Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580-1700 [1 ed.] 9781136290220, 9780415533416

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Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700

Exploring the works of key women writers within their cultural, artistic and socio-political contexts, this book considers changes in the perception of women in early modern China. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought rapid developments in technology, commerce and the publishing industry that saw women emerging in new roles as both consumers and producers of culture. This book examines the place of women in the cultural elite and in society more generally, reconstructing examples of particular women’s personal experiences, and retracing the changing roles of women from the late Ming to the early Qing era (1580–1700). Providing rich detail of exceptionally fine, interesting and engaging literary works, this book opens fascinating new windows onto the lives, dreams, nightmares, anxieties and desires of the authors and the world out of which they emerged. Daria Berg is Chair Professor (Ordinaria) of Chinese Culture and Society and Director of the Asia Research Centre at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She has published extensively on Chinese literature, popular culture and cultural history, including Carnival in China: A Reading of the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan. She edited Reading China: Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse. Essays in Honour of Professor Glen Dudbridge, and co-edited The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations Beyond Gender and Class.

Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia

1 Imperial Tombs in Tang China, 618–907 The politics of paradise Tonia Eckfeld 2 Elite Theatre in Ming China, 1368–1644 Grant Guangren Shen 3 Marco Polo’s China A Venetian in the realm of Khubilai Khan Stephen G. Haw 4 The Diary of a Manchu Soldier in Seventeenth-Century China ‘My service in the army’, by Dzengeo Introduction, Translation and Notes by Nicola Di Cosmo 5 Past Human Migrations in East Asia Matching archaeology, linguistics and genetics Edited by Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, Roger Blench, Malcolm D. Ross, Ilia Peiros and Marie Lin 6 Rethinking the Prehistory of Japan Language, genes and civilisation Ann Kumar 7 Ancient Chinese Encyclopedia of Technology Jun Wenren 8 Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700 Daria Berg

Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700

Daria Berg

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Daria Berg The right of Daria Berg to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Berg, Daria, 1964Women and the literary world in early modern China, 1580-1700 / Daria Berg. pages cm. -- (Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-53341-6 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-203-11422-3 (ebook) 1. Women and literature--China. 2. Chinese literature--960-1644--History and criticism. 3. China--Social life and customs--960-1644. I. Title. PL2275.W65B47 2013 895.1’099287--dc23 2012050053 ISBN: 978-0-415-53341-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-11422-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by GreenGate Publishing Services, Tonbridge, Kent

For Shaira and Vadim with love

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Contents

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Map of the Yangzi delta (Jiangnan) region in the late imperial period (Qing dynasty, 1644–1911) The rise of literary women: an introduction Concepts 2 Gentility and literary culture 6 The hidden sage 9 The historian as a messenger of souls 12 The publishing industry 13 Aims and outline 17 Notes 22

x xii xiv xvi 1

1 Writing goddess: virgin, venerators, literary vogues A new reading of Tanyangzi’s story 29 The voices 32 Literati reactions to female literacy 42 Conclusion 46 Notes 48

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2 The child prodigy The precocious girl 54 Styling the catkins poetess 56 What happens when the catkins poetess grows up? 60 Books, libraries and the child prodigy-turned-goddess 64

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Contents Duplicating goddesses 67 Reconstructing her voice 69 Conclusion 75 Notes 77

3 Queen of the bordellos? The courtesan’s quest An invitation 85 Qinhuai revisited 87 Biographical reconstruction 91 Reconstructing Xue Susu’s lost book 93 Recovering the courtesan’s poetic voice 95 Through the literati’s eyes 104 In the gentlewoman’s gaze 111 The artistic gaze 113 Conclusion 118 Notes 119 4 Miss Emotion: the drama of the new woman reader on the literary marketplace Portrait of a woman reader 128 The biographer’s gaze 131 The editor’s gaze 135 The female gaze in the literary oeuvre 136 Gossip, rumours or lies? The question of authenticity 147 Sweet words of seduction: the cult of emotions and the cult of clever women 150 The reader 153 Trading emotions: books and business 157 Conclusion 158 Notes 159 5 Editing her story, rewriting hi/story: the art of female self-fashioning The concept of self-fashioning 169 Editorship and the publishing industry 171 The gentlewoman editor 174 The professional woman editor 186 Gentlewomen critics and team editors 190

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169

Contents

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Courtesan editors 193 The courtesan collator-cum-copy editor 201 Male views of editorship 207 Perceptions of women editors: a view from fiction 208 Conclusion: editorial negotiations 209 Notes 210 6 Negotiating gentility: the Banana Garden Poetry Club A literary society for gentlewomen 222 The circle of poets 225 The Banana Garden 229 Simple, solitary and serene: the image of the gentlewoman scholar 233 The Banana Garden girls in the male gaze 235 Through female eyes 238 Women and publishing 240 The legacy of the Banana Garden club 241 Whose story is it anyway? 242 Conclusion 242 Notes 244

222

Epilogue

251

List of works cited Sources cited by abbreviation Other primary sources Secondary sources Index

254 254 256 264 279

Illustrations

Figures 1.1 Portrait of Tanyangzi 㙯春⫸ ascending to Heaven. By You Qiu ⯌㯪 (fl. 1564–90). Shanghai Museum. From Stephen Little, ed., Taoism and the Arts of China, Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000, 286. 2.1 Portrait of Xie Daoyun 嫅忻枆. Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru ⏛⍳⤪, Wu Youru hua bao ⏛⍳⤪䔓⮞, Vol. 1, Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983. 2.2 Portrait of Ye Xiaoluan 叱⮷淆 reading a book. From Yan Jiantang 柷揹⠀, Bai mei xin yong 䘦伶㕘娈, 1804. Repr. Guo Qing 悕䢔 and Liao Dong ⹾㜙, eds, Zhongguo li dai ren wu xiang zhuan ᷕ⚳㬟ẋṢ䈑⁷⁛, Jinan: Qilu shushe, 2002, 3171. 2.3 Tang Ying Ⓒ⭭. ‘Chui xiao shi nü tu’ ⏡䭓ṽ⤛⚦ (‘Portrait of a lady playing the flute’). From Nanjing bo wu yuan, ed., Nanjing bo wu yuan cang hua ⋿Ṕ⌂䈑昊啷䔓, Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1981, 31. 2.4 Portrait of Cao Dajia 㚡⣏⭞ (Woman sitting on a couch reading in the library). Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru hua bao. 2.5 Portrait of Ye Xiaoluan painting. Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru hua bao. 3.1 Xue Susu 啃䳈䳈 performing archery while riding a horse. Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru hua bao. 3.2 Xue Susu, ‘Shuang gou mo lan tu juan’ 暁戌⡐啵⚾⌟ (‘Outlined Ink Wild Orchids’, Detail 1). Honolulu Academy of Arts. 3.3 Xue Susu, ‘Shuang gou mo lan tu juan’ (‘Outlined Ink Wild Orchids’, Detail 2). Honolulu Academy of Arts. 3.4 Poems by Xue Susu. From Zhang Mengzheng ⻝⣊⽝, Qing lou yun yu 曺㦻枣婆, 1616. Repr. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1994, 12a.

41

53

56

63

65 72 85

100 101

103

Illustrations 3.5 The Tang dynasty courtesan Xue Tao 啃㵃. Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru hua bao. 3.6 Fan Yunlin (1558–1641), Colophon to Xue Susu, ‘Mo hua tu juan’, 1615, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. 3.7 Xue Susu, ‘Mo hua tu juan’, Detail 1, 1615, with colophon by Fan Yunlin (1558–1641). Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. 3.8 Xue Susu, ‘Mo hua tu juan’, Detail 2, 1615, with colophon by Fan Yunlin (1558–1641). Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. 3.9 Xue Susu, ‘Chui xiao shi nü tu’ ⏡䭓ṽ⤛⚦ (‘Portrait of a lady playing the flute’). From Nanjing bowuyuan, ed., Nanjing bowuyuan canghua ⋿Ṕ⌂䈑昊啷䔓, Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1981, 31. 4.1 Xiaoqing ⮷曺. Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru hua bao. 5.1 Portrait of Liu Rushi 㞛⤪㗗 in a male scholar’s attire on her first visit to Qian Qianyi. From Chen Yinke 昛⭭〒, Liu Rushi bie zhuan 㞛⤪㗗⇍⁛, Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980. 6.1 Er Qiao Ḵ᷼. Two girls reading together. Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru hua bao. 6.2 Portrait of Madame Guan 䭉⣓Ṣ painting in the studio. Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru hua bao.

xi 107 109 114 114

116 129

202 222 230

Map 0.1 Map of the Yangzi delta (Jiangnan) region in the late imperial period (Qing dynasty, 1644–1911).

xvi

Tables I.1 Book prices in the late Ming era (c. 1573–1644). 3.1 List of late Ming/early Qing anthologies containing Xue Susu’s poems. 5.1 Anthologies of women’s writings from the late Ming era (prior to the publication of Shen Yixiu’s 㰰⭄ᾖ anthology Yi ren si ẲṢ⿅ in 1636) edited by male editors. 5.2 Women editors’ anthologies from the late Ming to the mid-Qing era. 6.1 The Banana Garden Five poets. 6.2 The Banana Garden Seven poets.

14 94

170 178 223 224

Preface

When I first enrolled at university to study China, Chinese Studies firmly belonged to realm of the male scholar. Chinese Studies focused on the exploration of China’s eminent men past and present – including philosophers, thinkers, scholars, officials, historians, authors, poets, painters, statesmen and politicians. Male scholars also largely dominated the teaching and research of the field. Over the last three decades our approaches to China have changed radically, mainly thanks to the pioneering scholars – both male and female – cited in the pages of this book. During my first semesters as a student of China, women hardly featured in the curriculum. That aspect has changed dramatically too. Nowadays there are few Chinese Studies departments that do not boast courses on women and gender in China. A new generation of modern scholars have contributed personal interests and perspectives to the study of China, opening new windows onto the field of Chinese Studies past and present. I often wondered about the women around the eminent Chinese scholars whose lives and works we studied. What did it feel like to be a woman in early modern China? How much education could she get? What did she read or write? To what extent did she participate in the cultural production and consumption of her day? In what ways did women feature in cultural discourse? How did the men perceive the women around them? What did they think of them, how did they talk about them, what did they write about them? Many scholars have since set out to answer these questions but still many gaps in our knowledge remain. This book hopes to contribute to redressing this shortfall. It aims to recover the voices and visions of women in early modern China from literary, classical, vernacular and historical sources. The women of early modern China whom we encounter in this book too existed within a realm that firmly belonged to the male scholar. A male-dominated meritocracy held the reigns of power under the Chinese emperor who in traditional discourse generally appeared as the patriarch-polygamist par excellence. From the days of the Sui 昳 dynasty (589–618) until 1905 the Chinese political and cultural elite recruited their ranks through an imperial examination system that excluded women. The handful of women who managed to hold political power in imperial China entered the pages of history tainted with the vilifications of male scholars. And yet recent scholarship has begun to uncover only the tip of the

Preface

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iceberg of women’s writings and paintings that testify to women’s active involvement in cultural production and consumption. We now know that not all women were oppressed or cloistered, and that the literati indulged in cults celebrating women, female talent and emotions, hailing clever women as saints, saviours and goddesses while searching for new models of morality. This book is not just about women writers. It examines both historical women and literary figures, analysing perceptions and contemporary observers’ perspectives of women and their place in the literary world of early modern China. When I embarked on this study at the beginning of the new millennium books written by Ming and Qing women still counted as very rare materials that few libraries outside China or Japan would have access to. The field and research conditions have been changing rapidly during the last few years due to invaluable online resources, such as Grace Fong’s Ming Qing women writers database, a goldmine for students of women in early modern China. This book shows how women helped shape early modern China’s cultural discourse and rewrote history from their point of view. It also offers a new synthesis of classical and vernacular sources, analysing women’s classical Chinese poetry and prose writings, and classical-medium sources on women alongside vernacular narratives including fictional works that often portray women’s lives from more informal, intimate or unofficial points of view. The following chapters will reconstruct the stories of early modern China’s women and their relation to the literary world, retracing how women thought, wrote, lived, loved, dreamt, feared, self-fashioned and expressed themselves within a realm traditionally dominated by the male scholar.

Acknowledgements

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the many sources of support received over the last twelve years while I have been involved in the research and writing of this book. First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Glen Dudbridge for his invaluable comments, support and inspiration over the years, for opening the doors to the realm of early modern China’s textual empire, for showing me how to go beyond the world of the male scholar elite and how to access the realm of traditional Chinese women and vernacular culture. I would also like to thank Professor Allan Barr for his insightful comments and helping provide access to rare materials in China; Professor Hans Walter Gabler for his support over the last three decades, for teaching me how to read literature at the beginning of my studies, and for his comments on editorship; Professor Grace Fong for her comments and providing early access to her collection of rare women’s writings from the Ming and Qing eras; Professor Ellen Widmer for sharing her work and comments with me; Professor Harriet Zurndorfer for her comments and support; Professor ƿki Yasushi for inviting me to the University of Tokyo, for sharing his expertise on late Ming culture and sending books and other materials; Professor Taguchi Ichiro for answering queries on Ming and Qing history and texts; Professor Paolo Santangelo for organising our work on emotions in late imperial China; and Professor Joseph Poon for letting me benefit from his expertise in Chinese literature and sending parcels upon parcels of Chinese books. At conferences and beyond, Professors Ann Waltner, Ken Hammond, Maram Epstein, Keith McMahon, Alison Hardie and the other conference participants in Tokyo, New York, San Diego, Hong Kong, Leiden, Moscow, Durham, London and Bamberg, and the anonymous reviewer provided valuable feedback and useful comments. My colleagues at the University of St. Gallen, in particular Professors Ulrike Landfester, Ulrich Schmid and Alan Robinson have provided a great atmosphere to complete this project in the most wonderful surroundings of azure lakes, icy mountains and emerald pastures. My gratitude goes to the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the Universities’ China Committee London, for their much-prized fellowships, awards and grants that have supported parts of this research. I would like to express my thanks to my research assistants, in particular Chen Jue for his excellent help in providing access to source materials and

Acknowledgements

xv

comments on texts, Giorgio Strafella for cheerfully shouldering a great amount of work and completing tasks with great aplomb, Dr Mark Strange, Dr Carolyn Ford and Yoko Kawai who at various stages of this project helped collect materials and prepare the book for publication. My secretary Ai-Linh Achermann devoted much time and energy to preparing the final manuscript for printing. I am grateful to Mr Peter Sowden, my editor at Routledge, for guiding this project through its final stages. The picture on the front cover, a detail from Shi nü tu ṽ⤛⚾ (Portrait of Ladies) by Leng Quan ⅟戻 (fl. 1644–1911), in ink and colour on silk, 121 x 62.5 cm, has been reproduced with the kind permission of the Palace Museum, Beijing. My thanks also go to the Palace Museum, Beijing, Shanghai Museum, Nanjing Museum, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Shanghai guji chuban she, Shanghai renmin chubanshe and Qilu shushe publishing houses for granting permission to reproduce the other pictures that grace this book. This material has never been presented together in its current version. Earlier or shorter versions of some parts of the following chapters have been published in the following places: Chapter Three: ‘Cultural Discourse on Xue Susu, a Courtesan in late Ming China’, International Journal of Asian Studies 6. 2, 2009, 171–200; ‘Amazon, Artist, and Adventurer: A Courtesan in late Imperial China’, in Ken J. Hammond and Kristin Stapleton, eds., The Human Tradition in Modern China, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008, 15–32; Chapter Four: ‘Miss Emotion: Women, Books and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Jiangnan’, in Paolo Santangelo and Donatella Guida, eds., Love, Hatred and other Passions: Questions and Themes on Emotions in Chinese Civilization, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006, 314–30; Chapter Five: ‘Female Self-Fashioning in Late Imperial China: How the Gentlewoman and the Courtesan Edited Her Story and Rewrote Hi/story’, in Daria Berg, ed., Reading China: Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse – Essays in Honour of Professor Glen Dudbridge, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007, 238–89; and Chapter Six: ‘Negotiating Gentility: The Banana Garden Poetry Club in Seventeenth-Century Jiangnan’, in Daria Berg and Chloë Starr, eds., The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class, London: Routledge, 2007, 73–93. I would like to express my gratitude to all the publishers named above for permission to reprint selected materials. I would also like to thank Dr Philippe Forêt for help with the map. Above all I would like to thank my husband Dr Mohammed Shafiullah and my children Shaira and Vadim for making my home a wonderful place of distraction, relaxation and inspiration, letting nightmares, fears and anxieties always appear a little bit smaller; for moving with me from Durham to Nottingham and St. Gallen with good humour; and for their staunch support and constant love.

St. Gallen, 27 July 2012

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Map 0.1 Map of the Yangzi delta (Jiangnan) region in the late imperial period (Qing dynasty, 1644–1911).

The rise of literary women An introduction

What did it feel like to be a writing woman in early modern China? Which elements in Chinese society shaped her dreams, her social and cultural aspirations, her desires, fears and nightmares? How did she perceive herself, fashion her image and represent herself to the world? What impression did she make? How did her observers and contemporaries – in particular the literati, late imperial China’s political elite and the gatekeepers of elite culture, but also other literate women including both gentlewomen and courtesans – perceive and accommodate this new phenomenon? How did they construe the trope of the woman writer in their imagination and how did they portray her in cultural discourse? This book sets out to explore these questions, aiming to reconstruct the woman writer’s imagination, perceptions of the world, acts of self-fashioning, her impact and legacy. It aims to examine the discourse about the woman writer as constructed by the men and women in the world around her. The book aims to investigate how she carved out a place for herself in the literary world, how she inscribed her name into China’s cultural empire, how she crafted her image and immortalized her words. This research cuts across the fields of literature, art, cultural studies and cultural history including the origins of the commercial publishing industry in China, women’s history, art history and gender studies. It explores perceptions of literary women in the late Ming 㖶 (1368–1644) and early Qing 㶭 (1644–1911) dynasty cultural discourse and within their cultural, social and historical contexts covering China’s ‘long seventeenth century’ from around 1580 to 1700. This study aims to investigate the women writers’ lives, dreams, desires, anxieties, nightmares, ambitions and aspirations, providing the modern reader with new insights into the ascent of the woman writer in the context of the rise of the commercial publishing industry and the formation of new cultural ideals – of love, beauty, gentility and marriage – that have shaped Chinese imagination since the early modern era. The late Ming era gave rise to many trends in culture and commerce that we would today perceive as ‘modern’. The experience of the city for example constituted a new phenomenon, spurred by the worldwide economic boom, growth of market towns and the rapid expansion of the urban population. Mass culture had its origins in late Ming times with new developments in the technology and distribution of printing and the commercialization of the publishing industry.

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The rise of literary women

Recent Japanese scholarship by ƿki Yasushi ⣏㛐⹟ġhas identified the beginnings of mass information society and the mass communication era in the late Ming, defining it as a ‘media revolution’.1 Women emerged in new roles in society and the literary world from the late Ming era onwards: as the urban population expanded and enjoyed more wealth and leisure than ever before, women appeared on an unprecedented scale as consumers and producers of culture in the roles of readers, writers, poets, playwrights, editors and painters.2 Together with merchants, students, successful scholars and failed examination candidates, women formed a new reading audience, creating demands for new kinds of books. Women edited and published their own and other women’s writings, rewrote China’s literary history and established literary networks and private and public communities among each other. Although writing women still formed only a tiny percentage of China’s population in the late sixteenth century, they became publicly visible as readers, writers and artists in ever increasing numbers and formed a new tide that gathered momentum throughout the late imperial period. The acceleration of women’s participation in cultural production and consumption may define one aspect of China’s march towards ‘modernity’. This book in sum explores how women began to relate to the literary world from the early modern period onwards, focusing on the late Ming and early Qing era from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. It seeks to reconstruct and recover perceptions of writing women from China’s long seventeenth century and find out what these perceptions can tell us about the world out of which they emerged.

