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.

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.”

The Emaciated Soul: Four Women’s Self-Inscriptions on Their Portraits in Late Imperial China

NAN Nü ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-69
Author(s):  
Yuanfei Wang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Imperial China

Abstract This article examines the emaciated self-images of four women’s self-inscription poems on their own portraits. They are Huang Hong (early seventeenth century), Xi Peilan (1760­­­–after 1829), Tan Yinmei (fl. mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century) and Zheng Lansun (1819-61). These women similarly describe their self-images as qiaocui (emaciated), alluding to the legendary girl poet Feng Xiaoqing. Inherently ambivalent, qiaocui could imply sexual and erotic appeal, the virtuous mind of a recluse, sickness, ordinariness, melancholy, as well as aging and death. The article argues for the importance of the rhetoric of qiaocui and the topoi of Feng Xiaoqing in the self-inscriptions by women in Hangzhou and the broader Jiangnan region as a medium to construct their female subjectivity. This article suggests that, initially a persona publicly circulated in the late Ming, the topoi of Feng Xiaoqing came to define the women’s personhood in private spaces in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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