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A Concise History of Chinese Literature

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A Concise History of Chinese Literature CHAPTER SIXTEEN POETRY AND PROSE OF THE MING DYNASTY Te history of approximately two hundred and eighty years of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) corresponded roughly, within the range of the world, to the period of the Renaissance in Europe, an age of the transition from the medieval age to the “modern times.” For a long time, it was quite controversial whether some budding capitalism already emerged during the Middle and Late Ming times. Regardless of whether it was ever possible for the European format of capitalist production to appear spontaneously on the Chinese soil, the series of changes in the economy, ideology, and culture in the society that took place during the Ming, some of which may even be traced back to the Yuan dynasty, were quite remarkable. At the end of the Yuan, the economy of the handicraf industry and commerce in the coastal cities of southeastern China was already quite dynamic; afer the recession at the beginning of the Ming, it was restored and expanded further by the Middle and Late Ming times. Scholars have noticed in their research that at some textile mills the phenomenon of wage labor, on the scale of several tens of laborers, already began to occur. In the feld of ideology, the theory of Wang Yangming,1 from the Middle Ming, used its philosophical proposition, “human mind equals reason,” to call for revisions to the Lixue theory of Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi; with its underlying recognition of the individual’s right to learn truth and that of individual dignity and its opposition to idolatry, it was in vogue among scholar-ofcials for a time. By the Late Ming period, Li Zhi’s theory moved even further on the basis of Wang’s ideas. He not only fully afrmed human desire, but also argued, repeatedly, that it was a rational representation of human nature to seek proft for oneself. In addition, he also put forward the demand to get rid of the dependence on the “original classics” in history and reconstruct the ideology and 1 Wang Shouren (1472–1528), a Chinese philosopher. He has been better known as “Master Yangming” as he once built a residence at the Yangming Cave of his native town. 654 chapter sixteen culture in society. It is not out of bounds to call him a thinker of the enlightenment in pre-modern China. Not unlike the European Renaissance, the trend of ideology and culture of the Middle and Late Ming periods may also fall under human- ism in its connotation. In the former, however, humanism referred to the individual’s liberation from the authority of god, whereas in the latter, humanism stood for the individual’s liberation from the bond- age of the community consciousness and community morality with the purpose of preserving the system of imperial dictatorship and hierarchy. As widely acknowledged among the academia of today, the kernel of the intellectual trend of the Late Ming was the liberation of individuality. Two important theorists of the “May Fourth” movement of New Literature, Hu Shi and Zhou Zuoren, voiced diferent opinions in trac- ing the origin of the trend of New Literature; the former regarded the literature of the Jin and Yuan dynasties as the origin of New Literature, while the latter gave more emphasis on the inspiration of the literature of the Late Ming on New Literature. Each of them had personal prefer- ences in their suggestions, and we are not going to discuss them in detail. We can probably say that as early as during the Jin and Yuan times, there already germinated a transition in the direction of modernity in classical Chinese literature, and by the Late Ming such a transition was even more clearly and strongly represented, and it already crystallized in literary theories with a philosophical foundation. Accordingly, the literature of Middle and Late Ming displayed unprecedented scope and depth in the exertion of individual will and in the representation of the confict between human beings and environment and the straits of human existence. However, as widely known, the Ming dynasty was also an age when the system of imperial autocracy was strengthened in an unprecedented way. Compared to the social changes mainly in the coastal cities of the southeast since the end of the Yuan, the system of imperial autocracy, within the range of the entire nation, enjoyed a far deeper and more solid basis in agricultural economy and the village society, and the response to the historical challenge of its representatives was to contain stalwartly any forces that might imperil their own existence, and to strengthen the ideological control that aimed to enslave human nature. Tereupon the historical course of the transition toward modernity looked extremely difcult, and