Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China [1 ed.] 9789047443339, 9789004167766

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Different Worlds of Discourse

China Studies Published for the Institute for Chinese Studies University of Oxford

Editors

Glen Dudbridge Frank Pieke

VOLUME 16

Different Worlds of Discourse Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Edited by

Nanxiu Qian, Grace S. Fong, and Richard J. Smith

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

On the cover: “Siyi yanshuo” (A servant gave a public speech), Yisen huabao 5 (December 1907). This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Different worlds of discourse : transformations of gender and genre in late Qing and early republican China / edited by Nanxiu Qian, Grace S. Fong, and Richard J. Smith. p. cm. — (China studies ; v. 16) “This volume stems from an international conference, titled “Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and the Negotiation of Knowledge in Late Qing China,” held on 4–6 March 2005.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16776-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Women—China—History—19th century—Congresses. 2. Women—China—History—20th century—Congresses. 3. Chinese literature—Qing dynasty, 1644–1912—History and criticism. I. Qian, Nanxiu. II. Fong, Grace S., 1948– III. Smith, Richard J. (Richard Joseph), 1944– IV. Title. V. Series. HQ1767.D54 2008 305.40951’09034—dc22

2008018908

ISSN 1570-1344 ISBN 978 90 04 16776 6 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS List of Figures ............................................................................. Acknowledgments ....................................................................... Introduction: Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China ....................................................................................... Nanxiu Qian, Grace S. Fong, and Richard J. Smith

vii ix

1

PART ONE

TRANSFORMATIONS OF GENDER ROLES 1. Wang Zhaoyuan (1763–1851) and the Erasure of “Talented Women” by Liang Qichao ................................... Harriet T. Zurndorfer 2. “Tossing the Brush”? Wu Zhiying (1868–1934) and the Uses of Calligraphy ............................................................... Hu Ying 3. Reconfiguring Time, Space, and Subjectivity: Lü Bicheng’s Travel Writings on Mount Lu ......................... Grace S. Fong 4. From “Cainü” to “Nü Jiaoxi”: Female Normal Schools and the Transformation of Women’s Education in the Late Qing Period, 1895–1911 ............................................... Xiaoping Cong

29 57 87

115

PART TWO

TRANSFORMATIONS OF GENRES 5. Mediated Imaginings: Biographies of Western Women and Their Japanese Sources in Late Qing China ................ Joan Judge 6. Female Assassins, Civilization, and Technology in Late Qing Literature and Culture ................................................. Jing Tsu

147 167

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7. Patriotism Versus Love: The Central Dilemma of Zhan Kai’s Novel Bihai zhu ........................................................... Ellen Widmer

197

PART THREE

THE PRODUCTION OF GENDER AND GENRES IN NEW PRINT MEDIA 8. Women in Shenbaoguan Publications, 1872–90 ................ Rudolf G. Wagner 9. The Mother Nü xuebao versus the Daughter Nü xuebao: Generational Differences between 1898 and 1902 Women Reformers ............................................................... Nanxiu Qian 10. Tianyi bao and He Zhen’s Views on “Women’s Revolution” .......................................................................... Xia Xiaohong Translated by Hu Ying 11. Male Gaze/Female Students: Late Qing Education for Women as Portrayed in Beijing Pictorials, 1902–08 .......... Chen Pingyuan Translated by Anne S. Chao 12. The Construction of Gender and Genre in the 1910s New Media: Evidence from The Ladies’ Journal .................. Siao-chen Hu

227

257 293

315

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Suggested Bibliography ..............................................................

383

About the Contributors ..............................................................

403

Index ...........................................................................................

407

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1. Map of Fushan county, Dengzhou prefecture, Hebei province ........................................................................ Figure 1.2. Map of Qixia county, Dengzhou prefecture, Hebei province ........................................................................ Figure 2.1. Qiu Jin’s Epitaph on the Back of the 1908 Stele ... Figure 2.2. Detail of Qiu Jin’s Epitaph ..................................... Figure 2.3. Catalog of Wang Yun’s Paintings Owned by the Small Studio of Ten-Thousand Willows ................................................. Figure 2.4. Surangama Sutra, hand-copied by Wu Zhiying, woman of Tongcheng ............................................................ Figure 3.1. Map of Kuling (Guling), Lushan ............................ Figure 3.2. The former Fairy Glen Hotel in Kuling (Guling). Now a convalescent resort for military personnel ................. Figure 3.3. The Pavilion of Imperial Stele on Lushan ............. Figure 3.4. Photograph of Lü Bicheng in Shanghai with Western hairstyle ..................................................................... Figure 5.1. A visual representation of the visionary patriot dressed in armor .................................................................... Figure 5.2. Photograph of the Great American Educator, Mary Lyon ............................................................................. Figure 7.1. Cover of the original edition of the Bihai zhu ( Jewels in an Azure Sea) (1907) ............................................. Figure 7.2. Image of Jin Xiaobao from the original edition of Bihai zhu (1907) .................................................................. Figure 9.1. Cover page of the first issue of Chen Xiefen’s Nübao (Women’s journal) (8 May 1902) .................................. Figure 9.2. Cover page of the first issue of Chen Xiefen’s Nü xuebao ( Journal of women’s learning) (27 February 1903) ..................................................................

42 44 72 73 77 83 94 100 108 113 162 165 198 202 258 259

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Figure 9.3. Cover page of the first issue of the 1898 Nü xuebao (24 July 1898) .......................................................... Figure 9.4. Cover page of the first issue of Qiu Jin’s Zhongguo nübao (Chinese women’s journal) (14 January 1907) .............. Figure 9.5. Cover page of the first issue of Chen Yiyi’s Nübao (14 January 1907) (22 January 1909) ........................... Figure 10.1. Cover page of Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907) ........... Figure 10.2. He Zhen (front left) and her husband Liu Shipei (front, second from left), with Liu Yazi (1887–1958) (front right) and Su Manshu (1884–1918) (back left), September 1908, Shanghai. ................................................... Figure 11.1. “Shuo benbao de zongzhi” (On the principle of this pictorial), Kaitong huabao (30 September 1906) ........... Figure 11.2. “Siyi yanshuo” (A servant gave a public speech), Yisen huabao 5 (December 1907) .............................................. Figure 11.3. “Nüxue zhanlan” (An exhibition by a girls’ school), Xingqi huabao 45 (September 1907) ........................... Figure 11.4. “Nushi zouma” (Woman riding a horse), Xingqi huabao 22 (March 1907) ................................................ Figure 11.5. “Huajie rexin,” Kaitong huabao 8 (1907) ................. Figure 11.6. “Shizai nankan” (Indeed not good looking), Xingshi huabao 33 (3 January 1910) ......................................... Figure 12.1. Cover page of Funü zazhi (The ladies’ journal) 1.1 ( January 1915) .................................................................

261 262 264 294

296 321 323 327 335 339 344 350

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This volume stems from an international conference, titled “Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and the Negotiation of Knowledge in Late Qing China,” held on 4–6 March 2005, and coorganized by the present volume’s editors. Twenty-two scholars participated in the meeting; of the seventeen papers presented, twelve have been included in this volume. The 2005 Rice conference evolved from a Rice symposium on 7–9 March 2003, titled “Tradition and the Challenge of Modernity: Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China, 1840–1911.” At the conclusion of this ground-breaking scholarly gathering, the participants agreed that it would be both important and timely to hold a follow-up conference that would sharpen the focus of a number of issues discussed at the symposium while broadening the parameters of investigation both substantively and chronologically. All participants felt that while the preliminary meeting succeeded admirably in raising important questions related to China’s reform era (1890s–1910s), it also revealed how much has yet to be done in order to understand these crucial but still surprisingly understudied decades. Our thanks, therefore, go first and foremost to the attendees of the 2003 Rice symposium, especially Professors Susan Mann, Joan Judge, and Ellen Widmer, who pressed energetically for the idea of a follow-up conference and who provided the leadership and intellectual inspiration that helped to bring it to fruition. Professor Mann, in particular, not only offered insightful comments as the symposium discussant but also brought the papers to the attention of Professor Harriet T. Zurndorfer, Managing Editor of Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China. Thanks to Professor Zurndorfer’s relentless efforts, the papers were published a year later as a special issue of the journal (6.1 [March 2004]), and then as a book, Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China (Leiden: Brill, 2004). The rapid publication of the papers undoubtedly contributed to the success of our applications to the NEH and to Rice University for funding the 2005 conference. Naturally, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to the invited participants of the 2005 Rice conference, listed here alphabetically: Profes-

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sors Chen Pingyuan, Xiaoping Cong, Benjamin Elman, Joshua Fogel, Siao-chen Hu, Hu Ying, Theodore Huters, Joan Judge, Dorothy Ko, Joachim Kurtz, Richard John Lynn, Susan Mann, Jing Tsu, Rudolf G. Wagner, Ellen Widmer, Xia Xiaohong, Catherine Yeh, Michelle Yeh, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer. Although not all of their excellent papers and insightful comments could be included in our volume, the book is immeasurably better for their active participation and sustained interest in the project. Their presence at the meeting made the event not only intellectually stimulating but also genuinely enjoyable. For financial support, we are especially grateful to the NEH Collaborative Research Program; without its generous initial grant, our conference might not have taken place. We thank Ms. Alice Hudgins and Ms. Lydia Medici of the NEH as well as Dr. Heidi L. Thorton and Ms. Linda Bird of the Rice Office of Sponsored Research, for their help with both our application and the actual administration of the NEH grant. Rice University, through the kind offices of the President, the Provost, and the Dean of Humanities, supplied indispensable matching funds, for which we are enormously appreciative. Professor Werner Kelber, former director of the Rice Center for the Study of Cultures (CSC), now renamed the Humanities Research Center (HRC), approved funding for our 2003 symposium as well as for our 2005 conference. Professor Kelber attended both meetings, greeting the participants on each occasion with warm and insightful opening remarks. He and his successor, Professor Caroline Levander, together with their talented staff members, Ms. Sandra Gilbert, Ms. Melissa Bailar, Mr. Hank Hancock, and Ms. Carolyn Adams, have offered us tireless assistance from the initial organization of both gatherings to the final editing of both volumes. We would also like to thank the Rice Asian Studies Program, now the T. T. and Wei Fong Chao Center for Asian Studies, for hosting both the 2003 symposium and the 2005 conference. We especially appreciate the many contributions of Professor Steven Lewis and Ms. Dee Garza to the success of these two events. We are also grateful to the Rice Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality for its continued assistance and support. For help in the actual production of this volume, we want to express our special thanks to Ms. Kara Marler-Kennedy, who copy-edited the entire book, going over each chapter with special editorial care. Our appreciation for her outstanding work extends beyond words. We are also enormously grateful to Professor Hu Ying and Ms. Anne S. Chao for their excellent respective translations into English of the papers

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written by Professors Xia Xiaohong and Chen Pingyuan. Their renderings have made it possible for us to bring this particularly valuable scholarship from Mainland China directly into our volume. We also would like to thank Mr. Albert Hoffstädt, Ms. Patricia Radder, and Ms. Marjolein Landowski, the accomplished editors in Brill’s Asian Studies Publishing Unit, for expertly guiding us through the process of publication. Last but not least, we want to express our sincere gratitude to an anonymous outside reviewer, whose extraordinarily detailed and insightful comments and suggestions have helped us to sharpen the arguments of each chapter and to weave the individual themes into a larger interpretive fabric.

INTRODUCTION

DIFFERENT WORLDS OF DISCOURSE: TRANSFORMATIONS OF GENDER AND GENRE IN LATE QING AND EARLY REPUBLICAN CHINA The shock of China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, which seemed to discredit entirely the moderate approach to reform that had marked the preceding Self-Strengthening Movement (1862–94), produced a variety of reactions—often complex and interrelated—on the part of Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing period. For many, the outcome of the conflict was traumatic and humiliating. But the crisis atmosphere that prevailed in the immediate postwar years also provoked a sense of urgency, introspection, wide-ranging cultural exploration, and a variety of reformist and revolutionary proposals and strategies. The sense of possibility at the time was palpable.1 Under the new circumstances, some intellectuals sought primary inspiration from ideas derived from the West and/or Japan. Others looked mostly to past models and precedents for guidance, an approach epitomized by the now discredited tiyong 體用 (substance and function) formula of the Self-Strengthening era. Using this formula, reformminded Qing officials had tried to “graft” certain carefully selected branches of foreign technology ( yong 用) onto an essentially “Chinese” cultural foundation (ti 體). Still others sought some sort of creative synthesis involving both the past and the present—a synthesis that went beyond the tiyong model, assumed diverse forms, and changed over time, frequently in unanticipated ways. This volume focuses on individuals whose outlook was of this synthetic sort. For them, China’s search for “modernity,” however it might have been defined at the time, was not simply a matter of appropriating the new; it was also a matter of finding the proper place for inherited ideas and values. In this view, then, “traditional” values might have “modern” applications. What this suggests to us is that long-established

1 See Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 275 ff., for a discussion of this sense of possibility.

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terms such as “tradition” and “modernity” can no longer be seen as mutually exclusive concepts with fixed characteristics but rather as fluid categories that existed in a vast crucible of cultural choices—choices made available by the times, made imperative by the circumstances. Different Worlds of Discourse explores the late Qing reform era (ca. 1895–1912) from three interrelated and comparatively neglected perspectives: the construction of gender roles, the development of literary genres, and the emergence of new forms of print media. Inquiry into these still understudied issues will, we hope, shed new light on the reform period, offering new information and new paradigms of examination, hence enriching and broadening our understanding of the period, especially its significance in Chinese social, cultural, and literary history. Until the 1980s, the late Qing reform era was represented in the historiography of China primarily as either a “transitional” period between the death of the “traditional” Confucian imperial order and the enlightened embrace of “modern” ideas in the “New Culture Movement” (ca. 1915–25) or as the first stage in a process by which Chinese political and social values were challenged and eventually replaced by Western ideas. For example, historians in the People’s Republic of China tended to portray the initial phase of the late Qing reforms as an abortive hundred-day attempt at “bourgeois” political changes in 1898 (known as the Wuxu bianfa 戊戌變法)—a power struggle between two political factions, backed respectively by a stubbornly conservative and self-interested empress dowager and a reform-minded, yet weak-willed emperor. These abortive reforms were followed, so the argument went, by a decade of half-hearted, ineffective “New Administrative Policies” (Xinzheng 新政) that the alien Manchu regime shamelessly inaugurated to prop itself up.2 Studies of the reform era in the United States on the whole were overwhelmingly shaped by what Paul A. Cohen character-

2 See, for instance, Tang Zhijun 湯志鈞, Wuxu bianfa shi 戊戌變法史 (History of the 1898 reforms) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984), and Kang Youwei yu Wuxu bianfa 康有 爲與戊戌變法 (Kang Youwei and the 1898 reforms) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984); both works present solid research but are framed in the typical conservative/reform and tradition/modernity binary paradigms. Standard PRC textbooks maintained this sort of narrative even into the 1990s; see Li Kan 李侃, Li Shiyue 李時岳, Li Dezheng 李德征, Yang Ce 楊策, and Gong Shuduo 龔書鐸, Zhongguo jindai shi 中國近代史 (Modern Chinese history), 4th edn. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994), 233–73 for the 1898 reforms, and 369–83 for the “New Policy” reform. This textbook received a first prize from the Ministry of Education in China.

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izes as “three conceptual frameworks—[ Western] impact-[Chinese] response, modernization, and imperialism,” each of which in one way or another introduced “Western-centric distortions into our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century China.”3 Of course these interpretive paradigms encountered occasional challenges even prior to the 1980s and ’90s. For instance, Reform in Nineteenth-Century China, a volume that emerged from a 1975 Harvard workshop, attempted to “avoid a Western baseline” and to “clarify as much as possible how nineteenth-century reform related to what came before.”4 But with the approach of the one hundredth anniversary of the 1898 reforms, which resurrected interest in the period and its problems, the pace of scholarly critique and revisionist sentiment quickened in both China and the West.5 Despite different research interests, purposes, and perspectives,6 Chinese and Western scholars increasingly came to see that it was necessary to deconstruct the old

3 Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 3. 4 Reform in Nineteenth-Century China, eds. Cohen and John E. Schrecker (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, East Asian Research Center, 1976), 5. 5 In August 1998, Peking University held an international conference commemorating the 1898 reforms. The conference proceedings, Wuxu weixin yu jindai Zhongguo de gaige 戊戌維新與近代中國的改革 (The 1898 reforms and the reforms of modern China) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chuban she, 2000), edited by Wang Xiaoqiu 王曉秋, initiated a reconsideration of this crucial historical moment by expanding the focal issues from politics to education, culture, and intellectual history. In America, Peter Zarrow organized a double panel on the 1898 reforms at the 1998 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. The papers presented at this panel, together with a few additional solicited papers, later appeared in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, eds. Rebecca E. Karl and Zarrow (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002). Drawing upon recent American scholarship, the editors sought to liberate “late imperial history from the grip of May Fourth paradigms” (Karl and Zarrow, 8) and to dismantle the binary paradigms that had informed the standard 1898 narrative. 6 Wang Xiaoqiu edited Wuxu weixin yu jindai Zhongguo de gaige and co-edited with Shang Xiaoming 尚小明 another volume, Wuxu weixin yu Qingmo xinzheng 戊戌維新與 清末新政 (The 1898 reforms and the late Qing new policy reforms) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998), clearly using the 1898 experience as a point of reference for China’s contemporary reforms. (See Wang’s introduction to the Wuxu weixin yu Qingmo xinzheng, 1–2.) Karl and Zarrow, however, argue that it is the similar context of China’s two recent encounters with global capitalism—first in the late nineteenth century and then in the late twentieth century—that gives the early reform period so much meaning today. As they put the matter: “It is this [similarity], rather than the functionalist exhumation of 1898, that endows the re-emergence of scholarship on the 1898 reforms with contemporary historical significance” (Karl and Zarrow, 6–7).

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interpretive paradigms in favor of a more nuanced approach to historical and cultural analysis.7 This “rethinking” of the 1898 reforms resulted in substantial progress in the study of the period but unavoidably neglected certain aspects of the reform era.8 It is in this interpretive space that we seek to make a contribution, by focusing on gender, literary genres, and the role of China’s new-style print media in disseminating images and texts that dealt with these important issues. The late Qing reform era witnessed, for the first time in Chinese history, women emerging into public space in collective groups. The social repositioning of women demanded reconceptualization of their behavioral models, including their relationship with men, thereby triggering intensified debate over related issues along the gender line. Competing visions of an ideal womanhood and the unprecedented need to portray women in terms of their public presence found expression in new forms of print media. Reformers—men and, increasingly, women—who were poets, writers, scholars, editors, and artists of the age, were able

7 For other scholarly efforts to dismantle binary constructs such as tradition versus modernity and Chinese versus Western, see, for instance, Yu Yingshi 余英時, “Cong shixue kan chuantong” 從史學看傳統 (Examining tradition from historiographical perspectives), written in 1981, collected in his Shixue, shijia yu shidai 史學, 史家與時代 (Historiographies, historians, and times) (Guilin: Guangxi daxue chubanshe, 2004), 95–105; Liu Mengxi 劉夢溪, “Xueshu duli yu Zhongguo xiandai xueshu chuantong” 學術獨立與中國現代學術傳統 (Academic independence and the modern Chinese tradition of learning), written in 1991, collected in Chuantong de wudu 傳統的誤讀 (Misreading of the tradition) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 78–104; Luo Zhitian 羅志田, “Jindai Hunan quyu wenhua yu Wuxu xinjiu zhizheng” 近代 湖南區域文化與戊戌新舊之爭 (The local culture in modern Hunan and the 1898 dispute between the old and the new), originally published in Jindai shi yanjiu 近代史 研究 (Study of modern history) 5 (1998), collected in Quanshi zhuanyi: Jindai Zhongguo de sixiang, shehui yu xueshu 權勢轉移: 近代中國的思想、社會與學術 (Shifting of power: Ideology, society, and learning in modern China) (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1999), 82–114; and “Sixiang guannian yu shehui juese de cuowei: Wuxu qianhou Hunan xinjiu zhizheng zaisi” 思想觀念與社會角色的錯位: 戊戌前後湖南新舊之 爭再思 (Displacement of ideology and social roles: Rethinking the Hunan dispute between the old and the new around 1898), originally published in Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 (Study of history) 5 (1998), collected in Quanshi zhuanyi, 115–60. 8 The two main themes of gender and genre in the present volume are not addressed in Wang Xiaoqiu’s two edited volumes, Wuxu weixin yu jindai Zhongguo de gaige and Wuxu weixin yu Qingmo xinzheng. Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period, edited by Karl and Zarrow, includes three gender-oriented essays (two of whose authors, Hu Ying and Joan Judge, have also contributed to this volume). While these essays are said to “demonstrate how discourse on the ‘female,’ the ‘nation,’ and the ‘modern’ were fraught with contradiction from the very beginning in China” (Karl and Zarrow, 13), they all deal with post-1898 texts.

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to harness the power of existing cultural forms, including genres of poetry, biography, narrative literature, and scholarly commentaries on the classics, to accommodate and assimilate new ideas and experiences into their visions for a “new” Chinese woman. They not only reexamined classical forms of prose and poetry but also experimented with the vernacular language in new fiction and essays. This was also a period of unprecedented innovation in the realm of print culture. New-style fiction, periodicals, and pictorials, now produced by and for Chinese women, offered readers insights into, debates concerning, and strategies for dealing with the most pressing political, social, economic, and cultural questions of the day. A profusion of new literary, artistic, and intellectual creations thus recontextualized and redefined gender roles and genre types. Since the late 1990s, gender and women’s issues in the reform era have attracted increasing attention from China scholars,9 but questions concerning gender-related genres invite further exploration and elaboration. In the PRC, women writers before the “New Culture Movement” have been generally understudied. In the West, although late imperial women’s literature has been a central topic of China studies for the past two decades, the subjects usually predate the reform era. Neglect of the literary transformations of the reform era has been caused in part by the longstanding artificial demarcation between “modern” and “traditional” literature that leaves the turn of the twentieth century

9 A few recent Chinese and Western works on gender and women’s issues in the late Qing include: Luo Suwen 羅蘇文, Nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo shehui 女性與近代中國社會 (Women and modern Chinese society) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1996); Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹, Wan-Qing wenren funü guan 晚清文人婦女觀 (Late Qing literati view of women) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1995); Wan-Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo 晚清女性與近代中國 (Late Qing women and modern China) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2004); Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 106.3 (2001): 765–803; and Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29.4 (October 2003): 399–454. See also the 3volume Wusheng zhi sheng 無聲之聲 (Voices amid silence), which includes: vol. 1, Jindai Zhongguo de funü yu guojia 近代中國的婦女與國家 (Women and the nation in modern China), ed. Lü Fangshang 呂芳上; vol. 2, Jindai Zhongguo de funü yu shehui 近代中國的婦女與社會 (Women and society in modern China), ed. You Jianming 游鑑明; and vol. 3, Jindai Zhongguo de funü yu shehui 近代中國的婦女與文化 (Women and culture in modern China), eds. Luo Jiurong 羅久蓉 and Lü Miaofen 呂妙芬 (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003).

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relatively unattended.10 Moreover, recent academic fashions have tended to deflect scholarly interest from the women writers of this period. For example, in American academia, “where interest in postmodernism has spurred investigations into the plurality of modern society . . . [scholars] have made concerted efforts to direct attention to the contributions of groups other than the educated elite in society.”11 Thus, the volume based on a 2003 Rice University symposium, titled Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China,12 appears to be the only publication of its kind on the reform era. The present edited volume represents a further effort to fill this academic gap. Based on original, multidisciplinary research conducted in literary and historical archives, the studies in Different Worlds of Discourse bring to light new materials and provide us with fresh perspectives on late Qing social, intellectual, and cultural life. These perspectives take into account, but do not emphasize, the state-sponsored reform movements in the period from 1898 to 1911 or the preoccupations of individuals such as Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929), who have for so long dominated scholarship on the reform era. Our volume will demonstrate, for instance, the limitations of Kang’s and Liang’s ideas on gender, which many historians still consider to be at the core of the late Qing discourse on women. By focusing on other voices and other views, our authors have been able to reveal a remarkable richness and complexity in Chinese discussions and debates about gender during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

10 Scholars have already started addressing this problem. See, for instance, David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Huters, Bringing the World Home; and Jon Kowallis, The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” during Late Qing and Early Republican China (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2006). All of these works focus on transformations of literature during the late Qing and early Republican periods—Wang and Huters on fiction and Kowallis on poetry. But women’s literature of this period is still understudied. 11 Hung-Yok Ip, Tze-Ki Hon, and Chiu-Chun Lee, “The Plurality of Chinese Modernity: A Review of Recent Scholarship on the May Fourth Movement,” Modern China 29.4 (2003): 499. Zarrow’s recent edited volume, Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900 –1940 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), typifies this scholarly tendency. We naturally applaud the effort to devote scholarly attention to previously neglected social groups and classes in China, but we believe that certain sectors of elite society also deserve greater scholarly attention. 12 Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China, eds. Grace S. Fong, Qian, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

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These diverse voices, excavated from our archival research, will help to advance a view of the era that further deconstructs the previously prevailing binaries of Chinese and Western, and tradition and modernity. To be sure, Western (and Japanese) imperialism helped engender various forms of Chinese nationalism, causing some late Qing intellectuals to question inherited values and to advocate the rapid, single-minded acquisition of “wealth and power” ( fuqiang 富強) as the principal means of achieving their Western-oriented vision of a Chinese modernity. Tan Sitong 譚嗣同 (1865–98), for example, is often adduced as an example of a reformer who advocated the “total Westernization” of China. But as our volume reveals, many Chinese intellectuals, both men and women, were not swept up by a hegemonic “nationalist discourse” as conventional accounts of the reform period often suggest nor did they feel the need to make an either/or choice between “traditional” Chinese ideas and “modern” Western ones. Rather, most of our subjects saw ideas derived from Western and Japanese sources as items that could be incorporated into their own ever-expanding cultural repertoires. They were neither crippled by their Confucian past nor intimidated by modern ideas. Rather, they were able to reassess China’s own historical legacy and to draw upon new Western and Japanese resources to grapple with China’s new geopolitical and cultural circumstances. The question, then, is not the relationship of tradition to modernity nor that of China to the West but rather how “open” the parameters of cultural discourse were and how accommodating the Chinese cultural repertoire was at this crucial historical moment. By greatly expanding both the field of inquiry and the perspectives brought to bear upon it, this volume shows that the late Qing period was not simply located “between two worlds,” as it is often portrayed; rather, it was a world unto itself—one of cultural vitality and experimentation that is crucial to our understanding of what preceded and followed it. Our twelve contributions have been grouped into three parts, each reflecting one of the major issues outlined above. What follows is a description of the significance and purpose of each section as well as an overview of each individual contribution. This division is somewhat artificial, however, since most of our authors address all three issues in one way or another, either explicitly or implicitly. Moreover, virtually every chapter in this volume involves the concept of cainü 才女 (talented women) in one way or another. Therefore, before proceeding with a discussion of the three sections, we think it necessary to highlight the

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conceptualization and evolution of cainü in order to clarify its relationship to the reformist discourses of the late Qing era. During the reform period, women’s social, political, and cultural roles, as well as their relationships with men, went through unprecedented changes. On the one hand, it was a time when male reformers began to recognize the need to include women in the newly emerging Chinese public sphere and to enlist their substantial participation in reform efforts. On the other hand, the reformist polemics of these individuals often stigmatized cainü as the embodiment of all that was outdated, unproductive, and disgraceful in the Chinese cultural tradition.13 A group of reform-minded women, however, felt the need to redefine their roles and responsibilities under the new social circumstances in their own terms. This situation triggered an open debate between reformminded men and women that played itself out in the new print media of the day—a watershed event in modern Chinese history. One dramatic institutional change of the period, which took place in Shanghai, was the establishment on 6 December 1897 of the first public association for women in China, the Nü xuehui 女學會 (Women’s Learned Society).14 Under its leadership, the reformers founded on 31 May 1898 the first Chinese school for young elite women, the Nü xuetang 女學堂 (Chinese Girls’ School),15 and began to publish on 13 As Judge insightfully points out: “Women writers of the recent past came to function as a metonym for all that was obsolete and degraded in that tradition, and the passionate offensive against them was an attack on the perceived backwardness of the ‘old culture.’ Since these reformist writers themselves had a complex relationship to that culture—they were trained in its values and bound by its referents—it was perhaps easier for them to speak their critique of it through an indictment of the cainü” (“Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898,” in Karl and Zarrow, 165). 14 See “Jinguo duocai” 巾幗多才 (Many talents among women), Xinwen bao 新聞報 (News daily) (December 1897), a report on the first meeting of the society. This local initiative inspired the emergence of formal, Chinese-run schools for girls and women—privately from 1898, and publicly from 1907, when the Qing government officially sanctioned women’s education (see below). 15 There were, of course, Western missionary schools that dated from earlier periods, such as the one established in Ningbo in 1844 by the English woman missionary, Miss Aldersey; see Margaret E. Burton, The Education of Women in China (New York and Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company Burton, 1911), 35; and Xia, Wan-Qing wenren funü guan, 18. There were also predecessors of girls’ schools established by the Chinese, but they were not as famous or as large and influential as this one. See Xia, Wan-Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo, 4. For the inauguration date of the Chinese Girls’ School, see “Guishuli nü xuehui shushu qi” 桂墅里女學會書塾 (Announcement of the Girls’ School affiliated to the Women’s Learned Society at Gushuli), Xinwen bao (30 May 1898); also “guixiu shichao” 閨秀詩鈔 (Gentlewomen’s poems [by the faculty of the

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24 July 1898 the first Chinese women’s journal, the Nü xuebao 女學報 ( Journal of women’s learning; English title: Chinese Girl’s Progress).16 Male reformers initiated this early campaign for women’s education, and they made it clear from the outset that their goal was a pragmatic one: to teach women how to make their own living so that they would not burden the nation and be a cause of its continued backwardness.17 As Liang stated in his reform essay “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women), the new school was not for nurturing cainü, whom he described as the sort of women who knew only how to “tease the wind and fondle the moon, pluck flowers and caress the grass, and then compose some ci- or shi-style poems to mourn the spring and lament parting.”18 Yet, it was precisely the cainü type of woman who became most active in the political and educational reforms of the late Qing period—not merely as men’s followers, but as independent organizers and thinkers in their own right. Thus, any examination of the transformation of gender and genre in the reform era must give attention to the lives and works of those women, both past and present, who were designated, or who identified themselves, as cainü.19 Cainü as a distinct social and cultural category had gone through a long evolution in China, and so its connotations naturally varied over time. How, then, did women reformers in the late Qing view this concept and related notions of Chinese womanhood? In their journalistic writings, poems, and at their gatherings, women reformers often addressed

Girls’ School]), Xinwen bao (4 June 1898); and “Zhongguo Nü xuehui shushu gongqi” 中國女學會書塾公 (Announcement of the Girls’ School affiliated with the Chinese Women’s Learned Society), Xinwen bao (8 June 1898). The school had various names, including Zhongguo nü xuetang 中國女學堂, Jingzheng nüxue 經正女學, Shanghai Guishuli nü xuetang 上海桂墅里女學堂, Shanghai xinshe Zhongguo nü xuetang 上海新設中國女學堂, Guishuli nü xuehui shushu 桂墅里女學會書塾, and Zhongguo nü xuehui shushu 中國女學會書塾. See also Paul Bailey, Gender and Education in China: Gender Discourses and Women’s Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2007), for insights into this early phase of female education in the late Qing period. 16 Altogether there were twelve issues; publication was terminated in late October 1898. 17 See Liang Qichao, “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women), Shiwu bao 23 (12 April 1897): 1a–2a. 18 Liang, “Lun nüxue,” 2a. 19 We caution here that the much-contested term cainü was catapulted into singular prominence by its usage in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the imperial era, other expressions, such as guixiu 閨秀 (literally, “full flowering of the inner chamber”) and mingyuan 名媛 (notable ladies), were much more commonly used to refer to educated gentlewomen. Witness the titles of anthologies of women’s poetry and other writings that incorporate these terms.

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themselves, and even their female Western supporters, as xianyuan 賢媛 (virtuous and talented ladies) or one of its several variants.20 They praised each other for having a special intellectual manner, the linxia fengqi 林下風氣 (Bamboo Grove aura), and they frequently alluded to yongxu 詠絮 (chanting willow catkins) in describing admirable talent.21 These three expressions, taken together, manifest a conscious modeling after a literate culture of elite women formed during China’s Wei-Jin period (220–420).22 What made this ancient self-image so appealing to reform-minded Chinese women, and how did it serve their interests after the passing of sixteen hundred years? Xianyuan, linxia fengqi, and yongxu, all originated from the Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A new account of tales of the world), the paradigmatic text that characterized and categorized the diverse personalities of over six hundred historical figures from the late Han (ca. 150–220) to the Wei-Jin period, including one hundred or so women who were mainly portrayed in the chapter “Xianyuan.” The major character in this chapter, Xie Daoyun 謝道蘊 (fl. mid-4th century), is valorized as having the “Bamboo Grove aura,” an epithet generated from the famed Wei-Jin “Zhulin qixian” 竹林七賢, conventionally translated as the “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove.”23 Thus Xianyuan shares the same xian that appears in the expression Zhulin qixian. A widely used moral category in the early Han Confucian classics,24 xian depicts those who help to maintain the proper social order with

20 These variants included xianfu 賢婦 (virtuous and talented women), xianmu 賢母 (virtuous and talented mothers), xianshu furen 賢淑夫人 (virtuous, talented, and gentle wives), and xianshu mingyuan 賢淑名媛 (virtuous, talented, gentle, and distinguished ladies). See Jing Yuanshan 經元善, Nüxue jiyi chubian 女學集議初編 (Collected opinions on education for women), 1st edn. (Shanghai: Jing’s family edn., 1898), 2a, 8b, 10a–b, 12a, 15b, 34a. The Western translators Young J. Allen and Timothy Richard also adopted these terms in their writings about Chinese women reformers; Jing, Nüxue jiyi chubian, 50b, 51b. 21 See Jing, Nüxue jiyi chubian, 2a, 8b, 10a–b, 12a, 15b, 34a, 50b, 51b; also the poems documented in Qian, “The Mother Nü xuebao versus the Daughter Nü xuebao: Generational Differences between 1898 and 1902 Women Reformers,” in this volume, pp. 257–91. 22 We might note here that the term xianyuan was not commonly used during the Ming and Qing periods. The expressions linxia feng or lingxia fengqi and yongxu were not, however, eclipsed in the intervening centuries. They continued to be alluded to in various ways such as in prefaces and poems as well as in titles of collections. 23 See Liu Yiqing 劉義慶, Shishuo xinyu [ jianshu] 世說新語[箋疏] ([Commentary on] A new account of tales of the world), commentary by Yu Jiaxi 余嘉錫, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993), 2:698. 24 For example, xian appears in the Lunyu 論語 (Analects of Confucius) twenty-five times; see Yang Bojun 楊伯峻, Lunyu yizhu 論語譯注 (Annotated translation of the Lunyu) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 303.

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de 德 (virtue) and cai 才 (talent—particularly, the talent of acting in a virtuous way).25 The Han Confucian scholar Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE) thus identified xian as a primary moral code for women in compiling his Lienü zhuan 列女傳 (Biographies of women).26 Yet in the Wei-Jin conceptualization of xian, de was redefined as one’s moral strength or potentiality “acting according to the Dao,”27 and cai as the talent to enable such actions. Since the Wei-Jin concept of Dao went beyond the scope of the Confucian Dao, the meaning of xian likewise expanded. As the Shishuo xinyu indicates, the seven “virtuous and talented” men are designated xian because they represent the highest Wei-Jin intellectual and cultural achievements and especially because they are imbued with the “spirit of freedom and transcendence.”28 Similarly, Xie Daoyun heads the Xianyuan category and is linked to the “Seven Worthies” because her “spirit and feelings are relaxed and sunny”29 and because she has the talent of “chanting willow catkins.”30

25 For instance, the Shangshu 尚書 (Book of documents), “Da Yu mo” 大禹謨 (Counsels of the Great Yu) states: “No men of virtue and talent (xian) at large will be overlooked; and the myriad states will all enjoy repose” (野無遺賢, 萬邦皆寧). Shangshu [zhengyi] 尚書[正義] ([Orthodox commentary on] Book of documents), in Shisan jing zhushu 十三經註疏 (Commentaries on the thirteen Chinese classics), ed. Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), reprinted from the 1816 edn., 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), juan 4, 1:134; cf. James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 3 of The Shoo King, 5 vols. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 53; see also Lunyu, IV, 17; VI, 11; XV, 14; and so on. 26 See Ban Gu 班固 (32–92), Hanshu 漢書 (History of the Han): “Liu Xiang believed that the teaching of kings must proceed from inner to outer, beginning with those who are closest. Therefore he selected from the Book of Songs and the Book of Documents [examples of ] virtuous and talented royal consorts and righteous and chaste wives who could be taken as models for making the countries prosperous and their families illustrious. He also selected pernicious favorites who caused disorder and ruin. He put these life-stories in order and compiled the Lienü zhuan, originally in eight chapters, in order to warn the Son of Heaven.” (向以爲王教由内及外, 自近者始。故採取 «詩» 、 «書» 所載賢妃貞婦, 興國顯家可法則, 及孽嬖亂亡者, 序次為 «列女傳», 凡八篇, 以戒天子) (Hanshu, “Liu Xiang zhuan” 劉向傳 [Biography of Liu Xiang], 12 vols. [Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962], juan 36, 7:1957–58). Our translation follows Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 19. 27 See A. C. Graham’s interpretation of the Wei scholar Wang Bi’s 王弼 (226–49) conception of de in Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle IL: Open Court, 1989), 13. 28 See Richard B. Mather’s A New Account of Tales of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 371. 29 See Liu, Shishuo xinyu [ jianshu], 2:698. 30 Ibid., 1:131.

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In short, xianyuan represented the earliest and perhaps the most admirable example of cainü—women of talent, knowledge, intellectual independence, and moral strength, whom women in subsequent periods repeatedly invoked as inspiration. Susan Mann notes, for example: Eighteenth-century writers especially praised the female poets of the Six Dynasties period, and they often cited stories from the literary lives of characters in A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo xinyu). These Six Dynasties poets supplied a contrapuntal textual voice that spoke directly to women, for female poets and conversationalists in the Shishuo xinyu—especially Xie Daoyun of willow catkin fame—were renowned for upstaging their male friends and relatives in verbal combat and poetry contests.31

Yet Ming-Qing women writers seldom called themselves xianyuan. Instead, they tended to choose guixiu 閨秀 as their collective identification.32 This term is derived from the expression “guifang zhixiu” 閨房之秀, or the “full flowering of the inner chamber,” another epithet for women in the Shishuo “Xianyuan” chapter.33 It suggests a closer adherence to traditional markers of gendered space (inner for females, outer for males) than the xianyuan ideal of the Bamboo Grove aura, which celebrated the transgressing of these boundaries. This supports Dorothy Ko’s observation that, in the seventeenth century, “the most educated members of the female population were inclined more to celebrate their role as guardians of Confucian morality than to repudiate it.”34

Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 91. See also Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 161, 167, for references to Xie by Ming-Qing women. 32 Over forty titles with the phrase guixiu can be found in the approximately two hundred anthologies of poetry and other writings by Ming-Qing women assembled by Hu Wenkai 胡文楷, in Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歷代婦女著作考 (Catalogue of women’s writings through the ages) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985), 50–55. By contrast, only one anthology uses the term xianyuan in the title. 33 Both expressions, linxia fengqi and guifang zhixiu, appear in the following Shishuo “Xianyuan” episode: “Xie Xuan held his elder sister, Xie Daoyun (fl. mid-4th century), in very high regard, while Zhang Xuan constantly sang the praises of his younger sister, and wanted to match her against the other. Nun Ji went to visit both the Zhang and Xie families. When people asked her who was superior and who was inferior, she replied, ‘Lady Wang’s (Xie Daoyun’s) spirit and feelings are relaxed and sunny; she certainly has a Bamboo Grove aura (linxia fengqi ). As for the wife of the Gu family (Zhang Xuan’s sister), her pure heart gleams like jade; without a doubt she’s the full flowering of the inner chamber ( guifang zhi xiu)’” (Liu, Shishuo xinyu [ jianshu], 2:698; the translation is based on Mather, 355). 34 Ko, 9. 31

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Similarly, Mann comments on the eighteenth century that “elite women and men shared many assumptions about Confucian virtue and its proper representation in women’s lives.”35 Nonetheless, elite women in late imperial China never abandoned the desire for their own space. As Ko points out, “Although women could not rewrite the rules that structured their lives, they were extremely creative in crafting a space from within the prevailing gender system that gave them meaning, solace, and dignity.”36 In fact, over time, the Ming-Qing period witnessed a tremendous increase of writing women and the wide circulation of their printed works in Chinese society.37 Still, it was the xianyuan model that seemed to offer late Qing women reformers the firm ground of subjectivity that could best inspire and sustain their efforts at self-renovation and self-realization. This model included: (1) openly advocating the obliteration of the inner-outer gender boundary; (2) expanding the range of women’s learning to include not only a knowledge of the past and present but also an understanding of Chinese and Western traditions; and (3) defining the role of women—their “female Way” (kundao 坤道), in the words of the celebrated woman reformer, Xue Shaohui, in her “Inaugural Editorial” for the Nü xuebao—as embracing the “mothering” of all things, the fashioning of the self, the management of the household, the governing of the state, and the harmonizing of all under Heaven.38 The reform period thus witnessed the emergence of some extraordinarily accomplished women—individuals who displayed broad political, social, and intellectual concerns and who expressed their insights in creative and eclectic ways, unprecedented for women writers in previous periods of Chinese history. But their significance lies not only in their accomplishments but also in the way their lives reflect late Qing debates over competing visions of what constitutes new, desirable womanhood. These individual women were not only advocates for one or another position within these debates but also sometimes the objects of the debates themselves.

Mann, 3. Ko, 8–9. 37 See ibid., 123. 38 For a more detailed discussion see Qian, “The Mother Nü xuebao versus the Daughter Nü xuebao,” in this volume, pp. 257–91. 35 36

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The four chapters in this section deal explicitly with perceptions and constructions of womanhood in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury China. Harriet T. Zurndorfer’s chapter on the Qing woman scholar Wang Zhaoyuan 王照圓 (1763–1851) serves as an apt opening for Part One of this book, for Wang’s case provides a fascinating example of the way nationalism shaped the contours of male reformist discourse toward Chinese women’s education. Although Wang lived prior to the late Qing period, she, and the High Qing women’s literate tradition that she came to represent, were singled out by Liang in his critique of “female talent.” To be sure, Liang separated Wang, a scholar of evidential research (kaozheng xue 考證學) who could “read and study classics,” from women poets and artists whom he condemned as “frivolous.” But he dismissed Wang’s scholarship as insufficient for the purpose of building national strength when compared to that of Ida Khan, the orphan from Jiangxi who was adopted by a missionary and trained in Western medicine at the University of Michigan.39 Later, in his Qingdai xueshu gailun 清代 學術概論 (Intellectual trends in the Qing period) completed in 1920, Liang came to celebrate kaozheng scholarship. He found its values comparable to Renaissance scholarship in the West. Yet, he steadfastly refused to acknowledge Wang’s contributions to this arena, reserving his praise only for her husband and close collaborator, the kaozheng scholar Hao Yixing 郝懿行 (1757–1825). In the name of nationalism, Liang dismissed talented women on the grounds of both genre (that is, traditional poetics and literary scholarship being useless) and gender (kaozheng being a male sphere of activity). Two other prominent cainü of the time, Wu Zhiying 吳芝瑛 (1868– 1934) and Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883–1943), discussed by Hu Ying and Grace S. Fong respectively, had been close associates of the antiQing revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907). Both, however, remained politically unaffiliated, engaging with “current events through [their] literary and artistic practices.” For this reason, in later history books, “Wu would become the negative foil” for Qiu, remembered favorably only because of her courageous burial of Qiu, whereas

39 Liang, “Ji Jiangxi Kang nüshi” 記江西康女士 (Biographic record of Ms. Kang from Jiangxi), Shiwu bao 21 (23 March 1897): 2b.

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Lü, less closely identified with Qiu, would be forgotten. Underlying this historical judgment, as Hu Ying points out, “is the privileging of heroic action over artistic intervention, the privileging of the ‘sword’ over the ‘brush.’” In her chapter, Hu Ying presents Wu as a dissenting voice apart from the mainstream discourse of modern Chinese historiography—one that uses Qiu as “an index of the development of modern Chinese history.” Choosing calligraphy as her expressive genre, the artist Wu forged her identity and inscribed herself in the unfolding of modern Chinese history. Wu was not to be confined by either the conventional practice of the cainü or the political dictates of modern nationalism. For her, the persona of the literati artist was hardly the traditional relic that later generations tended to claim; rather, it was a major resource for constructing a vibrant female subjectivity, flourishing in its multiple roles on the stage of modern Chinese history. This subjectivity was not quite the same as the “woman hero” image that Qiu and many others strove to embody. Nonetheless, she was politically active and intellectually engaged. Her calligraphy served as a vital conduit for her engagement with artistic and spiritual needs as well as with the history that was unfolding around her. Lü Bicheng, a famous poet of the ci genre and one of the first women journalists and educators in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, selfconsciously adopted a cosmopolitan position in relation to race and ethnicity from the very start of her career. Coming from a gentryofficial family, she received solid classical and poetic training as a child. In the complex and “open” world of the Late Qing era, Lü forged an individualistic path afforded by the emerging educational, social, and economic opportunities. By the early Republican period, she had managed to amass great wealth by conducting business in Shanghai with Western merchants and so turned to pursue an extravagant lifestyle that combined the social and artistic pursuits of traditional literati—such as painting, poetry, and travel to scenic sites—with the luxuries of Western-style living and conspicuous consumption available in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Along with the transformation of her gender roles, Lü forged her classical poetry into a personal medium for the expression of reformist ideas, new forms of cultural identity, and the assimilation of new experiences at each stage. Her travel writings and her multifaceted, cosmopolitan life trajectory thus open up alternative readings of “modernity.” In her chapter, Fong explores the hybridity of time, space, and subjectivity in Lü’s travel essay about her visit to Guling, a

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Western resort on Mount Lu, in which desire and resistance, classicism and modernism, the global and local are simultaneously inscribed. This travel essay, though written in literary Chinese, evinces new spatial and temporal perceptions reconfigured by a cosmopolitan subject. Xiaoping Cong discusses the collective transformation of cainü from mothers to female teachers in the last decade of Qing rule. Cong argues that the rise of women’s education in modern China was an outgrowth of traditional educational practices—specifically, the nurturing of talented women among gentry families in late imperial China. This tradition, together with the twentieth-century imperative to create a modern Chinese nation-state, led reform-minded elites to engage in establishing women’s public schools in the late Qing period. Public education for women led, in turn, to the founding of normal schools for the training of women teachers. In short, the traditional idea that mothers should teach their own children for the sake of family prosperity was singled out by reformers and transformed into the idea that female teachers (nü jiaoxi 女教習) should teach young citizens in order to strengthen the nation under the state’s guidance. The “teachers of the inner chambers” ( guishu shi 閨塾師) were thus transformed into educators in the public domain, and female normal schools were built to train female teachers for the sake of national prosperity.40 II. Transformations of Genres Complementary to the revealing studies of individual and collective cainü in the preceding section, Part Two examines biographical and fictional constructions of images of women in this period. A time-honored genre since Liu Xiang’s Lienü zhuan of the Han, women’s biographies became a regular feature in the newly popular print media of the late Qing period, featured in textbooks, journals, and newspapers. Joan Judge’s chapter addresses the issue of how biographies of women helped to construct gender roles at a time when traditional models of behavior were being questioned and imported 40 According to Ko, “References to ‘teachers of the inner chambers’ [ guishu shi ] started to appear in seventeenth-century Jiangnan regularly. Some of these highly erudite women were from bankrupt gentry families who needed their income; some were such renowned poets and painters that prominent families sought to hire them” (in “Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women’s Culture in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China 13.1 [ June 1992]: 23n44).

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cultural icons from the West had begun to gain currency. The introduction of foreign women’s lives into a two-thousand-year-old tradition of “exemplary” female biographies in China expanded the parameters of this highly conventionalized genre and disrupted its fundamental gender norms. The issue was further complicated because Chinese compilers of women’s biographies often depended on translations of Western texts that had been published in Japan. Thus Chinese, Japanese, and Western selection strategies became intermingled. The end product of these multiple mediating processes was not only a distortion of the “host” biography or biographies but also the creation of a new Chinese “cultural imaginary.” Judge traces the various Japanese textual sources for a number of the most influential biographies of Western women. Closely reading the Chinese and Japanese biographies against one another, she demonstrates that the Chinese texts were not merely the product of linguistic translation and cultural borrowing but also of complex processes of mediation and accommodation. Meanwhile, late Qing reformers reached out to women via fiction, using it as a way of awakening women to the dangers threatening, as well as possibilities of changing, China. Novelists had never cultivated women readers so assiduously. Consequently, vernacular fiction (xiaoshuo 小説) became a popular “new” genre in portraying images of women. Female narrators, who had never appeared in Chinese fiction before, began to emerge in the late Qing period, enhancing in various ways expressions of the woman character’s “self.”41 Women’s assimilation of newly imported Western knowledge also influenced the portrayal of female characters. Cainü, therefore, found their radical transformation in late Qing fiction, as can be seen in Jing Tsu’s contribution to this volume. Tsu discusses two vernacular novels, Nüwa shi 女媧石 (Stone of Goddess Nüwa) and Nüyu hua 女獄花 (Female jail flower), both about female assassins resisting the bankrupt Qing regime and both resulting from a growing enthusiasm for Western science and politics as a source of not only pragmatic but also fantastical knowledge. Tsu looks at the new knowledge of Western science, technology, and nihilism and how it was conveyed through discussions of political radicalism in early twentiethcentury China, emphasizing, in particular, narratives of female assassins and female heroism in fiction. By analyzing the different cultural and

41

For example, the Nüyu hua 女獄花 (Female jail flower), discussed below.

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cross-cultural preoccupations that together make up the sensationalist image of the female assassin, Tsu shows the convergence of different developing conceptions about radical political heroism, women as agents of violence and diplomacy, the possibilities of modern science, and the technological transformation of society. Tsu also notes that the unusual roles of women as agents of political assassinations and technological salvation were introduced into different genres of late Qing fiction such as idealist fiction (lixiang xiaoshuo 理想小說), nation-saving fiction ( jiuguo xiaoshuo 救國小説), and science fiction (kexue xiaoshuo 科學小説). These new gender roles reflected an era of great political possibility—a time when female chivalry could be transformed into the project of “saving the nation” in the late Qing cultural imagination. Zhan Kai 詹塏 (fl. 1907) was also an author of late Qing fiction. Under the penname Siqi zhai 思綺齋 (Thinking of Elegance Studio), Zhan wrote two vernacular novels, Zhongguo xin nühao 中國新女豪 (China’s new heroine) and Nüzi quan 女子權 (Women’s rights), both dating from 1907, in which Zhan depicted reform-minded and highly idealized elite women. Having introduced these two works by Zhan in the 2003 Rice Symposium volume,42 Ellen Widmer examines another of Zhan’s novels, Bihai zhu 碧海珠 ( Jewels in an Azure Sea) (1907), written in wenyan 文言 (classical Chinese), which by then was increasingly rare in fictional works. The nostalgic mood of the language, however, reflected the contemporary relationship between the wenren 文人 (literatus) and courtesan, an alternative type of cainü that had once occupied the center of late Ming and early Qing biji 筆記 ( jotted notes). Bihai zhu poses its dilemma in terms of the first narrator, who settles for admiring the modern-minded, patriotic courtesan but who is nonetheless not entirely fulfilled. Meanwhile the imagined elite women readers hover in the background. As a group whose patriotism needs to be invigorated, these women stand to benefit from the example of the self-improving courtesan. If one thinks only in terms of motivating this sort of reader, Bihai zhu may not have been particularly successful, but its portrayal of the confusions of the late Qing period, as well as of the era’s widening cultural horizons, is quite illuminating. Bihai zhu’s elegiac portrait of a second, more traditional courtesan brings out

42 Ellen Widmer, “Inflecting Gender: Zhan Kai/Siqi Zhai’s ‘New Novels’ and His Courtesan Sketches,” in Beyond Tradition and Modernity, 136–68.

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the continuing allure of this type of figure even in an era that looked toward reform. III. The Production of Gender and Genres in the New Print Media The themes that the authors in the previous section have discussed so ably—the variety and modes of fictional narratives, the development of new female character types, and the persistent yet evolving biographical genres that implicated women’s issues and roles—further demonstrate the innovation, accommodation, and hybridity informing the discursive world of the late Qing period. We turn now to the vehicles that carried these and other discourses. As indicated earlier, the print media of the late Qing era reflected the social, political, and cultural changes of the reform era. By publishing writings of both men and women, these new media offered an unprecedented public venue for the articulation of views that crossed “traditional” gender lines and thereby encouraged a tendency towards gender equality. To be sure, publication by women was nothing new—the late imperial period witnessed thousands of women’s collections in print. Yet these works were primarily of poetry, with some drama43 and scholarly research (as in the case of Wang Zhaoyuan), but very few works of fiction. Furthermore, their circulation was relatively limited. By contrast, late Qing print media published women’s writings in a much larger range of genres, including those rarely attempted by women before, such as political essays. In addition, women’s rising voices were presented often in direct debate with men. And, as we have seen, the reform era witnessed the birth of the first women’s journal, the Nü xuebao, following major reform journals published by male reformers such as the Shiwu bao 時務報 (English title: The Chinese Progress) and the Qiushi bao 求是報 (English title: The International Review).44 With an allfemale editorial board, the Nü xuebao brought women into public space

43 See, for instance, Hua Wei 華瑋, Ming-Qing funü zhi xiqu chuangzuo yu piping 明淸 婦女之戲曲創作與批評 (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiusuo, 2003); and Ming-Qing funü xiqu ji 明淸婦女戲曲集 (Collection of drama by Ming and Qing women) (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiusuo, 2003). 44 The Shiwu bao was edited by Wang Kangnian 汪康年 (1860–1911) and Liang from 9 August 1896 to 8 August 1898, in Shanghai. The Qiushi bao was edited by Chen Jitong, Chen Shoupeng, and Chen Yen from 30 September 1897 to 7 March 1898, in Shanghai.

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as both individual thinkers and organized activists. New constructions of women’s changing gender roles and their relationship with men were broadly and rapidly circulated among its readership by print media, with its extremely quick production of visual images and written texts. The expanded sphere of women’s writing was part of a larger phenomenon in Chinese publishing. As Tan Sitong pointed out in his essay, “Baozhang wenti shuo” 報章文體說 (On journalistic genres), published in Shiwu bao in 1897, “Print media takes up all the genres in the universe” (報章總宇宙之文). Tan applauded the news media as being able to “carry through the past to the present, cover China and the West, glorify the benefits of history and manifest its writing principles, and epitomize the refinements of selected literary collections while rectifying their shortcomings” (貫穴古今, 籠罩中外, 宏史 官之益而昭其義法, 都選家之長而匡其闕漏).45 He grouped all writing genres into three categories and ten styles, believing that the news media could cover them all.46 The mutual influence and saturation of journalistic genres, the need to address women as an audience, and the contribution from women journalists, all led to a profusion of new writing styles. The most important change was perhaps that the expository essay replaced poetry, becoming the major genre of women’s contributions to the news media, including some pieces written in vernacular Chinese. Scholars have pointed out that the biggest challenge to the promotion of vernacular Chinese in the New Culture Movement lay not in its use in literary creation but in writing political and scholastic essays.47 Yet, some twenty years earlier, the female contributors of the 1898 Nü xuebao had mandated that seventy percent of its content should be written in the vernacular, and it had already published vernacular essays on such difficult issues as gender equality, political systems, freedom of marriage, and so forth.48 45 Tan Sitong, Tan Sitong Quanji 譚嗣同全集 (Complete collection of the writings of Tan Sitong), eds. Cai Shangsi 蔡尚思 and Fang Xing 方行 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 375. 46 See ibid., 377. See also Chen Pingyuan 陳平原, Chumo lishi yu jinru wusi 觸摸歷 史與進入五四 (Touching history and walking into the May Fourth) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005), 79. 47 See Chen, Chumo lishi yu jinru wusi, 81. 48 See Shen Ying 沈瑛 and others, “Zhongguo Nü xuehui zhi houguan Xue nüshi Shaohui shu” 中國女學會致侯官薛女士紹徽書 (Letter to Xue Shaohui from the Women’s Learned Society), Zhixin bao 59 (19 July 1898): 8b. See also Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition,” 413–16.

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The 1902 Nü xuebao continued writing in this new genre and expanded it to personal letters, also a type of vernacular essay, albeit one expressed in more intimate terms that related personal experience to reform issues. Print media also generated new types of art, which were often a creative combination of Western illustrations and Chinese woodblock prints. The emergence of all these new genres helped construct the image of “New Women” as active agents of change who contributed to shaping the nation and themselves. The five contributions in Part Three each address print media in the reform era with a clear focus on the interaction of gender and genres. Rudolf G. Wagner’s chapter, “Women in Shenbaoguan Publications, 1872–90,” questions the widespread assumption that the social role of women, women’s education, and the literary contributions of women only came to prominence in China at the turn of the twentieth century. His analysis of the attitude of the Shenbaoguan—a publishing house that consciously took women as its subjects, authors, and readers—shows its pivotal role in opening up this field of discourse several decades earlier. The Shenbao, which became the most important Chinese-language newspaper in China from the 1870s to the ’90s, began placing great emphasis on attracting women readers soon after its inauguration in 1872, publicly addressing issues such as footbinding, women’s education, and the intellectual and creative potential of women. The Shenbaoguan’s journals, together with the Shenbao itself, were the earliest news media that published works by Chinese women authors. This effort to promote women writers and women’s issues, although designed in part as a strategy for a publishing conglomerate to broaden its reader and author base, also reflected the cultural upbringing of the Shenbaoguan manager, Ernest Major. As Wagner effectively argues, many of the opinions on women expressed in Major’s publications were compatible with his essentially Scottish Enlightenment ideas; hence, there was an especially close fit between his personal values and the model he established for the later emergence of women’s journals in China. Nanxiu Qian’s chapter shows how and why the 1898 Nü xuebao, which had engendered the 1902 Nü xuebao, was later eclipsed in modern Chinese historiography by its “daughter” publication, a process that entailed the complicated interplay of issues related to gender, race, and nationalism. Only four years apart, the two journals display remarkable and sometimes radical dissimilarities. These differences reflect the respective preoccupations of two “generations” of women reformers, manifesting the rapid changes that were taking place in the

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envisioning and reenvisioning of women’s social, political, and cultural roles during the late Qing period. The “mother” journal continued the Chinese cainü tradition, placing the idea of women’s self-strengthening by means of knowledge acquisition above national empowerment; the “daughter,” however, boasted a raging nationalist discourse that valorized the nüjie 女傑 (heroine) ideal. The eventual elimination of the mother Nü xuebao from historical memory was occasioned by the increasing dominance of a male-oriented perspective on China’s modern needs, one that emphasized military power and patriotic self-sacrifice. Advocates of this view naturally preferred the more nationalistically oriented daughter to the culture-bound founding mother—especially since the daughter’s anti-cainü attitude echoed the prescription of men reformers in 1898 for the proper education of Chinese women. Her racially tinged militarism met the Republican revolutionary goal, and her heroic conception of women’s new social roles continued to hold appeal in China throughout the entire twentieth century. Among late Qing women reformers, He Zhen 何震 (1884?–?) presents perhaps the most radically transformed cainü in terms of the self-image she created through the news media. She rooted her feminism and anarchism firmly in Chinese tradition and promoted her extremist ideas in the Tianyi bao天義報 ( Journal of natural justice), which she edited and published in Japan in 1907. In her chapter, “Tianyi bao and He Zhen’s Views on Women’s Revolution,” Xia Xiaohong draws from previously unavailable archival material and addresses the tension between He’s Russian-influenced anarchism and her evolving feminism. Her somewhat paradoxical theory claims that the fundamental way “to escape from authoritarian rule and seek freedom” in the natural Dao was “revealed in the teachings of Chinese Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism.”49 From the standpoint of practice, she argued that anarchism could most easily be achieved in China if the fragile Qing political system could be preserved rather than strengthened by reform. Based on the same assumption, that institutional weakness was an anarchist advantage rather than a liability, He turned away from her former position of critiquing sexual inequality in the Chinese tradition to her later position of critiquing women’s liberation. Thus, He’s unconditional surrender A viewpoint He Zhen adopted from Qu Fei 去非 [Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1884–1919)], trans., “Jieyi E Duerside ‘Da Riben baozhi xinwenshe shu’” 節譯俄杜爾斯德答日本 報知新聞社書 (Selected translation from Tolstoy’s “Reply to Japanese Höchi News”), Tianyi bao 5 (10 August 1907): 38. 49

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to anarchist theory removed the practical foundation of her “women’s revolution.” Chen Pingyuan’s “Male Gaze/Female Students: Late Qing Education for Women as Portrayed in Beijing Pictorials, 1902–08” examines the correlation between public attitudes toward women’s education and the newly emerging pictorial journals. The explicit sanction of women’s education by the Chinese court in 1907 effected a change in public opinion regarding girls’ schools. Meanwhile, portrayals of such schools and their female students in late Qing pictorial journals accelerated the social acceptance of this new educational orientation. Women students clad in new uniforms strolled the broad, dust-choked boulevards of late Qing Beijing and caught the eye of the public. This scene registered a watershed moment, when hitherto sheltered females began to emerge on the nation’s political, social, cultural, and educational stage. The content of the pictorials, as analyzed by Chen, helps us to understand not only how these “delicate” women transformed themselves while under public scrutiny but also why the gaze they drew was a mixture of surprise, admiration, prejudice, and misunderstanding. Showing how the furtive gaze of the public came to be conjoined with the brushstrokes of the artists and the imprint of the times, Chen invites us to examine the concrete evidence of educational change as conveyed through the pictorials, to engage the notion of history as demonstrated by the gaze, and to consider the historicity of the gaze itself. Siao-chen Hu’s contribution, “The Construction of Gender and Genre in the 1910s New Media: Evidence from The Ladies’ Journal,” highlights themes of both continuity and change in the “talented women” tradition during the period between the late Qing era and the New Culture Movement. Recent scholarship has dismantled the long dominant historical paradigm that considered Chinese women to be primarily victims under the traditional Chinese patriarchy, arguing instead that elite women in late imperial China, through their literary and artistic pursuits, constructed self-identities, expressed innermost feelings, and achieved some of their ambitions and ideals. In the early twentieth century, what happened to such individuals? Did they convert and become New Women? Or did they continue to live in time-honored ways? The content and the editorial strategies of The Ladies’ Journal, as evaluated by Hu, show that, on the one hand, the efforts by male writers to retrieve the spirit of the tradition were reduced to nostalgia. On the other hand, some traditionally educated women courageously interacted with post-imperial trends and fashions, attempting to generate

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a women’s literature in which the old and the new could comfortably yet creatively meet. Although each contributor to this volume focuses on a distinct set of personalities, themes, and problems, a number of chapters converge in particularly interesting and provocative ways. Consider, for instance, the transformation of gender—one of the most fundamental concerns of this book. Fong has made an explicit argument about Lü Bicheng’s “self-transformation” from guixiu to New Woman, which Lü achieved by expanding her knowledge repertoires and operating spaces. Siaochen Hu has offered a virtually identical argument about Shi Shuyi. Hu Ying’s chapter does not state matters quite as directly or unequivocally, but the same basic point can be made about Wu Zhiying’s selftransformation. Together, these three individuals stand as a powerful counterimage to individuals such as Qiu Jin, Chen Xiefen (discussed by Qian) and He Zhen (discussed by Xia), who self-consciously and famously repudiated guixiu models in favor of a self-image defined by violent, revolutionary action. How do we account for such divergent self-positionings? Clearly we need more case studies of late Qing period and early Republican women—studies that take into account crucial variables such as personality, background, education (cf. the discussions of Cong and Chen), social and intellectual affiliations, historical circumstances, and so forth. Another major concern of this volume is the transformation of genre. It is commonplace to say that the late Qing period witnessed the rise of new genres, but one striking theme that emerges from various chapters in this book is the indeterminacy of these new genres. Wagner notes, for example, the conflation of editorials and reportage in Shenbao. Fong discusses Lü’s “experimental approach” to poetic and prose genres, indicating, for instance, that although Lü’s “record” is presented as a travelogue, it reads very much like fiction. Judge reads Dongou nü haojie primarily as biography whereas Tsu considers it as fiction. Indeed, Tsu’s chapter is all about the mingling of genres and the possibilities of “cross-genre translations” and “half-faithful translations.” In spite of, or perhaps because of, this indeterminacy, the “genre” of xiaoshuo had, according to Tsu, the power to generate new protocols in a confusing time, providing new discursive structures and new epistemological orientations. The chapters in this volume also highlight the complex relationship between gender and genre. We learn, for example, that the talented

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woman scholar Wang Zhaoyuan was twice stigmatized by Liang Qichao—first for her association with an allegedly “backward” kaozheng learning, and then because kaozheng, rehabilitated as an equivalent to the Western “scientific” method, was gendered “male” and therefore presumably off limits to Wang. Chen Xiefen disparaged classical Chinese poetry because of its generic affiliation with cainü, and yet by using this “obsolete” and highly gendered form of verse, Chen powerfully vented her hatred against the Manchu regime—a male political preoccupation. And ironically, although Western scientific knowledge was incorporated into the curricula for women’s education by the 1898 women reformers, it also served a revolutionary purpose, providing a conceptual framework for female assassins to fulfill their mission in newly minted works of Chinese science fiction. We can see the influence of this sort of fiction in the popularity of Russian nihilism among revolutionary women such as He Zhen.50 Taken as a whole, the chapters in this volume indicate quite clearly that the reform period from 1895–1912 stands on its own as an era of great historical significance. What should also be clear is that this significance has nothing to do with narratives that focus on simple binary oppositions such as “China” versus “the West” or “tradition” versus “modernity.” To be sure, these juxtapositions framed many of the discussions and debates of the late Qing period, as Chinese intellectuals grappled with the perennial and often pressing question of how China could best meet its internal and external challenges. But our concern in this book is with the discussions and the debates themselves, not with outcomes or explanations of success or failure. The importance of the reform period from our perspective lies in the wide range of discourses it generated and in the striking role that new-style media played in disseminating and encouraging these discourses. A systematic analysis of why the parameters of debate and discussion in China had been comparatively narrow before 1895, and why they became narrow again (in a different way) after the fall of the dynasty, is beyond the scope of this volume. Rest assured, however, that a careful reading of the chapters within will shed much useful light on these issues.

50 Our remarks in the preceding three paragraphs have been inspired by the outside reviewer’s comments.

PART ONE

TRANSFORMATIONS OF GENDER ROLES

CHAPTER ONE

WANG ZHAOYUAN (1763–1851) AND THE ERASURE OF “TALENTED WOMEN” BY LIANG QICHAO Harriet T. Zurndorfer Introduction: The Invention of China’s Feminine Past Among the best known writings of Liang Qichao 梁 超 (1873–1929) is his 1897 Shiwu bao 時務報 (Chinese progress) article “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women) in which he asserted the value of women’s education for the health and prosperity of the nation.1 Although many of his fellow reformers argued at this time that China’s acquisition of Western technology was more imperative than other matters, Liang contended in this essay that the key to the nation’s power and prosperity was the education of its women citizens. Because the majority of China’s 200 million women were absent from the workforce and dependent on men for their livelihood, he alleged, they were detrimental to the national economy. In their analyses of this essay, modern scholars have shown that many of the ideas Liang expressed in “Lun nüxue” were neither new nor original. Liang drew upon the British missionary Timothy Richard’s (1845–1919) 1893 treatise “Shengli fenli zhi shuo” 生利分利之說 (Productive and nonproductive methods), published in the popular journal Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報 (Chinese globe magazine) (printed 1899–1907), which professed the worth of a strong educational system for women in order to make them self-supporting citizens.2 Liang had served briefly in 1895 as Richard’s secretary and consequently became familiar with 1 Liang Qichao, Yinbing shi heji: wenji 飲冰室合集: 文集 (Writings from the IceDrinker’s Studio: Collected works), 24 vols. (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936), 1:37–44. This essay was originally published in his 1896–97 Bianfa tongyi 變法通議 (General discussion on reform). 2 Nanxiu Qian, “ ‘Borrowing Foreign Mirrors and Candles to Illuminate Chinese Civilization’: Xue Shaohui’s Moral Vision in the Biographies of Foreign Women,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 60–102. See pp. 66–67 for discussion here. Also, cf. Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹, Wan Qing wenren funü guan 晩清文人婦女觀 (Late Qing literati’s views on women) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1995), 16.

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what Richard and another influential missionary, the American Young J. Allen (1836–1907), were writing about the relationship between the status of Chinese women and the health of Chinese civilization.3 At that time Allen was compiling information for what was to become a ten-volume global survey of female mores, Quandi wudazhou nüsu tongkao 全地五大洲女俗通考 (Survey of female customs on the five continents), in which he argued, following Charles Fourier, “no country can ever hope to flourish without elevating and educating its women.”4 Liang “adopted” the views of these missionaries but “rephrased” the language to suit his own reform agenda.5 But what was new about Liang’s critique of Chinese women was his rejection of those females, that is, cainü 才女 (talented women), who could indeed read, write, and had published literary works. Liang judged cainü useless and their writings worthless: “a few trifling poems on wind and moon, flowers and grass.”6 In “Lun nüxue,” Liang conveyed the message that the genre of traditional poetics, in which these female writers engaged, reflected the feebleness and futility of their endeavors: “talented women in the past were capable of doing nothing more than accumulating volumes of poems on the sadness of spring and the pain of parting, chanting about the sun and the moon, and toying with images of the flowers and grass.”7 Liang bolstered his critique against cainü even further when in 1897 he also wrote for the Shiwu bao a biography of the first Chinese woman medical doctor, the University of Michigan-trained Kang Aide 康愛德 (1873–1931), and contrasted her with two specific cainü authors Liang Duan 梁端 (1793–1825) and Wang Zhaoyuan 王照圓 (1763–1851).8

3 Hu Ying, “Naming the First ‘New Woman,’” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, eds. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 180–211. See pp. 183–84 for discussion here. 4 Hu Ying, “Naming the First New Woman,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 3.2 (2001): 196–201, esp. p. 200. 5 Hu Ying, “Naming,” Nan Nü, 201. 6 Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 7–8. 7 Joan Judge, “Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898,” in Karl and Zarrow, 158–79, esp. p. 165. 8 Liang, “Ji Jiangxi Kang nüshi” 記江西康女 (Record of the woman scholar Kang from Jiangxi), in Liang, Yinbing shi heji: wenji, 1:119–20. As Angela Leung points out, Liang in this essay describes Kang’s graduation ceremony at Michigan as if he himself was actually present. See Leung, “Dignity of the Nation, Gender Equality, or Charity for All? Options for the First Modern Chinese Women Doctors,” in The Dignity of Nations:

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Unlike the American-educated Kang who in his eyes was “the modern cai par excellence,”9 Liang questioned the achievements of these two women who had both published annotated editions of the classic compilation Lienü zhuan 列女傳 (Biographies of women) by the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE). Although their work “rested squarely within the classical scholarship tradition of the Qing,” Liang passionately “proclaimed their learning ‘not real learning.’”10 Moreover, he singled out Wang because she had, in fact, demonstrated her talent in so many genres, not just poetry writing. He wrote: “Whereas the other cainü understood the meaning of texts, and were well-versed in carving insects, and capable of writing about flowers, grass, and winds, and the moon, Wang could read and compile her studies on the classics.”11 Nevertheless, in Liang’s view, the scholarly accomplishments of Wang could not measure up to the practical knowledge possessed by Kang. Liang’s particular choice of the two cainü Wang Zhaoyuan and Liang Duan to express his disavowal of female talent may be explained in two ways. First, he was familiar with the writings of the well-known nineteenth-century, Beijing-based bibliophile Li Ciming 李慈銘 (1830–94) who in his history of kaozheng 考證 (evidential studies) had compared the “northerner” Wang with the “southerner” Liang and recorded which individual male scholars had lent their names to the encomia in these women’s compilations.12 Liang Qichao had encountered Li and his literati circle around 1893–94 in Beijing. Second, Wang Kangnian 汪康年 (1860–1911), the pioneer journalist and founder of Shiwu bao for which Liang served as editor, was the grandson of Wang Yuansun 汪遠孫 (1794–1836), the husband of Liang Duan.13 As a bibliophile

Equality, Competition, and Honor in East Asian Nationalism, eds. Sechin Y.S. Chien and John Fitzgerald (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 71–91. See p. 77. 9 Hu Ying, “Naming,” Rethinking the 1898 Reform, 186. 10 Ibid., 187. 11 Liang, “Ji Jiangxi Kang nüshi,” 1:119. 12 See Li Ciming, Yuemantang dushu ji 越縵堂讀書記 (Record of studies from the Yueman Hall) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963), 423–25; see also, Xu Xingwu 徐興無, “Qingdai Wang Zhaoyuan Lienü zhuan buzhu yu Liang Duan Lienü zhuan jiao duben” 清代王照 圓列女傳補注 與梁端列女傳校讀本 (Wang Zhaoyuan’s “Commentary on the ‘Biographies of women’ ” and Liang Duan’s “Annotated reader of ‘Biographies of women’ ”), in Ming Qing wenxue yu xingbie yanjiu 明清文學與性別研究 (Studies of literature and gender in the Ming and Qing periods), ed. Zhang Hongsheng 張宏生 (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 2002), 916–31. Li Ciming has a brief biography in Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, ed. Arthur W. Hummel, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943–44; rprt., Taibei: Chengwen, 1967). 13 Hummel, 822.

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and cataloguer of the once-famous Wang lineage library, the Zhenqi tang 振綺堂, Wang Kangnian had accessed the printing history of Liang Duan’s Lienü zhuan jiaozhu duben 列女傳校注註本 (Annotated reader of collations and annotations to “Biographies of women”) (1825), which had cited Wang Zhaoyuan’s earlier Lienü zhuan buzhu 列女傳補注 (Supplementary annotations to the “Biographies of women”) (1812). Thus, from these two fellow intellectuals Liang had gleaned information about the two women scholars and their publications. Recent revisionist scholarship has cast Liang’s repudiation of these specific cainü and other “talented women” as part of his broader project to reevaluate the past and to reassess Chinese literate tradition.14 Liang’s effort to dismiss the accomplishments of established cainü was crucial to his program to reject what he considered the “feminized cultural tradition.” With the aim of dislocating the centrality of the privileged gentry minority, Liang renounced both the high Confucian culture this group embodied and the literate women that the cultivation of wen 文 (culture) empowered. However, this disavowal was complex because Liang, like many of his supporters, was “trained in the values and bound by [the] referents of the old culture which had become the object of their passionate offensive.”15 As both Hu Ying and Joan Judge have argued, Liang’s critique of cainü reverberated the engendering of authority. By disavowing the (feminine) authority of classical learning and the power of its writings, Liang hoped to separate past from present and to create a modern (masculine) nation.16 The female classical 14 See the essays by Hu Ying and Judge in Rethinking the 1898 Reform, and Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). For an overview of how Liang treated the Chinese historical record, see Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Harriet T. Zurndorfer, “China and ‘Modernity’: The Uses of the Study of Chinese History in the Past and the Present,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40.4 (1997): 461–85. 15 Judge, “Reforming the Feminine,” 165. 16 Hu Ying, “Naming,” Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period, 185–86. Liang also concerned himself with the feminization of Chinese men, which he designated in terms of dongya bingfu 東亞病夫 (sick man of East Asia), implying a weak nation with a weak body. According to Martin Huang, Liang countered the impression of Japan’s successful bushido 武士道 (warrior spirit) with the claim that Chinese men before the Han dynasty had also engaged in wushidao. But, wrote Liang, the Japanese “maintained” their bushido so well that they became a world-class power while the Chinese became ever so feminized after the Han era. See Huang, Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 202–03. For further discussion on the literary representation of Chinese men in premodern literature, see Song Geng,

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literate tradition “functioned as a metonym for all that was obsolete and degraded in that tradition.”17 What circumstances motivated Liang to defame Wang Zhaoyuan in particular and the entire Ming-Qing women’s literary heritage in general lead us to contemplate the problematic of measuring the interaction between contemporary social thought and the occlusion of the historical record. In this chapter, we explore the legacy of Liang’s campaign to discredit cainü and to make them invisible. While a number of Republican period scholars did challenge Liang’s castigation of female talent and thus laid the foundation of what is now an important facet of China studies, that is, the documentation of the lives and accomplishments of literate women in the pre-twentieth-century era, it is only recently that historians and literary specialists have analyzed more closely the biographies and extant works of these women. It is in this spirit of “retrieval” that this chapter pursues the life history of one of these vanished cainü, Wang Zhaoyuan. As we read the biography of Wang, a Shandong native, who was acclaimed during the late Qianlong-Jiajing era in male literati circles for the assistance she gave her kaozheng scholar-husband Hao Yixing 郝懿行 (1757–1825) in his revised versions of the Erya 爾雅 (Examples of refined usage), Xunzi 荀子 (Works of Xunzi), and the Shanhai jing 山海經 (Classic of mountains and seas), we need to consider the ease with which Liang dismissed her (and others like her). Our goal is to locate Wang’s endeavors within the broad contours of mid-Qing history and thus to demonstrate that her transformation from “scholar wonder woman” to reformers’ “outcast” reflects the predilections of Liang rather than any foibles of Wang herself.18 We intend to frame the space in which she practiced her talents and negotiated the boundaries of gender and genre. Finally, we aim to show how Liang Qichao narrowed the parameters of these boundaries to the extent that he manipulated the documentary record, with the result that he erased Wang from the register of distinguished Qing scholars.

The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004); and Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 17 Judge, “Reforming the Feminine,” 165. 18 On Liang’s ideas about women and gender relations in the course of his life, see Chang Peng-yuan, “The Tenacity of Tradition: Liang Qichao and Gender Relations,” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 25/26 (1993–94): 42–54.

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harriet t. zurndorfer Nationalist Sentiment and the Debasement of Chinese Women’s Literary Heritage

Liang was not alone in his effort to devalue the authority and privileged status of literate women in imperial China. Fellow reformers as well as a number of overseas female students, including Kang Youwei’s 康有爲 (1858–1927) daughter, Kang Tongwei 康同薇 (1879–1974), took part in the process of reassessing the function of literate women in the past and of diminishing their achievements. According to Judge, Kang Tongwei was an “archaeomodernist” who in the interest of utilitarian objectives could value both the literary talents of ancient women writers like Ban Zhao 班昭 (ca. 48–ca. 120) and yet despise the culture of Confucian patriarchy in which they functioned.19 Kang and her contemporaries disregarded the important role mothers had fulfilled in jiaxue 家學 (family learning) and deemed women’s talents in writing prose and poetry as irrelevant to the creation of modern citizenship.20 As Judge observes, the matter of female literacy was inextricably intertwined in the formula for nationalist utilitarianism: “The reformists of the 1898 period initiated the process [of modernization] by drawing a sharp distinction between an obsolete classical literacy and a dynamic new civic literacy, between narrow ancient book learning and global contemporary understanding, between the sterile, male scholarly tradition and a vital female knowledge for the nation.”21 May Fourth intellectuals added new stimuli to this debasement of Chinese women’s literary heritage out of ever-increasing nationalist sentiment and, consequently, canonized all Chinese women as “victims.”22 Many of these individuals had a feminist agenda and, in the interest of boosting their own pathbreaking ideas, alleged that Chinese women could not have been writers until the May Fourth era. In their quest to

Judge, “Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Nan Nü 6.1 (2004): 102–35. See pp. 118–24. 20 Judge, “Reforming the Feminine,” 168–69. On the role of jiaxue in eighteenthcentury family life, see Song Hanli 宋漢理 (Harriet T. Zurndorfer), “Xingbiehua de Zhongguo keju zhidu” 性別化的中國科擧制度 (Engendering the Chinese examination system), in Zhongguo yu Dong Ya de jiao yu chuan tong 中國與東亞的教育傳統 (Educational traditions in China and East Asia), ed. Li Hongqi 李弘祺, 2 vols. (Taibei: Ximalaya yanjiu fazhan jijinhui, 2006), 1:207–29. 21 Judge, “Reforming the Feminine,” 178. 22 Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 2. 19

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dissociate the past from the present, they downplayed, even to the point of oblivion, what cainü had indeed accomplished.23 Rather than view the variety of feminine self-expression in Ming-Qing women’s writing, May Fourth thinkers preferred to stereotype late imperial women authors as “anesthetized into complete passivity by discriminatory Confucian norms.”24 And so one may trace how the history of Chinese literate women before the twentieth century became obscured in the frenzy of the modernization project. How typical Hu Shi’s 胡適 (1891–1962) assessment of three hundred years of women’s writing as “without value” is awaits further consideration.25 But it is certain that the May Fourth interpretation of the Chinese literary past contributed to the depreciation and even erasure of female-authored writings.26 Ellen Widmer’s important study of those May Fourth intellectuals who did scrutinize cainü writing and publish histories of Chinese women’s literature confronts the ideological constructs that motivated their work. Her essay “The Rhetoric of Retrospection” assesses the major twentieth-century surveys of Chinese women’s literature by Liang Yizhen 梁乙真 (1900–?), Tan Zhengbi 譚正壁 (1901–?), and Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸 (1898–1958) as well as the anthologies of women’s writings compiled by late Qing and Republican intellectuals, including Shan Shili 單士釐 (1885–1968), Hong Meige Zhuren 紅梅閣主人 (1867–1943), and Shi Shuyi 施淑儀 (1878–?).27 She argues that even 23 Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 222–24. 24 Ellen Widmer, “The Rhetoric of Retrospection: May Fourth Literary History and the Ming-Qing Woman Writer,” in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, eds. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Old®ich Král (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 193–221, 197. 25 Hu Shi, Sanbai nian zhong de nüzuojia 三百年中的女作家 (Women writers in the past three hundred years), in Hu Shi wen cun 胡適文存 (Collected works of Hu Shi), 4 vols. (Taibei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1988), 3:167. 26 Doleželová-Velingerová and David Der-wei Wang, “Introduction,” in DoleželováVelingerová and Král, 1–27, esp. p. 6. 27 These works include: Liang Yizhen, Qingdai funü wenxue shi 清代婦女文學史 (History of Qing dynasty women’s literature) (1925), and his Zhongguo funü wenxue shigang 中國婦女文學史綱 (Historical outline of Chinese women’s literature) (1930); Tan Zhengbi, Zhongguo nüxing wenxue shihua 中國女性文學史話 (Historical discussion of Chinese women’s literature) (1930); Zheng Zhenduo, Zhongguo suwenxue shi 中國俗文學史 (History of Chinese popular literature) (1938); Shan Shili, Shouci shi shigao 受玆室詩稿 (Transcribed poems of Shouci house) (1900), and her Qing guixiu zhengshi zaixuji 清閨 秀正始再續集 (Sequel to Continued and Collected Correct Beginnings of Qing Gentlewomen) (1918); Hong Meige Zhuren, Qingdai guixiu shichao 清代閨秀詩鈔 (Transcribed poems of Qing dynasty gentlewomen) (1922); Shi Shuyi, Qingdai guige shiren zhenglüe 清代閨閣 詩人徴略 (Anthology of Qing dynasty gentlewomen poets) (1922).

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these comparatively sympathetic works expressed the fixed agenda of May Fourth intellectuals with the result that they did not give enough attention to the distinctions of traditional women’s writing. For example, Tan Zhengbi, in his book, came “under the thrall of the leading genreper-dynasty model” and, thus, chose not to explore in depth the many ways women writers of the Ming-Qing era wrote and edited nor to investigate the amount of “male mentoring” these women enjoyed: Tan excluded in his history how Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716–98), Wang Wenzhi 王文治 (1730–1802), and Chen Wenshu 陳文述 (1775–1845) had influenced the cause of female talent.28 Widmer has concluded that Tan’s skewed analysis underestimated “the extremely negative social climate” in which cainü wrote and yet made their way. Widmer also includes in her analysis a discussion of the leading contemporary bibliographic guide to women authors, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歴代婦女著作考 (Research on Chinese women’s writings through the ages) by Hu Wenkai 胡文楷 (1900–?), first conceived during the 1930s, published in 1957, and reissued in 1985 with some new materials.29 While Widmer links Hu’s work to that of those other scholars active in the 1930s (such as Tan, Liang, and Zheng), she applauds Hu’s singular efforts to register as many female authors as he could and not to privilege particular individuals or genres. Although Lidai funü zhuzuo kao separates Manchu and Mongol writers, along with Buddhist and Daoist nuns, from Chinese and Korean authors, it is not really possible to discredit Hu’s valuable contribution. As Widmer states clearly, his study has transformed the perception of traditional women’s writings and in broadbrush perspective has marked the beginning of a major shift in the academic study of Chinese women and gender issues in East Asia, Europe, and America during the last twenty years. The significance of Hu’s compilation is that it has enabled us to challenge far more effectively the “anti-cainü” claims of Liang and like-minded reformers.

28 Widmer, “The Rhetoric of Retrospection,” 209, 220. Cf. Clara Ho, “Encouragement from the Opposite Gender: Male Scholars’ Interests in Women’s Publications in Ch’ing China—A Bibliographical Study,” in Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives, ed. Zurndorfer (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 308–53. 29 Hu Wenkai’s revised edition was published by Shanghai’s Guji. See Widmer, “The Rhetoric of Retrospection,” 218.

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Locating Wang Zhaoyuan in the Contours of Mid-Qing History Turning again to Liang’s allusion to Wang Zhaoyuan, we may contrast his attitude toward her scholarship with the list of her writings in Hu’s bibliography.30 Hu credited her with twelve titles of which only one might be associated with guixiu 閨秀 (gentlewomen) writing—her essay “Guizhong wencun” 閨中文存 (In the women’s apartments).31 This list of her writings conveys her knowledge and authority to command various genres of writing: prose, poetry, as well as calligraphy. But it was her mastery of two other genres, classical commentary and historical criticism, that distinguished her from the majority of contemporary cainü. While Wang “bloomed” during the years encompassing the last quarter of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth century, the period which Beata Grant and Wilt Idema in their recent study The Red Brush characterize as “the second high tide of women’s literature,”32 her particular exploits seem extraordinary, even for this period of flourishing female talent. For one thing, Wang’s annotations to the Lienü zhuan signified her intellectual sojourn into what until then had been a singularly male pursuit, that is, commentary on that particular collection of biographies. For more than a millenium this text had not had a woman editor.33 A number of Wang’s other writings such Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuokao, 242–45. In addition to Hu Wenkai’s synopsis, the following publications also offer a brief biography and references to Wang’s oeuvre: Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽, Qingshigao 清史稿 (Draft history of the Qing dynasty), 48 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1976–77), 46:14051–52; Liu Shengmu 劉聲木, Changchu zhai suibi, xubi, sanbi, sibi, wubi 萇楚齋隨筆續筆三筆四筆 五筆 (Chottings [continued, third, fourth, and fifth sets] from the Changchu study), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), 1:487–88. See also Hummel, 277–79; and my entry “Wang Zhaoyuan,” in Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644–1911, ed. Clara Wing-chung Ho (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 227–30. Also relevant are my earlier studies on Wang. See Zurndorfer, “The ‘Constant World’ of Wang Chao-yüan: Women, Education, and Orthodoxy in 18th Century China—A Preliminary Investigation,” in Family Process and Political Process in Modern Chinese History, comp. Institute of Modern History, 2 vols. (Taibei: Academia Sinica, 1992), 1:581–619; and “How to Be a Good Wife and a Good Scholar at the Same Time: 18th Century Prescriptions on Chinese Female Behavior—A Preliminary Investigation,” in La Société civile face à l’État dans la tradition chinoise, japonaise, coréenne et vietnamienne, ed. Léon Vandermeersch (Paris: L’École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1994), 249–70. 32 Beata Grant and Wilt Idema, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 567–77. 33 See my study on this topic: “The Lienü zhuan Tradition and Wang Zhaoyuan’s Production of the Lienü zhuan buzhu (1812),” in Cultural Politics and Women’s Biography in China, eds. Hu Ying and Judge (University of California Press, forthcoming). Cf. Bret Hinsch, “The Textual History of Liu Xiang’s Lienüzhuan,” Monumenta Serica 52 (2004): 95–112. 30 31

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as her treatise on dreams Mengshu 夢書 (1812) or her annotations to another compilation attributed to Liu Xiang, his Liexian zhuan 列仙傳 (Biographies of transcendants), might have been just as easily authored by a man. Even after death, her fame endured. In 1883, the Guangxu emperor issued an edict expressing his admiration for her erudition and her contributions to scholarship and commanded that her writings on poetry, Shishuo 詩說 (Interpretation of poetry) and Shiwen 詩問 (Inquiries about poetry), which she coauthored with her husband, and her study Lienü zhuan buzhu be housed in the imperial pavilion Shangshu 尚書 for the consultation of Hanlin scholars.34 We may also view Wang’s achievements in the broader context of what was happening in women’s publishing history. Widmer sees the period of the early nineteenth century when news of Wang’s Lienü zhuan buzhu first spread as a time of women’s growing influence in literary production.35 She argues that there was then “an increasing public and print-orientated face to women’s culture which was matched by parallel developments in commercial publishing.”36 Although women writers had to take into account the pressures of didacticism, their work also had to meet the requirements of booksellers aiming for profit. Widmer points to the popularity of Hou Zhi’s 侯芝 (1764–1829) tanci 彈詞 (verses for picking) Zai zaotian 再造天 (Rebuilding heaven) (1828), with its “shroud of didactic armature,”37 which gave guidance to literary women seeking ways to express their talents in such a way that was both (morally) acceptable and appealing to a wide range of readers who were not necessarily of elite status.38 As for commercialism, publishers pursued wide audiences, and thus female authors had to accommodate themselves accordingly.39 It was not uncommon for commercial booksellers to arrange to have printed and distributed what had been a woman author’s home production of a set of her writings or an anthology of works by others. Widmer attributes the “pocket-size” issue of Yun Zhu’s 惲珠 (1771–1833) Langui baolu 蘭閨寳錄 (Precious

Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuokao, 244. Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 152–77. 36 Ibid., 170. 37 Widmer, “The Trouble with Talent: Hou Zhi (1764–1829) and her tanci ‘Zao zaotian’ of 1828,” CLEAR 21 (1999): 131–50. 38 Widmer, Beauty and the Book, 75, 93–96. 39 Ibid., 170–73. 34 35

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records from the maidens’ chambers) (1831) compendium, a study of “female worthies,” to how didacticism and commercialism fed off each other.40 Editors and booksellers knew books with a moral message could sell well, while authors and editors aimed to produce literature that would inspire women writers but not trespass the boundaries of propriety and correctness. The mid-Qing “near burst” of women’s writing and compilation, which in many cases encompassed the support and appreciation of men (fathers, brothers, husbands, sons), may be traced to mid-eighteenthcentury scholarly reorientations.41 The kaozheng movement had helped unleash a “classical revival,” stimulating what the prominent intellectual Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠 (1738–1801) proclaimed: “a rediscovery of the lost heritage of female erudition.”42 Although many officials and members of the Qing elite still regarded women’s literacy narrowly and continued to assign the aim of their education to jiaxue, others like Zhang celebrated “the purity of women’s learning,” in an age that was “tainted by men competing for degrees and offices.”43 It would seem that for every Wang Zhong 汪中 (1745–94), who valued educating women to the same standard as men so that they could read and understand the classics, there was another advocate like Chen Hongmou 陳宏謀 (1696–1771), whose program “to save the world” recommended study for women according to the stricture of “guidebooks” such as the Jiaonü yigui 教女遺規 (Sourcebook on female education).44 In any event, from the evidence of Hu’s compilation, we know that a relatively high number of women did learn to read and write, gained recognition and prestige, and in that way used their talents to empower themselves, especially within the family but also beyond their own homes and into wider networks.45 There is also evidence that women as early as the mid-eighteenth century were gaining a role in mainstream ideological and literary discourses. Shen Deqian’s 沈德潛 (1673–1769) Guochao shi 40 Widmer, “Considering a Coincidence: The ‘Female Reading Public’ Circa 1828,” in Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, eds. Judith T. Zeitlin, Lydia Liu, and Widmer (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 273–314. See pp. 294–95. 41 See Ho, “Encouragement from the Opposite Gender.” 42 Mann, Precious Records, 30–31. 43 Ibid., 31. See also Song Hanli, “Xingbiehua,” 220–23. 44 William Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in EighteenthCentury China (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 426–29. 45 Mann, Precious Records, 225–26.

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biecai ji 國朝詩別裁集 (Poetry anthology of our august dynasty) (1759), in which the poetic voice of women in “imperial civilizing projects” was central,46 may be considered the antecedent to Yun Zhu’s compilation Guochao guixiu zhengshi ji 國朝閨秀正始集 (Correct beginnings: Women’s poetry anthology of our august dynasty) (1831) about which Susan Mann has written. We now turn to the case of Wang Zhaoyuan whose literary abilities and scholarly prowess extended way beyond “the boundaries of the inner realm.” Our information on her originates in the nianpu 年譜 (chronological record) of her marriage to Hao Yixing that the Republican scholar Xu Weiyu 許維遹 (1905–51) prepared on the basis of his research in the various collected works the couple had compiled and their descendants had printed. As a scholar interested in new ways to read China’s past, Xu engaged in several projects in the 1930s that contributed to the revival of classical studies. He was known for his collaboration with Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978) and Wen Yiduo 聞一多 (1899–1946) on a commentary to the Guanzi 管子, entitled Guanzi jijiao 管子集校 (Collected annotations to the “Guanzi”) (26 BCE), which finally saw publication in 1956.47 It is likely that Xu came to discover the significance of Wang as he researched another classical text, Lü Buwei’s 呂不韋 (d. 235 BCE) Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏 春秋 (Master Lü’s “Spring and Autumn Annals”) (ca. 239 BCE), which had attracted the attention of a number of kaozheng scholars in contact with Hao.48 In the rest of this chapter, I will explore Wang’s life as chronicled in Xu’s “Hao Langao (Yixing) fufu nianpu” 郝蘭皐(懿行) 夫婦年譜 (Chronological record of Hao Langao [ Yixing] and his wife) (1936)

46 This work is listed in the catalogue compiled by Xie Zhengguang 謝正光 and Yu Rufeng 佘汝豐, Qingchuren xuan Qingchushi hui kao 清初人選清初詩彙考 (Collected research on selected early Qing poetry of early Qing writers) (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 1998). 47 Guo Moruo, Wen Yiduo, Xu Weiyu, eds., Guanzi jijiao 管子集校 (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1956). 48 Xu Weiyu’s study of Lü Buwei’s text was entitled Lüshi chunqiu jishi 呂氏春秋集釋 (Collected notes to “Master Lü’s ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’”) (Beijing: Guoli Qinghua daxue, 1935) and reissued by Beijing’s Wenxue guji kanxingshe in 1955. Another classical text that interested Xu was the Hanshi waizhuan 漢詩外傳 (Mr. Han’s anecdotes on the “Shijing”) (ca. 150 BCE). His study of this text was also published posthumously. See Xu Weiyu, Hanshi waizhuan jishi 韓詩外傳集釋 (Collected explanations on Mr. Han’s anecdotes to the “Shijing”) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980).

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(hereafter NP),49 and then consider the implications of her biography in relation to Liang’s dismissal of her. A Brief Narrative of Wang Zhaoyuan’s Life History and Writings Wang was born on the twenty-sixth day of the ninth month in the twenty-eighth year of the Qianlong reign (4 October 1763), in the village of Hebei 河北, Fushan 福山 county, Dengzhou 鄧州 prefecture (NP, 187), which is located on the northern side of the Shandong province peninsula (fig. 1.1).50 This locale, which one may consider a “cultural backwater” (especially in comparison with Jiangnan), was where Wang, the only child of two locally well-known teachers, grew up. At the age of five, her father Wang Xiwei 王錫瑋 (?–1767) died. Thereafter, she and her mother (surnamed Lin 林) began to subsist on the latter’s earnings as a teacher (NP, 187). Wang was very close to her mother who instructed her in literary skills. Apparently, she was a diligent student, but she claimed it was only due to her mother’s coaxing and encouragement that at around the age of eleven she could recite the Shijing 詩經 (Classic of poetry) (NP, 189). By the age of fourteen, she could read and write, practiced embroidery, and began to study the classics and (dynastic) histories (NP, 189). Probably, at this point in her life, Wang realized the significance of her intellectual abilities as a means of supporting herself and caring for her mother in her old age. From then on, she pursued her talents and followed her mother’s example as a “teacher of the inner chambers.”

49 The original version of this nianpu was published in the Qinghua xuebao 清華 學報 (Tsinghua journal of Chinese studies) 10 (1936): 185–233; there is a modern reprint edition. See Xu Weiyu, Hao Langao (Yixing) fufu nianpu (Xianggang: Chongwen shudian, 1975). 50 For a general history of Shandong, see Xu Tan 許檀, Ming Qing shiqi Shandong shangpin jingji de fazhan 明清時期山東商品經濟的發展 (The development of the commercial economy in Ming-Qing Shandong) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998); on the economic history of the Shandong peninsula during the eighteenth century, see Jean Oi and Pierre-Étienne Will, “North China: Shandong during the Qianlong Period,” in Nourishing the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850, eds. Will, R. Bin Wong, and James Lee (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies Publications, 1992), 321–88; and Christopher M. Isett, State, Peasant, and Merchant in Qing Manchuria, 1644–1862 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 249–51, 256–61. For a personal view of Dengzhou’s environs in the nineteenth century, see Ida Pruitt, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of “A Chinese Working Woman” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945).

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Figure 1.1. Map of Fushan county, Dengzhou prefecture, Hebei province. Source: Qianlong Fushan xianzhi (Gazetteer of Fushan county under the Qianlong reign), reprint of the 1763 edition, in Zhongguo difangzhi jicheng (Collected gazetteers of China), Shandong fuxianzhi ji (Section of Shandong prefectures and counties), 95 vols. (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe [originally Jiangsu guji chubanshe]; Shanghai: Shanghai shudian; Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 2004), 51:395.

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Such initiatives by both Wang and her mother may be considered indicative of the ways in which women negotiated their position in High Qing society. To be sure, there were other genres in which women practiced their skills—spinning, weaving, embroidery, calligraphy, and writing poetry and prose.51 But of all the ways women tended to their needs and demonstrated their capabilities, kaozheng scholarship, which became Wang’s forte, was the most prestigious. Thus, it is remarkable that at such a relatively young age Wang showed an interest in this genre. It was in her capacity as a female instructress to Hao’s only daughter Gui 桂 that Wang entered her future husband’s life. Hao’s first wife, also née Lin (b. 1758), had died in 1786. Although the nianpu does not make clear whether Wang had served in the Hao household before the wife’s demise, by late 1787, at the age of twenty-five sui 歲 (twenty-four-years old), she became Hao’s second wife in what proved a companionate marriage (NP, 191). The marriage itself provided what the gender historian Natalie Zemon Davis in her important study “Gender and Genre” argues is essential for “would be” women writers: a sense of connection to the sources (in this case classical texts) and an audience who would take her writing seriously.52 We will show here that Wang’s audience included the circle of kaozheng scholars who collaborated with her husband. Hao represented the fifteenth generation of the Hao lineage in Qixia 棲霞 (also, the birthplace of Wang’s mother), an inland district of Dengzhou prefecture (fig. 1.2). At the time of his marriage to Wang, he was in the throes of the cycle of examination success and failure. A year into his second marriage he gained his juren 舉人, but it would take some eleven years before he passed his jinshi 進士 (NP, 198). During the decade of the 1790s, a crucial period in the intellectual and social development of the couple, Hao stimulated Wang to use her literary talents to write prose commentary (NP, 196). In 1794, the great scholar and official Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730–97) became governor of Shandong, and his protégé Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), director of education 51 Grace S. Fong, “Female Hands: Embroidery as a Knowledge Field in Women’s Everyday Life in Late Imperial and Early Republican China,” Late Imperial China 25.1 (2004): 1–58. See pp. 1–3. Also, I acknowledge personal communication with Mann on this matter. 52 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400– 1820,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 153–82.

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Figure 1.2. Map of Qixia county, Dengzhou prefecture, Hebei province. Source: Guangxu Qixia xuzhi (Continual gazetteer of Qixia county under the Guangxu reign), reprint of the 1879 edition, in Zhongguo difangzhi jicheng, Shandong fuxianzhi ji, 51:22.

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for the same province (NP, 196).53 These eminent men had encouraged local scholars to engage in one of the specialities of kaozheng research, epigraphical study, which both Hao and Wang began to pursue. At this point, Ruan probably first became aware of Hao’s local reputation as a poet and scholar and of Wang’s literary talent. The relationship between Ruan and the couple intensified in 1799 when Hao passed (after two previous attempts) the metropolitan exam, then under Ruan’s directorship (NP, 198). Wang, accompanied by other Hao family members, journeyed to Beijing to join in the celebration of her husband’s achievement (NP, 199). On that occasion she met Ruan, along with other kaozheng luminaries. The happiness of this period was short-lived, however. The couple went into mourning at the death of Hao’s father Peiyuan 培元 in 1800 (NP, 200) and shortly thereafter for their second son Yinghu 應虎 (NP, 201). Earlier, in 1792, they had suffered the loss of their first son Shouen 壽恩 (NP, 196). Although Wang gave birth to a third son, Yungu 雲鵠, in 1801 (NP, 200), she remained profoundly distressed at the death of her eldest two children. With so much death and sorrow in the family in such a short period of time, she turned to annotating the Liexian zhuan. When news spread in literati circles that Wang was engaged in a meticulous and critical exegesis of this collection, the renowned bibliophile Hong Yixuan 洪頤煊 (1765–1837) immediately offered to write a preface. His encomium was incorporated into the final version, the Liexian jiaozheng 列仙校正 (Corrections to the “Biographies of transcendants”), first printed in 1812, some eight years after Wang had embarked upon the project (NP, 208).54 Wang may also have been interested in this specific Han work because of its resonances with the text she and Hao had been studying and revising around the same time, the Shanhai jing, and, in particular, its images of immortals. Also, in early 1805, Hao was collaborating with Gu Guangqi 顧廣圻 (1776–1835) on lexographical and phonological

53 Bi Yuan’s well-known collation to the Lüshi chunqiu (preface 1789) was of great interest to Xu Weiyu who made extensive research on this edition. See Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1993), 328–29. It was probably this study that led Xu to the circle of scholars around Bi and Ruan, including Hao and his wife. 54 Max Kaltenmark, Le Lie-sien Tchouan (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1953; reissued 1987), 1–8, remarks that Wang’s annotated edition of this text remains the most reliable.

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research to the Erya (NP, 202).55 Wang assisted them, and it was probably through her acquaintance with Gu that her appreciation of his 1796 publication Gu Lienü zhuan fu kaozheng 古列女傳附考證 (Appended evidential research to the “old” [version] of the “Biographies of women”) led her to consider formulating her own annotated edition to the Lienü zhuan. The Tongcheng 桐城 scholar Ma Ruichen 馬瑞辰 (1782–1853) wrote in the first of the two prefaces to the Lienü zhuan buzhu that Wang’s research on the Erya might have inspired her annotations. He commended her abilities “to examine (what was) counterfeit and to substantiate errors, to expand on existing evidence, and to document (that) in writing.”56 It took Wang almost seven years to complete her annotations to the Lienü zhuan, the Lienü zhuan buzhu, which modern scholars consider an exemplary piece of scholarship. As the epilogues to the various editions of this text attest, Wang was aware that she was not the first woman to offer exegesis on the text. However, she was the first woman to do so in more than a thousand years.57 Until she wrote her annotations to the Lienü zhuan, commentary to this text had been a male prerogative in imperial China. The three earlier female commentators were the well-known Han woman scholar Ban Zhao, Zhao Mu 趙母 or Mother Zhao (?–late Later Han era), and Yu Zhenjie 虞貞節. Given Ban’s stature among learned women, it is not surprising that Wang chose to identify her own commentary with the fifteen juan set of annotations attributed to Ban.58 Wang’s collated edition of the Lienü zhuan followed the Song dynasty edition’s eight-juan 卷 arrangement, with the first seven juan of biographies attributed to Liu Xiang, and the last chapter adding twenty biographies of women from the Zhou to the Han dynasties. Throughout this eight-juan compilation, Wang appended notes to the text, many of which indicated her affinity with contemporary linguistic controversies among kaozheng scholars and her superior knowledge of early texts. In general, her annotations expose three kinds of scholastic negligence: inaccuracies of transmission, omissions, and insufficient textual research. 55 On Hao’s work on the Erya, see Zhang Yongyan 張永言, “Lun Hao Yixing de ‘Erya yishu’ ” 論郝懿行的爾雅義疏 (Discussiing Hao Yixing’s “Commentary on the Erya”), Zhongguo yuwen 中國語文 (Chinese language) 11 (1962): 502–09. 56 Lienü zhuan buzhu, xu 序: 1a–b (ce 14 in the Haoshi yishu 郝氏遺書 edition [1879]). All citations originate from this edition. 57 Hinsch, 107. 58 Lienü zhuan buzhu, xulu 敍錄: 11a–b; Zhao Erxu, Qingshigao, 46:14052.

