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A OF READING IN LATE IMPERIAL , 1000-1800

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree Doctor of in the Graduate School of

The Ohio

By

Li , M.A.

* * * * *

The Ohio State University 2003

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Galal Walker, advisor Professor Mark Bender Professor Cynthia J. Brokaw ______Professor Patricia A. Sieber Advisor East Asian Languages and

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a historical ethnographic study on the act of reading in late imperial China. Focusing on the practice and representation of reading, I present a mosaic of how reading was conceptualized, perceived, conducted, and transmitted from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries. My central argument is that reading, or dushu, was indispensable component in the tapestry of cultural life and occupied a unique position in the landscape of in late imperial China. Reading is not merely a psychological act of individuals, but also a set of complicated social practices determined and conditioned by social conventions.

The dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 discusses motivation, scope, methodology, and sources of the study. I introduce a dozen different

Chinese terms related to the act of reading. Chapter 2 examines theories and practices of how children were taught to read. Focusing on four main pedagogical procedures, namely memorization, vocalization, , and explication, I argue that the loud chanting of texts and the constant anxiety of reciting were two of the most prominent themes that through both the descriptive and prescriptive discourses on the history of reading in late imperial ii China. Chapter 3 delineates a culture of reading dominated by males through a discussion of key elements of this culture: reading habits, the treatment of books, the hygiene of reading, reading paraphernalia, the elite conceptions of reading, and popular attitudes toward reading. Chapter 4 investigates women's reading, including their road to , and representations of what and how they read.

I argue that what caused the growing patriarchal anxiety over women’s during the late imperial period was not the rise in female literacy or the growth of female erudition, but rather the expansion of women’s literate practices, particularly writing in the sphere of men. Chapter 5 probes the questions of why and how non- peoples learned to read Chinese. I investigate the cases of four different groups: “alien rulers” (Khitans, Jurchens, and ), Jesuits, Chinese Jews, and . Chapter 6 reflects on the influence of the culture of reading on contemporary Chinese society, offers pedagogical considerations of teaching Chinese as a , takes issue with some Western paradigms of reading and orality, and provides suggestions for future .

iii

Dedicated to my parents and Jun

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Beyond endless searching, reading, and writing, the completion of a dissertation depends on a network of , financial, and emotional support. I am most grateful to the members of my dissertation committee: Galal

Walker, for initiating me into the world of the history of reading, and constantly stimulating me with his philosophical insights on and culture;

Mark Bender, for opening the world of and minority cultures to me, and guiding me through the of the academic palace; Cynthia Brokaw, for sharing her expertise in book and publishing history, and providing me with critical guidance and moral support much beyond what I had expected, such as going the extra mile to attend my conference presentations; Patricia Sieber (Pat laoshi), my liangshi yiyou, for setting high standards and expectations as a , and showing me genuine enthusiasm and support as a friend from the very beginning of the project till the very end.

Many experts in and other related fields, some of whom I have not yet had the fortune to meet, have provided invaluable suggestions and sent materials to me at various stages of the project. They are: John Miles Foley

(University of Missouri- Columbia), J. Marshall Unger, Ledyard (Columbia v University), Mark Halperin, Anne McLaren (University of Melbourne, ),

Patrick M. Patterson (Honolulu Community ), Joachim Kurtz (University of Göttingen, ), David Rolston (), Judith Zeitlin

(University of Chicago), Renfu ( Normal University, ),

Samuel Yamashita (Pomona College), and Kuang- (,

Taibei). Seminars offered at the Ohio State University by Marjorie Chan,

Jinhua (), Kirk Denton, David , Xiaomei Chen, -Shuan

Lao, Mari Noda, and Charles Quinn have expanded my knowledge in Chinese linguistics, , and language . I would like to especially thank

Christopher Reed in whose Chinese history seminar I finally learned how to read.

I am especially indebted to Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, an erudite Sinologist and energized researcher whose works have covered a wide range of topics on . His inspiration, guidance, and encouragement sustained me throughout the process of this dissertation.

Research support over the years came from the Department of East Asian

Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University. A Presidential

Fellowship granted by the Graduate School at the Ohio State University enabled me to work full time for a year on the dissertation. For this, I thank Galal Walker,

Mineharu (J.J.) Nakayama, Victor Mair, David Rolston, Patricia Sieber, and the anonymous panelists of the Graduate School review board. Xu Jun graciously provided for me after my funding dried up.

vi Thanks are due to my friends and colleagues who have helped to improve my

English writing skills and nourished me with their friendships all these years:

John Metcalf, Steven Knicely, , Timothy Foster, Haibing,

Aiping, Jing, Yu Hongyuan, Chengzhi, Walter Carpenter, Eric

Shepherd, -hsing, , Carole Shroeder, Hiromi Kasahara, Michael

Tangeman, Stephen Filler, Helena Riha, Tieniu, Wu Lijuan, Max

Bohnenkamp, Priya Ananth, and Warren Frerichs. James Cheng and Jonathan

Noble helped me in the electronic submission process of the final draft. Thanks go to Zhang Yulong for giving me last-minute help in locating sources, to Ho

Yeon Sung and Ok Joo Lee for helping with the pronunciations of Korean words.

Debbie Knicely’s administrative expertise helped me to meet all the deadlines of

Graduate School. A special thank is due to Roberto Padilla II and Janet

Eichenberger whose careful proofreading and editing of this dissertation saved me from many embarrassing mistakes.

I owe a great deal to my parents who have given me unconditional love even though they had never expected their daughter to obtain a , not to mention in the faraway land of America. Many thanks to my brother Yu and sister-in- Yao who offered much needed support while I was away from

Shanghai. Thanks finally to my husband Xu Jun for being a friend with whom I can discuss Chinese history and culture, and offering me a shoulder to cry on in times of frustration and during episodes of “writer’s blues.”

vii

VITA

October, 1971 ………………………...Born- Shanghai, P.R. China

July 1994…………………………… ...B.A. Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language East China Normal University Shanghai, P.R. China

September 1993- August 1995……...Instructor Center of Foreign Student Exchange East China Normal University Shanghai, P.R. China

September1995- December 1997…... Graduate Teaching Associate East Asian Languages and Literatures The Ohio State University

December 1997...... M.A. Chinese Language Pedagogy East Asian Languages and Literatures The Ohio State University

December1997- August 2000...... Graduate Teaching Associate, East Asian Languages and Literatures The Ohio State University

March 2000-Present...... Doctoral Candidate East Asian Languages and Literatures The Ohio State University

September 2000- July 2001………….. East Asian Languages and Literatures The Ohio State University

September 2001- August 2002………Graduate Fellow (Presidential Fellowship) Graduate School The Ohio State University

viii

PUBLICATIONS

1. Yu, Li. Forthcoming. Book Review of King Arthasiddhi: a Mongolian Translation of “The Younger Brother Don Yod.” by Marta Kiripolská (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001.) Journal of Central Asian Studies 5.2. 2. Yu, Li. 2001. “Conference Report of Beyond Pavilion: Performances, Ethnicity and Cultural Processes in China." AAS Newsletter 46.4: 19. 3. Yu, Li. 2001. Book Review of The Eternal Storyteller: Oral Literature in Modern China. Edited by Vibeke Bordahl. (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999.) Journal of American Folklore 14. 451 (Winter): 119-121. 4. Yu, Li. 2000. “Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Chinese Propaganda Posters, 1957-1983.” (http://deall.ohio- state.edu/grads/yu.124/minzu/) Modern and Culture (MCLC) Resource Center Publication. 5. Yu, Li. 1995. "Dianying yiming chutan" [A Preliminary Analysis of the Chinese Translation of English Film Titles]. Huadong shifan daxue xuebao [Journal of East China Normal University] 1995: 3.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: East Asian Languages and Literatures

Studies in Chinese Language Pedagogy and Cultural History (Professor Galal Walker)

Minor Fields:

East Asian Writing Systems (Professor J. Marshall Unger)

Education and Society of Late Imperial China (Professor Patricia Sieber)

Chinese Minority and Literacy Issues (Professor Mark Bender)

ix

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract...... ii

Dedication...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita ...... viii

List of Figures ...... xiii

Chapters:

1. Introduction...... 1

1.1 The Journey of an Idea: Why a “History of Reading”...... 1 1.2 What is a “History of Reading”...... 8 1.3 Sources ...... 11 1.4 Methodology and Approaches ...... 14 1.5 Chinese Terms related to Reading: a Linguistic Excursion ...... 18 1.6 Limitations and Caveats ...... 26 1.7 Chapter Organization ...... 34

2. to Read...... 40

2.1 Introduction...... 40 2.2 Memory and Memorization...... 48 2.3 Vocalized Reading and Chanting ...... 58 2.4 Marking and Punctuating ...... 68 2.5 Explicating the Text ...... 75 2.6 Conclusion ...... 79

x 3. A Culture of Reading ...... 91

3.1 Introduction ...... 91 3.2 Reading Habits: Practices and Representation...... 94 3.2.1 Reading Aloud ...... 94 3.2.2 Reading from the Wall ...... 98 3.2.3 Reading on the Road ...... 103 3.2.4 Reading behind Closed Doors ...... 105 3.2.5 Reading at Night ...... 107 3.2.6 Summary ...... 110 3.3 Treatment of Books ...... 111 3.4 Hygiene of Reading ...... 114 3.5 “Superfluous Things”: Reading Paraphernalia ...... 115 3.6 Elite Conceptions of Reading ...... 121 3.7 Popular Attitudes toward Reading ...... 130 3.8 Conclusion ...... 138

4. Reading in the Inner Chambers ...... 150

4.1 Introduction ...... 150 4.2 The Road to Literacy ...... 154 4.3 Reading Women’s Literate Practices ...... 177 4.3.1 Instructing Sons and Daughters ...... 178 4.3.2 Managing Household Affairs ...... 182 4.3.3 Inscribing Poems on the Wall ...... 184 4.3.4 Suffering as Martyrs ...... 189 4.3.5 Writing the Right Texts ...... 191 4.3.6 Summary 198 4.4 Self-Representations of Women’s Reading ...... 198 4.4.1 Reading by the Window ...... 200 4.4.2 Reading the Right Texts ...... 204 4.5 Conclusion ...... 206

5. Non-Han Peoples’ Reading Experiences in China ...... 216

5.1 Introduction ...... 216 5.2 Case Studies of Non-Han Peoples’ Reading Experiences in China 225 5.2.1 The “ Rulers”: Khitans, Jurchens, and Mongols ...... 227 5.2.2 The “Western Confucians”: Jesuits ...... 238 5.2.3 “Heavenly-Bestowed-Happily-Living (Yicileye)”: Chinese Jews 249 5.2.4 “Serving the Great”: Koreans ...... 260 5.3 Conclusion ...... 269

6. Epilogue ...... 283

6.1 Influence of the Culture of Reading on Contemporary Chinese 283 Society 6.2 Pedagogical Considerations 288 6.3 Reconsiderations of Some Western Paradigms 289 6.4 Suggestions for Future Research 292

Bibliography ...... 295 Primary Sources 295 Secondary Sources 302

Appendix A: Documents on Reading ...... 336

Appendix B: The Problematics of the “” Model ...... 342

Appendix C: Character List ...... 356

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

2.1 A scene from an elementary school ...... 81

2.2 A photo of “backing books” ...... 81

2.3 An example of a punctuated text ...... 82

3.1 Shibi (Poetry Wall) ...... 140

3.2 The interior of a reconstructed 1797 studio ...... 140

3.3 Rolling footstool...... 141

3.4 Sample pages from Xinbian duixiang siyan...... 141

3.5 Similar illustrations for different words...... 142

3.6 xi xuan [The pavilion of farming and rest]...... 142

3.7 Shanju dushu [A picture of reading in the mountains]...... 143

4.1 A portrait of Jinglan ...... 208

xiii

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This dissertation is a historical ethnographic study on the act of reading in

China. Focusing on the practice and representation of reading, I present a mosaic of how reading was conceptualized, perceived, conducted, and transmitted in late imperial China from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries. My central argument is that reading was an indispensable component in the tapestry of cultural life and occupied a unique position in the landscape of social history in late imperial China. Reading was not merely a psychological act of individuals, but rather a set of complicated social practices that were determined by social conventions.

1.1 The Journey of an Idea—Why a “History of Reading”?

The departure point of my query into the history of reading started in 1996 when I began to work on my Master’s thesis in the field of Chinese language pedagogy. Not yet familiar with the Western studies on the history of reading, I began a journey into an investigation of the “psychological” (“How do people

1 read?”) and “sociological” (“Why do people read?”) aspects of reading in contemporary China, so as to construct a pedagogical model of learning to read

Chinese as a foreign language for American students.

In my research, I was struck by the extreme emphasis put on reading and education, their respect for written words, and the prevalent methods used to teach reading in schools. The special values Chinese put on the act of reading is reflected in the word for reading, dushu, which in modern colloquial and many dialects also carries the meaning of education.

Books and written scripts are extremely revered in folk beliefs. Some people still believe whoever uses inscribed papers for toilet purposes will be struck dead by lightening.1 As for methods of teaching reading at school, members of a U.S.

Reading Study Team to China observe that reading aloud, recitation, and memorization are the major pedagogical procedures.2

As a native of China, I could not help but relate my own personal experience to these research findings. Born into a worker’s in the city of Shanghai, I was taught to recognize and write by my parents before I was enrolled in elementary school. I was told if I used a piece of paper with characters on it in the restroom, I would become illiterate instantly. If I wanted to excel at reading and memorization, I should put a book under my pillow when I slept at night. At school, the major activities in reading classes (for

Chinese and English alike) were oral reading and recitation. For

2 assignments, we were required to read aloud a text literally a hundred times, to memorize it, and sometimes even had to obtain witness signatures from parents to verify we had done so.

By the end of 1997, I had completed my thesis but was not able to answer many questions that arose from it. Why is reading so valued in the Chinese society? Why is reading taught the way it is? Why are oral reading, recitation, and memorization so important? How was reading taught in China historically?

Was the emphasis on oral reading, recitation, and memorization connected in some way with the history of reading pedagogy in early modern China? What is the history of reading in China? Who were the readers? How did they read? Why did they read? What did they do with their reading skills?

My “portal of entry” into the field of the history of reading was different from many other who turned to the history of reading from their earlier research on book history, intellectual history, or cultural history. In retrospect, my entry point was both a blessing and a “curse.” A blessing, because it motivated me to investigate the past in search of the answers for contemporary cultural practices and drove me to look at reading in action from an ethnographic perspective. A “curse,” because it preconditioned my choice of focal points and approaches, a point to which I shall return shortly.

When I decided my dissertation topic would be “a history of reading in

China” in the spring of 1998 and started to look eagerly for books and articles

3 related to the topic, research in this field of inquiry was just emerging as a focus of . Many China specialists in North America in the fields of book history, literacy studies, educational theories, literary history, and print culture, have carried out research projects related to the history of reading. The pioneering works by Tsien Tsuen-hsuin ( Cunxun) presents a world of ancient Chinese books before the advent of .3 's key study on

Chinese popular literacy examines the educational institutions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China and discusses the contribution of literacy to China's modernization.4 Charles Price Ridley’s dissertation investigates the theories and practices of teaching writing in the (1644-1911).5 The edited volume by Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee provides an overview of the impact of the Neo-Confucian philosophy 's educational theories and practices.6 David Rolston has edited a translated volume on traditional Chinese fiction commentators’ treatises on how to read the Chinese .7 A collection of essays edited by Benjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside deal specifically with issues on education and society in late imperial China.8 Thomas Lee has explored book collection and the appreciation of books in China (960-

1279).9 Susan Cherniack has examined book culture and textual transmission in the same period and argued that Chinese responses to textual changes differed historically.10 Cynthia Brokaw and Lucille Chia have explored the economic and social organizations of the publishing industry and book trade.11 Craig Clunas

4 has given enlightening comments on reading Chinese illustrated books.12

Robert Hegel has explored the practices of reading illustrated fiction in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.13 While these works provide important insights into the investigation of the history of reading, none of them presents a synthetic and comprehensive picture of how reading was perceived, conceptualized, conducted, and transmitted.

Although from and have worked on the in traditional China, the development of reading pedagogy has not been their focus. To cite a few examples, Zhang Zhigong’s study of the traditional philological education is mainly focused on textbooks for reading and writing.14 ’s study on the educational history of the

Song dynasty explores the life and thoughts of many influential educators.15

Dawei has looked at various aspects of women’s education and women’s achievements in the Chinese society.16 Angela K.C. Leung has examined elementary education through an investigation of institutions such as community schools.17 Hsiung Ping-chen has investigated the educational methods and values in established families from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.18

The paucity of research on the history of reading in China led me naturally to seek inspiration from the history of reading in the West. In and the

United States, the history of reading has been a fruitful and still growing field in

5 the past century, especially during the last three decades. Edmund Burke Huey

(1870-1913) pioneered a tradition of research into the and physiology of reading. His explorations into three areas of reading, namely, eye movement, perceptual aspects of the printed text, and “higher level” cognitive operations are still followed to this day. In his The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, which has become a monumental work on empirical studies of reading since its publication in 1908, raises important issues concerning the history of reading and the teaching of reading.19

Several book-length studies and edited volumes appeared in the 1990’s that deal with the historical experiences of reading in different cultures on the

European continent. James Smith Allen has written a history of reading in modern from 1800 to 1940, seeing reading as interpretive practices.20

Martyn Lyons has examined three types of readers, namely, workers, women, and , in the nineteenth-century French society.21 A collection of essays edited by James Rave, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor explore the practice and representation of reading in drawing on diverse fields such as medieval pedagogy, textual bibliography, and the history of .22 An edited volume by Bernadette Cunningham and Maire Kennedy is centered on the investigation of how people read in order to elucidate how they came to interpret certain written words in Ireland.23 Joyce Coleman’s study on public reading in late medieval England and France has challenged the bipolar theoretical model of

6 orality versus literacy advanced by Jack Goody and Walter Ong.24 The edited volume by Albrecht Classen combines studies on the book, reading, and writing in the Middle Ages across Europe from a comparative perspective.25 The distinguished paleographer Armando Petrucci has contributed to the history of reading from the perspective of the study of written culture in medieval .26

The publication of Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading in 1996 reflected a reinvigorated interest in reading among the general public that was first created with the publication of Edmund Burke Huey's book.27 While Huey looked at reading as an isolated and private psychological act, the renewed emphasizes reading as a social act in a historical context. In plain language,

Manguel explores the question of how reading took different shapes during the ages, including practices such as being read to, and reading silently in private.

He also looks at different categories of "readers": the forbidden readers (.g. the slaves in the American south), authors, translators, and the masses who are usually regarded by the elite as "incapable" readers.

A milestone of the most recent achievement in the research of the history of reading in the West is an edited volume by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger

Chartier, translated into English by Lydia G. Cochrane in 1999. In this collection of articles, a group of distinguished scholars investigate the role of books and reading in shaping culture, and many other aspects of a society from antiquity to the present. They examine not only the physical aspects of books, but

7 also the evolving forms of reading and the growth and transformation of the reading public. They refute the conventional view that invention and the spread of printing were solely responsible for bringing about the two major revolutions in reading (i.e., the invention of "silent" reading, and the advent of "extensive" reading) during the early modern age.

Though comprehensive and thought provoking, these works cover generalizations on the history of reading only in the Western hemisphere. One cannot help but ask if the hypotheses and models generated from observations of reading in the would also apply to the cases found in Chinese culture, a culture that has a that covers over three thousand years. Did the revolutions of “silent reading” and “extensive reading” occur in

China? If yes, when did they happen? How? If not, why? Is the hypothesis that word separation enables silent reading provable in the Chinese case? How can the prevalent modes of oral reading and re-reading be explained in the Chinese context?

1.2 What is a “History of Reading”?

History of reading is still an emerging field. It is sometimes mistaken for the history of literacy and more often than not seen as a branch of study affiliated with the history of the book, even though these three fields are closely related.28

The subject of study and approaches of the history of reading are continue to be defined and redefined by scholars. Regarding the history of reading as an

8 integral part of the history of written communications, Paul Saenger has defined it as a field of study that deals with the question of how people have evolved diverse cognitive techniques to negotiate meaning from written or printed text.29

This definition distinguishes the history of reading from the history of literacy, which deals with how the techniques of reading and writing are transmitted over time and into different social strata.

The French cultural Roger Chartier suggests that historians “stress that reading is a practice with multiple differentiations varying with time and milieu, and that the signification of a text also depends on the way it is read: aloud or silently, in solitude or in company, in private or in public, etc.”30

Emphasizing the importance on how texts are used, he defines the history of reading as a study that investigates the intersection between the “world of the text” and the “world of the reader”:

A history of reading and readers, popular or otherwise, is thus an account of the historicity of the process of the appropriation of texts. It considers the 'world of the text' as a world of objects or forms whose structures, devices and conventions bear meaning and constrain the production of meaning. Similarly, it considers the 'world of the reader' to be constituted by the 'community of interpretation' (the expression is Stanley Fish's) to which that reader belongs and which defines a shared group of competencies, habits, codes and . Hence we must consider both the material aspects of written objects and the behaviour of reading subjects.31

The American historian Robert Darnton, whose research has been focused on the social history of books and ideas, has proposed some preliminary steps toward a history of reading.32 He sees two dimensions of the history of reading: 9 one is internal, which recovers the “cognitive and affective elements of reading” through a search of record for readers and reader response to texts; the other is external, which looks at reading as a social phenomenon and examines the

“who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” “why,” and “how” questions related to reading.33 To tackle the questions of “who,” “what,” and “when,” historians have used a variety of source materials including registers of book privileges and library catalogues (France), catalogs of book fairs (Germany), subscription lists

(Britain), and records of lending libraries. To find answers to the more difficult questions of “where,” “why,” and “how,” Darnton suggests the use of primary and secondary sources such as fiction, paintings, letters, reports of censors, autobiographical accounts, literacy studies, and literary theories.34

In my dissertation, I adopt Darnton’s definition of the history of reading and address to the questions related to what he calls the external history of reading, with an emphasis on the questions of “whys” and “hows.” The “whos” of my research include four types of readers organized into four main chapters: children, men, women, and non-Han peoples. Additionally, the recurring themes in my dissertation are: Why were boys and girls taught to read? How were they taught to do so? Were the pedagogical theories and methods of teaching boys and girls different? Why did men and women read? How did they read? Where did they read? Why did different non-Han peoples learn to read

10 Chinese even when they were not coerced to do so? How did they manage to learn to read Chinese?

1.3 Sources

The biggest challenge in attacking the above questions is the primary sources.

In the beginning stage of my research, whenever I told East Asian specialists that

I was doing research on “the history of reading” or “the history of reading pedagogy,” I frequently got this response: “Aha, then you must be examining such primers as the San (zi jing), ( ), and Qian (zi ).” San Bai Qian is an acronym referring to the well-known series of elementary character books composed of the San zi jing (), Bai jia (A hundred ), and Qian zi wen (A thousand characters text). As my research progressed, I was able to tell them: “No, this is not the case.” In fact, this type of conception is misleading in two ways.

First, San Bai Qian did not reflect the whole array of elementary textbooks and the changes in the textbook market in the late imperial period. Published at different historical times, these three basic character books were not mentioned as a cluster until the late nineteenth century. Taeyong (1731-1783), a

Korean who visited in the middle of 1760's, observed that in all the village schools he had visited, children started with Bai jia xing, which was followed by San zi jing, Qian zi wen and the Four Books.35 He did not mention San

Bai Qian as a set phrase. In one chapter of the novel Laocan youji (The travels of

11 Lao Can) written by (1857-1909), the protagonist Lao Can went to visit a small bookstore in a city called Dongchang in North China. Browsing the available titles, Lao Can asked the shopkeeper if there were any old books. The shopkeeper bragged that this was the biggest bookstore north of the and they were responsible for distributing the San Bai Qian Qian in all schools within a hundred miles. Puzzled at what this San Bai Qian Qian was, Laocan asked for more clarification. The shopkeeper explained to him San Bai Qian Qian was not one book, but an acronym referring to four basic elementary textbooks.

Among the four, the first three sold very well. The last one Qianjia (Poems by a thousand poets) could only sell about a hundred copies each year.36 From this episode, we can infer that San Bai Qian did not become a “set” of materials until

Liu E’s time. In the biographical materials I have examined from the (960-1279) to (1368-1644), there were occasional mentions of the Qian zi wen as a beginner’s text, but no record of these three primers as a series of textbooks. Therefore, to use San Bai Qian as representative of all elementary textbooks in “traditional” China is to erase the history of many other textbooks. Unfortunately, this misconception is so deep-rooted that many people including China specialists still use San Bai Qian as the representative texts of the history of .37

Second and more importantly, textbooks are neither the only, nor the best primary sources for the reconstruction of the Chinese reading history. They are

12 certainly useful, but too much reliance on them gives us an incomplete and possibly distorted picture of the history of reading in China. Only used in combination and comparison with other primary sources, can textbooks be useful in providing information on such “how” questions of reading: How were textbooks supposed to be used? How were they actually used? I have found over a dozen types of primary sources in my search for data. Based on their , I divide them roughly into two categories: prescriptive and descriptive.

For prescriptive discourses, I rely mainly on five types of sources. First, Neo-

Confucian works on educational theory and reading pedagogy, such as Xi’s

(1130-1200) Dushu fa (Reading methods) and Cheng Duanli’s (1271-1345)

Chengshi jiashu dushu fennian richeng (Daily schedule of study in the Cheng family school, graded according to age). Such works indicate the orthodox views on what reading was and how it should be learned and taught. Second, family instructions and encyclopedia for everyday life. They both played critical roles in bridging the gap between the elite culture and popular culture and transmitted ideas from one generation to the next, echoing the teachings in the orthodox . Sometimes they even give us a rare peek into the social reality. Third, original learning materials and primers intended for the teaching of reading. They give me a concrete view as to how reading materials were presented and the rationales behind their designs. Fourth, commentaries on and dramas, and literary critics' views on how these texts should be read

13 and interpreted. They provide me with the social elite's perspective on advanced reading and the purpose of reading.

The descriptive discourses are more difficult to locate and manage since they are scattered over a variety of written genres of literature and history. I have tapped into the following ten textual and visual genres: biographies found in dynastic and tomb inscriptions, written communications between literati, unofficial history such as anecdotal notes, essays, poems, vernacular fiction, literati paintings, block print illustrations, and foreigners’ observations.

Vernacular fiction turned out to be a very rich source for the history of reading as many stories described the daily life of people and thus provided important information about how people actually read. I have been unable to find where others have used foreigners’ observation as sources for the research of the history of reading in China. In my dissertation, however, I have used Korean visitors’ travel diaries that were relatively more detailed in their description of how reading was actually practiced and taught in late imperial China. Additionally, I have also used some of the observations made by Western Jesuits.

1.4 Methodology and Approaches

The methodology and approaches of my dissertation depart from the established strains of scholarship in China studies. To retrieve the historical act of reading, scholars before me have used many different approaches and shed light on the history of reading in late imperial China from different perspectives.

14 Cynthia Brokaw, in her important study on the ledgers of merit and demerit, investigates the layout of the ledgers and language used therein to discern how they were possibly used by readers.38 Patricia Sieber, through a careful examination of the physical layouts of a corpus of drama texts and a close reading of these texts against their commentaries, reconstructs the editorial strategies embedded in zaju anthologies that were intended for the implied readers.39 David Rolston reveals the practice of fiction reading through an investigation of structures, narratorial voice, as well as the commentary contents and physical layout of commentated editions of vernacular fiction.40

Robert Hegel bases his search of how texts were read on close examination of the illustrated vernacular fiction as, text, artifact, and art. Hongyuan Yu, in her study on Shuihu zhuan () as an elite cultural discourse, examines how meaning is produced through the interaction between the text and its contexts.41 These scholars’ approaches, though different, share one commonality:

They focus on the texts to discern possible ways in which they were read. This method (which I call the “hermeneutic text-based method” and what Robert

Darnton terms “textual ”)42 is an extension from the methods used in book history where books and texts are seen as historical artifacts encoded with, borrowing Sieber’s term, “technologies of reading.”43

Departing from the methodological framework of book history, I approach the history of reading from an ethnographic perspective. The term

15 "ethnography" has undergone an evolution in the past three decades. In the

1970's, "ethnography" was defined by anthropologists as a scientific description of behavior in a particular culture.44 An ethnography at that time required a cultural anthropologist to do two things: spending an extended period of time doing fieldwork in the target culture, and writing an accurate account. From the early 1980's on, the "objectiveness" of the old view about ethnography began to be challenged in the fields of cultural anthropology and cultural studies.

Ethnography is no longer considered to be "a simple account of a people, society, or culture," but rather a complicated process that involves interpretation and representation. 45 Nowadays, ethnographers need not only learn to do fieldwork and write, but also learn who they themselves are and how their own experiences affect the way they observe and write about a culture.46

The term "the ethnography of reading" was first proposed by Jonathan

Boyarin in 1989, who was inspired by two pioneering works in cultural anthropology: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by

James Clifford and George Marcus, and Explorations in the Ethnography of

Speaking, edited by Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer.47 Bridging the gap between cultural anthropology and literary studies, the ethnography of reading has emerged in the past decade as an area of study to explore reading practices in different cultures.48 The ethnographic approach of seeing reading in action, in process, and in practice, challenges and goes beyond “the literary tendency to

16 analyze reading in terms of disembodied decoding of inherent meanings.”49

More importantly, recent ethnographic studies of reading in the West dissolve

“the stereotype of the isolated individual reader” and show that all reading is

“socially embedded.”50

The historical nature of my project prevents me from applying myself in any real fieldwork in a time frame that has already passed. However, my approaches are still behavior/practice-oriented in the sense that I use textual remains of the past as eyewitness testimonies of the act of reading. The ethnographic nature of my project prompts me to take special care in evaluating and analyzing information on practices of reading from historical texts and documents. Robert

Darnton has warned: “Not any text can be seen as a photograph of social reality.”51 A lot of primary materials found in the descriptive category are not the real ethnographic records of the act of reading in the traditional sense of the term. Textual and visual conventionality in many Chinese written genres and iconographic representations added complicity to the interpretation of these historical data. To take biographies as an example, they tend to use the same set of vocabulary and valorize a certain number of personalities or achievements when they describe the merits of a person. To see through this layer of conventionality in representation and retrieve the “social reality” behind it proves to be a very demanding task, if even possible at all. Therefore, in using my data, I tried to be both descriptive and analytical, particularly in view of their

17 rhetorical strategies, narrative conventions, and significance to Chinese cultural history.

1.5 Chinese Terms Related to Reading: a Linguistic Excursion

Before I delve into the complex web of discourses on reading in China, a clarification of Chinese terms related to "reading" is in order. The English word

"reading" has many different counterparts in . For the of clarity, I will explain these different terms either in pair or in groups through comparison. As in any linguistic system, the subtle semantic differences between these terms are all relative, not absolute. That’s why oftentimes we can see them used interchangeably. Among all these terms, and a compound based on it dushu, carry so many layers of meanings that their cultural significance calls for careful explorations. Therefore, I will give more attention to these two words, and a term related to them, dushuren, at the end of this section.

In all the sources I have examined, two verbs of “reading,” du and song, are most commonly used. In ’s (fl. 120) (Explanation and analysis of characters), du and song seem to carry exactly the same meanings.

Under the entry du, the explanation goes “song ” (to read aloud books).

Both indicate the importance of the voice in accessing a text. This is reflected in the use of both verbs in the compound songdu that means reading aloud.52

However, from the sources I have seen from the Song dynasty to the early , these two verbs more often imply two different strains of meanings:

18 while du emphasizes the oral realization of a text, song carries a connotation of memorizing and reciting it. Since the introduction of in China from the sixth century onward, du and song seem to have taken on another “division of labor.” For Buddhist sutras, the chanting action is most often denoted by song, whereas the oral realization of Confucian classics is usually denoted by du, even though both Buddhist sutras and Confucian classics are called jing (canons).

Therefore, would mean sutra chanting, whereas du jing would mean reading Confucian classics.53 Song frequently appears as a part in an idiom “ song ” (sound of reading) which can be literally translated as “the sound of string and recitation.” Etymologically, the idiom came from a phrase in the

Book of Rites, which stated that a student should chant in the spring and practice what was chanted on a string instrument in the summer (chun song xian).54

The second group I will discuss is du, kan, and guan. Craig Clunas has explored the difference between these three terms regarding picture viewing in his discussion of "practices of vision" in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).55 Citing writings and essays on methods of looking at paintings during the Ming time, he suggests that all of the three acts were conceived to be learned skills rather than physiological behaviors developed naturally in the Ming. Nevertheless, the act of kan involves the least effort, which is engaged only by "the vulgar, the uneducated" viewers.56 By contrast, both du and guan connate more effort and attention on the viewer's part. The difference between du and guan lies in the

19 idea of duration of visuality. Du connotes a moving mode of looking, where the eyes scroll across the surface of the picture. Guan, on the contrary, implies a fixed visual act, where the eyes stay (gaze) at a certain point of the picture and penetrate into it with the viewer's contemplation. Thus, in Clunas' configuration of practices of vision, there was a hierarchical relationship among the three acts of looking: kan being the shallowest and lowest act, du a little bit deeper and higher, and guan the deepest and highest in order.

The hierarchical relationship between kan, du, and guan that Clunas found in picture viewing can also be found in the act of book reading during the late imperial China. I will discuss this point in more detail in Chapter 3. Here, I will only discuss them from the linguistic angle. In Shuowen jiezi, neither kan nor guan had anything to do with reading. Kan is to look from a distance, and guan to look carefully. I do not know when these two terms came to be used in the sense of regarding a book. But in Cheng Duanli’s schedule for reading, he used kan with history books and du with classics. This seems to suggest three layers of subtle differences between kan and du. First, kan is to scan, to read quickly whereas du is a much slower and careful mode of reading. Second, kan implies the mode of silent reading whereas du is oral reading. Third, du is a more respected mode of reading than kan. Therefore, fiction reading, or reading of unauthorized materials (such as the roughly generalized category xieshu, literally “evil books”) is more often than not referred to by kan rather than du. Similar to kan, guan

20 carries the meaning of silent reading and quick scanning. However, guan is an honorific term in two ways. First, people with important status such as the , empresses, or respected scholars would guan a book rather than kan or du it. Second, a book, if it is a rare object, would require the action of guan instead of kan or du.

The third group I want to discuss is comprised of three verbs that share a common meaning of oral reading: feng, yin, and . In Shuowen jiezi, feng and song are equivalents.57 Yin means “to moan”58 while nian means “to miss (a person) constantly.”59 Both feng and yin were associated only with poetry chanting or crooning (including , shi, and genres) in the late imperial period.

From its original meaning of “thinking of constantly,” nian carries a connotation of repetition. It is used with both Buddhist sutras and Confucian classics, both requiring repetitive reading.

The fourth group of verbs I want to look at is , , and shi. Their commonality is that they implicitly refer to a silent mode of reading. In Shuowen jiezi, lan is equated with guan without any reference to book reading. In terms of book reading during the late imperial period, lan is very close to guan in the sense that it is also used as an honorific term. Emperors were most often described as reading a book with this verb in official history.60 Like guan and lan, neither yue nor shi meant anything related to looking at a book in Shuowen jiezi.

Yue, with a “gate” as its radical, originally meant “counting at the gate.”61 Its

21 connotation is “inspecting the actual strength of an army.”62 Because of this meaning of “inspection,” yue is more often used to refer to the reading and evaluation of examination papers on the part of examiners. Shi, according to

Shuowen jiezi, is “to look over.” Compared with dushu, shishu refers to a more careless and quick way of reading. In one anecdote recorded by both You

(1125-1210) and He Liangjun (1506-1573), the Northern Song prime minister

Wang Anshi (1021-1086) always looked down upon a Shen Wentong, who in his view lacked learning even though Shen had passed the examination as the Number One Scholar. After Shen died, Wang was invited to write a tomb inscription for him. He relentlessly put down a comment saying that Shen

“rarely read books (buchang dushu).” Persuaded by others that this judgment was too excessive to be appropriate for a Number One Scholar, Wang reluctantly changed buchang dushu to buchang shishu (rarely looked at books).63

This anecdote us to the next topic, the consecrated and hallowed meanings of dushu and dushuren in the cultural context of the late imperial period.

Chapter 3 will examine the key elements of what I call a culture of reading during the period. Here, I want to point out that this culture of reading took shape in the Song dynasty, culminated in the Ming dynasty, and became institutionalized in the early Qing dynasty. Among other factors, the rising importance of civil service examinations as a means for advancement during the

Song dynasty was a major driving force behind the social movement to

22 emphasize textual learning. In order to lessen the influence of the Tang aristocratic class, the Song emperors adopted a policy to use examinations to select a meritorious .64 Whether this policy was indeed fair or not, this stress on examinations sent out a message to the general population that reading and studying was the major, if not the only, route to success. When Zhu

Xi and the academy school rose to compete with schools and advocated “learning for self” instead of for the examinations, their emphasis on moral cultivation as the goal of studying only reinforced the importance of reading.65 When the civil examinations were stopped during the , the importance of dushu also seemed to have suffered, as the status of a

Confucian was ranked only above “beggars” in a rank of ten professions.66 But the social emphasis on dushu was quickly revived in the Ming dynasty.

Commercialization, urbanization, as well as developments in printing technologies and the expansion of the book market during the Ming dynasty helped to canonize and at the same time popularize the theories and practices of reading. The theme of dushu, especially the joy of dushu, appeared in many literati paintings, connoisseur literature, and artifacts. Despite the Manchu conquest, the culture of reading continued into the Qing dynasty. The inquisition during the Qianlong reign (1736-1795) and the professionalization of philological studies only pushed more scholars to avert their attention from politics to philology.67

23 Associated with the “halo effect” of dushu, dushuren became a label for a social status that was not determined by officialdom or wealth, but by the act of reading. According to Thomas Lee, the term took on a positive tone since the

Song dynasty when the Song literati rose as a new class distinguished by education and wealth.68 There were many uses of the term dushuren in the late imperial China, hence its multiple connotations. Here are some instances of its usage. In one story, the founding of the Song dynasty Zhang

Kuangying was recorded to have said: “Only dushuren can be appointed as prime ministers.” The reason he made this claim was because he found his ministers to be very knowledgeable.69 The emperor Xuanzong (r. 1213-1222) referred to his crown Shouzhong as a dushuren because Shouzhong always knew the proper thing to do.70 The (r. 1662-1722) once praised one expert on the Book of Changes as a “diligent (kuxin) dushuren,”71 while the (r.1723-1735) extolled a true Confucian scholar who brought his lecture audience to tears as a “law-abiding (anfen) dushuren.”72 The Qing evidential scholar Yucai (1735-1815) was a very unassuming person despite his erudition. When he died, his friend Wang Niansun (1744-1832) proclaimed:

“After Ruoyin’s (Duan Yucai) death, there will be no more dushuren under heaven!”73 From these examples, we find dushuren to be a synonym for such qualities as erudition, conservatism, propriety, diligence, and modesty.

24 Despite these different connotations, the essential meaning of dushuren did not change much since the Song dynasty. Dushuren was not a social class like scholar-officials (shidafu) that referred to the political elite who held governmental positions. Nor was dushuren equal to the so-called "gentry" or

"literati" group (shen, shenshi, wenren), members of which usually obtained degrees in the civil service examinations or enjoyed high literary reputations.74

Dushuren was a fluid social identity that any person who was devoted to the study of the classics, be he a high official or a poverty-stricken examination aspirant, could identify himself with. In most cases, what they did and what they thought they were doing (reading books) determined who they were

(dushuren). In some sense, the act of reading became a symbol of this self-styled social identity. The identity of dushuren was not usually associated with wealth or prosperity, but with pride—a pride in moral superiority.

To summarize this discussion of terminologies used to refer to the act of reading in late imperial China, the nine verbs out of the ten I have examined can be organized into three categories according to their semantic radicals. The first category contains du, song, feng and yin, sharing the radicals of “speech” and

“mouth.” The second category includes kan, guan, lan, and shi, sharing the radicals of “eye” and “to see.” The third category consists of nian, which has the radical “heart.” In a sense, these characters are sending out a very clear message

25 what reading is and how it should be done in the Chinese culture: you have to use your mouth, eyes, and heart/mind when you read!

1.6 Limitations and Caveats

The scope of this study covers a period of eight hundred years. To quote a

French reading historian’s words, “it would be presumptuous if not foolish to write a comprehensive history of reading.”75 One of the first critiques I received for a conference presentation of one of my chapters was that I was covering too long a time period. In fact, the decision to choose the current period was not due to arrogance or foolishness, but based on the availability of primary sources and the status quo of the field. When I started out with my dissertation proposal in

1999, I only planned to focus on the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), when all of was subject to alien rule for the first time in history and when Cheng

Duanli’s Chengshi jiashu dushu fennian richeng was published and widely circulated. However, the scarcity and fragmentary nature of primary sources in this period pushed me to broaden my search areas and examine in the that preceded and followed Yuan. More importantly, there are no monographs on the history of reading in China. So I was navigating in this uncharted waters, having no map to follow and almost blindly hunting for any possible clues that could me to my destination.

Another related and equally valid critique on my project is that my emphasis on patterns and continuities of the culture of reading obscured the historical

26 changes in late imperial China. For example, Lu Jiuyuan’s (1139-1193) philosophy of the mind and his preference for oral transmission over book learning must have competed with ’s Dushu fa and changed people’s attitudes toward book reading. The rise of vernacular fiction, especially illustrated ones, during the middle of the Ming dynasty, must have prompted changes in the reading practices. I admit that the picture my dissertation presents might be too neat to reflect the messiness of the social reality of reading.

However, I am not arguing that this “neat picture” was the social reality. On the contrary, almost certainly, it should be further differentiated by social events, new ideas, and innovative technologies from time to time. What I argue is that this neat picture itself is presented by the representations in the primary sources I have examined mostly written by elite males. It probably tells us more about textual and iconographic representations than real practices.

Additionally, historians are constantly building “an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing parts” with the discovery of every new piece of evidence.76 As

Robert Darnton has accurately put,

You open a box, take out a folder, open the folder, take out a letter, read the letter, and wonder what connects it with all the other letters in all the other folders in all the other boxes in all the other . Researchers have never even read the overwhelming majority of documents such as letters. Most people never wrote letters. Most beings have vanished into the past without leaving a trace of their existence.77

My dissertation is intended to be a sketchy mosaic that needs to be filled in with more tiles that will add greater details. If the source materials uncovered in 27 this dissertation can be used as a road map for researchers (myself included) in the future, then I have fulfilled my goal.

A third possible critique is that in focusing on the orthodox methods of reading, I seemed to have blurred the difference between “pleasure reading” and

“labor reading.” My response to this is that the distinction between “pleasure reading” and “labor reading” is a very Eurocentric idea in the first place and is not suitable for a Chinese context. In the fourth century, Augustine (354-

430) made a distinction between "reading for pleasure" and "reading for self- improvement." According to him, the former was carried out of an "aesthetic" impulse, while the latter, out of an "ascetic" one. "The aesthetic can be defined as a type of reader's response in which the pleasure of the text is an end in itself, while the ascetic assumes that the text is a means for attaining a higher, more pleasurable end. In an extreme form, the aesthetic sees nothing beyond the text; the ascetic sees nothing of lasting value in the text."78 This distinction was further developed by reading psychologist Victor Nell in his study on the psychology of pleasure reading. In Nell’s conceptual structure, he draws a distinction between

“ludic reading” and “labor reading.”79 According to him, ludic reading is of a paratelic nature, meaning the activity is performed for its own sake; whereas labor reading is characterized as telic, meaning the activity is labored at because of external rewards.

28 For elite women and men who read in the Chinese late imperial period, the boundary between the so-called "pleasure reading" and "labor reading" was blurred. I am not suggesting that readers in late imperial China did not read simply for the pleasure of reading, but rather the distinction between the two concepts is not useful in teasing out different modes of reading in the period.

From the self-representation as readers in women’s writings that I discuss in more detail in Chapter 4, we get an image of a “moral” reader who seeks the right text to read in order to improve her moral rectitude. In this case, reading was supposed to be a part of moral but these women seemed to also take pleasure in doing so. As for men, the discourse on the importance of reading gave us a mixed message as to what reading was and what it could attain. The following well-known and widely circulated poem written by a Song emperor

Zhenzong (r. 998-1022) demonstrated the double nature of reading in the

Chinese context.

There is no need for rich families to buy fertile lands, for in books, there are already a thousand 80of grains; There is no need to install high beams when building a house, for in books, there is already a house; Do not worry about having no good match-makers for your marriage, for in books, there are beautiful ladies; Do not worry about having no servants to follow you when going out, for in books, there are carriages and horses as many as arrow heads; Men, if you want to fulfill your lifetime ambition, read the Six Classics diligently by the window.81

The poem can be read both as an encouragement on “labor reading” and an exclamation of “pleasure reading.” One way of interpreting it is that the 29 emperor is simply encouraging people to study hard by reading the Six Classics diligently. Read literally, reading is depicted as an act that can bring a reader great fortune (grains and gold house), higher social status (carriages and horses associated with officials), and even a beautiful wife. Interpreted this way, the benefit and thus the ultimate goal of reading was the external reward of comfort of life and prestigious positions. Therefore, reading is telic in nature. However, read metaphorically, the poem is saying that reading is in and by itself a reward already. Symbolically, books contain fortune, esteem, and prosperity. Books are as wonderful as any of these things can be, if not better. Accessing books is by all means like accessing these marvelous things in life. Reading, in itself, is a pleasure of spiritual bliss.

When Zhu Xi elaborated on the difference between “learning for self” and

“learning for others,” he was using the goal of studying as a demarcation line. If one studied for self-improvement, he was reading for himself. But if one studied to gain fame or officialdom, he was reading for others. Although the reading methods he prescribed were laborious by today’s standard, reading for self or for others in that manner did not preclude one from reading for pleasure. In fact, reading was an enjoyable hobby for him and many other dushuren.82

This blurring boundary between “pleasure” and “labor” is further attested in seventeenth-century commentators’ remarks on how to read Chinese fiction

“correctly.” Chun , in her close reading of two types of vocabulary adopted

30 in fiction commentaries, has observed that literati readers and commentators emphasized both the pleasurable aspect and pedagogical aspect of reading.83 To push her argument further, when (1527-1602) expressed his joy in meeting people when he read books, when Jin Shengtan (1608-1661) claimed that Shuihu zhuan was a better textbook than classics for him as a boy and suggested that the reading methods of Shuihu zhuan could be applied to reading history books such as the Zhanguo ce (Intrigues of the Warring States),84 and when Zhang Zhupo

(1670-1698) recommended a slow mode of reading usually used to read the classics to read (see Chapter 2), they were not distinguishing “labor reading” from “pleasure reading” at all. For them, reading represented both modes of interaction with the printed text. In their attempt to raise the status of fiction in the traditional literary hierarchy, the commentators were prescribing the application of the methods of reading classics and histories to the reading of vernacular fiction.85

In the landscape of China’s socio-cultural history, the purposes of reading can hardly be encapsulated in the artificial distinction between “pleasure” and

“labor.” One of the arguments formulated in my dissertation, especially in

Chapter 5, is that different people read for different reasons. For dushuren, reading was the center of their life that opened the road to the ultimate moral cultivation. For examination aspirants, reading served as the bridge from obscurity and poverty to fame and prosperity. For artisans and , the

31 ability to read either improved their skills or expanded their clientele. For women, at least in some male literati’s eyes, reading enabled them to entertain men better. For “alien rulers” such as the Khitans, Jurchens, and Mongols, reading Chinese made the cultural heritage of the Chinese accessible to them. For Jesuits, reading Chinese facilitated their acceptance in this self- containing world.

A final note is needed here to clarify the term “Late Imperial China” used in this dissertation. “Late Imperial China” is a relatively new term coined by historians in the to replace the earlier term “premodern China” which implies a stagnant China waiting to be modernized in response to Western influence.86 There have been two definitions of the term “late imperial China”: one narrow, the other broader. The more widely accepted one refers to the last two dynasties, the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (1644-1911), particularly from the late Ming to the end of the Qing dynasty between 1550 and 1911. The rationale behind this is that the middle of the sixteenth century

(around 1550) which was marked by “an expansion of commerce and an increase in urbanization, publishing, courtesan culture, and other luxury trades” is an important demarcation line signaling the beginning of “a highly dynamic period in Chinese history.”87

The second and earlier use of the term, as summarized by John Dardess, includes the Song (960-1279), Yuan (1279-1368), Ming (1368-1644), and Qing

32 (1644-1911) dynasties. According to him, the early boundary (tenth and eleventh centuries) is marked by “a doubling of the population to the hundred million range; a surge of and enrichment; the spread of cheap printed texts; and the revival and reworking of the Confucian doctrinal heritage, a broad movement known as neo-.”88

For my dissertation, I choose the broader sense of the term and focus on the period between the tenth to the eighteenth centuries. This periodization is more relevant to the development of the culture of reading due to the following reasons. First, the spread of printing technologies, the burgeoning of the book market, the institutionalization of the civil examination system, and the rise of

Neo-Confucianism during the Song dynasty laid the foundation for the theories and practices of reading. Second, it was a period of great cultural mix in Chinese history that was largely responsible for the formation of contemporary China.

The conquests of the North China by the non-Chinese nomadic tribes, including the Khitans and Jurchens, and subsequently the conquering of the China proper by the Mongols, stimulated large-scale cultural diversification that was unprecedented in China. Third, the development of Neo-Confucianism, the explosion of printed texts, commercialization, urbanization, and the coming of

Westerners during the Ming dynasty further canonized the theories and popularized the practices of reading. Fourth, the subsequent Manchu cultural

33 policies and the development of evidential scholarship in the eighteenth century continued to nourish the cultural environment of reading.

1.7 Chapter Organization

The body of this dissertation will be divided into five chapters. Chapter 2 examines theories and practices of how children were taught to read. Focusing on four main pedagogical procedures, namely memorization, vocalization, punctuation, and explication, I argue that loud chanting of texts and constant anxiety of reciting were two of the most prominent themes that ran through both the descriptive and prescriptive discourses in the history of reading in late imperial China. Chapter 3 delineates a culture of reading dominated by males through a discussion of the key elements of this culture: reading habits, the treatment of books, the hygiene of reading, reading paraphernalia, the elite conception of reading, and popular attitudes toward reading. Chapter 4 investigates women's reading, including their road to literacy, and representations of what and how they read. I argue that what caused the growing patriarchal anxiety over women’s education during the late imperial period was not the rise in female literacy or the growth of female erudition, but rather the expansion of women’s literate practices, particularly writing in the sphere of men. Chapter 5 probes the questions of why and how non-Han peoples learned to read Chinese. I investigate the cases of four different groups:

“alien rulers” (Khitans, Jurchens, and Mongols), Jesuits, Chinese Jews, and

34 Koreans. Chapter 6 reflects on the influence of the culture of reading on contemporary Chinese society, offers pedagogical considerations of teaching

Chinese as a foreign language, discusses the issue of "second orality," and provides suggestions for future research.

35

Chapter 1 Notes

1 Guthrie 1984, 95. 2 See reports in Mei 1984. 3 Tsien 1962, 1988. 4 Rawski 1979. 5 Ridley 1973. 6 de Bary and Chaffee 1989. 7 Rolston 1990. 8 Elman and Woodside 1994. 9 Lee 1995. 10 Cherniack 1994. 11 Brokaw 1996; Chia 1996. 12 Clunas 1997. 13 Hegel 1998. 14 Zhang 1962, 1992. 15 Yuan 1991. 16 Cao 1996. 17 Leung 1994a. 18 Hsiung 1992. 19 Huey 1908. 20 Allen 1991. 21 Lyons 2001. 22 Raven, Small, and Tadmor 1996. 23 Cunningham and Kennedy 1999. 24 Coleman 1996. 25 Classen 1998. 26 Petrucci 1995. 27 Manguel 1996. 28 See for example McCleery 1998, 1. 29 Saenger 1999b, 11. 30 Chartier 1999, 276. 36

31 Chartier 1999, 276. 32 Darnton 1986, 1992. 33 Darnton 1986, 157. 34 Darnton 1986, 167-183. 35 YG, juan 8, 10b. 36 Liu 1958, 65-67. 37 See for example Miyazaki 1963. 38 Brokaw 1991, 216-226. 39 Sieber 1995. 40 Rolston 1997. 41 Yu Hongyuan 1999. 42 Darnton 1986. 43 Sieber 1995. 44 A representative definition is given by Clifford Geertz (1988, 141), cf. Jacobson 1991, 1-2. 45 Jacobson 1991, 1-2. 46 Goodall 2000, 7. 47 Boyarin 1992b, 3. Bauman and Sherzer 1974; Clifford and Marcus 1986. 48 See articles in Boyarin 1992a. 49 Boyarin 1992b, 3. 50 Boyarin 1992b, 4; see especially Elizabeth Long’s and Jonathan Boyarin’s articles in the collection (Long 1992, Boyarin 1992c). 51 Darnton 1998, 264. 52 Morohashi 1984, vol. 10, 483. 53 Morohashi 1984, vol. 10, 482, 611. Morohashi equates du jing with song jing. 54 LJ, juan 8. 55 Clunas 1997. 56 Clunas 1997, 117. 57 SWJZ, juan 3, shang, 3a. 58 SWJZ, juan 2, shang, 5b. 59 SWJZ, juan 10, xia, 5b. 60 The fact that in Japanese the same is used as an honorific term for “reading” is a good indication of its use in Classical Chinese. 61 SWJZ, juan 8, xia, 3b. 62 Morohashi 1984, vol. 11, 747.

