To support

his wife and son, he at first relied upon marketing his calligraphy, seal carvings, and

paintings.28 Later, he bought a vegetable garden where he grew medicinal plants. "We



live in a rundown little alley, surrounded in front and in back by peasants who raise

pigs for a living. . . . I wonder what's become of those I used to argue with before:

the sage emperor, the shining prince, the loyal ministers, the righteous scholars"

(Wan 1967, 3: 10a). Early in 1646, Wan Shouqi decided to "abandon

the ephemeral world for the true Reality," and he took the Buddhist names of Huishou, Shamen

huishou, and Mingzhi daoren (Wan 1967, 3:29b-30a). But his new attachments as a

Buddhist did not keep him from eating meat or drinking alcohol, and his con-

temporaries saw him as a hybrid figure.

Martyrs

Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. 
Professor Frye throws his mind against the literature of "Western" and "Classical" ages. He comes up with a set of "modes" that broadly matches against certain stages of history -- the classical era, the middle ages, the Renaissance, the 17th through 19th centuries, and the 20th century. Overall, for example, literature has tended to become more and more ironic, which is to say in its most basic sense less and less concerned with the Gods and more and more concerned with humans and their foibles.

: 39-42. Tragic modes.



In 青人杂剧初集 续离骚 Ji Yongren, 1931-1934: 2a, Fan Chengmo, who looked to Qu Yuan, and Ji Yongren. Zheng Zhenduo's preface. Governer Ma Xiongzhen, the neoclassicism of the High Qing during the following century. back to public performance in the early Qing. note the theme of Wen Tianxiang. The murder of Ma Xiongzhen. mass suicide by the women of the lineage. Biographical plays: Guilin shuang. Guilin frost. capture of the popular imaginations -- intimate publics?



imposed trajectories.



Giles A Chinese Biographical Dictionary. 1962, 857, Wei Jie the jewel, romanticism 实真明士自风流



清代文学批评资料汇编 [Collection of materials on Qing literary criticism] Wu Hongyi and Ye Chongbing, comps. 香草亭 传奇序 Preface to the play Eupatory Pavillion. Li Yu, 1979b: 106, Li Yu's play about Fan Chengmo



Su Xuelin, 1970. 中国文学史. hm!

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Kenneth Ch'en on the Ricci Map

The Nile, where people are naturally good at astronomy

Ch'en, Kenneth and Matteo Ricci. "Matteo Ricci's Contribution to, and Influence on, Geographical Knowledge in China." Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep., 1939), pp. 325-359.

This is a great example of a paper that steps back and, through simple narration of the contents researched, delivers a complete entertainment -- a whole world created, a whole drama acted out.

It may be outlined very briefly as follows:


Reporting on recent research in Peking in 1939, Professor Ch'en tells us that the map he is studying was probably produced eight times in succession by Matteo Ricci, who improved his map with each copy. These eight originals were then copied by those who recognized the map's value. Prof. Ch'en himself identified a certain barkeep who had this interest:

Another copy of the map may be found in Peking, owned by a wine merchant named Nicolai, who operates a wine shop in the Legation Quarters.

Following, Ch'en describes the contents of the map itself, all of the text boxes and general description and evaluation of the maps contents. It provided a tremendous amount of information in Chinese that was never available before: the five continents, the sphericity of the earth, the system of fixing meridians, the names of places outside China. The concept of the globe, and a global people. Of course, the modern global world was still a bit young, 1584-1608. It shouldn't surprise us that Ricci has some queer notions:

England : England has no poisonous snakes or other kinds of insects. Such things may be introduced into the country, but as soon as they reach the place they lose their poisonous nature.

I love that always when he exaggerates about Europeans, he does so in a positive way. Europe is a paradise, for "workers are skillful and clever, while the people are well-
versed in astronomy and philosophy." The Africans too, can be civilized, at least around the Nile:

Ni-lo 泥羅, (Nile River). This river, the longest on earth, empties into the ocean through seven mouths. Throughout the year there are no clouds in this region and so the inhabitants become good astronomers.

Sadly, the drama becomes tragedical when we discover that many Chinese readers couldn't handle the new reality represented in the map. In the end, the map ceased to have any influence over Chinese intellectual history.

The severe and uncompromising attitude expressed against Ricci by the imperial scholars sounded the death knell for Ricci's map. Nowhere do we find any favorable comment. It was no wonder that thereafter the work of the great Jesuit ceased to exercise its
influence over the thinking of the Chinese.

What factors caused this rapid decline of Ricci's influence?

Several may be advanced. In the first place there was the self-complacency of the Chinese. ...

Of course, before we pass judgment, we should think to ourselves whether the current culture could do any better, confronted with new knowledge of such incredible proportions as the very shape and nature of the earth.

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Reading Group: The Ricci Map

Illustration: "Conception of Heaven and Earth," an inset on the first panel of the map. The three disks described in the passage below are clearly visible here.

Our school has come into possession of a huge, 1602 world map by Matteo Ricci.

UPDATE: Today's New York Times profiles the map in its current exhibition space at the Library of Congress. Thanks to my new friend RAA for the link!

The piece is so large and sprawling that only when you hunker down and stare at it in detail does it start to become clear how staggering an accomplishment it is. What a testament to the Jesuit passion for knowledge and craftsmanship! Surely this adds powerfully, or could have, to the Chinese sense of self?

Below the fold, my in-progress look at the document.


A digital copy of the map is available here.

A simpler, single-file version is on Wikipedia. I'm working on getting a printout of this. The text of the colophon seems to be on Wikipedia as well, juan 75 in a larger document called "Gazetteer of Maps of Seas and States" 海國圖誌.

