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A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture
 900429175X, 9789004291751

Table of contents :
9200000040469018
history of chinese letters and epistolary culture-antje richter-2015
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
About the Contributors
Introduction: The Study of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture
Part 1 Material Aspects of Chinese Letter Writing Culture
Chapter 1 Reconstructing the Postal Relay System of the Han Period
Chapter 2 Letters as Calligraphy Exemplars: The Long and Eventful Life of Yan Zhenqing’s (709–785) Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter
Chapter 3 Chinese Decorated Letter Papers
Chapter 4 Material and Symbolic Economies: Letters and Gifts in Early Medieval China
Part 2 Contemplating the Genre
Chapter 5 Letters in the Wen xuan
Chapter 6 Between Letter and Testament: Letters of Familial Admonition in Han and Six Dynasties China
Chapter 7 The Space of Separation: The Early Medieval Tradition of Four-Syllable “Presentation and Response” Poetry
Chapter 8 Letters and Memorials in the Early Third Century: The Case of Cao Zhi
Chapter 9 Liu Xie’s Institutional Mind: Letters, Administrative Documents, and Political Imagination in Fifth- and Sixth-Century China
Chapter 10 Bureaucratic Influences on Letters in Middle Period China: Observations from Manuscript Letters and Literati Discourse
Part 3 Diversity of Content and Style
Section 1 Informal Letters
Chapter 11 Private Letter Manuscripts from Early Imperial China
Chapter 12 Su Shi’s Informal Letters in Literature and Life
Chapter 13 The Letter as Artifact of Sentiment and Legal Evidence
Chapter 14 Infinite Variations of Writing and Desire: Love Letters in China and Europe
Chapter 15 Writing from Revolution’s Debris: Shen Congwen’s Family Letters in the Mao Era
Section 2 Literary Letters
Chapter 16 Captured in Words: Functions and Limits of Autobiographical Expression in Early Chinese Epistolary Literature
Chapter 17 Civil Examinations and Cover Letters in the Mid-Tang: Dugu Yu’s (776–815) “Letter Submitted to Attendant Gentleman Quan of the Ministry of Rites”
Chapter 18 The Inscription of Emotion in Mid-Tang Collegial Letters
Chapter 19 Halves and Holes: Collections, Networks, and Epistolary Practices of Chan Monks
Chapter 20 Letters as Windows on Ming-Qing Women’s Literary Culture
Chapter 21 Epistolary Networks and Practice in the Early Qing: The Letters Written to Yan Guangmin
Section 3 Open Letters
Chapter 22 Aid and Comfort: Lu Zhaolin’s Letters
Chapter 23 She Association Circulars from Dunhuang
Chapter 24 Between Writing and Publishing Letters: Publishing a Letter about Book Proprietorship
Chapter 25 Opinions Going Public: Letters to the Editors in China’s Earliest Modern Newspapers
Scholarship on Chinese Epistolary Literature and Culture: A Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik Section four

China

Edited by Stephen F. Teiser Martin Kern Timothy Brook

VOLUME 31

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ho4

A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture Edited by

Antje Richter

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Wang Shizhen. Letter. Ink on paper with polychrome woodblock-printed design. H ca. 19 cm. Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, NY. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A history of Chinese letters and epistolary culture / edited by Antje Richter.   pages cm. — (Handbook of Oriental studies = Handbuch der Orientalistik. Section Four, China ; 31)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-29175-1 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29212-3 (e-book) 1. Chinese letters—History and criticism. 2. Letter writing, Chinese. I. Richter, Antje, editor.  PL2400.H57 2015  895.16’009—dc23 2015003080

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9520 isbn 978-90-04-29175-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29212-3 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Illustrations xi Abbreviations xiii About the Contributors xiv Introduction: The Study of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture 1 Antje Richter

PART 1 Material Aspects of Chinese Letter Writing Culture 1 Reconstructing the Postal Relay System of the Han Period 17 Y. Edmund Lien 2 Letters as Calligraphy Exemplars: The Long and Eventful Life of Yan Zhenqing’s (709–785) Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter 53 Amy McNair 3 Chinese Decorated Letter Papers 97 Suzanne E. Wright 4 Material and Symbolic Economies: Letters and Gifts in Early Medieval China 135 Xiaofei Tian

