“Let People See and Be Moved”: Stone Arches and the Chastity Cult in Huizhou during the High Qing Era

NAN Nü ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-163
Author(s):  
Yulian Wu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
Stone Arches

This article examines the chastity cult in China during the High Qing (c.1680–1830) era. It focuses on the physical characteristics and the cultural implications of chastity arches built in Huizhou (Anhui) during the eighteenth century. Using both written texts and evidence from extant arches, this article explores how these monumental objects served as a forum through which the ideology of female fidelity was constructed and perceived by different constituents including the Manchu court, wealthy Huizhou merchants, and resident commoners. These three groups had different attitudes toward the value of these chastity arches, and thus, this study reveals a dynamic and contradictory picture of how the chastity cult was contested and negotiated in the local community of Huizhou during the late imperial period.


Dreams as Life and Life as Dreams in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century xiaoshuo Narratives

T oung Pao ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 107 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 688-716
Author(s):  
Aude Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Dream Stories

Abstract In the depiction and analysis of various transtextual sources and rewritings, this article discusses narratives of Chinese late imperial xiaoshuo that dealt with dreams perceived as equally important if not more valuable than waking life itself. The discourse of these dream stories aimed at underlining the significance of the value granted to dreams, and consequently how this perspective on dreams could affect one’s stance towards life itself. With an emphasis on the eighteenth century, examples comprise narratives from lesser-known collections, such as Xieduo 諧鐸 by Shen Qifeng (1740?–?), but the author also highlights earlier texts—Daoist classics, chuanqi 傳奇 of the Tang, and chuanqi of the Ming—which served as sources for these late imperial tales. Although the theme of life-long dreams is found across the centuries and literary genres, this article points to its various treatments, that differed according to time periods and authors’ personal concerns. It highlights a shift in “life-long dream” stories of the late imperial period towards a concern for private matters, depicted in a detached and/or light-hearted tone.

Bringing Rain and Protection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barend J. ter Haar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Northern China ◽  
Supreme Deity ◽  
Do So

Deities were thought to help and protect people, heal them from illnesses, and sometimes also to punish them. And yet, a worshipper was not free to decide what to ask for, but had to work within a collectively created and transmitted paradigm of expectations of the deity. In Northern China, Lord Guan was often requested to provide rain, and everywhere he was asked to assist in the fight against demons and other types of outsiders (barbarians, rebels, or otherwise), or even appeared of his own accord to do so. From the early seventeenth century onwards, Guan Yu was seen as the incarnation of a dragon executed at the command of the Jade Emperor for bringing rain out of compassion to a local community sentenced to extinction by the supreme deity. Finally, his loyal image inspired his rise as a God of Wealth in the course of the eighteenth century.

Viktor Vasnetsov’s New Icons

Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Paris Exposition ◽  
The Many ◽  
Modern Orthodox ◽  
Human Hands

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.

Chinese Business Practice in the Late Imperial Period

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Zelin
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Development ◽  
Chinese Economy ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
Chinese Business ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Business In China ◽  
The Impact

The rapid development of the Chinese economy over the past several decades has stimulated new interest in the institutions, practices, and social formations that supported the development of business in China before the intensification of pressure from Western traders to conform to “modern” practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article aims to provide a foundation for understanding merchant practice as it developed during the important years of market expansion during the last Chinese dynasty and to dispel some of the enduring myths about the Chinese merchant, his relationship to family, community, and the state, and the ideological constraints on his activities. To that end I examine several aspects of late imperial merchant culture, beginning with the everyday practices that allowed business to flourish in the Qing, turning next to the large social formations through which long-distance merchants in particular identified and pursued their interests, and ending with some preliminary thoughts on the impact of the laissez-faire policies of the last dynasty and their implications for post-Imperial China.

scholarly journals Territory, enclosure, and state territorial mode of production in the Russian imperial periphery

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-25
Author(s):  
Vera Smirnova
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
The State ◽  
Rural Politics ◽  
Land Consolidation ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Mode Of Production

Abstract. After the imperial land consolidation acts of 1906, the Russian land commune became a center of territorial struggle where complex alliances of actors, strategies, and representations of territory enacted land enclosure beyond the exclusive control of the state. Using original documentation of Russian imperial land deals obtained in the federal and municipal archives, this study explores how the Russian imperial state and territories in the periphery were dialectically co-produced not only through institutional manipulations, educational programs, and resettlement plans but also through political and public discourses. This paper examines how coalitions of landed nobility and land surveyors, landless serfs, and peasant proprietors used enclosure as conduits for property violence, accumulation of capital, or, in contrast, as a means of territorial autonomy. Through this example, I bring a territorial dimension into Russian agrarian scholarship by positioning the rural politics of the late imperial period within the global context of capitalist land enclosure. At the same time, by focusing on the reading of territory from the Russian historical perspective, I introduce complexity into the modern territory discourse often found in Western political geographic interpretations.

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