Ann points out that Prof. Kenneth Ch'en wrote a paper on the subject back in 1939:

Ch'en, Kenneth and Matteo Ricci. "Matteo Ricci's Contribution to, and Influence on, Geographical Knowledge in China." Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep., 1939), pp. 325-359. (My notes on that here)

Our little group set to work to translate from the beginning of the colophon. Here's our progress so far:

◎國地總論中（原無今補）○利瑪竇《地圖說》

General Statement on States and Regions (Original, without modern supplement)

From Matteo Ricci, Sayings on Maps 地圖說


地與海本是圓形而合為一球，居天球之中，形（誠）如雞子，黃在青內。有謂地為方者，乃語其定而不移之性，非語其形體也。天既(槩)包地，則彼此相應。

Earth and sea originally are round in shape and matched to make one globe which resides in the center of the Heavenly Globe, in form like a chicken's egg, the yellow inside of the clear. Those who call the earth "square" are speaking of its fixed certitude and immobile nature; they are not speaking of the shape of the body. Heaven covers and extends completely over the earth, and so each reflects the other.

故天有南北二極，地亦有之，天分三百六十度，地亦同之，天中有赤道，自赤道而南二十三度半為南道，赤道而北二十三度半為北道。按中國在北道之北


Thus it is that Heaven has the two Southern and Northern poles, and Earth also has them. Heaven is divided into 360 degrees, and Earth also shares this. The middle of Heaven has an Equator (chidao). From this Equator 23.5 half degrees south, we have the Southern Road. Twenty-three and a half degrees north of this Equator is called the Northern Road. The placement of China is to the north of the Northern Road.

日行赤道，則晝夜平，行南道則晝短，行北道則晝長。故天球有晝夜平圈列於中，晝短晝長二圈列於南北，以著日行之界，地球亦設三圈，對於下焉。

When then sun progresses at the Equator, day and night are equal. Progress along the Southern Road makes for days that are short; progress along the Northern Road makes for days that are long. Thus the Celestial Globe has a Disk of Equal Day and Night set in its midst, and and two Disks, one for shorter days and one for longer days, set in the south and north, respectively; these mark out the boundaries of the progression of the sun. The Earth also is set up with three disks, which face opposite too and are beneath these (?)

A close up of the "Equator, Line of Days and Nights Being Equal," just above the Southern Road, here labeled as "Line of Shorter Days."

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翻译做完有感

Getting to Know Them Better: Ding Ling in the upper left; down one row and to her right is the poet Sun Li

Four translation gigs so far this semester have certainly eaten into my own research and creative writing time, but it was good work for all that -- work that simply increases background knowledge and language ability, familiarity with Chinese academic rhetoric. And more than anything, I think what is important is the feeling of work, of the pen rushing over the page, the output of something created, crafted. I'm just like a jewelry maker who receives an order over the internet, makes the product in his home, and delivers it back, hoping his fee is paid promptly and his customer is satisfied. There is a basic goodness to the ethic of the business transaction that in other areas of my work feels too sorely lacking.

Anyhow, it's time I began a full accounting of my translations, both for my CV and for my own notes. This latest article, for example, seems like it adds directly to my dissertation in two ways...

First, the business of "cross-period writers" suggests deeper comparisons with Yang Jiang. Like Yang Jiang, for example, Ding Ling lived a life that spanned the twentieth century and went through phases (albeit phases of a very different kind than Yang Jiang's).

Her life, from its ascent to fame in the 1920s as "yesterday's literate 'Miss'" to answering Lu Xun's call to arms with left-wing literature in the 1930s, to "Today's Martial General" under the flag of Mao Zedong, to facing over 20 years of suffering after 1957 before emerging once again in the 1980s, is a life of literary activities that spans the entire twentieth century. Her literary paths and her life experiences progressed in close lock-step with the modern and contemporary literature of China. They echo each other.

The really interesting question here is, how might these phases line up with Yang Jiang's? Ding Ling is a bit older, so we find no work by Yang Jiang in the 1920s to match up with Ding Ling's. But 1957 is an important year for both; Yang Jiang later wrote a sanwen essay detailing how 1957 was the first time she was "sent down."

Perhaps the main issue to consider is simply that Ding Ling was completely devoted to expressing the political in literature, even when she wasn't adhering to the rules of Mao's 1942 "Talks at Yan'an" literally. Yang Jiang, though is not terribly interested in "making literature for the service of the people." She is more interesting in finely-crafted portraits of human nature. Her art is of service, certainly, but not simply political service. In this she seems to have a soulmate in the poet Sun Li:

Sun Li was once and for all an old author known for discovering the beauty in human nature, of celebrating that beauty of human nature in song. In his later years he wrote a series of short works which, however, often lament the baseness of the human heart and the alienation of human nature; it was easy for people to see these as symptoms of his declining years. But actually, to observe coolly and calmy, with a transcendent attitude, the alienation of human nature during the revolutionary period is only a deepening and a complement to a poetic sensibility that had traced the most basic qualities of beauty of human nature during the war years. This warm style, plain-spoken and natural, but with internal resonance of meaning that draws readers to savor afterward, remained unified and consistent on the whole, before and after. There was certainly no great degradation.

The question of "degradation" in the quality of works by older writers is a most pressing one, so it is of interest to find that at least two Chinese scholars feel that old Sun Li did not degrade. One wonders if a Confucian bias towards respecting elders is at work here.

English Citation:

Liu Yong and Ji Xueyou. "Difficult Problems of the Practice of Holistic Approaches to Twentieth-century Chinese Literature: Taking the Study of Individual Cases of "Cross-Period" Authors as Examples" (Look at the turned-in draft of my translation, if you like)





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