Lotus flowers rising from the dark mud : late Ming courtesans and their poetry

The dissertation examines the close but overlooked relationship between male poetry societies and the sharp rise of literary courtesans in the late Ming. I attempt to identify a particular group of men who devoted exclusive efforts to the promotion of courtesan culture, that is, urban dwellers of prosperous Jiangnan, who fashioned themselves as retired literati, devoting themselves to art, recreation, and self-invention, instead of government office. I also offer a new interpretation for the decline of courtesan culture after the Ming-Qing transition.Chapter 1 provides an overview of the social-cultural context in which late Ming courtesans flourished. I emphasize office-holding as losing its appeal for late Ming nonconformists who sought other alternative means of self-realization. Chapter 2 examines the importance of poetry by courtesans in literati culture as demonstrated by their visible inclusion in late Ming and early Qing anthologies of women's writings. Chapter 3 examines the life and poetry of individual courtesans through three case studies. Together, these three chapters illustrate the strong identification between nonconformist literati and the courtesans they extolled at both collective and individual levels.In Chapter 4, by focusing on the context and texts of the poetry collection of the courtesan Chen Susu and on writings about her, I illustrate the efforts by both male and female literati in the early Qing to reproduce the cultural glory of late Ming courtesans. However, despite their cooperative efforts, courtesans became inevitably marginalized in literati culture as talented women of the gentry flourished.This dissertation as a whole explores how male literati and courtesans responded to the social and literary milieu of late Ming Jiangnan to shed light on aspects of the intersection of self and society in this floating world. This courtesan culture was a counterculture in that: (1) it was deep-rooted in male poetry societies, a cultural space that was formed in opposition to government office; (2) in valuing romantic relationship and friendship, the promoters of this culture deliberately deemphasized the most primary human relations as defined in the Confucian tradition; (3) this culture conditioned, motivated, and promoted serious relationships between literati and courtesans, which fundamentally undermined orthodox values

Fashioning the Reclusive Persona: Zeng Jing's Informal Portraits of the Jiangnan Literati

Zeng Jing (1564–1647) was a professional portraitist in late Ming China who specialized in informal portraits of contemporary literati in the Jiangnan region. Zeng’s portrait oeuvre embodies the Jiangnan literati’s eremitic aspirations, illuminating the ways in which the literati visually constructed their reclusive personae. Zeng depicted members of Jiangnan cultural elite as commoners or as mountain men, integrating the literati heritage of eremitism with a range of pictorial traditions of representing reclusive figures. The casual dress, relaxed postures, and informal settings in Zeng’s portraits functioned as visual signifiers of the political disengagement and reclusive lifestyle that his sitters pursued. Zeng’s focus on individualized physiognomy indicates the politically frustrated literati’s strong sense of self-awareness. Zeng designed all his portraits to convey the Jiangnan literati’s values of political insubordination, cultural self-contentment, and collective identity of reclusion.Zeng Jing’s portraits give visible form to the complex mindset of the reclusive literati and to the values and aspirations that characterized late Ming eremitism. Zeng’s appropriation and reinterpretation of the conventional scholar-in-landscape composition concretizes the enduring notion of reclusion as communing with nature. Zeng’s pictorial allusions to venerable recluses from earlier ages of Chinese history and his subtle use of Buddhist and Daoist iconography show how archaism and syncretism permeated the literati’s ethos of reclusion. Zeng’s portraits, coupled with the portrait encomia written by the sitters and their companions, emerge as both pictorial and literary testimonies of the Jiangnan literati’s self-fashioning. Through the collective acts of appreciating and inscribing portraits, the Jiangnan literati used Zeng’s portraits as a means to create camaraderie within reclusion. During Zeng’s most prolific years, many members of Chen Jiru and Dong Qichang’s coterie in Huating shared in the ideal of reclusion by sitting for portraits by Zeng, while the literary giant Chen collaborated with Zeng by providing encomia to Zeng’s portraits. As focal points for individual expression, social posturing, and aesthetic experience, Zeng’s portraits forged the Jiangnan literati’s eremitic cultural identity in reaction to the sociopolitical unrest of the late Ming

A Re-Evaluation of Chiang Kaishek's Blueshirts: Chinese Facism in the 1930s.