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Examples of the first type of deficiency may be seen in her notes to the eighth story in juan 1 “The Governess of the Lady of Qi” (Qinü fumu 齊女傅母). Wang recorded that the character jiao 交 in the text, meaning “to exchange,” should have been jiao 姣, indicating pretty or handsome, thus reading: “Lady Jiang was pretty” rather than “Lady Jiang was exchanged.”59 Similarly, she found transmission mistakes in the thirteenth story in juan 8, “The Wife and Daughter of Wang Zhang” (Wang Zhang qi nü 王章妻女). Wang Zhang’s difficulties with those at court is recounted here, and Wang Zhaoyuan notes that the matter of those who betrayed him, which led to his detention, was not simply an affair (shi 事) but in fact a crime (zui 罪).60 Her notices of omissions include remarks to the first story in juan 1, “The Two Royal Consorts of Youyu (Shun)” (You Yu [Shun] er fei) 有虞舜二妃. Here she demonstrated that an entire sentence from another text, the Shiji suoyin 史記索隱 (Commentary on the “Records of the historian”), first written by Sima Zhen 司馬貞 (ca. 656–720),61 was expurgated. Significantly, the deleted expression “that Yao’s daughters taught Shun the skill of a bird to go up into a well” reveals the remarkable talents of the two women.62 In other words, Wang restored passages in the Lienü zhuan that highlight female ability. Wang’s exegesis further confirmed her broad knowledge of pre-Han and Han texts, which she used to sharpen her analysis. For example, in the ninth story in juan 1, “Her Serenity Ji of Lu” (Lu Ji jing jiang 魯季敬姜), she directed attention to the original passage in the Guoyu 國語 (Discourses of the states), which conveyed that the wife of the Duke of Lu—and not an official—spoke up for him during a confrontation with a minister.63 Finally, we observe another occasion when Wang displayed her mastery of early texts. According to the fifteenth story in juan 6 “The Daughter of the Taicang of Qi” (Qi Taicang nü 齊太倉女), there were five kinds of corporal punishments. But Wang countered this statement with citations from the Shiji 史記 (Records of the historian) and Hanshu 漢書 (Standard history of the Former Han),

Lienü zhuan buzhu, 1:10b. Lienü zhuan buzhu, 8:11a. 61 And later by Wang Shizhen 王世貞 (1526–90). 62 Lienü zhuan buzhu, 1:2a. 63 Lienü zhuan buzhu, 1:15b, records that the expression dafu 大夫 (official) is a mistake for furen 夫人 (lady). 59 60

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which stated there were only three kinds of punishments at the time the story took place.64 Ma Ruichen’s introduction to the Lienü zhuan buzhu was complemented by that of another well-known kaozheng scholar, Zang Yong 藏庸 (1767– 1811). Zang, also a member of Ruan’s inner circle and acquainted with Hao already in 1794 during Ruan’s tenure as Shandong’s education commissioner, had lodged at the Hao home in autumn 1810 to assist Hao in the second edition of the appendices to his commentaries to the Shanhai jing, the Shanhai jing jianshu 山海經箋疏 (Explanatory notes to the “Classic of mountains and seas”).65 This undertaking also involved Wang. Zang was aware of how Wang helped Hao correct more than three hundred misprinted graphs and provided an updated count of the graphs for each chapter and for the book as a whole. Observing the couple’s working relationship, Zang compared them to the intellectual bonds between the father-and-son duo of Wang Shiqu 王石渠 (Wang Niansun 念孫), a scholar-official responsible for water control, and his learned son Manqing 曼卿 (Wang Yinzhi 引之), in his preface to Wang’s Lienü zhuan.66 At this point, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, news of Wang’s erudition and intellectual prowess was becoming widespread. No less than seven distinguished scholars commented at length on her particular amendments to the Lienü zhuan: Wang Niansun 王念孫 (1744–1832), Wang Yinzhi 王引之 (1766–1834), Ma Ruichen, Hu Chenggong 胡承珙 (1776–1832), Hong Yixuan, Mou Ting 牟庭 (1759–?), and Wang Shaolan 王紹蘭 (1760–1835), all wrote notations that were included in an appendix and printed in the 1879 edition of the Lienü zhuan buzhu. Several of these individuals were also close associates of Ruan, who with his powerful networks in the Jiangnan region and eventually in Guangdong, would help make known Wang Zhaoyuan’s scholarly prowess in locales far away from Shandong. Although Wang’s text was a “family production,” first printed in the Shaishu tang waiji 曬書堂外集 (Secondary works of the collection “Airing

Lienü zhuan buzhu, 6:28a. Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川次郎幸, “Zang Zaidong xiansheng nianpu” 藏在東先生 年譜 (Chronological record of Zang Zaidong [Yong]), Tōhō gakuhō 東方學報 (Eastern studies) 6 (1936): 280–307. See p. 296. 66 Lienü zhuan buzhu, xu: 1a. Zang Yong’s preface follows that by Ma Ruichen but has separate pagination. According to Hummel, 829–30, and 841–42, both Wangs were philology specialists and well known among other kaozheng scholars. 64 65

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books under a bright sun”),67 and later reissued in the printed collected works of Hao and Wang in the Haoshi yishu (1879), the popularity of her annotations to the Lienü zhuan was sufficient for various commercial publishers to print and periodically reissue her work as well as that of Liang Duan’s Lienü zhuan jiaozhu duben well into the twentieth century.68 And contrary to what Liang Qichao had written about these two cainü, their studies of Liu Xiang’s text were regarded as works of kaozheng scholarship by the men who wrote encomia for them; unlike Liang, these male scholars did not regard the efforts by these two women writers symbolic of female futility. Both Wang and Liang Duan were representative of the very essence of writing women in elite society, which now allowed their engagement in genres that had not busied them before the “second high tide of women’s literature.” 69 In the early nineteenth century, one may surmise, not only the partners of these women but also the intellectual circles in which their husbands associated had taken Zhang Xuecheng’s admiration of female erudition one step further and encouraged their female relatives to develop their talents and prowess in new directions. In that regard, one should remember that Zhang was once Bi Yuan’s patron, and Bi like Ruan were both advocates of women’s learning and the publishing of their writings.70 That Wang and Liang Duan had resurrected what had once been a female preoccupation, scholarship on the Lienü zhuan, and utilized kaozheng methods in their revisions to this text, signified further advancement of learned women’s talents and, not least, growing acceptance of their expression in the public domain. Despite the commercial and intellectual success of the Lienü zhuan buzhu for Wang personally, her life continued very much in the same way before its publication. Hao, suffering from a hernia since spring 1813 (NP, 209), had asked her to help him complete his work on the

An Zuozhang 安作璋 and Geng Tianqin 耿天勤, “Hao Yixing he ta de Shaishu tang ji ” 郝懿行和他的曬書堂集 (Hao Yixing and his “Works of the Sunbaking Books Studio”), Shixue shi yanjiu 史學史研究 (Research on the history of historiography) 2 (1989): 73–80. 68 Xu Xingwu, “Qingdai Wang Zhaoyuan yu Liang Duan,” 921–22, 924–27. 69 Cf. Grant and Idema, The Red Brush, 576–77. 70 On the relationship between Zhang and Bi, see Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 107–08. Bi’s delight with his talented daughter is mentioned in Clara Ho, “The Cultivation of Female Talent: Views on Women’s Education in China during the Early and High Qing Periods,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38.2 (1995): 191–223, esp. p. 195. 67

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official histories of the Jin 晉 (264–419) and Song 宋 (420–77) periods. The result of this joint effort was the set of studies Jin Song shugu 晉宋書故 (Notes on the Jin and Song dynasties) and Song suoyu 宋瑣語 (Fragmented words of the Song era). For these writings, and presumably others, Wang took control over the financial and business side of her husband’s work, including supervising the conservation of the printing materials (wooden and metal blocks and so on) (NP, 213). In 1819, Hao’s and Wang’s only surviving son Yungu, then eighteenyears-old, married (NP, 214). His bride was the eldest daughter of another Dengzhou literatus, from nearby Fushan (Wang’s district), Wang Yuying 王餘英 ( js 1809), who at the time of the wedding held the post of a county magistracy in Hunan. Two years later, Hao and Wang experienced the joy of having a first grandson, Liansun 聮蓀 (NP, 215). In 1825, another grandson, Lianwei 聮嶶, was born, but the happiness of this event was tempered. Hao had died that year in Beijing in the second month, and it was only in the fourth month that Yungu was able to return to Qixia with his father’s coffin (NP, 216). Given the long-term and close collaboration the couple had enjoyed, Hao’s death in far-away Beijing must have been traumatic for Wang. She dedicated the next twenty-six years of her life to preserving and arranging Hao’s many research notes, papers, and unpublished manuscripts. With the support of Wang Yun 王筠 (1784–1834), another literatus who had worked with Hao on the Shuowen jiezi 說文解子 (Explaining singlecomponent graphs and analyzing compound characters), she oversaw the preparation of her husband’s writings, as well as most of her own, for publication. Later, her grandson Lianwei finalized this preparation and arranged for the printing of the Haoshi yishu (NP, 217). Wang Zhaoyuan in Retrospect In some ways, Wang’s personal history conformed to the life course of guixiu that Mann analyzed in her study Precious Records. Like other girls of her station, Wang learned both practical and literary skills from her mother. Despite “genteel poverty,” her education was more than adequate to gain entrance into the inner quarters of the local gentry and eventually to make a “good match” with a family of certain upstanding and prestige in the community. Until her mother died, some four years after her marriage, Wang remained close to her. Whether she had conflicts with her mother-in-law in these early years of her relation-

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ship with Hao, we do not know. But Hao’s mother died in 1793 at a time when the couple was completely preoccupied with the birth and survival of their children. This early period of their marriage seems to have been especially disquieting; the events of these years may have added an extra sense of intimacy to what was already a companionate marriage. It was probably at midpoint during the second decade of her marriage that Wang’s life took a distinguished turn from that of other guixiu. The death of her children may have led Wang to find solace in texts focused on the theme of immortality. Hao’s commitment to kaozheng scholarship apparently influenced Wang on how to manage her grief in a similar fashion. Wang’s interest in the logic of the finite and in concepts of immortality, as expressed in her study of dreams, Mengshu (appended to the Liexian zhuan), did not take a religious turn but remained a secular preoccupation throughout her life. Lacking the usual female networks literary women often relied upon, Wang came to depend on Hao to fulfill her intellectual ambitions. The fact that Hao did not aspire to eminence in official life and spent most of his time in Qixia where he regularly hosted fellow scholars in his home meant Wang had relatively easy access to kaozheng circles. Wang’s contact with Ruan from Yangzhou, Gu Guangqi from Suzhou, and Zang Yong from Changzhou, also advanced her fame into Jiangnan. And yet, her incursion into the male literati world of scholarship does not seem “unnatural.” The praise and admiration Wang commanded in her lifetime did not lead to accusations of impropriety or indecency. The success of Wang’s Lienü zhuan buzhu was the direct inspiration for Liang Duan, the other woman scholar Liang Qichao attacked in the prelude to his biography of Kang Aide. In 1825, Liang Duan, shortly before her death, completed her collation to the Lienü zhuan, entitled Lienü zhuan jiaozhu 列女傳校注 (Collations and annotations to the “Biographies of women”), which was published in 1831 with the title Lienü zhuan jiaozhu duben by her husband Wang Yuansun and with a preface by Liang Duan’s aunt, the famed Hangzhou woman scholar Liang Desheng 梁德繩 (1771–1847).71 The elder Liang was married to Xu Zongyan 許宗彥 (1768–1819) who was also a member of the 1799 jinshi class. Thus, we know that Wang Zhaoyuan’s prominence was known not only in Ruan’s male circles but also within the elite clique of Jiangnan female

71

Hummel, 822; Widmer, Beauty and the Book, 109.

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writers. Wang’s celebrity was not to disappear after her death. At the end of the nineteenth century another woman kaozheng scholar Xiao Daoguan 蕭道管 (1855–1907), a native of Fuzhou (Fujian), compiled a set of annotations to the Lienü zhuan, called the Lienü zhuan jijie 列女傳 集解 (Collected explications to the “Biographies of women”).72 In the preface to this work, Xiao recalls Wang’s achievement while offering a number of amendations to her work.73 The Marginalization of Wang Zhaoyuan: On the Road to Oblivion Wang’s death in 1851 occurred when China was in the throes of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64). As her own life ended, so did a way of life that had held ethnic rivalries between Manchu and Han, and those between other regional and provincial groupings, in check. The cultural assault of the Taipings was aimed at the elite traditions that had integrated diverse groups within the society and had lent ideological legitimacy to Manchu monarchs. To be sure, the plurality of intertwining dialogues that had flourished under the censorious eyes of High Qing emperors and had fostered a certain validity to rival intellectual pursuits, by both Cheng-Zhu orthodox thinkers and Qing philologists, had already faded well before the onset of the Rebellion.74 Long gone were the glamour days when poet-emperors occupied the Qing throne and lent lavish sponsorship to the arts and to erudite scholarship. For women, the Rebellion brought backlash. As Mann has written: “women and men of the upper classes made a renewed commitment to the images of womanhood that stood for an unproblematized Han Chinese essence—bound feet, the sequestering of women, their essential roles as wives and mothers, and their vulnerability to invasion.”75

72 I thank Nanxiu Qian for supplying me with a copy of this rare publication, the original of which is held in the Shanghai Library. 73 All three woman annotators of the Lienü zhuan saw their task as kaozheng scholars to remove the distortions and corruptions that had affected Liu Xiang’s original text. But they differed in how they presented the results of their endeavors. Unlike Liang and Xiao who followed the convention of inserting amendments within the text, at each point of annotation, Wang arranged her corrections and comments at the end of each story. This made her philological research easier to read and gave her study a formidable and authoritative impression. 74 Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 233–48. 75 Mann, Precious Records, 222.

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Such attitudes toward women at midcentury, and the decades thereafter, may account for the rhetoric of Liang Qichao and other 1898 reformers who considered “the footbound, cloistered, unproductive woman” China’s scourge. And, in the interest of their cause, as we have noted, these reformers and their May Fourth followers created a narrative that helped mask how much publishing activity by women both before and after the midcentury cataclysms had flourished. But recent studies indicate that women did not put down their brushes in the post-Taiping era. Certainly, there is evidence that courtesans continued to represent themselves as both the personification of a world being lost and the embodiment of new worlds and objects.76 Moreover, as Widmer has argued, there were still “gentlewomen” writing and publishing poetry and embarking on fictional prose in a kind of pre-novel form during the second half of the nineteenth century.77 In the case of Wang’s particular path to oblivion, the story is somewhat more complicated because the genre in which she made her mark and fame, kaozheng scholarship, had already begun to lose its allure in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century. In the wake of a series of problems of domestic administration emanating out of the White Lotus rebellions (1795–1804, 1813–14)—piracy, opium smuggling, and monetary crisis—leading officials began to turn to more eclectic approaches to learning and scholarship. Central to this intellectual transition was Ruan who had once been the doyen of kaozheng scholarship at the capital, and in Jiangnan at the Gujing jingshe 詁經 精舍 (Retreat for Glossing the Classics), which he had founded in 1801. In 1820, he established the Xuehaitang 學海堂 (Sea of Learning Hall) in Guangzhou and there launched a program that included not only classical and historical learning but also “applied studies,” including astronomy and mathematics.78 Ruan saw his mission at the Xuehaitang to promote Jiangnan classical studies to Guangzhou scholars who 76 Paola Zamperini, “ ‘But I Never Learned to Waltz’: The ‘Real’ and Imagined Education of a Courtesan in the Late Qing,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 1 (1999): 107–44; Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 77 Widmer, Beauty and the Book, 273–77. 78 Elman, “The Hsueh-hai t’ang and the Rise of New Text Scholarship in Canton,” Late Imperial China 4 (1979): 51–82. In his recent book, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 265–70, Elman discusses Ruan’s Chouren zhuan 疇人傳 (Biographies of astronomers and mathematicians) (1797–99), which celebrated their works and demonstrated the “practical” side of evidential studies.

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hitherto had focused their academic study “in the stagnant tradition of Ming philosophical speculation.”79 By the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century when these administrative problems had reached a crisis point, Ruan urged reform, including the suppression of the opium trade.80 Like other scholars, Ruan turned to statecraft scholarship ( jingxue 經學), which, with its emphasis on moral and intellectual regeneration, served as a means to confront “the social realities” of Qing economic, social, and political problems.81 Statecraft scholarship in its various modes—“accommodationist” or “interventionist”—was to dominate Chinese academic learning for the rest of the nineteenth century and thus brought about the final demise of kaozheng study. Although there is some confusion about the intellectual ties between the post-Taiping-era “classically orientated academies,” especially those under the influence of Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811–72), and the evolution of “national learning” ( guoxue 國學) in the Republican era,82 suffice it to say that the prestige of kaozheng study perished until its “rescue” by none other than Liang Qichao in the third decade of the twentieth century. Liang Qichao’s Erasure of Wang Zhaoyuan and the Preservation of the Qing Past Turning to Liang’s expurgation of Wang from the Qing intellectual record, we may remember that during the 1890s, Liang confronted the idea “that the ‘old understandings’ were fundamentally inadequate.”83

79 Steven B. Miles, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 101. See also Miles, “Establishing Authority through Scholarship: Ruan Yuan and the Xuehaitang Academy,” in Confucian Cultures of Authority, eds. Peter D. Herschock and Roger T. Ames (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 151–69. Cf. Betty Peh-T’i Wei, Ruan Yuan, 1764–1849: The Life and Work of a Major Scholar-Official in Nineteenth-Century China before the Opium War (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 206–20. 80 Wei, Ruan Yuan, 274–81, argues at length that Ruan was not a proponent for the legalization of opium. 81 Man-Houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 14–15, 281, 297, discusses at length the relationship of statecraft policies to the monetary crisis of this time. 82 An excellent study of the problems in unravelling the roots of these links in Chinese intellectual history is Barry Keenan’s Imperial China’s Last Classical Academies: Social Change in the Lower Yangzi, 1864–1911 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1994). 83 Huters, 4.

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Liang engaged in the process, according to Theodore Huters, whereby “in the course of rejecting the old and then invoking the new,” he encountered “the complicated and contradictory revisions and recantations that arose out of that process.”84 In other words, at this point in time, Liang’s taking a distance from the past was integral to his vision of reform.85 Another way to contemplate Liang’s 1897 stance on cainü is what Prasenjit Duara calls a theory of discent, by which “a new national discourse at once claims both descent and dissent from prior cultural practices.”86 And yet, some twenty years later, Liang busied himself with what was indeed worthy about the “old.” In 1920, he completed his masterpiece, Qingdai xueshu gailun 清代學術概論 (Intellectual trends of the Qing period), in which he documented how kaozheng scholarship was “a movement in research methodology” whose impact was comparable in importance to Renaissance scholarship in the West.87 Here in this publication he dutifully recorded where Hao had made major contributions to this Chinese enterprise, but he left out from his account Wang’s input either to her husband’s work or to the world of Qing intellectual life. In Qingdai xueshu gailun, Liang restored the inner world of Qing intellectuals. With his aim to demonstrate that the Qing period constituted a distinct period in Chinese cultural history, Liang emphasized both how different and how “progressive” Qing scholarship was in comparison to that of the Song and Ming eras. This about-face may be explained in terms of the strong interest Liang (as well as Hu Shi) held at this point in modern science and what it could do for China.88 In his book, Liang posited that the philological scholarship of eighteenth-century academicians, with their respect for accuracy, comprehensive factual

Ibid., 7. Hu Ying, Tales of Translation, 8, following Michel de Certeau and his Writing of History, considers Liang’s attitude here as laying the basis for his conceptualization of the new-style knowledgeable woman as the antithesis to the old-style cainü. 86 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995), 66–67. 87 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period, trans. by Immanuel C.Y. Hsü (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 22. 88 On Liang’s “intellectual turns,” see Zurndorfer, “China and ‘Modernity’”; Zurndorfer, “Regimes of Scientific and Military Knowledge in Mid-Nineteenth Century China: A Revisionist Perspective,” available via the London School of Economics website: . 84 85

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knowledge, and inductive methods of verification, was proof that “Qing scholars . . . were generously endowed with the scientific spirit.”89 Such thinking on Liang’s part reflected another stage of his nationalist sentiment. His preoccupation was now not the useless feminized past but rather the recovery of the record of the pragmatic past. But, as before, his gender bias outweighed deference to the requirements of historical accuracy. In Liang’s view, science was a “male arena,” and so even Wang, the cainü who had proved her capacity to engage in that “scientific spirit,” was unable to gain entry into that privileged site. Thus, Liang’s erasure of Wang was a double bill: first, he negated her for exercising her talent in the genre of writing whose validity he doubted in the 1890s; and second, he made her invisible from the male circle of kaozheng scholars whom he validated in his 1920 book. From this, we may conclude that the impact of reformist nationalist discourse on Liang and other early Republican-era thinkers needs reappraisal. As I have tried to demonstrate here, to analyze their attitudes toward genre and gender is to question the entire reformist project and the assumptions behind those who participated in it.

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Liang, Intellectual Trends, 14.

CHAPTER TWO

“TOSSING THE BRUSH”? WU ZHIYING (1868–1934) AND THE USES OF CALLIGRAPHY Hu Ying On 15 July 1907, convicted of involvement in an anti-Manchu uprising, Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907) was executed in Shaoxing.1 As her family went into hiding to avoid government persecution, her body was roughly buried by a charity group in the hilly burial ground usually used for paupers and executed criminals. Not until February 1908, when Qiu’s friends Wu Zhiying 吳芝瑛 (1868–1934) and Xu Zihua 徐自華 (1875–1935) purchased ground by the West Lake in Hangzhou, was a proper burial conducted. In front of the tomb, Wu and Xu erected a stele containing Xu’s epitaph in Wu’s famed calligraphy. Within the year, the tomb was demolished by Qing soldiers, and the two chief mourners were blacklisted.2 Of the two mourners, Xu was already a member of the Revolutionary Alliance and became more directly involved in antigovernment activities; Wu, on the other hand, remained politically unaffiliated and engaged with current events through her literary and artistic practices. In later history books, while Xu was remembered as a (lesser) comrade of Qiu, Wu would become the negative foil, the uncomprehending friend, associated with the image of Qiu before her own awakening to the revolutionary cause. Underlying this historical judgment is the 1 For Qiu Jin’s life, see Qiu Jin yanjiu ziliao 秋瑾研究資料 (Research material on Qiu Jin), ed. Guo Yanli 郭延禮, 2 vols. ( Ji’nan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1987). Subsequent references to this text will be noted as Ziliao. For a pioneering study of Qiu in English, see Mary Rankin, “The Emergence of Women at the End of the Ch’ing: The Case of Ch’iu Chin,” in Women in Chinese Society, eds. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 39–66. For a well-documented study of contemporary responses to Qiu’s execution, see Xia Xiaohong, “Wanqing ren yanzhong de Qiu Jin zhi si” 晚清人眼中的秋瑾之死 (The death of Qiu Jin in the eyes of late Qing), in Wanqing shehui yu wenhua 晚清社會與文化 (Late Qing society and culture) (Hubei: Jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 208–43. 2 For a discussion of this burial including the content of the epitaph, see Hu Ying, “Qiu Jin’s Nine Burials: The Making of Public Monuments and Historical Memory,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19.1 (Spring 2007): 138–91.

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privileging of heroic action over artistic intervention, the privileging of the “sword” over the “brush,” so to speak. Within this framework, in which much of modern Chinese history has been written, the practices of Wu and those like her become increasingly more difficult to understand in any terms other than negatively “traditional.” Indeed, this privileging was already quite visible in Qiu’s own lifetime as she repeatedly wrote to her women friends expressing the wish that they “should soon become woman heroes,/And not dissipate their efforts in crafting fine lyrics.”3 Presumably a “woman hero” is someone who acts rather than writes, a sword-wielding, bomb-throwing revolutionary, participating directly in the unfolding of grand history.4 This image, in order to become markedly “modern,” is usually set up against the negative foil of the traditional cainü 才女 (talented woman), that prominent figure of late imperial China, proud mistress of literati arts such as poetry and calligraphy.5 Having been brought up as a cainü, Qiu, in the last few years of her life, made the decision to dedicate herself to the revolutionary cause, by “tossing the brush to join the military ranks” (toubi congrong 投筆從戎).6 This metonymic pairing of the brush and

3 Qiu Jin, “Zeng nüdizi Xu Xiaoshu heyun” 贈女弟子徐小淑和韻 (Presented to my woman student Xu Xiaoshu, matching her original rhyme), in Qiu Jin xuanji 秋瑾 選集 (Selection of Qiu Jin’s works), ed. Guo Yanli 郭延禮 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2004), 126. 4 This image is an amalgamation of heroic women from Chinese tradition (e.g., Hua Mulan 花木蘭) and newly introduced Western figures (e.g., Sofia Perovskaia). For this discussion, see Joan Judge, “Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 102–35; and Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), chaps. 2, 3, and 4. 5 On balance, poetry has attracted far more scholarly attention than calligraphy, although the two practices were in many ways inseparable for both literati and their counterpart, the cainü. More than any other art form, calligraphy is closely tied to the high literati tradition because it is one of the major means of fostering cohesion of the literati class through time and across geographical areas. See Lothar Ledderose, “Chinese Calligraphy: Its Aesthetic Dimension and Social Function,” Orientations 17.10 (1986): 35–50. 6 There is a basic contradiction in Qiu’s position as in countless others of her generation: even her admonition against traditional arts is itself couched in verse and written out in her fluid hand, evidence of long practice and reasonable talent of the very arts she was advising her friend to abandon. The most prevalent explanation of this apparent paradox is that the last generation of elite men and women well trained in the literati arts simply continued to practice them more or less out of habit. Joseph Levenson famously argued that Chinese intellectuals lost faith in the continuing value of their cultural tradition around the turn of the twentieth century. See his Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). For a pointed critique of Levenson, see Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the

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sword invokes several other pairs of dichotomies that were prevalent around the turn of the twentieth century: private arts versus public (revolutionary) action, personal pleasure versus dedication to a larger (often nationalist) cause, traditional pursuits versus modern endeavors, Old ( jiu 舊) versus New (xin 新), cainü versus the New Woman, and so on. For a time these pairs appeared to possess tremendous explanatory power; like incantations, they were voiced loudly by influential rhetoricians such as Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) and Qiu herself and echoed in the writings of young men and women with increasing vehemence.7 Admittedly, not all were completely under the spell of these dichotomies, and a few did question their validity, not excluding the loudest proponents. Still, the frequency of their appearance indicates that these dichotomies functioned as a discursive framework within which serious anxiety found expression and realpolitik concerns could be articulated. Even in today’s academic study of the late Qing and early Republican eras, these pairs are often invoked as a framework, even if to be deconstructed. In this project, I attempt to dishabituate myself from this dichotomous framework. More specifically, if the irrelevance of traditional arts is not simply assumed, as Qiu was persuaded to do, then a different question comes to the fore: what are the meanings of such artistic production in the context of the turbulent last years of the late Qing period? In pursuing this question, I am less interested in the theoretical dismantling of dichotomies such as private arts versus public action, or traditional cainü versus the New Woman; rather, I am concerned with the historically specific problems of how to locate the relative positioning of the artist and how to understand her artistic production. My aim in this chapter is therefore to reinterpret the historical meanings of Wu Zhiying’s calligraphic practice, especially its formal side, by framing the inquiry in such a way as to allow us to reenter the field of cultural production during the last decade of the Qing era and early days of the Republic. I will attend to the constructions of the artistic persona in conjunction with the cultural and social formations of the time, which entails

West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 10–11. 7 See Hu Ying, Tales of Translation, “Introduction”; and Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 106.3 (2001): 765–803. Compared to her contemporaries, Qiu’s dismissal of women poets was not particularly strongly worded.

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a close examination of the specific conventions, constraints, practice, and prevalent methods of interpreting calligraphy. For it is within such a field that the artist forged her identity and inscribed herself in the unfolding of modern Chinese history. Building an Artistic Reputation What did it take to become a well-known woman artist in late Qing China? Two conditions appear to be essential: a strong background of literati “family learning” and new opportunities for women that became available toward the end of the dynasty. Like successful women artists in much of late imperial China, Wu Zhiying’s natal and marital families were both important sources for building her artistic reputation. At the same time, she also took full advantage of the rapidly expanding horizon for women that was peculiar to the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Wu was born in 1867 to a minor branch of the illustrious Wu family in Tongcheng, Anhui Province. Of her mother, née Zhang 張 (?–1905), we know very little except that she was from Fengxian, Jiangsu. Her father, Wu Baosan 吳寶三 (1838–90), was a poet-calligrapher without advanced degrees. In part because of his fine calligraphy, he was eventually promoted from a low-level scribe to the position of district magistrate in Yuncheng, Shandong Province. Being the only surviving child to her aging parents, Wu Zhiying received an excellent education.8 Her biographers never fail to mention how her precocity impressed her uncle, the best-known name in her paternal lineage, Wu Rulun 吳汝倫 (1840–1903), advisor to several major statesmen of the time, prominent educator, and standard bearer for an important school in Qing literature, the Tongcheng Archaic Essay (Tongcheng guwen 桐城 古文).9 All through her life, Wu’s self-presentation was as the rightful

8 Earlier sources of Wu Zhiying’s life are in Yan Fu’s “Lianfuren Wu Zhiying zhuan” 廉夫人吳芝瑛傳 (Biography of Wu Zhiying, wife of Mr. Lian), Dagong bao 大公報 (Public daily) (1 December 1908); and the privately published Wu Zhiying zhuan 吳芝瑛 傳 (Biography of Wu Zhiying) (Wuxi: Shuangfeige cangban, 1936) by Hui Yuming 惠毓明. She thus shares with the late imperial tradition of women writers and artists several important traits: to be born into a literati family with doting parents and to have no male siblings or weak ones. For examples of this pattern, see Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 213. 9 For Wu Rulun, see Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, ed. Arthur W. Hummel, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943–44; rprt., Taibei: Chengwen, 1967), 2:870–72. For Wu Baosan, see Wu Rulun, “Congxiong Yuncheng zhixian Wujun

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heir to her family learning ( jiaxue 家學). When she signed her name as “Tongcheng Wu Zhiying” in her poetry, essays, and calligraphic works as she always did, she was thus invoking more than just her native place; she was also implicitly invoking the orthodox, classical tradition that the Tongcheng school claimed. This self-presentation, unapologetic without being quite dramatic, produced a public image with considerable cultural authority. Yet it was not an unalloyed authority. For conservatives who considered themselves “holier (more orthodox) than thou,” her claim to this heritage was largely ignored.10 For modernists who specifically targeted the Tongcheng school as the stalwart of useless tradition, her self-association with it meant that another layer of meaning to her family learning was obscured in later interpretation, that is, an enlightened promotion of new learning and a pragmatic approach to its implementation.11 For Wu Rulun was himself keenly interested in Western learning and vigorously promoted Yan Fu’s 嚴復 (1854–1921) translation of Western culture. Following her uncle’s example, Wu played an active role in educational circles in Beijing and Shanghai and wrote the preface to the first Chinese textbook on modern geology compiled by her life-long friend, the American missionary educator Luella Miner (1861–1936).12

mubiao” 從兄運城知縣吳寶三墓表 (Epitaph for my paternal cousin Wu Baosan, Magistrate of Yuncheng), in Tongcheng Wuxiangsheng quanshu: wenji 桐城吳先生全書: 文 集 (The complete works of Mr. Wu from Tongcheng: Essays), 30 vols. (Taipei: Yiwen yingshu guan, yingyin, nd), 2:53–55. 10 She does not appear in Ma Qichang 馬其昶 (1855–1930), Tongcheng qijiu zhuan 桐城耆舊傳 (Biographies of Tongcheng notables) (1910s; rprt. Hefei: Huangshan chubanshe, 1990); nor does she appear in Liu Shengmu 劉聲木 and Xu Tianxiang 徐 天祥, Tongcheng wenxue yuanyuan zhuanshu kao 桐城文學淵源撰述考 (Genealogical and bibliographical study of Tongcheng) (1929; rprt. Hefei: Huangshan chubanshe, 1989). On legal and financial fronts, she had considerable trouble resulting from her claims to inheritance. See Hu Ying, “Writing Qiu Jin’s Life: Wu Zhiying and Her Family Learning,” Late Imperial China 25.3 (2004): 119–60. 11 Contrary to the common understanding that Yan Fu used Wu Rulun to fortify his own claims to classical learning, and thus the implication that Wu Rulun and the Tongcheng School represented nothing but tradition, Wu Rulun was in some ways more liberal in his attitudes toward Western learning than Yan Fu. For a reassessment of Tongcheng in Chinese scholarship, see for example, Wu Mengfu 孟复, Tongcheng wenpai shulun 桐城文派述論 (Discussions of the Tongcheng literary school) (Hefei: Anhui jiayu chubanshe, 1992). 12 Luella Miner (Mai Meide 麥美德) was six years Wu’s senior, and the two became friends in 1900. Although the rest of Miner’s Geology was printed in modern letterpress, Wu’s calligraphy is reproduced in collotype on the title page and throughout her fivepage preface, as was the custom in fine book printing. See Miner, Dizhi xue 地質學 (Textbook of geology) (Yokohama, Japan: Fukuin Printing, 1911).

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Aside from the prestige of her “family learning,” another major factor that contributed to Wu’s artistic reputation was the promotion by her husband, Lian Quan 廉泉 (1868–1932), although here again the gain is not unalloyed. Except for a brief stint as a lower-level bureaucrat in Beijing when Lian was a colleague of Qiu’s husband, Lian did not hold official positions but was primarily known for his publishing ventures and art collection, in addition to his own poetry and calligraphy. Theirs seemed to have been an exceptionally companionate marriage, husband and wife well matched in matters of temperament and artistic taste.13 They promoted each other’s literary and artistic reputations, and both published under the imprint of their shared studio, the Small Studio of Ten-Thousand Willows (Xiao Wangliutang 小萬柳堂). Lian was known occasionally to sign off his calligraphy pieces with a self-deprecating colophon: “Copying the Slender-Golden Style. Don’t know if it is as good as that of my wife Madam Wanliu.”14 But such playful efforts at promoting her reputation occasionally backfired. Gossip columnist Chen Dingshan 陳定山 (1897–?) claimed that when Wu became too well known and often pressured for calligraphy gifts, she routinely asked her husband or their friends to ghostwrite.15 Rather than arguing from verifiable information or stylistic analysis, Chen reasoned that “she was sickly and pressed by creditors and therefore did not have the leisure to practice art.”16 With further essentialist confidence, he concluded that Sun Hanya 孫寒涯, one of the reputed ghostwriters, being a man, had a naturally more “vigorous and forceful style. Once you recognize the style, there is no mistaking it.”17 Another popular writer Gao Baishi 高拜石 (1901–69) repeated the rumor that Lian ghostwrote most of Wu’s public works including the stele for Qiu 13 Lian Quan was the son of a close family friend, and the two were married in 1886 when Wu Zhiying was 19 sui. They and their contemporaries compared their marriage to that of Zhao Mingcheng 趙明誠 (1081–1129) and Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084–ca. 1155) of the Song dynasty: both men were essentially private scholars; both women noted for their artistic talent; both couples famous for their collections of art and especially of stele rubbings. 14 Zheng Yimei 郑逸梅, “Yutai shushi bubian” 玉臺書史補編 (Supplement to history of calligraphy from Jade Terrace), Shufa 2 (1981): 27. 15 Chen Dingshan 陳定山, Chunshen jiuwen 春申舊聞 (Old stories from Shanghai) (Taipei: Shijie wenwu, 1975), 52. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. Wu was indeed plagued by various ailments throughout her life and especially during 1907–09. Her lack of physical health, however, need not correspond with artistic feebleness, which can be easily demonstrated from the immense vigor of her poetry from this period, many of which are in the typical “heroic mode” (Ziliao, 2:566–68).

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and further claimed that Lian promoted his wife’s artistic reputation with the intention of increasing his own.18 Such rumors disputing the attribution of her works are not unusual for women artists both ancient and modern, more so if they were married to artistic husbands, and still even more so in the art of calligraphy. For women have been closely associated with calligraphy from its beginning. According to legend, the great former Han statesman Cai Yong 蔡邕 (133–92) who first made an art out of writing transmitted it to his daughter Cai Wenji 蔡文姬 (?–220), who then passed it to Zhong You 鍾繇 (151–230), who passed it to Madame Wei (Wei Furen 衛夫人) (272–349). Madame Wei formally began the tradition of calligraphy as an independent art form by reputedly authoring the first systematic treatise, the much-quoted “Diagram of the Battle Formation of the Brush” (Bizhen tu 筆陣圖)19 and by teaching Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (321–79), who became the greatest master of the entire tradition. In this tradition, where male and female contribution intermingled in a kind of mixed relay, we find repeated references to gender confusion: daughters penning documents for fathers, wives ghostwriting for husbands, husbands suspected of ghostwriting for wives but who were then suspected to have had their wives ghostwrite for them instead, and so on.20

18 Gao Baishi 高拜石, Guchunfeng lou suoji 古春風樓瑣記 (Miscellaneous records from the Old Spring-Wind Tower), 20 vols. (1959; rprt. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2003), 6:99–105. 19 For a succinct account of the cultural and political origin of calligraphy and the legends of transmission, see Michael Nylan, “Calligraphy, the Sacred Text and Test of Culture,” in Character and Context in Chinese Calligraphy, eds. Cary Y. Liu, Dora C.Y. Ching, and Judith G. Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 16–77; for the transmission from Wei Furen to Wang Xizhi, see Eugene Y. Wang, “The Taming of the Shrew: Wang Hsi-chih (303–361) and Calligraphic Gentrification in the Seventh Century,” in Character and Context, 144–45. The consensus is that Bizhen tu was most likely forged a few hundred years after the time of Madame Wei. See Richard M. Barnhart, “Wei Fu-jen’s Pi Chen T’u and the Early Texts on Calligraphy,” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 18 (1964): 13–25. 20 Zhao Mengfu’s 趙孟頫 (1254–1322) wife, the famed artist Guan Daosheng 管道昇 (1262–1319), is said to have excelled in calligraphy, her running script indistinguishable from that of her husband (Li E, Yutai shushi [mid-eighteenth century] (rprt. Beijing: Zhongguo dabaike quanshu, 1997), 24. Again, the calligraphy of Empress Wu (1115–97) is said to be remarkably similar to that of Emperor Gaozong of Song (Marsha Weidner, “The Conventional Success of Ch’en Shu,” in Flowering in the Shadow: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, ed. Weidner [Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990], 45). See also Robert E. Harrist, Jr., “The Two Perfections: Reading Poetry and Calligraphy,” in The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the

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In such situations of confusing gender identity, the woman artist was sometimes praised for her ability to be the equal of men; other times she was condemned for her usurpation of male domain. Conversely, to some the authenticity of her art was automatically suspect until proven otherwise, and oftentimes a critic would marshal the “evidence” of her gender as a fundamental boundary that she could not possibly transcend to create a particular art. For the metaphorical impulse in Chinese art criticism means that there has been a long tradition of ascribing a quintessential feminine style in calligraphy.21 Thus, critics would claim that this or that artist had a delicate style, “as if a beauty not able to support the weight of her silk dress,” as the conventional expression goes. Even Madame Wei, the alleged author of the first treatise on calligraphy, which famously employs military metaphors throughout, had her calligraphy described by later critics as “a beautiful lady decked-out with flowers, dancing and smiling in front of the vanity.”22 Thus we see a tautological argument: first, a particular style is feminized through metaphorical language; as the metaphor takes hold, works of particular artists become the embodiment of the metaphor and are made to fulfill the preconceived expectation. Over time, the metaphoric language becomes so conventionalized that critics not infrequently remark on how a woman’s style is unexpectedly unlike the feminine style, the unexpectedness nothing but the inevitable gap between conventional language and real artistic practice. Thus as Wu’s chosen calligraphic styles often did not conform to the usual image of the “decked-out lady,” the above rumors of disputations are not surprising. My point here is not to vouchsafe the authenticity of all her extant works but

John B. Elliott Collection, eds. Harrist and Wen C. Fong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 282–87. 21 The metaphoric impulse is such that one art is always being compared to other arts (painting, sword play), the human body (bone, sinew, flesh), nature (thunder, mountain, rock). Gender, being one of the cardinal categories by which knowledge is organized, is predictably often invoked to describe styles of poetry, calligraphy, and other arts. When the metaphor of femininity is used to describe male artists, which is sometimes done as in the case of the great Tang dynasty master Yu Shinan 虞世南 (558–638), the point is usually to commend his embodiment of the gentility of literati culture. For a discussion of the masculine and feminine as descriptive tropes, see Wang, 149–56. When the metaphor is applied to women artists, however, it usually connotes conventionally conceived feminine qualities such as delicateness, elegance, and so on. 22 Yuan Ang 袁昂 (5th–6th century), “Gujin shuping” 古今書評 (An appraisal of calligraphy ancient and modern), in Lidai shufa lunwen xuan 歷代書法論文選 (Selected essays on calligraphy from previous generations) (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1979), 75.

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rather to cast some doubt on her doubters through their unreflective use of the convention, and more importantly, to underscore the risk of equating the female gender with an over-determined “feminine style.” For the risk is not just a theoretical one, namely essentialism, but also a historically real one, for such an equation could both make or break a woman artist’s reputation. Keeping this risk in mind, we are in a better position to appreciate why Wu often chose to adopt styles not easily described as “feminine,” as we will see shortly. Aside from generic reasons, the disputation of Wu’s works is also linked to the increased visibility of women artists and writers at the time, which generated considerable excitement as well as anxiety. This visibility was in part due to vigorous promotion by men, a continuation of the pattern from late imperial times, but with some important differences.23 Previously, literati promoting women writers operated against the presumption that women’s writing (inner words) should not be transmitted outside. Women’s talent then became firmly and directly linked to nationalism and modern progress so that women’s education (and the subsequent public display of their talent) became a platform with very wide appeal as literati-intellectuals of diverse political stripes supported it even as they denounced this or that strain of learning as useless. Indeed, the cachet for female authorship was so high in the first two decades of the twentieth century that it was not uncommon for male writers to adopt feminine-sounding pennames.24 It appears that for the male writer and artist, still groping to define his own role in the modern era, the promotion/impersonation of feminine voice conferred a much-needed dose of authenticity through its association with modernity. In our particular case, it is clear that Wu’s reputation at the time carried enough authority to be thought of as serious

23 For a discussion of the late Ming literati promotion of courtesans, specifically in terms of the search for their own authenticity, see Wai-yee Li, “The Late Ming Courtesan: Invention of a Cultural Ideal,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, eds. Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 46–73. For a discussion of the late Qing counterpart, see Hu Ying, Tales of Translation, introduction and chap. 3. 24 A quick glance at any compendium of pseudonyms of the time reveals many instances of men using explicitly feminine pennames ending with the suffix nüshi 女士 or ko 子 as in Japanese. Among the seven frequently used pennames of Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1968), for example, two have the feminine nüshi suffix. See Zhang Jinglu 張靜廬 (1898–1969), Qingmo minchu zhongyao baokan zuozhe biming zihao tongjian 清末民初重 要報刊作者筆名字號通鑒 (A dictionary of late Qing to early Republican pseudonyms of important newspaper and journal writers) (Hong Kong: Zhongshan, 1972), 12.

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cultural capital, so much so that an intentional scheme was thought of as necessary to account for its existence. If Lian’s promotion was a double-edged sword, another source for Wu’s reputation was even more dubious, that is, the alleged patronage from Cixi 慈禧 (1835–1908), the last Empress Dowager. The occasion was Cixi’s seventieth birthday in 1904, which was made use of years in advance by people of many political stripes. Legend has it that Wu’s calligraphy, together with embroidery by Shen Shou 沈壽 (1874–1921), were singled out by Cixi for particular commendation as examples of “women’s work.” In the case of Shen, it was her husband’s ambition that drove the enterprise, and their efforts were well rewarded: Cixi bestowed a calligraphy scroll on them consisting of two characters, Fu 福 (good fortune) and Shou 壽 (longevity), the latter taken by Shen for her own name as an expression of gratitude for the imperial favor. On Wu’s side, imperial patronage was never mentioned in her own extant writing, nor is it clear who presented her work to Cixi. For Lian was hardly in a position to curry favor from the Empress Dowager, having signed the 1898 petition in support of the Emperor, and Wu herself had become a sworn sister to the soon-to-be radical revolutionary Qiu. In any case, by 1904 they were leaving the capital, Lian putting an end to his official career and joining many literati in reinventing himself as a modern entrepreneur. The only trace of Wu’s fame in garnering imperial appreciation is the legend, repeated by the same gossip columnists who are nonetheless keen on disputing the attribution of her works. In the unpredictable world of artistic reputation, rumors such as these, of course, have a role to play. More significant from the perspective of the woman artist, what came with imperial commendation was the rapidly broadening horizon for women at the time, for although the Empress Dowager herself would go down in history as an ultraconservative, her patronage of women artists/artisans occurred during the post-1901 New Policy era. It was part of an imperial effort to support women’s education and industry, itself a gesture in the direction of modernity, however belated and forced in historical circumstances and however ironic in hindsight. Without making the gesture of a grateful imperial subject as did Shou, Wu was nonetheless keenly attuned to current events and clearly not one to pass up opportunities for expanding her own horizon. In addition to family connections and imperial recognition, both of which have their drawbacks, as we have seen, a sure way of cementing one’s artistic reputation is of course to display it, to perform calligraphy,

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for example, in full view of the public. And when such opportunities presented themselves, Wu seized them. In 1902, in Beijing, she and a few others championed the “Women Citizens’ Donation” (Nüzi guomin juan 女子國民捐), a project that solicited donations from “women citizens” to defray the large reparation to the Eight Powers after the 1900 Boxer debacle. Legend has it that “in front of her Beijing apartment, stacking up old portmanteaus as [a] table and picking up a broken roof tile as [an] inkwell, Wu wrote out couplets for sale.”25 This colorful description, repeated in numerous accounts, begs the obvious question of why her calligraphy stand could not be furnished with proper table and inkwell. Some speculate that the setup is an object metaphor to indicate “that the country was broken ( po 破), our territory about to be partitioned (sui 碎).”26 In any case, what the audience saw was not just the calligraphic products but also the calligrapher in action—or even, the calligrapher in an act, with dramatic props no less: a marriage of ancient literati art and modern conceptual-performance art. There was Wu, hardly the image of a sequestered literati wife but an artist-activist, writing out couplets on some Peking street under the eyes of a sundry all. Part of the show, unarticulated but no doubt on the mind of the viewers, was the gender of the artist. As each stroke of each calligraphic character was brought into being by the precise movement of her wrist and her body, her political intervention into the affairs of the state was mirrored in her physical transgression of public space. What legitimated her transgression of normative gender behavior was the fact that her art performance was directly hitched to the cause of national crisis, without question the highest cause in the twentieth century. (Although even in premodern times national crisis was treated as a state of exception whereby normal rules of behavior may be suspended—witness the legends of Qin Liangyu 秦良玉 [1574 or 1584–1648] and others.) It demonstrates the women artists’ astuteness in taking advantage of the legitimation and running with it. Another highly publicized artistic performance happened in the spring of 1904, when Wu’s sword-sister Qiu was about to leave for Japan, and Wu and a few women friends held a farewell party at Taoran Ting 陶然亭, a popular gathering place in the south of the capital with

25 Liang Xiyu, “Wu Zhiying qiren qishu” 吳芝瑛其人其書 (The life and calligraphy of Wu Zhiying), Zhongguo shufa 中國書法 (Chinese calligraphy) 1 (1988): 15. 26 Ibid.

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a famous seventeenth-century pavilion. This gathering was recognized as a newsworthy event and was reported in the Dagong bao 大公報 (Public daily), the largest northern newspaper at the time.27 For the occasion, Qiu composed a poem with the following preface: Tao Dize invited a farewell gathering at Taoran ting. Zhiying my sworn sister made a large-character calligraphy couplet as record of our parting sentiment, which reads: “Time is like a white horse racing past a narrow opening, we have been together for barely a year./Wind blows and clouds disperse, scattering to distant parts of the sky.”28

Wu’s couplet, as Qiu’s preface indicates, is in large-character calligraphy (bokeshu 擘窠書), a highly performative style, for not only is it usually written in public where every hook and dot is under the scrutiny of onlookers but also the writing of the unusually large characters requires specially sized paper and brush and engages the artist’s whole body in the execution. In addition to expressing genuine parting sentiment toward a good friend in established poetic language, the choice of this performative script bespeaks of a flamboyant artistic persona, more than confident of her own mastery and clearly relishing the public choreography-like demonstration. Performing Scripts, Performing Roles Though not nearly as dramatic as the public display of art performance, the fact is that each time a calligrapher puts her brush to paper, with or without an immediate audience, she is already performing: for each choice of script is a performance of a particular artistic persona, a persona chosen for the particular occasion to be on view for posterity. Wu’s extant calligraphic oeuvre consists of about forty-six examples, ranging in formats of letters, couplets, poems, scrolls, copies of famous models, stele, and sutra. Among these examples, we find several script styles including seal (zhuan 篆), standard (kai 楷), and running (xing 行) scripts, the majority of them in standard script. In terms of social functions, they can be roughly divided into the following categories:

Dagong bao (10 May 1904); Ziliao, 1:337–38. Wu and Qiu became sworn sisters in February 1904 (Ziliao, 1:55). In this couplet, Wu’s allusions are respectively to Zhuangzi’s “Zhibei you” 莊子: 知北遊 (in Zhuangzi jishi, ed. Guo Qingfan [ Taipei: Heluo, 1974]), and Cao Xueqin’s 曹雪芹 Honglou meng (The dream of the red chamber) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1972), chap. 106. 27 28

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(1) scrolls or colophons as gifts to relatives and friends; (2) in fine book production, either an entire handwritten book or as front matter of a book or periodical, such as the 1908 title for the feminist journal Shenzhou nübao 神州女報 (Women’s journal of the divine land); (3) engraved on stele, such as Qiu’s epitaph and a stele of “national shame” on the campus of a women’s school in Wuxi in 1915; and (4) for a political cause, such as in 1911 when Wu donated the sales of her calligraphy for the women’s revolutionary army. Contrary to the popular image of calligraphy as an ossified art form irresponsive to real historical changes,29 the tradition was in fact constantly evolving, and in the more recent history of the Qing dynasty, it was a dynamic force at the heart of intellectual debates. To briefly review Qing calligraphy: the eighteenth century saw a great revival of interest in the tradition of epigraphy, closely linked to the prevailing intellectual search for authentic textual sources on an archeological, philological, and epigraphic basis.30 The resulting “stele style calligraphy” (bei 碑 or weibei 魏碑) steadily supplanted the orthodox “classical tradition” (tie 帖), represented by Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi 王獻之) (344–88). By Wu’s time, the supremacy of stele calligraphy had been well established, its compact and muscular style considered more authentic than the adulterated classical tradition. In this context, her calligraphy practice may be described as orthodox on the surface yet innovative in actual practice. By her own account, she is squarely in the orthodox tradition. Until her early 30s, she studied the styles cultivated by Dong Qichang 董其昌 (1555–1636), the late

29 Two of the reasons that calligraphy has been described as conservative are: (1) its internal conventions are impermeable to historical change or the intent of individual practitioners because the conventions are largely determined by the technicalities of the brush, ink, and paper, and the basic formations of the Chinese characters; and (2) its practice stresses imitation of earlier models. 30 The tie 帖 tradition has been canonical since the fourth century, even though the debate over the authenticity of Wang’s extant works has almost as long a history. Northern Wei stele (Wei-bei ) refers to a distinctive style of calligraphy found on steles made after the relocation of the capital of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534) to Loyang in the late fifth century. The collection of these steles started in the Northern Song but was vigorously revived in the Qing dynasty. See Rende Hua, “The History and Revival of Northern Wei Stele-Style Calligraphy,” in Character and Context, 104–31; and Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), chap. 3. For the Qing debate concerning authenticity and tradition between bei and tie, see Benjamin Elman, Classicism, Politics and Kinship: The Ch’ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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Ming master of the classical tradition par excellence. This is not surprising for two reasons: Dong was a great synthesizer of the tradition and a supreme stylist much admired by the later generations, including those who later switched to the stele style. Given Dong’s own position as heir to the Tang-Song tradition, it is also intellectually consistent with the orthodox line of the Tongcheng school, Wu’s “family learning,” with its advocacy of the “archaic prose” harkening back to the Tang-Song masters. Indeed, in the extant examples we find Wu’s copies of the Tang masters Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢 (557–641), Chu Suiliang 褚遂良 (596–658), the Song master Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105), and, of course, the supreme master of the classical tradition, Wang Xizhi. When the occasion called for the most formal presentation (usually ritual or religious), it was a fine standard script that she would choose to use, a script acquired through the painstaking practice of models by these masters. Her famous stele for Qiu and her copy of Surangama Sutra (Dafoding shou lengyan jing 大佛頂首楞嚴經) are both written in this fine standard script. For other, less formal occasions, she would choose a more individualized style of running standard script, partly derived from the Slender-Golden Style (Shoujin ti 瘦金體) made famous first by Emperor Huizong of Song 宋徽宗 (1082–1135).31 The Slender-Golden Style is a very fine standard script whose thin and sharp lines were written as if by a stylus rather than the brush; its trademark is the “tilting, undulating horizontal strokes” resulting from “the horizontal stroke terminated with a sharp thin hook moving in a reverse direction.”32 A minor branch of the standard script, it had never been a particularly popular one with either male or female artists. Indeed, the few who practiced it in the late Qing period formed a sort of club, which included Wu, her husband Lian, Lian’s protégé Sun Hanya 孫寒涯, and a couple of others. Compared with the original Slender-Golden Style with its signature courtly luxuriance, Wu’s version subtly incorporates a touch of the north stele, not its heavy square strokes but the angular and tensile feel of stele typical toward the end of the Northern Wei period. The resulting style is unique, its irregularity and apparent awkwardness approaches the ideal of the “raw” and “marvelous” that

31 Emperor Huizong is an ambiguous figure in history. His mastery of calligraphy and other arts often pointed to by later historians as evidence that his aesthetic absorption was responsible for his political incompetence. 32 Pao-chen Ch’en, “The Early Scroll Book,” The Gest Library Journal: Calligraphy and the East Asian Book, Special Catalogue Issue, 2.2 (1988): 67.

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Dong Qichang advocated, but from a direction that Dong could not have foreseen.33 Although her contemporaries continued to call her style “the Slender-Golden Style” because of the infusion of stele style, it is more metal than “gold,” more thin than “slender.” This “thin-metal” script Wu would use on many occasions, such as in her preface to Miner’s Geology and her own fine book production in Fanyinglou jishi 帆影樓記事 (Records of events from the Tower in the Shadow of Sails). To recapitulate the basic technical points that function as the foundation for later discussion of specific samples of her work: (1) for a virtuoso like Wu there was a wide range of available possibilities within which the choice of a particular script (or subscript) is closely tied to a corresponding artistic persona; and (2) the choice of a particular script is in part determined by the specific occasion at hand; as the occasion differed, the choices of script and persona differed accordingly. Art as Public Protest We now return to the months after Qiu was executed and her remains virtually abandoned. Early in 1908, Xu purchased the burial plot for Qiu by the West Lake and organized the memorial service, and Wu financed the burial, including the transportation of the remains, construction of the tomb, and erection of the stele. In making the stele, they further divided the task, Xu composing the epitaph and Wu writing it out in her renowned calligraphy. Indeed, the resulting stele would be remembered by contemporaries as “three great feats” (sanjue 三絕): unique life (Qiu’s); inimitable writing (Xu’s epitaph); and unmatched calligraphy (Wu’s handwriting). In the original construction, the unadorned black stone stele stands in front of a cylindrical tomb of approximately five feet high. The front of the stele reads: “Alas, here lies the Tomb of Qiu, Female-knight-errant from Mirror Lake” (嗚呼鑑湖女俠秋瑾之墓). The calligraphy was engraved by a respected local stone-cutter named Jiang Pinsan 蔣品三. The epitaph inscription on the back of the stele is in small standard script, not Wu’s famed “thin-metal” style but a more neutral standard script (figs. 2.1–2.2).

33

For discussion of Dong Qichang’s calligraphy and theory, see Bai, 20–25.

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Figure 2.1. Qiu Jin’s epitaph on the back of the 1908 stele. Source: Zhongguo shufa, 1981.

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Figure 2.2. Detail of Qiu Jin’s epitaph. Source: Zhongguo shufa, 1981.

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There are several ways to understand this choice, which to the modern viewer may appear singularly lacking in free individual expression. On the most basic level, when the standard script is executed correctly, behind its apparent orderliness there is tremendous dynamic power; thus the legendary Madame Wei describes one stroke as “a stone falling from a high peak” and another as “[an arrow] shot from a three thousand pound crossbow.”34 Further, in choosing this script, Wu was following the time-honored tradition of writing for commemorative stele in which standard script in highly ordered columns and rows of characters had been the norm.35 For such a choice invokes “the Confucian virtues of simplicity and gravity” as opposed to other artistic possibilities that may appear eccentric or overly inventive.36 In choosing the most standard of standard scripts, what is implicitly stressed is thus the moral “correctness” (zheng 正) of the calligrapher-commemorator and, by implication, the moral “correctness” of the one being commemorated: the two images of “correctness” at the juncture of the stele become mutually constitutive. If this interpretation of moral correctness appears overly conservative, we need only to remind ourselves that this choice carried particular significance in the specific historical context. For Qiu at the time was not a celebrated hero but an executed state criminal, whose name was to be forgotten just as her remains were to be abandoned. Wu’s stele counters this official judgment by performing an act of public memory, for since the beginning of epigraphic art, “the use of stone bespoke . . . a desire to have later generations judge the merits of a case now presumably fixed forever, since those currently in authority could not be trusted to display the requisite discrimination.”37 The “correctness” of this script underscores the “correctness” of this record of Qiu’s life. At the same time, the choice of this script is a performative selfpresentation of the artist. For in the established tradition of criticism, calligraphy is taken to be transparent and truthful in revealing the artist’s long-cultivated virtue, an authentic signature of the soul, so to speak.38

Barnhart, 16. Harrist, 11. 36 Ibid. 37 Nylan, 44. 38 Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE) famously proclaimed: “Calligraphy is the picture of the mind. Once the picture is manifest, who is noble and who is not becomes apparent”; Zhang Huaiguan 張懷瓘: 文字論 (714–60) again echoes Yang: “While in essay writing, it takes many words to express [the author’s] intent; in calligraphy, it takes but one character” (Lidai shufa lunwen xuan [Selected writings on calligraphy 34 35

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If the artist is female and of literati background, then this presumed correspondence becomes extraordinarily important, as conventionally defined feminine virtues determined the evaluation of her person as well as her art.39 Thus Wu’s choice of a precise small standard script creates a public persona for the calligrapher, one that she wished to be perceived by generations of viewers, a choice that bespeaks of the writer as a person of high seriousness and righteousness, dedicated to public service and the preservation of historical memory. The finely written stele is a visual display of artistic skills as public performance and public protest. The fate of the stele provides yet another indication of the artist’s strong historical consciousness. Soon after the memorial service in February that culminated in open political protest, the Imperial Censor Changhui 常徽 memorialized the throne for demolition of Qiu’s tomb and severe punishment of the two chief mourners. The ensuing publicity by the media eventually put a stop to official persecution of the mourners, although Qiu’s tomb was demolished on 11 December 1908. Sometime in 1908, Wu and her husband purchased a new house by the West Lake, and she named an upper-story room Beiqiu ge 悲秋閣 (Chamber for mourning autumn) (Qiu: autumn). For the next five years it housed the original stele for Qiu, which Wu was able to spirit away before the demolition. Using the name of this chamber as that of a private imprint, Wu published rubbings of the epitaph; thus even though the original stele could no longer be viewed by the public, copies of it were still in circulation. Furthermore, the stele rubbing appears under the same cover as news clippings on the demolition of Qiu’s tomb and protest articles by a wide range of literati/intellectuals, including the famous translator Yan Fu and the American missionary educator Miner.40 What made the publication of such politically

from the past]). For the close association between a particular style of calligraphy and Confucian virtues, see Amy McNair, The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 15. 39 For example, Weidner observes that the artistic works of Chen Shu 陳書 (1660– 1736) of the Qing period “might have slipped into semi-obscurity” “had she not been recognized as a woman of great virtue” (149). The operative word here is recognition, achieved through her son’s prominent position at court and his repeated presentations of her art to the throne. 40 Wu and Lian, Jianhu nüxia Qiujun mubiao 鑑湖女俠秋君墓表 (The stele for the female knight of Jianhu, surname Qiu) (Shanghai and Hangzhou: Beiqiu ge, 1909).

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sensitive material feasible was in part the fine art packaging. As noted earlier, stele rubbings had been coveted possessions among literati connoisseurs in the Song and again in the Qing dynasties. Even though this one is admittedly not an ancient stele, the printing method is the same, that is, early Qing style xieke 寫刻 (carved-as-written), modified by collotype, a recently imported Western technology. This improved method has the virtue of reproducing stele rubbing with the same visual effect as traditional rubbing, for example, white characters with black-inked background, but it streamlines the laborious process that could introduce inauthenticity.41 It was the highest quality reproduction available at the time. The resulting book was thus part art display and part political protest. Literati-Shanghai Modern Another factor, a much more material one, that enabled Wu to publish the epitaph was the capital and technology of her husband’s publishing firm. Not unlike some of his contemporaries, Lian transformed himself from a petty official at the Qing court to a modern cultural entrepreneur. When they first moved to Shanghai from Beijing in 1904, Lian and a few associates from the same hometown (Wuxi) opened Wenming shuju 文明書局 (Civilization Books), soon to become a major publishing concern and rival to the Commercial Press.42 It was Civilization Books with its comprehensive business front and its high quality lithographic and collotype printers that produced this volume, even though the imprint is the private Chamber for Mourning Autumn. Although Lian was the major stockholder and manager of the publishing company, Wu played a continuous and prominent role as well: at least nine books published by Civilization Books bear significant contribution from her, at minimum a substantial preface in her hand and several others composed entirely by her. Perhaps the most unusual item on this list is the 1916 edition of Records of Events from Fanyinglou (Fanyinglou jishi 帆影樓記事) and its 41 For a detailed discussion of stele reproduction and the problems of inauthenticity involved, see Shen C.Y. Fu, “Reproduction and Forgery in Chinese Calligraphy,” in Traces of the Brush Studies in Chinese Calligraphy (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1977), 3–39. 42 Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876 –1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 60–63.

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Figure 2.3. Catalogue of Wang Yun’s Paintings Owned by the Small Studio of Ten Thousand Willows.

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companion Xiao Wanliutang Wang Yun huamu 小萬柳堂王惲畫目 (Catalogue of Wang Yun’s paintings owned by the Small Studio of Ten Thousand Willows) (fig. 2.3). It is entirely hand written by Wu, this time in her famed thin-metal style, printed in collotype, which preserves the look of a handwritten book (black characters with white background).43 To add to this already sumptuous format, the volume is threadbound with indigo cloth and with the four corners neatly encased—the likes of which “have not been seen even in the fine reproductions of Song and Yuan rare books.”44 Similar to the reproduction of the Qiu stele which bears the private imprint of her chamber by the West Lake, this book bears the imprint of the name of their house in Shanghai, Fanyinglou 帆影樓 (Tower in the Shadow of Sails).45 But unlike the stele, the subject matter here is of no apparent public significance and thus proves to be particularly resistant to interpretation. Part of the resistance comes from the content, which is in stark contrast to the fine workmanship. The volume specifically records two instances of financial difficulty that Lian and Wu experienced: once in 1910 when Lian was gravely ill and sold part of their art collection to settle a debt (Catalogue of Wang Yun’s Paintings was thus composed by Wu as a sales record); and again between 1913 to 1916 when they were involved in a protracted legal dispute with the son of Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 (1823–1901), for which Records of Events was published in part to clear their name despite losing the legal battle.46 That the latter goal could have been achieved more efficiently with a newspaper advertise-

43 Wu and Lian, Fanyinglou jishi/Xiao wanliutang Wang Yun huamu (Shanghai and Hangzhou: Xiao wanliutang, 1917). 44 Dao Zaiwen, “Lian Nanhu yu Wu Zhiying” 廉南湖與吳芝瑛, Dacheng 大成 (1979): 33. 45 Handwritten books after the establishment of printing were usually created for aesthetic and/or devotional reasons. Frederick Mote points out that “superior calligraphers seem to have been all the more drawn to creating handwritten books as works of art” (in “Hand-written Books after the Invention of Printing,” Calligraphy and the East Asian Book 2.2 [1988]: 76–96, 77). 46 Wu’s uncle Wu Rulun was initially responsible for the publication of the complete works of Li Hongzhang, the Qing statesman and Wu Rulun’s one-time boss. When Wu Rulun passed away, Lian took over the project. The massive work was finally completed a few months after the founding of the new Republic. At this unfortunate time of publication, those who pledged to purchase did not all pay up. Li’s son then sued Lian, which led to Lian’s eventual bankruptcy. All through her life, Wu had insistently and unabashedly claimed to have “inherited her family learning.” See Hu Ying, “Writing Qiu Jin’s Life.” In the present case, she may be said to have inherited a family responsibility along with the learning.

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ment only serves to underline the striking incongruity. The particularly mundane and private subject matter thus plays a contrastive function to the exalted aesthetics embodied by the deluxe book format and fine calligraphy. Thus, when displayed on a tea table of the art consumer, the immediate content of the Records of Events is to be no more than the dull background against which the fine arts of calligraphy and book printing would shine, much as admirers of the private letters of the master calligrapher Wang Xizhi had eyes only for the beauty of his calligraphy and cared little for the trivial content (for example, how many oranges he offered to a friend).47 That her calligraphy is featured, rather than that of her husband who was also known for his fine hand, may be interpreted as further augmenting the purity of their literati taste. Presumably as an elite woman, she was beyond the touch of crass business concerns even as her brush describes the precise taels of silver in debt; the elegance of her characters on paper is to be a testimony to the elegance of their personages in life. Further, it is an elegance that defies worldly concerns. Indeed, it does not care to be “pretty,” that is to say, appealing to the uninitiated. For in this book production, we find the “thinnest” of her famed thin-metal style: its asymmetrical and elongated characters display so much angularity that they are decidedly not softened by curves or ornamentation, a style that one cannot in any way describe with the conventional feminine terms of “fluidity” or “exquisiteness.” Her style does not evoke a “decked-out lady . . . dancing in front of the vanity,” but rather the “lofty peak and deep valley, resonant with the rhythm of ancient trees and cold springs.”48 In contrast to the upright and understated Confucian model exhibited in the self-effacing standard script in the stele, here then is another standard script—and a corresponding artistic persona—not particularly au courant with the times, nor even “morally upright” by any stretch of the imagination, since its originator the Huizong Emperor infamously loved the arts but lost his kingdom. The emphasis instead is on a highly individualized style, privileging aesthetic value and independent spirit

47 One of the most treasured examples by Wang Xizhi contains only twelve characters: “I present three hundred oranges. Frost has not yet fallen. I cannot get any more.” For a discussion of Wang’s letters in the calligraphy tradition, see Harrist, “A Letter from Wang His-chih and the Culture of Chinese Calligraphy,” in The Embodied Image, 241–59. 48 Liang, 11.

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above all else and a corresponding, quasi-Taoist, “mountain-hermit” persona. Such exaggeratedly fine book production advertised the purity of producers’ artistic taste. And taste is of course a fairly reliable index of one’s class membership.49 The question is: which class? On the one hand, through deft manipulation of symbolic cultural capital, this fine book production subtly but no less loudly proclaims the membership of the producers in the most exclusive section of the traditional literati; at the same time, the capital and technology proclaim their membership in the new class of Shanghai modern entrepreneurs. As historian Christopher A. Reed observes, “Late imperial bookmen were vital to the creation of Shanghai’s print capitalism,” whose “equivocality, by which they claimed links both to an elitist cultural past and to a commercial present . . . suggests the continuing, if irreconcilable, vigor of both.”50 It is precisely this “equivocality,” a dual allegiance and a fluidity of identity that is evident in Wu’s self-presentation. Yet another position was made possible: political activist. For even in this avowedly nonpolitical project, her having braved government persecution to bury Qiu a decade earlier served her in good stead, something she mentions only in passing in the preface but which by then was part of her public reputation. Thus political courage and artistic independence became interwoven and mutually enabling terms in her public persona. Art in Meditation Another major item in Wu’s calligraphy oeuvre is her handcopy of the ten-juan Surangama Sutra, an item that once again does not fit well in the usual narrative of modern history. The writing of the Sutra began in September 1908 and continued until April 1909, a painstaking process of two pages per day, more or less continuously for six months. The first five juan 卷 of the Sutra were published in one volume at the end of 1908, and the next five juan, also in one volume, were published in early May 1909 (Yufo ri 浴佛日 [8 April]), both produced by the studio Xiao wanliutang.51 Although this is also a handwritten book and not a stele, it was printed as if it were the latter in a combina49 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), esp. chap. 3. 50 Reed, 18. 51 Wu and Lian, Dafoding shou lengyan jing (Shanghai and Hangzhou: Xiao wanliutang, 1908–09).

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tion of collotype and xieke, much like Qiu’s stele rubbing. This deluxe edition was received as a work of art for collection as well as a work of religious devotion.52 Thus through both calligraphy and printing, the Sutra acquires an aesthetic of antique elegance and authority that inspires proper reverence. The body of the Sutra was written in a very fine standard script, which as art historian Amy McNair argues “is closely bound to the transcription of religious texts,” a script type that “conferred on texts qualities of legibility, precision and formality.”53 Wu’s standard script is painstakingly careful, characterized by well-balanced and sharply defined brush strokes, the characters slightly rectangular in shape, with vertical strokes often slightly thicker than horizontal strokes, and each dot and hook in clear evidence. The characters are arranged in neat and vertical columns of twenty characters, each with precise format of equal space for each character, which follows the format long established in sutra-copying known as the Xiejing ti 寫經體 (Sutra-copying script). From the fourth century onward, this style’s meticulous formatting required that “heads of columns [be] precisely aligned and the same number of characters to each column. That facilitated counting the number of characters in each text to assure that nothing had been omitted,” which is said to “bring to the entire composition a sense of rectitude and regularity.”54 On more than one occasion in her life, Wu had copied sutras. One of her studio names, with an accompanying stamp, was Xiejing shi 寫經室 (Sutra-Copying Studio). A widely publicized photograph of her was taken in the Sutra-Copying Studio, with stacks of sutra scrolls on the side. Clearly this practice is central in her life, her art, and her self-presentation. Both Wu and her husband were deeply interested in Buddhism, and as lay believers in the literati class who took serious interest in Buddhism, they were not unusual in the late Qing period.55

52 Many legends surround the reception and circulation of this volume: one that it was presented to the Japanese Emperor; another that it was going to be exhibited at the International Exposition at San Francisco; the most substantial one was that the Governor-General Duanfang 端方 (1861–1911) acquired most of it. 53 McNair, 238. 54 Chen, 58–59. Although there does not appear to be a particular style of calligraphy associated with sutra-copying as McNair convincingly demonstrates, there is a fairly uniform formatting requirement. See Mote, 13; and McNair, 234. 55 For the movement toward lay Buddhism in the Ming and Qing periods, see Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University

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Copying a sutra, or “votive copying,” has long been regarded as a special act of devotion.56 Typically, less literate women copied the “precious scrolls” (baojuan 寶卷), a popular genre of Buddhist narrative, and the more erudite favored the Diamond Sutra ( Jingang jing 金剛經), Heart Sutra (Xinjing 心經), or the Surangama Sutra.57 We can thus locate Wu’s copying of the Surangama Sutra squarely in this devotional tradition (fig. 2.4). Given that she had long cultivated her art of calligraphy, the perfection of which “was thought to enhance religious efficacy,” this practice is then an ideal marriage of the religious and the aesthetic. Several reasons are ascribed to the copying of the Sutra, the most personal of which is as supplication for good health, as Wu, her husband, and their oldest daughter had been seriously ill around that time. Another reason is to propitiate Qiu’s spirit and bring it to peaceful rest.58 This reason of copying the Sutra reveals a particular understanding of Qiu’s death quite different from the later prevailing interpretation of it as a heroic and patriotic death.59 Repeatedly in Wu’s poems and letters written at the time, what is registered is the violence of the execution, a physically felt violence that remained unrelieved by political or ideological sublimation. Meditation through sutra-copying would thus give relief to the anguish of the startled spirit and that of the suffering body at the same time. Scholars such as Susan Mann have argued that Buddhism held central importance “in the community life and domestic regime of every mid-Qing householder,” specifically “reposition[ing] Confucian family values for women, enriching the spiritual and emotional experience of motherhood, widowhood, and old age.”60 This observation remains true for the end of the Qing era as well, as women like Wu found Buddhist practice helpful in mediating the traumatic experience of losing a close

Press, 1964), chap. 16. Wu’s husband later in his life went into a year-long retreat at a temple in Beijing and died there. 56 Harrist, 11. 57 See Mann, 190–91. 58 Wu’s preface mentions that Lian initially promised to build a stupa to house the Sutra, a promise that was not fulfilled due to his bankruptcy later. This practice of housing a sutra in a stupa was believed to prevent reincarnation in the less desirable realms (McNair, 233). 59 In Xu Zihua’s 1908 epitaph, Qiu is compared to Yue Fei 岳飛, and thus her death already acquired a hint of the “good death.” The decisive turn occurred when in 1912, Sun Yatsen pronounced it to be a “willing sacrifice for the nation” (殉國). See Hu Ying, “Qiu Jin’s Nine Burials,” 158–61. 60 Mann, 191.

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Figure 2.4. Surangama Sutra, hand-copied by Wu Zhiying, woman of Tongcheng.

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friend to violent death, a deeply troubling emotional experience that happened in the larger context of a particularly turbulent time. Sutracopying thus provided her with an effective ritual of response to physical and psychological trauma, an important aspect not addressed in the sublimated narratives of historical transformation. For the key difference, as observed by Benedict Anderson, between “traditional religious world-views” and “evolutionary/progressive styles of thought” is that the former give “imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering” whereas the latter answer such questions “with impatient silence.”61 In part because of the increasingly secularizing tendency in the twentieth-century discourse of modernity and the nation, a grand narrative that framed Qiu’s death as a glorious sacrifice to the nation, this particular act of mourning Qiu remains unintelligible. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as we have seen, Wu used her calligraphy to respond to rapid historical changes. One hundred years later, some of her responses are easier to read than others. In the writing and preservation of Qiu’s stele, her epigraphic art clearly offered the artist a previously unavailable model of action, namely, direct political participation. Before and after this dramatic high point of political protest and government persecution, Wu continued to write and publish. Although her works remain rich with interpretive possibilities as valid responses to history, they tend to be drowned out by the familiar narratives of the nation and modernity. What may be most opaque to us, looking at her works through later paradigms, are the implicit and unarticulated reasons of a given artistic choice (typical misread: the artist was passively following convention). Some of her choices of “unfeminine” calligraphic styles, such as for Qiu’s stele, choices that signal distance between her gendered body and the apparently disembodied art product, were meant to achieve maximum impact as intervention into the writing of history. Other times, as when she performed calligraphy on the streets of Beijing to solicit donations, the physical presence of the artist at that moment made her art inevitably embodied and engendered, thus achieving the different goal of modeling “the woman citizen” in action. Another point of opacity is the fluidity of an artist’s identity (typical misread:

61 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), 10.

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the artist was inconsistent). Thus, she appears to resist my own effort at pinning her down: she conforms to neither a conventional image of the cainü nor an unequivocal New Woman. While exhibiting certain qualities associated with the New Woman, her calligraphic practice clearly demonstrates that the continued relevance of traditional arts lies not just in its possible new content but also often in its modes of circulation and usage. Ultimately, Wu resisted the interpellations of powerful forces even as she engaged them (whether such forces were represented by imperial patronage or nationalist discourse). It was the very multiplicity of identities that enabled her to define each identity on her terms. For her, the persona of the literati artist was hardly the traditional relic as later generations tend to portray it but was instead a major resource for constructing a vibrant female subjectivity, flourishing in its multiple roles on the stage of modern Chinese history. True, this subjectivity was not quite the same “woman hero” that her friend Qiu and many others strived to embody. Nonetheless, she was politically active and intellectually engaged, her relative self-positioning allowing her maximum flexibility in her creative intervention in current affairs. Her calligraphy, not limited to the private beauty of the “decked-out lady,” served as a vital conduit for her engagement with artistic and spiritual needs as well as with the history that was unfolding around her.

CHAPTER THREE

RECONFIGURING TIME, SPACE, AND SUBJECTIVITY: LÜ BICHENG’S TRAVEL WRITINGS ON MOUNT LU Grace S. Fong Introduction Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883–1943), an acclaimed woman poet of the ci 詞 (song lyric) genre, belonged to a generation of gentry-class men and women who were educated in the classical literary tradition of the late Qing period but who rebelled against or rejected the social mores and ideological constraints that this class background and education imposed on them. In various ways, some of these men and women were pioneers in negotiating radically new identities within the destabilizing contexts of the massive geopolitical changes affecting China in their lifetimes. However, as the cultural values and practices of members of this generation were later perceived to be “traditional,” Lü’s professional achievements in life and her literary writing came to be obscured in the New Culture/post-May Fourth narrative of modern literature and the dominant discourse of nationalism and modernization in twentiethcentury Chinese historiography and literary studies. These privileged the contributions of those who wrote in the vernacular (baihua 白話) and marginalized the literary productions of those like Lü who persisted in writing in the classical language (wenyan 文言). Lü’s multifaceted life and writing demand recontextualization in the shifting, many-sided literary, social, and cultural developments in the first half of the twentieth century.1 This talented and complex woman belongs to the “alternative world of letters from the May Fourth period,” to borrow Geremie Barmé’s phrase, aspects of whose cultural dynamics are beginning to be recovered in current revisionist literary and historical 1 In a recent article, I published a preliminary study of this “New Woman” and her consummate poetry in classical forms; see my “Alternative Modernities, or a Classical Woman in Modern China: The Challenging Trajectory of Lü Bicheng’s Life and Song Lyrics,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 12–59. I am currently engaged in research for a biographical study of Lü Bicheng.

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scholarship.2 The more I research into the context of Lü’s writing, the more I discover that it was intertwined with the proliferation of new print media in the late Qing and Republican periods. Throughout her protean life, she sent her finely wrought song lyrics, beguiling travel writings, and crafted essays to be published and serialized in newspapers and magazines in cosmopolitan Shanghai as well as in Beijing and Tianjin. She did so when she was abroad and continued to do so after she had converted to Buddhism later in life.3 Lü’s adult life was emblematic of the fantastic possibilities for self-transformation of which other contemporaries might have only dreamed. She broke away from the sheltered life of a young lady in a scholar-gentry family—a guixiu 閨秀—to become one of the first women journalists and educators in the last decade of the Qing era. She was an independent “New Woman” (xin nüxing 新女性) who truly stepped into the public arena and chose to remain single all her life. In 1904, she was invited to be an assistant editor at the progressive newspaper Dagong bao 大公報 (L’Impartial) by its founder Ying Hua 英華 (1867–1926), and, through Ying’s efforts, in the same year she founded Beiyang Nüzi Gongxue 北洋女子公學 (Beiyang Women’s Public School), the first government-funded public school for women in Tianjin, with financial support from the office of Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1858–1916), then Governor of Zhili 直隸. In this context, she developed literary connections with Yuan’s younger son Yuan Kewen 袁克文 (1890–1931). At the start of the Republic, Lü was invited by Yuan Shikai to be his presidential secretary, possibly at the recommendation of Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921), with whom Lü had studied

2 Geremie Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai 1898–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 6. See also, among other studies, Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, eds. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002); The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, eds. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Old®ich Král (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001); and Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 3 Her Buddhism, her worldview in a broad sense, or the sense of transcendence, may have contributed to her cosmopolitanism in complex ways. I plan to examine this later articulation of Lü’s cosmopolitanism in a full biographical study. During her commitment to Buddhist practice late in life, she also experienced a tension in her attachment to writing ci 詞 (song lyrics), which she felt was not entirely in keeping with her understanding of the Buddhist precepts.

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English in Tianjin in 1908.4 However, if she actually worked for Yuan in this capacity, it is believed that she quit the post in 1915 when Yuan began his monarchist movement.5 Although we do not have the precise date for Lü’s move to Shanghai, she began to make her appearance there in the 1910s. Her mother and younger sister were living in Shanghai after 1911, where her mother died in 1913.6 Lü attended the periodic “elegant gatherings” ( yaji 雅集) of the classical poetry society Nanshe 南社 (Southern Society) in 1914 and 1917.7 A loose literary group based in the Shanghai area, the Nanshe was founded in 1909 by the poets Liu Yazi 柳亞子 (1887–1958), Chen Qubing 陳去病 (1874–1933), and Gao Xu 高旭 (1877–1925). It published the journal Nanshe congke 南社叢刻 (Collected printings of the Southern Society) with contributions of classical verse from its members. While the Nanshe was seen as a politically progressive, anti-Manchu literary society before 1911, with a strong antivernacular strain among its members, it came to be perceived as apolitical and conservative in the changing context of the Republican period. Around 1915–16, Lü also sought out the Shanghai-based Daoist master Chen Yingning 陳攖寧 (1880–1969) for his teachings on inner alchemy.8 It was also during these early years of the Republican period

4 When Yuan Shikai became President of the new Republic, he appointed Yan Fu as President of Peking University and also as consultant to the Gongfu 公府 (public court). See Wang Quchang 王蘧常, Yan Jidao nianpu 嚴幾道年譜 (Bio-chronology of Yan Jidao), in Minguo congshu 民國叢書 (Republican collectanea), 3rd ser. (rprt., Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1991), 77, 81–82. 5 This period of Lü’s life remains obscure. On 1 February 1928, the newspaper Shuntian shibao 順天時報 (The Shuntian times), when introducing her in the first installment of her travel writing, mentions that she “served as presidential secretary” in the Republic (3). 6 This information comes from her older sister Lü Meisun’s 呂美蓀 memoir, Wanliyuan suibi 葂麗園隨筆 (Random notes from Wanli Garden) (Qingdao: Huachangda, 1941), 90. (A copy is in the Shanghai Library.) This is the sister with whom Lü Bicheng had a life-long falling out after their mother’s death. The memoir avoids any mention of Lü Bicheng. 7 See the attendance lists in Yang Tianshi 楊天石 and Wang Xuezhuang 王學莊, Nanshe shi changbian 南社史長編 (History of the Southern Society: Long compilation) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1995), 373, 445. 8 Xun Liu’s dissertation on Chen Yingning’s life and teachings suggests they met in Beijing in 1916 when Chen traveled there. At the time, Lü wrote Chen a letter with thirty-six questions on the practice of female inner alchemy (nüdan 女丹), which he answered. Chen published these letters many years later in the Daoist journal Yangshan banyuekan 揚善半月刊 (Biweekly journal to promulgate goodness) 86 (16 January 1937) that he started in 1933. Chen also wrote annotations to the Song female adept Sun Buer’s 孫不貳 (11th–12th century) poems on female inner alchemy for Lü, which he

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that she transformed herself into a business woman in Shanghai, where she amassed immense wealth in as yet unidentified dealings with foreign merchants. She began to pursue an elegant hybrid lifestyle that combined the social and artistic pursuits of traditional literati, such as painting, poetry, and travel to scenic sites, with the luxuries of Western-style living and conspicuous consumption available in that vibrant cosmopolitan metropolis. In 1920, Lü took her first trip abroad to America and studied at Columbia University in New York, returning to Shanghai in 1922. In 1926, she again left for America, ending her Shanghai period. From there she continued on to Europe, where she traveled extensively. Attracted by the scenic beauty of the Alps, she eventually settled in Montreux, Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, between 1927 and 1933. The multifarious ways in which Lü positioned herself culturally is of particular relevance to current rethinking of the notion of cosmopolitanism as being not only a Western invention and a Western prerogative but also “an impulse to knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcend partiality that is itself partial, but no more so than the similar cognitive strivings of many diverse peoples.”9 In many ways, Lü’s life embodies the “cultivated detachment from restrictive forms of identity” denoted by the term cosmopolitanism.10 As a frame of reference for my reading of Lü’s writings beginning in her Shanghai period (roughly 1913–26), I quote below the main features of cosmopolitanism as summarized in a recent article by Amanda Anderson: “[C]osmopolitanism is a flexible term, whose forms of detachment and multiple affiliation can be variously articulated and variously motivated . . . [C]osmopolitanism endorses reflective distance from one’s cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity.” Historically,

published as a book in 1934. See Xun Liu, “In Search of Immortality: Daoist Inner Alchemy in Early Twentieth-Century China” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 2001), 95, 283–90. I wish to thank Sara Neswald for calling my attention to this study. However, the section on Lü contains serious inaccuracies concerning her life and career. Lü first published her poem to Chen after her visit and appended his reply in the 1918 edition of the Xinfangji 信芳集 (Collection of news-bearing flowers) (shi 詩 3a–4b). It was included among her shi poems in subsequent editions of her poetry. 9 Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, eds. Pheng Cheah and Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 259. 10 Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,” in Cheah and Robbins, 266.

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cosmopolitan detachment was characterized by distance from restrictive adherence, for example, the aloofness of the Cynics and Stoics in ancient Greece from the polis, and the Enlightenment disengagement from “constricting allegiances of religion, class, and the state . . . In the twentieth century . . . it is defined against those parochialisms emanating from extreme allegiances to nation, race, and ethnos.”11 Lü’s detachment from, even resistance to, the emerging early twentieth-century Chinese nationalist discourse in her self-definition, her insistence on literary language as capable of being a “universal” vehicle of communication, and her multiple affiliations with “culture” both Chinese and European also bear suggestive relations to what Joseph Levenson identified as the Confucian cosmopolitanism internal to imperial China, but which Levenson regarded as displaced and provincial in the new world climate.12 I believe a critical engagement with the extended notion of cosmopolitanism can be useful in the analysis of issues of subjectivity and identity articulated in Lü’s life history and varied writings. As early as 1904, when Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907) tried to persuade Lü to go with her to Japan to study and to work for the revolution, Lü insisted on her “cosmopolitanism” or “globalism” (shijie zhuyi 世界主義), a position that embraced a global perspective and ethnic difference. Eschewing the anti-Manchu Han nationalism, she held a sympathetic view towards political reform by the Manchu government.13 While movement and shifting identities characterize Lü’s journey through life, in this study I am interested in exploring the travel writings she produced during the period of her double life in Shanghai. As a talented literata and sharp business woman, she had elusive encounters with Westerners, foreign power, and global culture in the local semicolonial context of the treaty port Shanghai in the 1910s. In particular the poems and prose essay written in connection with her 1917 visit to Mount Lu (Lushan 廬山), the renowned scenic mountain in northern Jiangxi province, demonstrate both thematic changes in traditional genres as well as the hybrid quality of Lü’s cosmopolitanism.

Anderson, 267. Joseph Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 2–3. 13 See Lü’s essay, “Yu zhi zongjiao guan” 予之宗教觀 (My religious views), in Lü Bicheng ji 呂碧城集 (Collected works of Lü Bicheng), 2 vols. (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1929), vol. 2, juan 5:61. See also Fong, “Alternative Modernities,” 25. 11

12

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While she wrote a number of poems on travel to scenic and historical sites during this period, the language and sentiments of these poems were constructed much more within the conventional bounds of literati culture.14 In contrast, her travel essay “Sojourn in Mount Lu: A Sundry Record” (You Lu suoji 游廬瑣記) exemplifies a new genre for women and articulates in significant ways the interaction and contradiction between cosmopolitanism, national boundaries, and cultural forms.15 This tension is particularly apparent when the essay is read in comparison with her two Lushan poems written in the conventional literati mode and the traditional genre of Chinese travel writing. Inscribing Mount Lu as Cultural Space On 31 August 1917, Lü left Shanghai by boat to visit the famous scenic mountain range, located south of Jiujiang 九江 near the confluence of the Yangzi River and Lake Poyang 鄱陽湖, inland from Shanghai. There are at least two poems extant—one in the shi 詩 (poetry) genre and one in the ci genre—about her stay in Lushan. The travel essay “Sojourn in Mount Lu: A Sundry Record” was written or completed not long after her trip, probably between 1918 and 1920. It underscores the freedom and independence as well as the problematic and ambiguous identity and subject positions of a cosmopolitan Chinese woman in the contexts of intercultural encounters in the extraterritorial space of a famous summer resort built and inhabited by Westerners on Mount Lu. Kuling (Guling in pinyin [牯嶺]), the resort town where she stayed, 14 Examples of her travel poems include, “Dengwei tanmei shi shou” 鄧尉探梅十首 (Going to view plum blossoms at Dengwei: Ten poems); “Xiqueqian: You Zhe jing zhushan” 喜鵲遷: 游浙江諸山 (Xiqueqian: Visiting the various mountains in Zhejiang); “Linjiangxian: Qiantang guanchao” 臨江仙: 錢塘觀潮 (Linjiangxian: Watching the tidal bore at Qiantang), in Xinfangji (1918), shi 4b–6a, ci 19b–20a, and ci 20b. The poem “Chu Juyongguan deng Wanli changcheng” 出居庸關登萬里長城 (Going out of Juyong Pass to climb the Great Wall) (shi 9b–10a) is different in having two notes, one referring to riding in a car through a tunnel and the other to the signing of the Sino-Japanese agreement (Zhong-Ri xieyue 中日協約) in 1915. A poem on her visit to Zhongshan 鍾山 in Shaoxing 紹興, which is not included in her poetry collections, was apparently published in the magazine Shenzhou nübao 神州女報 (Women’s journal of Shenzhou) 3 (1913). I have not had access to this journal. 15 I discuss how travel essays emerged as a new genre of writing for women in the late Qing and early Republic periods in “Redefining Travel: Evidence from Women’s Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republic,” paper for the international conference on “Women’s Magazines, New Women and Reconfigurations of Genres: China in International Perspective (1898–1949),” Heidelberg, 28 April–1 May 2007.

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has its own peculiar version of colonial history.16 A scenic site in central Lushan, its original name Guniuling 牯牛嶺 (Bull’s Peak) was derived from its shape, which resembles a bull stretching its head to the sky. The name was shortened to “Kuling” by the British developer Edward Selby Little (late 19th–20th century), who, in 1885, “leased” the land on the mountaintop in perpetuity for $500. As he explained, “I gave the estate a new name, calling it ‘Kuling’ and making it the Chinese form of the English word cooling, so that the name might describe its destined use . . . the cooling off of overheated foreigners.”17 Little then sold off lots to missionaries and wealthy foreign residents from Europe and America to build their summer cottages and villas. A resort town perched atop the mountain was developed in the late 1880s, and by 1935, when the KMT reclaimed the lease, a thriving foreign community had long been established there with a post office, police station, hospital, school, churches, tennis courts, and the landmark Fairy Glen Hotel, all in Western-style architecture (fig. 3.1). This Western resort, however, was only accessible by sedan chair.18 Lushan, of course, has another, much longer indigenous history that was diffused in time and space. With mountain ranges reaching more than 1400 meters high and spreading over 300 square kilometers, its spectacular natural scenery was dotted with temples, hermitages, and the White Deer Grotto Academy (Bailudong shuyuan 白鹿洞書院) made famous by the Song Neo-Confucian scholar-official Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) who taught there. In addition to its celebrated scenery, Lushan was regarded as an ideal site for reclusion and spiritual cultivation and had exerted a strong allure to literati-scholars through the ages. These literati-scholars left countless poems and travel records about

16 The information for the sketch below is gathered from “Lushan zhi lü” 廬山之旅, in Zhongguo shanshui wenhua daguan 中國山水文化大觀 (Survey of Chinese landscape culture), eds. Duan Baolin 段保林 and Jiang Rong 江溶 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1995), 419–37, esp. pp. 421–22; and Tess Johnston and Deke Erh, Near to Heaven: Western Architecture in China’s Old Summer Resorts (Hong Kong: Old China Hand Press, 1994), 54–57. 17 Quoted in Johnston and Erh, 56. 18 Johnston and Erh, 57; Liu Na 劉納, Lü Bicheng pingzhuan zuopin xuan 呂碧城評傳 作品選 (Biography of and selected works by Lü Bicheng) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1998), 145n6. As the children of missionary parents, my colleague Professor Paul Austin and his elder brother attended the American-built school there from 1948 to 1950. He remembers vividly being carried in sedan chairs to and from Kuling, and his mother staying at the Fairy Glen Hotel when she came to visit them. The Fairy Glen Hotel is now a convalescent home for military personnel.

Figure 3.1. Map of Kuling (Guling), Lushan. Source: Historic Lushan, the Kuling Mountains, eds. Albert H. Stone and J. Hammond Reed (Hankow: Arthington Press, Religious Tract Society, 1921).

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their visits to the site and captured its wonders in painting, making it one of the most inscribed landscapes in literati culture. Some of the most famous cultural figures associated with the site are the eminent Buddhist monk Huiyuan 惠遠 (332–414) and the iconic hermit poet Tao Qian 陶潛 (365–427), who both had their abodes nearby. The poem “Gazing at the Waterfall on Mount Lu” (Wang Lushan pubu shui 望廬山瀑布水) by Li Bai 李白 (701–62) and “Inscribed on the Wall of Xilin Temple” (Ti Xilin bi 題西林壁) by Su Shi 蘇軾 (1036–1101), in particular, immortalized this mountain in cultural memory.19 Xu Xiake 徐霞客 (1587–1641) and Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568–1610), two inveterate literati travelers of the late Ming era, were among many who left written records of their visits to this celebrated site.20 In imperial China, women were by and large excluded from such strenuous excursions to mountains except when they sometimes went on religious pilgrimages.21 But this did not stop literary women from textual encounters and literary engagement with well-known landscapes and scenic sites.22 When traveling by boat to Anhui to join her son at

See Peng Dingqiu 彭定求 et al., Quan Tangshi 全唐詩 (Complete Tang poems) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 1837; on Su Shi’s poem, see below. 20 See Xu Hongzu 徐弘祖, “You Lushan Riji” 游廬山日記, in Xu Xiake Youji 徐霞 客遊記 (The travel records of Xu Xiake), 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982), 1:24–29; Yuan Hongdao, “Ru Donglin si ji” 入東林寺記 (Record on entering Donglin Temple), “Yunfeng si zhi Tianchi si ji” 雲峰寺至天池寺記 (Record of going from Yunfeng Temple to Tianchi Temple), “Foshou yan zhi Zhulin si ji” 佛手巖至 竹林寺記 (Record of going from Foshou Cliff to Zhulin Temple), “You Sheshen yan zhi Wenshu shizi yan ji” 由捨身巖至文殊獅子巖記 (Record of going from Sheshen Cliff to Wenshu’s Lion’s Cliff ), “You Tianchi yu Hanfan ling zhi Sanxia jian ji” 由天 池踰含嶓嶺至三峽澗記 (Record of going from Tianchi over Hanfan Ridge to Sanxia Gorge), “Kaixian si zhi Huangyan si guanpu ji” 開先寺至黃巖寺觀瀑記 (Record of going from Kaixian Temple to Huangyan Temple to watch the waterfall), and “Zhi Lushan ji hou” 識廬山記後 (Colophon: Written after record of Lushan), in Yuan Hongdao ji jianjiao 袁宏道集箋校 (Collected works of Yuan Hongdao: Annotated), 3 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghi guji chubanshe, 1981), 3:1137–47. See also the two records—Anon., “Lay Scholars of Hermitage Mountain” (ca. 400), and Yun Jing 惲敬 (1757–1817), “Record of travel to Hermitage Mountain” (1813)—translated in Richard Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 67–71 and 413–16. 21 See the two chapters from the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan 醒世姻緣傳 (Marriage destiny to awaken the world), translated by Glen Dudbridge, “Women Pilgrims to T’ai Shan: Some Pages from a Seventeenth-Century Novel,” in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, eds. Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 39–64. 22 See examples of women “Armchair Travelers” in Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 224–26. 19

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his magistrate’s residence, the poet Gan Lirou 甘立媃 (1743–1819) saw the southeastern peaks of Lushan for the first time as her boat moved along the northern passage of Lake Poyang. Her poem inscribes her encounter—both textual and visual—with this much celebrated mountain: Gazing at Mount Lu as My Boat Passes Nankang Traveling on the river day after day I face misty hills, The Peak of Five Elders feels like kin as I point and look. I wished to climb this famous mountain so much it had entered my dreams, Now, finally, I am seeing the true face of Mount Lu.23 舟過南康望廬山 江行連日對煙鬟, 五老如親指顧間。 名嶽欲登曾入夢, 果然真面見廬山。

The poet’s familiarity and sense of closeness with Five Elders, in addition to playing with the peak’s name, derive from prior textual encounters and present physical proximity. The last line engages with Su Shi’s famous poem inscribed on a temple wall during his excursion to Mount Lu, particularly with his comment on the relativity of perception in the second couplet: Inscribed on the Wall of Xilin Temple Looked at horizontally it forms a range, but from an angle it forms peaks, Far and near, high and low, each one is different. The reason I don’t know the true face of Mount Lu Is because I am standing right on this very mountain.24 題西林壁 橫看成嶺側成峰, 遠近高低各不同。 不識盧山真面目, 只緣身在此山中。

The third line in Gan Lirou’s poem suggests that before this journey she could only fulfill her desire to climb this famous mountain in a dream. Even now, she was only passing by Mount Lu and catching a glimpse of it from her boat. However, by reworking Su Shi’s renowned lines she celebrates the visual contact by turning the limitation of movement into 23 Gan Lirou, Yongxuelou gao 詠雪樓稿 (Drafts from the Tower of Reciting Snow) (1843 edn.), 4.2a, in Ming Qing Women’s Writings . 24 Su Shi, Su Shi shiji 蘇軾詩集 (Poetry collection of Su Shi), ed. Wang Wen’gao 王文誥, 8 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 4:1219.

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a privileged viewing position. Because she is looking at the peaks from the distant perspective on the boat (rather than amidst them like Su Shi), she is able to claim that she is seeing the true face (zhenmian 真面) of the mountain. At the same time, the syntax of the line also suggests the reading: “Now, after all, with my true face I am seeing Mount Lu.” The term “true face” is made to do double service and refers to the physical reality of both her person and the mountain towering in the distance coexisting in the same space-time. Lü’s shi poem “On Climbing Mount Lu” follows very much in the thematic tradition of the ascent of a mountain as a spiritual, transformative experience developed by male poets. It also invites an allegorical reading.25 The sensory perceptions (visual and aural) index a kind of spiritual experience. At that height, the poet’s vision is elevated and all encompassing, and her hearing is purified by the sound of nature: On Climbing Mount Lu I went alone to the lofty peak, Patterned boots scratching traces of moss. I let my gaze take in the whole blue sky and green hills, Cleansing my ears is the gurgling sound of the stream. In aged autumn come fierce wind and thunder storms, But trees and rocks stand nobly in the empty mountain. In this vastness what worries are there? Arriving here I want to forget words.26 登盧山作 絕巘成孤往, 放觀盡蒼翠, 秋老風雷厲, 煩懮渺何許,

鸞靴破蘚痕。 洗耳有潺湲。 山空木石尊。 到此欲忘言。

At this rarefied summit, the poet finds a broadening of vision, purity of mind, strength, and freedom from anxiety. The vegetation high on the mountain withstands destructive forces. She is away from the dusty world (of Shanghai) and expresses the desire to leave behind her thoughts and worries. The term “forgetting words” (wangyan 忘言) originates in the 25 See Pauline Yu’s commentary on Wang Wei’s 王維 well-known poem “Climbing to the Monastery of Perception,” in The Poetry of Wang Wei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 134–35. 26 Lü, “On Climbing Mount Lu,” Xinfangji (1918), shi 1a. This poem on Lushan is placed as the first shi in all editions of Lü’s poetry. It is difficult to discern any rationale for Lü’s arrangement of her poems. They do not follow any neat chronological, formal, or thematic order.

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Daoist text Zhuangzi 莊子 (Master Zhuang) and was made even more familiar by the ultimate couplet in Tao Qian’s “Twenty Poems Written after Drinking Wine, #5,” which articulates a state of harmony and transcendence: “There is truth in all this/I want to explain but have forgotten the words.”27 In this cultural context, Lushan holds immense appeal as an inspiring, spiritual space. Lü’s other poem, a song lyric on Mount Lu written to the tune pattern “Qinyuanchun” 沁園春, as I have discussed elsewhere,28 also manipulates the well-established classical convention of writing about the sublime experience of landscape. For ease of reference, I quote the lyric below: The secluded dwelling is naturally hidden. Listening to hoary pines in the myriad valleys They turn into the sound of heaven even with no wind. Locked in on all sides by mountain mist, Though there’s no rain it is always cloudy. By the winding railing, a flowing rainbow Where the high tower rises like a piece of jade. At times I see the lovely shadow of a startled wild goose. In the peaceful night I faintly hear the sound of the phoenix flute Come wafting across, so cool and clear. How often can I ascend here in this floating life? Let me gather the misty vines into my persistent verse. Let the recluse come and go For none is host and none guest. While idle clouds drift There is no past or present. Hard to summon the yellow crane Still lingering among beautiful red blossoms. Looking back there is no limit to heaven or the world. Feeling rueful in vain How can I prove my past karma? I want to beg the mountain spirit.29

27 Tao Qian, “Twenty Poems Written after Drinking Wine, #5,” in Tao Yuanming ji 陶淵明集 (Collected works of Tao Yuanming), ed. Lu Qinli 逯欽立 (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 89. 28 Fong, “Alternative Modernities,” 41. 29 Lü, Xinfangji (1918), ci 9a–10b.

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沁園春 如此仙源, 只在人間, 幽居自深。聽蒼松萬壑, 無風成籟, 嵐煙四鎖, 不雨常陰。曲檻流虹, 危樓聳玉, 時見驚鴻倩影憑, 良宵靜, 更微聞鳳吹, 飛度泠泠。 浮生能幾登臨? 且收拾煙蘿入苦吟。任幽蹤來往, 誰賓 誰主, 閑雲缥緲, 無古無今。黃鶴難招, 軟紅猶戀, 回首人天總不禁。 空惆悵, 證前因何許, 欲叩山靈。

This lyric exemplifies Lü’s consummate skill in manipulating the subtle poetics of the ci. She distils from the poetic repertory the purest representation of her own experience and yearning for transcendence, which is an appropriate response to rarefied realms of scenic beauty. The otherworldly peace and transcendence are suggested by the seclusion and misty elevation of the mountain valley, where even sounds seem filtered by the distance. Her two poems on Mount Lu can be read as exemplary cultural forms in the literati tradition. They inscribe a poetic language, aesthetics, and thematics that are not only recognized but also admired within an established horizon of expectation. Furthermore, they can also be read as expressing her spiritual yearnings in the context of her interest in the practice of Daoist inner alchemy at that time.30 In the preface to the above song lyric, we also begin to see her practice of inserting original foreign place names in the midst of a Chinese passage: In the seventh month of the year Dingsi 丁巳 (1917), I visited Mount Lu and stayed at Fairy Glen Lodge, which is translated into Chinese as Xiangu 仙谷 (Immortal Valley). Perched high in the hollow of the mountain the scenery is marvelous. The name is quite fitting. After touring around to my heart’s content, I am moved to thoughts of leaving this dusty world and composed this lyric on the spur of the moment.31

Lü sought independence and freedom in urban spaces with blurred or open boundaries signified by treaty ports such as Tianjin and Shanghai and here by the Fairy Glen Hotel in Guling (fig. 3.2). She effects subtle changes in her writing to articulate experiences of cultural crossings, but in the formal structure of lyric aesthetics, the translatability and fluidity of language and culture in these semicolonial spaces are controlled and sublimated. That is to say, the totality of the lyric form can assimilate the foreign presence by naming the original English hotel name in the context-oriented preface while the poem itself maintains a pure 30 Her spiritual yearning would reawaken toward the end of her life and find its fulfillment in the practice of Buddhism. 31 Lü Xinfangji (1918), ci 9a.

Figure 3.2. The former Fairy Glen Hotel in Kuling (Guling). Now a convalescent resort for military personnel. Photograph by author, summer 2005.

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expression of Chinese sensibilities. Her literary essay on Mount Lu is more transgressive. It instantiates cultural heterogeneity and hybridity in a way never before encountered in the writings of a woman with the classical education of a cainü 才女 (talented woman) in the late Qing period. Therefore, my reading below suggests that Lü took a more experimental and open approach with the literary language to record “foreign” experiences and encounters. Inscribing Mount Lu as Foreign Space In the record about her sojourn in Lushan, Lü began by declaring, “I had for many years admired the beauty of Mount Lu,” which expresses the Chinese traveler’s common sentiment regarding knowledge of and yearning for a visit to a well-known scenic site. She continued by giving the time of her departure from Shanghai, as she did in the preface to the song lyric above: “This year (bennian 本年), on the fourteenth day of the seventh month, I set out by boat from Shanghai to go there.”32 As mentioned earlier, however, her destination was the foreign enclave on Lushan. After disembarking at Jiujiang, she recorded that she “left on a sedan chair for Guling,” using the only means of transportation on a trek that took close to six hours. As they drew near, she experienced a foretaste of spatial misapprehension: the sedan carriers pointed out the hotel where I had a reservation nestled among the crags in a green mist. Since it was in sight, I thought that we could reach it soon. But the peaks turned and the road switched back. After many steep rocks and hanging cliffs, the hotel, now visible, now concealed, was still out of reach.33

When they finally arrived, her description of the scene reflects the Western presence there, epitomized by the foreign name of the hotel: We came to a street that was built along the mountainside. It had a post office, police station, and various shops. At the end of the street was a clean level road with the mountain scenery in front and clear brooks flowing past. A tennis court and garden had been constructed neatly by the side of the road, with the hotel there. The hotel is called “Fairy Glen” [English in the original], translated quite aptly as Xiangu (Immortal Valley).34

32 33 34

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” in Xinfangji (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1925), wen 文 10b. Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 11a. Ibid.

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After her arrival, the narrative quickly becomes perplexing in terms of temporal markings and unconventional in the structure of presentation, defying expectations that a Chinese reader would bring to a record of travel to Lushan. Rather than reaching the peak or a state of transcendence (as in the case of her poems) or experiencing the well-inscribed terrain by visiting famous temples and scenic spots as in literati travel records,35 Lü soon finds herself getting lost twice on the mountain paths. In this “foreign” space, the only Chinese presence are the sedan carriers who brought her there, the woodcutter who showed her the way back to the hotel when she lost her way during a walk on the day after her arrival, and, at the end of her stay, the monks who seem to hover briefly between the boundary of dream and reality during her rest at a temple on her last excursion to view a scenic spot. These “natives” are marginal, nameless local people and groups. The named inhabitants on this mountain community are all foreigners, specific individuals such as Mrs. Aigede 愛格德 who managed the hotel’s accounts; the Russian tea merchant Gaolikaofu 高力考甫 who was also staying at the Fairy Glen and took a walk with her; and Weiersi 威而思, the white knight, who saved her from being lost in the mountain wilderness a second time. As if to throw a veil on their true identities, the names of these foreigners are given in transliteration rather than in alphabetical spelling. Lü also records a couple of incidents involving Western children who were staying there with their parents and who seemed bent on pestering her with their antics. Lü appears to be the only Chinese person staying in the Fairy Glen Hotel: “During the day I heard the gurgling sound of the waterfall mixed with the twittering of European language next door, at night the chorus of strange birds and sad-sounding insects.”36 The sounds around her at night, whether of humans or creatures in nature, are strange and unfamiliar, suggesting a sense of underlying unease in this “foreign” space surrounded by nature. But she also seems entirely at home as she writes matter-of-factly about her daily routine: I had brought a book of physical exercises (ticao shu 體操書) in my travel case. My custom was, every morning after I finished exercising according to the illustrations, I would have breakfast, read the newspapers and do

35 36

See, for example, Yun Jing’s essay in Strassberg, 413–16. Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 11a–b.