the complexity of the background also accounted for the complexity of the literature of the Ming dynasty. poetry and prose of the ming dynasty 655 1. Poetry and Prose of the Early Ming Period Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty and a man of great talent, bold vision, resolution, and cruelty, may be regarded a fgure with historical sensitivity. Afer he founded the state, he not only built up, by ruthless means, an unprecedented dictatorship, but also forcefully pursued the policy of “supporting agriculture and restrain- ing business” socially and economically. At the same time when he encouraged the cultivation of wasteland and propped up agriculture, he used military forces to block maritime trafc and prohibit foreign trade among the common people. In the coastal region of the south- east, which had the greatest vitality, a large number of local rich men either had their property confscated or were forced to move elsewhere; Suzhou, a key city, at one time turned desolate. All these were meant primarily to destroy the foundation of anything that might constitute a threat to the imperial rule. In ideology and culture, Zhu Yuanzhang also exercised strict con- trol. He declared: “Te Mongolian Yuan lost from lenience. Now that I have restored China, I have no choice but to resort to brute force. However, the evil people detest strict law and like lenience; they slander the state and stir up trouble by demagogy; they can hardly be controlled.” (“Te Emperor’s Note in His Majesty’s Own Handwriting” included in the Works of Liu Ji) Tis showed his abhorrence of free speech. At the beginning of the Ming dynasty there were quite a few cases of seemingly absurd, bafing literary inquisition. For example, a few prefecture instructors were all executed at the same time because the memorials to the throne they did the actual writing for contained the phrase in which the emperor was praised for “setting up the crite- rion” for the world, and the character for “criterion,” ze, was regarded as an insinuation of the character for “thief,” zei. Some considered this action to have resulted from narrow-mindedness, but actually there was a diferent profound implication therein. By slaughtering in such senseless and inexplicable style of “imposing punishment for mere thinking,” the absolute imperial authority could be brought out in full display so as to give a tremendous shock. In Chinese cultural tradition, scholars had always enjoyed the right to seek “hermitage,” and even took pride in that, but the Great Edict proclaimed by Zhu Yuanzhang laid down the rule that “men of letters in the nation who refuse to serve the sovereign” would be regarded as having committed the crime punishable by decapitation and confscation of property; by 656 chapter sixteen this way the scholar-ofcials were completely deprived of their option to keep themselves detached from the regime. Te cultural control in the Song dynasty may be considered as rather tight, but at least on the surface, the personal dignity of the scholar-ofcials was still respected, so they were able to pursue, more or less, their ideal that the search for the “Way” was their ultimate purpose in life, whereas the Ming regime, from the very beginning of its establishment, tried to cast the personality of men of letters in a slavish mould. During the Ming dynasty, the Cheng-Zhu Lixue was honored, forc- ibly, as a government-sponsored theory, and their annotated editions of Confucian classics were held as the required texts for daily learning and as the basis of the civil service examinations. From the beginning of the Ming to the Chenghua reign, the standard format in the civil service examinations gradually took shape. Te eight-legged prose, with fxed number of characters in length and the requirement that one could only “compose in the voice of the ancients” rather than freely assume one’s own, further reinforced the shackles on the thinking of the literati with a lasting infuence. (See “Survey of Ofcial Appoint- ment” in History of the Ming) Tereupon the free and lively literary practice, introduced in the last years of the Yuan, came to a sudden stop at the beginning of the Ming. Te more than a hundred years aferward (1368–1487), through the last years of the Chenghua reign, made a rather lengthy period of decline in the history of literature. Gao Qi and Others Te Poetic School of Suzhou, which started at the end of the Yuan, kept its momentum for a short while at the beginning of the Ming. At the time, with Yang Weizhen in his declining years, Gao Qi (1336–1374) became the main fgure. He was born and brought up in Suzhou. Dur- ing the upheaval at the end of the Yuan he lived at his hometown in seclusion. At the beginning of the Ming he answered the government’s summons and went to Nanjing to participate in the composition of the History of the Yuan.
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