37

63 LXABJ, juan 1, 7a-b; HSYL, juan 28, 18b. 64 Chaffee 1985. 65 Lee 1995. 66 This traditional view is summarized in the idiom “jiu ru shi gai.” Scholars in Hong and Taiwan have been exploring the true meaning of this term and the real status of dushuren in the Yuan dynasty. They argue that Confucian scholars were highly regarded in the Yuan society and the idiom did not reflect the social reality. See 1996, and Li 2000. 67 Elman 1984. 68 Lee 1985, 3-4; Lee 1995, 194-195. 69 SS, juan 3, reprint 50. 70 JS, juan 93, biographies 31, reprint 2061. 71 QSG, juan 290, biographies 77, reprint 10274. 72 QSG, juan 305, biographies 92, reprint 10507. 73 QSG, juan 481, biographies 268, reprint 13203. 74 Chung-li (1955) defines "gentry" as title, grade, degree, or official rank holders who obtained these either through examinations or through purchase. He further divides the gentry into two strata: the lower group which includes shengyuan (government student) and jiansheng (student of the Imperial College); and the upper group which consists of gongsheng (imperial student), (graduate of the provincial examinations), (graduate of the metropolitan examinations), and officials either through examinations or through purchase. Some other scholars define gentry as individuals possessing the juren or a higher degree. See for instance, Rosenbaum 1975. For a summary of various scholarly definitions of the term "gentry" and its Chinese equivalents, see Michael 1953, xvii-xix. Benjamin A. Elman distinguishes "gentry" and "literati" by seeing the latter as a subgroup of the former. For him, "gentry" refers to power- wielding landlords and officials of before 1900 and "literati" refers to "selected members of the gentry" who maintained their social and cultural status "primarily through classical scholarship, knowledge of lineage ritual, and literary publication" (Elman 2000, xvii, note 1). Recognizing that these two terms do overlap, he sometimes adopts the terms "gentry- literati" and "scholar-gentry." 75 Allen 1991, 19. 76 Carr 1961, 9-13. 77 Darnton 1999. 78 Stock 1996, 29. 79 Nell 1988. 80 Zhong is an old unit for capacity. During the , one zhong equaled to six plus four dou. In today's calculation, that is 640 liters. However, historically, one zhong was used to be equal with eight hu and ten hu as well. To make the matter more complicated, at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), one hu was changed from being equal to ten dou, to being equal to five dou. Dou was always equal to ten liters. In the context of this poem, a thousand zhong simply means a large quantity. 81 Qiu 1993, 3; translation is mine. 38

82 Lee 1995, 208-215. 83 Mei 2003. 84 Rolston 1990, 145, cf. Yu Hongyuan 1999, 58-59. 85 For male literati commentators' other strategies to raise the status of vernacular fiction, especially by associating it with the older genre of xiaoshuo (literally "small talk"), see Yu Hongyuan 1999, 25-49. 86 Widmer 1997, 1. 87 Widmer 1997, 1-2. 88 Dardess 1991, 74.

39

CHAPTER 2

LEARNING TO READ

2.1 Introduction

On the morning of the tenth day of the third lunar month in the year 1766, dozens of delegates on a Korean solstitial embassy1 entered a Temple of Chaste

Woman located in a village within Yongping in Northern China.2

They found a school next to the inner gate of the temple and half a dozen children sitting there studying. What amazed all of them was that, in spite of the noise the delegation had made, these children were not the least distracted and concentrated on their studies as if nothing had happened. A few moments later when Hong Taeyong (1731-1783), the nephew of the secretary of the solstitial embassy, arrived at the gate, an interpreter excitedly reported this marvelous scene to him. Suspicious of the veracity of the story, Hong went inside to investigate. What he discovered and later recorded in his memoir turns out to be a rare piece of evidence showing us a scene of children learning to read in early modern China.

40 Despite the fact that reading was greatly emphasized by educators and policy- makers in early modern China, very little was written on how children were actually taught to read. Previous studies on Chinese elementary education mainly focus on the issue of literacy, the content of education, educational institutions, and educators' theories on teaching.3 Some recent studies have shifted the focus to the roles played by the state, community, and family in education.4 Although primers and textbooks for children began to flourish in the

Song period,5 today’s researchers have found little evidence related to how the reading materials were used in daily school life. In this chapter, I will explore the descriptive and prescriptive discourses, from a variety of sources, in order to discern the actual pedagogical procedures related to reading in the late imperial period.

I will argue that in the history of reading in late imperial China, the loud chanting of texts and the constant anxiety of reciting were two of the most prominent themes that ran through both the descriptive and prescriptive discourses. I will explore how and why, during the very early days when children were led into the world of written words, the four interrelated tasks of reciting (), chanting (song), together with punctuating (judou) and oral explication (jiangshu) were introduced as basic reading skills.

Primary materials concerned with children’s acquisition of reading skills are widely scattered in various sources. Previous studies rely on educators’ theories

41 about how reading “should be taught.” For my research, I draw on the following eight types of source materials to explore not just the theories but also the actual pedagogical practices: 1) Neo-Confucian scholars’ texts on how to teach reading,

2) family instructions on reading and studying, 3) dynastic histories, 4) literati autobiographic writings on learning to read, 5) literati miscellaneous and anecdotal notes, 6) descriptions in vernacular fiction, 7) delineation in pictographic materials, and 8) contemporary observations as well as foreigners’ travel diaries. While data from the first two types of texts provide information on “what was supposed to be done” and the rationale behind it, data collected from the other six types of materials shed light on “how it was actually done.”

This is not to assume that the second type of materials present an absolute picture of a social reality. As W.L. Idema points out, historians and novelists share many assumptions and stereotypes about the society and social groups.

Their construction of reality is therefore subject to similar social constraints.6 To take Idema’s argument further, the dominant discourses in storytelling and influence the way novelists describe their imagined personalities and the way historians record the behavior of historical figures. Therefore, I especially favor those sources that have some ethnographic , such as Hong

Taeyong’s travel record, since their meticulous descriptions of Chinese society seem to be less removed from reality.

42 Hong Taeyong was a talented Korean scholar well-versed in the . His uncle Hong Ok (1722-1809) served as the secretary of the Korean solstitial embassy of 1765-1766. As one of the three ranking officials, Hong Ok had the privilege of bringing a personal aide. As a relative, Hong Taeyong seized this opportunity to visit China. He joined the embassy nominally as his uncle’s aide but in fact he was a tourist, who was curious about everything from Chinese musical instruments to the educational system. Hong kept a diary as he traveled and compiled a consolidated memoir after he returned to .7 It is in this memoir that Hong wrote his account of the

Chinese temple school.

Let us go back to where we left off in the beginning of the chapter. After

Hong lifted the curtain and entered the school, he was convinced that the interpreter was telling him the truth:

[T]here were indeed several children sitting in chairs around a desk with their heads gathered, reading. They were about the ages of fourteen or fifteen. Seeing me, they all stood up and made a bow with hands clasped. I stepped forward, paid back their respect, and asked them to sit back and read. They answered: 'Yes, sir.' They turned to their seats to read and did not look away for a moment. The way they swayed their bodies while reading in fast rhythm was not different from the children in my country.8

Hong examined the books the children were reading. They were the Four

Books, the Book of Odes, A Thousand Characters Text (Qian zi wen), Three Character

Classic (San zi jing), A Hundred Surnames (Bai jia xing) and so on. Curious to find out more about these well-disciplined children, Hong asked who their teacher

43 was. It turned out to be the monk in charge of this temple. He sought out the teacher and talked with him with the aid of a brush and a piece of paper due to his limited spoken Chinese. From their “brush talk” (written conversation),

Hong concluded that the teacher was “barely literate and there was nothing marvelous about him at all.”

Before Hong’s delegate left, they witnessed another activity that was essential to learning to read in a Chinese elementary school—text reciting:

The teacher had just sat down in a chair under the north wall. There was a desk in front of him. The children took their turns to recite texts....The person who was going to recite presented the book in both hands to the teacher, put it on the desk, stepped back and made a solemn bow, turned his back to the teacher, and recited quickly. After reciting, he turned back and bowed solemnly. The teacher then stuck a red label on the chapter he had just recited, and wrote the date on it. The child then stepped back and stood there. The ones following him all did it in the same manner. Those who had stepped back all looked down while standing straight. There was not one person who dared to look around or disturbed the order.9

Hong was deeply impressed by what he saw and did not conceal his admiration for the teacher and the well-behaved children. He could not help but exclaim: “He [the teacher] was just a barely literate person in a remote area, and the children were innocent farm children. Even their discipline is as strict as this, the manner of teaching and learning in the Qi Lu area (today’s

Province) can well be imagined then!”10

Although the children Hong met were indeed extremely well-disciplined, they might not be as typical as Hong had thought. If Hong had seen some

44 Chinese fiction and wood-block drawings, he would probably not have reached this conclusion. Children were after all children. In a Ming collection of stories about the in the Jiangnan area,11 a village school teacher had to deal with naughty students on a daily basis. His students would fight and cry in class, lie about being late for school, and frequently think of excuses to go out to play.12

The teenagers in the family school that Baoyu, the protagonist in the early Qing novel Honglou (), attended behaved in a similar manner when their teacher was not around.13 The theme of unruly children at school was vividly depicted in a traditional pictorial genre of wood-block nianhua () commonly used as household decoration and ornament.14 In one picture titled “Naoxue wanxi” (disturbing school by playing naughtily), a teacher and a parent came back to a classroom only to find the children having fun by acting out scenes from popular theatrical dramas (Fig.

2.1).15 The popularity of fiction and nianhua among the common people suggests that the general perception about elementary school students would be contrary to what Hong had seen.16

Nevertheless, Hong’s observation of the text reading and reciting scenes was very accurate. The pedagogical procedures he wrote about seemed to have lasted very long in China. One hundred and fifty years after his visit to the temple school, a photo was taken in a northern Chinese village school that captured a moment of school life exactly as Hong had described.

45 In this -and-white photo, probably taken during the late Qing period

(1644-1911), a group of children are anxiously waiting their turn to recite texts to their teacher (Fig. 2.2): The time is possibly winter, as indicated by the bulky clothes and a winter hat one of the boys is wearing. The place is a village school with only one classroom. Paintings and are hung on the wall. On the left side of the frame, a young teacher is sitting behind a desk, looking at a book in his hands. Across from the desk stand four boys with their backs turned toward the desk and their teacher. Three of them are looking away, while the tallest boy looks straight at the camera. On the right side of the frame, two groups of boys sit on benches around two smaller desks. One group of three in the back is sitting there with their heads lowered and eyes shut, books lying in front of them. The group in the foreground is doing the same thing, only one of them is standing instead of sitting and another is stealing a glance at the teacher's desk.

Using this photo as an illustration in his classic book on Chinese cultural characteristics, Arthur H. Smith (1845-1932), a missionary who had stayed in

China for years, observes that all students in Chinese schools “spend their time in shouting out their lessons at the top of their voice, to the great injury of their vocal organs.”17 Smith also finds the students’ practice of turning their backs toward their during recitation “singular,” and describes it with a tone of disbelief.18

46 Smith’s observations are confirmed in the words of a contemporary who had been to a school like the one pictured. When asked about her childhood education, Zhang Youyi (1900-1989), ex-wife of modern China's poet laureate Xu

Zhimo (1896-1931), had this to say about the school environment that she had seen in the beginning of the twentieth century:

I just sat in class and copied from the primer a few times for the tutor, while my brothers had not only to copy but to memorize hundreds of lines from the of and the Book of the Golden Mean. The room was filled with the sounds of their chanting as they attempted to memorize their lessons. The chanting became more intense as they raced through their lesson, hoping to learn each passage by heart, anxiously anticipating their turn. At any moment the tutor could call on one of them and demand a recital, or bei shu which, translated literally, meant 'back to the books.'19

These words provide more detail than is present in the photo. Education for boys was deemed by parents and teachers as more important than for girls. The fact that there were only boys in the photo speaks to this preference. The was very monotonous, revolving around the activities of reading the

Confucian classics. The reading activities were dull, marked by repetitious chanting, tedious memorization, and exhaustive recitation in front of (actually, with the back turned to) the teacher. The photo captures a most critical and typical moment of children learning to read around the turn of the century.

It is interesting to note that the character for “bei” (reciting) is also a noun meaning “the back.” Etymologically speaking, “reciting” is a relatively new meaning for this character. Another character that is commonly seen in earlier texts denoting the meaning of “recitation” is a homophone á which means 47 “multiplying.” This character implies the connotation of “going over a text again and again.” In written Classical Chinese, a more commonly used term for recitation is the character “song.” It is noteworthy that song also carries the meaning of “reading aloud.” The term itself seems to suggest that the activities of vocalizing a text, memorizing it, and reciting it from memorization are just different aspects of one central action: reading.

Although almost two centuries apart, the photo and Ms. Zhang's observation corroborated Hong Taeyong's record showing how similar the pedagogical procedures of reading were over a span of two hundred years in China. To be sure, there would be local and temporal variations. However, the continuity of certain procedures in this tradition is striking. Hong's account offers us a rare ethnographic peek into how these procedures were carried out in a village school in the middle of the eighteenth century. His detailed observations demonstrate how common the phenomena of chanting and reciting were in early modern

Chinese elementary schools.

2.2 Memory and Memorization

An erudite reader in the Chinese classics, Hong was probably not surprised to see the stress Chinese people put on memory and memorization. In biographies and anecdotal notes, literary figures were often praised for their good memory at a young age. The prominent Neo-Confucian scholar Cheng

(1032-1085) was said to be able to recite the Book of Odes and the Book of

48 Documents at the age of ten .20 Hu Yin (?-1151, j.s. 1119), the confidential advisor of Emperor Gaozong of the Southern Song, managed to memorize several thousand volumes of books when he was an unruly teenager.21 Cheng

Duanli (1271-1345), a Yuan Neo-Confucian scholar, was said to be able to memorize and recite the six classics when he was fifteen.22 Youguang (1506-

1571), a Ming statesman and well-known essayist, would be urged and supervised by his mother to recite the Classic of at midnight until he could recite without any mistakes when he was about seven.23 Even emperors were lauded when they showed signs of precocity in their early experiences of memorization. Zhu Houcong (1507-1566, r. 1522-1566), the Ming , was reported to be able to recite poems that his father read to him at the age of five.24

The formulaic pattern of praising a child who was able to recite a certain number of texts at a young age had a long history of tradition in Chinese written discourse. (27-97?), the Han philosopher, wrote that he could recite one thousand characters of text daily when he studied the Analects and the at age eight.25 (530-590), later a distinguished scholar and statesman during the Five Dynasties, recited 's "Rhapsody on the Capital of Shu" (Shudu fu) when he was a few years old.26 Simiao (581-682), the famous medical theorist and "King of ", could recite a thousand characters of text per day when he was seven.27 (669-726), a Tang

49 minister, was reciting Yu 's "Rhapsody on Withered Trees" (Kushu fu) when he was five.28 The young (?705-762) was commanded by his father to recite Xiangru's "Rhapsody of Zixu" (Zixu fu).29 The literary genre of rhapsody and the text of the Book of Documents were difficult even for adults to comprehend and remember. However, these preadolescent feats of memory, though amazing, were not uncommon during the late imperial period.30 We do not know if these children actually understood what they memorized. The pervasiveness of this phenomenon, however, reflected the emphasis that people put on the connection between memory and reading.

The emphasis on excellent memory was not surprising given the fact that the recognition of written characters and the future comprehension of written words would start from the memorized sound of texts. A good memory was not merely necessary, but indispensable to the process of learning to read. When

Qiling (1623-1716) was five years old, he expressed a wish to begin reading books.

His mother became his first teacher. Instead of going right to the books, what she did was ask her son to repeat after her when she recited the .

Only after he had memorized the whole text did she bring a book to him and ask him to read the text by himself. Using his memorized version as a guide, he managed to recognize all the characters in the book after only two readings.31

Mao was not alone in his experience. Yu (1272-1348), at the age of three, escaped with his parents during the turmoil of war. Without any

50 books, his mother, Miss , taught him orally to recite the Analects, the

Mencius, Zuo's Commentary, and written by Xiu and Su Dongpo.

By the time they returned home and hired a tutor for him, Yu Ji had already

"read" through all the classics and understood their meanings.32

These examples show that from the very beginning, reading was based on recognizing characters whose sounds the learner was already familiar with through repeated listening and recitation. While the was usually the first thing to study in learning to read in the West,33 Chinese children learned first to commit the sound of written words to their memory. The fact that antithetical verses were preferred in classic primers such as the Three Character

Classics, the A Hundred Surnames, and the A Thousand Characters Text also testified to this practice. Even in zazi, a specialized character primer aimed at certain groups of readers,34 characters were more often than not organized in an antithetical manner with two, three, four, or six characters per phrase. Lü

Desheng (fl.), in the preface to his ’er yu (Words for boys), stated that he put important ethical admonitions into colloquial antithetical verses so that little children could easily chant and remember them.35

Previous studies related to the process of learning to read have highlighted one method of character recognition, namely, the character blocks.36 Character blocks, like modern "flash cards," were squares made of wood, , or paper with characters written on them. This method was advocated in quite a few

51 educators' treatises on how to teach children to read.37 Although a popular method in the prescriptive discourse of the eighteenth century, my research in the descriptive discourse turned up no data to substantiate their use in real life.

It is tempting to hypothesize that the practice of reading unfamiliar texts against their memorized aural version might be the more commonly used method of acquiring basic characters throughout most of the late imperial period. With its simplicity and cost effectiveness, it was undoubtedly more popular than character blocks. It would be reasonable to assume that even after their introduction in the early eighteenth century, character blocks did not gain wide popularity among common people, since few of them would be able to afford such a relatively luxurious learning aid, both in terms of time and cost.

This method of acquiring characters has another important implication. Long before Western scholars and missionaries in the sixteenth century began to fantasize and circulate the myth of Chinese characters as "", or symbols that represent ideas,38 Chinese children were taught, somewhat in an unconscious way, to perceive characters as representations of sound rather than meaning as they embarked on the road to literacy. This perception was even more apparent given the fact that in many cases children would memorize texts without even knowing the sense of the words they had memorized. In his memoir, Hong Taeyong noted that many of the children he encountered in China could recite texts but did not understand the meaning of them.39 This practice of

52 mechanical memorization without access to meaning has been dubbed as siji yingbei (rote memory) in contemporary China and is often cited as a major piece of evidence by modern educators to criticize the failure of traditional education.

However, the longevity of this method seems to be partly due to its suitability in traditional education.

The very nature of the written Classical Chinese (wenyan wen) might have contributed to the necessity and usefulness of the memorization method. In his exploration of the rise of the written vernacular (baihua) in East , Victor Mair observed that the written Classical Chinese (what he calls Literary Sinitic, or LS) was a special, shortened cipher or code of the spoken Chinese (referred to as

Vernacular Sinitic, or VS) with its own unique grammatical and expressive conventions. LS and VS were so different that the nature of their differences far exceeded the contrast between written Latin and any modern Romance language.40 If the LS and the VS were indeed two linguistic systems as claimed by Mair, then for children of today's and early modern China alike, learning to read the written Classical Chinese was to enter an " of text"41 that was totally independent of the spoken world. In other words, it was like learning a foreign language, where its conventions of orthographical, lexical, and grammatical usage all needed to be memorized.

Recent studies in Chinese philology and cognitive science have lent weight to the importance of memorization. Zhenfu recognized the suitability of the

53 memorization method in his guidance of contemporary students who aspired to study Classical Chinese.42 After interviewing several elderly people who had been exposed to the traditional pedagogy of reading, he concluded that memorization could lead to a sort of "three-dimensional comprehension" (liti de dong) of Classical Chinese texts, whose lexicon, structure, and grammar are elusive to modern students. Studies in cognitive science and second language acquisition have shown that before a learner can internalize any new set of rules, new data must undergo several stages: first as "noticed input," then as

"comprehended input," then as "intake," and finally to be "integrated."43 The forced memorization of a large number of texts within a short period of time inject new linguistic and textual data into the young learner's knowledge base without him knowing exactly what they mean. A portion of this input data are later picked up (or "noticed") as salient features, comprehended, taken in, and finally integrated by the learner. Whether this hypothesis is valid or not is beyond the scope of this study. Suffice it to say here memorization might have played a constructive, and maybe even essential, role in the early training of reading Classical Chinese.

Touching upon the topic of learning to read in his study of writing pedagogy in Qing times, Charles Ridley argues that the unconscious learning of the structural patterns of Classical Chinese through memorization might be “the simplest and wisest approach to language teaching.”44 Comparing the process of

54 learning to read Classical Chinese to that of learning to read a foreign language,

Ridley hypothesizes that according to modern educational theories, it might have been “simpler to have learned to read with texts in the vernacular speech and have shifted later to a study of the literary language.”45 Citing the failed pedagogical experiment carried out by Tolstoy who attempted to teach children literary Russian with the help of vernacular Russian, Ridley concludes that the alternative method did not work.

When early modern Chinese educators reiterated the importance of memorization while reading ("shu xu cheng song"), they were not equipped with any linguistic theory or cognitive model of learning and memory. What they had was their experiential intuition and philosophical beliefs about how reading should be done. Zhang (1020-1077) suggested that all classics be memorized, because "as long as they were memorized (ji de), they could be stated (shuo de); as long as they could be stated, they could be practiced (xing de)."46 Memorization, for him, was a vital bridge between written words and behavioral practice. For many other Neo-Confucian literati, led by the voice of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), to emphasize memorization was to restore the authority of the classics and the way they were read in pre-print times.47 They were reacting anxiously to an emerging print culture that was starting to see speed (hence careless or sloppy) reading and irreverence toward books. The Song dynasty witnessed a major technological transformation: the advent of a print culture and the ensuing new

55 era of a printed book culture.48 As printing became widespread, books became more readily accessible and more affordable. Zhu Xi expressed his concerns this way:

The reason people today read sloppily is that there are a great many printed texts…It would seem that the ancients had no written texts, so only if they had memorized a work from beginning to end would they get it. Those studying a text would memorize it completely and afterwards receive instruction on it from a teacher… For people today, even copying down a text has become bothersome. Therefore their reading is sloppy.49

For Zhu, memorization was not merely a method for children learning to read, but for all serious readers who wanted to study the classics. However, memorization for adults would not come as easily as for children. Whereas in the West it was believed that memory capacity could be enhanced through various memory techniques,50 Chinese literati had long regarded good memory in an adult as a rare sign of heavenly endowment. (1007-1072) once exclaimed how different human nature (renxing) was when it came to the capacity for memorization.51 Zhou Mi (1232-1308) was amazed at people's supernormal abilities to memorize medical and musical texts.52 People who could memorize texts after just one reading were respected no less than a god.53

For Zhu Xi, however, the capacity for memorization was not determined by predestined human nature, but was rather a purely methodological problem that could be solved by reading in the proper mode. In his "Methods of Reading"

(Dushu fa), Zhu recommended that for adults to memorize texts easily, they should learn from children's experience: 56 It is best to read less but to become intimately familiar with what you read. That children remember what they've read and adults frequently do not is simply because children's minds are focused. If in one day they are given one hundred characters (of texts), they keep to one hundred characters; if given two hundred characters, they keep to two hundred characters. Adults sometimes read one hundred pages of characters in one day—they are not so well focused.54

On another occasion, he further explained his solution by defining reading as a slow and assiduous journey into texts:

Reading is simply comprehending paragraph by paragraph and little by little. The reason why a child can remember what he has read is that he does not recognize the following character and just concentrates on reading the characters one by one. When people today read, they just read hastily. Even when they have managed to read ten times, they still do not understand the meaning of the text.55

Reading less, as well as reading more slowly and more carefully, was thus prescribed by Zhu Xi as a sure way for children and adults alike to achieve memorization. On another occasion, he cited the example of Chen Lie to demonstrate that as long as one's mind is retrieved and settled (shou fang xin), one would be able to memorize anything he read.56 This prescription of a reading mode was to influence the way Chinese read for many centuries to come.

However, his assumption that children and adults shared the same memory capacity was not as widely accepted. Scholars of later days developed their own theories on memory. Lu Shiyi (1611-1672), a Neo-Confucian from the Jiangnan area, wrote that children up to the age of fifteen had a strong capacity for memorization, which tended to fade when they grew older.57 Therefore, Lu maintained that educators should exploit this golden age to make students 57 memorize as many texts as possible for future pondering and comprehension, even at the cost of them not understanding what they had memorized. Popular beliefs such as this were probably responsible for what Hong Taeyong had seen, and what Zhang Youyi's brothers as well as many other children had experienced first-hand in their elementary education.

2.3 Vocalized Reading and Chanting

Hong was not surprised when he saw the school children swaying their bodies while reading texts aloud in fast rhythm. In their homes and schools,

Chinese children were constantly reading texts aloud when they studied them.

In some school regulations, it was stated that the first thing a student should do in the morning was to read their books aloud.58 A place full of "the sound of reading" (xian song zhi sheng) would be mentioned approvingly by historians.

Not uncommonly, historians often recorded favorably how the sound of reading helped unsuspecting visitors to spot schools in remote villages. Li Jianxun (ca.

872-952), a former Tang minister, visited a village school in an excursion upon hearing the voices of children reading.59 The Zhangzong emperor (1168-1208, r.

1189-1208) of the (1115-1234) was enjoying a spring travel, when he accidentally overheard the sound of reading and discovered a small school taught by a famous recluse.60

Reading aloud, or vocalized reading and chanting, was referred to in different contexts as dushu, songshu, nianshu, and occasionally fengshu, as

58 opposed to kanshu, reading by looking or silent reading. In fiction and anecdotal notes, there were many stories in which children who read texts aloud would bring satisfaction to their parents or elders. In one poem, a proud father described four pleasures of life, one of which was having the son reading books

(dushu).61 Pulang, a figure in the eighteenth-century novel (The

Scholars), attracted a monk's attention when he brought a book to read (nian) in a temple everyday.62 In contrast, Baoyu, the protagonist of Honglou meng, was criticized by his father for browsing silently and carelessly (kanshu) and failing to read properly (dushu or nianshu).63 Some other parents, supervised their sons' studies by listening to them reading aloud. Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072) would ask his son to read a history book to him on a daily basis.64 (1037-1101) would lie down, relax and occasionally give his insights while listening to his son reading a history book.65 Yuan 's (1144-1224) mother would correct her sons' pronunciation when they read texts aloud.66

The revolutionary transition between oral reading and silent reading touted in the history of reading in the West did not seem to have occurred in China.67

Many factors in the larger cultural context might have contributed to this persistence on orality. First, oral performative realization of different genres of poetry (e.g. shi, ci and fu) which had existed for centuries still prevailed even after new literary genres such as fiction had appeared. During banquets, poems would be read aloud as a form of entertainment.68 Second, in Confucian, Daoist,

59 and Buddhist rituals, the practices of text reciting and sutra chanting occurred frequently in people's daily life. The voice of reading in these religious settings was considered to carry a tremendous power. Third, literary theories held that sound was an important criterion to the quality of an . Literary critics compared essays (wenzhang) to various acoustic patterns found in an army on the march, the rhythm of the rain, the boom of thunder, and the pounding of hail.69

Su Shi (1037-1101) once made a jocular statement that the success of a poem depended seventy percent on its oral presentation and thirty percent on its verse.70 Wang Mian (Song dynasty), who was good at oral reading, was asked by the emperor to read papers written by examination candidates. Those that were read by him would always end up being selected with a high ranking.71 Fourth, a sense of "reverence" was associated with reading aloud while silent reading tended to be thought of as "careless." For example, during the reign of Yingzong (r.1436-1450) of the Ming dynasty, a chief examiner, Sun

Ding, would dress himself formally and burn when he read examinees' papers out loud and decided who should be selected.72 (1436-1521), follower of the Cheng Zhu school, would read a friend's letter aloud solemnly as if he were listening to his admonishment face to face.73 On the contrary, reading silently and quickly sometimes led to trouble. Wang Xingzhi (Song dynasty) could read very fast. Hardly had others read three or four lines when he could

60 have finished a page. When reading a long gift list by a young guest, he read it so fast (and silently) that the guest was offended and thought him frivolous.74

As for the constant emphasis on vocalized reading in pedagogy, Zhu Xi and his followers may have again played an important role in the history of reading in China. They believed that oral recitation could be useful in three ways: 1) to help memorization; 2) to aid comprehension; and 3) to assist composition.

Zhu Xi, in his "Methods of Reading", implied that oral reading could facilitate both the memorization and comprehension of texts. He maintained:

In reading, keep the curriculum small but the effort you make on it large....Understand them in every detail, recite (du song) them until you are intimately familiar with them. In this way those with weak memories naturally will remember and those without the power of comprehension will be able to comprehend.75

The value of a book is in the recitation (du)76 of it. By reciting it often, we naturally come to understand it. Now, even if we ponder over what's written on the paper, it's useless, for in the end it isn't really ours. There's value only in recitation, though I don't know how (buzhi ru he) the mind so naturally becomes harmonious with the psychophysical stuff (xin yu qi he), feels uplifted and energized, and remembers securely what it reads. Even supposing we were to read through a text thoroughly, pondering it over and over in our minds, it wouldn't be as good as reciting it. If we recite it again and again, in no time the incomprehensible becomes comprehensible and the already comprehensible becomes even more meaningful. At the moment I'm not even speaking about the recitation of commentaries; let's simply recite the classical texts to the point of intimate familiarity....It has occurred to me that recitation is learning ()....Learning is reciting. If we recite it then think it over, think it over then recite it, naturally it'll become meaningful to us. If we recite it but don't think it over, we still won't appreciate its meaning. If we think it over but don't recite it, even though we might understand it, our understanding will be precarious.77

61 Puzzled at how memory really worked, Zhu referred to the memorization process as the harmonization between the mind (xin) and the "psychophysical stuff", or the unspeakable and untranslatable qi. "Qi" here seemed to refer to the inner flowing force of the text, or wen qi as commonly used in early Chinese literary criticism. For Zhu Xi, the goal of book learning was to understand the moral principle (yili) that was already innate yet evasive to common people due to their lack of personal experience.78 In order to understand the moral principle, one needed to internalize the words of the sages and worthies and reflect upon one's self. Oral reading, and repeated oral reading, until the words were as if

"coming out of one's own mouths"79 would help facilitate this internalization process because "if our mouths recite it, our minds will feel calm, and its meaning will naturally become apparent."80

In another instance, he mentioned the importance of applying three organs in reading: "You must frequently take the words of the sages and worthies and pass them before your eyes (yantou ), roll them around and around in your mouth

(koutou zhuan), and turn them over and over in your mind (xintou yun)."81 This maxim was later acronymized by his disciples as "the three presences" (san ), that is, the presence of the eyes, mouth, and mind (yan dao, kou dao, xin dao). A slightly different version of this "san dao" theory was proposed by Mei

Zengliang (1786-1856), a late Qing scholar. He maintained that by reading aloud, the essay was realized through the voice and it flowed with the vital force (qi).

62 Qi, according to him, was the essence of one's body. When one's own essence met with ancient people's essence, they could come together seamlessly. For him, people good at writing essays all benefited from this method.82 Even in contemporary China, this method is still being introduced to youngsters as an essential method of reading.83

The idea that repetitive oral reading and recitation could lead to comprehension was summarized in the popular saying “dushu baibian, qi zi xian” (the meaning of a text will come out automatically after hundreds of times of reading.) The Buddhist practice of chanting a sutra for thousands of times seemed to have fueled this popular belief. In one entry called “Method of

Reading” (dushu fa) included in a Ming miscellaneous note (biji), the author quoted from both the Buddhist and Confucian texts to illustrate that the secret of reading was directly related to repeated oral reading.84

The idea that oral recitation helped students compose was only implied by

Zhu Xi. The idea was not fully developed and articulated until the early Qing when the Tongcheng School proposed the theory of "following the sound to pursue the force" (yin sheng qiu qi) in their poetics of "archaic prose" (guwen). Part of the theory proclaimed that only by reading aloud could one grasp the essence of the archaic prose and master the writing skills of this genre. Yao Nai (1732-

1815), one of the leading scholars in this group, prescribed that one needed to read essays aloud both quickly and slowly. According to him, a quick oral

63 reading (ji du) revealed the form of an essay while a slow one (huan du) helped one savor its meaning. If one just read silently, then he would always be a layman in prose.85

In addition to the rationale of reading aloud, instruction on how it should be carried out was also given. Zhen Dexiu (1178-1235), a rigorous follower of the

Cheng-Zhu school, gave a brief instruction in his school rules on "learning to recite" (): "Look at the characters with undivided attention; read slowly, pausing at appropriate places;86 clearly distinguish, character by character; do not look at anything else or let your hands fiddle with anything."87 A popular

"Tips on Reading" (Dushu ) which circulated during the Ming times advised that when unfamiliar with a text, one should read slowly and when familiar, one should read quickly for as many times as possible.88 From the descriptive discourse, we see that these guidelines were more or less followed by school children. However, these rigid instructions still do not provide us with a vivid picture of how oral reading was actually performed. To discern the actual practice of oral reading, we need to go back to the descriptive discourse.

When the aforementioned Niu Pulang explained to the monk the reason why he wanted to read books, he said "When I passed the school, I overheard the sound of reading (nianshu de shengyin) which was very attractive (haoting). So I stole some from my store and bought this book to read."89 The word haoting was commonly used to describe a sound or voice that was melodic and

64 hence pleasant to the ear. Was Niu telling us that the sound of reading was like , not just metaphorically, but also literally?

Zhang Zhupo (1670-1698), in his commentary on Jin Ping Mei (Golden lotus), gave his readers suggestions about how to read this novel properly, which was based on lessons he learned from reading when he was a young child. As he started to learn to read, he overheard his teacher admonishing a fellow classmate that texts should be studied word by word instead of being swallowed as a whole. The young Zhang took these words to heart and started to read in a particular manner:

Thereafter, when reading a text (nian wen) I would linger over each character as though it were a syllable from an aria in a Kunqu opera (yi zi yi zi zuo kunqu qiang), drawing out its pronunciation and repeating it over and over again. I would not stop until I had made each word my own.90

Zhang stressed the efficacy of this method with a success story: Three days after he applied the approach to a phrase in the Confucian Analects, he completed an essay about it with unexpected ease. The teacher was greatly surprised to see Zhang’s rapid progress and suspecting him of cheating, so he closely observed Zhang when he studied. He soon found that Zhang was sitting with his “head bent over the table, following the text with one hand as [he] read it out loud, one character at a time.”91 Deeply satisfied with Zhang’s way of reading, the teacher asked all the other students to follow suit.

While Zhang’s story provides us with some clues about how the “voice of reading” really sounded, it raises more questions: Why did he use the Kunqu 65 tunes to read the text aloud? Was it just his impromptu invention, or was he following the example of his teacher or other adults? Did vocalized reading follow some standard patterns?92

De Qing’s account might shed some light on these questions. De Qing (1546-

1623), a highly accomplished monk, narrated in his autobiography that:

When I was nine I continued my studies in a temple. I heard monks reciting the Guan-yin Sutra which promises relief from the sufferings of this world. Greatly pleased, I got the text from a monk, and memorized it. My mother worshiped Guan-yin, and I always accompanied her when she burned incense and did obeisances. One day I told her that Guan-yin had a sutra, and she said that she did not know it. I then recited it for her. She was greatly pleased and said: 'Where did you get it? Your chanting of the sutra is like that of an old monk.93

Apparently, De Qing had either consciously or unconsciously mimicked the way monks recited the sutra. Given the role that Buddhist monks and temples played in the education system, would it not be a possibility that their chanting of sutras affected the way students read aloud?

Buddhist monks as teachers at the grass-roots level of education were not uncommon during late imperial China. In his study on Buddhism and education in Tang times (618-907), Erik Zürcher argues that the Buddhist monastery served as a surrogate for village schools to educate young boys.94 In the beginning of the Song period, Buddhist monks even abandoned their vows and started to take the civil service examination.95 Lu Rong (1436-1494), a Ming scholar, recorded that before official schools were established in his hometown, , Buddhist monks well-versed in the Confucian classics took the responsibility for educating 66 the youngsters of the villages and instructed them in the Four Books.96 In the

Ming period, it was so common for Buddhist monks to be familiar with

Confucian texts but not for Confucians to study the Buddhist sutras that someone made a jocular statement that Buddhist books were like dog and

Confucian books were human food. (Human beings only ate human food but dogs could eat both. Hence the superiority of Confucian texts.)97 The fact that the early Qing village school that Hong Taeyong visited was located next to a temple and supervised by a monk was not accidental.

Buddhist monks were of course not the only possible reading models available to students. Mothers, in many cases, were the first teachers of their sons and more often than not closer to their sons than their husbands both emotionally and physically.98 The fact that many women were pious Buddhists provided the possibility that their chanting of Buddhist sutras might have influenced their sons. It is also highly possible that the chanting patterns were subject to regional and individual preferences. We may never find out exactly how texts were read aloud in the early modern period. Suffice it to say that certain tune patterns (qiangdiao) were applied in oral reading. As texts were passed down orally from tutors to learners, the tune patterns were transmitted as well.

67 2.4 Marking and Punctuating

The emphasis on oral reading called for a correlated task—marking and punctuating—since most books were not punctuated throughout the early modern period. Zhu Xi once expressed his admiration for the way an elderly scholar read:

I once met the elder Donglai's older brother. He fully understood the Six Classics and the Three Commentaries and punctuated them himself. In the commentaries [to the Six Classics and Three Commentaries], moreover, he used small circles for punctuation; and where the meaning of the commentaries wasn't adequate, he would write a subcommentary in the clerical style using vermilion punctuation. No punctuation or stroke was made in haste. I saw only his , and it took this form; so did [his work] on all the other Classics.99

In modern writing systems, punctuation marks are an indispensable repertory of symbols inserted into written words to clarify syntactic structures and semantic senses. However, punctuation is a relatively recent invention in the long history of writing. In the history of reading in the West, the introduction and standardization of punctuation marks through printing was as important a technological revolution as printing itself. Modern Western punctuation has a history of eight hundred years and a of around a thousand years. The forerunner of punctuation in the West was the distinctiones, a system of punctuation developed in antiquity based on the division of a sentence by symbols placed at different heights in an ascending order of importance.100 By the twelfth century, scribes in the West were using an array of punctuation marks similar to modern conventions.101 It was not until printing technology 68 matured that punctuation symbols became standardized. Near the end of the fifteenth century, Aldus Manutius (1450-1515), a famous Italian printer, produced two prestigious books with a new type face which spread throughout

Europe. The punctuation marks in this font later became the European norm and the basis for the currently used symbols.102 Born in the West around the year of

1494, this set of symbols did not make their way into China for almost four hundred years when groups of Chinese in the nineteenth century began to look to the West for the cure to China's economic and political backwardness.103 This happened despite the fact that China already had its own punctuation system.

China had a long history of systematic punctuation. However, its symbols were not standardized, nor was it meant to serve as a writing device as it now does in most modern writing systems.104 Both in the West and China, punctuating started out as a readers' task when readers tried to separate words and mark pauses in the process of reading. In China, most books were circulated without punctuation or paragraphing. Starting from the middle of the Song period, some books were printed with punctuation (judou) and commentary markers (quandian) inserted into texts. Since the Yuan dynasty, punctuating and marking was widely extended to the genres of classics and histories.105 During

Ming times, fiction, and many dramas as well as reading primers used circling and pointing.106 However, the practice was haphazard throughout the late

69 imperial period.107 Therefore, one thing was clear for all inexperienced readers: they needed to learn the art of punctuating and marking soon after they had acquired enough characters and memorized some basic texts.

Since most books were unpunctuated, students learned the correct punctuation from their teachers. However, sometimes even teachers made mistakes. When was a , he often traveled around the village schools to inspect children's textbooks. If the punctuation was incorrect, he would correct it for them himself.108 In the Imperial School of the

Yuan dynasty, teachers and their assistants first taught the correct punctuation and pronunciation before explaining the texts.109 If a child could read and understand a text without instruction from a teacher or an adult, this prodigious achievement was considered so meritorious it would be entered into his biography: Wang Kekuan (Ming dynasty) at the age of ten was said to be able to punctuate the Four Books himself;110 Chen Jitai (1573-1640), when barely ten years old, could read an unpunctuated version of the Book of Documents and comprehend it.111

In early modern China, punctuation as a reading instrument can be divided into three categories based on function.112 First, it was used as a pedagogical tool. These were marks added by teachers and printers in texts to facilitate reading, or those added by readers to aid comprehension. Second, punctuation was used as a commentary tool. These were the marks that commentators or

70 readers made in texts to express their opinions and exclamations. Third, punctuation functioned as a collation tool. These were marks used by correctors when they collated texts.113

Among the three types of marks, only the first can be considered as punctuation in its modern sense, though the boundaries between these three categories in traditional China were not clear-cut. A reflection of this conflated status was the complication in terminology. Generally speaking, for the act of punctuating that created pauses in texts for better comprehension, there were two terms: judou (literally "stops and pauses") and zhangju (literally

"section and sentence").114 For markings that either conveyed the readers/commentators' appreciation or collators' corrections, the term was quandian, literally "circling and pointing."115 However, these terms often appear side by side in philologists' and collators' writings and are sometimes used interchangeably. For instance, reading a book was sometimes simply referred to as "dian shu" (marking up a book). This mix-up was not surprising, given the fact that a reader of that time would sometimes play the roles of teacher, collator, and commentator at the same time. When acquiring the skills of reading, students learned to use all three categories of marks as an integrated system.

Cheng Duanli, in his Daily Schedule of Study in the Cheng Family School, devoted many sections to how students should incorporate the act of punctuating and marking while reading. According to him, before working on

71 memorizing texts, students should first follow guidelines to punctuate them

(dianding judou) and mark out the pronunciation of phonetic characters

( fa jiajie zi yin).116 Cheng listed several models for punctuation and marking under the section "Guidelines for Commentating and Marking Classics" (Pidian jingshu fanli).117 The models were drawn from the methods used by him,

Gan (1152-1221, Zhu Xi's student and son-in-law), He Ji (1188-1268, Huang 's student) and some other Neo-Confucian scholars. In his system (see Fig. 2.3 for a sample), to mark a sentence (), a dot was made beside a character (cedian); while for a pause (dou), a dot was made in between two characters (zhongdian).

For people and place names, names for objects, as well as short phrases within a long sentence, a “dot in between” (zhongdian) was used. In Huang Gan's system, in addition to markers used for ju and dou, five other types of markers were used for other purposes: a “red daub in between” (hongzhongmo) for guidelines (gang) and guiding examples (fanli); a “red daub beside” (hongpangmo) for maxims

(jingyu) and important phrases (yaoyu); a “red dot” (hongdian) for character meanings (ziyi) and diction (ziyan); a “black daub” (heimo) for textual examination (kaoding) and institution (zhidu); a “black dot” (heidian) to complement texts (bu buzu).118 Since what made up a sentence (ju) and what made up a pause (dou) were complicated decisions to make, detailed examples and explanations were given to illustrate their distinctions and usage.

72 In the Neo-Confucian curriculum, the goal of reading classics (jing) was different from that of reading prose (wen). Accordingly, the way to punctuate and mark out prose required different strategies. In the section "Guidelines for

Commentating and Marking Han Style Prose" (Pidian Hanwen fanli),119 a more complicated system was introduced. In addition to the usual ju and dou, four colors (red, black, yellow and blue), seven styles (dash, half-dash, daub, circle, dot, large circle, large dot),120 and three locations (in between, beside, center)121 were combined to produce eighteen different types of markers to serve nineteen pointing functions. Some were used to mark out the textual structure. Some were for emphasis. Others were for marking out the rhetorical strategies. Still others were used for phonetic marking. It was not clear if, in reality, students and even the teachers strictly followed these burdensome guidelines in marking out prose. From the limited number of extant marked out texts, it is fair to say that although the system was not fully adopted, it was followed to various degrees. Red was a common color to use when collators corrected texts.

Markers such as the dot, the circle, and the daub can be commonly seen in commentated and marked-out texts.122

In addition to the punctuation and marking system, Cheng also passed on some tips for making tools and material for the purpose of pointing. For marking circles and dots, he recommended the method used by his teacher Shi

Mengqing (1247-1306): "Take a toothbrush handle made of black ox horn. Use

73 one end as a dot-marker and the other a circle-marker. Metals, bamboo, and white ox horn are all too firm and too dry to receive vermilion (zhu).123 Therefore they cannot be used."124 Cheng further distinguished the materials used for punctuation and collation: for the former, cinnabar (dan) should be used; for the latter, lead powder (qianfen). He wrote:

To point a book, use cinnabar. Cinnabar should be made with fresh glue decocted on that day. To correct errors, use lead powder. Wherever there is an error, use a black to correct it. The clarified text is then used as the base text. Apply lead powder to cover it and then write on the powder.125

He explained that the corrections should be made first so that in case lead powder fell off after a while, the base text could still be read. A scrupulous teacher, he instructed on how the lead powder should be made:

Let the lead powder be immersed in water for seven days. Stir it daily. When the water becomes clear, pour it out to get rid of the lead smell. Wait till what remains in the container dries out. Mix it with freshly decocted glue to knead it into solid blocks for later use. When copying texts, the original text should also be corrected before clipped paper is pasted on it and the correction is written clearly on it. Never carve the error out and paste on a hole. As time goes by, the pasted paper will fall off and the sense of the text can never be investigated.126

A commentary to this text gave readers further instructions on how the red, blue, and yellow colors could be made from glue instead of glue usually made from animal parts (comparable to Western hide glue). It was suggested that freshly cooked and filtered rice porridge be mixed with the color materials.

The mixture was then made into blocks and dried under the sun for later use.

Color thus made was believed not to blacken as time went by. If only red was 74 needed, then water melon juice and pear juice were good. Another tip for glue was that glue made from ox parts tended to become black and fish glue was therefore better.127

The skills of pointing and punctuating thus learned proved to carry a long way. It was said that He Ji (1188-1268) would punctuate each and every book that he read.128 Xu Qian (1199-1266) applied four colors to punctuate and commentate the Nine Classics, and the three commentaries to the Spring and

Autumn Annals.129 The late Qing scholar Guofan (1811-1872) would use a red brush to punctuate history books when he read. One of the recommendations that he gave to his younger brothers on learning to write examination essays was to punctuate and point them before more deepened reading.130

2.5 Explicating the Text

Following memorization, vocalization, and punctuation of texts was comprehension. As Robert Darnton points out, reading is “a way of making meaning” that varies from culture to culture.131 Our curious Korean visitor Hong

Taeyong was faced with such a phenomenon when he visited schools in China.

He asked several teenage learners he encountered to read texts aloud, and then explain the meanings of the texts and some phrases. On two occasions, upon his request, the students replied "the text has not been explained yet ( jiangshu ye.)" 132 Befuddled by the difference between the term "jiangshu" versus "nianshu",

75 Hong raised the question to a Teacher Zhou in a elementary school.

Zhou replied: "Nianshu is to read (aloud) the text, and jiangshu is to explicate its meaning. Without knowing the sectioning and punctuation of the paragraphs and sentences, how can one understand their meaning? That's why jiang is preceded by nian."133

While it was true that many students only memorized texts without really understanding the meanings and some even passed the civil service examinations by doing so, the comprehension of texts was indeed emphasized as a pedagogical task. Jiangshu, or explicating the text, was a procedure that reflected this emphasis. As a , teachers would explain texts to students after they became familiar with the texts by repeated reading and memorization. As a testing method, teachers would ask students to explain texts back to them in order to check their comprehension.

In the Song Imperial School, there were several officials called jiangshu guan

(literally, text-explicating officials) whose responsibilities were to explain the meanings of texts to students.134 In elementary schools, tutors would assume this role. In private academies, famous masters were invited to explicate certain paragraphs of a text in public lectures. 135 The jiangshu procedure was very similar to the practice of sutra lectures, where Buddhist monks explained line by line texts such as the Lotus Sutra to a public audience.136

76 Periodically, students were called upon to explain texts by their teachers to gauge their progress. According to Cheng Duanli's Daily Schedule, this should not be done too often. When it was done, it should be carried out stage by stage.

He wrote:

First (let the students) explain the elementary books, then the Great Learning, then the Analects. If elementary books are explained, ask them to clarify Master Zhu's annotations and Mr 's explanatory notes and his section titles first. When this is done successfully, ask them to explain according to the accompanying notes on characters and sentences. For characters, look for their pronunciation. If it is not in the annotations, let them inspect rhyme books to find it. Fabrication (of character pronunciation) should not be allowed to mislead people. A rough explanation according to the common understanding, however, is rather fine. When this is done successfully, ask them to explain the meanings of each sentence. When this is done, explain the meanings of every paragraph. Ask them to repeat, explaining the texts to themselves. When they pass the interview test, they may stop (doing that). After a while, they will realize they have roughly grasped the sense of texts and will be able to explain texts on their own (without any instructions). Then let them read annotations themselves and ponder on them. Ask them to come and try explaining the text. Challenge them with questions so that they can understand thoroughly. If the Great Learning and the Anlects are explained, ask them to explain clearly the annotations before they go on to the text itself with the help of the accompanying notes.137

If these guidelines were carefully followed, students would be able to totally comprehend the texts after repeated explanations of both the annotation and the text, in addition to repeated readings of them. They would not be able to hide behind others' annotations to pretend they had understood the texts. They would have to explain the annotations in their own words to show their total comprehension. They would ponder upon the meanings of the texts after repeated oral reading and explication. One of the key elements in Zhu Xi's 77 "Methods of Reading" was to ask students to contemplate and savor the meanings of texts on their own, usually in the evenings when it was dark and not economical to waste lamp oil or on looking at texts.

Cheng Duanli's teachings were strictly followed by many fathers. In his family instructions, He Lun, a well-known Ming paragon of filial piety, explained the interaction between teacher and student through jiangshu and the significance of doing this:

The achievement of learning lies completely in thorough explanation. The key of text-explanation is that after (the teacher's) explanation, you should look carefully, study intently, ponder quietly, interpret sentence by sentence, and comprehend paragraph by paragraph. Only in this way can one get the main idea. If there is any doubt, raise questions immediately and do not gloss over them in haste. After one book is explained through, continue to listen to the teachers to pick out the difficult places for questioning. If you cannot answer some of them, ponder them. If you do not understand, seek repeated explanations.... If (the teacher) explains hastily, and (the student) listens hastily and does not concentrate on taking notes, then it is all done in vain. Nothing will enter the bottom of one's heart.138

The text-explaining procedure was described in a chapter of Honglou meng, when the protagonist Baoyu was queried by his tutor about the meanings of several chapters in two Confucian texts. He was asked to first explain a chapter summary and then the text itself. Throughout the process, his tutor interrupted him to seek further clarification and admonish him from to time to time on what lessons he should learn from the texts.139 These two examples show that Cheng and his followers' instructions were carefully heeded in real life.

78 2.6 Conclusion

In conclusion, learning to read in early modern China centered around memorization and vocalization. Although the rise of a print culture and book culture since the tenth century made memorization seemingly less important and many literati complained about people’s careless reading, the pedagogical emphasis on memorization never lessened. In fact, it continued to be emphasized with the widely accepted views of the Neo-Confucians, especially

Zhu Xi’s “Methods of Reading.” The adoption of Zhu Xi’s commentaries of the

Four Books as the national standard, together with the way the civil service examinations were conducted, and the nature of the written classical language seem to have contributed to the perennial stress on the memorization of texts.

The vocalization of texts, on the other hand, is another cultural parameter that persisted in early modern Chinese society. Learning to read started with the sound of a text and ended with the comprehension of it through repeated recitation. To facilitate oral reading and memorization, students learned to mark texts with special punctuation and commentary markers. To demonstrate comprehension of a text, students orally presented its meaning to their teachers.

However odd this persistence on orality may seem in a society where a written tradition had existed for over three millennia and the state heavily depended on written communications, it shows that the drastic transition between oral reading and silent reading that occurred in the West in the Middle

79 Ages (13th-15th centuries)140 did not happen in China. The cultural and historical factors that contributed to this phenomenon need to be further investigated.

Reading comprised an essential component in the Neo-Confucian program of learning. The goal of reading was to attain the ultimate moral principle (yili).

According to Zhu Xi and his followers, the acquisition of reading skills was a painstakingly slow and meticulous process. Everybody possessed the potential of acquiring these skills if they followed the systematic guidelines. The pedagogical procedures discussed in this chapter were set within a larger cultural background, a culture of reading, a culture of dushu. The pedagogy of reading, in this sense, bore the burden of not simply passing down these specific reading skills, but more importantly, of ensuring the continuity of this reading culture. The following chapter will explore the components of this particular culture.

80

Figure 2.1 A Scene from an elementary school Source: Fuxing , Zhongguo minjian meishu quanji. Zhuangshi bian. Nianhua juan [A complete collection of Chinese folk fine arts: decoration section, nianhua volume]. (: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe; Shandong youyi chubanshe, 1995).

Figure 2.2 A photo of “backing books” Source: Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics. (New York: Felming H. Revell Company, 1894). p. 251.

81

Figure 2.3 An example of a punctuated text Source: Cheng Duanli, Chengshi jiashu dushu fennian richeng, sibu congkan edition.

