The Diffusion of Print Culture in Qing China

F OURTEEN ______

THE SIBAO PUBLISHERS illustrate the general historical trend noted in Chapter 1: the spread of woodblock publishing and book culture geographically outward, into the hinterlands of south China, and socially downward, to the minimally educated levels of the population. Over the course of their history, they sold their texts throughout most of the provinces of south China, not only in some of the major commercial and administrative centers of Jiangxi, Hunan, and Guangdong but also in the backwaters of these provinces, extending their reach into the frontier regions of Guangxi, Yunnan, and Guizhou. They sold to academy in- structors, educational officials, magistrates, local literati, and family and charitable schools. By the late nineteenth century at the latest, their pub- lications reached populations far distant, physically, socially, and cultur- ally, from the major seats of education and political authority. They sold a wide variety of texts, largely excluding works of elite lit- erature, philosophy, history, and controversial contemporary scholar- ship, but including most of the major educational texts of the examina- tion system, a considerable number of ritual and etiquette guides, household encyclopedias, medical manuals, and fortune-telling hand- books, and a representative sampling of the most popular works of fic- tion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within each of these categories, the Zou and Ma produced a range of titles. 536 The Diffusion of Print Culture in Qing China

What place did Sibao occupy in the book industry of southern China in the Qing? Was it unique in its operation and scope? Or does it pre- sent simply one variation on a common pattern of production and distribution? And what was the social and cultural impact of the growth and spread of commercial publishing? Did it, as the Zou and Ma pub- lisher-booksellers claimed, bring elite culture to the hinterlands and as- sist in the training of future “generals and ministers of state”? Although much more research must be done on publishing and bookselling in the Qing before these questions can be answered conclusively, I offer here some preliminary observations and a few speculations about the scope of commercial woodblock publishing and its impact on book culture, cultural integration, and literacy in the Qing.

Sibao in Context: Other Commercial Publishing Sites of the Qing The greater accessibility of texts in south China in the nineteenth century was not the work of the Sibao publishers alone. Many other sites of commercial publishing were active at the time. What do these other sites tell us about the distribution of texts and the nature of late impe- rial book culture? Below I briefly consider three other sites, each, like Sibao, a site of commercial enterprise, and each distant from major metropolitan centers: Xuwanzhen, a market town in eastern Jiangxi, which became one of the major centers of book publication in the Qing; Yuechi county, an impoverished rural backwater in eastern Sichuan, whose block cutters served both urban publishing houses in Chengdu and Chongqing and a local publishing industry; and Magang, a cluster of villages in the Pearl River Delta area, where peasant women worked as cutters supply- ing publishers as far away as Zhejiang with woodblocks. I have asserted, in Part I, the distinctiveness of the Sibao publishing-bookselling operation, and the material presented below does reveal glimpses of other forms of organization and marketing within the publishing industry. At the same time, these three examples reinforce the broad conclusions presented in Chapter 1 about the extent and depth of book distribution in southern China in the Qing.