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my morning toilet before going into the living room, and after lunch I would take a rest.37

By lodging in the thoroughly Western space of the Fairy Glen Hotel, Lü projects herself as a cosmopolitan woman who is constrained neither by her ethnic nor national identity. She takes for granted hotel services and amenities such as breakfast and daily newspapers, and the morning exercises she performs, following those in a “ticao shu,” suggest that she was doing physical education of Western import. But in another passage in which she describes how she inhaled (xi 吸) the mountain clouds that floated into her room through the open window, her action has strong Daoist overtones suggesting immortals imbibing roseate clouds (xia 霞) as their regular ambrosia. When she ventures out of this protected Western space to take a walk on the nearby mountain paths, however, she becomes disoriented. She wanders as though in some wilderness or supernatural realm, bereft of the security of inscribed landscapes and cultural markings from the past. About her first walk, she recorded: After walking for another li or so, the appearance of the peaks turned chaotic and wild (luanfeng cangmang 亂峰蒼茫). It was lonely and there were no human tracks. Looking around in all directions, there was only the hazy atmosphere of the mountains and the faraway sky reflecting each other. Being alone, I became afraid and didn’t want to proceed any more.38

At this point, a native inhabitant—a Chinese woodcutter—appears and guides her back. He is the only source of cultural history, or, more accurately, local legends, as he explains that the origin of the rocks with strange shapes in the mountain stream came from the construction of the First Emperor of Qin’s mausoleum. She quotes him and notes that he babbled along. Indigenous history comes to rest on a questionable knowledge of the past, while the “western-style buildings” ( yangfang 洋房) that come into view as she is led back to where she began her walk signify reality and civilization, a protected limit inside the wild terrain marked by an unreliable history.

37 38

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 13a. Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 11b.

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grace s. fong Shifting Temporalities: The Intersection of the Local and Global on Mount Lu

In this new hybrid space of Lushan, temporality is represented as multilayered and overlapping. Already in print media of the late Qing period, the Western solar calendar, the Gregorian system of marking time, came into use alongside the traditional lunar system. Some newspapers and magazines published in this period, such as the Dagong bao (founded 1902), for which Lü had been an assistant editor, indicated the Chinese and Western dates simultaneously. This adoption demonstrated an awareness and acceptance of a heterogeneous temporal and spatial world that paralleled and contained China and relativized it as a nation-state among others and its former universal time of the imperium as merely an alternate system. Even in some personal writings, notably the Travel Record of the Year Guimao (Guimao lüxing ji 癸卯 旅行記) (1903) by the gentry woman Shan Shili 單士釐 (1858–1943) discussed in Ellen Widmer’s seminal study, the dual system of dating was adopted and justified. (Shan, however, retained the sexagenary designation for the year in the book title.) Shan, who traveled to Japan, Korea, and then to Russia by train via Siberia while accompanying her diplomat husband, kept a day-by-day record of her observations. She praised the Gregorian calendar for its accuracy and efficiency but criticized those Chinese who used only the Western calendar in dating, a criticism that, as Widmer suggests, reveals her nationalist sentiments.39 The choice between the two dating systems in this transitional period, which served to mark different political and cultural positions, continued through the Republican period; the use of the Chinese lunar system functioned as a signifier of China’s distinct history and culture while that of the Western system signified the progressive temporality of modernity in this period. These varied uses—implicating issues of personal, national, and cultural identities—can be discerned to some degree in Lü’s You Lu suoji. In this essay, Lü shifts from one system to the other, creating a disrupted narrative sequence that effectively blurs the time between the occurrence of the recorded events and the time

39 I am grateful to Ellen Widmer for sharing with me her seminal study “Foreign Travel through a Woman’s Eyes: Shan Shili’s Guimao lüxing ji in Global and Local Perspective” before it was published in Journal of Asian Studies 65.4 (2006): 763–91. For Shan’s remarks on dating and on how the adoption of the Western dating system became a matter of concern to Qing officials, see Widmer, 776–77.

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of recording. Temporal ambiguity mirrors the spatial disorientation discussed above. At least three systems, or, more appropriately, ways of indicating time are used in the essay. The first is the Chinese lunar calendar, marking the “local” sense of time. The essay begins with the specific date of departure from Shanghai to Mount Lu—the fourteenth day of the seventh month, at the beginning of autumn according to the Chinese calendar. Hence her reference to the lingering summer heat on the journey and the night chill in the mountain. The year is given with a deictic—“this year”—pointing to the act of writing the essay as being in the same year when the journey was taken. We know this to be the year 1917, not from the essay itself, but from Lü’s preface to her song lyric on Mount Lu quoted above. Quotidian time, particularly how time is experienced and measured at night, is given in the traditional system of the five night watches, measured at two-hour intervals by a night watchman beating a drum or gong (between 7:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.). This system provides a point of temporal reference at night. For example, when she cannot sleep due to the oppressive heat during her overnight stay in Jiujiang, she gets up and onto the sedan chair at the “fourth night watch” (1:00–3:00 a.m.) for the last leg of her journey to Mount Lu. The following night, her first night on Mount Lu, she notes the contrasting chill on the mountain at the “fifth night watch” (3:00–5:00 a.m.).40 Finally, the duration of time taken for an action is indicated by the Western hour (xiaoshi 小時), such as the five hours it took on the sedan chair from Jiujiang to reach sight of the Fairy Glen Hotel. Later in the narrative, Lü makes the acquaintance of Weiersi (the German who would take her back to her hotel after she got lost while taking a walk by herself ). During a walk with Weiersi, she reflects on World War I and the fate of the German empire (see next section). In this context, time extended out of the geopolitical boundaries of China to mark the war in Europe (taking place in 1917 and ending in 1918). At this juncture, there is a self-conscious shift to the Western calendar at the beginning of the next paragraph: “By the middle of September of the solar calendar (Yangli jiuyue ban 陽曆九月半), I had been away from Shanghai for half a month.” Finally in the last paragraph, Lü remarks ambiguously, “As a long-term guest here I sorrowed over the

40

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 11a–b.

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times (shangshi 傷時).”41 By using the literary term “shangshi,” which conventionally implies concern for political conditions, Lü subtly laments the state of affairs both locally and globally, as China had become inextricably and unfavorably implicated in imperialist world politics. A personal dimension of time is also indicated during the journey but one that does not easily coincide with a personal history. When the boat passes by Xiaogushan 小姑山 (Little Aunt Hill) on the way to Mount Lu, Lü notes: “I recall I had passed here when I was young (tiaoling 髫齡). Suddenly more than ten years have passed.” However, the traditional term she uses—tiaoling, literally “the age with the hair hanging down”—refers to a preadolescent child whose hair is not yet capped or pinned up. In 1917, Lü was thirty-four-years old. She would have been in her early twenties when she passed by Xiaogushan before, hardly the age of a child. I argue that the use of both Chinese and Western calendrical systems and time markers and the apparent discrepancy in recording world events and personal history are signs of an emergent but unstable cosmopolitan consciousness—a culturally hybrid sensibility and perception, captured by an evolving literary prose. Desire and Subjectivity on Mount Lu The second time Lü Bicheng got lost on Mount Lu, it was no longer a Chinese woodcutter who came to her rescue but a foreign denizen of this resort town. She first narrates a similar process of becoming confused during an innocent stroll (obviously not having learned the lesson from her previous misadventure): After noon, I took a walk at the foot of the mountain. There were some lovely blue-colored mountain flowers growing in nooks and bends. Gathering them along the way, I gradually forgot how far I had gone. When I turned to look back, the sun was setting among a thousand peaks. The scenery was different from where I started. I couldn’t proceed because I had lost my way. I wanted to wait for a passerby but there was no sound of anyone around and the sun was sinking behind the mountains. Worried about where to go, I was beset by regret and fear.42

At this crucial moment, she continues:

41 42

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 14a, 15a. Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 12b.

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Just as I was hesitating, suddenly the green undergrowth at the bottom of the hill moved slightly and a Westerner, dressed in white, emerged with slow steps. He said to me, “I’ve been watching you for some time now from the hill ahead. You must have lost your way. Would you let me be your guide?” I thanked him gladly.43

In this episode, Lü constitutes herself as the object of a stranger’s voyeuristic gaze. The narrative holds promise as the beginning of a fairy-tale romance. The White Knight or Prince Charming comes to the rescue and wins the heart of the damsel in distress. She asks for his name—Weiersi. She notes that they conversed in English, but she discerned that he was German (presumably from his accent, which shows that even though she had not yet traveled abroad, she had great familiarity with the different types of English spoken in Shanghai). After he escorts her back to Fairy Glen, he presents her with a bouquet of purple flowers at parting, a quintessential Western romantic gesture. Her third walk is with Weiersi, who appears to have come for her as she runs into him at the hotel door. Accompanied by Weiersi, she does not lose her way this time. They walk and chat until they reach the Pavilion of Imperial Stele (Yubeiting 御碑亭), which, as the name indicates, had housed a relic from China’s vanished imperial past (fig. 3.3). At this historical site, Weiersi directs her line of vision to the brilliant setting sun that was rapidly disappearing behind the peaks, at which moment Lü bursts into a poignant contemplation of human impermanence against nature’s endurance, an apt literati response to a view from a height:44 This is not any less than seeing a person about to die. Indeed, why would I be glad to watch this? But the sun does not wear out even after countless ages. Since antiquity, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of people have come before us to watch, and they have all passed away.45

This cultural affect seems opaque to her Western companion (indeed the literary Chinese into which Lü translated her speech in English is dense with allusive terms and archaic elocutions). Weiersi remarked, “You are absolutely right. But what deep melancholy ( gankai 感慨)!” Lü writes immediately after his comment:

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 12b–13a. This is very much in the subgeneric mode of denglin 登臨 in shi poetry, “climbing to a high place to view.” 45 Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 13b–14a. 43 44

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Figure 3.3. The Pavilion of Imperial Stele on Lushan. Photograph by author, summer 2005.

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At the time, the war in Europe had broken out. Weiersi was waiting for news everyday, but he did not know that the fate of the German empire would be the same as this morning sun which was about to sink.46

This passage is crucial for dating the completion of this essay to after 1918.47 As her visit to Lushan is dated in the seventh month of the year Dingsi (1917) in the preface to her song lyric, her remark on the European war having broken out should refer to the United States having declared war on Germany in April and its troops arriving in France in June 1917, not to the official start of World War I in 1914. In turn, her comment on the fate of the German empire also indicates that she knew of Germany’s defeat by the Allied forces in the autumn of 1918, and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) in November that dissolved the German empire. Could this world event have prompted her to write or complete this essay? In this observation made more than a year after her stay in Guling, time and space expand in a global vision, which turns the sinking sun that she saw with Weiersi on Lushan into an omen for Germany’s defeat. Here, the expression of her sensibilities is very much shaped by the literati vision of sunset as a symbol of dynastic decline. When Weiersi invites her to go for a walk again some days later, she declines. The incipient attraction and desire are repressed but not without immediate signs of regret and somatized emotions: “Towards evening, there was heavy fog and I also felt out of sorts. Feeling enervated, I went to bed without eating dinner.”48 Further displacing the potential mutual romantic interest, the very next day, Lü goes for a walk to a remote scenic spot called Deer Ridge (Luling 鹿嶺) with an older Russian tea merchant by the name of Gaolikaofu. Not only does Lü not lose her way, she even encounters other foreign tourists with whom Gaolikaofu exchanges greetings, and he tells her they were Russian missionaries.49 Back at the hotel that evening, the account manager Mrs. Aigede teases Gaolikaofu about writing a love letter, an episode that flusters Lü.

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 14a. Also, this essay is not included in the 1918 edition of Xinfangji. However, Lü did not include any of her prose essays in that edition, some of which were written much earlier. The essays first appeared in the 1925 edition of the Xinfangji. 48 Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 14a. 49 Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 14a–b. 46 47

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Before returning to Shanghai, Lü decides to make a visit to Three Fold Spring (Sandiequan 三叠泉), which she had heard was the best scenic spot on Mount Lu. It is a long and harrowing journey by sedan chair through steep, slippery, and rocky mountains. Windy and cold when they arrive midday at a small temple, she rests in the Buddha hall while the sedan carriers go to the temple kitchen to cook their meal. Reality merges with dream space as the narrative tells of monks coming to chant sutras. Lü finds herself in a barren landscape witnessing a “Westerner with a white face and slight beard” commit suicide by jumping off a boulder because his country is defeated. She describes his head injury in vivid detail: His skull hit the ground with a cracking sound and he did not move. He probably was knocked unconscious. After a while he forced himself to get up. I saw that his skull had a dent because the cranium was probably smashed but the skin had not ruptured. I knew that he would not live. Because I respected him as a patriotic martyr, I went up to shake his hand while he still had some breath left. His spirit changed suddenly. He stood there for a long time without falling down. I was surprised and asked him, “What are you going to do?” I meant whether he was going to live or die. He answered, “Because of you I will endure death for a while.” After these words, blood gushed out from the top of his skull. It was fresh and dyed a deep red. I was startled awake in great fear. It was only a dream.50

Suppressed desires erupt into dreams. It is not difficult to see strong shades of Weiersi in this “patriotic martyr,” who dies not out of loyalty to his country but rather out of unrequited love. Or is it Lü who fears intimacy and therefore must kill the phantom of a love which might penetrate or take away her subjectivity, her sense of herself as a woman with hard-won independence and autonomy? On one level, she is assimilating him to the Chinese concept of zhong 忠, loyalty to the state, and the ultimate act of loyalism, suicide. Here we perhaps see the “internal” Confucian cosmopolitanism cited by Levenson at work, which civilized “barbarians” with cultural values. This oneiric attempt to assimilate the object of desire did not translate into acceptability in reality. When startled awake, Lü not only abandons the idea of continuing on to Three Fold Spring and returns instead to the hotel, where she says she “felt lost and didn’t know what to say”51 when asked about

50 51

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 15b–16a. Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 16a.

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this excursion, but she also makes the decision to return to Shanghai the next day, asserting her subjectivity over desire. Conclusion What do these encounters with foreigners on Mount Lu tell us about Lü’s experience of her ethnicity and subjectivity? She inserted herself as a cosmopolitan woman in the midst of Western expatriates and tourists, inhabiting their space, interacting with them on their own terms, using their language and customs. Yet a self-conscious sense of difference from time to time ruptures the placid surface of similitude. At the end of her outing with Gaolikaofu, who sang and whistled back to his compatriots up on a peak, she notes, for instance: “I could see very well how Western people know how to enjoy themselves.”52 Does this imply that, in comparison, the Chinese had a lack? Later, coming in between the two paragraphs narrating her first encounter with Weiersi and their second walk together is an incongruous passage describing the gorgeous appearance of an unnamed Western woman who arrived at Fairy Glen with a “fat guest”: At lunch the next day, a fat guest came with a beautiful woman. She had a noble demeanor and shone with brilliant charm. Each time she came to the dining hall, she had a change of clothing. It goes without saying her dresses were fantastic and beautiful: with translucent silk over her bosom, her shining wrists bare, she seemed like a peony covered by a light mist. The precious gem that hung on her breast was changed each day. If it was magenta color, then her dress, sash, handkerchief, etc., would all be magenta; if it was emerald, then everything would be emerald. She wore a high coiled-up chignon. One day, suddenly her cloud-like hair was let down, brushed at an angle across her forehead. It seemed like she was purposely imitating my hair style.53

This passage inscribes Lü’s gaze fixated on the voluptuous Western woman dressed in dazzling, bold colors and coordinated fashion. Lü’s description alludes to the legendary plump beauty Yang Guifei 楊貴妃 (d. 755), celebrated by the poet Li Bai as a luscious peony. Her ordered, controlled prose seems to reduce the beautiful Western woman into a mute object, merely an ostentatious display of sensuality and

52 53

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 114b. Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 13a.

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materialism. But her writerly control is belied by complex, conflicting emotions: admiration, disdain, envy, competitiveness. When the Western woman appears one day in a hairstyle that obviously copied Lü’s, the discovery of the reciprocal gaze cuts like a double-edged sword: it both flatters Lü and unseats her self-assurance. Lü’s wavy chinlength hairstyle, as seen in her photographs, is Western, which makes the Western woman’s changed hairstyle a copy of a Chinese woman copying Western styles (fig. 3.4). Yet, a sense of inferiority erupts as Lü ends the paragraph: She had ample comportment. Compared to her, I really felt like humble rushes and willow. A friend of mine said, “In the West, one comes to feel there are many beautiful women.” These are knowing words.54

Lü is keenly aware of the ethnic difference in build and appearance and conceded pride of place to women in the West. She seems to have admitted defeat here. Significantly, the 1925 edition of Xinfangji 信芳集, in which she published the “You Lu suoji,” is also the first collection of her writings in which she placed photographs of herself as front matter, constructing a kind of photo-autobiography beginning with the late Qing period in Tianjin, moving through Beijing, New York, and ending with Shanghai. Lü was clothed in elegant dresses, self-assured in her gaze, and, in all except the late Qing photograph, her bangs were “brushed at an angle across her forehead.” A new technological medium was appropriated for constructing new subject positions, in which Lü could lay claim to her beauty by reproducing and disseminating her image publicly and stare back at her imagined admirers and the empty space where desire could be expressed and await endless fulfillment. The writing of the Lushan essay, by projecting the experience of a Chinese woman sojourner in a “foreign” space within China, foreshadows Lü’s transformation of her literati tool into the modern genre of travel writing. The cosmopolitanism that she developed distanced her from any strong political or ideological affiliation. Her facility with a foreign language (English) gave her direct access to knowledge of and contact with segments of Western expatriate society in China. Her embodiment of the interpenetration of Chinese and Western culture informs the cosmopolitan subjectivity reflected in her writings.

54

Lü, “You Lu suoji,” wen 13a–b.

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Figure 3.4. Photograph of Lü Bicheng in Shanghai with Western hairstyle. Source: Lü Bicheng ji (1929).

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In 1926, the year following the publication of the Xinfangji, Lü would turn her Shanghai cosmopolitanism inside out by traveling to Europe as a single woman, seeking ever greater freedom and independence. Instead of writing a single travel essay, she would produce a series of travel records in literary language, serialized in the newspaper Shuntian shibao and the popular fiction magazine Ziluolan (Violet) back in China. In the space of self-exile, she constructed an inimitable persona of the cosmopolitan Chinese woman traveler, and her literary style continued to play an active role in an alternative world of letters after the May Fourth period.

CHAPTER FOUR

FROM “CAINÜ” TO “NÜ JIAOXI”: FEMALE NORMAL SCHOOLS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF WOMEN’S EDUCATION IN THE LATE QING PERIOD, 1895–1911 Xiaoping Cong* The political and educational reforms begun at the turn of the twentieth century marked the start of a century of transformation in China. However, when Qing dynasty reformers set out to create a modern education system in 1904, they excluded women and girls from public schools, upholding the traditional principle that female education, like all other female activities, should be confined to the home.1 But this situation changed very soon. Three years later, in 1907, the government decided to establish public schools for girls and women throughout the empire, under the slogan “women’s education is the foundation of citizens’ education” (Nüzi jiaoyu wei guomin jiaoyu zhi genji 女子教育為 國民教育之根基).2 For the purpose of training young citizens, both girls and boys, the government built up female normal schools. The establishment of female normal schools empowered women by opening the doors of public education to them and providing them with a legitimate role in the public domain as professional teachers, thus changing the position of women in Chinese society. By tracing the early development of girls’ schools during the waning years of the Qing dynasty and the process of establishing female normal schools, this chapter argues that the rise of women’s modern education

* This chapter is adapted from some sections of the author’s book, Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897–1937 (Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2007) and published here with the permission of the UBC Press to which the author’s sincere gratitude goes. 1 Xue bu 學部 (Board of education), “Mengyang jiajiao he yi” 蒙養家教合— (Unity of preschool and family education), in Xuezhi yanbian 學制演變 (Evolution of school systems), comps. Ju Xingui 琚鑫圭 and Tang Liangyan 唐良炎 (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991), 396. 2 Xue bu, “Xue bu zou xiang yi nüzi shifan xuetang zhangcheng zhe (fu zhangcheng)” 學部奏詳議女子師範學堂章程摺 (附章程), in Shiye jiaoyu, shifan jiaoyu 實業教育. 師範教 育 (Vocational education and teacher training), comps. Ju Xingui, Tong Fuyong 童富勇, and Zhang Shouzhi 張守智 (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994), 575.

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was a continuity of traditional female education rather than a pioneering project of Western missionaries. Traditional women’s learning, under strong nationalist sentiment and with partially borrowed content and forms from Western missionary schools, was extended to the public domain and integrated into state-building projects. The traditional education of nurturing talented women (cainü 才女) among gentry families in late imperial China and the imperative to create a modern Chinese nation-state led reform-minded elites to engage actively in establishing women’s public schools. In the meantime, concern about controlling women’s education and the training of teachers led the Qing state to intervene in the development of female education by building normal schools for women. It was nationalism and the state’s interest that played a key role in the transformation of women’s education and the establishment of teachers’ schools for women. The early development of girls’ schools from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century continued the late imperial tradition of women in poetic and prose writing,3 the acquisition of household skills, as well as the inculcation of moral values. Learning for the purpose of teaching young children was one of many considerations when it came to women receiving education in late imperial gentry families. However, it was because of state interest and male reformists’ promotion that the traditional idea that mothers taught their own children for family prosperity was singled out and transformed into the idea that female teachers (nü jiaoxi 女教 習) taught young citizens for the strength of the nation under the state’s guidance. “Teachers of the inner chambers”4 were thus transformed into educators in the public domain, and female normal schools were built to train female teachers for the sake of national prosperity. I. Women’s Education in Late Imperial Society: The Roots of Modern Female Education Imperial China in the eighteenth century developed educational programs for female elites with ideological and pragmatic purposes. Recent

3 See Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29.4 (October 2003): 399–454. 4 Here I am using Dorothy Ko’s translation for “gui shu shi” (閨塾師), “teachers of inner chambers.” Cf. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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scholarship suggests that some women began to gain access to education in late imperial China, especially during the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368–1911). Starting from the seventeenth century, talented women from gentry families in the Yangzi Delta region ( Jiangnan 江南) were involved in literary activities and female writers were well known among literate circles.5 In this cultured, urban milieu, high-level courtesans were also expected to cultivate elegant literary tastes.6 Evelyn Sakakida Rawski estimates that female literacy in the nineteenth century reached 2–10% of the total population.7 In some economically and culturally advanced areas, the female literacy rate might have been as high as 25%,8 and women in literati families no doubt enjoyed some of the benefits of the expansion of education at this time. Female education in late imperial China included a broad range of content. Susan Mann suggests that late Qing female education involved literate and nonliterate learning. Both were strictly limited to the domestic sphere, and there was no government involvement.9 At the same time, literate women were expanding the bounds of learning. According to Mann, the curriculum for the literate education of women during the Qing period was not limited to moral instruction written for women but also included classical texts and literature compositions, which were traditionally men’s study materials. Girls of elite families at an early age studied the same texts as their brothers.10 The traditional saying, “a woman is virtuous only if she is untalented,” was contradicted by practice, according to Dorothy Ko’s research on one 5 Ellen Widmer, “Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China 10.2 (December 1989): 1–43. 6 Ko, “Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women’s Culture in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China 13.1 ( June 1992): 9–19; again, see Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber, 29–112; Susan Mann, “Learned Women in the Eighteenth Century,” in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, ed. Christina K. Gilmartin et al. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 27–46; and Mann, “‘Fuxue’ (Women’s Learning) by Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801): China’s First History of Women’s Culture,” Late Imperial China 13.1 ( June 1992): 40–62; and Introduction to Writing Women in Late Imperial China, eds. Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2. 7 Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 6. 8 Rawski, 6–7, 140. 9 So far, the research on women’s education in imperial society has concentrated on women in gentry families in the Jiangnan area. We know very little about women in northern China or from lower gentry-official and petty-literati families. 10 Mann, “The Education of Daughters in the Mid-Ch’ing Period,” Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900, eds. Bemjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 20–27.

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group of talented women.11 Research shows that since the late Ming period, some male literati began to have a change in attitude toward women’s learning. They promoted the education and literary activities of their wives, concubines, daughters, and even daughters-in-law. Women showed talent in their writings and passed down this tradition to their daughters.12 This group of talented women, with the sponsorship of their male companions, formed a literary circle, in which their feelings and gifted minds flowed.13 Though a small number, some women taught at family schools in order to support themselves and their families. The experience of these women teaching in the domestic domain or selling their works for a living reflected the changing position of women in society in the eighteenth century.14 Besides literate education, nonliterate education included moral inculcation and domestic skills training and involved women of all social classes. Through this type of education, girls were surrounded by signs and symbols to remind them of their future duties. Different ceremonies such as footbinding, the Double Seven Festival Celebration 七夕, the sacrifice to Lei Zu (嫘祖),15 and dowry preparation taught girls to be good wives and mothers by staying at home, taking care of children, and putting to use the domestic skills they had learned.16 From Mann’s discussion, we may conclude that women’s education in the late Qing period was composed of three parts: literary study, moral teaching, and domestic skills training. Understanding these three subjects in traditional educational practices gives us an important perspective from which to view modern women’s education because literary study, moral cultivation, and housework skills training were also maintained as the three principal parts of the curriculum of modern girls’ schools in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Ko, “Pursuing Talent,” 9–39. Mann, “Learned Women,” 27–46; Mann, “‘Fuxue’ (Women’s Learning),” 40–62; and Mann, “The Education of Daughters,” 20–27. 13 See Ko, “Pursuing Talent,” 9–19; Mann, “The Education of Daughters,” 20–27; and Widmer, “Epistolary World,” 1–43. 14 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 115–42. 15 The Double Seven Festival 七夕 was held by and for girls on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. The ceremony was supposed to help girls get “spiritual assistance” to develop their household skills. According to legend, Lei Zu invented silk-making. She was regarded as the goddess of domestic skills. See Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 152, 170–71. 16 Mann, “The Education of Daughters,” 20–27. 11 12

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The goals of female education in late imperial society deserve attention because these goals figured centrally in the modern transformation of women’s education. There were several different purposes for promoting women’s education, including nurturing women’s talent, improving their status for marriage, bettering their ability to impart knowledge to children, backing up their husbands within the family domain, and maintaining family order. The most important reason for women’s education in the eyes of male Confucian elite, however, was maintaining family prosperity. Benjamin Elman’s study shows that throughout the Qing period, the rate of passing civil service examinations at each level was only 1.5–2.5% of candidates.17 The fierce competition involved in civil service examinations forced elite families to educate their sons as early as possible to improve their ability to pass the examinations. In children’s early education, mothers played an important role. Mothers were also expected to be the primary educators of their daughters, teaching them morality and housework skills. Chen Hongmou wrote, “A wise daughter will make a wise wife and mother. And wise mothers rear wise sons and grandsons.”18 Thus, the concept of the mother playing the role of teacher within the family received high recognition among male elites during the late Qing period. This tradition of women “as guarantors of household virtue and prosperity,” according to Paul Bailey, was the consideration of an “indigenous statecraft tradition” and became one important source for modern women’s education.19 However, Nanxiu Qian points out that women’s education in the modern era also had another source from tradition, the tradition of xianyuan 賢媛 (worthy, or virtuous and talented, ladies), which emphasized the literate culture of elite women in imperial history.20 All research shows that traditional women’s education in late imperial China, with its rich content and various forms, paved the way to the rise of modern Chinese female education in the early twentieth century.

17 Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Service Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 146–57. 18 Chen Hongmou 陳宏謀 (1696–1771), “Preface” to “Jiao nüyi gui” 教女遺規 (Bequeathed guidelines for the education of women), in Wu zhong yi gui 五種遺規 (Bequeathed guidelines of five kinds) (1742) (Shanghai: Jingwei shuju, 1935). 19 Paul Bailey, “‘Modernising Conservatism’ in Early Twentieth-Century China: The Discourse and Practice of Women’s Education,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 3.2 (November 2004): 217–41. 20 Qian, 399–454.

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xiaoping cong II. New Factors in Women’s Education: Missionary Schools and Overseas Students

In the mid-nineteenth century, Western missionaries introduced new elements into women’s education. These new elements included establishing missionary schools for girls and sponsoring female overseas students. These developments took place primarily in coastal areas. The first missionary school for girls in China proper was opened in 1844 in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province.21 By 1877, there were 38 missionary girls’ schools with 524 pupils.22 Missionary education for girls, however, was very limited until the 1890s. By 1896, there were 308 girls’ schools with 6,798 pupils.23 At the same time, missionaries also provided overseas study for both males and females. Historical records show that before 1895, missionaries sent only a handful of girls overseas for study.24 The appearance of missionary girls’ schools and female overseas students in the second half of the nineteenth century was quite distinct from late imperial traditional Chinese women’s learning in terms of student origin, motivation, the goal of training, and curriculum. At first, missionary schools encountered great difficulties in enrolling girls from elite families. In order to attract students, early missionary schools provided free tuition and board, even compensating the girls’ families 21 Chu Ji’neng 諸季能, “Nuxue xiansheng” 女學先聲 (A pioneer of girl’s schooling), Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern miscellany) 31.7 (1934): 23–27; Margaret E. Burton, The Education of Women in China (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1911), 35; Sun Shiyue 孫石月, Zhongguo jindai nüzi liuxue shi 中國近代女子留學史 (History of overseas study for female students) (Beijing: Zhongguo Heping chubanshe, 1995), 39–40. 22 Ida Belle Lewis, The Education of Girls in China (New York: Columbia University Press for Teachers’ College, 1919), 24. Another source says there were 2,064 students in missionary schools in 1877. See Lei Liangbo 雷良彪, Chen Yangfeng 陳陽鳳, and Xiong Xianjun 熊賢軍, Zhongguo nüzi jiaoyu shi 中國女子教育史 (History of Chinese women’s education) (Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 1993), 207. Lewis’s source may be more reliable because it was from contemporary missionary reports. Lei uses data published by a newspaper that was propagating women’s education in the late Qing period. 23 Lewis, 24. 24 Chu Ji’neng, “Jiawu zhan qian siwei nü liuxuesheng” 甲午戰前四位女留學生 (Four female overseas students before 1895), in Yangwu yundong shiqi jiaoyu 洋務運動時 期教育 (Education in China during the period of the Self-Strengthening Movement), comp. Gao Shiliang 高時良 (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1992), 369–75; Liang Qichao 梁 超 (1873–1929), “Ji Jiangxi Kang nüshi” 記江西康女士 (Bibliographic record of Lady Kang from Jiangxi), in Yinbingshi heji-wenji 飲冰室合集-文集 (Collected articles from Ice-Drinker’s Studio-Articles) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1932), 1:119–20; also see Weili Ye, “ ‘Nü Liuxuesheng’: The Story of American-Educated Chinese Women, 1880–1920s,” Modern China 20.3 ( July 1994): 318–24.

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in exchange for them to attend school. Such arrangements had special appeal for poor families.25 The situation shifted a bit during the 1880s, since by then a small number of female students attended not because of financial need but rather because of religious conviction.26 In the 1890s, the missionaries were able to adjust their recruitment strategy and turn their attention to girls and women from the upper classes.27 This shift in female education corresponded to the missionaries’ strategic change in their religious mission: searching for converts from the top down rather than from the bottom up. One sign of the changing class backgrounds of the girls who enrolled at missionary schools was the introduction of a tuition system. The earliest girls’ school in Ningpo, for example, gradually launched charges on board and tuition at the end of the 1880s.28 St. Mary’s Hall in Shanghai, a girls’ school established in 1881, was not very successful even though classes were free of charge and students were supplied with a stipend. By 1890, the school had only thirty-two students, but it started charging tuition after 1900, which signaled some improvement in admission as well as the change of the students’ origin.29 On the other hand, the missionaries’ education for upper-class women did not make

Sun Shiyue, Zhongguo jindai nüzi liuxue shi, 42–43. Chu Ji’neng, “Nüxue xiansheng,” 23–27. The author does not provide the background of these converts. 27 Shirley Garrett points out that before the end of the nineteenth century, missionaries failed to reach China’s upper classes successfully. In her book Social Reformers in Urban China: The Chinese Y.M.C.A., 1895–1926 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), she summarizes the content of a missionary conference in 1877, in which the missionaries felt that “missionary relationships with China’s upper classes still ranged from nonexistent to hostile. Most missionaries agreed that this lack of communication with the upper classes seriously impeded their work, but a remedy did not appear at hand.” Garrett concludes that “[o]n political, ideological, cultural, and intellectual grounds, missionaries seemed to assault the upper classes, and the upper classes fought back” (11). In the 1877 conference, several missionaries called for a change in strategy by teaching science in order to gain access to the upper class, but in the 1880s, only a few missionaries launched this type of experiment. Only in the 1880s, did they start to realize the problems of their old strategy and consider adopting a new strategy: “the best method was not to concentrate on the poor but to start as high as possible and work down” (Garrett, 22). The real change happened at the end of the nineteenth century, according to Garrett (23). See Garrett, esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 28 Chu Ji’neng, “Nüxue xiansheng,” 23–27. 29 “Sheng Maliya nü shuyuan xiaoshi” 圣瑪利亞女書院校史 (The history of St. Mary’s Hall), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao 中國近代學制史料 (Historical materials of modern Chinese educational system [second volume]), comps. Zhu Youhuan 朱有瓛 and Gao Shiliang 高時良, vol. 4 (Shanghai: Huadong Shifan Daxue chubanshe, 1989), 306–09. 25 26

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much progress until 1900. The most famous girls’ school, the McTyeire School for Girls (Zhongxi Nüshi 中西女塾), which was established in 1892 in Shanghai by missionaries, was specifically for Chinese upperclass women: “[I]t was the first school which charged parents regular fees for the board and tuition of their daughters while in school.”30 The American Methodist Church established a girls’ school in Fuzhou in 1859. During the early years of its existence, the school had only one student, but by 1888 it had thirty students. All students attended tuition free until 1894. In 1894, about one-third of the students in this school were child-brides (tongyang xi 童養媳), but by 1909 this group of students had become insignificant, amounting to one-eightieth of the student body.31 This change may reflect two possible tendencies of the school from the 1890s to 1900s: an increased number in enrollment and a reduced number of students from lower social strata. American Methodist Missionary reported in 1907 that its school for girls was ready to enforce tuition charges, regardless of students’ marital status and financial condition.32 The gradual exclusion of poor girls from missionary schools by imposing tuition fees indicates that the strategy of working with the upper classes had begun to pay off. But this strategy would need more time to show results. Enrollment records indicate that missionaries did not attract many upper-class female students until after 1900. The McTyeire School for Girls in Shanghai had only seven students enrolled in the first year.33 In 1900, only three students graduated from the school.34 St. Mary’s Hall had the same experience. In 1900, the school had only one graduate.35 Regarding an American 30 Walter N. Lacy, A Hundred Years of China Methodism (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1948), 149. In this statement the term “regular” is crucial because the Methodist Church reported that in the late 1880s most institutions made attempts to become “self-reliant” by gradually encouraging students’ parents to make small contributions to their daughters’ education—clothing, books, small cash allowances, and so on. They even encouraged students to work in schools or sell their handicrafts in order to subsidize their own schooling. I imagine that from the late 1880s to the early 1890s any kind of payment was “irregular.” These students differed considerably from the students in Chinese gentry-elite schools at the end of the 1890s, who not only paid their own tuition but also brought their maids to school. 31 Li Shuren 李淑仁, “Li Shuren ji Fuzhou Yuying nüzi xuexiao” 記福州毓英女 子學校 (Li Shuren’s journal from Yuying Girls’ School in Fuzhou), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 4:271–74. 32 Lacy, 158. 33 Ibid. 34 See Zhonghua Jidu jiaohui nianjian 中華基督教會年鑒 (The yearbook of Chinese Christians), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 4:296–97. 35 “Sheng Maliya nü shuyuan xiaoshi,” 4:307.

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Methodist school for girls in Fuzhou, Lacy notes that it was “Not till 1896 did it cease to be necessary to seek students and become possible to select students.”36 Apparently, the nationwide recruitment of girls by missionary schools during the decade of 1891–1900 was not very prosperous. Research shows that missionary schools did support the 1898 educational campaign for women’s education,37 which might have helped their recruitment, but the real development of missionary schools took place only after 1900, when Chinese gentry elites enthusiastically propelled the establishment of Chinese girls’ schools. Because the purpose of missionary education was to train assistants for religious missions,38 the curriculum in girls’ schools during the early period emphasized religious courses, world history, and basic knowledge of natural science. English language classes and Bible reading were emphasized while less attention was given to the study of the Chinese language.39 Courses on household skills, regarded by the Chinese as necessary to managing the home, were not included in the formal curriculum of missionary schools.40 This content was very distinct from that of the dominant stream of Chinese women’s education in the early twentieth century, which diverted from training “good mothers and virtuous wives” and training self-reliant women to promoting education for the rights of women and awakening women’s consciousness for the nation. The goal of the missionaries in educating girls also showed in their sponsorship of overseas female students. While only a few in number, these students focused their studies on medicine, which fit well into the agenda of the religious mission. After studying this group of early overseas students, Weili Ye points out that, “[r]ather than seeing their medical practice as a self-fulfilling career in the modern sense,” these

Lacy, 144. Qian, 404–05. 38 Chu Ji’neg, “Nüxue xiansheng,” 23–27; Sun Shiyue, Zhongguo jindai nüzi liuxue shi, 42. 39 See “Zhenjiang nüshu gongke jianbiao” 鎮江女塾功課簡表 (A brief curriculum of the Zhenjiang girls’ school), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 4:342–43; and “Shanghai Zhongxi nüshu zhangcheng” 上海中西女塾章程 (The regulations for the McTyeire School for Girls in Shanghai), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 4:299–302. 40 Ibid. Also see, “Xue Zheng ji Shanghia Zhongxi nüshu de kecheng” 薛正記上 海中西女塾的課程 (Xue Zheng’s memoir on the curriculum of the McTyeire School for Girls in Shanghai), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 4:303–05. 36 37

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highly educated women “looked at it essentially as a Christian service.”41 These women returned from overseas and actively engaged in missionary work by serving in and establishing hospitals; they had little to do with women’s education.42 Most of them never married and never had a chance to be wives and mothers.43 This practice was alien from the central values of women’s education in late imperial times and distinct from the goal of education promoted by Chinese gentry elites, which highlighted education as a way of nurturing women’s literary talent or training exemplar women to be wives, mothers, and primary educators. The missionaries’ overseas education of female students also differed from that of the government in the early part of the century, which would send female students overseas to enroll in teacher-training programs and stressed women’s roles as primary educators of young citizens to which I will return below. Despite their atypical nature, the establishment of girls’ schools and the sponsoring of early female overseas students by Western missionaries were of significance for women’s education in China in two ways. First, missionary schools brought the issue of female education, formerly confined within the domestic domain, to the public realm and heartened Chinese gentry elite to push previously existing female education into the public domain. Second, certain aspects of the missionary schools for girls were adopted by the Chinese gentry when setting up their own girls’ schools; for example, some courses of missionary schools were introduced into the curriculum of Chinese girls’ schools, and these schools also hired foreign teachers to teach these courses.44 As we will see in the following section, however, as change swept across China at the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese gentry elites were the driving force behind the transformation of women’s education. Under the imperative of nationalism, two distinct pedagogical streams

Ye, 322. Ye also notices that the mentality, goal, and practices of these returned overseas female students were different from those of later women’s movements. 42 Chu Ji’eng, “Jiawu zhan qian siwei nü liuxuesheng” 甲午戰前四位女留學生 (Four women who studied overseas before the first Sino-Japanese War), in Yangwu yundong shiqi jiaoyu 洋務運動時期教育 (Education in China during the period of the Self-Strengthening Movement), comp. Gao Shiliang 高時良 (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1992), 369–75. See also Liang, “Ji Jiangxi Kang nüshi,” 119–20. 43 See Chu, “Jiawu zhan qian siwei nü liuxuesheng,” 369–75. Of the four female students Chu studied, only one appears to have ever married. See also Ye, 324. 44 Chu, “Nüxue xiansheng,” 23–27. However, as we will see in a later section, the earliest girls’ schools set up by Chinese elites were quite different from missionary schools in terms of motivation and curriculum. 41

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converged, and the missionary experience blended with Chinese elite education to produce something new. III. Women’s Education in Diversity: 1895–1906 While Zheng Guanying 鄭觀應 (1842–1921) has been identified as the first spokesman for the general education of Chinese women, his ideas did not go much beyond training “virtuous women, virtuous wives and virtuous mothers (liangfu, liangqi, liangmu).”45 The publication of Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 (1873–1929) famous manifesto of 1896, “Bian fa tong yi” 變法通議 (A general proposal for reform), played an important role in the transformation of women’s education. In a section entitled “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women), Liang linked women’s education to the very survival of the nation. While it is difficult to unravel the patriarchal from the radical in this piece, Liang ambiguously asserts that “the weakness in this country (tianxia天下) is rooted in the fact that women are not educated.”46 As Qian points out, blaming women as the source for China’s weakness represented the view of the 1898 male reformers on women’s education, which saw women only as economic resources. Therefore, educating women, in the eyes of male reformers, like Liang himself, was a way “to restore Chinese pride, despite the recent humiliations.”47 From this approach, Liang accepted traditional ideas about mothers as the primary teachers of young children and transferred it into the notion of the mothers’ importance for raising decent men as citizens amid the resurgence of nationalism.48 In 1897, Liang wrote an announcement for the establishment of the Jingzheng nüxue 經正女學 (Girls’ School of Classical Principles), which was opened the next year in Shanghai by a group of local elites. In this announcement, he further detailed his idea on female education stated in “On Education for Women,” declaring that educated women benefited society in four ways: assisting their husbands, teaching their children, 45 Bailey, “Active Citizen or Efficient Housewife? The Debate over Women’s Education in Early-Twentieth-Century China,” in Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China, eds. Glen Peterson, Ruth Hayhoe, and Yongling Lu (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 318–47, 321. 46 Liang, “Bianfa tongyi: Lun nüxue,” in Yinbing shi heji-wenji, 1:37–44. 47 Qian, 403. Qian also points out that this perspective of Liang was not his own innovation but borrowed from British missionary Timothy Richard (1845–1919) and the American Young J. Allen (1836–1907) (403). 48 Liang, “Lun nuxue,” 40–41.

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benefiting their families, and strengthening the [Chinese] race (xiangfu 相夫, jiaozi 教子, yijia 宜家, and shanzhong 善種). Thus, the establishment of Jingzheng Girls’ School signaled the beginning of efforts to strengthen the country and promote the people’s intelligence.49 Liang belonged to the tradition of late imperial literati who promoted female education for the practical purpose of training wise mothers. By binding the nation’s fate to women’s education, Liang promoted women’s education by merging traditional ideas with modern, nationalist appeal. This link, however, was established on the basis that Liang excluded the cainü tradition from traditional female learning, as Harriet T. Zurndorfer discusses in this volume.50 Female reformers, on the contrary, embraced Western knowledge while maintaining their own tradition of xianyuan and cainü, which emphasized women’s selfexpression and intellectual independence.51 Unfortunately, as shown below, women reformers’ voices were inundated into the high tide of nationalism and urgent state-building programs of the 1902 New Policy Reform, which adopted the male approach of 1898 in promoting women’s public educational system.52 The Jingzheng Girls’ School, established by local elites in Shanghai in 1898 following Liang’s view, admitted students from age eight to age fifteen with basic literary skills. This requirement limited students to girls from gentry families. The regulations of the school stated that, “Although the school advocates the equal education among all classes and no discrimination in terms of different social status, opening this school is regarded as a pioneer action; this school is training teachers for the future. Therefore, it is necessary to select women from good families” (liangjia guixiu 良家閨秀). The founders and financial supporters of the school were all from official literati families, and the first group

49 Liang, “Chang she nü xuetang qi” 倡設女學堂啟 (An announcement on establishing girls’ schools), Yinbingshi wenji, 2:19–20. 50 Harriet T. Zurndorfer, “Wang Zhaoyuan (1763–1851) and the Erasure of ‘Talented Women’ by Liang Qichao,” in this volume, pp. 29–56. 51 See Qian, 400–02. 52 Bailey points out that it was the “modernising conservatism” that dominated the female educational project in the early twentieth century. This “modernising conservatism” was partially inherited from previous statecraft groups who considered women’s education to play a critical role in domestic domain. See Bailey, “‘Modernising Conservatism,’ ” 217–41. This view, on the one hand, indeed points out the root of modern education for women; however, it could only partially explain the Qing court’s enthusiasm for building female normal schools.

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of students were female members of these families.53 Jingzheng school’s regulation that forbade students from “bringing their own maids to live with them”54 provides another indication of the social background of the students. Chen Pingyuan’s chapter in this volume also indicates that when female education resurged in Beijing after the Boxer Rebellion, schools were full of girls from elite families.55 By enrolling girls from the gentry-elite class, the Jingzheng School, as a pioneer of female schools, followed the late imperial tradition of women’s education. As we will see below, the imperial tradition, including literary study, moral inculcation, and domestic skills training in female education, was not soon shaken off.56 The campaign for women’s education suffered a severe setback after the failure of the 1898 Reform. However, a new tide of female education emerged with the commencement of the Qing New Policy Reform in 1902. Although the educational reform of 1904 established a male-dominated school system that excluded female participation in public education, female education resurfaced as an unexpected result of the establishment of a public education system for boys. The 1904 regulations stated, “The aim of teaching 教 ( jiao) is to teach women the principles of being wife and mother [. . .] Girls should not go to school in groups or parade in the streets and markets. They should not read too many Western books or mistakenly learn foreign customs. This is so that they won’t start the trend to choose their own spouses and

“Si ci choubei huiyi jiyao” 四次會議紀要 (Records for four preparation meetings), in Wuxu shiqi jiaoyu 戊戌時期教育 (Education in China during the 1898 Reform period), comps. Tang Zhijun 湯志鈞 and Chen Zuen 陳祖恩 (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1993), 192–201. 54 “Nü xuetang zhangcheng” (1897), in Wuxu shiqi jiaoyu 戊戌時期教育 (Education in China during the 1898 Reform period) comps. Tang Zhijun and Chen Zuen 陳祖恩 (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1993), 188–92. 55 Chen Pingyuan, “Male Gaze/Female Students: Late Qing Education for Women as Portrayed in Beijing Pictorials, 1902–08,” trans. Anne S. Chao, in this volume, pp. 315–47. 56 Xia Xiaohong’s remarkable work on Jingzheng Girls’ School underlines the influence of missionary schools on recruiting teachers and developing curriculums. The school was meant to be an ideal institution “combining Chinese and western educational thoughts.” See Xia, Wan Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo 晚清女性與近代中國 (Women and modern China in the late Qing) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004), 3–37. Indeed, changing opinions about female education drew on both Chinese elite and missionary ideas during this period. Chinese elites did adopt the form of missionary schools and some elements of their curriculums, as I mentioned in this section. However, missionaries were also changing their original scheme in order to satisfy the demands of Chinese gentry elites. A further study on changing curriculum and student origin at missionary schools for girls might provide more insight on this issue. 53

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to disrespect their parents and future husbands.” On the other hand, the government acknowledged the necessity of women’s education. “If women of the entire country do not learn, then education of mothers (mujiao 母教) would not be improved, children would not have strong bodies, and their characters and behaviors would not be good.”57 This kind of education, however, was to be exclusively practiced at home. “Girls can only be taught at home, either by the mother or by a tutor, so that they are able to have practical literacy.”58 The government intended to direct female education through controlling the content and the publication of special textbooks for women and girls who studied at home. Despite all of the concern about the impropriety of girls attending school, the 1904 regulations acknowledged that new public kindergartens needed female teachers and caretakers who had been trained in new-style schools. Young boys, who had always been taught at home by their mothers in elite families, would now be attending public kindergartens. Thanks to the new school regulation, there was both an opportunity for the state to begin indoctrination earlier than ever and a need for women to step out of the inner chambers as salaried professional teachers. The attempt to extend male formal education to younger ages had unintended consequences. Although in reality only a few kindergartens were established in the 1900s, and a handful of boys may have attended the kindergartens, it created a legitimate reason for those reform-minded elites to endorse female schooling. After the Qing court launched the New Policy Reform in 1902, private new-style girls’ schools flourished in the Jiangnan area and the Zhili region (present Hebei Province), as well as in inland provinces such as Hunan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Jiangxi, Shandong, and even Guizhou and Yunnan.59 Women’s education during this period displayed great diversity in theory and practice. Western ideas about women having rights to receive education and reformist ideas about training “good mothers and virtuous wives” 賢母良婦 (xianmu liangfu) attracted both male and female reformers.60 The government, on the other hand, Xue bu, “Mengyang jiajiao he yi,” 396. Ibid. 59 See section of “Ge sheng jiaoyu hui zhi” 各省教育彚誌 (Education news in provinces), in Dongfang zazhi 1.1, 3, 5–6, and 11 (1904), and 2.9 (1905). 60 The connotation of “good mothers and virtuous wives” that had been deeply rooted in Chinese tradition was profoundly different from that of the Japanese term. As Liang said, a woman’s duties were “xiangfu jiaozi ” (相夫教子), assisting one’s husband 57 58

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advised women to stay at home, learning from textbooks peopled with both traditional and updated female moral exemplars.61 Different opinions and practices appeared with a common accent on the role of the mother and her duty to the nation at this time.62 A 1902 article published in Nübao 女報 (Women’s journal), “On Promoting Girls’ School,” echoed Liang, saying that the country’s fate depended on women’s education. It urged the government to establish a national school system for girls.63 Another article published in Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern miscellany) emphasized moral teaching in women’s education so that women would stay loyal to their family duties. Only if women fulfilled their family duties were they regarded as having also accomplished their duties to the country. This article, which promoted the goal of women’s education to be “good mothers and virtuous wives,” stressed that women’s duties after receiving education were still

and teaching one’s sons, which echoed Chen Hongmou’s call for women’s education. Certainly the mother’s role as the child’s primary educator was universally endorsed in imperial China. As Joan Judge points out, Japan’s “good mothers and virtuous wives” were expected to stay at home fulfilling maternal and wifely duties that would make an indirect contribution to the nation, whereas radical Chinese feminists were calling for Chinese women to participate in the nation’s political life and make a direct contribution to the country in education and in other public domains. See Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalism and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,” The American Historical Review 106.2 ( June 2001): 756–803. In fact, the idea that women could serve the country directly was not the monopoly of only radical feminists: state-built female teachers’ schools legitimized women’s service in public schools. Some women writers asked for being equal to men by participating in social and political activities and taking responsibility for the nation. Many reformminded male elites also strongly supported women’s role in public education. This direct service to the country would be conducted through teaching in the public schools. While Japan’s highly traditional rationale for women’s new educational role proved a drag on emancipation, the far more enlightened attitudes of China’s elite cleared the way for women’s advancement into public education and political participation. In the 1898 reform period, female reformists had already displayed this difference (see Qian). I believe that the fundamental difference in female education between the Chinese and the Japanese had been laid much earlier and made much clearer. 61 Judge, “Meng Mu Meets the Modern: Female Exemplars in Late-Qing Textbooks for Girls and Women,” in vol. 8 of Jindai Zhongguo funü shi yanjiu 近代中國婦女史研究 (Studies on modern Chinese women’s history) (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan jindai shi yanjiusuo, 2000), 133–77. 62 Regarding the debate, Bailey provides some insight on the purpose for women’s education in early twentieth-century China (“Active Citizen or Efficient Housewife?” 318–47). 63 Dong Shou 董壽, “Xing nüxue yi” 興女學議 (On promoting women’s education), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao 中國近代學制史料 (Historical materials of modern Chinese educational system), comp. Zhu Youhuan 朱有瓛 (Shanghai: Huadong Shifan Daxue chubanshe, 1989), 2B:570–72.

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first and foremost within the family.64 Some advocators argued that because of the alleged ignorance and backwardness of women it was impossible to produce qualified citizens. This more moderate group promoted women’s education on the premise that educated mothers were required to teach a new body of citizens and inculcate a new spirit of citizenship.65 During this period, a small group of radicals advocated educating women as the means to encourage revolution. They fiercely denounced the policy of educating women to become “good mothers and virtuous wives,” which, they argued, only turned women into “high-class slaves to men.” These revolutionaries looked forward to the day when women would free themselves from men’s control and dedicate themselves to destroying the Qing government.66 It is worth discussing the voice of female writers during this period and their views on the purpose for women’s education. Although the discourse on women as “mothers of the citizen” was prevalent in the discussion, most female writers developed a strong sense that education meant taking responsibility and being independent, as Xia Xiaohong points out.67 A brilliant female student, Zhang Jianren 張肩任, sixteenyears-old when she published her article on Women’s World (Nuzi shijie 女子世界) in 1904, wrote that the purpose of women’s education was for equality, “to take personal responsibility same as men, to share responsibility to support family like men and to enjoy all natural rights that men have.”68 To the question of what women’s education should do to empower women, her answer stressed individual liberation and the physical strength of women. Zhang accented the urgent task of anti-footbinding and physical training for a strong body so that women

64 “Lun nüxue yi zhuzhong deyu” 論女學宜注重德育 (Women’s education should stress moral education), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:584–87. 65 Ya Te 亞特, “Lun zhuzao guomin mu” 論鑄造國民母 (On forging mothers of citizens), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:573–76. 66 Su Ying 蘇英, “Susu nüxiao kaixue yanshuo” 蘇蘇女校開學演說 (Speech at the opening ceremony of the Susu School for Girls), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:582; Ya Lu 亞廬, “Ai nüjie” 哀女界 (Women’s sorrow), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:577–81. 67 Xia 夏曉虹, “Daodu: wan Qing nubao de xingbie guanzhao—Nuzi shijie yianjiu” 導讀: 晚清女報的性別觀照—«女子世界» 研究 (Readers’ guide: Gender vision of women’s newspapers in the late Qing—a study of Women’s world ), in Nüzi shijie wenxuan «女子世界» 文選 (Selected reading from Women’s world), comp. Xia (Guizhou: Guizhou jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), 1–52. 68 Zhang Jianren 張肩任, “Yu chang pingdeng xian xing nuxue lun” 欲倡平等先 興女學論 (Promoting equality must promote women’s education first), in Nüzi shijie wenxuan, 137–38.

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would have more freedom and social space.69 This idea was entirely different from the concerns of many male elites and educators who prioritized moral training in women’s education.70 These women’s eyes also extended to a much broader society: a woman writer wrote to congratulate the success of British women winning suffrage, warning her peer sisters to be prepared for some day when two hundred million Chinese women would have the same right.71 At the same time, exemplary women presented in Women’s World, such as gallant heroines and devoted nurses, strongly encouraged women to win their rights and freedom through education.72 Women’s voices also became critical of male reformers’ approaches to women’s education. Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883–1943) fiercely criticized official Qing discourse set up by the 1904 school system that limited women’s education to assisting their husbands and teaching their children only. She argued that women, as the mothers of the citizens, had to raise and teach their children, but their responsibility should not end there. As members also of the country, women “should fulfill the same obligations, possess the same political consciousness, and enjoy the same rights as male citizens.”73 She mocked some officials’ attempts to build women’s schools for training nannies and governesses as merely a way to produce new types of slaves for rich families.74 These female voices showed that before the state government became involved in female education in 1907, women themselves were looking for more diversified purposes for participating in modern education, and they were full of hope and imagination about their future. Becoming teachers might be considered as one, but not the only, option for which they were looking. Journalism, for instance, became another popular choice. Lü worked as an assistant editor of Dagong bao 大公報 (L’impartial).75

69 Zhang, “Ji jiu jiachen nian nüzi zhi fangfa” 急救甲辰年女子之方法 (Urgent way to save women in the year of Jiachen 1904), in Nüzi shijie wenxuan, 148–49. 70 “Lun nüxue yi zhuzhong deyu,” in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:584–87. 71 Liu Ruirong 劉瑞容, “He Yingguo funü de xuanju quan wen” 賀英國婦女得 選舉權文 (Congratulation to English women for their suffrage), in Nüzi shijie wenxuan, 157. 72 See Xia, Nüzi shijie wenxuan, 241–68. 73 Lü Bicheng nüshi 碧城女士, “Lun mou du zha youzhi yuan gongwen” 論某督 札幼稚園公文 (On some governor-general’s report on kindergartens), in Nüzi shijie wenxuan, 161. 74 Lü, 161–62. 75 See Grace S. Fong’s chapter “Reconfiguring Time, Space, and Subjectivity: Lü Bicheng’s Travel Writings on Mount Lu,” in this volume, pp. 87–114.

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Chen Xiefen 陳擷芬 (1883–1923), Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907), and He Zhen 何震 (1884?–?) even published their own news periodicals. The above variety was also embodied in educational practice during this period. Several of the most famous girls’ schools are selected as examples to represent different ideas of women’s education. For example, Wuben nüshu 務本女塾 (Nurturing Roots Girls’ School), established in Shanghai in 1902, was one of the earliest girls’ schools. It represented moderate elites and inherited the idea of the 1898 reformists that women’s education could lay a foundation for a strong nation. Based on the belief that “women’s education is the foundation of all education,”76 the founder developed a teacher-training program. The school declared that its purpose was to improve family practices, teach basic knowledge, and train women to teach children. Most students were expected to enter the teacher-training program (shifan ke 師範科) after they finished the lower level of study.77 The school stressed teaching morality, scientific knowledge, and especially household skills. The curriculum, at the lower elementary level, emphasized basic literacy and arithmetic, moral cultivation, as well as singing, physical training, drawing, sewing, and handicrafts. Courses such as history, geography, science, physiology, physics, and chemistry were introduced into the curriculum at the higher level of elementary school.78 Yujiao nü xuetang 豫教女學堂 (Girls’ School for Inculcating Proper Behavior) in Beijing, established by a group of gentry officials in 1904, was more aligned with the official ideology on female education expressed in the 1904 School Regulations. The school was explicitly set up for the purpose of training “good mothers and virtuous wives” (Xianmu liangfu 賢母良婦).79 The curriculum, besides teaching basic literacy, morality, and some Western knowledge, emphasized sewing, handicrafts, and other household skills that would prepare its students

76 Wu Xin 吳馨, “Wuben nüxue shilue” 務本女學史略 (A brief history of Wuben School for Girls), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:589–90. 77 “Wuben nü xuexiao di er ci gailiang guize” 務本女學校第二次改良規則 (The second revised regulation of Wuben School for Girls), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:590–91. 78 “Wuben nüshu zengshe chudeng, gaodeng nüzi xiaoxue guize shezhi dayi, 1905” 務本女塾增設初等高等女子小學規則設置大意 (The explanation on the regulations for the new lower and higher elementary levels in the Wuben School for Girls, 1905), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:594–96. 79 “Beijing Yujiao nü xuetang zhangcheng” 北京豫教女學堂章程 (The regulations of the Yujiao School for Girls), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:694.

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to stay at home in the future.80 It added a teacher-training program only after Qing officials promulgated the new regulations on building female normal schools in 1907.81 Revolutionary and anarchist leaders, in contrast, considered women’s education as a way of training spies and assassins. The well-known case of Aiguo nüxue 愛國女學 (Patriotic Women’s School) (1902), was intended to be a base for revolution, training female assassins and revolutionaries. Therefore, the school, besides teaching the regular curriculum for all levels, such as literacy, natural science, physical education, and family management, also taught revolutionary and anarchist theories and bomb-making skills to students at higher levels.82 Besides these famous girls’ schools, there were also other types of schools for women. From 1902–06, a small number of educators emphasized teaching women survival skills for their self-reliance. They built sericulture schools in Shanghai, Fujian, and Hangzhou; handicraft schools in Shanghai, Yangzhou, Hangzhou; and medical schools in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou.83 Other educators also created some alternative professions for women: three medical schools opened for female students in Shanghai (1905), Beijing (1904), and Tianjin (1906), and a midwife school for women in Hangzhou (1906).84 In 1906, a female language school was built in Beijing, named Yiyi nü xuetang 譯藝 女學堂 (Girls’ School of Language Translation), specifically training

Ibid., 694–96. “Shuntian shibao ji Yujiao nü xuetang xuesheng qingkuang” 順天時報記豫教女 學堂學生情況 (Shuntian times reports on the student’s situation of Yujiao School for Girls), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:703–06. 82 Yu Ziyi 俞子夷 (1885–1970), “Ji Aiguo nüxue yu Guangfuhui” 記愛國女學與 光復會 (Recollection on Patriotic Women’s School and Restoration Society), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:627–31. See also Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940), “Wo zai jiaoyu jie de jingyan” 我在教育界的經驗 (My experience in educational circles), in Cai Yuanpei Zishu 蔡元培自述 (Memoir of Cai Yuanpei) (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1967), 39. 83 See “Ge lei nü xuetang zhi mengya” 各類女學堂之萌芽 (The bids for various schools for girls and women,” in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:633–48. 84 See “Shanghai nüzi Zhong Xi yi xuexiao” 上海女子中西醫學堂 (Shanghai Sino-West Medical School for Women); “Dongfang zazhi ji Beijing she nü yi xuetang” 東方雜誌記北京設女醫學堂 (Eastern miscellany reports the establishment of a female medical school in Beijing); “Dongfang zazhi ji Beiyang nü yi xuetang” 東方雜誌記北 洋女醫學堂 (Eastern miscellany reports Beiyang Female Medical School established in Tianjin); “Dongfang zazhi ji Hangzhou she chanke nü xuetang” 東方雜誌記杭州設 產科女學堂 (Eastern miscellany reports a nurse/midwife school built in Hangzhou), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:646–49. 80 81

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students to be translators after graduation.85 Girls’ schools built during this period displayed a multifaceted development that offered girls and young women many diverse choices. These various types of girls’ schools shared several common features. First, at this early stage of women’s education most schools were at the elementary level and emphasized basic literacy and functional training, including arithmetic and household skills.86 The numbers of qualified students for secondary education was small; Beiyang Women’s Normal School in Tianjin, for instance, had to attract students from Shanghai.87 Second, most students came from the elite classes. At Patriotic Women’s School the students were drawn entirely from the founders’ families.88 The Wuben Girls’ School was originally founded for the gentry before it opened to the public. It required that students demonstrate the “good manner of great families” (dajia fengfan 大家風範).89 From the list of students, we can see that all students at the Yujiao Girls’ School in Beijing were exclusively from the upper classes, the female relatives of Manchu and Han Chinese officials.90 There were many cases in which gentry families cooperated in order to establish schools for their female family members.91 There is no doubt that Chinese elites continued their tradition by recruiting girl students from within their own group. It is understandable that most girls’ schools manifested strong continuity in their curricula, emphasizing the three fields of basic literacy, Confucian moral teachings, and household management since the dominant force of reform was male gentry elite. The majority of girls’

85 “Yiyi Nü xuetang zhangcheng” 譯藝女學堂章程 (Regulations for Girls’ School of Language Translation), in Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao 近代中國女權運 動史料 (Historical materials of women’s rights movement in modern China), comps. Li Youning 李又寧 and Zhang Yüfa 張玉法 (Taipei: Longwen chubangongsi, 1995), 2:1101–06. 86 Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, 2:1038–71. 87 Sarah Coles McElroy, “Forging a New Role for Women: Zhili First Women’s Normal School and the Growth of Women’s Education in China, 1901–2,” in Peterson, Hayhoe, and Lu, 348–74. 88 Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 (1873–1958), “Ji Shanghai Aiguo nüxuexiao” 記上海愛 國女學校 ( Jiang Weiqiao recalls Patriotic Women’s School), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:611. 89 Wu Ruoan 吳若安 (1890–1990), “Huiyi Shanghai Wuben nüshu” 回憶上海務 本女塾 (Recollection on the Wuben School for Girls in Shanghai), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:602–09. 90 “Shuntian shibao ji Yujiao nüxuetang xuesheng qingkuang,” in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:703–06. 91 Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, 2:1011, 1052, 1066, 1070.

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schools focused on teaching Confucian classics92 and taught light courses on Western scientific knowledge for family management, such as courses in physiology about family hygiene and rearing babies. Household skills were also an important part of the whole curriculum, including cooking, sewing, knitting, and family management ( jiashi 家事).93 New curricula also included physical education, game playing ( youxi 遊戲), and singing, all for training healthy mothers to produce strong, smart children. To conduct physical training, all girls’ schools admitted students only with unbound feet. Students who had bound feet when entering school were required to unbind them. The Wuben Girls’ School gave detailed instructions to students on how to unbind their feet step by step and provided samples of special shoes to help girls’ feet recover from binding.94 Various girls’ schools at this period became a model of what women could do after they unbound their feet and entered the sphere outside the family. During this period, educated women from elite families became very active in serving as administrators and faculty members at girls’ schools. When the Wuben Girls’ School converted to a public school, its founder Wu Xin 吳馨 (?–1919) employed his wife and his peers’ wives as its supervisors (shejian 舍監).95 Two women, Cheng Ying 程穎 and Wu Qiuxian 吳秋賢, who were also among the Wuben School circles, established a kindergarten for the Wuben students to practice teaching.96 In Guangdong, some elite women established girls’ schools and appointed themselves as principals and teachers.97 The Shanghai sucheng nügong shifan chuanxi suo 上海速成女工師範傳習所 (The Shanghai Accelerated Training School for Household Skills), which

92 See the curricula of the Wuben Girls’ School, the Aiguo Girls’ School, and the Yujiao Girls’ School, in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:591, 618, 695. 93 Ibid. Also see Wu Ruoan, 606. 94 On the Wuben Girls’ School, see Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:589, 594, 603; on the Aiguo Women’s School, see Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:619. 95 Wu Xin, “Wuben nuxue shilue,” and Chen Xiefen, “Ji Wuben nü xuetang” 記務本女學堂 (Recollection on Wuben School for Girls), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:598–99. 96 Ibid., and Wu Ruoan, “Huiyi Shanghai Wuben nushu,” in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:602–09. 97 “Guangdong she nü xuetang zhi fengpo” 廣東設女學堂之風波 (The dispute and conflict around establishing girls’ schools in Guangdong); “Yue sheng fengbi nuxue zh paishi” 粵省封閉女學之牌示 (The announcement of Guangdong province on banning girls’ schools), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:650–51.

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opened in 1904, hired ten female teachers.98 For these elite women, being vigorously involved in establishing and teaching in girls’ schools and kindergartens was only one way to extend women’s influence into the public domain and to obtain social equality with men. They did not limit their activities solely to teaching, which was quite different from later developments in women’s education, which was dominated by the Qing state that dictated training teachers was the only purpose for women’s schooling. IV. From Mothers to Teachers of Citizens: The State and Women’s Normal Schools, 1907–11 During this period, the ambiguous attitude of the Qing court toward women’s education provided flexibility for local governments, making them oscillate between supporting and banning girls’ schools. Some state institutions became more involved in women’s education but tended to limit this education to teacher training. Motivated by concerns about supplying teachers for local kindergartens and tutors for family education, some local governments started to explore ways to train women as teachers and child caretakers. In 1904, Hubei provincial Governor Duanfang 端方 (1861–1911), established a girls’ school in Wuhan to train caretakers for children.99 In 1905, the Hunan provincial government sent twenty female students to Japan to study in that nation’s teacher-training programs. Fengtian (present-day Liaoning) and several other provincial governments followed suit.100 Each time a new girls’ school opened, more female teachers were needed. Local governments began opening women’s normal schools. In 1906, Beiyang Women’s Normal School (Beiyang nüzi shifan xuetang

98 “Shanghai sucheng nügong shifan chuanxisuo gailiang jianzhang” 上海速成女 工師範傳習所簡章 (The regulations for the Shanghai Accelerated Training School for Household Skills); and “Shanghai sucheng nügong shifan chuanxisuo gailiang jianzhang” 上海速成女工師範傳習所改良簡章 (The reformed regulations for the Shanghai Accelerated Training School for Household Skills), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:639–44. 99 “Hubei caiche nüxue” 湖北裁撤女學 (Banning girls’ schools in Hubei), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:653. 100 Sun Shiyue, Zhonghuo jindai nüzi liuxue shi, 66–69.

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北洋女子師範學堂) opened in Tianjin.101 The Education Bureau of Fengtian established a women’s normal school in 1906, recruiting students between the ages of twenty and thirty.102 Although government authorities initially had wanted to limit women’s education within the realm of the family, the rapid development and diversity of girls’ schools began to escape their control. As a result, authorities changed their approach, authorizing the development of women’s education under its own direction in order to meet the needs of the state. The government’s involvement in girls’ schools had a decisive effect: local officials envisioned women’s secondary education exclusively in terms of training teachers for the public educational system. With restricted guidance from the government, whose concern was training female teachers, and with support from male gentry elite, the traditional mother’s role as the primary teachers of children was accentuated in building public schools for women. By 1906, the necessity of establishing girls’ schools was widespread among reform-minded elites. When the first imperial statistics on education were published in 1907, they recorded over four hundred girls’ schools.103 Although the number of girls’ schools opened before 1907 was miniscule compared to the number of boys’ schools, their existence put the issue of creating public girls’ schools on the agenda and prompted debate among imperial officials. At the same time, some students, such as Qiu Jin, who returned from overseas, also became involved in establishing girls’ schools and using those schools to spread radical ideas and actions. As more and more private and semi-official girls’ schools were opened by gentry elites and local governments, the Qing court was profoundly concerned about the moral impact of girls’ schools, their educational aims, their curricula, their textbooks, and the changes that education would bring to women’s lives and thinking.

“Beiyang nüzi shifan xuetang kai xiao ji sheng” 北洋女子師範學堂開校記盛 (Grand opening ceremony of Beiyang Women’s Normal School), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:689–90. 102 “Gesheng jiaoyu hui zhi [1906],” in Dongfang zazhi 3.6 (1906). 103 “Guangxu sanshi san nian quanguo nuzi xuetang tongji biao” 光緒三十三年全 國女子學堂統計表 (1907 statistics for women’s schools nationwide), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:649–50. 101

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Liu Xun 劉撏, an official of the Ministry of Works ( gongbu zhushi 工部主事), sent a memorial in 1906, urging the Qing court to promote regulations for girls’ schools, pointing out that, without opening schools for women, kindergartens would face a lack of teachers, and education within the family would be harmed. He was also worried that the growth of girls’ schools would have a bad influence on Chinese women if the government did not control them. “Chinese women’s education is in the embryonic stage,” he said, “but we have already seen malpractice. It is not unusual to see newspaper reports about women’s misconduct.” He proposed that the government issue special textbooks for women, select teachers by emphasizing their morality, and set up strict rules to separate males and females in schools.104 Similar concerns were expressed in a memorial from the minister of the Board of Education on the regulation for girls’ schools: Recently many women’s schools had been established by officials, merchants and gentry [. . .] If we do not set up regulations, the honest people who wanted to build schools would have no rules to follow. And on the other hand, those people who built schools only to win fame would lead women’s education into malpractice.105

Under this consideration, it was imperative for the central government to set up rules for women’s education. Local officials also joined the trend in urging the central government to pay more attention to women’s normal schools. Since women from ordinary families were not educated enough to teach their daughters at home to be “good citizens,” local governments were expected to provide tutors for family education.106 In 1906, Duanfang called on 104 Liu Xun, “Gongbu zhushi Liu Xun xuewu yaoduan zhe” 工部主事劉撏學務 要端折 (A memorial on the key issues of education from Liu Xun, junior official of the Ministry of Works), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:587–88. 105 Xue bu, “Xue bu Zou xiang yi nüzi shifan xuetang zhangcheng zhe (fu zhangcheng),” in Shiye jiaoyu, shifan jiaoyu, 573. 106 “Jiangsu xuewuchu pi nüxue bu neng yan nan jiaoxi” 江蘇學務處批女學不能 延男教習 (The instruction of Jiangsu Educational Bureau prohibiting girls’ schools from hiring male teachers), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:653–54. Some exceptions were made: male teachers over age fifty, for instance, were allowed to teach at female schools. Even this, however, opened up grounds for conservative criticism. See “Changzhou nüxue zhi zuli” 常州女學之阻力 (The obstacle of girls’ schooling in Changzhou); and “Ping Su xuewuchu yu Ning xuewuchu zhi pishi” 評蘇學務處與寧 學務處之批示 (Comment on the instructions of Educational Bureaus of Suzhou and Jiangning), in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao, 2B:654–57.

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the central government to issue regulations for women’s public education and pointed out that establishing women’s normal schools was the government’s “first priority” (wei diyi yaowu 為第一要務).107 Moreover, by 1906, after the first group of female students had finished their elementary education in private schools, there were demands to provide further education. Some girls’ schools, such as the Wuben School, the Hunan Zhounan School,108 the Jingzhu School,109 and the Lize Women’s Normal School in Wujiang County, Jiangsu Province,110 provided teacher-training programs in order to provide an outlet for their graduates. In 1907, the central government promulgated the imperial regulations that officially recognized women’s education in the public school system. Officially, women’s normal schools became the highest institutions for women’s education and the only kind of secondary public schools women could attend. Graduates would teach in girls’ elementary schools and would serve as kindergarten caretakers. Each township and county was to have its own women’s normal school. Like men’s normal schools, they would be founded by local governments, and tuition would be free. The regulations also made provisions for private normal schools, though these could be opened only with the special permission and supervision of local government. Having received a free education, the graduates of women’s normal schools were obligated to teach at public girls’ schools and kindergartens; those who chose not to would be liable for the entire cost of their education.111 With the 1907 regulations on women’s education, local governments began vigorously to establish both elementary schools for girls as well as women’s normal schools at the secondary level. However, the latter was regarded as the most urgent task in controlling women’s education. In the process of building women’s teachers’ schools, local

Xue bu, “Yi ding nüxue zhangcheng” 議定女學章程 (A discussion of making regulations for girls’ schools), in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, 2:1117. 108 Zhou Jianfan 周劍凡 (1883–1932), “Zhounan nüzi shifan xuexiao jingying zhuangkuang” 周南女子師範學校經營狀況 (The management of Zhounan women’s normal school), in Shiye jiaoyu, shifan jiaoyu, 976–77. 109 “Hunan nüxue zhi diaocha” 湖南女學之調查 (Investigation of girls’ schooling in Hunan), in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, 2:1038. 110 See “Ge sheng jiaoyu hui zhi,” Dongfang zazhi 3.5 (1906): 97–98. 111 Xue bu, “Zou ding nü xuetang zhangcheng zhe” 奏定女學堂章程 (The imperial approved regulations on women’s school), in Xuezhi yanbian, 574–83. 107

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officials sometimes took a shortcut, directly converting previously private female teachers’ schools into government-run schools. Jiangsu Cuimin Girls’ School (Cuimin nüxue 粹敏女學) was opened in 1905 as a private school, but when Duanfang became the Governor-General of Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and Anhui (Liang-Jiang zongdu 兩江總督) in 1908, he changed it into a government-run school to train female teachers.112 The Jiangsu Education Commissioner did the same thing to another private women’s normal school in 1911.113 From 1907–11, a number of women’s normal schools were established by local governments, such as Jingshi (Capital) Women’s Normal School (1908), Wuchang Women’s Normal School (1909), Jiangsu Women’s Normal School (1911), Hunan Women’s Normal School (1911), and He’nan Women’s Normal School (1911).114 The 1907 regulations stressed four aspects of women’s education. First, the students of women’s normal schools were expected to accept the traditional morality of being virtuous daughters, wives, and mothers. It pointed out that “all ideas of freedom (such as eliminating the demarcation between men and women, women selecting their own marriage mates, and women giving speeches in public political assemblies, etc.) must be prohibited in order to maintain social morality [. . .] Women should always obey their parents and husbands.”115 Second, women’s education was expected to train good mothers who would conduct good family education, which would assist the prosperity of the country. The regulations emphasized that the most important goal of women’s education was the prosperity of the country. If all women received education, they would understand the norms and follow the laws. Furthermore, “women’s education is the foundation of citizens’ education,”116 and a good family education depended on wise mothers. Third, the students were expected to learn skills that related to daily life and women’s housework. Fourth, the students would do physical exercises and learn good personal hygiene habits in order to enhance

112 “Cuimin nüxue shifansheng zuye” 粹敏女學師範生卒業 (Student graduating from the teacher-training program of Cuimin Girls’ School), in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, 2:1189. 113 “Nü shifan hua si wei guan” 女師範化私為官 (The women’s normal school changed from private to government run), in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, 2:1231. 114 See Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, 2:1179, 1208, 1231, 1236–37. 115 Xue bu, “Zou ding nü xuetang zhangcheng zhe,” in Xuezhi yanbian, 576. 116 Ibid., 576–77.

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their physical health. The practice of footbinding was once again prohibited.117 Using the example of Beiyang Women’s Normal School, as Sarah Coles McElroy points out, for the founders and administrators, the school “would not produce a group of hotheaded radicals but a set of teachers committed to traditional principles.”118 Therefore, the students were required to learn domestic skills, besides literacy training, in order for them to teach girls taking traditional roles in families. The government carried out a policy of sex segregation in schooling to limit women’s participation in social activities and prevent moral and conduct malpractice. The regulations for women’s education decreed that girls’ and boys’ schools must be separated, and all teachers and administrators in girls’ schools had to be women. They allowed men over the age of fifty to be managerial staff, but their offices had to be apart from the school building.119 Women’s normal schools also required students and faculty to live at school under highly restrictive conditions. Students were allowed to go home on weekends only when accompanied by a male family member. Relatives of faculty and students had to get permission to visit the faculty or students. Faculty and students were prohibited from wearing silk, colorful clothing, Western-style clothing, and makeup.120 The 1907 regulations for women’s education set up stricter rules, especially in terms of social conduct, for female students than it did for male students. Women’s normal schools differed from men’s normal schools in terms of schooling time and curriculum. The program for female teachers’ school lasted four years, one year less than the program for the male teachers’ schools. The female teachers’ school system did not have an advanced level as did the male teachers’ school system. The purpose of female teacher training was clearly restricted to preparing teachers for elementary and preschool education. The curriculum and course requirements were also simplified. The following table compares the curricula of male and female secondary-level teachers’ schools both of which prepared students to be primary schoolteachers.

117 118 119 120

Ibid., 577, 585. McElroy, 354. Xue bu, “Zou ding nü xuetang zhangcheng zhe,” in Xuezhi yanbian, 582. Ibid., 583. Also see Chen Pingyuan’s chapter in this volume.

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Table 1. Comparison of Curricula at Female and Male Secondary-Level Normal Schools121 Class hours per week

Courses

1st year

2nd year

3rd year

4th year

5th year

F

M

F

M

F

M

F

M

M

Moral cultivation

2

1

2

1

2

1

2

1

1

Education

3

4

3

6

3

8

1

51

41

9

9

9

Reading Classics

9

9

Chinese Language & Literature

4

3

4

2

4

2

1

2

History

2

3

2

3

2

3

1

1

Geography

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

1

Mathematics

4

3

4

3

3

3

3

3

Physics and Chemistry

2

2

2

“Bowu” 博物 (Botany & Zoology)

2

2

2

“Gezhi” 格致 (Science in General)

2

Calligraphy

2 3 2

2 2

2

2

2

1

2 1

2

1

1

1

1

1

1

Painting/Drawing

2

Household Management

2

2

2

2

Sewing

4

4

4

3

Handicrafts

4

4

4

3

Music

1

1

2

2

Physical training

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

Total

34

36

34

36

34

36

34

36

36

121 Xuebu, “Zouding chuji shifan xuetang zhangcheng” 奏定初級師範學堂章程 (Memorial to create regulations for [male] normal schools), in Shiye jiaoyu, shifan jiaoyu, 568–69.

5

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The gender-segregated curriculum manifested the idea of the Qing state on women’s education, indicating that women would only be assigned to teach the lower grades. The fact that female students were not designated to take the course on “reading classics” implies that the government considered female teachers unsuitable to teach “classics” designed for primary school curriculums. A little bit of history, geography, and science might fit women’s role for lower grades but not physics, chemistry, botany, or zoology, which were in upper primary-school curricula. Women were trained to teach “feminine” subjects such as music, household management, sewing, and handicrafts. This gender segregation in the curriculum set up by the Qing court defined what female students could learn and what purpose female education would serve. It also limited female students in acquiring the same knowledge as male students and was used deliberately to set up a gap between female and male students. V. Conclusion The framers of the 1904 education reform had declared that “[male] preschool education [. . .] is the primary foundation of citizens’ education” (Mengyang [. . .] wei guomin jiaoy zhi di yi jizhi 蒙養 . . . 為國民教育 之第一基址).122 Three years later, however, the designer of the 1907 regulations on women’s education would declare that “women’s education is the foundation of citizens’ education.”123 This shift reveals the extension of state power, which now formally encompassed the traditional domain where women provided their sons and daughters with a basic education. The establishment of women’s normal schools permitted women to receive an education beyond the elementary level and legitimated the work of women as teachers in the public domain. Although the schools provided women with an escape from the bonds of domesticity and assigned them a legitimate role in the public realm,124 women’s normal schools reinforced the traditional role of the female as family educator. The regulations deterred women from engaging in more radical social activities and suggested no avenues by which women 122 Xue bu, “Zouding mengyang yuan zhangcheng ji jiating jiaoyu fa zhangcheng” 奏定蒙養院及家庭教育法章程 (Memorial to create regulations or kindergartens and family education), in Xuezhi yanbian, 393–96. 123 Xue bu, “Zouding nüzi xiaoxuetang zhangcheng.” 124 McElroy, 348.

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might participate more fully in public life. This was a setback from the goal that 1898 female reformists expected to gain from education. With the state’s involvement, women’s multifaceted traditions of education were exclusively transformed into training female teachers. During this transformation, the specific tradition that the mother played the primary educator for her children was emphasized, whereas women’s learning of prose and poetic writings was suppressed. By establishing women’s normal schools, the state brought women’s education into the state-building process: previously fledgling, decentralized, private schools were recast in a unified state project. Taking over the traditional idea and practice of nurturing talented women and providing mothers with knowledge for the sake of family prosperity, the government advanced a project that turned talented women and educated mothers into a public resource. The rich and colorful tradition of women in literature and artistic works during the late imperial period was channeled into the sole direction of serving the nation’s needs. However, the social space that women carved by their educational activities continued opening up to future generations.

PART TWO

TRANSFORMATIONS OF GENRES

CHAPTER FIVE

MEDIATED IMAGININGS: BIOGRAPHIES OF WESTERN WOMEN AND THEIR JAPANESE SOURCES IN LATE QING CHINA Joan Judge As the title of this volume suggests, cognitive transformation was central to the historical changes of the late Qing era. Authors and editors of new-style textbooks and organs of the periodical press—the two most effective media for transmitting Western ideas to the Chinese reading public in this period—were not only committed to raising their female readers’ basic level of literacy but also their level of political, cultural, and global literacy. They did this by comparing the status of women in China, Japan, and the West, and by providing detailed introductions to foreign social practices and pedagogical theories. Most significantly, however, they extended the cultural horizons of their readership by adding the life stories of publicly engaged Western heroines to the two-millennia-old repertoire of Chinese female exemplars.1 This appropriation of Western women’s biographies was more culturally threatening than the widespread introduction of Western men’s biographies in this period. Biographies of foreign heroes and politicians galvanized their Chinese counterparts to perform their existing roles more effectively: to lead more courageously, to respond to new challenges more creatively, and to defend the nation’s interests more boldly.2

For a discussion of this repertoire, see Joan Judge, “Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China, eds. Grace S. Fong, Nanxiu Qian, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 102–35. 2 Biographies of Western men appeared in the range of journals of the period from Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 (1873–1929) Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 (New people’s miscellany) to the popular pictorial Tuhua ribao 圖畫日報 (Daily pictorial). They included biographies of such individuals as Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), George Washington (1732–99), and Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). On the invocation of such heroes in the essays of Liang and Shibao 時報 (original English title: The Eastern Times) journalists, see Judge, Print and Politics: “Shibao” and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 94–95. For a more detailed discussion of Liang’s biographies, 1

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In contrast, the actions of Western female exemplars defied normative Chinese gender principles and made previously unimaginable feminine social and political roles thinkable. Unlike most historical Chinese female paragons who had left their mark in history through private actions on behalf of their male kin, the Western heroines celebrated in the Chinese textbooks and women’s journals examined here intervened directly in history, unencumbered by domestic ties or concerns for ritual propriety.3 The Western women’s biographies published in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese materials were not unmediated appropriations, however. Chinese editors and compilers rarely worked with original Western-language biographies; rather, they were dependent on Japanese translations of Western texts. Chinese, Japanese, and Western selection strategies were thus layered on one another: Chinese editors chose from among biographies Japanese compilers had already selected from Western collections, collections that were themselves the product of editorial and ideological decisions.4 At the same time the meaning of a Western woman’s life story was translated both literally into a new language and substantively into new cultural registers and historical contexts first by Japanese and then by Chinese writers. The Chinese authors often freely translated and liberally altered the content of Japanese biographies of Western women. Even their more faithful translations frequently contained commentaries that directed the reader’s understanding of a particular life story. The biographies that resulted from these multiple mediations were, thus, not merely distortions of “original” texts but new creations, products of the Chinese cultural imaginary as much as the result of foreign borrowing. The complex processes of translation, appropriation, elision, and omission through which they were written illuminate how new cultural and political meanings were negotiated in turn-of-the-twentieth-century China.

see Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 80–116. 3 Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 (1866–1911) was unique in celebrating Western women for private accomplishments in the Waiguo lienü zhuan 外國列女傳 (Biographies of foreign women), co-compiled with her husband Chen Shoupeng (1857–1923?) (Nanjing: Jingling Jiangchu bianyi zongju, 1906), which I briefly discuss later in this chapter. 4 On the different purposes collections of “women worthies” had served in Western history from Plutarch to the nineteenth century, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “‘Women’s History’ in Transition: The European Case,” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 79–80.

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This chapter first examines the historical significance of the addition of Western women to the repertoire of Chinese exemplars. It then traces the specific textual route through which the ur-biographies of the more prominent Western women became established in late Qing materials. Finally, it briefly analyzes the appropriation of the life stories of two particular Western paragons, the renowned militant patriot Joan of Arc (Ru’an 如安, Ruo’an 若安, Ru’an Dakeniang 如安打克孃) (1412–31) and the American educator, Mary Lyon (Lihen 黎痕) (1797–1849). The Western Exemplars The integration of foreign heroines into new print genres at the turn of the twentieth century introduced the Chinese audience to an unprecedented range of global and feminine possibilities. Unlike their Chinese counterparts who generally entered history only through the performance of normative feminine roles as daughters, wives, and mothers, foreign women were celebrated for their direct engagement in society and politics. Late Qing authors often translated the heroic actions of these Western paragons into a familiar feminine idiom through tropes of love, nurturing, and service. Despite this mediating overlay, however, the new-style exemplars’ life stories powerfully suggested that women could act autonomously and purposefully beyond the confines of family and the strictures of Confucian ritual teachings (lijiao 禮教). Western heroines not only broadened the content of the Chinese exemplary repertoire by introducing new feminine roles but also extended it historically by filling the void left by late imperial women who many late Qing authors denied the status of exemplars.5 In these texts, the lineage of exemplary Chinese women generally ended in approximately the fifteenth century (with the exception of heroic late Ming loyalists like Qin Liangyü 秦良玉 [1576?–1648] and Shen Yunying 沈雲英 [1624–61]). The new lineage of Western heroines began at precisely this historical juncture—the 1400s—and reached its highest density in the last century of the Qing dynasty. 5 On the critique of the late imperial woman of talent or cainü 才女, see Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 6–8; and Judge, “Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898,” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, eds. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 158–79.

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The inclusion of these foreign figures in the repertoire of Chinese exemplars resulted in the creation of a new category of woman that extended from the depths of Chinese civilization to revolutionary and post-revolutionary France and America. This category both confirmed the continued value of the ancient Chinese past as an anchor for the future and asserted the desirability and possibility of change in the global present. The biographies of Western women that expanded the Chinese conception of woman were overwhelmingly translations from Japanese texts rather than from Western-language texts. The most notable exception was the Waiguo lienü zhuan 外國列女傳 (Biographies of foreign women), a collection of biographies translated and compiled by the female scholar-poet Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 (1866–1911) and her husband Chen Shoupeng 陳壽彭 (1857–1923?).6 Although Xue and Chen’s work was completed in 1903 and published in 1906—precisely the period when new-style textbook authors and journalists began to translate widely Western women’s biographies—and despite its tremendous breadth, it does not appear to have been a source, or even a point of reference, for the materials examined here. The preponderance of Western women’s biographies translated from Japanese conformed to broader East Asian translation patterns in the early twentieth century. Sixty percent of the estimated 533 books rendered into Chinese between 1902 and 1904 were translated from Japanese, while only 16% were translated from English, and 3% from French.7 The reasons for this have been well documented. From the 1870s, Japanese scholars and publicists had themselves translated an enormous number of Western works in a range of fields includ-

6 Nanxiu Qian has done extensive work on this text in conjunction with her project on Xue Shaohui. See Qian 錢南秀, “Qingji nüzuojia Xue Shaohui ji qi Waiguo lienü zhuan” 清季女作家薛紹徽及其 «外國列女傳» (The late Qing woman writer Xue Shaohui and her Biographies of foreign women), Wenxue pinglun congkan 文學評論叢刊 ( Journal of literary criticism) 4.1 (2001): 102–26; and “‘Borrowing Foreign Mirrors and Candles to Illuminate Chinese Civilization’: Xue Shaohui’s Moral Vision in the Biographies of Foreign Women,” in Beyond Tradition and Modernity, 60–101. 7 Xiong Yuezhi, “Degrees of Familiarity with the West in Late Qing Society,” in Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918, ed. David Pollard (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1998), 34; Xiong Yuezhi 熊月之, Xixue dongjian yu wan-Qing shehui 西學東漸與晚清社會 (Dissemination of Western learning and the late Qing society) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1994), 663–72.

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ing politics, law, and social and educational theory.8 Chinese students who, for reasons of linguistic and geographic proximity, chose Japan as their prime destination for overseas study from the last years of the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth century directly reaped the benefits of this Meiji-period (1868–1912) boom in translation. Japanese translations of Western texts both expanded their intellectual horizons and became a source for their own translations into Chinese.9 The scholarly and professional trajectories of publicists and political activists living in exile in Tokyo were often shaped by this exposure to Japanese translations. Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 (1873–1929) career was greatly enriched by his appropriation of Western ideas via Japanese sources, for example.10 All of the numerous Chinese language journals published in Japan in this period, whether run by seasoned journalists like Liang or fledgling groups of overseas students, included sections of translated essays, fiction, and biographies. Some publications such as the journal Youxue yibian 遊學譯編 (Overseas study and translation), published in Tokyo

On this process see Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002). 9 The number of students increased dramatically from 200 male students in 1898 to 13,000 in 1906, from a handful of female students in 1901 to 149 in 1909. The phenomenon of male overseas study in Japan has already been well studied. See Sanetō Keishū 實藤專秀, Chūgokujin Nihon ryūgaku shi zōho 中国人日本留学史増補 (A history of Chinese students in Japan), enlarged edn. (Tokyo: Kuroshio shuppan, 1970); Huang Fu-ch’ing 黃福慶, Qingmo liu-Ri xuesheng 清末留日學生 (Chinese students in Japan in the late Qing Period) (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan, jindaishi yanjiu suo, 1975); the latter has been translated into English by Katherine P.K. Whitaker as Chinese Students in Japan in the Late Qing Period (Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1982); Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). On the female students, see Judge, “Between Nei and Wai: Chinese Female Students in Japan in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China, eds. Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson (Boulder CO and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 121–43; and “Beyond Nationalism: Gender and the Chinese Student Experience in Japan in the Early 20th Century,” in Wusheng zhi sheng: Jindai Zhongguo de funü yu wenhua 無聲之聲 (III): 近代中國的婦女與文化 (Voices amid silence [III]: Women and culture in modern China [1600–1950]), eds. Luo Jiurong 羅久蓉 and Lü Miaofen 呂妙芬 (Taipei: Institute for Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003), 359–93. 10 On the influence of Japanese translations in the formulation of Liang’s ideas, see Liang Qichao, Mingzhi riben, Xifang 梁啟超, 明治日本, 西方 (Liang Qichao, Meiji Japan, and the West), ed. Xiajian Zhishu 狭间直树 [Hazama Naoki] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chuban she, 2001); and The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2004). Zhang Binglin 張炳麟 (1869–1936) was another important intellectual of the period influenced by the ideas he encountered in Japan. 8

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from 1903, exclusively specialized in translations. At the same time, both male and female students in Japan frequently translated Japanese textbooks for use in schools on the Chinese mainland.11 Chinese authors interested in translating Western women’s biographies had a wealth of material to choose from in Meiji sources. Of the 229, Meiji-period, book-length biographical works on women listed in the catalogue for the National Diet Library in Tokyo, at least fortyone introduced Western women either collectively or individually.12 A variety of Meiji journals also introduced individual Western women. Among these was Katei zashi 家庭雜誌 (Family journal) (September 1892–August 1898), which published a serialized biography of Madame Roland (Luolan furen 羅蘭夫人) (1754–93) from December 1893 to February 1894. This text served as the primary source for Liang’s influential “Jinshi diyi nüjie Luolan furen zhuan” 近世第一女傑羅蘭 夫人 (Biography of Madame Roland, the foremost woman hero of modern times), which established Roland as one of the icons of the French Revolution in China.13 The repertoire of foreign exemplars introduced to late Qing readers was thus largely determined by what was available to Chinese translators on the Japanese print market. Certain figures widely celebrated in Japanese texts became omnipresent in Chinese materials, including Joan of Arc, Madame Roland, Florence Nightingale (Niejike’er 涅幾柯兒, Nandingge’er 南丁格爾) (1820–1910), and Francis Willard (Fulanzhisi 扶蘭志斯, Weinade 維納德) (1839–98). There were, however, some figures prominently featured in Japanese collections who were not fully 11 One of the important sources for textbooks translated from Japanese in this period was the journal Jiaoyu shijie 教育世界 (The educational world) founded by Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866–1940) in 1901. The more important essays and translations from this journal were collected annually and reprinted in Jiaoyu congshu 教育叢書 (The educational miscellany). For more details on these journals, see Judge, “The Ideology of ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers’: Meiji Japan and Feminine Modernity in Late-Qing China,” in Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors: Chinese Views of Japan in the Ming-Qing Period, ed. Fogel (Armonk NY: EastBridge, 2001), 218–48. 12 Kokuritsu kokkai toshokan 国立国会図書館, Fujin mondai bunken mokuroku, Tosho no bu 婦人問題文献目録、図書の部 (Catalogue of materials related to the women’s question, books) (Tokyo: Kokuritsu kokkai toshokan, 1980–96), vol. 1, pp. 83–99. 13 Liang’s biography was written in 1902. Liang, “Jinshi diyi nüjie Luolan furen zhuan” 近世第一女傑羅蘭夫人傳 (Biography of Madame Roland, the foremost woman hero of modern times), Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 ( Journal of new people) 17 (October 1902). On the Japanese source for the biography, see Songwei Yanger 松尾洋二, “Liang Qichao yu shizhuan: Dongya jindai jingshen de benliu” 梁啟超與 史傳－東亞近代精神史的奔流 (Liang Qichao and biography: The torrential history of modern East Asia), in Xiajian Zhishu, 265.

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inducted into the Chinese repertoire. One example is the French novelist and political journalist Madame de Staël ( J. Sutairei fujin 蘇泰流 夫人, C. Sutailiu furen 蘇泰流夫人) (1766–1817). Whether because of her many lovers, her political engagement preceding and following the French Revolution, or her career as a novelist, de Staël was largely excluded from the Chinese biographical repertoire.14 Western women renowned for having mothered great men were also generally ignored by Chinese editors and translators who represented maternal rectitude as the distinctive preserve of Chinese women.15 Of the forty-one Japanese monographs on Western women published in the Meiji period, a number of specific texts became prime sources for Chinese biographies. In some instances the “original” Japanese biographies were simplified and paraphrased as they were appropriated into new-style textbooks or into the vernacular section of women’s journals. In other instances they were translated practically word for word as in the “Shi zhuan” 史傳 (Historical biographies) section in the influential Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi 中國新女界雜誌 (Magazine of the new Chinese women).16 Even these more direct translations allowed for Chinese editorializing, however, with translators often adding commentaries that announced the historical significance and contemporary relevance of a particular life story. The Japanese Sources Sekai Jūni Joketsu (Twelve world heroines) One of the most influential Japanese collections of Western women’s biographies in China at the turn of the twentieth century was Iwasaki Sodō 岩崎徂堂 (fl. 1901) and Mikami Kifū’s 三上寄風 (fl. 1901) Sekai jūni joketsu 世界十二女傑 (Twelve world heroines).17 Published in Tokyo in February of 1902, it was rendered into Chinese as Shijie shier

14 For Japanese collections that included Mme. de Staël together with women who were featured in Chinese materials see, for example, Kokuritsu, nos. 1136, 1173, 1191, 1212, and 1223. De Staël was included in Xue and Chen, Waiguo lienü zhuan, juan 4, 7b–8b. 15 For a Japanese collection of Western mothers of great men, see, for example, Kokuritsu, no. 1242. 16 The Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi was published in Tokyo in 1907. 17 Iwasaki Sodō 岩崎徂堂 (fl. 1901) and Mikami Kifū 三上寄付風 (fl. 1901), Sekai jūni joketsu 世界十二女傑 (Twelve world heroines) (Tokyo: Kōbun dō shoten, 1902).

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nühao世界十二女豪 by Zhao Bizhen 趙必振 (fl. 1902) almost exactly a year later. Zhao was establishing himself as a translator of a wide range of Japanese materials including a number of socialist texts at precisely this time. In 1902, he had translated Kōtoku Shūsui’s 幸得 秋水 (1871–1911) Nijisseiki no kaibutsu teikoku shugi 二十世紀の怪物帝 国主義 (Imperialism, the specter of the twentieth century) as Ershi shiji zhi guaiwu diguo zhuyi 二十世紀之怪物帝國主義, and in 1903, the same year Shijie shier nühao appeared, he translated Fukui Junzō’s 福井准造 Kinsei shakai shugi 近世社会主義 (Modern socialism, Tokyo, 1899) as Jinshi shehui zhuyi 近世社會主義.18 Given the kinds of texts included in Zhao’s translation repertoire, it seems likely that the Sekai jūni joketsu circulated among more radical groups in Japan in the first years of the twentieth century. Zhao did nothing intentionally to alter Iwasaki and Mikami’s text. He directly translated the title, preface, and the biographies themselves and did not add any front or back matter. The only changes in the text resulted from a number of infelicitous translations and from his altered transcription of two of the twelve heroines’ names and of other personal and place names.19 Zhao’s translation was the principal source for the volume on foreign women’s biographies in one of the most widely used and influential newstyle textbooks, Yang Qianli’s 楊千里 (fl. 1904) Nüzi xin duben 女子新讀本 (New reader for girls and women), published in 1904.20 Yang’s text included two volumes: the first featured historical Chinese exemplars; the second, Western heroines. This second volume established what would become the standard list of Western heroines in turn-of-thecentury Chinese texts. It was comprised of ten foreign women, half of whom were nineteenth-century figures. They included Anita Garibaldi (Manita Jialipoerdi Furen 馬尼他 加釐波兒地夫人) (1821–49), Louise Michel (Luyi Meishier 路易美世兒) (1830–1905), Francis Willard, 18 On Zhao’s translations, see Li Youning, The Introduction of Socialism into China (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1971), 13–14. Zhao’s Jinshi shehui zhuyi was published by Liang’s Guangzhi shuju, founded in Shanghai in 1901, the same company that published Shijie shier nüjie. Ershi shiji zhi guaiwu diguo zhuyi was published by the Dongya Book Company, also in Shanghai. 19 Yanqi Cutang 岩崎徂堂 [Iwasaki Sodō] and Sanshang Jifeng 三上寄付風 [Mikami Kifū], Shijie shier nüjie 世界十二女傑, trans. Zhao Bizhen (Shanghai: Guangzhi shuju, 1903). Zhao was from Wuling 武陵, in Hunan province, present-day Changde 常德. The text was first printed on 13 January 1903 and distributed on 17 February. 20 Yang Qianli 楊千里, ed., Nüzi xin duben 女子新讀本 (New reader for girls and women) (1904; Shanghai and Beijing: Wenming shuju, 1905).

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Harriet Beecher Stowe (Picha 批茶, Siduo Biqi 斯多婢棲) (1811–96), and Florence Nightingale. Four of these five women had died in the last decade of the nineteenth century or the first decade of the twentieth century, the period in which the Chinese textbook authors were writing. Of the five remaining Western exemplars, three were from the French Revolution period, including Charlotte Corday (Shalutuo 沙魯脫) (1768–93), Madame Roland, and Queen Louise (Liuyishe 流易設) (1776–1810). One, Lucy Hutchinson (Lüzhi 縷志) (1620–80), was active in the seventeenth century. The last was Joan of Arc. There are several indications that Yang had drawn on Zhao’s text. Eight out of the ten Western women Yang celebrated had first been featured in Zhao’s Twelve World Heroines and they were presented in precisely the same order. Most significantly, however, the transcription of the names of six of the eight women in the textbook was either identical or nearly identical to that used in the translation. In one case (Garibaldi), Yang used the given name that appeared within the biography but not as its title. If we consider the instability of transcription practices at the turn of the twentieth century when multiple renderings of even the most familiar Western names were often used, this was important evidence that Yang had relied on Zhao’s text.21

21 While most Japanese biographical texts published in this period used hiragana rather than kana or characters in transcribing foreign names, Iwasaki and Mikami used characters. For a sampling of the diverse ways Western names were transcribed in this period, see Hu Ying, 203–05. The transcriptions of the names of the female figures included in Sekai jūni joketsu/Shijie shier nühao (* indicates similar or identical transcription) were as follows: 1. Charlotte Corday ( J. Shârotto Korudei jō 紗魯土挌兒垤孃, C. Shalutu Ge’erdai niang 沙魯土 格兒垤孃) (1768–93); 2. The wife of Garibaldi ( J. Garibarujii fujin 加釐波兒地夫人, C. Jialipoerdi furen 加釐波兒地夫人) (1821–49); 3. Madame de Staël ( J. Sutairei fujin 蘇泰流夫人, C. Sutailiu furen 蘇泰流夫人) (1766–1817); 4. Louise Michel ( J. Rui Misêru joshi 路易美世兒女史, Luyi Meishier 路易美世兒) (1830–1905)*; 5. Joan of Arc ( J. Joan Dâku jō 如安打克孃, C. Ruan 如安) (1412–31)*; 6. Madame Roland ( J. Rōran fujin 朗蘭夫人, C. Langlan furen 朗蘭夫人) (1754–93)*; 7. Catherine the Great of Russia ( J. Rokoku jotei Kaserin 露國女帝伽陀釐, C. Eguo Nüdi Jiatuoli 俄 國女帝伽陀釐) (r. 1762–96); 8. Lucy Hutchinson ( J. Rushii Hatchinson joshi 縷志 發 珍遜女史, C. Luzhi Fazhensun nüshi 縷志 發珍遜女史) (1620–80)*; 9. Queen Isabelle [of Spain] ( J. Joō Isêberu 女王伊沙百兒, C. Nüwang Yishabaier 女王伊沙百兒) (ca. 1492); 10. Queen Elizabeth ( J. Erisabesu Joō 依里瑣比斯女王, C. Keluqimeisu Nüwang 克路崎美蘇女王) (ca. late 16th century); 11. Francis [Willard] ( J. Furanshisu jō 扶蘭志斯孃, Fulanzhisi niang 扶蘭志斯孃) (1839–98)*; 12. Prussian Queen Louise ( J. Pukoku Ōkō Ruizei 普國王后流易設, Puguo Wanghou Liuyishe 普國王后流易設) (1776–1810)*. The transcribed names of these figures in the Nüzi xin duben, vol. 2 (* indicates a biography not drawn from Zhao’s translation) were as follows: 1. Lessons 1–2. Charlotte Corday (Shalutuo 沙魯脫) (1768–93) (transciption differs from Zhao’s which

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The biographies in the Nüzi xin duben were significantly truncated versions of those in Zhao’s translation. Whereas chapters on individual women ran for approximately ten pages in the Shijie shier nüjie, even the biographies that spanned two lessons in Yang’s text were rarely more than three pages. In keeping with Yang’s aim of writing an easily accessible textbook, precise historical details—including dates and names of secondary characters—were left out in the interest of making the text more readable. Yang’s simplified version of three of Zhao’s translated biographies, together with two biographies not drawn from Zhao’s text, served, in turn, as the source for the chapters on Western women in a ten-volume reader for older women, the Zuixin funü guowen duben 最新婦女國文讀 本 (Newest Chinese reader for women) published in Fuzhou four years later, and conceivably for other textbooks as well. The text of the five Western women’s biographies that appeared in the Zuixin funü guowen duben were practically identical to Yang’s. The transcriptions of the names were all identical.22 Zhao’s translation was also the acknowledged source for a song with the exact same title, Shijie shier nüjie, included in Ye Zhongling’s 葉中 泠 Nüzi xin changge chuji 女子新唱歌初集 (First collection of new songs for girls and women), published by the Commercial Press in 1907. The transcription of names in the songbook was even closer to Zhao’s translation than was the transcription in Yang’s textbook. Three of the names were slightly altered in Ye’s version, whereas only one, Queen Elizabeth, was significantly different.23 differs from Iwasaki’s); 2. Lessons 3–4. Anita Garibaldi (Manita, 馬尼他) (1821–49) (given name as transcribed in Iwasaki and Zhao); 3. Lessons 5–6. Louise Michel (Luyi Meishier 路易美世兒) (1830–1905)*; 4. Lessons 7–9. Joan of Arc (Ruan 如安) (1412–31)*; 5. Lessons 10–11. Madame Roland (Luolan furen 羅蘭夫人) (1754–93)*; 6. Lesson 12. Lucy Hutchinson (Lüzhi 縷志) (1620–80)*; 7. Lessons 13–15. Francis Willard (Fulanzhisi 扶蘭志斯) (1839–98)*; 8. Lesson 16. Queen Louise (Liuyishe 流易設) (1776–1810)*; 9. Lessons 17–18. Harriet Beecher Stowe (Picha 批茶) (1811–96)*; 10. Lessons 19–20. Florence Nightingale (Nandingge’er 南丁格爾) (1820–1910)*. 22 Similar to Yang’s text, which devoted a first volume to Chinese women and a second volume to Western women, the Zuixin funü guowen duben celebrated Chinese exemplars in volumes 1 to 6 and Western exemplars in the last four volumes. Western women’s biographies in the Zuixin funü guowen duben include vol. 7 “Ji Picha” 記 批茶 (Record of Harriet Beecher [Stowe]); vol. 7 “Ji Liuyishe” 記流易設 (Record of Louise); vol. 8 “Ji Nandingge’er” 記南丁格爾 (Record of Florence Nightingale); vol. 9 “Ji Fulanzhisi” 記扶蘭志斯 (Record of Francis [Willard]); vol. 10 “Ji Ruan” 記如安 (Record of Joan [of Arc]). 23 Shijie shier nüjie, in Nüzi xin changge chuji, ed. Ye Zhongling, comp. Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1907), 52–58. Transcriptions of the names

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A text similar in title to Zhao’s translation, Shijie shi nüjie 世界十女傑 (Ten world heroines), was introduced in Chen Fan’s 陳範 (1860–1913) journal Subao 蘇報 ( Jiangsu journal) in June 1903 and again in the fourth issue of Nü xuebao 女學報 ( Journal of women’s learning), edited by Chen’s daughter, Chen Xiefen 陳擷芬 (1883–1923), four months later.24 These two articles explicitly compared the Shijie shi nüjie to the Shijie shier nüjie. The author of the Subao piece ascribed a different “value” to the two collections and seemed to prefer the collection of ten. He noted that the translator of this text had conveyed the drama of the biographies so effectively that the translation itself should be regarded as an original work.25 Chen Xiefen had intended to publish a vernacular rendition of each of the ten Shijie shi nüjie biographies in consecutive issues of her journal. This plan was aborted, however, when the Nü xuebao stopped publication in 1903. Chen did, nonetheless, publish the first installment of the biography of Louise Michel and it corroborates the Subao journalist’s claim that the collections of ten and twelve heroines diverged significantly: Chen’s description of Michel’s life was markedly different from the one in Zhao’s translated text.26

in the Nüzi xin changge are as follows: 1. Charlotte Corday (Shanutu Ge’erdie niang 沙奴土格兒垤孃) (1768–93); 2. The wife of Garibaldi ( Jialipoerdi furen 加釐波兒 地夫人) (1821–49); 3. [Madame de] Staël (Sutailiu furen 蘇泰流夫人) (1766–1817); 4. Louise Michel (Luyi Meishier nüshi 路易美世兒女史) (1830–1905); 5. Joan of Arc (Ruan Dake niang 如安打克娘) (1412–31); 6. Madame Roland (Langlan furen 朗蘭夫 人) (1754–93); 7. Catherine the Great of Russia (Eguo Nüdi Jiatali 俄國女帝伽陀釐) (r. 1762–96); 8. Lucy Hutchinson (Luzhi Fazhensun nü 縷志 發珍遜女) (1620–80); 9. Queen Isabelle [of Spain] (Yishabaier Nüwang 伊沙百兒女王) (ca. 1492); 10. Queen Elizabeth (Keluqimeisu Nüwang 克路崎美蘇女王) (ca. late 16th century); 11. Francis [Willard] (Fulanzhisi niang 扶蘭志斯孃) (1839–98); 12. Prussian Queen Louise (Puguo Wanghou Liuyishe Yamingli niang 普國王后流易設 亞茗里孃) (1776–1810). 24 Nü xuebao 4 (October 1903): 55–58; this issue was published in Tokyo. 25 “Shijie shi nüjie” 世界十女傑 (Ten world heroines), Subao 蘇報 (12 June 1903), rprt. in Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao: 1842–1911 近代中國女權運動史料 1842–1911 (Historical materials on the modern Chinese women’s rights movement: 1842–1911), eds. Li Youning 李又寧 and Zhang Yufa 張玉法, 2 vols. (Taipei: Taipei Chuan-chi wen-hsüehshe, 1975), 2:820. I have just located a copy of the Shijie shi nüjie and will analyze it in my forthcoming manuscript, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming, 2008). 26 Chunan nüzi 楚南女子 (Chen Xiefen 陳擷芬), “Shijie shi nüjie yanyi” 世界十 女傑 演義 (An [excursus on] “Ten world heroines”), Nü xuebao 女學報 4 (October 1903): 55–58.

