THE SOCIAL FORMATION OF LATE-IMPERIAL CHINA

2017 ◽  
pp. 192-250
Keyword(s):  
Social Formation ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Imperial China

Newly-Discovered Manuscripts of a Northern-Chinese Horse King Temple Association

T oung Pao ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 105 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 183-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meir Shahar
Keyword(s):  
North China ◽  
Rural Culture ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
The Village

AbstractWritten documents from rural north China are rare. This essay examines the newly-discovered records of a Shanxi village association, which was dedicated to the cult of the Horse King. The manuscripts detail the activities, revenues, and expenditures of the Horse King temple association over a hundred-year period (from 1852 until 1956). The essay examines them from social, cultural, and religious perspectives. The manuscripts reveal the internal workings and communal values of a late imperial village association. They unravel the social and economic structure of the village and the centrality of theater in rural culture. Furthermore, the manuscripts bring to the fore a forgotten cult and its ecological background: the Horse King was among the most widely worshiped deities of late imperial China, his flourishing cult reflecting the significance of his protégés – horses, donkeys, and mules – in the agrarian economy.

scholarly journals Autobiography and Symbolic Capital in Late Imperial China

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
David Pattinson
Keyword(s):  
Transition Period ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Economic Effects ◽  
Jiangxi Province ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Major Figure

Abstract This essay explores the use of autobiography to enhance symbolic capital in seventeenth-century China as exemplified by the chronological autobiography of the writer and geomancer Peng Shiwang 彭士望 (1610–1683). Peng was one of the Nine Masters of Changes Hall, a group of Ming loyalist scholars based in Ningdu in south-eastern Jiangxi province who gained a reputation among the cultural elite of the early Qing dynasty. Peng was not a major figure in the Ming–Qing transition period, and his own active participation in the Ming resistance to the Qing conquest was slight. Nevertheless, the economic effects of the Qing conquest, and his decision not to seek employment under the new dynasty, left him and his family in a financially and socially precarious position. When, in 1666, Peng published his collected poetry, he prefaced it with a chronological autobiography remarkable for devoting about half its space to the names of people he met during his peripatetic life. These names include a significant number of loyalists, even though Peng cannot have known some of the more famous ones very well. This essay argues that, through his autobiography, Peng sought to leverage his loyalist connections to create a form of symbolic capital which could be used to shore up his status among the educated elite of his time by increasing sales and circulation of his works and by expanding the social network he could draw upon for work as a geomancer or teacher, or for other support on his travels.

The Illusion of Standardizing the Gods: The Cult of the Five Emperors in Late Imperial China

1997 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szonyi
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Public Morality ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Insight Into

Nineteenth-century observers of the Fuzhou area, both Chinese and Western, were struck by the worship of a group of deities associated with pestilence and epidemic disease. The local people called these gods the Five Emperors (Wudi). To Justus Doolittle, an American missionary stationed in Fuzhou, Proclaimed Zuo Zongtang, Governor-General of Fujian and Zhejiang: “the rival societies for getting up processions to parade the idols have from the beginning violated the law and corrupted morals, hence the evil must be stopped without delay” (Zuo 1867, 22). While these two observers each brought his own concern to bear on his perceptions of popular belief and ritual practice, they were united in their focus on the dangers the worship of these deities posed to public morality and order; neither was much interested in the identities or histories of these gods. But a detailed investigation of their identities and histories may explain how the deities were perceived as dangerous to public morality and order, and offers rich insight into the social history of Late Imperial China.

scholarly journals Serving and Working for Others

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-203
Author(s):  
Claude Chevaleyre
Keyword(s):  
Labor Relations ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Development Patterns ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Legal Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Hired Labor

Abstract Over the past decades, “wage labor” has been a lingering issue in studies on the development patterns of late imperial China. The legal reconfiguration of the category of “hired laborers” (gugong 僱工) between 1588 and 1788, in particular, has been foregrounded as a salient manifestation of the “incipient capitalism” going hand in hand with the emergence of a “free” labor market and with the decline of bound labor. Questioning the preconception that the mere appearance of labor relations mediated by means of wages would suffice to prove the existence of “free labor,” this article proposes to revisit the issue of “hired labor” in late imperial China. It approaches this issue from a conceptual standpoint, as a first step toward an overdue reassessment of the significance of wages in labor relations and their impact on the status of workers. The first section endeavors to sketch out a general conceptualization of gugong from the Great Ming Code and from Ming and Qing legal exegesis. The second section focuses on the study of the legal redefinition of gugong between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and looks for the social and legal implications of being hired. By doing so, it also explores changes in the Chinese conception of the notion of “service” and its relationship with what we would name “servitude.”

Wang Fu-chih's Views on History and Historical Writing

1968 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Y. Teng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Blaise Pascal ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
The Social ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Imperial China

In the seventeenth century, at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Ch'ing dynasties, China produced three outstanding scholars: Huang Tsung-hsi (1619–95), Ku Yen-wu (1613–82), and Wang Fu-chih (1619–92), all great thinkers, voluminous writers, and ardent patriots. The social and political chaos, economic deterioration, excess of Wang Yang-ming's intuitionism, and, above all, the conquest of China by the Manchus must have stimulated the best minds to develop their ideas in a more practical direction. They were contemporaries of René Descartes 1596–1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and only slightly earlier than Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Confined by their cultural tradition and living in a vast but largely isolated empire, these men naturally developed ideas different from those of their European contemporaries. But they had enough challenges of their own to meet. The originality in their ideas bespeaks the intellectual vigor of late imperial China.

The Printed World: Books, Publishing Culture, and Society in Late Imperial China

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 787-817 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobie Meyer-Fong
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Under Construction

Beginning in the late Ming period, China experienced a surge in the production and consumption of books. Printed pages bound into fascicles and housed in cases moved across space and through the social landscape. Their trajectories illuminate larger social, intellectual, economic, and cultural patterns. They also reveal identities under construction—by readers, writers, publishers, and consumers. This article assesses the expanding field of late imperial Chinese book history in the United States and Japan, with some reference to scholarship in China and Taiwan. It looks at the field's move away from its origins in the history of technology and its increasing engagement with social and cultural questions. In particular, the article highlights the field's focus on the “place” of publishing in late imperial China, construed both in terms of regional orientation and the social position of readers and producers of books.

Popular Culture in Late Imperial China

1985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith A. Berling ◽  
James Hayes ◽  
Robert E. Hegel ◽  
Leo Ou-fan Lee ◽  
Victor H. Mair ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial China
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