Concepts This book investigates the rise of literary women and the relationship between women and the literary world in early modern China. It analyses the concept of China’s literary women in both meanings of the word: first, referring to educated women acquainted with or versed in literature, who are engaged in literary pursuits – reading, writing and publishing – as a pastime or a profession;3 and second, referring to portrayals of women protagonists in literary discourse, specifically fictional narratives, drama and poetry. In that sense this study also aims to straddle elite and popular culture; the officially recognized high culture and vernacular culture; and fictional and historical discourses.4 It aims to trace and reconstruct the discourses on and by women ‘in between’ elite and non-elite culture, exploring – to use Homi Bhabha’s words – the ‘in-between spaces’ as the location of culture.5 Although Bhabha’s critical concept refers to a different cultural context, it offers striking parallels that help situate the writing woman within her social and cultural contexts. This book is not just about women writers and the reconstruction of their voices within their literary and cultural contexts, but about the way women perceived themselves, the ways in which others perceived them, and the ways in which they fashioned themselves. Throughout the ages in China a handful of women excelled in literature but the rise of the woman writer on a large scale only occurred at the end of the

The rise of literary women

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Ming dynasty due to a variety of social, economic and technological factors. An increasing number of modern scholars have been mapping the history of women in late imperial China from various perspectives.6 This book builds on their pioneering scholarship. The concept of the ‘writing woman from the Ming and Qing era’ has become the focus of recent scholarship. Ellen Widmer for example notes: ‘Educated in the May Fourth belief that, with few significant exceptions, Chinese women were not writers until the May Fourth era, contemporary sinology has by turns been disoriented and delighted to learn how much writing Ming–Qing women left behind.’7 This book differs from previous scholarship by developing new directions in integrating research on literary women in the writings of both male and female writers with the analysis of women’s literary works and visual art within the context of literati-authored vernacular fictional narratives, prefaces, postscripts, commentaries, inscriptions on paintings and non-literary sources. The use of the term ‘early modern China’ in the title of this book – as opposed to the ‘late imperial’ label that links China to the traditions of the past – suggests the view that the intellectual trends and cultural developments of that time position the woman writer on the cusp of the modern age.8 Such trends enabled women to sow the seeds and in some respects reap the fruits of patterns of thought and action that would characterize not only the cultural scene of the late imperial era but also modern China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a working definition, the early modern age in this context refers to the period of the late Ming and Qing dynasties. The time frame that concerns us in this book extends from the late Ming to the early Qing era, spanning over one century from the Wanli 叔㙮 emperor (r. 1573–1620) to the early Kangxi ⹟䅁 emperor’s (r. 1661–1722) reign periods, from around 1580 to 1700. In early modern China merchants began to play roles that transcended the boundaries of their profession. As they accumulated wealth beyond that of their fellow citizens, including the members of the scholar-official elite that ruled China through the institution of the imperial bureaucracy, the merchants also emerged as participants in cultural production and consumption, once the privilege of the lettered elite. Merchants played important roles as patrons of scholarship and the arts and as benefactors and generators of ‘literati culture’. Their offspring often benefited from elite education that enabled them to make the transition into the ‘sashed and gartered’ class (shen jin 䳛堧, shen shi 䳛⢓), the charmed circles of the ruling elite of scholar-officials. Social boundaries remained fluid in imperial China, making upward mobility possible because the imperial civil service examinations were open to all – except slaves, the offspring of prostitutes, and women. An official career was out of the question for women, yet literacy and versatility in the Confucian classics served women in other ways, enhancing their perceived gentility and cultural capital and thus opening alternative unofficial trajectories in the private and public arenas. Moreover the literati traditionally regarded writing as a way to transcend time and space. Traditional Chinese thought regarded action (li gong 䩳≇), virtue (li de 䩳⽟) and words (li yan 䩳妨) as the three ways to immortality (san bu

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The rise of literary women

xiu ᶱᶵ㛥).9 As Grace Fong has pointed out, this notion of immortality was ‘in no way lost on educated women’ in late imperial China.10 The women of the Ming/Qing era who authored or edited literary works included gentlewomen (gui xiu 敐䥨) from elite families, courtesans (ji ⤻, ming ji ⎵⤻), and nuns of Buddhist (bi qiu ni 㭼᷀⯤) and Daoist (nü guan ⤛ⅈ) faiths.11 The term gentlewoman is taken to denote a ruling-class lady from a gentry or elite family whose fathers, brothers and husbands were higher degree holders and scholar-officials. As most of the women authors were not ‘professional writers’ who depended on their writings for a living, some modern scholars have tended to refer to them as ‘writing women’, rather than ‘women writers’. Yet some late imperial Chinese women did rely on their writing as their main income while the writings of other women were traded as cultural capital in a variety of social negotiations and exchanges. The Chinese term cai nü ㇵ⤛ (‘talented woman’) encapsulated the concept of the ‘woman writer’ in traditional China, positioning it within the Confucian moral universe in opposition to the concept of ‘moral virtue’ (de ⽟). ‘Lack of talent is a virtue in women’ (nü zi wu cai bian shi de ⤛⫸䃉ㇵὧ㗗⽟) proclaimed an age-old adage that found its way into print in the late Ming.12 As late imperial writers defined it, the term cai ㇵ when used for women usually denoted literary talent (wen cai 㔯ㇵ) although it could also refer to general skills.13 Traditional beliefs held that talent (cai) and virtue (de) were incompatible in women and their combination would result in a tragic fate (ming ␥) because heaven disapproved.14 Gentlewomen writers echoed such sentiments in their poetry.15 Yet the literati’s fascination with the fate of talented women appears to have gone beyond the affirmation of such beliefs. As an increasing number of women wrote, published and became famous, the details of their lives and deaths began to command the attention of their reading audience. By analysing their readers’ responses we can reconstruct how late imperial citizens tried to accommodate the new phenomenon. For the present purpose this study refers to women who wrote privately or professionally, engaged in literary exchanges or authored literary works – published or unpublished – as ‘woman writers’. This book traces the network of social negotiations involving the trading of poems, prose pieces, prefaces, colophons, letters and edited volumes by both gentlewomen and courtesans, and the exchanges that led these women on their way up the social ladder or provided them with perceived membership of China’s literary world. Analysis of the discourses around women and the literary world makes use of the concept of the gaze as a window into the minds of seventeenth-century writers, observers and women. Jacques Lacan defined the concept of the gaze (le regard) in psychoanalytical context, linking it with fantasy and desire: I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. This window, if it gets a bit dark, and if I have reasons for thinking that there is someone behind it, is straightaway a gaze. From the moment this gaze exists, I am already something other. In that I feel

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myself becoming an object for the gaze of others. But in this position, which is a reciprocal one, others also know that I am an object who knows himself to be seen.16 In view of the Chinese cultural context, too, this definition is relevant insofar as the gaze signifies first, the act of perceiving somebody – here early modern China’s literary women – and representing them in image or text; and second, the women’s perception of being seen, observed or described. Following Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on the concept of the ‘male gaze’ in Western cinema, we extend the notion of the gaze to the textual and visual realms of literary and cultural discourse while adopting it for the Chinese context.17 For our present purposes the gaze specifically refers to the practices of perceiving women, reading and writing about them, but it is not limited to the male gaze only. We trace how the male gaze constructs women in cultural discourse; how the female gaze constructs the female self, men and women; and how readers, spectators, biographers, editors and finally us – the modern critics – construct a new type of woman in the late Ming and early Qing era. We follow the literary constructions of women in the gaze of male and female writers, painters and observers through China’s long seventeenth century. In the following chapters the notion of the gaze is used as an analytical tool in the shape of the male/female gaze, the poetic, artistic, editorial or public gaze, the scholar’s gaze, gentlewoman’s gaze, courtesan’s gaze, biographer’s gaze, tourist gaze and traveller’s gaze.18 The gaze as an analytical tool in this book also implies agency – female agency in fashioning self-representations and representations of others. Michel Foucault has pointed out that the concept of the gaze relates to the distribution of power in society.19 Analysis of the gaze provides insight into perceptions of the relationships between spectator and object, viewer and viewed, writer and subject, men and women, and those between women. The notion of the gaze problematizes not just certain ‘ways of seeing’ in John Berger’s phrase, but also ‘practices of looking’ connecting images with power and politics as described by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright.20 In the Chinese cultural context we trace the connections between visual/textual culture and power – the power to describe, shape, prescribe and dominate. How would early modern Chinese observers have defined the gaze? Craig Clunas has described the ‘art of looking’ in China and demonstrated how Ming China was a visual culture, ‘one in which the related acts of making visible and making culture intertwined’ and where ‘visuality, “vision as a social fact”, was a central issue’.21 The gaze in the Chinese context relates to both visual and textual culture. Clunas finds early Ming philosopher Song Lian’s ⬳㽪 (1310–81) definition revealing: ‘If there were no writing there would be no means of recording things; if there were no painting there would be no means to show things. Is it not that these two reach the same point by different routes? Thus I say that writing and painting are not different Ways, but are as one in their origin.’22 Craig Clunas has also called for a revision of Roland Barthes’ famous demand for a “history of looking”’ by offering ‘culturally specific multiple histories of

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looking’.23 The term seeing (kan 䚳) relates to the connoisseur’s ‘power of the eye’ (mu li 䚖≃) to appreciate an object such as a painting in the gaze of the beholder; looking (guan kan 奨䚳) – at a picture for example – means both contemplating (guan 奨) and studying (xue ⬠) it, representing the ‘performative part of visuality’ in Ming literati discourse, sometimes with Buddhist or Daoist overtones.24 In the present study we aim to trace how the gaze relates to women – as objects but also as agents who look and contemplate the female self and the men and women around them. A 1580 guidebook from Ming China set new rules for contemplating paintings, in Craig Clunas’ translation: ‘When you see a shortcoming, do not sneer at it, but seek out a strength; when you see dexterity do not praise it but seek out artlessness.’25 According to late Ming scholar Zhang Dai ⻈ⱙ (1597–1689), the true connoisseur combined the power of the eye (mu li) with the power of the mind (xin li ⽫≃) in late Ming theory.26 Late Ming arbiters of taste such as the two famous literati Dong Qichang 吋℞㖴 (1555–1636) and Chen Jiru 昛两₺ (1558–1638) prescribed certain ways of looking at desirable objects.27 Talented courtesans and their works – mostly poems or paintings – counted as the classic objects of connoisseurship,28 but gentlewomen poets and painters too became visible in the public eye through their own works and through their contemporaries’ appreciation.29 This book examines how women appeared not only as objects but also as agents using the power of the eye and the power of the mind, and how the female gaze – at the female self, the men around the literary women and other literary women – added new ways of both perceiving and representing elite and vernacular cultures. The concept of the ‘literary world’ used in this book encompasses scholars, officials and literati but it also includes those on the fringe of the elite: upstarts, would-be scholars, failed examination candidates, unemployed literati, and women – gentlewomen, courtesans, ex-courtesans, concubines, religious women and professional writing women. They might not have belonged to China’s ruling class or wielded political power, but they also contributed to literature, scholarship and intellectual history. They too shaped and changed the empire of letters that characterized China’s official and unofficial culture.

Gentility and literary culture Literary culture in the Jiangnan 㰇⋿, ‘South of the Yangzi’, the Yangzi ㎂⫸ delta region, the cultural and economic heartland in late imperial China, traditionally formed part of the gentlemen’s world. It was the realm of the scholar-officials and the educated elite including the literati (shi da fu ⢓⣏⣓), or ‘men of culture’ (wen ren 㔯Ṣ), whether they held office or not. The intellectual elite also included men of letters who had withdrawn from public life and become recluses, other fringe groups such as the unprecedented numbers of aspiring scholars, examination candidates, failed examinees, scholars who defied Confucian convention and ‘gave up scholarship to go into business’ (qi ru cong shang 㡬₺⽆ ⓮), and wealthy merchants with cultural aspirations.30 The late Ming economic boom turned the Yangzi delta region in late Ming China into a hotbed of cultural activities. The economic prosperity of this area

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was mainly due to its salt monopoly, the port cities that thrived on trade with Japan, the influx of silver from Japan and Peru during a time of worldwide economic growth, and the fact that the highest-ranking officials in the imperial administration tended to choose it as a place to settle and retire. The era witnessed a flourishing of the creative arts, and new developments in literature, painting and colour printing.31 John Meskill describes the peculiarities of the ‘gentlemanly’ world in late Ming Jiangnan: The lower Yangtze valley cannot by any statistical legerdemain be offered as a microcosm of imperial China. In all aspects it was unusual. No student of economic history fails to see the signs that have been outlined above of its extraordinary wealth. No student of government and politics fails to notice the powerful representation of the region in the bureaucracy of Peking in the later imperial period. No student of literature can ignore its poets, essayists and fiction writers, who ruled the world of letters. No student of the fine arts need look elsewhere to find almost all the major painters. If the aim is to find regularities and norms, the lower Yangtze valley is not the place to look. Yet if the aim is to observe the life and thoughts of men who were especially favored by the civilization, it offers a rich record.32 Yet the world of the gentlewoman (gui xiu) – and those who aspired to this status – appears equally remarkable. Modern scholarship has pointed to the dominance of women writers in the Yangzi delta in late imperial times, and sparked interest in their world.33 Modern scholarship estimates that China’s total population approached between 150 and 175 million in 1600.34 Data from the late Qing indicate a literacy rate of thirty to forty-five percent for men and two to ten percent for women in China.35 In the late Ming era women readers and writers constituted only a tiny percentage of the total population – probably far fewer than the estimated one to five percent in the late Qing – but they nonetheless represent the formation of a new trend. Modern scholar Hu Wenkai’s 傉㔯㤟 catalogue lists the works of 244 women writers – including both courtesans and gentlewomen – from the Ming dynasty.36 Many more must have remained anonymous or authored works no longer extant. During the Qing era at least 3,500 women published their writings.37 To the literati, scholarship and poetry served the purpose of gaining social recognition. Such pursuits were linked with social advancement through the examination system. Success in literary composition and criticism would translate into a rise within the imperial bureaucracy. Gentlewomen on the other hand would have no such avenues open to them, as all women were barred from entering the examination system and competing for public office. Modern scholars such as Dorothy Ko, Ellen Widmer, Kang-i Sun Chang and Grace Fong and others have written extensively about the emerging women’s culture in late Ming China as increasing numbers of women became more educated and began to participate in the literary culture of the male elite.38 In late Ming times, however, it was

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predominately the courtesans whose education, scholarship and literary abilities matched those of the literati whom they had to entertain.39 In the seventeenth century the gentlewomen, too, emerged on the literary scene as producers and consumers of culture: they composed poetry, published their works, produced paintings, taught their daughters, and gained influence in literature and the arts as celebrated authors and artists. Gentlewomen displayed the defining traits of their gentility in public by becoming visible as writers, poets and painters. The term gentility is taken to denote the way of the gentleman and gentlewoman, the perceived quality that marked them as belonging to the social and intellectual elite. The Hangzhou 㜕ⶆ matriarch Gu Ruopu 栏劍䑆 (1592–c.1681), for example, a renowned poet and writer on statecraft and economics, advocated the importance of women’s literary education.40 She defined her vision of gentility for women in terms of acquiring womanly virtue and gracefulness (shu 㵹) by means of education, scholarship and learning.41 Attitudes among the literati changed as talent, beauty and virtue combined to form a new ideal of femininity and elite men valorized not only the courtesans but also the gentlewomen as intellectual companions. The woman poet Shen Yixiu 㰰⭄ᾖ (1590–1635) and literatus Ye Shaoyuan 叱 䳡堩 (1589–1648) formed such a companionate married couple, embodying the new romantic ideal of a scholarly husband and a cultured wife.42 The educated woman still remained a rare and unusual phenomenon. She was at home in the pleasure quarters and in elite households but still largely unknown in provincial society. The mid-seventeenth-century novel Xing shi yin yuan zhuan 愺ᶾ⦣䶋⁛ (Marriage Destinies that will Bring Society to its Senses) by a writer with the pseudonym of Xi Zhou Sheng 大␐䓇 (Scholar of the Western Zhou) provides sketches of women across the social spectrum from ruling class to rural families, provincial households of lower officialdom and those on the fringe of the elite to courtesans in both idealised or satirical depictions – but the women we see parade through the novel are not literate.43 The narrative voice in the Xing shi yin yuan zhuan depicts how the ideal Confucian family educates its sons while instructing its daughters in needlework on the model of antiquity. The wife of the model scholar You Xizuo 㷠ⶴ愊 in the novel’s brief vision of utopia can read some characters but leaves the business of book-learning to her husband and sons.44 The ideal teacher Shu Zhong 冺 ⾈, a paragon of virtue and a model of scholarship, educates his patron’s sons but not his daughters.45 The main female protagonist Xue Sujie 啃䳈⥸ is a professor’s daughter and the sister of two highest (jin shi 忚⢓) degree holders but she remains almost illiterate.46 Even the courtesan Sun Lanji ⬓嗕⦔ – who in a love affair with main protagonist Di Xichen 䉬ⶴ昛 acts out the literati dream of emotions – appears as neither a poet nor a painter but an illiterate entertainer.47 Analysis of Xi Zhou Sheng’s novel and its narrative voice suggests that late Ming Confucian conservatives appear not to have associated girl prodigies or female literacy with provincial or lower ranking literati households. Nonetheless the novel embraces the discourse on the apotheosis of the clever woman as a goddess and teacher of the literati that appears to have been inspired by the late Ming literati discourse on the

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woman mystic Tanyangzi 㙯春⫸ (1558–80), the focus of analysis in Chapter One. In the Xing shi yin yuan zhuan the venerated protagonist Madame Chao’s 㗩⣓Ṣ excellent morality and superior leadership skills make her a model for scholar-officials and a goddess to provide salvation for the people, yet she remains illiterate. While Tanyangzi is a gentlewoman, Madame Chao hails from a wealthy but illiterate commoner family and only marries into the fringe of the elite.48 This study explores the examples of educated women in the upper echelons of early modern society whose appearance in the literary world shocked and surprised the Confucian literati, creating not only new possibilities but also new tensions, anxieties and nightmares.

