Toward an Extraordinary Everyday: Li Yu's (1611-1680) Vision, Writing, and Practice

This dissertation considers how the literatus entrepreneur Li Yu (1610-1680) took advantage of the burgeoning market economy of early Qing China to engineer and market a new experience of the everyday. The world in which Li Yu's cultural products were best sellers was rife with novelty. The Ming dynasty had collapsed in 1644, yet many of its defining features remained: urban centers brimmed with gadgets, both Chinese and foreign, that offered new possibilities for engaging the material world. The status of writing and the reading public was also changing, as more books were published at lower costs than ever before. Li Yu capitalized on this ripe moment to develop and sell cultural products that directed the focus of consumers to the details and possibilities of their everyday. I argue that through his cultural production, Li Yu changed what constituted cultural capital and who had rights to it in the urban centers of southern China in the early Qing. Li Yu made a brand of his name, which he used to market his fiction and drama as well as intangible products like innovative designs and do-it-yourself technologies. I examine the strategies that traverse the range of his cultural production to demonstrate how he altered the physical makeup of the built environment and the visual experience of theatrical performance, while also revising the ways that they could be represented in language and depicted in narrative. Readers of Li Yu's writing, visitors to his gardens, and audiences for his theatrical productions could expect to encounter particulars: his language zooms in on the material world, narrating the gritty specifics of genitals and dirt; he waxes technical about his rigged stage lighting and dioramic windows. In one of his stories, a man uses a telescope to impersonate a god; in another a wily thief cannot "see" a woman's myopia, and so misjudges her. At the heart of this study is Li Yu's magnum opus, Leisure Notes (Xianqing ouji), a curious collection of several hundred essays on topics that range from theater direction to heating, choosing a concubine to balustrade design, the art of walking to pomegranate trees. This text has some commonalities with late-Ming manuals of taste, which documented the fine points of distinction around which people negotiated their status vis-à-vis conspicuous consumption of luxury commodities. In the late Ming, these markers of social distinction were hotly debated as merchants challenged literati claims to rights over cultural capital. I show how Li Yu departs from late-Ming discourse by rejecting luxury commodities to locate discernment instead in readers who join him in experimenting with his reproducible designs and technological improvements in the spaces of their everyday lives. I contend that these experiments reveal the limitations of grand narratives of the day--such as Confucian morality, gender norms, fate, and medicine--by exploiting their contingencies, and by elevating the status of individual experience

Dialogue with Feng Shui : an awareness of Chinese traditions in domestic architecture.

Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN058674 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

The diversity of urban life and form: an historical study of the urban transformation in Tang-Song China and nineteenth-century England

This research is a historical study of urban life and the urban fabric of Tang-Song China and nineteenth-century England. The urban patterns of these two historical cases show opposite transformations: from zoning to mixed-use, and vice versa. The inquiry and analysis are structured into three key aspects urban fabric, legibility of architecture, and people s living trajectories, which are all centered on the research question: whether physical, land-use variety is inherently connected to social diversity? Each of the three pairs of chapters examines one aspect in detail and the paired chapters are presented as comparative case studies. Firstly, the development of the urban fabric is a process of social and cultural production. Inhabitants are the prime agent in creating urban forms. Determined by strong social, political, economic and cultural forces, urban forms in Song-era China and Victorian England exhibits different patterns, but, as this historical inquiry validates, both of them were uniquely fitted into their social and cultural contexts. Secondly, the efficacy of urban forms is circumstantial. The development of architectural forms in pre-modern China was static, while that of nineteenth-century England was diverse. The role of architecture in articulating social hierarchy and relationship has been well performed since ancient times. However, further extending the role of architecture as a social apparatus in instructing human perception and behaviour requires social acceptance and cultural capacity to assure its efficacy. Thirdly, people s living patterns, evidenced as their spatial experience, vary individually while at the same time they demonstrate certain affinity among similar social members. For social interaction, it should not be understood as a merely observable phenomenon at a certain physical locus. Social coherence too, is structured by social, economic, cultural, religious, and political forces, rather than by physical planning. If the modern planning discourse essentially lies in the struggle of finding a perfect balance between laissez faire and political control, then such effort can only be achievable through a profound understanding of human nature animated by social and cultural circumstances. My research is to evoke our awareness of the social and cultural constitutions of individuals and groups, as they primarily determine our attitudes toward and understanding of the built environment

Governing Imperial Borders: Insights from the Study of the Implementation of Law in Qing Xinjiang

This research examines, through a detailed analysis of the way in which laws were implemented, the changing strategies that the Qing Empire employed to govern Xinjiang from 1759, when this area was annexed into the empire, to 1911, when the Qing dynasty collapsed. Focusing on the changes in the applicability of the two legal systems--Qing state law and indigenous Islamic law--in the criminal and the civil domains respectively, as well as the dynamic of the Qing legal policies, the dissertation studies the Qing's state building project in a multi-ethnic context from the legal perspective. Different from many historians studying European expansion, who argue that law was an important tool of forced acculturation, my research on Xinjiang shows that the Qing rulers managed to integrated this area without full acculturation. The story this dissertation is telling is one of the creation of Xinjiang as a province over time, though one that still holds an ambiguous status as an autonomous region even to today. It is against this background that the dissertation looks at how the two vast legal systems collided in China's northwestern frontier, and how the area's indigenous inhabitants and immigrants used the law to advance and defend their own interests

Changsha ware in the Art Museum, the Chinese University of Hong Kong: reflections of daily life in the Tang Dynasty.