PART 2 Contemplating the Genre 5 Letters in the Wen xuan 189 David R. Knechtges 6 Between Letter and Testament: Letters of Familial Admonition in Han and Six Dynasties China 239 Antje Richter

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7 The Space of Separation: The Early Medieval Tradition of Four-Syllable “Presentation and Response” Poetry 276 Zeb Raft 8

Letters and Memorials in the Early Third Century: The Case of Cao Zhi 307 Robert Joe Cutter

9

Liu Xie’s Institutional Mind: Letters, Administrative Documents, and Political Imagination in Fifth- and Sixth-Century China 331 Pablo Ariel Blitstein

10

Bureaucratic Influences on Letters in Middle Period China: Observations from Manuscript Letters and Literati Discourse 363 Lik Hang Tsui

PART 3 Diversity of Content and Style section 1 Informal Letters 11

Private Letter Manuscripts from Early Imperial China 403 Enno Giele

12

Su Shi’s Informal Letters in Literature and Life 475 Ronald Egan

13

The Letter as Artifact of Sentiment and Legal Evidence 508 Janet Theiss

14

Infinite Variations of Writing and Desire: Love Letters in China and Europe 546 Bonnie S. McDougall

15

Writing from Revolution’s Debris: Shen Congwen’s Family Letters in the Mao Era 582 Jie Li

Contents

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section 2 Literary Letters 16

Captured in Words: Functions and Limits of Autobiographical Expression in Early Chinese Epistolary Literature 621 Matthew Wells

17

Civil Examinations and Cover Letters in the Mid-Tang: Dugu Yu’s (776–815) “Letter Submitted to Attendant Gentleman Quan of the Ministry of Rites” 643 Alexei Ditter

18

The Inscription of Emotion in Mid-Tang Collegial Letters 675 Anna M. Shields

19

Halves and Holes: Collections, Networks, and Epistolary Practices of Chan Monks 721 Natasha Heller

20 Letters as Windows on Ming-Qing Women’s Literary Culture 744 Ellen Widmer 21

Epistolary Networks and Practice in the Early Qing: The Letters Written to Yan Guangmin 775 David Pattinson

section 3 Open Letters 22

Aid and Comfort: Lu Zhaolin’s Letters 829 Paul W. Kroll

23 She Association Circulars from Dunhuang 853 Imre Galambos 24 Between Writing and Publishing Letters: Publishing a Letter about Book Proprietorship 878 Suyoung Son

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25 Opinions Going Public: Letters to the Editors in China’s Earliest Modern Newspapers 900 Natascha Gentz Scholarship on Chinese Epistolary Literature and Culture: A Select Bibliography 933 Index 942

Acknowledgements My greatest thanks go to the authors of this book. Their enthusiasm for this project and generosity in sharing their learning about Chinese literature and culture have been a wonderful source of inspiration for my own scholarship. My conversations with some of the authors and correspondences with others—by email, alas—go back more than a decade. First of all I would like to thank those of the authors who participated in the workshop held at the University of Colorado at Boulder on 17 and 18 August 2012: R. Joe Cutter, Ronald C. Egan, Imre Galambos, Enno Giele, Natasha Heller, David R. Knechtges, Paul W. Kroll, Y. Edmund Lien, Bonnie S. McDougall, David Pattinson, Zeb Raft, Anna M. Shields, Suyoung Son, Janet M. Theiss, Xiaofei Tian, Lik Hang Tsui, Matthew Wells, and Suzanne E. Wright. They have all made this workshop a most stimulating and enjoyable gathering. For the organizational support of the workshop I am grateful to the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, in particular for the cooperation of our Program Assistant Lynne Buckley, and to Xuechun Wang and Fletcher Coleman, at the time graduate students in the Chinese program. The workshop was made possible by a generous grant of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and by additional funding from the University of Colorado at Boulder: in particular the Center for Asian Studies, the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and the Dean’s Fund for Excellence. Special thanks go to those authors who were not present at the conference, either because they could not be in Boulder at the time or because they joined the project later: Pablo Ariel Blitstein, Alexei Ditter, Natascha Gentz, Jie Li, Amy McNair, and Ellen Widmer. Without their crucial contributions this would be a sadly incomplete volume. Brill has played an essential role throughout, from the original conception to the final production of this book. I vividly remember my first conversation with Albert Hoffstädt at the annual conference of the European Association of Chinese Scholars in Riga in the summer of 2010. Albert with his extensive background in the Classics—where research of letters has long been a thriving field—immediately saw the potential of this field in Chinese studies and suggested that I consider Brill’s series Handbook of Oriental Studies for the publication of a History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture. Of course, I was only too happy to do so. Since the workshop in 2012, Patricia Radder has guided me most competently and patiently through the various stages of production. I cannot thank her enough. The book has also benefitted from a Kayden