This thesis considers the Chinese Blueshirts organisation from 1932 to 1938 in the context of Chiang Kaishek's attempts to unify and modernise China. It sets out the terms of comparison between the Blueshirts and Fascist organisations in Europe and Japan, indicating where there were similarities and differences of ideology and practice, as well as establishing links between them. It then analyses the reasons for the appeal of Fascist organisations and methods to Chiang Kaishek. Following an examination of global factors, the emergence of the Blueshirts from an internal point of view is considered. As well as assuming many of the characteristics of a Fascist organisation, especially according to the Japanese model and to some extent to the European model, the Blueshirts were in many ways typical of the power-cliques which were already an integral part of Chinese politics. The influence of Chinese secret society traditions is also examined as an aspect that clearly distinguished them from their European Fascist counterparts. The second part of this study will turn to the ideological development of the organisation, and to the ultimately abortive attempt to build up a mass-based organisation through the New Life Movement. At the same time, connections between the Blueshirts and the Qing Bang are analysed. Finally, this thesis looks at the apparent disbandment of the Blueshirts in 1938. The conclusion arrived at, is that the Blueshirts may properly be described as Fascist - or an organisation with unmistakable links to Fascism. Like Fascist movements in many countries, the Blueshirts displayed the same unstable combination of adherence to highly conservative traditional values while simultaneously embracing modernism in technology, communications and new forms of social and political organisation. Not only does this study contribute specifically to the political history of China, it also examines the development of political and military movements in the Far East in the period preceding World War Two

The chidu in late Ming and early Qing China

This thesis discusses the development and functions of an epistolary form called chidu, focussing on the period during which the chidu enjoyedthe greatest popularity, namely the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Partly because there has been very little work done on the genre at all, and more particularly to provide background to the discussion of late Ming and early Qing chidu, I begin by examining early uses of the term chidu and by looking at those texts which later writers referred to in their writings on the genre. I will show that in fact the early development of chidu is not at all clear, and that the texts to which later writers on chidu referred were not about chidu at all, but were about the more formal form of letter-writing called shu, which achieved canonical status from quite early times. I then proceed to look at the more distinct emergence during the Song dynasty of the kind of chidu which were practised in late Ming and Qing times. In the main part of the thesis, I examine a range of chidu anthologies from the late Ming and early Qing period and a number of texts about chidu which accompanied some of the anthologies, showing how there was a considerable discrepancy between the pedigree and ideals of the genre which they put forward on the one hand, and the actual practice of chidu-writing on the other. I will argue that the real motives of the compilers of chidu collections in presenting these arguments was to try to give their work the legitimacy it lacked precisely because of its lack of a classical pedigree and the general perception that it was a minor genre. In the case study for this thesis, Chidu xinchao compiled by Zhou Lianggong in 1662, I then try to establish what some of the real attractions of the genre for late Ming and Qing scholars might have been, its value as genteel entertainment aside. I will argue that the lack of classical antecedents and canonical status in fact gave writers considerable freedom, both stylistically and in terms of content. Although writers were still constrained by literary and social tradition as a whole, they did use the genre to experiment and made attempts to express themselves more directly. I will also show that the minor status of the genre made it an ideal vehicle for the expression of ideas which, because of their sensitive nature, could not be easily expressed in the canonical genres where they would have much more weight. And in the case of Chidu xinchao at least, it is possible to show how a compiler of an anthology of chidu could use such an anthology to present certain arguments through the letters in the anthology; not only was it a minor genre which was being anthologised, but the compiler was a step further removed from the contents because it was not through his own letters that the content was being presented

Tang Junyi

Both inside and outside of China, there have been heated debates about Confucian democracy, Confucian values and ethics, and Confucian alternatives to Western models of modernization. In many respects, however, the discussions have reached an impasse: Whereas some observers tend to depict Confucianism as a panacea for all kinds of political and social ills in East Asian and Western societies, others consider it to be a mere vestige of the Chinese tradition which lacks any relevance for contemporary discourse. The present study proposes a way through this impasse based on a critical examination of the modern Confucian project developed by the exiled philosopher Tang Junyi (1909-1978). Tang’s comprehensive reinterpretation of Confucianism ranks among the most ambitious philosophical projects in modern Chinese history