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Nemoto Shō’s Ō-bei Joshi Risshin Den (“Famous Women” [ Biographies of successful European and American women]) The two women included in Yang’s Nüzi xin duben who were not originally featured in Iwasaki and Mikami’s text were Nightingale and Beecher Stowe. Nightingale and Beecher Stowe, together with a number of their European and American contemporaries, were widely celebrated both in new-style women’s textbooks and in early twentieth-century women’s journals. The Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi included one or two extensive biographies of Western women in every issue of the journal: seven women were featured over five issues.27 With the exception of Joan of Arc, these women had all made their mark in the nineteenth century. These same seven nineteenth-century women were featured together in a number of Japanese collections of near-contemporary Western women’s biographies published in the first years of the twentieth century.28 These collections featured overlapping lists of European and American women noted for their writing, philanthropy, social work, and for their educational and artistic achievements. They included Nagayama Moriyoshi’s 永山盛良 (fl. 1900) Taisei meifu den 泰西名婦伝 (Famous Western women) published in 1901, the shortest of these texts with eight biographies; and Katō Minryū’s 加藤眠柳 (fl. 1900) Joshi risshi hen 女子立志編 (Compilation of accomplished women), the longest collection with nineteen biographies, published in 1903.29 Their precise source, however, was Ō-Bei joshi risshin den 欧米女子立身伝 (“Famous women” [Biographies of successful European and American women]), a collection of fifteen biographies translated into Japanese by Nemoto Shō (Tadashi) 根本正 (fl. 1900) in 1906.30 All of the women included

27 These are the only extant issues of the journal. According to the table of contents for the sixth issue published in the Zhongguo jindai qikan pianmu huilu 中國近代期刊篇目 彙錄 (A catalogue of the titles [of articles] in modern Chinese periodicals) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1979–84), 2115, two biographies were included, one of a Russian diplomat (Nabikefu 那俾可甫), the other of a French journalist (Yadan 亞丹). I have not yet been able to identify these women. 28 A number of separate Japanese monographs were also devoted to Joan of Arc, including Kokuritsu, nos. 1086 and 1088 both published in 1886. See also no. 1256, Rigiyōru リギヨ—ル (Francois-Alfred Desire Ligneul) (1847–1922). ジヤンダ—ク ( Joan of Arc) (Tokyo: Kyōgaku kensan Wa-Futsu kyōkai, 1910). 29 Nagayama Moriyoshi 永山盛良, Taisei meifu den 泰西名婦伝 (Famous Western women) (Tokyo: Seiyōdō shobō, 1901); Katō Minryū 加藤眠柳, Joshi risshi hen 女子立 志編 (Compilation of accomplished women) (Tokyo: Naigai shuppan kyōkai, 1903). 30 Ō-Bei Joshi Risshin den 欧米女子立身伝 (“Famous women”: Biographies of successful European and American women), trans. Nemoto Shō [Tadashi] 根本正 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1906).

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in the Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi biographies, with the exception of Joan of Arc, had been featured in Nemoto’s text.31 The Chinese translators of the biographies in the Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi faithfully rendered the Japanese life-story narratives but appended their own commentaries that interpreted those narratives for the Chinese reader. In addition, photographs identical to ones found in Nemoto’s text were included at the beginning of the issues featuring Nightingale, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Asuoli 阿索里) (1810–50), and Lyon. The influence of Nemoto’s text appears to have extended beyond the Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi to other turn-of-the-century journals. This was suggested in a biography of the American social reformer Willard, which appeared in Xinyi jie 新譯界 (New translations) in 1906. In this biography, Willard was named the “uncrowned queen” (Wuguan nüdi 無冠女帝), precisely the term and characters Nemoto had used to describe her.32 Textual Transformations I will give two examples of the resignification of Japanese renditions of Western women’s biographies in Chinese materials, one from Iwasaki and Mikami’s text and one from Nemoto’s.

31 Western women included in Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi (* indicates that a photograph of the woman appeared in the issue’s front matter): ISSUE 1: 1. Florence Nightingale (Niejike’er 涅幾柯兒) (1820–1910), part 1*; 2. Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Asuoli 阿索里) (1810–50)*; ISSUE 2: 3. Mary Lyon (Lihen 黎痕) (1797–1849)*; 1a. Florence Nightingale, part 2; ISSUE 3: 4. Joan of Arc (Ruoan 若安) (1412–30)*; ISSUE 4: 5. Mary Livermore (Lifuoma 黎佛瑪) (1820–1905)*; 6. George Eliot (Qiyuqi Ailiatuo 奇欲奇 愛里阿脫) (1819–80); ISSUE 5: 7. Lucretia Mott (Mode 墨德) (1793–1880). Women featured in Nemoto’s text together with the categories Nemoto assigned them (* designates a biography that also appeared in the Zhongguo xin nujie zazhi ). 1. Sutō スト—[ Harriet Beecher] Stowe: Writer; 2. Motto モット [Lucretia] Mott: Orator*; 3. Ribamōa りバモ—ア [Mary A.] Livermore: Orator*; 4. Osorii オソり—[Margaret Fuller] Ossoli: Journalist*; 5. Mitchiru ミツチル [Maria] Mitchell: Philosopher; 6. Arekotto アルコツト [ Louisa M.] Alcott: Narrator; 7. Rion りオン [Mary] Lyon: Educator*; 8. Suchîru スチール [Madame de] Staël: Political journalist; 9. Furai フライ [ Elizabeth] Fry: Philanthropist; 10. Naichingêru ナイチンゲ—ル [Florence] Nightingale: Nurse*; 11. Eriotto エりオット [George] Eliot: Novelist; 12. Torosea Rinto Jikiki トロせア、リント、ジキキ Dorothea Lynde Dix: Philanthropist; 13. Susanna Uesuri スサンナ、ウエスリ [Susanna] Wesley: Mother of aesthetics; 14. Shiuria Pâmuri Biringusu シウリア、パ—ムリービリングス Julia Parmly Billings: Philanthropist; 15. Uirâdo ウイラ—ド [ Francis] Willard: Uncrowned Queen*. 32 Liu Gengzao 劉賡藻, “Wuguan nüdi Weinade” 無冠女帝維納德 (The [uncrowned queen] [Francis] Willard), Xinyi jie 新譯界 (New translations) 2 [Tokyo] (16 December 1906) (rprt. in Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao, 1:341–46).

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Joan of Arc was the most prominent Western woman warrior figure featured in late Qing texts. Both a religious visionary driven by divine inspiration and one of Europe’s first nationalists, Joan led French efforts to repulse the British at the time of the Hundred Years War (1336–1453). Volumes of writing on this remarkable heroine existed in Western languages by the turn of the twentieth century when Joan was beatified.33 She had also become a significant presence in the Meiji Japanese imaginary. In 1885, when the feminist advocate for natural rights, liberty, and equality, Fukuda Hideko 深田秀子 (1865–1927), was imprisoned for antigovernment activities, she was labeled “Japan’s Joan of Arc.”34 The following year, two biographies of Joan, one clearly a translation, were published and others would follow through the early twentieth century.35 The many Chinese accounts of Joan’s life seem to have been based on Japanese biographies. These included Zhao’s 1903 translation of Iwasaki and Mikami’s collection. In the Chinese materials, Joan functioned as the Western equivalent of the legendary Chinese heroine Hua Mulan 花木蘭 (ca. 500). She was prominent in the full range of turn-of-the-twentieth-century materials, from long narrative accounts in textbooks and women’s journals, to political treatises, school ditties, and women’s poetry. She was often celebrated as a fervent nationalist, the “great female patriot Joan of Arc,” as recorded in a Beijing nübao 北京女報 (Beijing women’s journal) biography entitled “Aiguo nüzi Ruo’an Dake de gushi” 愛國女子若安 達克的故事 (The story of the patriotic girl, Joan of Arc).36 She was even inducted into the late Qing protofeminist struggle by the ardent radical Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907) who invoked Joan’s name in a song on women’s rights.37 If a compiler of a collection of Chinese historical exemplars was to include a single Western heroine in his text, that

33 She was beatified in 1909. On Joan of Arc, see Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 34 Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 36, 48. 35 Fukkoku joketsu Joan jitsuden: Jiyū no shinka 仏国女傑如安実伝ー自由の新花 (A true biography of the French heroine Joan: A new flower of freedom), ed. Asakura Kaseki 朝倉禾積 (Tokyo: Chōudō, 1886); and Kaiten iseki Fukkoku budan 回天偉蹟仏国美談, trans. Janet Tuckey and Awaya Kan’ichi 粟屋関一 (Tokyo: Dōmei shobō, 1886). 36 Anon., “Aiguo nüzi Ruo’an Dake de gushi” 愛國女子若安達克的故事 (The story of the patriotic girl, Joan of Arc), Beijing nübao 北京女報 (Beijing women’s journal) (21 July 1906). 37 Jianhu nüxia 鑑湖女俠, “Mian nüquan” 勉女權 (Urging women’s rights), Zhongguo nübao 中國女報 2 (4 March 1907): 47.

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heroine was usually Joan.38 At the same time, visual representations of the visionary patriot, often dressed in armor, graced the pages of a number of women’s journals (fig. 5.1). The numerous Chinese narrative accounts of Joan’s life varied in their degree of detail and points of emphasis. Generally, however, with the exception of Zhao’s text, which was a direct rendering of the Japanese, they were consistent in interpretation. Although all were written on the eve of Joan’s beatification in 1909, they uniformly presented the French heroine as a nationalist patriot rather than a pious saint. Insisting that Joan’s courage and patriotism be understood in purely human terms, Chinese authors of adapted translations or of commentaries on translated accounts of her life summarily dismissed her invocation of divine “voices.”39 This secularizing tendency was apparent in the biography of Joan of Arc that appeared practically verbatim in Yang’s Nüzi xin duben and in the Zuixin funü guowen duben. Based on Zhao’s Shier shijie nüjie, sections of this account were faithful to Zhao’s translation and many phrases were drawn directly from it. Yang occluded all of Iwasaki and Mikami’s (and thus Zhao’s), references to Joan’s religiosity, however.40 In Yang’s account, Joan was an intelligent young woman who “understood the meaning of patriotism.” Determined “to save the nation” and lead her countrymen in the struggle against the British, she also understood how difficult it was for a sixteen-year-old peasant girl to gain the allegiance of the ignorant masses. She therefore devised a strategy to win the deeply superstitious common people’s confidence: she would fool them into believing that she was divinely inspired. Yang’s representation of Joan’s feigned religiosity contrasted sharply with Iwasaki and Mikami’s/ Zhao’s, which described Joan’s faith as central to her character (ben yu xinggen 本於性根).41

38 See, for example, Jinguo xumei zhuan 巾蟈鬚眉傳 (Biographies of manly women), 4 vols. (Shanghai: Huiwentang shuju, 1900; rprt. Taipei: Hsin-wen-feng chu-pan kung-ssu, 1978), 4:2–3. 39 There is a Chinese exception to this representation of Joan of Arc. In Xue Shaohui’s Waiguo lienü zhuan, Joan was depicted as acquiring her magical power from divine “voices” ( juan 5, 7b). 40 See, for example, Zhao, 33, 41. 41 Yang Qianli, vol. 2, Lessons 7–9, p. 5b; Guang Zhanyun 廣展雲 (fl. 1908), Guang Yiyun 廣翼雲 (fl. 1908), and Chen Yuxin 陳與新 (fl. 1908), comps., Zuixin funü guowen duben 最新婦女國文讀本 (Newest Chinese reader for women) (Fuzhou: Jiaoyu pujishe, 1908), vol. 10; Zhao, 41.

Figure 5.1. A visual representation of the visionary patriot dressed in armor. Source: “Ruoan Dake Jeanne d’Arc ji,” Jeanne d’Arc ( Jeanne d’Arc), FNSB 4 (22 October 1911).

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Yang’s version of Joan’s story, which was repeated in the Zuixin funü guowen duben, advocated certain wenming 文明 (new or advanced) values, by resoundingly condemning superstition and commending female heroism. It ultimately sustained the gender ideology intrinsic to historical accounts of Chinese women warriors, however.42 Joan’s ultimate downfall, according to this version, lay in her refusal to make the crucial reversion back to her normative gendered role. On this point, Yang remained faithful to the thrust of Zhao’s translation. Zhao had explained that the British feared Joan would be spared death if she was dressed as a woman and, therefore, enticed her into resuming male attire. Joan willingly complied, recalling the glorious moment when she had presented herself to the king in male guise, a memory that overruled her better judgment and her knowledge that cross-dressing was against the law.43 Although Yang’s account was generally a significantly pared down version of Zhao’s, he greatly embellished the description of this moment. He portrayed Joan as vainly dancing about the soldier’s clothing, reveling in her past glory. It was at this point, Yang announced, that the British accused her of inciting the people with heresy and had her burned at the stake. Her tragic end was thus, Yang suggested, the result of her vainglorious heroism and, most importantly, of her refusal to follow the likes of Hua Mulan in resuming modest female dress when she left the battlefield.44 The pervasiveness of accounts of Joan of Arc’s life in turn-of-thetwentieth-century materials reflected the obsession with national heroism in this period. This obsession was not only manifest in the tales of woman warrior-like figures, however, but even in portraits of social reformers and foreign educators. Foremost among these was the American Mary Lyon, an emblem of the much-heralded Western women’s education in turn-of-the-twentieth-century East Asia. Together with Nightingale, Willard, and Beecher Stowe, Lyon was one of the newstyle social heroines lauded by turn-of-the-century authors for placing the collective good above personal comfort or individual fulfillment. The biographies of Lyon in Chinese women’s journals appear to have been based primarily on Japanese sources. Almost all Japanese

42 On this ideology, see Louise P. Edwards, Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in “The Red Chamber Dream” (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 87–112. 43 Zhao, 40–41. 44 Yang, vol. 2, Lessons 7–9; Guang Zhanyun, vol. 10. According to the sixth-century ballad, the Mulan ci 木蘭辭 (Ballad of Mulan), after fighting in her father’s place for twelve years disguised as a man, Mulan resumed her feminine role and dress.

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collections of Western heroines published in this period included Lyon, often as the single educator among ten to twenty women noted for various accomplishments. This was true of Nagayama Moriyoshi’s Famous Western Women, Katō Minryū’s Compilation of Accomplished Women, and Nemoto’s Famous Women where she was the one educator among eight, nineteen, and fifteen celebrated women respectively. While Chinese authors rarely translated the many accounts of painters, poets, or novelists in Japanese sources, they consistently appropriated Lyon as a model for young Chinese women. One of the more substantial Chinese biographies of Lyon appeared in the Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi in 1907 (fig. 5.2). Lingxi 靈希 was given as the name of the “author” of the biography, but it was a near-direct translation of the account in Nemoto’s collection. The text offered details about Lyon’s background, her character, and her accomplishments. It described how she remained focused on her studies during her childhood in Massachusetts even while dutifully helping her widowed mother. Intellectually gifted, hard working, and thrifty, Lyon served as an assistant teacher in a local school from the age of seventeen. Over the next twenty years she taught at different schools in Massachusetts and ultimately founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1834. Unmarried, she devoted herself to the school and to the promotion of women’s education, which she considered the source of all civilization.45 Although Lingxi faithfully translated the detailed Japanese narrative, her final paragraph in which she summarized the significance of Lyon’s life diverged significantly from the final paragraph in the Japanese original. In his conclusion, Nemoto revealed his adherence to the prevailing Meiji ideology of good wives and wise mothers (ryōsai kenbo 良妻賢母).46 Overlooking Lyon’s status as a single woman, he celebrated her for nurturing good wives and wise mothers who were, he claimed, the foundation of civilization (bunmei 文明). Lyon, Nemoto therefore declared, could be credited with American progress.47 In contrast, Lingxi used Lyon’s story to underline the links between female education and heroism that were so prominent in early twentieth-century Chinese discourse. She claimed that Lyon had sacrificed

45 Lingxi 靈希, “Meiguo da jiaoyujia Lihen nüshi zhuan” 美國大教育家黎痕女士傳 (Biography of the great American educator, Mary Lyon), Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi 中國 新女界雜誌 (Magazine of the new Chinese woman) 2 (5 March 1907): 65–70. 46 On this ideology see Judge, “Ideology.” 47 Nemoto, 82.

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Figure 5.2. Photograph of the Great American Educator, Mary Lyon. Source: XNJZZ 2 (5 March 1907).

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her own life so that other American citizens could seek happiness and become enlightened. Both men and women revered her as a beloved hero ( jing’ai yingxiong 敬愛英雄), and she achieved what all aspiring Chinese heroines sought—a place in history. Her name, Lingxi wrote, the name of a hero (renjie 人傑), would be remembered forever.48 Conclusion The Subao journalist who had introduced the Ten World Heroines claimed that the ten Western women’s biographies in that compilation would serve as a “precious raft,” which would gently ferry Chinese women through the often turbulent transitional period in which they lived (nüjie guodu zhi baofa 女界過渡之寶筏).49 Compilers of new-style textbooks and editors of women’s journals sought to achieve a similar objective in introducing their audience to the life stories of foreign heroines like Joan of Arc and Lyon. Committed to providing Chinese women with more than basic literacy skills, these individuals used biographies of Western heroines to equip their readers with a new understanding of heroism, patriotism, and social commitment. This knowledge would aid their female compatriots in weathering the vicissitudes of their era of heightened cultural change. It would also encourage them to contribute boldly to China’s future themselves. Authors who were determined that their readers not be left behind by the waves of new knowledge and practice central to the turn-of-thetwentieth-century global experience were, nonetheless, also concerned that young women not be swept away by the tide. Yang implicitly condemned Joan of Arc’s acts of gender inversion, for example, and Lingxi overwrote Lyon’s choice of a single life with descriptions of her devoted social mothering. The “precious raft” of Western heroine’s biographies would guide young Chinese women toward the global elsewhere that represented China’s future hope. Values of gender propriety and social service enshrined in the two-millennia-long tradition of Chinese female biography would continue, nonetheless, to function as their cultural anchor.

48 49

Lingxi, 70. “Shijie shi nüjie yanyi.” See note 26.

CHAPTER SIX

FEMALE ASSASSINS, CIVILIZATION, AND TECHNOLOGY IN LATE QING LITERATURE AND CULTURE Jing Tsu Growing interest in late Qing fiction in recent years has only begun to revise our conceptions of modern Chinese literature. Although historians and literary scholars in China and Japan have been studying this period for some time, its bewildering spectrum of genres and innovations seems to defy existing frameworks of literary historiography.1 While Liu E 劉鶚 (1857–1909) and Wu Jianren 吳趼人 (1866–1910) have long been heralded as masters of the genre of “fiction of social critique” (qianze xiaoshuo 譴責小說), many late Qing popular fiction writers did not prefer to maintain an intellectually critical distance from the political scandals that palpably shaped the urban landscape. On the contrary, commercially minded writers, keenly aware of the marketability of sensationalism, were eager to tap into the salacious details of the quickly modernizing urban scene, transformed by new forms of knowledge through popularized Western science, technology, and perceptions of individualism. The writing of late Qing literature was itself one of the many gestures and postulations of change during this pivotal moment of modern history and culture. A world in its own right, late nineteenth-century China was a nexus for old and new ideas, trafficking between fiction and second-rate writers and translators, and fostering a growing enthusiasm for Western science as a new source of not only pragmatic but also fantastical knowledge. It would be an exaggeration to say that this

1 Tarumoto Teruo 樽本照雄, Shinmatsu shōsetsu kandan 清末小說閒談 (Informal discussions about late Qing fiction) (Kyōto: Hōritsu Bunkasha, 1983); Fan Boqun 范伯群, Zhongguo jinxiandai tongsu wenxue shi 中國近现代通俗文学史 (A literary history of early modern and modern Chinese vernacular fiction) (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000); Yuan Jin 袁進, Zhongguo xiaoshuo de jindai biange 中國小說的近代變革 (Transformations of the Chinese fiction in the early modern period) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992); David Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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worldview was empirical, scientific, and thus “modern” in nature, as the boundary between the scientific and the fantastic was often indistinct. It would be equally misleading to assess the fiction from this period according to the standards of great literature, if by “great” we mean canonical works still recognized today. It is, in fact, the oblivion of these once flourishing literary labors and cultural engagements in the modern canon that makes them all the more significant. More than fiction, they bring into relief a world that is unique in its emphasis on innovation rather than staying power, epistemic fissure instead of cohesion. Examining this new constellation, this chapter analyzes the transposed knowledge of Western science, technology, and political nihilism, and their cultural relays through discussions of radicalism, female assassins, and heroism in early twentieth-century Chinese fiction. By looking at the different cultural and cross-cultural preoccupations that converged on sensationalizing the image of the female assassin, I am interested in how the different conceptions of radical political heroism, women as agents of violence and diplomacy, the possibilities of science, and the technologization of civilization gave new intelligibility to late Qing modernity. Admittedly, one of the difficulties of this task is that the late Qing cultural topography does not provide us with clear maps of genres. Operations of science, technology, gender, civilization, politics, and literature were interstitial, productive in their clashes rather than distinct voices. The complex production of late Qing culture, furthermore, mobilized a variety of sources. The abundance of biographies, journal articles, translated and untranslated Western fiction, Japanese science fiction, and political treatises on reform testified to the efforts of a diverse community of cultural agents working for profit, novelty, and ideology. This new proximity between the native and the foreign, science and literature, generated new epistemic grounds, forging surprising analogies between unobvious realms of cultural life and rearticulating scientism as a practical power and realizable fantasy. Taking shape in this context, literary treatments of female heroism and assassination were much more than gimmicks for print sensationalism. The tolerance for and even fascination with violence committed by women in two novels published in 1904, Nüwa shi 女媧石 (The Stone of Goddess Nüwa) and Nüyu hua 女獄花 (Female jail flower), boldly places these new women at the forefront of visionary scientific and political innovations. In their own ways, these two novels rationalize the moral ambiguity in the much flaunted but little explained notion of “civility” (wenming 文明), widely circulated as a topic of intellectual

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debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also provide an important focus for engaging discussions on the division between violence and civilization, radicalism and conservatism, and tradition and modernity. Following closely on the heels of the first Chinese literary appearance of the female assassin, Sophia Perovskaya (1853–81), in Dong ou nühaojie 東歐女豪傑 (Heroines of Eastern Europe) in 1902–03, these two novels absorb this exotic figure into the specific imaginary of late Qing political and scientific culture. A glimpse into this larger context reveals the extensiveness and productive inconsistencies of this translation of the “world.” The emergence of this interest in and acceptance of political violence, when delivered with extravagant technology manipulated by beautiful women, reflects not only the shifting perceptions of gender but also the mixing of genres between literature, history, politics, and science in configuring a new cultural episteme. I. Women’s Fiction and the Heroism of Destruction Chinese intellectuals’ and writers’ preoccupation with China’s transition from empire to nation around the turn of the twentieth century prompted an interest in revolutionary figures, or “heroes” (haojie 豪傑), particularly from the European and American contexts. Intellectuals greatly admired famous statesmen and generals such as George Washington (1732–99), Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), and Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), to name a few, for their resolve to realize extraordinary political visions.2 Russian nihilism prominently figured in this matrix as a more radical form of revolutionary inspiration. Popular fiction writers such as Zhou Shoujuan 周瘦鵑 (1894–1968) dabbled in translating nihilist fiction, while more committed translators such as Chen Jinghan 陳景漢 devoted their careers almost exclusively to the subject.3 2 See, for example, Chen Jianhua 陳建華, “Napolun yu wan Qing ‘xiaoshuo jie geming’ ” 拿破崙與晚清小說界革命 (Napoleon and “fiction revolution” in the late Qing), Hanxue yanjiu (Chinese studies) 23.2 (2005): 321–54. On the reception and transformation of George Washington as a figure of progressivism in China, see Pan Guangzhe 潘光哲, Huashengdun zai Zhongguo: zhizuo guofu 華盛頓在中國: 製作國父 (Washington in China: Producing the founding father) (Taibei: Sanmin, 2006). 3 There were many translations of nihilist fiction of known, partially known, and unknown origins. They were published in mainly literary journals such as Xiaoshuo shibao 小說時報 (Fiction times); Xiaoshuo xinbao 小說新報 (New journal for fiction); Xiaoshuo congbao 小說叢報 (Fiction series journal); Minyu bao 民籲報 (People’s sigh);

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As historians of anarchism and socialism in Japan and China have noted, the ideology of destruction appealed to the desire for social change.4 In the name of a kind of freedom not readily understood in the contemporary context of Western liberalism, anarchism and nihilism promised a utopian realization of society’s potential through political apocalypse.5 At the same time, not all of these preoccupations were in the service of bringing about large-scale epochal social and political transforMinhu bao 民呼報 (People’s cry); Yueyue xiaoshuo 月月小說 (Fiction monthly); Libailiu 禮拜六 (Saturday); Fubao 復報 (Recovery); Youxi zazhi 遊戲雜誌 (Play magazine); Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 (Short story monthly); and Min bao 民報 (People’s news). I give in parentheses dates of the translations, when available, followed by brief remarks on their likely provenances. See, for instance, Tanhua meng 曇花夢 (Dream of the Queen of the Night) (1914) [allegedly translated from the work of a Russian writer “Sana sikefu 薩那斯克夫”]; Nü xuwudang 女虛無黨 (Female nihilists) (1912), trans. Tianjin ludiao 天津路釣; Xuwudang 虛無黨 (Nihilists), trans. Chen Jinghan 陳景漢; Xuwudang zhenxiang 虛無黨真相 (Exposé on nihilists) [allegedly translated from the work of a German writer “Mohasun” 摩哈孫]; Meiren shou 美人手 (Beauty’s hand) (1903–06) [allegedly based on a French novel]; Xiaohun cao 消魂草 (Soul perishing grass) [allegedly authored by a British writer “Mailushi” 麥魯士]; Ye qiangwei 野薔薇 (1908), trans. Li Shicen, and retrans. Ba Jin (1909); Xiaohunyu 消魂雨 (Soul perishing rain) (1909), trans. Daohaizi 蹈海子; Xiehua leishi 血花淚史 (The teary history of blood-stained flowers) (1911), trans. Lu Guanchun 陸冠春; Qihuan 妻幻 (A wife’s illusion) (1917), trans. Shewo 舍我; Fantian fuyu 翻天覆雨 (Overturning heaven and redoubled rain) (1914), trans. Zhou Shoujuan 周瘦鵑; Huangshi zhi xuwudang 皇室之虛無黨 (Imperial nihilists) (1906), trans. Da ai shi 大哀氏 [this was translated from the work of Japanese writer 金津圓大郎]; Nü xuwudang ren 女虛無黨人 (A member of the female nihilist party) (1914), trans. Zhou Shoujuan; Sharen gongsi 殺人公司 (Assassination incorporated) (1908), trans. Chen Jinghan 陳景漢; Xuwudang 虛無黨 (Nihilists) (1904), trans. Chen Jinghan; Xuwudang an 虛無黨案 (A case of the nihilists) (1906); Xuwudang feiting 虛無黨飛艇 (Nihilist flying ship) (1911), trans. Yang Xinyi 楊心一; Xuwudang fuchou ji 虛無黨復讎記 (Revenge of the nihilists), trans. Yang Xinyi 楊心一 [from “Geweilian” 葛威廉, that is, William Tufnell le Queux]; Xuwudang miyi 虛無黨密議 (The nihilists’ secret summit) (1913) [allegedly translated from a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]; Yifeng shu 一封書 (A Letter) (1917). 4 See Don Price, Russia: The Roots of the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); John Crump, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); Martin Bernal, Chinese Socialism to 1907 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); Mary Backus Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Jiang Jun 蔣俊 and Li Xingzhi 李興芝, Zhongguo jindai de wuzhengfu zhuyi sichao 中國近代的無政府主義思潮 (The trend of anarchism in modern China) ( Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1990). 5 See Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 1; and Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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mations. The impassioned belief in destruction also harbored an idealized view of self-sacrifice. Expressing at heart an intense form of self-distinction, nihilism propagated a rather romanticist notion of destruction, glorifying the martyrdom of individual sacrifice. Dedicating themselves, often through death, to the cause of freedom, revolutionaries, anarchists, and nihilists shared a fervent desire for eternal recognition, leaving behind a prominent trail of pamphlets, suicide notes, and photographs. The well-known photograph of Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907), dressed in a Western man’s suit with a pipe in her mouth, remains an interesting commentary on radicalism as an antifeminine and anti-Chinese posture. Invocations of the famous last words of martyrs such as Chen Tianhua 陳天華 (1875–1905) and Zou Rong 鄒容 (1885–1905) predicated the possibility of liberation on the violence of racial nationalism and the assassination of Manchu officials.6 Wu Yue 吳樾 (1878–1905), who was responsible for the bombing attempt made on five Chinese emissaries, left behind what was originally a letter to his fiancée.7 It was later expanded and published as the programmatic statement for political radicalism and assassinations entitled “An Epoch of Assassinations” (Ansha shidai 暗殺時代). Succinctly expressing the self-appointed task of political radicals, Wu claimed that China, lacking a coherent sense of collectivity, was not yet ready for a revolution, which required collective action. More urgently needed were the exemplary gestures of extremist martyrs whose selflessness would inspire larger social rebellions and sacrifice. Indeed, political assassinations unleashed an era of subversive individualism, where exceptional acts carried greater value than life itself. Participating in the tumultuous period of dynastic decline and the founding of modern nationhood, the practice became increasingly notorious, especially after Shi Jianru 史堅如 (1879–1900) famously See Zou Rong 鄒容, “Gemingjun” 革命軍 (1903), in Xinhai geming qian shinianjian shilun xuanji 辛亥革命前十年間時論選集 (Selected political essays published during the ten years prior to the 1911 revolution), eds. Zhang Nan 張枬 and Wang Renzhi 王忍 之, 5 vols. (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1960), 1.2:649–77, esp. p. 665. For an earlier call for assassinations, see Li Qun 李群, “Sharen pian” 殺人篇 (Essay on assassinations) (1901), in Xinhai geming qian shinianjian shilun xuanji, 1.1:21–25. 7 Wu Yue 吳樾, “Ansha shidai” 暗殺時代 (An epoch for assassinations), in Xinhai geming qian shinianjian shilun xuanji, 2.2:714–33. For a discussion of the differences between revolutionaries and anarchists, see Meng Diesheng 夢蝶生 (Ye Xiasheng 葉夏聲), “Wu zhengfu dang yu geming dang zhi shuoming” 無政府黨與革命黨之說明 (Clarifications on the difference between anarchists and revolutionaries), in Xinhai geming qian shinianjian shilun xuanji, 2.2:490–97. 6

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assassinated the Governor-General of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, Deshou 德壽, in 1900. Beginning in 1903, reports on Russian revolutionaries and nihilism flooded the pages of radical and progressive journals such as Dalu 大陸 (Mainland), Guomin ribao 國民日報 (People’s daily), Hansheng 漢聲 (Voice of the Han), Subao 蘇報 ( Jiangsu journal), Minbao 民報 (People’s journal), Jingzhong ribao 警鐘日報 (Alarming bell news), Zhejiang chao 浙江潮 (Tide of Zhejiang), Tongzi shijie 童子世界 ( Juvenile world), and Jiangsu 江蘇.8 After 1903, assassination became a more commonplace technique for eliminating political opposition, and targeted killings continued throughout the Republican period. Translated from Russia, filtered through Japan, but reconceived in China as a new kind of modernist, individualist universalism, nihilism exceeded its original source of inspiration in its new frame of ambition. It took on distinct possibilities, increasingly coupled with other pressing concerns at the time. Constitutionalism, racial extinction, nationalism, and women’s liberation simultaneously pointed to violence as a justifiable and even celebratory kind of destruction. Tilting the discussion towards the reformist project of educating women, “women’s fiction” (nüzi xiaoshuo 女子小說) incorporated assassinations and political violence into its own vision of radicalism. At the frontline of this imagined revolution, however, one does not find the male revolutionary carrying out assassinations in Tianjin or Beijing, as was abundantly reported in urban newspapers and journals. Capturing the writers’ fancy, instead, was the image of stunningly beautiful female assassins traveling in enviable style in exotic Europe and America.9 While

8 Articles on Russian revolutionary and assassination activities in 1903 alone include “Eguo xuwudang sanjie zhuan” 俄國虛無黨三傑傳 (Biographies of three Russian nihilist heroes), Dalu 3 (1903); “Eluosi de gemingdang” 俄羅斯的革命黨 (Russian revolutionary alliance), Tongzi shijie 33 (1903); “Shi E di yalishanda zhe zhuan” 弑俄帝 亞歷山大者傳 (A biography of the assassin of Czar Alexander), Dalu 9 (1903); “Eguo gemingdang nüjie Shaboluoke zhuan” 俄國革命党女傑沙勃羅克傳 (A biography of Russian revolutionary heroine Shaboluoke), Zhejiang chao 7 (1903); “Ehuang yalishanda di er zhi sizhuang” 俄皇亞歷山大第二之死狀 (The circumstances surrounding the death of Czar Alexander II), Guomin ribao (1903); “Eguo xuwudang zhi jiguan” 俄國 虛無黨之機關 (The organization of Russian nihilists), Hansheng 6 (1903); “Lun Eluosi xuwudang” 論俄羅斯虛無黨 (On Russian nihilists) (1903): 40–41; “Xuwudang” 虛無黨 (Nihilists), Subao (19 June 1903); “Luxiya xuwudang” 露西亞虛無黨 (Russian nihilists), Jiangsu 4 (1903). 9 Other than Qiu Jin, there were Chinese female nihilists and radicals about whom we know very little but who were involved in heading assassination corps and bomb-making. Fang Junying 方君瑛, Zeng Xing 曾醒, and Chen Bijun 陳壁君, for instance, organized an assassination corps for Tongmenghui 同盟會 (Revolutionary Alliance) in Japan in

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male radicals in real life risked physical damage and disfigurement in their trade, novels portrayed female assassins as multilingual socialites, equally adept at public speaking and planning ambush. Distinguished from other Western figures associated with political virtue (Madame Jean-Marie Roland, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine the Great) who were revered by the Chinese around the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian female nihilist demonstrated a fierce resolve to carry out physical violence.10 Appearing between November 1902 and June 1903 in Liang Qichao’s seminal journal Xin xiaoshuo 新小説 (New fiction), Dong ou nü haojie 東歐女豪傑 (Heroines of Eastern Europe) shared the forum for original new fiction along with other ominous titles such as Liang’s Xin Zhongguo weilai ji 新中國未來記 (The future of new China), Hongshui huo 洪水禍 (Disaster of the flood), and Huitian qitan 回天綺談 (Beautiful tales of changing the world).11 By 1907, the figure of the woman nihilist assassin was frequently seen in late Qing fiction about women. As protagonists or key figures in individual chapters involving plots of political intrigue, they added a progressive appeal. Nihilists, not only Russian but also Chinese, became commonplace in translations and original Chinese creations alike. Apart from the biographical fiction about Qiu Jin such as Liuyue shuang 六月霜 (Frost in June), novels such as Zhongguo xin nühao 中國新女豪 (China’s new heroines), Nüzi quan 女子權 (Women’s rights), Nü xuwu dang 女虛無黨 (Female nihilists), and, later, Mimi nüzi 秘密 女子 (Secret female agents) featured Chinese female assassins conducting top-secret political negotiations, establishing constitutionalism and

1905. In 1906, Fang and Zeng, along with Cai Hui 蔡惠 and Tang Qunying 唐群英, were also involved in running a bomb-making facility in Yokohama. See below. 10 For a set of important articles on women’s literature, readership, and culture in the late Qing period, see Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004). 11 For an interesting discussion of this text in relation to Flower in the Sea of Regret, see Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), chaps. 1 and 3. Also see Chen Pingyuan 陳平原, Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi 二十世紀中國小說史 1897–1916 (History of twentiethcentury Chinese fiction, 1897–1916), esp. chap. 7, collected in Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuoshi lunji 陳平原小說史論集 (Chen Pingyuan’s collected works on the history of fiction), 3 vols. (Shijiazhuang shi: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1997), 2:794–833. Hongshuihui 洪水禍, a “historical novel” (lishi xiaoshuo 歷史小說) by Yuchenzi 雨塵子 (Dust from the Rain), is set in France, while Huitian qitan 回天綺談, a “political novel” (zhengzhi xiaoshuo 政治小說) by Yusezhai zhuren 玉瑟齋主人 (Master of Jade Zither Studio), is set in England. Both are collected in vol. 26 of Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi 中國 近代小説大系 (A compendium of modern Chinese fiction), 80 vols. (Nanchangshi: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe, 1991).

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the founding of the Republic, and forming worldwide revolutionary alliances.12 The popular literary vocation of assassins mirrored a notable change in writers’ conception of traditional character types of chivalry. Commenting on the unprecedented flavor of the modern assassin in his preface to his 1906 novel Cike tan 刺客談 (On assassins), Chen Jinghan remarked on the distinct break between the figures of the traditional xiake 俠客 (knight-errant) and the yishi 義士 (righteous man), on the one hand, and the new Russified Chinese assassin on the other.13 Assassins embodied a new modern heroism, and the idea of the female nihilist assassin, in particular, was revolutionary, as Chinese fictional heroines assumed the postures of Sarah Aizenson and Perovskaya while embodying new political sensibilities according to a different set of moral criteria. These standards were otherwise less permissible in the traditional categories of valor and virtue. The Russian examples thus inaugurated a series of imaginative embellishments, incorporating biographical sources on notable Western women, such as Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Nightingale, Roland, Beecher Stowe, as well as those on celebrated virtuous women from home. A distinctive feature Chen did not mention, however, was how, in fiction dealing with female assassins, the female assassin’s adroitness at technological manipulations became a distinguishing mark of her role as the harbinger of a more scientific than moral civilization. She was not only a symbol of antithesis to tradition but also, and more interestingly, embodied the negotiated copresence of Western-technological and traditionalist-moral worlds. The association between women revolutionaries and scientific knowledge and pragmatism was an important part of the theorization of political radicalism. It was first explicitly propounded in Jin Tianhe’s 金天翮 (1874–1947) 1903 Nüjie zhong 女界鐘 (Bell for women’s world).14 Zhongguo xin nühao and Nüzi quan are by the same author, Siqi zhai. For an interesting introduction to this little known writer, see Ellen Widmer’s “Inflecting Gender: Zhan Kai/Siqi Zhai’s ‘New Novels’ and Courtesan Sketches,” Nan Nü 6.1 (2004): 136–68. See Siqi zhai, Zhongguo xin nühao (Shanghai: Jicheng tushu gongsi, 1907); Nüzi quan (Shanghai: Zuoxin she, 1907); Tianjin Lugou 天津路釣, Nü xuwudang (Shanghai: Youzheng shuju, 1916). Nüzi quan is also collected in Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi, vol. 64. 13 “Xin Zhongguo zhi feiwu” 新中國之廢物 (The New Refuse of New China, Chen Jinghan’s 陳景漢 penname), Cike tan 刺客談 (On assassins), in Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi, vol. 58. 14 Jin Tianhe, Nüjie zhong (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2003). See also Xiong Yuezhi 熊月之, “Jin Tianhe yu Nüjie zhong” 金天翮與 ( Jin Tianhe and Nüjie zhong), Shilin 史林 3 (2003): 1–6; Hu Si 胡思 (Zhu Jianming 朱建明), “Nüjie 12

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The need for women’s education and political participation, in fact, had already been voiced in the 1870s in the newspaper Shenbao 申報 (Shanghai newspaper).15 Women writers Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 (1866– 1911) and Chen Xiefen 陳擷芬 (1883–1923) primarily focused on women’s rights in their journals of the same title, Nü xuebao ( Journal of women’s learning), founded in 1898 and 1902, respectively.16 Nüjie zhong, however, gave a complete program for the newly politicized woman, epitomizing the “new citizen” as a rebuilt feminine figure. Jin

zhong zuozhe zhenming kao” 女界鐘作者真名考 (A research on the real name of the author of Nüjie zhong), Dang an yu jianshe (Archives and construction) 11 (2003): 25–26; Li Xiaojiang 李小江, “Shi zhege nanren qiaoxiang le Zhongguo Nüjie zhong” 是這個 男人敲響了中國 “女界鐘” (It was this man who tolled the bell for Chinese women), Dushu 5 (2003): 68–74. 15 See, for instance, “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women), Shenbao 1203 (30 March 1876); “Shu ‘Lun nüxue’ hou” 書後 (Written after “Lun nüxue”), Shenbao (7 April 1876); “Zailun nüxue” 再論女學 (On education for women, a followup), Shenbao (11 April 1876). For a discussion of the author of the “Lun nüxue” (and “Zailun nüxue” should be written by the same author), see note 21 in Rudolf G. Wagner, “Women in Shenbaoguan Publications, 1872–1890,” collected in this volume, pp. 227–56. Cf. Liang Qichao, “Lun nüxue” 論女學, Shiwu bao 23 (12 April 1897): 1a–4a, and 25 (2 May 1897): 1a–2b. For articles that appeared around the same time as the novels I discuss, see, for example, Zhu Zhuang 竹莊, “Nüquan shuo” 女權說 (On women’s rights), Nüzi shijie 5 (1904): 1–5; Zhang Zhujun 張竹君, “Nüzi xingxue baoxianhui xu” 女子興學保險會序 (Prologue to the Society for Ensuring the Rise in Women’s Learning), Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi 中國新女界雜誌 4 (1907): 1–5. 16 Xue Shaohui is the first known woman translator of foreign fiction in the late Qing period. For a discussion of her life and others such as Chen Hongbi, see Guo Yanli 郭延禮, Zhongguo jindai fanyi wenxue gailun 中國近代翻譯文學概論 (A brief study of modern Chinese translational literature) (Hankou: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 168–69. For a chronology of her life and collection of her works, see Xue Shaohui ji 薛 紹徽集 (Collection of Xue Shaohui), ed. Lin Yi 林怡 (Beijing: Fangzhi, 2003). For a detailed study of Xue Shaohui’s fascinating life, see Nanxiu Qian, “Borrowing Foreign Mirrors and Candles to Illuminate Chinese Civilization: Xue Shaohui’s moral vision in The Biographies of Foreign Women,” Nan Nü 6.1 (2004): 60–101. For an account and useful list of female members of the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui 同盟會) and their activities in publishing and distribution, see Shen Zhi 沈智, “Xinhai geming shiqi de nü zhishi fenzi” 辛亥革命時期的女知識份子 (Female intellectuals during the 1911 revolutionary period), in Xinhai geming yu jindai Zhongguo 辛亥革命與近代中國 (The 1911 revolution and modern China), ed. Zhonghua shuju bianjibu 中華書局 編輯部 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994), 359–77. Also see Xie Changfa 謝長法, “Qingmo de liuri nüxuesheng jiqi huodong yu yingxiang” 清末的留日女學生及其活 動與影響 (The activities and influence of women students studying in Japan in the late Qing period), Jindai Zhongguo funu shi yanjiu 近代婦女史研究 (Research on women in the modern period) 4 (1996): 63–79; Bao Jialin 鮑家麟, “Wanqing ji xinhai geming shiqi” 晚清及辛亥革命時期 (The period of the late Qing and the 1911 revolution), in Jindai Zhongguo funü yundong shi 近代中國婦女運動史 (A history of modern Chinese women movements), ed. Chen Sanjing 陳三井 (Taibei shi: Jindai Zhongguo chubanshe, 1990), 53–156.

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eagerly argued for the usefulness of science as a tool for radicalizing women. He enthusiastically cited, for instance, the study of Western craniometry to show that, given the comparable size of their brains to the opposite sex, women were no less intelligent than men. The problem of inequality consisted more in everyday practice: since women were more likely to come into contact with nuns, Daoists, and shamans in their idle time, Jin believed, they were more prone to be deceived by folk medicine, magic, and enchantments. Only science could provide the antidote to the widespread superstition that for him was at the root of women’s inertia to learning. Women’s susceptibility to occultist beliefs was also evident in other aspects of their daily activities. Along with the abolition of footbinding and prearranged marriages, Jin proposed that women lighten their physical adornments and excessively complicated dress. Heavy hair dress impeded movement, not to mention the harm in wearing rouge, the lead content of which, Jin warns, could easily be absorbed into the skin and bloodstream. Coupling rudimentary physiology with progressive ideology, he encouraged women to become revolutionaries, educators, and entrepreneurs. With its impassioned language and focused expressions of grievance, Bell for Women’s World left an important imprint on not only political but also fictional visions of women’s liberation. Novels such as Ziyou jiehun 自由結婚 (Freedom in marriage), Women’s Rights, and Huang Xiuqiu 黃繡球, for example, replicated its extensive discussions of dress and choice of marriage. A key concern in Jin’s treatise, however, is that women’s political participation, as a measure of China’s progress toward modern civility, relied on a prerequisite willingness to resort to violence. The necessary struggle toward “civilization” was not without bloodshed, for one “in the end cannot reach out a begging hand to sages and rulers, but has to struggle for one’s lost rights with one’s own hands. Failing that, one would do better to sacrifice peace and embrace radicalism.”17 His sanctioning of individual initiative, however, did not replace the association of women with their traditional capacities in the popular imagination. Female radicalism was conceived of as more an extension than a replacement of women’s familiar social roles. This new way of seeing a woman as an agent of political transformations and violence

17

Jin Tianhe, Nüjie zhong, 48.

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widened the spectrum of her visibility, blending in conservatism and radicalism along a new axis of possibility. As though exemplifying this new recognition, the popular journal Xiaoshuo shibao 小說時報 (Fiction times) printed an illustration of women’s newly perceived versatility as encompassing the traditional and modern, the virtuous and decadent.18 The illustration, comprised of seven photographs, features a pair of delicate, feminine hands performing different traditional tasks. Building up to the climax, the illustration leads one’s gaze to an eye-catching finish: a photograph of the hands holding a dagger. Evoked in a metonymy, the image of the radicalized modern woman as a pair of hands implies a continuum between her domestic and political capacities. This versatile image of the female assassin was in many ways unprecedented to her contemporary audience. Furthermore, her participation in a worldwide, international movement of liberation introduced a kind of cosmopolitan legitimacy, transcending national and cultural boundaries, especially when facilitated—in fiction—by balloon travel, electric horses, and underwater transportation. Out of a sense of inspiration defined less by Western novelty than self-renewal, Chinese heroines embraced their own splendor as inventors and assassins. The female revolutionary and assassin was thus constructed out of a composite image of the scientist, educator, athlete, talented woman (cainü 才女), and martyr, which collectively redefined sacrifice in light of nationalism. This aura, of course, was a far cry from the risks of carrying out assassinations in real life. The only interaction an assassin had with royalty and officials was usually a fatal one. Acts of assassination, however glamorized in fiction, more often ended in aborted attempts, if not with the loss of a limb or eye, as was the case with Yang Dusheng 楊篤生 (1871–1911), who plotted to assassinate the Empress Dowager by blowing up the Summer Palace in Beijing. Real assassins were unambiguously on the other side of the law and never intersected it in any favorable way. As though making up for this less-celebrated side of male reality, the fictional embodiment of women assassins fulfilled the lack and more. This type of women’s fiction perhaps served as a positive example with which male readers could also identify. Noteworthy “women’s fiction” from this period, in fact, was mostly written by men, for whom writing

18

“Qianqian yuying” 纖纖玉影 (Slim jade shadow), Xiaoshuo shibao 15 (1912).

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cross-gendered fiction specifically about women was a novel and possibly more lucrative endeavor. Women writers such as Xue Shaohui and Chen Hongbi 陳鴻壁, as far as we know, translated Western science fiction and treatises with an eye on their serious intellectual content.19 While women’s fiction about female assassins embellished the new connection between women and science, women writers were more interested in probing that novelty as a form of transposable, modern knowledge. In the fictional imaginary, radical revolutionaries often traveled clandestinely between secret meeting points in Tokyo and Paris, Yokohama and Tianjin. The female assassin was desired but respectfully pursued by her male comrades, whose less successful careers in no way overshadowed hers. Her high-risk life flaunted a kind of sophisticated, cosmopolitan glamour that spoke more to its desired utopian possibility than to the reality of its practice. The enviable risk women took by smuggling explosives through checkpoints revamped the familiar knight-errant image with the flair of modern espionage. They also commanded a kind of international profile rivaling and even exceeding that of real-life official emissaries and diplomats, as they often commingled intimately, with an ease possible only in fiction, with high officials and international royalties. Bridging elitist and popular concerns, men and women, female assassins used their technological savvy to revitalize the idea of returning freedom to the common people. The coupling of romanticist self-distinction with selfless martyrdom for the nation provided an unusual catharsis for reconciling the desire for modern individualism and the imperative of nation-saving. Invariably multilingual, they were also the ultimate cultural diplomats, moving easily between languages and cultures, camouflage and impersonations. As anarchists and women assassins appeared frequently in novels, translations of Western fiction on anarchism or dealing with anarchism also rose in number. The genre varied. What was translated as “detective fiction” (zhentan xiaoshuo 偵探小說), like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, for instance, also carried significant anarchist plot twists. Those professing to be “nihilist fiction” (xuwudang xiaoshuo 虛無黨小說) did not have an exclusive claim on the topic. In the late Qing literary milieu of borrowings, translation-editing (bianyi 編譯), loose translations ( yanyi 衍義), and other forms of half-inventive, half-faithful translations, one original

19

See note 16.

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source goes a long way. British sensationalist writer William Tufnell le Queux’s (1864–1927) Strange Tales of a Nihilist (1892), for example, generated at least five different works, separately serialized in Minbao 民報 (People’s newspaper), Yueyue xiaoshuo 月月小說 (Fiction monthly), and Xiaoshuo shibao between 1908 and 1909.20 An English edition of le Queux praised his “startling and thrilling glimpses into the lives of underground Russian nihilists in London and the ever-threatening danger of the Russian Secret Police.”21 Translated into Chinese for the urban audience in Shanghai, Russian nihilists, ensconced in London, found an unexpectedly sympathetic readership. Works like “Xuwu dang qitan” 虛無黨奇談 (Wondrous tales of nihilists), “Nu zhentan” 女偵探 (Woman detective), “Baoliedan” 爆裂彈 (Explosive bomb), “E guo huangdi” 俄國皇帝 (The Russian emperor), and “E guo zhi zhentan shu” 俄國之偵探術 (Russian detective techniques) were taken from different le Queux stories and translated in different journals. A nonliterary example of cross-genre translation of anarchism is Kemuyama Sentarō’s 煙山 專太郎 Kinsei museifu shugi 近世無政府主義 (Modern anarchism), a condensed history of Russian anarchism and nihilism, which, in its adapted Chinese translation by Jin Tianhe as Freedom’s Blood (Ziyouxie 自由血), elicited very sympathetic responses from fiction writers and a great number of political radicals.22 II. The Stone of Goddess Nüwa: Science and Female Chivalry The initial attempts to sinicize the female assassin in the three years after the publication of Heroines of Eastern Europe demonstrated the degree of ingenuity required of this feat. A few writers tried to build the image of the radical, if not ascetic, woman revolutionary based on existing familiarity with traditional male hero (haohan 好漢) figures and virtuous daughters. The challenge of innovation consisted in superimposing inspired ideas about female assassins on this traditional screen. As agents of formidable destruction and barbarous violence, these new women were also great inventors who spearheaded unimaginable efforts 20 William le Queux, Strange Tales of a Nihilist (New York: R.F. Fenno, 1892). See Price, 264n66. 21 Le Queux, “Author’s Note,” iii. 22 See Jin Yi 金一 ( Jin Tianhe), Ziyouxie 自由血 (Shanghai: Jingjin shuju, 1904); Kemuyama Sentarō 煙山専太郎, Kinsei museifu shugi 近世無政府主義 (Modern anarchism) (Tokyo: Meiji Bunken, 1965).

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to elevate the standards of modern comfort and civilized living. The contrast between their capacity for annihilation and contribution to regeneration usually only heightened their dramatic appeal as a hybrid of traditionalism and technological modernity. A striking example of this experimental composite is the novel Nüwa shi by the writer pennamed Haitian duxiao zi 海天獨嘯子 (The Lone Howler of the Sea and Heaven).23 No stranger to science fiction, Lone Howler was one of the first translators who introduced Japanese science and adventure novels into China in the early twentieth century. In his 1903 translator’s preface to Japanese science fiction writer Oshikawa Shunro’s 押川 春浪 (1876–1914) Kongzhong feiting 空中飛艇 (Flying ship in the sky), he expresses his personal conviction in the importance of introducing fiction about science. Reiterating the view that fiction propagated science in a way that engaged the common reader, Lone Howler sees its additional benefit in fortifying people’s minds from superstitions, a danger against which all civilizations must defend itself: Women and young girls, taken in by talent-beauty fiction, wish only to emulate it. The worship of gods and belief in spirits is practically branded on their brains (naoguang yinlao 腦光印烙), calcified against any hope of breaking through [. . .] Today’s civilization, however, is radiating through untold distances. The time is ripe for breaking open this web; it is a time for fiction’s reform [. . .] As our citizens looked to each other, not knowing what to do, hopes of aspiration turn into shadow and froth in their minds (naojin zhi yinpao 腦筋之影泡). At such a time, one must judiciously choose the materials, revise one’s strategy, and inject (zhushe 注射) them into the brain in order to restore its vibrancy with new knowledge.24

Lone Howler hopes for a complete renovation of the mind through fiction. But this is in a much more radical sense than the mere observance of Liang Qichao’s 1902 programmatic statement. With the aid of science, the infusion of new knowledge takes on a specific form of transmission, targeting the brain as the appropriate site of surgical remedy. Elaborating on this kind of “scientific” reasoning, The Stone of Goddess Nüwa, which Lone Howler began to compose just one year later,

Haitian duxiao zi, Nüwa shi, in Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi, 25:439–536. Haitian duxiao zi, “Kongzhong feiting bianyan” 空中飛艇弁言 (Preface to the flying ship in the sky), in Chen and Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹, Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao 二十世紀中國小說理論資料 (Theoretical sources of twentieth-century Chinese fiction) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1997), 107. 23 24

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describes this mental renovation as no less than a mind-altering operation. Unlike the scientifically designed program of women’s reeducation that Jin Tianhe proposes, female assassins take the matter of science into their own hands. Taking the project of modern education a step further, the novel does not leave the implementation of science to the discretion of enlightened male intellectuals who get to decide what modern women need. In this vein, chapter ten features a climactic episode where the female protagonist assassin Jin Yaose wakes up to find herself on the operating table in a brain-washing clinic (xinaoyuan 洗腦院). She has been captured by members of an underground female revolutionary cell called White Cross Society. Mistaking her for a spy sent from the “barbaric” government in power, the supervising doctor Chu Xiangyun 楚湘雲 (pun on the chivalric Shi Xiangyun 史湘雲 of Cao Xueqin’s 曹雪芹 Honglou meng 紅樓夢 [Dream of the Red Chamber]) removes her brain for examination while she is unconscious. To their surprise, her cerebrum is white and unblemished. They soon realize that Jin is the heroic female assassin they had long known by reputation. When she regains full consciousness, they welcome her and explain their stated mission of purpose. One of their central operations is the innovative, brain-purification regime. Though flawless at birth, they explain, the brain can stray from its pristine state during the course of physical development under three kinds of corrupting influence. For those who grow up in poverty, their brains lie in waste due to the likely neglect of cerebral stimulation in a life engrossed in physical labor. In these cases, the nerves regress and their elastic tissues gradually atrophy, finally turning into fat. Those who live near water, on the other hand, because of the easy access to fish that provide essential nutrients for the brain, have particularly sensitive cerebra, as the sight of water also constantly replenishes their thoughts with the image of motion. Lastly, there are also those whose brains are of such cluttering density that they have long lost any responsiveness and become impervious to the effects of desires and emotions. To demonstrate this wide range, Chu shows Jin several atlases of the brain in its hundreds of variations. Some are dotted with black specks, while others resemble beehives. They can be further divided into solid masses and weaker ones that bear the literal imprints of objects. According to her analysis, impressions are left on the cerebral surface, depending on the different ways in which people exercise their imagination. Chinese officials, for example, slavishly pattern their thinking on the wishes of their superiors. What they pine for is a lucrative post.

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Their cerebra, consequently, acquire a dark gray shade as a result of their habitual obsequiousness and take on the image of their superiors. Correspondingly, the vessels and nerves in their cerebra loop and crisscross aimlessly, incidentally, but aptly resembling a pile of gold coins. In a similar state of degeneration, unenlightened traditional scholars who only read Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1130–1200) commentaries on the Confucian classics write eight-legged essays, copy standard scripts in their calligraphy, and have pools of ink cumulating in their heads, calcified like hard bricks. Their brains smell like manure and rot like mud. Covered with gray and black spots, they characteristically look like beehives. As for those who disingenuously cry for revolution and clamor for freedom, their brains are in actuality hollow as mists. They secretly dream of possessing many beautiful wives and concubines in the old ways of feudalism. On those cerebral surfaces, one could almost make out the contours of rouged lips. To counter such degenerate thinking, the secret society’s main mission is to cleanse as many brains as possible. For this purpose, Chu concocts a complex potion combining different chemical elements, using procedures of varying complexity. Those beclouded by title and fame, for instance, would have to be bleached by chlorine gas. Requiring a more complex procedure, those brains that have hardened from an excessive preoccupation with wealth must be first softened in chemical water being before irrigated with phosphate. As for brains imprinted with photo images of desired objects, a three-step measure is required: first, dissolve the impressions in sulfur, then, filter the remains with bone ashes, and, finally, put it back in the skull. When all else fails, the unsalvageable part of the cerebrum would simply have to be replaced with that of a cow. Physically transformed, the brain is thus reengineered to fit the requirements of enlightened thinking. Such an elaborate narrative of scientific procedure, of course, did not spring from the writer’s creative genius alone. The brain-washing episode took its inspiration from late nineteenth-century science journals such as John Fryer’s Science Compendium (Gezhi huibian 格致彙編) and treatises on Western anatomy like the work of London Missionary Society’s Benjamin Hobson in A New Outline of Anatomy (Quanti xinlun 全體新論) (1852). If Lone Howler thought that science could have an important place in Liang’s vision for new fiction, he saw it not as a set of hypothetical theories but the very instrument for physically altering the mindset of modern female citizens.

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The seemingly outlandish suggestions in The Stone of Goddess Nüwa lent “scientific” reasoning to the desire for new fiction and citizenry. The goal of rationalization was not so much to present an argument that is persuasive or credible. Rather, it was to familiarize oneself and one’s readers with the incredible in order to imagine, to accept, and to take it for granted as common sense. The dividing line Lone Howler wanted to draw between superstition and new knowledge was not between intrinsically unscientific and scientific beliefs. There was in fact nothing obvious about what counted or did not count as science. But this indeterminacy was not an impediment to creative understanding. Instead, it provided ample room for the fiction writer to establish new correspondences between the possible and the impossible by appropriating and immediately repackaging “scientific” knowledge, as it was introduced in journals, newspapers, and even other fiction by fellow novelty-seeking writers. In this cultural landscape of variegated citational practice, The Stone of Goddess Nüwa took its cue from nutritional science, assassination techniques, and electrical studies. Significantly, new knowledge did not necessarily engender correspondingly new applications. Often, it was brought back to deal with the old preoccupations in a familiar locus of cultural anxiety. During an interlude to Jin’s visit at another female revolutionary cell, Flower Blood Society, for example, we get a glimpse into how science served to extend the popular Daoist concern with “cultivating life” ( yangsheng 養生) and increasing longevity. Qin Ainong 秦愛濃, the leader of the society, invites Jin to dine with her in a special room modestly set up with a table and two rubber recliners. Two tubes are attached to a machine on the one end and to two small, individual pacifiers on the other. Electric gold plates carrying food are fed into the machine on a conveyor belt. After much noise, a fine-tasting elixir, distilled from an array of exotic and delicate flavors, begins to flow from the tubes and into the mouths of the two women, who suckle avariciously on the pacifiers. Qin then explains to Jin that she invented this “scientific trifle” (kexue xiaoxi 科學小戲) upon discovering the principle of longevity. According to her calculations, if properly cared for, the human body could continue to function for up to four hundred years. Much of its extended quality depended on the level of prior nutritional intake and, equally importantly, the process of digestion, which must be carefully monitored by first removing any harmful sodium or sediments from foods that could block circulation. The discovery that undigested sediments entered directly into the blood stream proved the linkage between

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aging and insufficient mastication. To remedy both problems, Qin extracts only the very essence of meats and vegetables before turning them into liquid form to be imbibed like the elixirs of immortality in Daoist literature. The association between science and occultism in The Stone of Goddess Nüwa deeply impressed one contemporary commentator, known to the reader as Sir Profligate the Crouching Tiger. Allegedly a close acquaintance of Lone Howler, he wrote the preface to the novel as well as the individual commentaries at the end of all sixteen chapters. In the first paragraph of his commentary to chapter ten, the word “marvelous” (qi 奇) appears no less than eighteen times.25 He remarks on China’s cultural preoccupation with longevity, which had never been more than an ill-defined, esoteric notion. The recent demonstration of a French scholar’s abstinence from food, however, showed that one could remain vibrant without reliance on physical food intake. Nonetheless, Sir Profligate acknowledges, Madame Qin’s liquefying device is certainly much more enjoyable without having to deprive one of the pleasures of taste. In this way, The Stone of Goddess Nüwa facilitates the everyday practice of science by making it accessible as short cuts that could facilitate the constant labor of self-care. But the necessity of nurture also raises a different issue. As though standing in for the lost mother, the feeding machine was suggestively attached to two pacifiers. In an implicit nostalgia for the womb, the two female assassins symbolically seal their common allegiance in the sharing of artificial maternal care. The catapult toward a futuristic world of sophisticated technology is thereby unexpectedly staged as a return to the primordial scene of bliss for the female assassin turned infant. The autonomous machine replaces the nurture of the mother in the world of female assassins and technology. In their dedication to a political cause, it is as though they must declare themselves to be first and foremost revolutionaries before they can recognize themselves as daughters. National filiation, it would seem, supersedes filial piety. This commitment to revolution at the price of symbolic matricide, in fact, is the first moral choice Jin has to make at her first attempt at assassination. The novel begins with her return to China after three years of studying abroad. After laboriously winning the confidence of

25

Haitian duxiao zi, Nüwa shi, 475.

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the Empress, who kindly takes her under her wing, Jin wastes no time in planning her assassination. She first smuggles a pair of ivory tusks, which store a lethal amount of electricity to be released upon impact, into the inner palace. Just as she is about to stab the Empress in her sleep, however, the Empress opens her eyes. Jin hastily explains that she has brought the ivory tusks as a token of her gratitude. The Empress soon resumes her slumber, and Jin tries to carry out another attempt, as she has hidden explosives in her sleeves as well. Jin is poised to toss the explosives through the bed curtains in a suicide mission, but at that very moment, the Empress stirs again, this time less persuaded by her excuses. Frustrated by her own failed attempts, Jin reproaches herself, as though voicing the novel writer’s own sigh, “If the Russian Nihilists can do it, why can’t I?”26 Revealingly, when the technology of killing comes face to face with the act of killing the mother, the female assassin falters. The Empress’s reprimanding eyes shake her resolve, now suddenly reduced to the guilt of an undisciplined daughter. She does not need to look to the Russian nihilist assassin as an example by which to measure her own lack of political courage. As a cold-hearted assassin willing to kill even her benefactor, she already proves her prior failure at embodying the ideal daughter. Her incompetence reflects not a fear of failure but, rather, the greater anxiety for success, which goes against the greater prohibition of matricide. Significantly, this initial cowering before the maternal figure is crucial in leading her on to the path of self-discovery. Only after she is forced to flee the maternal domain in order to escape persecution does she find her calling as a revolutionary. Instead of founding her political radicalism on killing the mother, in other words, Jin has first to be rejected and even threatened by the maternal figure in order to become a female assassin in her own right. Her allegiance to radicalism and new individualism is indebted to that initial separation from the mother, the first symbolic murder that wins her revolutionary freedom. Interestingly, the denial of filial submission to the mother is expressed in the female assassin as a different capacity for nurture. As though nostalgia for the mother is possible only upon her death, the assassin subsequently assumes the role as an agent of care. Notwithstanding their reading of technology as a replacement for lost maternal care, female assassins perform a different life-giving function by nurturing science in

26

Haitian duxiao zi, Nüwa shi, 460.

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turn, breathing life into inanimate objects. In this way, their femininity also expresses a desexualized generative capacity, released through the exercise of freedom and self-will. They invest in a kind of technology that correspondingly serves this new purpose of independence. Upon Jin’s departure from the Heavenly Fragrance Compound, she is given an electric horse (dianma 電馬) as a parting gift. Chapter nine focuses on an extensive treatment of electrical science, following Jin’s heroic feat of shooting down a balloon that she has mistaken for the colossal, mythical bird peng 鵬. While explaining to Jin the ingenuity of the gift, the leader of the Heavenly Fragrance Compound makes a distinction between the technology of electricity she reinvented and its Western genealogy: I should tell you that this electric horse is something that neither the ancients knew nor the Westerners could ever invent. It is a response to the era of electricity in the twentieth century. Since the discovery of electromagnetic waves (dianlang 電浪) in the eighteenth century, people have recognized the power of electricity (dianqi 電氣). Though Yadang, Lin Desui, Leisi, Hengli, and others all have had, one after the other, their own contributions and inventions, the practical use of electricity has not yet been fully demonstrated. For instance, Tesina’s (Nikola Tesla) use of Heshi’s (Heinrich Hertz) electromagnetic waves to navigate ships is in truth only a toy for scholars. Its use in things like wireless telegram shows its enchanting force. But once put to practical test, it is intolerably clumsy and inadequate. This proves the shallow depth of recent knowledge. For instance, how ridiculous is it that trams (dianche 電車) would still require tracks or that telegrams need lines? Don’t they know that the release of energy has its own spontaneous quality, depending entirely on how people use it?27

This exposition on electricity is less concerned with accuracy than novelty. Madame Qin’s reasoning makes little distinction between electricity and electromagnetic waves, as everything that had anything to do with electricity—such as trams (dianche 電車), telegrams (dianbao 電報), and telephones (dianhua 電話)—featured “electric” dian as a prefix in the binome. The generalization, however, does not dampen the enthusiasm of Sir Profligate. Having found Madame Qin’s explanations true to the source and backed with proof ( yougen youju 有根有據), he is duly impressed. Her “pioneering thinking” (dupi xinsi 獨辟新思) insightfully grasps the fundamental principles of the universe. Excited at the

27

Haitian duxiao zi, Nüwa shi, 491.

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implications, he asserts, “That my country is wealthy in its people’s talent for innovations is a fact publicly recognized by the author, the readers, and the white people [. . .] Westerners say that in the coming century Chinese will bring the newest technology into the world. I, for one, believe it wholeheartedly.”28 This expressed euphoria does not just belie Sir Profligate’s own personal enthusiasm. The conviction in the power of fiction to state truths about science was more widely felt as a new confidence. In this respect, he is the expression of a particularly interesting relationship to science in the text. On the one hand, he presumes to be able to judge the truth or falsity of its empiricism, as though already equipped with prior scientific knowledge. On the other hand, the commentator also marvels at the science described in the text, taking it as evidence for the latest innovation in technology. The text in turn, in other words, authorizes him. This marks a subtle corroboration, whereby science and fiction, commentator and text, acquire mutual legitimacy through a process of defamiliarization marked by surprise, marvel, and inspiration. The principles of science are held up to the requirements of proof and empiricism, while at the same time subjected to intuitive taste and judgment. The objective presence of science carries the subjective impressions of the commentator, but this recognition dawns on him only as exterior knowledge. As though displacing the secret hope for science as an universal truth, the representation of science in fiction expresses a kind of coveted self-affirmation, coming back as tested and proven objective reality. The Stone of Goddess Nüwa is one of the most outlandish fictional accounts of science from the late Qing period. It predates Wu Jianren’s well-known Xin shitou ji 新石頭記 (New story of the stone) by just a few months. Similarly playing on the conventions of Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, it begins with a myth of creation, where a colorful boulder falls out of the sky after Goddess Nüwa completes her task of mending the universe. Instead of being endowed with human sentience, however, creation becomes the object of not literary genius but empirical production. The novel’s use of elaborate scientific explanations anticipates the narrative practice of documenting the technical provenance of sophisticated weaponry in the futuristic fiction New Century (Xin jiyuan 新紀元), which was published three years later in

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Haitian duxiao zi, Nüwa shi, 495.

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1908 and reprinted eight times by 1936. The Stone of Goddess Nüwa, however, is not a simple tale of science fantasy, despite its meticulous cataloguing of all of the latest, real or imagined, Western technological innovations. The novel is, more importantly, in dialogue with the various issues concerning women’s liberation, the promise of science, and ideas for social cleansing. Rather than fundamentally challenging traditional roles, the novel reenacts a more complex relation to its predecessors in traditional fantasy literature as well as Western science. It revels in reversing cultural stereotypes only to highlight the transgressibility of genres to which it too is subordinated. Thus, certain inconsistencies in the text appear to question its own success in revamping the female image. Combining Russian nihilism with a Buddhist mission, Jin’s task as a female assassin is, oddly, first and foremost to “redeem” ( pudu 普度) those mired in corruption as though out of religious benevolence rather than political vengeance. Her ideology of assassination claims no singular object or enemy, as she seeks a liberation transcending even that of the political. This exaltedness of the ideal subsumes under the rubric of legitimacy all otherwise questionable behavior and narrative logic. The reader is expected to accept with equal plausibility her progressivism and her earlier, voluntary prostitution. One of her most daring escapes is accomplished with the assistance of a “former client,” who oddly appears as a political comrade rather than paramour. Despite the strict codification explicitly imposed on the female revolutionaries, the practice of celibacy signifies a rather artificial renunciation. The figure of the female assassin plays on the legitimacy and illegitimacy of opposites, yet goes far beyond their restricted scopes of antithesis. She brings destruction for good, encourages lust for the sake of redemption, belittles her own sacrifice while desiring posthumous fame, and practices science in the service of superstition. As though at times finding it irresistible to allow the precarious distinction between good and evil to collapse, the narrative sometimes hints at the distinction’s vulnerability, as Jin herself at one point becomes the pursued in a witch hunt for a local sorceress ( yaonü 妖女), causing an identity crisis between the high-tech assassin and hypersexualized shaman. For a sobering moment, the aura of beautiful international secret agents disappears and is replaced by the general stigma of punished women. Nonetheless, female assassins-cum-inventors infuse not only their deeds of destruction but also their projects of invention with the desire for freedom. But the freedom desired by nihilism and anarchism was

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very far from being defined by concrete visions. What distinguished a politically seditious act from legitimate overthrow was as fraught a question as it was to choose between conservative and radical change. One observer commented in 1904 on the difference with remarkable economy: “when it’s a few, it’s assassination, when it’s a majority, it’s revolution.”29 The desire for revolution, in this way, translates into a will to upset the order of things, to turn meanings against each other, and to mark a passageway for words with opposing meanings. Even the most violent deeds, according to this great epistemic revaluation, may well gain legitimacy in retrospect. In this unresolved way, “freedom” (ziyou 自由) is a liberating notion but lacks a pragmatic plan of reconstruction. Seldom does one get a definition of what this state of freedom might look like after destruction. Early revolutionary writings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries incite the will for change rather than envision its political substance, and even within this passion for liberation, there is often an immediate counterimpulse. Liberation is defined in terms of new restraints, as female assassins must observe a strict regime of celibacy and renounce the sexual body along with motherhood. The return to traditional female virtues, while being politically subversive, seems to be the most difficult fantasy to realize. The female assassin’s body is exclusively the focus of aptitude rather than birth and sexual desire. While the athleticism of the female assassin may shame her male counterparts, her sexuality is often muted under a restraint disguised as choice. How to portray the fine distinction between the ideologically committed assassin and the sexual, independently minded woman was admittedly a hard choice to make. Indeed, writing fiction for women during this period had its share of difficulties. It was easier to defy the virtuous role and to take pleasure in subversive femininity than to manage woman’s volatile role at the juncture of tradition and modernity. The Stone of Goddess Nüwa, taking the easier route, indulges in the quick fix of a revenge fantasy as the return of oppressed femininity. The successful version of radicalism is hastily articulated as simply the female embodiment of male heroism. Jin Yaose’s maid, Feng Kui 鳳葵, in this regard, is a perfect example. She is clearly intended to be a spitting female image of the bruteturned-monk Li Kui 李逵 from Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 (Water margins).

29

Xinhai geming qian shinianjian shilun xuanji, 1.2:127.

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Rebelling against the strict tenets of female revolutionary societies while displaying the unrefined directness and crass humor much enjoyed and condoned in the righteous world of brotherhood, Feng Kui is the instigator of drunken bouts that were entirely symmetrical to those of Li Kui. Not so subtly modeled after the incorrigible but righteous ruffian, Feng Kui even embodies his well-known attributes, being unattractive, dark skinned, and quick tempered. III. Female Jail Flower: From Violence to Political Constructivism Though The Stone of Goddess Nüwa radicalized the solution to the question of women’s freedom, it also recognized its own limitations. A different novel about female radicalism appearing around the same time, Female Jail Flower, opted for another approach. Working earnestly with the given reality of inequality, it constructs a socially more realistic scenario for negotiating women’s equality and freedom. In the 1904 edition of Female Jail Flower, the preface writer Yu Peilan 俞佩蘭 notes that although traditional Chinese novels are rich in genres such as the link-chapter (zhanghui 章回), romance (chuanqi 傳奇), and plucking rhymes (tanci 彈詞), those dealing with women’s rights and education are far and few between.30 “Fiction for women’s world” (nüjie xiaoshuo 女界小說) required a different set of demands on the woman writer. She needed to have the “talent of singing willow wisps, a pen that grows flowers, Buddhist compassion, and the methods of a hero (haojie zhi shouduan 豪傑之手段). Combining precarious talent, benevolence, and revolutionary will, the woman writer, much like her fictional character, also had to be a new composite. She had to display leadership in rebuilding civilization from the ruins of destruction.”31 Beginning with a tribute paid to a great hero (da haojie 大豪傑)— “China’s Columbus” (a likely reference to Jin Tianhe)—who advocated women’s rights, Female Jail Flower traces the revolutionary path of the female assassin protagonist Sha Xuemei 沙雪梅. While appearing to glorify political assassinations and female political radicalism, the narrative, however, abruptly changes its tone in chapter ten (of twelve), where the leader of the women’s revolution suddenly dies and is subsequently replaced by the less radical and ultimately more effective reformist and 30 31

Wang Miaoru 王妙如, Nüyu hua 女獄花, in Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi, 64:701–60. Wang, 705.

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educator Xu Pingquan 許平權 as the protagonist. The radical part of the novel, however, deserves to be examined first. Sha Xuemei, prophesied to be a “woman devil who kills without blinking her eyes” (sharen bu zhayan de nü mowang 殺人不眨眼的女魔王), teaches martial arts by day and studies Herbert Spencer’s (1820–1903) treatise on women’s rights by night. She sets the tone for female radicalism when she kills her husband with a “black-tiger-stealing-the-heart punch” (heihu touxin de quantou 黑虎偷心的拳頭), after he violently attacked her during an argument. She concludes that, though the world has evolved, the institution of marriage failed to evolve with it, resulting in the totalitarian rule of men over women. As is characteristic of early, modern novels that first try their hand at articulating modern female political radicalism and progressivism, traditional male chivalry provides the obvious blueprint. One day, enraged by a similar logic of inequality which she witnessed in a tiger that deferred to lions but aggressed toward a nearby female panther, Sha pummeled the tiger with her bare hands in the heroic style of Wu Song 武松. A total of six women join forces to start a women’s revolution. They travel to Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Paris to pay homage to the birthplace of freedom. Political radicalism in the nihilist vein, however, proves unsustainable. Along with the seventy other female terrorists who fail, Sha commits suicide through self-immolation. In the absence of leadership, the women’s revolution grinds to a halt, leaving the only alternative of taking up reform through education. The surviving members then found schools and focus on teaching medicine, history, geology, mathematics, and engineering to young women. Xu Pingquan and her husband, whose marriage was consecrated on the basis of mutual respect and free will, spearhead this new effort at civilized revolution. Female Jail Flower chooses a provocative way of reconciling the problem of violence with political constructivism. Through the interchange between its two female protagonists, the narrative argues for the necessity of both chivalrous assassinations and moderate reforms. This is demonstrated in the dialogue between Sha and Xu at their first meeting in chapter eight. Sha proposes to form a clique with the mandate to kill all men and take over national power. Xu, on the other hand, expresses deep skepticism at the high cost of human lives. Her grounds for objection, however, are less genuinely pacifist than racially motivated. She explains that revolution is easier to carry out on foreign soil where the difference in race, religion, and language makes it matter

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less to inflict violence. Revolutions, however, would be much more difficult, because they are instigated toward members of one’s own race. In response, Sha points out that men’s physical abuse of women does not differ all that much from the mistreatment of foreign races. Similar to the recommendations made for the female assassin in The Stone of Goddess Nüwa, Sha believes that women must sever their emotional attachments in order to assert a basic invulnerability. For Sha, however, this would be accomplished in accordance not with revolutionary imperative but emotional propensity. Endowed with a naturally “cold disposition” (bingshuang xingzhi 冰霜性質), women can more readily dispense with their passions and adapt to the absence of “love” (qing 情).32 The discussion soon falls back on an analogy of racial disparities and their correspondence to the weak and the strong: Xu: Look at the Indians, for instance, despite their valor, they cannot begin to express the bitterness of their enslavement by the British. Even though every day they speak of revolution, the hope for revolution and gaining independence does not lie with them. Sha: India is an inferior race ( jianzhong 賤種). Of course they can’t break free. The brain quality of women, however, surpasses that of men. How can you take Indians as an analogy? Xu: According to Western biologists, ants’ brains are the most superior, followed by the avians, then humans. The reason that humans rather than ants oversee the world is because the physical structure of ants, like avians, is not complete. Women, similarly, have not been educated or physically unfettered, thus their attempts at revolution have yet to succeed.33

The analogy between women and the Indians links the project of women’s liberation to the discourse on national salvation. Discussions on racial survival in the late Qing period utilized the framework of Social Darwinism as a way of reassigning superiority and inferiority.34 Though at times looked upon sympathetically, Indians, along with the Persians, Poles, and Egyptians, were considered people of perished nations (wangguo 亡國) who served as negative examples for the Chinese.

Wang, 741. Ibid. 34 See discussions in Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: Hurst, 1992); Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Jing Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 32 33

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This conclusion led to two different interpretations. One was that the Chinese could easily follow the footsteps of these enslaved races and nations, if the empire continued to disintegrate without making a viable transition to modern nationhood. The other was that China was still in some way better off than these inferior races, since it had not yet incurred a similar fate.35 Racial hierarchy was both the mirror for seeing China’s subordination and the frame for objectifying the lamentable fate of the presumably truly inferior races. The goal of revolution may have been to do away with one’s own subordination. In rationalizing one’s way out, however, it also reinvested in the terms of subordination and inferiorization. It is as though in order to understand what it would mean to be free, one had to draw on an example of greater unfreedom. Expressing two sides of the feminist debate, Sha and Xu nonetheless share the assumption that some races are intrinsically more inferior than others. The inequality between the Indians and British, for example, reflected less the problem of imperialism than the Indians’ own weakness. The lack of agency was recuperated as a strangely articulated question of choice. The issue was not racial subordination itself but, rather, that some races allowed themselves to be enslaved, thereby contributing to their own miserable fate. Drawn as an analogy to women’s liberation, this logic has uncomfortable implications. The attempted comparison with the plight of the “inferior race” discloses the unevenness in the ground of comparison. Identification with the weak is admonitory, while that with the strong is aspiring in tone. Reintroducing the assumption of natural hierarchies of race and power into the discourse on women’s liberation, Sha’s view becomes entangled in the proliferating terms of subordination. Borrowed from other discourses as a case in point but, in the end, narrowing the vision of female radicalism to a subversion of inferiority, Sha’s and Xu’s analogy stops just short of reevaluating the larger framework of rivalry and uneven capital that continues to replicate and reinforce

35 I discuss this elsewhere. See my Failure, Nationalism, and Literature, chaps. 2 and 3. This discourse on perished nations also extended to oppressed peoples in general, including, for example, the Jews and the Filipinos. See, for example, Xiamin 俠民, “Feiliebing waishi zixu” «菲獵濱外史» 自序 (Preface to An unofficial history to the Philippines), in Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao 二十世紀中國小說理論資料 1897–1916 (Theoretical materials of Chinese novels in the twentieth century, 1897–1916), eds. Chen and Xia (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1989), 145; and “Feilubin wangguo canzhuang ji lue” 菲律賓亡國慘狀記略 (A record of the horrendous circumstance of the extinct nation Philippines), Cuixinbao 1 (1904): 1–6. Cf. Karl, chap. 1.

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these terms of subordination. Inferring from craniometry the root of women’s atrophied intelligence, Xu further borrows from Jin’s version of science to strengthen rather than to challenge the imperialist logic of racial and sexual inferiority. The two female revolutionaries seem to be arguing for the possession of the logic of subordination, as they deposit the specter of inferiority and unworthiness into the category of race, along with its naturalized undesirability. IV. Concluding Remarks Fiction about women assassins, in this way, is significant less for its subversion of social protocols than its demonstration of how those protocols were generated and reformulated. The sense of novelty expressed in late Qing fiction does not necessarily have much to do with experiencing the truly unknown. It emerged equally from the defamiliarization of old tropes rediscovered as new. Writers created a semblance of the “new” out of the “old,” “civilization” from “barbarity,” and female assassins from good wives and daughters in order to forge a range of credible possibilities that facilitated rather than fixed polarities. In this way, late Qing fiction was engaged in a process of creating epistemic beliefs. Rather than unreflectively favoring the hierarchy of modernity over tradition, it provided a discursive forum where they met as outlandish science fantasies or sensationalist political intrigues. In this regard, fiction about female assassins and inventors in particular was not exceptional to this larger discursive nexus. These novels participated in and, by virtue of their literary production, reinforced the trafficking of different orders of plausibility. To claim them as a distinct genre because they ostensibly dealt with women would be to miss the hidden differences within sameness. Perhaps for this reason, the late Qing period witnessed an explosion of new genres, not only women’s fiction (nüzi xiaoshuo 女子小說), nationloving fiction (aiguo xiaoshuo 愛國小說), sentimental fiction ( yanqing xiaoshuo 言情小說), nihilist fiction (xuwudang xiaoshuo 虛無黨小說), legal fiction ( falü xiaoshuo 法律小說), and even women’s nihilist fiction (nüzi xuwudang xiaoshuo 女子虛無黨小說) but also fiction of social critique, constitutionalism fiction (lixian xiaoshuo 立憲小說), utopian fiction (wutuobang xiaoshuo 烏托邦小說), idealist fiction (lixiang xiaoshuo 理想小說), detective fiction (zhentan xiaoshuo 偵探小說), nation-saving fiction ( jiuguo

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xiaoshuo 救國小說), and science fiction (kexue xiaoshuo 科學小說).36 Even though late Qing fiction reinvigorated the question of tradition versus modernity, its cultural openness to experimentation also exceeded the scope of that inquiry by fundamentally reconceptualizing how literature engaged its cultural context. Genres, as with gender, involved a process of distinctions and polarities, disguising commonality as difference and passing off differences as analogies of the same. Female assassins and inventors did not stand out as particularly outlandish figurations of radicalism or modernity but, in their novelty, extended this larger epistemic web of possibilities.

36 While some—such as zhengzhi xiaoshuo 政治小說 (political fiction) and lishi xiaoshuo 歷史小說 (historical fiction)—are more common, others carry unusual specificity, including xuejie xiaoshuo 學界小說 (scholarly world fiction); shiye xiaoshuo 實業小說 (industrial fiction); hangxing xiaoshuo 航行小說 (navigation fiction); yixue xiaoshuo 醫學小說 (medical studies fiction); minzu xiaoshuo 民族小說 (racial fiction); shengji xiaoshuo 生計小說 (livelihood fiction); shangye xiaoshuo 商業小說 (commercialism fiction); shangwu xiaoshuo 尚武 小說 (militarism fiction); shuxue xiaoshuo 數學小說 (mathematics fiction); tanci xiaoshuo 彈詞小說 (prosimetric narrative fiction); yuye xiaoshu 漁業小說 (fishing industry novel); yanjiu bingqi xiaoshuo 研究兵器小說 (study of weaponry fiction); and guanggao xiaoshuo 廣告小說 (advertisement fiction).

CHAPTER SEVEN

PATRIOTISM VERSUS LOVE: THE CENTRAL DILEMMA OF ZHAN KAI’S NOVEL BIHAI ZHU Ellen Widmer Introduction Zhan Kai’s 詹塏 (fl. 1907) Bihai zhu 碧海珠 ( Jewels in an Azure Sea) (1907) is an intricately plotted short novel in classical Chinese.1 It was written under the penname Siqi zhai 思綺齋 (Thinking of Elegance Studio) (fig. 7.1). It has some antecedents in the fiction of the day, but the use of wenyan 文言 (classical Chinese) in a novel is unusual, and it is otherwise the product of an original mind.2 It provides a rich field of inquiry on at least three points. First, it can be related to Zhan’s two other known narrative styles. Both appeared under the name Siqi zhai and were partly or fully published in 1907.3 Courtesans are a major topic in Bihai zhu, but it is not a series of “courtesan sketches” like Zhan’s Rouxiang yunshi 柔鄉韻史 (Poetical history of the gentle countryside) (1898), Huitu haishang baihua zhuan 繪圖海上百花傳 (Illustrated sketches of Shanghai courtesans) (1903), or Huashi/Huashi xubian 花史/花史續編 (History of courtesans/Sequel to History of courtesans) (1906–07).4 And although it is carefully plotted, it is not a

1 The reprinted edition of Bihai zhu is found in Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi 中國近代 小說大系 (Compendium of recent Chinese novels), 61 vols. (Nanchang: Baihua zhou wenyu chubanshe, 1996), 38:263–310. The original publisher was Jingshi huye gongsi 京 師書業公司 in 1907. A copy of the original edition is held in the Zhejiang library. 2 See Patrick Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 8 and 9. These do not refer to Bihai zhu, but they describe other works with similar narrative features. 3 Cf. Zhan Kai’s poetry, which appeared under the penname Xinglou zhuren 幸樓 主人 (Master of Fortunate Tower). I have not seen Zhan’s poems, which may never have been published. 4 For the most part, I center discussion of the courtesan sketches on Huashi and Huashi xubian, although the other two collections could have been brought in. The publishing information on the courtesan sketches is as follows: Huitu haishang baihua zhuan is held in the Nanjing Library. The publisher is Wenhan ge. There are many editions of Rouxiang yunshi. The earliest, from 1898 by Yuyan baoguan 寓言報官, is held in the Peking

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Figure 7.1. Cover of the original edition of Bihai zhu ( Jewels in an Azure Sea) (1907). Source: Zhejiang Library collection.

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“new novel”5 like his Zhongguo xin nühao 中國新女豪 (China’s new heroine) and Nüzi quan 女子權 (Women’s rights), both published in 1907.6 That is to say, it is not written in the vernacular, nor does it explicitly advocate social change, although it comes close to doing so.7 Bihai zhu allows us to think of Zhan as a three-pronged writer of narrative and to understand more about his output as a whole. Second, Bihai zhu is of historical, one might even say sociological, interest. It provides insight into several types of relationships between Chinese guixiu 閨秀 (gentlewomen) and courtesans. In the process, it offers two ways of sorting courtesans—into the more and less guixiu-like and the more and less caught up in new educational currents. These distinctions are worth clarifying for their own sakes, but they also bear on the choices affecting all women in Zhan’s day. It turns out that in describing a courtesan’s efforts to educate herself, Zhan hoped to inspire lazy guixiu to do the same. In the novel three characters are central: two courtesans of contrasting styles and a young man who becomes involved with them. The two women have significantly different personalities. Zhan uses them to pose a contrast between old-fashioned forms of learning and Western ideas. For the young man, however, the key issue is quite different: what becomes of personal feeling when the most admirable women are going to school? The narrator is a second masculine presence in the story. University Library. Huashi came out in two collections. The first, dated 1906, fourth month, was published by Zuoxin she 作新社. The second, dated 1907, tenth month, was published by Shangwu yinshuguan 商務印書館. Both are held in the Zhejiang Library. I am grateful to Hsiung Ping-chen for supplying me with copies of Huashi and Rouxiang yunshi. 5 Zhan does not use the term “new novel.” That comes from Liang Qichao 梁啟 超 (1873–1929). But he does refer to one of the two, Nüzu quan 女子權 (Women’s rights), as a guomin xiaoshuo 國民小說 (citizen’s novel). See the title page of the copy from the Shanghai Library described below. I am indebted to James Cheng and Shum Chun of the Harvard-Yenching Library for obtaining copies of the original editions of both Zhongguo xin nühao (Shanghai: Jicheng tushu gongsi 集成圖書公司, 1907) and Nüzi quan (Shanghai: Zuoxin she, 1907). Subsequent references to these texts will be to the original editions. Chen Pingyuan 陳平原 has more on the various kinds of xin xiaoshuo 新小說 (new novels). See his Xiaoshuo shi: Lilun yu shijian 小說史 : 理論與實踐 (History of fiction: Theory and practice) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1993), esp. pp. 227–42. See also Hanan, 162–81, for a discussion of stylistic components of new fiction. Several of the techniques used in Bihai zhu were also used by Wu Jianren 吳趼人 (1866–1910), Hanan’s subject of discussion in these pages. For more on this see below in both text and notes. 6 Nüzi quan is deeply concerned with free choice in marriage, a point I do not discuss in this chapter. For more on this issue, see Hanan, 190–91. Although I call these new novels, they bear traces of zhanghui xiaoshuo 章回小說 (old-style vernacular novels). 7 One social change it advocates is the education of courtesans. See below.

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He has less “personality” than any of the three main characters, and he never meets either of the courtesans. Indeed, we never even know whether he frequents courtesans, a point that distinguishes him from the typical portrayal of wenren 文人 (man of literature) in courtesan literature at this time.8 However, in juxtaposition to the male lead, who does involve himself in dalliances, he comes across as one half of a pair. Additionally, he enables the male lead’s ruminations on the kinds of changes women are undergoing. This male lead’s dilemma—can a man go on loving courtesans in the old, familiar way once they are seized with modern ideas?—is stated quite explicitly, but it is also reinforced by the way the story is told. As we will see, the male and female pairs function quite differently, and they take up different issues, but they add up to a statement about the vexed nature of personal feeling in an era of rapid change. Related to these points is the use Bihai zhu makes of the novel form. This will come up for discussion as a fourth topic after the three main points of interest have been reviewed. The Plot of Bihai zhu Let me begin by outlining the plot of the novel. Because it is somewhat convoluted, my summary is rather lengthy. The novel starts off with the first-person narrator saying that he has never understood all the ramifications of qing 情 (feeling, sentiment, passion, emotion, affection, and so forth). He then describes a good friend named Qiqing sheng 綺情生 (Young Man of Elegant Sentiment). “Sheng,” as he is called throughout, is a man passionate enough to come to the aid of those in need but not someone one would think of as an expert on love. One night the narrator, Sheng, and some others are sitting around discussing Tang 唐 love stories and wishing they could have known the individuals concerned. Surprisingly, Sheng waxes eloquent when describing the ways qing can inform such virtues as loyalty and filial piety.9 He asks whether he might drop by at a later time and relay some of his experiences on these matters to the narrator. A few days later he arrives for a long night of conversation, and the narrator prepares to make a transcript of their words.

8 See for example, Catherine Yeh, “The Life-Style of Four Wenren in Late Qing Shanghai,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57.2 (1997): 419–70. 9 For a comparable practice in the work of Wu Jianren, see Hanan, 191. The passage Hanan cites dates from October 1906.

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At this point, Sheng pulls a small image out of his sleeve and props it up on the table. It is of a beautiful woman. When the narrator asks him who it is, Sheng coyly asks him to guess, then makes a list of all the things that can go wrong in a relationship (one party loves the other more than she or he is loved back, one party ends up admiring rather than loving the other, and so on). Except for a few questions from the narrator, the rest of the story is Sheng’s elaboration, in the first person, on Jin Xiaobao 金小寶, the courtesan in the picture (fig. 7.2), and a second courtesan, Peng Hechou 彭鶴儔. Sheng first introduces Jin, a courtesan who also comes up for comment in Zhan’s courtesan sketches.10 In the sketches, she is most prominently described as one of the Sida jingang 四大金剛 (Four Guardian Gate Gods), a famous quartet of courtesans,11 but here she is developed along other lines. Jin’s early life in Suzhou and her training as a courtesan introduce her story. Sheng is filled with pity at the early age (ten) at which Jin was put to work as well as admiration at the way Jin and her teacher held onto their dignity under trying circumstances. Jin is beautiful, intelligent, and talented. Her fame spreads in part thanks to her success in a “flower contest” organized by a newspaper. While still in Suzhou, she develops the habit of displaying her paintings, and famous painters become interested. Soon thereafter she moves to Shanghai for the city’s greater excitement and opportunity. Almost immediately, she is drafted by three other women to become part of the Gate Guard group. Each night at sunset, the four dress up and parade around in a carriage. This activity is covered by the entertainment newspaper Youxi bao 游戲報 (Entertainment weekly), so Jin’s name becomes widely known. When some famous Suzhou painters donate a name placard for her studio, her fame increases yet again, but she never forgets her fellow courtesans back home. Her place in Shanghai becomes a major social center, and the editor of Youxi bao writes her biography. This leads to an even larger clientele, including customers from Japan. All the while Jin remains sensitive to the poor fates of those less fortunate within the profession. Wealthy herself, she raises money for a cemetery for courtesans. With this she attracts still more customers. This section winds down with a number of poems by

See esp. Zhan, Huashi, 136–39. For more on Jin, see Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitutes and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 152, 169–72. 10 11

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Figure 7.2. Image of Jin Xiaobao from the original edition of Bihai zhu (1907). Source: Zhejiang Library collection.

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her admirers, which were printed and circulated around the time the cemetery was donated. Some, but not all, of the poems refer to the cemetery. The next year is wuxu 戊戌 (1898), and the views of Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) dominate discussion, even at this level of society. When asked one of the burning questions of the day—whether Chinese people should start wearing Western clothes—Jin demurs, but in the ensuing discussion, she announces her intention to go to school. The narrator interrupts to ask Sheng what kind of relationship he has with Jin. Sheng notes that Jin was responsible for one of the main points of the story, his renunciation of qing, on which he will eventually say more. At this point, he changes the subject to Peng, another courtesan. (Like Jin, Peng is represented in Huashi, albeit far less fully than Jin.)12 Sheng tells the narrator that Peng inspired Jin to change her profession. He further suggests that a description of his experience with Peng will give the narrator a better idea of what went on between him and Jin. Sheng then presents Peng’s life history. She is from Jiangxi. Her family was once respectable, and she underwent some schooling before her father ran out of funds. After various ups and down, she makes her way to Shanghai, where she fares rather well. But as an outsider, she is lonely in the big city. She is touched by a newspaper article praising her artistic talent and wants to give a painting to the reporter who wrote it. This reporter turns out to be Sheng. Sheng is curious about her and is pleasantly surprised to discover that the paintings she said she painted are really hers. Soon, Sheng and Peng begin dating and corresponding. Peng is more eager about the relationship than Sheng. In addition to letters, she also sends him more paintings and poems. He tries to return her interest, but he is working a regular schedule as a reporter and cannot always accommodate her requests for meetings. Peng is rather sickly and because she thinks she might be dying, Sheng resolves to have her photograph taken, but she does not much like the photograph.13 Once it becomes obvious that Sheng has no

See Zhan, Huashi xubian, Appendix, 1–7. There are illustrations at the beginning of the novel. These include the photograph of Peng and Sheng’s little image of Jin (see plot summary). They are reproduced in the front matter of Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi, 38. 12 13

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intention of marrying her, Peng decides to go back to Jiangxi, where she looks forward to reconnecting with a painting teacher of whom she was fond. Although Sheng is greatly saddened by this development, he is also relieved to have escaped the net of qing, which not only makes him anxious on its own account but also prompts him to worry about his job. Sheng and Peng’s goodbye is long and drawn out and filled with misunderstandings. Some of the notes Sheng writes Peng as they part strike the narrator as cruel. Questioning from the narrator prompts Sheng to reveal more about the relevance of Peng’s story to Jin’s. The most obvious connection is that once Jin met Peng she was lost in admiration of Peng’s superior talent at poetry and painting. The narrative then returns to Jin. Peng’s display of talent catalyzes Jin’s ambition to go to school, a move that eventually means abandoning her career as a courtesan. In addition, by this time, the seismic events of gengzi 庚子 (1900) have occurred, and the crisis of Chinese culture continues to be felt by courtesans as well as others. Jin moves to a new location, changes her name, and starts studying Chinese and English with private tutors. She meets a man who takes her to Beijing, but in the end her past catches up with her, and she is rejected by the man and robbed of much of her fortune. The rest of the novel details Jin’s various attempts to enroll in school in Shanghai. All of these end in failure as new schools do not accept former courtesans as pupils. Old customers resurface, but she is not interested in them anymore and prefers to focus on learning. Sheng relays the names of a couple of Shanghai schoolgirls (presumably historical individuals) that had become special favorites of Jin’s.14 Sheng’s story concludes with the thought that Jin could have been happy had she found the right partner but that she could also be happy devoting herself to learning. He sees her as an antidote to run-of-themill guixiu, who tended to be somewhat degenerate and lazy and hence unwilling to take advantage of the new educational opportunities. The narrator interrupts to ask why Sheng presents so many of Peng’s writings

14 They are Lin Zhongshu 林忠書 of Aiguo nü xuexiao 愛國女學校 (Patriotic Girls’ School) and Lu Shoumin 陸守民 of Chengdong xuetang 城東學堂 (Hall of Learning of the Eastern Part of the City). I have not been able to ascertain whether these are actual people.

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yet none of Jin’s appear. Sheng answers evasively. The narrator then asks Sheng how he would compare Jin and Peng. Sheng reverts to his initial discussion of the things that can go wrong in a relationship. In his relationship with Peng, he says, we have a case of the woman being more interested in him than he was in her. In Jin’s case, he admired her talent and respected her as a friend but that was all. The upshot is that in the end qing fails again. Sheng goes on to say that Peng represents the negative side of the pair of women. Her chief ambition was to buy a mountain and retreat there with Sheng, but he feels himself too young to withdraw from the world. In contrast, Jin represents the positive side. She has energy and wants to rush forward with the changing times. Yet Sheng doubts that he and Jin could have sustained a lasting relationship because he is more methodical than she is. The narrator expresses surprise that Sheng has now forgotten qing altogether (wang qing 忘 情) but ends up saying he thinks he can understand. The two agree to meet again on another day and continue their discussion of Sheng’s failed relationships. Sheng reiterates (for the third time) his list of what can go wrong in such encounters and promises to offer more sorrowful examples for the narrator to behold. Situating the Action in Real Time Peng and Jin are historical individuals, but the story takes poetic license when it presents them as two sides of a single coin. When one is used to complete the story of the other, their complementarity is emphasized, but overall the contrasts catch the eye. Whereas Peng is a talent of the old school and very affecting, Jin is caught up in the spirit of the new age. However, her ambition makes her less loveable than Peng. As for Sheng and the narrator, one clue to the nature of their relationship may lie in the ascription of the writing to a “Boxing lang” 薄幸郎 (Heartless Lover) and of the editing to “Wang qing zi” 忘情子 (He Who Has Forgotten Qing). As noted above, the term “wang qing” is also used to refer to Sheng in the course of the story. Additionally, Sheng’s name Qiqing sheng 綺情生 is close to Zhan Kai’s penname, Siqi zhai. Boxing lang also overlaps slightly with the penname Zhan used for his poetry, Xinglou zhuren 幸樓主人 (Master of Tower of Good Fortune). This naming practice, along with the fact that Sheng is a newspaper reporter, as Zhan Kai himself likely was, allow us to see the narrator

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and Sheng as two facets of a single individual, that individual being (in some respects, at least) Zhan Kai.15 A further link to Zhan’s reality emerges if one tries to sort out the relationship between the biographies of Jin and Peng. In relative time, we know that the entire second half of Jin’s biography was stimulated by her encounter with Peng. This second half-biography can also be dated in absolute time. It is subsequent to the encounter with Peng, which we know took place under the stimulus of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao’s pronouncements of 1898, with the result that three years later, presumably in or around 1901, Jin ended up in school (Bihai zhu, 284). We are also told that this second half got underway just after the shocks of gengzi (庚子 1900; these included the Boxer Rebellion and foreign invasion) (Bihai zhu, 306). Whether by one reckoning or the other, 1900–01 is a key moment in the story. Here personal time and national time become intertwined. This juxtaposition underscores the link between the crisis of individuals and the crisis of the nation. It was around the same time, in response to his failed relationship with Peng, that Sheng decided to leave the yuhai 欲海 (sea of desire) (Bihai zhu, 306). We are not told how much time elapsed between the end of the second part of Jin’s story and the conversation between the narrator and Sheng, although we can deduce that the conversation must have taken place sometime between 1901 and 1907, the year of publication. The picture of Peng enclosed in the book is inscribed by Siqi zhai and dated seventh month of the seventh day, 1907, which intimates that someone (Sheng? Zhan Kai?) kept up with Peng until that time. As far as the narrator’s encounter with Sheng is concerned, all of the events involving women took place at a prior time. Sheng has already renounced qing by the time he visits the narrator, and by the end of the novel we find out why. In midstream, the novel raises a question about Sheng—why the renunciation?—which it answers with recourse to the two women’s lives. Yet the repetition of the reasons romance can fail at the end of the novel anticipates a moment in which more backward looks at more failed romances will be narrated, even though this is beyond the scope of Bihai zhu. Neither Huashi nor Zhan’s new

15 For what I have been able to unearth about Zhan’s life so far, see my “Inflecting Gender: Zhan Kai/Siqi Zhai’s ‘New Novels’ and Courtesan Sketches,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 136–68, esp. pp. 138–41.

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novels are anywhere near as complexly organized in terms of time. This temporal complexity is emblematic of the greater complexity of Bihai zhu when compared with Zhan’s other writings. Bihai zhu and Zhan’s Other Writings Time is only one of the ways in which Bihai zhu is more complicated than Zhan’s other narratives. I have discussed the others at length and in juxtaposition on a previous occasion.16 Here I merely note the similarities and differences that emerge when each of the two styles is compared to Bihai zhu. Like the courtesan sketches, Bihai zhu dwells in the literary past. Its subject matter concerns courtesans, and the language is classical Chinese. Tang tales are frequently referenced, and narration is in the first person, or rather, narration is by two first-person narrators, the narrator and Sheng. Poems are interspersed among prose, but they are not the main vehicle of narration. Again like the courtesan sketches, the tone is fairly realistic, which is to say, the daily lives of courtesans are evoked in some detail. In contrast to the sketches, which portray over one hundred women, Bihai zhu focuses on only two courtesans. Moreover Bihai zhu is a novel; the sketches are not, being broadly documentary of a reality Zhan had experienced firsthand. Thus, unlike the courtesan sketches, Bihai zhu has a plot, a unified time scheme, and a consistent attempt to control point of view. In sum, Bihai zhu combines the old-fashioned world of courtesans and male admirers with modern political content and fashionable narrative style.17 Reminiscent of Zhan’s two new novels are the high degree of plotting and the length, which is much longer than any individual courtesan sketch and not much shorter than Nüzi quan or Zhongguo xin nühao.18 The intensity of focus on the reforms of Liang and Kang is another way in which Bihai zhu and the new novels coincide. By contrast, the new novels are written in much simpler language (always prose); they reference modern and even Western writers but never Tang tales or other premodern literature; and narration is in an impersonal and omniscient See ibid. On other writers following the same fashion, see note 2 above. 18 In modern reprint, Bihai zhu is fifty-three pages long. Zhongguo xin nühao has no modern reprint that I know of, but Nüzi quan occupies about seventy-six pages of vol. 64 of Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi. 16 17

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third-person style. Additionally the new novels are set far in the future. Where these novels are realistic, it is not about the daily lives of courtesans but about the crisis China faces at home and abroad. Within Bihai zhu, some sections are more Huashi-like, whereas others come closer to the new novels. Thus, the discussion of Peng replicates some of the heavy nostalgia of the courtesan sketches, and the romance between Peng and Sheng (such as it is) is carried out through poems and correspondence that are redolent of old-fashioned qing. By contrast, the discussion of Jin looks more to the future than the past, just as the new novels do. Jin is certainly not a virginal guixiu like the heroines of Zhan’s two new novels, but she passes, or almost passes for a guixiu on several occasions. And even though her impetus to study comes from her encounter with Peng, a talent of the old school, because of her interest in learning, her part of the story seems forward looking, and it concludes with a reference to two students she admires. This puts it more in line with Zhongguo xin nühao and Nüzi quan. Combining the three categories of work allows us to see a continuum in Zhan’s output of 1906–07: from Huashi (preface published third month, 1906; published fourth month, 1906); and Xubian (second edition; published tenth month, 1907); to the two “new novels” Zhongguo xin nühao (preface published fall, 1906; novel? published third month, 1907); and Nüzi quan (published sixth month, 1907); to Bihai zhu (published ninth month, 1907). For whatever reasons, we may infer, Zhan consciously played around with writing styles as he switched from one type of work to another, and though the time of writing (or at least of publishing) was virtually identical, three distinct configurations of genre and gender emerge. We may also infer variations in audience from this evidence. Thus, the new novels appear to be most suitable for young and naïve readers including women; the courtesan sketches reach out to wenren like the narrator; and Bihai zhu addresses Sheng-like men of more modern sensibility, who knew the old world of courtesans but believe it is time to move to more modern ways. Women may have been welcome readers for all three styles of writing, but in focusing so much on men’s ruminations, both the sketches and Bihai zhu reach out primarily to men.