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Research Grant, which allowed me to enlist the help of two graduate students in my department, Laura Garrison and Alan Solomon, whose careful proofreading has been tremendously helpful. My husband, Matthias L. Richter, has heard much about this project over the years and supported me in many ways; I am grateful for his love, patience, advice, and cheer. Antje Richter Boulder, March 2015

List of Illustrations 1.1 Dunhuang Relay Routes during the Han Period 40 2.1 Yan Zhenqing, Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, ca. 775 55 2.2 Zhang Xu (after), Stomach Ache Letter, undated 65 2.3 Yan Zhenqing (after), Wenshu Letter, ca. 775 66 2.4 Wen Zhengming, Letter to Hua Zhongfu, ca. 1530 72 2.5 Yan Zhenqing (after), Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, ca. 1603 81 2.6 Qian Feng, copy of Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, undated 91 2.7 Qian Feng, copy of Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, undated 91 3.1 Shen Liao, Dong zhi tie, detail 103 3.2 Li Kan, att., Ink Bamboo, detail of Forest of Gentlemen 104 3.3 Bao Tingbo, Letter 107 3.4 Lu Zhi, Letter 108 3.5 Wang Shizhen, Letter 109 3.6 Gao Shixian, Letter 110 3.7 Zhang Zhaoxiang, Wenmeizhai baihua shijian pu 111 3.8 Yu Shaosong, Letter 112 3.9 Jiang Biao, Letter to Shen Xuanhuai, 1897–99 114 3.10 Hu Zhengyan, Thinking of Carp 117 3.11 Hu Zhengyan, Lai’s Garment 119 3.12 Zou Zhilin, Letter 121 3.13 Li Yu, Letter 126 3.14 Anonymous, Cinnabar Pills Extend Spring 128 3.15 Min Qiji, leaf 9 from Xixiang ji 130 10.1 Zhazi by Zhao Ding 370 10.2 Zhazi by Lu You (1) 373 10.3 Zhazi by Lu You (2) 374 11.1 Letter on coarse silk from Xuanquanzhi, recto and verso 408 11.2 Sealing label from Niya with seal intact and Kharoshti writing on the concealed surfaces 416 11.3 Dimensions of sealing labels plotted over the folding creases of paper manuscripts 418 11.4 Two wooden sealing labels from Juyan with address inscriptions 420 11.5 Silk pouch from Dunhuang inscribed with a letter address 421 11.6 Silk letter from Yuan to Zifang found at Xuanquanzhi, Dunhuang 429 11.7 Silk letter from Jian to Sir Zhong and his wife found at Xuanquanzhi, Dunhuang 436 11.8 Two silk letters to Youqing and Junming found at Dunhuang 440–41

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11.9 Letter copy on a wooden rod found at Yumen, Huahai, Dunhuang, two sides 446 11.10 Letter from Zheng Hong to Li Zizhang found at Juyan, recto and verso 448 11.11 Letter from Xuan to Yousun and his wife found at Juyan, recto and verso 451 11.12 Two Qin letters from Shuihudi, recto and verso 458–59 11.13 A letter and a label from Liye 465 11.14 A letter or greeting tablet from Tianchang, recto and verso 468 14.1 Last page of Lu Xun’s letter to Xu Guangping, dated May 15 [1929], with Lu Xun’s “elephant” signature 576 14.2 Xu Guangping’s letter to Lu Xun, dated May 20, which she wrote on receiving his letter of May 15 577 14.3 The first page of Lu Xun’s letter to Xu Guangping, dated May 23; the notepaper shows a lotus flower 578 23.1 Manuscript Or.8210/S.865V with four unfinished fragments of circulars written from left to right 869 23.2 Manuscript Or.8210/S.329V with a circular running from left to right 871