The hidden sage As modern historian Dorothy Ko has pointed out in her pioneering study of women in seventeenth-century Chinese culture, the celebrated woman poet Chai Jingyi 㞜朄₨ (d. 1680) from Qiantang 拊⠀ in Hangzhou Bay admonished her daughter-in-law Zhu Rouze 㛙㝼⇯ (fl. 1661–1722), another famous poet with the following pentasyllabic old style (wu yan gu shi Ḽ妨⎌娑) poem: Hidden dragon do not act, Clucking hens just incur shame. I send these words to you, my girl in the inner chambers, Being gentle and meek will save you from grief.49 Both Chai Jingyi and Zhu Rouze gained fame as members of the prestigious Banana Garden Poetry Club (Jiao yuan shi she 哱⚺娑䣦) in Hangzhou, one of the first public literary societies founded by women for women in late imperial China that is the object of our study in Chapter Six. The Banana Garden women poets became publicly visible in the literary world – the playground and intellectual battlefield of imperial China’s male scholar elite, the realm of letters that constituted the hallmark of the ruling class. The Banana Garden poets were active from the 1660s to the 1680s, during the first decades of the Kangxi emperor’s reign period – a time of political stability that witnessed the reconstruction of order after the trauma of the dynastic transition from the Ming to the Qing in 1644. The members of the Banana Garden Poetry Club were not the first women to write or reach male-level proficiency in the realm of letters and the arts. Women had participated in cultural production and consumption in traditional China for centuries. Chinese readers believed to hear the female voice in literary writings as early as the Shi jing 娑䴻 (Book of Odes). The Han 㻊 dynasty (206BC–AD220) historian Ban Zhao 䎕㗕 (c. 48–c.120) became a famous model for later educated writing women. Although she was not the first woman writer in Chinese history, Ban Zhao appears as a prominent early example of a woman who mastered all literary genres of her time and made significant contributions to the world of letters.50 The Banana Garden poets formed part of a new wave of highly literate women who made an unprecedented impact on their world as readers, writers, teachers

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and editors. This book examines the rise of the literary woman in early modern China, her perceptions of the world and her construction in cultural discourse, aiming to assess the impact she had on her world, retracing a trend that had been taking shape during China’s ‘long seventeenth century’, from the Wanli emperor’s reign period in the late Ming to the Kangxi era of the Qing dynasty. In Chai Jingyi’s poem the very medium and the implied literary act of writing undermine the message: Far from discouraging the younger woman from writing, Chai Jingyi advises her to persist with her literary efforts while preserving the face of modesty as a woman in Confucian society. Chai Jingyi dresses her words in the literary form of the classical Chinese poem, the linguistic medium of the literati, the scholar-officials who formed China’s intellectual and political elite. The literati had to master poetry and classical composition to gain entry into the ruling class since the introduction of imperial examination system (ke ju 䥹冱) during the Sui 昳 (581–617) dynasty to recruit the meritocracy that served under the Chinese Emperor. Chai Jingyi appropriated the literati’s literary language as a vehicle of expression, as a tool for communication with the implied addressee, the other woman writer, and for her act of self-fashioning, shaping her words for publication and posterity. The image of the hidden dragon has its roots in ancient Chinese thought. It alludes to the qian Ḧ hexagram of the ancient classic Yi jing 㖻䴻 (Book of Changes): ‘The dragon is hidden, do not act.’ The commentary runs: ‘A sage is placed in a lowly rank and there remains hidden.’51 In contrast to Western thought, Chinese tradition perceived the dragon as a benevolent creature that epitomizes the male principle as a progenitor and force of nature.52 The hidden dragon undergoes six transformations.53 Modern scholars such as Maureen Robertson and Dorothy Ko have interpreted these as ‘a revelation about the worth and power of the individual’.54 The hidden sage plays an important role in Confucian thought. The Lun yü 婾婆 (Analects) open with the following exhortation by the Master: ‘Is it not gentlemanly (jun zi ⏃⫸) not to take offence when others fail to appreciate your abilities?’55 This is the first Confucian definition of gentility as epitomized by the concept of jun zi, the gentleman or morally superior man in Confucian thought. It stresses above all his lack of interest in recognition of his worth and talent, his disregard for fame and fortune. These are the first and foremost characteristics of his gentility, or perceived belonging to the category of morally superior gentlemen, the ideal that China’s educated elite would strive for from the days of Confucius until the end of dynastic rule in the twentieth century.56 Early Qing literati and philosophers also used the image of the hidden sage as a metaphor for their own existence, such as Chai Jingyi’s contemporary, the district magistrate Tang Zhen Ⓒ䒬 (1630–1704), whose philosophical–political treatise Qian shu 㼃㚠 (The Book of the Hidden Hero) gave advice to the ruler and provided the blueprint for an ideal utopian society.57 In the context of Chai Jingyi’s poem, the image of the hidden dragon inverts gender expectations and refers to the writing woman who makes her voice heard and her impact felt on the literary scene and in intellectual circles during the first

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decades of the Qing dynasty in a China still steeped in late imperial tradition yet already on the verge of modernity. The concept of the hidden sage in the context of writing women takes on a particular significance in the Ming and Qing era. During that time the Neo-Confucian teachings of the radical philosopher Wang Yangming 䌳春㖶 (1472–1529) changed literati thought and attitudes among the educated elite in fundamental ways. During the sixteenth century Wang Yangming and his followers caused a revolution in education by appealing to the masses and appealing to the Confucian ideal that ‘in education there should be no class distinctions.’58 Merchants who followed the prescribed Confucian moral ways gained recognition for their potential as ‘gentlemen’.59 In the late Ming era merchants thus began to claim their place within the circles of the elite by means of patronizing, sponsoring and participating in literati culture. Wang Yangming also believed that gender would not make any difference: he was the first thinker to endow women with the potential for sagehood in the Confucian world order.60 Examples of women educated in the Confucian sense have existed since antiquity, but in the late Ming era women began to make an impact on the literary scene on a larger scale. The rise of women writers in the late Ming era coincided with the valorization of women and femininity in literati circles: male writers turned to female subjects and helped transmit the voices of women through their writings by means of editing and publishing women’s literary works. As numerous prefaces by male and female writers to such works make clear, however, women took it for granted that their writings would remain in obscurity and that their literary talents and output would not find wide exposure. For centuries gentlewomen had remained in the seclusion of their boudoirs, at most rising to the status of ‘teachers of the inner chambers’, while courtesans at the other side of the social spectrum rarely gained prominence beyond the walls of the pleasure quarters. Once a courtesan had married into the elite, usually as a concubine rather than a first wife, she would join the cloistered life-style of the gentlewomen in the inner chambers. The ideal of the hidden gentlewoman with its aura of gentility may have appeared as a prize, but in the late Ming women began to make their dream of transcendence and immortality come true by means of publishing their works and building networks across space and time. Modern scholars such as Dorothy Ko, Ellen Widmer, Kang-i Sun Chang, Maureen Robertson, Paul Ropp and Grace Fong among others have shown that women took on agency from the late Ming onwards: emerging from their cloistered seclusion, they began to make an impact on the literary world. Shattering the May Fourth myth of the fettered, cloistered female in traditional China, these modern scholars have shown how these teachers of the inner chambers began to reach out, appear in public view and form communities and literary societies with each other. While preserving modesty and abiding by Confucian values, women were making their own voices heard from the late Ming onwards. Rather than seeking to revolutionize Confucian China, they played by its rules. They aspired to a form

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of gentility that Confucian norms and values prescribed but did so in a more public arena. First the courtesans in the late Ming and then over the decades from the Wanli to the Kangxi period the gentlewomen emerged in the literary world and left their traces in elite culture. As writers and artists these women gained recognition in the eyes of the men who valorized their voices and helped to transmit them.

The historian as a messenger of souls What can we discover about the writing women of that time, their lives, dreams and desires? What were their anxieties, their nightmares, what ambitions did they fight for and what goals did they realize? How can we gauge their impact on their world? As we ask these questions today, we must remain aware of the distance between us and the subjects of our historical inquiry, and take into account our own cultural and generational bias as we approach the historical and literary sources from the past. This study uses as source materials the writings by both women writers and the literati, including poems, prose prefaces and colophons from literary volumes, plays, vernacular novels and classical tales alongside non-literary sources such as paintings, inscriptions and seals imprinted on paintings, philosophical, political, moral and religious treatises. This book offers a new style of reading these sources in context, using literary sources as historical source materials while analysing the dynamics of discourse that shaped and characterized early modern China’s cultural history. This study explores perceptions of women writers in the Ming/Qing cultural discourse and within their cultural, social and historical contexts. The focus on the quest for gentility provides an analytical concept to revaluate and rethink the position of the early modern women writers in texts and their cultural contexts by retracing negotiations that transcend gender and class. This approach takes inspiration from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s concept of the historian as a messenger of souls whose task it is to make the dead speak. It also draws on the New Historicist concept of the network of social negotiations and exchanges and the circulation of social energy between genres, texts and contexts, revealing how a text circulates inseparably from its literary and non-literary contexts.61 As the historian attempts to speak with the dead, she too becomes a messenger of souls who transmits and conveys voices from the past and has to identify and analyse the many other transmitters of these voices and fragments and their perceptions that may have filtered or changed the ways the original texts were read or transmitted. Modern literary critics Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher have applied similar approaches to the study of Shakespeare, Renaissance selffashioning and women’s literature in England.62 The sinologist Glen Dudbridge has pioneered a related style of reading in his study of Tang Ⓒ dynasty (618–907) Chinese narratives.63 I have discussed the implications of using such an approach for a poetics of Chinese culture elsewhere.64

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The publishing industry The rise of literary women in early modern China began with the late Ming economic boom and the growth of the commercial publishing industry in the prosperous Yangzi delta region. New developments in print technology and book distribution facilitated a mass print culture in the seventeenth century, engendering the beginning of mass communication society.65 The new publishing industry responded to a craze for works by women and about women,66 as well as producing textbooks for examination candidates, entertainment literature, guidebooks on style, elegance and gentility, erotic handbooks, poems and plays about emotions, and literary anthologies. Evidence of a commercial interest in publishing, the focus on women as literary subjects, and the awareness of an emerging market of female readers had already appeared in the fifteenth century.67 In the mid-Ming dynasty the publishing industry gradually shifted its centre from Fujian 䤷⺢ to the cities of the Yangzi delta region, in particular Nanjing ⋿Ṕ, Suzhou 喯ⶆ and Hangzhou. Individual enterprises and commercial bookstores, rather than the official channels, began to dominate the market. Technological advances and changes in the production mode such as the simplification of fonts and the division of labour in wood block cutting made publication faster and more economical. The Huizhou ⽥ⶆ merchants readily supplied Jiangnan publishers with wood from Anhui ⬱ ⽥ province.68 The merchants’ rising profits in turn enabled them to educate their offspring and become part of a new and growing reading audience. The Ming state had cancelled its tax on books as early as 1368, yet books remained expensive and were not common in the days of the early Ming.69 By the late Ming era the revolution in publishing resulted in mass printing. During the late sixteenth century the state made further tax concessions for some trades, such as newspaper publishers, booksellers and stationers, considering their businesses insufficiently profitable to pay shop tax. The Jesuit missionary and traveller Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) marvelled at the circulation of books in China, noting ‘the exceedingly large number of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold.’70 Popular stories and plays had a price tag of no more than 0.15 to 0.3 silver taels (or fifteen to thirty copper cash, qian 拊, or wen 㔯) per volume.71 A copy of a novel would cost between one and two silver taels (liang ℑ).72 Recent scholarship estimates that Ming dynasty novellas sold for less than 0.1 to 0.61 silver taels.73 In theory the exchange rate amounted to one thousand copper cash to one silver tael, but it fluctuated considerably throughout the seventeenth century.74 Prices of books varied according to booksellers, regions and the rarity of editions.75 Modern scholars conjecture that sixty-five per cent of the male urban population in Jiangnan was literate and that forty per cent of them could afford to purchase works of fiction and drama.76 Table I.1 provides a price list of novels, anthologies of literary pieces or songs, popular collections and almanacs from the late Ming era, indicating the cost in silver taels (liang) and copper coins (qian).

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Table I.1 Book prices in the late Ming era (c. 1573–1644). Book title

Cost in silver taels

Han Wei ming jia ji 㻊櫷⎵⭞普a Feng shen yan yi ⮩䤆㺼佑b Yong huai tang gu wen zheng ji 㯠㆟➪⎌㔯㬋普c Xuanhe ji gu yin shi ⭋␴普⎌⌘⎚ Ming shan ji, Di li tong zong ⎵Ⱉ姀炻⛘䎮䴙⬿d Xin bian shi wen lei ju han mo da quan 㕘䶐ḳ㔯栆倂侘⡐⣏ℐe Wu che wan bao quan shu Ḽ干叔⮞ℐ㚠f Lie guo zhi zhuan ↿⚳⽿⁛g Zeng Nanfeng xian sheng wen ji 㚦⋿寸⃰䓇㔯普h

3.0 taels (liang) 2.0 taels 2.0 taels 1.5 taels 1.2 taels 1.0 taels 1.0 taels 1.0 tael 0.8 taels (8 copper coins (qian)) Xin juan wu yan Tang shi hua pu 㕘揓Ḽ妨Ⓒ娑䔓嬄 0.5 taels (5 qian) 0.2 taels (2 qian) Ni Yunlin xian sheng shi ji ῒ暚㜿⃰䓇娑普i 0.12 taels (1.2 qian) Xin diao wan qu chang chun 㕘婧叔㚚攟㗍j 0.1 taels (1 qian) Wan bao quan shu 叔⮞ℐ㚠k Xin ke Meigong Chen xian sheng bian ji zhu shu bei cai wan juan 0.1 taels (1 qian) sou qi quan shu 㕘⇣䚱℔昛⃰䓇䶐廗媠㚠⁁㍉叔⌟㏄⣯ℐ㚠l

Sources: ƿki, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 104; Chow, Publishing, 259–61; Wang, Ming Erotic Novellas, 67. Notes a A Ming dynasty collection of ancient texts, also entitled Han Wei liu chao bai san ming jia ji 㯱櫷 ℕ㛅䘦ᶱ⎵⭞普, edited by Zhang Pu ⻈㹍 (1602–41), published by the Wang Family, Huizhou, in 1572–1644. b The Investiture of the Gods, a famous Ming dynasty vernacular novel recounting a historical romance in 100 chapters attributed to Xu Zhonglin 姙ẚ䏛 (d. c. 1566) or Lu Xixing 映大㗇 (1520–c. 1601). The edition Xin ke Zhong Jingbo xian sheng pi ping Feng shen yan yi 㕘⇣揀㔔ỗ ⃰䓇㈡姽⮩䤆㺼佑ġpublished by Shu Wenyuan 冺㔯㶝 in Suzhou sold for 2.0 taels in c. 1600. c Published by Duan Junding 㭝⏃⭂, sold in 1633. d Record of Famous Mountains, a travel writing collection, as sold in 1586; cf. Chow, Publishing, 259. e Complete Guide to Writings, Newly Edited is a Yuan dynasty almanac or epistolary manual, reprinted in 1611; cf. Wang, Ming Erotic Novellas, 67. f Five Carts Piled with an Encyclopedia of Myriad Treasures is a luxury edition of an almanac published in 1614; cf. Wang, Ming Erotic Novellas, 67. The other almanac editions listed in this table (Wan bao quan shu; Xin ke Meigong Chen xian sheng bian ji zhu shu bei cai Wan juan sou qi quan shu) are much cheaper at 0.1 tael. g A Fictionalized History of the States by Yu Shaoyu ἁ恝欂ġand one of the sources for the novel Feng shen yan yi. h A collection of literary writings. i A poetry collection, sold in 1629. j All-time Popular Myriad Songs in a New Tune, an anthology of opera pieces printed by a Fujian publisher during the Wanli era (1573–1620). k Encyclopedia of Myriad Treasures, a large popular encyclopedia including information on popular games, entertainments and sexual pleasures, compiled by imperial order in 1573; cf. Wu Huifang ⏛唁剛, Wan bao quan shu: Ming Qing shi ji de min jian sheng huo shi lu 叔⮞ℐ㚠 : 㖶㶭㗪㛇䘬 㮹攻䓇㳣⮎抬, Taibei: Guoli zhengzhi daxue lishi xi, 2001; Chow, Publishing, 25. l Almanac of marvels drawn from countless volumes: a complete selection, edited by Mr. Chen Jiru and newly caved, published in 1628; cf. Wang, Ming Erotic Novellas, 67.

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A look at some figures for comparison shows what such book prices amounted to in real terms. According to a late Ming source from 1619, a labourer earned twenty-four to twenty-five cash in copper coins per day, hardly enough to keep him alive.77 The price of rice could vary from as little as twenty-five copper cash per peck (dou 㔿, ten catties, or 10.74 litres) in the mid-sixteenth century to one tael per picul (shi 䞛, 100 catties) after natural disasters in the early seventeenth century.78 A day worker’s average income of 1.5 taels a month would not suffice to purchase warm clothes for his family in winter, let alone books. The literati and merchants however would have considered book prices cheap.79 Landed gentry and high officials like Wang Shizhen 䌳ᶾ屆 (1526–90) and Qian Qianyi 拊嫁䙲 (1582–1664, jin shi 1610) could afford to acquire rare collector’s items such as a Song dynasty edition of the historical work Liang Han shu ℑ㻊 㚠 (History of the Former and Latter Han) for a piece of land or a sum of 1200 taels.80 High-ranking officials earned an annual income of around 152 silver taels but also received gifts from provincial officials amounting to ten times as much.81 Lower-ranking officials might receive no more than thirty-five taels per annum and go into debt or find other, not always legal, sources of income.82 Late Ming documents inform us that women, too, had cash in hand and participated in the money economy just like men.83 Scholars, officials, merchants and their womenfolk thus emerge as the main buyers and consumers of books. Towards the mid-seventeenth century books became even cheaper. While the prices of food and necessities rose during the 1630s and 1640s due to hoarding, poor harvests and speculation, the prices for other goods fell as inflation gave way to deflation.84 A copy of a household encyclopaedia (ri yong lei shu 㖍䓐栆㚠), an almanac containing a plethora of practical advice, cost one silver tael at the turn of the seventeenth century but only one qian of copper cash during the last Ming reign period (1628–44).85 Moreover, technical innovations in printing techniques, production and distribution further decreased the prices of books, making them more widely available. Late Ming publishers and booksellers catered to a mass market consisting of the growing urban population and unprecedented numbers of examination candidates, lower degree holders, failed students, upwardly mobile merchants and literate women. The booming book trade also tempted bibliophiles to amass grand private collections. As we have seen, privately owned libraries – such as for example those of literati Wang Shizhen, Hu Yinglin 傉ㅱ湇 (1551–1602),86 Qi Biaojia 䣩⼒Ἓ (1602–45) and his wife Shang Jinglan ⓮㘗嗕 (1605– c. 1676),87 or the studio of Qian Qianyi and his wife ex-courtesan Liu Rushi 㞛 ⤪㗗 (1618–64) – could contain anything between ten thousand and one hundred thousand volumes (juan ⌟).88 Scholar Li Rihua 㛶㖍厗 (1565–1635), the onetime husband of the celebrated courtesan Xue Susu 啃䳈䳈 (fl. 1575–1637) – the subject of Chapter Three – gained fame for his collection of books, paintings and calligraphy.89 The passion for collecting books had two important consequences: first, it gave some women – the bibliophiles’ wives, concubines, daughters and sisters – access to well-stocked libraries within their own homes. The libraries enabled

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them to indulge in literary pursuits for entertainment, study or professional work. Second, commercial publishers began to make serious money. The owner of the Huanduzhai 怬嬨滳 publishing house in Hangzhou, Wang Qi 㰒㵯 (c. 1605–after 1668) watched in amazement as his profit turned ‘his tadpole studio into a unicorn pavilion’, as Ellen Widmer has noted.90 Wang Qi never passed any examinations but as a publisher he found himself in the position to offer employment to the highest degree holders.91 Wang Ang 㰒㖪 (1615–after 1694), a relative of Wang Qi’s who also worked in the family publishing business, professed to scholarly aspirations but withdrew from government service when the Ming dynasty fell. His life, occupation and circumstances remain obscure but we know that he described himself as ‘filthy rich’.92 In the seventeenth-century novel Xing shi yin yuan zhuan the narrative voice considers the dilemma of the literatus how to make money and keep up with the new culture of consumption. It mocks the ‘poor scholar’s option of making money by opening a bookstore’.93 Here the ‘poor scholar’ refers to the licentiate (literally ‘fine talent’ xiu cai 䥨ㇵ, or sheng yuan 䓇⒉), a government student who has passed the first public examination but needs to take further examinations before he can qualify for civil service. But what can the poor licentiate do to make a living? He can only open a bookshop. He invests several hundred silver taels as capital, hires a professional and kind man as his assistant, travels in person to Suzhou and Hangzhou to buy books, places them in boat, reads them on his way back, and he can also read them at home before selling them. On the way he does not need to fear any tax extortion. After arriving in the Huai area, he furthermore does not need to fear that the customs investigator might snatch away half of the goods. Is this not an excellent trade? But there are also quite a few disadvantages. First, you do not necessarily have those several hundred silver taels as your capital to start with. Second, fellow scholars, literary friends, relatives and acquaintances often buy a whole series of books ‘on credit’. This so-called ‘buying on credit’ actually means cheating, which you cannot afford. Third, although the government officials will not tax you, they will ask you for books. If you have what they want, you can still make it as long as you do not care what the purchasing price was. The trouble starts if it is something you do not have. You will have to spend good money to buy them from local gentry, or you might even have to go to a distant market. After you brought them the books, you still cannot be sure that they will be satisfied. These troubles make the business that the licentiate should have been able to do no longer an option for the licentiate. As for opening a satin shop, clothes shop, silk shop, or pawnshop, needless to mention, he does not have sufficient capital, but even if he had the required capital, the profit he could earn would not suffice to deal with the government. These businesses are yet again not an option for the licentiate.94

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The narrative voice continues its satirical soliloquy considering other income options for the poor scholar without any capital such as collecting night-soil, currying favour with the local bigwigs, manufacturing coffins, or going into teaching and opening his own academy.95 The passage on the licentiate opening a bookstore alludes to the seventeenth-century publishing boom and the general popularity of books among an emerging vast and varied readership. It also indicates a change in attitude to commerce among China’s elite. Indeed many Confucian scholars followed this trend and gave up book learning to go into business (qi ru cong shang) from the late Ming era onwards.96 Famous examples of seventeenth-century scholars-turned-publishers include writer and artist Chen Jiru in Songjiang 㜦㰇, the anthologist Feng Menglong 楖⣊漵 (1574–1646) in Suzhou, and the dramatist Li Yu 㛶㺩 (1610–80) who in 1669 set up his bookstore and printing house the Mustard Seed Garden (Jie zi yuan 前⫸⚺) in Nanjing.97 According to a recent estimate, seventeenth-century China boasted 374 major publishers. Suzhou had the largest share with forty-two publishing houses while Hangzhou and Nanjing had thirty-one each.98 Li Yu’s enterprise made money producing and selling not only his own writings but also works of popular fiction such as the vernacular novels Shui hu zhuan 㯜㺠⁛ (Water Margin), Xi you ji 大㷠姀 (Journey to the West) and Jin Ping Mei 慹䒞㠭 (The Plum in the Golden Vase).99 Failed examination candidates, too, would seek their luck in the publishing industry, among them Yu Xiangdou ἁ尉㔿 (fl. 1599) from Jianyang ⺢春, Fujian province, who advertised his business by including his portrait in his publications – guide-books to the kind of gentility he aspired to.100 Commercial interests also fuelled the publishers’ search for women’s writings to be included in literary anthologies.101 Literati attitudes towards money and silver underwent change during the last decades of the Ming. The Roman Catholic Grand Secretary Xu Guangqi ⼸⃱┇ (1562–1633) from Shanghai declared in the 1620s that he perceived silver not as wealth but as a means for assessing wealth.102 In 1639 the poet, scholar and anthologist Chen Zilong 昛⫸漵 (1608–47) confirmed his view that silver did not create wealth – in the way land did – but served to concentrate and direct resources.103 As Timothy Brook concludes, these Confucian scholars ‘were acknowledging that silver was a fact of late-Ming life and indicating that they were comfortable with that fact.’104 At that time Chen Zilong had just composed a preface for his former lover, courtesan Liu Rushi’s poetic collection Wu yin cao ㆲ⭭勱 (Manuscript from the Year 1638), helping her to appear in print and perhaps earn money as well as fame.