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Bihai zhu and the Issue of Female Education This section addresses two questions that come up in Bihai zhu: the reasons a courtesan like Jin would want to emulate someone like Peng and the reasons Jin might think about going to school. Background on both matters can be found in Huashi and the other courtesan sketches. Huashi gives several instances of courtesans whose posture is quite guixiu-like, whether in their superior skill at poetry and painting (as in the case of Peng herself, among others), their sedate demeanor (Huashi, 70), or their studiousness (Huashi xubian, 50). Such women, although courtesans, would presumably have aimed to attach themselves to a single patron so as to avoid having to take customers. A few may have hoped to marry out of the courtesan world altogether, although not everyone took such an opportunity when it came along.19 Failing that, another escape route lay in making a fortune, as Jin’s example demonstrates. But not every successful courtesan-entrepreneur had the skill at poetry or painting and the reserved manner commonly associated with guixiu. In Bihai zhu we note Jin’s deep admiration on perceiving Peng’s skill at poetry and painting, and we witness her effort to acquire those skills. Resulting in a more marriageable Jin, this behavior is completely consonant with evidence from Huashi that taking on guixiu-like airs and attributes could advance a courtesan to a higher social plane. Alongside the gentleman from Beijing’s ultimate rejection of Jin, however, the fact that one of the most guixiu-like of all the courtesans, Li Cai 李采, was on record as despising Jin (Huashi xubian, 28) can be taken as evidence that a guixiu-like demeanor took more than simple determination to pull off convincingly. Why might Li have so disliked her fellow courtesan? We learn from Li’s biography that she was exceptionally reserved. Perhaps she was put off by Jin’s skill at singing, her large, public parties, or her early history as a Gate Guard.20 One assumes that Jin would have shed these behaviors later in life, certainly by the time she tried to function as a guixiu-like consort to the gentleman from Beijing, so perhaps Li’s 19 An example of one who balked at marriage was Li Pingxiang. See Zhan, Huashi, 19–21. 20 The last explanation seems the most likely, as the same passage notes that Li Cai also disliked Lu Lanfen 陸蘭芬, another Gate Guard. On the other hand, one of the Li’s, Li Yong, wrote a poem to Jin. See Zhan, Huashi’s appendix on Li Yong, 3. Li Yong and Jin must have been friends.

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disdain dates from Jin’s Gate Guard period. In contrast, Bihai zhu gives the impression that Peng had an easy time assuming guixiu airs. She not only came from a good family, but she also had guixiu friends, some rather close (Bihai zhu, 287, 289). Peng’s own guixiu-like qualities are reinforced by her associations with “real guixiu.” Given that Bihai zhu is fiction, it is possible that these high-class friends were invented, but they seem rather plausible, given Peng’s documented talent for writing and her fictionalized talent at painting. How might a courtesan like Peng have made the acquaintance of guixiu? One possibility is through painting teachers. Huashi observes that Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716–98) took only guixiu as pupils (14), but such segregation was apparently less strict in the late Qing period. Another possibility may have been theatergoing by guixiu and courtesans in tandem. A fictionalized example comes up in Bihai zhu when Peng goes to the theater with a guixiu friend (291). In any event, for Jin to want to be more guixiu-like reflects a hierarchy that is documented in Zhan’s historical writings on courtesans. The obvious cachet of guixiu among courtesans, not to mention other women, makes an interesting counterpoint to Liang’s efforts to debunk the old-fashioned talented woman (cainü 才女) at this time. The issue of courtesan schooling evidently heated up with the reforms of 1898 and the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Whereas previously, courtesans were educated in poetry, painting, singing, and other traditional arts, the question now arose as to whether they ought not to go to modern schools as other women were preparing to do. This new concern is amply documented in Huashi, which features biographies of three courtesans surnamed Li—Li Cai, Li Yong 李詠, and Li Pingxiang 李蘋香—each of whom tried to launch modern-style schools for courtesans.21 All three of these women had received good educations in the traditional guixiu style before their courtesan days and were thus literate enough to write petitions to educational authorities or newspapers in support of their cause. Some of these petitions are reprinted in the biographies of Li Cai and Li Yong. We learn from outside sources that all such efforts ultimately failed, but this does not

21 The biographies of Li Pingxiang, Li Yong, and Li Cai are found in Zhan, Huashi xubian on pages 19–21, 123–28, and 27–38, respectively. Li Pingxiang’s educational efforts are far less fully developed than those of the other two, but she is the only one of the three to be mentioned in Huashi’s preface (under the name Xie Wenyi 謝文漪) as an educational reformer. Hershatter, 171–74, lists others besides these three.

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diminish the importance of these and other early attempts to enlist courtesans into new educational initiatives.22 What might the goals of giving courtesans a modern education have been? Those articulated by the three Li’s, both in Huashi and in newspapers of the day, include making China stronger by improving the lot of women, preparing these women for eventual status as “good wives and wise mothers,” lifting them out of the degraded status they had fallen into rather than chosen, and keeping up with the Japanese, whose courtesans were literate. Interestingly, in this discussion the “mothers of citizens” argument is strongly in evidence, perhaps more so than the “citizens” approach, to bring in a recent formulation by Joan Judge on women’s roles.23 Implicit but referenced less directly as a force behind such initiatives is the courtesans’ own patriotism. A call to courtesans to invest in railroad shares as a way of keeping these shares in Chinese hands is appended to the end of Huashi xubian and shows their patriotic emotion at work in another vein. Patriotism was one reason for their urge to be educated.24 This is so even though we know that one important reason for the failure of courtesan schools was that few courtesans could accommodate study into their work schedules.25 One way the organizers tried to get around this problem was to organize part-time schools, the specific organizational features of which are detailed in an appendix to Li Yong’s biography. Reading the courtesans’ own words in Huashi and Huashi xubian brings out another important problem with this endeavor. Both Li Cai’s and Li Yongping’s petitions, devised for public circulation, take note of the hostile receptions earlier proposals had met among educational

Ibid. There is extensive development of the idea that children learn from their mothers more than their fathers. Although courtesans are fallen women, the logic runs, they may hope to do better and eventually to marry and have children, hence the need for educating them. See Joan Judge, “Citizens or Mothers of Citizens?: Gender and the Meaning of Modern Chinese Citizenship,” in Citizenship in Modern China, eds. Elizabeth Perry and Merle Goldman, Harvard Contemporary China Series (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23–43. 24 Huashi does not record Jin’s interest in going to school. That only comes out in Bihai zhu. But it does mention a few other courtesans with this interest, for example, Lin Xiuying 林秀英 (Huashi xubian, 50) and Jin Lianqing 金蓮卿 (Huashi xubian, 74–75). 25 Hershatter, 171–74. 22 23

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authorities.26 They attempt to counter such setbacks by appealing to altruistic individuals for advice and funds. In the process, they invoke the doctrine of human rights—only recently introduced to China27—to support their embattled claim that courtesans are people and deserve to learn. In courtesans’ own words: “Although our profession is degraded, we are still people. [No one can say that] we ought not to seek learning” (Huashi, 124). In Huashi, Zhan Kai waxes indignant at the hostile receptions these efforts received: “I do not understand the stubbornness [on this point] of officials from Western Zhejiang” (123). Bihai zhu fictionalizes the same uphill fight on a less public, more individualized plane when it documents Jin’s many failed attempts to get a modernstyle education. Her several expulsions from proper girls’ schools and her gritty efforts to find alternatives constitute one of two chief points of interest in the second segment on Jin. Bihai zhu also has something to say about the content of the new education, in that it included both guowen and English. On this point, too, Jin’s fictionalized story accords with the dreams of those who aimed to found courtesan schools, as we see from Li Yong’s petition, which places guowen and foreign languages on the agenda, along with home economics, vocational education, geography, and history (Huashi, 127). Elsewhere, in Huashi xubian, we find that at least one courtesan studied from a text prepared by missionaries for use in Chinese schools, Waiguo qianzi wen 外國千字文 (The foreign thousand character text) (1).28 Together, Bihai zhu and Huashi provide fascinating evidence of the trickle-down effect of the educational views of Liang and Kang (or in the view of conservative local educational authorities the “residual poison of Liang and Kang” [Huashi, 123]) and the work of missionary

26 Li Cai’s petitions are said to have been published in Nanfang bao 南方報 (Southern newspaper) and Zhongwai ribao 中外日報 (Chinese and foreign daily), but I have not yet found them in these newspapers. Li Yong’s petition does not say whether it was published, but the tone suggests that it was written for publication. 27 According to Stephen C. Angle, human rights discourse, in an approximately Western sense, began in China in the mid-nineteenth century and became more consolidated by the late 1890s. See his Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 138–39. 28 I have not yet tracked down this source myself, but Ryan Dunch informs me in a recent email that it is probably the work attributed to Wilhelm Lobscheid in Alexander Wylie, Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese, Giving a List of Their Publications, and Obituary Notices of the Deceased, with Copious Indexes (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Press, 1867; rprt. Taibei: Chengwen, 1967), 185. The entry in Wylie gives no indication of how Christianized (if at all) it might have been.

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educators, who might have been surprised to discover how their texts were being used.29 How does Zhan Kai relate these dreams of educating courtesans to China’s future? Huashi’s preface has a passage on fashion and its affect on guixiu, which offers one possible answer. It begins by describing the high level of guixiu attraction to courstesan styles. It goes on to say that if only guixiu could see examples of individuals (like Jin) who fought against poor fates and struggled to improve themselves, they might be inspired to embrace the new educational opportunities, in much the same way that they would embrace new clothing styles. Bihai zhu has a slightly different way of framing the subject but a similar logic: My country is in a period of declining Confucianism. Although female learning is on the rise, the guixiu have degenerate habits, which increases people’s scorn for them. If you want to find an outstanding woman with strong will, you need to look among the courtesans.30

Zhan’s point here seems to be that lazy guixiu have hitherto taken the wrong kind of inspiration from courtesans. Rather than looking to them for fashion tips, guixiu would do better to imitate the determination of courtesans like Jin Xiaobao, who sought to improve themselves by going to school. However, Zhan’s hope that guixiu would even read a work like Bihai zhu, let alone conclude what he wants them to from Jin’s example, seems quixotic. This may be one reason that the two new novels are addressed to guixiu directly, with no reliance on courtesans as intermediaries. It may also explain why they portray modernized guixiu in unfamiliar guises—well educated and traveling around the globe to study women’s conditions worldwide. This time the goal is not to deter guixiu from admiring courtesans for the wrong reasons but to create idealized models through whom impressionable young women can catch a glimpse of the future. Even with the new novels, however, it is unlikely that Zhan expected readers to copy these idealized heroines in every particular, which is to say, that he really expected them to make fact-finding tours of the world on behalf of Chinese women during their unmarried years. Zhan’s two new novels rarely address the subject of courtesans head on, and when they do it is very much in passing. The one possible

29 It is interesting that Li Cai made a point of studying textbooks during her free time. See Zhan, Huashi xubian, 28. 30 Zhan, Bihai zhu, 309. These are Sheng’s words.

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clue that Zhan had not abandoned courtesans altogether in these works lies in the rather frequent references to vocational education, particularly in Nüzi quan, where it comes up as an important topic in the later chapters. It will be recalled that vocational skills were among the educational offerings at Li Yong’s projected school. But in the new novels, vocational education is never keyed to courtesans specifically. As observed above, the lack of attention to courtesans is a major reason that the two novels seem so different from Bihai zhu and the courtesan sketches. Only when one recalls that all three novels were motivated (at least superficially) by the aim of reaching benighted guixiu and through them all of Chinese women does a link between them emerge.31 There is another way in which Bihai zhu differs from Zhan’s other types of writing. This is exemplified in Jin’s conversion from old-style, guixiu-like learning, as epitomized by Peng, to modern learning. Such conversions are mentioned in Zhan’s other works, but they are not dramatized as they are here. In Huashi, learning is mostly of the old school. The parttime schools proposed by the three Li’s are given considerable play, but emphasis is still on the uphill fight faced by these courtesan leaders, not on their success at reaching individual students. And although the heroines of Zhan’s two modern novels, Huang Yingniang 黃英娘 and Yuan Zhenniang 袁貞娘, are well educated (one is a student at a girls’ high school attached to Waseda, the other at a girls’ school in Beijing), neither is a convert from learning of the old style. Only in Bihai zhu is the transition from one form of learning to the other dramatized. Jin’s trajectory allows her to escape her otherwise bad fate, as Zhan tells us in the following terms: Fortunately we have someone like Xiaobao, whom the Creator caused to meet adversity as a child and who was forced to undergo a thousand troubles and a hundred setbacks, so that her reputation was ruined. But she showed her ambition and moral fortitude; and in the end she became a member of the learned community. Is it not regrettable [that she had to go through so much]?32

Implicit in Bihai zhu is the notion that if a courtesan like Jin could prevail against her bad fate, so can other Chinese women and indeed China itself (a logic frequently encountered during the early twentieth

31 This logic appears in the preface to Zhongguo xin nü hao, which is organized around a quotation from missionary Young J. Allen. 32 Zhan, Bihai zhu, 309.

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century),33 but the analogy between courtesan and nation is not as explicit as in Huashi. In Bihai zhu, rather, Jin’s personal struggle is emphasized. In her own way as heroic as Yingniang and Zhenniang, Jin is meant to provide inspiration for readers (among other purposes), but her case is portrayed as more exceptional than ordinary, and she does not have Yingniang’s and Zhenniang’s larger-than-life qualities, so she does not make as easy a synecdoche for the plight (and hope) of Chinese women as a whole. Bihai zhu and the Dilemma of Qing Unlike the dilemma of education, which is cast in terms of women, the dilemma of qing is cast in terms of men. Bihai zhu does not ask whether a woman like Peng or Jin would find the new man appealing. It asks what the new (or modernizing) man should do when he discovers that the ambitious, educated woman is not as easy to love as the talented beauty of the old school. Bihai zhu’s resolution of the qing issue—Sheng’s decision to give up on feeling altogether or perhaps to convert from romance to patriotism—would not have appealed to many of his readers. Yet in stating this dilemma, Zhan addresses a problem that comes up in other literature of this and later periods. Sheng’s growing realization of the problem is the second major outcome of the second section on Jin. The importance of qing is highlighted in Bihai zhu’s overall structure, which we now approach through individual points of narrative. This work’s narrative niceties include the careful accounting of how the speaking subject knows what he knows, the pairing of characters, and the autobiographical or semiautobiographical narrator. As for the accounting for information, we are filled in three times as to how the speaking subject knows what he knows. The first is at the beginning, when the narrator explains that he will hear Sheng’s account and write it all down. This narrative contextualization between the narrator and Sheng is amplified by the “hard evidence” of the portrait of Jin. Sheng adds to our understanding of the narrative set-up later in the text when he rather ironically refers to his method as xianshen shuofa 現身說法 (a manner of telling that begins by manifesting the body

33

Hershatter, 174, and elsewhere.

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[Bihai zhu, 285]), referring to the early introduction of Jin’s image on the scene. The second fill-in comes at the beginning of Jin’s story, when we are told that Sheng got his information from gossip, books, newspapers, and Jin’s own account of her life, probably (but not necessarily) meaning an oral account (Bihai zhu, 268). We are also told that an unnamed servant of Jin’s added a point of information Sheng could not otherwise have known (Bihai zhu, 272). The third fill-in has to do with Peng. Here again Sheng divulges his sources: a diary Peng kept of their relationship, the letters and poems she and others sent to Sheng, and regular infusions of information from Peng’s maid Zhang Laolao 張老老, both before and after Peng’s return to Shanxi. It is not clear whether Zhan actually gleaned information from such sources or whether the authentication process is itself part of the fiction that is underway. In any event, this careful accounting of how observers come to know what they know could also be described as “restricted first-person narrator” or “first-person participant narrator,” techniques emerging in the fiction of Zhan’s day.34 As previously noted, this technique is one clear means of distinguishing Bihai zhu from Huashi, which has a much simpler, omniscient narrative style. With this background in mind, let us take up our second point of interest, the pairing of characters. As previously noted, Bihai zhu’s three characters and narrator take shape as male and female pairs. Within each pair one finds points of similarity but also points of difference. Thus, the courtesans are both highly intelligent, but they are quite different personalities to begin with, and they negotiate the reforms of Liang and Kang in very different ways. For example, in Peng’s case, these reforms make virtually no difference, whereas with Jin, they make all the difference in the world. The narrator and Sheng are similar in that both appear to be about the same age, and they are good friends. They could be called each other’s alter egos, and both probably represent the author in some way, yet the two men are also contrasted, in that the narrator is much more caught up in old-style feeling, whereas Sheng resolves to extricate himself from romantic entanglements in order to help his country in its time of need. Jin’s conversion to new learning would at first appear to be the most dramatic development in the story, but Sheng’s conversion from qing-mindedness to renunciation takes shape as more consequential. Together, the two conversions

34

Hanan, 162–82.

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constitute the heart of the novel’s interest. Meanwhile, a secondary plot line can be identified in the narrator’s and Peng’s residual commitment to older ways. In elaborating more fully on these two pairs of characters, I shall begin with the women, even though my ultimate focus is the predicament of male individuals, for whom passion is problematized in a changing age. Just as the personalities of Jin and Peng differ vastly, so too does the way they are presented. Zhan’s characterization of Jin is entirely from the outside. This is true in both the first and the second section of her life story, although the type of information we learn in each is somewhat different. In the first section, her initial plight, her talent, and her migration to Shanghai from Suzhou are similar to the type of thing we learn about all courtesans in Huashi and related texts. Even Jin’s concern for fellow courtesans and her successful effort to create a cemetery for them, although unusual in its day, would not have stood out in Huashi, because the series as a whole describes a series of grand gestures.35 Both because it is not completely clear that Sheng really knows Jin and because Jin’s own voice is never brought out directly, this part of Bihai zhu could almost be called biographical rather than fictional. However, because it is tied to the second part of Jin’s story and the rest of Bihai zhu, it is obvious that it has undergone artistic shaping of a sort not found in Zhan’s more historical writing. The second part of Jin’s description takes off where the first left off, after the long interval in which Peng takes center stage. This part proceeds in relation to the story of Peng and brings out the work’s central comparison as far as the women are concerned. It takes up Jin’s efforts to acquire Peng’s panache, her disastrous relationship with the gentleman from Beijing, and her decision to devote herself to obtaining a modern education. As always her story is told from the outside. However, the level of detail involved and the juxtaposition of high hopes with repeated failures make this part of Jin’s story more dramatic and poignant than the first part. The difference may further signal a transition to a time in which Jin actually knew Sheng, as opposed to one when he had merely heard of her. Personal acquaintance might be the reason that he is able to narrate milestones not commonly found

35 Another of the Gate Guards, Lin Daiyu 林黛玉, was associated with this enterprise. See Hanan, 185, and also Hershatter, 170.

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in the biographical literature on Jin.36 However, we are never fully informed about Sheng’s level of acquaintance, and it is just as easy to assume that he went on learning about Jin from reading or hearsay rather than direct involvement. Jin’s story can also be contrasted with Peng’s story, which its two halves bookend. First of all, we learn what we know of Peng in one fell swoop, rather than two separate sections. In contrast to at least the first part of Jin’s story and perhaps also the second, the section on Peng presents her and Sheng as mutually involved. This is also a contrast to Huashi, where the narrative concentrates on individual subjects and seldom tries to relate their lives romantically to the narrator, that is, to Zhan himself. Furthermore, in Huashi, Zhan as author occasionally intervenes,37 perhaps to offer an opinion on courtesan education (see above), to comment on the general plight of women (91), or to note how he first learned of a certain courtesan (107). The sketch is seldom a romance involving himself and the subject. Here, however, except for a short introductory section that fills in Peng’s background, her story is set forth in terms of her relationship with Sheng. The second contrast is that Peng’s voice is constantly invoked, most notably through a series of letters that respond to every twist and turn in their relationship. (Sheng’s letters are mostly withheld.) These contrasts mean that as far as capturing an individual’s experience is concerned, Peng’s story is more poignant and alive than either portion of Jin’s story and than any biography in Huashi, as well. Conversation between Sheng and the narrator leaves open the possibility that Sheng may not have had the same level of documentation for Jin that he had for Peng. Could this be artistic license? Or could it mean that Jin’s level of literacy was not as great as Peng’s? (Peng is one of only four out of a hundred or so subjects to have her individual poems appended at the end of the text of Huashi.)38 Sheng further hints that his and Jin’s relationship is simply too personal to be recorded by the narrator, but his evasiveness raises the possibility that this excuse may be disingenuous. Whether the relationship between Jin and Sheng

For more on this literature, see Paula Zamperini, “ ‘But I Never Learned to Waltz’: The ‘Real’ and Imagined Education of a Courtesan in the Late Qing,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 1.1 (March 1999): 107–44. 37 Sometimes under his penname Xinglou zhuren, sometimes with the introduction Huashishi yue 花史史曰 (The Historian of Courtesans says), sometimes simply using the pronoun I. 38 The others are Li Yong, Li Cai, and Zhou Aiqing 周愛卿. 36

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never existed, was never properly documented, or was too intimate to be divulged, it, too, was imbued with feeling, at least on Sheng’s side. But this feeling seems to have been more admiration or patriotism than old-fashioned qing—feeling, in other words, of a somewhat impersonal nature. Indeed, Sheng praises Jin as his taishang 太上 (Daoist mentor) in forgetting qing (Bihai zhu, 285).39 By contrast, Peng’s voice is highly personalized and eroticized. She lets us know in no uncertain terms what a godsend it was for her to encounter Sheng. He was her answer to her loneliness in the big city, as we see in the following passage from her letters: Although I have the comfort that good friends and family frequently visit from my home town, there is no one better than you at turning my tears to laughter. Why? I myself do not know. I had been in Shanghai half a year and had not found anyone to talk to. When I met you and you did not reject me, I realized I had found the friend of a lifetime. I don’t like to tell my secret thoughts and bitter reactions to anyone else. Whenever I meet you for a whole day, all my grievances melt away.40

Compared to the two women, Sheng and the narrator make a more subtly contrasting pair. Together they offer an effective counterpoint on the question of how a patriotic man might act toward courtesans in 1907. On the one hand, Sheng’s behavior toward Jin sounds more like wish fulfillment than lived experience. On the other, his behavior toward Peng seems heartless and self-indulgent, not as righteous as he would like the narrator to believe. In both cases, Sheng’s possible unreliability is brought out by the narrator. We have already discussed the narrator’s query about the extent to which Sheng and Jin were acquainted and noted Sheng’s equivocations. As far as Sheng’s denouement with Peng is concerned, it is a surprising but telling “forgetting of qing” at the dawn of the modern age. Sheng relates the thought processes that led to this resolution in a series of short passages. The first is rather tradition minded, being 39 This alludes to an episode in the chapter “Shangshi” 傷逝 (Grieving for the departed), in Liu Yiqing’s 劉義慶 (403–44) Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A new account of tales of the world), which recounts Wang Rong’s 王戎 words in mourning his son: “A sage forgets his feelings; the lowest beings aren’t even capable of having feelings. But the place where feelings are most concentrated is precisely among people like ourselves” (聖人忘情，最下不及情；情之所鍾，正在我輩). The Chinese text is in Yu Jiaxi 余嘉錫, Shishuo xinyu jianshu 世說新語箋疏 (Commentary on the Shishuo xinyu) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 638; and can be found translated in Richard B. Mather, A New Account of Tales of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 324. 40 Zhan, Bihai zhu, 298.

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based on the Tang tale Yingying zhuan 鶯鶯傳 (The story of Miss Oriole) and his wish to follow in the footsteps of its hero Zhang Sheng 張生 (Scholar Zhang) (Bihai zhu, 305). The second is more visibly influenced by reformist rhetoric of the late Qing period: the needs of the country to work against personal love (Bihai zhu, 306). Set against Peng’s palpable disappointment, Sheng explanations at first seem fatuous and unfeeling, a point brought out in further questioning by the narrator. Finally, Sheng’s complaint that Peng is a negative rather than a positive character, and his justifications for not getting involved—that he is too young to isolate himself on a mountain, that he might lose his job, and so on—again strike the narrator as churlish. At this moment, Peng’s own voice, having been touchingly rendered through her letters, threatens to overwhelm the manifest rhetoric of the novel, which is that love affairs like the one Peng could have offered Sheng, together with the qing-oriented style in which she expresses herself, no longer suits China’s needs. The upshot is that, for just a moment, Sheng comes across as a cad. Only after the narrator reflects on Sheng’s reasoning and ultimately forgives him does Sheng’s position begin to seem more reasonable. Or to put this another way, only after the narrator’s exclamations of regret and sympathy does the reader start to sense the chasm that Sheng has crossed, his discovery of new ways of conducting himself. These supplant an older, more qing-oriented model. Unlike Zhan’s two new novels, in which the heroines both voice and embody the overall rhetoric, Peng causes the reader momentary confusion about where the novel really stands. It is, of course, all the more effective to make the embodiment of the old way so compelling. Peng’s very charm and sadness end up demonstrating that a qing-filled personal style no longer has appeal, at least not for a forward-looking man such as Sheng. This realization can be painful, for the reader as well as Sheng, but it underscores how much less simplistic this novel is than Zhan’s two novels in a modern vein. At this moment, Bihai zhu outlines a problem the new era poses for wenren like Sheng: in this time of crisis, there seems to be no right way to relate to ambitious or patriotic women and no way to justify the kind of solipsism to which a qing-based relationship would normally lead. This dilemma lies at the heart of the anxiety and uncertainty of the new age. Turning now to the narrator, we assume that he is autobiographical, perhaps no less than Sheng. This is in part because he is referred to in

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the first person, and in part because autobiographical narrators were fashionable at the time.41 However, he is a figure about whom one is told nothing, except that he is a friend of Sheng’s. From the context one deduces that he is the more old-fashioned and qing-oriented of the pair. His sensibility puts him more in line with Peng than with Jin, and his concerns are one reason that Peng’s old fashionedness (we might also call this her high level of feeling) comes across so vividly. This is again a far cry from Zhongguo xin nühao or Nüzi quan, where neither heroine bucks the rhetorical tide. Had Sheng and the narrator been one and the same, the complexities in Sheng’s conversion, the losses as well as the gains, might have been less apparent. After the narrator probes Sheng’s choices then seeks to understand them, however, Sheng’s behavior appears brave and selfdenying but not heroic, and it provokes more regret than applause. We thus take note of the complexities in this cross-pair dynamic, namely, that the narrator brings out the virtues in Peng’s position, even as Sheng dismisses it as negative. In other words, a strong countercurrent emerges from the “alliance” between the narrator and Peng, even as Jin’s and Sheng’s more modern approach carries the day. Both Jin and Sheng make interrelated brave decisions, which are provoked by China’s crisis and by the words of Liang and Kang. But these decisions are not so much full of feeling as dutiful, and they point to the vexed character of romance between men and women in a complex age. In this lies Bihai zhu’s contribution to an understanding of its time. Bihai zhu and Zhan’s Use of the Novel Form To sum up, Zhongguo xin nühao, Nüzi quan, and Bihai zhu can all be considered novels, although the latter contrasts with the former two. Except that it is fictionalized, Bihai zhu’s autobiographical narrator links it closely to Huashi and related materials, in which Zhan often voices personal concerns. And it has little of the simple-minded quality that one finds in the two new novels, which are idealistic, filled with coincidence, and in which Zhan’s personal voice is difficult to find. We know from Zhan Kai’s brother, Zhan Xi 詹熙 (1850–1927), that he regarded the novel as a humorous form, even though he wrote

41

See note 2.

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at least one reform-minded novel, Hualiu shenqing zhuan 花柳深情傳 (Love among the courtesans) in 1897.42 Zhan Xi’s novel takes up serious matters, such as the bane of opium, but it does so in a neatly wrapped, coincidence-filled package rather like that of Zhan Kai’s two new novels. The description “humorous form” might well be applied to both brothers’ modern offerings, despite the seriousness of some of the subject matter, but this description does not apply to Bihai zhu. Rather, Bihai zhu portrays its two courtesans as victims in highly moving terms. At the same time, it describes the rather depressing uncertainty of a young man like Sheng, when he discovers that an immersion in qing-based values is no longer the cultural given it once was. The difference between Bihai zhu and the two new novels, then, goes beyond such obvious points as linguistic difference (classical versus vernacular), narrative styles (involved first-person versus impersonal third-person), or audience (women and men versus only women). In Bihai zhu we see the craft of fiction taken much more seriously. Zhan Kai’s careful manipulations of time, information flow, and character provide a window on the painful choices that might really have been faced by himself and his friends as well as by women like Peng and Jin. Conclusion It would be a mistake to see Bihai zhu as a gloss on every feature of Zhan’s other writings. Huashi’s far-reaching inquiry into courtesans’ lives makes it much more broadly informative than Bihai zhu, which concentrates on only two women, just as Zhongguo xin nühao and Nüzi quan make a much more comprehensible appeal to guixiu readers. Yet to put the three sides of Zhan’s work together makes an interesting package. With Bihai zhu included, the courtesan sketches and new novels look more closely related than would otherwise be the case. More importantly, Bihai zhu stands on its own in expressive terms. Less simply descriptive than Huashi, it crystallizes dilemmas that could well have been felt by Zhan and his male contemporaries as well as by courtesans caught in a wave of change. More subtle and moving

See Hanan, 137–38. The date 1897 is found within the novel. An early published edition is from 1908 by Guangya shuju 廣雅書局. It is the basis of the Beijing Shifan daxue chubanshe 北京師范大學出版社 edition of 1992. For the information on dating see pp. 1–2 of the Shifan daxue edition. 42

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than either of the two “new novels,” and more clearly anchored in the present, it convinces us of Zhan’s respect for the novel form. As we know nothing about Zhan’s life after 1907, we cannot say how or even whether he followed up on techniques devised for use in Bihai zhu. Whatever the case, Bihai zhu holds its own artistically, and it documents an important tension between personal feeling and patriotism at the dawn of the modern age.

PART THREE

THE PRODUCTION OF GENDER AND GENRES IN NEW PRINT MEDIA

CHAPTER EIGHT

WOMEN IN SHENBAOGUAN PUBLICATIONS, 1872–90 Rudolf G. Wagner Introduction In 1872, Ernest Major (1841–1908), together with his twin brother and two other men from the British Isles, founded the Shenbaoguan Publishing House 申報館 in Shanghai. They published a newspaper, the Shenbao 申報 (Report), which quickly eclipsed its rival, the Shanghai xinbao 上海新報 (Shanghai news report), to become the most important Chinese-language newspaper in the land for the next twenty years. It also served as a training ground for the first generation of professional Chinese journalists. From early on, in addition to this newspaper, the Shenbaoguan also published a large number of books and a sequence of cultural periodicals. In 1879, it added lithography printing to its publication arsenal and started the mass reproduction of works of art, including those of Haipai 海派 (Shanghai school) painters such as Ren Bonian 任伯年 (1840–96). Eventually, in 1884, the Shenbaoguan came out with what was to become the most important early Chinese pictorial, the Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畫報 (Pictorial from the Touchstone Studio).1 Lithography was also used to reproduce sometimes monumental works—such as the imperially commissioned encyclopedia known as the Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成 (Complete collection of illustrations and writings, past and present)—for which resetting the type and redrawing the illustrations would have been forbiddingly expensive. The Shenbaoguan book-publishing venture set out to republish works of high cultural value for either learning or entertainment, works that could not be found on a market devastated by the Taiping Civil War (1851–64) and that had been identified by the Christian-inspired Taipings as associated with the “satanic” traditional culture and hence See Rudolf G. Wagner “Jinru quanqiu xiangxiang tujing: Shanghai de Dianshizhai huabao” 進入全球想象圖景: 上海的點石齋畫報 ( Joining the global imaginaire: The Shanghai pictorial Dianshizhai huabao), Zhongguo xueshu 8 (2001–04): 1–96. 1

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been destroyed.2 These republished books ranged from research tools such as the Jingji zuangu 經籍纂詁 (Collected interpretations of classics) to satirical novels such as the Rulin waishi 儒林外史 (Scholars). The Shenbaoguan also published a sizeable number of new works such as the Fusheng liuji 浮生六記 (Six chapters from a floating life). The publishing house set great store in two features of its books— careful and critical editing and the high quality of its prints, which were modeled on the eighteenth-century imperial deluxe editions produced in the Wuying Palace in Beijing. The Shenbaoguan publications thus set the standard for later book ventures such as those of the Tongwen and the Commercial Press. These later enterprises often began by reprinting Shenbaoguan books, and as a rule they kept to the formats and publishing principles established by the Shenbaoguan. The Shenbao, journals, books, and lithograph reproductions published by the Shenbaoguan were nationally distributed from a very early date through a rapidly developing network of outlets and also through traditional postal carriers. The Shenbao was the main advertising tool for these print products, and the Shenbao distribution channels were natural conduits for them. While the Shenbaoguan became an increasingly large and diverse enterprise, it is clear that Major remained closely involved in nearly every aspect of the publication process, from determining content to managing production and overseeing distribution. Some scholars have claimed that Major was only interested in the business side of things, leaving content management to his Chinese staff.3 There is very little historical evidence to back up this assertion, however. To the contrary, this study argues that there was a unified agenda expressed in the Shenbaoguan’s publications for at least the period from 1872 to the late 1880s, when Major left China. The agenda grew out of Major’s education and experiences in Europe. His legendary mastery of written and spoken Chinese made it possible for him to translate these ideas directly into his publications and to link them with conditions in China.

2 Wagner 魯道夫 • 瓦格納, “Shenbaoguan zaoqi de shuji chuban” 申報館早期的書 籍出版 (The early publishing activities of the Shenbaoguan), in Wan Ming yu wan Qing: Lishi chuancheng yu wenhua chuangxin 晚明與晚清: 歷史傳承與文化創新 (The late Ming and the late Qing: Historical continuation and cultural innovation), eds. Chen Pingyuan, Wang Dewei, and Shang Wei (Wuhan: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002), 169–78. 3 See, for example, Liang Jialu 梁家祿, Zhong Zi 鍾紫, Zhao Yuming 趙玉明, Han Song 韓松, Zhongguo xinwenye shi 中國新聞業史 (History of the Chinese press) (Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe, 1984), 38.

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The Shenbaoguan and Women’s Issues The Shenbaoguan made a point to have Chinese individuals as journalists and editors in responsible positions and to hire Chinese printers instead of Portuguese printers. This was a big and bold step. For a further step, namely to hire Chinese women as journalists, editors, or staff, the times were not ripe. Such positions barely started to open for women in England at the time. Still, the Shenbaoguan was the first publishing house in nineteenth-century China to devote systematic attention to the treatment of women in society and to women as subjects, authors, and readers. Its publications were an ideal forum for the public articulation of opinions about women that had previously been privately held or only individually put into practice. By publishing newspapers and periodicals as well as books both by and about Chinese women, the Shenbaoguan made their lives into topics of debate, writing openly about the hollow rituals that constrained them and advocating new approaches to their education. At the same time, it brought Shanghai’s vibrant courtesan culture to the attention of its readers.4 In short, Major offered a platform outside the control of the Qing court and the gentry for news and discussion by and about women. The Heidelberg Index to the contents of the Shenbao indicates that between 1872 and 1895 there were 281 editorials indexed with “woman” or “women” as keywords. If we add to this number the 49 editorial references to “courtesans” and the 35 to “prostitutes,” the total is 365 entries. This compares to 569 for “trade,” 463 for “education,” 323 for “tax,” and 224 for “imperial” (a category that included most matters relating to the Beijing court).5 Women were thus among the most important editorial topics in the Shenbao. They also featured frequently in the news section of the paper.6 The gender-related subject matter of the Shenbao ranged broadly, from a historical sketch and scathing critique of footbinding to several articles on the rigorous rules for separating men and women that had been derived from the ancient Chinese classic known as the Liji 禮記

4 Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture, 1850– 1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), esp. chap. 3. 5 http://147.142.222.208/Lasso/Shenbao/searchSimple.lasso. 6 Barbara Mittler has dealt at length with women in the Shenbao with a focus on women as the implied readers and on the later period. See her A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 245–311.

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(Record of ritual); from reflections on the hopeless efforts of the Shanghai Daotai 上海道臺 (Circuit intendant) to ban women from visiting theaters to the free manner with which Shanghai women—not just courtesans—were moving about in the streets; from clamors for women’s education to biographies of women who had been killed in their effort to save their families during the Taiping Civil War; from the criticism of women being mistreated by their in-laws to public debates about the authority of officials and parents over marriages (as, for example, between a girl and an actor); from the need for schools offering education to women to the need for homes offering protection to abused women; from the human traffic in women to the ban of opium consumption by women; from courtesan entertainment to women serving in opium dens; and from women worshipping actively in Buddhist temples to women criminals in the Shanghai courts. From this broad range of articles I have chosen a few examples of the way in which women’s issues were dealt with by the Shenbao. In May 1872, just a few weeks after the inaugural issue of the newspaper, a lengthy, unsigned article appeared, titled “Chanzu shuo” 纏足說 (On footbinding). Probably written by one of the editors, it is the first article in Chinese to give a sober historical account of the custom.7 Before the end of the Tang, feet or their size were never mentioned when women’s beauty was described. The custom only spread since the Southern Tang in the tenth century. Women ended up competing to force it on their daughters, disregarding the pains of the deformation as well as the consequences for the mobility of the women: “When the feet first are bound, the pain in the bones and sinews already brings about a situation where women can only make very small steps and are hard put to move. Once the binding is completed the damage done to the bones and sinews makes for even greater discomfort in moving about. The women sometimes need support when moving or they swoon as if they were sick.” And again: “Courtesans eventually went on to seduce men with the small size of their feet. In the beginning they made their bow-shaped shoes into private tokens of their love, and it continued with the drinking bowl set in the horn-shoe to be given to the leader of drinking games among friends.”

7 For background, see Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

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The article goes on to point out that the acceptance of the custom among the learned, the rich, and the poor was so widespread in China that even a “stringent ban by the [early Qing] state” was ineffective. “I am afraid,” the author concludes, that “compliance with this established custom will only come to an end with Heaven and Earth themselves, and that for millions of years there will be no change.”8 Written three years before the first call for an anti-footbinding society in China, this knowledgeable article is obviously highly critical of the practice but not on the grounds that it was a way of mistreating or oppressing women typical for a primitive society. Nor was the author’s emphasis on the “unnatural” way that the custom deformed women’s bodies; after all, such deformations were also a common phenomenon among Western women in Shanghai with their corsets. Rather, the critique focused primarily on the way that footbinding restricted women’s mobility, and, by implication (the point was not made explicitly in the article), their public mobility. In 1875, the Shenbao published a long article on the curious habit of men, women, and even guests bathing together in Japan. It begins with a telling reference to Chinese social customs: Is not the separation between men and women [in China] really too rigid (男女之為別也嚴矣哉)! From statements in the old rituals such as “[men and women] do not [use] the same clothes rack,”9 “in giving and receiving [a man and a woman] should not touch each other” [as the Mengzi said],10 “[from the seventh year on boys and girls] do not sit on the same mat,”11 “the wife of the older brother and the younger brother do not communicate [polite] inquiries to each other,”12 down to “words about the inner [women’s] quarters do not leave the door, words about the outside [men’s activities] do not get into the inner quarters”13 are saying that even the simplest household equipment cannot be jointly used, even

“Chanzu shuo” 纏足說 (On footbinding), Shenbao 21 (24 May 1872): 2–3. Liji 禮記 (Book of rites), chap. “Neize” 内則 (Inner principles), trans. Séraphin Couvreur, in Li Ki, Mémoires sur les bienséances et les cérémonies, 2 vols. (Ho Kien Fou: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1913), 1:660. See also chap. “Quli shang” 曲禮上 (Detailing rites, I), trans. Couvreur, 1:29. 10 Mengzi yinde 孟子引得 (Index to Mencius) (Beiping: Hafo Yanjing xueshe, 1941), 29/4A/18. Cf. D.C. Lau, Mencius, Translated from the Chinese (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1970), 124. It should be noted, that while Mengzi confirmed that this was proper ritual behavior, he also made it clear that some circumstances might override this rule. See also “Quli shang,” 1:29. 11 “Neize,” 1:673. 12 “Quli shang,” 1:29. 13 Ibid. 8 9

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rudolf g. wagner those [ boys and girls] of very young age cannot be together, even the wife of an older brother is not allowed to speak to the younger brother of her husband, to the point that even the separation between the inner and the outer is like a bamboo curtain. When the sage kings of old made such efforts to establish prohibitions for interaction, they were only worried that they would not be tight enough. [But] how could they intentionally make binding obligations that would cause people to avoid following their feelings altogether? It was above all because [they] assumed that if there were not such stringent prohibitions between men and women, all sorts of love affairs would easily develop in social intercourse, and bantering entertainment would easily form in one’s activities. Worse, laissez faire [in the former] would give rise to sprouts of lecherous excess and getting used [to bantering entertainments] would end up in the abolishment of all measures of restriction. Such a situation was bound to end up in the complete abolishment of the separation between men and women, and that would be that! Once things have gone that far, who would believe that although the outward appearance is all corrupted and muddied, the inside is truly all clean and pure, and that although the body might be despicable, the heart is truly without any intimate cravings?14

After this somewhat ambivalent opening, the article shifts its focus to Japan. There, nothing of this separation seems to exist, and men and women communicate freely without anyone thinking much about it. But with what result? In fact, a Westerner told the author that a Japanese business partner had invited him to bathe with him and his wife, stating with some amazement that the woman was perfectly at ease and very friendly, although neither of them had any clothes on. One might have expected a biting comment on the debauchery of Japanese customs, but there is little of the kind. “As of now, Japanese customs do not show any secret lecherousness,” the author concedes, only to finish with some reassuring words: “In fact, however, this is the epitome of laissez faire. It manifestly abolishes the grand prohibitions of ritual and righteousness, while secretly eroding the very thought of shame.”15 I am not entirely clear what to make of this article, which is unsigned and therefore written by one of the Shenbao journalists, if not Major himself. Reading the two parts against each other, it seems that the implicit message is that both the extreme separation of the sexes in China and the naked bathing of men and women in Japan are unacceptable extremes and that such practices have to be moderated. At 14 “Lun Dongyang nannü tongyu” 論東洋人男女同浴 (On men and women together taking baths in Japan), Shenbao 30 (4 June 1872): 1. 15 Ibid.

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the very least, however, the article inaugurates a discussion about the merits of the ritual separation between men and women in China. Discussions of this sort became increasingly timely with the growing social importance and cultural influence of Shanghai courtesans, especially in the International Settlement, which lay outside the walled city. The freedom and visibility of these women, who were often highly literate and sophisticated, affected the tone and tenor of Shanghai’s social and intellectual life in important ways, to be discussed again below. Their striking, unmistakable presence in various public parts of the city, including parks, theaters, and restaurants, gave Shanghai a “modern” feel, and contributed to its emerging cosmopolitan flavor.16 Naturally, then, the Shenbaoguan published many editorials, news pieces, and literary works about Shanghai courtesans, who made up a very sizeable, as well as an exceedingly visible, portion of the women in the city. While the company editorially maintained a certain decorous distance from this vibrant world, its editorials and reportage about these women as well as the very sizeable amount of poetry produced for them and reminiscences about them published by the Shenbaoguan, made sure that they were locally and even nationally visible as an integral part of Shanghai’s public landscape. An article in the same issue of the Shenbao from which I have quoted above suggests the social implications of this new cultural phenomenon, approaching the issue of confining women to the inner quarters not from the angle of ritual norms and foreign comparisons but from the angle of life on the streets of Shanghai in 1872. Under the sensational title, “Erren moru pijia” 二人摸乳被枷 (Two men confined to cangue for grabbing breast), the piece begins in a manner that shows how difficult it was at this moment in time to separate editorializing from reportage: Wives and girls basically should remain deeply hidden in the women quarters and should not be allowed to frivolously look at men’s faces. This is of the highest importance for separating the inner and the outer and preventing lascivious desires. But one cannot count the number of married and unmarried women who rush about the streets in Shanghai! If they meet someone they know on the street, they happily talk about things that have passed, the weather, and they joke. They are so cavalier about it that in tea houses or wine shops they drink a glass and chat to their hearts content, hold hands without being fined, and let their eyes

16

See Yeh, Shanghai Love, for details.

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rudolf g. wagner fly without restraint and are flirtatious. The boys as a consequence have no restraint whatever in satisfying their desires. This habit is spreading more by the day and no one is able to put an end to it. Yesterday, a woman was parading alone in front of the Temple of the City God in the walled city. She was very young and quite pretty. Two young men, one called Xiang Jiao, the other Xu Jin, saw that she was unaccompanied and went after her. Giggling they pointed at her and made comments about her looks. That was not the end of their fun. They ran a few more steps and, when they had come to the door of the wine shop of the Four Sights Gardens, they grabbed her by the shoulder and stretched out their hands to squeeze her nipples, acting in a reckless manner. The woman was greatly shocked. Grabbing their arms with both hands, she loudly cried to have these hoodlums arrested. The two quickly escaped her grip and wanted to run away. At this moment passers-by congregated and surrounded the woman [and the boys] asking what had happened. The woman explained [what had happened] in detail whereupon everyone laughingly scolded her. Thereupon they arrested the two young men and sent them to the district magistrate. Now they together have a cangue around their neck and are shown to the crowd outside the door of the Four Sight Gardens and only after three months will they be set free.17

The article ends by observing that in exchange for a little reckless fun, two young men would be spending three months of public humiliation in a joint cangue. At the same time, it admonishes young women not to flirt in public, lest they invite this sort of unseemly behavior. The report is written from a seemingly orthodox position that invites agreement from the reader while being open for the complex new realities of Shanghai city life, perhaps influenced by the new visibility of courtesans and their patrons. First, there is a clear breakdown of the traditional rules not just in the International Settlement but even in the walled city of Shanghai. But new routines have already taken hold. The young woman’s behavior is self-confident and shows experience with city life: she not only boldly walks alone through the streets of the city, but, after she is molested by the two men, she grabs her assailants and attracts enough public attention to secure their arrest. The passers-by in the story, for their part, might laugh and scold the young woman, but they nonetheless convey the two culprits to the District Magistrate’s office for punishment. No one even considers that the woman does not deserve protection if she had been so bold and

17

“Erren moru pijia,” Shenbao (4 June 1872): 1.

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dared to venture abroad. And the Magistrate’s punishment is quite severe—an obvious deterrent to such assaults. On 9 August 1878, we find another revealing Shenbao article on the topic of gender segregation.18 This anonymous editorial, titled “Lun li bie nannü” 論禮別男女 (On the ritual rule of separating men and women), reads much as if Major himself had written it. The pretext for the editorial was the story of a very successful tea party for the diplomatic corps in London, hosted by Guo Songtao 郭嵩燾 (1818–91), the Chinese ambassador to England, and his wife. Boldly elevating Guo to the rank of a daring and innovative cultural pioneer, willing to break with outdated ritual prescriptions by including his wife in this social event, the article deplored that Guo could only take this step in far-off London and that it would be impossible in his home country.19 The article compares China’s insistence on proper ritual with the desperate attempts of the ancient state of Lu to compensate with overzealous ritual correctness its actual weakness, which had become the laughingstock of the other kingdoms during the Spring and Autumn period. Ritual, the author argues, has a reasonable root, ben 本, as well as an appropriate external manifestation, mo 末, but because the “former kings were concerned that people might not fully understand the ‘root’, they were exceedingly strict about external regulations, in order to prevent later generations from abandoning themselves to debauchery.”20 With today’s adherence to external forms rather than to internal substance, the writer goes on to say, ritual behavior “of both high and low” has become “a charade” (weiji 偽跡). From this standpoint, the moral core purpose of ritual would be better served by the much freer customs of the West; adherence to outmoded rituals in China, the article argued, was nothing but a sign of antiquarian weakness and pretentiousness. A core feature of this editorial is the question of the participation of Guo’s wife in public activities, which had been criticized by Chinese memorialists. The article comes out strongly in favor of her activities and deplores that the separation of women and men in China had reduced 18 “Lun li bie nannü” 論禮別男女 (On the ritual rule of separating men and women), Shenbao 1930 (9 August 1878): 1. 19 In fact, Chinese officials criticized Guo Songtao’s 郭嵩燾 (1818–91) behavior in memorials to the throne. On the controversy and reports about it, see my “The Shenbao in Crisis: The International Environment and the Conflict between Guo Songtao and the Shenbao,” Late Imperial China 20.1 (1999): 107–38. 20 “Lun li bie nannü,” 1.

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women to a deplorable timidity if they actually were confronted with a situation of public communication with others. In fact, it argued, this separation was not even pervasive in China altogether but mostly in China’s South. Manchu women in the North were free of these rules and behaved quite differently. The issue of women’s education was first broached in a long editorial dated 30 March 1876.21 Taking as its point of departure the story of how two Western women had helped to raise funds for the newly established Gezhi shuyuan 格致書院 (School of Sciences) in Shanghai, the article goes on to suggest that these two Western women could be considered the precursors of women’s education in China. In the West, the author notes, women’s education was spreading rapidly, but China lagged behind. Although there had been education for women in the early medieval period of Chinese history, this could not be documented for later times.22 This was, in the author’s view, a tragic waste of human potential: While there is no lack of talent and intelligence (tianzi minwu zhi liu 天資 敏悟之流) among women here, they have no way to bring them forth so that eventually they end up being unknown. As [according to the Classics] the “Supreme has endowed [people] with qualities, and following them they have a constant nature,”23 [the] spiritual endowment (lingxing 靈性) of women is like that of men, in that there are brilliant ones and there are thoughtful ones, and to both an education may be dispensed according to their capabilities. It is absolutely not the case that because someone has a woman’s body her talents are feminine and weak and form

21 “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women), Shenbao 1203 (30 March 1876): 1. It is signed by Dihua shuwu 棣華書屋, which seems to be 鄧蓉鏡 (1832–1900), by whom a Songfen tang wencun 誦芬堂文存 (Collected essays from Chanting Fragrance Hall) survives in Berkeley, California (1934 printing). On this editorial see also Mittler, 278. 22 The author claims that a special book had already been written on the history of women’s education in China. He refers to Lan Dingyuan’s 藍鼎元 (1680–1733) Nüxue 女學, published in 1717. It has six juan, respectively titled: 女學總要, 婦德篇 上, 婦德篇下, 婦言篇、婦容篇、婦功篇, a combination of selected principles and anecdotes from classics and histories. 23 The authority of this statement comes from its being a quotation from the Shangshu 尚書 (Book of documents), chap. “Tang gao” 湯誥 (Edict of Tang). See James Legge, The Shoo King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 185. The quotation here is somewhat foreshortened. Its original version reads 惟皇上帝, 降衷于下民, 若有恆 性; the quotation here only reads 惟皇降衷, 若有恆性. The Chinese commentarial tradition, followed by Legge with a twist, has read this Shangshu line as meaning “the great God conferred even on the inferior people a moral sense, compliance with it would show their nature invariably right.”

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a separate category. To teach only men and not women is the way to get only half [the possible result]. Is it not true that men and women are about equal in number with one half men and one half women?! If there is no “teaching irrespective of categories [in this case, gender]” ( youjiao wulei 有教無類),24 then ten people will only have the usefulness of five—is that not turning one’s back against the great creation of human beings? That girls are being drowned occurs time and again these days. If we probe the cause for this, it is because when women have no education, they are held in low esteem by all. Does it not make one think that no one wants to be in a woman’s body (爲人莫作婦人身, 良可慨已矣)!25

The article then offers what amounts to a theoretical statement about gender relations, which we shall again encounter below. Generally speaking, if [the idea that] Heaven comes before Earth [in the pair tiandi, Heaven and Earth] and that man comes before woman (in the pair nannü) is a canonical statement that has not changed in the last thousands of years, why is it then that in the [ pair] yin [female] and yang [male], the yang does not come first, so that [the pairing] would be yang/yin? . . . [The Changes] of the Shang dynasty known as the Guicang 歸 藏 [“Return to be treasured”] changed this and put the Kun 坤 [female] element first,26 and that is why this [the yin/yang sequence] is arranged in this manner. From this we can know that with respect to yin and yang, neither of them may be emphasized in a one-sided manner, and [for the same reason] both men and women must be allowed to study (從可知 陰陽之不可偏重, 男女之必需並學). Among the ten thousand kinds of entities, the yin comes first and the yang follows [because] if there were

This was a type of learning that Confucius advocated. See Lunyu 論語 (Analects of Confucius), XV, 39 (Lunyu yizhu 論語譯註 [Analects of Confucius, translated into modern Chinese with annotations], translated and annotated by Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 [Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980], 170). 25 “Lun nüxue,” 1. 26 See the statement “Guicang shou Kun er xu yi Qian” 歸藏首坤而續以乾 (In the Guicang Kun [yin-female] is first, followed by Qian [yang-male]), s.v. Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE), Tai( yuan)[xuan] jing 太(元)[ 玄 ]經 (Classic of the great mysterious), Siku quanshu zongmu 四庫全書總目 (Annotated catalogue of the Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries), 2 vols. (1822; rprt. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), juan 108, 1:914. Recently, a version of the Guicang was found in a Han tomb. This text confirms that the Guicang had the sequence kun/qian. See Wang Mingqin 王明欽, “Wangjiatai Qinmu zhujian gaishu” 王家台秦墓竹簡概述 (Outline of the bamboo texts from the Qin tomb in Wangjiatai), in Sarah Allan and Xing Wen, eds., Xinchu jianbo yanjiu 新出簡帛研究 (Studies on newly excavated bamboo and silk manuscripts) Xinchu jianbo guoji xueshu yanlunhui wenji 新出簡帛國際學術研論會文集 (A collection of papers for the International Scholarly Conference on newly excavated manuscripts on bamboo and silk) (Beijing, August, 2000) (Beijing: Cultural Relics Publishing House, 2004), 26–49. 24

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rudolf g. wagner no women, how could men be born? If every family drowned its girls, would this not be equivalent to cutting off the human species? In the love that human beings have for children there is a feeling of compassion; why then are they drowned?27

Here the author plays on the yin/yang sequence to subvert traditional notions of the primacy and superiority of the male in order to bring China in line with the prevailing trends in the West, which have been instrumental in harnessing all energies for the advance of these countries: “If women study, and the men whom they marry also study, then both husband and wife . . . will spur each other on as is appropriate for husband and wife as well as for friends.”28 In short, this will not only lead to a better education for the children, including the sons, but also to an altogether new relationship between husband and wife—one that, as we shall see, was very much reminiscent of the bourgeois family ideals prevailing in Major’s homeland. Women in the Shenbaoguan Literary Periodicals In the other media of the Shenbaoguan we find a similar emphasis on women. From 1872 on, the company published a cultural periodical, which changed its name twice.29 Let us take some examples of this emphasis from its second embodiment, the Siming suoji 四溟瑣紀 (Tidbits from the four corners of the earth) (1875). In nearly every issue the periodical devoted long sections to women. The first issue carried a piece commemorating a young girl’s bitter experience entitled “Lin lienü shi bing xu” 林烈女詩並序 (A poem on the virtuous woman Lin, with a preface) by Hongxing ciren 紅杏詞人 (Red-Apricot Poet): Preface: The family name of the girl is Lin, she is from Shanyin. She was taken in by the Li family to be brought up there [as a bride to their son]. The [ Li] woman [that is, the mother-in-law] was not virtuous and as her own sexual charms were fading, she tried to force the girl to replace her [in having a sexual relationship with the father-in-law]. But the girl did not listen. First they enticed her with food and clothing, then they added [ punishment] giving her the whip, and in the end locked her

“Lun nüxue,” 1. Ibid. 29 The name of this periodical was first changed from Yinghuan suoji 瀛環瑣紀 (Tidbits from the world) (1872–75) to Siming suoji 四溟瑣記 (Tidbits from the four corners of the earth) (1875–76) and then to Huanyu suoji 寰宇瑣紀 (Tidbits from the universe) (1876). On these journals, see my “China’s First Literary Journals,” unpublished MS, 2000. 27 28

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up in a solitary room, taking away her clothes, not giving her anything to eat, and not inquiring after her for days on end. When the girl was starving, they went so far as to stuff her with chicken, but her heart was completely unmoved, like stone or iron. The husband [of the girl] was weak and stupid; he just looked on from the side. One evening the old man [ Li] returned drunk and asked the girl whether she had changed her mind. When his wife told him about what had happened, he flew into a rage, and strangled the girl with a long string around her neck. Her beautiful young body expired. But when he turned around and thought about it, he became afraid. He put her on his back with the intention of dropping her at some opportune place. He had hardly gone out of the door more than a few steps when the sound from the night guard drifted by. So in a hurry he ascended the city wall, and threw her into the moat. The next day, he went to the girl’s mother and asked for her. In a very intimidating way he scared her by saying he would take her to court. The mother did not know what to do, and looked all over for the girl. Someone told her that below the city wall there seemed to be feet sticking out, so she went there to look for it, put the weeds away and verified that this indeed was the girl. She went to the magistrate and cried murder. She was arrested and interrogated. As no new evidence was forthcoming, [it was assumed] that the girl had killed herself in desperation [because of the treatment by the family] and the old man got six years in jail. My now-deceased father was replacing an official in Shanyin and as he went through the files in order he discovered this case. He felt pity and cleared the girl. He erected a commemorative tablet in the ancestral hall and had a tomb built [for her]. He looked for a poem to have this affair commemorated. Although I am not skilled in literary matters, I exerted myself to write this poem and added a short preface. “My birth—unlucky day; My life—hardship. My death—why be sad about it, As long as my integrity stays intact?

妾生兮不辰 妾遇兮艱辛 妾死何足惜 妾志幸已成

“My heart still lingers around My aging father and mother. I have no resentment—since My parents-in-law were not unkind.

妾心有所戀 堂上老雙親 妾意無所怨 翁姑非不仁

“Utter chastity was difficult to combine with utter filial piety, [ But] my heart was unwavering like metal and stone! Wind whispers through the poplars; Spirit fires flicker sorrow in the long night.

全節難全孝

“One death sustains a thousand autumns; Her name has left a trace of fragrance. When I came to this bend of Mirror Lake I heard about her and sighed with sadness.”

一死足千秋 姓氏餘芳馨 我來鑑湖曲 聞之嗟嘆頻

此心金石貞 白楊風蕭蕭 長夜鬰鬼燐

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rudolf g. wagner Inscribed tablets [now] shine at both sides of the door Today the injustice has already been cleared up Many are the pretty ones who die young How many generations are still to be abandoned to the windy dust of this fate? Long may remain the record of this virtuous girl Year for year may it shine from the bamboo slips.30

旌章輝綽楔 今日冤已伸 紅顔薄命多 幾革委風塵 長留烈女篇 年年照汗青

There are several noteworthy features of this article, all of which seem to reflect Major’s editorial strategy. One is the specificity of its detail; it reads much like an item in a British paper or a scene in a Dickens novel. Second, the story celebrates a young woman of enormous fortitude, remarkable for the unflinching stubbornness with which she refuses to bend to either bait or whip. She is not a weak, pining female; rather she resembles in her fortitude the bold young lady who made her way through the walled city of Shanghai. Third, we encounter Chinese men who are enlightened and sympathetic enough to clear the young girl’s name and to commemorate her behavior through the erection of a tablet and literary writing. Finally, although the values the girl stood for were close enough to Chinese notions of female chastity, they would not have seemed out of place in Victorian England either. Nearly every issue of the Siming suoji carried articles on unbending women who had died heroically during the Taiping Rebellion. While this war had been the most costly in terms of human lives worldwide in the entire nineteenth century, I have seen no traces of social mourning in the aftermath, only efforts at restoration or reform. That is, until I happened upon these texts, in which survivors record for history the names and deeds of those civilians and especially women who lost their lives while trying to save their families and their honor in this civil conflagration. Often the writers apologize that they have forgotten many details such as the maiden names of the women they are commemorating. One has to keep in mind the fact that there was at the time no climate for reports about the misdeeds of either Manchu troops or the Braves commanded by Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811–72) or Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 (1823–1901). The villains are always the Taiping. In the third issue of the journal we find an article that might be considered representative of this genre:

30 Hongxing ciren 紅杏詞人 (Red-Apricot Poet), “Lin lienü shi bing xu,” Siming suoji 1 (1875): 13b–14a.

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I have forgotten the [maiden family] name of virtuous woman Yao. She was from Santuan in Nanhuai. Promised in marriage to the Yao family, she grew up in the house of her husband. When she was sixteen, the Cantonese rebels [that is, the Taipings] came and wanted to defile her. When she cursed them vehemently and grabbed a knife to turn against them, the rebels slit her throat but as she was not yet dead they stabbed her again. Quickly she ran to the river bank and threw herself into an ice pit. The rebels continued stabbing her and she died at a time not ordained for her. At this moment her father, her mother-in-law, as well as her husband, all escaped and waited elsewhere for the rebels to leave. When they [came back] and looked for her, her body had already decomposed without being buried and one could only see the teeth and claws in a gesture of killing the rebels. They bought a coffin and buried her, wailing: “The bride of Yao has fulfilled her betrothal, our house mourns [ in recognition of ] her virtue.”31

In short, the women in these biographies are strong characters, even in the face of death. They are devoted to their families and often are shown to have become circumspect managers in these times of turmoil. Compilations by and about Chinese Women The Shenbaoguan also made a point to publish books by and about women. One such work was the Lidai mingyuan tushuo 歷代名媛圖說 (Illustrated anecdotes about famous women throughout the ages), which came out in September 1879. According to an advertisement in the Shenbao, which I summarize here, this work originated with Empress Ma of the Ming, who ordered scholars to add materials from more recent times to Liu Xiang’s 劉向 (77–6 BCE) well-known compendium, Lienü zhuan 列女傳 (Biographies of women). But subsequently, only a few copies of the Lidai mingyuan tushuo seem to have circulated. At some point a woman surnamed Wang 汪 from Xin’an in southern Anhui, managed to gather together a full copy of this book and then added stories of virtuous and upright women of later ages up to the Wanli era (1573). As she was most familiar with her own district of Huizhou, her own lineage, and that of another family, the Chengs 程, this area and these families are prominently represented in the work. To increase the attractiveness of the book, she asked Qiu Ying 仇英 (ca. 1494–ca. 1552), one of the most distinguished artists of the Ming

31

Siming suoji 3 (1875): 9b.

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period, to paint 311 illustrations for it.32 The book was then sent out for publication, but it was not printed and circulated until the Qianlong era by a Mr. Bao, also from Huizhou (preface dated 1775). From that time onward the book began to circulate widely. Over time, however, the print became illegible and there was no one who could continue to make illustrations for it. Fortunately, the Shenbaoguan acquired a good copy of the Bao edition and printed a refined version (shanben 善本), using lithographic technology. According to the Shenbao advertisement: Those putting emphasis on women’s studies will each [want to] purchase a set (重女教者 各置一編). If, during their spare time away from embroidering, women would thoroughly read through this book, this would be much superior to showing theater plays to inform (them) about virtuous conduct or having blind singers tell (them lewd) stories in order to make (them) understand uprightness and filial piety. Printed on white paper of superb quality, this book comes in two volumes, and we charge seventy coins apiece only to compensate for the printing cost.33

The 1775 preface to this work boldly states: “The education of women is no less important than that of men; the fate of the family as well as that of the state depends on it” (女教之重不後於男也, 家之興廢, 國 之盛衰, 率由乎是).34 Clearly the Shenbaoguan held a similar view. In this superbly illustrated volume, women have been involved in compiling, editing, and printing; at the same time they are the optimal implied readers. In the disparaging remarks on the regular reading matter of women, we find an echo both of criticisms in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century China and England. In 1878, the publishing house printed a fine edition of the Ming dynasty author Xu Zhen’s 徐震 Nü caizi 女才子 (Women of talent), with selections of poetry written by twelve distinguished women. No printing blocks had survived the civil war and the Shenbaoguan was the first to make this item available again as an important part of a

32 On Qiu Ying, see Ellen Johnston Laing, “Sixteenth-Century Patterns of Art Patronage: Qiu Ying and the Xiang Family,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111.1 (1991): 1–7. 33 Advertisement, Shenbao (19 September 1879). 34 “Wang shi ji Lienü zhuan xu” 汪氏輯列女傳序 (Preface to the Biographies of women as collated by Née Wang), in Lidai mingyuan tushuo 歷代名媛圖說 (Illustrated anecdotes about famous women throughout the ages) (Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1879), preface, 1.

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threatened heritage. Much has already been written on this book, and so I will not discuss it here.35 Although the Shenbaoguan was the first commercial press in China with a clear commitment to publishing literary works by women authors, I have seen no programmatic statement from the press to this effect. However, the introduction to one of the works produced by it may serve as a substitute. This introduction was written in 1876 by Yin Hui 尹慧 for a collection of women’s poetry titled Gonggui lianming pu 宮閨聯名譜 (Assorted [distinguished] names from the inner chambers of women). The book itself had been compiled by Dong Xun 董恂 (1807–1902) from Kunshan and carefully edited by the Shenbaoguan’s own Cai Erkang 蔡爾康 (1852–1920), who also was active in running Shenbaoguan journals.36 The introduction begins: From Heaven and Earth down to the ten thousand kinds of entities, everything follows the principles of yin and yang. Man is the finest among the ten thousand kinds of beings, and thus he too is gifted with yin and yang. As a consequence, there is the division between men and women, men’s correct position is in the public, women’s correct position is in the interior, and thus neither yin nor yang are denigrated in a onesided manner.37

Here again we encounter the iconoclastic view that yin is not inherently inferior to yang. From this position, Yin Hui develops a surprisingly practical conclusion. He acknowledges that the big names handed down in Chinese historical writings and collections of literary and other works are all those of men. “But,” he continues, “is it possible that there should be nothing by women that could be transmitted? As we all know, if the way of the earth is not completed, the capacity of the female will not shine forth, the yin will not ride on the yang, and their order will hardly survive for long. That women do not transmit Yuanhu yanshui sanren 鴛湖煙水散人, Nü caizi (Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1878). Studies on this work include Wu Hong, “Beyond Stereotypes: The Twelve Beauties in Qing Court Art and the Dream of the Red Chamber,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, eds. Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 330; and Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 352ff. 36 Dong Xun, Gonggui lianming pu 宮閨聯名譜 (Assorted [distinguished] names from the women’s quarters), ed. Cai Erkang (Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1876). The book came out in 1876, but the title is not listed in Hu Wenkai’s 胡文楷, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歷代婦女著作考 (A study of works by women of past dynasties) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1985). 37 Yin Hui, Gonggui lianming pu, preface, 1a. 35

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their own [material] is due to ritual, not to a one-sided distribution of creativity” (婦人不自傳, 禮也; 非造物有所偏也).38 With a first preface dated 1865, the Gonggui lianming pu is the fruit of an intensive search through records from earliest antiquity to the present to find traces of women’s writings, each case accompanied by a short biographical note. I have seen no record of an earlier printed edition. The energy and effort that the Shenbaoguan put into this fairly large and thematically arranged collection can be seen from the fact that Cai Erkang checked all the references, wrote an extensive preface outlining his editorial procedures, added critical notes, and eventually supplemented the whole with three separately marked additional chapters. The Shenbaoguan catalogue entry for this work says that reading it may give readers “help in conversation” (ke zi tan zhu 可資談助).39 The Xiangke ji 香咳集 (Collection of fragrant utterances) consists of about 1,000 poems by 416 women, with a biographical note on each one of them. The preface, by the editor Xu Kuichen 許夔臣 (Shanqu 山臞) (fl. 19th century), is dated 1804, and the volume was printed by the Shenbaoguan in 1876, once more under the editorial supervision of Cai Erkang.40 This is the first post-Taiping print of this work, and it might be the first one ever, for, as far as I can tell, nothing is known of an earlier printing. In its 1804 preface, Dai Jian 戴鑑, a friend of the editor,41 again boldly addresses the position of women in Chinese literature: Poems are the means to express one’s feelings (詩所以道性情), and [feelings] are definitely something that all human beings ( jinren 盡人) possess. [ But still] many in our times say that women should not write poetry, and if they should have any [poetry] for recitation (偶有吟詠), it definitely should not be shown to others for circulation. Aya! What a shallow view! When in antiquity the Master [Confucius] fixed the Shi (Book of Songs), the “Zhou nan” (周南) section contained eleven pieces, of which seven were by women. The “Shao nan” (召南) section had fourteen pieces, of which nine were by women. Instruction in compliant manners and simple honesty has to start in the women’s quarters. If [their words] are locked inside the curtains and are not allowed beyond the inner doors,

Ibid., 1b. Shenbaoguan shumu 申報館書目 (Bibliography of Shenbaoguan) (Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1877), 8. 40 Xu Kuichen, Xiangke ji (Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1876). 41 Dai Jian is also the author of the Pomo xuan ji 潑墨軒集 (Collection from SplashedInk Studio), of which Harvard has an 1843 edition. 38 39

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then they quickly disappear . . . [and are lost to future generations]. During the Han and the Six Dynasties periods, the number of virtuous women who were recorded together with the most famous cannot be counted. Since the Tang and Song this slowly went out of fashion. Our dynasty’s cultural achievements are brilliant and from among the inner quarters famous ladies have emerged. Compared to those of old, they are not much behind . . . [ But if ] there are no benefactors (haoshi zhe 好事者), who will speak up for them? They will be like fallen flowers, blown about and disappearing with the wind. Is that not sad? My friend, Master Xu Shanqu, edited the Collection of Fragrant Utterances in 10 juan—altogether over 1,000 poems. This might be called a great achievement! However, I say women working on poems have it even harder than men. Why? Because they stay locked up in secluded quarters, having no famous mountains or great rivers to be inspired by, nor good friends and excellent comrades to discuss the strong and weak points of their poems. Moreover, they are busy with the well and the mortar . . . [they are preoccupied with] embroidery, rice, salt and other trifles, and their hearts and minds are full of worry. If they don’t happen to have the heavenly gift of a sharp wit and the quick perception of a great talent, they don’t even know what the feng and ya [odes in the Book of Songs] are all about. Is it not a wonderful situation that even though writing poetry is so difficult for women, they are working at it in such great numbers . . .? Once this collection is out, it will prompt those in our time, who have seen little [of the accomplishments of women] but who have [nonetheless] parceled out blame, to learn that womankind is never lacking in talents and that their literary productions are unendingly varied.42

The argumentative strategy of this preface fits the Shenbaoguan agenda perfectly. The idea that women should be confined to the inner quarters, that they should have no education, and that they should not express themselves through poetry is described as a historical anomaly of relatively recent origin. Confucius had no problems with inserting many works by women into the Shijing, and women were an active part of the literary scene of the medieval period, as seen, for example, in the Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A new account of tales of the world).43 And now the great Qing dynasty has produced yet another remarkable resurgence of writing by women. Another volume, this one an original collection of poetry by women “from the last fifty or sixty years,” came out in 1877. The advertisement

Dai Jian, Preface to Xu Kuichen, Xiangke ji. Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 (403–44), Shishuo xinyu, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993). The chapter entitled “Xianyuan” 賢媛 (Worthy ladies) in this work is entirely devoted to women. 42 43

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for this work, the Guixiu shi ping 閨秀詩評 (Poems from the inner chambers with commentary),44 states: “This book collects excellent women’s poetry from the last fifty to sixty years, either in its entirety or [in the form of ] excerpts. It deals with all matters in the inner chambers and adds a small critical evaluation. Reading it is like singing in competition with ladies within the ornamented doors; this really is opening a new vista in the realm of literary criticism.”45 To include poetry by women in the category of things to be critically evaluated presumably served the purpose not only of elevating women’s poetry above the amateur level but also of helping to improve it by subjecting it to careful scrutiny. Poetry by women authors also appeared in the Shenbao and the journals of the Shenbaoguan. The Siming suoji, for example, carried in its first issue a series titled Yuanhu Zhuzhi ci 鴛湖竹枝詞 (Bamboo-twig lyrics on Mandarin Duck Lake).46 The series consisted of twenty poems by a woman writer named Wang Ruixian 王蕊仙 (fl. 19th century), whose poetic collection Xiuyu xueyin 繡餘學吟 (Learning to chant after working on embroidery) was destroyed in 1860 during the Taiping Rebellion. She is not recorded in Hu Wenkai’s 胡文楷 (fl. 20th century), Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歷代婦女著作考 (A study of works by women of past dynasties). These Bamboo-twig lyrics had been discovered by accident in an old basket and were published by Wang Ruixian’s husband, who styled himself the Yuanhu sanhua xianshi 鴛湖散花仙史 (Flower-Spreading Immortal Historian on Mandarin Duck Lake) (fl. 19th century). He wrote the preface in the winter of 1874. This is the first time that a woman’s poetry was published in the new medium of the periodical in China. As is often the case with such Bamboo-twig lyrics, they carry an extensive commentary by the poet conveying the details to which the poems refer. Below are two pieces from this collection: The lights are lit for the seasonal feast, thick with joyous atmosphere Drifting boats with flutes and drums are all over the water; One might well say that this is a year of fine sights;

上燈時節興偏濃 蕭鼓游船水面逢 會說今年風景好

44 Kanghuayuan zhuren 槺華園主人, Guixiu shi ping (Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1877). There is a Ming dynasty book with the same title by Jiang Yingke 江盈科 (1553–1605). 45 Advertisement, Shenbao 1651 (11 September 1877). 46 Wang Ruixian, “Yuanhu Zhuzhi ci,” ed. Yuanhu sanhua xianshi, in Siming suoji 1 (1875): 30ff. Mandarin Duck Lake is in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province.

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南臯峯勝北臯峯

Commentary: On Lamp-lighting Day [13th of the first month] according to agricultural custom, performances are given at the temple of the Heavenly King on the Southern Lake and tourists are especially numerous (禾俗上燈日, 南湖上天王廟演戲, 游人特盛). Much hustle in picking the plum tree, even the district officials come; Three hundred plum trees in a row, spot the one that has opened; Looking for the right line under the eaves, amidst the fragrant snow of the blossoms. The clear tea makes the rounds, and we sip many cups.

尋梅爭逐郡衙來 三百株齊試一開 索句廵簷香雪裏 清茶還得啜多杯

Commentary: In front of the magistrate’s yamen hall there are three hundred plum trees. At the time of their blossoming the hawking of tea in the two corridors is not forbidden. After the tourists have flocked in, [xx] remains (府治大堂前有梅三百株, 花時兩廊沽茶不禁, 游人刼後 [xx]存 ).

These poems are interesting because they are mostly a genre used by men to describe new and interesting sights seen on travels.47 The immediacy of the depiction would seem to indicate that the woman poet herself was part of these outdoor scenes, which she describes from her own experience. Her main poetic work is lost, we are told, and her husband now preserves her name by having at least these few items published, for which a journal was an ideal place. The Shenbaoguan was also active in publishing works by women in other genres, such as entire novels written in the form of plucking rhymes, tanci 彈詞, or short prose pieces. One such tanci was the Bi sheng hua 筆生花 (Flowers from a brush) by Qiu Xinru 邱心如 (fl. 1857), who signed as the “Lady Historian Xinru from Huaiyin” (Huaiyin xinru nüshi 淮陰心如女史).48 In this piece, which came out in 1882 and ended up being one of the three most famous tanci, a woman goes

47 The main collections containing this type of poetry are Shanghai yangchang zhuzhi ci 上海洋場竹枝詞 (Bamboo-twig lyrics from the foreign settlements in Shanghai), ed. Gu Bingquan 顧炳權 (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1996); and Zhonghua zhuzhici 中 華竹枝詞 (Chinese Bamboo-twig lyrics), ed. Lei Mengshui 雷夢水, 6 vols. (Beijing: Beijing guji, 1997). On these poems see Yeh, Shanghai Love, 100–01. 48 Huaiyin xinru nüshi 淮陰心如女史 [Qiu Xinru 邱心如] (fl. 1857), Bi sheng hua 筆生花 (Flowers from a brush) (Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1882).

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through an official career disguised as a man and eventually meets her unsuspecting fiancé as her subordinate.49 It has a preface dated 1857 by another woman, Yunyu nüshi 雲腴女士 (The Lady from Yunyu) (fl. 19th century), who recounts how the author spent some thirty years on this work. The standard catalogues mention an 1867 edition, which the Shenbaoguan editors had evidently not seen, as well as an 1894 edition, but they do not refer to the Shenbaoguan edition of 1882, on which the 1894 edition is most likely based.50 Major’s announcement of the book in the Shenbao is of interest: The Zaju drama scripts already cannot match the Major Elegantiae of the Book of Songs, but tanci [really] drags us down to the bottom [of poetic production]. Nonetheless, generations of women time and again in their spare moments after working on embroidery will put exhortations for women and lectures for the women’s quarters on some [inaccessible] high shelf, [ because] what they most love is to take a tanci in hand and read it. This has to do with the fact that the literary refinement (wenli ) [of these works] is shallow and common, so that they are easy to read. True, books easy to read and full of dirt such as the Wopao zhuan 倭袍 傳 (Story of Japanese cloak) [a banned tanci in the Wu dialect about a woman killing her husband to remove an obstacle for her affair with a neighbor]51 really are capable of hurting morals and damaging proper behavior and should [therefore] be banned. If, however, the emotions are violent but their purpose proceeds from a correct motive, and if the language is extravagant but it does not go against the classics—as is the case of the Bi sheng hua, written by lady [Qiu] Xinru from Huaiyin—then this . . . [is a work that is] truly unusual and singularly skilled. This book consists of thirty-two episodes in sixteen volumes. The events in it might be considered exceedingly shocking and amusing, optimistic and tearful, but still they manage to stay clear of vulgarity and they singularly retain refined meaning. We have heard that Lady [Qiu] Xinru spent thirty years of concentrated work to finish this book. Distressed in her poverty she did not give it to the printers [because she lacked the funds to finance publishing]. Although she made a [manuscript] copy to circulate, copies were rarely seen. Our company therefore made a special effort to buy the manuscript and print it with movable type for all to see.52

49 On the tanci, see Mark Bender, “Regional Literatures,” in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. Victor Mair (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1019–20. 50 Me Liangchun 馬良春 and Li Futian 李福田, eds., Zhongguo wenxue dacidian 中國文學大辭典 (Dictionary of Chinese literature) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1991), 4856. 51 I have only seen one copy of this work, a Daoguang-period print in the rare books section of the Harvard-Yenching Library, where it appears under the title Guobao lu 果報錄 (A record of retribution). 52 Advertisement, Shenbao (27 February 1882).

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Here we have a work with a woman as the author, a woman as the chief protagonist, and women as the main implied readers. With its high moral pitch of the heroine of the story first going through an official career in which she surpassed most men and then marrying her fiancé and accepting a woman’s role, the work held out both the lure of sensational adventure and the comfort of abiding by conventional moral standards. Again, the Shenbaoguan put as much effort into securing the quality of the editing and printing as it had done with any grand classical work. Another genre was short prose narratives. The Dianshizhai huabao had been published thrice a month by a subsidiary of the Shenbaoguan since 1884. It joined the fair number of pictorials in Europe and the United States and copied from them the habit of adding supplements such as serialized novels or travel notes with illustration. From early May 1890 through the end of April 1891, the Guiyuan congl!u 閨媛叢錄 (Collection from the ladies’ quarters) was serialized there with illustrations first by Wu Youru 吳友如 (?–ca. 1893), and from October 1890, by Jin Chanxiang 金蟾香 or Jin Gui (sheng) 金桂 (生) (fl. 19th–20th century). These were short narratives by women about women.53 In 1878, the Shenbaoguan came out with an original publication of Chidu jijin 尺牘集錦 (Collected brocade letters), written in parallel prose by a woman named Ding Zhixian 丁芝仙 (fl. 19th century), who signed herself Ding Shanyi 丁善儀 from Xishan 錫山 (Wuxi 無錫).54 It came with a preface by another woman, Renyi nüshi 紉宜女史 (Lady Historian from Renyi). This preface elaborated at length on the prominent role women had played in literature up to the Tang, when women’s fate, in the narrative of these years, took a turn for the worse with them being excluded from public and with footbinding becoming

The narratives were serialized in the Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畫報 from number 223 (申 6, early May 1890) to number 260 (亥 7, late April 1891). The reprints do not contain these supplements. The only original copy of these issues known to me is in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK. For details on the supplements to and illustrations in the Dianshizhai huabao, see Wagner “Joining the Global Imaginaire: The Shanghai Illustrated Newspaper Dianshizhai huabao,” in Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in the Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870 –1910, ed. Wagner (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 145–47. 54 Ding Shanyi, Chidu jijin (Collected brocade letters) (Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1878). The title of the collection inside this volume is Shuanggui xuan chidu 雙桂軒尺牘 (Letters from Double-Cassia Studio). The volume is in the “Shenbaoguan congshu” 申報館叢 書 (The Shenbaoguan series) in the library of the University of California, Berkeley, California, the titles of which are not catalogued individually. 53

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increasingly pervasive. Including the works of a woman into a series of model letters published by the Shenbaoguan was a courageous step because the art of letter writing was very much a male domain, tied as it was to scholarly, literary, and official communication. Nothing in the preface or advertisements suggests that these were model letters for women only. From these examples it should be clear that the Shenbaoguan as a commercial venture went out of its way to publish writings by women, and from all we know it was a pioneer in this field. It advertised these writings in programmatic statements and prefaces, which argued on grounds of both principle and evidence that Chinese women historically had enjoyed, and by rights should enjoy, a place in the literary field and that they should not be excluded because of gender bias. Women as Readers In the initial announcement of the Shenbao, women were not specifically named among the envisaged readers, although an effort was made to produce writing that was “easy to understand.”55 The actual articles and editorials in the paper suggest, however, that Major had a hard time finding writers who were willing to lower their standards. In 1876, he made another effort to reach a broader audience with a lower level of literacy, including women, children, and workmen. Although the paper resulting from this effort, the Minbao 民報 (People’s paper) faltered very quickly, the effort still shows his intention. The women addressed in this paper for popular audiences were not the same as those who would write poetry or compose letters worthy to be published as models. Yet there was obviously both a literacy level and a range of interest shared by a broader segment of women, to which, for example, the advertisement for the Bi sheng hua quoted above had made reference. Once lithography had become available, the Shenbaoguan went for illustration in a big way and eventually came out with the Dianshizhai huabao in 1884. The mix of illustration and text in this paper was described in various advertisements and editorials as particularly suited to women’s literacy level and interests. In one of these statements about the pictorial, we read: “As to stories, the novelists always put an illus-

55

Benguan gaobai, Shenbao 1 (April 1872).

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tration at the head of a chapter, and there are the ‘blue books’ (lanben 藍本) for theatre, where the masks are depicted. Readers of novels for the greater part are women and young people.”56 As we have seen, the Shenbaoguan produced a wide range of publications. Its first breakthrough on the book market came with Wu Jingzi’s Rulin waishi, and this was quickly followed by many of the most interesting and often provocative works of fiction, ranging from Shen Fu’s 沈復 (1763–1825) Fusheng liuji 浮生六記 (Six chapters from a floating life) to Li Ruzhen’s 李汝珍 (1763–1830) Jinghua yuan 鏡花 緣 (Flowers in the mirror), Cao Xueqin’s 曹雪芹 (1715?–64?) Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the red chamber), and the many sequels to this and other novels.57 We may safely assume that women were among the consciously envisaged readers for these publications as much as they were for the Dianshizhai huabao. As mentioned, the Dianshizhai huabao in turn serialized illustrated novels and series of short stories, offering a bridge from the pictorial to the literary work. Some of Wang Tao’s 王韜 (1828–97) works appeared in this form. The Shenbao newspaper, however, at the time still seems to have had few women readers. We know this not only from its comparatively high literary quality but also from the advertisements, which principally address men even if they advertise books of interest to women or of medical afflictions that are specific to women.58 Publishing Works about, by, and for Women: A Double Agenda of the Shenbaoguan When Major started his publishing enterprise in 1872, the role and treatment of women had already become an increasingly important topic in certain sectors of the Chinese public. Since the eighteenth century, Chinese women had become more active in writing and had found men willing to help them to hone their literary skills and to get

56 Jian suojian zhai 見所見齋 [ ? ], “Yue Huabao shu hou” 閱畫報書後 (After reading the [Dianshizhai ] huabao), Shenbao 4016 (19 June 1884): 1. 57 On Shenbaoguan book publishing, see Wagner “Shenbaoguan zaoqi de shuji chuban” 申報館早期的書籍出版 (The early publishing activities of the Shenbaoguan), in Wan Ming yu wan Qing: Lishi chuancheng yu wenhua chuangxin, 169–78. 58 Mittler, “ ‘Stay Home and Shop the World’: The Cosmopolitan Nature(s) of Advertising in Shanghai (1860s–1910s),” in Studies in the Chinese Public Sphere, eds. Yeh and Wagner, in press.

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published.59 Moreover, there seems to have been much greater fluidity in gender differentiation in Qing fiction as compared to that of the Ming period.60 Inserted into a karmic plot machine of Buddhist origin, all transformations were possible and came about in the novels, a feature already prefigured in the ironical exchange between the goddess residing in Vimalakirti’s house and Buddha’s “senior disciple” Subhuti in the Vimalakirti nirdesa.61 As the subjects of novels, there had been a big shift for women in the Qing period, including the superb satire on their treatment in the Flowers in the Mirror, the variety of literate and often strong-willed female characters in Dream of the Red Chamber such as Xue Baochai 薛寳釵, Lin Daiyu 林黛玉, and Wang Xifeng 王熙鳳, and the official exploits of the heroine of Bi sheng hua. This elevation of women had been accompanied by an increasingly scathing tone in Chinese writings about the attitude and education of men (as in Scholars). Jia Baoyu, the “hero” of Dream of the Red Chamber (which became the most popular novel during the last decades of the nineteenth century), is utterly disinterested in either the examination system or an official career.62 There was even serious self-doubt among at least some men as to whether they could honestly say that they had fulfilled their roles in state and society, as reflected in Sun Dingchen’s 孫鼎臣 (fl. 19th century) “Zhi lun” 治論 (On politics) (ca. 1830).63 The sudden shift in both the status of Confucian education and in the status of women under the Taipings may be viewed in the same context. But this was the Chinese side of the story. How did Major fit into the picture and how did his experiences and background in Europe shape his response to the social and literary environment of nineteenth-century China?

See Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 60 I am grateful to Professor Wilt Idema for a stimulating discussion of this point. 61 See Vimalakirti Sutra, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 83–92. 62 On role playing based on characters in Dream of the Red Chamber, see Yeh, Shanghai Love, chap. 3. 63 A fine analysis of this extraordinary piece can be found in Andrea Janku, “Preparing the Ground for Revolutionary Discourse: From the Jingshiwen Compilations to Journalistic Writings in Nineteenth-Century China,” T’oung Pao 90.1–3 (2004): 65–121. 59

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Major arrived in Shanghai in 1861 at the age of twenty without a university education.64 His father was a man of modest means (a third clerk in the War Ministry), but he had rather substantial connections to a group of people who favored a positive and culturally informed rather than a mostly military approach to China. One of the effects was that young Major had already learned a substantial amount of Chinese before he left England; indeed, the London and China Express carried a letter praising this young man for his surprising fluency. Major was a man not given to grand pronouncements. He lived through his practice and did not leave behind any diaries or collections of letters that might have shed light on his thoughts, feelings, or ambitions. We thus have to extract from his actions what might have been their guiding interests and principles. With David Hancock’s Citizens of the World (1995) we have a fine, and very empirically grounded, story about how the Scottish Enlightenment notion of “betterment” or “improvement” as a guide to action had filtered down into the minds and lives of the eighteenth-century traders this book studies.65 Although not dealing with the nineteenth century, this seems a promising track to follow Major’s family life in Clapham, in south London. He most likely went to the Clapham Grammar School, easily the most advanced and innovative school in the city and the country at the time. It produced many of the top scientists and public intellectuals of the generation that came of age between 1860 and 1880. Its philosophical as well as its practical agenda was very much informed by what one might call a “popularized” Scottish Enlightenment. That is, many of the originally pathbreaking Scottish philosophical ideas had become commonplace assumptions by the 1850s and 1860s, spread not only through schools, universities, publishers, and intellectual journals but also through the lives of many British and Scottish merchants. Within the Scottish Enlightenment debates, the “woman question” was of the highest importance. Some of its philosophers had gone so far, in fact, as to make the status and treatment of women into the yardstick by which to measure the degree of “civilization” that a

64 The following arguments take up some of the lines of thought I pursue in my study of Major, which I hope I will some day actually finish. I will not insert the full documentation here so as not to overburden the text. 65 David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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society could claim. William Alexander, the author of the first History of Women (1782) wrote: As strength and courage are in savage life the only means of attaining to power and distinction, so weakness and timidity are the certain paths to slavery and oppression: on this account, we shall almost constantly find women among savages condemned to every species of servile, or rather, slavish drudgery; and shall as constantly find them emerging from this state, in the same proportion as we find the men emerging from ignorance and brutality, and approaching to knowledge and refinement; the rank, therefore, and condition, in which we find women in any country, mark out to us with greatest precision, the exact point in the scale of civil society, to which the people of such a country are arrived; and were their history entirely silent on every other subject, and only mentioned the manner in which they treated their women, we should, from thence, be enabled to form a tolerable judgment of the barbarity, or culture of their manners.66

In this intellectual context, the “betterment of China” very much hinged on the betterment of the situation of Chinese women. But the scathing criticisms in the Shenbaoguan publications of the way women’s lives were arranged in China never reduced China to the status of a “primitive” society, too high was Major’s respect for this “cultured nation,” whose cultural legacy he was republishing with modern means. Scottish Enlightenment writings stressed the need for women to be educated as a condition for them taking their rightful place in human society. Already the French philosophers in the first half of the eighteenth century had come out strongly in favor of women’s education, and after the French Revolution this had become a common trope.67 It is my contention that Major used the different outlets that the Shenbaoguan offered as a forum for the public articulation of opinions on women’s issue that had previously been privately held or individually put into practice. These media could publicize news about the treatment of women, could publicly talk about restrictive and hollow rituals, the need for women’s education, and could publish books by and about 66 William Alexander, The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time; Giving Some Account of Almost Every Interesting Particular Concerning That Sex, among All Nations, Ancient and Modern. The Third Edition, with Many Alterations and Corrections, 2 vols. (London: C. Dilly and R. Christopher, 1782). Here qtd. in E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3. 67 Katherine B. Clinton, “Femme et Philosophe: Enlightenment Origins of Feminism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8.3 (Spring 1975): 295.

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women as well as reading material for women. In short, it could offer to Chinese society a platform outside the control of the Qing court or eager gentry on which to move towards a new public consensus. He actively published many of the strongest Chinese opinions on women that were compatible with Scottish Enlightenment ideas. He inserted values and ideas into editorials, prefaces, and reportages that drew on both Chinese and Scottish sources of inspiration, thus bringing them together. Through selection and emphasis, he offered the image of a new type of woman who could, and would, fearlessly walk about in the big city of Shanghai and yet still abide by the standards of Victorian/ Chinese “virtue.” Among the most important influences informing the thinking of both the French philosophers and many of their Scottish successors (who like David Hume [1711–76] had spent considerable time in France) was the very prominent presence of women of talent, education, and power (although the legal position of women in French society remained on a par with children and imbeciles). French salons were run by such talented women, and in these places men met women writers and women scholars who effectively undermined their unchecked assumptions about women’s intellectual potential. Thus, an actual social shift promoted a rethinking of basic social assumptions. Shanghai, with its new-style attractions and new-style periodical press, provided a somewhat similar environment. The city’s social and cultural life was tightly bound up with Shanghai courtesans, many of whom were highly literate devotees of works such as the Honglou meng and powerbrokers in their own right. They had spotted the chance offered by the International Settlement, had moved from their enclosed houses in the walled city into the public arena of the International Settlement, and had, in the process, “gone public” in the sense of becoming a stunning, strong, and unmistakable presence in the parks, theaters, and restaurants of the city. For many male Chinese Shanghai sojourners, these women were a new and enormously attractive species. They became, as Catherine Yeh has shown, the emblem of urban sophistication for the entire country; to have a look at them parading about with their patrons was counted among the essential sights of Shanghai extravagance and modernity.68 She suggests that these women opened up a space into which other women could move and provided

68

See Yeh, Shanghai Love, chap. 3.

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an opportunity for many men to envisage women of a completely different type than they had ever known and a life with them that would be utterly different. The magic of this concatenation of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Chinese critical thinking and a Scottish Enlightenment philosophy that had become commonplace is that it offered one key ingredient that moved the entire process out of a painful Westernsubsidized proselytism: it was good business. The Shenbaoguan’s print products were highly profitable, and their public articulation of many of the pressing issues of the time as well as their commercial expansion into new social sectors and into other parts of the country were fully legitimized by them being “bona fide commercial goods” in the terms of the Tianjin Treaty, that is, goods that could be sold throughout the country.69 Seen in this light, it seems clear that we now need to revise the standard narratives suggesting that issues such as the social role of women, women’s education, and the literary contributions of women only came to prominence in China at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.70

69 The formula is from the reply given to Major when he had asked the British Consul in Shanghai, Thomas Wade, about the legal status of commercial print products as opposed to nankeens or other commercial goods. See Wagner, “The Shenbao in Crisis.” 70 An example may be the otherwise very well-documented study by Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹, Wan Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo 晚清女性與近代中國 (Late Qing Women and Modern China) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004).

CHAPTER NINE

THE MOTHER NÜ XUEBAO VERSUS THE DAUGHTER NÜ XUEBAO: GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN 1898 AND 1902 WOMEN REFORMERS Nanxiu Qian Periodicals for Chinese women first appeared during the 1898 Reform Movement and increased to dozens during the last decade of China’s imperial period; they were published in both China and Japan.1 Which one pioneered this unprecedented cultural and intellectual trend? The Zhongguo jindai qikan bianmu huilu 中國近代期刊編目彙錄 (Collected catalogues of modern Chinese periodicals) [hereafter the Collected Catalogues], edited by the Shanghai Library and first published in 1965, documented Chen Xiefen’s 陳擷芬 (1883–1923) Nübao 女報 (Women’s journal) as “the first Chinese periodical for women” (fig. 9.1).2 According to the Collected Catalogues, Chen started her Nübao in 1899 but only for a brief period. She then republished the journal as a monthly in 1902 with the Subao 蘇報 ( Jiangsu journal) publisher and renamed it Nü xuebao 女學報 ( Journal of women’s learning) in 1903 (fig. 9.2).3

I would like to thank Professor Tani Barlow for her invaluable comments on a draft of this chapter. 1 The Zhongguo jindai baokan minglu 中國近代報刊名錄 (Record of the titles of modern Chinese periodicals), eds. Shi He 史和, Yao Fushen 姚福山, and Ye Cuidi 葉翠娣 (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1991), recorded thirty-three women’s journals published in the late Qing period. 2 Zhongguo jindai qikan bianmu huilu, ed. Shanghai Library (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1965, 1980), s.v. Nübao, Nü xuebao, footnote to the entry. 3 Ibid.; it also notes: “In the same year of 1903, the Subao was involved in a lawsuit, and Chen Xiefen escaped to Japan. The fourth issue of the Nü xuebao was then published in Tokyo by the Shanghai People’s Daily. The date of its termination is unclear. This catalogue collected the entire stack of the 9 issues of 1902 and the 1–4 issues of 1903. The issues of 1899 have not been seen. Later Chen Yiyi’s Nübao was also published in Shanghai, bearing the same title as this periodical” (同年蘇報案發生, 擷芬避居日本, 第 4 期改在東京出版, 由上海國民日日報發行。停刊時間未詳。本書收錄續出第 1–9 期全部及第二年第 1–4 期, 1899 年各期未見。此後復有陳以益主編之 «女報» 亦創刊於上海, 與此刊同名).

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Figure 9.1. Cover page of the first issue of Chen Xiefen’s Nübao (Women’s journal). The actual title that appears on the page reads Xuchu Nübao (Continual publication of Woman’s Journal ) (8 May 1902). Shanghai Library collection.

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Figure 9.2. Cover page of the first issue of Chen Xiefen’s Nü xuebao ( Journal of women’s learning) (27 February 1903). Shanghai Library collection.

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In fact, however, the first Chinese periodical for women, also titled Nü xuebao (with the English title Chinese Girl’s Progress), appeared during the heyday of the 1898 Reforms. Its twelve issues were edited and published by an all-female editorial board from 24 July to the end of October 1898 (fig. 9.3). Literally and metaphorically, the 1898 Nü xuebao can be viewed as the mother of Chen’s 1902–03 Nübao/Nü xuebao. Not only Chen but also several daughters of the contributors to the 1898 Nü xuebao who wrote for Chen’s journal claimed the inheritance.4 The question is why the Collected Catalogues would exclude this the earliest women’s journal, even though at least two articles, both published in the Tushuguan 圖書館 ( Journal of library science) in 1963, had provided detailed introductions to its entire twelve issues then still extant.5 The Collected Catalogues was not, however, the first record to neglect the existence of the 1898 Nü xuebao. The elimination of its memory started as early as in 1907, barely a decade after its publication. In the inaugural issue of the Shenzhou nübao 神州女報 (Women’s journal of the Divine Continent) (December 1907), a periodical that claimed to have continued the Republican martyr Qiu Jin’s 秋瑾 (1875– 1907) Zhongguo nübao 中國女報 (Chinese women’s journal) (fig. 9.4), the editor Chen Yiyi 陳以益 (also known as Chen Zhiqun 陳志群) (1889–1962), a central figure in late Qing journalism for women, attributed the “birth of the first sprout” (mengnie chuxing 萌檗初興) of women’s journalism to Chen Xiefen’s 1902–03 Nü xuebao.6 Chen Yiyi

Including Chen Chao 陳超 (courtesy name 班仙) and Chen Qian 陳騫 (courtesy name 槎仙), the two transracial daughters of the reformer Chen Jitong 陳季 同 (1852–1907) and his French wife Lai Mayi 賴媽懿 (Marie Talabot [ ? ]), and the nieces of Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 (1866–1911), the leading editor/contributor of the 1898 Nü xuebao; also included were Wu Ruonan 吳弱男 (1886–1973) and Wu Ya’nan 吳亞男, daughters of a male reformer Wu Baochu 吳保初 (1869–1913). Chen Chao alone published four articles and a long poem that expressed her admiration for Chen Xiefen’s reform determination. 5 See Pan Tianzhen 潘天禛, “Tan Zhongguo jindai diyifen nübao—Nü xuebao” 談中國近代第一份女報——女學報 (About the first women’s journal in modern China—Chinese Girl’s Progress), Tushuguan 3 (Beijing 1963): 57–58; Du Jikun 杜繼琨, “Zai tan Nü xuebao” 再談女學報 (More about the Chinese Girl’s Progress), Tushuguan 4 (Beijing 1963): 55–56. There was also a third article about this journal, published later in 1986, Yu Fuyuan 余福媛, “Guanyu Nü xuebao de kanqi he kanxingqi” 關於女學報 的刊期和刊行期 (About the publication dates of the Chinese Girl’s Progress), Tushuguan 2 (Shanghai, 1986): 52–53. According to my investigation, today only the first eight issues of the 1898 Nü xuebao are still extant in the Wuxi Library. 6 Chen Yiyi, “Shenzhou nübao fakanci” 神州女報發刊詞 (Forward to the Shenzhou nübao), included in Nülun 女論 (On women) (a special issue of the Nübao 女報 [Women’s journal] that was edited and published by Chen Yiyi), trans. and ed. 4

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Figure 9.3. Cover page of the first issue of the 1898 Nü xuebao (24 July 1898). Wuxi Library collection, courtesy Zhang Junfeng.

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Figure 9.4. Cover page of the first issue of Qiu Jin’s Zhongguo nübao (Chinese women’s journal) (14 January 1907). Fudan University Library collection.

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then reaffirmed this acknowledgement in his “Nübaojie zuixin diaochabiao” 女報界最新調查表 (Most updated investigation of the periodicals for women), published in the Shenzhou nübao 3 (February 1908)7 and again in the first issue of his Nübao (22 January 1909) (fig. 9.5).8 This collective neglect of the first Chinese women’s journal, which continued until very recently,9 entailed complicated interplays of issues related to gender, race, and nationalism. The “modernized” Chinese patriarchy, it seems, has preferred a more nationalistically oriented daughter to her culture-bound founding mother of Chinese women’s journalism. In the process, Chen Xiefen’s 1902–03 Nübao/Nü xuebao served as a crucial passage that continued, and simultaneously broke away from, the 1898 Nü xuebao. A close comparison between this mother/daughter pair, conducted primarily on the analysis of the writings by two women journalists, Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 (1866–1911), the leading contributor to the 1898 Nü xuebao, and Chen Xiefen, the Editor-in-Chief of the 1902–03 Nübao/Nü xuebao, will manifest a rapid change in how the late Qing dynasty envisioned women’s roles in China as well as in the world.10 By examining the purpose of the publication, the ideal of womanhood, and the resources of values of each of these two journals, Chen Yiyi (Shanghai: Nübao she, 1909), 9. For a detailed introduction to Chen Yiyi’s life, his connections with Qiu Jin, and his important contribution to late Qing women’s journals, see Xia Xiaohong’s 夏曉虹 introduction “Wan-Qing nüxing de xingbie guanzhao” 晚清女性的性別觀照 (Viewing late Qing women from gender perspectives), in Nüzi shijie wenxuan 女子世界文選 (Selected works from the Women’s world ), ed. Xia (Guiyang: Guzhou jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), 45–52. 7 Chen Yiyi, “Nübao jie zuixin diaocha biao,” originally published in Shenzhou nübao 3 (February 1908); included in Nülun, 11–12. Chen reported eleven journals in this investigation. Including the Huixing Nü xuebao 惠興女學報, which he also mentioned in the Nülun, p. 13, and his own Nübao, he recorded altogether thirteen women’s journals published by 1909. 8 Chen Yiyi, “Fakan ci” 發刊詞 (Forward), Nübao 1 (22 January 1909): 1. 9 As late as 2002, scholarship in English still mistook the 1902–03 Nübao/Nü xuebao for the first Chinese women’s journal; see, for instance, Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, eds. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 163. Since the late 1990s, increasing scholarship in Chinese has acknowledged the existence of the 1898 Nü xuebao but only relying upon secondary sources such as the two 1963 articles. By far only my own works have examined the journal itself. See, for instance, Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29.4 (October 2003): 399–454. 10 Analysis of Xue’s thoughts will also include a reading of her works in Xue’s Daiyun lou yiji 黛韻樓遺集 (Posthumously collected writings from the Black Jade Rhythm Tower), including Shiji 詩集 (Collected shi-style poems), 4 juan; Ciji 詞集 (Collected ci-style poems), 2 juan; Wenji 文集 (Collected prose), 2 juan; edited by Chen Shoupeng 陳壽彭 (Fuzhou: The Chen family edition, 1914).

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Figure 9.5. Cover page of the first issue of Chen Yiyi’s Nübao (14 January 1907) (22 January 1909). Shanghai Library collection.

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this chapter will try to answer the following questions: Why was the 1898 protofeminist program that was inspired by, and consciously modeled after, a traditional literate culture of elite women, rejected by later generations? Why would the more pluralist, confident, self-assured, and creative voices of the mother generation of women reformers give way to more patriarchal, value-abiding, and heroically vengeful daughters? I. The Mother Nü xuebao: Recreation of the Cainü Tradition What motivated the publication of the 1898 Nü xuebao? In its first issue, the leading contributor Xue Shaohui had the following to say in her “Nü xuebao xu” 女學報敍 (Inauguration editorial [literally, Preface] to the Nü xuebao): In the past, Gou Jian forbore hardships in order to restore his state (woxin changdan 臥薪嘗膽, literally, lay on faggots and tasted gall), and he sought for help from women. After a ten-year profusion of his people and training of his soldiers, he eventually empowered himself and gained hegemonic control of the realm. He understood the use of women’s [ labor]. He did not know, however, women’s learning had a greater function. Although [the function of ] women’s learning seems to be limited to family management, its assistance to governing the state and pacifying all under Heaven, looking trivial, is in fact important. This is why the publication of Nü xuebao is imperative under today’s situation. We Chinese women are two hundred million in number. In poetry we have the Book of Songs, and in ritual we have the “Inner Principles.” Thus I dare not say that we do not have learning. Yet today new knowledge from all countries has been glamorously and beautifully developed, going beyond the scope of the masters and the one hundred schools [in the Chinese tradition]. If we women, staying in the inner chambers all day long, still hold the division between the inner words and the outer words and limit our learning [within a narrow field], how can we talk about getting knowledge so as to fit ourselves to the principle of the “new people” (xinmin 新民)? Therefore, we publish this journal to enlighten our women. For those who are already learned we enlarge their knowledge, and for those [who] yet have to learn we open up their minds. Known to every household, this new knowledge will enable our women in assisting their husbands and teaching their children. This is because the skills of managing a household contain that of governing the state and harmonizing all under Heaven. Laozi said: “The Dao is the mother of all things.” Mothering the world is precisely our women’s business. Who says that the female Dao cannot achieve anything?11 11

Xue, “Nü xuebao xu,” Nü xuebao 1 (24 July 1898): 2b–3a.

