Riddles in Jin Ping Mei

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-370
Author(s):  
Thomas Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Character Development ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Jin Ping Mei ◽  
Entertainment Culture

Abstract Jin Ping Mei cihua 金瓶梅詞話 (Plum in the Golden Vase) displays an unprecedented interest in breaking apart and reassembling the components of words. This essay asks where the Cihua edition's fascination with character manipulation (a procedure the author refers to as chaibai daozi 拆白道字) comes from and how it relates to literary riddles that precede and follow this landmark sixteenth-century novel. Jin Ping Mei cihua enlarges the presentation and associations of riddles in fiction through its engagement with contemporaneous theatrical literature and the entertainment culture of the brothel. Later commentators, notably Zhang Zhupo 張竹坡 (1670–1698), reorganize the game sequences within which bouts of character manipulation are embedded for the purposes of narrative prolepsis and character development, advocating an approach to reading enigmas as portents that influenced late imperial novelists. In doing so, however, they efface the Cihua's unruly celebration of contingency, the novel's seductive insinuation that it might be written otherwise.

Challenging Yin Hierarchy

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-56
Author(s):  
Y. Yvon Wang
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Chinese Markets

This chapter demonstrates that, under the regime of licentiousness, hierarchies of pleasure largely matched the distribution of worldly power: elites backed up both articulation and denial with physical and material domination. The chapter then introduces the early modern challenge to yin ideology. Despite the crisis in control over sexual depictions that began in the sixteenth century, hierarchical values around the regulation of these representations largely persisted. By exemplifying the crucial developments in Chinese markets for, and regulations of, sexual representations from the earliest periods of Chinese history up to about the year 1880, the chapter traces these developments as they form a culturally specific backdrop essential to understanding the pornographic transition after 1880. Ultimately, the remainder of the chapter turns to the late imperial breakdown of elite dominance over the circulation and consumption of sexual representations and how the legal and cultural authorities tried to impose new controls over licentious print goods.

Failure Stories: Interpretations of Rejected Papers in the Late Imperial Civil Service Examinations

T oung Pao ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 101 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 168-207
Author(s):  
Shiuon Chu
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Small Proportion ◽  
Personal Communication ◽  
Examination System ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Examination System ◽  
Imperial Examination ◽  
Civil Service Examinations ◽  
Imperial Examinations

This article investigates the practice of returning marked papers to rejected candidates in late imperial Chinese examinations. The practice—common from the sixteenth century to the abolition of imperial examinations in 1905—established a sense of personal communication between examiners and examinees and was an opportunity for rejected candidates to benefit from the examination system. The failed papers returned to their authors enabled them to make sense of their performance by interpreting, when not misconstruing, examiners’ comments. The examiners sometimes praised the papers and blamed the decision to fail on other examiners. As a result, most rejected candidates tended not to challenge the examiners through official channels or take collective action against the examination system. Thus, in the late imperial examination system, the ways in which rejecting decisions could be negotiated and construed were no less important than the awarding of degrees to an extremely small proportion of participants.
Cet article s’intéresse à la pratique, particulière à la période impériale tardive, consistant à rendre leurs copies aux candidats ayant échoué aux examens. Courante depuis le xvie siècle et jusqu’à l’abolition des examens mandarinaux en 1905, cette pratique créait l’impression d’une relation personnelle entre les examinateurs et les candidats et était un moyen pour ceux qui avaient échoué de tirer profit du système. Les copies rejetées retournées à leurs auteurs permettaient à ces derniers de donner un sens à leur performance en interprétant, voire en dévoyant, les commentaires des examinateurs. Il arrivait que les examinateurs fassent l’éloge des copies et attribuent à autrui la décision de les rejeter. De ce fait, la plupart des candidats malheureux évitaient de contester les examinateurs par la voie réglementaire ou de manifester collectivement contre le système. Ainsi, dans le système des examens à la fin de la période impériale, la manière dont les décisions négatives pouvaient être négociées ou interprétées n’était pas moins importante que l’attribution de rangs académiques à une toute petite proportion de ceux qui concouraient.


scholarly journals Writing for Justice: An Activist Beginning of the Cult of Female Chastity in Late Imperial China

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 991-1012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siyen Fei
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
Imperial China

This article examines the rise of the chastity cult—the quintessential symbol of patriarchal suppression of female agency for modern reformers—during the sixteenth century. Despite the resultant stricter control over female sexuality, the growing dominance of the chastity cult cannot be simply construed as a product of top-down imposition. What made possible the penetrative power of chastity practice, this article argues, was a state indoctrination working in reverse. That is, the fast ascendance of the chastity cult in the late Ming was powered by various strains of activism that sought to protest and repair the failing system of chastity awards. The activist impetus greatly enhanced the centrality and influence of chastity practice in social life and, in doing so, opened the notion of chastity to contentious and sometimes subversive negotiations.