82 Chapter 2 Notes

1 The "solstitial embassy" was so named because they left Korea each year around the time of the winter solstice. They usually stayed in for about two months. The solstitial embassies were ceremonially the most important exchanges between Korea and China during that period. See Ledyard 1982, 63. 2 Yongping Prefecture (Yongping fu) is located in today’s province. 3 See for example, Chen 1934, Dardess 1991, Guo 1998, Lee 1977, Rawski 1979, Woodside 1983, Wu 1989, Wu and Hu 1997, Xiong 1996, Yuan 1991, Zhang 1962, 1992. 4 See Leung 1994a. 5 For a discussion on how "childhood" began to be perceived as a unique stage during the Song (960-1279) and how the education of children began to be emphasized, see Lee 1984. 6 Idema 1990, 461. 7 For a study on Hong Taeyong's visit to China and his records of this experience, see Ledyard 1982. For Hong's travel record written in Classical Chinese, see YG. The translations of his records in this chapter are all mine. 8 YG, juan 7, 49b-50a, reprint 25. 9 YG, juan 7, 49b-50a, reprint 25. 10 YG, juan 7, 50a, reprint 25. 11 The West Lake is located in today’s , Province. 12 XHEJ, juan 3, reprint 46-47; cf. Wu and Hu 1997, 237. 13 HLM, chapter 9, reprint 91-93. 14 For studies on nianhua, see Wang 1991; for a collection of Chinese traditional nianhua, see Deng 1995. 15 Deng 1995, plate 109. 16 In fact, when Hong pleaded to the teacher that his strictness was a little bit too inhuman, the teacher agreed with him. The teacher then signaled to allow the students to go and look at the delegate, and the children all rushed out gleefully. YG, juan 7, 50a, reprint 25. 17 Smith 1894, 251. 18 Ibid. 19 Chang 1996, 47. 20 MDXSXZ, reprint 147. For scarcity and the formulaic nature of biographic writings on ancient Chinese childhood, see Wu 1995, 129-130. The Chinese way of reckoning age is adopted in this dissertation. A baby is one-year-old (one sui) at the time of its birth, and another sui is added when the Chinese is passed. 21 QDYY, juan 6, 12b. 22 YS, juan 190, 4343. 83

23 XBSL, reprint 153. 24 MSZSL, juan 1, 1. 25 ZJ; cf. Wu 1989, 44. Wu translates the term “rifeng qianyan” (literally, daily reciting a thousand words) as “memorizing one thousand characters each day.” I think the correct way to interpret the term is “reciting texts with a total of a thousand characters a day.” 26 HSYL, juan 22, 8a. 27 HSYL, juan 22, 8b. 28 HSYL, juan 22, 9a. 29 HSYL, juan 11,14b. 30 For more mnemonic feats, see GJTSJC, ce 606,32b-35b; cf. Spence 1984,156-157. 31 MXHXS, juan 11, 1a. A translation of Mao's narration can be found in Wu 1990,180 and Wu 1995, 132. Robert Hegel (1998, 298) quoted Mao's paragraph to illustrate that this kind of training formed a habit of slow and careful reading which would shape the reading that fiction commentators expected of their readers. 32 YS, juan 181,4174. 33 For a brief discussion of the ways reading was learned in the Roman world during the imperial age (1st c.-3rd c. AD), see Cavallo 1999, 72. He also points out that prior to learning to read, learners would learn to write. For studies on learning to read in the seventeenth-century England, see Spufford 1979 and 1981. Spufford notes that children learned to read before they learned to write; cf. Darnton 1992, 154. 34 Zhang Zhigong (1962, 1992) discusses the categories of zazi texts and their usage. Zhang identifies four types of zazi according to their compilation method. Three out of these four categories organize characters in antithetical manner, whether rhymed or not. The other type simply sorts characters out based on different categories. Zhang believes the former three types were used as character textbooks. 35 XEY, reprint 93. 36 See for example Miyazaki 1963, Chapter 1; Chen 1934, 49, and Leung 1994a, 393 and 412. 37 According to Leung (1994a, 393 and 412, note 64), Tang Biao's (fl. 18th c.c.) Fushi you fa [Good methods for fathers and teachers], Xuegu's (fl. 18th c.c.) You xun [Instructions of children], and ’s (1784-1854) tongzi fa [Methods of teaching children] all recommended using wooden squares to teach children characters. 38 For a detailed account of the "ideographic myth" about the nature of Chinese characters, see DeFrancis 1984, 133-148; for the argument that the idea of "" was not a Chinese or Japanese, but rather a European, invention and imagination, see Unger 1990. The "ideographic myth" was so entrenched that the term "ideogram" still lingers on when people talk about Chinese characters. For an argument that supports the notion of Chinese characters as being "ideographic," see Hansen 1993. For a refutation of Hansen's argument, see Unger 1993. 39 YG, juan 8, 4a-5a, reprint 28-29;10b, reprint 31. 40 Mair 1994, 709. 41 I have borrowed the term "empire of the text" from Connery 1998. While Connery argues that the "empire of the text" was a self-contained terrain of textuality that recognized no world of 84 orality, I posit there were interactions (e.g. borrowing, mixing) between the LS and the VS, as noted by Mair 1994, 709. For a review and critique of Connery's theory, see Durrant 2000. 42 Zhou 1992, 1-24. 43 Ellis 1994, 349. 44 Ridley 1973, 351. 45 Ridley 1973, 350. 46 Wang et al 1988, 208; Zhang and Zeng 1995,382. 47 For a discussion on how the spread of printing transformed the book culture and the authority in textual transmission during Song times, see Cherniack 1994. 48 Joseph McDermott (forthcoming) takes issue with this widely accepted view that printing dominated the Chinese world during the Northern Song (960-1126). Drawing on data of the literate elite of the Lower Yangzi delta area, he argues that the imprint culture did not rise until the sixteenth century. Even with the ascendance of imprint books, manuscripts continued to persist in the book market. 49 ZZYL, reprint 116; translation quoted from Gardner 1989, 146. A longer and slightly different translation can be found in Cherniack 1994, 51. For a complete translation, see Gardner 1990, 139- 40, no. 4.43. 50 For discussions on mnemonic techniques in the medieval West, see Yates 1966, and Carruthers 1993, chapter 3. 51 Ouyang Xiu recorded one anecdote of Song Shou and Xia Song, who went to test young monks in reciting Buddhist sutras. One monk did not pass the test. They asked him how long he had practiced this sutra, he replied "It's been ten years." The two gentlemen smiled and had pity on him. They took the sutra and recited it. It only took Song ten days, and Xia seven days to memorize it without any missing words. See GTL, juan shang, 17b. 52 GXZZ, houji, 35a-b. 53 See for example GXZZ, xuji, juan xia, 31b. Another example is Matteo Ricci. Equipped with western mnemonic techniques, Ricci (1552-1616), or Li Madou as he is known in China, managed to impress the Chinese officials with his memory feat of running through a list of several hundred random Chinese characters and then repeating them in reverse order. See Spence 1984, 9 and 273 (note 21). 54 ZZYL, reprint 111-112, translation (with slight revision of mine) from Gardner 1990, 132, no. 4.22. 55 ZZYL, reprint 112, translation is mine. Gardner 1990 does not include this item. 56 ZZYL, reprint 121, translation from Gardner 1990, 145, no. 5.8. 57 Quoted in WZYG, sec.1, B.21b-22a; cf. Dardess 1991, 81. 58 See for example Chu 1999a; cf. Liu 1958, 421. 59 SBLC, juan 19, 3b-4a. 60 SBLC, juan 6, 18a.

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61 The poem was recorded in HRZYT, juan zhong, 27b. The other three pleasures were: an inexpensive place to live, a decent government position, and the wife and concubine getting along with each other. 62 RLWS, Chapter 20, reprint 205-206. 63 Miller 1995, 230. 64 QWJW, juan 3, 6a-b. 65 QWJW, juan 5, 8b. 66 JZJ, juan 21, 353; cf. Ebrey 1993, 185. For a discussion on educated women's role in their sons' early education during the Song period, see Ebrey 1993, 183-187. For mothers' role in transmitting orally the Classics to their sons during the Yuan dynasty, see Makino 1979; cf. Ko 1994, 158. 67 Even today, oral reading is very common in people's daily lives in China: students read texts aloud in classes, and people gather weekly to study political directives by reading them aloud. Anderson (1984) and Guthrie (1984) document that “precise, fluent oral reading”and “correct pronunciation of characters” are constantly stressed in a Chinese classroom teaching reading. Oral reading also evolved into various forms of public performing art: poetry recital (shi langsong) and essay reading accompanied by music (peiyue sanwen) are the most popular ones. In today's Xishuangbanna, , and Yi areas, people still learn to read by repeatedly reading written scriptures aloud (personal communications with Mark Bender.) 68 See for example, QWJW, juan 5, 6b-7a. 69 See for example QDYY, juan 10, 3b-4b. 70 QDYY, juan 20, 5b. 71 SRYSHB, juan 4, no. 8, reprint 149; also in QDYY, juan 20, 5b. 72 SYZJ, juan 3, 9a-9b. 73 FSZXSJ juan 2, reprint 183-184. 74 LXABJ, juan 2, 6a-7a. 75 ZZYL, reprint 112; translation from Gardner 1990, 132, no. 4.23. Italics added by me. 76 Gardner notes that du here was specifically meant as oral recitation. I agree with his interpretation. See Gardner 1990, 137, note 13. 77 ZZYL, reprint 115-116; translation from Gardner 1990, 138-139, no. 4.41. Italics added by me. 78 For discussions on Zhu Xi's aim as an educator and his program of learning, including the essential points in his reading method, see de Bary 1989 and Gardner 1989. 79 ZZYL, reprint 114; translation from Gardner 1990, 135, no. 4.33. 80 ZZYL, reprint 122; translation from Gardner 1990, 147, no.5.16. 81 ZZYL, reprint 109; translation from Gardner 1990, 129, no. 4.7. 82 Zhou 1992, 32. 83 Interestingly, in the contemporary Chinese education discourse, this method was not introduced as initiated by the Neo-Confucianists, but by "the private schools of the old times." In newspaper articles targeted at young readers and exam aspirants, both (1881-1936) and 86

Hu Shi (1891-1962) were said to have sanctioned the method of san dao and personally carried it out when they read. See for example Zhongxuesheng kexue , June 6, 1999 (http://www.bsti.ac.cn/bsti_zjkx/html/stnewspa/mssnews/b4/4b32804.htm ) and Guangming ribao, June 7, 2001 (http://book.peopledaily.com.cn/gb/paper17/19/class001700005/hwz139031.htm). 84 ZZC, juan 3, 5a, reprint 39. 85 Zhou 1992, 30. The term yin sheng qiu qi was coined by Zhang Yuzhao (1823-1894). It was also he who attributed this theory to the Tongcheng school. See Zhou 1992, 33-35. 86 The original text is duan ju, Ron Guey Chu (1999b) translates it as "short passages at a time." I think it carries the meaning of stopping and pausing at appropriate places. This is still considered a basic skill of oral reading in the art of langsong in today’s China. 87 JZZG, 8b. Translation from Chu 1999b, slight revision is mine. 88 Two slightly different versions of these "Tips" can be found in SYZJ, juan 2, 4a-4b, and SJXH, juan 4, 8a. It also advised against rushing into memorization without first getting familiar with the text. 89 RLWS, Chapter 20, reprint 206. 90 JPMDF, item 70, reprint 82; translation taken from Rolston 1990, 234-235. 91 Ibid. 92 Some modern philologists, such as and Zheng Dating, have tried to find out the tunes and patterns (qiangdiao) of oral recitation based on their personal experiences in the traditional way of education of the Classical Chinese. Zheng recounted that when he studied the Three Character Classic, A Hundred Surnames, and the Analects, they read the texts character by character. When they began to study the , certain tunes and patterns were slowly introduced. Zhu observed that in modern schools in the early twentieth-century, children read texts such as A Hundred Surnames, A Thousand Characters Text, and the Four Books two characters by two characters, with a pause in between. For Zheng's account, see Lin 1989, 61. For Zhu's observation, see Zhu 1942, 1946a, b, c. An interesting theory on the method of oral recitation was proposed by Huang Zhongsu (1936). Based on Shuowen jiezi and his personal experience, he classified four types of tunes and patterns of oral recitation: songdu (reciting), yindu (crooning), yongdu (chanting), and jiangdu (lecturing). A close analysis of his classification indicates that he meant these four patterns for different types of literary genres. According to Professor Renfu Wu of the East China Normal University, his college teachers read Classical Chinese texts with different tunes and in different dialects (personal communications). David Prager Branner's recent study shows that Taiwanese scholars read aloud or chanted Hanbun (Classical Chinese texts) in unique Taiwanese accents and reading styles (Branner 2002). 93 ZBHSDS, 10-11; quoted from Wu 1989, 144. 94 Zürcher 1989, 39-44. 95 Lee 1989, 110-111. 96 SYZJ, juan 2, 9a-9b. 97 SYZJ, juan 2, 16b.

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98 For the role that mothers played in educating their sons and daughters during Song, cf. no. 62. For a discussion of the close emotional bond between mothers and sons in the late imperial period, see Hsiung 1994. 99 ZZYL, reprint 120; translation from Gardner 1990, 142, no. 4.53. 100 Parkes 1993, 303. 101 Parkes 1993, 41. 102 Parkes 1993, 51-52. 103 Two movements in modern Chinese history played pivotal roles in introducing the Western symbols into the Chinese : the Alphabetic Movement (qieyinzi yundong) of the late 19th century, and the Vernacular Language Movement (baihuawen yundong) of the early 20th century. For a discussion on their involvement, as well as the distinction between the so- called "new style punctuation marks" and "old style punctuation marks", see Yu 1999a. For a history of the Alphabetic Script Movement, see 1948. 104 Roy Harris (1995) distinguishes two types of punctuation based on the criterion whether the presence of punctuation in a text is "due to activity on the part of the writer or the reader" (170). If punctuation is added by the reader, then it becomes part of the reading process. It has been a Western consensus that punctuation as a writing device (as opposed to reading device) was not known to Chinese people until 1919 (Alleton 1990; cf. Harris 1995, 170). However, Chinese scholarship has tried to challenge this Eurocentric assumption. Chinese scholars argue that archaeological findings on script show that more than three thousand years ago, a hooked vertical line was used between two short divinatory texts to indicate the end of the first text and the beginning of the second one. Similar marks were also found in unearthed texts inscribed on vessels and bamboo dated back to the dynasty (221 B.C.- 206 B.C.) (Zhang 1991, 2). Similar to the practice of "paleoanthropological nationalism" discussed by Barry Sautman (2001), the focus of punctuation studies in China has placed an emphasis on tracing the earliest occurrence of punctuation marks in the Chinese textual history, while no particular distinction has been made between punctuation as a reading device and a writing device. 105 SLQH, juan 2, 4a-4b. 106 Zhang 1991, 6. I follow Parkes 1993 in applying the term “point” which refers to the act of punctuating and marking out texts. I prefer to use this English term because it is an accurate translation of its equivalent in the Classical Chinese: dian. 107 Rolston 1997,18. 108 SS, juan 427,12714-5. 109 YS, juan 81, 2029. 110 MS, juan 282, 7225. 111 MS, juan 288, 7403. 112 As a device for reading, punctuation served different functions in different scripts. For example, in Classical Tibetan writing, punctuation marks indicated syllable division (Harris 1995, 171); whereas in ancient Greek writing, punctuation marks facilitated oral reading, (Parkes 1993, 9). 113 Zhang 1991, 2-6.

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114 According to Yang Yuan (1995), the tradition of zhangju started with Confucius' (551 B.C. - 479 B.C.) student Zixia (507 B.C.-420 B.C.) who became the teacher of Confucian doctrines after his mentor died (223). Yang Shuda (1957) speculates that students in their teens spent one or two years learning to parse texts in ancient times (1). This is based on the phrase yinian shi bian zhi in the Book of Rites (). It was agreed that from the (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), the zhangju tradition became established and scholars began to punctuate ancient texts and interpret them according to their own punctuation. On the issue of the importance of zhangju, scholars of the Han dynasty held diametrically different views. Some thought that this was a minor skill and people who were good at punctuation tended to ignore the whole sense of texts, while some thought that it was a basic skill for interpreting texts. Shen Gua (1031-1095) of the concluded this historical debate by proposing that punctuation was the prerequisite for discussing the sense of texts, and that different punctuation often entailed different interpretations of them. For a detailed discussion on the history of zhangju, see Yang 1995, 223- 231. Zhu Xi titled his commentaries to the Four Books as zhangju, which involved both punctuating and annotating. 115 David Rolston (1997) translates the term quandian as "emphatic punctuation." While his translation correctly describes the function of quandian (that it was mostly used to emphasize certain parts of a text), I think there is a need to distinguish judou and zhangju from quandian in the English translation. Judou and zhangju usually aimed at marking pauses and paragraphs in an unpunctuated text to clarify the syntactic structure and aid comprehension. Quandian, however, aimed at emphasizing certain subtle meanings or pointing out textual mistakes that would otherwise have been overlooked by potential readers. Therefore, I translate judou and zhangju as "punctuating" and quandian as "marking". Since they were used as nouns in Classical Chinese, I translate their corresponding nouns in English as "punctuation" and "commentary markers." 116 CSJS, juan 1, 3b-4a. For a study on Cheng Duanli’s curriculum, see Hennings and Kurtz 1993. 117 CSJS, juan 2, 20b-26b. 118 CSJS, juan 2, 21a-21b. 119 CSJS, juan 2, 27a-30a. 120 The Chinese terms are huajie, huajie, , quan, dian, daquan, dadian. 121 The terms are zhong, ce, zheng. 122 Some good examples are the examination papers read by examiners, and courtiers' memorials read by the emperors. 123 Vermilion (zhu) was also known as zhusha, a vivid red pigment of durable quality that was usually obtained by grinding pure cinnabar. It was used commonly in China as a color material for writing and painting. Susan Cherniack discussed the material aspect of collation from Tang to Yuan in her 1994 article (see especially 88-93). 124 CSJS, juan 2, 26a. 125 CSJS, juan 2, 26a-27a. 126 Ibid. 127 CSJS, juan 2, 26b in the commentary column. 128 SS, Biographies juan 197, ce 16, 12979.

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129 YS, juan 189, p. 4319. 130 ZGFJS. 131 Darnton 1992, 152. 132 YG, juan 8, 3b-4a, 5a, reprint 28-29. 133 YG, juan 8, 2b, reprint 27. 134 Other names for this position included shuoshu and zhijiang. SS, juan 165, 3909. In the Ming period, it was called jiangdu guan. 135 Walton 1999,15. 136 Schmid 2001, 985. The many sutra lecture texts (jiangjingwen) discovered in attest to this practice. For textual characteristics of jiangjingwen, see Mair 1986, 1989. 137 CSJS, juan 1, pp. 5a-6a. 138 HSJG, reprint 204; translation is mine. 139 HLM, Chapter 82, reprint 737-739. 140 Saenger 1997, 1999a, and 1999b.

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CHAPTER 3

A CULTURE OF READING

3.1 Introduction

From the early Song period (960-1279) on, China began to experience rapid economic growth driven by advances in , industry, and commerce.

Meanwhile, the cultural landscape underwent a series of important changes.

Printing, invented during the Five Dynasties (907-960), reached one peak during the Song times and continued to be refined and standardized in subsequent dynasties.1 More books and texts were being printed and starting from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), illustrated books, including primers, fiction, plays, and encyclopedias, appeared in increasing abundance.2 With more books being produced and consumed, the need to store them properly led to the building of large libraries toward the end of the sixteenth century.3 Schools and academies promoted the dissemination of knowledge of basic literacy as well as sophisticated philosophy.4 The refinement of the examination system put constant pressure on both the privileged and the unprivileged to study the

Confucian classics.5 Against this background of a flourishing print culture and

91 book culture, a culture of reading was quietly formed. While dynasties rose and fell, certain elements of this culture of reading continued throughout the late imperial period, even well into modern times.

Culture, in this context, is defined in an anthropological sense. There are hundreds of definitions of culture suggested by anthropologists. One of the most often cited in cross-cultural research is that summarized by A.L. Kroeber and

Clyde Kluckhohn:

Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. , historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached value; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action.6

Simply put, culture is a symbolic system that offers the members of a community a social way of life unique to this community. In the words of cultural anthropologist Bradd Shore, culture "provides a stock of conventional models that have a powerful effect on what is easily cognized and readily communicated in a community."7 Underlying this definition is a cognitive approach that seeks to combine the of two separate disciplines: anthropology and psychology. As Jerome Bruner has pointed out, however divergent the methodologies of these two disciplines are, they share some profound common ground in the study of man, such as how culture and the mind interact.8 While psychology pursues theories of thinking and feelings of 92 individuals, anthropology studies the characteristics of a group of people as a whole.

Drawing on these theories on culture, I use the term "a culture of reading" to refer to a dynamic system that provides a stock of conventional models of reading to its members in terms of ideas, behavioral patterns, and artifacts. In this culture, certain ideas and behaviors of reading are valued over others.

Through various ways, people born into this culture are inculcated in these ideas and behaviors. The term “culture of reading” does not imply a static system that never changes. Every culture changes over time. However, some essential elements of a culture constitute the core characteristics of it and maintain its uniqueness. In the following pages, I will delineate these elements in order to sketch out a culture of reading in late imperial China.

The rest of this chapter is organized in six parts. First, I start with an examination of the practice and representation of reading habits (mostly used by male readers) during the late imperial period. Second, I investigate the habits of treating books. Third, I examine the discourses on the hygiene of reading.

Fourth, I look at the paraphernalia related to reading. Fifth, I explore elite perceptions and conceptions of the significance of reading through paintings, woodcut illustrations, and connoisseurship literature. Finally, I end the chapter with a discussion of the popular attitudes toward reading through individuals’ writings and family instructions. These six sections delineate a culture of

93 reading from three angles, namely, its behavioral, 9 material, and ideological aspects. This discussion is not meant to be exhaustive. It can, however, provide a small opening for the examination of this otherwise invisible culture.

3.2 Reading Habits: Practices and Representations

Examining the reading habits for people who lived centuries ago is a daunting task. In a study of peasant reading habits in the age of the

Enlightenment, Roger Chartier based his examination on a survey conducted in

1790.10 In the case of late imperial China, however, no such surveys were conducted. Nor are there any realistic iconographic representations (such as photos or films) which can be used as the basis for any meaningful inferences.

The data that I based my research on come from four types of sources: biographical records in dynastic histories, miscellaneous and anecdotal notes, poems and essays, stories and vernacular fiction. Due to a lack of more data, I will discuss only five prominent practices of reading: reading aloud, reading from the wall, reading on the road, reading behind closed doors, and reading at night. The images of these five practices permeate the descriptive discourse found in these sources.

3.2.1 Reading Aloud

Although silent reading was attributed to Chinese readers as early as the thirteenth century,11 it never managed to take the place of oral reading. Not only was there no stigma linked with reading aloud, but the term "voice/sound of

94 reading (dushu sheng) was always mentioned with glory and pride. In a story of an eighteenth century novel Rulin Waishi (The Scholars), a civil examination aspirant Kuang Chaoren was studying hard for the examinations. During the day, he worked to support his family. Late into the night, he read model examination essays out aloud. It so happened that the passed by his window and heard his voice. Deeply moved by his diligence, the magistrate sought him out and befriended him. 12

Obtaining appreciation and approval through the voice of reading did not just occur in fiction. Positive tones were in constant company with historians' mention of the "voice of reading." For example, Zeng Wenqing (Song Dynasty) had a lifetime habit of reciting a chapter from the Analects every morning after getting up.13 It was recorded in the Ming Shi (Dynastic ) that a prefect (early Ming) would get up at dawn every day to read and his voice was heard even outside of his residence. His action impelled all the students in the prefect to get up early and study.14

In contrast with the numerous mentions of oral reading, silent reading seemed to have occurred only under special circumstances when secrecy was expected. It was said that Kuangyin (r. 960-975), of the

Song Dynasty, erected an inscribed stone stele in a side room in the sleeping quarters of the emperor. According to his instruction, after the coronation, every new emperor would come to this stone stele, kneel down, memorize the

95 inscriptions, and make a pledge. To ensure that the contents of the inscriptions did not leak out, the new emperor was to read silently and be accompanied only by an illiterate while all the others waited far away in the yard.15

Another record had it that when his father was worried that constant overnight reading would affect his health, Cao Yuanyong (Yuan Dynasty) covered his window with clothes and read his books silently (moguan).16 Zhang Yanghao

(Yuan Dynasty), at the age of ten, studied very hard everyday and read incessantly. His parents worried about his health and tried to stop him from reading. To prevent them from knowing, he read silently day and night.17

Diametrically opposite to the Chinese celebration of oral reading was the

West's excitement over silent reading.18 When Saint Augustine (354-430) observed Ambrose reading with his eyes "scanning the page" with his voice silent, his tongue still, he could not help but exclaim about his discovery of a new manner of reading.19 In Europe, silent reading replaced oral reading as the dominant mode of reading in the later Middle Ages (13th-15th centuries), possibly due to changes in the presentation of texts, especially the constant use of separated and punctuated texts.20 In today's Western societies, there is a stigma associated with oral reading: one who needs to understand a text by reading aloud is considered illiterate.21 In the history of reading in the West, "the opposition between a necessarily oralized reading and a possibly silent reading marks a break of capital importance."22

96 In addition to the general reasons for the dominance of oral reading discussed in Chapter 2, there were specific situations when oral reading became a necessity.

Hu Dan (Song Dynasty) lost his eyesight and had to rely on others to read classics and history books to him.23 Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072) was severely near- sighted and had difficulty reading. Sun Jue (1028-1090) was plagued by an eye at an old age. Both of them had to rely on others for reading.24 Cao Duan

(1376-1434), while still a student, would read the Confucian classics and famous family instructions to his undereducated father to enable his father to learn the sacred words.25

The sense of solitude and privacy brought about by silent reading and so treasured by Saint Augustine did not become a critical issue in the Chinese context. When the subject was reading aloud, the sense of a private reading space was strengthened, rather than weakened, by the "voice of reading."

Ironically, this very "voice of reading" transcended the boundaries it helped to strengthen by creating an even larger imaginary space where the reader could communicate with authors of the texts, figures in the texts, and fellow readers/listeners. The mode of collective reading enabled through oral reading was so deeply rooted in the Chinese culture that more in-depth research is needed to explore its mechanism, processes, and philosophy.

97 3.2.2 Reading from the Wall

Another mode of reading that crossed the border between a private reading space and a public one was the phenomenon I call, "reading from the wall." The notorious practice of dazibao (literally, Big Character Poster) during the Cultural

Revolution (1967-1977) was not unprecedented and possibly had its precursor in this practice of reading.26 During the imperial period, there would be a wall called shibi (literally, poetry wall) erected in most temples and monasteries, on which people could write poems and couplets, compose in reply to others' works, or just show off their calligraphy. Sometimes, poems were written on a piece of paper and pasted onto the wall. Travelers could stop by and enjoy reading off the wall. In restaurants, tea shops, and inns, a wall would be reserved for this purpose (see Fig 3.1 27). More often than not, guests wrote freely on whichever wall they pleased, sometimes even against the will of the proprietors.

In an anecdote recorded by Zhang Qixian (943-1014), there was a young man named Yang Ningshi who was good at calligraphy and had a haughty personality. When he stayed in , he visited all the Daoist and Buddhist temples. Whenever he saw water, rocks, pines, bamboo, and secluded scenery, he would compose poems and inscribed them on the wall. The monks treasured his calligraphy and preserved his works well. They even went out of their way to whiten the walls that Yang had not written on and cleaned the place nearby.

When Yang came and found the clean wall, he would stare at it as if crazy, then

98 compose on it until it was covered with his characters. Bystanders would wait around to appreciate his poems. Yang's actions was endorsed in two poems also inscribed on the walls by one An Hongjian, a jinshi degree holder, and a Feng

Shaochang, son of a prince.28

The tale of Yang Shining might be an extreme example of the tradition of writing on the wall. It nevertheless reflects the popularity of the practice among both the writers and readers. Travelers had it as a habit to stop to read from the walls. The existence of stele forests (beilin) and calligraphy carvings on stones in the historical and scenic sites all over China is the living testament to this reading practice. Many interesting stories happened surrounding this reading activity.

When he traveled to a Gold Mountain Temple, the prime minister of the

Northern Song Dynasty (1021-1086) found a long poem written by a

Guo Xiangzheng that he took a particular liking for. Later Wang found a couplet written by the same person inscribed on a mountain dwelling. Wang ordered an artisan to paint the scene described in the couplet and inscribed a caption himself on the picture. He then ordered this picture and a gold wine vessel to be sent as gifts to Guo. Though Wang and Guo never met in person, the wall helped the two foster a patronage relationship.

According to another anecdote, Yan Yuanxian (Song Dynasty) liked to play a little game when he traveled to temples and read off the walls. Letting a scribe read out loud poems on the wall without revealing the authors' names, he

99 would close his eyes and walk slowly to enjoy the poems. Occasionally he could guess correctly who composed the poems. There was one time when he traveled to the Great Light Temple in Luoyang and heard an excellent poem. He found that the poet was a local low-ranking official called Wang Qi. He then invited

Wang to a meal and they composed couplets together. Deeply impressed with

Wang's talents in poetry, Yan helped him climb the official ladder with his recommendations.29

Through the media of walls, a loosely organized yet closely connected reading and writing community was formed. People from various geographical areas, of different ages, and with different life experiences were brought together in front of the walls. Temporal, spatial, and emotional gaps were bridged. This community was an "imagined" one. People inscribed on the walls with an imagined audience in mind, hoping to find their zhiyin (bosom friends) even if they would never be able to meet them. Occasionally, persons like Guo

Xiangzheng and Wang Qi rose from oblivion and became recognized by the world. Most of the time, they remained anonymous while their literary talents were passed down into history. Unlike bounded volumes of poems, the wall was not a discriminating editor who exerted the power of selection as to which poems could appear in this venue. Many otherwise unknown poets and poems earned their places in the hall of Chinese literary history thanks to their

100 brushwork left on these walls. Many excellent poems made their way from the wall into the paper of literary anthologies.30

These walls literally told stories. A prominent example was the court lady poet Wang Qinghui (fl. 1270) who inscribed three poems on the wall of a government hostel near (in today's province) when she was taken to the north by the conquering Mongolian army. The poems together with the story of their composition were recorded in many anecdotal compilations and became the only testament to her talents and even her existence.31 Moved by the lyrics in her poems, the famous literary figure and military leader Wen Tianxiang

(1236-1283) could not help but bemoan her plight and composed a poem in her honor.

Through the walls, the private voice of a poet was heard in a public arena by a varied readership. People came to the walls to read with different expectations, some did not even expect to read at all. Some, like Wang Anshi and Yan

Yuanxian, hoped to find masterpieces of art and locate people of great talents.

Some wished to be informed with news and information from other parts of the country. Many poems reflected opinions and complaints of the current time.

Because of this, some restaurants and inns would forbid their guests from inscribing on the walls to avoid trouble. Other readers simply wanted to relive the history through the inscriptions made by generations of forerunners. Yao

Tongshou (Yuan Dynasty), for instance, would stop by any inscribed walls near

101 historic sites and study them with respect to the historical events recorded therein.32

The motif of "reading from the wall" appeared frequently in literary fiction. In the famous Ming story collection Jingshi Tongyan (Stories to Warn the World), there are two stories with the major plots closely connected with this motif.33 In one story, a failed and despairing examination candidate Yu Zhongju wrote a poem on the walls in an expensive Hangzhou restaurant before his suicide attempt, hoping that his name would be known by future generations.

Incidentally, his poem was read by the emperor's father who was visiting the restaurant in plain clothes. Appreciating Yu's talents, he recommended him to the emperor who changed Yu's fate overnight. In another story, the stubborn

Prime Minister Wang Anshi did not realize how much the people disliked his new reform policies until he took a trip in the country. Wherever he stopped (at a temple, an inn, a 's house, an official post, and a public toilet), he encountered complaining poems on the walls. So embarrassed and fearful to read more such poems, he dared not step out of his sedan until he reached his destination.

Unlike reading from books, where the reader was usually the one to be affected, these two stories show in vivid detail how the act of reading affected the life of both the writer and reader. The energy of reading, in the case of reading from walls, traveled on a two-way street. This energy was not always

102 positive though. Many times, people who inscribed a so-called fanshi (rebellious poem) would be arrested and persecuted. On lesser serious occasions, they would be hated and excluded by a certain social group.34

3.2.3 Reading on the Road

"Reading from the walls" was a special case of "reading on the road." For lack of a better term, I mean "reading on the road" to be a behavior of book- reading in different transportation modes and somatic positions. Today, people read everywhere: on the bus, train, or airplane, in bed and a lot of times even on the toilet.35 In a recent study of the reading activities of people in Beijing, 37 percent were found to have the habit of reading on the toilet and 50 percent read in bed.36

People in late imperial China read in many different places too. Travelling by boat was common and it offered an extended period of idleness. It usually also provided a less bumpy environment than carriages and horses. Therefore, the act of reading occurred more often in boats.37 (1051-1107), a famous Song painter, put his library of books and paintings on a barge and traveled around with them. Since his time, the imagery of reading on a boat became a stock phrase (shuhua chuan) in the Chinese vocabulary of literary allusions to be associated with diligence and learnedness. 38 Ruopu (1592-ca. 1681), a famous woman poet of the Ming Qing period, had a boat refurbished for her son to be used as a study and composed a poem for this event.39 A moment of reading in a

103 boat surrounded by peacefulness and solitude was best captured in a poem titled

"Reading 's Poetry in a Boat" written by the famous Tang poet Bai Juyi

(772-846). The verse read:

I held the volume of your poems and read under a lamp, When I finished reading, little light was left in the lamp and dawn had not yet broken. My eyes aching, I turned off the lamp and sat in the darkness, The only sound there was the head wind blowing the waves, beating the boat.40

For avid readers, any place and any time was good for reading. Wang Anshi was said to hate sitting around all the time during the day. In his retirement, he would go out every day with a donkey and a servant. He went wherever the donkey or the servant led him to, but always carried his books. Whether it was riding on the donkey, resting under a pine, in the field, or in a temple, he would always read.41 This imagery of reading while riding seemed to have its predecessor in (582-618), rival of the founder of the . He was spotted by his future patron Yang Su (?-606) on the back of an ox, with one hand holding the reins of the ox and the other turning pages of the (Hanshu) which was propped up against the ox's horns.

Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072) recorded the deeds of two diligent readers who would not let books leave their hands for one moment. Qian Sigong read classics and histories when he sat, read miscellaneous notes in bed, and read poetry in the toilet. Song Chuitong would read books in a loud voice heard by people near and far whenever he went to the toilet.42 Ouyang's praise for the diligence of 104 these two readers was challenged four centuries later by Lu Rong (1436-1494), who believed that books should be objects of reverence as sutras were for

Buddhist and Daoist followers. The toilet, for him, was simply too dirty to be an appropriate place for reading.43

One Chinese idiom best summarizes the behaviors of "reading on the road": shoubushijuan (literally, hand not letting go of volumes). It was widely used in historical biographies to project an image of a diligent scholar holding a book in hand wherever he went.

3.2.4. Reading behind Closed Doors

Contrary to reading on the road was the behavior of "reading behind closed doors." This reading imagery was described by a phrase bihu dushu (read books with a closed door) or sometimes dumen dushu. The closed door created a private reading space both physically and symbolically. With the door shut, the noise of the real world and the interactions with the people in the real world were cut off.

Additionally, the idea of material wealth and political gain was pushed outside of one's mind. Li Sirang, a Yuan government official, would close his doors to read whenever he had a day off. Since he was never concerned about the household's financial well-being, his wife had to weave to supplement his meager salary. He was so poor that he had only one cloth robe, which could be laundered or mended only on his days off. When visitors called upon him, this became a ready excuse for his son to use to turn them away.44

105 Many people simply read behind closed doors with a practical purpose: to prepare for the civil examinations. Li Chang (1203-1289), a future National

College academician, stayed at home to read every day and sat in for the examinations with his father at a very young age. 45 Zhang Zhu (Yuan Dynasty) shut himself indoors to read day and night so that his interest in music could be shifted to the Confucian classics.46

An extreme form of reading behind closed doors was reading in the temple which was supposed to be a secluded place ideal for studying. (Ming

Dynasty) was said to have stayed in the mountains to read for thirty years and never set foot in the city.47 Yuchen (Yuan Dynasty) returned from his official post only to build a house in the mountains for reading and writing.48 Buddhist and Daoist temples where renowned figures used to study were often honored after they became famous.49 Temples, however, were not always peaceful and quiet. When Yuanfa (11th century) stayed in a Buddhist temple to study, he was taken to court by the monks because he could not resist the temptation of meat and cooked the temple dog to eat.50 Stories of young examination aspirants who studied in the mountain temples being seduced by beautiful ladies also seemed to have problematized the supposed secludedness of this reading place.

Though represented as a lofty behavior in dynastic histories and anecdotal notes, bihu dushu was not always as innocent as its verbal representation sounded.

Although the image of it was associated with the lofty ideal of reading for one's

106 own sake, the reality of it was more often than not connected to the accumulation of one's fame. In other words, staying indoors, cut off from the real world, became a strategic way for one to gain fame in the outside world, even if the person may not have intended to do so. Nevertheless, people were well aware of the cultural significance of this behavior and conscious of protecting this hard- earned fame. Yin Se (Southern Song Dynasty), stayed home to read for thirty years before he stepped out and served the court, only to be exiled to the remote south. Reflecting his decision, he warned others: "I closed my door to read for thirty years and cultivated a small reputation. I did not think clearly. How much did I gain from that [i.e. going to the outside world]? Now my reputation is destroyed and completely lost. Though I regret, how much use is this?"51

3.2.5 Reading at Night

If the imagery of "reading behind closed doors" emphasized the solitary aspect of reading in terms of space, then "reading at night" realized it from a temporal perspective. People were praised for their diligence for reading at night.

Wang Anshi was said to often read the whole night and forget to wash his face and rinse his mouth before going to the office.52 (1249-1333), when hardly nine years old, would read all night even though his mother did not give him any lamp oil.53 Liu Song (Ming Dynaty) was recorded as reading all night in the light of an oil lamp.54 An idiom often used to describe this diligence was feiqinwangshi (literally, ceasing to sleep and forgetting meals).

107 The image of an individual reading by a "lonely lamp" (gudeng) appeared frequently in poems. 's "Reading military books in the evening" was such an example. The poem reads:

The lonely lamp brightens the frosty evening, I read military books in the deep mountains, The goal of my life is the ambition of rendering meritorious service ten thousand li away, By taking up and joining the pioneering army of the monarchy. To die is a soldier's honor, It is a shame to stay with my wife and children, Success comes accidentally, All predictions are unrealistic. Hungry people are shouting in waters, Poor scholars are let down for years, I sigh at the face in the mirror, How can it not grow old?55

The lonely reader in this picture does not just dwell on his book, but focuses on the contemplation of the future of the country and his unrealized ambition.

His thoughts go beyond the remote mountains and out to the hungry people and poverty-stricken scholars who were disappointed at the Southern Song's policy of not recovering the lost northern land. This image of a sole reader with a lonely lamp in this case symbolizes the frustrated voice of a group of dissatisfied and alienated intellectuals.

More often, the image of the night reader conjures up a familiar trope in

Chinese literary tradition: an earnest and industrious reader. This trope is represented in a group of idioms such as "zuobi touguang" ("to drill a hole in the wall to steal light"), "nangying zhaodu" ("to put fireflies in a bag to read by the 108 glow"), and "yingxue dushu" ("to read by the reflection of snow"). According to these idioms, Kuang Heng of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C-220) stole light from his neighbor to read by drilling a hole on the wall.56 Sun of the Jin

Dynasty (265-420) was said to have used the moonlight reflected of the snow to read.57 Sun Kang's contemporary, Che Yin, would catch many fireflies, bag them, and read by the glow.58

In anecdotal notes and literary fiction, there was an interesting phenomenon where night readers were often encountered by spiritual beings and ghosts. It was recorded that on a spring evening of the year 1135, a student named Zhong

Zhaozhi read books by the window and heard someone chanting two verses of a poem twice. He opened the doors and found no one. Deeming this as aid from a spiritual being, he adopted the two verses in his examination poem and obtained a high ranking.59 Similar stories were too numerous to be numerated.

Encountering ghosts, especially female ghosts, was another popular theme. In a collection of 2,692 stories compiled by Hong (1123-1202), there are a dozen with the motif of "reading and strange beings.”60 In one story, a student named

Huang Yin stayed in a hostel on his way to take the civil examinations at the capital. He read books late into the night when he heard a knock on the door.

The visitor turned out to be a girl who claimed to be a neighbor and was attracted there by his reading voice. She had herself invited in and read Huang's books for fun. They soon became lovers and Huang stayed on at the hostel for a

109 couple of weeks. He did not want to leave until one of his relatives passed by and urged Huang to accompany him to the capital. On their way, Huang found out that the girl was in fact the statue of a maid in a nearby temple. These two tales give us not simply another instance of reading at night, but an implicit rationale for doing it: there may be some kind of reward for the diligent reader.

3.2.6 Summary

As Roger Chartier has admonished us, there is always a gap between representation and real practice.61 Sadly enough, historians work within the constraint of their sources, mostly written ones. The reading modes discussed above provide two layers of cultural significance: on the first level, these modes of reading (reading aloud, reading from the wall, reading on the road, reading behind closed doors, and reading at night) seem to have been the dominant reading practices in late imperial China. On the second level, they were

"constructed realities" formulated through the verbal and pictorial representations of the time. The salience of the occurrence of these behaviors described in textual and pictorial discourses, as well as their entry into the formal histories as models for later generations to emulate, was the results of the intellectual efforts to pass on the idea that reading was an important way of life for dushuren. This is not to say that the practices discussed above were either

“real” or “constructed.” Actually, this reflects the complicated interaction between the intellectual discourses and the real practices. On the one hand, the

110 intellectual discourses noticed and recorded real practices; but on the other hand, they also informed and shaped the latter. As soon as they were entered into the realm of writing, these practices came to occupy an important place in literary imagination. Skillfully used, idioms associated with these reading practices conjure up intended imageries of reading and the social and cultural value attached to them.

3.3 Treatment of Books

Closely related to the habits of reading were the habits of treating books.

Timothy Brook has argued in his paper on the building of school libraries in

Ming times that reverence for the Confucian Classics was strategically used to justify the building of libraries to house books.62 This attitude of reverence toward books, however, was formulated long before the Ming. In earlier times, as rarities and expensive commodities, books were taken good care of by book collectors. Joseph McDermott has explored the interesting phenomenon of how book collectors cherished their books and forbade them from being seen by others.63 Thomas Lee has linked the rising interest in book collection and care for books with the ascending status of dushuren in the Song dynasty.64 As books became more and more accessible and inexpensive, people seemed to begin abusing them. This called for book lovers to speak up against the mistreatment of books. The discursive they usually adopted was that Buddhist and

111 Daoist followers revered their books and therefore Confucians should do even better.65

As a result, correct habits of treating books were disseminated in great detail.

Sima (1019-1086) of the Song Dynasty had a collection of over ten thousand volumes of books and read them on a daily basis. Though frequently read, all his books were like new after several decades. In his instructions to his son, he pointed out that books were the only treasure a Confucian had. He described how he took good care of the books: Whenever he opened a book, he would clean the desk first and sit upright to read. When he wanted to read while walking, he would hold the book with a wooden block so that the sweat and dust from his hands would not touch the book. When he wanted to turn a page, he would carefully turn with only two fingers, hardly touching the face of the page. He strongly disapproved young people's habit of using all their fingers when they turned the pages.66 Similar admonishments were given by book collectors. In one treatise reproduced in late Ming guidebooks, one collector warned: "Don't fold dog ears; don't scratch the characters with fingernails; don't wet your fingers with saliva before turning the pages; don't use your book as a pillow."67

Reality might have been diametrically the opposite in spite of these prescriptive instructions. A story surrounding the authoring of one of China's most erotic works of fiction Jin Ping Mei revolves around a supposedly "bad"

112 reading habit. Jin Ping Mei was said to be authored by (1526-1590) who wanted to avenge the death of his father. Hearing that his nemesis liked to read erotic fiction, he wrote the book and soaked the corners of its pages with . Sure enough, his enemy was attracted to the book and finished reading it overnight. Hardly had he finished reading when he found that his tongue became numb and darkened in color. He died soon after. This happened because he had the habit of moistening his fingers in his mouth before turning the pages while reading.68 It was by finding out this habit that Wang managed to kill his enemy.69

Popular religious movements also encouraged people to cherish books and paper with written characters on it. In Ming times, the merging of a local popular to worship the god in and the worship of god (god of the scholars) among dushuren led to a religious movement of

“cherishing written characters” (xizi). It was believed that people who cherished written characters would accumulate merit and have a better chance to succeed in the civil service examinations. People were told to collect abandoned paper with written characters, carefully cleaned it, burn it in a specific furnace, and drain the ashes into a river or the sea. This private, religious act developed into organized societies called xizihui (societies for cherishing written characters) in the Qing dynasty, especially during the Qianlong period (1736-95), when the act of cherishing written characters was popularized and associated with other

113 charity activities such as donating coffins and helping the poor.70 In some family genealogies, detailed instructions were given for people to “revere and cherish written characters.”71

3.4. Hygiene of Reading

Due to the limitations of lighting facilities, poor eyesight was a constant concern for readers. The aforementioned Sun Jue and Ouyang Xiu both suffered from eye . To be able to read fine fonts (xishu) at an old age was something worth celebrating. Li Zhi (1527-1602) could not help but thank heaven for giving him eyes that could still read small characters at the age of seventy.72 In the "Discourse on Extending Life and Avoiding Disease,”

(fl. 1580-1600) cited one prescription for eyes recorded in Bianmin tuzuan

(Compiled Pictures for the Convenience of People):

On the sixth day of the sixth lunar month, rinse salt with well water fetched afresh in the early morning. the mixture and use a new to let the water evaporate. Use the salt to rub the teeth. Spit the salt out with saliva onto the center of the hands. Wash the eyes with it. When (you) become old, (you) can still read under a lamp.73

Another health hazard seemed to have been caused by reading aloud. Wu

Yubi (1391-1469), a Ming Neo-Confucianist, mentioned this problem in his letter to a friend:

Recently I met with Wu Derang, who mentioned that you suffered from a disease of weakness. This must have been caused by too much reading. It would be better if you could make the necessary adjustment. In the past, I did not understand things and was eager to make progress. I used to work too hard at books, and raised my 114 voice in a high volume when reading. This was most damaging to the essential energy and did great harm. I was inflicted with the disease when I was in the capital. Now I dare not to read books loudly.74

The problem of reading dyslexia seemed also to bother some people. Liu

Yuanfu (1019-1068) appeared to have suffered from dyslexia in his later years and could not recognize a single character. Unable to give any medical explanation to his predicament, people said that this condition was due to his hobby of acquiring too many antiques from ancient tombs.75

3.5 "Superfluous Things" of Reading

No investigation of a particular culture is complete without a discussion of its material aspect, that is, items that were produced and used by the participants in a culture. Studying "things" gives us an opportunity to see how the behavior was situated in a physical surrounding. The attention paid to the making of material objects related to the act of reading is also a reflection of the popular attitude toward it. For this discussion, I rely on connoisseurship literature and miscellaneous notes that talked about "things" related to reading. In using the connoisseurship literature, I am aware of the danger of oversimplification, as acutely pointed out by Craig Clunas, to see the texts as if they "told us what things were like."76 Nevertheless, the writings of connoisseurs represented an ideology of mass culture that was produced by its writers and publishers, and consumed by its readers. The writings on the things of reading reflected the ideology of the reading culture that I have discussed in the first part of my paper. 115 I will begin with the discourse on the ideal private space of reading in these writings. Fig 3.2 shows the interior of a reconstructed 1797 Chinese library in the

Minneapolis Institute of Arts.77 The room is filled with a harmonious atmosphere suitable for the act of reading. The elegant style of the hardwood furniture symbolizes dignity and naturalness. An art historian's interpretation of such a setting is worth quoting in full here:

It is also apparent that a chief ideal of a home was to join the inhabitants with nature. While the walled-in courtyard house provided private outdoor space within an urban setting, the studio and its adjoining garden was undoubtedly the most symbolic link to nature. The library and garden reflect both Confucian learning and the ideals of the Taoist recluse. The scholars desk or large painting table was usually the dominant piece of furniture in a study. A large comfortable armchair, book cabinets and perhaps a simple day bed were also companions in many libraries. The careful choice of aesthetic surroundings including items of contemplation, elegantly proportioned, minimally decorated hardwood furniture, rustic rootwood stands and brushpots, traveling book cabinets, table rocks, and precious antiques were all selected and displayed in support of the scholar's intellectual mission and cultivated taste. In this respect, library furniture and other furnishings were chosen and arranged with more emphasis on individual taste and personal comfort than was true of formal reception hall furnishings.78

In his "Discourse on Comfort on Rising and Resting,” Gao Lian devoted a large portion of his writings on the layout of different architectural buildings in a home such as a pine pavilion and a tea room. The room he spent most ink on was none other than the scholar's studio. Unlike his other discussions on buildings where he used the names of the buildings as titles of each section, the title he gave for the section on studios was "Master Gao's theory on studio" (Gaozi 116 shuzhai shuo). By labeling his opinions as a "theory,” he elevated the importance of the studio. According to his "theory":

The studio should be bright and quiet, but not too open. Brightness and cleanness makes one's mind and spirit clear. Too open, however, will hurt one's eyes. The walls outside the window are filled with climbing ivy. In the middle, put miniature pines and cypress, or grow one or two orchids. Surrounding the stairs, plant green and fragrant grasses. Let them grow, and a sense of lush greenness will be created. On the side, set up an inkstone washing pond. Put another basin pond close to the window. Keep half a dozen gold fish in it to observe their liveliness and vibrant nature. In the middle of the studio, place a long table arranged with an ancient ink stone, an old bronze water vessel, a brush rest made in an ancient kiln, a bamboo brush holder, a brush wash from an ancient kiln, a box for sticking paste, an ink grinder, and a bronze paper weight. Put a small day bed to the left of the table. Under the bed, place a rolling footstool....79

He went on and on meticulously as to what kind of vases and stone basins to display, what types of paintings to hang on the walls, and what kind of shrines to use to house the Buddhist statues. He prescribed in great detail what types of books to put on the shelves. Confucian classics, anthologies of poetry and essays,

Buddhist sutras, Daoist writings, medical treatises, and models of calligraphy all should occupy a place there. He went so far as to list all the book titles that must be included. In addition to books, scrolls of paintings and calligraphy were necessary. The whole idea about the studio was that it was a place "where nothing will bother the mind and where one can enjoy himself in unfettered relaxation."80

In this lavish description of a studio, we see an idealized private reading space.

The garden and the interior of the studio were woven into a synthesized 117 harmony. Though the reader might be reading inside, his mind was by no means restricted to a small self-contained space. The garden provided an easy access to the observation and contemplation of nature. The grass, the flowers, the , and the fish served as a miniature version of nature. A secluded yet symbolically open site, a visually appealing environment (both the interior and the exterior), and all those comfortable paraphernalia constituted an ideal space for reading.

The rolling footstool that Gao Lian mentioned was a favorite piece of furniture among the Ming literati. The image of it appeared frequently in illustrations of Ming printed fiction.81 It was used both to rest the feet and to have them warmed and massaged. The rods installed in the middle could roll when one moved his feet back and forth on them (see Fig 3.382).

(1585-1645), grandson of the Ming painting master (1470-1559), and author of another important treatise on things—Treatise on Superfluous Things

—could not hide his excitement over the usefulness of this stool: "The Spring-

Gushing-Acupoint (yongquanxue) 83 is where the vital energy comes from and it is good for it to have some exercise."84 With this healthful function, the stool naturally became a desirable instrument for readers who had to spend extended periods of time in front of books. As the case with the studio, it is highly possible that only the affluent could afford such a thing. Li Shimian (1374-1450), a poor examination aspirant who would cover his feet with quilt and put them into a

118 barrel to conquer the winter chill while reading, would certainly have loved to have had this furnishing.85

In addition to the footstool, there were other little things that aided the act of reading either directly or indirectly, especially in response to the sleepiness related to reading. Lu Rong recorded that in the area, there was a special type of wooden chair called meideshui (literally, "cannot sleep") used solely by students and dushuren. Unlike long benches, it could seat only one person and thus prevented the person from lying down and falling asleep.86 Wen Zhenheng mentioned a fragrant tea that could purify one's mind and pleasure one's spirit.

He suggested people who read through the night to use it to drive away sleepiness.87

Since people read so often during the night, there was no other issue that attracted more attention than the problem of lighting. When candles and oil lamps were such a luxury to many poor people, readers sought alternative ways to get light. The inventory of the Chinese literary illusions had many stories of diligent people reading with the help of these alternative ways. The aforementioned Kuang Heng, Sun Kang, and Che Ying were said to have solved the lighting problem with the light from a neighbor, the snow reflected moonlight, and the glow from bagged fireflies.88 A legend has it that a Buddhist monk Chengmiao was good at mysterious skills. He had a hole between his breasts with a diameter of between four and five cun. It went all the way down

119 to his belly and sometimes his intestines would come out of it. Usually he put wadding to fill it. But when he read in the night, he would pull out the wadding and a light would come out of the hole that could brighten the whole room.89

A more realistic idea than this legendary was the idea of a permanent lamp. According to , Chinese used asbestos wicks for lamps as early as the Han times.90 An asbestos wick meant a permanent wick that would burn as long as the oil was refilled. Since oil was consumed by the burning wick and a process of evaporation was created due to the heat of the burning wick, an ingenuous way of saving oil was devised to cool the lamps and prevent the evaporation. Lu You recorded the existence of such a lamp in his anecdotal notes:

In the collected works of Duke Song Wen'an there is a poem on "economic lamps' ( deng). One can find these things in the area of Hanjia. They are made of two layers. On one side there is a small hole into which you put cold water, changing it every evening. The flame of an ordinary lamp quickly dries up the oil as it burns. But these lamps are different. They save almost half of the oil. When the Venerable Ji was governing Hanjia, he sent several of them to scholar-officials at court. Since Wen'an was once the executive officer of the area Yujin, then Hanjia has been producing this thing for almost three hundred years.91

Lu You's book was published about 1190. So the invention and mass production of this lamp must have started at the beginning of the tenth century.

Though economical on oil, it was unlikely that the lamp became a household item. It possibly remained a luxurious good that only the rich and the powerful could afford to use. Poor people still had to rely on various alternative methods. 120 Yang Jue (1493-1549) of the Ming Dynasty was too poor to afford candles so he read by burning dried branches in the fields.92 Shaojun (?-1625), a female poet of the Ming Dynasty, sadly described in a poem for her late husband that the wall by their bed was broken where he used to read on his pillow by the moonlight.93

3.6 Elite Conceptions of Reading

The behavioral and material aspects of the culture of reading can not be totally understood out of the context of how reading was woven into the tapestry of intellectual life. Connoisseurship literature, paintings, and woodcut illustrations provide us with some clues as to how the act of reading was conceived and perceived by the male elite. In the following pages, I will try to show that reading was regarded as a sacred act which needed to be conducted in a harmonious and pleasant environment. Reading books was not merely deciphering the written graphs, but rather a contemplation of the harmony between the external world and one's inner nature. While kan facilitated the acquisition of the basic skills of reading, it was the cultivation of one's inner vision, or "power of the eye" (muli) that determined whether one could see "the invisible.”