Abbreviations AM AS BSOAS CLEAR EMC HJAS JAOS LIC MCL(C) MS TP

Asia Major Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews Early Medieval China Harvard Journal for Asiatic Studies Journal of the American Oriental Society Late Imperial China Modern Chinese Literature (and Culture) Monumenta Serica T’oung Pao

About the Contributors Pablo Ariel Blitstein is Associate Researcher at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at the University of Heidelberg. He holds a PhD in Chinese history from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, France) and is the author of the book, Les Fleurs du royaume: savoirs lettrés et pouvoir impérial dans la Chine du Sud aux Ve–VIe siècles (Paris: les Belles Lettres), forthcoming in 2015. He has been a research and teaching assistant at the INALCO and at the Collège de France and is co-founder of a Chinese history section at the Universidad de San Martín (CEMECH, Argentina). Robert Joe Cutter earned his PhD in Asian Languages and Literatures (Chinese) from the University of Washington. From 1983 until 2005, he was a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently director of the School of International Letters & Cultures at Arizona State University, a position he has held since 2005. His primary field of teaching and research is early medieval Chinese literature. Alexei Ditter is an Associate Professor of Chinese at Reed College. His research explores the interaction between social and textual practices in medieval Chinese literature, focusing in particular on questions of place, genre, and memory. He has published articles on the writing of Tang literary histories in the twentieth century, conceptions of urban space in the ninth century Records of Monasteries and Stupas, and the commercialization of commemorative writing in the midTang. He is currently completing a monograph on changing practices and styles of prose writing in China’s late-eighth and early-ninth centuries. Ronald Egan is Professor of Sinology in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. His research is on Tang and Song period poetry, aesthetics, and literary culture. He is the author of The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (2006), and the translator of selected essays from Qian Zhongshu’s Guanzhui bian, which appeared as Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters by Qian Zhongshu (1998).

About The Contributors

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His newest book, The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China, was published by the Asia Center at Harvard University in 2013. Imre Galambos is a specialist of Chinese manuscripts, who initially worked on Warring States scribal habits and published a book on the orthography of the Chinese script. After receiving his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, he worked for the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library for ten years, where his research interest gradually shifted to the Dunhuang manuscripts. More recently, he has been also working on Tangut prints and manuscripts from the territory of the Xixia state. He has been teaching at the University of Cambridge since 2012. Natascha Gentz (Vittinghoff ) took up the position as Chair of Chinese at the University of Edinburgh in 2006. She received her MA (1994) and PhD (1998) degrees from Heidelberg University. Her studies included residences at Fudan University, Shanghai (1988–90), People’s University, Beijing (1995–96), and Tokyo University (1997). In 2002 she became Junior Professor at Frankfurt University. Her publications include a monograph on the history Chinese journalism, two edited volumes— one on transcultural knowledge transfer in Late Qing China, and one on how global media are shaping cultural identities—and a book on contemporary Chinese historical drama. Enno Giele holds the chair for Classical Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg. Previously he held positions in Münster, Berkeley, and Tucson. He has published on early imperial China’s institutional, cultural, and social history. Publications include “Excavated Manuscripts: Context and Methodology” (in China’s Early Empires: A Re-appraisal, Cambridge University Press, 2010); “Kodai no shikiji nōryoku wo ikaga ni hantei suru no ka” [How to establish ancient literacy?] (in Sanzennen no kanji, Rinsen shoten, 2009); and Imperial Decision-Making and Communication in Early China: A Study of Cai Yong’s Duduan (Harrassowitz, 2006). Natasha Heller teaches Chinese religions at UCLA. She is the author of Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben (Harvard Asia