Leung Yuen-fun Rachel.Thesis submitted in: May 2004.One leaflet mounted.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005.Includes bibliographical references.Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter Chapter One: --- Historical BackgroundThe discovery of the kiln sites --- p.1The naming of Changsha ware --- p.3The beginning of production --- p.5Chapter Chapter Two: --- Development of Changsha wareDuration of operation --- p.10Stages of development --- p.11Reasons for decline --- p.15Chapter Chapter Three: --- Glaze and Kiln Characteristics of Changsha wareBody --- p.18Shaping method --- p.19Glazes --- p.19Kiln --- p.21Chapter Chapter Four: --- Classification of Changsha ware in the Art Museum collectionIntroduction --- p.24Daily household wares --- p.25Cultural and scholar's articles --- p.44Toys --- p.47Potter's tool --- p.51Chapter Chapter Five: --- Decoration of Changsha ware in the Art Museum collectionIntroduction --- p.53Decorative technique --- p.54Decorative motif --- p.59Chapter Chapter Six: --- Changsha ware as reflections of daily lifeCustom and religion --- p.78Games --- p.94Childhood education --- p.98Cross cultural Communication --- p.100Chapter Chapter Seven: --- Conclusion --- p.10

Schooling and society in late Qing China

In the years 1901-1905 a school system modelled on those of Japan and Europe was introduced in China, after much debate, by a government anxious to use education to strengthen the country internally against the foreign threat. Contradictions unforeseen by its sponsors arose between the new system and the society to which it was introduced. Deep-rooted indigenous educational institutions, especially the sishu or traditional private school, showed surprising powers of resilience. The new schooling was intended to be universal but did not reach the masses, who merely provided the money for the new schools through taxes. Instead, it retained the elite associations of its predecessors. Access to the elite was altered by the predominantly urban location of the new schools, which demanded a level of professional expertise and material equipment unknown to the old. Urban gentry and business families were able to use the schools as a vehicle for social mobility; in addition, the foundation of schools afforded immediate advantage in terms of finance and prestige for the men who operated them. Confidence gained through school management fuelled demands for self government among the gentry, while the visible ineffectiveness of attempted centralization brought out the weakness of the government. Where the old schooling had been flexible and, at the upper levels, had made the student responsible for his own progress (I use 'his' deliberately, since both the old and the new schooling made little provision for women), the new imposed unfamiliar standards of punctuality, uniformity and external direction by impersonal rules. Much of the turbulence of late Qing schools can be traced back to the clash between their rigid discipline, derived from the demands of modern industrial society, and the mores of the society in which they were set. As with calls by the gentry for greater autonomy vis-a-vis the government, the dissatisfaction of students and staff was frequently expressed in political language acquired from the West. A significant minority espoused revolution. The system of schooling in force under the Qing and the Republican government was more a divisive than a unifying force: it marked off its beneficiaries from the mass of the population. It was not until the establishment of the People's Republic that a beginning was made in extending an understanding and acceptance of the concepts, values, and habits of modern industrial society to the mass of people, and to resolving the contradiction between 'foreign' and 'Chinese'

Dress and Strategic Bodily Practice: A Case Study of Women's Socio-political Negotiation in Postwar Taiwan

__Abstract__ This dissertation explores how women have been governed by society, and how they have negotiated to regain control in their own way, by investigating the interrelation between women, body, dress and social structures. Throughout history, bodies have been disciplined by certain social norms, emphasizing social difference and thus benefitting particular groups. Never on the favorable end of this equation, women´s bodies have traditionally been the site where such discipline is practiced. Dress is thus a common tool for enforcing order. Hence, to examine the interaction between body and dress is crucial to understanding the relationship between human and society. This thesis develops the theoretical framework of strategic bodily practice. This theory accounts for the complexities that social forces place on body and dress, and reveals the active nature of individual negotiation, which usually becomes apparent as the strategized and embodied practice of women´s dress. On the basis of these concepts, the present study focuses on seeing the body not so much as a passive societal recipient but as an animated entity. Dress is not seen merely as a set of insensate symbols, but as a living tool of mediation. The process of regulation and negotiation in society and among individuals is viewed as an ongoing dialectic process. The case study examines the interrelations between Taiwanese women´s bodies, dress, sociocultural position, and agency in the post-war era. The complex history and constantly changing social context of Taiwan make it ideal material for developing a theory of strategic bodily practice. This study uncovers how particular forms of dress were used to create a dominating ideology during different periods in the history of Taiwan. It also reveals how changes in the political and the economical situation, as well as the strategic bodily practice of Taiwanese women are reducing this power of dress