The Rules of Prose in Sixteenth-Century China: Tang Shunzhi (1507-1560) as an Anthologist

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-182
Author(s):  
Timothy Robert Clifford
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
Endless Variety

AbstractThis paper examines the role of the anthologist in late imperial Chinese print culture. Specifically, it focuses on the sixteenth-century anthologist Tang Shunzhi. Tang’s first place finish in the 1529 metropolitan examinations came at a pivotal moment. As commercial anthology printers responded to an expanding reading public by applying readers’ aids such as punctuation and commentary to increasingly diverse textual corpora, Tang’s distinctive method of annotation was used to ‘reveal’ the rules of Ming examination prose operating universally across a seemingly endless variety of texts. At the same time, Tang’s own belief in universal rules of prose was the product of an educational movement to supplement the narrow and monotonous examination curriculum by providing students with anthologies of ancient literature. These two Tangs—one revealing uniformity within diversity, the other revealing diversity within uniformity—highlight contradictory trends toward both stereotypy and diversification within sixteenth-century print culture more broadly.

Crafting a Book: The Sequel to The Plum in the Golden Vase

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoqiao Ling
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Implied Author ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Jin Ping Mei ◽  
Print Industry

Abstract This paper examines the book form of the original woodblock edition (ca. 1660) of Xu jin ping mei 續金瓶梅 (The sequel to Jin ping mei), a sequel to the acclaimed yet controversial sixteenth-century vernacular novel Jin ping mei 金瓶梅 (Plum in a golden vase). Critics tend to hold Xu jin ping mei in low regard because the sequel’s extensive citations from religious texts and morality books disrupt the flow of the narrative. As this paper shows, such ‘weakness’ is part of the sequel writer’s conscious exploration of the productive gap between the text and the book as an object—cover page, the front matter, illustration and fiction commentary all contribute to the totality of the bound text as an object of connoisseurship. Another indicator of the author-editor’s effort at creating the sequel’s own social reception is a list of cited books that captures the full spectrum of textual production in the seventeenth century, thereby inscribing Xu jin ping mei in a cultural matrix that accommodates multiple modes of reading with a sense of hierarchy. To situate Xu jin ping mei in the context of the burgeoning print industry will help us go beyond the textual level to assess the sequel as an important cultural phenomenon. It is exactly the desire to cash in on the popularity of the original masterworks that pushes author, editor, and publisher to craft the book as a referential field in which the implied author engages anticipated readers of different dispositions to comment on, extend, and improve the original work.

Textual Transmission of Earlier Literature during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wai-Yee Li
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
Ming And Qing Dynasties ◽  
Political Legitimation

Classical Chinese literature exerts a powerful hold on readers and writers in later periods. The question of how earlier literature was preserved, classified, anthologized, and distributed is vital for understanding how authors defined their creative and interpretive endeavors during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Printing expanded, with a dramatic increase in numbers and variety in the sixteenth century. For many of the texts discussed in our volume, the earliest extant editions or reconstituted versions date from the Ming dynasty, and many important commentaries and annotations were produced during the late imperial period. Encyclopedias and collectanea show how tradition is repackaged. Political legitimation is bound up with state-sponsored comprehensive collections and encyclopedias. Anthologies of earlier literature and commentaries on them yield insights into literary trends in later periods. Primers and textbooks demonstrate the role of classical literature in acquiring basic linguistic and literary competence.

From Tradition to Community: The Rise of Contemporary Knowledge in Late Imperial China

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Vedal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Specialized Knowledge ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Literature Reviews ◽  
Sources Of Authority ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Scholarly Collaboration

This article examines the emergence of a new emphasis on contemporary specialized knowledge in sixteenth-century China. During this period, sources of authority such as antiquity and the court came to lose their elevated status. As a result, scholars increasingly saw the expertise of a contemporary disciplinary community as a superior standard for validating knowledge. This trend appeared in scholarly collaboration and the citation of contemporaries, as well as new kinds of paratextual materials such as lists of works cited and literature reviews. These findings on new intellectual communities in the sixteenth century call for a reassessment of the better-documented shifts in East Asian intellectual culture from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.

scholarly journals Land markets in late imperial and republican China

2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
KENNETH POMERANZ
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
East China ◽  
Land Markets ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Strong Position

ABSTRACTChina has had very active markets for both the sale and the rental of land since Song times (960–1279), if not longer. By the sixteenth century, most of the institutional arrangements that would characterize these markets until 1949 were in place. These institutions differed sharply from those of emerging land markets in early modern Western Europe: in particular, government played a lesser role in adjudicating disputes over land contracts, and customary arrangements included features that (a) gave some sellers of land claims on purchasers that could last for many years and (b) gave some tenants, especially in South and East China, very strong usufruct rights, which themselves became a form of tradable property. However, despite these and other differences from Western models, Chinese land markets were quite efficient, and provided the incentives needed for a very productive agriculture; secure tenants, for instance, responded to their strong position by behaving like owners and investing heavily in improving the land.

Maxims of Foreign Policy

Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-79
Author(s):  
W.J. Boot
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Japanese Identity

In the pre-modern period, Japanese identity was articulated in contrast with China. It was, however, articulated in reference to criteria that were commonly accepted in the whole East-Asian cultural sphere; criteria, therefore, that were Chinese in origin.One of the fields in which Japan's conception of a Japanese identity was enacted was that of foreign relations, i.e. of Japan's relations with China, the various kingdoms in Korea, and from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and the Kingdom of the Ryūkū.

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