SESSION: ETHICS AND VALUE SYSTEM

Juxtaposing the Refined with the Vulgar: Editing the World of Desire in Qinglou Yunyu

Chen Jiani

Sun Yat-Sen University ( China) — Jiani Chen, assistant professor in the department of Chinese Language and Literature (Zhuhai) at Sun Yat-sen University, China. She obtained her PhD degree from SOAS, University of London. Her fields of interest include women literature and vernacular literature in late imperial China.

Abstract — Focusing on the textual and visual representations of the bewildering world of the brothel, Qinglou Yunyu 青樓韻語 (Enchanting Words from Green Tower, 1616) exemplified the late Ming enthusiasm in the acquisition of urban life knowledge, the pursuit of linguistic novelty and rhetorical effects (especially parody), and the interplay between values, tastes, and styles belonging to different social and cultural realms. Qinglou yunyu consists of four parts: (1) a brothel treatise entitled Piaojing 嫖經 (Classic of Whoring) along with annotations from daily-use encyclopedias to impart insider knowledge to brothel visitors; (2) the compiler's new commentaries on each entry of Piaojing and elucidations on some old annotations; (3) a selection of poetic works by both historical and contemporary courtesans that was arranged by the themes summarized from the entries of Piaojing; (4) twelve illustrations resembling the popular painting manuals on which courtesans' poems were inscribed. Qinglou yunyu triggered complicated interaction among the four parts by juxtaposing ya 雅 (the refined) with su 俗 (the vulgar) on the same page: On the one hand, the newly-added commentaries continued the subversive playfulness towards canonical texts along with their value system and social respectability in Piaojing while at the same time inserting current intellectual trends and literary standards into these amusing writings. On the other hand, the courtesans' poetic works selected for Qinglou yunyu not only were framed within the various vernacular writings which served as “eye-guiding” devices, but also conversed, complemented, and competed with the vernacular writings from perspectives of different gender, genre, and langauge register. Consequently, multilayered meanings were coded into the world of desire in Qinglou yunyu, creating unique discursive space between the romanticized “cult of qing 情 (feeling/sentiment)” and the practical knowledge in the exchange of money and sex.

Ethics and the discourse on vernacular in Peach Blossom Fan

Rainier Lanselle

CRCAO ( France), 2 - Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE-PSL) ( France) — Rainier Lanselle 藍碁 is Directeur d'études (Professeur) at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE-PSL) in Paris, France. His main field of research focuses on Yuan to mid-Qing fiction, short story, theater, traditional literary criticism and commentaries, vernacular language and its usages, the status of subjectivity. He is also a translator of premodern fiction, theater, and poetry, as well as issues related to Chinese culture and psychoanalysis. He is currently half-way through his complete annotated translation of Kong Shangren's Taohua shan, which will be the first translation in a Western language not to be an adaptation, and has taught extensively on the subject.

Abstract — The vernacular language could not be a viable vehicle for the transmission of knowledge if it did not possess an intrinsic ethical dimension, which alone can give it the authority to perform this function. A good example of this is given by the great chuanqi The Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan 桃花扇), in which its author, Kong Shangren 孔尚任 (1648-1718) both illustrates such a function and explains its mechanism. On the one hand, Taohua shan, in the vernacular field of theatre-opera, serves as a vehicle for the narration of crucial historical events, that Kong has been keen to construct methodically, going to such lengths as to listing the sources which he has subjected to his rewriting under this form. On the other hand, Kong organizes a complete critical discourse on the ethical value of the vernacular language, a task that is conducted on three levels: a. in the very text of the play and in the different discursive modes attached to its characters, including their specific relationship with vernacular culture; b. in the different elements of the paratext that Kong attaches to his work, in which he points out the ethical significance of his personae in regard with their language and cultural associations; c. in the dialogue that he establishes with readers whose comments he has collected, some of which address his concerns about the ethical value of vernacular culture. Kong Shangren can thus legitimately assert the eminence of the latter, and claim that in dealing with history through drama, he is perfectly in line with the tradition of his ancestor Confucius editing the Chunqiu 春秋 or the Shijing 詩經. My contribution will focus mainly on the analysis of certain passages in the critical apparatus of the Taohua shan in the 1708 edition.

Trading of the Tomb's Trees: Funerary Ritual and its Literature Writing in Qi Lu Deng

Zhu Shan

Institute of literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences(CASS) ( China) — Dr. Zhu Shan is an assistant researcher in the Institute of Literature at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). She received her B.A in Chinese Language and Literature from Nanjing University, and earned her M.A and Ph.D. both in Ancient Chinese Literature from Peking University. Afterwards, she worked for 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow in CASS. Zhu Shan's areas of research include ancient Chinese novels and Chinese documents overseas. She has published over 20 essays in journals including Wenxueyichan, Wenxian, Mingqing Xiaoshuo Yanjiu, and Hongloumeng Xuekan among others. Her book on the study of manuscripts of Qi Lu Deng will be published in 2022.

Abstract — Chapter 81 “The Selling of Trees on the Tans' Ancestral Graves” has great significance in Qi Lu Deng（《歧路灯》）. However, this plot has not been attached much importance in the previous studies. The purpose of this investigation is to give a detailed study of Qi Lu Deng ‘s literary writing of funerary ritual. This paper can be divided into 3 parts: Firstly, based on the study of Qi Lu Deng's narrative structure, this paper illustrates that the selling of ancestral grave's trees is set as a critical turning point in the novel. Secondly, by analyzing the literary writing of tomb's trees in Chinese literature history, this paper points out that Qi Lu Deng gives such important narrative significance to funerary ritual, which is quite rare, and possibly unique. Finally, this paper explores the cultural connotation of this plot from the perspective of the author's background and standpoint, clan perception, as well as the traditional Confucian funerary ritual system. This paper aims to point out that by integrating the Confucian spirit into the literature writing of funerary ritual, Qi Lu Deng therefore deepens its Confucian thought and educational significance on levels of narrative structure and cultural connotation. Keywords: Qi Lu Deng（《歧路灯》）, Li Hai-guan(李海观), Tomb's Trees, Ancestral Graves, Funerary Ritual.