Aims and outline The present book divides into six main parts: each part seeks to explore the perceptions of women through the eyes of both women writers and the literati. This book explores the history of women and the literary world in China’s ‘long seventeenth century’ from around 1580 to 1700, the dynastic transition period from the Wanli to the early Kangxi reign periods across the Ming/Qing cataclysm in 1644

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which entailed great changes in cultural, economic and political conditions.105 Most time frames are constructs, artificial in their neatness but useful for scholarly inquiry in focusing analysis on certain aspects and trends. The concept of the ‘long century’ – following Susan Mann’s use of the term106 – indicates that the limits of using a century as a time frame are never neat, that there are always trends and ideas that originated earlier or lasted longer, transcending the boundaries of frameworks imposed by later chronologists or modern historians. This book investigates what was new in the relationship of women writers and the literary world in early modern China, how late imperial citizens reacted to the new trends and why such trends occurred. It aims to reconstruct the perceptions of women in relation to the literary world and to retrace in cultural discourse how this relationship changed over China’s turbulent and traumatic long seventeenth century and how it differed in the days of the late Ming from the early Qing era. This book argues: •

•

•

First, that decisive changes took place in the relationship of women writers and the literary world over the century from the Wanli reign period of the native Chinese Ming dynasty to the Kangxi reign period of the Manchu Qing dynasty, c. 1580–1700; Second, that these changes caused new tensions and anxieties among the established cultural elite that show in the critical analysis of Ming and Qing cultural discourse; and Third, that these changes can be described as early modern in the sense that the seeds were sown for major developments with regards to women and literature that took place throughout the Qing. These trends continued until the modern period when the last Chinese emperor abdicated in 1911 and women played active and revolutionary roles in the political, social and literary movements that followed in the wake of the cultural reform inspired by May Fourth, 1919.

The perceptions that we gain from the analysis of cultural discourse provide new insights into the early modern period, the story of women writers as told by Ming and Qing witnesses, the history of women writers and their rise in the literary world of early modern China. This book opens with the creation of a writing goddess in 1580 in literati discourse, showing how the young gentlewoman Tanyangzi appears as a goddess because she writes and disseminates her teachings through her writings. The prosperous region around the city of Suzhou, a culturally thriving Jiangnan region, sets the stage for this spectacle. Ming dynasty China counts among the largest and most culturally sophisticated empires on earth. The ruler on the dragon throne is the thirteenth Ming monarch Zhu Yijun 㛙佲懆, or Shenzong 䤆⬿ (1563–1620, r. 1572–1620), better known by his reign period as the Wanli emperor. The boy emperor ascends the throne at the age of eight in 1572. The Wanli reign period begins in 1573. He is only a teenager when the events around Tanyangzi unfold in 1580.107 At that time the emperor’s private tutor Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng

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⻝⯭㬋 (1525–82) still holds tight control of the government. The drama of Tanyangzi unfolds among Zhang Juzheng’s political opponents. The Wanli reign period lasted almost half a century and became one of the longest and most culturally diverse eras of the Ming dynasty. The borders of Wanli’s empire extend from the economically flourishing cities in the Yangzi delta region and along the Pacific coast in the east to the Himalayas in the west, from the stormy sands of the Gobi desert in the north to the subtropical jungles around the Mekong river in the south. The Chinese empire ranks among the most powerful states in the region, with its neighboring vassal states paying regular tribute to the Son of Heaven who formally rules over ‘all under Heaven’ (tian xia ⣑ᶳ).109 Modern scholarship has examined commercial culture and the rise of the commercial publishing industry in China,110 yet many aspects of women’s lives and culture in relation to the publishing world still remain to be explored. This study aims to contribute further to our understanding of the negotiations involving women, books, culture and the market place. Our story explores how women began to relate to the literary world from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, what perceptions of writing women in the late Ming and early Qing era we can recover and what these perceptions can tell us about the late imperial Chinese world – perceptions by the writing women themselves and those by the men who wrote about them. As we move through China’s long seventeenth century in the course of the six main chapters, we retrace the rise of female literacy and the emergence of the woman writer as a new phenomenon in the literary world. While courtesans were the leading group among women poets at the end of the sixteenth century, elite women gradually began to catch up. By the end of the seventeenth century they had replaced the courtesans as the dominant group of women writers in elite culture. Chapter One ‘Writing goddess: virgin, venerators, literary vogues’ analyses the story of the female immortal Tanyangzi as told in her bestselling biography by the foremost writer of the late Ming era, Wang Shizhen. It describes how the teenage widow Tanyangzi wins the admiration and adulation of China’s most senior government officials and ministers who accept her as their spiritual leader. This chapter situates Tanyangzi the faithful maiden who refuses marriage after the death of her fiancé in the context of the late Ming cult of chastity and the rise of elite women’s literacy. In the eyes of her contemporary observers Tanyangzi undergoes apotheosis and turns into a goddess who disseminates her teachings through her writings. Here I argue that her story maps the tensions that the rise of the woman writer on the cultural scene of late Ming China entailed in the perception of contemporary observers. This chapter proposes a new reading of Tanyangzi as a literary woman, arguing that her death can be read as the birth of a new phenomenon in late Ming discourse – the emergence of high literacy among women, in particular those from elite backgrounds, on an unprecedented scale, a process rapidly accelerating from the late Ming onwards. In 1580 however the gentlewoman writer was still so unusual a phenomenon that the literati had to devise strategies to cope with it. 108

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Chapter Two ‘The child prodigy’ investigates how the literati dealt with the shock of seeing the new women readers and writers vying for membership in the literary circles of imperial China’s intellectual elite. The chapter charts literati reactions to clever girls by casting them as child prodigies. It explores how the literati would have dealt with the clever girl poet when she grew up. I argue that the literati found the phenomenon of the new literary woman so unsettling that they responded to the growing female literacy in the late Ming era by resorting to explanations of supernatural intervention and divine causes, turning these emerging writing women into the new goddesses. Chapter Three ‘Queen of the Bordellos? The Courtesan’s Quest’ shifts the focus from the writing gentlewoman onto a woman poet and painter on the other side of the social spectrum, using the celebrated courtesan Xue Susu as a case study. Xue Susu entertained men from the literary, political and military elite with her art and archery performances during the last decades of the sixteenth century. Around 1600 she, too, sought respectability and gentility – the perceived attributes and membership of the ruling class – by means of marriage into the scholar elite. As a result she almost vanished from sight in the contemporary sources mostly authored by the literati. The study of Xue Susu investigates perceptions of courtesans from various perspectives, using both literary and non-literary sources by late imperial Chinese male and female writers. Xue Susu began her career as a courtesan in Nanjing’s legendary Qinhuai 䦎㶖 pleasure quarters in the 1580s. Established by the first Ming emperor Zhu Yuanzhang 㛙⃫䐳 or Hongwu 㳒㬎 (r. 1368–98), the Qinhuai entertainment district in the prosperous Yangzi river delta flourished throughout the Ming era but was reduced to ruins after the dynastic fall and afterwards never regained its past glamour. The late imperial pleasure quarters at the banks of the Qinhuai river in the city of Nanjing have continued to exercise the imagination of China’s literati and scholars until modern times. Analysis focuses on representations of Xue Susu by herself and by other writers of different background, gender and class – such as the contemporary and later literati, gentlewomen and other courtesans. Late imperial Chinese discourse embeds the image of the courtesan in the cult of emotions (qing ね). This discourse also negotiates the formation of new beauty ideals, changing gender roles, and the issues of emancipation and power. Paradoxes abound as late Ming observers associated the courtesan’s name with notions of chivalry, chastity and loyalty. Ming and Qing dynasty writings about the colourful figure of Xue Susu reflect not only current perceptions of women and courtesans in early modern China but also the social and cultural aspirations, dreams and desires of those who wrote about her. Chapter Four ‘Miss Emotion: the drama of the new woman reader’ explores the lore of Xiaoqing ⮷曺 (1595–1612), a semi-legendary woman poet, and probes deeper into the context of the late Ming craze for romance and the cult of emotions (qing) among the reading public in seventeenth-century Jiangnan. The story of Xiaoqing, a pun on ‘Miss Emotion’, dramatizes the new spectacle of women readers in early modern China. It straddles the borderline between

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history and fiction: it exists in various versions of biographies, but it also inspired works of drama, fiction and poetry and continued to exercise the Chinese imagination through three centuries until the May Fourth era. A new look at Xiaoqing’s remaining poetic oeuvre enables insights into the woman reader-cum-writer in the female gaze. Although some literati denied Xiaoqing’s authenticity, late imperial Chinese readers apotheosized the teenage poet after her early death – similar to Tanyangzi – and built shrines to her memory both in stone and on paper. Xiaoqing became a tragic heroine modelled on the famous literary protagonist Du Liniang 㜄渿⧀ from Tang Xianzu’s 㸗栗䣾 (1550–1616) sixteenth-century play Mu dan ting 䈉 ᷡṕ (The Peony Pavilion, first published in 1589). Her untimely death was attributed to an ‘excess of emotion’ and she lived on in the readers’ minds as a symbol of new womanhood. By analysing the story of Xiaoqing in the context of the publishing industry and the contemporary cultural discourse, this chapter traces how the literati’s vindication of the cult of emotions celebrated female talent and how they constructed the new trope of the ‘woman reader’ in their discourse. Chapter Five ‘Editing her story, rewriting hi/story: the art of female selffashioning’ explores the ways in which women fashioned representations of the female self by editing and publishing their own and other women’s writings. The publishing boom in late Ming/early Qing China propelled literary women into prominence, as both producers and consumers of literature. This chapter analyses the literary and cultural aspirations, social anxieties and financial motivations of women editors from the opposite ends of the social spectrum – presenting two groups of editors from the economically prosperous and flourishing cultural environment of seventeenth-century Jiangnan as case studies: First, the editorial activities of the known gentlewoman editors Shen Yixiu 㰰⭄ᾖ (1590–1635) and Wang Duanshu 䌳䪗㵹 (1621–c.1701), with reference to other gentlewomen editors such as Fang Weiyi 㕡䵕₨ (1585–1668) and Ji Xian ⬋⪢ (1614–83) and the late seventeenth-century groups of gentlewomen team editors around Huang Dezhen 湫⽟屆 (fl. seventeenth century) and her daughter Sun Huiyuan ⬓唁 ⩃ (fl. late seventeenth century). The second group of editors introduced in this chapter consists of late Ming courtesans from the Qinhuai pleasure quarters. This chapter discovers the editorial activities of Xue Susu and places them into context by comparison with other known courtesan editors such as Wang Wei 䌳 ⽖ (c. 1600–47) and Dong Xiaowan 吋⮷⭃ (alias Dong Bai 吋䘥, 1624–51), followed by a discussion of the editorial role of the ex-courtesan copy-editor Liu Rushi. A comparative look at vernacular fictional narratives opens new windows on perceptions of editorship and women editors by early modern male authors. As women set out to edit women’s writings, they discovered that the process of rewriting China’s literary history empowered them in new and different ways. In the role of editor, women perceived their work as a means to change the course of history and their own representations within it. Chapter Six ‘Negotiating gentility: the Banana Garden Poetry Club’ explores the women poets of the Banana Garden Poetry Club in Hangzhou during the 1660s, 1670s and 1680s as a case study for investigations into perceptions of

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gentility in early modern China. As a formal, public literary society founded by a woman and for women, the Banana Garden Club was among the very first of its kind: a public institution to connect women across different families and backgrounds. Analysis focuses on the social network of negotiations and exchanges involved in the establishment of this club in the early Qing. This chapter analyses the literary constructions of gentility in the Banana Garden poets’ works, and traces the image of the lady scholar as seen through comments about the club by other writers. Contemporary and later generations of observers’ portrayals of the Banana Garden poets and their works reveal how perceptions of gentility differed according to gender, class and time. The tensions between gentility and commercialization in the discourse about the club are explored through the role of the Jiangnan publishing industry. In sum this book aims to recover the voices and perceptions of women from early modern China as readers, writers, editors and members of literary societies; to trace their discursive representations as producers and consumers of culture; to analyse their perceptions, cultural accommodation and the construction of the trope of the woman writer in contemporary discourse using classical medium sources such as poetry, prefaces and commentaries alongside vernacular fictional narratives as source materials; and to reconstruct the dynamics of the women writers’ discourse and the discourse about them in the literary world of early modern China.

Notes 1 ƿki Yasushi ⣏㛐⹟, Chnjgoku Minmatsu no media kakumei: shomin ga hon o yomu ᷕ⚥㖶㛓̯ΙͿ͚͛朑␥ : ⹞㮹̍㛔͓婕́, Tokyo: Tǀsuishobǀ, 2009. 2 Cf. ƿki, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 74–102. 3 Cf. Lesley Brown, ed., The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, Vol. 1, p. 1604. 4 On vernacular culture, see Glen Dudbridge, Books, Tales and Vernacular Culture: Selected Papers on China, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2005. 5 Cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, 2ff. and 10; idem, ‘Culture’s In-Between’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds, Questions of Cultural Identity, 1996, repr. London: Sage Publications, 2003, 53–60. 6 Milestones in modern scholarship about women writers in the Ming and Qing era include for example: ƿki Yasushi, Chnjgoku ynjri knjkan: Min Shin shinwai gijo no sekai ᷕ⚥忲慴䨢攻:㖶㶭䦎㶖⤻⤛̯ᶾ䓴, Tokyo: Seidosha, 2002; Gǀyama Kiwamu ⎰Ⱉ䨞, Min Shin jidai no josei to bungaku 㖶㶭㗪ẋ̯⤛⿏̩㔯⬎, Tokyo: Kyuko shoin, 2006; Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994; Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997; Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, eds, Writing Women in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1997 [hereafter: WWLIC]; Harriet Zurndorfer, ed., Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives, Leiden: E.J. Brill: 1999; Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds, Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999 [hereafter: WWTC]; Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004 [hereafter: RB]; Judith

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7

8

9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18

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Zeitlin, The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature; Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007; Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; Grace S. Fong, Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008; and Grace S. Fong and Ellen Widmer, eds, The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming Through Qing, Leiden: Brill, 2010, among others. Ellen Widmer, ‘The Rhetoric of Retrospection: May Fourth Literary History and the Ming–Qing Woman Writer’, in Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral, eds, The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, 193–225, esp. 193. For a similar use of the early modern era, see Paul S. Ropp, Dissent in Early Modern China: ‘Ju-lin wai-shih’ and Ch’ing Social Criticism, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1981. See also Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, London: Hutchinson, 1990; Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004, xvi. Chun qiu Zuo zhuan zheng yi 㗍䥳ⶎ⁛㬋佑, Song ed., repr. by Ruan Yuan 旖⃫, in Shi san jing zhu shu ⋩ᶱ䴻㲐䔷, 1816, repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju chuban, 1983, 35.277a–b. Fong, Herself, 4. On the term gui xiu, short for gui fang zhi xiu 敐㇧ᷳ䥨, literally ‘elegance from the inner quarters’, see Dorothy Ko, ‘The Written Word and the Bound Foot: A History of the Courtesan’s Aura’, in Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, eds, WWLIC, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1997, 74–100, esp. 80; Widmer, Beauty, 9. On the concept cai nü, see Clara Wing-Chung 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. Cf. Liu Yongcong ∱娈倘 (Clara Wing-Chung Ho), ‘Zhongguo chuan tong cai de guan yu Qing chu si chao you guan nü xing cai yu de zhi bilun’ ᷕ⚳⁛䴙ㇵ⽟ 奨冯㶭⇅⿅㼖㚱斄⤛⿏ㇵ冯⽟ᷳ㭼婾, Dong fang wen hua 㜙㕡㔯⊾ 26.1, 1988, 95–128. Cf. Ho, ‘Female Talent’, 191–223. See, for example, Ye Xiaowan’s poems lamenting the deaths of talented family members: ‘Ku mu’ ⒕㭵 (‘Mourning my Mother’), in Ye Shaoyuan 叱䳡堩, ed., Wu meng tang ji ⋰⣊➪普, preface 1636, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998 [hereafter: WMTJ], 654; and ‘Ku wu di Shu qi’ ⒕Ḽ⻇㚠㛇 (‘Mourning my fifth brother Shuqi’), WMTJ, 746. Cf. Liu Yongcong ∱娈倘, ‘Qing chu si chao nü xing cai ming guan guan kui’ 㶭⇅⿅㼖⤛⿏ㇵ␥奨䭉䩢, in Bao Jialin 欹⭞惘, ed., Zhongguo fu nü shi lun ji ᷕ⚳⨎⤛⎚婾普, Vol. 3, Taibei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1993, 121–62, esp. 121–7. See also Jǀo, ‘Gender’. Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers On Technique 1953–1954, trans. with notes by John Forrester, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 215. Cf. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in T. Bennett et al., eds, Popular Television and Film, London: British Film Institute, 1981, 206–15. On the editorial gaze, see Hans Walter Gabler, ‘Thoughts on Scholarly Editing: A Review Article occasioned by Paul Eggert, Securing the Past. Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009’, JLTOnline, 12, http://www.jltonline.de/, accessed 5 April 2011; on the tourist gaze, see John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage, 1990. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Allen Lane, 1977.

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20 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin, 2008; Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 21 Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, 11 and 13. 22 Craig Clunas’ translation, Clunas, Pictures, 109. 23 Clunas, Pictures, 111. 24 Clunas, Pictures, 117 and 129. 25 Clunas, Pictures, 115. 26 Cf. Clunas, Superflous Things, 86. 27 On Dong Qichang and Chen Jiru, see Chapters Two and Three. 28 Cf. Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644, London: Reaktion Books, 2007, 136; see Chapter Three. 29 See Chapters Three and Six. 30 On these groups, see Daria Berg, Carnival in China: A Reading of the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002, 225–76. 31 Cf. Berg, Carnival, 33–57. 32 John Meskill, Gentlemanly Interests and Wealth on the Yangtze Delta, Ann Arbor, MI: AAS Monographs, 1994, 5–6. 33 See Daria Berg and Chloë Starr, eds, The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class, London: Routledge, 2007. 34 Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959, 261–2. Over 65 percent of the male urban population counted as literate; cf. Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992, 273. 35 Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1979, 140. 36 See Hu Wenkai 傉㔯㤟, Li dai fu nü zhu zuo kao 㬟ẋ⨎⤛叿ἄ侫, rev. ed. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985 [hereafter: LFZ]. 37 Cf. Ping-chen Hsiung, ‘Seeing Neither the Past Nor the Future: The Trouble of Positioning Women in Modern China’, in Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski, eds, Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, Münster: Lit, 2005, 16. 38 See above; for example, ƿki, Chnjgoku ynjri knjkan; Gǀyama, Min Shin; Ko, Teachers; Mann, Precious Records; WWLIC; WWTC; RB; Judith Zeitlin, ‘Shared Dreams: The Story of the Three Wives’ Commentary on The Peony Pavilion’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54.1, 1994, 127–79; Widmer, The Beauty and the Book; Fong, Herself; Fong and Widmer, eds, The Inner Quarters and Beyond, among others. 39 See, for example, Ko, Teachers; WWLIC, 17–143. 40 On Gu Ruopu, see Ko, Teachers, 245f; WWTC, 302–313. 41 See Chapter Six. 42 On the new romantic ideals, see Ko, Teachers, 183ff. 43 On this novel, see Berg, Carnival. The pseudonym Xi Zhou Sheng appears to allude to the Western Zhou (Xi Zhou 大␐) dynasty (c.1050–770 BC). The true identity of the anonymous author remains shrouded in mystery. As the novel mainly focuses on Shandong province and uses Shandong dialect, famous seventeenth-century writers from Shandong such as Pu Songling 呚㜦漉 (1640–1715) and Ding Yaokang ᶩ 侨Ṋ (c. 1599–1670) have been proposed and in turn rejected as candidates for the authorship. A fierce debate among scholars over the last decades has so far failed to resolve the problem of authorship; cf. Berg, Carnival, 8–9. 44 Xi Zhou Sheng 大␐䓇, Xing shi yin yuan zhuan 愺ᶾ⦣䶋⁛, 3 vols., Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981, repr. 1985 [hereafter: YYZ], 23.348; 24.358. 45 YYZ, 23.348.