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As Xue states here, the publication of the Nü xuebao aims at promoting women’s learning that has a greater function than women’s labor in national strengthening. Meanwhile, women’s learning intends for fashioning xinmin, a new Chinese womanhood in this context, and should therefore include most updated knowledge, Chinese and foreign. In both self-fashioning and national strengthening, women should stand in a leading place instead of their conventionally subordinate position, for women’s Dao had “mothered” wanwu 萬物 (myriad things), all things under Heaven. With Xue’s editorial published at the outset, the Nü xuebao dispatched dissident opinions against male reformers’ designation of women’s function in a national reform movement. To be sure, the Nü xuebao was part of a campaign for women’s education that men initiated during the reform era. Once women joined in, they quickly engaged in an intensive conversation about the competing visions of a new Chinese womanhood both with men and among themselves. Enraged and demoralized by China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the humiliating “Scramble for Concessions” that followed, the Chinese intellectual elite, with the support of the Guangxu Emperor, initiated the 1898 Reform Movement—the first attempt in some two thousand years to transform China from a highly refined imperial system into a modern, constitutional nation-state.12 Among the many campaigns that stemmed during the 1898 reforms was one for women’s education—the triad of Nü xuetang, Nü xuehui, and Nü xuebao. Xue, her husband Chen Shoupeng 陳壽彭 (1857–1928?), brother-in-law Chen Jitong 陳季同 (1852–1907), and Jitong’s French wife, known by her Chinese name Lai Mayi 賴媽懿,13 all played major roles. Xue, for her part, served as the leading contributor to the Nü xuebao.14

12 Hosea Ballou Morse (1855–1934) points out that “It may fairly be said that, in the spring of 1898, all the younger members of the mandarinate and the gentry were reformers—some of them, perhaps, with a confused idea of what reform meant, but all ready to support moderate reform, and some resolved on radical measures” (in The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, 3 vols. [London and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910–18], 3:132). 13 Lai’s French name was possibly Marie Talabot; see Chen Jitong [Tcheng-KiTong], “A Madame Marie Talabot,” printed on the frontispiece of Chen’s Le théâtre des Chinois: étude de moeurs compares (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1886), in which Chen dedicated this volume to Talabot, with obvious affection, saying that because of her name, the frontispiece “will become the most lovely page in the book” (frontispiece). 14 According to the first eight issues I have examined, the editorial board of the Nü xuebao enlisted thirty Chinese women altogether, with frequent dropouts and add-ins. Xue remained the first on the list at least until the eighth issue.

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Previous study has pointed out, however, that for leading male reformers such as Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929), “Nationalism tended to be the primary concern, and women’s issues tended to be subordinated to larger national issues. Few advocated the cause of women for its own sake.”15 The 1897–98 campaign for women’s education typified such male mentality. It was inspired primarily by Liang’s famous essay “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women), published in the spring of 1897 in the reform periodical Shiwu bao 時務報 (English title: The Chinese Progress).16 In it Liang argued that “China’s accumulated weakness has arisen, fundamentally, from the lack of education for women.”17 Drawing upon Timothy Richard’s (1845–1919) essay, “Shengli fenli zhi fa” 生利分 利之法 (Productive and nonproductive methods), Liang, however, twisted Richard’s argument on keeping the growth of national wealth with the pace of the population increase, making it a criticism of the “parasite” status of Chinese women. Liang reasoned that the foundation of a well-governed state were citizens who could feed themselves—the more jobholders, the richer the state. Western countries were wealthy and powerful because they had strong educational systems not only for men but also for women, which produced job opportunities for both genders. China, therefore, should set up a similar educational system for women in order to change their idle and useless status and enable them to feed themselves.18 Having set up national empowerment as the primary agenda for women’s education, Liang made clear that the long-standing Chinese literate tradition of cainü 才女 (talented women) was not what he would envision for women and that women’s learning should focus on practical matters, as also stated in his “On education for women”: What people called cainü in the past refers to those who tease the wind and fondle the moon, pluck flowers and caress the grass, and then compose some ci- or shi-style poems to mourn the spring and lament parting. That’s all. Doing things like this cannot be regarded as learning (xue 學).

15 As pointed out by Noriko Kamachi at the 1975 Harvard workshop on late Qing reforms, in Reform in Nineteenth-Century China, eds. Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, East Asian Research Center, 1976), 248. 16 Liang Qichao’s “Lun nüxue” was published continually in Shiwu bao 23 (12 April 1897): 1a–4a; and 25 (2 May 1897): 1a–2b. 17 Liang, “Lun nüxue,” Shiwu bao 23: 1a. 18 Timothy Richard, “Shengli fenli zhi fa,” Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報 (English title: A Review of the Times) 51 (April 1893): 1a–3a; Liang, “Lun nüxue,” Shiwu bao 23: 1a–3b.

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Liang’s nationalistic approach to education for women, along with his indictment of cainü culture, was chorused by his fellow male reformers, as recorded in the Nüxue jiyi chubian 女學集議初編 (Collected opinions on education for women, first edition), a collection of the major documents of the campaign that Jing Yuanshan 經元善 (1841–1903), the initiator of this campaign, edited and published in the spring of 1898.20 They also singled out the Song woman poet Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084–ca. 1155) as the agent of this “frivolity,” making the accusation that her talent (cai 才) had undermined her moral integrity ( jie 節).21 By contrast, women reformers seem to have put their self-cultivation above national strengthening. To be sure, women like Xue wanted China to be strong and self-sufficient but not at the expense of their own vision of womanhood. Education for women meant not merely job training but also a great opportunity to establish themselves with all the most current knowledge and fine qualities, whether past or present, Chinese or Western. Xue was the first systematically to present such an ambition against the decree of the newly rising nationalistic patriarchy. In her “Chuangshe Nü xuetang tiaoyi bing xu” 創設女 學堂條議並敍 (Suggestions for establishing the Girls’ School, with a preface) (hereafter “Suggestions”), published at the early stage of the campaign in the Qiushi bao 求是報 (English title: The International Review), a reform periodical edited by the Chen brothers, Xue dealt a direct blow to Liang’s “Lun nüxue.”22 Xue argued at the outset that Chinese women were not idle and useless; rather, they were not well used. They

Liang, “Lun nüxue,” Shiwu bao 23: 2a. For men’s nationalistic approach see Jing Yuanshan, ed., Nüxue jiyi chubian (Shanghai: Jing’s private edition, 1898), 38b, 39a, 40a, etc.; for their criticism of cainü see ibid., 4a, 41a. 21 See ibid., 4a. 22 There are at least two versions of Xue’s “Chuangshe Nü xuetang tiaoyi bing xu.” One was published in the Qiushi bao 9 (18 December 1897): 6a–7b; and again in volume 10 (28 December 1897): 8a–b. A revised version, with five more suggestions, appeared in the Xinwen bao (14–17 January 1898). An abridged version was later included in the Nüxue jiyi chubian: 33a–35a. The following discussion will mainly cite the Qiushi bao version so as to keep the original publication dates. 19 20

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dutifully fulfilled domestic obligations conventionally assigned to them; many were also accomplished in cai 才 (scholarly and literary talents) and yi 藝 (artistic and scientific accomplishments). Education for women, therefore, should nurture women’s long-ignored talents, training them to acquire cai and yi so that they could be “prepared to be selected for the use of the state” ( yibei guojia youyong zhi xuan 以備國家有用之選), the same goal privileged in men’s education.23 Xue relentlessly defended the cainü tradition that, as she recounted with indignation, had suffered negligence from patriarchal society for too long.24 Xue proposed poetry to be the most important subject for women’s learning because it “cultivates one’s disposition and feelings” (taoxie xingqing 陶寫性情).25 Pointedly warding away men’s criticism of Li Qingzhao, Xue valorized Li as a teacher for women for both her talent and her virtue. In her “Suggestions,” Xue recommended Li’s ci lyrics as patterns for women’s poetic creation.26 Xue’s cai-yi approach represented women reformers’ collective plea for women’s self-fashioning. Jiang Lan 蔣蘭 (courtesy name Wanfang 畹 芳), a future editorial contributor to the Nü xuebao and faculty member of the Girls’ School, also argued that a “perfect and flawless” (meishan wuhan 美善無憾) educational plan for women should incorporate features of both the Chinese and the Western systems. It should cover Western as well as Chinese learning and include not only scholarship but also artistic and poetic creation.27 Many more women proposed their designs for an ideal womanhood in poetic lines—a conscious choice of genre against Liang’s dismissal of women’s poetry. They recall a tradition full of cainü: “Since antiquity there have been numerous talented ladies;/Every time reading history our spirit follows their track” (古來

23 Xue, “Chuangshe Nü xuetang tiaoyi bing xu,” Qiushi bao 9 (18 December 1897): 6a–b. 24 As recounted by Xue’s eldest daughter, Chen Yun 陳芸 (1885–1911), in her selfpreface to Xiaodai xuan lunshi shi 小黛軒論詩詩 (Poems on poetics from Little Black Jade Pavilion), 1b; attached to Xue, Daiyun lou yiji. 25 Xue, “Chuangshe Nü xuetang tiaoyi bing xu,” 7a–b. 26 See ibid.; and Xinwen bao (15–16 January 1898). 27 Jing, Nüxue jiyi chubian, 20a. Shen Ying 沈瑛 (courtesy name Heqing 和卿), the future superintendent of the Girls’ School, and her niece-in-law Zhang Lan 章蘭 (courtesy name 畹香), also presented their draft of the regulations for the Girls’ School, see “Neiban zhangcheng” 內辦章程 (Regulations for internal management [of the Girls’ School]), Xinwen bao (10 December 1897); it is also included in Nüxue jiyi chubian, 13a–14b.

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才媛不乏數, 每覽青史神為追). Yet, “The inner chamber talents and wisdom were bitterly neglected;/Not being able to mend Heaven, we failed Goddess Nüwa” (閨中才智苦沉埋, 補石無能愧女媧). With the reform movement, opportunity comes for their long-overdue selfaffirmation and self-cultivation: “We create and manage the new foundation [for women’s education],/Now when female talents can heave a long repressed ambition” (經營締造闢新基, 不櫛英才吐氣時); “For women, half of the Chinese population,/This [educational campaign] gives rise to our self-esteem” (中原一半裙釵輩, 吐氣揚眉肇在斯). And the learning they desire covers every aspect of knowledge: “From now on the luck for us girls knows no bound;/Principles of things, feelings of people, we can all understand” (女兒從此幸何之, 物理人情盡可 知); “How can we discriminate against any scholarship?/Chinese and Western, let’s taste all of them!” (論學何敢分涇渭, 中西學問宜兼味); “What we hear and see increases day by day;/Chinese and Western, culture and learning, we compete for broad comprehension” (耳聞目 見日恢廓, 中西文學爭鴻裁); “Diligently we study both Chinese and Western knowledge;/poetry, painting, zither, and go-game, we’ll know after learning” (中西並習好為之, 詩畫琴棋學後知).28 Noble purposes motivate their learning, as Zhou Yuanxing 周遠香, also a future contributor to the Nü xuebao and faculty member of the Girls’ Schools, affirmatively puts it: If not to become a great minister, I’ll surely be a good doctor; Prolonging lives, spreading out compassion, in similar ways. I will beg the goddess Baogu for her divine medicine; To relieve, instantly, all the ailments on earth.

不為良相必良醫, 壽世宏慈道未歧, 願乞鮑姑仙術在, 29

頓教大地起瘡痍。

Zhou’s poem elaborates Xue’s demands that education for women should better prepare them to serve the country. In Zhou’s view, women are capable of taking the most challenging positions, either governing the state or curing human bodies, with the ultimate purpose

28 Jing collected twenty-three of these works in Nüxue jiyi chubian, 15b, 21b–22a, 44b–45a, 46b–47b. After the Girls’ School officially opened on 31 May 1898, about twenty-five more poems by its all-women faculty appeared in various newspapers and periodicals (see Xinwen bao, June 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12; Nü xuebao 5 [27 August 1898]: 3b; 8 [September 1898]: 3b; and Wanguo gongbao 115 [August 1898]: 29). 29 Jing, Nüxue jiyi chubian, 44b.

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of people’s wellbeing rather than national empowerment. Women reformers engaged themselves in more detailed discussions about their educational goals after the Nü xuebao was inaugurated on 24 July 1898. They contributed more than twenty essays in its twelve issues, advocating women’s rights and encouraging the study of science, medicine, art, and literature.30 Despite leading male reformers’ dismissal of cainü, women reformers claimed through the news media their direct inheritance of the Wei-Jin Xianyuan 賢媛 (virtuous and talented ladies) legacy, the earliest significant group of cainü who, with talent, knowledge, and intellectual independence, started this female literate tradition.31 Meanwhile, female reformers, in many ways, also renovated the path of their precursor mothers. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century elite women, for instance, shared with men “many assumptions about Confucian virtue and its proper representation in women’s lives”32 and worked to play “guardians of Confucian morality [rather] than to repudiate it.”33 The 1898 female reformers went beyond a Confucian scope for a more iconoclastic construct of intellectualism. Cainü mental strength, often appearing as an unabated desire for learning, opened them to a heightened awareness of ideas transmitted to China via Japan and the West. Women reformers, while still in close cooperation with their male supporters, conducted their own quest for an ideal womanhood and an ideal social order, often in direct dispute with the leading male reformers’ “patriarchal nationalism.”34 Consequently, it was precisely the cainü type of women who became most active participants in political and educational reforms not merely as men’s followers but also as organizers and thinkers. Perhaps the conceptualization of aiguo 愛國 (love of country) in the 1898 Nü xuebao can best exemplify the contributors’ Xianyuan ideal and their iconoclastic thinking. In her article, “Li Qingzhao Zhu Shuzhen

30 For a list of these essays and an analysis of their major arguments, see Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition.” 31 See the introduction to this volume for a detailed discussion of the evolution of the cainü tradition. 32 Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth-Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3. 33 Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 9. 34 Prasenjit Duara, “The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China,” History and Theory 37.3 (October 1998): 298.

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lun” 李清照朱淑貞論 (On Li Qingzhao and Zhu Shuzhen), possibly published in one of the later issues of the Nü xuebao in October 1898, Xue acclaimed aiguo as a virtue of Li Qingzhao.35 This is about the first time that aiguo is applied to Li’s comments.36 Xue had clearly adopted this term from the 1898 Reform discourse, in which patriotism loomed large when China’s sovereignty is facing foreign threat. Yet Xue’s concept of aiguo, which is embedded in China’s tradition, differed very much from nationalistic patriarchy’s version of aiguo that placed sovereignty before people’s wellbeing. For Xue, aiguo meant first and foremost love for the land, the people, and the culture, as well as relentless criticism of a sovereign who fails to protect all this and, even worse, puts his 35 From the publication dates of the first eight issues of the Nü xuebao preserved in the Wuxi Library, Yu Fuyuan has deduced that the last four issues should all have been published in October 1898; see Yu, “Guanyu Nü xuebao de kanqi he kanxingqi,” Tushuguan 2 (1986): 52–53. I consider the “Li Qingzhao Zhu Shuzhen lun” to be in one of the four later issues of the Nü xuebao, which are yet to be located, because of the following four reasons: (1) Xue’s Daiyun lou wenji collected nineteen pianwen essays. While sixteen of them can be dated as written after 1900, the remaining three, “Fu Shen nüshi shu” 覆沈女士書 (Letter to Ms. Shen), “Xizi lun” 西子論 (On Xizi), and “Li Qingzhao Zhu Shuzhen lun,” bear no clear indication of the writing and publication dates. According to Xue’s elder sister Xue Sihui’s 薛嗣徽 (1859–?) preface to Xue’s Daiyun lou wenji, Xue Shaohui sent her “newly written pianwen essays published in newspapers” (新作駢文刊印於報章者) after moving to Shanghai in 1897. These three were very likely among those sent to Sihui during this time. (2) From 1897–98, Xue published in three periodicals, namely, Qiushi bao, Xinwen bao, and Nü xuebao. I have searched through all the twelve issues of the Qiushi bao (30 September 1897–7 March 1898) and the whole stack of Xinwen bao from 1897–98 but found no pianwen essays written by Xue; hence Nü xuebao is the only possible place for publishing these three essays. (3) Xue was the leading contributor of the 1898 Nü xuebao, yet she only published two articles in the first four issues, namely, “Nü xuebao xu” 女學報序 (Preface to the Nü xuebao), Nü xuebao 1 (24 July 1898): 2b–3a; and “Nüjiao yu zhidao xiangguan shuo” 女教與治道相關說 (On connections of women’s education to the way of governing), Nü xuebao 3 (15 August 1898): 2a; and 4 (20 August 1898): 2a–b. Very possibly, during the heyday of the reform, the Nü xuebao was piled up with contributions, so Xue felt no urgent need to write more until after Cixi terminated the One Hundred Day Reform on 21 September 1898. In the eighth issue, published at the end of September 1898, many contributors quit and Xue became one of the few who continued working with the journal. Maybe then she felt compelled to write more and hence published these three essays. (4) All three essays were written on behalf of women and, therefore, were fit for Nü xuebao: the “Fu Shen nüshi shu” on footbinding; the “Xizi lun” on conventional accusation of women as the origin of disasters; and the “Li Qingzhao Zhu Shuzhen lun” on women’s equal rights of learning. 36 Aiguo has since become an indispensable comment in modern study of Li Qingzhao, although its actual meaning has never been clarified. See Qian, “Li Qingzhao de jiaguo qinghuai ji qi xiqu chengxian” 李清照 (1084–ca. 1155) 的家國文化情懷及 其戲曲形象呈現 (The Song woman poet Li Qingzhao’s [1084–ca. 1155] version of patriotism and its visualization in drama), Nüxue xuezhi ( Journal of women and gender studies) 16 (November 2003): 222–24.

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people in misery. Based on this cultural and humanitarian interpretation, Xue argued that men have long slandered Li because they are fearful of her lofty Dao (daogao huilai 道高毀來), for she openly criticizes the evil Song statesmen who, for self-interest, never want to retrieve the land and people lost to invaders.37 Lu Cui’s 魯翠 “Nüzi aiguo shuo” 女子愛國說 (On patriotism of women), on the other hand, considered aiguo as women’s equal rights in voicing their opinion on state affairs and receiving the same political and educational privileges. She argued: Our country is now increasingly endangered by the imperial invasions. Whoever has a voice should heave a sigh! Last month His Majesty decreed that each of His people might present his/her opinions. Since “people” should include both male and female, we women should also present a collectively signed memorial to the emperor with our candid views.38

Lu then listed systematic requests to the emperor, asking him to open girls’ schools, publish women’s journals, build libraries and reading clubs for female readers, patronize art exhibitions for female artists, run gynecological and obstetric hospitals, and even organize beauty pageants. The most solemn request that Lu put forward was to establish an educational bureau for women, which would hold female civil examinations and select members for a female parliament.39 II. The Daughter Nü xuebao: Valorization of the Nüjie 女傑 (Heroine) Ambition The Collected Catalogues recorded Chen Xiefen’s Nübao to have been first published in 1899 but did not provide any evidence. This documentation, I believe, resulted from a misreading of the cover page of Chen Xiefen’s Nübao—all its nine issues of 1902 were titled Xuchu Nübao 續出女報 (Continual publication of Woman’s Journal ). This xuchu should refer to Nübao’s continuity of the 1898 Nü xuebao rather than of its own alleged “previous issues.” For Chen stated in the first issue (8 May 1902): “This issue is only our debut, so it is not perfect and rather rough. We

37 38 39

Xue, Daiyun lou yiji, Wenji, juan 2, 23b–25a. Lu Cui, “Nüzi aiguo shuo,” Nü xuebao 5 (27 August 1898): 2b. See ibid., 2b–3a.

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expect that the future issues will become better and better.”40 Also in this issue, while reporting on a newly established girls’ school, Chen recollected the Girls’ School established during the 1898 campaign for women’s education.41 In the Xuchu Nübao 2 (6 June 1902), Chen reported two further continual operations following on the 1898 campaign: to reopen the 1898 Nü xuetang under the original superintendent, Shen Ying 沈瑛 (courtesy name Heqing 和卿), and to reestablish the Nü xuehui with the original members as its nucleus. The first meeting of the resumed Nü xuehui was held on 7 May 1902. Twenty women, most of them served at the editorial board of the 1898 Nü xuebao and the faculty of the 1898 Nü xuetang, attended the meeting, along with several daughters of the 1898 reformers. Six men, including Jing Yuanshan, the initiator of the 1898 campaign, were invited to give speeches.42 In his speech Jing recalled that “back to the years of 1897 to 1898, we established the first girls’ school in Shanghai; that was the sprout [of education for women].”43 Shen Ying, in an essay written for this issue, also indicated the 1898 campaign as the predecessor for the present activities. All this made clear that Chen’s 1902–03 Nübao/Nü xuebao was an intentional continuation of the unfulfilled goals of the 1898 founding mothers. Yet Chen’s Xuchu Nübao showed immediate discrepancy from the founding mothers. First of all, all the articles published in the 1898 Nü

40 Chen Xiefen, “Baihua yanshuo de yuangu” 白話演説的緣故 (Why vernacular speeches?), Xuchu Nübao 1 (8 May 1902), the column of “Nübao yanshuo” 女報演説 (Speeches), 2a. 41 “Nüshu shenshao” 女塾甚少 (Girls’ schools are too few), Xuchu Nübao 1 (8 May 1902), the column of “Nübao xinwen” 女報新聞 (News), 3b. Later in the Xuchu Nübao 4 (4 August 1902), Chen reported her visit to this new girls’ school on 12 July 1902 and identified it as “Wuben nüshu” 務本女塾 (Root-Strengthening Girls’ School). Its founders were Wang Peisheng 王培生 and Wu Huaijiu 吳懷疚 (Wu Xin 馨, styled Huaijiu) (?–1919). Their wives served as the superintendents (Chen, “Ji Wuben nü xutang” 記 務本女學堂 [ Report of the Root-Strengthening Girls’ School], the column of “Nübao yanshuo,” 1a–3a). Chen Yiyi, in his acknowledgment of Chen Xiefen’s Nübao/Nü xuebao as the first Chinese periodical for women, also indicated that it was published during 1902–03 (rengui zhijiao 壬癸之交) (“Shenzhou nübao fakanci,” Nülun, 9). 42 See “Jiangkai nü xuetang” 將開女學堂 (Will open a new girls’ school) and “Nü xuehui timing lu” 女學會題名錄 (A member list of the Women’s Learned Society), Xuchu Nübao 2 (6 June 1902), the column of “Nübao xinwen,” 5b–6a. 43 Shanxi longsou 剡溪聾叟 (The Deaf Old Man from the Shan Stream [ Jing Yuanshan]), “Di yici Nü xuehui yanshuo” 第一次女學會演説 (Speech at the first meeting of the Women’s Learned Society), Xuchu Nübao 2 (6 June 1902), the column of “Nü xuehui yanshuo” 女學會演説 (Speeches at the meeting of the Women’s Learned Society), 1b.

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xuebao were written by women, mostly by its all-female editorial board of more than twenty members; each published one or two pieces. Hence the entire stack of the journal offered a forum of multiple female voices. The major essays in Chen’s journal, including twenty-three lunshuo 論説 (expository essays), in classical Chinese, and thirty-six yanshuo 演説 (speeches), in vernacular Chinese, were mostly written by Chen. She alone published eleven lunshuo and twenty-nine yanshuo. Eight other women contributed four lunshuo and seven yanshuo; the remaining eight lunshuo were by men. Chen also reprinted a great number of men’s writings from other periodicals. Thus, although the daughter Nü xuebao had much more space, 50–60 pages in each issue compared with 8 pages in each issue of the mother Nü xuebao, it did not offer opportunities for diversified voices of women. More divergence between the mother and the daughter Nü xuebao lay in the contents. The first two issues of Chen’s Xuchu Nübao still focused on education for women and their equal rights plea—the two primary agendas of the 1898 women reformers. Starting from the third issue (5 June 1902), Chen sharply changed the thematic concerns of the journal. With her yanshuo, “Yaoyou aiguo de xin” 要有愛國的心 (We must embrace patriotism),44 Chen engaged in a patriotic agenda, tying women’s education first and foremost to national strengthening, as she argued: Previously, I did not know why we should love our nation. After I moved in Shanghai, I see foreigners live in our place, yet we Chinese are afraid of them. Why so? People tell me that their nations are stronger than ours. Thus I start looking for ways to strengthen our nation. At first I thought only officials could change China’s weakness. Then I found out that the power of their nations came not from their governments but from the patriotism of the people. Now I understand: if ordinary Chinese people were never patriotic, China would never become strong.45

Chen then placed the responsibility of patriotism on women, saying, “I wish you all would not say something like: if men do not even know what patriotism is, why do we care whether our nation is strong or not? You should know, though, men do not love our nation because we women do not love it.”46 Chen, “Yaoyou aiguo de xin,” Xuchu Nübao 3 (5 July 1902), the column of “Nübao yanshuo,” 1a–2b. 45 Ibid., 2a. 46 Ibid., 2b. 44

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Having blamed women for men’s nonpatriotism, Chen launched a full attack on the cainü tradition, arguing that the knowledgeconstruct for cainü caused women’s indifference about the nation’s destiny. Chen therefore advised women “Mokan xiaoshuo” 莫看小説 (Don’t read xiaoshuo). Using Jinghua yuan 鏡花緣 (Flowers in the mirror) for example, she wrote: [At first,] with extreme admiration, I loved to read it. I envied so much the lives of those talented girls that I wished I could be just like them. Yet where on earth does such a thing exist as the civil examination for women? It was but a fantasy! This fantasy made me waste so much time!47

She also accused Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the red chamber) of causing a young girl’s death, for she was “bewitched” (rumo 入魔) and “poisoned” (shoudu 受毒) by its description of cainü.48 Her general objection to xiaoshuo, however, did not stop her from promoting Western novels, especially the Chahua nü shi 茶花女史 (Biography of Lady Camellias):49 “Although [the novel] also talks about love, it is an engine stimulating our spirit.” To fend off possible criticism about her worship for the West—valorizing foreign novels while despising their Chinese counterparts—she argued: “There is in fact a difference: Reading [Chinese xiaoshuo] leads one to inertia; reading [ Western novels] leads one to action.”50 Chen further elaborated her anti-cainü position in another vernacular essay, “Nü xuetang diyi kecheng yaojin” 女學堂第一課程要緊 (Curriculum weights the most important for girls’ schools). Chen began with a story: a famous scholar raised his daughters with a typical, traditional education of Chinese historical, literary, and philosophical classics. Grown up, these girls became greatly accomplished in literature. Yet their talents were not appreciated by their husbands and in-laws. One of the girls thus died in desolation. Chen then comments: Please, my readers, don’t think that I am advising people not to let their daughters study. I only want you to know that the famous scholar [men-

47 Chen, “Mokan xiaoshuo,” Xuchu Nübao 3 (5 July 1902), the column of “Nübao yanshuo,” 3b. 48 Ibid. 49 Also known as Bali Chahua nü yishi 巴黎茶花女遺事 (The legend of Lady Camellias of Paris), trans. Lin Shu 林紓, from Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas (1824–95), first published in Fuzhou, 1899, by Lin’s own studio Weilu 畏廬 (Hut of Fear). 50 Chen, “Mokan xiaoshuo,” Xuchu Nübao 3 (5 July 1902), the column of “Nübao yanshuo,” 4a.

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tioned in the above story] was stark wrong by teaching his daughters only about history, classics, and poetry. Why? Men and women in this world each have their responsibilities and occupations. They need to go to school for acquiring the capability of fulfilling their duties, not for becoming some female scholars (nü boshi ) or women of talents (nü caizi ). Even for Chinese men, the highest achievements they can manage are but becoming boshi or men of talents (caizi ). What they have learned, however, will be of little use for their future occupations, either a statesman, a farmer, an artisan, or a merchant. This is why our nation has become weak and our race inferior. It is urgent for us to open girls’ schools today, yet the curriculum should include courses for practical use. Make sure our girl students are not affected by Chinese women’s habitual indulgence in poetry and painting, or by Chinese men’s indulgence in the Four Books, the Thirteen Classics, the evidential research (Kaoju), and composition of poetry and prose. Most important, we should educate these girls to embrace patriotism and to strengthen our race. The setup of courses should be able to lead them to fulfill their ambitions. Therefore, the first important course should be hygiene; second, politics and history; and third, geography and math. They may write poetry, but do not take it seriously. They may learn how to paint, but only in the Western style. Do not grind rouge and fondle powder to paint flowers and beauties [in Chinese ways].51

Notably, Chen describes Chinese painting skills using the phrase, “grind rouge and fondle powder” ( yanzhi longfen 研脂弄粉), hence disparaging this artistic style comparing it to that of a woman beautifying her face—decorative and useless. The essay launched a full-scale attack on the Chinese cultural tradition, including learning the classics, poetic composition, and artistic creation. The message is clear: if this tradition cannot even enable Chinese men to empower our nation, it will do much less for Chinese women. In place of cainü, Chen introduced to her readers the concept of nü haojie 女豪傑 (heroine). In the Xuchu Nübao 6 (2 October 1902), Chen reprinted the first scene of a drama, Aiguo nü’er chuanqi 愛國女兒傳奇 (Legend of patriotic girls), originally published in a Japanese periodical. The scene depicts the major female character, Xie Jingqin 謝錦 琴, inviting several friends over to enjoy a “famous Western flower” (Taixi minghua 泰西名花) named after Victoria, Queen of England. Admiration for Queen Victoria’s achievements in strengthening her nation led to their lament over China’s increasing weakness ( yuqu yuxia

51 Chen, “Nü xuetang diyi kecheng yaojin,” Xuchu Nübao 6 (2 October 1902), the column of “Baihuo yanshuo,” 1a–3a.

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愈趨愈下). Xie then argued on women’s responsibility in strengthening China, expressing her concern that “I only fear some poetic sprite,/ to claim herself a heroine,/by composing eight pentasyllabic lines” (還只怕詩思文妖, 五言八句便稱豪). A true heroine should be “capable of carrying a thousand catties of heavy load” (千鈞重任, 肩上輕挑). The scene ends in a chorus: “The Jingwei bird, dashing between Ocean and Heaven, was actually a female./We should make every Chinese household worship heroines./With slim white hands, we shall restore the beauty of our mountains and rivers” (海天精衛原雌鳥, 要博得 震旦家家拜女豪, 願素手纖纖扶得江山好).52 The drama dismisses women’s literary creation in favor of their martial vigor, although it uses ornate literary style to convey the message. This heroic vigor acquired more space in later issues. In Xuchu Nübao 8 (30 November 1902), Chen reprinted two pieces that advocated women’s heroism inspired by patriotism. One was a mobilization speech before a battle by the French heroine Joan of Arc (1412–31), in which she put the sovereignty (zhuquan 主權) of a nation ahead of the lives and properties of its people. As Joan of Arc called upon her fellow country men: Every person is a citizen and therefore represents the sovereignty. Thus, everyone should obey this sovereignty and join the military force to serve the nation. We should spare no effort to defend our nation the same way as protecting our own lives and properties, and to avenge our nation’s humiliation the same way as washing away our own. This is what we people should understand.53

The other one was Liang Qichao’s newly published “Luolan furen zhuan” 羅蘭夫人傳 (Biography of Madame Roland). Liang celebrated Marie-Jeanne Roland (1754–93) as the “mother” of the French Revolution and “the first heroic woman in modern times.” He wrote: Who is Madame Roland? She was born of liberty, and died of liberty. Who is Madame Roland? Liberty was born of her, and she died because of liberty. Who is Madame Roland? She is the mother of Napoleon, the mother of Metternich, the mother of Mazzini, the mother of Kossuth, the mother of Bismarck, and mother of Cavour. In short, all great men of nineteenth-century Europe must regard her as mother; all civilizations

Ai’guo nü’er chuanqi, Xuchu Nübao 6 (2 October 1902), the column of “Nübao fujian” 女報附件 (Appendix), 2b–3a. 53 “Faguo nüzi Zhende yanshuo” 法國女子貞德演説 (A speech by the young French woman Joan of Arc), Xuchu Nübao 8 (30 November 1902): 2a. 52

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of nineteenth-century Europe must regard her as mother. Why is this so? Because the French Revolution is the mother of nineteen-century Europe, and Madame Roland is the mother of the French Revolution.54

Chen’s nationalistic nüjie ideal recruited support primarily from male reformers. From the Xuchu Nübao 8 on, men’s voices brought in a strong nationalistic and heroic tone to the journal. A male writer pennamed Qunchai zhenpu 裙釵真僕 (A Real Servant for Women) reported on a public speech by the Guangdong female reformer, Du Qingchi 杜 清池. He applauded her: Alas! At this moment while our nation is dying, a woman, not a man (literally, a person wearing chignon not braid, and hairpins not an official cap), cries out amid howls of spirits and ghosts, vowing to rescue the nation at the risk of her fragrant body. Who is this person? Isn’t she the returning soul of Joan of Arc . . .? We bearded men should open our eyes and see!55

Such a romantic tone, transporting a woman’s fragrant body from the inner chamber to a scary public space, was echoed by male poets. Jiang Jinghan 江競厈, for instance, dedicated a group of quatrains to Du Qingchi, published also in Xuchu Nübao 8. Two of them read as follows: Diligently, you dare not forget a citizen’s responsibility; Indignation makes you ignore your young, female body. Our great rivers and mountains deserve to have you; Among the anarchists, we see such a person!

兢兢敢墜國民責？

In bloody tears, you summon the soul of the nation,

血淚盈盈喚國魂,

憤憤常忘兒女身。 絕好河山合有分, 虛無政黨見斯人。

54 Liang, “Luolan furen zhuan,” originally published in Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 ( Journal of new people) 17/18 (October 1902), under Liang’s pseudonym Zhongguo zhi xinmin 中國之新民 (A New Chinese Citizen) and the title “Jinshi diyi nüjie Luolan furen zhuan” 近世第一女傑羅蘭夫人傳 (Biography of the most eminent modern heroine, Madame Roland); reprinted in Xuchu Nübao 8 (30 November 1902): 1a–2b, and Xuchu Nübao 9 (30 December 1902): 3a–4b, incomplete. Translation is based on Hu Ying’s Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 172. Liang’s biography of Madame Roland is basically adopted from Tokutomi Roka 德富蘆花 (1868–1927), Sekai kojin meifu kan 世界古今名婦鑑 (Famous world women, past and present); see Xia, Wan-Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo, 192. 55 Qunchai zhenpu, “Ji Du Nüshi yanshuo shi” 記杜女士演説事 (Report on a public speech by Ms. Du), Xuchu Nübao 8 (30 November 1902): 2a.

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誓將慧劍斷奴根。 自由不死民心死, 喜見盧騷現女身。56

Chen’s own soaring voice raised the female heroic tone to its highest scale after the Subao incident. Originally a reform periodical, the Subao became a Republican revolutionary journal after the owner Chen Fan 陳範 (1860–1913), Chen Xiefen’s father, invited Zhang Binglin 章炳麟 (also known as Zhang Taiyan 章太炎) (1869–1936) to be the Editorin-Chief. Their pro-revolutionary articles enraged the Qing court. The Manchu government arrested Zhang Taiyan and four other contributors on 30 June 1903 and closed down the Subao on 7 July 1903.57 Chen Fan and Chen Xiefen fled to Tokyo, where Chen Xiefen published the Nü xuebao 4 (the last extant issue of the journal) in November 1903. Now written under the pseudonym “Xiangyan nüshi” 湘言女史 (Female Historian of the Hunan Dialect),58 Chen composed poems to protest the Manchu government’s brutal persecution of her fellow reformers and revolutionaries. Alas! I miss the six gentlemen; they were beheaded at Firewood Market; I miss Tang Caichang; he was killed on the Han River; I miss Shen Jin; he was beaten to death in a Beijing prison. Why, no struggle yet involves a female, Making the history of bloodshed lack glory for women?!

吁嗟乎, 吾念柴市駢首六君子, 吾念漢江飲刃唐才常, 吾念北京杖死沈漁隱, 何不波及一女子, 59

乃使流血史内女界無輝光。

56 Jiang Jinghan, “Du Du Yuebo nüshi shicao zuoci zengzhi” 讀杜月波女士詩草 作此贈之 (To the female scholar Du Yuebo after reading her poetic drafts), 2 and 3, Xuchu Nübao 8 (30 November 1902), the column of “Tongsheng ji” 同聲集 [ Voices of solidarity], 1a. 57 See Joan Judge, Print and Politics: “Shibao” and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 30; see also Xu Songrong 徐松榮, Weixin pai yu jindai baokan 維新派与近代報刊 (Reformers and near-modern periodicals) (Taiyuan: Shanxi guji chubanshe, 1998), 173–74. 58 Chen Fan and Chen Xiefen were natives of Hunan. 59 Xiangyan nüshi (Chen Xiefen), “Zhang Zou qiu” 章鄒囚 (Imprisoning Zhang [ Taiyan] and Zou [ Rong]), Nü xuebao 4 (1903): 51–52.

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The 1898 female reformers were not unfamiliar with Western heroines such as Joan of Arc and Madame Roland. Yet because of their cainü approach to the education for women, they did not choose these types of women as their exemplars. As Xue clearly pointed out in her “Suggestions”: “Joan of Arc was known to her contemporaries, to later generations, and to the entire world for her military bravery (wuyong). She did not, however, achieve all this because of literary and artistic talents.”60 Written around the same time as Liang’s biography of Madame Roland, Xue’s Waiguo lienü zhuan 外國列女傳 (Biographies of foreign women) also presented Roland’s life sketch much closer to its Western original—a victim rather than the mother of the brutality and violence embroiled in the French Revolution. Xue depicts Roland as an intelligent, hardworking young scholar. Although unwittingly entangled in male politics, she never ceased learning and writing until the last minute: “At the foot of the guillotine, Madame Roland . . . asked for pen and paper, yet the execution was ordered before she could write anything.”61 This symbolic moment offered a revealing response to Madame Roland’s famous last words, “O Liberté, comme on t’a jouée!” (Oh Liberty, how we have abused you!)62 To Xue, it seems, one of the wanton crimes committed in the name of Liberty was to destroy female beauty and literacy, the most tender and refined elements of human life. All that was dictated by the 1898 male reformers but refuted by their female counterparts loomed large in Chen’s 1902–03 Nübao/Nü xuebao. Among them the most highlighted issues included: (1) the valorization

Xue, “Chuangshe Nü xuetang tiaoyi bing xu,” Qiushi bao 9 (1897): 6b. Xue Shaohui and Chen Shoupeng, trans. and eds., Waiguo lienü zhuan (Nanjing: Jingling Jiangchu bianyi zongju, 1906), juan 5, 9a. 62 Austin Dobson, Four Frenchwomen (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1895), 59. This version of Madame Roland’s last words differs from the one quoted in Liang’s “Jinshi diyi nüjie Luolan furen zhuan”: “自由自由, 天下古今几多之罪恶, 假汝之名以行” (Oh Liberty, what crimes under Heaven, past and present, are committed in thy name!), which is clearly rendered from a more popular version: “O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!” (Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!). The authoritative Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition used this latter version, although it quoted Dobson’s Four Frenchwomen as one of its seven references (The Encyclopædia Britannica; A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information, ed. Hugh Chisholm [1866–1924], 11th edn. [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1910–11]), s.v. Madame Roland. I use Dobson’s version because the biography of Madame Roland might be one of Xue’s references, with some close similarities in details, such as: “At the foot of the guillotine, it is said, she asked for pen and paper to write the strange thoughts that were rising in her, but her request was not granted” (58). 60 61

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of patriotism that subordinated women’s issues to the primary concern of nationalism; and (2) the dismissal of the cainü tradition. The two generations of female reformers must have been keenly aware of this sharp discrepancy. Few 1898 women wrote for Chen’s journal. Only one of the contributors to the 1898 Nü xuebao, the previous superintendent of the Girls’ School, Shen Ying, sent in the afore-mentioned essay for Xuchu Nübao 2, and a previous teacher at the Girls’ School, Zhang Jingxian 張靜嫻, published a lunshuo essay in Xuchu Nübao 8 (30 November 1902). Moreover, in 1904, when a girls’ school intended to invite Xue to be its head teacher, Xue responded with the following poem: My learning favors antiquity; Others mostly follow the modern. Tradition and modernity go separate paths, Let me not labor my mind in vain!

吾學本好古, 世人多趣今。 今古不同道, 休勞一片心。63

Her frustration is apparent! III. Some Tentative Explanations of Women Reformers’ Generational Differences Three factors might have accelerated the discrepancy between the mother and daughter reformers: (1) the 1900 Boxer Rebellion and the invasion of the Eight Joint Forces empowered nationalistic discourse; (2) the die-hard disparagement of the cainü tradition under the traditional patriarchy was resurrected under the newly rising nationalistic patriarchy; the conventional cainü versus lienü 列女 (exemplary women) dichotomy was transformed into that between cainü and nüjie; and (3) the influence of Social Darwinism amid Chinese intellectuals’ intention of learning from Japanese experience was sweeping. The first two find thorough illustration in Jiang Zhiyou’s 蔣智由 (courtesy name Guanyun 觀雲) (1865–1929)64 speech at the opening ceremony of the Aiguo nüxuexiao 愛國女學校 (Patriotic Girls’ School),

63 Xue, “Waizi shu yan youren yu yan yu ru Suzhou zhujiang nüxue zoubi dazhi” 外子書言有人欲延余入蘇州主講女學走筆答之 (In reply to my husband upon hearing from him that someone would like to invite me to head a girls’ school in Suzhou), Daiyun lou yiji, Shiji, juan 2, 16b. 64 Jiang was one of the “Three Heroes of Modern Poetry” ( jishi shijie sanjie 近世詩 界三傑) that Liang later acclaimed. See Liang, Yinbing shi shihua 飲冰室詩話 (Poetic talks from Ice-Drinker’s Studio) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1959), 21.

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published in Xuchu Nübao 9 (30 December 1902). In it Jiang recounted China’s humiliation from the recent imperial invasions: .

The 1894 Sino-Japanese War, in which China was defeated by Japan, claimed us a compensation of two hundred million taels of silver; the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, in which China was defeated by the Eight Joint Forces, claimed us four hundred million taels of silver. Then Lüshun is lost to Russia, Jiaozhou lost to Germany, Weihaiwei and Kowloon lost to Britain, and Taiwan lost to Japan. Now even the Yangtze River valley, where we are living, is about to be occupied by foreign powers, no longer our territory!65

Against this political backdrop, Jiang then emphasized that a new course, a course for learning to be heroes, should be installed in the girls’ school. He further theorized the nüjie ideal in relation to patriotism. Jiang generalized a person’s relationship with human communities into three types, namely, shenjia zhuyi 身家主義 (family-ism), guojia zhuyi 國家主義 (nationalism), and shijie zhuyi 世界主義 (globalism). He maintained that China had been a nation whose people knew only to care about their own persons and families, such as in the case of the traditional heroine Mulan. The Europeans and Americans had cared for their nations, such as in the case of Joan of Arc. As for shijie zhuyi, Jiang set up the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) as an example. An American white woman, Beecher Stowe advocated liberty for black slaves from Africa in her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).66 Jiang then continued to say: Therefore, family-ism belongs to the past; globalism belongs to the future; nationalism belongs to the present and is the one we should endeavor to work on. China has emphasized the importance of family-ism; hence since ancient times our women have been filial daughters, virtuous daughters, martyred daughters, and chaste daughters. The will, disposition, and features of these sorts of women are still models for us to follow. But we must expand these models with new knowledge.67

The knowledge that Jiang recommends introducing women to is, as contextualized in Jiang’s speech, the enlightenment of nationalism. He concludes:

65 Jiang Zhiyou, “Aiguo nü xuexiao kaixiao yanshuo” 愛國女學校開校演説 (Speech at the opening ceremony of the Patriotic Girls’ School), Xuchu Nübao 9 (30 December 1902): 3a. 66 See ibid., 1b–2b. 67 Ibid., 2b.

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Linking patriarchal moral codes to nationalism, Jiang modernized the traditional concept lienü to nüjie, in contrast to the “women in idle fictions” that Chen Xiefen clearly identified as cainü. In her study of the definition of new female literacy by the 1898 and post-1898 (male) reformists and overseas women writers, Joan Judge points out that their “radical break with the cultural world of the talented women (cainü)” resulted from the nationalist utilitarianism of this period.69 These reformists’ indictment of cainü culture amounted to an assault on Chinese tradition. As Judge insightfully writes: Women writers of the recent past came to function as a metonym for all that was obsolete and degraded in that tradition, and the passionate offensive against them was an attack on the perceived backwardness of the “old culture.” Since these reformist writers themselves had a complex relationship to that culture—they were trained in its values and bound by its referents—it was perhaps easier for them to speak their critique of it through an indictment of the cainü.70

The comparison between mother and daughter Nü xuebao further finds that these reformists did not reject the Chinese tradition in its entirety. While dismissing the cainü culture, they picked up the lienü tradition that emphasized de, virtue, over cai, talents. The famous male poet Pan Feisheng 潘飛聲 (studio name Duli shanren 獨立山人 [Independent Hermit]) (1858–1934)71 explains this preference more clearly in his poems dedicated to Chen, also published in the Xuchu Nübao 9. One poem states: Liu Xiang compiled biographies of exemplary women; The “Inner Principles” left instructions for the inner chambers.

劉向一編傳列女, 閫言内則有遺經。

Ibid. Judge, “Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898,” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period, eds. Karl and Zarrow, 164. 70 Ibid., 165. 71 Pan later joined the Republican revolutionary poetry club Nanshe 南社 (Southern Society). For his life see Zheng Yimei 鄭逸梅, Nanshe congtan 南社叢談 ( Jotted notes about the Southern Society), qtd. in Qingshi jishi 清詩紀事 (Bibliographic records of Qing poets), ed. Qian Zhonglian 錢仲聯, 22 vols. (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1989), 21:14760–62. 68 69

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誰從末俗維風化? 72

不愧才人牛德貞。

Male reformers’ preference of lienü to cainü was rooted in a dichotomy of women’s learning that had long been fabricated by the Chinese male elites, as summarized by Susan Mann, through a debate between Zhang Xuecheng and Yuan Mei: Women’s learning invoked sharply different reactions from learned men. At one extreme was Zhang Xuecheng’s ideal, a moral instructress whose family roles (whether maternal, wifely, or daughterly) at once desexed her and endowed her with power and autonomy. The other extreme was Yuan Mei’s ideal, a young passionate aesthete whose frail body and sexual naiveté signaled her vulnerability and dependency.73

For these learned men, the “two classical models—the moral instructor and the brilliant prodigy . . . represented competing ideals of erudite womanhood that were impossible to reconcile.”74 Thus, oftentimes the Chinese male elites would consider, in Judge’s words, “the definition and scope of women’s learning as an extension of their own political and cultural concerns,”75 regardless of the fact that learned women themselves might hardly see the two in any conflict.76 In the case of the 1898 campaign for women’s education and its aftermath, male reformers, in their new political concern for nationalism, favored nüjie, the modernized version of lienü in accordance with patriotism, the modernized version of de. Although the mother Nü xuebao contributors, Xue Shaohuo and her colleagues, had argued persuasively that talented women, by incorporating all kinds of up-to-date knowledge, could better serve the nation, their cultural appeal was overwritten by the daughter Nü xuebao’s political ambition. Interestingly, however, the seemingly radical daughter actually followed the nationalistic, patriarchal voice.

72 Duli shanren Pan Feisheng, “Chen Xiefen nüshi jichen Nübao liuce xiti san shou” 陳擷芬女士寄陳女報六冊喜題三首 (The female scholar Chen Xiefen sent me six issues of the Nübao, delighted, I commemorate this with three poems) (3), Xuchu Nübao 9 (30 December 1902), “Tongsheng ji,” 1a. More to be found about Niu Dezhen 牛德貞. 73 Mann, Precious Records, 93. 74 Ibid. 75 Judge, “Reforming the Feminine,” 162. 76 For an example as to how, at the time of Zhang Xuecheng and Yuan Mei, a woman writer considered a brilliant prodigy could also be a moral instructor, see Qian, “Milk and Scent: Works about Women in the Shishuo xinyu genre,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender Early and Imperial in China 1.2 (Fall 1999): 222–30.

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The mother/daughter difference was also caused by increasing Japanese influence. While almost no Japanese references were included in the mother Nü xuebao, writings by Japanese scholars became major theoretic and discursive resources for the daughter Nü xuebao. For instance, throughout the nine issues of the Xuchu Nübao, Chen serially reprinted the Riben ge nü xuexiao zhidu 日本各女學校制度 (Regulations for Japanese girls’ schools) and Naruse Jinzō’s 成瀨仁藏 Nüzi jiaoyu lun 女子教育論 (On education for women). Among these Japanese sources, two long articles by two Japanese women scholars had the strongest influence. The common messages the two shared were primarily Social Darwinism. To be sure, as early as in 1895, Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921) already introduced Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) and Herbert Spencer’s (1820–1903) evolution theories to the Chinese audience. In the four essays he wrote for this purpose, Yan rejected the traditional distinction between a civilized centre and a barbarian periphery. He disengaged man from an imperial cosmology to embed him into a new spatial structure. Culture was abandoned: race became the norm by which group membership was assigned.77

From 1895 on, many reformers “gradually came to adopt a vision of a world order dominated by the white race against which the yellow race had to fight in order to survive.”78 Even so, Social Darwinism did not get much space in the culturally oriented mother Nü xuebao. Neither had it come into full play in the daughter Nü xuebao until Chen’s publication of Shimoda Utako’s 下 田歌子 (1854–1936) “Lun Zhongguo nüxue shi” 論中國女學事 (On education for Chinese women) in the Xuchu Nübao 9. Shimoda, then the superintendent of the Japanese Aristocratic Girls’ School, was arguably the most influential Japanese woman scholar known to Chinese women because of her active involvement in education for Chinese girls. Chen listed her “Regulations for the Aristocratic Girls’ School” at the top of the “Riben ge nü xuexiao zhidu” 日本各女學校制度 (Regulations of Japanese girls’ schools).79 In both Xuchu Nübao 1 and 3, Chen reported that scholar Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉 (1865–1953) and his wife would take

77 Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: Hurst & Company, 1992), 67. 78 Ibid., 69. 79 See “Riben ge nü xuexiao zhidu,” Xuchu Nübao 1 (8 May 1902), the column of “Nübao fanyi” 女報繙譯 (Translations), 1a.

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eight Chinese girls to study in Japan; four of them would attend the Aristocratic Girls’ School and live with Shimoda.80 In Xuchu Nübao 4, Chen reprinted three letters to Shimoda from the Chinese girl students then studying at the Kobe Foreign Language School, each expressing their admiration for Shimoda’s efforts in promoting education for women both in China and in Japan.81 Shimoda’s “On Education for Chinese Women” was originally addressed to male Chinese students who were going back to China. The major part of this speech criticized the narrow approach of China’s reform in recent years: thirty years had passed since China had begun its Westernization, the same time as Japan started its reform. The Chinese government, however, had focused on only trivial matters such as building ships and cannons, neglecting education as the foundation for national strengthening. As a consequence, China cannot recruit her people’s talents in competition with other nations. No way to escape the rules of evolution (tianyan zhi gongli 天演之公例), “the survival of the fittest,” China now can hardly support herself with sufficient human resources. Facing the bully of the West, China does not know what to do, and we onlookers often feel indignation and frustration.82

Shimoda also picked up footbinding as the “extreme evilness” (zhi’e 至惡) of Chinese custom that rendered Chinese women useless and severely damaged China’s progress, for weak women could only deliver weak babies, and weak babies would pass down even weaker descendants. Shimoda then warned: Today’s world is a world of racial competition. The superior wins and the inferior loses; the strong survives and the weak extinguishes. The five continents, as large as they are, cannot tolerate any weak and inferior nations to coexist on earth.83

80 See “Shi ming xiaolian” 是名孝廉 ([Wu Zhihui] is indeed an outstanding scholar), Xuchu Nübao 1 (8 May 1902), the column of “Nübao xinwen,” 4a; and “Nü xuesheng fu Riben” 女學生赴日本 (Girl students went to Japan), Xuchu Nübao 3 (5 July 1902), the column of “Nübao xinwen,” 1a. 81 See “Ge ju jinxin” 各具錦心 (Each [girl] has a refined mind), Xuchu Nübao 4 (4 August 1902), the column of “Nübao xinwen,” 2a–4a. This foreign language school was established by the Chinese and named Tongwen xuexiao 同文學校. It then enrolled eighteen Chinese girl students. The principal was Zhong Ling 鐘齡. See also ibid. 82 Shimoda Utako, “Lun Zhongguo nüxue shi,” Xuchu Nübao 9 (30 December 1902), the column of “Nübao lunshuo,” 1a–b. 83 Ibid., 2a.

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In order to save the Chinese nation, Shimoda strongly suggested that China refurbish its educational system, paying equal attention to men and women. Only then “can we invigorate our Asia and our yellow race, and compete with the white race in the future world.”84 Two male Chinese students translated Shimoda’s speech into Chinese. One was Yang Du 楊度 (1874–1931), an enthusiastic activist who would later participate in every turn of Chinese reforms and revolutions. Their rendering, with clear reference to Yan Fu’s Taiyan lun 天演論 (On evolution), undoubtedly reinforced Shimoda’s compelling tone. Chen further elaborated Shimoda’s nationalistic and racial war approach to education for women by publishing Fukuda Hideko’s 福田 英子 (1865–1927) “Zhi Xue Jingqin shu” 致薛錦琴書 (Letter to Xue Jingqin) in Nü xuebao 1 (27 February 1903). Fukuda wrote: I think today’s competition of human beings does not occur between nations but between the East and the West. Westerners are often strong and bullying, and Easterners humbled and restrained. The West wins and the East is defeated. Such a situation seems to have been decided by Heaven . . . The world is, however, every one’s world, not something belonging only to Westerners. Westerners willfully trample the other peoples’ freedom to set up their authority and offend the other peoples’ rights to boast their valor. By doing this, they have made themselves the dead enemies of Easterners. Today if we want to defeat [ Westerners], we’ll have to look into our weak points and learn from their strong points; we’ll have to use their strong points to fix our weak points, and then use our strong points to overcome their weak points. This is the way of defeating enemies. What they are strong and we are weak at lies precisely in whether women would support their men . . . If we can call on our wives to assist their husbands, our mothers to instruct their sons, and our elder sisters to admonish their younger brothers, inspiring our women to encourage their men, our nation’s spirit will always stand firm, impossible to be frustrated. Why, then, would we be afraid of the white peoples’ invasion? China and Japan have established the nations in the East Ocean and stand on the same ground of sorrow and happiness. Though we are separated by ten thousand li, you and I share the same will and dreams. I only hope that we can support and help each other, so that we can inspire our peoples to enlarge our great Way of Benevolence.85

In her postscript, Chen described Fukuda’s letter as “profoundly sorrowful” (chentong 沉痛) and called upon her readers to transform the indignation toward Western invasions into self-stimulation for achiev84 85

Ibid., 2b. Fukuda Hideko, “Zhi Xue Jingqin shu,” Nü xuebao 1 (27 February 1903): 34–35.

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ing civilization in China. From this issue on, there would be no more mention of the Japanese invasion.86 The racial-war theme in Chen’s Nü xuebao would soon take another turn after the Subao incident. Writing in Japan, under another pseudonym “Chunan nüzi” 楚南女子 (A Girl from the South of Chu), Chen transformed the racial war from that between the white and the yellow races to that between the Han Chinese and the Manchus. In the first article in the Nü xuebao 4 (November 1903), titled “Zhongguo nüzi zhi qiantu” 中國女子之前途 (The future of Chinese women), Chen summarized three features of Chinese women: (1) The mind of perseverance ( jianzhi xin 堅執心), which, having sustained our women to be filial daughters and chaste wives (xiaonü jiefu 孝女節婦) for their families, would be easily transformed into patriotism for our nation; (2) The mind of motherly love (ciai xin 慈愛心), which would enable our women to love our race; and (3) The mind of vengeance (baofu xin 報 復心), about which Chen offers a lengthy elaboration: There is a long-standing disparaging expression about women in China: “A woman’s mind is the most malicious” (zuidu furen xin 最毒婦人心)! I know, however, this malice of a woman’s mind is actually the most beautiful feature (temei xing 特美性) of our women. We Chinese never know what hatred is. We have been suffering daily from foreigners, yet we never know to hate them. Some of us even hurry to meet their demands. Take, for example, the Manchu aliens, they have been eating our products and trampling our land for two hundred and sixty years! We may not blame those who are ignorant about the history. But there are some of us who are clear about what is going on. Only because they have received a bit of wealth and position from [the Manchus], they ignore how the Manchus kill our compatriots and destroy our land every day! As long as his own person is safe, he cannot care less about the difference between aliens and compatriots! [ Worse even,] if he could see an opportunity to gain for himself, he would help the aliens to kill his own compatriots without mercy! Alas! How miserable! How sad! We women, [on the contrary,] once we understand that the Manchus are aliens, who brutalize our compatriots and cede our territory [to foreign invaders], strong hatred will grow in us. We’ll try all our means to fight against them regardless of our own persons. What we call the “malice of a woman’s mind” means this: as soon as we know who is not [our own], we shall fight him to the last minute, making no mistake by treating him now as an enemy and now as a friend.87

See ibid., 35–36. Chunan nüzi [Chen Xiefen], “Zhongguo nüzi zhi qiantu,” Nü xuebao 4 (November 1903): 2–4. 86 87

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This statement combined and radicalized the themes of nationalism, heroism, and racial war, all those that had separated the daughter Nü xuebao from its founding mother. The radicalization of these themes, as displayed in Chen’s argument above, further marked the watershed moment of the daughter Nü xuebao’s transformation from a reform journal into a revolutionary mouthpiece. This change arguably made the determining point for the daughter Nü xuebao to enter modern historiography as the first Chinese women’s journal. Its anti-Manchu momentum certainly suited well Chen Yiyi’s agenda when he inaugurated the Shenzhou nübao in the wake of Qiu Jin’s Republican martyrdom. Chen Yiyi wrote in his “Forward to the Shenzhou nübao”: Why are we publishing the Shenzhou nübao? [ We are publishing this journal] in grand memory of the bloodshed of Ms. Qiu Jin. In the past, during 1902–1903, women in China yet lived in darkness and ignorance. The only light shone through that awakened women to their desolate situation (literally, like a phoenix singing to the morning sun) was Ms. Chen’s Nü xuebao. The birth of this first sprout enabled ensuing herding of cows and sheep. [ Unfortunately, however,] there happened to be the arrest of Zhang [ Taiyan] and Zou [ Rong]. Ms. Chen was forced to flee abroad, not knowing when to turn back. [ This first women’s journal] only lasted a very brief time, like the night blooming cereus. People were shocked by the incident. . . . When Ms. Qiu Jin was in Shanghai, she initiated the Zhongguo nübao, and I contributed some effort to her journal . . . The day she died for the nation, the Zhongguo nübao became history . . . Of course, a mere Zhongguo nübao cannot represent the profundity of Ms. Qiu’s great personality; yet it still conveys her spirit . . . Therefore, I have collected all the leftover embers and created this Shenzhou nübao, in order to fulfill her unfinished mission.88

Clearly, Chen Yiyi was weaving a genealogy of women’s journalism and trying to align it with Qiu Jin’s revolutionary career. For this purpose, Chen Yiyi played an unfilial son but an adoring younger brother who chose his anti-Manchu sister over his mother. Later generations have either neglected these women’s reform effort—so far not even Chen Xiefen’s Nü xuebao has received careful examination, let alone the 1898 Nü xuebao —or, if they care at all, they tend to accept Chen Yiyi’s version of genealogy inasmuch as the daughter Nü xuebao consisted of all that modern Chinese historiography would highlight about women issues. 88

Chen Yiyi, “Shenzhou nübao fakanci,” reprinted in Nülum, 9–10.

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Its anti-cainü attitude echoed 1898 male reformers’ agenda for the education of Chinese women; its racial-war advocacy met the Republican revolutionary goal; and its nationalistic/patriotic/heroic approach to women’s new social roles appealed to all of twentieth-century China. This chapter intends to understand why the mother Nü xuebao was eclipsed by the daughter Nü xuebao amid the contingency of historical, sociopolitical, and cultural circumstances and how the process entailed complicated interactions and intersections of gender, racial, and nationalistic issues. There is no comfortable ground yet upon which to place a value judgment. Thus, at this point, I only want to show rather objectively the multiple discourses that women formed in response to the rapid changes of the time. The analysis of the process, however, does challenge the longstanding binary between radical/revolutionary/progressive women on the one side and conservative/reactionary/regressive women on the other, when we see a mild mother talking in her own voice, while a radical daughter parrots every sentence of her father.

CHAPTER TEN

TIANYI BAO AND HE ZHEN’S VIEWS ON “WOMEN’S REVOLUTION”1 Xia Xiaohong Translated by Hu Ying He Zhen and Tianyi bao On 10 June 1907, a new periodical Tianyi bao 天義報 ( Journal of natural justice) appeared in Tokyo.2 In all nineteen numbers of the journal, except the first one, He Zhen 何震 (1884?–?) was listed as the Chief Editor.3 From the first number onward, numerous articles appear under the name He Yinzhen 何殷震, or as Zhen 震, or Zhenshu 震述 (Zhen’s remarks).4 In these articles there exists a high degree of consistency in terms of focus, and that focus is unwaveringly on women’s liberation (fig. 10.1). Few historical documents survive concerning He Zhen. What we can ascertain is that she was originally named He Ban 何班, courtesy name Zhijian 志劍, from the town of Yizheng 儀征, in Jiangsu 江蘇 Province. “When she was young and living at home, she was given such a strictly sequestered upbringing that she had never even met anyone outside the family.”5 She married Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1884–1919) in 1904, and in 1 A pioneering study of He Zhen in English can be found in Peter Zarrow’s 1988 article “He Zen and Anarcho-Feminism in China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 47.4 (1988): 796–813. This was translated by Ma Xiaoquan and Zhang Jiazhong in Guowai Zhongguo jindaishi yanjiu 國外中國近代史研究 (Studies on modern Chinese history from abroad) 22 (1993): 206–29. The present study presents archival material from nos. 1, 2, and 4 of Tianyi bao, material that is crucial in understanding He Zhen’s thoughts but that was not available for Zarrow’s work. 2 Initially called Tianyi bao ( Journal of natural justice), its name was altered to Tianyi (Natural justice) starting with the third issue. 3 For the first number, Zhen Sheng 震生 is listed as the Chief Editor. In future numbers, He Zhen’s official title appears as Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, which later changed to Editor-in-Chief and Printer. 4 Subsequent references to He Zhen’s publications will be cited by the penname she used for each source, followed by He Zhen in brackets. 5 Mei Hesun 梅鶴孫, Qingxi jiuwu yizheng Liushi wushi xiaoji 青溪舊屋儀征劉氏五世 小記 (Brief genealogical account of five generations of the Liu family in Yizheng), ed. Mei Yingchao 梅英超 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004), 36.

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Figure 10.1. Cover page of Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907).

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short order her thinking was radicalized (fig. 10.2). She then entered Aiguo nüxiao 愛國女校 (Women Patriots’ School), founded by Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940), in Shanghai, and changed her name to Zhen 震 (Thunderclap). At the time, Cai held the belief that “women were particularly suited to assassination,” and the guiding principle of his school was to train “women anarchists.” In terms of curriculum, “advanced students” were taught the history of the French Revolution and the history of Russian anarchists, “with heavy credits concentrated on courses on physics and chemistry as preparation for bomb making.”6 Such a curriculum no doubt further stimulated He Zhen’s growing revolutionary sentiments, as evidenced by her poems of this period, one of which reads: “To sacrifice my life, I don’t mind becoming Sophia [ Perovskaya];/to compete for patriotism, we all emulate Mme Roland.”7 Clearly He Zhen of this period was largely stirred by ethnic nationalism. In 1907, He Zhen went to Japan for a year. In 1910, she was hired for a while as a family tutor by Yan Xishan 閻錫山 (1883–1960). After Liu died in 1919, He Zhen suffered a mental breakdown and eventually ended her life as a nun, known by her convent name Xiaoqi 小 器 (Small vessel). The journal Tianyi bao founded by He Zhen and others was originally meant to be the official publication of a group that called itself Nüzi fuquan hui 女子復權會 (Women’s Rights Recovery Association). The “Tianyi bao qi” 天義報啟 (Announcement for the publication of Tianyi bao), signed by five people, including He Zhen, thus proclaims: Witnessing the current state of affairs, we are greatly troubled and thus we created the Women’s Rights Recovery Association. We intend to engage in the discussion as well as the practical realization of our goal. Concerned that the principle of sexual equality is not widely known, we thus created Tianyi bao as our official journal.8

6 Huang Shihui 黃世暉, Cai Jiemin xiansheng yanxing lu 蔡孑民先生言行錄 (Records of Cai Yuanpei’s words and conducts) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1920), 17. Cai Yuanpei, “Wo zai jiaoyu jie de jingyan” 我在教育界的經驗 (My experience in education), Yuzhou feng 宇宙風 (Wind of the universe) 55 (December 1937): 249. 7 He Zhen, “Zeng Houguan Lin Zongsu nüshi” 贈侯官林宗素女士 (To Ms. Lin Zongsu of Houguan), Jingzhong ribao 警鐘日報 (The Daily of alarm bells) (26 July 1904). 8 He Yinzhen [ He Zhen] et al., “Tianyi bao qi,” Nüzi shijie 女子世界 (Women’s world) 2.6 ( July 1907): frontispiece.

Figure 10.2. He Zhen (front left) and her husband Liu Shipei (front, second from left), with Liu Yazi (1887–1958) (front right) and Su Manshu (1884–1918) (back left), September 1908, Shanghai. Source: Liu Yazi xuanji (Selected works of Liu Yazi) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989).

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“Our goal” is clearly stated under “Zongzhi ji mingming” 宗旨及命名 (Purpose and name) in the “Tianyi bao jianzhang” 天義報簡章 (Bylaws of the Journal of natural justice) that appear in the first number of the journal: “Our purpose is to destroy the old society and practice human equality. In addition to women’s revolution, we also advocate racial, political and economic revolutions. Thus its name Tianyi bao.”9 That its chief concern is women’s revolution (revolution between men and women) is derived from the anarchist ideal of human equality. He Zhen’s premise is that “Unless the old society is destroyed, it is impossible to eliminate class and have a just world; and of all existing classes, the class difference between men and women is most stringently maintained.” “Thus, in order to eliminate class, we must first demolish the one between the sexes.”10 This argument is based on the assumption that the two sexes are the primary categories of human society; for the ultimate social goal of achieving the liberation of all of humanity, the two sexes must first achieve equality and mutual independence. For the anarchists, an ideal point of departure is women’s revolution, for it is a revolution that promises to achieve “natural justice” and “true collective good.” To advocate for “women’s revolution,” He Zhen wrote a series of articles for Tianyi bao, the most important being “Nüzi xuanbu shu” 女 子宣布書 (Women’s declaration), “Nüzi fuchou lun” 女子復仇論 (On women’s revenge), and “Nüzi jiefang wenti” 女子解放問題 (Problems in women’s liberation). In addition, in the journal’s most prominent column “Editorials,” women’s issues consistently received top billing in all but three (7, 11/12, and the last number devoted to translation) of the nineteen numbers. Clearly there was a concerted effort to give priority to topics concerning women. This highly visible focus on gender is what distinguishes Tianyi bao from its counterparts in Western and Japanese anarchist official publications. The present study draws from previously unavailable archival material and addresses the tension between He Zhen’s anarchism and her feminism. Following closely her contributions to Tianyi bao, I focus specifically on two key issues: her uses of the rhetoric of violence and the anarchist concept of absolute equality among all people.

9 10

Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): i. He Yinzhen [ He Zhen] et al., “Tianyi bao qi,” frontispiece.

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In the second number of Tianyi bao published in late June 1907, Shehui zhuyi jiangxi hui 社會主義講習會 (Society for the Study of Socialism) made its first appearance.11 From this point on, the journal began to shift from its status as the official publication for the Women’s Rights Recovery Association to becoming the official publication of the Society for the Study of Socialism. This shift is clearly reflected in the revision of the primary purpose of the journal. The revised “Purpose” in the “Bylaws,” which appears at the front page of the combined volume of numbers 8, 9, and 10, published at the end of October 1907, clearly states: “[Our goals are] to realize internationalism, abolishing all the national and racial distinctions. To revolt against all the authorities of the world. To overthrow all the political systems of the present time. To realize communism. To realize absolute equality of man and Asia [sic] Woman.”12 Taken as a whole, these five purposes give a definitive and complete statement of anarchist belief. What used to be the primary purpose, namely “to advocate women’s revolution,” is now replaced by the purpose “[t]o realize absolute equality of man and woman,” which appears as the last item on the list, a good indication of the position of women’s revolution within anarchist revolution. While it is reasonable to conclude that the later issues of Tianyi bao were no longer intended as the official voice of the Women’s Rights Recovery Association, it is not true that He Zhen gave up the goal of women’s revolution. In fact, there is a definite consistency between the earlier position of advocating for women’s revolution based on the principle of human equality and the later position of demanding “absolute equality of the sexes.” More to the point, at the heart of He Zhen’s women’s revolution is her focus on the practice of equality. When Tianyi bao was newly founded, He Zhen in her high spirit published a series of articles—“Women’s Declaration” and “On Women’s

Its announcement, written by Liu Shipei (Guanghan) 劉師培 (光漢) (1884–1920) and Zhang Ji 張繼 (1882–1947), appears in Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907): inserted page. 12 The revised “Purpose” was published in the combined volume of nos. 8, 9, and 10, in Chinese with an English translation. The English version here is adopted from a revised English translation that appeared again in Tianyi bao 11–12 [combined ] (30 November 1907): ii. The Chinese original for “internationalism” is shijie zhuyi 世界主義. 11

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Revenge”—with statements clearly intending to shock the readers. Three of her pronouncements, for example, are that “men are women’s mortal enemy”; “the only way to control men is through violence”; and “virgins must not be married to widowers.”13 Conventional wisdom regards these pronouncements as “extremist, comical and shallow.”14 In my view, despite their radical rhetoric, the above statements are all predicated on a powerful demand for sexual equality. Take, for example, her argument that “men are women’s mortal enemy.” What follows is that “until the day when women and men enjoy equality, this rancor will persist.”15 At the opening of “On Women’s Revenge,” He Zhen further elaborated on this point: “Alas, do our sisters understand that men are our mortal enemies? Do we know that it has been more than a thousand years since men held women under their control? The ancients say: ‘Mistreatment engenders rancor.’ As no man has not mistreated women, thus no woman does not hold rancor toward men.”16 Clearly, here the basic assumption underneath the rhetoric of enemy and revenge is the fundamental fact of inequality between the sexes. What the rhetoric represents is thus a highly self-conscious revolt against hegemony, in this case, gender oppression. Even though He Zhen’s rhetoric tends toward the extreme when she addresses issues of sexual inequality, in substance, when she speaks of “revenge,” it appears to be synonymous with “the return of natural rights.” What her rhetoric is meant to emphasize is immediate action. For example, when she discusses the issue that “land and property should be owned jointly so that men and women no longer have unequal access to wealth,” the underlying principle is again “equality in every aspect.” She further explains: “If this principle is put to practice, then the natural right of equality is returned to all living beings; and women will have fulfilled their desire for revenge.”17 Her speech given on the occasion

13 Respectively, Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi xuanbu shu,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 3, 6; “Nüzi fuquan hui jianzhang” 女子復權會簡章 (Bylaws of the Women’s Rights Recovery Association), Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): iii [inner side of the back cover]. See also “Nüzi Fuchou lun,” Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907): 1. 14 Jiang Jun 蔣俊 and Li Xingzhi 李興芝, Zhongguo jindai de Wuzhengfu zhuyi sichao 中國近代的無政府主義思潮 (Anarchist thoughts in recent Chinese history) ( Jinan: Shandong renmin, 1991), 65. 15 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi xuanbu shu,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 3. 16 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi fuchou lun,” Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907): 1. 17 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi fuchou lun,” Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907): 3.

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of the founding of the Society for the Study of Socialism further clarifies the semantic content of her word choice. Having declared that the original impulse for Tianyi bao is to “advocate sexual equality on the one hand, and advocate anarchism on the other,” she specifically confirms that “more than a theory, anarchism is a practice.”18 By “revenge,” she means women’s self-conscious revolt against the oppression from male power and their active search for sexual equality. In order to avoid potential misunderstanding because of her radical language, He Zhen especially explains: “What women are fighting for is a matter of universal principle, not a grudge for the crimes men committed against women in the past. The point is not to subjugate men.”19 The ultimate goal of “women’s revenge” is defined as the realization of the “universal principle,” namely, human equality. As a result of this desire for a strenuous promotion of “absolute equality between the sexes,” He Zhen’s rhetoric is frequently colored with violence. So much so that the only two “procedures” actually outlined in the bylaws for the Women’s Rights Recovery Association are “forcible suppression of men” and “forcible intervention with women who voluntarily submit to male oppression.”20 To explain how these principles may be put into practice, her “Women’s Declaration,” for example, lists seven concrete goals that women should fight for, the first being “to practice monogamy.” Thus, “if the man has more than one wife, or secretly keeps concubines, or visits brothels, then his wife has the right to enforce the most extreme measure, that is: to put him to death.” This is clearly meant to shock. Yet the violence is not directed at men alone. For what follows are ideas about women’s self-discipline as well as discipline against women, for example: “If a married woman is willing to submit to a polygamous man, then other women should rise up and kill her. If a man is monogamous but his wife has another lover, then both the male and female community should also rise up and kill her.”21 Such absolute application of equal treatment is perfectly in accord with her principle of absolute equality.

18 Gongquan 公權, “Shehui zhuyi jiangxi hui di yi ci kaihui jishi” 社會主義講 習會第一次開會記事 (Minutes of the first meeting of the Society for the Study of Socialism), Tianyi bao 6 (1 September 1907): 30. 19 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi fuchou lun,” Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907): 3. 20 He Zhen, “Nüzi fuquan hui jianzhang,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): iii. 21 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi xuanbu shu,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 3.

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Another important factor that influenced the violent rhetoric in her discussion of “women’s revolution” is of course the activities of Russian nihilists at the time. Because of her urgent desire for action, He Zhen greatly admired the Russian nihilists (that is, the People’s Will, known collectively as “Xuwu dang” 虛無黨, or nihilists in the late Qing era) who resorted to assassination to eliminate autocratic rulers. For the anarchists greatly “favored action,” and “among all other European countries, anarchism is most prevalent in Russia.”22 Not surprising, then, that He Zhen graphed the idea of using assassination to accelerate revolution onto the demand for sexual equality. Nor is it surprising that violence as a current practice in all revolutions was looked upon fondly. To use her words, “In order to seek sexual equality, it is far from enough for women to simply resist men; they must use violence to force men to conform so that men will have no other choice but [to] treat women as equals.”23 At this point in her argument, violence appears to be the only choice in achieving absolute equality between the sexes. In addition, He Zhen was of the strong belief that women’s liberation must come from “women’s concerted effort” and not from men’s handout. But because He Zhen also believed that the origin of sexbased prejudice is an essential confrontation between the sexes, she harbored profound distrust of men who agreed with and advocated for women’s liberation. In distinguishing between women’s self-liberation and their being passively liberated by men, He Zhen thus tended to stress grave dangers resulting from the latter: If women’s responsibilities are forced on them by men, then it means the loss of their real liberty; if their rights are given by men, then it means that they are totally dependent on men. In name they may be liberated, but in reality the liberating power belongs elsewhere, appropriated by men in this case, and women remain dependent appendages.24

Since He Zhen had determined that men who advocated for women’s liberation were doing it “for their own selfish reasons,” then as long as women sought real self-liberation, they would have to confront men’s self-interest; the logical conclusion is that in such confrontations, violence would be inevitable.

Gongquan, “Shehui zhuyi jiangxi hui di yi ci kaihui jishi,” Tianyi bao 6 (1 September 1907): 30–31. 23 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi xuanbu shu,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 6. 24 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi jiefang wenti,” Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907): 13. 22

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At the time of its publication, what caused controversy was not her sensationalist rhetoric of “women’s revenge” or “using violence to suppress men” but rather her rules regarding marriage. Those who opposed her views were not just Chinese but also Japanese radicals. In the heated exchange between He Zhen and her interlocutors, her concept of “absolute equality of the sexes” became fully developed, a concept that serves as the theoretical foundation of her general program of women’s liberation. It might appear that one particular bylaw for the Women’s Rights Recovery Association is already rather austere: “A virginal woman must not marry a widower.”25 In comparison, the same principle as stated in her “Women’s Declaration” is clearly colored with violence: A virginal man can be matched with a virginal woman. After his wife dies, a man can remarry, but he must marry a widow. After her husband dies, a woman can also remarry, but she must marry a widower. If there is anyone who intends to marry off a virginal woman to a widower, all women must rise up and kill him.26

Such a prescription is not just puzzling today but was at odds with either traditional ethics or new mores at the time. One of its readers was Kotoku Shusui 幸德秋水 (1871–1911), who was enthusiastic for the journal Tianyi bao and especially for He Zhen’s “Women’s Declaration” whose argument he called “a heroic tour de force” in his letter to He Zhen.27 Nonetheless, he was rather nonplussed about the above opinion: “The crucial point about marriage should be love between the man and woman involved. Even when both are virgins, if they do not love each other, they will not make a good marriage. Let’s say there is a pair of a virginal woman and a remarrying man, if they truly love each other, what harm is there to allow them to marry?”28 Here, love is the one and only justification for marriage; indeed, for Kotoku Shusui, who had by then turned to anarchism, love is far more important than marriage. In order to preserve the sanctity of love, it is allowable to eliminate current law or even the institution of family itself: “Once love is taken as the crucial element in a union, then it is not necessary to inquire if such a union is legally sanctioned. In the future society, the

He Zhen, “Nüzi fuquan hui jianzhang,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): iii. Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi xuanbu shu,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 4. 27 Kotoku Shusui 幸德秋水, “Xingde qiushui laihan” 幸德秋水來函 (Letter from Kotoku Shusui), Tianyi bao 3 (10 July 1907): 45. 28 Ibid. 25 26

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family system as we know it, i.e., a household of man and wife, need not be a necessary element.”29 If the household and the institution of marriage can both be eliminated, then voluntary love becomes the one and only reason for any union between a man and woman. Judging by this principle, it is no wonder that Kotoku Shusui suspected that He Zhen’s thinking was implicitly constricted by traditional morality: “If you still think only virgins should marry each other and only widows should marry widowers, then are you not simply repeating the worn-out old moral precept that ‘a virtuous woman does not serve two husbands?’ ”30 Indeed, if we check the first number of Tianyi bao in which He Zhen wrote “Zhen zhi liuri nüxuesheng shu” 震致留日女 學生書 (An open letter to Chinese women students in Japan), Kotoku Shusui is more than justified in his impression. For He Zhen’s letter opens with this point of criticism: lately there were “women students who espouse such theories as free marriage and sexual equality; I rather think it is excessive.” With regard to students who “take matrimonial matters into their own hands, without announcing it to their parents or friends, to the point that within a few years, they have been in and out of several relationships,” He Zhen calls such behavior “barbaric freedom.”31 Yet the same He Zhen also ferociously attacks traditional morality. She astutely reveals the connection between morality and power: “Morality is none other than disguised force,” for It is defined by the powerful in order to protect the interests of the powerful . . . Of the ways the powerful dominates the weak, whatever can be accomplished by force is accomplished by force; and whatever cannot be accomplished by force is accomplished by morality. Domination by force is visible whereas domination by morality is invisible.32

Of all the moral precepts current at the time, He Zhen believes that the precepts of “loyalty and chastity are the most convenient tools for the exercise of authoritarian power.” Following the logic of anarchism: “In order to eradicate the exercise of power in the present world, one must first eradicate morality as it is practiced today. If we discard current morality and law as so much rubbish, then [real] public justice will Ibid., 45–46. Ibid., 45. 31 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Zhen zhi liuri nüxuesheng shu” 震致留日女學生書 (An open letter to Chinese women students in Japan), Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 39–40. 32 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], 道德與權力 (Morality and power), Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 15–16. 29 30

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resurface one day.”33 No doubt then, “the precepts most convenient to authoritarian rule,” namely, “loyalty and chastity,” must be eradicated at the very outset. To review He Zhen’s myriad ideas together, it may be surprising how many contradictions they contain. While some of these contradictions may be attributed to her strict upbringing in traditional “feminine morals,” in rejecting the then popular idea that “as men have multiple wives, women should also have multiple husbands,” what He Zhen instead argues is that For a man to have multiple wives is his great failing . . . for a woman to have multiple husbands, she is no different from a prostitute. Those who advocate for multiple husbands today appear to be fighting against men’s privilege but are in fact bent on gratifying their own desire to act as prostitutes. They are traitors to womenfolk.34

In other words, “men with multiple wives” and “women with multiple partners” are treated in the same way by He Zhen, that is, as “doing injustice” to the other party. Thus her criticism of allowing free rein to women’s desire is very different from the conventional morality of “one woman, one husband.” Instead, her point is to apply the principle of “absolute equality of the sexes” down to the very basic level of human desire. Thus, of the seven important accomplishments that “women’s revolution,” a revolution that aims at the ultimate goal of absolute justice, is to achieve is in the matter of divorce, significantly not phrased in the traditional legal frame of a man’s unilateral abandonment of his wife. Rules concerning divorce are quite precise: “If man and wife are not harmonious, then they may proclaim their divorce. But before such a proclamation is made, the man must not remarry, nor the woman.”35 Clearly, to He Zhen, equality as a basic social principle is far more important than freedom. Thus, when she debated with Kotoku Shusui and Sakai Toshihiko 堺利彥 (1871–1933), another Japanese anarchist who shared Kotoku Shusui’s views whether there should be precise rules governing first and second marriages,36 He Zhen understood her differ-

Ibid., 16. Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi xuanbu shu,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 6. 35 Ibid., 4. 36 In his letter to He Zhen, Kotoku Shusui mentioned that “[he] has a friend Sakai Toshihiko who has dedicated his life to the study of women’s rights. [Kotoku Shusui] would like to invite him along when [He Zhen] comes to discuss such issues.” See “Xingde qiushui laihan,” Tianyi bao 3 (10 July 1907): 46. In the book review section 33 34

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ence from the two Japanese radicals in the following way: “According to Kotoku Shusui and Sakai Toshihiko, the point is for humanity to achieve complete freedom; while for me the most crucial point is for humanity to achieve absolute equality. There is a difference in terms of our basic assumptions.”37 Following from this principle of absolute equality, then, of course, “only a virginal man may marry a virginal woman, and a virginal woman must not marry a widower.” Indeed, the difference between Kotoku Shusui and He Zhen (together with Liu Shipei) is not limited to gender issues. In the Japanese context, the theory that Kotoku Shusui and Sakai Toshihiko espoused is liberal socialism,38 whereas the brand of anarchism that Liu Shipei and He Zhen were enamored of is based on the key concept of human equality. Thus Liu Shipei believed that “For humanity to reach happiness, the utmost thing is to achieve equal rights.” And “in order to achieve equal rights among all people, it is acceptable to put a limit on individual freedom.” Liu Shipei calls this principle “our fundamental assumption.”39 To privilege equality over freedom is thus the unique characteristic of Liu Shipei’s and He Zhen’s anarchism. With this larger context in mind, it is not difficult to see why He Zhen was so opposed to the idea of hunyin ziyou 婚姻自由 (free marriage). “Free marriage” and “multiple divorces” to He Zhen all belong to the kind of individual rights that should be suppressed because their practice is premised on the impingement of other people’s equal rights. Even among late Qing anarchists, such absolute respect of equality, to the extent of rejecting freedom, makes its advocators a species onto themselves. From the perspective of intellectual history, He Zhen’s insistence on “absolute equality between the sexes” as the foundational principle of “women’s liberation” has special significance. In terms of practicality, however, her “absolute equality” had little chance of being realized. Since individual difference cannot be eliminated, the extreme formulation

of the same volume, Sakai Toshihiko’s newly published monograph Fujinmondai 婦人 問題 (The women question) (Tokyo, 1907) was highly recommended. 37 These notes from He Zhen are appendixed to “Letter from Kotoku Shusui.” See note 36 above. 38 Furuo 扶弱, “Zhu Riben shehui dang zhi fenlie” 祝日本社會党之分裂 (In celebration of the breakup of the Japanese Socialist Party), Tianyi bao 8–10 [combined] (30 October 1907): 60. 39 Shenshu 申叔 [ Liu Shipei], “Wu zhengfu zhuyi zhi pingdeng guan” 無政府主義 之平等觀 (The concept of equality in anarchism), Tianyi bao 4 ( July 1907): 7.

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of absolute equality must remain an academic concept. Still more importantly, even if such a concept were to be enforced in social practice, it would create new forms of inequality. Because difference exists absolutely in reality, He Zhen could only focus her attention on formal rather than actual equality. Thus the formal equality of “only virginal man for virginal woman” may, in fact, negate the actual equality of “love as the crucial element in sexual union.” Despite the above criticism, I would still maintain that given the extraordinarily unequal society of the late Qing period, even such an extreme formulation of equality as this was not excessive. To Topple Government and Suppress Male Dominance To compare He Zhen’s views with opinions expressed in the many periodicals devoted to women at the time is to realize that, unlike most who focused on such topical issues of footbinding and women’s education, her approach was considerably more elevated, her conception of women’s liberation far more thoroughgoing. This thoroughgoingness is no doubt a direct result of her dedication to anarchist theory. The German socialist August Bebel (1840–1913) in his 1879 Women and Socialism already proclaimed that, within the current system of nation-states, it is not possible to eliminate sexual inequality. Thus, he believed that the goal of socialists “must not remain merely on the level of bourgeois women’s liberation, namely, the search for equal rights within the confines of extant nation state and social organization. What we seek is the elimination of all obstacles within a system that allows some people to be subordinate to others.” Thus, “the current forms of government and social organization must be fundamentally changed.”40 He Zhen, in fact, goes one step further than Bebel, for she had by then accepted the more radical anarchism as opposed to Bebel’s socialism. Thus, for her, the point is no longer the reformation of “government and social organization” but their complete elimination. In other words, after admitting that it is impossible to achieve human equality under the current social conditions, He Zhen takes the elimination of government as the only guarantee of absolute sexual equality.

40 August Bebel, Women and Socialism, trans. into Chinese by Shen Duanxian 沈端先, Furen yu shehui zhuyi 婦人與社會主義 (Beijing: Sanlian, 1955), 4–6.

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According to anarchism, “the state is the origin of all social evils.”41 This is because As long as there is a state, there must be governing bodies; and these governing bodies are where power is concentrated. As long as there are governing bodies, there must be people staffing them, and thus these people will by necessity acquire special privileges. Thus the state is the origin of human inequality.42

In order to “realize absolute equality between the sexes,” by this logic, the state must first be eliminated. This basic idea was already clear when He Zhen first founded Tianyi bao. In her article “On Women’s Revenge,” He Zhen passionately declares: “Our ultimate goal is to eliminate government altogether. Once government is no longer, then all men are equal and all women are equal, and men and women are equal. Is not this state a state of true justice for humanity?”43 It is clear here that the elimination of government is considered the absolute and only necessary condition for the realization of the real equal rights between men and women. Compared with other revolutionary theories, a striking feature of anarchism is its idealistic insistence on the absolute negation of personal interests, its insistence on the purity of revolutionary means and ends. This is also the chief reason that He Zhen and Liu Shipei were dedicated believers of anarchism: “We believe that the ultimate goal of the present revolution must be the abolition of the state. Thus everyone would have to realize that at the end of the revolution there is nothing to be gained personally. Following this realization, if people persist in par44 ticipating in revolution, then their sincerity can be ascertained.” Furthermore, according to He Zhen and Liu Shipei, “The abolition of the state naturally encompasses racial, political and economic revolutions”; thus the abolition of the state has all the advantages of other revolutions without any of their ills. To He Zhen and Liu Shipei, such an allencompassing revolution, pure and thorough, had the enormous appeal of accomplishing all goals with one strike: “Instead of going through

41 Zhida 志達, “Zhengfuzhe wan’e zhi yuan ye” 政府者萬惡之源也 (The state is the origin of all social evils), Tianyi bao 3 (10 July 1907): 33. 42 Shenshu [ Liu Shipei], “Wu zhengfu zhuyi zhi pingdeng guan,” Tianyi bao 5 (10 August 1907): 18. 43 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi fuchou lun,” Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907): 3. 44 He Zhen and Liu Shipei, “Lun zhongzu geming yu wuzhengfu geming zhi deshi” 論種族革命與無政府革命之得失 (On the gains and losses of racial revolution versus anarchist revolution), Tianyi bao 6 (1 September 1907): 19.

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several revolutions and then reach the state of anarchism, it would be much more efficient to realize anarchism immediately after the first revolution, which has the advantage of preserving many lives.”45 Thus, sexual revolution can also be encompassed within the anarchist revolution, and its ultimate goal can be reached at the time of the anarchist revolution. He Zhen, who describes herself as “an agnostic toward all schools of learning but a pious believer of anarchism,”46 thus left on her theory of women’s revolution the heavy imprint of anarchism: In our history of several thousand years, we have a world of human government, of hierarchies, and thus of male domination. As we seek to correct it today, we must abolish government and practice human equality and thus make the world jointly owned by men and women. To reach this goal, we must start with women’s revolution.47

Even though her theory may be traced to the liberalism of John Stuart Mill’s (1806–73) Subjection of Women (1869) and Herbert Spencer’s (1820–1903) work on women’s rights, both translated by Ma Junwu 馬 君武 (1881–1940), that her ultimate goal is the abolition of state and government makes it fundamentally different from all other feminist theories of the time.48 Influenced by Ma Junwu’s translations of Western feminist theories, many radical intellectuals at the time considered it their responsibility to be vocal advocators of “women’s rights,” intellectuals such as Jin Tianhe 金天翮 (1874–1947), Liu Yazi 柳亞子(1887–1958), and Ding Zuyin 丁祖蔭 (1871–1930). In their presentations, however, women’s rights were inevitably connected with human rights. For example, in “Nüzi jiatin geming shuo” 女子家庭革命說 (Women’s revolution in the family), Ding Zuyin makes the following comparison: “Political revolution means the struggle for the freedom of all citizens; family revolution means the struggle for the freedom of individual citizens. Their goals are the same.”49 Thus their advocacy of women’s revolution was rooted in their interest in political or racial revolution. The Ibid. Tianyi bao 6 (1 September 1907): 20; and 7 (15 September 1907): 22. Gongquan, 30. 47 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi jiefang wenti,” Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907): 5. 48 Ma Junwu’s 馬君武 (1881–1940) translations of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, Herbert Spencer’s work on women’s rights, and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) were printed under one cover and published by Shaonian Zhongguo xuehui 少年 中國學會 (Young China Association) in 1902. The second chapter of Ma’s introduction to Mill’s work, separately entitled “Nüquan shuo” 女權說 (On women’s rights), was published in Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 (New citizen’s journal) 30 (April 1903): 9–14. 49 Chuwo 初我 [Ding Zuyin], “Nüzi jiating geming shuo,” Nüzi shijie 4 (April 1904): 2. 45 46

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struggle for women’s rights was conceived of as a core component within the theory of “natural rights.” Thus Jin Tianhe and many others preferred to call it “revolution for women’s rights.” Liu Yazi further named the twentieth century “the century for women’s rights,” while Ding Zuyin called the twentieth century “the realm for the struggle for women’s rights.” Both of these statements came from Jin Tianhe’s proclamation that the “twentieth century is the time for revolution in women’s rights.” This is also directly connected with another theory that Ma Junwu expounded, namely, that modern European civilization is a direct product of “two revolutions,” the revolution between royalist and democrat and between men and women.50 Clearly, the late Qing “revolution for women’s rights” is modeled on women’s movements in the West. Admittedly, in her early discussion of “women’s revolution,” He Zhen also used the term “women’s rights” as a counterpoint to male dominance. One example of her rhetorical flourish is at the end of her “Women’s Proclamation” when she declares “If we succeed, we will have acquired women’s universal rights; if we fail, we will then perish with our enemy; never again will we be under the yoke of men.”51 Yet, because she was so wary of the implication of any mention of “rights,” even in the midst of her passionate war cry, He Zhen still took care to make the following distinction: “It is not that we women want to fight for extra rights and privileges but that all rights are naturally given, for men and women alike. As men and women are equally human, if they are not equal then it is not just, then it is against nature.”52 Thus, her cautious employment of the term “women’s rights,” a term that she stopped using altogether later on, is a direct indication of the firmness of her belief in anarchism. After all, any rights will result in some form of inequality, including “women’s rights.” Perhaps the most fully developed expression of He Zhen’s thoughts may be found in her article “Problems in Women’s Liberation,” published in Tianyi bao in September 1907. Her basic argument is crystallized in the following goal: “To overthrow the state so as to abolish male

50 Ni Shouzhi 倪壽芝 [ Liu Yazi], “Lili bucanzu hui yuanqi” 黎裡不纏足會緣起 (The origin of the anti-footbinding society of Lili), Nüzi shijie 3 (March 1904): 70; Chuwo, “Nüzi jiatin geming shuo,” Nüzi shijie 4 (April 1904): 1. Jin Yi 金一 [ Jin Tianhe], Nüjie zhong 女界鐘 (Women’s bell) (1903): 56; Ma Junwu, “Mile Yuehan zhi xueshuo” 彌勒 約翰之學說 ( John Stuart Mill’s thought), Xinmin congbao 30 (April 1903): 9. 51 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi xuanbu shu,” Tianyi bao 1 (10 June, 1907): 6–7. 52 Ibid., 5.

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domination.” Her logic is that if male domination must be abolished, there is no need to fight for women’s domination. Compared with her views as expressed in the June article “Women’s Declaration,” her anarchist position became still more thoroughgoing: Thus for women of today, rather than fighting with men for their rights, it is much better to overthrow the state, and thus to force men to give up their privileges [unequal rights], and thus to be equal with women. Thus the world will no longer have women who are dominated nor men who are dominated. Only thus can women be liberated; only thus can fundamental reform be accomplished.53

Because her assumption was that the abolition of the state was the fundamental requirement for women’s liberation, she was rather critical of various proposals on women’s liberation that were being made at the time in China. She accused men who advocated for women’s education of “liberating women for their own comfort.” For those who advocated the notion that “family education is the foundation of all education,” she argued that “their point is simply that educated women manage the household better than uneducated women, and that educated women teach their children better than uneducated women.” Women who received this sort of education could only become better slaves for men. For those who advocated women’s economic independence, she accused them of “liberating women because they can profit from it” by forcing women to share the burden of supporting the family. These examples are to demonstrate that men liberate women for their own selfish interests; thus He Zhen unsparingly condemned this sort of behavior because “they only appear to help women to become independent and to enlighten them into modern civilization; in reality, they give women nothing but the empty word of liberation, while forcing them into increasing hardship.” What women gain from this sort of liberation is not happiness but suffering. This is followed by a still stronger accusation: “There are those men these days who publish articles and books to advocate for women’s liberation, out of a sense of curiosity or for the love of notoriety. It is not out of real care for

53 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Furen jiefang wenti,” Tianyi bao 8–10 [combined] (30 October 1907): 6. When this article’s first installment appeared in Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907), the Chinese term for women was nüzi 女子, while later installments the term was furen 婦人.

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women.”54 For men who devoted themselves to women’s rights, this criticism must have appeared greatly unjust. Even on the issue of women’s suffrage, an issue that was only beginning to gain support in the West and admired from a distance in China, the early He Zhen more or less chimed in: “It is a great shame on women that they do not have voting rights. It is women’s natural duty to struggle for suffrage.”55 The later He Zhen, however, stuck firmly to the anarchist principle that “congressional system is the worst of all evils in the world”56 and exclaimed that “unless there is fundamental reform whereby every person becomes truly equal, I would rather give up women’s voting rights. For only a small number of women will benefit from voting rights in any case.”57 In her view, then, as some women acquire voting rights, there is then new inequality among women: “The few women who are in a position to participate in government will then dominate over the majority of women who are not in a position to do so. Then not only will there be inequality between men and women, there will also be increasing inequality among women.”58 In contrast, here is He Zhen’s ideal: “What we call equality between men and women is not just the abolition of male dominance, but also the abolition of men’s dominance over other men, and women’s dominance over other women. Thus all will be equal.”59 In order to realize equality among all people, He Zhen thus demands that “women who are dedicated to the struggling for suffrage” should transfer their energy toward “the struggle for the abolition of the state.”60 Once again, the anarchist goal is privileged as the be-all-end-all program. It is important to understand that He Zhen was not the only one making such critical reflection on women’s education and women’s rights, as a cohort of core contributors to Tianyi bao shared the basic tenet of her criticism. Zhida 志達, for one, also claimed that “today’s so-called women’s education is none other than education for slaves,” for “it either forces women to become family slaves or forces them to become the nation’s slaves.” The former accusation is not hard to understand, the Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi jiefang wenti,” Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907): 11–14. Zhida, “Bei zai nanquan zhi zhuanzhi” 悲哉男權之專制 (The tragedy of male domination), Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 24. 56 Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Furen jiefang wenti,” Tianyi bao 8–10 [combined ] (30 October 1907): 1. 57 Ibid., 5. 58 Ibid., 6. 59 Ibid., 2. 60 Ibid., 6. 54

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latter is derived from the idea that “if women are only encouraged to be patriotic, then they are being led to become the nation’s slaves.”61 This line of logic is characteristic of anarchist thinking. On the issue of rejecting women’s suffrage, in the same issue of Tianyi bao in which He Zhen’s article “Problems in Women’s Liberation” is being serialized, there is also an article by Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1968), at the end of which Zhou explicitly states: Women’s suffrage is a major topic these days. Yet if you fight for suffrage, then that means you already recognize the state and government. The principle of our society is the abolition of the state and the abolition of men’s special privileges, which will lead to the equality between the sexes. Our aim is not merely women’s suffrage.62

Clearly, this article closely anticipates He Zhen’s argument of “abolition of the state and abolition of men’s rights,” which would be serialized in the next issue of the journal. It should also be mentioned that in the realignment of He Zhen’s thinking, two articles by Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) played a significant role, “Da Riben baozhi xinwenshe shu” 答日本報知新聞社書 (Reply to Japanese Hōchi News) and “Zhi Zhinaren shu” 致支那人書 (Letter to a Chinese).63 In the former article, an excerpt of which was translated by Liu Shipei, Tolstoy repeatedly emphasized that the “Dao in ancient Chinese philosophy is the fundamental humanistic principle, and is similar in spirit to the principle of freedom.” Thus Western Europeans who lived under capitalism “have completely lost their freedom,” whereas the people of ancient China “enjoyed a small degree of freedom.”64 The fundamental way for Europeans who “wanted to 61 Zhida, “Nüzi jiaoyu wenti” 女子教育問題 (Problems in women’s education), Tianyi bao 13–14 [combined] (30 December 1907): 1–2. 62 Duying 獨應 (Zhou Zuoren 周作人), “Jizhe zhi” 記者識 (Reporter’s comments), appendix to “Funü xuanju quan wenti” 婦女選舉權問題 (Problems of women’s suffrage), Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907): 40. 63 Qu Fei 去非 [ Liu Shipei], trans., “Jieyi E Duerside ‘Da Riben baozhi xinwenshe shu’ ” 節譯俄杜爾斯德答日本報知新聞社書 (Selected translation from Tolstoy’s “Reply to Japanese Höchi News”), Tianyi bao 5 (10 August 1907): 35–38. The “Reporter’s Comments” that appear after the news article claims that “This letter by Tolstoy and his ‘Letter to a Chinese’ [Zhi Zhinaren shu] mutually elaborate each other” (38). The selected translation of “E Duersituo zhi Zhinaren shu” 俄杜爾斯托致支那人書 (Tolstoy’s letter to a Chinese), trans. Chen Chu 忱芻, appears in Tianyi bao 11–12 [combined] (30 November 1907): 51–55; the full translation appears in Tianyi bao 16–19 [combined issue] (15 March 1908): 73–78. 64 Qu Fei [ Liu Shipei], trans., “Jieyi E Duerside ‘Da Riben baozhi xinwenshe shu,’ ” Tianyi bao 5 (10 August 1907): 35.

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escape from authoritarian rule and seek freedom” was to believe in “the natural Dao” that “was revealed in the teachings of Chinese Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism.”65 While in China, because of the recent history of imperialist pressure from the West, people “tried to reform the government” by introducing Western parliamentary systems and industrial policies. This to Tolstoy was “the worst possible route,” as it would increase the difficulty of escaping from “authoritarian rule.”66 Greatly influenced by Tolstoy’s argument, Liu Shipei and He Zhen coauthored an article “Lun zhongzu geming yu wuzhengfu geming zhi deshi” 論種族革命與無政府革命之得失 (On the pros and cons of racial revolution versus anarchist revolution), in which Tolstoy’s views are not only directly referenced but also provide the starting point for their claims. Thus Liu Shipei and He Zhen claim: “It is because of the corruption and inaptitude of its current government that the Chinese people have been able to somewhat escape its control and thus enjoy a small degree of freedom . . . Thus the political custom of present day China is closest to anarchism.”67 Following this logic, the Chinese people should only maintain the traditional social system rather than engaging in reform to strengthen it because “to overthrow a laissezfaire government is easy, but to overthrow an intervening government is much more difficult. And for people who have been free, to overthrow a government is easy; for people who have been under the yoke of an intervening government, to overthrow it is much more difficult.”68 Thus, Liu Shipei and He Zhen believe that “For China to practice anarchism is not difficult. And China should therefore be the first to practice it among all the countries of the world.”69 Based on the same logic, He Zhen turned away from her former position of critiquing sexual inequality that resulted from traditional Chinese politics and ritual practice to her later position of critiquing the practitioners of women’s liberation, including those who advocated for women’s education and women’s equal rights.70 As her position became more extreme, her argument also became more forced and Ibid., 38. Ibid., 37–38. 67 He Zhen and Liu Shipei, “Lun zhongzu geming yu wuzhengfu geming zhi deshi,” Tianyi bao 6 (1 September 1907): 14. 68 Ibid., Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907): 21. 69 Ibid., Tianyi bao 6 (1 September 1907): 15. 70 Jin Yi [ Jin Tianhe], “Nüzi shijie fakanci” 女子世界發刊辭 (Publication announcement of the Women’s world ), Nüzi shijie 1 ( January 1904): 2. 65 66

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further divorced from reality. In an extreme example, she came to claim that “In the past, men were considered superior and women inferior. In reality men were suffering and women were enjoying themselves. Now women have come to share men’s suffering, and men to share women’s joy, all the while probing into the exact meaning of a proper womanhood, without any respect for women’s dignity.”71 If there is no more need for the struggle for educational rights, or for professional rights and political participation, then according to He Zhen, the only thing left for women is “assassination” because it is the first duty in practicing anarchism.72 Thus emptied out of every concrete concern, “women’s revolution” becomes an abstraction if only for “the storage bin.” What He Zhen hoped for, that is, the immediate entry into the anarchist world of absolute sexual equality, became a very distant goal. Thus, He Zhen’s unconditional surrender to anarchist theory inadvertently removes the practical foundation of her “women’s revolution.”

71 72

Zhenshu [ He Zhen], “Nüzi jiefang wenti,” Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907): 13. Gongquan, 31.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MALE GAZE/FEMALE STUDENTS: LATE QING EDUCATION FOR WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN BEIJING PICTORIALS, 1902–08 Chen Pingyuan Translated by Anne S. Chao The reforms of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China proceeded unevenly. Prior to 1900, Beijing lagged behind Shanghai in two important areas of change: the creation of new-style pictorials (huabao 畫報) designed to promote “enlightenment” and the development of women’s education. But the occupation of the Qing capital in 1900 by foreign powers during the Boxer Rebellion marked a turning point in the consciousness of both Beijing citizens and the throne. From above, the Qing government inaugurated a series of sweeping reforms in the period from 1901 onward known as the “New Administrative Policies” (Xinzheng 新政), while from below, scholars at the capital sought ways of reinvigorating Chinese political, social, and especially educational life. Peng Yizhong’s 彭翼仲 anguished outcry was emblematic of the prevailing sentiment among Beijing’s scholarly elite: “I resigned my official position to start a pictorial because I could no longer bear to witness the deterioration of my country” (Qimeng huabao 蒙畫報) (1902).1 In the same spirit, Shen Jun 沈钧 and his wife established the Yujiao nü xuetang 豫教女學堂 (Girls’ School for Inculcating Proper Behavior), hoping to revive Chinese learning while helping to strengthen the state. Thus, although the people of Beijing were introduced to the “New Learning” later than their Shanghai counterparts, “once [the process of enlightenment] began, there was no slowing it down, and compared to the Southerners, their [ Beijing citizens’] actions were straightforward and clear.”2 1 Guan Yixian 管翼賢, “Beijing baozhi xiaoshi” 北京報紙小史 (A brief history of journalism in Beijing), in Zhongguo jindai baokan fazhan gaikuang 中國近代報刊發展概况 (A summary of the development of journalism in modern China), eds. Yang Guanghui 杨光輝 et al. (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1986), 402. 2 Peng Yizhong, “Beifang ren de rexue jiaoduo” 北方人的熱血較多 (Northerners have more hot blood), in Jinghua ribao 京話日報 (15 May 1906).

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Residence at Beijing presented special challenges to progressiveminded individuals. Unlike some of their brethren, who sought refuge abroad or in foreign settlements where they could heap scathing criticism on the Emperor with impunity, intellectuals at the capital found that proximity to the Son of Heaven constrained their speech and movement. For this reason, among others, the “enlightenment thoughts” of Beijing intellectuals seem relatively tame by comparison to the dramatic pronouncements and revolutionary activities of Chinese intellectuals in safer havens. More often than not, activists in the capital chose reform over revolution. It is no wonder, then, that scholars of late Qing intellectual history have often overlooked or downplayed the new developments taking place in post-Boxer Beijing, focusing instead on the more dramatic events that occurred overseas or in treaty ports. This chapter discusses one important facet of reform in the capital: the more or less simultaneous development of pictorial publications and girls’ schools after 1900. What was the relationship between these two components of the New Learning, and what does an examination of the two tell us about educational and gender issues in late Qing China? Gender-based novels of the period, such as Siqi zhai’s 思綺齋 (penname of Zhan Kai 詹塏) (fl. 1907) Nüzi quan 女子權 (Women’s rights) (1907) and Zhongguo xin nühao 中國新女豪 (China’s new heroines) (1907), had great appeal to female students in the capital, with their descriptions of women who attended high school in Beijing, traveled to America, studied in Japan, and returned to establish training schools for women laborers.3 But for a less dramatic and more reliable source of information on women’s schools and their students, we may turn to pictorials, which were designed expressly for Chinese women and children. Pictorials and Women’s Education Due to a commonly shared focus on women’s daily lives and their fates, the pictorials and the campaign for women’s education formed a natural alliance. Before getting into a detailed discussion, we need to give a brief introduction to the evolution of women’s education and the founding of pictorials in late Qing Beijing.

3 For a detailed discussion of the late Qing novelist Siqi zhai and his works, see Ellen Widmer, “Inflecting Gender: Zhan Kai/Siqi Zhai’s ‘New Novels’ and Courtesan Sketches,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 136–68.

