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Pleasure and Excess in Ming China: a Talk Given at Casa Asia, June 3 2004

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Pleasure and Excess in Ming China: a Talk Given at Casa Asia, June 3 2004 DO NOT CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 1 Pleasure and Excess in Ming China: A talk given at Casa Asia, June 3 2004 Craig Clunas School of Oriental and African Studies, London [email protected] At some point in the middle of the sixteenth century, the painter Lu Zhi (1496- 1576) created for an unidentified client, or at least a client of whom we have the name, ‘Master Yunquan’ but no other details, an album of ten small paintings depicting, ‘The Pleasures of a Secluded Existence’ (You ju le shi). They are, in the order in which they are currently mounted: ‘Dreaming One is a Butterfly, ‘A Crane in a Cage’, ‘Contemplating Plum Blossom’, ‘Picking Medicinal Herbs’, ‘Crows in the Evening’, ‘Pausing the Sound of the Zither’, ‘Fishermen’, ‘Releasing Ducks’, ‘Listening to the Rain’, and ‘Treading on Snow’.1 One can learn a lot about a culture from its pleasures. These decorous and admirably restrained indulgences, several of which also carry historical allusions to paragons of the past who were particularly associated with them, are all here carried out by a single solitary male figure (he is implied as a viewer but not pictured in the scenes of crows and fishermen), simply but elegantly dressed in the robes of the recluse, remote and untrammeled by the cares of the world. He is the gao shi or ‘lofty scholar’, the ideal of elite male subjectivity, the point of viewing of the ten thousand things of the world. He is, indeed, an ideal, and his pleasures are ideal pleasures. The word used for them in Lu Zhi’s title is le, which echoes through Ming writing, and which is found equally often in contexts which reveal, unsurprisingly, that pleasure was not an DO NOT CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 2 uncomplicated Good Thing for the authors of these texts. It is for example exactly the same word that the anecdotist He Liangjun (1506-1573), one of Lu Zhi’s contemporaries, used in writing about the former Grand Secretary Xie Qian (1449-1531), who passed his days in retirement from high office playing cards with his granddaughters, and playfully gambling for cakes and fruit as a form of pleasure (xi du yi wei le). We are acerbically told, ‘He never asked about public affairs. Considered nowadays, he was a silly old fool.’2 Even more extreme, the Ming Chinese term chun le, literally ‘Springtime Pleasures’, refers not to the enjoyment of the vernal greenery or a picnic in the countryside, but to pleasures of pornographic imagery and sexual indulgence. ‘Springtime pictures’, chun hua, are the Japanese shunga, pornographic imagery which was as widely circulated as it was condemned and banned by public and private moralists alike. The wide range of the term ‘pleasure’, and of some cognate terms like ‘amusement’ (wan) and ‘play’ (xi), as it deployed across a huge range of visual and material culture in Ming China (1368-1644), will be the focus here. Sources of many kinds confirm the supposition that looking, and spectatorship, were themselves conceived as a form of pleasure, whether licit or illicit. The lofty scholar with his crane in a cage is paralleled by the early fifteenth century emperor examining a caged singing bird which is held up for his inspection by a boy eunuch. It comes from a series of court paintings of imperial pleasures, collectively known as Xing le tu, or ‘Pictures of Activities of Pleasure’, which have been the subject of a detailed analysis by Wang Cheng-hua, as part of a thesis on material culture and emperorship at this period.3 Series of such ‘Pictures of Activities of Pleasure’ were an established genre of court art, many more such series being recorded textually than now come down to us. They first of all showed eminent recluses of the past in rural settings, but were adapted to display the splendours of pleasure at the imperial court, thus not only creating an analogy between the reigning sovereign and worthies of the past, but stressing that the peace and prosperity of the imperium allowed the ruler to engage in suitably decorous pastimes appropriate to his status. Thus a huge surviving painting attributed to Shang Xi, now mounted as a hanging scroll but once probably a more permanently visible screen panel shows the Xuande emperor (r. 1426-1435)hunting in the imperial park in the company of his household eunuchs.4 DO NOT CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 3 Others show the emperor as spectator, looking at seasonal and other entertainments, including the setting off of fireworks, court ladies and children playing at the street life of roaming and shopping, processional floats and the antics of tumblers, all laid on for his pleasure. These acts of imperial delight in looking are attested in the textual sources also, where they are also occasions for the pleasure of looking in company, and of the emperor sharing his pleasures with his subjects. Thus in 1412 on the occasion of the New Year, when a banquet was held for officials, both