The rise of literary women 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65

25

YYZ, 44.649. YYZ, 37.545–9. YYZ, 15.228; 16.235; cf. Berg, Carnival, 335. Chai Jingyi 㞜朄₨, ‘Yu zhong fu Zhu Rouze’ 冯⅊⨎ 㛙㝼⇯, in Hu Xiaosi 傉⬅⿅, ed., Ben chao ming yuan shi chao 㛔㛅⎵⩃娑憼, n.p.: Lin yun ge, 1765, 1.3a. For Ko’s translation, see Ko, Teachers, 248. All translations are my own, except where otherwise indicated. Cf. RB, 18ff. Zhou yi zheng yi ␐㖻㬋佑, Song ed., repr. by Ruan Yuan 旖⃫, in Shi san jing zhu shu ⋩ᶱ䴻㲐䔷, 1816, repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju chuban, 1983, 1.6a. Cf. Wolfram Eberhard, Lexikon chinesischer Symbole: geheime Sinnbilder in Kunst und Literatur, Leben und Denken der Chinesen, second revised edn, Köln: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1985, 60. Cf. Wai-lim Yip, Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993, 157–9. Cf. Ko, Teachers, 341, n. 67. Lun yu zhu shu 婾婆㲐䔷, Song ed., repr. by Ruan Yuan 旖⃫, in Shi san jing zhu shu ⋩ᶱ䴻㲐䔷, 1816, repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju chuban, 1983, 1.1a. D.C. Lau’s translation; Confucius, The Analects (Lun yü), translated with an introduction by D.C. Lau, Harmondsworth: Penguin, repr. 1987, 59. On the concept of gentility in Chinese literature and history, see Berg and Starr, eds, The Quest for Gentility. On Tang Zhen, see Daria Berg, ‘Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century China: Tang Chen and Huang Tsung-hsi’, M.Litt. thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. Lun yu yin de 婾婆⺽⼿, Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series 16, ed. William Hung et al., Beijing: Hafu-Yanjing xueshe, 1940, 15/39. Cf. Berg, Carnival, 226. Cf. Berg, Carnival, 247–76. On Wang Yangming, see Shimada Kenji Ⲟ䓘嗼㫉, Chnjgoku ni okeru kindai shii no zasetsu ᷕ⚳̬̋̒͌役ẋ⿅ょ̯㋓㉀, Tokyo: Chikuma shobǀ, 1949, repr. 1970; William Theodore de Bary, ‘Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming Thought’, in William Theodore de Bary, ed., Self and Society in Ming Thought, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1970, 145–247; Berg, Carnival, 225, 259, 335. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294–1324, trans. Barbara Bray, London: Penguin Books, 1980, 345. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 1; Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670– 1820, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Glen Dudbridge, Religious Experience and Lay Society in T’ang China: A Reading of Tai Fu’s Kuang-i chi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Daria Berg, ‘What the Messenger of Souls has to Say: New Historicism and the Poetics of Chinese Culture’, in Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits, eds, Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, 171–203. See for example ƿki Yasushi ⣏㛐⹟, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan ni okeru shuppan bunka no kenkynj’ 㖶㛓㰇⋿̬̋̒͌↢䇰㔯⊾̯䞼䨞, Hiroshima daigaku bungakubu kiyǀ ⸫Ⲟ⣏⬎㔯⬎悐䲨天ġ 50.1, 1991, 74–102; Ellen Widmer, ‘The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Publishing’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56.1, 1996, 77–122; Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998; Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004; and Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006, among others.

26

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66 Ko, Teachers, 72. 67 Ye Sheng 叱䚃, Shui dong ri ji 㯜㜙㖍姀, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980, 21.213–4; cf. Clunas, Pictures, 33. 68 Cf. ƿki, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 74–102. 69 Brook, Confusions, 62ff. 70 Louis J. Gallagher, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, New York: Random House, 1953, 21. 71 Cf. Chang and Chang, Crisis, 161. 72 See ƿki Yasushi, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 102–8. 73 Richard G. Wang, Ming Erotic Novellas: Genre, Consumption and Religiosity in Cultural Practice, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011, 87. 74 Cf. Berg, Carnival, 29. 75 ƿki Yasushi, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 104. 76 Chang and Chang, Crisis, 273. 77 Cf. Brook, Confusions, 154. 78 Cf. ƿki Yasushi, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 105; Brook, Confusions, 106. For further examples of prices of food, utensils and miscellaneous things between the 1570s and 1640s, see Chow, Publishing, 47–8 and 262–3. 79 See also the discussion of book prices in Chow, Publishing, 38–56. 80 Cf. Chow, Publishing, 38–9. On Wang Shizhen, see L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, eds, Dictionary of Ming Biography, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1976 [hereafter: DMB], 1399–1405; on Qian Qianyi, see Arthur Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 1644–1912, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943–44 [hereafter: ECCP], 148–50. 81 Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth Century China, 2 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 10f. 82 Cf. Miyazaki Ichisada ⭖Ⲷⶪ⭂, ‘Tǀyǀteki kinsei’ 㜙㲳䘬役ᶾ, Ajia shi ronkǀ ͚Ͱ͚⎚婾侫, Tokyo: Asahi shimbun shakan, 1975, 1.240–1; Adam Y.C. Lui, Corruption in China during the Early Ch’ing Period, 1644–1660, Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1979, 6. 83 Brook, Confusions, 160. 84 Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 6. 85 On prices of books, see ƿki Yasushi, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 102–8; Shen Jin 㰰㳍, ‘Ming dai fang ke tu shu zhi liu tong yu jia ge’ 㖶ẋ⛲⇣⚾㚠ᷳ㳩忂冯₡㟤, Guo jia tu shu guan guan kan ⚳⭞⚾㚠棐奨䚳 1, 1996, 101–18. 86 On Hu Yinglin, see DMB, 645–7; and Chapter Three. 87 Cf. Joanna F. Handlin Smith, ‘Gardens in Ch’i Piao-chia’s Social World: Wealth and Values in Late-Ming Kiangnan’, Journal of Asian Studies 51.1, 1992, 55–81, esp. 60. 88 Cf. Wu Han ⏜㗿, Jiang Zhe cang shu jia shi lüe 㰇㴁啷㚠⭞⎚䔍, repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981. 89 Chow, Publishing, 80. On Li Rihua, see DMB, 826–30. On Xue Susu, see Chapter Three. 90 Widmer, ‘Huanduzhai’, 89. 91 Widmer, ‘Huanduzhai’, 87. 92 Widmer, ‘Huanduzhai’, 91. 93 YYZ, 33.478. 94 YYZ, 33.478–9. 95 YYZ, 33.478–83. 96 On this trend in seventeenth-century China, see Berg, Carnival, 247–63. 97 On printing, see Chow, Publishing, 90–148. On Chen Jiru, see ECCP, 83–4; ƿki Yasushi, ‘Yamabito Chin Keiju’. Chen Jiru from Huating 厗ṕ, Jiangsu province, never made it beyond the status of licentiate in his examination career, but he owned a great library and employed a number of poor scholars to assist him in editing a large

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98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109

110

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anthology. On Feng Menglong as an editor, see ƿki Yasushi, Chnjgoku Min Shin jidai no bungaku ᷕ⚥㖶㶭㗪ẋ̯㔯⬎, Tokyo: Hǀsǀ daigaku kyǀiku shinkǀkai 2001, 109–114. On Feng Menglong, see also DMB, 450–3. On Li Yu, see ECCP, 495–97; Chang and Chang, Crisis; Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; see also Chapter One. Cf. Chang and Chang, Crisis, 273. Chow, Publishing, 84. Cf. Ko, Teachers, 40. For a detailed depiction, see Brook, Confusions, 213; picture reproduced on p. 215. Cf. Ko, Teachers, 53. Xu Guangqi ⼸⃱┇, Nong zheng quan shu 彚㓧ℐ㚠, 1643, 3 vols, repr. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979, 1: 237. See Chen Zilong 昛⫸漵, ‘Xu’ ⸷, in Xu Guangqi, Nong zheng quan shu, 1: 1; cf. Brook, Confusions, 210. Brook, Confusions, 210. On the Ming/Qing cataclysm, see for example Lynn Struve, Voices from the Ming– Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers’ Jaws, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993; paperback 1998. Mann, Precious Records. Zhu Yijun reigned from 19 July 1572 to 18 August 1620, but the Wanli era extends from 2 February 1573 to 27 August 1620. On Zhu Yijun, see Ray Huang, ‘The Lungch’ing and Wan-li reigns, 1567–1620’, in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds, The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7, part I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 511–84; DMB, 324–38. On Zhang Juzheng, see DMB, 53–61. On tianxia, see Wang Gungwu, ‘Tianxia and Empire: External Chinese Perspectives’, Inaugural Tsai Lecture, Harvard University, 4 May 2006, http://www.fas.harvard. edu/~asiactr/Archive%20Files/Tsai%20Lect.Harvard.05.06.pdf, accessed 9 July 2006. See for example ƿki, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 74–102; Widmer, ‘Huanduzhai’, 77–122; Brook, Confusions; Chow, Publishing; McDermott, Book.

1

Writing goddess Virgin, venerators, literary vogues

On the Double Ninth Festival – the ninth day of the ninth month on the lunar calendar, or 17 October 1580 – an extraordinary story unfolds in Zhitang 䚜⠀ village, Taicang ⣒ᾱ district, near the prosperous city of Suzhou in the Jiangnan, or Yangzi delta region. Over a hundred thousand people have gathered to witness how a twenty-one-year-old woman from an elite family ascends to heaven, undergoes transformation into a goddess and attains immortality. She is the ‘faithful maiden’ zhen nü 屆⤛ or virgin widow Wang Daozhen 䌳䆦䛇 (1558–80) – better known under her religious name Tanyangzi 㙯春⫸ or Master Tanyang – the daughter of Hanlin 侘㜿 Academician, President of the Board of Rites, Minister of Personnel and Grand Secretary Wang Xijue 䌳拓䇝 (1534–1611, jin shi 1562), one of the highest ranking officials in the civil service of the Wanli emperor. Tanyangzi comes to the shrine of her late fiancé whose widow she claims to be. Among her last acts she requests brush and ink and composes more than ten pages.1 She bathes, dons a new outfit, pays her respects, takes leave of her relatives, instructs her disciples and enters the shrine.2 She sends out her writings and a poem, four pages for her father and grandfather and one page for literatus Wang Shizhen (1526–90), while undergoing transformation into a goddess.3 This is how we – the modern reader, cultural critic, the historian whose task it is to make the dead speak – learn about Tanyangzi’s story: through the voice of a Ming dynasty scholar-official and self-proclaimed eyewitness. The literary giant Wang Shizhen, a holder of the highest academic ‘Advanced Scholar’ (jin shi 忚 ⢓) degree of 1547, gives testimony about the event in his Tanyang da shi zhuan 㙯春⣏ⷓ⁛ (Biography of Great Master Tanyang, 1580):4 I then followed all her disciples in bidding her farewell. Tears streaming down our faces, we swore an oath of allegiance. All of a sudden the sword in the Master’s hand pointed upwards. She opened her eyes a little bit, made some indistinct movements above her shoulders, and then she was gone. All the onlookers trembled, terrified. I retreated and opened the envelope with the paper to find there were precepts and exhortations of over two hundred words written all over the page from top to bottom and left to right. … At that point one hundred thousand people had gathered on three sides around the outside of the palisade, some kowtowing, others kneeling, weeping, crying out to the Master and praising the Buddha’s name. It was beyond description.5

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Other literati later confirm these events in further biographies and writings about Tanyangzi, largely reiterating Wang Shizhen’s version of the story.6 ***

This chapter unravels two stories: first, the story of a woman who became a goddess in 1580 because she could read and write; and second, that of the literati who wrote her into being as a literary figure, inscribing the image of the writing woman as a new goddess in late Ming elite discourse. They invented her as a literary figure, shaping her image to express male perceptions of the rise of literary gentlewomen in early modern China’s literary world. The story of Tanyangzi as told by her male observers provides a window on male reactions to the rise of female literacy, revealing the tensions in late Ming popular imagination produced by the new phenomenon of the writing gentlewoman. Holy women perceived to have ascended to heaven feature in Daoist hagiography; a prominent example is Daoist Master Du Guangting’s 㜄⃱⹕ (850–933) biographical collection Yong cheng ji xian lu ⠱❶普ẁ抬 (Records of the Assembled Transcendents of the Fortified Walled City, 910).7 Daoist women who turned into goddesses were known as shenxian 䤆ẁ (spirit-immortal), nüshen ⤛䤆 (goddess) or nüxian ⤛ẁ (female immortal).8 A prominent example of a gentlewoman said to have ascended to heaven and become a goddess is the archetypal female Daoist mystic, the revealer of holy scriptures Wei Huacun 櫷 厗⬀ (252–334), also known as Madame Wei from the Sacred Peak of the South (Nanyue Wei fu ren ⋿ⵥ櫷⣓Ṣ), the daughter of Minister of Education Wei Shu 櫷冺 (209–90) of the Jin 㗱 dynasty (265–419).9 Wang Shizhen’s Biography of Great Master Tanyang invokes this goddess as Tanyangzi’s teacher,10 implying her function as a religious model. But the portrayal of Tanyangzi differs from earlier women’s hagiography in one crucial aspect: she is a writing woman. This chapter divides into three main parts: the first part proposes a new reading of Tanyangzi’s story, arguing that her apotheosis symbolises the emergence of the writing woman in China’s literary world. The second part analyses the voices that transmit her story in various versions across different genres – in particular, official historiography, private biography and painting – while highlighting the role of the publishing industry in promoting the cult of the writing goddess. The final part examines literati reactions to female literacy and traces how late Ming literati writings constructed the trope of the literary gentlewoman as a goddess.

A new reading of Tanyangzi’s story In 1580 the gentlewoman writer was still so unusual a phenomenon that the literati had to devise strategies for how to cope with it. One such strategy was to rewrite her story as that of a goddess. Although this study focuses on one virgin, her venerators and the literary vogues they created around her as a case study, it shows that Tanyangzi was not the only one to appear as a venerated woman in the cultural discourse of late imperial China. She presents but one element in a network of negotiations and exchanges linking her to literary antecedents,

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contemporary reflections and later reproductions of this prototype. The discourse around her was not restricted to her as a unique phenomenon, but celebrated her as emblematic of the Zeitgeist of the late Ming era. This study offers a new reading of Tanyangzi’s story as a contemporary male observer’s comment about the rise of writing women in early modern China. Wang Shizhen’s biography portrays her as a syncretist sage and saviour embodying the unity of the three teachings – Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism – true to the intellectual climate of the late Ming era. Tanyangzi also appears as the disciple and reincarnation of the bodhisattva Guanyin 奨枛. Some elements, including both small motifs and larger themes, show a close resemblance to the popular story of Miaoshan ⥁┬ that in various versions shaped Chinese imagination from 1100 onwards.11 Similar to Miaoshan who is conceived when her mother the queen dreams that she swallows the moon, Tanyangzi is conceived when her mother dreams that the moon descends onto her bed. Like Miaoshan, Tanyangzi devotes herself to religious pursuits and refutes marriage and motherhood. Tanyangzi, too, takes on a priestly role. Similar to Miaoshan, Tanyangzi cures her father’s illness, albeit in a less spectacular way. Tanyangzi’s ascension involves a dramatic scene witnessed by a mass audience, echoing Miaoshan’s triumphant apotheosis. Here the differences to the Miaoshan legend provoke interest, pinpointing trends peculiar to late Ming times. Miaoshan’s filial piety transforms into faithful maidenhood in Tanyangzi’s story, situating this text squarely within the context of the late Ming cult of chastity and the fashion for faithful fiancées. Miaoshan is a princess whereas Tanyangzi’s story leads the reader into the world of the upper echelons of the imperial bureaucracy, into the households of scholar-officials (shi da fu ⢓⣏⣓) and gentlewomen (gui xiu).12 Wang Shizhen’s version of Tanyangzi’s biography portrays a gentlewoman in the acts of reading and writing, while dramatizing the effects of her reading and writing. The story shows how her words are disseminated to the people around her and how they make their way into print, reaching a larger audience. The biography of Tanyangzi thus adds some new elements to the lives of female saints: Tanyangzi appears not only as a saint, saviour and goddess but also as a writer, poet, calligrapher and painter. As Wang Shizhen portrays her, Tanyangzi achieves an unusual feat in late Ming society: a talented young woman (cai nü) attracts the attention of high-ranking scholar-officials. Members of imperial China’s elite begin to worship her as a deity and declare themselves as her disciples, among them her father Wang Xijue; her uncle, the vice-commissioner of education Wang Dingjue 䌳溶䇝 (1536–85); Wang Shizhen and his younger brother, the poet and minister Wang Shimao 䌳ᶾㅳ (1536–88); the prefectural judge Fan Shouji 劫⬰⶙ (1542–1611); the scholar-official Shen Maoxue 㰰ㅳ ⬠ (1539–82); the magistrate, poet and dramatist Tu Long Ⰸ昮 (1543–1605); the chancellor of Nanjing National University Feng Mengzhen 楖⣊䤶 (1546–1605); the scholar Qu Ruji 䝧㰅䧟 (1548–1610); the scholar-official Guan Zhidao 䭉⽿ 忻 嵁䓐 lli (1536–1608); (1536-1608); and the Hanlin Academician and minister Zhao Yongxian Yongxian!Mim 'il (1535–96) (1535-96) – - all alljin 13 岊 jin shi degree holders.13

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Tanyangzi’s story holds interest for the modern scholar from the literary and historical perspectives. Tanyangzi’s immortalization becomes the focal point of an elite cult and a corpus of writings that cross the ‘uncertain boundaries between religion, literature and entertainment’, as Glen Dudbridge puts it in his study of Miaoshan.14 After Tanyangzi’s death, her followers compose her biography and erect the Shrine of Serenity and Simplicity (tian dan guan 〔㽡奨) named after her teachings in her memory. This study argues that the discourse about Tanyangzi’s death and apotheosis epitomize the birth of a new phenomenon in early modern cultural discourse: the emergence of writing women on an unprecedented scale, a process that gained momentum during the sixteenth century and rapidly accelerated throughout the seventeenth century. The analysis of the discourse on Tanyangzi enables us to retrace late Ming citizens’ reactions to this phenomenon, to understand their ways of coping with cultural shifts from the familiar old world, and to retrieve their perceptions of the changing new world around them. The story of Tanyangzi belongs to an era that witnessed the rise of mass information society, nurtured by a booming publishing industry that began to transform Chinese culture in the late Ming era.15 This study traces the links between perceptions of talented women, the rise of the woman writer and the impact of the publishing industry in late imperial times. The story of Tanyangzi is well known, thanks to recent scholarship by Miura Shnjichi, Sakai Tadao, Gǀyama Kiwamu ⎰Ⱉ䨞 and Ann Waltner.16 Modern historical scholarship has mainly documented the cult of Tanyangzi as a historical phenomenon. Ann Waltner has investigated Tanyangzi as a historical personage and a holy woman within her historical setting, maintaining that the late Ming literati who immortalized Tanyangzi aired but ‘their own moral and political anxieties’.17 Miura Shnjichi has interpreted Tanyangzi as a personification of the late Ming Zeitgeist, expressing a longing to transcend human artificiality, to solve the conflict between individuality and public duty in times of political chaos, and to return to nature.18 I have elsewhere examined Tanyangzi in the late Ming context of the veneration of mother goddesses and the search for a saviour.19 One new way of reading Tanyangzi’s story is to argue that she is portrayed as a holy woman precisely because she is a writing woman. Her perceived extraordinary nature and divine essence derive from her writings and the message transmitted through her writings. In her observers’ perception, her superior intelligence and talents transcend the world of mortal women. As a divine woman, the literati offer her their admiration and adulation. Her audience primarily comprises ruling-class men, the authors and guardians of China’s textual empire. Tanyangzi exists in the literati’s minds as a writing woman and as such she creates a stir in late Ming literati discourse. This is why her story matters, and why our story starts with Tanyangzi. Tanyangzi serves as an example of a clever and highly literate writer who in the eyes of her observers became a trendsetter, a woman who helped shape late Ming cultural discourse, generating echoes and resonances in the writings of other men and women. This study privileges a reading of Tanyangzi’s story as a discursive movement that provides insights into cultural shifts in the perceptions of women and their

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changing positions in the early modern age. For the present purpose, it does not primarily matter whether Tanyangzi existed as a historical personage as Wang Shizhen described her, whether her story is fiction or history, which details of her life story ‘really happened’, or to what extent her biographies tell the ‘truth’. What matters here is to retrieve and hear the voices that debate Tanyangzi and circulate her story, to reconstruct what these voices have to tell, and to understand how they negotiated their world. The historian may not be able to interview the dead, but similar to the messenger of souls that Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie describes in his study of the medieval French village Montaillou, s/he can make them speak.20 This study aims to explore what the discourse about Tanyangzi reveals about perceptions of women in late imperial China, their lives, works, historical experiences, dreams, desires and anxieties, the moral map of early modern citizens’ minds, their imagination and emotional universe. By retracing Tanyangzi’s story in its cultural context we can probe the social and intellectual transformations in early modern culture that helped create the cult around her.