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A study of women’s education in the late Qing period must take into consideration both public opinion and government policies of the period. While the former was generally supportive of women’s educational reforms, the latter evolved more hesitantly. The negotiation between the two thus shaped the fate of women’s education in Beijing. The Ministry of Education’s regulations concerning girls’ elementary schools and women’s normal colleges, issued in March 1907, was widely recognized as the official incorporation of women’s education in the Qing educational system. This monumental decision culminated from a series of prior court decisions. On 13 January 1904, Rongqing 榮慶 (1859–1917), Zhang Baixi 張百熙 (1847–1907), and Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837–1909) presented to the court the “Zouding mengyang yuan zhangcheng ji jiating jiaoyu fa zhangcheng” 奏定蒙養院章程 及家庭教育法章程 (Memorial to create regulations for kindergartens and family education). While restricting women to education pertinent only to “family management and teaching of children,” it nevertheless represented a breakthrough in the establishment of girls’ schools in Beijing.4 As a result, the systematic planning implied in the 1907 regulations by the Ministry of Education was disingenuous. In truth, there was strong opposition against women’s education at the local official level, and the court gingerly took it one step at a time.5 Therefore, most scholars would concur that 1905, not 1907, marked the beginning of women’s education in Beijing. According to “Diyici jiaoyu tongji tubiao” 第一次教育統計圖表 (First educational survey) conducted in 1907 by the Ministry of Education, a total of twelve girls’ schools emerged in Beijing by the fall of 1906, with 22 administrators, 59 teachers, and 661 students.6 The educational column in the fourth issue of the Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌

4 Rongqing, Zhang Baixi, and Zhang Zhidong, “Zouding mengyang yuan zhangcheng ji jiating jiaoyu fa zhangcheng,” in Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji) 中國近 代學制史料 (第二輯) (Historical materials of modern Chinese educational system [second collection]), ed. Zhu Youhuan 朱有瓛, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Huadong Shifan Daxue chubanshe, 1989), 2:573. 5 Because of strong disputes on this issue, officials in Guangdong, Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxu provinces even proposed to dismantle women’s schools before Rong Qing et al. presented this memorial; see Zhu Youhuan, ed., Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji), 2:650–57. 6 See Zhu Youhuan, ed., Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji), 2:649; Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao 近代中國女權運動史料 (Historical materials of women’s rights movement in modern China), eds. Li Youning 李又寧 and Zhang Yufa 張玉法, 2 vols. (Taipei: Longwen chubangongsi, 1995), 2:1073.

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(Eastern miscellany) (1907) counted a total of 42 public colleges, 35 public elementary and high schools, and 7 private girls’ schools, with about 11,500 graduates.7 These reports and the findings of Hattori Unokichi 服部宇之吉 (1867–1939), provost of Beijing Imperial University, showed that the following girls’ schools had been established in Beijing by 1907: (1) Yujiao nü xuetang 豫教女學堂, established on 1 August 1905, by Shen Jun, had 6 teachers, 5 administrators, and 50 students. It drew students from the middle and upper classes. All courses were taught in Japanese, except for one on Chinese language and literature. (2) Zhennuo nü xuetang 振懦女學堂 (Girls’ School of Self-Strengthening), established on 1 August 1905, by Chongfang 崇芳, had 6 teachers, 3 administrators, and 60 students. (3) Shufan nü xuetang 淑範女學堂 (Girls’ School of Gentle Models), established on 5 August 1905, by Ying Xianqi 英顯齊 and Wen Shiquan 文時泉, had 5 teachers, 2 administrators, and 80 students, and it was tuition free. (4) Nüxue Chuanxi suo 女學傳習所 (The Training Schools for Women) was founded by Jiang Shaoquan 江紹銓 on three campuses: innercity, outer-city and central-city; the earliest was established in 1905. Its outer-city campus, established in 1906, had about 140 students and was reported to have “the best school structure, the most thorough curriculum, the most prestigious faculty, and the biggest enrollment in all of Beijing.”8 The gates of all three campuses were inscribed by famous women poets and artists: outer-city, Wu Zhiying 芝瑛; inner-city, Lü Bicheng 吕碧城; central-city, Sun Songzhao 孫誦昭.9 (5) Yiyi nü xuetang 譯藝女學堂 (Girls’ School of Language Translation), established on 11 March 1906, by Xie Zuyuan 谢祖沅, had 5 teachers, 6 administrators, and 40 students.

Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, eds., Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao, 2:1073. “Xiangji waicheng nüxue chuanxi suo bada tese” 詳記外城女學傳習所八大特色 (A detailed report on the eight features of the Outer-city Training School for Women), Shuntian shibao (25 December 1906). 9 “Sancheng nüxue chuanxi suo kaixue” 三城女學傳習所開學 (The opening of the three Training Schools for Women), Shuntian shibao (3–7 September 1909), collected in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, eds., Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao, 2:1190–94. 7 8

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(6) Sichuan nü xuetang 四川女學堂, established on 6 April 1906, by the Association of the Sichuan Townspeople, had 6 teachers, 2 administrators, and 41 students. (7) Huixian nü xuetang 慧仙女學堂, founded on 6 April 1907, by the estate of Ms. Huixian 慧仙, and administrated by Chengzhang 誠璋, an official from the Palace Bureau. It had two Japanese teachers instructing weaving and gym, and one Chinese female language instructor, with 70 students. This school had received a plaque inscribed by the Empress Dowager. Among the pictorials published in late Qing Beijing, the oldest is Qimeng huabao (Pictorial of enlightenment). It has enjoyed a great reputation among scholars, who often cite it in histories of modern Chinese journalism.10 Other Beijing pictorials did not fare as well. Because of limited circulation and their readership of underprivileged women and children, few copies of these pictorials have survived. Despite reprints of some of these pictorials in recent years, over half of them are apparently no longer extant.11 Below are eighteen available late Qing pictorials, listed chronologically by their publication dates:

10 See Ge Gongzhen 戈公振, Zhongguo baoxue shi 中國報學史 (History of the study of Chinese journalism) (Beijing: Zhongguo xinwen chubanshe, 1985), 109; Guan Yixian, “Beijing baozhi xiaoshi,” 402; Peng Yongxiang 彭永祥, “Qimeng huabao,” in Xinhai geming shiqi qikan jieshao (diyi ji) 辛亥革命時期期刊介紹(第一集) (Introduction to the publication of periodicals during the Xinhai Revolution [First collection]), ed. Ding Shouhe 丁守和 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1982), 189–95; Beijing baokan shihua 北京報刊史話 (History of late Qing journalism), ed. Huang He 黃河 (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1992), 16–17; Chen Yushen 陳玉申, Wan-Qing baokan ye 晚清報刊業 (The business of journalism at the end of Qing) ( Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2003), 152. 11 For the records of late Qing Beijing pictorials, see “Qingmo minchu Jing-Hu huakan lu” 清末民初京滬畫刊錄 (Record of late Qing and early Minguo pictorials in Beijing and Shanghai), in Zhongguo jindai chuban shiliao er bian 中國近代出版史料二編 (Historical materials of the modern Chinese press) (Second collection), ed. Zhang Jinglu 張靜廬 (Shanghai: Qunlian chubanshe, 1954), 297–301; Peng Yongxiang 彭永祥, “Zhongguo jindai huabao jianjie” 中國近代畫報簡介 (A brief introduction to modern Chinese pictorials), in Ding Shouhe, ed., Xinhai geming shiqi qikan jieshao (Fourth collection) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1986), 656–79; Jiujing Xingshi huabao 舊京醒世畫報 (Pictorial of awakening the world in the old capital) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2003); and Qingmo minchu baokan tuhua jicheng 清末民初報刊圖畫集成 (Collected news illustrations of late Qing and early Minguo periodicals), and its continuing edition (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin edn., 2003).

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Qimeng huabao (1902) Beijing huabao 北京畫報 (Beijing pictorial) (1906) Kaitong huabao 開通畫報 (Enlightening pictorial) (1906) Xingqi huabao 星期畫報 (Pictorial weekly) (1906) Yisen huabao 益森畫報 (Benefiting the masses pictorial) (1907) Rixin huabao 日新畫報 (Daily renewal pictorial) (1907) [Beijing] Shishi huabao [北京]時事畫報 (Pictorial news) (1907) Qianshuo riri xinwen huabao 淺説日日新聞畫報 (Pictorial news daily in easy language) (1908) Zhongshi huabao 中實畫報 (Inner-strength pictorial) (1908) Huitu wuribao 繪圖五日報 (Pictorial of every five days) (1908) Dangri huabao 當日畫報 (Pictorial daily) (1908) Liangri huabao 兩日畫報 (Pictorial of every other day) (1908) [ Beijing] Baihua huatu ribao [北京]白話畫圖畫報 (Vernacular pictorial) (1908) Xinming huabao 新銘畫報 (Newly printed pictorial) (1909) Xingshi huabao 醒世畫報 (Pictorial of awakening the world) (1909) Yandu shishi huabao 燕都時事畫報 (Pictorial news of Yan capital) (1909) Zhengsu huabao 正俗畫報 (Pictorial of rectifying customs) (1909) These pictorials shared two main goals, which were clearly expressed in their inaugural prefaces: bringing enlightenment to readers and targeting a specific audience of women and children. These goals were well articulated in the inaugural editorial, “Shuo benbao de zongzhi” 說本報的宗旨 (On the principle of this pictorial), of Kaitong huabao on 30 September 1906. The editorial featured an illustration of the paper’s five male founders earnestly supplying spiritual nourishment to the “unenlightened” women (fig. 11.1). The following excerpt is illuminating: Ha ha! Wonderful! Today we finally issued the Kaitong huabao! What do we mean by kaitong? It is our effort to enlighten [kaitong] those people who need to be informed . . . Who, then, are the most difficult to be “enlightened”? Women at home! Women are the mothers of our citizens. If they are not enlightened and remain full of superstition, how can they nurture good citizens? Seeing this problem, we have decided that we must put pictures in the paper and provide vernacular explanations . . . In addition (thinking about young girls from good families), if we want to enlighten numerous people, we must bring enlightenment first to children, and then to our friends in the lower class . . . Dear friends, if you have children, you must let them learn to read, to work with others, to be patriotic, and to be proud of our Chinese race, and they will all become great people. Our

Figure 11.1. “Shuo benbao de zongzhi” (On the principle of this pictorial), Kaitong huabao (30 September 1906). The editorial featured an illustration of the five male founders of the paper, earnestly supplying spiritual nourishment to the “unenlightened” women.

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chen pingyuan paper is named Kaitong because we aim to enlighten our people and to rectify their minds. Friends, please read our paper!

Evidently, the job of “enlightening the people and rectifying their minds” belonged to the male adults, while those on the receiving end were women, children, and the lower class. The process of “enlightenment” implied a one-way instructional path that ran from the wise higher-ups to the uneducated masses below, and this implicit inequality of gender and class was even more clearly pronounced in visual-based pictorials than in other media. The late Qing Beijing pictorials thus conveyed ambivalent messages to women, by supporting their emancipation on the one hand, while using their images for male voyeurism on the other. Using simple texts and pictures to present news stories, the pictorials soon gained a wide circulation among the public. Two examples from early Beijing pictorials demonstrate the influence of this new medium, particularly on the lower stratum of society: The media that best touched men’s hearts are the play and the pictorials in that order. Outside of the Yuezhong Publications Office by the Huizhao Temple at the North Gate, we posted a copy of our Beijing huabao. Each day I would see a crowd gathered to read. One day an old man wept upon reading about the suffering of the overseas Chinese laborers. Indeed, as Chinese, could we still consider ourselves human if we were not moved by the sight of our fellow countrymen’s suffering?12 At a girls’ school in Maojiawan, students were picked up by family members each afternoon. [ The picture showed that] a servant, about fifty years of age, was talking to the other waiting fathers, brothers and servants about the benefits of reading newspapers. His eloquent speech impressed the audience. Making a public speech is now common, but from a servant is unusual (fig. 11.2).13

By associating girls’ schools with “newspaper reading” and “public speech” by the lower class, the editors of the pictorials highlighted the commonly acknowledged “three weapons in the spread of civilization” (chuanbo wenming san liqi 傳播文明三利器).14

12 “Kan huabao diao yanlei” 看畫報掉眼淚 (Crying upon reading the pictorials), Beijing huabao 16 (October 1906). 13 “Siyi yanshuo” 廝役演説 (A servant gave a public speech), Yisen huabao 5 (December 1907). 14 The equation of “school,” “newspapers,” and “public speech” as “three weapons in the spread of civilization” was a late Qing catchphrase. Although the term was coined by a Japanese, Inukai Tsuyoshi 犬養毅 (1855–1932), it became highly popular in China

Figure 11.2. At a girls’ school in Maojiawan, students were picked up by family members each afternoon. Here, a servant, about fifty years of age (second from right), talks to the other waiting fathers, brothers, and servants about the benefits of reading newspapers. His eloquent speech impressed the audience. Source: “Siyi yanshuo” (A servant gave a public speech), Yisen huabao 5 (December 1907).

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The popularity of Beijing pictorials can also be seen in a poem from Lanling Youhuansheng’s 蘭陵憂患生 (The Lanling Scholar of Sorrow) Jinghua bai’er zhuzhi ci 京華百二竹枝詞 (102 verses of Beijing bamboo branch lyrics), composed in 1909: Pictorials of every kind are briskly sold, Competing to outdo each other; Even the illiterate lady of the night, Holds a copy of the news to discuss.

各家畫報售紛紛, 銷路爭夸最出群。 縱是花叢不識字, 亦持一紙說新聞。15

It seemed evident that lively pictures, accompanied by simple text, could readily reach women, children, and members of the lower class, and as a result, pictorials quickly became aligned with the campaign for women’s education. Qimeng huabao, first published in 1902, was the most influential among them. By its fourth issue this pictorial circulated in twenty-six cities, including Baoding, Tianjin, Jinan, Nanjing, Suzhou, Yangzhou, Wuxi, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Taiyuan, Nanchang, Jiujiang, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuchang, Hankou, Changsha, Yuezhou, and Kaifeng, and by its twelfth issue, it also reached Guangzhou, Shantou, Changzhou, Shanxi, and Jinzhou. From its seventh to ninth issues, the pictorial ran an advertisement for a “women’s journal.” Understandably, the Shanghai Wuben nüxuetang 務本女學堂 (RootStrengthening Girls’ School) was one of its loyal subscribers. The bond between women’s education and pictorials was most clearly demonstrated in Zhang Zhanyun’s 張展云 publication of the newspaper Beijing nüxue in 1905, followed by the pictorial Beijing huabao a year later. As one scholar has noted, the Beijing nüxue was “the only women’s periodical in the North” at the time, and also “the first women’s news daily in the country.”16 Its perspective on women’s education must certainly have influenced the Beijing huabao, as can be seen in the coverage of the story of Huixing 惠興 (1870–1905). Toward the end of 1905, Huixing, a young Manchu woman and an enthusiastic champion of women’s education, committed suicide in Hangzhou after her failed due to Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 (1873–1929) wonderful interpretation; see Liang Qichao, “Ziyoushu: chuanpo wenming san liqi” 自由書 ∙ 傳播文明三利器 (Book of freedom: Three weapons in the spread of civilization), in Yinbing shi heji—zhuanji 飲冰室合集 ∙ 專集 (Collected works from Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Specific collections) (Shanghai: Zhonghua Shuju, 1936), 2:41. 15 Lanling Youhuansheng, “Jinghua bai’er zhuzhi ci,” in Qingdai Beijing Zhuzhi ci 清代北京竹枝詞 (Qing Beijing bamboo branch lyrics), ed. Lu Gong 路工 (Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 1982), 126. 16 Huang He, ed., Beijing baokan shihua, 19–20.

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attempt to establish a girls’ school. At a commemorative fundraiser held soon afterwards in Beijing, the famous Peking opera singer Tian Jiyun 田際雲 (1864–1925) staged Huixing’s life story.17 The Beijing huabao covered the entire event, including warmly received speeches before the performance by Zhang Zhanyun, Qimeng huabao’s publisher Peng Yizhong, and a reformer named Wang Zizhen 王子貞.18 When policemen mocked women students who appeared in public before the official promulgation of the regulations for the girls’ school, the Beijing huabao chided them and called for police protection of the girls’ schools because of their value to the educational system.19 Late Qing pictorials featured many reports on girls’ schools and women students, and juxtaposing these accounts against other historical sources reveals both the development of women’s education and changes in people’s attitudes over time. Among the girls’ schools in Beijing, the three Training Schools for Women founded by Imperial University professor Jiang Kanghu 江亢虎 (original name Jiang Shaoquan 江紹銓) (1883–1954) were “the most praised in education circles” (最爲 學界美談).20 Accounts of these schools exemplified the effort of Beijing pictorials to champion women’s education. The Outer-city Training School for Women opened on 30 September 1906, and several pictorials reported on the inaugural ceremony. The Xingqi huabao wrote: On that morning, a pair of dragon flags was hoisted at the gate. At 10:00, 130 newly admitted girls arrived. There were also five hundred guests, including Duanfang, the Governor-General of Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and Anhui, Dai Hongci, the Minister of Rites . . . Duanfang spoke first: “In terms of women’s education, America is the most enlightened nation. Now our Empress Dowager plans to establish a higher institution of learning for women. After your graduation, you can enter that institution

17 See Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹, Wan-Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo 晚清女性与近代中 國 (Late Qing women and modern China) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004); and Xia, “Jiu xitai shang de wenmin xi—Tian Jiyun yu Beijing ‘Funü kuangxue hui’ ” 舊戲臺上的文明戲—田際雲與婦女匡學會 (The civilized drama on the old stage: Tian Jiyun and Women’s Association for Rectifying Learning), Xiandai Zhongguo 5 (Wuhan: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2004). 18 “Xi yuanzi jinhua” 戲園子進化 (Evolution of the theatre), Beijing huabao 3 (1906). 19 The police said: “While everything is all right, why establish these good-fornothing girls’ schools? They will only get the nice girls pregnant, and only then will they shut down!” (in “Jingguan mei jiaohua” 警官沒教化 [The police are not civilized], Beijing huabao 14 [October 1906]). 20 “Sancheng nüxue chuanxi suo kaixue” 三城女學傳習所開學 (The opening ceremony of the three Training Schools for Women), Shuntian shibao (3–7 September 1909).

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chen pingyuan to become Her Majesty’s disciples. Isn’t it a great honor?” Several other dignitaries also spoke. Principal Jiang Kanghu was the last one to speak. Photos were taken and the meeting was adjourned by 4:00 p.m.21

Duanfang 端方 (1861–1911) and Dai Hongci 戴鴻慈 (1853–1910) were among the five ministers that the court had sent abroad the year before to inspect American and European constitutional systems. Duanfang was a fervent advocate of American-style women’s education, and only a person in his position could say that the Empress was planning on setting up a women’s school of higher learning. A half-year later, the Shuntian shibao 順天時報 (Shuntian times) reported: It was understood that officials Duanfang and Dai Hongci sent a memorial to the Empress explaining that the regulations and curriculums of the American girls’ schools were the most comprehensive, and suggested that China emulate them. When the two Majesties reviewed the memorial, they were most pleased. They allocated 100,000 taels of silver from their private funds, and instructed the elder sister of Prince Su to organize a women’s normal college.22

While it is not certain that Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) supported women’s education because of Duanfang’s influence, the latter was undoubtedly the most enthusiastic among late Qing governor-generals in promoting girls’ schools. In 1906, he created an exemplary girls’ elementary school in Nanjing and appointed his wife as supervisor.23 In 1909, he took control over the teetering Central Gate Girls’ School. All these actions demonstrate that Duanfang was committed to educating Chinese women, and he looked to American women’s educational institutions as his model for reform.24 Jiang Kanghu used the anniversary of his Training School for Women to hold an exhibition on campus, which brought awareness of women’s education to the wider public and raised funds for the school. The Shuntian Times reported these successful events on numerous occasions.25 Xingqi huabao also offered a glimpse into the first exhibition (fig. 11.3): 21 “Nüxue chuanxi suo kaixue” 女學傳習所開學 (The opening ceremony of the Training School for Women), Xingqi huabao 2 (October 1906). 22 “Bobi kaiban nüxue” 撥幤開辦女學 (Setting funds for establishing girls’ schools), Shuntian shibao (27 April 1906). 23 “Dushu xingxue” 督署興學 (The Governor-general supports girls’ schools), Zhongguo Nübao 1 (14 January 1907). 24 “Duan zhijun weichi nüxue jie” 端制軍維持女學界 (Governor-general Duanfang supports girls’ schools), Shuntian shibao (4 January 1910). 25 See “Ji neicheng nüxue chuanxi suo zhounian jinian hui” 記内城女學傳習所周

Figure 11.3. Jiang Kanghu used the anniversary of his Training School for Women to hold an exhibition on campus, which brought awareness of women’s education to the wider public and raised funds for the school. The handicrafts, drawings, and artwork of the students, as well as those sent in by girls’ schools outside of the capital, were duly exhibited and available for all to judge. Source: “Nüxue zhanlan” (An exhibition by a girls’ school), Xingqi huabao 45 (September 1907).

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chen pingyuan The exhibition to commemorate the first anniversary of the Outer-city Training School was held in the eighth month. On the 13th [20 September 1907] female guests were welcomed, and the male guests were greeted on the 14th [21 September]. The handicrafts, drawings, and artwork of the students, as well as others sent in by girls’ schools outside of the capital, were duly exhibited and available for all to judge. There was a lantern show, a movie, and games on the evening of the 13th [20 September]. The hosts and hostesses were extremely attentive. Guests not affiliated with the school were charged $1.00 as a contribution to school expenses. Our paper was honored to be invited, and we are illustrating the report on the event in order to celebrate it.26

These exhibitions showcasing women’s education invited the public to inspect the girls’ schools. At the same time, women began physically to leave the school campus in order to raise funds for victims of natural disasters. In February 1907, the Chinese Women’s Association conducted a fundraiser in Guangdian for the victims of a disaster in the Northern Jiangsu. The event marked female students’ first foray into society and carried great historical significance. Many periodicals reported on this surprising event. The Shuntian Times recounted: Women students printed 20,000 flyers, depicting the plight of the victims in revealing pictures and simple language. The girls hoisted red flags that displayed “Chinese Women’s Association” written in bold, stood on the stone steps of the Juhe Ginseng Shop, and hawked these posters.27

Just over a week later, the Times concluded from this event that: Many of today’s women have a clear vision of our social and political situation, and care strongly for the wellbeing of our people. How can those cold-blooded men not be ashamed in the presence of these hotblooded young women?28

年紀念會 (Report on the celebration to the first anniversary of the Inner-city Training School for Women), Shuntian shibao (12–14 April 1908); “Ji waicheng nüxue chuanxi suo di’er zhounian hui bing zhanlan hui” 記外城女學傳習所第二周年會並展覽會 (Report on the celebration to the second anniversary of the Outer-city Training School for Women and its exhibition), Shuntian shibao (10–15 September 1908); “Nüxue zhanlan hui zhisheng” 女學展覽會志盛 (Report on the success of the exhibition by the Training Schools for Women), Shuntian shibao (29 April 1909); and “Nüxue jinian zhanlan hui xiangji” 女學紀念展覽會詳記 (A detailed report on the commemorating exhibition by the Training Schools for Women), Shuntian shibao (1–2 October 1909). 26 “Nüxue zhanlan” 女學展覽 (An exhibition by a girls’ school), Xingqi huabao 45 (September 1907). 27 “Nuzi shoutu zhuzhen” 女子售圖助賑 (Women sell paintings to help raise the relief fund), Shuntian shibao (19 February 1907). 28 “Qing kan Shuwen nushi tanhua wenming” 請看淑文女士談話文明 (Please see Ms. Shuwen talk about civilization), Shuntian shibao (1 March 1907).

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The enthusiasm of these women students greatly inspired the citizens of Beijing. Actresses and circus performers entertained at evening fundraisers organized by the students.29 Even courtesans joined in the relief effort, collecting three thousand silver dollars for the victims.30 However, having the world of academia consorting with the world of entertainment portended trouble, and when news broke out that a male Imperial University student, Qu Qiang 屈彊, had penned amorous letters to Du Chengshu 杜成淑, a student of Sichuan Girls’ School and the secretary of the Chinese Women’s Association, public approval of the women students’ fundraising activities waned.31 Finally, the court decided to intervene, and on 5 April 1907, the Ministry of Education issued a decree that restricted future girls’ school activities to within the campus: Now that education for women is in its incipient stage, ardent supporters must understand the difficulty involved and refrain from stirring up controversies. This ministry therefore advises that students who submit their handcrafts to the exhibition for fundraising purposes do so through an intermediary. Singing and dancing at these events are especially inappropriate for women students. Inviting circus entertainers to school events is also not respectful for students.32

However, the court’s intervention did not prevent female students from attending public activities. Furthermore, reports on similar events elsewhere continued to surface in the papers after the Ministry’s order. The Shuntian Times, for instance, published articles about elaborate disasterrelief benefits staged by Jiang Kanghu, the principal of the Training Schools for Women, which featured “women students displaying handicrafts, selling items, singing, holding exhibitions of art and antiques, and inviting female actresses to perform drama and circus . . . in order

29 See, for instance, “Nüxue cishan hui dafang huahe” 女學慈善會大放花盒 (Display of fireworks at the charity evening hosted by the Training Schools for Women), Shuntian shibao (15 March 1907). 30 “Huajie rexin” 花界熱心 (Courtesans willing to help), Xingqi huabao 24 (April 1907). 31 See Xia, Wan-Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo, chap. 2, “Xin jiaoyu yu jiu diode—yi Du Chengshu ju Qu Qiang han weili” 新教育與舊道德—以杜成淑拒屈彊函為例 (New education and old virtue: The case of Du Chengshu’s rejection to Qu Qiang’s love letter), 45–56. 32 “Xuebu tongchi jingnei ge nüxuetang wen” 學部通飭京内各女學堂文 (Instructions from the Ministry of Education, to all girls’ schools in Beijing), in Zhu Youhuan, ed., Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji), 2:674–75.

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to entertain the public audience.”33 Such widespread media coverage contributed to women’s increasing visibility in the public space. The media also highlighted women’s own effort in establishing girls’ schools, especially valorizing two Manchu women, “Née Ezhete 額者 特 and Ms. Huixing, one in the North and the other in the South,” as “today’s two major heroines” for women’s education.34 Huixing, mentioned earlier, had committed suicide as a way to call for support on women’s education. Née Ezhete, the widow of Chenghou 承厚, a department director at the Ministry of Works, left the sum of 25,600 taels of silver in her will for establishing girls’ schools.35 Her generosity was widely reported. The Xingqi huabao published her portrait along with a tribute by a family friend, Chengzhang 誠璋: Née Ezhete was well versed in history and the classics as a youngster, and conversant in current affairs as an adult . . . She deplored China’s long-standing practice of preferring male over female, resulting in the impoverishment of mother’s teaching, and the breakdown of women’s perfect virtues. Women therefore tend to devalue themselves, and become men’s financial burden.36

Lamenting the lack of success in women’s education, Née Ezhete, near death, decided to “give her inheritance to public projects to benefit society,” rather than following the conventional Chinese practice of passing it down to one’s descendants.37 Chengzhang later established a school for women laborers named after her, which opened on 9 March 1907. Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu, upon hearing her story, inscribed a plaque in her honor with the words “training talents and advancing learning” ( peicai quanxue 培才勸學) and “nurturing tal-

33 “Nikai nüxue cishan hui” 擬開女學慈善會 (Plans for charity events by girls’ schools), Shuntian shibao (17 April 1907); see also “Nüxue cishan hui pizhun” 女學慈 善會批准 (Court’s approval of charity events by girls’ schools) in the same issue. 34 “Qingkan nüjie Burute Gezhete shi juanzhu xuekuan erwan wuqian qibai liang” 請看女傑布魯特額者特氏捐助學款二萬五千七百兩 (See heroine Burute Gezhete donate 25,700 taels of silver to school), Shuntian shibao (19 January 1907). 35 Dongfang zazhi 9 (1906), in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, eds., Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao, 2:1068. 36 Cheng Zhang, “Huixian nügong xuexiao xiaobei ji” 慧仙女工學校校碑記 (Epitaph commemorating the establishment of the Huixian School for Women Laborers), Xingqi huabao 24 (April 1907). 37 Ibid.; see also “Gu nüshi juanchan xingxue” 故女史捐產興學 (The late Lady [Gezhete] donated her properties to support [girls’] schools), Shuntian shibao (18 January 1907).

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ent and developing education” ( yucai xingxue 育才興學), respectively.38 The imperial favor caused a media furor, with the Xingqi huabao hailing the establishment of the Huixian (Née Ezhete’s given name) School for Women Laborers as “the beginning of women’s education [in China]” (nüjiao qidian 女教起點).39 Although Née Ezhete’s story is quite moving, it did not herald China’s “beginning of women’s education.” The Huixian School’s opening caught the attention of the rulers because it fit the court’s desire to respond to rising popular sentiments in favor of women’s education, and thus it was more than coincidental that the Ministry of Education issued its regulations for girls’ schools a day before the opening of the Huixian School. While the media reported that “Empress Cixi favored women’s education,” in reality the court was only following the people’s wishes.40 A Vibrant Scenery of Women and the Hidden Desires of Men In order to establish girls’ schools, the country desperately needed competent teachers, textbooks, classrooms, and eager students. The court, however, seemed more interested in the design of student uniforms. The reason why is related to the collapsing distinction between women’s public and private personas entailed by the new schools. Women had traditionally remained sequestered in the inner chambers, where how they dressed was a private matter. Now that they began to appear in public, their costumes became a matter for social concern. The “Regulations for Beijing Yujiao Girls’ School,” drafted with the help of Hattori Unokichi, stipulated that “students must dress sensibly, and not ostentatiously. Even those from wealthy homes must forego luxury and cherish frugality.”41 The Yujiao Girls’ School aimed at nurturing “worthy mothers and good wives” (xianmu liangqi 賢母良妻) and regarded the uniform as a means of moral indoctrination.

38 “Nüjiao qidian” 女教起點, Xingqi huabao 23 (April 1907); see also related reports in Xingqi huabao 24 (April 1907). 39 “Nüjiao qidian,” Xingqi huabao 23 (April 1907). 40 “Cigong zhuzhong nüxue” 慈宮注重女學 (Empress Cixi favored women’s education), Shuntian Times (5 April 1905). 41 “Beijing yujiao nü xuetang zhangcheng” 北京豫教女學堂章程 (Regulations for the Beijing Yujiao Girls’ School), Dongfang zazhi 12 (1905).

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Similarly, the Ministry of Education received permission in 1907 to establish women’s normal colleges and girls’ elementary schools, and the uniforms for these court-sanctioned schools engaged the nation’s imagination. The Ministry began to regulate women’s uniforms with increasing stringency, instructing students and faculty alike to “wear cotton gowns in light or dark blue colors; discard silk clothing and be free of make-up; and not follow Western fashions so as to avoid ridicule.”42 Why was there such a fuss over women students’ uniforms? The court believed that “the way women dress themselves is key to the cultivation of elegance and the refinement of character, which in turn was essential to uphold moral teaching.”43 As a result, the “Nüxue fuse zhangcheng” 女學服色章程 (Regulation for the uniforms of women students), drafted in 1910 by the Ministry of Education, became substantially more detailed: 1. The uniforms of women students must be long gowns that reach below the knees, the hem two inches above the ground with no slits, and with one-inch borders on the sleeves and the front. 2. The uniforms of women students must be blue for the spring and winter seasons, and light blue for summer and autumn, with black borders. 3. The uniforms of women students must be made with cotton and linen produced in China.44

The regulations also contained rules forbidding footbinding, applying cosmetics, and emulating Japanese or Western fashions. The drafters of these rigorous rules must have gathered dress codes from different girls’ schools. Dress codes of this sort had appeared in Lanling Youhuansheng’s “102 Verses of Beijing Bamboo Branch Lyrics” of 1909: In rickshaw or on foot, Powderless but most enlightened, Calm and poised in simple frocks, Women students set standards high.

或坐洋車或步行, 不施脂粉最文明。 衣裳樸素容幽静, 程度絕高女學生。45

“Xuebu zouding nüzi shifan xuetang zhangcheng zhe (fu zhangcheng)” 學部奏 定女子師範學堂章程折(附章程) (Memorial to create regulations for women’s normal colleges by the Ministry of Education [regulations attached]), in Zhu Youhuan, ed., Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji), 2:674. 43 “Xuebu zou zunni nüxue fuse zhangcheng zhe (bingdan)” 學部奏遵擬女學服色 章程折(並單) (Memorial to create regulations for uniforms of women students by the Ministry of Education [Regulations attached]), in ibid., 2:675. 44 Ibid., 2:676. 45 Lanling Youhuansheng, Jinghua bai’er zhuzhi ci, in Lu Gong, ed., Qingdai Beijing Zhuzhi ci, 125. 42

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But not all were enamored of the “powderless” women students. Some men even ridiculed the change of women’s clothing in the capital. The Xingshi huabao published a series of poems, “Nü’er duoai xue nanzhuang” 女兒多愛學男裝 (Girls most prefer to dress like men), by Zhina Fubairen 支那腐敗人 (Rotten Chinamen). Below are four selections: Sporting black boots and false gallantry, Girls most prefer to dress like men; Abandoning their lotus shoes, Only to teeter and totter on the roadside.

足着烏靴假大方, 女兒多愛學男裝; 鳳頭鞋子雖抛却, 終是趑趄向路旁。

Affairs of the world have all reformed; Girls most prefer to dress like men. Messy hair, rough clothes, and sallow mien, For perfume and powder they disdain.

世事于今盡改良, 女兒多愛學男裝; 亂頭粗服焦黄面, 只為不親脂粉香。

Newly fashioned clothes, delicate hems; Girls most prefer to dress like men. Male or female, who can tell? Good or bad, let people talk!

新式衣裳巧樣鑲, 女兒多愛學男裝; 雌雄到此渾難辨, 一任他人說短長。

Lining up for daily exercises; Girls most prefer to dress like men. Don’t brag of the invincibility of women warriors; They lack Geshu fighters’ half-length spears.

結隊[出]操列幾行, 女兒多愛學男裝; 漫说娘子軍無敵, 輸却哥舒半段槍。46

With unbound feet, powderless faces, and hemmed clothes, many women followed the standard dress code for late Qing women students. The sight of women students exercising in groups created a public sensation, so much so that it even became a decorative motif of folk art for the New Year.47 With the court’s active interest and the public’s insatiable curiosity, uniforms of women students set the fashion standard in late Qing Beijing, unlike in Shanghai, where courtesans led such trends. The situation in Beijing either reflected the conservative nature of the citizenry or the lower status of courtesans. But the Xingshi huabao was rather indignant over this development:

46 Zhina Fubairen, “Nü’er duoai xue nanzhuang,” Xingshi huabao 16 and 17 (17 and 18 December 1909). 47 “Yangliu Qing Nianhua: Nü xuetang yanwu” 楊柳青年畫：女學堂演武 (The Yangliu Qing New Year paintings: Military training at a girls’ school), collected in Zhongguo Minjian nianhua shi tulu 中國民間年畫史圖錄 (Pictorial records of the history of Chinese New Year folk paintings), ed. Wang Shucun, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1991), 2:544.

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chen pingyuan On the afternoon of the 19th of the eleventh month [31 December 1909], two prostitutes on the Yuguangfu Street dressed to look very civilized. They wore boots, donned pairs of gold-rimmed glasses, and pinned corsages, resembling two women students. Alas, our Chinese dress code has fallen into such disrepair, to the extent that men and women mix clothing at will, like passing off fish eyeballs as pearls!48

From the perspective of social conservatives, the sentiment that “girls most prefer to dress like men” revealed women’s refusal to stay home and their demand to appear in public. The Rixin huabao chided a teenage girl for running through the streets with a kite “like a madman,” blaming her bad behavior on poor upbringing and “the underdevelopment of girls’ schools.”49 Alas, he was mistaken. Had the girls’ schools truly proliferated, there would have been even more young women running wild on the streets. Witness the story in the Xinming huabao: Yesterday, on the Front City Gate Boulevard, a girl drove a large carriage all by herself. She looked at most twenty and, upon inquiry, turned out to be a student at a girls’ school. That self-satisfied look on her face was too much to mention. Is this what they mean by freedom? (Isn’t it too much?).50

Others expressed more tolerance—and even admiration—for these “freedom-pursuing girls.” For example, the Xingqi huabao showed a picture of a girl student riding a horse through Liulichang streets (fig. 11.4). A spectator commented that “women should be occupied with inner chamber business and not boast their capabilities this way,” but the author, Yang Caisan 楊采三, defended the student: Alas, people who say this are as stubborn as can be. Since antiquity women have been taught that it was their natural gift to care for the home, but they were not barred from knowing public affairs. If we want China to be strong today, women riding horses will directly contribute to self-strengthening. Did Hua Mulan, who took her father’s place in war, and Lady Qiaoguo, who led the troops, not know how to ride horses?51

48 “Yumu hunzhu” 魚目混珠 (Passing off fish eyeballs as pearls), Xingshi huabao 34 (4 January 1910). 49 “Nujie xianxiang” 女界現象 (Contemporary situation about women), Rixin huabao 25 (1908). 50 “Guniang yiche” 姑娘衘車 (Young maiden driving a carriage), Xinming huabao 33 (17 September 1909). 51 “Nushi zouma” 女士走馬 (Woman riding a horse), Xingqi huabao 22 (March 1907).

Figure 11.4. Some people expressed more tolerance and even admiration for these “freedom-pursuing girls.” The Xingqi huabao showed this picture of a female student riding a horse through Liulichang streets. Source: “Nushi zouma” (Woman riding a horse), Xingqi huabao 22 (March 1907).

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Using traditional heroines such as Hua Mulan 花木蘭 and Lady Qiaoguo 譙國 as a shield for the nascent women’s education movement, or insisting that a woman riding a horse symbolized “self-strengthening,” could not fully assuage social anxieties about seeing girls active in the streets. A March 1907 article in the Shuntian Times, “Geguo nüxue qingxing” 各國女學情形 (The situation of education for women in various countries), included the following comments: When a vulnerable girl from a sheltered home steps into the center of social activities, she becomes the focus of ten thousand eyes. Some may look upon her as reckless and frivolous. For her part, if not careful, she may meet with untoward circumstances. All this may push women back to darkness.52

Although the author showed a concern for women’s fate, his words nevertheless implied a certain amount of prejudice. Why would women “become the focus of ten thousand eyes” as she entered society? The implication here is that women in public easily became subject to a voyeuristic “gaze,” since most men are often tempted to look at beautiful girls. Thus, even when “nice girls” walked together in the streets, their appearance, however innocent, attracted public attention and provoked the hidden desires of men. The ensuing turmoil could disrupt the traditional ritual system and erode social order—the ultimate fear of the court and the guardians of morality. Such fears help explain why Rong Qing and his two colleagues proposed in their 1904 “Memorial to Create Regulations for Kindergartens and Family Education” that: Girls should not go to school in groups or parade in the streets and markets. They should not read too many Western books or mistakenly learn foreign customs. This is so that they won’t start the trend to choose their own spouses and to disrespect their parents and future husbands.53

It seems reasonable for the court to prevent young women from choosing their spouses and disrespecting their parents, but why forbid them “going to school in groups or parading in the streets and markets”?

52 “Geguo nüxue qingxing,” Shuntian shibao (22 and 23 March 1907); see also Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, eds., Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao, 1:289. 53 Rongqing, Zhang Baixi, Zhang Zhidong, “Zouding mengyang yuan zhangcheng ji jiating jiaoyu fa zhangcheng,” in Zhu Youhuan, ed., Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji), 2:573.

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On the surface, the proposed regulations were intended to protect fragile women from harm, but in reality they also attested to a degree of insecurity among officials about the potential consequences of male arousal. Similar concerns also appeared in the “Xuebu zouding nüzi shifan xuetang zhangcheng zhe” 學部奏定女子師範學堂章程折 (Memorial to create regulations for women’s normal colleges by the Ministry of Education) (March 1907), which stated: “The moral character of Chinese women is respected throughout the ages.” Accordingly, female students must study diligently the Lienü zhuan 列女傳 (Biography of women), Nujie 女誡 (Proscriptions for women), and Nuxun 女訓 (Instructions for women), as well as “foreign books on women’s cultivation not in conflict with Chinese moral teachings.” The petitioners further maintained that “visitors, whether foreign or Chinese, should not visit the college without permission; the students must live on campus and not leave at will.”54 Such regulations clearly targeted not only female students but also those who might potentially be attracted to them. An interesting passage in the “Zouwei zunyi sheli nüzi shifan xuetang zhe” 奏為遵議設立女子師範學堂折 (Memorial to set up women’s normal colleges following the court’s decision) (1908) also deserves scrutiny: The students must live on campus and have regular holidays, so as not to let them parade in public and contract bad habits. Their clothing in school must be uniforms, plain, made of cloth, and not silk or satin. Their hairpins and earrings should also be of the same style and not fancy.55

Not to parade in public, and not to wear silk or satin—these two interrelated rules revealed concerns that beautifully dressed women in public would attract a great deal of attention and thus disrupt the social order. The drafters of this memorial understood well the inclinations of the common folk. Their attempt to prevent such subversive attractions, however, did not always work. It was not unusual for passers-by to look twice at beautifully dressed women. It was, however, uncivilized for policemen to scrutinize such

54 “Xuebu zouding nüzi shifan xuetang zhangcheng zhe (fu zhangcheng)” (March 1907), in Zhu Youhuai, ed., Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji), 2:674. 55 “Zouwei zunyi sheli nüzi shifan xuetang zhe,” in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, eds., Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao, 2:1175.

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women from head to toe, or for male students to “stare at women and dispatch open critiques.” Late Qing pictorials in Beijing often attempted to rectify such ugly manners.56 One 1907 pictorial report in the Kaitong huabao, “Huajie rexin” 花界熱心 (Enthusiastic call girls), most accurately captured this sentiment: Since the disaster that befell people north of the Yangzi, the folks in Beijing from all walks of life came to their aid. Courtesans were particularly enthusiastic. They organized speech rallies on behalf of these starving refuges. Many people contributed.57

Unfortunately, this touching tableau was marred by a man holding a telescope in its upper right-hand corner (fig. 11.5). What was he doing as people were busy raising funds? He must have been ogling the performance-dressed courtesans to his heart’s content. If it had been girls from middle- and upper-class families rather than sexy lowly courtesans walking down the streets, such voyeurism would have been even more pleasurable. This behavior was considered a serious matter, and it proved to be the biggest challenge to girls’ schools early on. The court wanted to segregate the girls’ schools from the busy streets and markets, and it demanded that family members accompany their girls home after school clearly because of concerns that the (male) public was “not civilized.” Indeed, a pictorial report in a 1907 issue of the Rixin huabao was titled “Bu wenming” 不文明 (“Not Civilized!”). The author complained that when a girls’ school at Ganshiqiao was let out each afternoon, “the streets were filled with people and became impassable. Watching the students may be all right, but they should not block traffic. The guards there should make people beware.”58 Similar sentiments were expressed in an article in the Zhengsu huabao titled “Taibu xiangshi” 太不像事 (“Really too much!”). It depicted a scene outside another girls’ school: while students were chatting by the school gate, a few rickshaw pullers nearby stared and laughed at them, making comments like “this one’s hairdo is too modern; the other’s feet

56 See “Tebie zhuangshu” 特別裝梳 (Special dress-up), Xinming huabao 32 (16 September 1909); “Bugou zige” 不夠資格 (Not entitled), Zhengsu huabao 21 (11 April 1909); and “Xuesheng yeman” 學生野蠻 (Uncivilized students), Xinshi huabao 52 (22 January 1910). 57 “Huajie rexin,” Kaitong huabao 8 (1907). 58 “Bu kaitong,” Rixin huabao 9 (1907).

Figure 11.5. Courtesans enthusiastically organized speech rallies on behalf of the starving refugees from north of the Yangzi. Many people contributed. Note the man with a telescope in the upper-right corner. Source: “Huajie rexin,” Kaitong huabao 8 (1907).

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are too big!” The author lamented the depravity in social conventions and implored the police to chase away the loitering drivers.59 Needless to say, the gazing spectators were all men. If the men lurking near the girls’ schools only “enjoyed” staring, as uncivilized a gesture as it was, that might have been tolerable. The drafters of the “Regulations for Women’s Normal Colleges,” foreseeing the possible problem of male voyeurism, had stated: “The magistrate has a duty to protect the school, should any local hooligans dare to spread rumors or stir up troubles.”60 Yet these spectators were not “local hooligans,” nor did they “stir up troubles.” The magistrate had no particular right to stop them from either congregating or staring. Beautiful young female students thus did not need to drive carriages or fly kites to threaten the social order. Merely by appearing in groups and walking in the streets, they created a vibrant scenery of women that enticed male desires. This is the reason why courtesans were suddenly so eager to imitate the uniforms of women students. Juxtaposing Female Portraiture with News Illustrations Watching women, especially students who were “demure and plainly dressed,” could be done by men either as public audience or as private readers at home. Since the latter activity did not affect the lives of the observed as a form of harassment, men could therefore enjoy it more thoroughly. In this respect, the recently created pictorials played a large role because unlike the female portraiture (shinü tu 仕女圖) of past centuries, pictorials supplemented the news and depicted women on the move. Meanwhile, both the creators and the readers of pictorials continued to find themselves irresistibly drawn toward the powerful tradition of female portraiture. The most important function of the pictorials was to combine news with illustrations. Unlike newspapers or collections of drawings, pictorials reported social news, described daily lives, and expressed social and cultural ideals by means of illustrations and their accompanying texts. As the inaugural editorial of the Yisen huabao put it:

“Taibu xiangshi,” Zhengsu huabao 18 (8 April 1909). “Nuzi shifan xuetang zhangcheng,” in Zhu Youhuan, ed., Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji), 2:667. 59 60

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Gathering all sorts of news, we want to compose grand articles, create refined pictures and tell truth from falsehood. Collecting news from inside and outside the court, we use one square foot to display the views of a thousand li. We aim to present both criticism and exhortation, and use illustrations to enhance historical accounts. [ To achieve all this,] what can be more effective than the pictorial?61

“Gathering all sorts of news” and “creating refined pictures” were the cardinal rules that all pictorials should observe. But as pictorials became more established as a genre of news media, a corresponding demand arose for higher qualitative standards. If the purpose of pictorials was only to enlighten children and inform the semiliterate, the quality of their illustrations might not be particularly important. However, if a pictorial hoped to expand its readership to include the elite class by discussing such topics as culture and art, then its painters’ capabilities became crucial. The Kaitong huabao believed that “low circulation is caused by the poor quality of the pictures . . . [ We] hope that readers from all walks of life, from aristocrats to farmers, artisans, and merchants, will benefit from reading this pictorial.”62 The Zhengsu huabao went one step further. In addition to its conventional take on “the quality of the pictorial as a gauge of the enlightenment of women and children, and of social progress,” its editor also considered “the pictorial as closely related to people’s customs and thoughts,” and as such it should be viewed as “an educational tool as well as an art form.”63 However, illustrations in pictorials generally remained simple in composition mainly because of the technical constraints imposed by the mass production of monochromatic prints. Despite these shortcomings, the low cost and large circulations of pictorials provided people who normally had little exposure to art with an important new resource. The Xingshi huabao observed in 1909 that “one great advantage of pictorials is that young students and little girls, after reading them, could cover them with a thin sheet of paper and trace outlines of the pictures.”64 Of all illustrators in late Qing Beijing, Li Juchai 李菊儕, who worked for the Kaitong, Rixin, Zhongshi, Xingshi, and Zhengsu pictorials, was possibly 61 “Yisen huabao yuanqi” 益森畫報緣起 (Purpose of the Yisen pictorial ), Yisen huabao 1 (November 1907). 62 “Gaobai” 告白 (Announcement), Kaitong huabao 1 (December 1907). 63 Zhe Hong 蟄鴻, “Zhu Zhengsu bao chuban ci” 祝正俗報出版詞 (Celebrating the publication of the Zhengsu Pictorial ), Zhengsu huabao 7 (28 March 1909). 64 Yang Manqing 楊曼青, “Kan huabao zhiyi” 看畫報之益 (The benefit of reading pictorials), Xingshi huabao 12 (13 December 1909).

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the most artistic and prolific.65 In 1906, he placed an advertisement in the Kaitong huabao, which stated that he “specialized in drawing fashionable beauties, illustrations for journalistic pictorials, and landscapes and florals in the Southern style.” Although Li contributed to news pictorials, the main staple of his business remained traditional female portraiture. From Li’s point of view, portraits of beauties not only attracted a large base of consumers but also displayed the virtuosity of the artist: Female portraiture is essentially the most difficult genre of painting, but often attracts the eye of women and children. Seeing this, I plan to add one hundred portraits of fashionable ladies in the back of this paper, and I hope to discuss painting skills with my colleagues so that all of us can attain a higher level of artistry. Beijing pictorials have now become more popular each day—which is exactly what I had expected. Since Beijing is the center of literary culture, I look forward to critiques from famous artists who have read our pictorial. If I can thus improve my skill and have my work in such demand that everyone would want a copy [of our paper], then it’s not only my good fortune, but that of society as well.66

Following Li’s announcement, every issue of the Xingshi huabao carried “a portrait of a beautiful lady.” But the Xingshi huabao was not the first one to use paintings of beautiful women to expand circulation and raise aesthetic standards. The Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畫報 (Pictorial from the Touchstone Studio), founded in Shanghai in 1884, had created a supplement with colored prints of works by famous artists to increase sales and promote artistic taste. These diverse colored prints included portraits of beauties.67 Later, for similar purposes, Wu Youru’s 吳友如 (?–ca. 1893) Feiyinge huabao 飛影閣畫報 (Pictorial from Flying-Shadow Studio) and Wu Youru huabao 吳友如畫寳 (Collection of Wu Youru’s art treasures) featured two major projects of female portraiture, the “gujin baimeitu” 古今百美圖 (One hundred beauties, past and pres-

65 Li Juchai was notable for collaborating with his brother Li Hanyuan 李翰園 in producing a series of drawings for Dream of the Red Chamber, which became an important addition to the study of the novel. See A Ying 阿英, “Mantan Honglou meng de chatu he huace” 漫談紅樓夢的插圖和畫冊 (A casual discussion on the illustrations and pictorial albums of Dream of the Red Chamber), originally published in Wenwu 6 (1963); collected in A Ying wenji 阿英文集 (Collected works of A Ying) (Beijing: Sanlian shuju, 1981), 902. 66 “Li Juchai qishi” 李菊儕 事 (Li Juchai’s statement), Xingshi huabao 14 (15 December 1909). 67 See Rudolf G. Wagner, “Jinru quanqiu xiangxiang tujing: Shanghai de Dianshi zhai huabao” 進入全球想象圖景：上海的點石齋畫報 ( Joining the global imaginaire: The Shanghai pictorial Dianshizhai huabao), Zhongguo xueshu 4 (2001): 1–96.

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ent) and the “Shanghai baiyantu” 上海百艷圖 (One hundred beauties in Shanghai).68 When pictorials began to be published in Beijing, they launched a trend of juxtaposing portraits of beauties alongside news illustrations. For instance, one pictorial featured a painting of “Mulan joining the army” side by side with an illustration of the Chinese Women’s Association; a portrait of the Han beauty Luofu 羅敷 was paired with an illustration of the Imperial University student Qu Qiang leaving Beijing after his failed courtship of Fan Chengshu; and a portrait of Han female scholar Cao Dagu 曹大家 (also known as Ban Zhao 班昭) (45–120?) was put next to an illustration of the opening ceremony of a women’s school.69 Although these stories all involved women, they drew from widely disparate time periods and artistic traditions. The increasingly popular juxtaposition of portraits of beauties with illustrated news stories in late Qing Beijing pictorials had a direct impact on the artistic style of this news medium. The pictorials’ illustrators used the tried-and-true technique of painting all types of Chinese women as traditional beauties, from well-known but homely women of antiquity to all types of women in the streets of their day. For the familiar story about the Han woman Meng Guang 孟光 respecting her husband, the painter reminded the reader that “Meng Guang was plain but most virtuous.” She was nevertheless portrayed as a beauty.70 While the papers might deplore the lack of upbringing of various Manchu women and young girls, their portraits looked no different from those of a gentle lady on the next page (fig. 11.6).71 One could say that, in many instances, the tradition of female portraiture homogenized the faces of Chinese women in late Qing Beijing pictorials. This tendency was exactly what had alarmed the British journalist Ernest Major (1841–1908) decades before. In his “Dianshizhai huabao yuanqi” 點石齋畫報緣起 (Prologue to the Dianshizhai huabao) (1884), Major—or, as he was also known, Zunwenge zhuren 尊聞閣主人 (Master of Revering-News Studio)—had lamented the fact that popular 68 See Wu Youru, Wu Youru huabao 友如画报 (Pictorials by Wu Youru) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1998), vol. 1. 69 See [Beijing] Shishi huabao 1 (1907); [Beijing] Shishi huabao 2 (1907); Rixin huabao 11 (1907), respectively. Luofu, the heroine of the famous Han yuefu poem “Moshang sang” 陌上桑, was a beautiful girl who resisted the seduction of the prefect. 70 “Juan qimei” 舉案齊眉 ([Meng Guang] Raising the tray to the height of her eyebrows [to show her respect for her husband]), Rixin huabao 5 (1907). 71 “Shizai nankan” 實在難看 (Indeed not good looking), Xingshi huabao 33 (3 January 1910).

Figure 11.6. While the papers might deplore the lack of upbringing of various Manchu women and young girls, their portraits looked no different from those of a gentle lady on the next page. In many instances, traditional female portraiture homogenized the faces of Chinese women in late Qing Beijing pictorials. Source: “Shizai nankan” (Indeed not good looking), Xingshi huabao 33 (3 January 1910).

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European pictorials could not succeed in China. After much reflection, he had ventured the suggestion that: Western painting differed from Chinese painting . . . While the former emphasized semblance to reality, the latter valued intricate technique. Realistic representation imitated the truth, but skillful rendering did not. If the representation was not realistic, then why create another illusion when the fact is already recorded?72

Journalistic pictorials, in Major’s view, should emphasize faithfulness to reality. By contrast, the images of females in late Qing Beijing pictorials years later, which were influenced by traditional Chinese portraiture styles, represented women in idealized and unrealistic forms. What caused the technique of painting beauties to dominate the artistic style of late Qing Beijing pictorials? Apart from the artist’s conventional training, readers’ tastes probably influenced the depictions of women. The pictorial editors all claimed semiliterate women and children as their targeted audience. Rifling through a large quantity of portraits of beauties in late Qing pictorials, however, one senses a spectacle similar to that of the men loitering outside the Ganshiqiao girls’ school, watching the students. This type of voyeuristic “gaze” emanated from grown men, no matter what their social class or education. In the name of enlightening women, late Qing Beijing pictorials carried a voyeuristic overtone, one that honed in on educated and well-heeled new women in particular. Ironically, the editors were sincere in their intention to promote women’s education, but the negotiation between the artist’s skill and the reader’s interest resulted in a reversion to traditional techniques of painting beauties to represent contemporary women in the news. Nor was the hidden agenda of watching women limited to Beijing pictorials alone. In fact, it permeated through almost all descriptions of girls’ schools and female students in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century China. For male readers, the concept of “woman student” acted as a cultural signpost encompassing attributes of “fashion” and “sex” that were ripe with playful possibilities. A good example can be found in New Year’s paintings from late Qing or early Republican China, which portrayed women students marching

72 Zunwenge zhuren [Ernest Major], “Dianshizhai huabao yuanqi,” Dianshizhai huabao 1 (8 May 1884).

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with guns over their shoulders.73 No scene, perhaps, could be more fashionable than this in reflecting the political situation of the late Qing reforms. Upon closer inspection—except for the guns, which were emblematic of the times—the pretty faces, the delicate demeanor, the elegant costumes, and the three-inch golden lotus feet, all could have been designed to “stop the heart” of the male spectator. In hindsight, the late Qing male taunt “Don’t brag of the invincibility of women warriors;/they lack Geshu fighters’ half-length spears” still echoed a half-century later, when it was said that “China’s daughters have high-aspiring minds;/they love their battle array, not silks and satins.” Both equally conjure up images of women associated with “fashion” and “sex.” The creators of the pictorials could laugh at the spectators gazing at women students and call them “ill-bred,” but they nonetheless displayed a similar mentality when incorporating female portraiture into their news illustrations. Without denying the contribution to women’s education made by the late Qing Beijing pictorials, then, one should add this caveat: both for the authors and readers of the pictorials, this journalistic genre was created not only for the larger goal of “enlightenment” but also as a means to express hidden voyeuristic desires. Women students clad in new uniforms strolled the broad, dust-choked boulevards of late Qing Beijing and caught the eye of the public, among whom were the journalists and illustrators of the new pictorials. The scene these women presented could not be ignored, as this was the moment when hitherto-sheltered females began to emerge on the nation’s cultural, educational, and political stage. Ten or more years later, swept up by the tide of the New Culture Movement, they would change the cultural landscape of modern China with grace and poise. The existence of the pictorials helps us understand how these “delicate” women struggled to transform themselves in the public gaze. The gaze was mixed with surprise, admiration, prejudice, and misunderstanding. Women’s education in late Qing Beijing pictorials conjoined the furtive gaze of the public with the brushstrokes of the artists and the imprint of the times. In this regard, one must contend with not only

“Nü xuetang yanwu tu” 女學堂演武圖 (Military training at a girls’ school), in Zhongguo chuantong nianhua yishu tezhan zhuanji 中國傳統年畫特展專輯 (Collection from a special exhibition of traditional Chinese New Year paintings) (Taipei: Zhongyang tushuguan, 1991), 44. 73

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the concrete evidence of the pictorials but also history as demonstrated by the gaze and the historicity of the gaze itself. The wide-ranging and multifaceted late Qing Beijing pictorials did not consciously chronicle the history of women’s education, hence they may not be able to offer a complete picture of this subject. Research into these pictorials must be wary of both the fragmented messages often presented in these media as well as the potentially anachronistic assumptions that even diligent scholars sometimes bring to their interpretations of them. But the scenes captured in late Qing pictorials may nevertheless allow us to appreciate neglected dimensions of the period’s reforms and thus to better understand changing social relations and gender roles during those tumultuous years.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER AND GENRE IN THE 1910S NEW MEDIA: EVIDENCE FROM THE LADIES’ JOURNAL Siao-chen Hu Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌 (The ladies’ journal) was one of the most wellknown and widely circulated periodicals in the Republican era (fig. 12.1). Its publication lasted for more than one decade, from 1915 to 1931, a period that witnessed dramatic changes and transformations in sociopolitical and cultural domains. Tracing the revisions and shifts of editorial strategies of The Ladies’ Journal, this chapter will focus on the intertwined relationships among women, literature, and the emergence of modern China. It will also look into a bewildering question in literary history, namely, how do we approach literature of the ambiguous period between the late Qing era and the May Fourth period? In the early years of the twentieth century, what exactly was going on between the writers of the thereby labeled “traditional” or “old-fashioned” school and those of the “new” school? Is there any possibility of reconstructing the historical reality of this period? By no means do I propose to answer these questions completely but rather to raise them and to offer possible conduits to their solution. In the past ten years or so, scholars of Ming-Qing history as well as literary history have successfully given women of China from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries new images. For example, the ideas of victimization and oppression no longer suffice to portray the experience of Chinese women. We have come to realize, through literary and artistic pursuits, that many women tried to construct self-identities, express their innermost feelings, and even achieve some of their ambitions and ideals. Curiously enough, however, when we shift our attention to the early twentieth century, we encounter a series of novel questions. Was there a continuation or a gap between the tradition of literary women and the emergent paradigm of the New Woman? When major trends were shifting, what happened to cainü, the talented women, as individuals, if they did not vanish overnight? Did they convert and become New Women? Or did they continue to live in their own way?

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Figure 12.1. Cover page of Funü zazhi. Source: Funü zazhi (The ladies’ journal) 1.1 ( January 1915).

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Further investigations should be made. For example, what roles did Chinese educated women play in the feverish pursuit for modernity at the turn of the century? Did they do more than become the subject of enlightenment? How did they interact with male intellectuals? Pressed from both their cultural background and contemporary trends, how did they make choices? If we try to explain how the traditional and the modern worlds impacted these women as individuals, do we necessarily have to consider it from the angle of collision and replacement? The content as well as editorial strategies of The Ladies’ Journal will give us clues and a special angle from which to explore these questions. Wang Yunzhang 王蘊章 (also known as Chunnong 蓴農, Xishen 西 神, and Xishen Canke 西神殘客) (1884–1942) began editing The Ladies’ Journal for the Commercial Press in Shanghai in 1915 and worked as the Editor-in-Chief in its first six years (from January 1915 to December 1920) of publication.1 Most scholars classify the first six years as the earlier stage of the magazine and define its general ideology and style as conservative, assuming that it promoted idealized domesticity, wifehood, and motherhood.2 As for the magazine’s attitude towards literature, scholars often generalize it as belonging to the school of “Mandarin ducks and butterflies.” The truth is, in the first six years of the magazine, The Ladies’ Journal changed its editorial strategy more than once and made it impossible for scholars to pin it down to one thing. In the first three years, the

1 A woman named Hu Binxia 胡彬夏 (1888–1931) became the Editor-in-Chief in the second volume, but Wang Yunzhang seems to have dominated the magazine. Hu Binxia was from Wuxi, Jiangsu, and was one of the first female students who studied in Japan. She entered Zisen jo gakuen 實踐女學校 (Zisen Girls’ School) in 1902, when Shimoda Utako 下田歌子, the famous woman educator, was the principal. In 1903, she inaugurated Gong’ai hui 共愛會 (Society for Universal Love), a society for Chinese female students studying in Japan, with the ideal of promoting education for women and equality between the two sexes. After she returned to China, she made contributions to the development of preschool education. Some claim that Hu Binxia was only an editor in name and was not involved in actual editing. See Zhou Xuqi 周 敘琪, 1910–20 niandai duhui xin funü shenghuo fengmao—yi Funü zazhi wei fenxi shili 一九 一0∼一九二0年代都會新婦女生活風貌─以 «婦女雜誌» 為分析實例 (Aspects in the life of urban new women in the 1910s and 1920s: Taking The Ladies’ Journal as an example) (Taipei: Taiwan University, 1996), 40. However, Hu Binxia wrote an essay for the magazine in almost each number of the second volume, and a touch of change in its tone is also discernible in the second volume. It is therefore too early, I believe, to conclude that she made no contribution to the editing of the magazine. 2 For example, Wang Zheng has pointed out that The Ladies’ Journal before the May Fourth Movement held a conservative ideology that was opposed to women’s liberation. Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 77.

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magazine was a public field for contesting positions, and the debate was often so heated that the slogan “dutiful wife and good mother” is far from enough to define its editorial principle.3 Narrowing down attention to the parts in the magazine that are related to literature, I also find the situation complicated. It is true that the editor Wang Yunzhang and many of the contributing authors were associated with the “Mandarin duck and butterfly” school; however, the school itself is a complex problem that deserves more exploration. Therefore, to label The Ladies’ Journal a “Mandarin duck and butterfly” magazine does not explain much. We should also consider that the same author might write differently for different types of publication. More importantly, the concept of literature in the 1910s is not the same as ours today. For example, in the 1910s, poetry, in addition to lyricism, still served the purpose of social exchange as well as political expression/repression, whereas fiction oscillated between the traditional goal of didacticism/pleasure and the new pursuit for enlightenment. All these factors make it hard to discuss the literature sections in The Ladies’ Journal at its earlier stage. Therefore, I will limit my focus to the idea of women’s literature. I will discuss how the editor(s) and authors collaborated to establish a theory of women’s literature and how the theory became discursive, complicated itself, and argued against itself. In the end, it relied on women writers to revive the idea of “women’s literature.” I will borrow three terms from the magazine—“literary garden” (wenyuan 文苑), “toilet case” (duoluo 多羅), and “kusumamālā ” (huaman 華鬘) (floral headdress)—to represent the theoretical core, transformation, and transcendental orientation of the concept. All three terms are taken from either a column title or a particular essay in The Ladies’ Journal, and I will explain what they mean and signify contextually. In short, the first term refers to how the editor began to imagine women as independent authors like men and how his endeavor failed; the second refers to the male writers’ self-serving fantasy of collecting women’s beauty and talent. The last term refers to how women writers trained in the traditional way, encountered the new age, and tried to edge through the many confusions and difficulties they faced.

3 “Dutiful wife and good mother,” or “xianqi liangmu” 賢妻良母, was an influential concept in women’s education in modern Asia. See Chen Zhengyuan 陳姃湲, Jianjie jindai yazhou di xianqi liangmu sixiang: cong huigu riben, hanguo, zhongguo di yanjiu chengguo tanqi 簡介近代亞洲的「賢妻良母」思想—從回顧日本、韓國、中國的 研究成果談起 (A brief introduction to the idea of “dutiful wife and good mother” in modern Asia).

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Promoting a Literature of Their Own— The “Literary Garden” in The Ladies’ Journal Wang Yunzhang was an active figure in the Shanghai publishing industry in the early years of the twentieth century. While he was Editor-in-Chief for The Ladies’ Journal, he also participated in many other activities, including editing Xiaoshuo yuebao 小説月報 (Fiction monthly) for the Commercial Press and writing in different genres for other magazines. He is often categorized as a “Mandarin duck and butterfly” writer, and the Xiaoshuo yuebao was considered a publishing paradise for authors of similar literary taste. This explains why it is generally believed that Wang Yunzhang also directed The Ladies’ Journal to the style of the “Mandarin duck and butterfly” school. I have no doubt that Wang Yunzhang had a plan for the literary performance of the magazine. He made a clear statement for it from the beginning. He set up a column called “Wenyuan,” which literally means “Literary Garden,” in the first issue and specified in his announcement that this column was “reserved for women authors, whether their works are poems, lyrics, or songs.”4 It was common for journals and magazines to set up a “Wenyuan” column from the late Qing period on. For example, when Liang Qichao inaugurated Guofeng bao 國風報 in 1910, there was a “Wenyuan” column for contemporary authors. No women authors, however, made any contribution. Female-oriented newspapers and magazines also had “Wenyuan” columns, as in the case of Nüzi shijie 女子世界 (Women’s world), the longest-standing women’s magazine of the late Qing period.5 Literary magazines were no exception. Both Xiaoshuo yuebao and Xiaoshuo lin 小説林 (Forest of fiction) had a “Wenyuan” column. It is interesting to note that, though the two magazines sometimes published women’s works, their “Wenyuan” seem to have been reserved for male authors. Women’s newspapers and magazines, such as Nüzi shijie and Funü shibao 婦女時報 (The women times), regularly published women’s works, but they seldom intentionally reserved any column for women.6 The groundbreaking significance of Wang Yunzhang’s setting up a “women writers’ The Ladies’ Journal 1.1 ( January 1915): np. Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹, “Wanqing nübao di xingbie guanzhao” 晚清女報的性 別觀照 (Gender issues in late Qing women’s newspapers), Xiandai zhongguo 現代中國 (Modern China) 3 (October 2002): 18. 6 According to Xia, the “Wenyuan” (later changed to “Wenyi” 文藝) column in Nüzi shijie is divided into two parts, “Yinhua” 因花 (Uniting flowers) and “Gongyü” 攻 玉 (Carving jade), which published men’s and women’s works respectively (“Wanqing nübao di xingbie guanzhao,” 32). 4 5

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garden” easily eludes us today, especially when we ignore that women and the idea of the “Wenyuan” had historically never been compatible. “Wenyuan,” or writers, as a biographical category in official histories is often juxtaposed with “Rulin” 儒林, or scholars. Needless to say, women did not have a place in either. When early twentieth-century magazines used “Wenyuan” for contemporary authors, the term had lost its historical and canonical aura; however, in most cases it still had little to do with women. Considering the background, we begin to realize the significance of setting up a “literary garden” column exclusively for women. A women-specific column can, in effect, confine women’s works, and it implies a different (and therefore inherently second-rate) standard for women’s literary accomplishments. Nonetheless, this column does try to promote the collective status of women authors. More importantly, it implies that female authors are entitled to aspire to significant positions in the literary circle, as the term “Wenyuan” presupposes. There has always been the tradition for Chinese men of letters to praise, collect, and compile women’s writings, and the practice thrived in the Ming and Qing periods in particular.7 For the editor of The Ladies’ Journal to define women’s literature as potentially of the same value as works of scholars, however, was a creative gesture that had to do with intellectual reflections on Chinese women and their roles since the late Qing era. In other words, no matter whether the editor’s literary opinion was a continuation of the old-fashioned literary tradition, his plan for the women writers’ garden was an attempt under the influence of his time to elevate women’s role in society. As concept and reality do not always go together, the literary performance of the “Wenyuan” column greatly differed from the editor’s original vision. I will analyze the development of the column in order to trace the experiment and practice of women’s literature in the 1910s. As I explained above, Wang Yunzhang openly announced that the “Wenyuan” column would only publish writings, especially poetry, lyrics, and songs, by women. The situation of the first issue should be seen as a paradigm, as it necessarily reflects the editor’s concept of women’s 7 Many Ming and Qing writers made an effort to collect and preserve women’s poetry and their life stories. Mingyuan shigui 名媛詩歸 (Collection of poetry by distinguished ladies); Gujin nüshi 古今女史 (Women poets of past and now); Furen ji 婦人集 (Record of women); and Ranzhi ji 然脂集 (Record of burning tallow candles) are only some examples. Some women are also known to have done the same, such as Wang Duanshu’s 王端淑 Mingyuan shiwei 名媛詩緯 (Anthology of poetry by distinguished ladies of the late Ming period) and Wanyan Yun Zhu’s Guochao guixiu zhengshi ji 國朝 閨秀正始集.

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literature at its most original. Besides a few articles by school teachers and students, this issue also published poems by Wang Caiping 王采 蘋 (1826–93), Liu Sheng 劉王盛 (?–1916), Zhu Chengfang 朱承芳, Lü Wuyi 呂無逸, and Xu Zihua 徐自華 (1873–1935), and song lyrics by Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883–1943) and Xu Zihua. The trick here is easy to see. Taken metaphorically, the “Wenyuan” column would be a liminal space, a twilight zone, where the living and the dead could meet and mingle. Authors whose works were published in this issue included contemporary revolutionary women as well as talented ladies of the last century. Wang Caiping, for example, was a typical woman poet of the late Qing period, coming from one of the families that took much pride in their literary women.8 These families were products of the women’s literary culture of late imperial China, while the women received support from their families in education and even publication of their writings. In the first issue of The Ladies’ Journal, Wang Yunzhang selected some works from Wang Caiping’s Duxuan lou shigao 讀選樓詩稿 (Poetry manuscript from the Selective-Reading Tower), copied comments made by her uncle Zhang Yaosun 張曜孫 (1808–63),9 and introduced her background and literary achievement. Liu Sheng, mother of Lin Chuanjia 林傳甲 (1877–1922),10 was a devoted female educator. Zhu Chengfang was the late wife of Xu Ke 徐珂 (1869–1928). According to Wang Yunzhang, being a prolific writer, she destroyed her work on her deathbed, following many of the women poets who believed

8 Wang Caiping was the daughter of Zhang Wanying 張紈英 (1801–42), a woman lyric writer of the Changzhou school. Zhang Wanying was Zhang Qi’s 張琦 (1764–1833) daughter, who trained his four daughters—Caiping, Caifan 采蘩 (1827–?), Cailan 采藍 (1832–?), and Caizao 采藻 (1839–?)—to write. On the literary women of the Zhang family, see Susan Mann, “Womanly Sentiments and Political Crises: Zhang Qieying’s Poetic Voice in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Wusheng zhi sheng (I): Jindai zhongguo di funü yü guojia (1600–1950) 無聲之聲 (I): 近代中國的婦女與國家 (1600–1950) (Voices amid silence, I: Women and the nation in modern China [1600–1950]), ed. Lü Fangshang 呂芳上 (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003), 199–222; Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 9 Zhang Yaosun (style name Zhongyuan 仲遠), was Zhang Qi’s son, brother of the Zhang sisters. See note 8. 10 Lin Chuanjia was an important educator as well as a scholar of regional records of the early twentieth century. He was appointed department head in the bureau of education of Heilongjiang soon after the Republic was established and made significant contributions. He is known to have paid particular attention to women’s education, too. His mother Liu Sheng and wife Zhu Zongliang 祝宗梁 were dedicated to women’s education in Heilongjiang all their lifetime.

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a woman’s writing should not be read by the public. Wang Yunzhang managed to collect her only four surviving poems and published them here. Xu Zihua, one of the true friends of the woman revolutionist Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875–1907), was at that time the principal of Jingxiong 競雄 Women’s School of Shanghai. Lü Bicheng was the most reputed woman lyric writer of the late Qing and early Republican periods. Her life and writing style have always interested scholars.11 What does this list of literary women, both living and dead, lead us to think? First, we must consider that the selection may have been influenced by many factors other than literary ones. For example, the fact that Xu Ke was Wang Yunzhang’s acquaintance at the literary club Nanshe 南社 (Southern Society) can help explain why Zhu Chengfang, whose works had been mostly burned, was included in the list. We can nonetheless try to interpret what the editor was thinking. Wang Yunzhang made Wang Caiping of the last century and Lü Bicheng of the contemporary period the leading figures of poems and song lyrics respectively. He also paid particular tribute to Wang Caiping, praising her as “the only person who could compete with writers of the Han and the Wei.”12 One of the reasons for him to say so is that her poetry often treats grand-scale subjects and shows patriotic sentiments.13 Wang Yunzhang’s admiration of Wang Caiping indicates his preference for women writers who can go beyond the symbolic confinement of the inner quarters. For Wang Yunzhang, these two women were clearly the representative figures of poems and lyrics, or the past and the present. Lü Bicheng was surely an author who enjoyed symbolic status. As a woman who had made herself famous in Tianjin before she turned twenty and never married, Lü traveled to many places in China and abroad. She was in every sense a woman who deliberately deviated from the norm of a traditional lady. Her literary career, on the other hand, was a defiant effort to invent novelty in a static genre while persisting in a tradition that was being overwhelmed by new trends.14 Wang Yunzhang’s paralleling of Wang

11 See Hu Ying’s and Grace S. Fong’s chapters in this volume for discussions of Qiu Jin and Lü Bicheng, respectively, pp. 57–85 and pp. 87–114. 12 “Wenyuan” column, The Ladies’ Journal 1.1 ( January 1915): 6. 13 See Mann, Talented Women, 130–64. 14 As Liu Na 劉衲 points out, when Lü Bicheng was writing, it was already very hard to find novel literary images, and she “had to deal with an overloaded literary heritage and the predicament of a literary form that was too ripe.” Like other writers of lyrics of her time, Lü had to find a new way of literary expression through the well-knitted web of tradition. After the May Fourth Movement, however, she decided to stick to

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Caiping and Lü Bicheng, whether self-conscious or not, signifies the turning point of the tradition of literary women of late imperial China. We should also note that, although the works selected by the editor for the first list of literary women in The Ladies’ Journal are, without exception, of traditional genres, the authors themselves were far from traditional. This will interest us especially when we consider the fact that the female gender was, necessitated by political factors, endowed with multilayered symbolism in the late Qing construction of history. The old-fashioned woman labeled both physically and mentally weak and inferior was the sign of the past and of tradition; the liberated new woman, on the other hand, became the symbol of a new China for the future. It has also been pointed out that late Qing discourse connected women and their learning to national culture and even fate.15 As the academic paradigm shifted, traditional scholarship became outdated cultural essence,16 whereas the literary pursuit of writing women no

so-called old literature, refusing the possibility of converting to new literature. See Liu Na, “Fenghua yü yihan—Lü Bicheng de ci” 風華與遺憾─呂碧城的詞 (Glamour and regret: Lü Bicheng’s lyrics), in Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu 中國文學研究 (Studies of Chinese literature) 2 (1998): 57–63. Fong went further to explore Lü’s inheritance and reflection of the classical tradition in the face of China’s modernities. See her “Alternative Modernities, or a Classical Woman of Modern China: The Challenging Trajectory of Lü Bicheng’s (1883–1943) Life and Song Lyrics,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6.1 (2004): 12–59. See also Fong in this volume. 15 For example, Hu Ying has analyzed how Liang Qichao, in an essay written for Shiwu bao 時務報 (The Chinese progress) in 1897, made the new woman the opposite of the talented lady in the past. See Hu Ying, “Lishi shuxie yü xin nüxing xingxiang di chuli: cong Liang Qichao ‘Ji jiangxi Kang nüshi’ yiwen tanqi” 歷史書寫與新女性形象 的初立: 從梁啟超 «記江西康女士» 一文談起 (The New Women and the writing of history: The case of Kang Aide), in Jindai zhongguo funüshi yanjiu 近代中國婦女史研究 (Research on women in modern Chinese history) (August 2001): 5–29. 16 See Chen Pingyuan for the question of paradigm shifting in his Zhongguo xiandai xueshu zhi jianli: yi Zhang Taiyan Hu Shizhi wei zhongxin 中國現代學術之建立: 以章太 炎、胡適之為中心 (The establishment of modern scholarship in China: The cases of Zhang Taiyan and Hu Shizhi) (Taipei: Ryefield, 2000). About traditional scholarship in early Republican China, see Shen Songqiao 沈松僑, Xueheng pai yu wusi shiqi di fan xin wenhua yundong 學衡派與五四時期的反新文化運動 (The Critical Review School and the anti-New Cultural Movement in the May Fourth Period) (Taipei: National Taiwan University, 1984); Shen Weiwei 沈衛威, Huimo xuehengpai—wenhua baoshou zhuyi di xiandai mingyun 回眸「學衡派」─文化保守主義的現代命運 (A retrospective look at the Critical Review School: The modern fate of cultural conservatism) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1999); Zheng Shiqu 鄭師渠, Guocui, guoxue, guohun—wanqing guocui pai wenhua sixiang yanjiu 國粹、國學、國魂─晚清國粹派文化思想研究 (National essence, national scholarship, and national spirit: Studies on the thoughts of the school of national essence in the late Qing period) (Taipei: Wenjin, 1992); Zheng Shiqu, Zai ouhua yü guocui zhijian—xueheng pai wenhua sixiang yanjiu 在歐化與國粹之間─學衡派文 化思想研究 (Between Europeanization and national essence: Studies on the thoughts

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longer qualified as serious scholarship in the modern sense because it had little to do with the nation.17 Literary women existed only to foreground the image of the New Woman, and they were destined to fade away. This theory against the tradition of talented women was refuted by some contemporary women,18 but others chose to echo the argument that equated women’s literary practice with traditional scholarship that deserved to be gotten rid of. Both Kang Tongwei 康同 薇 (1879–1974) and Liu Renlan 劉紉蘭 (fl. late Qing era) in the Qing period, for example, expressed similar views, taking women’s literature as either idleness or seduction that was of no use to the nation.19 Harsh as they may have been, such criticisms against the talented women in the late Qing did not succeed in sweeping away contemporary literary practice. Traditional genres such as poetry and song lyric remained the principal vehicles by which educated women, no

of the school of national essence) (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue, 2001); Lo Zhitian 羅志田, Guojia yu xueshu: Qingmo minchu guanyü guoxue di sixiang lunzheng 國家與學術: 清末民初關於「國學」的思想論爭 (Nation and scholarship: Debates centering on the idea of “national scholarship” in the late Qing-early Republican period) (Beijing: Sanlian, 2003). 17 Liang Qichao says in his essay “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women) that those women who were traditionally proclaimed talented did little more than writing useless poetry. “This is no true scholarship,” he says. As Hu Ying argues, what Liang did is to redefine scholarship and limit it to things that are related to the nation. The traditional talented women therefore became the sign of so-called old scholarship. See Hu Ying, “Lishi shuxie yu xin nuxing xingxiang di chuli: cong Liang Qichao ‘ji jiangxi kang nüshi’ yiwen tanqi,” 5–29. See also Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 4–8. 18 According to Nanxiu Qian’s discussion, for example, some women at the end of the nineteenth century strived to give new significance to the traditional ideal of the “worthy ladies.” See Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29.4 (October 2003): 399–454. 19 See Kang Tongwei, “Nüxue libi shuo” 女學利弊說 (On the advantages and disadvantages of women’s education), in Zhixin bao 知新報 (News for new learning) 52 (1898): 2; Liu Renlan, “Quan xing nüxue qi” 勸興女學啟 (A notice to advocate women’s education), in Nü xuebao 女學報 (Journal of women’s learning; English title: Chinese Girls’ Progress) 4 (1898), qtd. in Wang Fei 王緋, “Zuichu di qianshou—jindai funü wenxue yü zhengzhi” 最初的牽手─近代婦女文學與政治 (Holding hands for the first time: Modern women’s literature and politics), in Funü yanjiu luncong 婦女研究 論叢 (Collected essays on women’s studies) (May 2002): 41. Their statements basically repeat what Liang Qichao said. At the time when The Ladies’ Journal began, similar criticisms often appeared. For example, in the first two issues there is an essay by Li Suyun 李素筠, the principal of Hanzhang Women’s School in Liuyang, Hunan, which strongly criticizes the literary practice of traditional women. See Li Suyun, “Lun nüzi yi tong xiaoxue” 論女子宜通小學 (On the necessity for women to learn philology), in “Lunshuo” column, The Ladies’ Journal 1.1 ( January 1915): 3–6; and “Lunshuo” column, The Ladies’ Journal 1.2 (February 1915): 5–8.

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matter what their political position was, expressed their feelings and opinions.20 The Ladies’ Journal perfectly illustrates the situation. Most of the literary women selected in the first issue were qualified as women of the era. Xu Zihua’s friendship with Qiu Jin was nearly legendary. She partook in many unconventional and chivalrous doings in her life, including participating in the revolution. After Liu Sheng was appointed the director of Women Teachers’ Training School in Fengtian 奉天, she compiled Nüzi lishi 女子歷史 (Women’s history) as teaching matter. She resigned from the Fengtian school in 1913, went to Heilongjiang to serve as the first director of the women’s school in that province, and had a great impact on women’s learning.21 Revolutionary or not, none of them was a cloistered lady who immersed herself in idle lamentation. In other words, although the lifestyle of traditional literary women was condemned as the symbol of old China’s disease at the turn of the century, traditional literary genres continued to be adopted by new heroines as their vehicles of expression. As The Ladies’ Journal shows, as late as the 1910s, many active women found no conflict between progressive action and traditional literary styles. The Ladies’ Journal also published works by women of former times. Aside from publishing Wang Caiping’s Duxuan lou shigao, starting from the fifth issue of the first volume,22 the journal published Wuzhong shi nüzi ji 吳中十女子集 (Anthology of ten women of Wu) in its “Mingzhu” 名著 (Masterpiece) column. It is a collection of poems by ten women poets of the Qingxi shishe 清溪詩社 (Pure Stream Poetry Club) of the Qianlong period, with comments by the famous scholar Ren Zhaolin 任兆麟 (fl. late 18th century).23 According to Wang Yunzhang,

See Qian. In 1905, Liu Sheng’s son Lin Chuangjia 林傳甲 was invited by Heilongjiang’s general Cheng Dequan 程德全 (1860–1930) to set up schools. Her daughter-in-law Zhu Zongliang 祝宗梁 also found the first female elementary school in Heilongjiang in 1906. According to Zhu’s essay, published in vol. 2, issue 1, of The Ladies’ Journal, by 1915, the number of women students in Heilongjiang had reached over a thousand, and the percentage was even higher than Beijing. For the contribution made by the family to the education in Heilongjiang, see Wang Yanhua 王延華 and Wang Fang 王芳, “Jianshu Qingmo minchu Heilongjiang nüxue jiaoyu” 簡述清末民初黑龍江 女學教育 (A brief introduction to women’s education in the Heilongjiang province in the late Qing-early Republican period), Heilongjiang shizhi 黑龍江史志 (History of Heilongjiang) (March 2000): 10–11. 22 The journal was published monthly. 23 For the connection of Ren Zhaolin with the poetry club, see Dorothy Ko, “A Man Teaching Ten Women: A Case in the Making of Gender Relations in the Eighteenth Century,” in Yanagida Setsuko Sennsei koki kinen: Chugoku no denndou syakai to kazoku 柳田節 20

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the book had long been lost, and people could only see bits and pieces of the poems in other anthologies. As Liu Yazi 柳亞子 (1887–1958) hand-copied the collection and sent it to Wang Yunzhang, he decided to publish it in serial form in The Ladies’ Journal and planned to publish it in book form in the future. For anyone now interested in women’s literature of the Ming-Qing period, the importance of the collection is evident. In volume 2, issue 3, the journal published eighteenth-century woman poet Yao Qixia’s 姚棲霞 Jianchou yin 翦愁吟 (Songs of clipping sorrows) in its “Wenyuan” column. The Jianchou yin noted that Wang Qishu’s 汪啟淑 (1728–99) Xiefang ji 擷芳集 (A nosegay of flowers) (1773) was a work once praised by Guo Lin 郭麐 (style name Pinqie 頻伽) (1767–1831), a famous writer from Jiangsu.24 The copy was submitted to the journal by Jiang Ruizao 蔣瑞藻 (1891–1929), author of Xiaoshuo kaozheng 小說考證 (Textual studies of xiaoshuo). According to Jiang’s foreword, he had been impressed by Yao Qixia’s talent when he first read some fragments of her poems in Suiyuan shihua 隨園詩話 (Suiyuan’s notes on poetry) but never had a chance to read her works as a whole. He had recently obtained the first edition of Jianchou yin and therefore submitted it to The Ladies’ Journal so that it could be passed down. The Ladies’ Journal contributed to the preservation of women’s writing by publishing all of Yao Qixia’s works in the collection. As recent studies have reinterpreted the importance of women’s literature, the efforts made by Wang Yunzhang and his colleagues to collect and preserve women’s works should be reevaluated, too. The journal also solicited contemporary women’s works. For example, volume 1, issue 3 published several poems from Weixue yi xiaocao 味雪簃 小草 (Drafts of poetry from the Room of Savoring Snow) by a woman called Shubing nüshi 漱冰女士. According to the note by the editor, the woman sent him her manuscript, which included over a thousand poems in three large volumes. By submitting her lifelong work, she demonstrated how much she aspired to the approval, and perhaps the prestige, of the “Wenyuan” column of the journal. In the 1910s, it 子先生古稀記念: 中国の伝統社會と家族 (Volume in commemoration of Professor Yanagida Setsuko’s seventieth birthday: Traditional society and family in China) (Tokyo: Kyuko Shoin, 1993), 41–64. 24 Guo Pinqie wrote a lyric song to the tune “Fenghuangtai shang yi chuixiao” 鳳 凰台上憶吹簫 (Remembering the flute playing on the phoenix terrace) in praise of Jianchou yin. The song was appended to the same issue of The Ladies’ Journal (vol. 2, issue 3).

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was still conventional etiquette for the woman author to use a penname, but it also leads to the suspicion that the work could be made up by a male author or the editor himself. This is a question that I have to suspend. Solicitation of women’s writings was common in journals of this time, and it recalls, perhaps remotely, the nineteenth-century literary project directed by Wanyan Yun Zhu 完顏惲珠 (1771–1833) who solicited poems by women all over the country to compile the anthology Guochao guixiu zhengshi ji 國朝閨秀正始集 (Correct beginnings: Women’s poetry of our august dynasty) (1831), only that it is a much downscaled replicate. We should also note that in the “Wenyuan” column, women’s works were often published with commentary made by male writers such as Xishen 西神 (style name Wang Yunzhang) and Shuigong 蛻 公 (style name Xiao Shui 蕭蜕) (1876–1958), most of them members of the Nanshe club. The solicitation was like a women’s version of the examination system. It allowed women to open their writing to the public and receive appraisals from (superior?) male authors. On the one hand, it reacted to the demand new since the late Qing period to revalue women’s role, but on the other hand, it also continued the tradition of men selecting and anthologizing women’s poetry in the late imperial period. Another observation to make is that although the announcement in the first issue only listed poetry and song lyric as the representative genres of women’s literature, the editor did not follow this as a rule in practice. In the first issues, expository essays by contemporary women, most of them teachers and students, were published in the “Wenyuan” column, too. Only later were they transferred to the “Lunshuo” 論說 (Exposition) column of the journal. Genres in rhymed verse—poetry, songs, tanci narrative, and so on—were indeed the major forms that Ming-Qing women used when they wrote. When women at the turn of the century began to publish their prose writings, they fundamentally changed the nature of women’s education in language and literature, a topic that needs more exploration. The journal also regularly published women’s drawings, paintings, and embroidery patterns. These artistic practices, together with poetry writing, constituted traditional women’s training in art and literature. The Ladies’ Journal in its earlier stage apparently adopted this definition of women’s education.

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When we take the solicitation announcement for women’s works in the “Wenyuan” column of The Ladies’ Journal as a certain manifesto for women’s literature, and the solicitation itself as a project of recuperating women into the territory of literature, we must also consider the practice of this grandiose plan. Regrettably, but also expectedly, though the “Wenyuan” column continued to publish women’s poetry as early as volume 1, issue 3, it had given up its rule to publish only women’s works and began to publish men’s works. It even went back to tradition by publishing essays by male authors like “Celebrating the Seventieth Birthday of Lady Fu,” which traditionally served more a social than literary function. Works by male authors of the past also began to appear. For example, in volume 1, issue 6, there is an article entitled “Lühuai shuwu yishu tuji” 綠槐書屋肄書圖記 (An essay on the painting “Studying in the Study of the Green Scholar Tree”) by Zhang Yaosun 張曜孫 (1808–63), who was active in the Daoguang period. The article recorded how his sister Zhang Lunying 張綸英 (1798–?) practiced calligraphy and achieved distinction. In the same issue there is also a preface to Wang Caiping’s Duxuan lou shigao by Xu Zhenyi 許振褘 of the Qing period. Both examples, though by male authors, were at least directly related to Qing era women poets. As time went by, however, more works by men were published in the “Wenyuan” column, and most of them were written to celebrate someone’s mother’s birthday, to commemorate someone’s mother or wife in an epitaph, to be inscribed on a painting in memory of a devoted mother, or to record the life of a chaste woman. The transformation took place gradually in the first year of the journal but became obvious especially after the proclaimed “reform” of the journal beginning in the second year. For example, in the “Wenyuan” column in volume 2, issue 4, there are two texts—a tomb inscription and a poem in praise of the author’s mother, all by men. Women’s works disappeared without a trace. From then on, the majority of the works published in the “Wenyuan” column became biographies of chaste or filial women, whereas women’s poetry was no longer an indispensable part of the column. It is true that articles with social functions, such as birthday-celebrating pieces, tombstone inscriptions, and biographies, have always constituted a very large portion of Chinese writing. When the “Wenyuan” column switched to these types of writing, it was only returning to tradition. Women’s role

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as authors of literature, however, ceased to be the focus of attention in this column. The editor’s project of preserving and encouraging women’s writing of traditional genres, however, seems to have been doomed since the very first time a man’s work was published in the column. As the Editorin-Chief, Wang Yunzhang had the responsibility of reacting to the failure of the project. In volume 2, issue 10, instead of printing anything by women authors, he published and commented on two biographies. The first is the biography of a chaste martyr woman by the Qing officialwriter Li Zongchuan 李宗傳 ( jüren 舉人, or provincial candidate, of 1798), and the second, by a Ming loyalist, Zhou Rong 周容 (1619–79), is about the moral deeds of the wife of Zhou Yanru 周延儒 (1593–1644), one of the most corrupted ministers of the late Ming period. After the comment, Wang Yunzhang noted that the “Wenyuan” column would open up to “famous masterpieces from the past.” Poems and song lyrics were welcome, he said, without specifying the gender of the author, and there would be comments and annotations to provide reference for women students to “study the national language by themselves.”25 In other words, the editor intended to transform the column to a textbook supplement. The note announced Wang Yunzhang’s belief that his effort to preserve the tradition of literary ladies had failed and it was officially put to an end. In an announcement in volume 3, issue 1, he stated that from then on, “the two columns of the ‘Wenyuan’ and the ‘Zazu’ 雜俎 (Miscellaneous) would be reserved for writings about women’s virtue or women’s education.”26 By so doing, he reconfirmed that the journal had given up the expectation for women’s literature. Some poems and songs by women that appeared in the journal afterwards can only be considered a farewell gesture. The decline of the “Wenyuan” column had to do with the shift of contemporary women’s literary practice. Poems and song lyrics, in other words, writings in “traditional forms,” could no longer describe, let alone prescribe, modern women’s ways of literary expression. Essays began to receive more attention, and short stories in prose became the new choices for writing women. The fact that women began to write short stories and later novels in prose is particularly significant, as we understand that in the Ming-Qing period, when fiction was in

25 26

“Wenyuan” column, The Ladies’ Journal 2.10 (October 1916): 6. “Guanggao” 廣告 (Advertisement), The Ladies’ Journal 3.1 ( January 1917): np.

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its prime, women very rarely participated in the writing of prose fiction.27 As we all know, most of the short stories or novels of the late Qing period that were allegedly by women authors were in fact by men who borrowed women’s names. We encounter similar difficulties with works published in The Ladies’ Journal. As many authors chose to use pseudonyms, it is hard to identify them or even decide their gender. The first fictional work signed by a woman in the journal, that is, if we tentatively exclude the possibility of a man borrowing a woman’s name, is a classical tale entitled “Yujing yuyun” 玉京餘韻 (Lingering music in the capital city), in the “Xiaoshuo” 小說 (Fiction) column in volume 2, issue 8. The tale, signed by “Hua Qianlin nüshi” 華潛麟女 史 (Madam Hua Qianlin), tells the story of a beautiful young woman who drifts around the world and encounters adventures. It is a rather long tale and was published in serial form until volume 2, issue 12. The author of the tale used flashback technique and developed complicated plot and characters. Two short classical tales attributed to a woman named Wang Yunxin 汪芸馨, “Jiubi” 酒婢 (Wine as maid) and “Qiqi” 棋妻 (Chess piece as wife) were published in volume 2, issue 9. We should note that Wang Yunxin had contributed a series of song lyrics to the journal before. In the “Wenyuan” column in volume 2, issue 1, she published “Jide ci sanshiwu shou” 記得詞三十五首 (I remember, thirty-five songs), which was a series of autobiographical songs. Again in the next issue, she published another twenty-five poems. Considering this, I tend to assume that this woman author was authentic. Compared with “Yüjin yüyun,” however, her two tales are insufficient in plotting and characterization and do not qualify as mature works of fiction. It is important to remember that the fictional works published in The Ladies’ Journal at this stage are basically in literary Chinese, and none of the examples above is an exception. In addition to prose fiction, the “Xiaoshuo” column often published serialized verse fiction, that is, tanci. Most of the tanci published here are 27 The only example known to us is Gu Taiqing’s 顧太清 (1799–1877) Honglou meng ying 紅樓夢影 (Shadows of The Dream of the Red Chamber). See Ellen Widmer, “Honglou meng ying and Three ‘Women’s Novels,’ ” in Wusheng zhi sheng (III): Jindai Zhongguo di funü yü wenhua (1600–1950) 無聲之聲 (III): 近代中國的婦女與文化 (1600–1950) (Voices amid silence, III: Women and culture in modern China [1600–1950]), eds. Luo Jiurong 羅久蓉 and Lü Miaofen 呂妙芬 (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, 2003), 301–26. However, we should note that women of the Qing period wrote narratives profusely in verse.

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by Cheng Zhanlu 程瞻廬 (1879–1943), a well-known “Mandarin duck and butterfly” school writer, and an unidentified author named Xihua 惜華. Quite a few tanci narratives of masterpiece scale, for example, Zaisheng yuan 再生緣 (Love in reincarnation) and Bisheng hua 筆生花 (Flowers from the writing bush), in the Qing period are by women. It is logical to assume that women in the early twentieth century were still interested in the genre. However, as far as we can tell from The Ladies’ Journal, the tanci was not particularly preferred by women authors of the journal’s earlier stage. In fact, the only example I can find of a tanci work that was allegedly by a woman is “Shuangxia jianchou ji” 雙俠 殲仇記 (The revenge of two swordsmen), signed by Huabi nüshi 華璧 女士. The story, which appeared in volume 3, issues 8–9, is about two sisters-in-law who devote themselves to an act of revenge. It would be very interesting to imagine Hua Bi and Hua Qianlin (mentioned earlier) to be the same person, but it may be too far fetched at this point. There are experiments with fiction in vernacular Chinese in the journal at this stage, too, and some of them are allegedly by women authors. For example, in the “Xiaoshuo” column of volume 3, issues 11–12, there is a story in vernacular entitled “Shuangyuan tiye lu” 霜猿啼夜錄 (Record of apes crying on frosty nights), allegedly by a woman named Wu Mengchun 伍孟純 (also known as Ruoyun nushi 若芸女士).28 It is a story about a female student who credulously marries a scoundrel and encounters a series of misfortunes. The story, like the classical tale “Yujing yuyun” mentioned earlier, uses flashback. Without future biographical information, it is impossible to explore the true identities of these (alleged) women authors. On the condition that both Wu Mengchun and Hua Qianlin really were women, not men who borrowed women’s names, we may say that women were under the influence of late Qing experiments with narrative modes such as flashback. Another example of the vernacular story is a “science fiction” story in volume 3, issue 12, “Nü boshi” 女博士 (The female scholar) by a woman named Zhu Minxian 朱敏嫻. The story tells about how a young girl of strong curiosity and thirsty for knowledge finally becomes a scientist, after making many experiments and being laughed at by all. Both works are quite simple stories. Generally speaking, without Wu Mengchun also contributed several children’s stories to the journal. See “Jiashi” 家事 (Household), in vol. 3, issue 8; “Dayan zhi lang” 大言之狼 (The bluffing wolf ), in vol. 4, issue 2; and “Lüzi titou” 驢子剃頭 (The head-shaving of the donkey), in vol. 4, issue 3. 28

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considering the possibility of male authors borrowing women’s names, all fictional writings allegedly by women published in the first three years of The Ladies’ Journal, whether they are in classical, vernacular, or verse, are artistically immature, maybe with the only exception of “Yujing yuyun.” It is nonetheless a noteworthy fact that women’s interest in writing fiction began to grow tremendously. An interesting essay in the “Jishu” 記述 (Report) column in volume 3, issue 12 of the journal, “Taixi nü xiaoshuojia lunlue” 泰西女小說家論略 (A brief discussion of women fiction writers of the West) by a young woman called Lin Deyu 林德育, introduces the accomplishments, both moral and literary, of ten women novelists of the West. The ten novelists selected are Ailun Wode 愛倫 渥德 (Mrs. Humphry Ward),29 Si Jinsilie 司金斯列 (Mary Kingsley),30 Jiayin Aosidingmei 迦因奧士丁美 ( Jane Austen),31 Yilishabo inchibaode 伊里沙伯印尺保德 (Elizabeth Inchbald),32 Shaluode 沙洛德 (Charlotte Brontë),33 Aimi 愛密 (Emily Brontë),34 Anni 安尼 (Anne Brontë),35 Falanxisi Buerni 法蘭西斯布爾妮 (Fanny Burney),36 Laimi Luyi 萊 米路易, Wolifen 沃力芬, Sang Qiaozhi 桑喬治 (George Sand),37 and Luobinsi Yilishabo 羅賓斯伊麗沙伯 (Elizabeth Madox Roberts).38 29 Mrs. Humphry Ward (1851–1920), author of Robert Elsmere (1888), was born Mary Augusta Arnold. She was one of England’s best-selling novelists and a life-long social activist at the turn of the twentieth century. 30 Mary Kingsley (1862–1900), author of Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899), was famous for her adventures in Africa and conservative views on women’s emancipation. 31 Though Jane Austen (1775–1817) had famous admirers such as Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), her works did not enjoy wide popularity until the 1900s. 32 Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) was an English actress, dramatist, and novelist. Her most famous novel is A Simple Story (1791), which is believed to have influenced the writing of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. 33 Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), the eldest of the Brontë sisters, was the author of The Professor (1857), Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), and Villette (1853). 34 Emily Brontë (1818–48) was the second of the Brontë sisters and the author of Wuthering Heights (1847). 35 Anne Brontë (1820–48) was the youngest of the Brontë sisters. She wrote Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). 36 Fanny Burney (1752–1840) was the best-known woman novelist of the late eighteenth century in England. Her novels include Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), and The Wanderer (1814). She is also widely known for her diaries and letters. 37 George Sand is the assumed name of the French novelist Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant (1804–76). She was the most famous woman writer in nineteenth-century France. 38 Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881–1941) was an American woman writer. She authored about ten novels and collections of short stories.

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Both the author and the essay have something to tell us. Lin Deyü was Liu Sheng’s granddaughter, and Lin Chuanjia 林傳甲 (1877–1922) and Zhu Zongliang’s 祝宗梁 daughter; in other words, she was born to a family involved in new-style education.39 Both Liu Sheng and Zhu Zongliang published essays on women’s education in The Ladies’ Journal, and Lin Deyu was not a first-time contributor either. She published “Jingshi baiyunguan youji” 京師白雲觀遊記 (A trip to the Baiyun Daosit Temple in the capital) as early as volume 3, issue 4, and “Pochu yuegong zhi mixin” 破除月宮之迷信 (On doing away with the superstition of the “Moon Palace”) in volume 3, issue 11. Apparently she wrote and submitted the two essays under the guidance and urging of her father, as the author stated. “Taixi nü xiaoshuojia lunlue,” however, seems to have been written of her own will. She confidently claimed her interest and ambition in writing stories and novels and furthermore encouraged women to follow her model and try their hands, too. With her family background, however, she also showed traditional women’s ambivalence towards novel writing in the early twentieth century. Lin Deyu started by demonstrating her motivation in writing the essay. Having read a book called Taixi ming xiaoshuojia luezhuan 泰西名小說家 略傳 (Biographies of famous fiction writers of the West), translated by “Beijing tongsu jiaoyu yanjiuhui” 北京通俗教育研究會 (Beijing Institute of the Studies of Popular Education),40 she was inspired to write biographies for women novelists of the West who likewise had made accomplishments by writing. In her analysis, the major contributions of women novelists include advocating virtue and morality, following and then exalting their fathers’ careers, promoting the equality between the sexes, and enhancing the ideal of world peace. Notably, her judgment was made on the basis of women’s education, as if she had inherited the educational ideal from her family. It comes as no surprise, as she reverently proclaimed in the essay, that “it is my duty to continue the

39 Lin Deyu studied in the Women Teacher’s Training School in Heilongjiang. She once wrote the school song for Heilongjiang’s Women’s Nurture School. See Liu Xinfang 劉欣芳 and Wang Xiulan 王秀蘭, “Heilongjiang jindai jiaoyü dianji ren Lin Chuanjia yijia dui Heilongjiang jiaoyü di gongxian” 黑龍江近代教育奠基人林傳甲一家對黑 龍江教育的貢獻 (The contribution of Lin Chuanjia, the founder of Heilongjiang’s modern education, and his family to education in the Heilongjiang province), Jiaoyü tansuo 教育探索 (Explorations into education) (May 1997): 62. 40 The institute was founded in 1912 and renamed as Beijing tongsu jiaoyu hui the next year. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate the article Lin Deyu mentioned.

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career of my parents and glorify my family scholarship.”41 Lin Deyu’s education-oriented vision of novels had roots in tradition, as Chinese narratives theoretically had always been loaded with the responsibility of didactic instruction, and many Chinese novelists of the early twentieth century believed in the enlightening function of novels for the public.42 Though Lin Deyu wrote the essay in the name of education, she also revealed a strong aspiration for the imagined superior, affluent, and respectable life of women novelists of the West. Their superiority lay foremost in fame and reputation. For educated women in China, she said, career choices were still terribly limited. She argued that teaching “would not make one known outside the particular school,”43 whereas getting oneself published in a famous journal would earn immediate and countrywide fame. She also pointed out that fiction had been undervalued in China and was only beginning to gain validity. As she enthroned Lin Shu 林紓 (1852–1924) as the most successful novelist in China of her time, she lamented the fact that China had not yet seen a woman novelist. She determined to become one herself, enthusiastically stating, “I desire to become a woman novelist after the model of Lin Weilu 林畏廬 (Lin Shu)!”44 Apparently, she did not mind inheriting a male writer’s tradition, at least not in the Chinese context. The glorification of the novel was nothing new since late Qing enlightenment discourse, but what was valuable about novel writing in Lin Deyu’s mind had shifted from its enlightenment to its financial function. In a broader sense, it had much to do with the commercialization of publishing. Lin must have been impressed by examples of successful money-making fiction writers in the magazines she read. When The Ladies’ Journal offered remuneration to contributing authors, it was something for women writers to take seriously. The immediate pecuniary reward for fiction writing became a new incentive for writers, women included. Interestingly, the conventional conflict between education and profit does not seem to have come to Lin’s realization. She believed, naïvely perhaps, that writing stories or novels was a good way

Lin Deyu, in “Jishu” column, The Ladies’ Journal 3.12 (December 1917): 18. For discussions of the function of fiction in the early twentieth century, see the many citations in Chen Pingyuan 陳平原, Ershi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao 二十世 紀中國小說理論資料 (Theories of fiction in twentieth-century China: A sourcebook) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1989). 43 Lin Deyu, in “Jishu” column, The Ladies’ Journal 3.12 (December 1917): 18. 44 Ibid. 41 42

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for contemporary Chinese women to achieve economic independence.45 According to Lin’s statement, she had finished two stories the previous month, got them both accepted by The Ladies’ Journal, and earned a handsome payment that was enough to support a person for a month. She therefore thought that if one could be dedicated to the writing of stories and novels, the income would suffice for supporting a family.46 In the previous three centuries, women authors of long narratives in verse often made lifetime efforts just to express what was in their bosom and be remembered as writers. They were motivated by psychological needs rather than economical gains.47 In the early twentieth century, as seen in the case of Lin Deyu, the invitation of profit grew much stronger. This is a new fact, aside from political and ideological factors, that will complicate our studies of women’s literature of this period. On the other hand, Lin in her essay objected to women’s participation in drama. She found it detestable to see female students play roles in the “new drama” and even suggested a mysterious connection between the popularity of drama and China’s declining fate. As she was inclined to take up a traditional position in the question of drama, she nonetheless ignored the aspect of entertainment in the reading and writing of novels and the potential dangers for women to pursue fame. In other words, if drama is morally corrupt in nature, how is it that the novel is educational? And if it is immoral for a lady to appear on the stage, why is it considered worthy of praise for a woman to gain national fame by writing novels? The key to understanding Lin’s position, which is otherwise perplexing to us, lies in the fact that actors and actresses were still considered of a lower social status, and it was degenerating for an educated woman to play in public. In her introduction to women novelists of the West, Lin encouraged Chinese women to become pioneers in the novel field of fiction writing, yet the way her argumentation was caught up among popular education, literary reputation, and financial profit testifies to the many dimensions writing women faced in the 1910s. When Lin used women authors of the 45 Women’s economic independence was Liu Sheng’s most important appeal in her promotion of women’s education. See her “Nüzi jiaoyu yi mo jingji duli ce” 女 子教育宜謀經濟獨立策 (On the importance of economic independence in women’s education), The Ladies’ Journal 1.2. 46 Lin Deyu, in “Jishu” column, The Ladies’ Journal 3.12 (December 1917): 18. 47 See Hu Xiaozhen 胡曉真 (Siao-chen Hu), Cainü cheye weimian: jindai zhongguo nüxing xushi wenxue di xingqi 才女徹夜未眠: 近代中國女性敘事文學的興起 (Burning the midnight oil: The rise of female narrative in early modern China) (Taipei: Ryefield, 2003).