SESSION: WAYS TO BETTER LIVES

Classifying Water in Early Modern China

Andrew Schonebaum

University of Maryland ( United States) — Andrew Schonebaum is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is editor of Approaches to Teaching the Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber), MLA, 2012, with Tina Lu, and Approaches to Teaching the Plum in the Golden Vase (The Golden Lotus), MLA, 2022. In 2016 he published his first monograph, Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China (2016) with the University of Washington Press. His next book, under contract with UWP, is Classifying the Unseen: Curiosity, Fantasy and Common Knowledge in Early Modern China, due out in 2023.

Abstract — The history of water control in China has been discussed in volumes to the point where China has been termed a “hydraulic society.” But there were more personal relationships with water – writing, healing, cooking, making tea. What was water to early modern writers? Was it really an object of connoisseurship, and if so, what were the stakes? Were tea drinkers supposed to be able to tell the difference between last year's rainwater and the melted snow collected from the branches of winter-flowering plum trees five years ago - as Adamantina (Miaoyu) suggests in the Story of the Stone? It seems a joke meant to highlight her eccentricity (guaipi 怪僻) and obsession with purity, but a story in Anomalous Accounts from Liaozhai (Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異) suggests that the market really may have distinguished between waters – that “the price of that mountain water...was like that of fine liquor and was of such a quality that it was in demand everywhere.” The Classic of Tea preferred mountain water to that of rivers or wells, but Yuan Mei (1716-1797), in his Recipes from the Garden of Contentment (Suiyuan Shidian 隨園食單), made other distinctions. Water as an often-overlooked natural object of investigation provoked the broadly curious and the narrowly obsessive. Zhao Xuemin (1753-1803), for instance, in his Supplement to the Systematic Compendium (Bencao gangmu shiyi 本草綱目拾遺) added twenty-four kinds of water, each with their own properties and uses, to Li Shizhen's (1518-1593) fifty-six varietals, many of which Li claimed, were newly classified. My paper explores the evolving common knowledge of water, itself infinitely changeable, in the late Ming and Qing periods.

Vernacular Narratives of Healthcare in the Eighteenth Century

Zanolini Sj

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine [Baltimore] ( United States) — Short bio: SJ Zanolini specializes in both the history and practice of Chinese medicine. They earned a B.A. in History from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in Chinese Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an M.S. in East Asian Medicine from Dongguk University at Los Angeles, and are currently a PhD candidate in the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. Their research interests encompass the relationship between diet and healing in medical practice, geographic and seasonal determinants of health and illness treatment, and the interplay between medical, religious, elite, and popular ideas in Chinese history.

Abstract — Vernacular fiction is a rich and underexplored source of knowledge about the religio-medical marketplace in late imperial China. Beyond engaging physicians in moments of crisis, characters take medicinal formulas to treat constitutional weakness, gift each other culinary delicacies as marks of favor or concern, and engage religious specialists to conduct ceremonies of merit-dedication. Violations of health taboos often advance the plot, demonstrating contested notions of the (im)purity of specific foods, people, spaces, and intimate acts. To what extent are such fictionalized health behaviors illustrative of quotidian understandings of health? Can we find in them traces of the ways medical thinking filtered beyond medical genres, influencing everyday ideas about bodies – their needs, norms, and limits? In this paper, I analyze scenes related to food and drug consumption found in two eighteenth-century vernacular novels, Honglou meng and Rulin waishi, focusing especially on the ways characters interact with food as a drug-like object – sharing it, abstaining from it, and medicalizing its consumption. As literary scholars and anthropologists have demonstrated, food is always a signifier. Consumption choices, or lack thereof, magnify the general interpersonal status differences that likely distinguished real versus ideal health behaviors. I cross-reference the remedies and rationales described in these narratives of applied therapeutics against a range of relevant sources written in the same period, including Pu Songling's reading primer Riyong suzi, encyclopedias of daily life (including Wanbao quanshu), and medical sources (materia medica, case study collections, and treatises by prominent Jiangnan physicians). By following information about these therapeutic remedies across literary registers and genres, I aim to nuance the many points of intersection – and contestation – prevalent in textual representations of everyday health knowledge.

Spirit-writing records as an archive of spiritual knowledge and conversations in late imperial China

Vincent Goossaert

École pratique des hautes études ( France) — Vincent Goossaert 高萬桑 (PhD, EPHE, Paris, 1997) was a research fellow at CNRS (1998-2012) and is now Professor of Daoism and Chinese religions at EPHE, PSL; he has served as dean of its graduate school (2014-2018). He has been Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Geneva University, and Renmin University. His research deals with the social history of Chinese religion in late imperial and modern times. He is co-editor of T'oung Pao, a leading journal in sinology established in 1890.

Abstract — Spirit-writing was a widespread practice in the late imperial Chinese world (1600-1900), and produced a huge amount of texts that only now begins to be explored. Among the many genres in which the gods expressed themselves, are recorded dialogues (yulu) of the gods with their living disciples, and tracts exhorting them to live better lives; some of these texts (largely depending on the divine persona of the god expressing itself) are in a language that is in part vernacular and highly performative. Although these texts are not (with a few exceptions) narratives, they open a new window on the intimate lives of educated Chinese (mostly men but not exclusively so), on their daily concerns and spiritual aspirations, and on the language in which these concerns were expressed.