The voices When exploring the hi/story of Tanyangzi who became a goddess in the eyes of her observers, we deal with both literary and non-literary sources: both offer perceptions of the world at a particular moment in time. Analysis of the various portrayals of Tanyangzi tackles the following questions: why is she depicted in a certain way? Which elements in the society around her have contributed to create this particular portrayal? What can the story of Tanyangzi tell us about the world out of which it emerged, in particular about the perceptions of women in her day? The discourse about the writing goddess began to multiply after Wang Shizhen’s biography of Tanyangzi turned into a bestseller in 1580. Tanyangzi the literary figure generates more texts: Wang Shizhen’s story inspires a flood of biographies, prose narratives, stories, poems, plays and paintings depicting writing goddesses. This section traces the creation of the trope of the writing goddess in late Ming cultural discourse, aiming to identify and explain the underlying reasons in early modern citizens’ imagination. The figure of Tanyangzi exists in various versions in late Ming official and unofficial discourse: first, in the pages of imperial historiography; second, in private historiography including unofficial biography, hagiography, letters, essays, plays and poetry; and third, in literati painting. Her hi/story emerges from the interfaces of literary writings, religious compositions, cultural artefacts and historical documents, effacing the boundaries between fiction, hagiography and historiography. The modern critic encounters Tanyangzi on the borderline between literary analysis and historical inquiry, between fact, belief and social practice. The question remains: which came first – the historical maiden or the story of the cult? Did the maiden model herself on the biographies of saints, or did the biographer plot her story? Did she fashion herself as a religious figure influenced by what she had read? Did she turn her life into the story of a religious celebrity, or did the literati use her image to create a new type of goddess? To speak with Stephen

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Greenblatt, how did social energy circulate in Tanyangzi’s world? And why did Tanyangzi’s contemporaries circulate, replicate, retell and consume her story in the way they did? Tanyangzi does not appear to have left any works to posterity, but she is important for our present purposes because the literati perceived and portrayed her as a writing woman. Wang Shizhen’s biography claims that her family commissioned the publication of her works, including several gathas, thirty copies of the Xinjing ⽫䴻 (Heart Sutra), and a painting.22 The biography also notes that Nominee for Office (gong shi 届⢓) Zhang Houde ⻝⍂⽟ carved woodblocks to print Tanyangzi’s ‘Ba jie’ ℓㆺ (‘Eight Admonitions’), a set of moral instructions she issued to her disciples before her ascension.23 If these works ever existed, they are no longer extant. It is possible that Tanyangzi burnt her works. The Biography of Great Master Tanyang informs us that Tanyangzi’s father had written a diary of her enlightenment but one day she suddenly burnt it.24 Although the diary is a work about Tanyangzi, rather than by Tanyangzi, the narrative voice shows Tanyangzi displaying the behaviour that Confucianists would have considered proper for a writing gentlewoman. Already in the Tang Ⓒ dynasty (618–907) gentlewomen poets burnt their works, rather than leaving them to posterity, for fear that the publication of their writings would endanger their reputation and gentility – or at least so the literati tell us. In the tenth century literatus Sun Guangxian ⬓⃱ㅚ (d. 68) recorded how the gentlewoman poet Lady Sun ⬓ of Lechang 㦪㖴 ‘one day burnt her entire poetry collection because she regarded intellectual pursuits (cai si ㇵ⿅) as not appropriate for a married woman.’25 Wilt Idema and Beata Grant conjecture that this ‘may well be the earliest recorded case of a woman destroying her writings’.26 While Sun Guangxian reports that she did what the literati would have considered the proper thing to do, he reserved the right for himself to transmit samples of her writings in his anthology, promoting her as a woman who had internalized literati attitudes. Elite men delineated their position as gatekeepers of elite culture by deciding which of a woman’s works would enter literary history. In the Ming many women poets followed Lady Sun’s example, yet some works survived the flames, or survived despite the flames.27 As in Lady Sun’s case, the men around the writing woman often saved her works. Most of the women’s writings that reach us today survive because of the efforts, support or sponsorship of the men around them – in the cases of both gentlewomen and courtesans.28 Wang Shizhen portrays Tanyangzi in a grotesque enhancement of her displaying the behaviour deemed proper for a writing woman: she even burns a work about her. Unlike Lady Sun, Tanyangzi is not married but she claims the status of a widowed gentlewoman. Here, too, as in Sun Guangxian’s case, the male writer Wang Shizhen who champions the writing woman’s works, claims the merit of transmitting them, filtering in the process her words through his consciousness. Wang Shizhen’s narrative depicts Tanyangzi at the very moment of ascension as a writing woman. In the drama of her apotheosis she undergoes transformation while distributing some more of her writings. Her disciples venerate her as a spirit-immortal (xian ẁ), an otherworldly being that has extraordinary powers:

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exceeding contemporary expectations of women, different from mortal women, transcending the human world, sublime and therefore divine. The act of writing plays a central role in her biography as told by Wang Shizhen: he casts her as a reader, writer, calligrapher, painter and teacher who communicates with brush and ink, transmitting dozens of pages to her disciples. She distinguishes herself through her competence in the literati arts. The act of writing links her religious and social activities with the world around her: she transcribes and annotates the scriptures, composes poetry and prose pieces, such as the eulogy for her late fiancé and notes containing moral instructions to her followers. Tanyangzi communicates her religious experience and moral message to her audience by means of writing. Tanyangzi’s story involves books, the acts of reading, writing and annotating, and new perceptions of women. As the female figure at the centre of the story remains silent, we approach Tanyangzi through the filter of the literati’s perceptions and their versions of her story. The voices that speak out about Tanyangzi – transmitting their versions of her voice – come from the male-authored discourse: the following three sections look at the voices from official historiography, private biographical writing and painting, depicting her as a faithful fiancée, a spirit-immortal, and a literati icon respectively. The faithful fiancée The voice of official historiography pronounces its verdict on Tanyangzi’s story in the gazetteer of her native Taicang: Miss Wang, the daughter of Grand Secretary [Wang] Xijue, was engaged to the academician’s sickly son Xu Jingshao. When Jingshao passed away in his youth, she swore an oath that she would sacrifice herself and follow him into death. She starved herself to death on her fiancé’s grave.29 The imperially ordained and officially recognized version of history authored by scholar-officials verifies Tanyangzi as a historical personage but accords her only a small part in local history. The gazetteer positions her life within the social negotiations surrounding a woman’s life in an elite household. Tanyangzi’s father Wang Xijue betrothed her in early childhood to Xu Jingshao ⼸㘗枞, the son of his friend and colleague Xu Tingguan ⼸⺟䤤 (jin shi 1559),30 but the groom passed away just before the wedding in 1574 when Tanyangzi was aged seventeen sui. The official discourse does not acknowledge her religious role or spiritual impact. Nor does it spell out her existence as a writing woman. The brief mention in the gazetteer mainly situates Tanyangzi’s life within the context of chaste widowhood (jie fu 䭨⨎). It implies a verdict of suicide for a faithful fiancée (zhen nü 屆⤛), a betrothed but bereaved maiden who stays loyal to the memory of her deceased fiancé and refuses to consider any other marriage. If she followed him into death, she would become a ‘martyred maiden’ (lie nü 䁰⤛). This theme

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links Tanyangzi to the Ming and Qing cult of chastity, framing her within the traditional Neo-Confucian discourse that defines women by their social and moral roles within the family.31 The official version of history thus endorses an ideal of womanhood that dominated literati discourse since the Neo-Confucian philosophers Cheng Hao 䦳栍 (1032–85) and Cheng Yi 䦳柌 (1033–1107) in the Song ⬳ dynasty (960–1279). In the Ming and Qing era, the female chastity ideal grew into an imperially sanctioned and officially sponsored movement that honoured purity and martyrdom as the paramount female virtues.32 Chaste widows and female martyrs (lie fu 䁰⨎) first received imperial honours – including gateway insignia, the construction of monumental arches, a regular grain quota and the family’s exemption from corvée labour – under the Yuan ⃫ dynasty (1271–1368).33 Such rewards would enhance the family’s status, conferring local prestige. In 1304 the government legally defined chaste widowhood, decreeing women eligible if widowed under thirty and celibate at least until fifty years of age. This definition was later copied into Ming and Qing law.34 Late imperial official historiography records peak figures for the Ming dynasty with 35,829 cases of chaste women, including 8,688 widow suicides.35 Modern scholarship has examined the chaste widow cult at length while the cult of faithful fiancées has recently received some scholarly attention.36 The founding emperor of the Ming dynasty, Hongwu 㳒㬎 (r. 1368–98), was the first to honour a faithful fiancée, but the concept only acquired currency in local historiography and the wider literati discourse during the Jiajing ▱曾 reign period (1522–66). As the ancient classic Li ji 䥖姀 (Book of Rites) only prescribed a mourning period for a deceased fiancé,37 faithful fiancées like Tanyangzi appeared to some literati as a perversion of Confucian ritual, representing a practice that caused controversy in literati discourse from the mid-Ming onwards.38 The Ming shi lu lei zuan 㖶⮎抬栆个 (Ming Court Records) register a total of 156 faithful fiancées for the Ming dynasty, including 112 suicides.39 According to local historiography, seventeen faithful fiancées received honours in the surroundings of Tanyangzi’s native Suzhou city during the Ming dynasty; two of them committed suicide while twelve continued to stay with their parents.40 Tanyangzi thus does not appear as an isolated case in her time. The locus classicus for the portrayal of a gentlewoman as a faithful fiancée appears in the Lie nü zhuan ↿⤛⁛ (Biographies of Women), recounting a semi-legendary episode from the Spring and Autumn (Chun qiu 㗍䥳) period (700–476BC) about the Lady Weixuan (Weixuan fu ren 堃⭋⣓Ṣ), the daughter of the Marquis of Qi 滲ὗ.41 Lady Weixuan receives the news of her fiancé the Lord of Wei’s 堃⏃ death when she reaches the gates of his city. She refuses to return home, enters the city, observes a three-year mourning period and rejects the marriage proposal of his younger brother and heir. She withholds pressure from her own family to give in and announces her resolve by composing a poem quoting the Shi jing: My mind is not a stone – you cannot turn it around. My mind is not a mat – you cannot bend it.42

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The Lie nü zhuan, the literary model for women’s biographies throughout the centuries, thus portrays the archetypal faithful fiancée as both a gentlewoman and a writing woman. This aspect remains absent in the version of Tanyangzi’s story told through the voice of official historiography, but features prominently in Wang Shizhen’s biography. Wang Shizhen’s biography makes Tanyangzi rationalize her decision to become a faithful fiancée on the grounds of Confucian ethics. He describes her reaction upon receiving the news of her fiancé’s death: My Master undid her hair, ran around without shoes and wailed. On the third day she took out her bag with the white silk mourning robe and straw sandals that she had made. She wore them to meet her father the Academician and her mother. She told them: ‘I surely belong to the late Mr Xu, but in consideration of [my filial duty to] my parents I shall not follow him in death. Yet I wish to be regarded as Mr Xu’s widow.’ The Academician pretended to rebuke her: ‘Since you were not married to Xu, how can you become his widow?’ My Master replied: ‘Does my Father mean that those who do not receive a salary are not the subjects of the ruler? Then when the day comes that the emperor’s death is announced, why do clerks and commoners wail and also put on mourning garments?’ The Academician had no answer to this, and the Master held even more firmly to her belief in maintaining moral integrity at that time of sorrow.43 The Biography of Great Master Tanyang situates Tanyangzi in the Confucian master narrative on female virtue, following Han dynasty moral instructress Ban Zhao’s insistence that a virtuous woman should not remarry after her husband’s death. Married at thirteen and widowed early on, Ban Zhao refused to remarry, ‘inadvertently making herself a role model for the late imperial chaste-widow cult’, as Susan Mann has noted.44 Ban Zhao devoted her widowhood to the education of her son and daughters, to scholarly pursuits and literary life, serving at the imperial court as a historian, poet and teacher of scholars. Tanyangzi by contrast chooses life as a faithful fiancée, following a practice that gained prominence only during the Ming dynasty. As Du Fangqing and Susan Mann have shown, the Confucian virtue of filial piety (xiao ⬅) was subsumed in late imperial China into a discourse that celebrated purity (jie 䭨) and martyrdom (lie 䁰) as paramount female virtues.45 Tanyangzi’s story illustrates this process. Wang Shizhen shows how Tanyangzi as a young adult, like Wei Huacun, moves into separate rooms of her own and practises the techniques of inner alchemy to gain immortality. The tale of Wei Huacun similarly shows the precocious child growing into a divine woman.46 Wei Huacun converses with spirit-immortals and eventually ascends to heaven, similar to Tanyangzi. Wei Huacun however marries and gives birth

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to two boys whereas Tanyangzi chooses chaste widowhood. This difference weaves the story of Tanyangzi firmly into the late Ming discourse on the cult of chastity. The seventeenth-century magistrate Huang Liuhong 湫ℕ泣 (c. 1633–after 1704) perceived women from urban official or degree-holding families to receive honours for their virtue more easily and in greater numbers than those from poor backgrounds or from the countryside.47 This claim however reveals more about literati rhetoric than historical realities. Modern historian Mark Elvin has shown that data from Jiaxing ▱冰ġ in the Jiangnan area point to the opposite: sixtyeight percent of the officially honoured widows in the late Ming and seventy-eight percent in the Qing were commoners.48 The portrayals of Tanyangzi and other gentlewomen as faithful fiancées thus appear to highlight literati ideals and aspirations, dreams of social patterns consistent with the imagined matrix of perceived gentility and with ruling-class image, rather than historical events. It also shows how the late Ming literati constructed the notion of the ‘writing woman’ as part of a more palatable moral discourse: they could deal with the phenomenon of a woman to be measured on the moral scale – ranging from morally pure or praiseworthy to extreme or objectionable – much more easily than with the new trend of talented, clever or literary women with aspirations to take part in the literary world – requesting entry into a realm that the literati traditionally perceived as the prerogative and hallmark of ruling-class men. The bestselling subject The earliest and most extensive source on Tanyangzi’s career as a saint and goddess is Wang Shizhen’s Biography of Great Master Tanyang from 1580. It became the matrix for all later versions and adaptations, including Fan Shouji’s Tanyang xian shi zhuan 㙯春ẁⷓ⁛ (Biography of Immortal Master Tanyang, 1590); Tu Long’s Tan shi yi yan 㙯ⷓ怢妨 (Master Tan’s Testament); poet-dramatist Xu Wei’s ⼸㷕 (1521–93) Tan da shi zhuan lüe 㙯⣏⢓⁛䔍 (Biographical Sketch of Great Master Tan); Tian yuan lou ji ⣑怈㦻普 (Collection of Tianyuan Pavilion) by scholar-official and Vice-minister of Personnel Xu Xianqing ⼸栗⌧ (d. 1602, jin shi 1568), Wang Xijue’s colleague; 49 and late Ming chronicler Shen Defu’s 㰰⽟䫎 (1578–1642) piece on the imposter ‘Jia Tanyang’ `㙯春 (‘The Fake Tanyangzi’) in his work of private historiography Wanli ye huo bian 叔㙮慶 䌚䶐 (Private Gleanings from the Wanli era).50 Wang Shizhen, one of the ‘Latter Seven Masters’ (hou qi zi ⼴ᶫ⫸), counted as the leading writer of late Ming China. Graduating with the jin shi degree at the age of twenty-one (in 1547) paved his way to high office in the capital Beijing. In 1576 intrigues at court led to his denunciation and Wang Shizhen retired to his native Suzhou. He remained there for twelve years until 1588. During this time Wang Shizhen socialized with his friend Wang Xijue, Tanyangzi’s father, who had also temporarily retired from office and returned to Suzhou in 1578.51 The period in Suzhou saw Wang Shizhen turn towards Buddhism and Daoism, and develop an interest in the teachings of Tanyangzi. He composed and published her biography within a few months of her death.