An appropriate point of departure is an allegedly fifteenth-century illustrated primer, Xinbian duixiang siyan, or “A Newly Compiled Illustrated Four-Word

Glossary.” It was an early sixteenth century reprint of an edition that first

121 appeared in 1463.94 According to Goodrich, although there is a character that respects the taboo name of the First Song Emperor (r.960-976) and there is a drawing that depicts the Song scholar’s garb style, there is no consensus whether this was originally produced in the Song (960- 1279), early Yuan (1280-1368), or the Ming dynasties.95 Despite the controversy, there is no doubt that it is the earliest extant illustrated primer in the world.

The primer presents 224 characters and 82 -syllabic words along with 306 drawings. Both the characters and bi-syllabic words are grouped by four without rhyming (see Fig 3.4). The presence of drawings to accompany the words anticipated a boom of illustrated books during the middle Ming.96 In this instance, the objects to be “looked at” and the discrete texts to be “read” or

“recognized” are displayed side by side. In terms of the use of vision, this juxtaposition seems to imply that the practice of kan holds the potential of assisting the learning of reading, du. From illustrated Buddhist sutras in the

Tang Dynasty (618-907) to illustrated fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties, pictures would serve the function of prompting a certain "frame of mind" in the reader: either to arouse a sense of awe and respect, or to provide story clues for the inexperienced, or to draw attention to the climax.97

In this illustrated primer, the pictures served as the link between the real world and the world on paper. 97.4% of the words in the primer are the names and labels for things that exist in the material world: natural phenomena (e.g.,

122 thunder, rain), plants and animals (e.g., bamboo, elephant), architect structures

(e.g., pavilion, temple), (skirt, trousers), and so forth. Only sixteen words/characters, which consist of 2.6% of the whole inventory, refer to three abstract categories.98 These primers follow the tradition started by the earlier character such as where names for things are explained one by one. However, it is different from character in the sense that while dictionaries are intended for explaining what a thing is, primers aim at showing the representation of the thing on paper together with the written graph.

The pedagogical assumption behind this format is that when the reader recognizes the thing in its pictorial representation, he will be able to associate its sound in the spoken language with its representation in the written language.

Thus, he learns character by character, word by word, and embarks on the journey of learning to read. The perception was that “looking at pictures” would facilitate the act of “reading.” It was through this act of "looking" that the world of reality became associated with the world on paper.

Not only did the contents of the primer, but also its physical features, suggest the perception of the connection between looking and reading. The exquisite lines of the pictures and the beautiful style of calligraphy indicated that the edition in question was not meant to be a coarse or cheap copy.99 Its delicate line drawings and appealing calligraphy invited, in Alois Riegl's terms, both optical and haptical modes of viewing. Drawing on the art historian Riegl, and citing

123 data collected by psychological experiments on picture and text viewing, Claude

Gandelman argued that there are two modes of vision: The optical approach scans the surface of things, and the haptical approach penetrates in depth.

Although both modes of vision are involved in reading texts and careful regarding of pictures, usually pictures invite the optical vision. It is only in careful viewing of the pictures, that haptical vision is involved.100 In many illustrations in the primer, the delicate differences between certain pictures invited readers to “read” very carefully. For example, the pictures for house, temple, Daoist temple, Buddhist temple, and hall are extremely similar (see Fig

3.5). In order to distinguish which is which, the reader must stop to examine carefully: bells hung from the eaves of a house might indicate a Buddhist temple.

Although data on how readers of the late imperial period actually looked at or read the primer are not available, these details in the pictures provide some possibilities about how the acts of “looking” and “reading” were approximated in the process of learning to read.

If looking served as a stepping stone for reading, then contemplation was the ultimate ideal "frame of mind." The idea that reading embodied a way of life slowly took its shape during the imperial period and culminated during the

Ming dynasty. Connoisseur writings and guide-books that described the occasions for reading, as well as paintings that depicted the scenes of reading all sent out a common message: reading (du) was contemplation (guan); reading was

124 for the body to be embraced by nature and to be nourished by it; reading was not about books, but more about the refinement of the reader's inner virtues.

This idealized mode of reading was mentioned dozens of times in Gao Lian's

(fl. 1580-1600) Eight Discourses on the Art of Living (Zunsheng bajian), a collection of citations on various ways of leading a life full of material and spiritual satisfactions.101 In the introduction to the "Discourse on Comfort on Rising and

Resting" (qi ju anle), Gao related that there were ample opportunities in one's daily life for one to attain longevity and comfort. Two citations in this section typically represented how reading was incorporated in the pursuit of a peaceful and serene life. The first one was an excerpt from Helin Yulu by Luo Dajing

(style: Helin) of the thirteenth century and the second one by Yan Du (style:

Shujian) of the Han Dynasty (see Appendix A).

Seemingly offering interpretations to a poetic verse, Luo depicted the quiet life of a recluse. Reading, together with writing, taking a nap, sipping tea, walking in the mountains, meeting friends, talking about crops, and enjoying a beautiful sunset, constituted a picture of an idealized life style characterized by relaxation and otherworldliness. This life was free from the noise and dust of the city. It was pure and idyllic, achieving the serenity and simplicity described in the Dao De Jing. If dwelling in the mountain made a dushuren physically detached from the world of fame and profit, then reading helped him achieve the goal spiritually.

125 Following Luo's paragraph was an item written by Yan Du. It further highlighted reading as part of a leisurely and contented life. He wrote:

I get up and comb at dawn and sit in the living room. In the morning, I recite the Book of Change (Yi jing), calendars of the , the Classic of Rituals (Dianli) by Dan, and scan Confucius' Spring and Autumn. In the evening, I relax in the inner halls, chanting poems at the Southern Studio. The pieces authored by various writers fill my ears and dazzle my eyes. One after another, I enjoy them all by myself. At this time, I do not know that the sky is the cover and the earth is the carrier. I do not know that in the world already have a body. [Gao] played the zhu instrument as if there were nobody around and Gao Feng read books without realizing the thunderstorm. Even they cannot be compared with me. 102

Reading, here, was described to possess such a strong power that it dissolved the sense of self, space, and time. Sucked so deep into the space and time created by the books he read, his spirit traveled freely, harmonizing with the nature.

Paragraphs and aphorisms like these found their way to go down the cultural history and circulate in the cultural community through compiled works.

These collections offered its readers an imagined community where this outlook on reading was shared and resonated by their well-educated readerships. For example, Luo Dajing's paragraph was quoted in full in Zongyi's (1300-1368)

Chuogeng lu, where he described himself as living in a thatched cottage in the mountains. Although he lived by the sea, he could still see mountain springs and plants (motifs in Luo's descriptions) in his dreams. Quoting Luo's words,

Tao claimed that he must be one of the very few readers who could share Luo's appreciation of Tang Zixi's poetic verse.103 In another popular collection of

126 aphorisms compiled during the late Ming, Caigen (Discourses on

Roots), the sentiment of reading with spiritual purity was resonated in a phrase:

"Reading in an evening of rain and snow makes one's spirit pure."104

Paintings by literati corroborated the outlook on reading expressed in written words. Several works by Shen Zhou (1427-1509) provided perfect illustrations to this view of reading. Shen Zhou was the most prominent painter among the "Four Ming Masters".105 Born into a wealthy family in , Shen was not motivated to pursue an official career. Instead, he dedicated his life to the enjoyment of calligraphy, collecting and painting.106 A free spirit, Shen stressed simplicity, naturalness, and honesty in his painting of landscapes. The

“Pavilion of Farming and Rest” (Geng xi xuan, No. 3 of the East Estate Picture

Series, Fig 3.6 107) conveys a sense of plainness and serenity in a scene of reading.

The painting depicts a gentleman’s secluded dwelling surrounded by trees and bushes. The owner of the studio sits in the hall of the house, holding a book in his left hand. A stack of books are laid on the floor to his left. In front of him is a wide-open window. Rather than burying his head into the book, he is staring into the distance. The picture depicts a scholar in his private reading space, immersed not in the book in front of him, but rather lost in a contemplative mode looking at nature. The space his gaze is fixed on is represented by a patch of emptiness. This seems to suggest that rather than enjoying the physical

127 beauty of nature, he is indeed delighting in the serenity that nature provides for contemplation.

Another painting, “A Picture of Reading in the Mountain Dwelling” (Shanju dushu tu, Fig 3.7), is one of the very few paintings that bear the word “reading”

(dushu) in their titles. The scene is again a gentleman’s reclusive dwelling. In the foreground (lower part of the scroll) is the house, set in a wooded area accompanied by a river and a bridge. The small figure inside the house holds in his hands a large piece of paper (or maybe meant to be a book). In the distance

(the upper part of the scroll), are layers and layers of mountains and cliffs.

Several characters in the inscription at the top of the scroll are too smeared to be readable, but the seven-character poem says something to the effect of “I have not been to this dwelling for a long time, all the old paths that I have walked are now covered with green moss. The wind of the stream coming from all four directions is as cool as the water, ….” The motifs of a distant dwelling, moss- covered path, and stream echo with the scene depicted in Luo Dajing's words.

Here, although the title of the painting indicates it to be a “a picture of reading”

(dushu tu), neither the reader, nor the material he is reading occupies the focal point of the painting. What the poem suggests is a sense of reclusion and otherworldliness. What the picture displays is a harmonious scene of nature and humanity. Reading, again, is not portrayed as a function of regarding books, but rather of viewing both the internal and external worlds.

128 Contemplation required a special kind of vision. In traditional Chinese optics, light came from the eyes. Therefore, the potential of enlightenment resided in one's mind's eye. Li Zhi (1527-1602), philosopher and critic, took it a great fortune to be bestowed an inner vision-- a mind's eye (xin yan)-- which enabled him to see the merits of people who had been despised by other readers, and to see the ugliness of those who had been admired by other readers.108 In his “Joy of Reading,” he wrote:

Why do I read? [Because] there are many people I can meet there. As soon as they meet with my mind, I cannot help but laugh and sing. I cannot stop singing and chanting, then I will shout and cry. I cry and shout, my tears run like heavy rains. It is not without reason that I sing. There are people in the book. I see those people, who really capture my heart. It is not without reason that I cry. There are no people in the empty pond. I cannot see people. This makes my heart tired. [You may say:] “Throw away the book and do not read, or put it away high in the attic. Refine your nature and cultivate your spirit; stop singing and halt crying.” When I first heard these words, it sounded as if it pitied the poor? [But] if I have to put the book away and not read, how can I be happy? Refinement of nature and cultivation of the spirit, lies right in there. How narrow is the world! How wide are the books!109

For Li Zhi, the joy of reading was in finding people who captured his heart and mind in the books (wo guan qi , shi wo xin). As expressed in the paintings by Shen Zhou, to read is “to refine the nature and to cultivate the spirit.”

In the genre of dufa essays which were meant to guide people on how to read fiction,110 the importance of “vision” was also stressed. Jin Shengtan (1608-1661), commentator of Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin), wrote to his readers: “When

129 you read a book, you should widen and deepen your range of vision (yan guang).”111 He warned readers of the danger of overlooking the subtle compositional devices in case they did not read carefully and deeply enough.

Later in the same essay, he mentioned: “As soon as a young person can read a little, he should be taught to read the book carefully over and over again.”112

Thus, the “vision” to see what a common reader could not see was not born with the person. He must be trained to become able to appreciate the fine points in a book.

Zhang Zhupo (1670-1698), commentator of Jin Ping Mei (Golden lotus), suggested that before reading the novel, "one should sit in contemplation (jingzuo) for three months. Otherwise his vision (yan guang) may be so clouded that it will not be able to "shoot" (jishe) at the point and will miss it.”113

Apparently, vision mentioned by both Jin Shengtan and Zhang Zhupo did not refer to the vision of the physical eyes, but rather the mind's eye as Li Zhi called it. To train people to read, therefore, was to train them to develop the force of their mind's eye so that insight or enlightenment could "shoot" out of one's eyes and shed light on what was read.

3.7 Popular Attitudes toward Reading

The elite perceptions and conceptions of reading affected popular attitudes toward reading among the general public. The popular perception of reading during the late imperial period was very much shaped by the teachings of Neo-

130 Confucianism which constituted the core curricula of the civil service examinations. The goal of reading, for the Cheng-Zhu school, was to pursue the

Heavenly Principle and to cultivate one's human nature to harmonize with it. A person without adequate self-cultivation would not be qualified to govern others.

Thus, moral training became one of the most important components in the Neo-

Confucian program of learning.114 Dushu qiongli, or reading books to pursue the

Principle, was the ultimate responsibility of a dushuren (literally, the person who reads). As I pointed out in Chapter 1, dushuren was a unique social class of people who identified themselves as a superior group of people simply because they read the Confucian classics. Dushuren was a special label that connoted a sense of pride and superiority.

Family Instruction, a genre of writings that contained a set of regulations that household heads stipulated for their offspring or clan members to observe, played an essential role in transmitting these values. The genre of Family

Instruction dated back to the warning letters that fathers wrote to their sons during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220).115 The quintessential example of the culmination of this genre was Family Instructions for the Yan Clan (Yanshi jiaxun) authored by (531-?) of the Dynasty (550-577). The twenty chapters dealt with various aspects of proper conduct in life ranging from the teaching of children to funeral arrangements. Chapter Eight "Encourage

Study" was devoted to the benefits of reading and learning. Interestingly, while

131 Yan regarded reading as a skill (ji, or yi) for survival, he approached the importance of reading in a mixed tone of pragmatism and idealism:

To understand the ideas of the Six Classics or to wade through the writings of the hundred philosophers, even though this cannot add to or improve conduct, it is nevertheless a resource on which one can depend...A proverb says, "To amass wealth by the million does not compare with the mastery of a small skill." Among valuable skills easy to learn there is none comparable to reading...Those who read may know what has happened throughout the world from the time of [Fu] Hsi and [Shen] Nung until now—not only the personalities, events, success or failure, likes or dislikes of human beings, but also those things which the universe cannot hide nor the spirits conceal.116

The voices for stressing reading as a means for self-cultivation and as a skill for vocational choice co-existed in the family instructions, with more weight put on the former in earlier times. As studying turned more and more into a profession with the development of the examination system and commercialization of the society toward the late imperial period, the pragmatic tone intensified. In her quantitative study of clan rules gleaned from 151 genealogies dating from sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries

(printed in China from 1912 to 1936), Hui-Chen Wang Liu found that 128 clans mentioned studying, 70 of which emphasized it as a vocational preference over farming, trade, craft, pasturage and fishery.117

In addition to the vocational flexibility, reading was stressed for some other utilitarian purposes. For example, Yuan (ca. 1140-1195) noted that the skill of reading had its "useless use" (wuyong zhi yong): it could engage the interests of young men from rich and noble families in all types of books other than the 132 classics and prompt them to strike up friendships with scholars, so that they would hardly have time to see to other affairs or to cause trouble in the company of indecent people.118 In his family instruction, Lu You (1125-1210) advised that even when offspring had limited talents, they must be allowed to read books so as to keep the "book seeds" (shuzhong) alive.119 The term "book seeds" originated from the term "literary seeds" (wenzhong) coined by Du (?-838, j.s. 785) in his instruction to his sons. Adopting Pei's terminology, Shan Gu also warned his offspring not to let the "reading seeds" (dushu zhongzi) die. The idea seemed to be quite popular early on in late imperial China. Zhou Mi (1232-1308) mentioned that there was a "Hall of Book Seeds" in his household.120 The metaphor of looking at book reading as seed sowing reflected the patriarchal anxiety over leaving a legacy of prosperity to the future generations.

The case of Lu Longqi (1630-1693) provides a good example of how fathers and officials injected the values of reading into the minds of the younger generation and the general public. Lu Longqi, more commonly known as Master

Lu and Duke Qingxian posthumously, was a prominent advocate of Neo-

Confucian learning during the Qing period.121 He obtained the jinshi (Presented

Scholar) degree in 1671 at the age of forty-one and was assigned the post of county magistrate of Jiading in the Jiangnan at the age of forty-six. An impartial judge and upright official, he was demoted one year later because of discord between him and his corrupt superior. He finally lost his position due to

133 a robbery case the subsequent year (1677). On the day that he left his post, it was said that the people of Jiading county closed the market and thousands of them took to the streets to see him off. He was not to be rehabilitated for the following six years. Returning home, he devoted most of his time to teaching and promoting Zhu Xi's teachings. At the age of fifty-three (1682), just one year before his official rank was restored, he suffered a tremendous blow, when he lost both his eldest son and daughter-in-law within two months. Stricken by deep sorrow, he wrote a letter to his deceased son three months after his death.122

In this heart-breaking letter (see Appendix A), Lu profusely expressed his feelings, especially the sense of guilt. It is important to note that during this period, it was not uncommon for a father to express his sorrows about the untimely death of his child in writing. In fact, according to Pei-Yi Wu, a trend had developed from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, when more and more parents wrote about the loss of their children with deep affection. Their emotions were more directly revealed through a vernacular narrative style, the language of which enabled them to describe the personalities of their departed children in vivid detail.123 Lu's letter to his son fell into the category of writing what Wu called "necrology," which included "a requiem (jiwen), grave notice

(kuangzhi), tombstone inscription (muzhi ming), and other lesser-known genres."124 Compared with other writings in the necrology genre, the letter was

134 not special in terms of the intensity of emotions expressed therein. Nor was it unique that it was addressed to a deceased child as if he were still alive.

The uniqueness of Lu's letter lay in the many ways that the importance of reading played out in a parental voice. First, reading books for one's own sake was a merit. Lu remembered his son as smart and quick to learn to read and write. Unlike other parents who asked their sons to read for the civil examinations, he wished Dingzheng to read to learn the way of the sages and worthies. As Zhu Xi's adamant follower, Lu apparently prioritized learning for self (wei ji zhi xue) over learning for others (wei ren zhi xue).125 Lu’s own belated attempt at the examinations attested to this. For him, reading and learning to be a man (zuoren) were not two separate matters as the former served as a means to the realization of the latter.126 He was relieved to see that Dingzheng understood his wishes and studied for a higher goal.

Second, helping others to read was a virtue. Lu remembered Dingzheng as a son who had helped him in reading. As a father and teacher, Lu constantly gave his son advice in his studies. When Dingzheng started to study for the examinations, Lu gave Dingzheng a book he edited as a gift to remind his son of the importance of learning for one’s own sake.127 While in mourning, father and son studied together. In answering Dingzheng's questions on classics and histories, Lu made a lot of discoveries himself. For this, he was grateful to

Dingzheng.

135 Third, reading was a necessity even for a dead soul. Lu thought Dingzheng should review what he had read in classics and histories so that his vital energy would prevail and his spirit would solidify. Though dead, Dingzheng still needed to work hard.

Fourth, failure in reading accounted for disasters in one's fate. For

Dingzheng and his wife's deaths, Lu blamed himself, particularly his failure in reading. In a letter to a friend during the same year, he mentioned that as a motto for admonishment and a prayer for blessings, he wrote a motto for himself:

"Not until old did I find my temperament to be impure; pondering the reason, I think it can be nothing but my carelessness in studying books." He further lamented that there might be no way for him to find out where his impurity and carelessness lay.128

In his Maxims on Administrating the County of Jiading, Lu Longqi reiterated the importance of reading to the people of Jiading. These Maxims were said to be the key to his success in governing the county and earning respect and love from its people.129 Out of one hundred and seventy-five pieces of advice on a wide range of topics including filial piety, brotherly love, harmony in an extended family, marriage, sacrificial rituals, women's behavior, household and safety, twenty-six (14.86%) were related to the topics of reading and studying. This topic ranked only second in number to the theme of "dealing with people"

(twenty-nine items, 16.57%). It was above the topics of household financial

136 management (twenty-five items, 14.28%) and filial piety (twenty-two items,

12.57%).

In the very first item "Teach sons reading and writing," he spelled out the goals and usefulness of reading and studying in very practical terms:

The degrees of juren and jinshi come with one's destiny and are determined by one's previous lives. I do not dare to demand too much from my sons, as long as you study hard from morning till evening, read until you understand a little bit about writing, and earn yourselves a title of xiucai. This can at least enable you to make a living by teaching and exempt you from punishments or insults. If you have good handwriting, this will earn you a reputation in the community, enabling you to eke out a living as scriveners. In case you are so ill-fated and the timing was unfit for you to become a scholar, you can still distinguish the principle and avoid being bullied by others. If you do not study or read, you cannot become a xiucai. If you want to plow and plant, you do not have any strength for doing so. If you want to do , you do not have any capital. You may practice astrology and geomancy or enter the government to become clerks, but your character will deteriorate. How are you supposed to establish yourselves? How are you supposed to establish the household? How can you present yourself to scholar-officials? How can you step into the court to face government officials? How can you encounter the unpredictable and deal with disasters? At those times, you will have to bow your head down onto the ground and kneel on the stairs, referring to yourself as "the small one" and calling others "Your Honor." When I speak of this, my heart aches. When I write of this, my tears trickle down. You sons are not inhuman. How can you not be sad?

Apparently, trying to appeal to a general public, Lu preached the importance of reading by adopting a pragmatic tone instead of a moralistic one. The value of reading was presented not from a moral standpoint, but from a practical perspective: the hardship of becoming a farmer or for dushuren, the prospect of earning a living by teaching and copying, the privilege of being exempted from insults and punishments, the ability to avoid disasters and 137 bullying. He mentioned morality only once by stating that the professions of astrology and court clerk would corrupt one's moral character. Throughout the rest of the Maxims, he emphasized the benefits of becoming a xiucai, the glories one could bring to his ancestors by studying books, the flexibility of pursuing alternative careers such as calligraphy, painting, or medicine.

3.8 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have delineated a culture of reading in China that began to be formulated from the eleventh century and culminated in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. I proposed the notion of a "reading culture" to form a triangular structure with the print culture and book culture. Heeding

Roger Chartier's injunction on the theory of reading, my approach is focused on the ideology and behavioral patterns of the culture of reading. The ideology of this culture regarded reading as an important way of life for the self-styled dushuren, an identity that crossed the boundaries of class and wealth. The representation of the reading habits that I have discussed, including reading aloud, reading from the wall, reading on the road, reading behind closed doors and reading in the night, perpetuated this constructed notion of what reading was. In addition to the habits of reading, I have looked at the treatment of books, the hygiene of reading, and material items related to reading.

The term dushuren was a prestigious designation used only to refer to men but never to women. Some stock phrases in the standard vocabulary of the

138 representation of the habits of reading (e.g. shoubushijuan, feiqinwangshi, bihudushu) were hardly ever applied to female readers. If a particular culture could be seen as concentric circles in terms of its participants, then Chinese women occupied a place that was far from the center. The question of women and reading will be explored in the following chapter.

139

Figure 3.1 Shibi (Poetry Wall) Source: Ming Wanli Rongyutang edition of Shuihu zhuan [Water Margin], reproduced from Quncy Chuang, ed., The Chuang Family Bequest of Fine Ming and Qing Furniture in the Shanghai Meseum. (: the Woods Publishing Company, 1998).

Figure 3.2: The Interior of a reconstructed 1797 studio Source: Quncy Chuang, ed., The Chuang Family Bequest of Fine Ming and Qing Furniture in the Shanghai Meseum. (Hong Kong: the Woods Publishing Company, 1998).

140

Figure 3.3 Rolling footstool Source: Ming Wanli edition of Luban jing (Carpenters' manual), reproduced from Quncy Chuang, ed., The Chuang Family Bequest of Fine Ming and Qing Furniture in the Shanghai Meseum. (Hong Kong: the Woods Publishing Company, 1998).

Figure 3.4 Sample pages from Xinbian duixiang siyan Source: L. Carrington Goodrich, Fifteenth Century Illustrated Chinese Primer: Hsin- pien tui-hsiang szuyen. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967).

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Figure 3.5 Similar illustrations for different words Source: L. Carrington Goodrich, Fifteenth Century Illustrated Chinese Primer: Hsin-pien tui-hsiang szuyen. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967.)

Figure 3.6 Geng xi xuan [The pavilion of farming and rest] Source: renmin meishu chubanshe, Ming si jia huaji [A collection of paintings by the Four Masters of Ming]. (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin meishu chubanshe, 1993.)

142

Figure 3.7 Shanju dushu tu [A picture of reading in the mountains] Source: Tianjin renmin meishu chubanshe, Ming si jia huaji [ A collection of paintings by the Four Masters of Ming]. (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin meishu chubanshe, 1993).

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Chapter 3 Notes

1 For histories of the Chinese printing technology, see Zhang 1989, Carter 1931, and Tsien 1995. 2 Guo 1962, 1-4, 38-130. 3 Brook 1996, 93. 4 For a general history of academies in China, see Fan 1995; for a social and intellectual history of academies during the Southern Song dynasty, see Walton 1999. For a general history of ancient Chinese schools, see Guo 1998. For a general history of ancient Chinese private education, see Wu and Hu 1997. 5 Ho 1962. 6 Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, 180; cited in Brislin 1981, 5. 7 Shore 1998, 31. 8 Bruner 1996, xiv. 9 Hector Hammerly (1982, 512-514) divides culture into three parts: achievement culture, informational culture, and behavioral culture; cf. Walker 2000, 234.

10 Chartier 1988b. 11 There has not been any systematic study on the origin of silent reading in the Chinese history of reading. I inferred the date thirteenth century roughly from two indirect pieces of evidence. The first is the term "yi wu hang" (to read five lines with one glance). It was used to describe fast readers, usually accompanied with a praise of the subject's good memory. The term began to appear more frequently in the Dynastic (1206-1368). The second piece of evidence is the distinction between the terms "du" (read) and "kan" (look) made by Cheng Duanli (1271-1345). He used "du" for classics and "kan" for histories. By this difference, he might have meant a distinction between "intensive reading" and "extensive reading." Although there was not any definitive causal relationship, silent reading was usually correlated with faster and more extensive reading. 12 RLWS, Chapter 16. 13 HSYL, juan 9, 17b. 14 MS, Biographies, juan 143, no. 31. 15 SBLC, juan 1, 1a-2a. The contents of the inscriptions were not revealed until the end of the Northern Song dynasty when the army of Jin conquered the capital and broke into the secret room. The inscriptions contained three items: One, the descendants of the family (from whom, Zhao Kuangying seized the throne) are not to be punished even when they are guilty of a crime. Two, scholar-officials and people who offered admonishments to the throne are not to be killed. Third, anybody who breaks this pledge will be punished by heaven. For an English account of this anecdote, see Luan and Tang 1994, 428-430. 16 YS, Biographies, juan 172, no. 59. 17 YS, Biographies, juan 175, no. 62.

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18 The term "silent reading" is actually very ambiguous. The interest in "silent reading" started from Josef Balogh. In his 1927 article “ Voces Paginarum,” Balogh claimed that “silent reading was, if not completely unknown in the ancient world, at least so rare that whenever it was observed, it aroused astonishment, even suspicion” (Knox 1968, 421). Balogh went to the extreme to say that “silent reading was not just unusual but almost unheard of” (Knox 1968, 421). To counter Balogh’s arguments, Knox refuted them point by point and noted that it was hard to believe scholarly readers at that time did not develop a technique of silent, faster reading. Hendrickson (1929) suggested that “there are many gradations between vocal and silent reading, descending from distinct oral utterance to indistinct murmurs, to whispers, to mere lip motions, and so on through unconscious muscular movements of the tongue, throat or larynx, to pure eye- reading unattended by any enunciatory effort” (196). Here by "silent reading,” I mean a mode of reading where there was no audible sound involved. Psychologically speaking, even without sound, there might be phonological recoding, i.e., various degrees of articulation, involved in the process of reading. For a critical survey of a heated debate in the field of psychology starting from the 1970's over the necessity of "phonological recoding" in the process of reading, see Yu 1999b. 19 Manguel 1996, 42. 20 For the relationship between the origin of silent reading and word separation, see Saenger 1997, 1999a, and 1999b. 21 Cavallo and Chartier 1999, 24. 22 Cavallo and Chartier 1999, 24. 23 SS, Biographies, juan 432, no. 191. 24 SRYSHB, juan 8, reprint 357; HSYL, juan 11, 20a. 25 YXZX. 26 Dazibao were posters on which people wrote down their opinions or attacks of a person. They were then posted on a public bulletin board for the general public to view. 27 The illustration was originally taken from a Ming edition Shuihu zhuan, reprinted in Chuang 1998, 38. 28 LYJS, juan 1. 29 SBLC, juan 20, 7a-7b. 30 See for example a poem recorded in SBLC, juan 20, 25b. Judith T. Zeitlin (2003) examines the cultural phenomena of tibishi (poems written on walls) and male recording females' poems from walls during the imperial period. 31 Wang Qinghui's story can be found in SBLC, juan 13, 4a-5a; HRZYT, juan 2, 8b-9a; CGL, juan 3; and Wen Tianxiang's Wenshan xiansheng quanji, juan 14. For an English account of her life and translation of her poem, see Chang and Saussy 1999, 113. 32 LJSY, 1a-1b. 33 JSTY, by , juan 4 " xianggong yinhen banshantang" [The Stubborn Prime Minister Nursed a Grievance in the Hall of Half Mountain]; and juan 6 "Yu Zhongju tishi yu shanghuang" [Yu Zhongju Met the Emperor Through an Inscribed Poem], reprint, 39-50, 63-79. 34 See for example Lin 's story in GXZZ, bieji, juan shang, 13a-14a.

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35 For example, (1898-1976), the late premier of the People's Republic of China, was remembered by his secretaries to read documents and issue executive orders in the toilet. 36 Nielsen 2000, 155. Thanks go to Minae Savas for pointing out this source for me. 37 See for example RLWS, Chapter 17, reprint 172. 38 Fang 1998, 197. 39 Chang and Saussy, 1999, 302. 40 Wang 1980, 158. 41 SBLC, juan 14, 8b-9b. 42 GTL, juan xia, 6b. 43 SYZJ, juan 13, 5a. 44 HSYL, juan 3, 27a. 45 YS, Biographies, juan 160, no. 47. 46 YS, Biographies, juan 186, no. 73. 47 MS, Biographies, juan 180, no. 68. 48 MS, Biographies, juan 207, no. 95. 49 See for example, WLJS, juan 5, 5a. 50 SBLC, juan 21, 26a. 51 HSYL, juan 30, 5b-6a. 52 Gao 2000, 184. 53 YS, Biographies, juan 171, no. 58. 54 MS, Biographies, juan 137, no. 25. 55 Zhu 1999, 1. 56 Fang 1998, 955-966. 57 Fang 1998, 704-705. 58 Fang 1998, 1129-1130. 59 SBLC, juan 5, 27b-28a. 60 YJZ. 61 Chartier 1988a. 62 Brook 1996, 114-117. 63 McDermott 2003. 64 Lee 1995. 65 See for example SYZJ, juan 13, 5a; and SBLC, juan 36, 14a-14b. 66 SBLC, juan 36, 14a-14b. Sima's treatment of books was repeatedly used in contemporary China's discourse as an example of why and how books should be revered. See for example

146 http://www.they.china.com/whbl-jxzz.htm for the use of such a story. It was argued that books carried dignity. Since dignity lay in the knowledge the books conveyed, dushuren acquired dignity through book reading. 67 Ko 1994, 45. 68 Huang 1987, 327. 69 Interestingly, the same reading habit was found in Umberto Eco's bestseller The Name of the Roses. The story was set in a European monastery in the year of 1327, where a series of murders occurred within a short period of time. Several monks were killed mysteriously. It was later found out that they all moistened their fingers to turn the pages of a forbidden book, corners of which had been poisoned by the book's guardian. See Eco 1983. Thanks to Jonathan Roberts for pointing out this parallel situation. 70 For a detailed description of the development and activities of xizihui, see Leung 1994b. 71 Taga 1960, 596; Sakai 1960, 432; cf. Leung 1994b, 87. 72 DSL, reprint 516. 73 ZSBJ, juan 4, 41a. 74 YYRS, reprint 94-95. 75 SRYSHB, juan 9, reprint 397. 76 Clunas 1991, p 9. 77 Jacobsen and Grindley 1999, 32. 78 Jacobsen and Grindley 1999, 29-31. 79 ZSBJ, juan 7, 29b-30a. 80 ZSBJ, juan 7, 30a-32a. 81 Chuang 1998, 134. 82 The illustration was originally taken from a Ming Wanli edition of Luban jing. Reprinted in Chuang 1998, 134. 83 This acupuncture point is located at the center of the sole of the feet. Chinese medical theory holds that massaging this acupoint could warm the feet, relieve tension, and alleviate weariness. 84 ZWZ, juan 6, 7b. 85 MS, Biographies, juan 163, no. 51. 86 SYZJ, juan 3, 8b. This chair sounds similar to the high chairs mentioned by Shen Zhaolin (1801-1862) used in his native Hangzhou area. While a child, Shen had a tendency to faint and fall. Since children sat on high chairs while reading (probably preventing them from falling asleep), Shen would suddenly suffered from a seizure and passed out, falling onto the ground together with the chair. See Hsiung 1994, 91. 87 ZWZ, juan 12, 1a. 88 See section 3.2.5 "Reading at Night." 89 HSYL, juan 23, 8b. 90 Needham and Wang 1959, 657. 147

91 LXABJ, juan 10, 9a; translation is based on Needham's with some corrections made by me. According to Needham and Wang 1959, there are several specimens of this lamp preserved in the Museum in China. 92 MS, Biographies, juan 209, no. 97. 93 Chang and Saussy 1999, 218-220. 94 Goodrich 1967. This edition, published by the Hong Kong University Press in 1967, is a facsimile reproduction of the copy preserved in the . 95 Zhang Zhigong (1992) proposes that it was an early Yuan production (1280-1368). Zhang’s evidence is very convincing. He looks at various aspects of the text, including the political and philosophical thoughts the choice of words represents, the material culture that certain terms reflect, the character taboo practices in Song and Yuan, the forms of certain characters, as well as the comparison with its offspring editions. His conclusion is that this edition was a transitional text between a Southern Song edition (around the beginning of the thirteenth century), and the Ming and Qing editions. 96 Hegel 1998 discusses the boom of illustrated books during the Ming Dynasty. 97 Hegel 1998, 164-214. 98 The sixteen words/characters are: eight nouns that classify professions and social categorization (shi nong gong shang ru shi dao ren: scholar, peasant, artisan, merchant, Confucianist, Buddhist, Daoist, commoner); six adjectives that describe human figures (bo tuo gao fei shou: lame, hunchback, tall, short, fat, thin); and two nouns that depict shapes (fang yuan: square, circle). Among the three categories, the last category can be easily represented by pictures while the first two need the context to facilitate the link between the characters and the corresponding pictures. 99 Based on the width and length of the original page provided by Goodrich, the little squares that contain the drawings and characters are 3.35 cm wide by 3.4 cm long. With this decent size, both the pictures and characters are very easy to recognize, unlike the case with cheap copies printed typically by the printing houses during the late imperial period. 100 Gandelman 1991. 101 For Gao Lian's life and his Eight Discourses, see Clunas 1991, 13-20. 102 ZSBJ, juan 7, 3a-b. 103 CGL, juan 15, 14b-15a. 104 Caigen tan was Confucian-bent in nature but was also very popular among the Buddhists, especially in . It was well received and studied in Japan and became popular again in 1980's both in Taiwan and Mainland China. For an introduction and its influence in Japan, see Gong 1988, Vos 1993. For translations of its aphorisms, see Chin 1979, Wilson 1985. 105 The other three are Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), Tang Yin (1470-1523), Qiu Ying (fl. First half of the sixteenth century). They are referred to either the “The Four Ming Masters” (Ming si jia) or the Suzhou School (Wumen huapai). See Tianjin renmin 1993. 106 For an introduction on Shen Zhou, see Cahill 1978, 83. 107 Both Fig 3.6 and 3.7 are taken from Tianjin renmin 1993. 108 DSL, reprint 516. 148

109 DSL, reprint 516. 110 For a discussion on this genre and translations of these dufa essays, see Rolston 1990. 111 JSTQJ, 18; translation from Rolston 1990, 133, no.8. 112 JSTQJ, 19; translation from Rolston 1990, 135, no.18. 113 JPMDF, 83; translation from Rolston 1990, 235, no.72. 114 Lee 1977, 45. 115 Xu 1996b, Teng 1968. According to Teng (1968, xii-xiii), the genre had its predecessors in a number of chapters in the Book of History. 116 YSJX, Chapter 8, reprint 80-81, translation from Teng 1968, 54-55. 117 Liu 1959, 161. 118 YSSF, reprint 48. For an analysis and translation of it, see Ebrey 1984. 119 FWJX, reprint 40. 120 QDYY, juan 20, 19a-b. 121 For discussions on Lu's thoughts and his position in the Cheng-Zhu school, see Wilhelm 1965, 291-293, and Chan 1975, 551-552. 122 Lu Longqi's writings were posthumously collected by his nephew Lu Lizheng in Sanyutang wenji. A of his life (nianpu) was compiled by his second son Lu Chenzheng and son-in- law Li Xuan. 123 Wu 1995, 148-149. 124 Wu 1995, 138. 125 For Zhu Xi's distinction between learning for self and learning for others, see Gardner 1989, 143-144. Cheng Duanli put this theoretical distinction into practice in his Daily Schedule with a carefully planned learning schedule, see Hennings and Kurtz 1993 for a detailed discussion. One of Lu Longqi's contributions to promoting Zhu's teachings was to have reprinted Cheng Duanli's Daily Schedule at the age of sixty (1690) and to promote its use among students and friends. 126 In another letter to Dingzheng written while he was still alive, Lu Longqi spelled out his understanding of what reading was for and gave advice on how Dingzheng should read in a proper way. See his "Shi da'er Dingzheng" [A letter to my eldest son Dingzheng] in SYTWJ, juan 6, 9a-10a. 127 NP, 7a. 128 NP, 12b. 129 ZJGY, "Preface.”

149

CHAPTER 4

READING IN THE INNER CHAMBERS

4.1 Introduction

The previous two chapters have examined the reading education of boys and a culture of reading dominated by men. This arrangement does not imply that women were excluded from this culture. Although compared with boys’ education, girls’ literacy education was not a priority under Confucian ideology, partly because the civil service examination was inaccessible to female aspirants, a good proportion of the female population in the late imperial period nevertheless achieve literacy to various degrees and participated in the culture of reading. In fact, Chinese women of the late imperial period enjoyed such a unique and rich literate and literary world of their own that their acquisition of literacy and their use of literate skills deserve an extended discussion.

This chapter follows the scholarly trend to reevaluate the status of women in late imperial China. The modern Western and Chinese imagination of the pitiful status and poor education of women in traditional China has been challenged by many recent studies on women’s education and women’s writings of the late imperial period. Jennifer Holmgren challenges the misconception of a victimized

150 premodern Chinese woman and traces its origin to the history of Western attitudes toward women, and modern Chinese feminists’ preoccupation with women’s emancipation.1 Susan Mann recounts the stories of and

Yang Guifei to illustrate how Western historical imagination and Chinese modern appropriations have cooperated to create the myth of a weak and oppressed Asian woman.2 Dorothy Ko poignantly points out that the inventors of this “ahistorical Chinese tradition” were the “May Fourth , the Communist revolution, and Western feminist scholarship.”3

Seeing women as an active agent in Chinese history, contemporary historians have “rescued” early modern women from being “victims” of the Confucian patriarchal order.4

Along with this direction of historical scholarship, there has been a growing interest in the past decade on the study of “writing women.” Armed with analytical concepts such as “subjectivity” and “voice,” China specialists in both the early modern and modern fields have paid much attention to “writing women” and “women’s writing” in hope of discovering a female consciousness and the ideological constraints on women who wrote.5 Among all writing women, two groups have attracted much attention: high-level courtesans and the cloistered women of established families, both of whom had advanced levels of literacy and fine skills in composing poetry.6

151 The focus of my research shifts the attention from “writing women” to

“reading women,” which includes all those who could read but who did not necessarily leave any writing behind. In most cases, erudite women were found among the elite class, whose families’ wealth and values on education enabled them to have easier access to the necessary material and financial resources as well as the leisure time required for attaining and using literacy. However, a large number of Chinese women of lower social origins, most notably courtesans or palace women, were also literate. Many of them elevated their social status with the help of high achievements in their literary pursuits. Additionally, economic growth, urbanization, commercialization, as well as developments in print technology enabled more and more women to attain literacy.

By expanding the subject from female writers to female readers, the scope of this research allows me to treat “writing women” as a special case of “reading women”: writing women were exceptional readers who used their literate skills to pour out their ideas and feelings through ink and paper.7 The exploration of the reading world of women provides us a new perspective on the historical circumstances around the writing activities of literate women.

Inspired by Rebecca Krug’s study of women’s literate practice in England from 1100 to 1500,8 I propose a theoretical distinction between two concepts:

“literacy” and “literate practice” in the Chinese context. The term “literacy” refers to a continuum of reading and writing skills that range from the full

152 mastery of the written language to knowing a few hundred characters. This definition includes on the one end, what J. Marshall Unger calls “restricted literacy,”9 and on the other end, what Evelyn Rawski refers to as “functional literacy” which is “the acquisition of some functional level of reading and writing abilities.”10

By “literate practice,” I mean individuals’ social use of their reading and writing skills. This definition is slightly different from Krug’s use of the term.

For her research, she distinguishes “literate practice” from “literacy” in order to look at illiterate women’s responses to written words without addressing the question of whether they are literate or not. This distinction is important in the context of late medieval England where it was common for husbands and brothers to read to their illiterate wives and sisters. In the context of late imperial

China, however, what is at issue is the gap between the spread of female literacy and the societal constraints over how women should use their reading skills.

Female literacy was generally allowed and at certain times even encouraged to boost a young woman’s chances of a good marriage. What the patriarchal society could not agree on, however, was how women should use their literate skills. It was fine for literate women to teach their sons to read, to keep financial records of a household, to write letters to each other, or to compose poetry together with men. But if women exchanged erotic poems with their lovers or attempted to participate in the civil service examinations, the society at large

153 would not sanction such behavior. Here, I will argue that what increased patriarchal anxiety over women’s education during the late imperial period was not the rise in female literacy or the growth of female erudition per se, but rather the expansion of women’s literate practices, particularly writing in the sphere of men.

The following sections consist of three interrelated themes. The first part entitled “Road to Literacy” documents a “downward” and “outward” trend of the spread of female literacy in a chronological order and examines the prescriptive and descriptive discourses on girls’ literacy education. The second part called “Reading Women’s Literate Practices” investigates how reading women were supposed to use their literate skills in a patriarchal society. The analysis is based largely on the construction of female reader images in male writings. The third part titled “Self-representation of Women’s Reading” investigates women’s own representation of themselves as readers through an examination of women’s poetry and essays.

4.2 The Road to Literacy

In a classic study on women’s education of the Southern dynasties (420-589),

Beatrice Spade argues that the education of women hailing from either the prominent families or the lower bureaucratic families improved dramatically from the fourth to the sixth centuries, due to certain particular historical circumstances of that time. During the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), the

154 characteristics of a good woman were promulgated as “purity, obedience, filial piety, humility and virtuousness.”11 This ideal gave way to a new image of an intelligent, capable, strong-willed, and erudite woman during the Southern dynasties. The factors contributing to this change were the rise of private tutoring and schooling for girls and the increasing popularity of Buddhism and

Daoism among women.

While her argument was valid that the fourth- to sixth-century southern societies were permissive and even supportive of elite women’s education,

Spade’s reliance on the vision of the ideal women in Han times as represented in

Liu Xiang’s (ca. 77- ca.6 B.C.) Lienü zhuan (Biographies of eminent women) and

Ban Zhao’s (ca. 49-ca.120) Nü jie (Admonitions for women) as a comparison basis is a matter of debate.12 There are reasons to believe that the “ideal women” presented in these texts was not a predominant social reality. First, neither Lienü zhuan nor Nü jie can be seen as true descriptions of the reality of women’s situation of the Han dynasty. On the contrary, they can be read as a Confucian reaction toward the social reality of the period. Second, although both Lienü zhuan and Nü jie advised women to embrace their “lowly and weak” (beiruo) position as opposed to men, neither of them admonish their women readers not to learn to read or receive education. An eminent woman herself, was the co-author of Hanshu (Book of Han), the official history of the Han dynasty.

She was also invited to visit the palace frequently to instruct the empress and

155 imperial consorts.13 For all her achievements, she thanked her doting father and exemplary mother, who was her first teacher. Other learned women during and before Ban Zhao’s period who left a mark in Chinese literary history included

Zhuo Wenjun, Feng , Ban jieyu (“Favorite Beauty Ban,” ca. 48-ca. 6 B.C.E.),

Xu Shu, and (176?-early ).14 Under Confucian ideology of the

Han dynasty, therefore, the demand for female virtue and domesticity did not preclude female literacy. On the contrary, the fulfillment of virtue required a certain degree of literacy.

The Song dynasty was generally considered a turning point for women’s status since it was lowered due to the rise of Neo-Confucianism. However, even

Zhu Xi complained about the paucity of reading materials for women and laid out a plan to write one.15 Lü Kun (1536-1613), another Confucian thinker, reacted to a rise in female literacy by producing treatises on the model behavior for his women readers.16 Despite the widespread maxim of “women without talent are virtuous” (nüzi wu cai bian shi de) from late Ming times on, the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries still saw a growing number of educated women.17

One of the earliest prescriptive references to teaching girls reading and writing comes from Jia fan (Household rules), a family instruction authored by the prominent Song scholar-official (1019-1086). Sima Guang was best known as a grand historian who compiled (The comprehensive mirror for aid in government). As the chief political opponent of

156 Wang Anshi (1021-1086) who started a political reform during the reign of

Shenzong (r.1068-1086), Sima Guang was also known as a spokesman for the leading conservative force in the court. During the reign of Zhezong (r. 1086-

1101), he was appointed Great Minister and completely revamped Wang’s reform program.18 A native of Xia County of Shan Prefecture (today’s Xia county in ), Sima spent nearly two decades (1066-1085) in Luoyang, Henan, where he finished Zizhi tongjian. It was probably during that period that he compiled

Jia fan and Jujia zayi (Miscellaneous proprieties for managing the family), both of which, together with Yuan Cai’s Shi fan (Precepts for social life) became models for household instruction in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Sima Guang was heavily influenced by the Book of Rites (Li ji) in his instruction on the different behavioral codes for men and women. In the Book of

Rites, it was stated that men could not talk about the affairs of the inner chambers while women could not discuss the outer world. Only during the family rituals could men and women pass utensils to each other. Even when doing this, they should avoid touching each others’ hands. Men and women could not share the same well (for water), bathroom, sleeping mat, or clothes. When men entered the inner chambers, they should not make any noise. While walking outside, women must have their faces covered to avoid being seen. On streets, men should walk on the right side of the road while women the left side.19 In Sima

Guang’s Household Rules, the different spheres men and women should occupy

157 were similarly emphasized: men should be in charge of the “outer matters”

(waishi) while women the “inner matters” (neishi). Men were not supposed to stay in bedrooms during daytime whereas women could not peek outside of their inner chambers without good justification.

While the Book of Rites did not mention girls’ education in particular, Sima

Guang applied the strict differentiation and separation of sexes to the education of boys and girls. At the age of six sui, children were taught numbers and directions. Boys started to practice calligraphy while girls began to do small needlework. At the age of seven, boys and girls could no longer share the same sitting mat, nor could they eat together any more. Boys were taught to recite the

Classic of Filial Piety and the Analects. Sima Guang suggested that even girls should be taught to recite the same two texts since this would be beneficial. At the age of eight, boys were taught to recite the Shangshu (Book of documents).

Sima Guang did not say if girls should be taught the same text. Since the

Shangshu was a relatively difficult text, he probably did not think this was an appropriate text to be assigned to girls. From the age of eight, girls could not step outside of the inner chambers. At the age of nine, boys started to recite the

Spring and Autumn Annals and all kinds of other history books. At the same time, they began to be instructed in the meaning of all the texts they had recited so that they could understand the basic principles (yili). Meanwhile, adults were to explain to girls the meaning of the Analects, the , and the

158 Biographies of Eminent Women and the Admonitions for Women. Girls were only required to know the general meanings of these texts. At the age of ten, boys were sent out to study with a tutor. They could no longer reside in the inner chambers. They would study the Book of Odes, the Book of Rites, and the commentaries to the . From there, they could later read more books extensively such as the Mencius (Meng zi) and the Xun zi

(Master Xun’s philosophy). As for girls, reading instruction stopped at the age of ten, the same time when they began to be trained to be docile. They also started to learn the more complicated needlework from this age on.

From this instruction, we know that the only time period when a girl had access to classical texts was the two years from age seven to nine. Although it was not stated, her teacher was probably her mother who taught her both the basic texts and needlework. The different life paths for boys and girls were set as early as six sui. Unlike their brothers, girls’ gentle wrists and fingers were not trained to handle brush and paper, but needle and fabrics. In this text, Sima

Guang did not present any contempt for women or their intelligence. The different requirements from boys and girls in learning to read were determined by their different roles in the household and society at large.

Sima Guang’s regulation did imply a “passive” and “restricted” literacy for girls. The reading activities girls had were “passive”: before they learned to recognize characters, they simply recited what they heard; when they were old

159 enough to understand textual meanings, they only listened to the meaning of the texts being explained to them. Their exposure to texts was also limited to a selected few, namely, the Analects, the Classic of Filial Piety, Biographies of

Exemplary Women, and Admonishment for Women. Additionally, in Sima Guang’s vocabulary, the verb “du” was used for boys’ reading activities but not for girls.

From Sima Guang’s regulations, we do not see an image of a girl holding a book to herself to read in private while a boy was certainly allowed to do so. In her study on the life of women during the Song dynasty, Patricia Ebrey claims that

“even though girls did not follow the same schedule as their brothers, they would read such books as the Analects, Classic of Filial Piety, and the Biographies of

Great Women.” 20 It is important to note here that although both boys and girls were taught to read, they were supposed to read in a different manner, with girls more restricted by their parents.

This “restricted” literacy was not limited in terms of the number of characters girls were taught. In fact, the number of characters they knew was probably adequate for them to carry out household responsibilities or pursue some literary pastime such as poetry writing. Given that they memorized the two basic texts

(the Analects and the Classic of Filial Piety), they could have the potential of recognizing at least hundreds, if not thousands, of different Chinese characters.21

Sima Guang’s Household Rules became very popular after its publication. It was reproduced in various encyclopedia for people’s daily reference. Zhao

160 (1085-1147), a scholar-official of the Southern Song dynasty who also came from

Shanxi, ordered his sons and grandsons to each make a copy of the Household

Rules and read it frequently.22 In another treatise called Jia Li (Family rites), commonly (and mistakenly according to the compilers of the ) attributed to Zhu Xi, Sima Guang’s education schedules for children were copied verbatim.23 It is safe to assume that many households followed Sima Guang’s instructions and probably heeded his advice on how to teach girls.

Despite the “restricted” literacy training model espoused by Sima Guang, the

Northern Song dynasty actually saw many bright and exceptional women who could read and write. Miss (1004-1052) was said to enjoy reading.24 Miss

Qian (1030-1181) mastered literature and history together with the art of calligraphy and composition.25 Miss Huang (1063-1121), the eldest of the three daughters from a scholarly family, could recite passages amounting to over ten thousand characters a day.26 As Patricia Ebrey has pointed out, literacy seemed to have enhanced a woman’s chances of getting a good marriage and women were praised in biographies for their familiarity with books and for teaching their sons to read and monitoring their exercise of this skill.27

Although Sima Guang’s Household Rules did not approve of girls learning to chant poetry (geshi), poems seemed to be a popular genre used to teach girls during the Song period. Many women’s exposure to poetry at a young age can be partly explained by the fact that poetry was a main subject in the Song civil

161 service examination system following its peak in the Tang dynasty.28 Miss Wang

(987-1041), daughter of a prime minister, was taught by her father to recite several hundred of the Tang poet Bai Juyi’s (772-864) poems and when she was little.29 Wei Tai (ca 1015-1110) commented in his work on poetry that elite women of his time were mostly skilled at composing poems. He cited that in the household of Wang Anshi, Wang’s younger sister, daughter, and wife had all written impressive lines.30 The seven daughters of a Miss Huang (1063-

1121) were adept at the Book of Odes thanks to their mother’s instruction.31

The Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) saw the spread of literacy into the lower classes. Girls from lower classes began to be reported to have attained relatively high levels of literacy. In a story recorded by Hong Mai (1123-1202), the concubine of a rich merchant Chen Rengong from the Changle country of

Fuzhou Prefecture could read. On the night of the first day of the first lunar month in the year of 1174, she dreamed of three men coming into her chamber who wrote several huge characters on the wall predicting that Mr. Chen would die a violent death on the seventh day of the fourth lunar month. Afraid to tell her husband, the concubine divulged the secret to her maids. The prediction turned out to be true when Mr. Chen died in a boating accident several months later because of his greed.32 Miss He, a contracted concubine of a widowed Gao

Wenhu (1134-1212), was said to be able to help him “look things up and answer

162 letters.”33 This spread of literacy was probably due to a growing concubine market that demanded girls have basic literate skills.34

Economic expansion, the growth of large commercial cities in the South, as well as advances in printing technology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries enabled girls of the educated class to have easier access to books and thus enhance their erudition. Miss Dai (1121-1192) had a doting maternal grandfather who had just taken up the teaching profession. He taught her all the classics required for a boy’s education.35 Miss Gu Jinghua (1186-1238), daughter of a writer, learned prose written by various writers and historians, together with

Daoist and Buddhist books.36 Miss Miaozhuang (d. 1257) was reported to read on a daily basis several passages from the Analects and the Mencius, the latter being a textbook assigned only to boys by Sima Guang.37 The fact that Lady

Wei (fl. 1050) and (1084-1151) were praised as the quintessential poetesses by male literati such as Zhu Xi (1130-1200) might have created an appealing image for aspiring girl poets. Published collections of poems written by female poets might have enjoyed a large female readership. Some erudite women even made a bold attempt to break into the public sphere which was supposed to be a male space. In the year 1212, a girl named Wu Zhiduan went to attend the examination for precocious children.38

In contrast with the spread of literacy and the rise of female erudition was a decreased attention given to women’s literacy training. The family instructions

163 of the Southern Song dynasty represented by Yuan Cai’s Precepts for Social Life,

Lu You’s (1125-1210) Family Instruction of Lu You (Fangweng jiaxun), and Ye

Mengde’s (fl. 1138) Family Instruction of Ye Mengde (Shilin jiaxun) were silent about girls’ education. All of these male literati stressed the importance of teaching sons and grandsons to study but did not mention girls at all.39 Yuan Cai emphasized that women should not interfere with the business of their husbands and sons even if they squandered the family property.40 He recognized that there were women with incompetent husbands or widows with young sons who were literate (zi shi shu suan) enough to manage the household finance either themselves or with some outside aid.41 However, he did not seem to expect such behavior from most women.42

The seeds of the late Ming popular saying “women without talent are virtuous” seemed to have been sowed during the Southern Song. Investigating women’s refusal to show their poetic works to others, Patricia Ebrey has found that the Neo-Confucian objection to poetry writing was responsible for suppressing women’s literary toward the end of the Song dynasty.43 In a biography Lu You wrote of his cousin’s daughter Miss Sun (1141-1193), he showed apparent approval and admiration toward women who did not pursue their literary talents. He recorded an incident in which Miss Sun turned down the offer from Li Qingzhao to teach her by saying “Talent is not women’s business.”44 Many other women loved poetry but chose not to indulge in this

164 pursuit. This Neo-Confucian injunction against poetry writing provided an important precedent for the late Ming maxim.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries continued to see a reticence on women’s education in the prescriptive discourse. Under foreign domination by the Khitans, Jurchen, and Mongols, Chinese women probably kept their way of life as they did under the Chinese rulers.45 There is no evidence to show that the different customs in the alien rulers’ treatment of women and their unique family systems affected the male literati’s discourse on the way of life for Chinese women. In the family instruction of the Zheng clan who resided from early Yuan

(1271-1368) to early Ming for ten generations in the county of

Prefecture (today’s Zhejiang Province), there was no mention whatsoever of the clan women’s literacy training, but only strict rules to ensure their proper manners and behavior.46

In spite of this continued silence in the prescriptive discourse on women’s literacy instruction in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the descriptive discourse we see that fathers became more involved in their daughters' literacy training and literary pursuits. Zhang Yuniang (fl. 13th century), was taught by her father the Classics of Filial Piety and the

Admonishments for Women.47 Sun Huilan (1305-1328), a native of Kaifeng, was a prolific poet who died young at the age of twenty-three. Losing her mother at the age of six, she studied books before she learned to do needlework. Her teacher

165 was her father who taught her the Classic of Filial Piety, the Analects, and the

Admonishments for Women. Although he did not teach her the art of poetry, Sun

Huilan picked it up herself by reading books belonging to her younger brother who was studying Tang poems at the time.48 Another female poet, Guo

Zhenshun (1308-?), a native of the Longxi area (today’s Province), studied under the guidance of her father who was a teacher himself.49 The fact that some other female poets’ fathers were teachers by profession (e.g. Zhao

Xizhu, native of Henan, whose father Zhao Songqiu was a teacher; and Zheng

Yunduan (ca. 1327-1356) whose father and brothers were all teachers’;50) indicates a correlation between these women’s accomplishments and their fathers’ encouragement and personal tutelage.