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West as the model and contemporary Chinese master Lin Shu as her idol, she also pointed to the influences women were receiving when they looked for new directions of literary activities. But did Lin Deyu have any followers who published stories or novels in The Ladies’ Journal after she made the call? It is true that from the fourth year, a tremendous increase of fictional works in the journal can be seen, and the vernacular was also gaining the upper hand. The changes must have been made by the editor who sensitively perceived literary trends and felt the readers’ preference. As for women authors who wrote for the journal, despite Lin Deyu’s anticipation, they do not seem to have followed the new trend as fast as men. During the time when Wang Yunzhang was still the editor, there were only a few works written or translated by women: “Maibao nü-er” 賣報女兒 (Newspaper girl) by Huabi nüshi in volume 4, issue 2, and volume 4, issue 3; “Cimu lei” 慈母淚 (Tears of a loving mother), translated by Gao Junshan 高君 珊 in volume 4, issue 10; “Hui-er lizhi ji” 蕙兒立志記 (The ambition of Hui-er) by Jiang Zeng Shuwen 蔣曾淑溫; “Muxin” 母心 (Mother’s heart) by Gao Junshan in volume 2, issue 12; “She” 奢 (Extravagance) by Wu Mengchun in volume 5, issue 2; and “Yi lan hua” 一籃花 (A basket of flowers) in volume 5, issue 4.48 As the example of The Ladies’ Journal shows, we have more evidence to say that we have to wait for the rise of New Literature to see women novelists; although the literary trend was already shifting in the 1910s, young women writers had begun to experiment with the genre, and fictional works were published in journals whose authors claimed themselves to be women. It is a phenomenon in the study of women’s literature that deserves further exploration. Women’s writing thrived in the Ming-Qing period, and hundreds and thousands of women authors had been recorded. After the rise of New Literature, it was also easy to spot works in “traditional” genres by women. In the early Republican period, women continued to participate in literary activities; however, what they really did has been eluding literary historians and critics. What is portrayed in the earlier stage of The Ladies’ Journal is also an

48 It is also interesting to point out that, although Lin Deyu mentioned in her essay that she had submitted two stories to the journal and got accepted, I am unable to locate any fictional works in the journal that are attributed to her. If she used a pseudonym, I still find the only woman author who published two stories was Hua Bi. The assumption will be significantly countered if we consider that “Shuangxia jianchou ji” was written in the form of tanci verse, which was popular in the area of Suzhou and Shanghai, and Lin Deyu was a native of Fujian who received her education in Heilongjiang.

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ambiguous picture. As the old-fashioned “Wenyuan” column witnessed the rapid decline of the tradition of talented women poets, the emerging “Xiaoshuo” column had yet to wait for the birth of women novelists of maturity. Many signs show that women writers struggled during the transitional period. Toiletries, Flowers, and Women’s History— Literary Cultivation, Historical Construction, and Transcendental Pursuit At the same time when the “Wenyuan” column was set up in the first issue of The Ladies’ Journal, a serialized special column called “Duoluo yanxie” 多羅豔屑 (Colorful bits and pieces from a lady’s toilet case) also started in the “Yuxing” 餘興 (Entertainment) column of the journal. The compiler was Chunnong 蓴農, that is, Wang Yunzhang. To start the special, Wang Yunzhang did research and explained that “duoluo” meant a woman’s toiletries. He went on to demonstrate, in elegant parallel prose, his intention in the compilation project. In short, he planned to collect episodes about and allusions to women, art, and literature from any source he could have access to. Poetry, calligraphy, painting, embroidery, performance, as well as contemporary stories were all included. In imperial China, there was a long tradition of scholars searching and collecting often fragmentary texts by and about women, and it would be deemed romantic. What Wang Yunzhang tried to do was only an attempt to follow in this tradition. However, it is noteworthy that similar editorial projects abounded in The Ladies’ Journal of this period. In the first issue, we find “Yutai yicheng” 玉臺藝乘 (Records of art of the jade terrace), also compiled by Wang Yunzhang, in the “Meishu” 美術 (Fine art) column. Its aim was to record women’s accomplishments in art, including calligraphy, music, seal cutting, spinning and weaving, embroidery, and crafts. To begin with, Wang Yunzhang also explained his intention. Women of his day, he said, were eager to pursue the new. While most women had not yet mastered the new, they were quickly losing capability in traditional scholarship. This, he said, was most pathetic. Believing that women were naturally born to be good at concentration, which is a quality required in art, Wang Yunzhang tried to encourage women to study art to “preserve and enhance women’s learning.”49 His essentialist

49

Wang Yunzhang, in “Meishu” column, The Ladies’ Journal 1.1 ( January 1915): 1.

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theory echoes the argument made by an author named Yu Tiansui 余天遂 in his essay “Yu zhi nüzi jiaoyu guan” 余之女子教育觀 (My views on women’s education), published in the first issue of the journal. Also in this issue is a special entitled “Jin furen ji” 今婦人集 (Record of contemporary women) in the “Zazu” 雜俎 (Miscellaneous) column. The record was compiled by Wang Yunzhang’s friend Pang Shubo 龐 樹柏 (style name Bozi 檗子) (1884–1916) and annotated by Pang’s wife Cheng Jiaxiu 程嘉秀 (style name Lingfen 靈芬). “Jin furen ji,” apparently inspired by Chen Weisong’s 陳維崧 (1625–82) Furen ji 婦 人集 (Record of women), aimed at introducing and recording contemporary women. The women introduced in this issue are Qiu Jin, Xu Zihua, Wu Zhiying 吳芝瑛, Xu Yunhua 徐蘊華 (style name Xiaoshu 小淑) (Xu Zihua’s younger sister) (1883–1961), and Xu Xinhua 徐新 華 (Xu Ke’s daughter) (1894?–1914), all were well known in the early twentieth century. Again, in the “Bubai” 補白 (Supplement) column we find a special entitled “Guixiu cihua” 閨秀詞話 (Commentary on women’s song lyrics), which is a collection of comments on and anecdotes about women lyricists and their works. The compiler is said to have been Pang Bozi. In the first issue of the journal, there are at least four special columns that are devoted to topics about women. Although each claims to emphasize different aspects such as literature, art, contemporary writers, or the song lyric, they converge on the belief that women writers and artists as well as their works can only be remembered as a pastiche of episodic fragments, just like the bits and pieces from the toiletries. There was more than one example of this type of project in The Ladies’ Journal at its early stage. When “Jin furen ji” was discontinued after Pang Bozi died, Wang Yunzhang began to publish “Ranzhi yuyun” 然脂餘韻 (Lingering scents from burning tallow candles) from volume 1, issue 5 on. In the preface he explained that he used to write “Ranzhi yüyun” in serial form for Xiaoshuo yuebao. Because readers kept sending enquiries, he decided to resume writing and publish it in The Ladies’ Journal. The title alludes to Ranzhi ji 然脂集 (Record of burning tallow candles), a huge collection, no longer extant, compiled by Wang Shilu 王士祿 (1626–73) about women poets. “Ranzhi yüyun” was designed to be a sourcebook of contemporary women’s lives and works. While he did not deviate much from the tradition of men collecting materials of women, Wang Yunzhang tried to endorse more traditional views on women’s education. For example, in “Ranzhi yüyun” in volume 1, issue 6, he mentioned Huang Yiyu 黃易瑜, who was teaching in a women’s school in Hanshou 漢壽 county, and quoted one of her poems,

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“Independence, equality and freedom, such slogans are thundering in China. Gentleness and sincerity (wenrou dunhou 溫柔敦厚) are the true essence of poetry, where the superiority of womankind lies.”50 Wang Yunzhang marveled at Huang Yiyi’s insistence on gentleness, a belief already rare in the Westernized trend of women’s education, he said. He also paid tribute to Huang Yiyi’s resistance to slogans of women’s liberation, as he took them to be the excuse for women’s self-indulgence. “Her integrity has won my heart,” said Wang Yunzhang.51 In the “Zazu” column in volume 2, issue 5, a new special column entitled “Jingtai luoxie” 鏡臺螺屑 (Powder from the eyebrow pencil on the dressing table) appeared. Compiled by Cheng Jiaxiu, it is again a collection of anecdotes about talented women of former times. Other similar cases include “Guixiu shihua” 閨秀詩話 (Commentary on women’s poetry) in volume 2, issue 12, compiled by Danfu 亶父, and “Nü yiwenzhi” 女藝文志 (Record of women’s art and literature) in volume 3, issue 1, compiled by Jiang Shanyuan 江山淵. Some of the projects were very short lived; some published regularly, but they all shared the same assumption of women’s literature. In contrast to the ambition of elevating and making mainstream women’s literature as announced in the “Wenyuan” column, the compilation projects of anecdotes about women and their works, scattered in the entertainment, supplement, and miscellaneous columns, collaborated to essentialize the marginality of women’s literature and art despite their contribution to the preservation of historical materials (especially in the case of “Ranzhi yuyun”). The “bits and pieces from a toilet case” were of the nature of fragmentarity and superfluity. To be fair, I should also point out that, though most of these compilation projects sprang from nostalgia, a cultural phenomenon in the early Republican period, the efforts were not made in vain. For example, the journal published a special column entitled “Guiyuan congtan” 閨媛叢 談 (Collected anecdotes about ladies) by Shi Shuyi 施淑儀 (1876–1945) in volume 1, issue 3. There are only two items—“Zaisheng yuan” 再生 緣 (On Zaisheng yuan) and “Shangwu jingshen” 尚武精神 (On military spirit). “Zaisheng yuan” is an often-quoted source in the study of the famous tanci Zaisheng yuan; however, all who use the source, including myself, have copied it from Xiaoshuo kaozheng 小說考證, compiled by Jiang Ruizao 蔣瑞藻 (1891–1929), without realizing what “Guiyuan

50 51

“Zazu” column, The Ladies’ Journal 1.6 ( June 1915): 2. Wang Yunzhang, in “Zazu” column, The Ladies’ Journal 1.6 ( June 1915): 2.

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congtan” really is. A reader of The Ladies’ Journal would know that it came from one of its short-lived compilation projects. What seems to be a minor detail can serve as a useful reference for later research. This single instance calls our attention to the fact that, despite the nostalgic mentality of many compilers of anecdotes about women, they often provide us with valuable information. The example also leads to the last focus of my discussion, that is, Shi Shuyi (written as 施淑儀 or 施淑懿 in different records) as a figure representing the complexity of the cainü tradition in the early twentieth century. Shi Shuyi is an understudied woman. She not only often wrote for The Ladies’ Journal at its earlier stage but also compiled Qingdai guige shiren zhenglüe 清代閨閣詩人徵略 (A sketchy research on women poets in the Qing period), a work still widely used by scholars of Qing women’s literature. Shi’s life and the choices she made represent many other women of her time. On the one hand, she was born to a gentry family, trained to be a lady of moral integrity, and versed in the literature of classical forms. On the other hand, though she had received traditional education, she nevertheless was prone to accept the discourse of enlightenment.52 In the early stages of The Ladies’ Journal, when the journal ideologically promoted ideal wifehood and motherhood in general, Shi’s position in adhering to women’s individual growth often appeared aggressive. Take for example her interest in publishing her portrait. While photographs of celebrities were often used in magazines of this period to solicit readers, some women would also permit magazines and newspapers to publish their portraits. Shi sent one of her pictures to The Ladies’ Journal, which was published in volume 1, issue 2, appended to a poem she wrote.53 The photograph is meticulously designed, with Shi in early Republican attire, standing on the right in the picture. The picture shows her holding a knitting needle in each hand, a gesture responding to a phrase in the appended poem that says, “It delights me that you will not forsake the needle.”54 There is also a 52 We should note that as an unmarried girl Shi Shuyi accompanied her father and traveled a lot. See the item on Shi Xueshi 學詩 (style name Shi Shuyi) in Chen Ganyi 陳灨一, Xin Yulin 新語林 (New collection of anecdotes) (1922; rprt. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1997). 53 This was not an isolated case. She began submitting her portraits to women’s journals in the late Qing period, and to my knowledge, she also submitted her portraits to Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 (Short story magazine). 54 The Ladies’ Journal 1.2 (February 1915): np.

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short-haired woman, probably Shi’s cousin that she mentions in the appended poem, on the left. The photograph only shows her back to the viewer. A plantain tree is situated between the two women. We do not know if Shi was dominant in the composition of the picture, but she was certainly involved in the process of photographing. One cannot ignore the mixed message the picture gives. On the one hand, we see a woman’s strong will to represent/expose herself in public regardless of the unconventional nature of such an act; on the other hand, she wanted the viewer to believe that she embraced the traditional norm of womanhood, represented by the weaving needle. The works Shi published in The Ladies’ Journal were of a distinctive nature, too. In the “Lunshuo” column in volume 1, issue 8, she published an essay entitled “Duiyu liefu xunfu zhi ganyan” 對於烈婦殉夫之感言 (Some words on suicide of chaste widows). The essay attacks the custom, which was apparently still practiced by some in her time, and the approving attitude many male scholars held toward it. She surveyed the efforts made by Qing scholars to honor women who committed suicide on the death of their husbands and taunted them for being foolish. She said, “As I am compiling Qing guixiu lue 清閨秀略, I have browsed many collected works of masters. They wrote many women’s biographies, and were enthusiastic in honoring widowed women who committed suicide . . . Alas! How foolish was it!”55 She went on to criticize contemporary Chinese society for not abolishing the custom. She said, “In recent days people are becoming more open-minded, and I thought this desperate custom would be removed gradually. However, the reality is, there still are educated women who make themselves known by committing suicide. What is more, scholars and writers also try to instigate women to follow the trend. Is it true that women’s illluck has to go on?”56 Widows “have nothing to die for,” she reasoned, as suicide is incompatible with ideas of equality, humanism, patriotism, social obligation, and moral integrity. Each woman, she claimed, is a totally independent individual and therefore should not die for anyone else. Women bear responsibilities to society and the nation, and it would be a crime for them to die without accomplishing anything. Furthermore, she suggested that a woman with dignity should be able to bear a life without men, though, she admitted, sexual desire is no

55 56

Shi Shuyi, in “Lunshuo” column, The Ladies’ Journal 1.8 (August 1915): 5. Ibid.

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shame. In conclusion, Shi encouraged widows to render their service to society and the nation. Before she ended the essay, she took herself as an example. She said, Shuyi has been through this. As a girl I received an education and was moved by virtues in the narrow sense such as loyalty, filial piety, and chastity. When I met the greatest misfortune,57 I was also struck with unbearable grief and could die. In recent years, however, I have had the chance to read the philosophies of both Eastern and Western masters. Their teachings have broadened my mind and overthrown my old beliefs. It is as if I was walking on the Shanyin path (shanyin daoshang 山陰道上), the wonders surrounding me are too many for me to respond to.58 My thought has been completely changed. The disciplines I give myself and others are no longer as narrow-minded as before.59

Apparently, remarrying was not an alternative for Shi. She admitted that desire was natural, but it was to be overcome not followed. Her advice was actively to devote oneself to public service. Shi demonstrated, using her experience as an example, how a woman who received a traditional moral and literary education learned to adjust herself to new thoughts in social turmoil and developed a new self-realization and identity. Hers is one more example that may help us to understand women in the transitional period of the late Qing and early Republican eras. Shi was obsessed with autobiography and self-representation. Certainly she was not as glamorous as Lü Bicheng, who paid meticulous attention to her image,60 but publishing her portraits in magazines, writing essays with autobiographical elements, and compiling Qingdai guige shiren zhenglüe all attest to this obsession. In volume 5, issue 7, The Ladies’ Journal published an announcement, submitted by Shi Shuyi’s women students, soliciting contributions to celebrate her fortieth birthday. According to her students, Shi was a woman who concentrated on studies and was poor at household management. As a teacher, she “paid little attention to the doctrine of dutiful wife and good mother” but emphasized the importance of “educating women of talents and 57 The misfortune refers to the death of her husband Cai Nanping 蔡南平 (?–1904) in 1904. 58 This is an allusion. The Shanyin path, located in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, has been famous for its scenery. It is said in the Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A new account of tales of the world) that the scenic wonders on the Shanyin path are “too many for one to respond to” ( yingjie buxia 應接不暇). 59 Shi Shuyi, in “Lunshuo” column, The Ladies’ Journal 1.8 (August 1915): 8. 60 See Fong in this volume, pp 87–114, for the discussion on Lü Bicheng’s selfrepresentation.

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noble character.”61 The students also said that she admired heroines such as Qiu Jin and Sophia Perovskaya and “despised” traditional role models such as Ban Zhao 班 昭 (45–120?). As Xia Xiaohong has pointed out, Ban Zhao was interpreted by some notable late Qing reformists as the greatest woman educator and the symbol for women’s learning in China.62 Shi did not buy this. As one of the first women in her hometown to wear short hair,63 she had faith in revolution and would not compromise to admire a figure who taught women to accept a lower status. As her students recorded, she never refrained from contact with male teachers, was good at giving speeches, and enjoyed social activities; as a result, her students claimed that “women in Chongming 崇明 now can engage in social activities,” and “it was our teacher who started it.”64 In the next issue, Shi published “Sishi zishu” 四十自述 (An account of my forty years of life), a set of twelve autobiographical poems, in the “Wenyuan” column. In the poems, she described the pleasure of her childhood when she studied poetry, the happiness she had with her husband composing poetry together, the bitterness she chewed after she was widowed, the hardship she endured escorting her mother-in-law back home, the kindness she received from family and friends, and the friendships with her students that she cherished. Many aspects of Shi’s experience—she received education from her parents, she spent her unmarried days with books, and she married a man who was also a poetic companion—were common to Ming-Qing educated women. In this respect, Shi’s life was a continuation of the tradition of Ming-Qing talented women, while her poetry collections—Xianghen yincao 湘痕吟草 (Drafts of poetry on tear marks) and Binghun ge ji 冰魂閣集 (Collection of poems from the Chilled Soul Pavilion)—perfectly matched what Wang Yunzhang had in mind as authentic “women’s literature.” But as my analysis demonstrates, she had another dimension that clearly deviated from the norm of talented women of late imperial China and

The Ladies’ Journal 5.7 ( July 1919): 5. Xia, Wanqing nüxing yu jindai zhongguo 晚清女性與近代中國 (Late Qing women and early modern China) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004), 145–71. 63 According to local record, Shi Shuyi cut her hair before the 1911 revolution. She was also the leader of Chongming’s “fangzu hui” (Anti-Footbinding Society), founded in 1906. See Chongming xianzhi 崇明縣志 (Annals of the Chongming county) (Shanghai: Shang renmin chubanshe, 1989), vol. 35, p. 899. 64 The Ladies’ Journal 5.7 ( July 1919): 5. Shi Shuyi hailed from Chongming (an island near Shanghai) and was the founding director of its first women’s school Shangzhi nüxue 尚志女學 (Shangzhi Women’s School), also known as Shangzhi nüshu 尚志女塾 (Shangzhi Women’s Private School). 61 62

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showed signs of impact from late Qing discourse. As she was developing a revolutionary mode of thinking, she was also realizing it in the way she dealt with the world. However, Shi was never a woman who discarded the past to pursue the future. In the tenth of her autobiographical poems, our heroineadmiring author revealed her true love, as she said, Under the flowers, beside the books, I hold a wine cup in the moonlight. 花下圖書月下樽 In the garden, shadows of trees guard the gate. 芳園林影護重門 Burning the oil, I write, my heart full of pure joy. 然脂寫韻饒清興 Daoli 忉利65 and Huaman 華鬘66 are rooted in me from my previous lives. 忉利華鬘累宿根 I am lucky to have friends who appreciate my writing; 文字幸留知己感 I find it hard, however, to communicate my ambition with the ordinary. 壯懷難與俗人言 As I take pity on those who have been left out in women’s history, 為憐彤史多遺漏 I will recall their beautiful souls to pass on. 喚起嬋娟一代魂67

The poem portrays the focus of her life as a teacher. In other words, besides poetry and wine, she was all for writing and religion. What she meant by “ranzhi xieyun” 然脂寫韻 (burning the oil, I write) is not exclusively poetry writing. It refers directly to Qingdai guige shiren zhenglüe, which she had just completed, and also recalls Wang Shilu’s Ranzhi ji and Wang Yunzhang’s Ranzhi yuyun. While the Ranzhi ji was lost, and Ranzhi yuyun was written in a casual and fragmentary manner, Shi’s

65 Daoli tian, or Trayastrimsa Heaven, is the second of the six heavens in the realm of desire. It is also known as “Heaven of the Thirty-three Gods.” One day in this heaven is the equivalent of one hundred years in the human realm. 66 Huaman, or kusumamālā, is a wreath or chaplet of flowers. In China and Japan it is used as an offering to Buddha. Both Daoli tian and Huaman indicate Shi Shuyi’s interest in Buddhist belief and practice. As seen from numerous late imperial records, many educated women turned to Buddhism as the gateway to the ultimate pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. 67 “Wenyuan” column, The Ladies’ Journal 5.8 (May 1919): 5.

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Qingdai guige shiren zhenglue was carefully structured. Ranging from Shen Yunying 沈雲英 of the late Ming to early Qing periods to Qiu Jin of the late Qing era, she researched each author’s biographical background and her work. It is until now an indispensable source for the study of women writers of the Qing period. As the compiler, Shi stated her personal views on the project in the “Foreword.” For example, she set an editorial strategy that was based on an author’s artistic accomplishment rather than her moral conduct and subverted the hierarchy of virtue and talent. On the other hand, as she always had a preference for heroic deeds, she deliberately started the book with late Ming loyalist heroines such as Shen Yunying, Liu Shuying, 劉淑英 and Bi Zhu 畢著 (1622–?) and ended it with the late Qing female martyr Qiu Jin. More significantly, though the book was supposed to be about Qing women poets, she still put the wives of Huang Daozhou 黃道周 (1585–1646) and Qi Biaojia 祁彪佳 (1602–45), two late Ming martyrs, in her list. She did it to overthrow the rule that makes a woman want to “follow her husband,” and to manifest the concept that men and women are equal and that women are independent individuals.68 As a result, the contribution Shi made by putting ten years of effort into the compilation of sources of Qing women poets, I think, is different from what other early twentieth-century writers did by collecting fragmented information on women. For many male writers, episodes about women of the past could lead them into a nostalgic state, but after all, these episodes were no more than bits and pieces from a lady’s toilet case, fragmentary and supplementary. Collecting the information was like whisking dust off an antique toilet case, good for curing their nostalgia for the good old days. For a woman like Shi, who personally experienced the transition from a traditional talented lady to a woman marching into the new epoch, however, women writers of the past were like bosom friends. Writing biographies of women poets was like a substitute for writing an autobiography. There was the aspect of identity-building in the project of the compilation of Qingdai guige shiren zhenglue, but for Shi, it was also an attempt to write women’s history,

68 For Shi Shuyi’s editorial strategy, see Kang-i Sun Chang, “Ming and Qing Anthologies of Women’s Poetry,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, eds. Widmer and Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Widmer, “The Rhetoric of Retrospection: May Fourth Literary History and the Ming-Qing Woman Writer,” in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, eds. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and OldÏrich Král (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 193–221.

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an undertaking of her whole life. While she wrote the history of the talented women of the past, she was also giving a testimony of how traditionally educated women in the early twentieth century looked back on women’s literary practice of the past and forward to a new identity in the future. As I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, recent studies have convincingly argued that late Qing enlightenment discourse imagined a unified image of women of the past at the price of devaluing the tradition of the talented women, in order to generate the New Woman.69 We must ask, however, how traditionally educated women responded to it. Did they quietly accept the destiny of being washed away? Or did they try to find a way to readjust themselves to the new? Or did they try to mark out a new territory of women’s literature by going back to their predecessors and reconstructing a women’s history? It is extremely significant for us to know that, during the May Fourth Movement, Shi led her female students to take part in political demonstrations. In 1920, she actively responded to the call for a unified national language and went to Beijing to study in Cai Yuanpei’s 蔡元培 (1868–1940) “Guoyu jiangxi suo” 國語講習所 (Mandarin seminar). After she returned to Chongming, she wrote freestyle baihua poems and published them in the local newspaper Xin Chongming 新崇明 (New Chongming island).70 The case of Shi perfectly breaks the imagined boundary between old and new. Shi is an exemplary, transitional woman, giving us another brilliant example of the important link between women’s pasts and their futures at this moment. When Wang Yunzhang began to edit The Ladies’ Journal, he tried to preserve women’s literary tradition by setting up the “Wenyuan” column that encouraged writing about and collecting sources of talented women and their works. His attempt in the first six years of the journal proved a failure, but it is possible for us to trace the delicate but extremely rapid changes that women’s literary tradition was undergoing. In recent years, many scholars have tried to uncover the positive value of the tradition of Ming-Qing writing women; others, however, still choose to emphasize the painful experience of women who felt undermined and the progressive meaning of converging women’s literature and

69 70

Hu Ying, Tales of Translation, 4–8. Chongming xianzhi, vol. 35.

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nationalism in the late Qing and especially May Fourth periods.71 While both positions have made solid arguments, I believe it is important to note the fact that the tradition of writing women could not and did not collapse overnight and that it did not necessarily have to come into conflict with the paradigm of the New Woman. In fact, there was significant overlapping. It may be enlightening if we take another look at how traditionally educated writing women responded to new trends before women writers of New Literature emerged in the 1920s. Wendy Larson has pointed out that, in the period between 1916 and 1925, scholars tried to define and honor the tradition of “women’s literature” in premodern China; however, in the period between 1925 to 1935, leftist critics deliberately devalued the tradition and excluded it from their literary vision. The tradition of the writing women in late imperial China was sacrificed in order to help establish the concept of unisex literature. It has also been argued that, before 1925, critics tended to identify “the female” with the idea of “literature,” as they defined the nature of Chinese literature to be lyrical and therefore feminine. After 1925, however, as critics began to switch to socialist literary theories, the newly constructed paradigm of traditional women’s literature was considered defective.72 The argument is a good summary of what happened to the theory of women’s literature in the transitional period of the first thirty years of the twentieth century. However, if we take an individual case such as The Ladies’ Journal into consideration, we discern that in the 1910s changes and transformations were already taking place within the tradition of women’s literature. On the one hand, efforts by male writers like Wang Yunzhang and his colleagues to retrieve the spirit of the tradition were reduced to nostalgia. On the other hand, some traditionally educated woman such as Shi courageously interacted with new trends, collecting sources from the old and building a new image in order to generate a women’s literature where the old and the new could meet. The problem was not easily

71 For example, Wang Fei compares women’s literary writing in the Qing period to “women’s exercise on top of a mountain of knives.” She argues that women’s literature was not considered “useful” until very late in the nineteenth century, when it was connected to national politics. Wang Fei 王緋, “Zuichu di qianshou: jindai funü wenxue yu zhengzhi” 最初的牽手: 近代婦女文學與政治, in Funü yanjiu luncong 婦女研究論 叢 48 (September 2002): 40–41. 72 Wendy Larson, “The End of ‘Funü Wenxue’: Women’s Literature from 1925 to 1935,” in Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 59–64.

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solved in reality. In The Ladies’ Journal, for example, very few women’s works were published until their new solicitation in September 1921. In this issue, the journal announced “Duzhe wenyi” 讀者文藝 (Literary writings of our readers), a new column open to fictions and poems in the new form, and women authors once again began to contribute. Another new column called “Wenyi” 文藝 (Literature) appeared in the second number in 1924, accommodating fictions and dramas in the new form by both men and women. When the journal was drawing to its end, there appeared a special issue on “Women and Literature,” in the sixth number of 1931, that was solely dedicated to the introduction of women writers of the West. Since the “Wenyuan” column was initiated in the opening issue of 1915 to the special issue on women’s literature of 1931, The Ladies’ Journal testified to the transformation of both the theory and the practice of women’s literature. For the study of women and literature in early twentieth-century China, this is only a point from which to start.

SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY “Aiguo nüzi Ruoan Dake de gushi” 愛國女子若安達克的故事 (The story of the patriotic girl, Joan of Arc). Beijing nübao 北京女報 (Beijing women’s journal) (21 July 1906). Alexander, William. The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time; Giving Some Account of Almost Every Interesting Particular Concerning That Sex, among All Nations, Ancient and Modern. The Third Edition, with Many Alterations and Corrections. 2 vols. London: C. Dilly and R. Christopher, 1782. An Zuozhang 安作璋 and Geng Tianqin 耿天勤. “Hao Yixing he ta de Shaishu tang ji” 郝懿行和他的曬書堂集 (Hao Yixing and his “Works of the Sunbaking Books Studio”). Shixue shi yanjiu 史學史研究 (Research on the history of historiography) 2 (1989): 73–80. Anderson, Amanda. “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 265–89. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1983. Angle, Stephen C. Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bai, Qianshen. Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. Bailey, Paul. “Active Citizen or Efficient Housewife? The Debate over Women’s Education in Early-Twentieth-Century China.” In Peterson, Hayhoe, and Lu, Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China, 318–47. ——. Gender and Education in China: Gender Discourses and Women’s Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge, 2007. ——. “ ‘Modernising Conservatism’ in Early Twentieth-Century China: The Discourse and Practice of Women’s Education.” European Journal of East Asian Studies 3, no. 2 (November 2004): 217–41. Ban Gu 班固. “Liu Xiang zhuan” 劉向傳 (Biography of Liu Xiang). In Hanshu 漢書 (History of the Han). 12 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Juan 36, 7:1928. Barmé, Geremie. An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai, 1898–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Barnhart, Richard M. “Wei Fu-jen’s Pi Chen T’u and the Early Texts on Calligraphy.” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 18 (1964): 13–25. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Burton, Margaret E. The Education of Women in China. New York and Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1911. Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培. Cai Yuanpei Zishu 蔡元培自述 (Memoir of Cai Yuanpei). Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1967. Chang, Kang-i Sun. “Ming and Qing Anthologies of Women’s Poetry.” In Writing Women in Late Imperial China, edited by Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Chang Peng-yuan. “The Tenacity of Tradition: Liang Qichao and Gender Relations.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 25/26 (1993–94): 42–54.

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“Chanzu shuo” 纏足說 (On Footbinding). Shenbao 21 (24 May 1872): 2–3. Ch’en, Kenneth. Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. Ch’en, Pao-chen. “The Early Scroll Book.” The Gest Library Journal: Calligraphy and the East Asian Book, Special Catalogue Issue, 2, no. 2 (1988): 67. Chen Chu 忱芻, trans. “E Duersituo zhi Zhinaren shu” 俄杜爾斯托致支那人書 (Tolstoy’s letter to a Chinese) (selected translation). Tianyi bao 11–12 [combined issue] (30 November 1907): 51–55. ——, trans. “E Duersituo zhi Zhinaren shu” (full translation). Tianyi bao 16–19 [combined issue] (15 March 1908): 73–78. Chen Dingshan 陳定山. Chunshen jiuwen 春申舊聞 (Old stories from Shanghai). Taipei: Shijie wenwu, 1975. Chen, Ganyi 陳灨一. Xin Yulin 新語林 (New collection of anecdotes). 1922. Reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1997. Chen Hongmou 陳宏謀. Wu zhong yi gui 五種遺規 (Bequeathed guidelines of five kinds). 1742. Shanghai: Jingwei shuju, 1935. Chen Pingyuan 陳平原. Chumo lishi yu jinru wusi 觸摸 史與進入五四 (Touching history and walking into the May Fourth). Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005. ——. Ershi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao 二十世紀中國小說理論資料 (Theories of fiction in twentieth-century China: A sourcebook). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1989. ——. Zhongguo xiandai xueshu zhi jianli: yi Zhang Taiyan Hu Shizhi wei zhongxin 中國現代學 術之建立：以章太炎、胡適之為中心 (The establishment of modern scholarship in China: The cases of Zhang Taiyan and Hu Shizhi). Taipei: Ryefield, 2000. Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong, eds. Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao 二十世 紀中國小說理論資料 (Theoretical sources of twentieth-century Chinese fiction). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1997. Chen Xiefen 陳擷芬 [Chunan nüzi 楚南女子]. “Baihua yanshuo de yuangu” 白話 演説的 故 (Why vernacular speeches?). Xuchu Nübao 1 (8 May 1902): column of “Nübao yanshuo” 女報演説 (Speeches), 1a–2a. ——. “Mokan xiaoshuo” 莫看小説 (Don’t read xiaoshuo). Xuchu Nübao 3 (5 July 1902): column of “Nübao yanshuo,” 2a–4a. ——. “Nü xuetang diyi kecheng yaojin” 女學堂第一課程要緊 (Curriculum weights the most important for girls’ schools). Xuchu Nübao 6 (2 October 1902): column of “Baihuo yanshuo,” 1a–3a. ——. “Shijie shi nüjie yanyi” 世界十女傑演義 (Tales of the “Ten world heroines”). Nü xuebao 女學報 4 (November 1903): 55–58. ——. “Yaoyou aiguo de xin” 要有愛國的心 (We must embrace patriotism). Xuchu Nübao 3 (5 July 1902): column of “Nübao yanshuo,” 1a–2b. ——. “Zhongguo nüzi zhi qiantu” 中國女子之前途 (The future of Chinese women). Nü xuebao 4 (November 1903): 1–6. Chen Yiyi 陳以益 [Chen Zhiqun 陳志群]. “Nübaojie zuixin diaochabiao” 女報界 最新調 表 (Most updated investigation of the periodicals for women). Originally published in Shenzhou nübao 3 (February 1908). Reprinted in Nübao 1 (22 January 1909): 11–12. ——. “Shenzhou nübao fakanci” 神州女報發刊詞 (Forward to the Shenzhou nübao). Originally published in Shenzhou nübao 1 (December 1907). Reprinted in Nülun 女論 (On women), a special issue of Nübao (28 September 1909): 9–10. Chen Yun 陳芸. “Xiaodai xuan lunshi shi xu” 小黛軒論詩詩敍 (Self-preface to the Poems on poetics from the Little Black Jade Pavilion), 1b. The work is attached to Xue Shaohui, Daiyun lou yiji. ■

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Chen Yushen 陳玉申. Wan-Qing baokan ye 清報刊業 (The business of journalism at the end of Qing). Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2003. Chen, Zhengyuan 陳姃湲. “Jianjie jindai yazhou de xianqi liangmu sixiang: cong huigu riben, hanguo, zhongguo de yanjiu chengguo tanqi” 簡介近代亞洲的「賢妻 良母」思想 — 從回顧日本、韓國、中國的研究成果談起 (A brief introduction to the idea of “dutiful wife and good mother” in modern Asia). Jindai zhongguo funüshi yanjiu 近代中國婦女史研究 (Research on women in modern Chinese history) 10 (December 2002): 199–219. Chongming xianzhi 崇明縣志 (Annals of the Chongming county). Vol. 35. Shanghai: Shang renmin chubanshe, 1989. Chu Ji’neng 褚季能. “Nuxue xiansheng” 女學先聲 (A pioneer of girl’s schooling). Dongfang zazhi 31, no. 7 (1934): 23–27. Clery, Emma Juliet. The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Clinton, Katherine B. “Femme et Philosophe: Enlightenment Origins of Feminism.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 283–99. Cohen, Paul A. Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Cohen, Paul A., and John E. Schrecker, eds. Reform in Nineteenth-Century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, East Asian Research Center, 1976. Dao Zaiwen. “Lian Nanhu yu Wu Zhiying” 廉南湖與吳芝瑛. Dacheng 大成 (1979): 33. Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820.” In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, edited by Patricia Labalme, 153–82. New York: New York University Press, 1983. ——. “ ‘Women’s History’ in Transition: The European Case.” In Feminism and History, edited by Joan Wallach Scott, 79–104. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Dikötter, Frank. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. London: Hurst & Company, 1992. Ding Shanyi 丁善儀. Chidu jijin 尺牘集錦 (Collected brocade letters). Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1878. “Diyici jiaoyu tongji tubiao” 第一次教育統計圖表 (First educational survey). In Zhu Youhuan, Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (di’er ji), 2:649–50. Dolezelová-Velingerová, Milena, and OldÓrich Král, eds. The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Dong Xun 董恂. Gonggui lianming pu 宮閨聯名譜 (Assorted [distinguished] names from the women’s quarters), edited by Cai Erkang 蔡爾康. Shanghai: Shenbaoguan 1876. Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern miscellany). Du Jikun 杜繼琨. “Zai tan Nü xuebao” 再談女學報 (More about the Chinese Girl’s Progress). Tushuguan 4 (1963): 55–56. Duan Baolin 段保林 and Jiang Rong 江溶, eds. Zhongguo shanshui wenhua daguan 中國山水文化大觀 (Survey of Chinese landscape culture). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1995. Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Dudbridge, Glen. “Women Pilgrims to T’ai Shan: Some Pages from a SeventeenthCentury Novel.” In Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, edited by Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü, 39–64. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Edwards, Louise P. Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in “The Red Chamber Dream.” Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. ■

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Elman, Benjamin. Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch’ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. ——. A Cultural History of Civil Service Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ——. From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1984. ——. “The Hsueh-hai t’ang and the Rise of New Text Scholarship in Canton.” Ch’ingshih wen-t’i 4, no. 2 (1979): 51–82. ——. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550 –1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. ——, and Alexander Woodside, eds. Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600 – 1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. “Erren moru pijia” 二人摸乳被枷 (Two men confined to cangue for grabbing breast). Shenbao (4 June 1872): 1. Fan, Boqun 范伯群, Zhongguo jinxiandai tongsu wenxue shi 中國近现代通俗文学史 (A literary history of early modern and modern Chinese vernacular fiction). Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000. Fogel, Joshua A., ed. The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2004. Fong, Grace S. “Alternative Modernities, or a Classical Woman of Modern China: The Challenging Trajectory of Lü Bicheng’s (1883–1943) Life and Song Lyrics.” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 6, no. 1 (2004): 12–59. ——. “Female Hands: Embroidery as a Knowledge Field in Women’s Everyday Life in Late Imperial and Early Republican China.” Late Imperial China 25, no. 1 (2004): 1–58. ——. “Redefining Travel: Evidence from Women’s Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republic.” Paper presented at the international conference “Women’s Magazines, New Women and Reconfigurations of Genres: China in International Perspective (1898–1949).” Heidelberg, 28 April–1 May 2007. Fong, Grace S., Nanxiu Qian, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer, eds. Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Fu, Shen C. Y. “Reproduction and Forgery in Chinese Calligraphy.” In Traces of the Brush: Studies in Chinese Calligraphy, by Shen C. Y. Fu et al., 3–39. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1977. Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌 (The ladies’ journal). Fukuda Hideko 福田英子. “Zhi Xue Jingqin shu” 致薛錦琴書 (Letter to Xue Jingqin). Nü xuebao 1 (27 February 1903): 31–36. Gao Baishi 高拜石. Guchunfeng lou suoji 古春風樓瑣記 (Miscellaneous records from the Old Spring-Wind Tower), vol. 6, 99–105. 20 vols. 1959. Reprint, Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2003. Gan Lirou 甘立媃. Yongxuelou gao 詠雪樓稿 (Drafts from the Tower of Reciting Snow). 1843. Gao Shiliang 高時良, comp. Yangwu yundong shiqi jiaoyu 洋務運動時期教育 (Education in China during the period of the Self-Strengthening Movement). Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe [Shanghai Education Press], 1992. Garrett, Shirley. Social Reformers in Urban China: The Chinese Y. M. C. A., 1895–1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Ge Gongzhen 戈公振. Zhongguo baoxue shi 中國報學史 (History of the study of Chinese journalism). Beijing: Zhongguo xinwen chubanshe, 1985. Gilmartin, Christina, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, eds. Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

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Gongquan 公權. “Shehui zhuyi jiangxi hui di yi ci kaihui jishi” 社會主義講習會第一 次開會記事 (Minutes of the first meeting of the Society for the Study of Socialism). Tianyi bao 6 (1 September 1907): 27–31. Graham, A. C. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989. Grant, Beata, and Wilt Idema. The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004. Gu Bingquan 顧炳權, ed. Shanghai yangchang zhuzhi ci 上海洋場竹枝詞 (Bamboo-twig lyrics from the foreign settlements in Shanghai). Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1996. Guan Yixian管翼賢. “Beijing baozhi xiaoshi” 北京報紙小史 (A brief history of journalism in Beijing). In Zhongguo jindai baokan fazhan gaikuang 中國近代報刊發展概况 (A summary of the development of journalism in modern China), edited by Yang Guanghui 杨光輝 et al., 399–432. Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1986. Guang Zhanyun 廣展雲, Guang Yiyun 廣翼雲, and Chen Yuxin 陳與新, comps. Zuixin funü guowen duben 最新婦女國文讀本 (Newest Chinese reader for women). 10 vols. (8 vols. extant: 1, 4–10). Fuzhou: Jiaoyu pujishe, 1908. Guo Yanli 郭延禮, ed. Qiu Jin yanjiu ziliao 秋瑾研究資料 (Research material on Qiu Jin). 2 vols. Ji’nan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1987. ——, ed. Qiu Jin xuanji 秋瑾選集 (Selection of Qiu Jin’s Works). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2004. ——. Zhongguo jindai fanyi wenxue gailun 中國近代翻譯文學概論 (A brief study of modern Chinese translational literature. Hankou: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998. Hanan, Patrick. Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Hancock, David. Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hao Yixing 郝懿行. Haoshi yishu 郝氏遺書 (The bequeathed books of the Hao family). 50 ce 冊. 1879. Harrell, Paula. Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895 –1905. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Harrist, Robert E., Jr. “The Two Perfections: Reading Poetry and Calligraphy.” In The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection, edited by Harrist and Wen C. Fong, 282–87. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. He Zhen 何震 [under Zhenshu 震述]. “Nüzi fuchou lun” 女子復仇論 (On women’s revenge). Tianyi bao 2 (25 June 1907): 1–13. ——. “Nüzi fuquan hui jianzhang” 女子復權會簡章 (Bylaws of the Women’s Rights Recovery Association). Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): iii. ——. “Nüzi jiefang wenti” 女子解放問題 (Problems in women’s liberation). Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907): 5–14. ——. “Nüzi xuanbu shu” 女子宣布書 (Women’s declaration). Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 1–7. —— [ He Yinzhen 何殷震] et al. “Tianyi bao jianzhang” 天義報簡章 (Bylaws of the Journal of Natural Justice). Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): i. ——. “Tianyi bao qi,” 天義報啟 (Announcement for the publication of Tianyi bao). Nüzi shijie 女子世界 (Women’s world) 2, no. 6 ( July 1907): frontispiece. He Zhen and Liu Shipei 劉師培 [ Zhen 震 and Shenshu 申叔]. “Lun zongzu geming yu wuzhengfu geming zhi deshi” 論種族革命與無政府革命之得失 (On the gains and losses of racial revolution versus anarchist revolution.” Tianyi bao 6 (1 September 1907): 11–20. Hershatter, Gail. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitutes and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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Hinsch, Bret. “The Textual History of Liu Xiang’s Lienüzhuan.” Monumenta Serica 52 (2004): 95–112. Ho, Clara. “The Cultivation of Female Talent: Views on Women’s Education in China during the Early and High Qing Periods.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 2 (1995): 191–223. ——. “Encouragement from the Opposite Gender: Male Scholars’ Interests in Women’s Publications in Ch’ing China—A Bibliographical Study.” In Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives, edited by Harriet T. Zurndorfer, 308–53. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999. Hongxing ciren 紅杏詞人 (Red-Apricot Poet). “Lin lienü shi bing xu.” Siming suoji 1 (1875): 13b–14a. Howland, Douglas R. Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002. Hu Shi 胡适。Hu Shi wen cun 胡適文存 (Collected works of Hu Shi). 4 vols. Taibei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1988. Hu Wenkai 胡文楷. Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 代婦女著作考 (Catalogue of women’s writings through the ages). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985. Hu, Xiaozhen 胡曉真 [Siao-chen Hu]. Cainü cheye weimian: jindai zhongguo nüxing xushi wenxue de xingqi 才女徹夜未眠: 近代中國女性敘事文學的興起 (Burning the midnight oil: The rise of female narrative in early modern China). Taipei: Ryefield, 2003. Hu Ying. “Lishi shuxie yu xin nüxing xingxiang de chuli: cong Liang Qichao ‘Ji jiangxi Kang nüshi’ yiwen tanqi” 史書寫與新女性形象的初立：從梁啟超《記江西康 女士》一文談起 (The New Women and the writing of history: The case of Kang Aide). Jindai zhongguo funüshi yanjiu 近代中國婦女史研究 (Research on women in modern Chinese history) (August 2001): 5–29. ——. “Naming the First New Woman.” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 3, no. 2 (2001): 196–201. ——. “Naming the First ‘New Woman.’ ” In Karl and Zarrow, Rethinking the 1898 Reform, 180–211. ——. “Qiu Jin’s Nine Burials: The Making of Public Monuments and Historical Memory.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 138–191. ——. Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1898–1918. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. ——. “Writing Qiu Jin’s Life: Wu Zhiying and Her Family Learning.” Late Imperial China 25, no. 3 (2004): 119–60. Hua Wei 華瑋. Ming-Qing funü zhi xiqu chuangzuo yu piping 明淸婦女之戲曲創作與批 評 (Drama creations and criticism of Ming and Qing women). Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiusuo, 2003. ——. Ming-Qing funü xiqu ji 明淸婦女戲曲集 (Collection of drama by Ming and Qing women). Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiusuo, 2003. Hualiu shenqing zhuan 花柳深情傳 (Love among the courtesans). 1897. Huaiyin xinru nüshi 淮陰心如女史 [Qiu Xinru 邱心如]. Bi sheng hua 筆生花 (Flowers from a brush). Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1882. Huang Fu-ch’ing 黃福慶. Qingmo liu-Ri xuesheng 清末留日學生 (Chinese students in Japan in the late Qing period). Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan, jindaishi yanjiu suo, 1975. ——. Chinese Students in Japan in the Late Qing Period, translated by Katherine P. K. Whitaker. Tokyo: The Center for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1982. Huang He 河, ed. Bejing baokan shihua 北京報刊史話 (History of late Qing journalism). Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1992. ■

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Huang Shihui 世暉. Cai Jiemin xiansheng yanxing lu 蔡孑民先生言行 (Records of Cai Yuanpei’s words and conducts). Beijing: Peking University Press, 1920. Huanyu suoji 寰宇瑣紀 (Tidbits from the universe). Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1876. Hui Yuming 惠毓明. Wu Zhiying zhuan 吳芝瑛傳 (Biography of Wu Zhiying). Wuxi: Shuangfeige cangban, 1936. Hummel, Arthur W. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943–44. Reprint, Taibei: Chengwen, 1967. Huters, Theodore. Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Ip, Hung-Yok, Tze-Ki Hon, and Chiu-Chun Lee. “The Plurality of Chinese Modernity: A Review of Recent Scholarship on the May Fourth Movement.” Modern China 29, no. 4 (2003): 490–509. Iwasaki Sodō 岩崎徂堂 and Mikami Kifū 三上寄風. Sekai jūni joketsu 世界十二女傑 (Twelve world heroines). Tokyo: Kōbundō shoten, 1902. ——. Shijie shier nüjie 世界十二女傑 (Twelve world heroines). Translated by Zhao Bizhen 趙必振. Shanghai: Guangzhi shuju, 1903. Janku, Andrea. “Preparing the Ground for Revolutionary Discourse: From the Jingshiwen Compilations to Journalistic Writings in Nineteenth-Century China.” T’oung Pao 90, nos. 1–3 (2004): 65–121. ——. Electronic Index to the Early Shenbao (1872–1895). . Jiang Jun 蔣俊 and Li Xingzhi 李興芝. Zhongguo jindai de Wuzhengfu zhuyi sichao 中 國近代的無政府主義思潮 (Anarchist thoughts in recent Chinese history). Jinan: Shangdong renmin, 1991. Jiang Zhiyou 蔣智由. “Aiguo nüxuexiao yenshuo” 愛國女學校演説 (Speech at [the opening ceremony of ] the Patriotic Girls’ School). Xuchu Nübao 9 (30 December 1902): 1a–4b. Jin Tianhe 金天翮 [ Jin Yi 金一]. “Nüzi shijie fakanci” 女子世界發刊辭 (Publication announcement of Women’s world ). Nüzi shijie 1 ( January 1904): 1–3. —— [ Jin Yi ]. Ziyouxie 自由血. Shanghai: Jingjin shuju, 1904. Jindai Zhongguo funü shi yanjiu 近代中國婦女史研究 (Studies on modern Chinese women’s history). Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan jindai shi yanjiusuo, 2000. Jing Yuanshan 經元善. Nüxue jiyi chubian 女學集議初編 (Collected opinions on education for women). 1st collection. Shanghai: Jing’s family edn., 1898. “Jinguo duocai” 巾幗多才 (Many talents among women). Xinwen bao (7 December 1897). Jinguo xumei zhuan 巾蟈鬚眉傳 (Biographies of manly women). 4 vols. Shanghai: Huiwentang shuju, 1900. Reprint, Taipei: Xinwenfeng chuban gongsi, 1978. Johnston, Tess, and Deke Erh. Near to Heaven: Western Architecture in China’s Old Summer Resorts. Hong Kong: Old China Hand Press, 1994. Ju Xingui 琚鑫圭 and Tang Liangyan 唐良炎, comps. Xuezhi yanbian 學制演變 (Evolution of school systems). Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991. ——, Tong Fuyong 童富勇, and Zhang Shouzhi 張守智, comp. Shiye jiaoyu, shifan jiaoyu 實業教育．師範教育 (Vocational education and teacher training). Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994. Judge, Joan. “Between Nei and Wai: Chinese Female Students in Japan in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China, edited by Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, 121–43. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. ——. “Beyond Nationalism: Gender and the Chinese Student Experience in Japan in the Early 20th Century.” In Wusheng zhi sheng (III): Jindai Zhongguo de funü yu wenhua ■

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Kotoku Shusui 幸德秋水. “Xingde qiushui laihan” 幸德秋水來函 (Letter from Kotoku Shusui). Tianyi bao 3 (10 July 1907): 45–46. Kowallis, Jon. The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” during Late Qing and Early Republican China. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2006. Lacy, Walter N. A Hundred Years of China Methodism. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1948. Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Sixteenth-Century Patterns of Art Patronage: Qiu Ying and the Xiang Family.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 1 (1991): 1–7. Lan Dingyuan 藍鼎元. Nüxue 女學 (Women’s education). 1717. Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1997. Larson, Wendy. “The End of ‘Funü Wenxue’: Women’s Literature from 1925 to 1935.” In Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism, edited by Tani E. Barlow, 59–64. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Lau, Dim Cheuk. Mencius, Translated from the Chinese. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970. Ledderose, Lothar. “Chinese Calligraphy: Its Aesthetic Dimension and Social Function.” Orientations 17, no. 10 (1986): 35–50. Legge, James, trans. The Chinese Classics. 5 vols. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960. Lei Liangbo 雷良彪, Chen Yangfeng 陳陽鳳, and Xiong Xianjun 熊賢軍. Zhongguo nüzi jiaoyu shi 中國女子教育史 (History of Chinese women’s education). Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 1993. Lei Mengshui 雷夢水, ed. Zhonghua zhuzhici 中華竹枝詞 (Chinese Bamboo-twig lyrics). 6 vols. Beijing: Beijing guji, 1997. Levenson, Joseph. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. ——. Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Lewis, Ida Belle. The Education of Girls in China. New York: Columbia University Press for Teachers’ College, 1919. Li Ciming 李慈銘. Yuemantang dushu ji 越縵堂讀書記 (Record of studies from the Yueman Hall). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963. Li E 厲鶚. Yutai shushi 玉臺書史 (History of calligraphy from the Jade Terrace). [mideighteenth century]. Beijing: Zhongguo dabaike quanshu, 1997. Li Juchai 李菊儕 et al. Jiujing Xingshi huabao 舊京醒世畫報 (Pictorial of awakening the world in the old capital). Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2003. Li Kan 李侃, Li Shiyue 李時岳, Li Dezheng 李德征, Yang Ce 楊策, and Gong Shuduo 龔書鐸. Zhongguo jindai shi 中國近代史 (Modern Chinese history). 4th ed. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994. Li Ki, Mémoires sur les bienséances et les cérémonies. Translated by Séraphin Couvreur. 2 vols. Ho Kien Fou: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1913. Li, Wai-yee. “The Late Ming Courtesan: Invention of a Cultural Ideal.” In Writing Women in Late Imperial China, edited by Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, 46–73. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Li Youning 李又寧. The Introduction of Socialism into China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Li Youning and Zhang Yufa 張玉法, eds. Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao 1842–1911 近代中國女權運動史料 1842–1911 (Historical materials on the modern Chinese movement for women’s rights, 1842–1911). 2 vols. Taipei: Taibei zhuanji wenxue she, 1975. [ Liang Ch’i-ch’ao.] Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period. Translated by Immanuel C.Y. Hsü. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.

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Liang Qichao 梁 超. “Ji Jiangxi Kang nüshi” 記江西康女士 (Biographic record of Ms. Kang from Jiangxi). Shiwu bao 21 (23 March 1897): 2b–3a. ——. “Lun nüxue” 論女學 (On education for women). Shiwu bao 時務報 (English title: The Chinese Progress) 23 (12 April 1897): 1a–4a, and 25 (2 May 1897): 1a–2b. ——. “Jinshi diyi nüjie Luolan furen zhuan” 近世第一女傑羅蘭夫人傳 (Biography of the most eminent modern heroine, Madame Roland). In Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 ( Journal of new people) 17 and 18 (October 1902). ——. Yinbing shi heji: wenji 飲冰室合集: 文集 (Writings from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Collected works). 24 vols. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936. Liang Xiyu. “Wu Zhiying qiren qishu” 吳芝瑛其人其書 (The life and calligraphy of Wu Zhiying). Zhongguo shufa 中國書法 (Chinese calligraphy) 1 (1988): 15. Lidai mingyuan tushuo 代名媛圖說 (Illustrated anecdotes about famous women throughout the ages). Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1879. Lingxi 靈希. “Meiguo da jiaoyujia Lihen nüshi zhuan” 美國大教育家黎痕女士傳 (Biography of the great American educator, Ms. [Mary] Lyon). Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi 中國新女界雜誌 (Magazine of the new Chinese woman) 2 (5 March 1907): 65–70. Link, Perry. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Liu Mengxi 劉夢溪. “Xueshu duli yu Zhongguo xiandai xueshu chuantong” 學術獨 立與中國現代學術傳統 (Academic independence and the modern Chinese tradition of learning). In Chuantong de wudu 傳統的誤讀 (Misreading of the tradition), 78–104. Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996. Liu Na 劉納. “Fenghua yü yihan—Lü Bicheng de ci” 風華與遺憾─呂碧城的詞 (Glamour and regret: Lü Bicheng’s lyrics). In Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu 中國文學研究 (Studies of Chinese literature) 2 (1998): 57–63. ——. Lü Bicheng pingzhuan zuopin xuan 呂碧城評傳作品選 (Biography of and selected works by Lü Bicheng). Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1998. Liu Shengmu 劉聲木 and Xu Tianxiang 徐天祥 Tongcheng wenxue yuanyuan zhuanshu kao 桐城文學淵源撰述考 (Genealogical and bibliographical study of Tongcheng). 1929. Reprint, Hefei: Huangshan chubanshe, 1989. Liu Shipei [Qu Fei 去非], trans. “Jieyi E Duerside ‘Da Riben baozhi xinwenshe shu’ ” 節譯俄杜爾斯德答日本報知新聞社書 (Selected translation from Tolstoy’s “Reply to Japanese Höchi News”). Tianyi bao 5 (10 August 1907): 35–38. —— [Shenshu]. “Wu zhengfu zhuyi zhi pingdeng guan” 無政府主義之平等觀 (The Concept of equality in anarchism). Tianyi bao 4 ( July 1907): 7–20. Liu Xinfang 劉欣芳 and Wang Xiulan王秀蘭. “Heilongjiang jindai jiaoyü dianji ren Lin Chuanjia yijia dui Heilongjiang jiaoyü de gongxian” 黑龍江近代教育奠基人林 傳甲一家對黑龍江教育的貢獻 (The contribution of Lin Chuanjia, the founder of Heilongjiang’s modern education, and his family to education in the Heilongjiang province). Jiaoyü tansuo 教育探索 (Explorations into education) (May 1997). Liu Xun. “In Search of Immortality: Daoist Inner Alchemy in Early Twentieth-Century China.” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2001. Liu Yiqing 劉義慶. Shishuo xinyu [ jianshu] 世說新語[箋疏] ([Commentary on] A new account of tales of the world). Commentary by Yu Jiaxi 余嘉錫. 2 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993. Lü Bicheng 呂碧城. Lü Bicheng ji 呂碧城集 (Collected works of Lü Bicheng), 2 vols. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1929. ——. Xinfangji 信芳集 (Collection of news-bearing flowers). 1918. Reprint, Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1925. Lu Cui 魯翠. “Nüzi aiguo shuo” 女子愛國說 (On patriotism of women). Nü xuebao 5 (27 August 1898): 2b–3a. ■

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Lu Gong 路工, ed. Qingdai Beijing Zhuzhi ci 清代北京竹枝詞 (Qing Beijing bamboobranch lyrics). Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 1982. Lü Meisun 呂美蓀. Wanliyuan suibi 葂麗園隨筆 (Random notes from Wanli Garden). Qingdao: Huachangda, 1941. “Lun li bie nannü” 論禮別男女 (On the ritual rule of separating men and women). Shenbao 1930 (9 August 1878): 1. “Lun Dongyang nannü tongyu” 論東洋人男女同浴 (On men and women together taking baths in Japan). Shenbao 30 (4 June 1872): 1. Luo Suwen 羅蘇文. Nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo shehui 女性與近代中國社會 (Women and modern Chinese society). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1996. Luo, Zhitian 羅志田. Guojia yu xueshu: Qingmo minchu guanyü guoxue di sixiang lunzheng 國家與學術：清末民初關於「國學」的思想論爭 (Nation and scholarship: Debates centering on the idea of “national scholarship” in the late Qing-early Republican period). Beijing: Sanlian, 2003. ——. “Jindai Hunan quyu wenhua yu Wuxu xinjiu zhizheng” 近代湖南區域文化與 戊戌新舊之爭 (The local culture in modern Hunan and the 1898 dispute between the old and the new). Originally published in Jindai shi yanjiu 近代史研究 (Study of modern history) 5 (1998). Collected in Luo. Quanshi zhuanyi: Jindai Zhongguo de sixiang, shehui yu xueshu 權勢轉移：近代中國的思想、社會與學術 (Shifting of power: Ideology, society, and learning in modern China), 82–114. Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1999. ——. “Sixiang guannian yu shehui juese de cuowei: Wuxu qianhou Hunan xinjiu zhizheng zaisi” 思想觀念與社會角色的錯位：戊戌前後湖南新舊之爭再思 (Displacement of ideology and social roles: Rethinking the Hunan dispute between the old and the new around 1898). Originally published in Lishi yanjiu 史研究 (Study of history) 5 (1998). Collected in Quanshi zhuanyi, 115–60. Ma Junwu 馬君武. “Nüquan shuo” 女權說 (On women’s rights). Xinmin congbao 新民 叢報 (New citizen’s journal) 30 (April 1903): 9–14. Ma Liangchun 馬良春 and Li Futian 李福田, eds. Zhongguo wenxue dacidian 中國文 學大辭典 (Dictionary of Chinese literature). 8 vols. Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1991. Ma Qichang 馬其昶. Tongcheng qijiu zhuan 桐城耆舊傳 (Biographies of Tongcheng notables). 1910s. Reprint, Hefei: Huangshan chubanshe, 1990. Mair, Victor, ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Mann, Susan. “The Education of Daughters in the Mid-Ch’ing Period.” In Elman and Woodside, Education and Society, 19–49. ——. “ ‘Fuxue’ (Women’s Learning) by Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801): China’s First History of Women’s Culture.” Late Imperial China 13, no. 1 ( June 1992): 40–62. ——. “Learned Women in the Eighteenth Century.” In Gilmartin, Hershatter, Rofel, and White, Engendering China, 27–46. ——. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ——. The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ——. “Womanly Sentiments and Political Crises: Zhang Qieying’s Poetic Voice in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” In Wusheng zhi sheng (I): Jindai zhongguo de funü yu guojia (1600–1950) 無聲之聲 (I): 近代中國的婦女與國家 (1600–1950) (Voices amid silence, I: Women and the nation in modern China [1600–1950]), edited by Lü Fangshang 呂芳上, 199–222. Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003. Mather, Richard B., trans. A New Account of Tales of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. ■

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Matsuo Yōji 松尾洋二. “Liang Qichao yu shizhuan: Dongya jindai jingshen shi de benliu” 梁启超与史传—东亚近代精神史的奔流 (Liang Qichao and historical biography: The flow of the modern East Asian historical spirit). In Liang Qichao, Mingzhi riben, Xifang 梁启超, 明治日本, 西方 (Liang Qichao, Meiji Japan, and the West), edited by Hazama Naoki 狭间直树, 244–85. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2001. McElroy, Sarah Coles. “Forging a New Role for Women: Zhili First Women’s Normal School and the Growth of Women’s Education in China, 1901–2.” In Peterson, Hayhoe, and Lu, Education, Culture, and Identity, 348–74. McNair, Amy. The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998. Mei Hesun 梅鶴孫. Qingxi jiuwu yizheng Liushi wushi xiaoji 青溪舊屋儀征劉氏五世小記 (Brief genealogical account of five generations of the Liu family in Yizheng), edited by Mei Yingchao 梅英超. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004. Miles, Steven B. “Establishing Authority through Scholarship: Ruan Yuan and the Xuehaitang Academy.” In Confucian Cultures of Authority, edited by Peter D. Herschock and Roger T. Ames, 151–69. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. ——. The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. Miner, Luella [Mai Meide 麥美德]. Dizhi xue 地質學 (Textbook of geology). Yokohama, Japan: Fukuin Printing, 1911. Mittler, Barbara. A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004. Mote, Frederick. “Hand-written Books after the Invention of Printing.” Calligraphy and the East Asian Book 2, no. 2 (1988): 76–96. Nagayama Moriyoshi 永山盛良. Taisei meifu den 泰西名婦伝 (Famous Western women). Tokyo: Seiyōdō shobō, 1901. Nemoto Shō [ Tadashi] 根本正, trans. Ō-Bei joshi risshin den 欧米女子立身伝 (“Famous Women” [ Biographies of successful European and American women]). Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1906. Nü xuebao 女學報 ( Journal of women’s learning) (English title: Chinese Girl’s Progress), edited by Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 et al. 12 issues (24 July to 29 October [ ? ] 1898). Nü xuebao, edited by Chen Xiefen. 4 issues (27 February to November 1903). Nübao 女報 (Women’s journal), edited by Chen Yiyi. 3 issues. (22 January to 20 April 1909). [Plus two special issues: Nülun 女論 (On women) and Yuehen 越恨 (Anguish of Yue) (28 September 1909).] Nylan, Michael. “Calligraphy, the Sacred Text and Test of Culture.” In Character and Context in Chinese Calligraphy, edited by Cary Y. Liu, Dora C. Y. Ching, and Judith G. Smith, 16–77. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pan, Guangzhe 潘光哲. Huashengdun zai Zhongguo: zhizuo guofu 華盛頓在中國 : 製作國父 (Washington in China: producing the founding father). Taibei: Sanmin, 2006. Pan Tianzhen 潘天禛. “Tan Zhongguo jindai diyifen nübao—Nü xuebao” 談中國近代 第一份女報——女學報 (About the first women’s journal in modern China—Chinese Girl’s Progress). Tushuguan 3 (Beijing 1963): 57–58. Peng Dingqiu 彭定求 et al. Quan Tangshi 全唐詩 (Complete Tang poems). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960. Peng Yizhong 彭翼仲. “Beifang ren de rexue jiaoduo” 北方人的熱血較多 (Northerners have more hot blood). Jinghua ribao 京話日報 (Mandarin daily) (15 May 1906). Peng Yongxiang 彭永祥. “Qimeng huabao” 蒙畫報 (Pictorial of enlightenment). In Xinhai geming shiqi qikan jieshao (diyi ji) 辛亥革命時期期刊介紹(第一集) (Introduction to the publication of periodicals during the Xinhai Revolution [First collection]), edited by Ding Shouhe 丁守和, 189–95. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1982.

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Yuan Hongdao. Yuan Hongdao ji jianjiao 袁宏道集箋校 (Collected works of Yuan Hongdao: Annotated). 3 vols. Shanghai: Shanghi guji chubanshe, 1981. Yuan, Jin 袁進, Zhongguo xiaoshuo de jindai biange 中國小說的近代變革 (Transformations of Chinese fiction in the early modern period). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992. Yuanhu yanshui sanren 鴛湖煙水散人. Nü caizi 女才子 (Women of talent). Shanghai: Shenbaoguan, 1878. Zamperini, Paula. “ ‘But I Never Learned to Waltz’: The ‘Real’ and Imagined Education of a Courtesan in the Late Qing,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China. 1, no. 1 (March 1999): 107–44. Zarrow, Peter. “He Zen and Anarcho-Feminism in China.” The Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (1988): 796–813. ——. Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. ——. Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900 –1940. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Zhang Jinglu 張靜廬. Qingmo minchu zhongyao baokan zuozhe biming zihao tongjian 清末民初 重要報刊作者筆名字號通鋻 (A dictionary of late Qing to early Republican pseudonyms of important newspaper and journal writers). Hong Kong: Zhongshan, 1972. Zhang, Nan 張枬, and Wang Renzhi 王忍之, eds. Xinhai geming qian shinianjian shilun xuanji 辛亥革命前十年間時論選集 (Selected political essays published during the ten years prior to the 1911 revolution). 5 vols. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1960. Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽. Qingshigao 清史稿 (Draft history of the Qing dynasty). 48 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua, 1976–77. Zheng, Shiqu 鄭師渠. Guocui, guoxue, guohun—wanqing guocui pai wenhua sixiang yanjiu 國粹、國學、國魂─ 清國粹派文化思想研究 (National essence, national scholarship, and national spirit: Studies on the thoughts of the school of national essence in the late Qing period). Taipei: Wenjin, 1992. ——. Zai ouhua yü guocui zhijian—xueheng pai wenhua sixiang yanjiu 在歐化與國粹之間─學 衡派文化思想研究 (Between Europeanization and national essence: Studies on the thoughts of the school of national essence). Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue, 2001. Zheng Yimei 郑逸梅. “Yutai shushi bubian” 玉臺書史補編 (Supplement to history of calligraphy from Jade Terrace). Shufa 2 (1981): 27. Zhan Kai. Bihai zhu ( Jewels in an Azure Sea). In vol. 38 of Zhongguo jindai xiaoshuo daxi 中國近代小說大系 (Compendium of recent Chinese novels), 263–310. Nanchang: Baihua zhou wenyu chubanshe, 1996. ——. Nüzi quan (Women’s rights). Shanghai: Zuoxin she, 1907. Zhida 志達. “Bei zai nanquan zhi zhuanzhi” 悲哉男權之專制 (The tragedy of male domination). Tianyi bao 1 (10 June 1907): 24. ——. “Nüzi jiaoyu wenti” 女子教育問題 (Problems in women’s education). Tianyi bao 13–14 [combined issue] (30 December 1907): 1–8. ——. “Zhengfuzhe wan’e zhi yuan ye” 政府者萬惡之源也 (The state is the origin of all social evils). Tianyi bao 3 (10 July 1907): 33–34. Zhongguo chuantong nianhua yishu tezhan zhuanji 中國傳統年畫藝術特展專輯 (Collection from a special exhibition of the art of traditional Chinese New Year paintings). Taipei: Zhongyang tushuguan, 1991. Zhongguo jindai qikan pianmu huilu 中国近代期刊篇目汇录 (A catalog of the titles [of articles] in modern Chinese periodicals). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1979–84. Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi 中國新女界雜誌 (Magazine of the new Chinese woman). Tokyo: Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi she, 1907. Reprint, Taipei: Youshi wenhua shiye gongsi, 1977. ■

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Zhongguo jindai qikan bianmu huilu 中國近代期刊編目彙 (Collected catalogues of modern Chinese periodicals). Edited by the Shanghai Library. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1965, 1980. Zhongguo nübao 中國女報 (Chinese women’s journal). Edited by Qiu Jin. 2 issues. (14 January to 4 March 1907). Zhou, Xuqi 周敘琪. Yijiu yiling ~ Yijiu erling niandai duhui xin funü shenghuo fengmao —yi Funü zazhi wei fenxi shili 一九一0∼一九二0年代都會新婦女生活風貌─以《婦女雜 誌》為分析實例 (Aspects in the life of urban new women in the 1910s and 1920s: Taking The Ladies’ Journal as an example). Taipei: Taiwan University, 1996. Zhou Zuoren 周作人 [Duying 獨應]. “Jizhe zhi” 記者識 (Reporter’s comments). Appendix to “Funü xuanju quan wenti” 婦女選舉權問題 (Problems of women’s suffrage). Tianyi bao 7 (15 September 1907): 40. Zhu Youhuan 朱有瓛 and Gao Shiliang 高時良, comps. Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao 中國近代學制史料 (Historical materials of modern Chinese educational system. 2nd vol.). 4 vols. Shanghai: Huadong Shifan Daxue chubanshe [East China Normal University Press], 1989. Zurndorfer, Harriet T. “China and ‘Modernity’: The Uses of the Study of Chinese History in the Past and the Present.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40, no. 4 (1997): 461–85. ——. “The ‘Constant World’ of Wang Chao-yüan: Women, Education, and Orthodoxy in 18th-Century China—A Preliminary Investigation.” In Family Process and Political Process in Modern Chinese History, compiled by Institute of Modern History, 1:581–619. 2 vols. Taibei: Academia Sinica, 1992. ——. “How to Be a Good Wife and a Good Scholar at the Same Time: 18th-Century Prescriptions on Chinese Female Behavior—A Preliminary Investigation,” In La société civile face à l’état dans la tradition chinoise, japonaise, coréene et vietnamienne, edited by Léon Vandermeersch, 249–70. Paris: L’École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1994. ——. “The Lienü zhuan Tradition and Wang Zhaoyuan’s Production of the Lienü zhuan buzhu (1812).” In Women’s Biography and Gender Politics in Chinese History, edited by Hu Ying and Joan Judge. Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming. ——. “Regimes of Scientific and Military Knowledge in Mid-Nineteenth Century China: A Revisionist Perspective.” s.v. The London School of Economics . —— [Song Hanli 宋漢理]. “Xingbiehua de Zhongguo keju zhidu” 性別化的中國 科擧制度 (Engendering the Chinese examination system). In Zhongguo yu Dong Ya de jiao yu chuan tong 中國與東亞的教育傳統 (Educational traditions in China and East Asia), edited by Li Hongqi 李弘祺, vol. 1, 207–29. 2 vols. Taibei: Ximalaya yanjiu fazhan jijinhui, 2006. ——. “Wang Zhaoyuan.” In Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644–1911, edited by Clara Wing-chung Ho, 227–30. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. ■

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Chen Pingyuan 陳平原 is Professor of Chinese Literature at Peking University and Chaired Professor of Chinese Literature at Hong Kong University. His publications include Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian 中國小說敍事模式的轉變 (Changes of narratological patterns of Chinese fiction) (1989), Zhongguo xiandai xueshu zhi jianli: yi Zhang Taiyan Hu Shizhi wei zhongxin 中國現代學術之建立 : 以章太炎、胡適之為中心 (The establishment of modern Chinese scholarship: Taking Zhang Taiyan and Hu Shizhi as the central focus) (1998), and Chumo lishi yu jinru wusi 觸摸歷史與進入五四 (Touching history and approaching the May Fourth) (2005). Xiaoping Cong is currently Associate Professor of History at University of Houston, Texas. She is the author of Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897–1937, published by the University of British Columbia Press, in 2007. Grace S. Fong is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at McGill University, Canada. She has published widely on classical Chinese poetry and poetics and women’s writing. Her most recent book is Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (2008). Siao-chen Hu is Associate Research Fellow of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan. She has done research in the fields of Ming-Qing narrative literature, women’s literature (with an emphasis on tanci narrative by women authors), and modern (early Republican) literature. She is the author of Cainü cheye weimian: Jindai zhongguo nüxing xushi wenxue di xingqi (Burning the midnight oil: The rise of female narrative in early modern China) (2003). Hu Ying is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at University of California, Irvine. In addition to a number of papers on Chinese fiction, both traditional and modern, she is the author of Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in Late Qing China (2000). She is currently contemplating a study of women’s travel writing.

404

about the contributors

Joan Judge is most recently the author of The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (2008) and of a number of articles on female subjectivity, education, and citizenship in China at the turn of the twentieth century. An Associate Professor in the Division of Humanities and the School of Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, she is currently coediting a volume on the cultural politics of female biography in China from the ancient through the contemporary period. Nanxiu Qian is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Rice University, Texas. She has published on classical Chinese literature and women and gender studies, including Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy (2001). Richard J. Smith is Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, Texas. He is the author, coauthor or coeditor of twelve books, the most recent of which is Fathoming the Cosmos and Managing the World (2008). Jing Tsu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She is author of Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895–1937 (2005). Rudolf G. Wagner is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He has published scholarly work on early medieval Chinese philosophy (Wang Bi), nineteenth- and twentiethcentury history (Taiping religion, early Chinese press), and on politics and literature in the People’s Republic of China. Ellen Widmer is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of East Asian Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of The Margins of Utopia: Shuihu hou-chuan and the Literature of Ming Loyalism (1987) and The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (2006). Her edited volumes include Writing Women in Late Imperial China (with Kang-i Sun Chang) (1997), Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature (with Wilt Idema and Wai-yee Li) (2006), and China’s Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections (forthcoming with Daniel Bays) (2008).

about the contributors

405

Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹 is Professor of Chinese Literature at Peking University. Her publications include Jueshi yu chuanshi: Liang Qichao de wenxue daolu 覺世與傳世: 梁啟超的文學道路 (Enlightening the world and posthumous influence: Liang Qichao’s literary path) (1991), Wan-Qing wenren funü guan 清文人婦女觀 (Late Qing literati view of women) (1995), and Wan-Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo 清女性與近代 中國 (Late Qing women and modern China) (2004). ■

■

Harriet T. Zurndorfer is a Senior Research Scholar at the Research School of the Center for Non-Western Studies, Leiden University. She is the author of Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History (1989), China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works about China, Past and Present (1995; paperback edition 1999), editor of the compilation Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives (1999), and has published more than fifty learned articles and reviews. From 1992 to 2000, she served as Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. She is also founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China, published since 1999. She has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College (Oxford), Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne, and a participant in the London School of Economics-sponsored project Global Economic History Network (2003–06).

INDEX 1898 Reform Movement 2, 3, 3 n. 5, 4, 53, 127, 129 n. 60, 132, 257, 260, 266, 272, 274 1904 School Regulations 127–28, 132 1907 Regulations on Women’s Education 139, 141, 143 absolute equality between the sexes as the foundational principle of “women’s liberation” 305 advertisement, women as implied readers of 229 n. 6, 242, 249–251, 324 aiguo (love of country) 271–272, 272 n. 36, 273 Aiguo nüxiao (Women Patriots’ School) 133, 295 Alexander, William 254 Allen, Young J. 10 n. 20, 30, 214 n. 31 American Methodist Church 122 anarchism 22, 170, 178–179, 188, 297, 300–303, 305–309, 313–314 assisting one’s husband and teaching one’s sons 128 n. 60 Ban Zhao 34, 46, 343, 377 baofu xin (the mind of vengeance) 289 Bebel, August 306 Beijing 23, 31, 45, 50, 61–62, 67, 76, 82 n. 55, 84, 88, 89 n. 8, 112, 127, 132–134, 172, 177, 204, 209, 214, 217, 222 n. 42, 228–229, 280, 315, 315 n. 1, 316–319, 322, 324–325, 329, 331–333, 338, 341–347, 359 n. 21, 367 n. 40, 380 Beijing nübao (Beijing women’s newspaper) 160, 160 n. 36 Beiyang Women’s Normal School 134, 136, 137 n. 101, 141 Bell for Women’s World (Nüjie zhong) 174, 176 Bi Yuan 43, 45 n. 53, 49 Bi sheng hua 247, 247 n. 48, 248, 250, 252 Bihai zhu 18, 197, 197 nn. 1–2, 198–199, 199 n. 5, 200, 202, 206–207, 207 n. 18, 208–210, 211

n. 24, 212–213, 213 n. 30, 214, 214 n. 32, 215–217, 219 n. 40, 220–223 Buddhism 22, 81, 81 n. 55, 82, 88, 88 n. 3, 99 n. 30, 313, 378 n. 66 cai 2, 11, 31, 268–269, 284 Cai Erkang 243–244 Cai Yuanpei 295, 380 cainü 7–9, 9 n. 19, 12, 14–18, 22, 25, 30–33, 35–37, 49, 55, 55 n. 85, 56, 58, 58 n. 5, 59, 85, 101, 116, 126, 149 n. 5, 177, 210, 267–268, 268 n. 20, 269, 271, 271 n. 31, 276–277, 281–282, 284–285, 349, 374 calligraphy 15, 37, 43, 57–58, 58 n. 5, 60, 61 n. 12, 62–63, 63 nn. 19–20, 64, 64 nn. 21–22, 66–69, 69 nn. 29–30, 70 n. 31, 71, 71 n. 33, 74, 75 n. 38, 79, 79 n. 47, 80–81, 81 n. 54, 82, 84–85, 182, 362, 371 Cao Dagu (a.k.a. Ban Zhao) 343 Chahua nü shi (Biography of Lady Camellias) 276 Chen Fan 157, 280, 280 n. 58 Chen Hongbi 178 Chen Jinghan 169, 174 Chen Jitong 19 n. 44, 266 Chen Shoupeng 19 n. 44, 150, 266, 281 n. 61 Chen Tianhua 171 Chen Xiefen 24–25, 132, 135 n. 95, 157, 175, 257–260, 260 n. 4, 263, 273, 274 nn. 40–41, 280, 280 n. 58, 284, 285 n. 72, 290 Chen Yingning 89, 89 n. 8 Chen Yiyi (a.k.a. Chen Zhiqun) 257 n. 3, 260, 260 n. 6, 263 n. 6, 264, 274 n. 41, 290 Chidu jijin 249 child-brides 122 Chinese girls’ schools 8, 8 n. 15, 123–124 (see also girls’ schools) chuanbo wenming san liqi (three weapons in the spread of civilization) 322 ciai xin (the mind of motherly love) 289 civilization (wenming) 30, 76, 103, 150, 163–164, 168–169, 174, 176, 180,

408

index

190, 194, 253, 278, 289, 309–310, 322, 324 n. 14, 328 n. 28 Cixi, the Empress Dowager 66, 272 n. 35, 326, 330–331 Cohen, Paul 2 Commercial Press 76, 156, 228, 243, 351, 353 congressional system 311 Corday, Charlotte 155, 155 n. 21 cosmopolitanism 88 n. 3, 90–92, 110, 112, 114 courtesans, in Shenbao reporting 229 courtesans, public roles of in Shanghai 204, 234, 333 courtesans, social roles and powers of Shanghai 201, 217, 230, 233, 255 Cuimin Girls’ School 140, 140 n. 112 curriculum 117–118, 120, 123–124, 124 n. 44, 127 n. 56, 132–133, 135, 137, 141, 143, 276–277, 295, 318, 326 Dai Hongci 325–326 Dai Jian 244, 244 n. 41, 245 n. 42 Davis, Natalie 43, 43 n. 52, 148 n. 4 de (virtue) 11, 284 detective fiction (zhentan xiaoshuo) 178, 194 Dianshizhai huabao (Pictorial from the Touchstone Studio) 227, 249, 249 n. 53, 250–251, 342–343 Ding Zhixian 249 Ding Zuyin 308, 308 n. 49, 309 “Diyici jiaoyu tongji tubiao” (First educational survey) 317 domestic skills training 118, 127 Dong Xun 243 Du Qingchi 279 Duanfang 81 n. 52, 136, 138, 140, 325–326 Eastern miscellany 129, 318 Editing, Shenbaoguan techniques of 248–249 Education, of mothers 128 Education, women’s 8 n. 14, 9, 14, 16, 21, 23, 25, 29, 65–66, 116, 117, 117 n. 9, 118–120, 120 n. 22, 123–126, 126 n. 52, 127–129, 129 nn. 60, 62, 130–134, 136–141, 143–144, 163–164, 175, 230, 236, 242, 254, 256, 266–267, 270, 272, 274–275, 285, 291, 306, 310–311,

313, 315–317, 324–326, 328, 330–331, 336, 345–347, 352 n. 3, 355 n. 10, 361, 363, 367, 369 n. 45, 372–373 Education Bureau 137 Enlightenment, Scottish 21, 253–256 Enlightenment, Scottish, role of in Ernest Major’s orientation 21 Enlightenment, Scottish, views on women 253–254 Enrollment 122, 318 Fairy Glen Hotel 93, 93 n. 18, 99–100, 102–103, 105 family educator 143 “family learning” 34, 60–62, 70 Female Jail Flower (Nüyu hua) 17, 168, 190–191 female assassins and revolutionaries 17–18, 25, 133, 168–169, 172–174, 177–179, 181, 184–185, 188–190, 192, 194–195 female education 9 n. 15, 115–117, 119, 121, 124–127, 127 n. 56, 128, 129 n. 60, 131–132, 143, 164 female exemplars 147–148 female normal schools 16, 115–116, 126 n. 52, 133 female overseas students 120, 124 female portraiture 340, 342–343, 346 female students 23, 34, 121–124, 124 nn. 41, 43, 130, 133, 136, 139, 141, 143, 151 n. 9, 152, 316, 328–329, 337, 340, 345, 351 n. 1, 365, 369, 380 female teachers 16, 116, 128, 129 n. 60, 136–137, 140–141, 143–144 fiction of social critique (qianze xiaoshuo) 167, 194 footbinding 21, 118, 141, 176, 229–231, 249, 272 n. 35, 287, 306, 332 footbinding, editorial on 118, 229–230, 306 footbinding, erotic practices associated with 141, 287 footbinding, Shenbao critiques of 231 n. 8 free marriage 303, 305 Freedom’s Blood (Ziyouxie) 179 Fukuda Hideko 160, 288 Funü zazhi 349 fuqiang (wealth and power) 7 Fusheng liuji 228, 251

index Future of New China, The (Xin Zhongguo weilai) 173 Gan Lirou 96 Garibaldi, Anita 154–155, 155 n. 21, 157 n. 23 gaze 23, 107, 111–112, 177, 336, 345–347 gender, concepts of borders between in Qing fiction ix, 18, 56, 143, 252, 316 gender, talent and 14, 33 gender inversion 166 gender role 2, 5, 15–16, 18, 20, 347 General Proposal for Reform 125 genre types 5 girl students 134, 277, 287, 287 n. 81, 334 girls’ school 8, 8 n. 15, 23, 115–116, 118, 120–124, 124 n. 44, 125–126, 127 n. 56, 128–129, 132–135, 135 nn. 92, 97, 136–141, 212, 214, 268–269, 269 n. 27, 270, 270 n. 28, 273–274, 274 n. 41, 276–277, 282–284, 286–287, 316–318, 322, 325–326, 328–332, 334, 338, 340, 345 Girls’ School for Inculcating Proper Behavior 132, 315 Girls’ School of Classical Principles 125 Girls’ School of Language Translation 133, 318 Gonggui lianming pu 243, 243 nn. 36–37, 244 good mothers and virtuous wives 123, 128, 128 n. 60, 129–130, 132 good wives and wise mothers (ryōsai kenbo) 164, 211 Guicang, women in 237 guishu shi (teachers of the inner chambers) 16 Guixiu, or guifang zhixiu (full flowering of the inner chamber) 9 n. 19, 12, 12 n. 33 Guixiu shi ping 246, 246 n. 44 Guiyuan conglu 249 “gujin baimeitu” (One hundred beauties, past and present) 342 Gujin tushu jicheng 227 Guo Songtao 235 n. 19 Guo Songtao, tea party by with wife in London 235 guojia zhuyi (nationalism) 283

409

Haipai (Shanghai school) 227 Hao Yixing 14, 33 Haoshi yishu 50 Hattori Unokichi 331 Heroines of Eastern Europe (Dong ou nühaojie) 169, 173, 179 He Zhen (He Ban, courtesy name Zhijian, pennames He Yinzhen, Zhen, or Zhenshu) 22, 22 n. 49, 24–25, 293, 293 n. 1, 295, 295 n. 8, 297, 297 n. 10, 298–303, 303 n. 32, 304, 304 n. 36, 305, 305 n. 37, 306–311, 313–314 History of Women, by Alexander, William 254 Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber), by Cao Xueqin 181, 251, 255, 276 Hongxing ciren 238, 240 n. 30 Hu Wenkai 12 n. 32, 36, 37 n. 31, 246 Hua Mulan 58 n. 4, 160, 163, 334, 336 huabao (pictorials) 227, 249, 249 n. 53, 250–251, 315, 319–320, 322, 324–326, 330, 342, 343 n. 68 Hualiu shenqing zhuan 222 Huashi 197, 197 n. 4, 203, 206, 208–210, 210 n. 21, 211, 211 n. 24, 212–218, 221–222 Huashi xubian 197, 197 n. 4, 209, 210 n. 21, 211–212 Huitu Haishang baihua zhuan 197, 197 n. 4 Huixian 319, 331 Huixing 324–325, 330 hunyin ziyou (free marriage) 305 Hutchinson, Lucy 155 imperial regulations 139 inferior race ( jianzhong) 192–193 Iwasaki Sodō 153, 153 n. 17 Japan, relations between men and women in 151 n. 9, 152, 232 Japanese translations 148, 151, 151 n. 10 Jia Baoyu 252 Jiang Kanghu (original name Jiang Shaoquan) 325–326, 329 Jiang Zhiyou 282 jianzhi xin (the mind of perseverance) 289

410

index

jie (moral integrity, wifely fidelity) 268 Jin Chanxiang 249 Jin Gui 249 Jin Tianhe 179, 190, 309 Jin Xiaobao 201, 213 Jing Yuanshan 274 Jinghua yuan (Flowers in the mirror) 251, 276 Jingji zuangu 228 Joan of Arc 149, 152, 155, 156 n. 21, 158, 158 n. 28, 159, 159 n. 31, 160, 161, 161 n. 39, 163, 166, 174, 278–279, 281, 283 Joshi risshi hen (Compilation of accomplished women) 158 Journalists, training of Chinese 15, 88, 151, 227, 229 Kang Youwei 2 n. 2, 6, 34, 203, 206, 267 kaozheng 14, 25, 31, 33, 39–40, 43, 45–46, 48, 48 n. 66, 49, 51–52, 52 n. 73, 53–56 Katei zashi (Family journal) 152 Kemuyama Sentarō 179, 179 n. 22 Kinsei museifu shugi 179, 179 n. 22 Ko, Dorothy x, 12 nn. 31, 34, 13, 13 n. 36, 34 n. 22, 65 n. 24, 95 n. 22, 116 n. 4, 117, 230 n. 7, 271 n. 33, 359 n. 23 Kotoku Shusui 302–303, 304 n. 36, 305 Kuling (Guling) 92–93, 93 n. 18 kundao (female Waw) 13 Ladies’ Journal, The 23, 349, 351, 351 n. 2, 352–355, 357, 358 n. 19, 359, 359 n. 21, 360, 360 n. 24, 361–362, 364–369, 369 n. 45, 370–372, 374–376, 380–382 Lai Mayi 260 n. 4, 266, 266 n. 13 Late Qing reform era 2, 4 Late Qing reforms 267 n. 15, 346 Li Cai 209, 209 n. 20, 210, 210 n. 21, 211, 212 n. 26, 213 n. 29, 218 n. 38 Li Pingxiang 209 n. 19, 210, 210 n. 21 Li Qingzhao 269, 271–272, 272 n. 36 Li Yong 209 n. 20, 210, 210 n. 21, 211–212, 212 n. 26, 214, 218 n. 38 Liang Duan 31–32, 49, 51 Liang Qichao 25, 29, 29 n. 1, 33, 49, 51, 59, 147 n. 2, 173, 180, 206, 278, 353, 357 n. 15, 358 nn. 17, 19

liberal socialism 305 Lidai mingyuan tushuo 241, 242 n. 34 lienü (exemplary women) 282 Lienü zhuan (Biography of women) 11, 11 n. 26, 16, 31, 37, 46–49, 51–52, 52 n. 73, 148 n. 3, 241, 337 Lienü zhuan buzhu 32, 46, 46 nn. 56, 58, 47 nn. 59–60, 62–63, 48, 48 nn. 64, 66, 51 Lienü zhuan jiaozhu duben 32, 51 Lienü zhuan jijie 52 lijiao 149 Lin Deyu 366–367, 367 n. 39, 369–370 linxia fengqi (Bamboo Grove aura) 10, 10 n. 22, 12 n. 33 Liu E 167 Liu Shipei 298 n. 11, 305 Liu Xiang 16, 38, 46, 49, 52 n. 73, 284 Liu Yazi 309 literary study/literate education 117–118, 127 lithography 227, 250 love, as the crucial element in sexual union 302, 306 Lü Bicheng 15, 24, 87 n. 1, 89 n. 6, 91 n. 13, 106, 318, 356, 356 nn. 11, 14, 357, 376 “Lun nüxue” 9, 29–30, 125, 267–268 lunshuo (expository essays) 275, 282, 361, 375 “Luolan furen zhuan” (Biography of Madame Roland) 152, 278 Lyon, Mary 149, 159, 159 n. 31, 163–164, 166 Ma Ruichen 46, 48, 48 n. 66 Madame Roland 152, 155, 278–279, 279 n. 54, 281, 281 n. 62 Major, Ernest 21, 227–229, 232, 235, 248, 250–253, 253 n. 64, 254, 256 n. 69, 343, 345 n. 72 Major, Ernest, intellectual background of 228, 253 Major, Ernest, role of in publication process 228 Male gaze 23 Mann, Susan ix–x, 12, 12 n. 31, 13, 13 n. 35, 35 n. 23, 39 nn. 42–43, 45, 40, 43, 50, 52, 52 n. 75, 60 n. 8, 82, 82 nn. 57, 60, 117, 117 nn. 6, 10, 118 n. 12, 285

index May Fourth 34, 35, 53, 114, 349, 351 n. 2, 356 n. 14, 357 n. 16, 380, 381 McTyeire School for Girls 122 Michel, Louise 154, 157 Mikami Kifū 154, 155 n. 21, 158–161 missionary schools for girls 120, 124, 127 n. 56 modernity 1–2, 4 n. 7, 7, 15, 25, 65–66, 84, 104, 168–169, 180, 189, 194–195, 255, 282, 351 moral teaching 118, 129, 134, 332, 337 mothers of citizens 211 Mount Lu 16, 92, 95–97, 99, 101, 105–106, 110–111 Mount Lu, poems about 91, 96–99 Nanshe (Southern Society) 89, 284 n. 71, 356, 361 nationalism 7, 14–15, 21, 65, 87, 91, 116, 124–126, 171–172, 177, 263, 282–285, 290, 295, 380 Nemoto Shō 158, 158 n. 30 New Century (Xin jiyuan) 187 New Culture Movement 2, 5, 20, 23, 346 new-style schools 128 new-style textbooks 147, 153, 166 New Woman (xin nüxing) 24, 59, 85, 87 n. 1, 88, 349, 358, 380–381 Nightingale, Florence 152, 155, 156 n. 21, 173 nihilist fiction (xuwudang xiaoshuo) 178, 194 nonliterate education 118 Nü caizi 242, 277 Nü xuebao ( Journal of women’s learning; English title: Chinese Girl’s Progress) 9, 13, 19–22, 157, 175, 257, 257 n. 3, 259–260, 260 nn. 4–5, 261, 263, 263 n. 9, 265–266, 266 n. 14, 269, 270, 271–272, 272 n. 35, 273–274, 274 n. 41, 275, 280–282, 284–286, 288–291 Nü xuehui (Women’s Learned Society) 8, 266, 274 Nü xuetang (Chinese Girls’ School) 8, 266, 274, Nübao (Women’s Journal), a.k.a. Xuchu Nübao (Continual publication of Woman’s Journal ) 129, 257, 257 n. 3, 258, 260, 260 n. 6, 263, 263

411

nn. 7, 9, 264, 273–274, 274 n. 41, 275, 277–279, 281–284, 285 n. 72, 286–287 Nüjie (Heroines) 22, 273 Nujie (Proscriptions for women) 337 Nurturing Roots Girls’ School 132 “Nüxue fuse zhangcheng” (Regulation for the uniforms of women students) 332 Nuxun (Instructions for women) 337 “Nüzi fuchou lun” (On women’s revenge) 297 Nüzi fuquan hui (Women’s Rights Recovery Association) 295 “Nüzi jiatin geming shuo” (Women’s revolution in the family) 308 “Nüzi jiefang wenti” (Problems in women’s liberation) 297 Nüzi quan (Women’s rights; 1907) 18, 173, 174 n. 12, 199, 199 n. 6, 207, 207 n. 18, 208, 214, 221–222, 316 Nüzi xin duben (New reader for girls and women) 154, 154 n. 20, 155 n. 21, 156, 158, 161 “Nüzi xuanbu shu” (Women’s declaration) 297 Ō-bei Joshi Risshin Den (“Famous Women” [Biographies of successful European and American women]) 158, 158 n. 30 On Assassins (Cike tan) 174 Patriotic Women’s School 133–134 patriotism 18, 161, 166, 211, 215, 219, 223, 272, 275, 277–278, 282–283, 285, 289, 295, 375 Peng Hechou 201 Periodicals, Shenbaoguan 238 periodical press 147, 255 perished nation (wangguo) 192 Perovskaya [Perovskaia], Sophia 58 n. 4, 169, 174, 295 primary educators 119, 124 professional teachers 115, 128 poetry, by women 9 n. 19, 160, 243, 246, 269, 354 n. 7, 361–362 poetry, women should not write 244 public, women in 336–337 public kindergartens 128 public school for girls and women 16, 88, 115–116

412

index

Qin Liangyü 67, 149 qing 192, 200, 203–206, 208, 215–216, 219–222 Qingdai guige shiren zhenglüe (A sketchy research on women poets in the Qing period) 374, 376, 378–379 Qingdai xueshu gailun 14, 55 Qiu Jin 14, 24, 57, 91, 132, 137, 160, 171, 172 n. 9, 173, 260, 263 n. 6, 290, 356, 359, 372, 377, 379 Qiu Xinru 247, 247 n. 48, 248 Qiu Ying 241 Qiushi bao (English title: The International Review) 19, 19 n. 44, 268, 268 n. 22, 272 n. 35 Queen Louise 155 Ranzhi yuyun (Lingering scents from burning tallow candles) 372–373, 378 Readers, women as majority of novel readers 251 Ren Bonian 227 Richard, Timothy 10 n. 20, 29, 125 n. 47, 267 Ritual, political cause for severity of in China 235 Roland, Madame 152, 155, 173, 278–279, 281, 281 n. 62, 295 Rouxiang yunshi 197, 197 n. 4, 199 n. 4 Ruan Yuan 43 Rulin waishi 228, 251 Russian anarchists 295 Sakai Toshihiko 304, 304 n. 36, 305 seal (zhuan), standard (kai), and running (xing) scripts 68 Sekai jūni joketsu (Twelve world heroines) 153, 153 n. 17, 154, 155 n. 21 Self-Strengthening Movement 1 sexual equality 295, 299–301, 303, 306, 314 sexual revolution 308 Shandong province 41, 60 “Shanghai baiyantu” (One hundred beauties in Shanghai) 343 Shehui zhuyi jiangxi hui (Society for the Study of Socialism) 298 Shen Yunying 149, 379 Shenbao 21, 24, 175, 227–229, 229 n. 6, 230–233, 235, 241–242, 246, 248, 250–251 Shenbao, index for 229

Shenbaoguan 21, 227–229, 233, 238, 241–251, 254, 256 Shenbaoguan, book, image, and newspaper distribution by 227 Shenbaoguan, periodicals published by 238 Shenbaoguan, publishing standards set by 228 Shenbaoguan, reportage style in 233 shenjia zhuyi (family-ism) 283 Shenzhou nübao (Women’s journal of the Divine Continent) 260 Shi Shuyi 24, 35, 373–374, 374 n. 52, 376 Shijie shi nüjie (Ten world heroines) 157 Shijie shier nühao (Twelve world heroines) 154 shijie zhuyi (cosmopolitanism [in Fong], globalism [in Qian], internationalism [in Xia]) 91, 283, 298 n. 12 Shijing 41, 245 Shimoda Utako 286, 351 n. 1 Shishuo xinyu 10–12, 245, 376 n. 58 Shoujin ti 70 Shuntian shibao 89 n. 5, 114, 326 Sida jingang 201 Siming suoji 238, 238 n. 29, 240, 246 Sino-Japanese War 1, 266, 283 Siqi Zhai (penname Zhan Kai) 18, 197, 205–206, 316 St. Mary’s Hall in Shanghai 121–122 Staël, Madame de 153, 153 n. 14, 155, 157, 159 stele style 69–71 Stone of Goddess Nüwa, The (Nüwa shi) 17, 168, 179, 180, 183–184, 187–189, 190, 192 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 155, 158, 163, 173–174, 283 Su Shi 95–97 Subao ( Jiangsu journal) 157, 166, 172, 257, 257 n. 3, 280, 289 Sun Dingchen 252 Sun Songzhao 318 Taiping Civil War 227 Taiping Civil War, women in 230 Taiping Rebellion 52, 240, 246 Taisei meifu den (Famous Western women) 158 “Taixi nü xiaoshuojia lunlue” (A brief discussion of women fiction writers of the west) 366–367 Taiyan lun (On evolution) 288

index talented women 7, 10 n. 20, 14, 16, 23, 30, 32, 116–118, 144, 255, 267, 284–285, 349, 358, 371, 373, 377, 380 Tan Sitong 7, 20 Tanci, by women 38, 190, 247–248, 361, 364–365, 370 n. 48 Teachers’ schools for women 116, 139 Teacher-training programs 124, 136, 139 tianyan zhi gongli (rules of evolution) 287 Tianyi bao ( Journal of natural justice) 22, 293, 293 nn. 1–2, 294–295, 297–298, 300, 302–303, 307, 309, 311–312 Tiyong (substance and function) 1 Tolstoy, Leo 312–313 Tongcheng guwen 60 tradition 2, 7, 13–14, 16–17, 22–23, 25, 31–34, 36, 52, 54, 58 nn. 4–6, 60 n. 8, 61, 61 n. 11, 63–64, 69, 69 n. 30, 70, 74, 79 n. 47, 82, 87, 97, 99, 116, 118–119, 126–127, 128 n. 60, 134, 144, 166, 169, 174, 194–195, 236 n. 23, 265, 267, 269, 271, 271 n. 31, 272, 276–277, 282, 284, 340, 343, 349, 354, 356, 356 n. 14, 357, 357 n. 14, 358, 361–363, 368, 371–372, 374, 377, 380–381 translation 17, 61, 148, 150–151, 151 n. 10, 152, 152 n. 11, 153–157, 160–161, 163–164, 169, 169 n. 3, 173, 178–179, 279 n. 44, 297, 298 n. 12, 308 travel writing 15, 88, 89 n. 5, 91–92, 112 tuition 120–122, 122 n. 30, 139, 318 Twelve World Heroines (Sekai jūni joketsu, Shijie shier nühao) 153, 155 virtuous wives 123, 125, 128, 128 n. 60, 129–130, 132 Waiguo lienü zhuan (Biographies of foreign women) 148 n. 3, 150, 281 Wang Ruixian 246 Wang Tao 251 Wang Yuansun 31, 51 Wang Yunzhang 351, 351 n. 1, 353, 355–356, 359, 361, 371, 378 Wang Zhaoyuan 14, 19, 25, 30, 32–33, 37, 40, 47–48, 51 Water Margins (Shuihu zhuan) 189 Wei Furen 63, 63 n. 19

413

wenming 163, 168 Wenming shuju 76 Western heroines 147–149, 154, 164, 166, 281 Western science 17, 167–168, 178, 188 Widmer, Ellen ix–x, 18, 35–36, 38, 53, 104, 104 n. 39 Willard, Francis 152, 154, 159, 163 Wise mothers 119, 126, 140, 164, 211 Woman warrior 160, 163 Women, and poetry 5, 12, 90, 92, 160, 244–46, 269, 354, 358, 361–62, 377 Women, as authors, subjects, and readers in Shenbaoguan publications 21 Women, assumed literacy levels of 250 Women, education of 117 Women, emphasis on education of 242 Women, footbinding 21, 118, 141, 176, 229, 231, 249, 287, 306, 332 Women, importance of as topic of Shenbao news and reports 21, 229–34, 241–43 Women, intellectual gifts of 12 Women, literary works by neglected by tradition 30, 233, 243 Women, model letters from 250 Women, novelists 247, 366–71 Women, poetry published in Shenbaoguan journals 228, 243 Women, ritual separating of from men criticized 229 Women, short narratives by 249 Women, strength of depicted 12 Women, urban savvy of 178 women anarchists 295 Women and Socialism 306 women poets 14, 318, 355, 359, 362, 371–372, 374, 379 women’s education 8 n. 14, 9, 14, 16, 21, 23, 25, 29, 65–66, 115–116, 117 n. 9, 118–120, 120 n. 22, 123–126, 126 n. 52, 127–129, 129 nn. 60, 62, 130–134, 136–141, 143–144, 163–164, 175, 230, 236, 236 n. 22, 254, 256, 266–267, 270, 274–275, 285, 306, 310–313, 315–317, 324–328, 330–331, 336, 345–347, 355 n. 10, 361, 363, 367, 369 n. 45, 372–373

414

index

women’s fiction (nüzi xiaoshuo) 172, 194 women’s learning 13, 49, 115, 118, 120, 144, 265–267, 269, 285, 359, 371, 377 women’s liberation 22, 172, 176, 188, 192–193, 293, 301–302, 305–306, 310, 313, 373 women’s public schools 16, 116 women’s revolution 23, 190–191, 297–298, 301, 304, 308–309, 314 women’s suffrage 311–312 Wopao zhuan 248 Worthy ladies 263 n. 9, 20 n. 48, 116 n. 3, 245 n. 43, 263 n. 9, 271 n. 30, 358 n. 18 Wu Jianren 167, 187, 199 n. 5 Wu Jingzi 251 Wu Yue 171 Wu Youru 249, 342 Wu Zhiying 14, 24, 57, 60–61, 62 n. 13, 83, 318, 372 Wuxu bianfa, the 2 Xian (virtuous and talented) 10, 10 n. 24, 11 Xiangke ji 244 xianmu liangqi (worthy mothers and good wives) 331 Xianyuan (virtuous and talented ladies) 10, 10 n. 22, 11–12, 12 n. 32, 13, 119, 126, 245 n. 43, 271 Xiao Daoguan 52 xiaoshuo (fiction) 17, 24, 276, 360, 364–365, 371 Xiaoshuo yuebao (Fiction monthly) 353, 372 Xie Daoyun 10–12, 12 n. 33 Xinglou zhuren 197 n. 3, 205, 218 n. 37 Xinzheng (New Administrative Policies) 2, 315 Xu Weiyu 40, 40 n. 48, 45 n. 53 Xu Zhen 242 Xue bu (Board of education) 115 n. 1 Xue Shaohui 13, 150, 150 n. 6, 161 n. 39, 175, 175 n. 16, 178, 260 n. 4, 263, 265, 272 n. 35 “Xuebu zouding nüzi shifan xuetang zhangcheng zhe” (Memorial to create regulations for women’s

normal colleges by the Ministry of Education) 332 nn. 42–43, 337 Xuwu dang (nihilists) 301 Yan Fu 61, 61 n. 11, 75, 88, 89 n. 4, 286, 288 Yang Dusheng 177 yanshuo (speeches) 275 Yin Hui 243 yin/yang, and gender relations 237–238 Yingniang 215 Yingying zhuan 220 Yongxu (chanting willow catkins) 10, 10 n. 22 Youxue yibian (Overseas study and translation) 151 Yuan Kewen 88 Yuan Mei 36, 210, 285, 285 n. 76 Yuan Shikai 88, 89 n. 4 Yun Zhu 38, 40, 354 n. 7, 361 Yunyu nüshi 248 Zang Yong 48, 51 Zhan Kai 18, 197, 197 n. 3, 205–206, 212–213, 221–222, 316 Zhan Xi 221–222 Zhang Binglin (Zhang Taiyan) 151 n. 10, 280 Zhang Xuecheng 39, 49, 117 n. 6, 285, 285 n. 76 Zhang Zhidong 317 Zhao Bizhen 154 Zhenniang 215 “Zhi Zhinaren shu” (Letter to a Chinese) 312, 312 n. 63 Zhongguo nübao (Chinese women’s journal), the editor 260, 262, 290 Zhongguo xin nühao (China’s new heroines) 18, 173, 174 n. 12, 199, 207, 207 n. 18, 208, 221–222, 316 Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi (Magazine of the new Chinese women) 153, 153 n. 16, 158–159, 159 n. 13, 164, 164 n. 45 Zhou Shoujuan 169 Zhou Zuoren 65 n. 24, 312, 312 n. 62 “Zhulin qixian” (Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove Aura) 10 zhuquan (sovereignty) 278 Ziluolan 114 Zou Rong 171

index “Zouding mengyang yuan zhangcheng ji jiating jiaoyu fa zhangcheng” (Memorial to create regulations for kindergartens and family education) 317 “Zouwei zunyi sheli nüzi shifan xuetang zhe” (Memorial to set up women’s

415

normal colleges following the court’s decision) 337 Zuixin funü guowen duben (Newest Chinese reader for women) 156, 156 n. 22, 161, 161 n. 41, 163

China Studies ISSN 1570–1344 1. Berg, D. Carnival in China. A Reading of the Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12426 8 2. Hockx, M. Questions of Style. Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12915 4 3. Seiwert, H. Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13146 9 4. Heberer, T. Private Entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam. Social and Political Functioning of Strategic Groups. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12857 3 5. Xiang, B. Transcending Boundaries. Zhejiangcun: the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14201 0 6. Huang, N. Women, War, Domesticity. Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14242 8 7. Dudbridge, G. Books, Tales and Vernacular Culture. Selected Papers on China. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14770 5 8. Cook, C.A. Death in Ancient China. The Tale of One Man’s Journey. 2006. ISBN-10: 90 04 15312 8, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15312 7 9. Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Shaping the Reforms, Academia and China (1977-2003). 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15323 3, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15323 3 10. Berg, D. (ed.) Reading China. Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse. Essays in Honour of Professor Glen Dudbridge. 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15483 3, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15483 4 11. Hillenbrand, M. Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance. Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990. 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15478 7, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15478 0 12. Hsiao, L. The Eternal Present of the Past. Illustration, Theater, and Reading in the Wanli Period, 1573-1619. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15643 2 13. Gerritsen, A. Ji’an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15603 6 14. Starr, C.F. Red-light Novels of the late Qing. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15629 6 15. Xiaolin G. State and Ethnicity in China’s Southwest. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16775 9 16. Qian, N., Fong, G.S. and Smith, R.J. (eds.). Different Worlds of Discourse. Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16776 6 17. Bellér-Hann, I. Community Matters in Xinjiang: 1880-1949. Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16675 2