Origin Narratives: Reading and Reverence in Late Ming China

In this dissertation, I examine a genre of commercially-published, illustrated hagiographical books. Recounting the life stories of some of China’s most beloved cultural icons, from Confucius to Guanyin, I term these hagiographical books “origin narratives” (chushen zhuan 出身傳). Weaving a plethora of legends and ritual traditions into the new “vernacular” xiaoshuo format, origin narratives offered comprehensive portrayals of gods, sages, and immortals in narrative form, and were marketed to a general, lay readership. Their narratives were often accompanied by additional materials (or “paratexts”), such as worship manuals, advertisements for temples, and messages from the gods themselves, that reveal the intimate connection of these books to contemporaneous cultic reverence of their protagonists. The content and composition of origin narratives reflect the extensive range of possibilities of late-Ming xiaoshuo narrative writing, challenging our understanding of reading. I argue that origin narratives functioned as entertaining and informative encyclopedic sourcebooks that consolidated all knowledge about their protagonists, from their hagiographies to their ritual traditions. Origin narratives also alert us to the hagiographical substrate in late-imperial literature and religious practice, wherein widely-revered figures played multiple roles in the culture. The reverence of these cultural icons was constructed through the relationship between what I call the Three Ps: their personas (and life stories), the practices surrounding their lore, and the places associated with them (or “sacred geographies”). In this dissertation, I explore this dynamic through the prism of origin narratives by focusing on the immortal Xu Xun 許遜, the god Zhenwu 真武, and the immortal bard Lü Dongbin 呂洞賓. I conclude with a case study of a recurrent theme in origin narratives: the protagonist’s journey through hell. The main goal of this dissertation is to examine the pivotal yet overlooked genre of origin narratives and unveil its significance to Chinese literature and cultural practice. What was the reading experience of origin narratives? What spurred their rise and commercial success in late Ming? And what was their long-term impact on writing and worship in late-imperial China? To answer these questions, this dissertation attempts to transcend anachronistic disciplinary boundaries that obscure the realities of life in late Ming China, and instead explore origin narratives within the broader cultural framework that informed their production and consumption during this period. Therefore, I analyze origin narratives in conjunction with a wide range of materials that fall into the realms of literature, religion, and history. These include literary works, canonical texts, popular religious tracts (baojuan and shanshu), daily-life encyclopedias, local gazetteers, geographical compendia, pictorial hagiographies, and art works. Origin narratives reflect three concomitant trends in late-Ming book culture: a renewed interest in hagiographies, a penchant for anthologizing in commercial publishing, and the multiple roles xiaoshuo narratives played in the culture. In their hybrid composition and encyclopedic scope, origin narratives are a unique late-Ming phenomenon that opens a rare window onto the interplay between literature and religion during this transformative period in the history of Chinese culture

Study of Wang Tao’s (1828-1897) Manyou suilu and Fusang youji with reference to Late Qing Chinese foreign travels

Traditionally, Chinese regarded China as the centre of the world, displaying little interest in foreign lands. Before the 1840s, although there were records of a few brave pilgrims traveling to huge distances, Chinese travel literature was dominated by essays and diaries written about the natural scenery of China. In the late Qing, a period of transformation during which Chinese society was challenged by the West and later Japan, Chinese intellectuals, realizing China’s weakness, traveled to these countries in search of remedies for the state. The resulted burgeoning travel literature contains not only firsthand information of the West and Japan at the time, but also details about individual responses to the foreign lands they visited. Despite the relatively small amount of research done on these writings, they are, indeed, the most significant archival materials for the study of the early perceptions of the Chinese of the West in the modern period. Among these travelers, Wang Tao (1828-1897) is certainly worthy of discussion. Apart from being a reform pioneer, Wang Tao was also being pioneering to be the first intellectual to travel to Europe and Japan. His two travelogues, Manyou suilu and Fusang youji, however, have only been used as references in biographical research, neglecting the fact that they consist of not only unprecedented journeys of a Chinese intellectual, but also Wang’s constant evaluations of home politics, of which he carefully laid out in the form of travelogue. This dissertation aims to explore the two travelogues, and is particularly concerned of their relationship with the historic context, the author’s motives of writing and other foreign travel writings of the time. The two travelogues stand out both in subject maters and the subtle ways Wang (re)constructed Europe and Japan. They can be seen as a manifesto of Wang’s views on himself, China and the world. While many travelogues of the same period were written in a data or analysis-based style, Wang Tao embodied his observations abroad, his criticism and vision of the future China, his personalities, assumptions and expectations and the spirit of his time with a highly refined language in the two accounts, and had make them intriguing works of literature