By the end of the fourteenth century, there was indirect evidence that female literacy had spread into the merchant class. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, a merchant class slowly emerged to assert themselves and competed with the ruling elite in terms of social power. Metropolitan cities and urban commerce in China developed to an unprecedented scale. The economy expanded in what Mark Elvan calls a “medieval economic revolution.”51 Large cities such as Hangzhou and became hubs for commercial activities and urban life.52 In a short story collection Jiandeng xinhua (New stories by the lamp) written by a Qiantang (today’s Hangzhou) native You (1341—1427), there is one story about the two daughters of a rich rice merchant in the Wu

166 county: Xue Lanying and Xue Huiying. Both were good at poetry and wrote several hundred poems. Reading a collection of West Lake zhuzhi tunes composed by a Guiji scholar, they matched them with their own compositions.53

Female literacy continued to rise in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Lü

Desheng (fl. 16th century), father of the well-known Confucian thinker Lü Kun

(1536-1618), wrote two popular textbooks for children: Xiao’er yu (Words for boys), and Nü xiao’er yu (Words for girls), popular works with rhymed phrases created respectively for boys and girls to memorize. Before Lü Desheng, admonishments such as Ban Zhao’s Nü jie, Madame Zheng’s Nü xiaojing (Classic of filial piety for women), and Song Ruoxin’s Nü lunyu (Analects for women) were all addressed to an upper-class female audience. Based on the advice Lü gave and the language style he adopted in Nü xiao’er yu, it can be inferred that his targeted audience was girls from the middle and lower classes. He used simple language to advise them to work before others and eat after others. They should know where all the kitchen utensils were. They should keep themselves clean all the time by frequently rinsing their mouth and cleaning their hands.

They should not use elaborately embroidered quilts since those were difficult to launder. More importantly, they should not read heterodox books or listen to heterodox words (xieshu xiu kan, xiehua xiu ting).54 He did not specify what books were “heterodox.” Given the social environment of his times, they might refer to as the increasingly popular texts of fiction and drama.

167 By the end of the sixteenth century, as noted by Joanna Handlin, women’s literacy spread to such an extent that Confucian scholars such as Lü Kun (1536-

1618) were compelled to target their didactic works toward a female audience.55

He took it upon himself to continue his father’s work to write popular pedagogical literature for boys and girls. His works were intended for those

“women and girls among the people who suddenly have three or five volumes in their chest.”56 In his Gui fan (Exemplars in the female quarters), he rearranged the categories in Lienü zhuan and provided his own encomiums for exemplary women. Although he added a category called “literary women” (wenxue zhi fu) which briefly praised Cai Yan (Wenji), Li Qingzhao, and Zhu Shuzhen, he did not approve of women excelling at literature. According to him, virtuous girls and chaste women never value literature. Therefore, the model woman in this category was not the aforementioned accomplished poets, but Ban jieyu.

Although Ban jieyu was a talented poet in her own right, did not highlight her literary talents, but rather her virtuous behavior: She not only declined the imperial favor to ride with the emperor in order to preserve his reputation as a wise ruler, but also shunned competition with other imperial consorts to prevent court politics.57 In other words, literary talent by itself was not adequate to qualify a woman as exemplary. It was how she used her literary talent that mattered. As for literacy instruction, Lü Kun summarized and endorsed Sima Guang’s schedule for girls.

168 Despite Neo-Confucians’ anxieties over more women becoming literate and erudite, the late Ming and Early Qing period can be characterized as the peak for women’s learning. An interesting phenomenon that signaled a potential transgression of male/female-outer/inner boundaries was the emergence of formal schooling for young girls in some families. In the famous play Peony

Pavilion, an important plot was Prefect Du’s selection of teachers for his daughter

Du Liniang. The selection criteria were first old age and second erudition (fu ru).58 Similar plots appear in stories written by (1640-1715) and in

Hong Lou Meng when Daiyu’s father chose an elderly man as her private tutor. 59

In one story of the collection Pai’an jingqi (Amazing tales) authored by Ling

Mengchu (1580-1644), a girl called Xixi was sent by her parents to study with their neighbor’s son in their family school.60 In a story in Jiandeng xinhua, a girl called Liu Cuicui was so smart that her parents sent her to the village school to study with boys.61 Previously, only courtesans and nuns enjoyed the freedom to travel around in public to seek male teachers, and only female teachers were allowed into the inner quarters to instruct female students. This new social phenomenon to invite male teachers into the inner quarters and to send girls out to schools signaled the elevated values put on women’s education. It also reflected the idea pointed out by William T. Rowe that women had to depend on men’s guidance to achieve literary and moral sophistication. 62

169 The rise of fiction and drama as well as an explosion of published texts from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of seventeenth century gave urban women easier access to more texts both in terms of quantity and variety.

Tang Xianzu’s (1550-1616) masterpiece Peony Pavilion fueled “a cult of qing (love, emotion, feelings)” among its passionate female readers. Peony Pavilion was also the first text authored by a male that attracted females to write commentaries.63

As Dorothy Ko has explored, for girls who approached fiction and drama texts in the Ming and Qing period, reading constituted four meanings. First, fiction reading provided girls with role models and helped them form expectations for future life. Second, it aided them in constructing an imagined world. Third, reading became “fatal” for women when they did it in an addictive manner.

Fourth, reading was transcendental when women found friendships in imagined and real reading circles.64

Women’s reading of fiction and drama invited drastically different reactions from male literati. suggested fiction and drama be used as textbooks for girls to improve their reading skills. The rationale, as he put it, was that these texts gave them an incentive to read unfamiliar texts. According to him, these books used vernacular language and slang (changtan suyu) that made them more accessible to female readers. These books should be given to girls when they had acquired a certain number of characters and were at a stage of eagerly looking for more reading matters. When these unskillful readers encounter new

170 characters in a sentence, they could guess what the characters were from the context. Thus, they could learn more characters without consulting a teacher.65

Other literati, however, rejected the idea of women reading fiction, especially erotic works. Zhang Zhupo (1670-1698), a commentator of Jin Ping Mei (Golden lotus), advised that this book be banned for female readers. He disapproved of the practice of many people who would read a chapter or two from the book to their wives and concubines while in bed. For him, Jin Ping Mei was such a highly crafted piece of art that only the most talented and discerning reader could discover the superb quality. Among male readers, there were already very few who could detect the admonishing message in the book and discipline themselves accordingly. According to him, there were even fewer among women who possessed this capability. He suggested that for women who were excellent at books and histories, Zuo’s Commentary and the Book of Odes were appropriate reading matters. To strengthen his argument, he further noted that women need not learn to write essays after all. Therefore, the compositional strategies and patterns in Jin Ping Mei would be beyond their abilities to master.

Even if they could, it was of no use to them. In one word, women’s lack of ability to appreciate the deeper meanings of Jin Ping Mei made them unqualified readers of the book. Zhang worried that people would blame the book when women took the sexual descriptions in the book as models and failed to admonish themselves. Furthermore, even if some women did have the required reading

171 skill, they would not have any use of it, since writing essays was not their business to begin with.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a boom in published anthologies of women’s poetry. 66 Both male literati and female poets participated in this “movement” to preserve the otherwise obscure and lost voices of female poets. This increased interest in women’s poetry can be seen both as a reflection of the literary trend at the time and as fueling the fad for poetry among women rich and poor. The story of He Shuangqing (1714-?) found in Shi Zhenlin’s (1693-ca. 1779) Xiqing sanji (Random records of west-green) attested to the fact that even the daughters of poor peasants were striving to learn poetry by the middle of the eighteenth century.67 Although Shuangqing’s story could be a fictionalized legend of an ideal feminine image fantasized and fetishized by a male literatus,68 the narrative of how she acquired literacy, whether fictional or not, gives us clues on how lower classes women could have learned to read. He Shuangqing was a native of Xiaoshan (in today’s ,

Jiangsu Province). She was born into a lowly peasant family. At a young age, she learned poetry by listening to her maternal uncle who taught in the village school. She exchanged her beautiful embroidery for poems to study. She also learned to be a skillful calligrapher.69

Shuangqing’s acquisition of literacy is echoed in the experience of a young talented woman about whom we have more reliable information. In a much

172 celebrated account of female talent and virtue, Shen Fu (1763-?) relates how his wife, Chen Yun (1763-1803), learned to read. Compared with Shuangqing, Chen

Yun came from a family of higher social status, but lowly economic means. Chen

Yun was from a poor scholar’s family. She lost her father when she was four years old. When she grew older, her fine needlework provided for her family of three, as well as her brother’s education. Like Shuangqing, she had no teacher, nor books. However, she managed to teach herself with the help of one poem.

When she started to talk, she was taught to recite a long poem written by the

Tang poet Bai Juyi. Several years later, finding a written copy of the poem in her brother’s book-box, she learned to recognize all the characters as she recalled the poem she had memorized. Thus, she embarked on the road to literacy.

Throughout the late imperial period, there was a special route for girls from obscure backgrounds to attain literacy: when they were selected as palace women or sold as concubines and courtesans. Literacy, in these cases, took on both a utilitarian and aesthetic value. Both basic literacy and more advanced literary accomplishments became desirable qualities in these women whose major function was to serve and entertain men. Ironically, when underprivileged girls entered the palace and the bondage market, many received the most regulated literacy instruction.

In the Northern Song court, as Priscilla Ching Chung has investigated, the

Department of Education affiliated with the Bureau of Rites and Etiquette was in

173 charge of teaching palace women classical texts.70 Erudite women such as Ban

Zhao of the Han dynasty and Song Ruozhao (?-825) of the Tang Dynasty were summoned into the palace as female officials in charge of the education of palace women.71 Details of the palace women’s curricula are not available. But many female textbooks such as the Analects for Women (Nü lunyu) and Admonishments for the Inner Quarters (Nei xun) were first circulated in the palace. They later became very influential and made their way out of the palace and reached a general audience.

Of all people, Li Yu (1611-1680), an eccentric and highly talented literatus, playwright, commentator, and purported author of the erotic fiction Rou putuan

(Carnal prayer mat), left an interesting discussion on how to conduct basic literacy training for girls. In his Xianqing ouji, he devoted a small section to the topic of teaching concubines to read.72 According to him, if instructed properly, women could do better than men in learning beyond the initial stage. It was not because they were smarter, but they usually exhibited a greater level of concentration. The first step was to teach the girls to recognize characters.

According to his curriculum, girls should be taught to recognize characters before they learned to write them. Each day, they should be taught to recognize only a few characters. They should start from the simplest and most frequently used ones. After about one year and a half, they would be able to read books. At this turning point, they should be given interesting and well-plotted fiction to

174 read. From this point on, they no longer needed any teachers because books would become their best tutors.73

Following the tradition that many courtesans were fine poets, Li Yu advocated teaching concubines the art of poetry and explained how to teach girls to compose poems and lyrics. In his opinion, only one or two out of ten girls possessed the special linguistic gifts required for poetic composition. The method to select a potential poet was to observe how one talked in daily life. If in her casual speech, a woman could talk with a musical rhythm and never used repetitive or awkward words, then she was a good candidate. According to him, the key to learning poetry was to read aloud as many poems as possible (duo du).

He suggested choosing poems of the late Tang and Song as teaching materials for women. Poems of the Early, Middle, and High Tang, as well as those from earlier periods should be prevented from being seen by women. The reason was that poems suitable for women to learn should be plainly easy () and charmingly clever (jianyin). As for lyrics, women who were good at singing should be instructed in this art. Since women were exposed to lyrics and tunes on a daily basis, it was relatively easier for them to learn this art.

In summary, the prescriptive and descriptive discourses on females’ acquisition of literacy presented two sharply contrasting pictures of female literacy in late imperial China. From the prescriptive discourse, restriction on female literacy and suppression of female erudition are the most salient features.

175 The restriction and suppression is manifested in three aspects. First, girls’ education was supposed to be short and informal compared with boys’. Many a woman, like Chen Yun, obtained literacy “accidentally” without any parental intention to educate their daughters. Second, the contents of their literacy education were mostly moral admonishments, instructing them how to behave as proper women. Third, they were considered to be intellectually inferior to men and thus lacked the capacity (and necessity) to read more difficult texts.

Fourth and most importantly, girls’ use of their literacy skills was highly restricted. We will return to this point shortly.

From the descriptive discourse, however, the picture looks more complicated.

Although women were not supposed to devote themselves to reading and studying, but rather to needlework and domestic affairs, many of them did manage to have a lifelong experience with books and reading. If Hu Wenkai’s survey of women writers from the Han dynasty to the Qing dynasty can be used as a preliminary indicator of female literacy,74 then a pattern of rising female literacy emerges: throughout the late imperial period, there was a trend for the female literacy rate to increase overtime despite the Confucian and Neo-

Confucian emphasis on female virtues and domesticity. On the macrohistorical level, the developments in printing technology and book culture might be the major factors contributing to the increasing female literacy rate throughout the late imperial period. At the individual level, economic status, values placed on

176 education, parental attitudes, geographic differences, as well as local cultures might have more weight gender politics in determining a girl’s chances to attain literacy.

Some important changes took place in women’s literacy acquisition during the late imperial period: First, poetry increasingly became an important tool used by girls to attain literacy and pursue their literary talents. Second, in terms of the length, breadth, and depth of their learning, the early modern women kept breaking the boundaries set for them by orthodoxy. Third, males, especially fathers, increasingly became directly involved in women’s education. Many social factors contributed to these changes. I would like to highlight one of them.

The patriarchal and patrilinear society was generally tolerant of the rising female literacy. However, on the last and most critical front, that is, how women used their literate skills, there was little room to make concessions. It was on this ground that the debate over women’s learning took place in the eighteenth century. To clarify this point, I now turn to the issue of reading women’s literate practices as represented in male writings.

4.3 Reading Women’s Literate Practices

In the paradigm of “modernity,” an individual’s literacy is regarded as an indispensable tool for success and the literacy rate of a nation-state is seen as an important yardstick to measure its level of “modernity.” The ability to read and write on the part of an individual is believed to have the potential of liberation

177 and empowerment, opening the gate to all kinds of opportunities leading to success in a modern society. The act of reading is seen as a social practice that can transform a society from backwardness to progressiveness, from ignorance to enlightenment, and from barbarism to civilization. Similarly, if an individual has the ability to read and write, then little can stop the person from attaining a higher goal. Amidst all the talk about literacy, a blind spot of many modern scholars’ investigations is the social and cultural functions of literacy in different societies at different historical moments.

Chinese reading women’s literate practices present a case in point to show that a patriarchal society could be relatively tolerant of female literacy, but not loosen control over women’s literate practices. Through the discussion of representations of women’s literate practices in writings mainly authored by men,

I attempt to show how the society took special care as to what uses female readers could put their literate skills. This is not to suggest that the scope of female literate practices did not change over time. Nor does it exclude geographic variations and exceptions. I intend to argue that the concept of literate practice helps us to understand many seemingly contradictory arguments in the heated debate over women’s learning in the eighteenth-century China.

4.3.1 Instructing Sons and Daughters

From the section Biographies of Eminent Women in official histories and from women’s epitaphs written by men, we can gain an overview of women’s literate

178 practices that won approval from society. One of the most prominent themes was literate mothers or sisters teaching their sons and daughters or younger brothers to read. Ouyang Xiu’s (1007-1072) mother was remembered to have used reed stems to teach her son characters because she could not afford to buy ink and paper. This story, summarized in the idiom “Oumu huadi,” together with another idiom “Mengmu sanqian,”75 was passed down as the quintessential model for all literate mothers. Miss Hou (1004-1052), mother of the two founders of Neo-Confucianism Cheng Hao and , used Ban Zhao’s Nü jie to teach her daughters regularly.76 Miss Shangguan (1094-1178) was remembered in her tomb inscription to have personally taught her sons to read and recite.77 Miss

Chen, wife of Xing (), taught classics to all of her six sons, two of whom became prime ministers.78 The tutor of the astrological calendar expert

Wang Xun (early Yuan dynasty) at the age of three was his mother Miss Liu who taught him the Thousand Character Text.79 Hanlin academician Ouyang Xuan’s

(early Yuan dynasty) mother Miss Li taught him the Classic of Filial Piety, the

Analects, and various other elementary textbooks.80 As mentioned in Chapter 2,

Miss Yang, mother of Yu Ji (1272-1348) who was regarded as one of the four

Confucian masters of the Yuan, taught him orally the texts of the Analects, the

Mencius, Zuo’s Commentaries, and essays by Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi in a time of turmoil when no books were available.81 Miss Liu taught her dead husband’s younger brother to read and corrected his punctuation.82

179 The iconographic representation of reading women also conveys a similar message. Shang Jinglan (1604-ca. 1680) was a celebrated female reader, poet, and painter of the Ming-Qing period. She was known to have organized excursions for family women to scenic spots and compose poetry. Her poems were collected and published in her day. In a woodblock illustration, a moment of

Shang Jinglan reading a book is captured (fig 4.1). Shang is depicted as sitting beside a desk with a book in hand. Two boys are practicing writing at the desk.

Stealing a moment of relaxation, Shang turns her attention to the book and reads peacefully. According to records, Shang’s two sons, four daughters, and two daughters-in-law all received literary training from her.83 In the picture, we only see two boys, not girls. The irony of the portrait lies in the fact that although she is a prominent reader in her own right, Shang’s image is framed, celebrated, and remembered as a mother who supervises the study of her sons.84 Similarly, in a painting by a Qing court painter Jin Tingbiao (fl. 1760-64) discussed by Susan

Mann, the famous women’s teacher Ban Zhao was transformed from “a representation of women’s learning” into a “metaphor for motherly instruction.”85

Why were so many literate women represented as amenable motherly instructors? Hsiung Ping-chen has pointed out that the emotional bond between mothers and sons in the Ming-Qing society was socially and culturally constructed. Hsiung observes that for most women, the only way to acquire

180 public acclaim during the Ming and Qing dynasties was through their sons’ success. That was why mothers labored hard to finance their sons’ education and pressed their sons relentlessly to succeed in their studies. I think in addition to emotional and material motivations, the canonized image of a mother instructing her son depicted by the official discourse and iconography was also at work in urging mothers to take up this role. Although in the Three Character

Classic it is said fathers were to be blamed if their sons were not taught properly

(zi bu jiao, fu zhi guo), in reality, mothers were always the first teachers of their children.

Based on the teachings of earlier family instructions and later medical discourse, women assumed the responsibility of their children’s education as early as when they became pregnant. According to Yanshi jiaxun (Family instruction of the Yan clan), mothers of ancient sages and kings began “fetal education” (taijiao) when they were three months into their pregnancy. They moved into a separate palace and would not cast a sidelong glance or let presumptuous words into their ears. Whatever they heard and ate was regulated by propriety (yi li jie zhi).86 This instruction on prenatal education was further elaborated in Madame Zheng’s Nü xiaojing, one of the eighteen sections of which is devoted to taijiao. According to her, all pregnant women (not just mothers of sages and kings as espoused in Yanshi jiaxun) were responsible for the proper upbringing of the fetus they were carrying. In order for their children to grow

181 into worthy and healthy human beings with beautiful appearances and outstanding talents and virtues, expectant mothers must sleep, sit, and stand assuming the proper postures. They should abstain from food with strange tastes, shun evil colors, and avoid licentious sound. They should refrain from talking arrogantly or holding improper instruments (xie qi). At night they should recite the classics, and in the morning they should discuss rites and music.87 As

Charlotte Furth notes, this discourse of taijiao continued into medical texts on women’s medicine well into the Qing dynasty.88 These practical teachings as well as stories and iconographic representations of model mothers must have inspired all women to take full responsibility for bearing and rearing their children.

This discourse of reading women as motherly instructors was taken to the next level in the late eighteenth century, when Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801) wrote the polemical essay on women’s learning (Fuxue). Zhang’s ideas have been fully explored by Susan Mann.89 To summarize, Zhang advocated women to be the upholders and transmitters of Confucian morals. He celebrated learned women such as Ban Zhao, Cai Yan, and Yu Xuanji who were exceptional female scholars and played pivotal roles in preserving and passing down classical learning to later generations.90

4.3.2 Managing Household Affairs

The second socially desirable literate practice for reading women was managing the household affairs, especially handling the account books and

182 family investments. In his Precepts for Social Life, Yuan Cai recommended that widows should learn to read and calculate. Although he insisted that women should generally not interfere with outer affairs,91 he made an exception for widows and those women who had incapable (chun nuo, literally stupid and timid) or unfilial (buxiao) husbands who were unable to manage or preserve the household wealth. He thought such women were virtuous (xian furen) because they helped to save households from .92 Wen Huang (1585-1645),

Presented Scholar during the Chongzhen reign, recorded his mother Miss Lu’s teachings in a well-circulated family instruction text Wenshi muxun (Motherly instruction of the Wen family]. In it, he specifically spelled out that “women should only learn roughly a few hundred characters related to firewood, rice, fish and meat.”93 Influenced by the late Ming social attitude against women’s literacy training, he thought it would do more harm than good for women to know more characters. The mentioning of characters related to firewood, rice, fish, and meat indicates that the desired women’s literacy was a specialized one required for the proper management of the basic household functions such as food and fuel. In the family instructions of Lu Longqi (1630-1693), a preeminent

Qing Neo-Confucian, it is stated that one of the two things that would anger a husband to death was that his wife did not manage the household in a thrifty manner (the other thing was when his son did not study).94 In addition,

183 he admonished both men and women to learn to do math so they could keep accurate household accounts.95

Women’s important role in household management has been fully investigated by Japanese and American historians. Niida Noboru, examined a wide variety of source materials including family instructions, official histories, fiction and drama, together with contemporary field work investigations of village life in North China and folk songs he collected, convincingly argues that from the Song dynasty to the 1940s Chinese wives played a key role in handling and managing the household finances.96 Building on Niida’s work, Joseph

McDermott has discovered that a major responsibility for women involved with household management was handling the account books and family investments.97 This tradition explains why in a women’s admonishment book called Xinggui pian with a preface dated in 1861, the author Liao Mianjiao devoted a long section to the topic of “hui dangjia” (managing household).98

4.3.3 Inscribing Poems on the Wall

In contrast with the male image of “reading from the wall” as discussed in

Chapter 3, a prevalent female literate practice emerging from anecdotal notes and poetic anthologies authored by male literati was “inscribing poems on the wall.” Leaving writings on walls was not an exclusively female practice. Men did this more frequently. But compared with other representations of women’s use of their literate skills, this practice stood out. Like other female literate

184 practices represented in male writings, it reveals gender politics in late imperial

China.

Both Dorothy Ko and Judith Zeitlin have investigated “poems written on walls” (tibishi) as a special literary genre and social phenomenon. 99 Ko observes that this genre “appeared in particularly large numbers around the time of the

Ming-Qing transition” and that many female-authored tibishi were used didactically to promote the chastity cult in the Qing period.100 Zeitlin, focusing on the seventeenth-century enthusiasm for female authored tibishi, argues that the collection of these poems on the part of men of letters spoke of their anxiety of loss and their attempt to “arrest the vanishing of a fallen dynasty by paradoxically testifying to its disappearance.”101 Although both Ko and Zeitlin acknowledge the long history of tibishi and Ko mentions three Yuan women’s tibishi in a footnote, they seem to imply that female authored tibishi were a uniquely Ming-Qing phenomenon.

Investigating when and how this female literate practice was represented, I offer two arguments: First, female-authored tibishi tended to appear in abundance during the traumatic periods of dynastic transitions and foreign invasions (e.g. both the Song-Yuan and Ming-Qing transitions). Second, the collection and preservation of these poems reflected the male literati’s attempt to channel their own traumatic experience and sentimental resistance to an alien invasion through a female voice. In a “culturally nostalgic” mood similar to the

185 male literati's fascination with late Ming courtesans in the middle-seventeenth- and early twentieth-centuries,102 indignant male literati found a symbolic voice in women’s poems for their nostalgia of a lost civilization, their obsession with loyalty, the agony of lost dignity, and resistance to alien rulers. It was through the invention of these female martyrs and a feminine poetic voice that men sought consolation and vindication.103

Without repeating the legends and cultural significance of female tibishi of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which have been competently explored by

Ko, Zeitlin, and Grace Fong,104 I will use a few well-recorded anecdotes of Yuan women’s tibishi as examples to support my arguments.105 The most famous story concerns Wang Qinghui (fl. 1270), one of the Nine Concubines for the last emperor Duzong (r.1265-1274) of the Southern Song dynasty. After the fall of the dynasty in the spring of the year 1276, she was taken north to the Mongol capital along with other imperial members. During the trip, she composed a song-lyric set to the tune “Man jiang hong” and inscribed it on the wall of an inn. In the poem, she lamented the bygone glory and loss of the Chinese territories. She prayed to the Goddess of the moon to give her strength to face the changed fate.106 After she reached Dadu (today’s Beijing), she petitioned to become a nun.

Her story was repeatedly recorded in Zhou Mi’s Haoranzhai yatan (Elegant talks of the grand studio), Tao Zongyi’s Chuogeng lu (Records of retirement from farming) and Pan Yongyin’s Songbai leichao (Anecdotes and classified stories

186 from the Song dynasty).107 Reading Wang Qinghui’s poem, the Southern Song loyalist Wen Tianxiang (1236-1283) was said to have sighed at the pessimistic tone of the last few lines and composed a more upbeat poem in response.

In another well-circulated story, a commoner’s wife, Ms Wang, a native of

Zhejiang, was forced to marry a Mongol army officer who had killed her husband and parents-in-law. She pretended to agree to the marriage but asked for one month to mourn her dead parents-in-law and husband. When passing a place called “Pure Wind Ridge” (Qingfeng ling), she sighed to heaven and said to herself: “Now I have a proper place to die!” She bit her finger, inscribed a poem with her blood on a nearby rock, and threw herself off the cliff. It was said that her blood on the rock was not washed away by wind and rain.108

Tao Zongyi’s Chuogeng lu recorded more such stories. Hu Miaoduan, a native of the Sheng county of the Zhejiang Prefecture, was said to have been taken to

Nanjing by an army. She bit her finger, left a poem on the wall, and drowned herself.109 Song Huixiang, a courtesan of the Qinhuai area (today’s ), was taken to Henan by the Yuan army. Her tibishi lamented the loss of the country and her own pitiful fate.110 An anonymous wife of a certain Xu Junbao, a native of Yuezhou (today’s in province), was taken by a prince in the

Yuan army to Hangzhou. One day, when the Mongol prince was angered and wanted to rape her, she told him: “Let me offer a sacrifice to my dead husband first and then serve you. Why do you have to be angry?” The prince turned

187 happy and agreed. She then dressed herself up, burned incense, bowed twice, and wept, facing the south. After inscribing a poem to the tune “Man ting fang” on the wall, she drowned herself.111

In addition to the motif of “inscribing poems on the wall,” these legends shared some other commonalities. First, these women were loyal to their husbands (and their home country) and remained chaste either by committing suicide or taking religious vows. Second, all of them were smarter than their captors and tricked them into believing they were going to serve them. Third, in their poems, they all linked their own sorrowful destiny to the collapse of the dynasty. The fusion of personal and cultural loss added new meanings to their poems and elevated the significance of their poetic voice. The invention, preservation, and circulation of these images of chaste women (zhenfu) and their poetic voice offered the male literati a rhetorical way to channel their own nostalgia toward a fallen dynasty and lost civilization.

As though they expected people to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of these stories, anecdote recorders took special care to assure readers of their credibility.

It was said that a person who did not take Miss Wang’s story seriously and wrote a poem to discredit it died without posterity.112 Another person named

Yang Liansheng of the Yuan dynasty wrote a poem to question Miss Wang’s chastity. One night, in his dream, Miss Wang appeared and chastised him for distorting the meaning of chastity. She told him that because of this, he was

188 punished by heaven and would not have any sons. Yang Liansheng woke up and regretted what he had done. He wrote another poem to vindicate Miss Wang’s reputation. He then dreamed of the woman again who came to thank him. Soon enough, a son was born to him.113

To be sure, these extraordinary women poets were enshrined as paragons of loyalty toward a lost glorious dynasty. Their stories of female suffering and loneliness, together with their bemoaning poems, became testimonies of the trauma that male literati sustained after a dynastic fall. The humiliation of women forced into public and threatened with rape signified the ultimate insults the subjects of a fallen dynasty had to endure. Their subsequent action of leaving a poem in public symbolized their unbearable helplessness and was recognized as a dignified form of protest. In a sense, the literate practice of “inscribing poems on the wall” became highly gendered in that it was through a feminine poetic voice that these sufferings were fully articulated and overtly sympathized with.

4.3.4 Suffering as Martyrs

In official biographies, reading women were usually applauded not for their exceptional literary ability, but for knowing moral principles (zhi yili, zhi dayi) based on what they had learned from books. Literate women stood out in their resolve to commit suicide when they faced the danger of losing their dignity

(shouru). In the biography of Shunying (Jin dynasty), it is said that Nie had

189 studied many books and knew the principle (po dushu zhi yili). She was widowed at a young age. Prompted by the death of her father in a city , Nie committed suicide by breaking her neck. The narrative reminded readers that she did this in a city without humanity (renli), where when food ran out, some people were selling their wives in exchange for food, and others resroted to thievery and robbery. 114 In the biography of Xu Cailuan, the narrative started with an anecdote that she was moved whenever she read Wen Tianxiang’s poems. The story developed when in 1355, she presented herself to the enemies in order to save her father from being killed. Her legend reached a climax when she made two attempts to commit suicide. Leaving a poem on the wall saying

“only the water under the Guiling bridge will reflect my pure heart for a thousand years to come,” she threw herself into the river. After being rescued, she was still determined to die and managed to drown herself in a second attempt.115 Another exemplary woman, Chen Shuzhen (fl. 14th century), daughter of a scholar’s family who could recite poems and play the qin instrument, also threw herself into a lake when insurgent armies conquered her city. The lake was too shallow and she refused to come out of the water under threat. She was shot to death with arrows by soldiers on the .116 Miss

Zhuang (Ming dynasty), wife of a county magistrate Zhou Yanjing, was also known to read books and understand the great principle (dushu zhi dayi). When there was a riot, people escaped to nearby mountain caves. Miss was

190 reluctant to go along because men and women would not be separated in the caves. Her husband tried to persuade her by saying that if she did not go, she would be killed. Miss Zhuang replied “Having no propriety is worse than death.

Do you suspect I am afraid of death?” She then killed herself.

This emphasis on the link between book reading and virtuous action can be seen to accompany a phenomenon that was most conspicuous during the Ming.

As examined by Katherine Carlitz, this was the practice of using women’s bodies as both “icons of virtue and objects of sensuous connoisseurship.”117 The aforementioned stories showcase reading women as the emblems of both female and male virtues. In other words, the “principles” they knew were chastity (jie), filial piety (xiao), loyalty (zhong), propriety (li), and most importantly the determination to die when they were about to lose these virtues. As explained in

Chapters 2 and 3, the goal of reading and studying in the Confucian curriculum was for moral cultivation and purification. The actual physical practice of moral teachings was highly desirable. However, it was through the female body and the physical suffering of women, that this ideal was most extensively manifested and canonized.

4.3.5 Writing the Right Texts

Similar to the change which took place in eighteenth-century Britain where the image of female reading shifted from being a “sign of virtue” to being a potentially dangerous act of sexual transgression,118 female writing began to be

191 increasingly controversial in seventeenth-century China. The controversy was crystallized in the much-contested widespread saying “women without talent are virtuous.”119 In his groundbreaking work A History of Chinese Women’s Life,

Chen Dongyuan traces the origin of the expression to the late Ming society. He interprets “talent” to refer exclusively to poetry writing. According to him, there were three reasons to associate poetry writing with negative images of women.

First, popular stories and legends spread the view that women who were good at poetry tended to draw disasters to themselves. He cites the examples of

Yingying in the Legend of West Chamber and Empress Yide of the Liao dynasty who was falsely accused of exchanging erotic poems with a Chinese household servant (see Chapter 5). Second, poetry writing was commonly associated with courtesans who had a lowly social status in the late Ming society. Third, talented women such as Ye Xiaoluan’s premature death caused people to consider talent to be inauspicious.120

In the past decade, the issue of women and writing, framed in the opposition between “talent” and “virtue,” and “inner” versus “outer” has continued to be explored by China specialists in the United States.121 Dorothy Ko detected a paradox of women’s learning and education in her investigation of seventeenth- century women’s writing activities.122 She found it difficult to understand the positive image of women writers in a constraining Confucian society:

From hindsight, the impact of the urban print culture can only be described as a paradox. On an individual level, some women gained 192 parity with men in the world of learning and literature; the opposite is true on a systemic level, where the promotion of the woman writer served only to reinforce the prevalent premise of gender distinctions…The rise of the woman reader-writer, in other words, was a sign largely of the strength of the Confucian gender system, not its demise.123

Although this paradox can be solved by a reevaluation of the inherent malleability of Confucian ideology, I intend to offer an alternate explanation of it with the help of the concept of “literate practice.” In fact, I posit that the phenomenon Ko noticed was not paradoxical at all. In the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, the question was not whether women could write, but what they should write, how they should write, and who they should write for. In other words, the essential contested site, or restraint of the early modern society, was not whether women should become writers, but rather, as reader-writers, how they should use their reading and writing skills in society. In assuming that women were empowered simply by the acts of reading, writing, and publishing,

Ko failed to reveal the social intricacy revolved around the use their literate skills.

The ideal woman writer that both male literati and female authors tried to promote in late imperial China was the one who “wrote the right texts.” To support this argument, I use as examples the opinions expressed by Li Yu, and

Miss Liu who was a model mother and author of the popular female textbook Nü fanjie lu (Instruction of a model woman). Both Li Yu and Miss Liu were strong opponents of the saying “women without talent are virtuous.” For both of them,

193 cai was not the opposite of de. On the contrary, cai and de were complementary to each other.

Li Yu’s model for an ideal woman writer was one with the moral rectitude to fight licentiousness. In his Xianqing ouji, he started the section on how to teach concubines reading and writing with an attack on the saying “women without talent are virtuous.” He dismissed this idiom as the result of an action of yinye feishi (giving up at the slightest obstacle; literally, "to stop eating because one has choked before"). He suggested that it was coined by talented women who had lost their chastity due to their literary skills and thus anguished over the fact that unintelligent women were more valued in society. He compared these women’s rationale to those men who admonished their sons not to study or become officials because they met with disaster when they had been officials. For him, talent and licentiousness did not necessarily go hand in hand in a woman.

Therefore, a woman could be both virtuous and talented.

Miss Liu was the mother of (fl. 17th century) who was an active commentator and publisher of popular elementary texts such as the Three

Character Classic and Poems by a Thousand Poets. He compiled Admonishments for

Women, Analects for Women, Instruction for the Inner Quarters, and his mother’s book into a collection called Women’s Four Books. Miss Liu was a native of

Jiangning and was good at writing at a young age. She was widowed at the age

194 of thirty and kept her chastity for sixty years. In addition to Nü fanjie lu, she authored a book titled Gujin nüjian (Women’s mirror old and new).

Nü fanjie lu contains eleven chapters. The first ten are “general discussion,”

“empresses’ virtue,” “mothers’ elegance,” “filial piety,” “virginity and chastity,”

“loyalty and righteousness,” “kind love,” “propriety,” “wisdom,” and “diligence and thrift.” The last chapter is titled “talent and virtue,” in which she expressed her disagreement with the saying “women without talent are virtuous.” She listed examples of exemplary women and excellent female writers of previous dynasties to illustrate her point that “if women learn to read and write and become so erudite in rites and classics that their reputation is spread at the time and their talents are known by later generations, is this not nice?”124

A closer examination of what kind of female writers she approved of shows that she only promoted those who had written the right texts. Among these model writers are Ban Zhao who wrote Nü jie, Madame Zheng of the Tang dynasty who authored Nü xiaojing, the Song sisters who wrote Nü lunyu, and

Empress Renxiao of the Ming dynasty who compiled Nei xun. In addition to these female teachers, she mentioned one talented poet Su Hui (fl. 350) of the

Eastern Jin period (317-420), who embroidered a palindrome (huiwenshi) on a handkerchief to admonish her distant wayward husband.125 All these women have written the right texts, in the sense that they were either admonishments to one’s husband or moral texts intended for a female readership.

195 Images of female writers in official biographies further attests to the fact that morality was a constant measure for female writing. Very few biographies mentioned the act of writing on a woman’s part. An exemplary woman Miss

Jiang (Ming dynasty) was reported to have supplemented Liu Xiang’s Biographies of Exemplary Women before committing suicide.126 Yun Zhu (1771-1883) was said to have considered compiling a collection of exemplary women’s biographies.

She finally decided to edit a collection of women’s poems instead and called it

Guochao guixiu zhengshi ji (Correct beginnings: women’s poetry of our august dynasty).127 The women writers Yun Zhu saw as models included Ban Zhao, Su

Hui, and three of the five Song sisters (one of whom wrote the Analects for

Women).128

What was considered as “the right text” was not monolithically the same, but changed over time. Women’s poetry writing presented a complicated case as to what was “right” and what was not. As mentioned before, Sima Guang and

Neo-Confucians opposed the idea of teaching girls the art of poetry chanting.

However, women of those times still learned it and many became talented poets.

Paul Ropp has amply demonstrated that the images of courtesan culture changed from relatively positive to relatively negative with the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644.129 Poetry, especially the sub-genre xiangyan ti (fragrance style), came to be associated with courtesans and deemed inappropriate for women from established families to write. As Susan Mann points out, eighteenth-

196 century women justified their poetry writing by linking themselves to the moral authority found in the Book of Odes. Even Yuan Mei (1716-1798), teacher of many talented women poets of his time and the main target of Zhang Xuecheng’s attack, had to resort to the moral authority of the Book of Odes to justify his support for women to pursue their literary talents in poetry writing. In the preface of his shihua (Sui garden poetry talks), he wrote: “In our illustrious dynasty, literary instruction illuminates the realm, womanly virtue is correspondingly felicitous, and the women of the empire’s great families have all been transformed by the teachings of the ‘Er nan’.”130

Another controversial genre for women writers to author was vernacular fiction. As I briefly mentioned in the previous section, women's exposure to xiaoshuo (literally "small talk," vernacular fiction) was a controversial issue in late imperial China. In her study of the impact of Honglou meng on women writers of the Qing dynasty, Ellen Widmer demonstrates that in contrast with tanci

(literarly "plucking lyrics," prosimetric narrative), vernacular fiction was conventionally regarded as a male genre, even though some women writers may have authored fiction but burned their manuscripts, and a few others left anonymous fictional works.131

Even in the case of nütanci (female prosimetric narrative) genre which was usually presumed to have female authorship,132 female writers tended to address their works to an exclusive female audience and justify their writing activities in

197 moral terms.133 Hou Zhi (b. 1766), an accomplished writer and editor, published a tanci text Zaisheng yuan (Love reincarnate) written by Chen Duansheng (1751-ca.

1796) and completed by Desheng (1771-1847). In her preface, Hou stresses that the quality of a story must be judged "with the bounds of loyalty, filial behavior, purity, and righteousness, in accord with the standards of moral conduct."134

4.3.6 Summary

This discussion of women’s literate practices sanctioned and promoted by the orthodox Confucian ideology demonstrates that literate women of late imperial

China, however accomplished they were, were constrained nevertheless in terms of how to exercise their reading skills. In the written discourse authored mostly by male literati and a few by exemplary females, women are represented to use their literate skills to better serve men’s practical and emotional needs: instructing offspring, managing households, embodying moral principles by inscribing poems in public, committing suicide, or writing the right texts. Such representations constituted an image of a morally superior female reader.

However, how did women see their own reading and represent their use of their reading skills? I will explore this question in the following section.

4.4 Self-Representations of Women’ s Reading

As we will see below, women’s writings, being a major medium for women writers to channel their feelings and record moments of their daily lives, provide

198 us a unique window through which we can see how the social constraints played out in women’s reading world. Susan Mann, in her investigation of eighteenth- century women, skillfully uses women’s poetry to reconstruct what women actually “felt and believed, and what they actually did.”135 While Mann focuses her search for women’s views on gender relations, life course, writing, entertainment, work, and piety through their writings, I sift through women’s poems and essays in search for what they read and how they read, particularly their self-representation as readers.

Although a very small proportion of women’s poems directly or indirectly mentioned the act of reading, the existence of such poems still provides us with some basic information about what books women read. From these poems, we know women read a variety of texts, mostly Confucian textbooks for women such as Nü jie, the Book of Odes, Buddhist sutras, poems by women within the family circles, famous poems and song lyrics by both male and female authors, biographies of historical poets, and popular dramas such as .

In one poem titled “Tasting Tea,” a Ming courtesan Zhao Guan mentioned trying out tea after reading the book Tea Classic (Cha jing).136 In another poem, a woman named Zhou Yuxiao (Ming Dynasty) even mentioned reading a book on applied geometry (celiang). The first two lines of her poem read: “The knowledge of applied geometry is profound, it enables us to see within a finger and a glance what is otherwise unreachable.”137

199 4.4.1 Reading by the Window

As if in parallel with the male images of “reading on the road” and “reading behind closed doors” discussed in the previous chapter, seventeenth and eighteenth-century women poets frequently use the motif of window in the depiction of their own reading scene. Gu Ruopu (1592-ca. 1681), a talented woman scholar of the Ming-Qing period, remembered a youthful self reading books under a window (chuandu) until dawn.138 The first two lines of a poem written by an eighteenth-century woman poet Liang Lan’e describing her daughter’s reading scene read “My trifling, lowly little girl, reciting your lessons by the window.”139 Another woman Zhang Wanying read her elder sister’s poems “under the western window.”140 Why would the window be an important motif in a scene of reading? I would like to offer three possible cultural meanings of window as explanations for this image of “reading by the window.”

First, windows, like doors, serve as a demarcation line between the outside world and the inner chambers of the women’s world. Chinese archaeologists have discovered long ago the intricate relationship between women and doors as motifs on murals, relief sculptures, and the interior decorations of Song tombs.

Su Bai points out that the image of “a woman leaning on a door” (funü yimen) is very common in Song ci poems and paintings.141 Following up on Su’s work,

Deng Xiaonan argues that the prevalent theme of “a woman opening a gate”

200 (funü qimen) found in Song tombs is meant to represent an ideal female image that follows the doctrines of separate spheres for men and women during the

Song times. From women’s poems, we see that the space under the window signifies a feminine space. The space by the window is usually where women did their hair, put on their makeup, did their embroidery, and played musical instruments. Therefore, the window is a symbol of domesticity, feminine beauty, and female virtue. In this sense, reading by the window represents an image of a virtuous female reader.

However, windows are different from doors in that they are also openings toward the exterior space. Compared with doors, a window is also a safer channel to the outer world as it presents a smaller chance of women being seen by outsiders. In many courtesan poems, the motif of the window usually appears in conjunction with the rain, moon, a lonely lamp, and tears, all symbols of loneliness and yearning. Through this small opening, women watched the beautiful trees and flowers, felt the cold wind, listened to the sad rain, and reflected on their loneliness. The melancholy mood associated with the combination of these images is succinctly captured in one of the song lyrics set to the tune “Sheng sheng man” written by Li Qingzhao, the preeminent Song poet.

The last three lines of this ci poem read “I sit by the window, alone, while night quietly falls. The parasol tree together with fine rain, is dripping water when the twilight comes. This scene is beyond what the word ‘melancholy’ can

201 describe.”142 Here, the scene of the window represents a sentiment of helplessness. Sometimes, the window presents an alluring outside world yet confines the one inside from reaching it. A woman could only sit quietly under the window, intoning a poem to bemoan her lonely figure. Reading by the window, in this sense, represents the double meanings of fighting loneliness and resisting temptation.

Third, the aesthetic appeal of a window as a frame of a beautiful scene, especially promoted in late Ming connoisseur literature, might be another important factor that makes it an alluring background for a female reading scene.

Li Yu, in his Xianqing ouji, reminds his male contemporaries of the beautiful scene of a female reading and writing under the window. This paragraph is worth citing in full here:

You will benefit enormously for women to read books and practice characters, especially when they complete their studies. Even when they are just embarking on the road of learning, it is beneficial to the viewer (guanzhe): When they (women) simply lay a book on the desk (to read), or hold a brush (to write), while sitting under the green window and emerald bamboo curtain, then this becomes a picture (huatu). The looks (rong) of Lady Ban (Zhao) presuming writing of (the Han) history, and the posture (tai) of Xie (Daoyun) chanting a poem on snow in the garden, are no more beautiful than this. Why do you have to wait until you see their poems and compare their literary skills when you finally enjoy the pleasure of sharing the chamber with a cultivated lady (guixiu)? Alas! This sort of picture is not rare among people. Unfortunately, when people are in front of these pictures, they only view them as common things. What a shame!143

To fully explore the cultural significance of the male voyeuristic gaze presented in this paragraph, a brief excursion on Li Yu’s view of female literacy 202 is necessary. As said before, Li Yu has left a detailed discussion on how men should teach concubines to read and write. However, his advocacy for female literacy training and literary education cannot be seen as a modern feminist move. In the beginning of his discussion, Li argued for the importance of literacy and principle (wenli). According to him, wenli was the key (suoyao) to all things under heaven. Between wen and li, the latter is more important. Literacy serves as a stepping stone for people to attain the principle. All skills come from this principle. Therefore, scholars, , craftsmen, and merchants should all learn to read and write in order to grasp the principle. If they did, they would excel in their trade. Li believed that women should not be an exception to this rule. If women were literate, then men would not be bothered with a sorrowful scene of “a full hall of stupid wives and concubines.”144 For him, reading and writing, together with playing musical instruments, singing, and dancing, were embellishing skills that enable concubines to entertain and satisfy men better.

The goal of teaching concubines to read and write, in Li Yu’s curriculum, was to ultimately serve the interest of men: they could have someone sharing the pillow to discuss literature!

As a result, Li Yu’s voyeuristic gaze is focused on the looks and postures of female reading and writing rather than their literary skills and talents. The scene of female reading, in his depiction, presents male viewers a pleasant picture to look at: the green window, emerald bamboo curtain, colorful clothing (Li Yu

203 devotes another section on women’s clothing and accessories), beautiful looks, and elegant postures. The window, as the background, is also an indispensable frame for this picture. Therefore, the image of “reading by the window” as presented in women’s poetry might be a reflection of this male aesthetic orientation.

4.4.2 Reading the Right Texts

Women’s writings also depict an image of “reading the right texts.” In a poem authored by a female prodigy Sun Huilan (1305-1328), she relates how she seeks out books to read on her own. “I have just learned the Classic of Filial Piety.

Poor me! I am so tender and timid but born with a sensitive nature. I seek out the Admonishments for Women and read it under the window. Alas! Why didn’t my family let me hear this earlier.” Here, by listing two of the most important works which were also the most frequently used textbooks for women, the poet succeeds in conjuring up an image of a female reader reading the correct texts.

Her prodigious talent is complimented by a moral rectitude. Through the right texts, an image of a female reader with moral authority is built up.

To draw sources for female inner virtues, women readers frequently relied on the Confucian classics. Miss Wen (fl. 16th century), native of in

(northwest of today’s Xi’an), left a series of nine rhapsodies modeling after Qu

Yuan’s “” (Encountering sorrow), in which she relates her reading experience. The opening lines of the preface reads: “In my youth my paternal

204 aunt and I used to study works setting out the principles of life in the women’s quarters. With my revered grandfather I studied the Analects and the Book of

Odes.” Both her aunt and she became widowed at a young age. “Night and day I had always to be on guard against the slightest fault, trusting only in my inward virtue….Forgetful of sleep and food, I read through the night with a single lamp in my hand, studying the principles of the ancients and striving to follow their virtuous examples.”145

In another poem entitled “Sitting at night reading Zhou nan,” authored by

Miss Pan, a Ming poet whose father and husband were both scholars, a scene of reading moral texts is described in detail. “I sit alone, unable to fight the nightly cold. The nascent moon shines through the window. I am not good at writing essays. The only thing I can do is to read carefully the Book of Odes.” 146 The reading matter “Zhou nan” appears also in a poem by an eighteenth-century woman poet called Hu Shenrong. “The new spring is just appearing, the moon slender and fine. Because I dread the spring chill, I do not raise the screens.

Moved to seek out the clear night, I lean on my maid to rise. I light the incense, sit straight upright, and read the ‘Zhou nan’.”147 As Susan Mann has argued, the

Zhou nan, together with the Shao nan were the morally correct texts for women to read, since they “celebrated the virtues of the wife of King Wen during the golden age honored by Confucius.”148

205 4.5 Conclusion

The discussion of women’s literacy, literate practices, and self- representations of the act of reading leads us to a deeper reflection on the term

“literacy.” As Brian Street has noted in a different context, there has been an

“autonomous model” of literacy formed in the Western capitalist ideology that worked on the assumption that literacy was closely connected with progress and development. This model typically ignored the local view toward literacy rooted in its unique social and cultural background.149 To replace the “autonomous model,” Street has suggested an alternative model of literacy that “depends upon the social institutions in which it is embedded.”150

This chapter has demonstrated that literacy by itself was not adequate to empower women of late imperial China. It was the literate practices located in the social contexts that had the potential of empowering and enabling women. It is the transgressive social use of females’ literate skills that threatened their male counterparts. I will not go as far as saying that the early modern Chinese women were either “victims” or “active participants” of the patriarchal system, but these literate and literary women were constantly fighting within the limited literate space society allowed them. They had to live with the frustration that the social reality did not allow them to put their literate skills and literary talents into full use. When Xue Baochai complained to Lin Daiyu that girls would do better not to know any characters,151 she was not being hypocritical as many modern critics

206 have charged her, but pointing to a real plight that many talented women of her time encountered.

207

Figure 4.1 A portrait of Shang Jinglan

Source: Yuyue xianxian xiang zhuan zan [Portraits, biographies, and eulogies of previous sages], reproduced from Xihua Fu, ed, Zhongguo gudian wenxue banhua xuanji, edited by Fu Xihua. (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1981). p. 1018.