Transnational Travels of the Caterpillar Fungus, 1700-1949

This dissertation explores the transformation of Chinese materia medica in the 19th- and the first half of the 20th-centuries, especially the Republican period, in a global context. It is based on a microhistory of the caterpillar fungus, a curious object and also a medicinal substance initially used by Tibetans no later than the 15th century and then assimilated into Chinese materia medica from the 18th century. This study first traces the transmission of specimens and knowledge of the caterpillar fungus in Chinese society and from China to France, Britain, Russia and Japan by the end of the 19th century; then it investigates the tensions and negotiations between Chinese and newly produced European knowledge about the caterpillar fungus, initially emerging in 18th- and 19th-century Europe but then shifting to communities of scientists, traditional physicians and other intellectuals in Republican China. The overall research question is that why did the caterpillar fungus attract the attention of so many different scientific communities, and how did its transnational travels impact on the making of the 20th-century Chinese materia medica? Drawing on Bruno Latour’s discourse on the agency of objects and characterisations of modernity, this dissertation demonstrates that the caterpillar fungus stimulated people’s curiosity about exotic objects and their pursuit of new medicinal substances, with itself changing from a transformable wonder in China to a scientific wonder in Europe and East Asia in transnational networks of knowledge production; in the meantime the caterpillar fungus also witnessed the powerful rhetoric of modern science. On the basis of a further analysis of changes in knowledge about Chinese medicinal substances represented by the caterpillar fungus in Republican China, I argue that the ‘modern’ Chinese materia medica, characterised by plural knowledge systems related to and in conversation with the new goal of scientification, had never been modern

The Impact of Japanese Shinpa on Early Chinese Huaju

This dissertation explores the intercultural forces that affected the formation of wenmingxi (civilized drama), China's first Western-style theatre that flourished in Shanghai in the 1910s, following the 1907 production of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by the Chinese student group the Spring Willow Society (Chunliu She) in Tokyo. In contrast to huaju (spoken drama), the present form of Western theatre in China, which came into existence in the 1920s through a whole-sale importation, wenmingxi adopted a localized approach by mixing Western drama, shinpa (new school drama, the first Western-style Japanese theatre), and traditional Chinese theatre. Based on primary sources as well as recent historical and theoretical studies from China, Japan, and the West, my dissertation focuses on the ideological, dramaturgical, and theatrical transformation wenmingxi brought to Chinese theatre.The study is divided into four chapters and an introduction, which lays out previous research on this topic and my theoretical framework. Chapter One presents a historical review of wenmingxi, from early Western theatrical productions in Shanghai by expatriates and students of missionary and other schools, through Spring Willow's productions in Tokyo, and finally to the rise and fall of wenmingxi in Shanghai in the 1910s. Chapter Two examines the role of nationalism in the emergence of speech-based theatre in Japan and China around the turn of the twentieth century when political instability and fear of national peril largely accounted for both the political focus of early wenmingxi and its continued nationalist content even during its brief commercial success in the mid 1910s. Chapter Three focuses on wenmingxi dramaturgy by tracing the intercultural transformation of several representative plays. It deals with three topics: the use of scripted plays vs. scenarios, adaptation vs. translation of European and shinpa plays, and melodrama as the emblematic dramatic mode for a society in transition. Finally, Chapter Four examines wenmingxi's localization of the theatrical institution—especially in the realm of performance—between the poles of "free acting," Western naturalism, and native theatrical conventions such as singing and female impersonation

Chen Duxiu's early years: The importance of personal connections in the social and intellectual transformation of China 1895--1920

Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), is without question one of the most significant figures in modern Chinese history. Yet his early life has been curiously neglected in Western scholarship. In this dissertation I examine the political, social and intellectual networks that played such an important role in his early career---a career that witnessed his transformation from a classical scholar in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), to a reformer, to a revolutionary, to a renowned writer and editor, to a university dean, to a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, all in the space of about two decades