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Wang Shizhen was a prolific writer. His literary output included over three hundred volumes (juan) of prose narratives, as well as works of poetry, historiography and scientific treatises.52 His interest in fictional narratives became evident in his editing the Yan yi bian 导䔘䶐 (Compilation of Stories about Love and Strange Events, 1566), a collection of tales about courtesans and demons, and an anthology of stories about knight-errants, Jian xia zhuan ∵ᾈ⁛ (Traditions of Swords and Chivalry).53 Wang Shizhen’s interest in Daoist immortals was not limited to Tanyangzi. He authored a collection of 640 biographies of immortals entitled Lie xian quan zhuan ↿ẁℐ⁛ (Complete Collection of Biographies of Immortals, 1598), a piece about the Queen Mother of the West, Jin mu ji 慹 㭵䲨 (Chronicle of the Golden Mother), and the mystic and Buddhist treatise Tanluan da shi ji 㙯淆⣏⢓䲨 (Chronicle of the Great Master Tanluan, 1598) which combined Pure Land Buddhism with Daoism and Tanyangzi’s teachings.54 These writings place Wang Shizhen into the tradition of Daoist hagiographers. Wang Shizhen’s biography of Tanyangzi reflects his perception of the young woman, mixing historiography, fiction and hagiography. Biographical writings enjoyed particular popularity among the late Ming literati. Sinologist Wolfgang Franke describes the genre as follows: In biographical writing, often no strict line can be drawn between history and literature. … the main purpose of biographical writing in China was to pay respect to the dead and to give a final judgement on their lives…55 Sima Qian’s ⎠楔怟 (c. 145–c. 90BC) Shi ji ⎚姀 (Historical Annals) set the stylistic standard for historical biographies as early as the Former Han dynasty (206BC–AD8). The figure of the dramatized narrator that appears in the Biography of Great Master Tanyang traditionally features in biographical accounts and in Tang dynasty tales. Wang Shizhen’s text also builds on two other strands of narrative traditions: Daoist hagiography dating back to the collection of Daoist immortals Lie xian zhuan ↿ẁ⁛ (Biography of Immortals) and women’s biographies modelled after Lie nü zhuan. Both these works are traditionally attributed to the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang ∱⎹ (c. 79–c. 6BC), although it is more likely that the Lie xian zhuan stems from the Latter Han dynasty (25–220).56 From the late sixteenth century onwards the composition of biographies counted among the scholar-gentleman’s social obligations.57 Even the composition of pseudo-biographies that paraded as historical biographies became a source of light entertainment and a pastime for the literati.58 Biographies cross the borderlines between historiography and entertainment literature. The traditional Chinese writer was not primarily interested in defining such boundaries clearly. To the modern reader, analysis of these texts adds another perspective to the official version of history. It provides insight into unofficial history, the private sphere and domestic realm, and the cultural discourse on the dreams, desires, nightmares, fears and anxieties at one moment in time. The contemporary official and unofficial discourses describe Wang Shizhen’s biography of Tanyangzi as an instant bestseller. One contemporary scholar-official

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Wu Yuancui ẵ堩厫 (fl. 1550–1608, jin shi 1580) reported that in 1580 all his friends in Beijing were reading the Biography of Great Master Tanyang.59 In the official view the text did not remain politically innocent. Imperial censor Sun Chengnan ⬓㈧⋿ (jin shi 1567) who assumed office on 8 October 1580 – around a week before Tanyangzi’s death – noted: As to the fact that since assuming office I have seen the story of Miss Wang from Taicang district spread among scholar-officials, everybody actually knows that Miss Wang was haunted by a snake monster. Only her father thought she became an immortal. Since I became a censor the circulation of the story has increased rapidly. Soon I see the biography of Tanyangzi being printed and circulated in the market place. I am utterly astonished.60 In the summer of 1581 the imperial censors finally intervened and impeached Wang Shizhen, Tanyangzi’s father Wang Xijue and her brother Wang Heng 䌳 堉 (1561–1609) for participating in her cult, accusing them of sorcery and heresy.61 In the officials’ eyes, the Biography of Great Master Tanyang proved the guilt of the accused. The censors appear to have read the biography as a historical document, rather than a literary narrative, as a testimony of religious devotion, and a threat to authority that appeared real enough to warrant action. Only the interference of Minister of Rites Xu Xuemo ⼸⬠嫐 (1522–94, jin shi 1550), a fellow native of Suzhou, helped avert punishment and saved the three men from the death penalty.62 The ban on the Biography of Great Master Tanyang does not appear to have put an end to its dissemination, judging by its popularity and the flood of later narratives by different authors that it inspired. In late imperial times both the court and local officials issued book bans, yet the new commercial publishing industry that began to boom in the late Ming era rendered prohibition ineffective.63 The censor’s words situate Tanyangzi’s story within the new social negotiations and exchanges that thrived on the publishing boom in late Ming Jiangnan: the text becomes a commodity produced, reproduced and sold to keep up with the demand for entertainment literature. As Kai-wing Chow notes in his study of early modern Chinese print culture, Wang Shizhen became ‘increasingly involved’ in the commercial publishing industry as an editor and compiler from the 1550s onwards, as did other leading literati including philosopher Li Zhi 㛶岬 (1527–1602), literary critic Yuan 64 Hongdao 堩⬷忻 :(;'t:1::lli' (1568–1610) (1568-1610) and anthologist Zhong Xing 挦ア iii'llt (1574–1625). (1574-1625).64 These literati took part in the new commercial mass print culture that catered to a large new audience of of scholars, aspiring and would-be scholars, successful and 65 failed examination candidates, educated urban dwellers and women. wornen. 65 the Latter During his time in Taicang Wang Shizhen promoted the poetics of ofthe Seven Masters, exerting considerable impact on examination candidates, the upand-coming elite. Students would keep copies of of Wang Shizhen’s Shizhen's writings as

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a model to memorize and reproduce for literary occasions.66 Wang Shizhen’s works were published by two commercial publishing houses Shijingtang ᶾ䴻 ➪ and Shidetang ᶾ⽟➪ in Nanjing and circulated widely. Nanjing had become the largest publishing centre in the late Ming boasting 180 publishers.67 These publishers produced not only examination aids for the large market of examinees but also high-quality publications and prints of paintings for a specialized elite clientele. The Shidetang publishing house also specialized in fiction and drama. Kai-wing Chow deems it remarkable that Wang Shizhen was willing to have his works published by commercial publishers although he had the resources to publish his own works.68 Commercial publishers paid only bestselling authors. Wang Shizhen counted as a literary giant whose works guaranteed sales. Both popular hagiography and works about women enjoyed particular popularity during the Wanli era. The Biography of Great Master Tanyang responded to both these literary vogues.69 As a member of the landed gentry Wang Shizhen may not have needed to make a living from his writings, although other literati such as Tu Long did. Wang Shizhen’s use of commercial publishers would have further enhanced his reputation, promised posthumous fame and ensured literary immortality.70 The censors’ remarks about the Biography of Great Master Tanyang moreover testify to the wider implications of the publishing boom, such as the proliferation of unlicensed and pirated copying of bestsellers and their fast and wide distribution through unofficial publishing networks. The popularity of Tanyangzi’s story demonstrates the inefficacy of official censorship and the increasing impact of the booming commercial publishing industry. The painted icon The only known text attributed to Tanyangzi that survives outside of Wang Shizhen’s biography appears as a quotation on a painting by You Qiu ⯌㯪 (fl. 1564–90) dated 1581. You Qiu settled in Taicang as the son-in-law of painter Qiu Ying ṯ劙 (c. 1495–1552), one of the Four Masters of the Ming Dynasty (Ming si jia 㖶⚃⭞) and the founder of the Wu ⏛ (Suzhou) School of Painting. Three months after Tanyangzi’s death You Qiu executed her portrait in ink and colour on silk. This painting, considered a masterwork of Daoist art, remains preserved in the Shanghai Museum.71 It shows Tanyangzi in an ochre gown with a light blue border wearing a black hat and holding a ritual sword in her left hand. The face is executed in pale white pigment, her lips in deep red. The signature on the painting reads: ‘Painted by You Qiu from Changzhou 攟㳚ġon an auspicious day in the twelfth month of gengchen ⹂彘 [1581] during the Wanli of the year gengehen ~JR reign' reign’..

Figure 1.1 Portrait of Tanyangzi 㙯春⫸ ascending to Heaven. By You Qiu ⯌㯪 (fl. 1564–90). Shanghai Museum. From Stephen Little, ed., Taoism and the Arts of China, Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000, 286.

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The picture presents Tanyangzi at the moment of ascension by creating the illusion of her gown lifting itself upwards to let her float away. The inscription on the painting quotes the mystic’s ‘Eight Admonitions’ that she left behind for her believers before her ascension.72 Closer inspection reveals that the text corresponds to a passage in the Biography of Great Master Tanyang. The citation must have been copied either from a common source – perhaps in Tanyangzi’s own hand – or from Wang Shizhen’s text. According to poet Wang Chang 䌳㗞 (1725–1807), You Qiu moreover painted another picture of Tanyangzi as part of a mural on her shrine in Taicang.73 This painting depicting Tanyangzi’s ascension to heaven in broad daylight was already no longer extant during Wang Chang’s lifetime in the mid-Qing era. You Qiu enjoyed fame as a specialist for portraiture. What motivated You Qiu to execute Tanyangzi’s pictures? Wang Shizhen acted as his patron and commissioned several paintings of historical and legendary figures from You Qiu, including Huaqing shang ma tu 厗㶭ᶲ楔⚾ (Huaqing [Yang Guifei] mounts a horse), Guan jiang jun si shi tu 斄⮯幵⚃ḳ⚾ (Four Stories about General Guan Yu [the God of War Guan Gong]), and Si fang shi liu guan jing ⚃㕡⋩ℕ奨䴻 (Sixteen Meditations of Amitabha).74 The negotiations between You Qiu and Wang Shizhen do not seem to have been limited to monetary transactions alone. The two men regarded each other as friends. You Qiu exchanged paintings for poems with Wang Shizhen and escorted him on literary excursions.75 The late Ming boom in publishing promoted the production of literary works by or about women. As a painter You Qiu catered to a thriving market, too. Representations of women attracted attention and commanded a good price. You Qiu counted as a professional artist who earned his living by painting, similar to other late Ming literati such as Chen Jiru, Chen Hongshou 昛㳒䵔 (1599–1652) and Ding Yunpeng ᶩ暚 洔 (fl. 1584–1618),76 and female artists including You Qiu’s daughter Miss You ⯌ 㮷 and his sister-in-law Miss Qiu ᷀㮷.77 It is possible that You Qiu benefited from participating in the cult of Tanyangzi. It is conceivable that You Qiu acted on Wang’s commission and painted the portrait of Tanyangzi the literary protagonist, rather than Tanyangzi the historical woman, as he imagined her after reading her story.

Literati reactions to female literacy Wang Shizhen’s biography casts Tanyangzi as a poet, too. The narrative voice mentions a song (ge 㫴) composed by Tanyangzi: At midday the gnomon of the sundial was about to reach the zenith when two white rainbows spread across the sky.78 The cap on her head came into contact with willow water79 and sparkled as if it was sprinkled with gold dust, like a constellation of stars. A flame sparked off the tip of her sword, bigger than a pint measure. Far and near everyone saw it. People also saw two yellow butterflies emerge from the shrine and circle around for a while before they left. One song (ge) by my teacher contained a line saying ‘A pair of butterflies blissfully floats through the void.’ Everybody believed that the butterflies had appeared as an echo to her verse.80

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In Chinese popular imagination, a deceased woman could appear to her husband as a butterfly. A butterfly would also represent the soul of a dead girl leaving her grave.81 In this sense the butterfly could be read as an omen of Tanyangzi’s death, but the image also represents a familiar topos in traditional Chinese writings. The motif of the butterfly in the narrative about Tanyangzi suggests fluid boundaries between poetic imagination and perceived reality, an idea deriving from the episode ‘Hu die meng’ 圜圞⣊ (‘Dream of the Butterfly’) in the book of Zhuangzi.82 In Wang Shizhen’s narrative the two butterflies from Tanyangzi’s poem become real, appearing at the scene of Tanyangzi’s transformation into an immortal in response to her poetic imagination. The butterflies mirror the story of Tanyangzi: the artefact from her song becomes part of perceived reality, similar to Tanyangzi transforming from a writing gentlewoman into the literary protagonist of Wang Shizhen’s narrative. Tanyangzi the literary protagonist in turn begins to dominate literati discourse, a new idol seeping into late Ming beliefs. The theme of Tanyangzi as a poet emerges in Wang Shizhen’s biography at the climax of the story, the moment of her apotheosis. Although Wang Shizhen does not dwell on Tanyangzi’s poetry, the fact that she composes a song – one form of poetry – signifies one aspect of her reaching male-level literacy, a major theme underlying the Biography of Great Master Tanyang. To a late Ming mind the combination of woman and versification would spontaneously evoke the pleasure quarters. ‘Famous courtesans’ (ming ji), as the cream of the profession was called, entertained the scholar elite with their poetic skills that matched the accomplishments of their clientele. Yet during Tanyangzi’s lifetime an increasing number of gentlewomen also began to compose and publish their poetry. The tradition of educating elite women dates from the Han dynasty historian Ban Zhao, one of the first known gentlewoman poets in China. Her Nü jie ⤛婉 (Precepts for Women) became the classic recommendation for a girl’s education; its repertoire included moral instructions for children of both sexes. Late imperial gentlewomen such as Hangzhou poet and teacher Gu Ruopu 栏劍 䑆 (1592–c. 1681) endorsed its value and embraced Ban Zhao’s ideals as their own.83 Precepts for Women codified female humility and submissiveness, urging a woman to respect and obey her husband.84 Ban Zhao stressed the Confucian virtues of simplicity and modesty.85 In Wang Shizhen’s portrayal Tanyangzi personifies such moral values. Yet Tanyangzi no longer fulfils the four womanly virtues (si de ⚃⽟) as Ban Zhao defined them: What is womanly virtue (fu de ⨎⽟)? She does not distinguish herself in talent and intelligence. What is womanly speech (fu yan ⨎妨)? She does not sharpen her language and speech. What is womanly manner (fu rong ⨎ ⭡)? She does not seek to be outwardly beautiful or ornamented. What is womanly merit (fu gong ⨎≇)? She does not outperform others in her skills and cleverness.86

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In Wang Shizhen’s portrayal Tanyangzi inverts these womanly virtues: first, she distinguishes herself through her talent and intelligence. Second, she argues her case and transmits her message with eloquence. Third, she actively seeks to be seen in public for example when soaring over the rooftops;87 and fourth, she outperforms others by virtue of her cleverness. Wang Shizhen reveres her for these very traits, portraying changes in the perceptions of talented gentlewomen and the emergence of a new ideal of womanhood. Tanyangzi thus epitomizes the new elite women’s culture that became more visible in the public eye from the sixteenth century onwards. Women from elite backgrounds began to excel in the inner chambers as teachers, writers, poets, dramatists and editors, and they also entered, participated and earned recognition in the public domain.88 Female literacy began to rise in Tanyangzi’s days to an unprecedented degree. Factors contributing to the spread of women’s education included rising economic prosperity, the expansion of the urban population, the booming publishing industry and new trends in Neo-Confucian thought that changed the literati’s perspective on women. The philosopher Wang Yangming’s reinterpretation of Confucianism acknowledged for the first time the potential of women – alongside the merchants – to become sages. This new intellectual trend exerted its impact on literati society from the mid-Ming onwards.89 As a moral instructress, a syncretist teacher equally versed in the Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist canons and a woman who reaches enlightenment, Tanyangzi can be read as embodying an idealized image of the new female sage true to the spirit of Wang Yangming. The moral instructress and the catkins poetess constituted two classical models for elite women that, according to Susan Mann, ‘represented competing ideals of erudite womanhood that were impossible to reconcile’.90 The portrayal of Tanyangzi paradoxically combines both types. It poses a new challenge for the literati: how to deal with the child prodigy who has grown up to become a teacher, poet and writer making her voice heard not only in the inner chambers but also in the company of the male elite. The Biography of Great Master Tanyang implies that for the late Ming literati one way of dealing with the rising phenomenon of the talented gentlewoman was to explain her talent by her divine nature. The biography recounts how in 1574 sixteen-year-old Tanyangzi foresees her fiancé’s death and decides to forsake marriage and motherhood and pursue a religious quest and spiritual journey instead.91 As her father arranges her wedding, Tanyangzi sweeps her room, kowtows before an image of Guanyin and proclaims that she will follow a life of perpetual abstinence, take priestly vows and serve as a disciple of Guanyin.92 After her fiancé’s death, Tanyangzi insists on living in rooms of her own, claiming the status of widowhood. She has visions of conversing with female deities, including the Queen Mother of the West, the bodhisattva Guanyin, and the spiritimmortal Zhu zhen jun 㛙䛇⏃, the Perfected One. Faithful maidenhood endows Tanyangzi with the aura of chastity and moral purity but it also aligns her lifestyle with that of the Daoist adept, characterized by withdrawal from the traditional social relationships carved out for a woman’s

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life. Modern scholar Suzanne Cahill has shown that Daoist holy women in the Tang dynasty removed themselves from the body of society, controlled the needs of nutrition and sexuality by means of discipline, and regarded religious practice as a path to corporeal transformation, physical liberation and immortality.93 While male Daoist practitioners rejected power and money, Daoist women renounced food, sexuality and reproduction, the aspects of life that they could control.94 The female adept rejected marriage and motherhood, progressing by means of religious practices through a series of stages towards the final goal of immortality. The Daoist immortal avoided burial in a tomb or under the earth, ascending skywards into the Daoist pantheon instead.95 Transcendence appeared as the ultimate liberation of the body from death and decay. Suzanne Cahill notes that ascent to heaven in broad daylight counted as the ‘highest form of celestial transformation’.96 The Tang dynasty Daoist hagiographer of holy women Du Guangting singled out Wang Fajin 䌳㱽忚 and Bian Dongxuan 怲㳆䌬 as the only Tang women to achieve this form of transformation97 – a feat Wang Shizhen credits Tanyangzi to have replicated in the late Ming. As Tanyangzi undergoes apotheosis, the Biography of Great Master Tanyang refers to her as Great Immortal (da xian ⣏ẁ), a term also used for the Buddha, revealing her identity as the reincarnation of the Tanluan bodhisattva.98 Tanyangzi lives the life of a religious recluse within her family home. She communicates with her literati disciples through Wang Shizhen, her disciple and biographer, and through her writings. She receives divine instructions from the immortals. When advising her father in political matters, she displays her wisdom and knowledge of the Confucian canon.99 Wang Shizhen stresses that Tanyangzi’s erudition derives from her divine inspiration and the deities’ intervention. Wang Shizhen marvels at Tanyangzi reaching the highest level of literacy: In the beginning when she was taught to read, she was unable to read through two volumes (juan). She was barely literate, unable to read more than one or two out of ten written characters. Yet since her transformation into the Supreme Perfected immortal (shang zhen ᶲ䛇), she attained a state of profound knowledge and fluently wrote and conversed about the six classics,100 philosophers’ works and histories. I was not able to find out the source of her commentaries. She would often gain higher insights into the hidden meaning of the two canons [of Daoism and Buddhism]. She alone would attain a state of knowledge that even senior scholars could not aspire to.101 Wang Shizhen’s biography describes Tanyangzi as in perfect command of the Confucian, Daoist and Buddhists canons, symbolizing the world of men. Yet it also situates her knowledge within the realm of intuition about human emotions (qing ね), a discourse that late Ming literati shaped but perceived to belong to the realm of women: ‘She had a particular ability to investigate human emotions (qing).’102 Zhu the Perfected One becomes Tanyangzi’s teacher, encouraging, instructing and praising her.103 The deity also instructs Tanyangzi in classical exegesis:

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Writing goddess The winter solstice brought heavy snowfall. The Master swept the path as if she was waiting for someone. Presently two red beams of light appeared from the southwest, followed by a group of Perfected Ones whose upper halves were clearly visible. Below they were obfuscated by a white cloud and could not be clearly distinguished. Zhu the Perfected One used her hand to wipe snowflakes from the Master’s hair, took a copy of the Jin gang jing 慹∃ 䴻 (Diamond Sutra), punctuated the text for her, and explicated its difficult meanings. A little while later they left.104

Religion here serves as an explanation for the young woman’s literary talent and acquisition of knowledge. Zhu the Perfected One appears as her teacher. The title zhen jun 䛇⏃ usually refers to the ‘perfected man’ in the hierarchy of Daoist adepts, also known as a spirit-immortal (shen xian 䤆ẁ). In Tanyangzi’s visions Zhu the Perfected One emerges as a Daoist nun who plays a motherly role, for she gives Tanyangzi her religious name and instructs her in literacy.105 The immortal’s name moreover puns on that of Tanyangzi’s mother, Madame Zhu 㛙㵹 Ṣ (1533–98). The act of naming implies a relationship based on the parent– child model. The Biography of Great Master Tanyang describes the relationship between Immortal Zhu and Tanyangzi as that of ‘mother and daughter’.106 Hailing from the highest echelons of the elite, Tanyangzi grew up in a rulingclass family with a tradition of educating women. Madame Zhu was well versed in the canonical literature and would counsel her husband Wang Xijue about important affairs of state.107 Tanyangzi’s brother Wang Heng later expressed admiration for his mother’s learning: ‘She would quote ancient and recent examples and ponder the problem from all sides.’108 In the Biography of Great Master Tanyang Immortal Zhu’s literacy mirrors that of Madame Zhu, implicitly linking the mother’s talent, learning and wisdom with divinity, too.