208

Chapter 4 Notes

1 Homgren 1981. She attacks the problem from three angles: women’s status in non-Confucian , women’s education, and female infanticide. 2 Mann 2000. 3 Ko 1994, 3. 4 Guisso and Johannesen 1981; Ko 1992b, 1994; Mann 1991, Bailey 2001. 5 Mann 1994, Robertson 1992, Widmer 1997b, Larson 1998. 6 Widmer 1997a, 2. 7 In some cases, they wrote with media other than ink and paper, such as with their own blood and on rocks or walls. 8 Krug 2002. 9 Unger 1996, 26. 10 Rawski 1979, 2. 11 Spade 1979, 34. 12 Spade 1979, 34-35, note 68. 13 Zhang 1996, 1. 14 Cao 1996, 471-472. For the life and translations of Ban jieyu and Cai Yan’s works, see Chang and Saussy 1999, 17-30. 15 Birge 1989, 326. 16 Handlin 1975. 17 Ko 1994, Mann 1997. 18 For Sima Guang’s political thought, see Sariti 1972. 19 LJ, juan 5, no. 12 “Rules for the inner chambers,” reprint 154-155. 20 Ebrey 1993, 123. 21 According to Benjamin Elman’s calculation, the Analects contained 11,705 and the Classic of Filial Piety had 1,903 repeating characters (Elman 2000, 267). In combination, these two books contained 13,608 written graphs (including repeated ones). 22 JXBL, reprint 30. 23 JL, juan 1. 24 ECJ, wen ji, juan 12, 653; cf. Ebrey 1993, 61. 25 SWGWJ, juan 62, 953; cf. Ebrey 1993, 61. 26 LXJ, juan 170; cf. Ebrey 1993, 121-122. 27 Ebrey 1993, 120-121. 209

28 Elman 2000, 44. 29 NYJ, juan 30; cf. Ebrey 1993, 186. Bai Juyi’s poetic works were lauded as elegant yet simple for even children to remember. 30 Hu 1957, 34; cf. Ebrey 1993, 122. 31 LXJ, juan 170; cf. Ebrey 1993, 186. Ebrey translates the term “shi li” as “poetry and ritual.” I think here the term refers to the books that Miss Huang taught her daughters, which were the Book of Odes and the Book of Rites. Either book was supposed to be mastered by women. 32 YJZ, wu juan 1, 11a-12a. 33 Ebrey 1993, 226. 34 Ebrey 1993, 119-221. 35 JZJ, juan 21; cf. Ebrey 1993, 122. 36 HCXS, juan 156, 1a-b; cf. Ebrey 1993, 122. 37 Ebrey 1993, 123. 38 SHYJG, juan 12, 38b-39a; cf. Ebrey 1993, 25. Another girl called Lin Youyu who made the same attempt earlier than Wu Zhiduan was appointed as a “Confucian” (ruren) by the government, see Gao 1996, 65. 39 FWJX, reprint 40; YSSF, reprint 73. 40 YSSF, reprint 57. 41 YSSF, reprint 58. 42 During the same period, there was growing anxiety over women’s improper manners in male writings. This is fully reflected by discussions on vicious traits of women in male literati works. Female gossip was condemned as the source of disturbance in an otherwise harmonious household. In his Precepts for Social Life, Yuan Cai (ca. 1140-1195) warned that wives’ talking was the main cause of grievance among family members. He attributed this to two reasons: First, women were not far-sighted and did not have a reasonable understanding of what fairness was. Second, women did not have blood relations with their in- so they tended to build up tension with their husband’s relatives. Among all women, he especially blamed maids and concubines for sowing the seeds of discord among family members due to their ignorance and constant tattling (YSSF, reprint 53.) 43 Ebrey 1993, 123-124. 44 Ebrey 1993, 123. 45 Franke 1980, 23. 46 ZSGF, reprint 111-112. For a detailed analysis of the history and organization of the Zheng clan, see Dardess 1974. For an analysis of Zheng’s family rules, see Langlois 1981. 47 Cao 1996, 176; Zhang Yuniang’s biography and her poems can be found in Chang and Saussy 1999, 142-149. 48 CGL, juan 13, 8a; Hu 1957, 58. 49 Hu 1957, 59.

210

50 Hu 1957, 61-63; A biography of Zheng Yunduan and translations of her works can be found in Chang and Saussy 1999, 131-140, 677-678. 51 Elvan 1973, 179; cf. Lippit 1978, 255. For brief discussions on the rise of merchant class and the mercantile activities from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, see Gernet 1962. 52 Ebrey 1996, 187. 53 Hu 1957, 64. 54 NXEY, reprint 55. 55 Handlin 1975. 56 Handlin 1975, 17. 57 GF, reprint 73. 58 MDT, juan shang, 5a. 59 Gao 1996, 72; HLM, chapter 2, reprint 15. 60 PAJQ, juan 29; cf. Gao 1996, 72. 61 Yi 1971, 120. 62 Rowe 1992, 25. 63 Whether those commentaries were really authored by women or forged by men is still an open question. See Zeitlin 1994, Ko 1994, 96-99. 64 Ko 1994, 68-69. 65 XQOJ, juan 7, reprint 153. 66 Chang 1997. 67 For a study on Shi Zhenlin’s Random Records of West-Green and the story of He Shuangqing recorded therein, see Fong 1997, Ropp 2001. For a translation of He Shuangqing’s poems, see Chang and Saussy 1999, 454-465, and Choy 2000. 68 Fong 1997, 278, note 18; Ko 1994, 64, 308, note 79. Ropp 2001 concludes that Shuangqing was not a historical figure, but a literary creation, invented by Shi Zhenlin to symbolize the unappreciated talent and beauty that frustrated eighteenth-century male literati could easily relate to. As Ropp has pointed out, the leading Chinese experts on He Shuangqing insist that He was a real historical figure and all her poems were real. 69 Choy 2000, 49; Ropp 2001, ix, 17. 70 Chung 1981, 13-14. 71 Chung 1981, 39-68. On Song Ruozhao, see Hu 1957, 18-19, and Chang and Saussy 1999, 671-672. 72 Dorothy Ko (1989, 92-94) has discussed the same treatise by Li Yu but with a different focus. Looking at Li Yu’s training program (of literary skills, musical instruments, songs and dance, and needlework) as a whole, she argues that Li Yu’s program “can be taken as an ideal representation of education for women in the demimonde.” 73 XQOJ, juan 7, reprint 152-153. 74 Due to the lack of quantitative data, it is still difficult to discern the percentage of women who had the ability to read in early modern China (Mann 1994, 34-35). Paul Ropp (1993, 108) uses 211

Hu’s survey to speculate that female literacy expanded “at a comparable order of magnitude” as women’s publications flourished during the Ming and Qing periods. 75 “Mengmu sanqian” relates the story how Mencius’ mother moved three times in order for her son to concentrate on study. 76 ECJ, juan 12, 653-655; cf. Ebrey 1993, 184. 77 NJJYG, juan 22, 458-460; cf. Ebrey 1993, 15. 78 LS, juan 107, biographies 37, exemplary women, reprint 1471. 79 YS, juan 164, biographies 51, reprint 3843. 80 YS, juan 182, biographies 69, reprint 4196. 81 YS, juan 181, biographies 68, reprint 4174. 82 MS, juan 302, biographies 190, exemplary women 2, reprint 7725. 83 For a brief biography of Shang Jinglan and translations of her poems, see Chang and Saussy 1999, 314-320. 84 Fu 1981, 1018, plate 795. 85 Mann 1997, 79. 86 YSJX, section 2. 87 NXJ, reprint 11. 88 Furth 1987, 8; cf. Mann 1997, 62. 89 Mann 1992; Mann 1997, 83-94. 90 Zhang Xuecheng’s polemic enemy was Yuan Mei who advocated that women write poetry. For Zhang, women’s poetic voice “smacked of lewdness” represented by courtesan poetry (Mann 1997, 89). 91 YSSF, reprint 57. 92 YSSF, reprint 58. Based on the same section, Chen Dongyuan (1991,245) concludes that Yuan Cai was a woman sympathizer who advocated literacy for all women. I do not agree with him. To look at Yuan Cai’s family instructions as a whole, he is far from a “women’s sympathizer” in Chen’s sense. 93 WSMX, reprint 187. 94 ZJGY, reprint 42. 95 ZJGY, reprint 45. 96 Niida 1952. 97 McDermott 1990, 1991. 98 XGP, reprint 219-223. 99 Ko 1992a; Zeitlin 2003. 100 Ko 1992a, 462, 465. 101 Zeitlin 2003.

212

102 Li 1997, 47-52. 103 On male literati use of female and feminine voices to express their own anxiety and agony throughout Chinese literary history, see also Hegel 2002, Ropp 1997. This partly explains the phenomenon of forgeries as discussed briefly by Ko 1992a. 104 Fong 2001. 105 Similar stories are not limited to the Mongol invasion. One story relates an incidence of tibishi during the reign of Jingkang (1126-1127), commonly known as the “Disruption of Jingkang” (Jingkang zhi luan), when the Jurchen army invaded the south. In this story, an anonymous daughter of a Jiang Xingzu, a native of (today’s Yixing county in Province), was taken to the north by the Jurchen after her parents and brother all died in resistance. When passing the post stop in Xiongzhou (today’s in Hebei Province), she left a song lyrics on the wall, expressing her nostalgia (Zhou, Xu, and Huang 1983, 238). 106 SBLC, juan 13, 4a-b. For a brief introduction of Wang Qinghui’s life and a translation of her “Man jiang hong,” see Chang and Saussy 1999, 112-114. 107 SBLC, juan 13; HRZYT, juan 2, 8b-9a; CGL, juan 3. 108 SBLC, juan 13, 5b-6a. 109 CGL, cf. Yi 1971, 122. 110 Liu, Sun, and Pan 1992, 8. 111 CGL, cf. Zhou, Xu, and Huang 1983, 238. 112 SBLC, juan 13, 8b. 113 SBLC, juan 13, 9a-b. 114 JS, juan 130, biographies 68, exemplary women, reprint 2804. 115 YS, juan 201, biographies 88, exemplary women 2, reprint 4503. 116 YS, juan 201, biographies 88, exemplary women 2, reprint 4505. 117 Carlitz 1991, 1994. 118 Pearson 1999, 7-8. 119 Chen 1928. 120 Chen 1928, 188-202. 121 For example, the articles in Late Imperial China 13.1 (1992), Ko 1994, Mann 1997, essays in Widmer and Chang 1997, Chang and Saussy 1999, Larson 1998. 122 Ko 1992a,1994. 123 Ko 1994, 66-67. 124 NFJL, reprint 40-41. 125 Zhang 1989, 48-49. There are two different versions of Su Hui’s story as to why she would compose the palindrome, see Jiang and Wang 1984, 57-59. 126 MS, juan 302, biographies 190, exemplary women 2, reprint 7723.

213

127 QSG, juan 508, biographies 295, exemplary women 1, reprint 14026. For an in-depth study of Yun Zhu and her poetry collection, see Mann 1997. 128 Mann 1997, 213. 129 Ropp 1997. 130 Mann 1997, 92. 131 Widmer 1997b. 132 Widmer 1997b, 392. 133 Bender 1995, 2001, 2003. 134 Bender 2001, 1022. For a complete translation of Hou Zhi's preface and its original Chinese text, see Bender 1995, 60-62, 393. 135 Mann 1997, 1. 136 Zhang 1980, 27. 137 This poem entitled “Du celiang shu” (Reading a book on applied geometry (du celiang shu) is collected in Liu 1936, 107. Zhou was a native of Fujian, daughter of a merchant family. She was married to a military officer called Fang Yu at the age of seventeen. In Fang’s household, she had access to a variety of books and became learned in history and poetry. A collection of one hundred and thirty poems written by her was published after her death by her daughter. Two pieces of evidence suggest that the book Zhou Yuxiao mentioned in her poem was one of the two Chinese books on the topic of geometry authored by Jesuits. First, Zhou’s husband Fang Yu was imprisoned for proposing a policy of appeasement toward the Dutch invaders on the Fujian coast. His sympathetic attitude was probably due to his exposure to Western knowledge. Second, there were no Chinese works on the study of surveying and measuring before the publications of Matteo Ricci’s (1552-1610) Celiang fayi (The law of applied geometry) and Sabbathin de Ursis’ ( Xiong Sanba, 1575-1620) Celiang yitong (Differences and similarities in applied geometry) (MS, juan 98, zhi 74, yiwen 3, 2439; Feng 1960, 53). For a biography of Zhou Yuxiao, see Hu 1957, 99. 138 Hu 1957, 167. A translation of the paragraph can be found in Robertson 1997, 182. 139 Mann 1997, 105. 140 Mann 1997, 101. 141 Su 1957; cf. Deng 2001. 142 Zhou, Xu, and Huang 1983, 216-17; translation is mine. 143 XQOJ, juan 7, reprint 154. 144 XQOJ, juan 7, reprint 151. 145 Chang and Saussy 1999, 179-180. 146 For a very brief biographical note on Miss Pan, see Hu 1957, 158; for seven of her poems (one of which cited here), see Liu 1936, 21-22. Translation is mine. 147 Susan Mann (1997, 64) uses the same poem to illustrate the description of the sickness of women poets during the High Qing period. 148 Mann 1997, 85. 214

149 Street 1984. 150 Street 1984, 8. 151 HLM, chapter 42, reprint 365.

215

CHAPTER 5

NON-HAN PEOPLES’ READING EXPERIENCES IN CHINA

5.1 Introduction

On the twenty-second of the third lunar month in 1766, Hong Taeyong returned to Shenyang with the Korean embassy after a visit to the Qing capital.

He was once again hosted at the house of an instructor at a prefectural school, next to an elementary school. He and his servant Pyeongzhong paid a visit to the school as soon as they returned from their Beijing trip. As they entered the hall, chaos erupted among the half-dozen school children. “Are they also human beings?!” The children asked one another. When Pyeongzhong sat down at a desk to scan through the books on it, the children murmured among themselves:

“How can he read?!” Pyeongzhong read out loud a chapter from the Book of Odes and the children all laughed: “What is that sound?!” Provoked by the apparent indignity, Hong picked up the book and read aloud one chapter in Chinese. The children were astounded and handed him the Mencius to further test him. Hong read aloud a few lines in it and now the children were convinced he could read.

216 They inquired if such books existed in Korea as well. Hong proudly answered:

“Have you not read in the that ‘over the kingdom, all writing is with the same characters’?” The children nodded and agreed.1

A close reading of the three comments made by the school children, Hong’s rhetorical answer, as well as the two parties’ distinctive ethnic statuses provides us with a thought-provoking entry into the discussion of non-Han peoples reading experiences in late imperial China. The term “non-Han peoples” includes in this context both non-Han Chinese people and foreign visitors to

China.2 The children’s first comment “Are they also human beings (tamen yi ren hu)?!” was probably triggered by the two Korean visitors’ peculiar clothing. The

Korean officials followed the clothing system of the fallen Ming dynasty. When the Korean solstice embassy arrived in the capital, the officials in the Qing court could not help but stare at the strange clothes and hats the Korean delegates were wearing.3 This encounter epitomizes how people tend to draw a line between themselves and the “other” by different garb, manners, food ways, and other behaviors.4 Clothing and adornment composed a “social skin” for people to denote social status.5 It is not surprising that these strangely-clad outsiders excited the young school children.

Their judgment that these visitors were hardly human beings reflected the most inveterate ethnocentric views of Chinese toward foreigners. Like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese saw themselves at the center of the world

217 and the hub of civilization.6 “” lived beyond the borders of the civilized world and were only to be transformed by adopting Chinese ways so as to ascend to a higher level of civilization but not vice versa.7 In the Chinese context, barbarians were generically referred to as hu, man, , rong, or yi as opposed to han or hua.8 Until the late 1930’s, the names of barbarian groups were written in characters with radicals indicating animals.9 Its origin unclear, there had been a custom of referring to barbarians as birds and beasts.10 Although this custom might have started out as an innocent way of naming a group of people according to its totem beliefs,11 this widespread and entrenched practice constituted “part of a mentality that integrated the concept of civilization with the idea of humanity, picturing the alien groups living outside the pale of

Chinese society as distant savages hovering on the edge of bestiality.”12 Simply based on their clothing, the schoolchildren judged the two strangers to be non- human beings. After all, they might not have expected the blunt remark to be fully understood by the two visitors.

Their subsequent comment “How can he read (ta neng zhishu hu)?!” seems to corroborate the aforementioned speculation. A foreign-looking person is usually not expected to be able to speak the Chinese language, not to mention read its written script. The ancient Greeks called the peripheral peoples who did not speak Greek “barbarians” (barbaroi) because they spoke as if giving out sounds like “bar-bar.”13 For both Greeks and Romans, “barbarians” spoke imperfectly

218 but they were not necessarily illiterate. In fact, writing was invented and imported into by barbarians.14 In the ancient Greek world, what distinguished barbarians from the civilized men was not literacy, but rather the spoken language together with appearance and temperament.15 The Chinese, however, with a written tradition that dated back to the third millenium B.C. E., valued the written script much more than the spoken language.

While it is not clear when the transition from oral society to a written one took place in China or how literacy rates changed from antiquity to the modern times in China,16 it is certainly true that the Chinese took pride in their unique writing system. Many myths recorded in ancient Chinese texts narrated how writing was invented from great antiquity.17 Although other scripts co-existed during the dynasties under alien rule18 and books were published in other languages,19 the Chinese script never failed to remain the dominant written language in book printing, historiography, and administration.20 Chinese orthography spread widely into the neighboring countries as characters were either borrowed as written scripts for the native languages or emulated as the basis for newly created writing systems.21 The flow of information in written languages between cultures seemed to be mostly a one-way street from the

Chinese to the other languages. Through translation, Chinese texts were distributed in the Tangut, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongolian, and Manchu languages from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries.22 During a period of fifteen hundred

219 years from the fourth to the nineteenth centuries, there were only three major movements when large numbers of foreign texts were translated into Chinese due to religious and political motivations.23 Government sponsored translation bureaus existed not to introduce and appreciate foreign cultures, but rather to

“isolate and denigrate” them.24 From the Yuan to the Qing dynasties when

Chinese territory expanded through military conquest, one of the most important methods adopted by court officials who governed the new frontier was to civilize the local peoples by building schools to teach children to read the

Confucian classics.25 In a sense, the ability to read Chinese became a demarcation line between the civilized and the uncivilized worlds. Scholar officials believed literacy, that is, literacy in the Confucian classics in particular, to be an empowering tool that would shed light on those remote areas that were otherwise infested with ignorance and backwardness. It is no surprise that the young children, themselves still on the road to literacy, would doubt the two foreigners’ ability to read the Chinese classics.

The children’s third comment “What is that sound (ci he sheng)?!” raises an issue of what is deemed the “correct pronunciation” in reading Chinese texts. In classical Chinese, a distinction is made between “sheng” (sound, noise) and

“yin”(voice, pronunciation).26 The former usually refers to noises or sounds made by animals and inanimate things, whereas the latter refers to pleasant sounds made by human speech and musical instruments. By using the term

220 “sheng,” the children seemed to be implying that Pyeongzhong (who apparently was using the proper Korean pronunciation) was giving out noises or sounds like birds or beasts instead of reading the texts out properly in their correct “yin”

(pronunciation).

As discussed in Chapter 2, the correct pronunciation of characters was deemed very important by parents and teachers. For example, one of the first tasks assigned by Cheng Duanli to his students during their first reading of a text was to discover and mark out pronunciations of phonetic loan characters.

Educators and literati took pains to explain the correct pronunciations of certain characters and compile long lists of phonetic loan characters. Although differences in spoken languages were readily accepted as naturally deviated local dialects () within the kingdom, there was supposed to be only one correct reading (in terms of pronunciation) of the classics. Requirements in examination compositions may also have contributed to this emphasis on pronunciation. For instance, students had to know the correct pronunciations and rhyme categories of characters in order to compose poetry, rhyme-prose, and belle-lettres.27

Although poetry questions were abolished in the examinations in the early Ming and then revived during the Qianlong reign (1736-1795),28 composing poetry remained one of the most enjoyable pastimes for literati. Therefore, making mistakes in pronunciation while reading was considered unacceptable and associated with inferior reading abilities.

221 The emphasis on the correct pronunciation of the classics was taken to the next level by a couple of eminent scholars in the “evidential research movement”

( xue), which started in the late seventeenth century and continued its influence on Chinese philology well into the twentieth century.29 This movement saw a change of focus in intellectual studies from philosophy to philology

(traditionally considered as a “lesser learning”/xiaoxue), even though the forerunners to the movement held philosophy to be the goal of philological studies.30 With the growth of philology, etymology (xungu), paleography (), and phonology (yinyun) rose to become three of the most important branches of studies.31 The central concern in these three domains was to find out the original form (xing), pronunciation (sheng), and meaning (yi) of characters used in

Confucian classics.32 Within one particular line of research tradition that was pioneered by (1613-1682), developed by Hui Dong (1697-1758), and perfected by Dai Zhen (1724-1777),33 evidential scholars believed that the search for correct pronunciation would reveal the correct meaning of key terms, enable the correct interpretation of the Confucian classics, and hence restore the correct moral philosophy of antiquity.34 For them, the reconstruction of ancient pronunciation was to serve the purpose of reviving the ancient institutions and manners carried out by the sage-kings.35 Although their argument did not dominate the research discourse in late eighteenth century, their methodology

222 exerted a profound influence on later philological studies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.36

The young children in this Shenyang elementary school must have been reprimanded by their teachers or parents for their incorrect pronunciation when they read. That might be the reason why they were so relentless when they heard the Korean visitor’s rendering of the classics in the native Korean tongue.

As a Sirhak (practical learning) scholar, Hong Taeyong was devoted to many areas in Chinese classical studies and was probably aware of the Chinese insistence on correct pronunciation.37 That might explain why he picked up the book and read it in Chinese to fend off the apparent insult. Sure enough, the children were convinced that he could read.

The ethnic status of the school children and their visitors in our story further compounds the complexity of this analysis. The school Hong describes was located in Shenyang, the second capital of the ruling Manchu court. As Hong notes in his memoir, the two sons of his Manchu host were sent to this school to study.38 It was probably a Manchu school run by the banners or some family clans with the primary goal of educating the Manchu zidi (sons and brothers).39

Ethnically speaking, these children were Manchu.40 Yet, in terms of certain behavior patterns, they presented typical Han-Chinese characteristics: they spoke the Chinese language,41 read Chinese books in the Chinese way,42 and used

Chinese standards to judge the foreigners. The paradox here begs the question of

223 who are the Manchus and who are the Hans, who are the Chinese (hua) and who are the barbarians (yi).

The Confucian theories on the distinction between Chinese and barbarians were embraced by Korean scholars of Hong’s time. Although the Chinese regarded the Koreans as (Eastern barbarians), Korean literati prided themselves on being the followers of the Chinese civilization and called Korea the “small China” (Sohwa, or xiao zhonghua in Chinese pronunciation).43

After the Qing overthrew the Ming, most Korean scholars could not agree whether the Manchus should be considered Chinese (hua) or barbarians (yi),44 but they had no doubts that Korea belonged culturally to the hua category. By associating Korea with the Chinese civilization, Hong’s answer to these children’s inquiry about the existence of Chinese texts reflected this sense of cultural superiority.

Hong’s quote “ shu wen” (over the kingdom, all writing based on the same characters) is taken from one of the Four Books, the Doctrine of the Mean, which was memorized and recited by students and scholars alike.45 In the original context, the phrase paints a Confucian political ideal of peaceful harmony represented by standardized writing, measures, and human behavior patterns. Over the course of time, the phrase “unifying scripts and standardizing measures” (tong wen gong gui) took on a symbolic meaning of political power and legitimacy. As a literary allusion, the phrase is best known to be associated with

224 the First Emperor of the , who reformed scripts and standardized measures and the axle-width of carriage wheels as soon as he conquered all the other states and unified China. His reforms, in turn, became symbols of a unified

China to be lauded in every history book. The Yuan emperor Khubilai, probably inspired by this allusion, actually attempted to institute a universal script to be devised to transcribe all spoken languages within his realm.46 In other words, the phrase started out as a descriptive term for a series of political reforms but ended up as an ideological label for a range of ethnocentric views on written scripts and cultures.47

5.2 Case Studies of Non-Han Peoples’ Reading Experiences in China

How we characterize Hong Taeyong and the school children’s behaviors raises an important question about how the “culture of reading” in late imperial

China functioned at its “peripheral regions” and expanded its “territories.” In the following pages, I will use four case studies to demonstrate how and why non-Han peoples learned to read Chinese. Although these four cases present different historical moments, geographical areas, as well as diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, they nevertheless prove that “the culture of reading” did exist and included readers at different levels. The reading proficiency levels of all the individuals discussed therein varied due to different factors. However, these individuals did share one commonality: none of them were forced to study

225 . They all voluntarily studied the Chinese language and learned to read its script.

A discussion of how members from an outgroup participated in the Chinese culture inevitably evokes the notion of “sinicization.” From both the traditional and modern Chinese perspectives, Hong’s erudition in the Chinese language and culture, his behavior, and his words can probably be conveniently explained as indicators of his “sinicization.” Like the historical figures in Chen Yuan’s seminal study on sinicized Central Asians under the Mongols, Hong possessed all the characteristics that qualify him to be labeled as highly “sinicized.” Likewise, the

Manchu children’s behavior can also be referred to as the by-product of

“sinicization.”

For various reasons (see Appendix B), I will not use the “sinicization” model as a theoretical framework to explain why and how non-Han peoples learned to read Chinese. On the contrary, the following case studies show that it is simply impossible and meaningless to use one theoretical term to generalize about a whole range of different cultural phenomena even when they superficially all revolve around the behavior of reading. In addition, these cases demonstrate that there is not an “essentialized” Chinese culture, but it has been constantly reshaped by its participants, regardless of whether they were “Chinese” or not.

The cases studied below are not meant to be exhaustive or all-inclusive. They are presented to spark more interest in the issue of reading so that more

226 researchers with different expertise will closely examine each individual case so a clearer picture will come into view about the reading experiences of the non-

Han peoples in China. For data, I rely heavily on primary sources in Chinese because my limited foreign language skills do not allow me to treat documents in the wide variety of languages and scripts (Khitan, Jurchen, Mongolian, Italian,

French, Latin, Hebrew, and Korean). For secondary sources, I am indebted to a number of studies done in Chinese, English, Japanese, and German.

5.2.1 The “Barbarian Rulers”: Khitans, Jurchens, and Mongols

In the year of 916,48 a nomadic tribe leader (872-926) established a kingdom in the northern part of China and named it Khitan. This was not the first time in Chinese history that a foreigner founded a state on Chinese soil. Nor was it the first time a foreign regime would rule a population dominated by Han-

Chinese. However, the establishment of the Khitan kingdom (later changed into the name of Liao) marked a historical beginning in Chinese history in more than one sense. The Khitan Liao was to rise in power and compete with the Song dynasty (960-1276) as a major political rival and constant military threat on the

Chinese territory for more than a century. They reached a treaty in 1004 with the

Song in which the latter had to make generous gifts in exchange for a peaceful border. This treaty and its later reincarnations reversed the order where only “barbarians” paid to the Chinese emperors. The Khitan Liao kingdom (907-1125) was defeated by the Jurchen Jin (1125-1234), who rose from

227 the mountains of east and later expanded their territory to include

China proper to the north of the . Then in 1234 and 1276 respectively, both the Jurchen Jin and Southern Song were conquered by the Mongols. With the fall of the Southern Song, the Mongols assumed the rule of a reunified China.

Through the compilation project of the “Three Histories” (official histories of

Song, Liao and Jin) under the sponsorship of the Mongol Yuan, the Khitan Liao and Jurchen Jin were formally entered into as two legitimate dynasties together with the Song. Thus, with no small significance, the Khitan Liao opened a new era of “conquest dynasties” or “alien rule” in

Chinese history.49

The Khitans might have been the descendents of the people, who spoke either a proto-Mongolian or a Tungusic language with many loan words from the Turkic language.50 They did not have their own script until the year 920 when they introduced a script modeled after the Chinese writing system called

“large Khitan script” (Qidan dazi).51 Five years later, another script based on

Uighur alphabetic writing was introduced.52 Both scripts have survived only in the form of epigraphic and little progress has been made to decipher them. It is not clear how widely used these two scripts were in the Liao territories53 but it is known that they later became the basis for the Jurchen scripts. From a handful extant sources, it is understood that some Chinese texts, including a calendar, a couple of history books, a medical treatise, a collection of

228 Tang poet Bai Juyi’s (772-846) essays, and possibly a Daoist treatise (or maybe military handbook), were translated into the .54

No evidence shows that the Liao regime systematically promoted the Chinese language and writing system among its tribal members even though it adopted many Chinese institutions (yong hanfa). Despite the fact that there were constant tensions between the emulation of Chinese ways and the preservation of the traditional Khitan practices, many members of the royal clan still managed to accomplish high achievements in the Chinese language arts, either in poetry or in calligraphy. Bei (900-937), the eldest son of Abaoji, kept a collection of Chinese books which numbered in the thousands of volumes. Furthermore, he was adept at writing essays in both Khitan and Chinese. He was an expert in prognostication (yinyang), music (yinlü), medicine (yiyao), and acupuncture (bian), most likely thanks to his wide reading knowledge of Chinese texts devoted to these topics. He even translated one Chinese Daoist (or possibly military) treatise into Khitan.55 Deguang (902-947), Bei’s younger brother, who became the second emperor of the Liao, was said to have been a capable calligrapher.56 Yelü

Shucheng, another royal clan member, was a fine writer in both Khitan and

Chinese, especially with regard to poetry. He was ordered by the emperor to translate the Chinese Fangmai shu (Book on prescription and diagnosis) into the

Khitan language, which was widely distributed among Khitan physicians and enabled them to improve their medical skills.57 His nephew, Pulu, was said to

229 have spent less than ten years studying Chinese and yet possessed a thorough knowledge of the classics. He even sat for the civil examinations designed only for Chinese subjects and obtained the jinshi degree. Discovering Pulu to be a

Khitan, the chief examiner reported the incident to the emperor Xingzong (1016-

1055, r. 1031-1055), who in turn punished Pulu’s father with two hundred lashes,58 but rewarded Pulu for his literary talents.59

Xingzong’s punishment of Pulu’s father was probably merely due to a legal technicality that perfunctorily honored Khitan traditions. His reward of Pulu, however, spoke of the royal family’s deep appreciation of the Chinese language art. Xingzong himself did not seem to have an advanced reading knowledge of

Chinese, since he needed Khitan translations to read Chinese history books.60

Yet his eldest son Hongji (1032-1101, Daozong), who ascended the throne upon Xingzong’s death, was well educated in Chinese and wrote .61 He was fond of Confucian and Buddhist writings and was reported to have read and admired an essay written by Song Renzong (r. 1023-1064).62 Under his reign, Chinese style education and civil examinations flourished.63 His empress, Xiao Guanyin (canonized as Empress Xuanyi), was also adept in

Chinese poetry. Her accomplishments even won her a name as an outstanding poet in Chinese literary history.64 Ironically, in a court conspiracy, she was falsely accused of having written erotic poems to her Chinese household servant and forced to commit suicide.65

230 Like the Khitans, the Jurchens created two types of scripts of their own and promoted their use with a series of political actions. They spoke a Tungusic language66 and did not have a written language until they discovered the Khitan and Chinese orthographies through their interactions with the Liao dynasty. In

1119, under Aguda’s (r. 1115-23, canonized as Taizu) sponsorship, Wanyan Xiyin

(?-1140), a statesman and well-known expert on China, created the so-called large Jurchen script (Nüzhi dazi) based on Chinese and Khitan characters.67 The small Jurchen script (Nüzhi ) was said to have been created in 1138 by the

Jin emperor Xizong (r. 1135-50) who was murdered in a court coups d'etat by his successor.68 Under the golden reign of Shizong (1123-89, r. 1161-89), schools of the two Jurchen scripts were established in 1165 and as many as three thousand young children from the Jurchen tribal systems were selected to study the scripts.

Their textbooks were newly translated Chinese classics.69 Five years later, the top one hundred of these students were chosen to go to the capital for further study for four years before taking a final examination. Those who excelled were later awarded the jinshi degree and sent back to the prefectural schools as teachers.70

By the year 1183, an impressive collection of Chinese classics including the Five

Classics had been translated into Jurchen for wide circulation.71 These efforts took place during a period when Shizong was trying to revive Jurchen traditions by prohibiting the Jurchens from adopting Chinese names or dress and by encouraging them to speak the Jurchen language.72

231 For the Jurchen administrators, the Khitan and Chinese scripts seemed to be of equal importance. In their dealings with the Khitan Liao, documents were drafted in both the Khitan and Chinese scripts.73 Chinese was used in diplomatic correspondence between Jin and Koryo, Xi Xia, and Song.74 After the annexation of former Khitan and Chinese territories, a large population under the rule of Jin was ethnically Khitan and Chinese. Initially, the Khitan language served as a medium between Chinese and Jurchen in translation.75 This was probably because there were not as many Chinese-Jurchen bilingual speakers/readers as there were Jurchen-Khitan and Chinese-Khitan bilinguals.76 In the fourth lunar month of the year 1191, those clerks who only transcribed the Khitan scripts in the Bureau of National Historiography were dismissed and eight months later, the Khitan script was officially abolished.77 This move was mostly likely due to an increase of scribes literate in both Chinese and Jurchen, thanks, in part, to the efficacy of Jurchen schools.

Among the royal family members, quite a few were literate in Chinese.

Xizong, who allegedly created the small Jurchen script, had Confucian scholars as his tutors when he was a child and learned to compose poetry.78 Hailing

Wang (r. 1149-1161), an avid reader of the Chinese classics and histories, was also a fine poet in both shi and ci (song-lyric) poetry.79 His successor, Shizong, though a vigorous promoter of the Jurchen scripts and traditional culture, sought out a

Confucian scholar to be the tutor of his heir apparent (Zhangzong’s father,

232 canonized as Xianzong, who died before ascending the throne) and chose well- known Jurchen jinshi to teach one of his grandchildren both the Jurchen small script and Chinese.80 As a result, Xianzong enjoyed a profound knowledge of

Chinese. Among Shizong’s other grandchildren, Zhangzong (1168-1208, r. 1190-

1208) who issued the imperial to stop the of the Khitan scribes and the use of the Khitan script was himself a bilingual reader of the

Jurchen and Chinese scripts. When he was eleven years old, his father saw to it that his two sons (the other son was Xuanzong, r. 1213-1224) received the best education in reading both the Jurchen small script and Chinese.81 Another grandchild of Shizong, Shousun (1172-1232) was a song-lyric poet and an avid reader in Chinese history books. He was said to have read Zizhi tongjian (A thorough mirror of politics) thirty times.82 It is evident that the Jin royal family did not see the Chinese writing system as an obstacle to the promotion of the

Jurchen script. On the contrary, they seemed to encourage the study of Chinese among the Jurchen elite.83

The Mongols, unlike the Khitans and Jurchens, already possessed a national script of their own when they rose to power in the beginning of the thirteenth century. The script was phonetic based on the Uighur Turkic alphabet.84

Dissatisfied with the old script and intending to create a universal script to transcribe all spoken languages within the Yuan territories, Khubilai ordered a new script to be devised. By 1269, a new based on Tibetan

233 orthography devised by the lama ‘Phags-pa (1239-1280) was introduced as the new national script. The new script was called Mengguzi and guozi during the

Yuan dynasty, but is now better known as the ‘Phags-pa script. Despite the phonetic accuracy of the script and Khubilai’s limited efforts in propagating it, the ‘Phags-pa script failed to replace the old Mongolian script and Chinese characters. It saw only limited use in administration when sanctioned by law.

For private and literary purposes, Mongols continued to favor the older script.

The Yuan emperors’ interest in studying the Chinese language and literature has been thoroughly explored in a study by Herbert Franke.85 Among the twelve emperors after Khubilai, three of them were erudite in Chinese. Although

Khubilai himself could not speak or read Chinese, he made sure that his heir apparent received lessons in Chinese writing. Renzong (r.1312-1321) was able to read the Chinese version of Zhenguan zhengyao (Political Treatises during the

Zhenguang Reign). Wenzong (r. 1330-1333) was an accomplished calligrapher and liked to read Chinese prose and poetry. He read a juridical in Chinese and gave it his full approval. Shundi (r. 1333-1368), also a fine calligrapher, started to learn Chinese as a boy and learned to read through the Chinese classics such as the Analects and the Book of Filial Piety. The son of Shundi also received a

Chinese education when he was only ten years old. Two other emperors

Yingzong (r. 1321-24) and Taiding (r. 1324-27) probably also had some reading

234 knowledge of Chinese as proved by some of their extant specimens of handwriting.

The above discussion shows that a good number of members from the ruling clans of the Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties had a reading knowledge of Chinese.

Their proficiency in the written language was not an absolute indicator of their ability in the spoken language. Nor did their literacy in Chinese reach the same level: some of them achieved quite advanced levels whereas others merely passed the basic level. The fact that these royal family members were able to read Chinese poses a thorny question about these “conquest dynasties”: why would they study Chinese in the first place? There was no apparent reason and necessity for them to study the Chinese language and writing system. All of them had devised their own scripts and conducted administrative business either in their own language and script or in a bilingual fashion. Interpreters and translators were also readily available for administrative purposes.

To say that these “alien rulers” learned to read Chinese because they admired the Chinese civilization might be overstating the role of the Chinese language and writing system in a period when multilinguality and the co-existence of various scripts in one kingdom was commonplace. By the same token, to measure the educational standard of these alien rulers only by their knowledge of Chinese marginalizes the role of their own native languages and scripts. Both

235 views are the logical extension of the sinicization myth that oversimplifies a complicated sociolinguistic phenomenon.

The fact that the Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongolian scripts were newly minted scripts that lacked a rich native written literature might be one of the major reasons for the alien rulers to turn to Chinese, which had a full-fledged literary tradition. Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongolian promoters of native scripts did not seem to realize the importance of sponsoring a national literature for the survival and development of their national scripts. The only exception was the Jin emperor Shizong, who actually sensed this potential problem and expressed his concerns to his court official. He praised the superiority of the Khitan script over the Jurchen script because the former had a longer history and was able to express profound and subtle meanings in poetry.86 He was worried that people of later generations would despise the Jurchens because their script did not carry as profound meanings as Chinese characters. His prime minister assured him that the Chinese characters probably had the same problem at the inception of the script and had only been refined by generations of sages and worthy men. He believed as more Chinese classics were translated into the Jurchen language, it would only be a matter of time until Jurchen essays would be of the same quality as those in Chinese.87 Shizong’s policy of ordering more Chinese works to be translated into Jurchen might have helped build a Jurchen national literature.

However, his decision that Jurchen examination essays should be translated into

236 Chinese for Chinese examiners to judge might just have reversed his goal.88 This decision implicitly accepted Chinese literary criteria as the standard by which to judge the Jurchen written language and hence impeded the growth of the

Jurchen orthography as a mature written language.

Another important factor might be that these rulers accepted the values put on reading, especially reading Chinese, by the Chinese literati whom they had conquered militarily but not culturally. The alien rulers were quick to adopt the

Chinese view of a world divided into two spheres: “civilized” and “barbarian.”

A sense of cultural superiority dominated the Chinese literati discourse even when China was defeated by these “barbarians.” The Song literati did not hesitate to refer to the Liao and Jin states as “barbarians” in writings not to be seen by them.89 When the Song embassies traveled to the Liao court, they made a special effort to write in the archaic verbose style in order to impress (maybe intimidate) their Liao counterparts.90 The Song Chinese did not bother to study the scripts of their enemies.91 Nor were the literati under the Mongol rule eager to embrace the new national script.

In the written records left by Chinese literati, the Liao and Jin envoys to the

Song court who were learned in the Chinese classics and histories were either dismissed as admirers of the Chinese civilization92 or mocked as inferior readers who did not really know how to read. In one anecdote, Lu You recorded that in

1189, a Jin envoy was sent to the Southern Song. The ambassador was said to be

237 a scholar who enjoyed reading and writing. He was accompanied by a Song official to visit the West Lake in Lin’an (today’s Hangzhou). When he saw the shrine for Lin Hejing, he asked if Mr. Lin had ever governed the city of Lin’an.

The Song official simply laughed and did not answer. 93 Lin Hejing was the canonized name for Lin Pu (965-1026), a native of Zhejiang who retired from the world and lived the life of a recluse, growing plum trees and keeping cranes. In the eyes of the Song official and Lu You, this Jin ambassador asked a silly question that disqualified him as a learned man.94

A complete picture of how these alien rulers learned to read Chinese is hard to reconstruct due to the lack of direct evidence. Most of these rulers seemed to have access to very learned Chinese scholars as their tutors. It is reasonable to assume that the pedagogical methods used were modeled after the Chinese ones.

For textbooks, they probably used the Chinese classics. During the Yuan dynasty, erudite scholars wrote a genre of zhijie (direct explanation) books of the Chinese classics especially for the consumption of the Mongol rulers.

5.2.2 The “Western Confucians”: Jesuits

The Ming dynasty, founded by Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-98, r. 1368-98), reclaimed Chinese territory from the “barbarian” Mongols when the Yuan dynasty under the reign of Shundi disintegrated in the latter half of the fourteenth century. The next two hundred years saw a slow yet steady commercialization of society despite the founding emperor’s policies against

238 such a trend.95 Starting from the early sixteenth century, the growth of commerce also became international when the European mercantile reached the southeast coast of China first through the form of pirate raids and later through negotiated trade . China was again forced to face a "barbarian" threat but this time the danger came from the in the form of commerce. In the 1540s, Macao became the first trade “rented” by the Portuguese to carry on trade with the Chinese. This small town turned out to be not just a middle point for commercial exchanges, but also a key site for China to meet European civilization. 96

Among the first to settle in this new international town were various religious groups including the Franciscan and Dominican friars and the Jesuits.97 Jesuits

(meaning “one who frequently used or appropriated the name of Jesus”) were members of a Roman Catholic order called the Company of Jesus (later better known as the ), which was founded by Ignatius Loyola (1491-

1556) in 1534 and officially approved by the pope in 1540. The society recruited young professionals and trained them to become evangelical missionaries to be sent all over the world. Francis Xavier (1506-1552), one of the Society’s initiating members, went to Japan to convert the pagans. There, he realized that in order for his evangelical work to succeed, he must speak, read, and write Japanese and conform to local customs.98 This method was contrary to what the society members had been practicing in where they simply relied on interpreters to

239 preach to the natives.99 Another important discovery that Xavier made was that in order to convert the Japanese, the Chinese had to be converted first.100 Using

Macao as his base, Xavier attempted to enter mainland China in 1552 but failed and died of sickness on the island of Shangchuan.101

More than thirty years had passed since Xavier’s death when the Jesuits finally succeeded in establishing a residence in mainland China. Seeing that all efforts to penetrate China ended up in failure, by 1580, Alesssandro Valignano

(1539-1606, Chinese name Fan Li’an), then Visitor of the Far Eastern missions, decided to adopt Xavier’s cultural accommodation approach and summoned

Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607, Chinese name Luo Mingjian) and later Matteo Ricci

(1552-1610, Chinese name Li Madou) from India to Macao to begin the study of the Chinese language and script.102 The first break in penetrating China came when Ruggieri went to (Canton) with a group of Portuguese merchants for a biannual trading fair where he impressed the local officials with his spoken Chinese. Ruggieri was invited to stay at the hostel prepared for the

Siamese tributary embassy.103 With his good manners, a little Chinese, and a catechism written by him in Chinese with the help of some translators as a gift,

Ruggieri soon struck a friendship with a Chinese admiral (haidao), a vice magistrate (tongzhifu), and a regional commander (zongbing).104 Two years later, the Jesuits were allowed to settle in , located in Guangdong province.105

240 As the first person among the Jesuits to study the Chinese language, the difficulties that Ruggieri encountered were enormous. The first obstacle was the

Macao missionaries’ objection to his studies. They thought he was wasting time studying a difficult language and script when he could have spent this time working for the church in Macao. It was only after Valignano’s intervention that

Ruggieri was left alone to pursue his endeavors.106 The next difficulty he had to overcome was finding a good language teacher and suitable teaching materials.

His first language teacher was a painter who taught him a rudimentary number of Chinese characters.107 According to his letter to General Aquaviva in 1583, his teacher drew a picture of a horse to teach him the character for horse.108 He may have hired some other tutors at his own expense.109 Instead of the Three Character

Classic (Sanzi jing), Ruggieri started with the Great Learning (Daxue) from the Four

Books and some poetry books.110 His method of learning the written language was probably translation as he had already translated part of the Great Learning by 1581.111 His trips to China to deal with local officials probably gave him some rare opportunities to practice what he had learned about the language and

Chinese etiquette. After he resided in Zhaoqing, he could hardly continue his studies because of the frequent dealings with the local officials, visitors, and potential converts. However, he used those conversations to practice his spoken

Chinese and managed to write a catechism to spread the Christian teachings

241 among the Chinese.112 In one Chinese poem he composed, he expressed the frustration of not being able to preach easily in Chinese:

Several years have I resided in this place and still find it hard to teach the Christian religion, It is all because there is a difference between the foreign and the Chinese language, I must go on waiting until I have mastered the Chinese language, Then I shall be able to preach with ease.113

Despite the hardships he encountered in learning the Chinese language and script, Ruggieri made rapid progresses in his Chinese studies. By October 1581, it was reported that he already knew 12,000 characters.114 In 1585, he published

Xianbian Xizhuguo tianzhu shilu (Newly Compiled Records of the Heavenly Lord of the West) in Chinese. His translation of the Great Learning published partially in 1593, though not as influential as the translation projects by his Jesuit successors, was nevertheless significant because it was the first work to introduce

Confucianism to Europe.115 He was the first Jesuit to translate the Four Books into

Latin and brought it back to Europe.116 Between 1582 and 1588,117 Ruggieri tried his hand at composing poems, a common pastime among Chinese scholars. The poems he wrote roughly recorded his experience, thoughts, and ideas while residing and travelling in China.118 From the only extant copy of his poems, it can be seen that his skills with the Chinese writing brush were very good even though he did make some occasional mistakes with a few characters.119

Like Ruggieri, Ricci’s experience in learning Chinese was also full of twists and turns. He arrived in Macao on August 7, 1582 and started to learn the 242 language almost immediately.120 In September 1583, he went to Zhaoqing with

Ruggieri to establish a Jesuit residence.121 In 1584, he preached and heard confessions with the aid of an interpreter.122 By 1585, he claimed he could have a conversation with people without the help of an interpreter and could read and write fairly well.123 From December 1591 to November 1593, Ricci was translating the Four Books into Latin to help a newly arrived Jesuit study the

Chinese language.124 Having studied the language and the writing system all on his own for at least seven years,125 in 1594 he took lessons from a teacher and started training in writing essays in Classical Chinese.126 By 1595, he published three treatises in Chinese.127

Ricci’s first judgement about the Chinese language and script were rather naïve from today’s perspective. He described his experience in learning the language as a first-year student in a letter dated February 13, 1583.128 He highlighted two features of the language in its spoken and written forms: tones and characters. For him, there was a logical connection between the existence of these two features: words with different tones are written with different characters so that people could understand each other both through speech and written communication without confusion. Like his contemporaries, he held the view that written Chinese acted as a universal script in all the countries where it was used in spite of the existence of different spoken languages.

243 His view that Chinese characters are images of things (xiangxing) was further discussed in his treatise Xiguo jifa (The mnemonic methods of the West). For

Ricci, the “principle of six scripts” (liushu) of the origin of Chinese characters expounded in Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi (Explanation and analysis of characters) worked perfectly well with the Memory Palace System. He explained that among the six orthographic formation rules, xiangxing (pictographic) was the most fundamental one whereas the other five were supplemental to it (bu xiangxing zhi buzu).129 Due to orthographic changes over time, the characters lost their resemblance to their original image and people thought they were unusual.

Therefore, Ricci proposed a practical imaging principle to remember them. First, if the characters refer to real things, use the real image of these things to remember the characters. Second, if the characters do not refer to real things, images can be borrowed or created to remember the characters. For example, for characters that refer to “sun, moon, stars, mountain, river, mount, , flowers, fruits, grass, trees, animals, insects, palace and rooms, instruments, clothes, food and drinks,” apply the first method. For characters invented through the zhishi principle (indication) such as “ben (root)” and the huiyi principle (compound) such as “ming (bright),” create an image to remember them. For characters created through the jiajie and zhuanzhu principles (both are phonetic borrowing,) borrow images referred to by their homophonic counterparts. 130 Interestingly, Ricci did not discuss characters formed by the

244 most important xingsheng principle (phonetic-radical) which was responsible for over ninety percent of all the characters.131 Whether he intentionally avoided this category because this type of characters would be too easy to remember or including them would diminish the importance of his method, we do not know.

But his Memory Palace did help him in a way that he had not expected.

A keen observer, Ricci identified some important features of the Chinese reading culture and made them work for his evangelical efforts. He noticed that written words in the form of books commanded an unspeakable power over the

Chinese compared to an oral argument. Additionally, he observed that literacy was comparatively widespread among the common people either through or through the oral reading of books among a group of people. Hence, he concluded that by writing down the rules of they could spread their religious teachings more easily and widely.132 He also noticed people’s love for books, especially exquisitely printed ones.133 He further observed that

Chinese liked to collect aphorisms from books. They would write down those short phrases they collected from books either onto a folding fan or a piece of paper to be hung on the wall for future reading and appreciation. He decided that adding a few short moral axioms onto whatever the Jesuit fathers had written in Chinese would attract attention and friendly responses from the

Chinese readers.134

245 Ricci’s ultimate acceptance by the Chinese literati world was facilitated by two important events that were subtly related to the culture of reading. The first was his adoption of Confucian literati-style dress in November 1594.135 After

Ricci resided in China, he slowly realized the importance of acculturating to the

Chinese way in order to be accepted by hostile and vigilant Chinese. In 1585, two years after he established residence in Zhaoqing, he noted the importance of having a Chinese name for every Jesuit in China.136 In 1589, he learned a hard lesson in Zhaoqing when he built a European style church, and so decided to adopt the Chinese architectural style later in Shaozhou.137 In 1594 after taking residence in China for more than eleven years, he realized that wearing the robes of Chinese Buddhist monks with shaved heads presented the Jesuits in the wrong light to the Chinese.138 The Jesuits had adopted the Buddhist robes since their settlement in Zhaoqing based on Ruggieri’s information that the of Guangdong and , who granted the approval for Jesuits to establish residence in Zhaoqing, wanted the Jesuits to be dressed that way.139 In Shaozhou where the Jesuits settled after being expelled from Zhaoqing, Ricci became acquainted with Qu Taisu. Qu was initially attracted to the Jesuits by the rumor that they knew the secret of turning things into silver. He later became a faithful follower of Ricci in the study of and . He proved to be an invaluable friend who introduced many local officials to Ricci and helped the

Jesuits negotiate a number of legal entanglements.140 Most importantly, Qu

246 pointed out to Ricci the inappropriateness of the Jesuits' Buddhist attires. He suggested they exchange their monk robes for the apparel of a Confucian scholar.141 Himself a member of the dushuren echelon,142 Qu insightfully anticipated the advantages the Jesuits would have if they changed their image.

The second key that opened the gate for Ricci to the Chinese literati’s world was his demonstration of using Western mnemonic techniques to remember

Chinese characters. In 1595, Ricci stopped in on his way back from

Nanjing where he had been driven out by the local officials.143 Here, he received a warm reception from the local literati. He was once invited to a party attended by some degree holders. Intending to show some goodwill, Ricci suggested that they randomly write down on a sheet of paper a large number of Chinese characters. Then, using his Memory Palace system, he looked at them only once before repeating them in the correct order and then backwards. This amazing mnemonic feat obtained an effect that Ricci had not expected: these people begged him to teach them this skill.

Ricci’s performance of the Memory Palace system with Chinese characters was not reading in its strictest sense. However, the way he recited the characters resembled the way Chinese texts were vocalized. It was also logical for the

Chinese to assume that if he could memorize random characters with ease, then he could certainly remember Confucian texts without much difficulty. Ricci indeed remembered some essays that he had read and quoted them when he

247 debated with his Chinese literati friends.144 His ability to recite these texts backward seemed to also have greatly impressed his friends since this action of

“daobei ruliu” (reciting texts backward fluently) had turned a literary expression of mnemonic power into reality. His reputation grew disproportionately after this demonstration. Against his protestations, he was known to be able to recite any book only after one reading. Although he vigorously denied these rumors, word of mouth actually helped him secure a niche in literati circles and in an important way enabled his final ascent to Beijing.145 Thanks to his newly gained fame, Ricci soon earned the name “Western Confucian” (xiru) and his network of

Chinese scholars and high-ranking officials quickly expanded. In 1599, Ricci made the acquaintance of Li Zhi (1527-1602), an iconoclastic and controversial thinker. Although Li could not understand why Ricci was in China, he did not hesitate to show his appreciation of Ricci’s skills in the Chinese language and script.146

Both Ruggieri and Ricci’s efforts in learning the Chinese language and adapting to the reading culture among Chinese dushuren and scholar-officials paved the way for successive generations of Jesuit priests in China. The Jesuits who came after Ruggieri and Ricci had a more hospitable environment in which to study the language and culture. Their textbooks were probably the draft translations of the Four Books and Chinese texts on Catholicism written by their predecessors. They could concentrate on their studies because their seniors were

248 more protective and lessened the burden of evangelical and administrative work on them. Ruggieri and Ricci’s reports on China also contributed to the development of in Europe. It was not a coincidence that the Jesuits of the later generations, such as Jules Aleni (1582-1649, Chinese name Ai Rulüe),

Jean Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666, Chinese name Tang Ruowang), and

Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730, Chinese name Bai Jin) were more prepared to accommodate Chinese culture and so in turn were more readily accepted by the higher levels of the Chinese ruling class.147

5.2.3 Heavenly-Bestowed-Happily-Living (Yicileye): Chinese Jews

On June 24, 1605, a sixty-year-old man came to Ricci’s residence in Beijing and introduced himself as Ngai and a long-time admirer of Ricci. He came from

Kaifeng, Henan Province but looked different from other Chinese Ricci had met.

He had read about Ricci’s religion from books and thought they shared the same

God. Ngai admitted that he was an Israelite but did not know the word “Jew.”

When Ricci showed him a royal edition of the Bible, he recognized the Hebrew letters but could not read the text. 148 He said that some people in his hometown could read Hebrew. He claimed that while his brothers chose to learn to read

Hebrew, he had opted to study Chinese literature and neglected the study of

Hebrew. Ricci was apparently excited about what Ngai told him. Three years after their meeting, Ricci sent someone to investigate Ngai’s hometown and

249 Ngai’s story was confirmed. 149 Through Ricci’s report, the world discovered a

Jewish community in the heart of China.150

The Kaifeng Jews are believed to have settled there sometime between 960 and 1125.151 According to their oral accounts and historical records in the Song dynastic history, a group of about seventy households sent their representatives to present colorful cotton (wuse mian) and its seeds to the Song emperor.152 The emperor happily bestowed upon them his own Chinese family name as well as those of his court officials. They were allowed to settle in the Song capital

Kaifeng and maintained their own beliefs and practices. They referred to themselves as the “sinew-plucking sect” (tianjingjiao) because of their practice of cutting out the tendon of sheep and cattle when butchering them.153 The Chinese called them huihui (Muslims) due to their common taboo against pigs and .154 Later in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), they were known as believers of the Yicileyejiao (Israelite Religion). The most important historical sources about the Kaifeng Jews are found in four extant stone inscriptions dated 1489, 1512,

1663, and 1669 respectively. If not for Ricci and his successors’ investigation into the matter, the history of Chinese Jews could easily have been obscured due to the lack of sources and research.