officials and common people were allowed into the Wumen to gaze on the ‘Turtle Mountain’, a vast temporary structure ablaze with lanterns and fireworks. One senior official named Xia Yuanji (1366-1430) brought his mother to see the sight, showing that such festival spectatorship was not totally restricted by gender. (Eunuchs informed the emperor of the lady’s presence, and the sovereign described her as a worthy woman and ordered rewards all round.)5 The following year court annals tell how the emperor drove to the Eastern Park (the court was by now in Beijing) to ‘watch (guan) striking the ball and shooting at the willow, allowing the civil and military officials, the ambassadors of the Four Barbarians and the elderly of the capital to participate in the spectatorship.’ We get a description of the two ball teams, led by aristocrats, with the whole court from the emperors grandson downwards taking a turn at the ball and the shooting. The emperor was delighted his grandson did so well, and capped a line of verse he produced – his rewards and those given to other officials are listed.6 Again on the New Year in 1414 the emperor, ‘went to the Meridian gate to view the lanterns…’, and poems and gifts were the result of his pleasure in the spectacle.7 Just over a hundred years later, in 1517, the Zhengde emperor, who has gone down in the history books as a much less ideal ruler, was seeing in the New Year at Xuanfu on the northern frontier, in the course of one of his rackety progresses; this was a somewhat DO NOT CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 4 raucous affair involving processions of decorated floats of monks and women, and the playful throwing of balls by the latter at the former. ‘The emperor’ we are told ‘roared with laughter, and took great pleasure (le)’.8 With his known love of pomp and excitement, he was presumably similarly pleased with the festivities and fireworks which marked his ceremonial return to Beijing in the following year.9 These ephemeral aspects of Ming material culture, in particular things like festival lanterns and fireworks, are almost totally lost to us now, surviving only as hints in things like the few scrolls of imperial pleasures which survive, and in occasional descriptions and printed illustrations in novels. Fireworks feature prominently in Jin Ping Mei, for example, which reveals that specialists could be hired for parties to set them off, and which gives us lists of their evocative specialised names: ‘Slow-blooming lotus blossoms’, ‘Golden thread chrysanthemums’, ‘Ten-foot high orchids’, ‘Brighter than moonlights’, ‘Ten-foot high chrysanthemums’, ‘Great smoky orchids’, ‘Gold lamp on a silver stand’.10 What certainly does survive is some of the puritanical strictures against visual pleasures of this type, ranging from simple prohibitions on feasting and theatricals at funerals,11 to much more drastic measures such as the occasion in 1567 when a series of bad portents led the emperor to decree that there was to be no holiday over the New Year for officials, while ‘the people were forbidden to hang lanterns and take [literally ‘make’] their pleasure’ (zuo le).12 Similarly in 1625 bad news led to the situation in which ‘The emperor proclaimed a strict prohibition on the people setting off fireworks and rockets, on drumming and playing at kickball’.13 For the Ming educated male, the grander associations of ‘pleasure’ were with anything but fireworks, drumming and football, at least in the majority of their public pronouncements. There was a long tradition of engagement with the problem of pleasure, stretching back to the thinkers of the Warring States period, two thousand years before. As Michael Nylan has shown, in the only sustained discussion of the problem, polemic centred on the relationship between the sensual and experiential pleasures of things like sumptuous clothes and fine wines, and what she calls the ‘relational pleasures’, such as ‘getting good men to serve in office through politicking; cultivating oneslef in the arts of social intercourse; taking pleasure in virtue; taking pleasure in one’s profession; and taking pleasure in heaven and its moral imperatives’.14 Only through an DO NOT CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 5 attention to the latter could ‘consuming pleasures’ be transmuted into ‘sustaning pleasures’. ‘Is it not a delight (le) to have friends come from afar ?’, is the famous opening passage of the Confucian ‘Analects’, the sayings of the sage himself, while in the 1487 metropolitan exam the examiners set as the quotation for discussion by candidates a text from the no-less canonical philosopher Mencius; ‘He who delights (le) in Heaven will continue to possess the empire’.15 Yang Dongming (1548-1624), an official from impoversihed Northeastern Henan who was personally close to the Donglin faction of reformist officials, formed in 1590 in a ‘Society for Sharing Pleasure’, later transmuted into a ‘Society for Sharing Goodness’, which did charitable work like road and bridge building, funding weddings and funerals.16 This sense of decorous pleasure is well captured above all in studio names.
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