Conclusion In sum, the sources about Tanyangzi show that her voice reaches us only through the filter of male-authored discourse from literati works. We primarily hear the voices of her observers and look at their perceptions of the female figure in text and image. These voices are important for our study of women and the literary world because they chart new responses to female literacy in late Ming. Their analysis sheds new light on how the literati confronted the new phenomenon of the talented woman who reads, writes and excels in her literary pursuits. The observers’ voices convey the new tensions felt in the literary circles of imperial China’s male elite. They express the shock of absorbing the new female aspirants as producers and consumers of elite culture. The story of Tanyangzi provides new insights into both contemporary perceptions of literary women and literati reactions to their appearance in the literary world. I have argued that the literati found the phenomenon of the new literary woman so unsettling that they responded to the growing rate of female literacy by resorting to explanations of supernatural intervention and divine causes. Their reaction to the image of Tanyangzi as a

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mystic and a clever woman poet, scholar, commentator on the written canon and calligrapher was to turn her into a goddess. The Tanyangzi phenomenon reverberated for decades in Chinese cultural discourse, as the following chapters will show. Some late Ming readers believed that some elements in Tang Xianzu’s drama Mu dan ting were inspired by Tanyangzi, sparking the cult of emotions.109 As noted above, the early seventeenth-century novel Xing shi yin yuan zhuan provides insights into literati perceptions of women in provincial society.110 The action of Xing shi yin yuan zhuan is mainly set in the villages and market towns of Shandong province during the 1620s and 1630s, with occasional excursions to Sichuan and the capital Beijing. The rise of female literacy hardly features in this novel – in contrast to some seventeenth-century scholar and beauty romances (cai zi jia ren xiao shuo ㇵ⫸ἛṢ⮷婒) and works of fiction such as the early Qing Rou pu tuan 倱呚⛀ġby Li Yu (1610–80) whose heroine is an educated girl from a scholar household.111 While the latter works are set within elite circles, the Xing shi yin yuan zhuan portrays the fringe of the elite. Even men who acquire scholar-official positions such as main protagonists Chao Yuan 㗩㸸 and Di Xichen 䉬ⶴ昛ġare less than semi-literate. There are no women reading books in local society as portrayed in this novel but it includes the appearance of one chaste illiterate widow who teaches the literati and becomes a goddess – echoing the story of Tanyangzi while transposing it from elite circles to the margins of the provincial scholar class.112 The main protagonist’s mother Madame Chao 㗩⣓Ṣ, a woman from a commoner family, turns into an immortal, saint and saviour. Similar to Tanyangzi, Madame Chao becomes a chaste widow, ascends to heaven to become a goddess and teaches the literati how to be better leaders and morally superior gentlemen. By contrast Madame Chao becomes a goddess only in old age. She lacks literacy or a classical education and never counted as a child prodigy. Here the discourse on clever women has shifted away from the theme of female literacy, highlighting instead the role of the wise womanturned-goddess as a foil to the failing late Ming male elite.113 The novel, written nearly half a century after Tanyangzi’s lifetime, shows the growing literati preoccupation with the fate of the Ming dynasty and the reasons for its decline as its time drew to a close. But it also highlights the novelty of the woman figure who inverts gender and social roles and acts as a teacher, preacher and saint, providing leadership and guidance for the literati in times of trouble. As we probe such perceptions with the quest to learn more about the discourse on women in early modern China’s literary world, we can read the literati-authored literary and artistic representations of Tanyangzi alongside those of other talented women of the late Ming and early Qing eras who speak to us across the centuries in their own voices. The following chapter will turn to these women writers’ voices, tracing the trajectory of the educated woman’s life – from child prodigy to goddess – in her own words and in the perceptions of both male and female authors from the late Ming and early Qing era.

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Notes 1 Wang Shizhen 䌳ᶾ屆, ‘Tanyang da shi zhuan’ 㙯春⣏ⷓ⁛, in Yan zhou shan ren xu gao ⺯ⶆⰙṢ临䧧, Chongzhen edn, 1628–1644, repr. Taipei: Wenhai, 1970 [hereafter: YZSRXG], 78.23a. 2 YZSRXG, 78.23b–24a. 3 YZSRXG, 78.24a. 4 YZSRXG, 78.1a–31a. I am indebted to the pioneering work of Ann Waltner and her generosity in circulating her draft translation of ‘Tanyang da shi zhuan’ and sharing her expertise on Tanyangzi with the participants of the symposium ‘The World of Wang Shizhen: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in Sixteenth-Century China’, Leiden, Netherlands, June 2003. 5 YZSRXG, 78.24b. 6 For example, see Fan Shouji 劫⬰⶙, ‘Tanyang xian shi zhuan’ 㙯春ẁⷓ⁛, Chui jian cao ⏡∵勱, in Yu long zi ji ⽉漵⫸普, 1590, 32.1a–22b. For others, see below. 7 Cf. Suzanne Cahill, ‘Discipline and Transformation: Body and Practice in the Lives of Daoist Holy Women of Tang China’, in Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, eds, Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 272. On Du Guangting, see Franciscus Verellen, Du Guangting (850–933): Taoïste de cour à la fin de la Chine médiévale, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, 1989. On the transmission of religious traditions, see Glen Dudbridge, Die Weitergabe religiöser Traditionen in China, München: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2004, esp. 46ff. 8 Cf. Gǀyama, Min Shin, 415. 9 On Wei Huacun, see RB, 159–60. 10 YZSRXG, 78.17b. 11 Glen Dudbridge, The Legend of Miao-shan, London: Ithaca Press, 1978, 58. 12 On the term gui xiu, see Introduction. 13 On these scholars, see DMB, 138–40 (Zhao Yongxian), 343 (Feng Mengzhen), 702 (Qu Ruji), 740 (Guan Zhidao), 1192 (Shen Maoxue), 1324–7 (Tu Long), 1376 (Wang Dingjue), 1406–8 (Wang Shimou). 14 Dudbridge, Miao-shan, 9. 15 On the rise of mass information society, see ƿki, ‘Minmatsu Kǀnan’, 74–102. 16 On Tanyangzi, see Daria Berg, ‘Der Kult um die Unsterbliche Tanyangzi: Biographie als Bestseller im China der späten Kaiserzeit’, in Jianfei Kralle and Dennis Schilling, eds, Schreiben über Frauen in China: Ihre Literarisierung im historischen Schrifttum und ihr gesellschaftlicher Status in der Geschichte, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004, 285–310; DMB, 1425–7; Sakai Tadao 惺ḽ⾈⣓, Chnjgoku zensho no kenkynj ᷕ⚥┬ 㚠̯䞼䨞, Tokyo: Kokusho kankǀkai, 1977, 258–63; Ann Waltner, ‘T’an-Yang-tzu and Wang Shih-chen: Visionary and Bureaucrat in the Late Ming’, Late Imperial China 8.1, 1987, 105–33; idem, ‘Learning from a Woman: Ming Literati Responses to Tanyangzi’, International Journal of Social Education 6.1, 1991, 42–59; Miura Shnjichi ᶱ㴎䥨ᶨ, ‘Shinkǀ Yu Anki hon seiritsu no jidaiteki jǀkyǀ – Banreki no chishikijin to dǀkyǀ’ 䛇婍ᾆ⬱㛇㛔ㆸ䩳̯㗪ẋ䘬ね㱩 – – ᶯ㙎̯䞍嬀Ṣ̩忻㔁, in Yoshikawa Tadao ⎱ⶅ⾈⣓, ed., Chnjgoku kodǀkyǀshi kenkynj ᷕ⚳⎌忻㔁⎚䞼 䨞, Kyoto: Dǀhǀsha, 1992, 511–64. A new monograph on Tanyangzi The World of a Late Ming Mystic by Ann Waltner, is forthcoming, but has not yet been available at the time of writing. 17 Ann Waltner, ‘The Grand Secretary’s Family: Three Generations of Women in the Family of Wang Hsi-chüeh’, in Family Process and Political Process in Modern Chinese History, vol. 1, Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1992, 541–77, esp. 572. 18 Miura, ‘Shinkǀ’, 148.

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19 Berg, Carnival, 323–54. 20 Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 345. For a discussion of this approach in the Chinese context, see Berg, ‘Messenger of Souls’, 187. 21 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 1–20. 22 YZSRXG, 186.3b. 23 YZSRXG, 78.22a. 24 YZSRXG, 78.25a–b. 25 Li Fang 㛶㖱, ed., Tai ping guang ji ⣒⸛⺋姀, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961, repr. 1995 [hereafter: TPGJ], 271.2137. 26 RB, 165. 27 See the example of Xiaoqing discussed in Chapter Four; see also Fong, Herself, 66. 28 For the courtesan Xue Susu, see Chapter Three; on gentlewoman poet Wang Fengxian 䌳沛⪢ (fl. early seventeenth century) and her brothers who collated her poetry, see Fong, Herself, 103. 29 Tai cang zhou zhi ⣒ᾱⶆ⽿, 1919 edn, repr. Taipei: Chengwen, 1975, 24.54a. 30 Cf. Waltner, ‘T’an-Yang-tzu’, 106. 31 On the late imperial cult of chastity, see T’ien Ju-kang, Male Anxiety and Female Chastity: A Comparative Study of Chinese Ethical Values in Ming-Ch’ing Times, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988; Mark Elvin, ‘Blood and Statistics: Reconstructing the Population Dynamics of Late Imperial China from the Biographies of Virtuous Women in Local Gazetteers’, in Harriet T. Zurndorfer, ed., Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999, 135–222; Cao Dawei 㚡⣏ 䁢, ‘Zhongguo li shi shang zhen jie guan nian de bian qian’ ᷕ⚳㬟⎚ᶲ屆䭨奨⾝䘬 嬲怟, Zhongguo shi yan jiu ᷕ⚳⎚䞼䨞 2, 1991, 24–30; Ann Waltner, ‘Widows and Remarriage in Ming and Early Qing China’, in R.W. Guisso and S. Johannesen, eds, Women in China, Youngstown, OH: Philo Press, 1981, 129–46; Katherine Carlitz, ‘The Social Uses of Female Virtue in Late Ming Editions of Lienü zhuan’, Late Imperial China 12.2, 1991, 117–52. 32 Fangqin Du and Susan Mann, ‘Competing Claims on Womanly Virtue in Late Imperial China’, in Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush and Joan R. Piggott, eds, Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 219–47. 33 Cai Linghong 哉ⅴ嘡, ‘Ming dai jie fu lie nü jing biao chu tan’ 㖶ẋ䭨⨎䁰⤛㕴堐 ⇅㍊, Fujian lun tan 䤷⺢婾⡯ 6, 1990, 44–5. 34 Bettine Birge, ‘Women and Confucianism from Song to Ming: The Institutionalization of Patrilineality’, in Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds, The Song-YuanMing Transition in Chinese History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 212–40, esp. 235–8. 35 Du and Mann, ‘Competing’, 223. 36 On the cult of faithful fiancées, see Weijing Lu, True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. 37 Mann, Precious Records, 84. 38 Cf. Gǀyama, Min Shin, 174–7. 39 Lu, True to her Word, 33. 40 Cao Yunyuan 㚡⃩㸸, ed., Wu xian zhi ⏛䷋⽿, 1933, repr. Taibei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970, 1520–2, 1539. 41 Liu Xiang∱⎹, Gu Lie nü zhuan ⎌↿⤛⁛, Wen yuan ge 㔯㶝敋 Si ku quan shu ⚃ ⹓ℐ㚠 edn, repr. Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1986, 4.36. 42 ‘Bo zhou’ 㝷凇, Mao shi zheng yi 㮃娑㬋佑, Song edn, repr. by Ruan Yuan 旖⃫, in Shi san jing zhu shu ⋩ᶱ䴻㲐䔷, 1816, repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju chuban, 1983, 2A.28c; for alternative translations, see James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Volume 5: The She King or The Book of Poetry, repr. Taibei: Southern Materials Center, Inc., 1985, 39; Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes: Chinese Text, Transcription and Translation, Stockholm: The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950, 15.

50 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Writing goddess YZSRXG, 78.4a. Mann, Precious Records, 80. Du and Mann, ‘Competing’, 220 Yan Zhenqing 柷䛇⌧, Nan yue Wei fu ren zhuan ⋿ⱛ櫷⣓Ṣ⁛, in Gu Yuanqing 栏 ⃫ㄞ, Yang shan Gu shi wen fang xiao shuo si shi zhong 春Ⱉ栏㮷㔯㇧⮷婒 ⚃⋩䧖, 1506–66 edn, repr. Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1998, 8a–b. Huang Liuhong 湫ℕ泣, Fu hui quan shu 䤷よℐ㚠, Author’s preface, 1694, Wen chang hui guan 㔯㖴㚫棐 1889 edn, Si ku wei shou shu ji kan ⚃⹓㛒㓞㚠廗↲, repr. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1997, 24.27a–b. Elvin, ‘Blood’, 177. On Xu Xianqing see DMB, 1607. Shen Defu 㰰⽟䫎, Wanli ye huo bian 叔㙮慶䌚䶐, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju 1959, repr. 1980, 23.593–4. On the friendship of Wang Shizhen and Wang Xijue, see YZSRXG, 178.3a. Controversially the erotic novel Jin Ping Mei 慹䒞㠭ġ and some historical dramas have been attributed to him, too; cf. William H. Jr. Nienhauser, ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986 [hereafter: IC], 874–6. Cf. Allan Barr, ‘The Later Classical Tale’, in Victor Mair, ed., The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001, 675–96, esp. 687–8. Wang Shizhen䌳⢓䥃, Jin mu ji 慹㭵䲨, YZSRXG, 68.3273–3306. Wolfgang Franke, ‘Historical Writing during the Ming’, in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds, The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, part I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 726–82, esp. 760–1. Daoist hagiography also includes works such as Shenxian zhuan which is attributed to Ge Hong 吃㳒 (283–343). On the Liexian zhuan, see also Max Kaltenmark, Le Liesien tchouan: biographies légendaires des immortels taoïstes de l’antiquité, Beijing: Bali Daxue Beiping hanxue yanjiusuo, 1953. On the concept of the gentleman in China, see Introduction; Berg and Starr, eds, The Quest for Gentility. Cf. Herbert Franke, ‘Literary Parody in Traditional Chinese Literature: Descriptive Pseudo-Biographies’, Oriens Extremus 21, 1974, 23–31. Wu Yuancui ẵ堩厫, Lin ju man lu 㜿⯭㻓抬, 1608 edn, repr. in Xu xiu si ku quan shu 临ᾖ⚃⹓ℐ㚠, Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995–2002, vol. 1172, bie ji, 2.5b–6a. Wanli di chao 叔㙮恠憼, Ming edn in Guoli zhongyang tushuguan, Taibei; repr. Taibei: Xuesheng chubanshe, 1968, 119. The censors are Niu Weibing (filing his accusation on 9 June 1581) and Sun Chengnan (on 22 June 1581); cf. Waltner, ‘T’an-Yang-tzu’, 108–9; DMB, 1426. In gratitude Wang Xijue posthumously honours Xu Xuemo (DMB, 585–7) with a eulogy, see Wang Xijue 䌳拓䇝, ‘Ji wang xu Xu xiu cai wen’ 䤕ṉ⨧⼸䥨ㇵ㔯, in idem, Wang Wensu gong wen cao 䌳㔯倭℔㔯勱, 1615 edn, repr. Taipei: National Central Library Microfilm, 12.16b–17b. Cf. Brook, Confusions, 171. Chow, Publishing, 203. On Zhong Xing, see IC, 369–70; DMB, 408–9; Nancy Norton Tomasko, ‘Chung Hsing (1574–1625): A Literary Name the Wan-li Era (1573–1620) of Ming China’, PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1995. Chow, Publishing, 199. Chow, Publishing, 198–9. Chow, Publishing, 84. Chow, Publishing, 199. Widmer, ‘Huanduzhai’, 77–122. Cf. Chow, Publishing, 199.

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71 118.5 x 57.3 cm. For a reproduction, see Stephen Little, Taoism and the Arts of China, Chicago, IL: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000, 286–7. On You Qiu, see Osvald Sirén, Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles, part II, vol. 7, London: Lund Humphries, 1958, 274. The painting has also been discussed by Ann Waltner, ‘Authenticity and Authority in a Portrait of Tanyangzi’, unpublished conference paper, ICAS 2, Berlin, 9–12 August 2001. 72 YZSRXG, 78.22a. 73 Cf. Little, Taoism, 289. 74 These paintings are no longer extant; cf. Louise Yuhas, ‘Wang Shih-chen as Patron’, in Li Chu-tsing, James Cahill and Wai-kam Ho, eds, Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Paintings, Lawrence, KS: Kress Foundation Department of Art History, 1989, 139–53, esp. 145. 75 Cf. Yuhas, ‘Wang Shi-chen as Patron’, 145. 76 Chow, Publishing, 108f; cf. ECCP, 87–8 (on Chen Hongshou), DMB 1289–90 (on Ding Yunpeng); on Chen Jiru, see Introduction. 77 Cf. Ellen Johnston Laing, ‘Women Painters in Traditional China’, in Marsha Weidner, ed., Flowering in the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990, 90–91; idem, ‘Wives, Daughters, and Lovers: Three Ming Dynasty Women Painters’, in Marsha Weidner et al., eds, Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists, 1300–1912, Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988, 31–9. 78 The rainbow can be either auspicious (depicted as a snake or dragon in early Chinese representations) or inauspicious (symbolizing marital union or adultery); cf. Eberhard, Symbole, 237–8. 79 In Buddhism willow water (yang liu zhan shui 㣲㞛㱦㯜) was believed to be a sweet dew with the power to bring people back to life; see ‘Fo tu deng’ ἃ⚾㼬, Jin shu 㗱㚠, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,1974, 95.26b; here I am indebted to Ann Waltner, ‘Tanyang da shi zhuan’, unpublished manuscript, ‘The World of Wang Shizhen: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in Sixteenth-Century China’, Leiden, Netherlands, June 2003. 80 YZSRXG, 78.24a–b. 81 Cf. Eberhard, Symbole, 256. 82 Zhuang zi 匲⫸, ‘Qi wu lun’ 滲䈑婾, in Guo Qingfan 悕ㄞ喑, ed., Zhuang zi ji shi 匲 ⫸普慳, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961, repr. 2004, 2.112. 83 See Chapter Six. 84 See also Yenna Wu, The Chinese Virago, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 21. 85 Cf. RB, 26. 86 Fan Ye 劫㙬 et al., Hou Han shu, ⼴㻊㚠, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975, 84.2787– 92; translation by Thomas H.C. Lee, Education in Traditional China: A History, Leiden: Brill, 2000, 470. 87 YZSRXG, 78.11b. 88 See, for example, Ko, Teachers; Ellen Widmer, ‘The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China’, Late Imperial China 10.2, 1989, 1–43; WWLIC, 17–396. 89 On Wang Yangming, see Introduction. 90 Mann, Precious Records, 83. 91 YZSRXG, 78.2a–b. 92 YZSRXG, 78.2b. 93 Cahill, ‘Discipline and Transformation’, 255. 94 Cahill, ‘Discipline and Transformation’, 270. 95 Cahill, ‘Discipline and Transformation’, 272. 96 Cahill, ‘Discipline and Transformation’, 257. Ming edn, edn, repr. fepr. Taibei: Taibei: Yiwen, Yiwen, 1977, 1977,38.30340-2. 97 Zheng tong 38.30340–2. tang dao daa zang 㬋䴙忻啷, lEWtJiliit Ming

52

Writing goddess

98 YZSRXG, 78.22b. 99 YZSRXG, 78.4b. 100 Traditionally including the Shi jing (Book of Odes), Shu jing 㚠䴻 (Book of History), Li ji (Book of Rites), Yi jing (Book of Changes), Chun qiu 㗍䥳 (Spring and Autumn Annals) and the lost Yue jing 㦪䴻 (Book of Music). 101 YZSRXG, 78.26b. 102 YZSRXG, 78.26b. 103 YZSRXG, 78.3b. 104 YZSRXG, 78.4b–5a. 105 YZSRXG, 78.1a, 78.3a. 106 YZSRXG, 78.5a–b. This is noted by Waltner; see Waltner, ‘The Grand Secretary’s Family’, 564–5. 107 Berg, Carnival, 251. 108 Wang Heng 䌳堉, Gou shan xian sheng ji 䶙Ⱉ⃰䓇普, Wanli edn, repr. Taipei: Wenhai, 1970, 14.35a. 109 See Chapter Four. 110 On this novel, see Berg, Carnival. 111 On scholar beauty romances, see Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male–Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995; on Li Yu and his works, see Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu. 112 See Berg, Carnival, 323–54. 113 The main focus instead revolves around the new social phenomenon of literati and merchant families mixing and merging, and the resulting social tensions.

2

The child prodigy

Ever since the girl poet Xie Daoyun 嫅忻枆 (fl. 399) stunned the literati by her knack for versification, describing snowfall as ‘rather like willow catkins whirling in the wind’ (wei ruo liu xu yin feng qi 㛒劍㞛䴖⚈桐崟), female child prodigies have enjoyed celebrity status in traditional China.1 The willow catkins child prodigy became a topos in late Ming literati portrayals of talented women. Tanyangzi’s contemporary and a fellow native of Suzhou, the renowned gentlewoman poet Xu Yuan ⼸⩃ (1560–1620), daughter of an imperial retainer, was celebrated as a child prodigy. In contemporary literati discourse she gained the sobriquet ‘Reincarnation of Xie E [Daoyun]’ Xie Ehou shen 嫅⧍⼴幓.2 The late Ming iconoclastic thinker Li Zhi’s emphasis on the concept of the ‘childlike mind’ (tong xin 䪍⽫) moreover offered a new philosophical foundation for the literati’s fascination with the child prodigy within the Neo-Confucian context.3

Figure 2.1 Portrait of Xie Daoyun 嫅忻枆. Woodblock cut. From Wu Youru ⏛⍳⤪, ofXie ~tmrml. ~ 1Z 3< D , Wu WU Youru hua bao ⏛⍳⤪䔓⮞, Vol. 1, ~ 1Z3