The enthusiasm on the part of Western scholars and religious workers for research on the history and condition of the Kaifeng Jewish community took off since Ricci’s time and the Chinese research followed suit from the early twentieth

250 century on.155 One of the central themes that many studies have focused on is the “assimilation” of the Kaifeng Jews into the Chinese culture. What intrigued these scholars was that the Chinese Jews presented the only case where Jews were completely assimilated into the surrounding sociocultural milieu.156 In two early studies, Donald MacGillivray and David Brown summarized six major factors responsible for the Jewish “decline and denationalization” in China: isolation, low birth-rate caused by strict endogamy, ensuing intermarriage with

Chinese, failure to proselytize, lack of prophetic leadership, and the absence of

Chinese translations of the Hebrew Scriptures.157 Rejecting the above factors as the primary cause, Song Nai Rhee argues that the impact of the Chinese civil service examination system was the major reason for the “Jewish demise.”158

According to him, the examination system not only “Confucianized” Jewish intellectuals and syncretized Judaism with Confucianism, but also reduced the

Jewish population in Kaifeng and facilitated their intermarriage with Chinese.159

Whereas Rhee rationalizes that the Chinese Jews’ motivation to participate in the examination system was to distance themselves from their mercantile origins,

Wendy Abraham and Qianhong Zhang propose new ideas. For Abraham, their motive is to be found and explained by the similarities between traditional

Jewish and Chinese views on the importance of education.160 For Zhang, however, the Chinese Jews chose to do so simply because they had to for the

251 sake of survival. Neither Abraham nor Zhang challenge Rhee on his

“assimilation” thesis.161

The only scholar who disagrees with this prevalent idea is Irene Eber, who points out that the Chinese Jews were not completely assimilated because they still retained and wanted to revive their “Jewish identity” in the eighteenth century and thereafter.162 She introduces the concept of “sinification” by which she means “the gradual adaptation of customs from the Chinese environment that led not to assimilation and disappearance but to the strengthening among at least some Jews of their Jewish identity.”163 Apparently for her, sinification is a process of acculturation whereby the Chinese Jews slowly integrated themselves into the mainstream culture while retaining some of their own customs and practices. Although she discusses the fluidity of the Chinese Jewish self-identity, she failed to mention the role played by the Western “rescuers” in the complicated identity politics of the Chinese Jews. However, “identity” goes far beyond what the concepts of “acculturation” and “assimilation” can account for.164

A complete reevaluation of the above studies is beyond the scope of this chapter, but I will ask and attempt to answer one question that they neglect to discuss in depth: what role did “reading in Chinese” play in the integration process of the Chinese Jews? In a society highly dependant on written communication like that of late imperial China, although “reading in another

252 language” is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to change a person’s identity or self-identity, it is nevertheless an essential factor in the process of acculturation.

An exploration into why and how the Kaifeng Jews learned to read the

Chinese classics might provide us with an important touchstone as to their acceptance of and by their surrounding environment. From the conversation between the licentiate Ai and Ricci, it is known that Ai and his brothers had different career paths ahead of them. By studying the Chinese classics and taking part in the civil service examination, Ai had embarked on the road to becoming a scholar-official, a position associated with power and prestige in

Chinese society. His brothers, however, by studying the Hebrew scriptures and becoming well-versed in them, were advancing toward becoming synagogue officers who held much power in the local Jewish community, not just in religious but also social terms. This arrangement was probably the result of a conscious “division of labor” embraced by the family in order to ensure the well- being of the whole lineage.165 The fact that Ai knew the Hebrew letters indicated that he had some very basic education in that script. It was possible that he and his brothers received some form of education in both Chinese and Hebrew when they were young before a decision was made on who should pursue which literacy. In the same Ai lineage, another set of siblings realized a similar kind of

“division of labor.” Ai Yingkui, son of a juren degree holder, was a famous

253 physician who was also fond of literature. He had five sons. Among them,

Fusheng followed in his father’s footsteps and became a doctor. Dasheng was a manla (Hebrew ‘la, honorable person in the Jewish community166). Xiansheng, the elder one, was both a doctor and manla.167 Like his father, Fusheng authored many Chinese couplets presented to the synagogue when it was repaired.168

Dasheng, well-versed in Hebrew, was recorded to have taken on the responsibility of copying one Scripture of Moses.169

There is no evidence that shows the Kaifeng Jews, as a group, intentionally abandoned Hebrew in favor of Chinese. In one couplet authored by Ai who attained the juren degree in 1573, it is related that the twenty-seven letters of the

Hebrew alphabet were taught and known in every household.170 Hebrew literacy was, however, limited to the knowledge of the holy scriptures. Such a literacy was “sacred” as found in most early Jewish and Christian communities.

The goal of education was to be able to read the scriptures and people gathered in the synagogues to read, hear and discuss their holy texts.171 In a letter dated

November 5, 1704, Portuguese Jesuit Jean-Paul Gozani (1647-1732, Chinese name

Luo Baolu) gives a rare first-hand report of what he saw in the Kaifeng synagogue (libaisi). The locals revered what they called Da Jing (Great Scriptures, i.e. Pentateuch of Moses, or the “Torah”) written in Hebrew and carefully stored thirteen copies of it in the synagogue. Every Saturday and on solemn days, they gathered in the synagogue to hear this book read aloud by a reader.172 As in the

254 Jewish tradition,173 the letters by themselves were considered “sacred” as they were referred to in Chinese as shengzi (sacred characters).

The decline of Hebrew knowledge among the Kaifeng Jews over the course of several centuries was probably not simply because of the “assimilation” forces of

Chinese, but rather due to some internal factors. First, Hebrew literacy extended only among synagogue officers (including zhangjiao and manla), not every worshipper. Summarizing several Jesuits’ reports, Gabriel Brotier (1723-89) relates that the Great Scriptures had neither points nor punctuation. It was divided into fifty-three sections by a few section marks. A reader was responsible for reading one section from it every Sabbath day while the congregation listened to him. The rabbi and one monitor would stand beside the reader to supervise him in case he made a mistake.174 If as Cecil Roth speculates, the Kaifeng Jews also read the Scroll of Esther, then the way they did it was probably by holding the text in hand while listening to it being read out loud.175

In both cases, no active literacy was required on the part of the listener.

Second, there was a continuous lack of learned teachers and explanatory texts to the scriptures to aid the learning of Hebrew. Jesuit Jean Domenga (?-1735,

Chinese name Meng Zhengqi), who spent eight months in Kaifeng in 1715, observed that most Jews there could not understand the Great Scriptures and other Hebrew books they had. Even the most skilled ones could only understand a few passages. When he inquired the reason for their ignorance,

255 they answered that they had long lost the dujingben (Scripture Reading Book) which expounded the scriptures and did not have a learned teacher to explain the texts.176

Third, even when people had acquired literacy in Hebrew, they used it only for religious purposes. One of the most important tasks for them was the reproduction of the Great Scriptures. According to M.D. Goodman, a Hebrew scribe enjoyed prestige and power in the ancient Jewish world.177 The Kaifeng

Jews kept thirteen copies of the Pentateuch of Moses in thirteen tabernacles stored in the most secret place in the synagogue.178 When the city of Kaifeng suffered a flood in 1642, all these scriptures were engulfed in water. Ten damaged copies were eventually saved and compiled into one complete text.

With the help of the whole congregation, twelve other copies were made in the following years.179 Apparently, the “sacred literacy” of Hebrew was not intended for the general public and therefore was not easily disseminated among the common people in this isolated Jewish community.

Superficially speaking, the Kaifeng Jewish children probably found there were few differences in learning to read Hebrew and Chinese. First, memorization was essential in both traditions. In the Jewish tradition, education started with people memorizing the Torah before complete comprehension took place.180 Second, oral recitation was important. The Scriptures were read aloud in the synagogue every Saturday for attendants to hear. Third, both literacy

256 training started at home where parents and tutors taught the children. This is not to say that learning to read in Hebrew and Chinese involved the same strategies and required the same amount of effort for Kaifeng Jews. The fact that their Hebrew literacy was limited to the knowledge of the few available sacred texts coupled with the lack of good Hebrew teachers might have actually made

Classical Chinese an easier system to master.

In the secular world of Kaifeng Jews, Chinese became the dominant written language. All the extant inscriptions on stones and archway as well as couplets written on columns that now constitute the major historical sources about

Kaifeng Jews were written in Classical Chinese. Even in the only extant Kaifeng

Jews’ genealogy that was probably used as a prayer book for the dead,181 Chinese characters were written alongside some of the Hebrew names of the Kaifeng

Jews. The fact that many members from this community obtained degrees through civil service examinations during Ming and early Qing dynasties indicates that the Chinese education they received was on par with that in other regions of the same geographical area.

Being successful in the Chinese examination system not only promised these

Jews prestige in Chinese society, but also made them prominent in the Jewish community. A case in point was Zhao (1619-1657?), who obtained the highest degree and established a highly successful career in Chinese society.

He obtained the jinshi degree in 1646 and was appointed the director of the

257 Ministry of Justice. In 1650, he was sent to Fujian and (now

Province) for various posts.182 As an official, he was remembered in a local as an efficient administrator and wise Confucian scholar who effectively exterminated local bandits and established schools. He was lauded as having brought “the sound of reading” to a place once plagued with bandits.183

When he returned home from his official post, he actively participated in synagogue affairs. As a Jew, he was commended for financing the rebuilding of the synagogue and contributing his expertise to the reproduction of the Great

Scriptures.184 His efforts were well recognized by the local community as demonstrated in the stone inscriptions of 1663. Well-versed in both Chinese and

Hebrew, he made his contributions to the two seemingly different societies without any conflict. Being a successful Chinese scholar-official did not preclude him from fulfilling his Jewish obligations, on the contrary, his position provided the necessary financial support, prestigious reputation, and possibly important government connections for the successful completion of the synagogue project.

Zhao Yingcheng was not alone in being a bilingual Confucian scholar and religious Jew. From the few available sources, many others seemed to be comfortable in both Chinese and Hebrew and active in both worlds. According to the stone inscription of 1489, manla Ai Jing who was expert in the Hebrew scriptures presented a (in Chinese) in 1461 to the provincial authorities for permission to reconstruct the synagogue.185 According to the inscription of

258 1663, Gao Xuan, a licentiate (shengyuan) not only made several trips to the flooded synagogue to save the Great Scriptures and some miscellaneous scriptures on his father’s order, but also joined Zhao Yingcheng in editing and restoring the damaged scriptures.186 According to the reverse side of the stone inscription of 1663, Gao Dengkui, another licentiate, was responsible for making a copy of the Great scriptures.187 The aforementioned Ai Xiansheng, both a manla and physician, enthusiastically copied a couplet originally composed by his grandfather, had it made into a board inscription, and hung the board in the synagogue to celebrate its completion in 1663.188

If not for the records preserved in the stone inscriptions, we would probably never know that so many Chinese degree holders actually had a Jewish background and that in all likelihood Classical Chinese was their second written language. Their Confucian side was probably their second “social skin” under which they performed naturally in the Chinese society. In their local religious community, they were known by their Jewish names and they performed the social rituals piously. Further research is needed to discover and analyze more sources to find out whether they were indeed, as most scholars believe,

“assimilated” by the mainstream culture or were in reality at ease with a dual identity just as they were comfortable with a dual literacy. Until then, caution is needed when terms like “Confucianization,” “sinification,” or “assimilation” are applied to these Chinese Jews and their Chinese writings.

259 5.2.4 “Serving the Great”: Koreans

Thanks to their erudition and interest in the Chinese Confucian classics and histories, the Korean visitors to China were among the most active foreign groups to have participated in the reading culture of late imperial China. During the Ming and Qing dynasties as part of the ceremonial rituals between and suzerain, the Yi dynasty of Korea (1392-1910) regularly dispatched diplomatic missions to the Chinese court. Usually a middle- or high-ranking official would head these embassies staffed with an entourage that varied in size in accordance with the official rank of the ambassador. As keeping a diary while traveling was a habit of Koreans, many officers on these embassies left travel diaries that recorded what they did and observed along the trip. The thirty-some diaries extant today sporadically mention their reading activities during their ancestors’ trips to China.189 In addition to Hong Taeyong’s travel memoir, the primary data of the following discussion are collected from two important works from the

Beijing diary genre: Nogajae yonhaeng ilgi by Kim Ch’angop (1658-1721) and Yorha ilgi by Pak Chiwon (1737-1805).190

Kim Ch’angop (style name Kajae or Nogajae) went to Beijing in 1712-13, as an aid to his older brother Kim Ch’angjip who was the ambassador of the solstitial embassy. His journal included among other things a roster of the embassy staff, lists of gifts presented to the Chinese emperor, daily supplies to the embassy provided by the Chinese court, return gifts from the Chinese emperor, a

260 summary of scenery and customs in China, and a day-to-day record of his activities and observations.191 Even during Kim’s lifetime, his diary was widely read. Hong Taeyong carried a copy of Kim’s diary with him on his trip and referred to it from time to time.192

Pak Chiwon went to China in 1780 as an aide on a special felicitation embassy to celebrate the ’s seventieth birthday. An activist of the

Northern Studies (pukhak) movement, Pak consciously observed Chinese technology and commerce in order to promote them in Korea. His journal, organized both chronologically and thematically, contained detailed descriptions of the places he had visited, the people he had met, and “brush talks” he had conducted with his Chinese literary friends. Unlike Hong, neither Kim nor Pak could speak Chinese. Therefore, their communications with Chinese were dependent on either interpreters or “brush-talk.”

All three were Confucian scholars and exhibited a persistent interest in the culture of reading in China. As if conducting a survey, they were careful to seek out literate young men and asked them a set of questions: what books had they studied, who were their teachers, and why did they study books. When they visited temples and people’s homes, they took a special note of what books were there. Whenever they encountered written words or poems on the road, they read them and copied them down. On one occasion, Kim even left his own handwriting on the walls of a small inn near Shenyang. He had read earlier in

261 the collected works by Shik’am about a Chinese woman named Ji Wenlan. Ji was kidnapped and sold into servitude in Shenyang in the year of 1678. On her way to Shenyang, she left a poem and wrote a prologue of her sad story on the wall of an inn hoping that passersby would sympathize with her fate. Although the poem and her writings were long gone when Kim visited the inn, he nevertheless sought out the innkeeper and asked her about this story. When the innkeeper confirmed what he had read, Kim could not help but compose a poem in the same rhyme as Ji’s and signed “inscribed by a Korean.”193

In their conversations with Chinese friends, these Korean scholars would inevitably talk about reading. One of Pak Chiwon’s Chinese friends complained to him about the lack of text explication in reading instruction in China and asked him how it was done in Korea. Pak told him they read the text out loud and the teacher would explain both its pronunciation and meaning.194 A master of the Chinese classics and a practitioner of evidential scholarship, Pak discussed with his Chinese literary friend Wang Huting at great length about the relationship between book reading (dushu) and singing (xiange). Pak noticed that in one chapter from the Confucian Analects, the sentence read “Confucius said to

Boyu, ‘have you done the Zhounan and Shaonan.’”195 Pak pointed out that the verb du (to read) was not used here, and instead, the verb wei ("to do") was used.

He speculated that wei actually referred to singing. Wang applauded Pak’s insight and commended him for discovering something no one had ever noticed.

262 Although these Korean travelers were highly literate in Chinese, there were times when their literary training backfired because book knowledge was not sufficient to deal with unfamiliar cultural practices. Pak was a fine calligrapher and he soon found his skills to be useful in befriending storeowners who had the custom of asking refined guests for their brush works to be hung in their stores.

When he visited a pawn shop one day, he was asked by the shopkeeper to write a phrase for the store gate. Searching for a fine phrase, he remembered frequently seeing four characters at the gate of many stores in the market. The phrase read “qishuang saixue” (exceed frost, surpass snow). Figuring it meant that storeowners were honest and their conscience was clearer than snow and frost, Pak deemed it a suitable phrase to be presented to the owner. After he laboriously produced four beautiful characters, the storekeeper only shook his head and said: “(This phrase is) irrelevant.” Pak was irritated and dismissed him as an illiterate person who did not know how to appreciate calligraphy. On the following day, he visited a jewelry store. Again he was asked to show off his calligraphy. Hoping to vindicate the shame from the previous day, Pak presented the same phrase and again was shown a cold shoulder. Bewildered, he asked if the phrase was irrelevant. The storeowner agreed and said they sold jewelry, not flour. Only then did Pak realize that the phrase meant something totally different from what he had thought. It was a phrase only used by flour stores to mean that their flour was whiter than snow and frost!196 The mistake

263 Pak made was simply due to his lack of experience in a Chinese market. His reading of the phrase was perfectly correct if it was not already pre-empted by that context.

Kim Ch’angop, Hong Taeyong, and Pak Chiwon’s erudition in Chinese was not surprising given the fact that Koreans had been using the Chinese writing system and studying the Chinese language for centuries before their time. The

Chinese writing system was introduced to Korea and used there prior to the fourth century.197 Classical Chinese dominated the written communications among the Korean upper-class since the seventh century.198 Similar to the

European upper classes’ use of Latin, the Korean elite only read and wrote in

Classical Chinese but spoke in Korean.199 Most of them did not care to study spoken Chinese since it was the responsibility of lower ranking officials who acted as interpreters in the diplomatic exchanges between the two countries.200

Books (including history, novels, and most poetry) were written in Chinese and sons of upper-class families began to receive instruction at home or in private schools on Chinese characters and the Confucian classics when they were young.

As early as the Period (B.C.E.-668), Confucian education was institutionalized at the state level with well-established educational and examination systems.201

At the elementary level, private schools called sodang (“reading hall”) proliferated in small towns and villages during the Yi dynasty (1392-1910).

264 There, young sons from privileged as well as common families were instructed in the basic Chinese characters. A scene of learning to read was captured in a well- known painting by Kim Hongdo (1766-?): a group of boys sit on the floor looking at the books in front of them while one boy sits in front of the teacher’s desk with his back turned toward the teacher who is also looking at the book.

The young boy was apparently crying, possibly reproached by the teacher for failing to complete his assignment. 202 In Nogoltae (“Lao qida” as pronounced in

Chinese), a popular textbook written probably during the fourteenth century, some information on how Chinese was taught and learned in Korea can be found in a section where the imaginary interlocutor relates his experience in learning the Chinese language. Although the text was for the instruction of spoken

Chinese, what the person talks about seems to be his experience in learning to read Chinese.203

According to his story, he studied Chinese texts with a Chinese teacher.

Every morning, he went to school and received instructions about a few passages in the text from the teacher. In the afternoon they copied characters. After that, they learned to compose couplets. After couplets, they recited poetry. Then, they explained passages they had learned in the morning to the teacher. The last assignment for every day’s school work was to recite the text in front of the teacher. Those who failed to memorize the text would be punished with three beatings. Those who passed would get a token from the teacher to be used in the

265 future to avoid beating if they failed to recite a text. For textbooks, they used the

Analects, Mencius, and the Small Learning (Xiaoxue) authored by Zhu Xi.204

Since Chinese and Korean are two totally different languages and Classical

Chinese was difficult even for Chinese people, it was natural for Koreans to develop special ways to mark the Chinese texts to aid their reading. Kugyol

(literally, “orally transmitted secret”) was one such system. Kugyol was developed from the idu system205 whereby Korean grammatical elements written in Chinese characters with fixed patterns were inserted into Chinese texts to aid comprehension. When a Korean read out a Chinese text, he would pronounce the characters in either Korean or Sino-Korean pronunciation while adding necessary kugyol.206 It was said that Sol Ch’ong read nine Chinese classics in the native language. It is believed that he must have used the kugyol system to aid his reading.207

Relying on written Chinese, Koreans nevertheless developed a script of their own in the middle of the fifteenth century. Realizing the difficulty of Chinese and the limitations of Chinese characters in recording Korean sounds, King

Sejong (r.1418-1450) ordered a new alphabet to be designed so that the general population could become literate. The result was hunmin chongum (“proper sounds to instruct the people,” later known as the ), a of twenty- eight letters was capable of truly representing all sounds in the .

In the year 1446, the new syllabary was formally promulgated. Though

266 scientifically designed and easy to learn, the hangul syllabary was used only among the lower class and among women, including ladies of the palace and the wives and daughters of the yangban (scholar-official) families. It did not become widespread until the beginning of the twentieth century when its use symbolized the expression of Korean nationalist pride under the Japanese colonial rule (1910-

1945).208

The Korean upper-classes vehemently rejected the use of hangul and maintained the importance of written Chinese. Frits Vos summarizes four arguments given by one of these Korean scholars, Ch’oe Malli (fl. 1444).209

Ch’oe’s views are representative and provide some insights into my question of

“Why Chinese” for Koreans. According to Ch’oe, first, the invention of letters violates the principle of “serving the Great” (, shida in Chinese) since

Chinese do not have these letters. Second, these letters do not account for different local dialects in Korea. Third, use of this new syllabary hinders the study of the Confucian classics and leads to inefficiency in government administration. Fourth, use of this new syllabary reduces Korea to the level of

“barbarians” such as , Tibet and Japan.

Among these four reasons, while the second item questions the linguistic adaptability of the syllabary, all the others are concerned with vital ideological principles adopted by the Korean ruling class. As early as the seventh century,

Confucianism was established as the dominant ideology in the Korean kingdoms.

267 Some men who studied and passed civil exams in Tang China (618-907) introduced the Chinese examination system to Korea. In 788, a quasi- examination system was set up in the Unified Silla Kingdom (668-935 AD) and in

958, a full-scale system was set up in the Koryo kingdom (918-1392) based on the

Chinese model. Exam aspirants were tested on their knowledge of the Confucian

Five Classics and the Four Books and on their ability to compose prose and poetry in Classical Chinese.210 With the introduction of Confucianism, the idea of sadae

(“serving the Great”) was also accepted by the Korean ruling class as the guiding principle of the relationship between Korea and China. Initially as a small vassal of the Chinese court, the Korean kings adopted the principle sadae as the only way for Korea to survive and prosper against the threat (sometimes “protection”) of China. 211 As the principle of sadae permeated the mind of the Korean ruling class, they followed the example of China in all types of institutions, including rites and clothing. They prided themselves on becoming the “small China” and looked at all the “barbarian” peoples such as Mongolians and Manchus with a sense of superiority, even though the Chinese referred to Koreans as the “Eastern barbarians” (dongyi).212 Naturally, the sadae principle became a ready reason cited by Korean officials for the importance of studying the Chinese language and writing system.213

268 5.3 Conclusion

Using four case studies of the experiences of non-Han peoples in reading

Chinese, this chapter has demonstrated the participation and contribution of non-Han peoples in the culture of reading in late imperial China. Spanning an era from the late tenth to the eighteenth centuries, this chapter explores why and how four groups of people, namely, the “alien rulers” of China (Khitans, Jurchen, and Mongols), the Jesuits, the Chinese Jews, and the Koreans learned to read

Chinese and how they applied their reading skills. It shows that the circumstances in which each group chose to master the Chinese written language were different. For the Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongol rulers, it was due to the failure in promoting their own scripts. For the Jesuits, they claimed to “admire the Chinese culture,” but actually wished to proselytize in China. For Chinese

Jews, the Chinese language was the key to their survival and success in the

Chinese society. In addition, their mastery of it reflected the value they put on education. For the Koreans, literacy in Chinese was the result of a clearly defined ideological decision to follow the Confucian model of China. If the same term “sinicization” is applied to all these situations, then it becomes simply a narrative that carries too many meanings to be meaningful.

These non-Han peoples also learned to read Chinese with different methods.

Using today’s terminology, the Chinese Jews studied to read Chinese in an L1 environment, in which they already knew the spoken language. All the other

269 groups learned to read Chinese in an L2 environment, where spoken Chinese was not their native tongue. Because of this, they heavily relied on the translation method.

Despite these differences, they all share one thing in common: they valued

“reading” as a sociological act as the Chinese did. The Chinese script is not merely a writing system, it is a part and parcel of the Chinese culture. As a technology, it was spread throughout Asia and became the model for written scripts of many neighboring peoples. As a recording device, it preserved the

Chinese history on bamboo, , and paper. More importantly, as a symbol of

Chinese culture, it was believed to have an enlightening and civilizing power. It is not a coincidence that the Chinese word for written script wen comprised the major part of such compound words as “documents” (wenxian), “literature”

(wenxue), “culture”(wenhua), “civilization”(wenming), and “humanity” (renwen).

There is a cultural logic between these terms. Written documents and written literature were impossible without a writing system. Two of the major markers for a culture are its writing system and the written documents recorded in this writing system. The power of wen lies in its capacity for transformation.

Through the power of script, barbarians can be “civilized” and hence attain

“humanity.” Along this line, shared script (tongwen) would imply shared culture and a common civilization. In a sense, it “extends beyond shared writing and common patterns of behavior to signify the essence of a shared Civilization.”214

270 Naturally, from the Chinese perspective, the ability to decipher this shared script, i.e., reading in Chinese, was a sign of civilization and humanity.

Theoretically, “barbarians” who lived on or beyond the borders of the Chinese civilization were not expected to possess this ability. However, when foreign- looking people showed their skills to do so, they would be praised, and more credit would be given by Chinese scholars to the powerful Chinese script. The idiomatic term “tianxia tongwen” carried the implication that the Chinese writing system would prevail universally wherever the Chinese political and cultural influence reached. In real practice, the Chinese writing system and the

Confucian Classics were used by officials and scholars to transform “backward” and “ignorant” people. Along this line of cultural logic, people needed to learn to read Chinese because it was an essential part of the “civilizing process”

(wenhua). The “barbarian” readers may not agree with this Sino-centric view, but in a Chinese dushuren’s eye, they nevertheless inadvertently proved this through their actions.

271

Chapter 5 Notes

1 YG, juan 8, 2, reprint 27. The translation for the phrase from the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) is from Legge 1960, vol. I, 424. 2 For the problem of translation concerning the terms “han,” and “Chinese,” see Gladney 1991, 318-319, and Gladney 1998, 165. 3 Ledyard 2000. YG, juan 7, 1a, 3b, reprint 1, 2. 4 Wiedemann 1986, 189. 5 Turner 1980, cf. Peterson 1994, 403n1. 6 Meserve 1982, cf. Dikötter 1992, 4. For a discussion of the Greek and Chinese ethnocentric views of the world, see Mallory and Mair 2000, 34-36. 7 Dikötter 1992, 18. 8 Lü 1934. 9 1941, 73; Dikötter 1992, 4. 10 Dikötter 1992, 4. 11 Rui Yifu (1941, 74-79) summarizes that there are four possible origins for this custom. First, the psychology of despising outgroups; second, folk creation stories and legends that some minority groups were descendants of animals (e.g. some groups of the Miao and have purportedly claimed their ancestor to be a dog); third, environmental features of the geographical areas some groups reside (e.g. the south area is replete with snakes, hence the ethno-names min and man carry the radical of beast); fourth, totem beliefs and taboos. Rui concludes that the first reason is probably the major one. 12 Dikötter 1992, 4. 13 Mallory and Mair 2000, 34. 14 Woolf 1994, 84. 15 Woolf 1994, 84. 16 Evelyn Rawski’s (1979) classic study shows that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, there was a continuum of literacy from barely literate people to highly educated scholars. She estimates that the literacy rate during the Qing dynasty was 30-45 percent for men and 2-10 percent for women. This estimate might be too optimistic given her definition of the term “literacy” and the methodology of calculation she uses. See Kessler 1980 and Cohen 1980 for two critical reviews. For a discussion on the transition between the oral and the literate societies, see Ong 1982 and Goody 1968. 17 Li 1995, 14-15. 18 For a brief discussion on the historical co-existence of the Chinese orthography and other scripts in China, see Li 1995, 54-87. For promotion of the during the Qing period, see Crossley 1994.

272

19 For printing in non-Han languages (Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan) during the Qing, see Rawski, forthcoming. For Chinese printing during the four alien dynasties, see Wu 1950. 20 For Chinese scholars’ role in compiling the three histories (Song shi, Liao shi, Jin shi) under the Mongol sponsorship, see Franke 1974, 15-19. 21 For discussions on the adoption of Chinese characters in the Japanese and Korean writing systems, see Daniels and Bright 1996, 209-210, 218-219. For a brief discussion on the creation of Bacterian, Khitan, and Jurchen scripts based on the Chinese model, see Li 1995, 76. 22 For translation of Chinese literature into Tangut, Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongolian languages from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, see Franke 1974, 19-24. For translation of Chinese texts into the Manchu language during the Qing period, see Crossley 1994, 345. See Crossly 1990b for a discussion on the function of the translation bureau, Siyiguan, during the Ming-Qing period. 23 The first movement was the translation of Buddhist texts into Chinese, see Zürcher 1959, Ch’en 1964 and Tang 1955. The second movement was during the late sixteenth century when Jesuit missionaries translated Western works into Chinese, see Tsien 1954. The third movement was during the Tongzhi Reformation (1862-1874), when mostly Western works on political theories, international law, and technologies were translated, see Wright 1957, 237-248. 24 Crossley 1994, 347. 25 Armijo-Hussein 1989; Rowe 1994; Stevan Harrell terms this kind of efforts as the “civilizing project” that is a “kind of interaction between peoples,” in which “the inequality between the civilizing center and the peripheral peoples has it ideological basis in the center’s claim to a superior degree of civilization, along with a commitment to raise the peripheral peoples civilization to the level of the center, or at least closer to that leve.” (1995,4). 26 In the modern Chinese language, “sheng” and “yin” combine to become a compound “shengyin” which means both sound and voice. As traditional phonological terms, “sheng” refers to the “initials/” and “yin” refers to the “finals/.” 27 Elman 2000, 266, 269. 28 Elman 2000, xxxiv, 444-445, 546-562. Elman (2000, 550) notes that by 1800, dynastic schools and private academies were all teaching ancient poetry. 29 Elman 1984; Liang 1921, 1923. 30 Daizhen (1724-1777) was such a pioneer who did not see difference between philological and philosophical studies, see Brokaw 1994, 259 and Elman 1994, 17-22. Following the tradition of Dai’s followers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, scholars tend to discuss Dai’s achievements and the intellectual trend of his time in two categories: kaozheng (evidential research) vs. yili (philosophical thinking). See for example Yu Yingshi’s (1976) thorough study on Dai’s life and work. This does not necessarily mean that Dai himself polarized these two endeavors. 31 Zhang 1995; Elman 2000, 562. 32 Elman 1984, 19. 33 According to Zhang Binglin (1995, 30-31), Dai Zhen surpassed Gu Yanwu in his etymological and phonological analysis because he had profound knowledge in both phonology and (yinli) while Gu was only good at phonology.

273

34 For this line of argument and its counter-argument, see Elman 1984, 212-221; for more on Dai Zhen and his followers on this agenda, see Elman 2000, 562; Dai 1980, vol.2, 255-273. 35 Elman 1984, 219. 36 Dai 1980, vol.2, 264-273. 37 The Sirhak tradition was in many ways similar to the Evidential Scholarship movement in China. See Ledyard 1982. 38 YG juan 8, 2a, reprint 27. 39 For Manchu education, especially state policies on examination and school systems during the Qianlong (1736-1795) reign, see Crossely 1994, 352-359. Crossley uses a metaphor of “a set of concentric circles” to characterize the hierarchical nature of the school system under the Qing for the education of imperials, nobles, and common bannermen. The center represents the highest degree of prestige and political demands (352). She also notes that the Qing did not have a “universal, effective means of elementary education for the banner populations” due to lack of state sponsored elementary educational institutions (ibid). 40 For the complicity of the Manchu classification, see Crossley 1990c, and Crossley 1994, 369 n1. 41 For language customs in the garrisons, see also Crossley 1994, 84, 250-251, n15, n16. 42 It is not clear from Hong’s narration if the books he examined were written in bilingual Chinese-Manchu fashion or only in Chinese. Based on two pieces of information, I think the books were probably written only in Chinese. First, Hong is a very acute observer and he would not leave out any details that caught his attention. Elsewhere, he notes that the eldest son of his host was studying the bilingual version of the Four Books; see YG juan 7, 43b, reprint 22. Second, Crossley (1994, 359-365) notes that from the middle of the eighteenth century, Qianlong emperor was trying to revive the Manchu identity and culture by emphasizing the importance of the study of Manchu language and qishe (riding and ). This policy is probably triggered by the prevalent phenomenon of Manchu studying the Chinese classics. At the elementary level where the state administration hardly reaches, there would be only more dominance of the Chinese studies than less. 43 Chen et al 1999, 289. 44 Hong Taeyong was actually one of the first persons to propose that the Manchus should not be considered as barbarians (yi) due to their respect for Confucian rites, loyalty, and filial piety. See Chen et al 1999, 300-302. 45 Translation of the phrase is taken from Legge 1960, 424. 46 Rossabi 1994, 466. 47 See Howland 1996, 43-68 for an interesting analysis on the use and play of the term “tongwen” among Chinese and Japanese literary people in the nineteenth century. According to Wang Xiangrong (1989,1), the term was only applied to Japan, but not Korea, , or other Chinese tributaries (c.f. Howland 1996, 260 note 1). The fact that Hong Taeyong encountered many Chinese scholars who used this term after he showed them he could read and write Chinese proves Wang’s statement to be incorrect. More research is needed to see if the same term was applied to other Chinese tributaries that shared the same writing system. My speculation is that it was.

274

48 According to Denis Twitchett and Klaus-Peter Tietze (1994, 60), the date that Abaoji “ascended the imperial throne” varies between 907 and 922 with different historical sources. I follow the widely accepted traditional Chinese chronology to use the year 916. 49 For general introductions of the histories of the Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties, see Franke and Twitchett 1994, Ebrey 1996, Tillman and West 1995, and Langlois 1981. 50 Twitchett and Tietze 1994, 46. 51 Franke and Twitchett 1994, 31; Twitchett and Tietze 1994, 67. See also LS, juan 2, imperial annals 2. 52 For a study of this so-called “small Khitan script,” see Qinggeertai et al. 1985. 53 Qingge’ertai et al 1985, 12. 54 Franke 1974, 20-21. 55 LS, juan 72, biographies2, 1211. 56 Twitchett and Tietze 1994, 69. 57 LS, juan 89, biographies19, 1349; cf. Franke 1974, 21. 58 The reason for the punishment was there was not a legal code in the Khitan law for Khitans to sit for the civil examinations. For more on the purpose and function of the civil examinations during the Liao, see Wittfogel 1947 and Elman 2000, 19-25. 59 LS, juan 89, biographies19, 1350; cf. Wittfogel 1947, 17. 60 LS, juan 103, biographies33, literature shang; cf. Franke 1974, 21. According to the biography of Xiao Hanjianu (fl. 11th cc.), Xingzong issued an imperial policy for various books to be translated into the Khitan language. Xiao Hanjianu, an accomplished writer in both Khitan and Chinese, translated Tongli (Calenda), Zhenguan zhengyao (Political strategies of the reign Zhenguan), and Wudai shi (History of the Five Dynasties) for the imperial peruse. 61 Twitchett and Tietze 1994, 126. 62 Wright 1998, 83. 63 Dwitchett and Tietze 1994, 126. 64 Zhang, Ma and Chen 1994, 236-237. 65 LS, juan 71, biographies1, imperial consorts, 1205; cf. Twitchett and Tieze 1994, 133. 66 Franke 1994b, 216. 67 JS, juan 73, biographies11, 1684; Xiyin might have an assistant or collaborate called Yelu in creating the script, see JS, juan 10, imperial annals 10, Zhangzong 2, 231; see also Lo 1996, 100 note 35 for more information on the Jurchen scripts and their creators. 68 JS, juan 73, biographies11, 1684; Franke 1994b, 239, 282. 69 JS, juan 51, zhi 32, examinations 1, 1133 and 1140 contain a chronicle of the development of the Jurchen education system. For Shizong’s rulership, see Franke 1994b, 243-245; see Elman 2000, 24 for a brief comment on the Jurchen part of the Jin examination system; see Bol 1987 for a brief history of the Jin school and examination systems; for the Jurchen tribal system called meng’an mouke, see Franke 1994b, 273-277. 70 JS, juan 51, zhi 32, examinations 1, 1133, 1140; JS, juan 97, biographies37, Tudan Yi. 275

71 JS, juan 8, imperial annals 8, Shizong, 184; see Franke 1974, 21-22, for a list of translated titles from Chinese to Jurchen. 72 Franke (1994b, 244-245, and 281) discusses Shizong’s policies of preserving Jurchen identity and language. But he does not mention Shizong’s policy concerning the Jurchen scripts. 73 JS, juan 73, biographies11, 1680; see also Lo 1996, 99. 74 Franke 1994b, 282. 75 Franke 1994b, 283. 76 One piece of evidence to support this view is from JS, juan 53, zhi 34, examinations 3, 1182. In the year 1156, the examination regulations were set up for testing scribes in the Bureau of National Historiography. Jurchen scribes were required to translate texts from Khitan to Jurchen, whereas Khitan scribes were required to translate texts from Chinese to Khitan. 77 JS, juan 9, imperial annals 9, Zhangzong, 218 and 220; see also Franke 1994b, 283. Franke renders the phrase “guoshiyuan zhuan xie Qidanzi zhe ” as “those officials in the Bureau of National Historiography who knew only Khitan were dismissed.” I think there is a subtle difference between “who knew only Khitan” and “who wrote only Khitan.” The Chinese original reads “those who wrote only Khitan.” These were probably Qidan shuxie (Khitan scribes) who knew both Khitan and Chinese scripts and were employed to translate Chinese texts to Khitan for nüzhi shuxie (Jurchen scribes) to further render into the Jurchen script. As more Jurchen/Chinese bilinguals were available around 1191, there was probably no need to keep this tedious translation method any longer. 78 Jin 1995, 223. 79 JS, juan 76, biographies14, 1736; Franke 1994b, 239-240; Jin 1995, 224-225. 80 JS, juan 19, imperial annals 19, 410; JS, juan 93, biographies31, 2056. 81 JS, juan 9, imperial annals 9, Zhangzong 1, 207; JS, juan 98, biographies36, Wanyan Kuang, 2163. 82 Zhang, Ma and Chen 1994, 247. 83 Jin Qicong (1995, 231) concludes that this shows the failure of Shizong’s policy of revitalization of the Jurchen traditions. This view presupposes that Chinese and Jurchen were two competing languages and scripts in the Jin dynasty. I think we need to be cautious in making this judgement. It seems that the Jurchen rulers also intended a bilingual administration like the Mongol Yuan did later. They saw the possibility of the co-existence of the two languages and scripts and assigned different functions to them. They did not intend either one to beat the other and dominate the society. The failure for the Jurchen language and script to survive might be due to complicated socio-linguistic reasons. More research is needed to determine the nature and cause of this problem. 84 The following discussion on the Mongolian script is indebted to Rossabi 1994, 465-467 and Rachewiltz 1967, 71-74. 85 Franke 1953. The following discussion is a summary of his findings. 86 JS, juan 51, zhi 32, examinations 1, 1141. Herbert Franke (1994, 282) cited the same source to illustrate the point that “this reflects the alphabetic and phonetic character of the smaller Khitan characters, which could easily render the sounds of Jurchen.” 87 JS, juan 51, zhi 32, examinations 1, 1141-1142.

276

88 JS, juan 51, zhi 32, examinations 1, 1142. 89 Franke 1983; Tao 1983. 90 Wright 1996, 57. 91 Franke 1994b, 283. 92 Wright 1998, 45. 93 LXABJ, juan 1, 18a. 94 For Lin Hejing’s biography, see Giles 1975, 485. 95 Brook 1998. 96 Mote 1999, 722. For a general survey of Ming’s society when Jesuits came, see Chan 1990. For an account of Ming’s decline, see Huang 1981. 97 Sebes, 1990, 23. 98 Sebes, 1990. 23. 99 Spence 1984, 41. 100 Sebes, 1990. 24. 101 Sebes 1990, 25-27. For a detailed account of Xavier’s attempt, see Latourette 1929, 86-88, and Gallagher 1942, v. 102 Sebes 1990, 34. 103 Feng 1960, 34-35. 104 Chan 1993, 131. 105 Feng 1960, 34-35. 106 Peterson 1994, 408; Feng 1960, 33. 107 Feng 1960, 33. 108 Lundbaek 1979, 3. 109 Chan 1993, 130. 110 In one of his poems, Ruggieri narrates “in the morning I study the Four Books, in the evening I read poems.” Original poem in Chan 1993, 142, poem 11; translation in Chan 1993, 161. 111 Lundbaek 1979, 2, Feng 1960, 33. 112 Feng 1960, 35-36. 113 Chinese original in Chan 1993, 153 poem no.24, translation 167. The Chinese term Ruggieri adopted for “foreign” was “yi”/barbarian. He was probably not conscious of the negative connotations of this term. 114 Other versions of the report says 15,000 characters, see for example Lundbaek 1979, 3. 115 Lundbaek 1979, 2. For a comment on Ruggieri’s translation of the Great Learning, see Lundbaek 1979, 5-7. 116 Lundbaek 1979, 4, Chan 1993, 133-135. In 1596, Valignano recommended to the General of the Jesuit Order to print the Four Books translated by Matteo Ricci instead of the one by Ruggieri 277 because he thought Ricci had a higher achievements in the Chinese language whereas Ruggieri “knew very little of Chinese letters” (Lundbaek 1979, 4, Chan 1993, 135). 117 Feng 1960, 37; Chan 1993, 132. 118 Chan 1993, 136-139. 119 For a reproduction and translation of Ruggieri’s poems, see Chan 1993, 140-172. 120 Spence 1990, 10; Feng 1960, 42. 121 Feng 1960, 42. 122 Spence 1990, 12. 123 Peterson 1994, 410-411; Spence 1990, 12-13. 124 For a detailed account of the Jesuits’ translation projects of the Four Books, see Mungello 1990, 253. 125 Peterson 1994, 411. 126 Peterson 1994, 411; Spence 1990, 13. 127 Feng 1960, 50-51. 128 Venturi 1911-1913, 2:69, 117-118, 237, quoted in Spence 1990, 11. 129 XGJF, 11b, reprint 29. 130 XGJF, 11b-12b, reprint 29-31. 131 Characters formed through the xingsheng (phonetic-radical) rule constitute 97% of the total number of Chinese characters. See DeFrancis 1984. 132 He et al. 1983, 482-483, 594; see also Gallagher 1942, 45-46, and Spence 1984, 154. 133 He et al. 1983, 21-22; Gallagher 1942, 32. 134 He et al. 1983, 381-382. 135 Spence 1984, xii; Peterson 1994, 413. 136 Feng 1960, 43. 137 Feng 1960, 43; the details of the incident can be found in He et al 1984, 193-197. 138 Peterson 1994; Spence 1984, 115. 139 Peterson 1994, 409; Feng 1960, 34. 140 He et al 1984, 218-219. 141 Peterson 1994, 412. 142 Qu Taisu was a shengyuan which meant he had passed the civil examinations at the local level but not yet advanced to a higher degree that would ensure him an official post. 143 He et al 1984, 293-300. 144 Spence 1984, 140. 145 Spence 1984, 138-140. 146 XFS; cf. Waltner 1994, 422-423. 278

147 For two studies on Aleni’s work in Fujian, see Zürcher 1985 and 1990; for a study on Adam Schall, see Chen 1939; for letters written by Joachim Bouvet concerning Chinese dynastic records of Matteo Ricci, see von Collani 1993. 148 Misreading Jules Aleni’s account of the meeting between Ricci and Ai, Chen Yuan (1920, 281) thought that Ai was good at the Hebrew script. From all the available Jesuit reports, Ai could not read the bible Ricci showed him. 149 Gallagher 1942, 178-181; Moule 1966, 31-35. 150 According to ’s research, this Jew Ngai Ricci mentioned was Ai Tian, a licentiate from Kaifeng, see Pelliot 1921. An English translation of Pelliot’s article is Petrie 1966, and a Chinese translation can be found in Feng 1964. Pelliot’s conclusion has been doubted by Laufer 1930, but confirmed by A.C. Moule who reviewed Laufer’s paper (Moule 1931, 20-21) and Chen 1949. Pelliot’s view and Chen’s confirmation were both endorsed by Donald Leslie (1971, 104). Wang Yisha, a leading scholar on history of Chinese Jews, disagrees with Pelliot’s conclusion. Based on other documentary sources, Wang thinks there are two other possibilities for the identity of this Jew Ai. For Wang’s account, see Wang 1992, 130-131. 151 For various theories on the arrival date of Chinese Jews in China, see Chen 1920, 274-278, Lieslie 1972, 22-24, and Wei 1998. Based on oral legend and historical sources, Wang Yisha (1992, 6) thinks the time frame for Kaifeng Jews to arrive in China was between 998-1125. Most Western scholars, including Leslie (1972, 23), puts the arrival date at 1163. Wei Qianzhi (1998) holds the view that they arrived in Kaifeng in the year of 1008. 152 Wang 1992, 145-147; Chen 1920, 257-258. 153 Chen 1920, 279. 154 Chen 1920, 280. 155 There has been a very rich literature on the topic of Chinese Jews. For comprehensive and useful annotated bibliographies on the topic, see Shapiro 1984, Pollak 1993, and Shulman 1998. For an exhaustive and accessible summary and analysis of accounts about the Chinese Jews, see Pollack 1980. For a seminal Chinese study on the origin of the Yicileyejiao (Israelite Religion) in China, see Chen 1920. For a collection of Western works and documents on the history, inscriptions, and genealogies of the Chinese Jews from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, see White 1966. White’s work has been criticized to have distorted some historical facts. In the Chinese historiography, White is known as a foreign priest who attempted to and did steal many precious historic relics from China. For Wang’s critique of White 1966 and Wang’s own study on the history of Chinese Jews, see Wang 1992. For Chinese perceptions of the Jews and Judaism, see Zhou 2001. For summaries of Chinese research on Jewish diasporas in China, see Wang 1998 and Xu 1998. For a collection of oral stories and legends in the Chinese Jew community in Kaifeng, see Wang 1992, 145-194. 156 Rhee 1973, 115. 157 MacGillivray 1928, 175, Brown 1933, 153; cf. Rhee 1973, 118. 158 Rhee 1973, 119. 159 Rhee 1973, 121-125. 160 Abraham 1991, 32-35. 161 Zhang 1995.

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162 Eber 1993, 1998. Eber 1998 is an abridged version of Eber 1993. 163 Eber 1993, 231, and 1998, 22. 164 Brown 1996. 165 Cynthia Brokaw (1996, 69) discusses the “division of labor” among brothers of book merchants in Sibao, Fujian Province in the Ming and Qing dynasties. She also discusses the dual emphasis on educational and commercial success in the family publishing industries. Due to the hardship and cost in studying for the civil service examinations, only the smartest son would be chosen to pursue the path of civil service examination whereas the other siblings would become merchants to support the big extended family. 166 Leslie 1962, 352. Leslie rejects the idea that the transliteration manla came from Moslem Mullah or Mollah as believed by many scholars. Following Haim Rabin’s view, he thinks it is an extremely accurate transcription of the Hebrew term ma‘la, the meaning of which also matches the function of manla in the Chinese Jewish community. 167 Wang 1992, 101-105, 119-120. 168 According to Wang (1992, 104,120), Ai Yingkui authored one couplet in 1653 (the tenth-year of the Shunzhi reign). According to Chen Yuan (1920, 281), in the year 1688 (the twenty-seventh year of the Kangxi reign, White 1966, 146 says 1668), Ai Fusheng composed as many as eight antithetical couplets on vertical columns (yinglian) hung in the synagogue. This shows both the father and the son were well-versed in Chinese. The Chinese version of their couplets can be found in Chen 1920, 297-299. An English translation of these couplets are in White 1966, Part II, 144-152. 169 Wang 1992, 104. 170 The phrase reads “shengzi ershiqi zimu, jiayuhuxiao” (Chen 1920, 297). English translation in White 1966, Part II, 143. White mistakenly translates the four-character idiom “jiayuhuxiao” literally as “we teach in our families, and display on our doors.” The is commonly known to have twenty-two letters, but the Jews of Persia included five finals and thus make the total number to twenty-seven (White 1966, Part II, 143). 171 Goodman 1994, 99. The term “sacred literacy” can be found in Fox 1994, 126. 172 Gozani 1704, 40. For a biography of Gozani, see Pfister 1976, 469-472. 173 Goodman (1994, 101) notes that at least by the fifth century, the Hebrew alphabet was considered to be sacred by the Jews. 174 Brotier 1770, 54-55. 175 Roth 1966, 1. 176 Brotier 1770, 62. For a biography of Jean Demenge, see Pfister 1976, 498-501. 177 Goodman 1994, 103-108. 178 Gozani 1704, 39-40. 179 Wang 1992, 43-44. 180 Abraham 1991, 34.

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181 This important Hebrew-Chinese manuscript was obtained by two Protestant delegates from Shanghai to Kaifeng in 1851 (White 1966, Part III, 1). For a preliminary study on this genealogy/codex, see Laufer 1930. For its English translation, see White and Williams 1966. 182 Leslie 1971, 116-117. 183 Leslie 1971, 121-122. 184 CJQZSJb, English translation and notes in White 1966, Part II, 58-77. 185 CJQZSJa, English translation and notes in White 1966, Part II, 8-33. 186 CJQZSJb. 187 BYTM; Chen 1920, 283. 188 Chen 1920, 297; White 1966, Part II, 143. 189 For a study of the Korean travelers to China during the four hundred years between 1488 and 1887, see Ledyard 1974. A useful collection of extant Koreans’ travel diaries can be found in Yonhaengnok songjip compiled and published by the Taedong Munhwa Yonguwon of Songgyn- gwan University from 1960 to 1962. Ledyard (1974, 29-42) contains a list of thirty diaries reprinted in this collection. 190 For a study on the connection between the diaries by Kim Ch’angop, Hong Taeyong, and Pak Chiwon, see Ledyard 1982. Pak Chiwon’s political thoughts and his Yorha ilgi have been thoroughly studied by Eikemeier 1970. 191 NYI, 1-26. 192 Ledyard 1982, 85. 193 NYI, 110. According to the innkeeper, the story happened five or six years prior to Kim’s visit (1713). However, according to the record Kim had read, the incident happened during the year of wuwu (1678), which was actually twenty-five years before Kim’s visit. Either Kim misunderstood the innkeeper or recorded it wrong. 194 YI, 547. 195 The sentence is from Analects 17.10. Confucius was inquiring his son Boyu if he had studied Zhounan and Shaonan, two parts from the Book of Odes were supposed to teach important lessons on personal virtue and family management. The verb wei is usually rendered as “study.” The whole phrase is “The Master said to Boyu, ‘Do you give yourself to the Zhounan and Shaonan. The man who has not studied the Zhounan and Shaonan, is like one who stands with his face right against a wall. Is he not so?’ (Legge 1960, vol. 1, 323.) 196 YI, 557-561. 197 Vos 1963a, 23. 198 Lee 1984, 57-58. 199 Horigan 1992, 14. 200 For a study on learning of foreign languages including Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, and Jurchen (Manchu), see Song 2001. 201 Taylor and Taylor 1995, 257-258.

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202 The painting is kept in the National Central Museum in Seoul. A reproduction of this painting can be found in Taylor and Taylor 1995, 258. 203 For a complete text of Nogoltae and its English translation, see Dyer 1983. 204 Dyer 1983, 305-309. 205 Since Chinese and Korean are two totally different languages, using Chinese characters to record the spoken Korean presented special problems. Various attempts were made to devise a reasonable transcription system to use this foreign writing system to adapt to the Korean language. Developed during the seventh century, the Idu system selected Chinese characters to represent the sound and meanings of Korean words and arranged them according to the Korean word order. It was mostly used by middle-class people and in government. Another earlier transcription system called hyangch’al chose Chinese characters with the same meaning to express Korean nouns and characters with similar pronunciations to denote Korean grammatical elements. This system was mostly used for writing poetry and is still being studied by scholars for reconstruction. For the idu system, see Vos 1963b. For studies on hyangch’al, see Vos 1963a. 206 Vos 1963b, 30-31. 207 Lee 1984, 57-58. 208 For more on the history and linguistic analysis of hangul, see Vos 1963b, Horigan 1992, Taylor and Taylor 1995, 211-230, Lee 1984, 192-193, and articles in Kim Renaud 1997. 209 Vos 1963b, 32. 210 Taylor and Taylor 1995, 255-256. 211 Chen et al 1999, 280. 212 Chen et al 1999, 289. 213 Song 2001, 22. 214 Howland 1996, 55.

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CHAPTER 6

EPILOGUE

6.1 Influence of the Culture of Reading on Contemporary Chinese Society

In the previous chapters, I have examined the reading practices of four types of readers, namely, children, men, women, and non-Han peoples in late imperial

China. I have emphasized the cultural conventions involved in the act of reading, its perception, conceptualization, practices, and transmission. Reading was more of a sociological act than a psychological one, in the sense that the manner and purpose of reading was determined and conditioned more by social conventions than by individuals’ psychological dispositions. These social conventions constituted a culture of reading that was unique in late imperial China. It was a culture that was dominated by well-educated men and in which literate women and some non-Han peoples marginally participated. At the center of this culture stood dushuren, a special group of male readers who regarded the reading of the

Confucian classics for moral cultivation as a defining characteristic of their status.

283 The official abolition of the civil service examinations in the year of 1905 had a huge impact on the lives of numerous dushuren in the Qing Empire. The abolition left tens of thousand of “upper gentry men” including juren

(employable men) and gongsheng (senior licentiate), and over several hundred thousand of “lower gentry members”—shengyuan (licentiate), waiting to be reassigned into the new educational system.1 Among them, those who were young and strong entered new Western-style schools to further their study or to become teachers. Those who could not to the new learning were allowed to take a set of special examinations to decide their future in the bureaucratic system. There is no quantitative study on how well these supplementary examinations solved the problems of the remaining graduates, but given the limited number of quotas set for these examinations and the large number of students, it can be estimated that a considerable number of lower gentry members could not find suitable positions for themselves after the abolition of the civil service examinations.

The victims of the abolition, according to Miyazaki Ichisada, were those students who had not yet reached the status of shengyuan and were too old to switch to the new learning or too proud to turn to other occupations.2 Using Lu

Xun's famous fictional character as example, Miyazaki demonstrates the tragic ending of these types of old students. In this short story, we see a vivid image of the old fashioned self-styled dushuren. Kong Yiji belonged to the poor

284 class but he was different from them. He was the only “long-gowned customer” who would drink at the bar where the “short-coated class” usually hung out. He could read and write. He had a beautiful calligraphic hand. He spoke with phrases cited from Classical Chinese texts. Most importantly, he possessed this unique pride associated with his status. When accused of stealing books, he retorted: “Taking books can’t be thought of as theft...Taking books... is a dushuren’s matter ... it can't be counted as stealing."3 Even though Kong Yiji was not a qualified reader according to the examination standard or a decent person abiding by the social ethical codes, he nevertheless regarded himself as a privileged member of the dushuren class.

The meaning of the term dushuren took on a new dimension with the advent of the New Culture Movement in the 1920’s during which a new culture and the use of a vernacular written language was advocated. The cultural connotation of the term dushuren began to be conflated with that of two new Western style words zhishifenzi (intellectuals) and zhishi jieji (intelligentsia), which were associated with a sense of historical mission to speak up against authority and to guide the ignorant people. In contemporary Chinese language, dushuren and zhishifenzi are almost synonymous except that the latter has been used in the official forms in the Communist China to designate an individual’s “class background.” Due to many political movements in the 1950s through 1970s in

Mainland China, zhishifenzi has taken on a negative connotation implying

285 spinelessness and humility.4 In an attempt to restore the reputation of the term zhishifenzi, a collection of essays on the social role of Chinese intellectuals authored by Yu Yingshi in which qualities of zhishifenzi were traced back to the shi (scholar-official) traditions of ancient China has been published recently in

Mainland China.5

In contrast with the negative connotations and the rich Western discourses related to the word zhishifenzi, the term dushuren never failed to stand as a positive and unique term in the contemporary Chinese language and cultural discourse. In an article on dushu published in 1940, a historian Yang Yuqing gave a strict definition of Chinese dushuren. According to him, a dushuren is not a person who studies in order to get a diploma or an official post. Nor should a dushuren see reading as a fashion or use it as a decoration. A true dushuren should learn from lessons in texts and apply them into real actions.6 In a recent controversy over the forgery of overseas doctorate degrees by many Mainland

Chinese scholars and businessmen, people still hold the view that

“trustworthiness” (chengxin) and “outspokenness” (shuo zhenhua) are the basic qualities of a dushuren.7

One of the main implications of my dissertation is that this exclusive status of dushuren in the Chinese culture was shaped in the distinctive culture of reading

(including its ideology and practices) of late imperial China. Am I suggesting that explanations of contemporary Chinese cultural phenomena ought to be

286 sought in history? The answer is “yes and no.” Yes, because the long tradition of the Chinese written culture and the social values placed on texts have inevitably fostered a sense of continuity throughout the Chinese cultural discourse. No, because social changes continually shape the present and distinguish it from the past.

However, the exploration of the history of reading in late imperial China does help us to understand some current social phenomena from a historical perspective. For example, Chinese society, however “modern” and “open” it has become, still frowns on the idea of any female student receiving a doctorate degree.8 For another example, the beginning of the twenty-first century saw a popular “dujing” (classics-reading) movement crop up in Mainland China, in which parents in big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing rushed to send their young children to special schools to memorize and recite Confucian classics.9 The social forces behind this grassroots movement are very complicated. But one of the main rationales behind it is that parents and educators believe the old- fashioned reading pedagogy to be more effective.

Some of the reading practices I have discussed found their way into the daily lives of contemporary Chinese through a large number of modern advice books and dictionaries on reading. Zhang Jingsheng (1888-1970), a famous sexologist in

Republican China, advises his readers in one of his essays titled Xiaoqian fa

(Ways to kill time) that the “three-on methods of reading” (sanshang dushu de

287 fangfa, namely reading on the toilet, on the pillow, and on the horse) invented by

Ouyang Xiu are the best ways to kill time.10 In a book titled Gujin mingren dushufa [Historical celebrities’ reading methods] that was published first in 1940 and reprinted in 1992 and 1998, the editor compiles stories of two hundred and ninety-three famous scholars from the (1100 B.C.E.-256 B.C.E.) to the Qing dynasty, so that young readers could learn from the reading experiences of ancient people.11 On top of these, A Comprehensive Dictionary on

Reading in China [Zhongguo dushu dacidian] published in 1993 is intended to be an all-inclusive guide on the history of the Chinese book culture and reading culture to contemporary readers.12

6.2 Pedagogical Considerations

The present study also implicates the effectiveness of certain pedagogical procedures in the learning and teaching of reading Chinese. Memory, especially aural memory, played an important role in the early stages of the acquisition of reading skills. The memorization and recitation of phrases and texts built up phonological, morphological, as well as discursive awareness in a child’s memory. Recent studies in Chinese and Japanese children’s reading acquisition have shown that these are critical constructs in learning to read for native speakers.13

The emphasis placed on sound in the reading pedagogy of late imperial

China also indicates that native Chinese never looked at Chinese characters as

288 ideograms, or graphs that only represent ideas. The "ideographic myth" about the Chinese writing system was a "Western gift" to Chinese people. The practice for children to learn the sound of a text before proceeding to recognize characters and comprehend the text suggests that it is beneficial to allow a time gap in the introduction of Chinese characters into a reading curriculum. In the context of learning Chinese and Japanese as a foreign language, this means teaching listening and speaking first, reading and writing next. For those teachers who are too eager to delay the introduction of Chinese characters and kanji to their

English-speaking students, this traditional Chinese pedagogical practice might encourage them to reconsider their decisions.14 Additionally, this practice implicitly offers support to a viewpoint that all textual materials for level-one students should be pedagogically created representations of the spoken language except for some commonly-used signs.15

6.3 Reconsiderations of Some Western Paradigms

Another important implication of this dissertation is that the Western hypotheses and models of “revolutions of reading” do not seem to stand the test of data from the Chinese historical experience of reading. What made silent reading possible in Chinese history was apparently not word separation or punctuation. The act of silent reading, a revolutionary mode of reading marveled at and celebrated by the Western scholars in the history of reading in the West, was treated by Chinese cultural discourses without any excitement.

289 When there was mention of what the Westerners called “silent reading” in

Chinese historical texts, it was the “quickness” aspect of it that was praised and marveled at, rather than the “silence” part.

By comparing China with the West, I am not trying to pose them as two opposites of the world, one as the “other” of the other. I am opposing a

Eurocentric view that tends to equate the West with the “modern,” the

“progressive,” and the “standard.” The enormous jigsaw of “the history of reading” has to be composed of pieces of evidence from as many cultures and written traditions as possible. In fact, studies in psychology and psycholinguistics in the past decade have demonstrated that the physiological aspects of reading (such as the phonological loop in processing written graphs) across cultures and writing systems are not as different as we had thought they were. Studies in the historical aspects of reading might turn up many similarities between different cultures too.

In the debate over the proper understanding of "orality" and "literacy," specialists from the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics have formed two camps concerning the "great divide" hypothesis. This widely accepted hypothesis, proposed by Eric Havelock, Jacky Goody, Ian Watt, and

Walter Ong, holds that the advent of writing systems transformed human cognition and drew a distinctive line between literate people and oral people.

The hypothesis consists of a two-pronged thesis. First, literacy liberated people

290 from utilizing memorization and oral recitation as the major means of preserving and transmitting cultural traditions. Second, writing enabled records to be created, checked, and compared, which led to the advent of an analytical consciousness. As a result, literacy caused such cognitive abilities as abstractions and non-narrative organization. 16 Opponents of this hypothesis, including linguist Deborah Tannen, psychologists Sylvia Scribner, Michael Cole, and anthropologist Brian Street, argue that there is a continuum between orality and literacy, and that literacy by itself does not have a liberating power on human cognition and culture.17

Together with a few pioneering works on the historical practice of public reading in the West, the Chinese practice of emphasizing orality and memorization in reading discussed in my dissertation challenges the "great divide" hypothesis from the perspective of the history of reading. Focusing on the nature of aurality (reading of books aloud to one or more people) among the reading public in late medieval England and France, Joyce Coleman dismantles the "great divide" hypothesis with her argument that orality was a "vital, functioning, accepted part of a mixed oral-literate literary tradition."18 At first glance, the emphasis on orality in the Chinese context can be seen as an instance of "secondary orality" which was mentioned in passing by Walter Ong.19

However, what Ong meant by "secondary orality" was very narrow. It refers to the revival of some communication traits from primary oral cultures in the

291 electronic age with the advent of telephone, radio, and computer. This notion does not seem to be adequate to explain the centrality of orality in written literature and society at large in late imperial China.

6.4 Suggestions for Future Research

This dissertation is just a first step toward the long history of reading in late imperial China. Many questions and issues remain to be solved. Among others, here are a few most intriguing ones that call for future research. First, changes in reading practices and discourses of representations of reading over time. How did social, political, religious, and cultural movements change people’s views toward reading and their way of engaging in the act of reading? Second, gender analysis in men’s and women’s reading practices. Did men and women read differently? For example, did women tend to reread more often than men, or vice versa? Third, the role of religion in people’s reading practices. How did

Buddhist and Daoist practices of reading affect the reading practices discussed in this dissertation? Did women tend to read more religion-related texts than men?

Fourth, the role of ethnicity in people’s reading practices. How did reading traditions in the Mongolian and Manchu cultures affect their reading habits in the Chinese language? Fifth, popular levels of reading or “shared reading” in

Roger Chartier’s term: How did the non-elite people, such as the peasants, artisans, businessmen, and courtesans use their literate skills? What books did

292 they read? Where did they read? How did they read, or approach texts, differently from the elite class?

293 Chapter 6 Notes

1 Shang 1958. 2 Miyazaki 1963. 3 Lu 1919. 4 The usage of the term zhishifenzi in Taiwan does not have any negative connotations. Thanks to Su-hsing Lin for pointing this out. 5 Yu 1996. 6 Qiu 1993, 5. 7 Xiao 2002. 8 E 1999. 9 Mooney 2002. 10 Zhou 1998, 79. 11 Zhang 1940. 12 Wang and Xu 1993. 13 For Chinese children's reading acquisition, see essays in Li, Gaffney, and Packard 2002; for Japanese children's reading acquisition, see Noda 2003. 14 For more on the controversy over the time lag between language instruction and orthography instruction among Chinese teachers in the United States, see Yu 1997, Chapter 4, section 4.1. For the introduction of kanji in a Japanese reading curriculum, see Nara 2003, esp. 155-162. 15 See Walker 1989 for such an argument from a pedagogical perspective. 16 Havelock 1963, Goody and Watt 1968, Ong 1982. 17 Tannen 1982, Scribner and Cole 1981, Street 1984. 18 Coleman 1996, 1. 19 Ong 1982. I thank Professor H. Lewis Ulman for pointing this out to me.

294

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335

APPENDIX A

DOCUMENTS ON READING

1. Luo Dajing’s recipe on reading1

A poem by Tang Zixi says: "The mountain is as quiet as the remote antiquity, a day is as long as a short year."2 I dwell in the deep mountains. Every year when spring and summer come across, the stairs are covered by moss and the path is filled with fallen flowers. There are no knockings on the door. Under the uneven shadows of pine trees, surrounded by the twittering of birds, I take an afternoon nap. When I wake up, I fetch some mountain spring water and pick up some pine twigs to broil some bitter tea and drink it. At ease, I read several chapters from the Classics of Change, Zuo's Commentary, Encountering Sorrow,

Records of the Historian, Tao [Yuanming] and Du [Fu]'s poems, and Han [Yu] and

Su [Dongpo]'s essays. Leisurely walking on the mountain paths, I gently stroke bamboo and pines. I rest with cattle among the tall trees and rich grasses. I sit down to play with the flowing spring water, cleaning my teeth and washing my feet. When I return, my wife and little children produce bamboo shoots and

1 ZSBJ, juan 2.

336 brake leaves from under the bamboo window to cook a meal. I happily fill my stomach. Between the windows, I handle my brush and write down dozens of characters of various sizes. I open my collection of calligraphy books, brush works, and painting scrolls to appreciate them. When my interest rises, I will chant a little poem or draft a few paragraphs for my book. Again, I broil a cup of bitter tea. Walking out to the stream, I meet a few old garden men and friends along the stream. We ask about mulberry and hemp, talk about rice, measure sunshine and rain, inquire about solar terms and count the seasons.

Gathering together, we converse for the whole afternoon. Returning home, I lean over my cane and stand by the gate made of twigs and branches. The sun is setting into the mountain with purple and green rays changing every moment. It is a dazzling scene. Sitting on the back of the buffalo, the buffalo boy comes back while playing the flute. The moon is already reflected in the front stream. I savor Zixi's verse. It is indeed fantastic. This verse is really wonderful. Perhaps not many people realize it is so good. Those who lead dogs and hunt in the fields of fame and profit, only see the billowy dust in front and the hasty shadows between horses. How can they understand the beauty of this verse?

Those who really understand are described by [Su] Dongpo like this: "Sitting here quietly without anything to do, one day is equal to two days. If he lives to

2 The poet is Tang Geng (1071-1121) of the Song Dynasty. This verse comes from his famous poem "Drunken Sleep" (zui mian). 337 be seventy, then that is a hundred and forty years." Is not that which is gained a lot?

338

2. Lu Longqi’s letter to his deceased son3

On the New Year's Eve of the Year renxu, under the lamp, I stop my tears and write to the soul of my son Dingzheng: Alas! You were not born until I was thirty-one years old. It has been twenty-three years now and your father and mother have endured all sorts of hardships to raise you, hoping that you would establish yourself to bring glorification to our ancestors and to continue the cause of your father. Who would have expected that you would pass away in the middle of it, doubling my sorrow. You were born smart and you progressed fast in reading and writing. I did not want to teach you the vulgar learning and intended to lead you onto the way of sages and worthies. I would rather you progress slowly but surely than taking a shortcut in learning. You understood my intentions and did not have low expectations of yourself. My heart rejoiced and I thought you were very hopeful. Who would have expected this! You were just married last year. Your wife came to our home and the whole household praised her to be capable and virtuous. When you were gone, you did not have a son. Your wife served her parents-in-law and helped with the kitchen. Seeing her was like seeing you. Why was it that you were gone for just forty-seven days when your wife also deserted the world? Was it that you did not have the heart to see her as a widow for long and therefore led her away? Or was it fate?

3 "Gao zhangzi Dingzheng wen" in SYTWJ, juan 12, 19a-21a. 339 Within two months, we have suffered one loss after another. The rooms are still the way they used to be and the curtains are still there. Things remained to be the same but people have changed. Human hearts are not made of wood and stone. How can I bear this. This is all because your father is not virtuous and has offended Heaven. Heaven passed down a punishment and sent down calamities on you and your wife. It was not your and your wife's fault. What more can I say! What more can I say! As my son, you had not fulfilled all my wishes and left me. However, in the fall of the year wuwu (1678), when your grandfather passed away, I was in the capital and could not see to the details of the funeral. Without you, I would not have fulfilled my obligations. I was benefited by you in many other ways and your life was well worthwhile. During the mourning period, we read the Classic of Rituals together. Without your questions, I would not have discovered the similarities and differences between

Wang [Bi] and Zheng [Xuan]'s annotations, and explored the profound meanings of the two Dai (Dai Sheng and Dai De's Book of Rites). In the evenings, we looked at Gangmu (Zizhi tongjian gangmu, Outline of the comprehensive mirror for aid in government, authored by Zhu Xi) and you indeed inspired me about stability and chaos, successes and failures (of dynasties). Your help in my learning was indeed not shallow. Last year, I traveled to Mount Yu. The household affairs all depended on you and you planned all of them in good order. To the household, you had also performed meritorious service. Please rest under the Nine Springs

340 and do not regret that you had not served your parents to the end. Your spirit shall not vanish instantly. You shall stay constantly at home to accompany the ancestors. You shall remember constantly the words of the sages and worthies that you had read in your whole life. You shall dwell on what was recorded by historians of all times. Although life and death do not cross roads, those whose vital energy prevailed would have a solid spirit. When they are alive, they are the sages and worthies. When they die, they become wise gods. The principle is the same. You shall work hard. As for the continuance of your family line, when your younger brother has a son, he shall be adopted as your heir. If our family prospers, there will be no worry that sacrifices will be offered to you and your wife. This again lies in the virtue of your father and whether or not I can move heaven. This is not your responsibility and do not worry about it. Your books and things have all been collected and waited to be given to your heir. You shall rest assured and do not grieve or worry. A year has ended, and it has been a hundred and seven days since you passed away and sixty-one days since your wife followed. Thinking of this, I cannot but feel heartbroken. Therefore I wrote this letter to comfort you.

341

APPENDIX B

THE PROBLEMATICS OF THE “SINICIZATION” MODEL

The validity and usefulness of the term “sinicization” has been called into question in several independent yet interrelated disciplines in China studies.

Specialists on Chinese religion have been reflecting on the usefulness of this term to explain the Chinese transformation of various Buddhist traditional norms.1

Anthropologists of contemporary Chinese minority cultures have rejected the term as a hegemonic narrative that claims Chinese culture to be so internally strong and charismatic that it encompasses the surrounding minority cultures.2

Political are challenging the use of this term as an antithesis against

“Westernization” to refer to the Chinese appropriations of Western economic and political theories.3 In the past three decades, historians in the Chinese field

1 Kieschnick 2000. See also Schopen 1997 for a critique on Kenneth Ch’en’s (1973) use of the term “sinicization.” Although Schopen’s critique is valid, I need to point out that he fails to recognize Ch’en’s contribution by proposing “Sinicization” as a counter model of “Indianization” which was proposed by Hu Shi. 2 See Brown 1996 and Gladney 1998 for such critiques. 3 See for example Keith 1996, Stranahan 1996. See Dirlik 2000 for a critique of such uses. 342 have had two major debates over the validity of this term in Chinese historiography.4

The first debate revolved around Tao Jingshen’s pioneer book The Jurchen in

Twelfth-Century China: A Study of Sinicization published in 1977. Drawing on

Western anthropological and sociological studies on the distinction between acculturation and assimilation, Tao uses the term in the sense of assimilation in which “the subordinate group attempts to abandon its existing inadequate culture by entering into the society of the dominant group and accepting its culture.”5 As proofs of “sinicization,” he cites examples such as Jurchen’s adoption of Chinese institutions and political ideas, their interest in Chinese classics and kind treatment of Chinese scholars.6 In their respective reviews of

Tao’s book, both Ruth Dunnell and John Dardess offer cogent counter-arguments against Tao’s use of the term “sinicization.”7 For Dunnell, the question lies in the fact that “sinicization” was not an adequate concept to explain the complex processes whereby non-Chinese kingdoms interacted with China.8 She suggests

“Sino-Jurchen synthesis” as an analytical tool in this case to replace

4 Tao 1977, Dunnell 1977, Dardess 1978, Bol 1987, Crossley 1990a, Shepherd 1993, Rawski 1996, Ho 1998. 5 F. C. Anthony Wallace 1962, 163, quoted in Tao 1973, xiii. 6 Tao 1977, 38-51. 7 Dunnell 1977, Dardess 1978. 8 Dunnell 1977, 79. 343 “sinicization.”9 For Dardess, Tao’s equation of “sinicization” with “assimilation” is problematic.10 In his own study on the Yuan period, Dardess distinguishes

“sinicization” from “Confucianization.” “Sinicization,” for him, only refers to social and cultural changes that involves adoption of Han customs and identities by non-Han minorities. On the other hand, “Confucianization” refers to the political, institutional, and systematic adoption of Chinese ethical and political behavior by non-Han people.11 Peter Bol puts an end to this debate with his admonishment that the term “sinicization” obscures the difference between two types of transformation—political and institutional adoptions of Chinese style imperial government versus social changes of the non-Han rulers. He suggests a

Chinese phrase “shangwen” (promoting wen) as a new analytical term to replace

“sinicization” in the case of the Jurchens.12

Two decades after this debate, another contention rose between Evelyn

Rawski and Ping-ti Ho, two prominent historians in the Chinese field. This time, the controversy revolves around the issue of whether sinicization is a valid

“central theme” in the Chinese historiography for the late imperial period.13

9 Dunnell 1977, 78-79. 10 In his reply to Dardess’s critique, Tao 1979 maintains his definition of sinicization. I think their disagreement is mainly due to their different interpretations of the term “assimilation.” 11 Dardess 1973, 3. 12 Bol elaborates on the four levels of meanings of wen, in which Jurchen rulers and Han literati shared common ground while the Jurchens were still able to maintain their own identity (Bol 1987, 484-493). 13 Rawski 1996, Ho 1998. 344 Their views do not just represent their own positions, but rather the opinions from two camps contending for years over the usage and interpretations of

“sinicization.” For the sake of argument, I will call Rawski’s party the

“assimilation camp” and Ho’s the “acculturation camp.”

In the “assimilation camp,” Pamela Crossley debunks the notion of

“sinicization” which, for her, carries the implication that people from other cultures were attracted and transformed by the Chinese civilization due to its

“sheer charisma” without any obstacles.14 Her critique is echoed by Melissa

Brown who distinguishes the concept of sinicization which refers to cultural changes, and the phenomenon of becoming Chinese which involves identity change.15 Rawski sums up a precise definition of “sinicization” as members of this camp understand it. It is “the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture.”16 Apparently, Rawski is up against a misleading impression evoked by this term and a notion held to be true by many Han-nationalists and chauvinists: the Han Chinese civilization was so powerful and attractive that it had absorbed

14 Crossley 1990a, 2. 15 Brown 1995, 41-43. 16 Rawski 1996, 842. Hok-Lam Chan (1984, x) also points out that this belief “was rooted in the continuous assimilation of the frontier tibal minorities by the indigenous Chinese, and their gradual integration with the non-Han peoples, which broadened the ethnic basis of the Chinese and provided the unbroken chain of Chinese dynastic history.” Although he points out and mildly criticizes that this is “a unique view of Chinese history shared by both ethnocentric and Marxist historians in contemporary Chinese historiography,” he adopts the “sinicization” theme without further questioning in his discussions of Jurchen Jin’s adoption of Chinese political institutions and cultural customs. 345 into it all the non-Han cultures that came into its way and transformed almost all of the non-Han peoples in its realm into “Chinese.” For scholars in the

“assimilation camp,” the danger of this widespread view is it ignores the reciprocal nature of cultural encounter and the hybrid origins of the “Chinese” culture.

From the “acculturation camp,” John Shepherd criticizes Crossley for overloading the term with “preconceptions about assimilation, conquest dynasties, and the charisma of Chinese culture.”17 He defines the term as “a process of acculturation” whereby non-Chinese groups adopt elements of the

Chinese culture when in contact with it.18 In a similar move as Dardess’s and

Bol’s, he further distinguishes “sinicization” from “adoption of elements of

Confucian civil culture” (jiaohua, shangwen).19 On another front, Ping-Ti Ho, takes issue with Rawski to defend the validity of the theme of sinicization in

Chinese historiography. He does not give a definition of “sinicization,” but his interpretations of the term can be inferred from his two articles. In his 1967 article, sinicization was a political process whereby Chinese institutional and cultural system was consciously and systematically adopted by Manchu rulers who attempted to rule an empire with a majority population of Han Chinese.

Like Shepherd, Ho recognizes that some Qing rulers still made efforts to

17 Shepherd 1993, 521 note 5. 18 Shepherd 1993, 521 note 5. 19 Shepherd 1993, 371. 346 preserve their own Manchu traits and customs.20 However, the result of this sinicization policy was the decline of the Manchu culture. In his 1998 article in which he cites various cases of “sinicization” at China’s different historical periods, sinicization was both a process and an end product of political, social, and cultural acculturation where the customs, values, institutions, and languages of the Han Chinese came to be adopted by alien rulers and cultures and ultimately prevailed in the Middle Kingdom.21 Recognizing that the content of the Chinese civilization was expanded by various groups of sinicized peoples,22 he emphasizes the durability and internal strength of the Chinese civilization.

One opinion that all nine of the aforementioned authors have in common is that they refuse to see “sinicization” as a static, monolithic concept. However, a critical point of disagreement arises on whether “sinicization” was “assimilation” or “acculturation.” Both Tao and Dardess see “sinicization” in terms of assimilation, only they cannot agree on when “complete assimilation” of occurred in history. Dunnell, Crossley, Brown, and Rawski equate

“sinicization” with assimilation as understood and utilized by many China historians whose view they set out to critique. Shepherd and Ho interpret the term as a process of “acculturation,” which implies a continuum of cultural and political changes.

20 Ho 1967, 192. 21 Ho 1998, 128-150. 22 Ho 1998, 125. 347 A scrutiny of terminology used in anthropology might offer some help in resolving these differences. In the literature of Western cultural anthropology, acculturation studies preceded assimilation studies. Earlier classic studies on cultural encounter define “acculturation” as a process of reciprocal (and oftentimes assymetrical) changes in two cultures when they have firsthand contact.23 Within this framework, no culture (whether it is a dominant culture or a minority one) can escape the fate of being “acculturated” when encountering a different culture. In this context, “assimilation” is seen as a phase or result of acculturation.24 In other words, from a classic anthropological viewpoint,

“sinicization” means by a process of “acculturation” whereas “being sinicized” or “being assimilated” refers to an end condition of this long process.

Tao, Dardess, Shepherd and Ho seem to have followed this tradition in their definitions of “sinicization.” Due to the same reason, Bol, Dunnell, Crossley,

Brown, and Rawski can redefine “sinicization” as “assimilation” and then reject it.

However, studies on immigrant experiences in the United States during the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have brought more dimensions to the distinction and interrelation between acculturation and

23 For definitions along this line, see for example Kroeber 1948, 425 and Kottak 1987, 313. 24 Redfield et al. 1936; cf. Tao 1977, 123 note 12. 348 assimilation.25 In this new paradigm, “assimilation” acquires a status that is opposite to “acculturation” instead of being an end product of the latter. For an immigrant, “being acculturated” means acquiring a second culture while maintaining one’s own, whereas “being assimilated” refers to being totally absorbed into a dominant culture and abandoning one’s original culture.26 In other words, “acculturation” implies multiculturalism and multiplicity in identity while “assimilation” means being immersed into a new culture and assuming a new identity. In this configuration, the complicated issues of identity and self-identification are brought into the picture.

With this new distinction, the issue of “assimilation” versus “acculturation” in the Chinese context turns into an ethno-psychological question of whether

“being sinicized” is equal to “becoming Chinese” (as judged by the ingroup and through self-identification). For Dardess, “being sinicized” means total loss of national and linguistic identity on the part of the non-Han peoples.27 Bol and

Shepherd, on the other hand, hold that adopting Han language and customs does not rule out the possibility that the non-Han people can still hold on to their own separate identities and loyalties to their own cultures.28 Cautiously,

25 Milton Gordon (1964), in his classic study on assimilation in the United States, defines “assimilation” as a series of three stages that an individual passes in an immigration experience: behavioral assimilation (acculturation), structural assimilation (social assimilation), and marital assimilation. 26 Soriano 1995 and Korzenny 1999. 27 Dardess 1973, 3. 28 Bol 1987, Shepherd 1993, 371. 349 Dunnell, Crossley, Brown, and Rawski call attention to the murky boundaries of

“being Chinese” in historical contexts.

When “sinicization” has to deal with the issue of “ethnic identity,” the conceptual tool proves to be futile and helpless. Ethnic identity is a fluid, ever changing subjective state that is subject to political manipulation and constant negotiation.29 Any attempt to judge historically if a non-Han group has “become

Chinese” has to answer these three basic questions: First, what were the essential elements of the “Chinese civilization” historically? Second, how did Chinese people as an ingroup of Chinese culture identify the non-Han people when the latter adopted certain elements of Chinese culture such as surnames, dresses, languages, rituals, and values? Did they accept them as “Chinese” or still categorize them as “barbarians”? Third, how did the non-Han people who had adopted the Chinese customs and institutions identify themselves? Did they view themselves as part of the “Chinese,” or still as outsiders, or both? These are difficult questions. Due to different geographical, historical, and psychological factors, one thing is for sure: there are no absolute and unified answers to these questions.

The difficulty of applying the concept of “sinicization” in the Chinese historiography is further exacerbated by the fact that there is no historically accurate equivalent of “sinicization” in the Chinese language. Hanhua has been

29 Harrell 1996, Gladney 1998, 164-165. 350 the most commonly used translation for the term and is still widely used in contemporary Chinese society.30 In the field of political science, a more contemporary term “zhongguohua” has been coined to denote the notion of

Chinese adaptations of Western theories. In the field of religious studies, bentuhua (nativization) has emerged in the past decade as a replacement of hanhua to describe cultural processes similar to Chinese adoption and transformation of Buddhism. A more archaic term than hanhua is huahua. As a fact, Ping-ti Ho suggests huahua, as found in Chen Yuan’s famous study Western and Central Asians in China Under the Mongols, is “the truly correct” translation for

“sinicization.” 31

However, even Chen Yuan’s definition of the term is ambiguous. In the earlier drafts of the book, Chen used zhongguohua and hanhua.32 In the final version, he changed it to huahua, with a sense of national dignity in the face of

Western oppression.33 He defines huahua as non-Chinese people’s acquisition of

30 In the computer age, the term hanhua takes on one more meaning: it becomes the shorter form for “hanzi hua” (change into Chinese characters), or transforming the operational interface of foreign software so that they become characters-friendly. 31 Ho 1998, 152. 32 Chen 2000, 4. 33 Ping-ti Ho (1998, 150) suspects that Chen Yuan might have been inspired by Paul Pelliot (1878- 1945) when he published his study on sinicization of Western and Central Asians under the Mongol rule. According to Chen Zhichao’s interpretation (2000, 5), however, Chen Yuan wrote the book because he was infuriated at a time when “Chinese were looked down upon the most [by Westerners] and many [Chinese] scholars were promoting the idea of ‘complete Westernization’ (quanpan xihua).” Further research is needed to find out why Chen adopted the term “huahua” to replace zhongguohua and hanhua. 351 characteristics that “Chinese alone possess” (houtian suohuo, huaren suo du zhe).34

The uniquely Chinese characteristics, according to him, do not include qualities such as “loyalty, righteousness, filial piety, friendship, and political sense” as these could come naturally to any people.35 In his analysis, the following qualities are considered to be “Chinese”: conversion to Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, achievement in the Chinese literature and art, adoption of Chinese customs (including Chinese names, Chinese way of mourning and burial, building of shrines and making of sacrifices, and Chinese style dwellings). Ch’en examines the essays of four Yuan scholars to see how they viewed the sinicization of people from the . Ironically, none of these scholars mentioned the term “sinicization” or huahua. Phrases they used were

“wochao wenhua zhi qia, wu yuan fu zhi” (the culture of our dynasty has reached everywhere on earth) and “wochao wanghua zhi daxing” (the extensive penetration of our kingly civilization).36

Etymologically, both hanhua and huahua are very “modern” in terms of their origins. Neither term is anywhere to be found in the volumes of the twenty-five dynastic histories.37 In their stead, to denote the meaning of adopting Han

Chinese customs or institutions to transform the non-Han “barbarians,” terms

34 Chen 1962, 3; translation in Ch’en 1966, 6. 35 Ch’en 1966, 6. 36 Chen 1962, 134-135; translation in Ch’en 1966, 292-294. 37 According to Peter K. Bol, the term hanhua cannot be found in any Jin texts either. See Bol 1987, 486, note 74. 352 such as “fenghua,” “jiaohua” (to transform through education), “wenzhi jiaohua”

(to govern by refinement and to transform through education; short form

“wenhua”), “shangwen” (to promote refinement) or “xi hanren fengsu” (to practice the Han Chinese’s customs) are oftentimes used.38

The terms hanhua and huahua were coined by Chinese nationalists and revolutionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both words consist of two parts: the first parts han and hua mean “Chinese,” and the second part “hua” means “assimilation” (tonghua). Both terms appeared as the revolutionaries created the ethnic identities of Han and Hua in their attempt to overthrow the Qing court in late nineteenth century.39 Prominent scholars such as Liang Qichao (1873-1929) and Zhang Binglin (1868-1936) extensively discussed and favorably regarded the supremacy of the Chinese race.40 Zhang did so by tracing the origins of hanzu to huazu, xiazu, , and zhuxia that appeared in ancient texts.41 In a seminal article on the term “Zhonghua minguo,” Zhang Binlin contends that hua is originally the name for an old country bordering on Mount

Hua (Huashan) and Xia is the name of a river (Xiashui). The meanings of Hua, Xia, and Han converged because the founders of the Han dynasty came from

38 Shepherd (1993,371) points out that there is a distinction between sinicization/hanhua (“the adoption of specifically Han customs”) and two other types of cultural borrowings: jiaohua, shangwen (“the adoption of elements of Confucian civil culture”) and the “submission to imperial authority” without adopting Han customs or the loss of a separate identity. 39 Rawski 1996, 839. 40 For a discussion on Liang Qichao’s views on the Chinese race, see Dikötter 1992, 82-87. For Zhang Binglin’s role in advocating Han people as a race, see Chow 1997.

353 geographic areas where and Xia River were located. Three decades after the publication of Zhang’s article, one of his opponents, Rui Yifu criticized him for not understanding the true meaning of the term Hua. According to Rui, hua comes from the term wenhua (culture). Drawing on Sun Yat-sen’s notion of nationalities (minzu), Rui argues that hua, as opposed to yi, symbolizes a higher level of civilization and therefore any assimilated nationalities whose cultural levels have been reached to that of the Chinese civilization can be considered as part of it. In other words, the Chinese nationality (zhonghua minzu) have taken in and mixed with (ronghe) a lot of nationalities that might belong to several different races (zhongzu) in the past thousands of years. Though disagreeing on the meaning of hua,42 both Zhang Binglin and Rui Yifu created and participated in a historiographical tradition holding that Hanzu (ethnic Chinese) is the dominant ethnic group in China that encompasses all its neighboring minorities to form a powerful and multinational Huazu (Chinese nationality).

This paradigm continued to flourish in the following decades till today.

Although contemporary Chinese historians, ethnologists and anthropologists are more inclined to discussing the “multinational organic” (duoyuan yiti) or “unified multinational” (tongyi de duominzu) nature of the Chinese nation and recognizing the contributions that minorities have made to the Chinese civilization, they still

41 Zhang 1979.

354 implicitly work within this “sinicization” paradigm formulated a century earlier.43

This discussion yields one conclusion: “sinicization” is an unhelpful generalization. As an analytical paradigm and theoretical model, the term has proven to cause more confusion than clarification. It has become such an overloaded signifier that its referents cover a wide range of complicated political, social, and religious processes that occurred when alien cultures encountered the

Chinese civilization. To use it as an analytical term for a wide range of cultural phenomena is to obfuscate the social and cultural mechanisms behind them.

Like “nationalism” for modern Chinese history, “sinicization,” for imperial

Chinese history, is “conceptually imprecise and empirically oversimplified in its version of the historical change in question.”44 To quote John Kieschnick, the sinicization model “is too crude to be useful” in teasing out the complexity in cultural transmission and diffusion.45

42 In Morohashi’s Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, both interpretations were adopted. In the entry “huaxia” (Morohashi 1986, volume 9, 710), Zhang Binlin’s definition of the term hua is cited. In the entry “zhonghua” (volume 1, 293), hua is defined as “having culture.” 43 See for example Lü 1934, Fei 1989, Gu 1989, and Chen 1989. 44 The quote is from Townsend 1992, 98. Townsend questions the theoretical validity of applying “nationalism” to the modern Chinese historiography. 45 Kieschnick 2000, 24. 355

APPENDIX C: CHARACTER LIST

Ai Dasheng 艾达生 Ai Fusheng 艾复生 Ai Jing 艾敬 Ai Rulüe 艾儒略 Ai Tian 艾田 Ai Xiansheng 艾显生 Ai Yingkui 艾应奎 An Hongjian 安鸿渐 anfen 安分 Bai Jin 白晋 Bai Juyi 白居易 baihua 白话 baihuawen yundong 白话文运动 ban huajie 半画截 Ban Jieyu 班婕妤 Ban Zhao 班昭 bei shu 背书／倍书 bei 背/倍 beilin 碑林 beiruo 卑弱 bentuhua 本 土 化 bian 砭 Bianmin tuzuan 便民图纂 bihu dushu 闭户读书 biji 笔记 Bo Shaojun 薄 少 君 bu buzu 补不足 buchang dushu 不常读书 buchang shishu 不常视书 buxiao 不肖 buzhi ruhe 不知如何

356 Cai Yan (Wenji) 蔡琰 (文姬) Cao Duan 曹端 Cao Lin 曹璘 Cao Yuanyong 曹元用 ce dian 侧点 ce 侧 celiang 测量 Ch’oe Malli 崔万里 changtan suyu 常谈俗语 Che Yin 车胤 Chen Duansheng 陈端生 Chen Hongmou 陈宏谋 Chen Jitai 陈际泰 Chen Lie 陈烈 Chen Rengong 陈任公 Chen Shuzhen 陈淑真 Chen Yun 陈芸 Cheng Duanli 程端礼 Cheng Hao 程颢 Chengmiao 澄妙 chengxin 诚信 chuangdu 窗读 chun nuo 蠢懦 chun song xia xian 春诵夏弦 ci he sheng ? 此 何 声 ？ ci 词 Cui Xuegu 崔学古 cun 寸 Da Jing 大经 dadian 大点 Dai Zhen 戴震 dan 丹 daobei ruliu 倒背如流 Daozong 道宗 daquan 大圈 dazibao 大字报 De Qing 德清 di 狄 dian shu 点书 dian 点 357 dianding judou 点定句读 Dongchang 东昌 dongyi 东夷 dou 读 du 读 du wen 读文 duan ju 断句 dujing 读经 dumen dushu 杜门读书 duo du 多读 dushu 读书 dushu baibian, qi yi zi xian 读书百遍，其义自见 Dushu dacidian 读书大辞典 Dushu fa 读书法 dushu fa 读书法 dushu jue 读书诀 dushu qiongli 读书穷理 dushu zhi dayi 读书知大义 dushu zhongzi 读书种子 dushu 读书 dushuren 读书人 dusong 读诵 Duzong 度宗 Erya 尔雅 Fan Li’an 范礼安 (Alexandre Valignani) Fang Yu 方舆 fangyan 方 言 fanli 凡例 fanshi 反诗 Feng Liao 冯嫽 Feng Shaochang 冯少常 feng 讽 fenghua 风 化 fengshu 讽书 fu ru 腐儒 fu 赋 funü qimen 妇女启门 funü yimen 妇女倚门 Fushi shan you fa 父师善诱法 Fuxue 妇学 358 gang 纲 Gao Dengkui 高登魁 Gao Xuan 高选 Gaozi shuzhai shuo 高子书斋说 Geng xi xuan 耕息轩 geshi 歌诗 Gong Dan 公旦 gongsheng 贡生 Gu Ruopu 顾若璞 Gu Yanwu 顾炎武 guan 观 Guangdong 广东 guanzhe 观者 gudeng 孤灯 Gui Youguang 归有光 guixiu 闺秀 Gujin mingren dushufa 古今名人读书法 Guo Xiangzheng 郭祥正 Guo Zhenshun 郭真顺 guwen 古文 haidao 海道 Hailing Wang 海陵王 Han 汉 hanhua 汉 化 Hanjia 汉嘉 hanzihua 汉 字 化 hanzu 汉 族 haoting 好听 He Ji 何基 He Shuangqing 贺双卿 heimo 黑抹 Helin yulu 鹤林玉露 Hong Mai 洪迈 Honglou meng 红楼梦 hongpangmo 红旁抹 hongzhongmo 红中抹 Hou Zhi 侯芝 houtian suohuo, huaren suo du zhe 后 天 所 获 ， 华 人 所 独 者 Hu Dan 胡旦 Hu Miaoduan 胡妙端 359 Hu Shenrong 胡慎容 Hu Shi 胡适 Hu Yin 胡寅 hu 胡 Hua Mulan 花木兰 Hua 华 huahua 华 化 huajie 画截 huan du 缓读 Huang Gan 黄干 Huang Yin 黄寅 Huashan 华 山 huaxia 华 夏 huazu 华 族 huihui 回回 huiwenshi 回文诗 idu 吏读 ji de 记得 ji du 急读／疾读 ji she 激射 ji 伎 Jiandeng xinhua 剪灯新话 jiangdu guan 讲读官 jiangdu 讲读 jiangjingwen 讲经文 jiangshu 讲书 jiangshu guan 讲书官 jiansheng 监生 jianyin 尖颖 Jiao tongzi fa 教童子法 jiaohua 教 化 jie 节 Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 Jin Shengtan 金圣叹 Jin Tingbiao 金廷标 jing 经 Jingshi tongyan 警世通言 jingyu 警语 jingzuo 静坐 jinshi 进士 360 jiu ru shi gai 九儒十丐 jiwen 祭文 ju 句 judou 句读 juren 举人 kan 看 kanshu 看书 kao ding 考订 kaozheng xue 考证学 Kim Ch’angop 金昌业 KongYiji 孔乙己 koutou zhuan 口头转 Kuang Chaoren 匡超人 Kuang Heng 匡衡 kuangzhi 圹志 kugyol 口诀 Kushu fu 枯树赋 kuxin 苦心 lan 览 langsong 朗诵 Laocan 老残 Li Bai 李白 Li Chang 李昶 Li Delin 李德林 Li ji 礼记 Li Jianxun 李建勳 Li Madou 利玛窦 (Matteo Ricci) Li Mi 李密 Li Qingzhao 李清照 Li Shimian 李时勉 Li Sirang (Zhongqian) 李思让 (仲谦) Li Yu 李渔 Li Zhi 李贽 li 礼 li 里 Liang Desheng 梁德绳 Liang Lan’e 梁兰猗 libaisi 礼拜寺 Lienü zhuan 列女传 Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 361 Lin Hejing 林和靖 Lin Qiao 林乔 Lin Youyu 林幼玉 liti de dong 立体的懂 Liu Cuicui 刘翠翠 Liu Song 刘崧 Liu Xiang 刘向 Liu Yuanfu 刘原父 Longxi 龙溪 Lü Benzhong 吕本中 Lü Desheng 吕得胜 Lu Dingzheng 陆定徵 Lu Jiuyuan 陆九渊 Lu Longqi 陆陇其 Lu Rong 陆容 Lu Shiyi 陆世仪 Lu Xun 鲁迅 Lu Xun 鲁迅 Lu You 陆游 Luo Baolu 骆保禄 (Jean-Paul Gozani) Luo Dajing (Helin) 罗大经 (鹤林) Luo Yuchen 罗虞臣 man 蛮 manla 满喇 Mao Qiling 毛奇龄 Mei Zengliang 梅曾亮 meideshui 没得睡 Meng Zhengqi 孟正气 (Jean Demenge) Mengmu sanqian 孟母三迁 Mi Fu 米芾 min 闽 minzu 民 族 mo 抹 moguan 默观 muzhi ming 墓志铭 nangying zhaodu 囊萤照读 naoxue wanxi 闹学顽戏 neishi 内事 neishi 内事 nian wen 念文 362 nian 念 nianhua 年画 nianshu de shengyin 念书的声音 nianshu 念书 Nie Shunying 聂舜英 Niu Pulang 牛浦郎 Nü jie 女诫 nütanci 女弹词 Nüzhi dazi 女直大字 Nüzhi xiaozi 女直小字 nüzi wu cai bian shi de 女子无才便是德 Oumu huadi 欧母画荻 Ouyang Xiu 欧阳修 Ouyang Xuan 欧阳玄 Pak Chiwon 朴趾源 裴度 peiyue sanwen 配乐散文 Pidian Hanwen fanli 批点韩文凡例 Pidian jingshu fanli 批点经书凡例 pingyi 平易 po dushu zhi yili 颇读书知义理 Pyeongzhong 平仲 qi 气 qi ju anle 起居安乐 Qian Sigong 钱思公 qianfen 铅粉 qiangdiao 腔调 Qianjia shi 千家诗 qieyinzi yundong 切音字运动 qin 琴 Qingfeng ling 清风岭 qishuang saixue 欺霜赛雪 Qu Taisu 瞿太素 Qu You 瞿佑 quan fa jiajie zi yin 圈发假借字音 quan 圈 quandian 圈点 quanpan xihua 全 盘 西 化 qufo buru 驱佛补儒 renli 人理 363 renwen 人文 renxing 人性 renxu 壬戌 Renzong 仁宗 rifeng qianyan 日讽千言 rong 容 rong 戎 Rulin waishi 儒林外史 sadae 事大 San Bai Qian 三百千 San Bai Qian Qian 三百千千 sandao 三到 sanshang dushu de fangfa 三上读书的方法 Shan Gu 山谷 Shang Jinglan 商景兰 Shangshu 尚书 shangwen 尚 文 Shanju dushu tu 山居读书图 Shao Ji 邵济 Shao Xiangpu 邵香圃 Shen Fu 沈复 Shen Wentong 沈文通 Shen Zhou 沈周 shen 绅 sheng 声 shengyou deng 省油灯 shengyuan 生员 shenshi 绅士 Shenzong 神宗 shi langson 诗朗诵 shi langsong 诗朗诵 Shi Mengqing 史蒙卿 Shi Zhenlin 史震林 shi 视 shi 诗 shibi 诗壁 shidafu 士大夫 Shik’am 息庵 shishi jieji 知识阶级 shishu 视书 364 Shizong 世宗 shou fang xin 收放心 shoubushijuan 手不释卷 shouru 受辱 Shousun 壽孫 Shouzhong 守忠 shu tong wen 书 同 文 shu xu cheng song 书须成诵 Shudu fu 蜀都赋 shuhua chuan 书画船 Shuihu Zhuan 水浒传 Shundi 順帝 shuo de 说得 shuo zhenhua 说真话 shuoshu 说书 shuzhong 书种 siji yingbei 死记硬背 Sima Guang (Wengong) 司马光(温公) 司马相如 Siyiguan 四夷馆 Sohwa 小华 song 诵 Song Chuitong 宋垂同 Song Huixiang 宋惠湘 song shu ye 诵书也 songdu 诵读 songjing 诵经 songshu 诵书 Su Hui 苏蕙 Su Shi (Dongpo) 苏轼 (东坡) Su Ting 苏頲 Sun Ding 孙鼎 Sun Huilan 孙蕙兰 Sun Jue (Shenlao) 孙觉 (莘老) Sun Kang 孙康 孙思邈 suoyao 锁钥 ta neng zhishu hu ? 他 能 知 书 乎 ？ tai 态 Taiding 泰定

365 taijiao 胎教 Taizong 太宗 tamen yi ren hu ? 他 们 亦 人 乎 ? tanci 弹词 Tang Biao 唐彪 Tang Geng (Zixi) 唐庚 (子西) Tang Ruowang 汤若望 Teng Yuanfa (Dadao) 滕元发 (达道) tianxia 天下 Tiaojingjiao 挑筋教 tong wen gong gui 同文共规 tonghua 同 化 tongzhifu 同知府 Tudan Yi 徒單鎰 waishi 外事 Wang Anshi 王安石 Wang Chong 王充 Wang Jin 王璡 Wang Kekuan 汪 克宽 Wang Mian 王沔 Wang Qi 王琪 Wang Qinghui 王清惠 Wang Shizhen 王世贞 Wang Xingzhi 王性之 Wang Xun 王恂 Wang Yun 王筠 Wanyan Kuang 完颜匡 Wanyan Xiyin 完颜希尹 wei ji zhi xue 为己之学 wei jiangshu ye 未讲書也 wei ren zhi xue 为人之学 wei 为 wen qi 文气 Wen Tianxiang 文天祥 Wen Zhengming 文徵明 Wen Zhenheng 文震亨 wen 文 wenhua 文 化 wenli 文理 wenming 文明 366 wenren 文人 wenxian 文献 wenxue zhi fu 文学之妇 wenxue 文学 wenyan wen 文言文 wenzhang 文章 wenzhi jiaohua 文 治 教 化 wenzhong 文种 Wenzong 文宗 wo guan qi ren, shi huo wo xin 我观其人,实获我心 wochao wanghua zhi daxing 我 朝 王 化 之 大 行 wochao wenhua zhi qia, wu yuan fu zhi 我 朝 文 化 之 洽 ， 无 远 弗 至 Wu Cheng 吴澄 Wu Yubi 吴与弼 Wu Zhiduan 吴志端 wuwu 戊午 wuyong zhi yong 无用之用 xi hanren fengsu 习 汉 人 风 俗 Xia 夏 xian furen 贤妇人 xian song zhi sheng 弦诵之声 xianbei 鲜卑 xiange 弦歌 xiao 孝 Xiao Guanyin 萧观音 Xiao Hanjianu 萧韩家奴 Xiaoqian fa 消遣法 xiaoshuo 小说 Xiashui 夏 水 xiazu 夏 族 xie qi 邪器 xieshu xiu kan, xiehua xiu ting 邪书休看, 邪话休听 xieshu 邪书 xin yan 心眼 xin yu qi he 心与气合 Xinbian duixiang siyan 新编对相四言 xing de 行得 Xing Jian 邢简 xing 形 Xingzong 兴宗 367 xintou yun 心头运 Xiong Sanba 熊三拔 (Sabbathin de Ursis) Xiqing sanji 西青散记 xiru 西儒 xishu 细书 xiucai 秀才 Xizong 熙宗 Xu Cailuan 徐彩鸾 Xu Junbao 徐君宝 徐淑 Xu Zhimo 徐 志 摩 Xuanyi huanghou 宣懿皇后 Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 Xue Huiying 薛蕙英 Xue Lanying 薛兰英 xue song 学诵 xue 学 yan dao, kou dao, xin dao 眼到, 口到,心到 Yan Du (Shujian) 延篤 (叔坚) yan guang 眼光 Yan Yuanxian 晏元献 Yan Zhitui 颜之推 Yang Guifei 杨贵妃 Yang Jue 杨爵 Yang Liansheng 杨廉生 Yang Ningshi 杨凝式 Yang Su 杨素 Yang Yuqing 杨玉清 yantou guo 眼头过 Yao Nai 姚 鼐 Yao Tongshou 姚桐寿 yao yu 要语 Yelü Abaoji 耶律阿保机 Yelü Bei 耶律倍 Yelü Deguang 耶律德光 Yelü Hongji 耶律洪基 Yelü Pulu 耶律蒲鲁 Yelü Shucheng 耶律庶成 yi 艺 yi li jie zhi 以礼节之 368 yi mu wu hang 一目五行 yi zi yi zi zuo Kunqu qiang 一字一字作昆曲腔 yi 义 yi 夷 Yicileyejiao 一赐乐业教 yili 义理 Yin Se (Shaoji) 尹穑 (少稷) yin sheng qiu qi 因声求气 yin 吟 yindu 吟读 yinglian 楹联 Yingzong 英宗 yinian shi li jing bian zhi 一年视离经辨志 yinlü 音律 yinshi 吟诗 yinxue dushu 映雪读书 yinyang 阴阳 yinye feishi 因噎废食 yiyao 医药 yong hanfa 用汉法 yongdu 咏读 Yongping fu 永平府 yongquanxue 涌泉穴 You xun 幼训 Yu Ji 虞集 Yu Xin 庾信 Yu Zhongju 俞仲举 Yuan Cai 袁采 Yuan Xie 袁燮 yue 阅 Yuyue xianxian xiang zhuan zan 於越先贤像传赞 Zaisheng yuan 再生缘 zaju 杂剧 zazi 杂字 Zeng Guofan 曾国藩 Zhang Jingsheng 张竞生 Zhang Mao 章懋 Zhang Qixian 张齐贤 Zhang Wanying 张纨英 Zhang Xuecheng 章学诚 369 Zhang Yanghao 张养浩 Zhang Youyi 张 幼 仪 Zhang Yuzhao 张裕钊 张载 Zhang Zhu 张翥 Zhang Zhupo 张竹坡 zhangju 章句 Zhanguo ce 战国策 Zhangzong 章宗 Zhao Ding 赵鼎 Zhao Guan 赵观 Zhao Kuangyin 赵匡胤 Zhao Songqiu 赵松湫 Zhao Xizhu 赵喜珠 Zhao Yingcheng 赵映乘 Zhao Yingdou 赵映斗 Zhaoqing 肇庆 Zhen Dexiu 真德秀 zhenfu 贞妇 zheng 正 Zheng Dating 郑大挺 Zheng Yunduan 郑允端 Zhezong 哲宗 zhi dayi 知大义 zhi fudao 执妇道 zhi yili 知义理 zhidu 制度 zhijiang 直讲 zhishifenzi 知识分子 zhiyin 知音 zhong 忠 zhong dian 中点 Zhong Zhaozhi 钟炤之 zhong 中 zhong 钟 Zhongguohua 中 国 化 Zhonghua minguo 中 华 民 国 zhonghua minzu 中 华 民 族 zhongzu 种 族 Zhou Mi 周密 370 Zhou nan 周南 Zhou Yanjing 周彦敬 Zhou Yuxiao 周玉萧 Zhu Houcong 朱厚骢 Zhu Shuzhen 朱淑贞 Zhu Xi 朱熹 Zhu Ziqing 朱自清 zhu 朱 Wenjun 卓文君 zhusha 朱砂 zhuxia 诸 夏 zi bu jiao, fu zhi guo 子不教, 父之过 zi shi shu suan 自识书算 zi yan 字眼 zi yi 字义 Zixu fu 子虚赋 Zizhi tongjian 资治通鉴 zui mian 醉眠 Zuo Si 左思 zuobi touguang 凿壁偷光 zuoren 做人

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