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About The Contributors

Center, 2014). Other research articles have considered the relationship between Buddhism and secular culture in China from the Tang dynasty through the Ming. Her current book project is a study of Buddhist children’s literature in contemporary Taiwan. David R. Knechtges is Professor Emeritus of Chinese Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of over 100 articles and ten books including Two Studies of the Han Fu (1968), The Han Rhapsody (1976), Wen-xuan or Selections of Refined Literature (three volumes, 1982–96), and Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature: A Reference Guide (2010), co-authored with Chang Taiping (four volumes, Brill, 2010–14). He is the editor of the English version of the four-volume Peking University The History of Chinese Civilization published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. Paul W. Kroll is Professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published widely on medieval literature and cultural history, and is most recently the author of A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese (Brill, 2014). Jie Li is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Teaching and researching in the areas of modern Chinese literary, film, and cultural studies, she is the author of Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (2014) and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Utopian Ruins: A Memory Museum of the Mao Era. She has also co-edited a volume entitled Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (forthcoming). Y. Edmund Lien obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972. He worked as professor, researcher, manager, and entrepreneur in high tech areas until 2004, when he started to pursue his interest in Chinese literature. He completed his doctorate at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2011 and is presently an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the University of Washington.

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Bonnie S. McDougall is Visiting Professor of Chinese at the University of Sydney and Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. She has also taught at Harvard University, the University of Oslo, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the City University of Hong Kong, and has spent long periods in teaching, translating, and research in China. She has written extensively on modern Chinese literature and translated poetry, fiction, drama, letters, essays, and film scripts by Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Ah Cheng, Chen Kaige, Lu Xun, Mao Zedong, Wang Anyi, Dung Kai-cheung and many others. For further details see www. bonniesmcdougall.com. Amy McNair is Professor of Chinese Art History at the University of Kansas and serves as Editor-in-chief of Artibus Asiae. She recently published an essay on the Cuan Baozi Stele, called “Looking at Chinese Calligraphy: The Anxiety of Anonymity and Calligraphy from the Periphery,” in Looking at Asian Art edited by Katherine R. Tsiang and Martin J. Powers (2012). Her annotated bibliography on calligraphy appears in Oxford Bibliographies Online: Chinese Studies, and she is currently engaged in writing “The Visual Arts in the Sui and T’ang” for Cambridge History of China: Volume 4, Sui and T’ang China, 618–907, Part II. David Pattinson gained his PhD in pre-modern Chinese literature from the Australian National University, and has taught in Hong Kong and New Zealand. Since 2000 he has worked at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom where he teaches Chinese history and literature. His main research interests are in letter-writing and letter collections, social networks, and responses to social upheaval in late imperial China. He has also written on pre-modern beekeeping in China. Zeb Raft is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Alberta. His research interests include early medieval poetry and literary culture, Chinese rhetoric, and the translation of Chinese poetry into western languages. Antje Richter is Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She studies the culture of early and medieval China, with research interests in literature, art history, and medicine. Her first book in English, Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture in

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Early Medieval China, was published in 2013 by University of Washington Press. She is currently working on two major projects: an exploration of Chinese literary imagination and a study of medical narratives in medieval China. Anna M. Shields is Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of two books: Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Collection from among the Flowers (Huajian ji) (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) and One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) and several articles on Tang and Five Dynasties literary writing. She is currently working on a new project that examines Five Dynasties and Northern Song representations of Tang dynasty literary culture. Suyoung Son is Assistant Professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the social practice of writing and reading in light of the historical conditions of print culture, commercialization, and urbanization from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Her current book project examines the self-publishing boom of writers in early Qing China, specifically the ways in which the material conditions of print reshaped literary production, circulation, and reception. Janet Theiss is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (2005) and articles on various topics in Chinese legal, family and gender history. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Family Scandal and Family Fortune in Qing China, a study of a state-elite relationships based on a complex cluster of adultery and corruption cases from the early Qianlong period. Xiaofei Tian is Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table (2005), Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557) (2007), and Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-century China (2012). Her most recent publication is The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath (2014), a translation, with critical introduction and notes, of a late nineteenth-century

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memoir. Her Chinese publications include a book on the sixteenth-century novel The Plum in the Golden Vase. Lik Hang Tsui teaches Chinese history and Classical Chinese as a Departmental Lecturer at the University of Oxford. A graduate of Peking University, he is completing a doctoral dissertation on Southern Song epistolary culture at Oxford. He has conducted research at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and in the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei as a doctoral fellow, and has received the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. He is the author of several articles and reviews on premodern Chinese history and culture in both English and Chinese. He has also taken part in translating several books. Matthew Wells is Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include, historiography, biography, autobiography, and life writing in early Chinese literature. He is the author of the book To Die and Not Decay: Autobiography and the Pursuit of Immortality in Early China (2009). Ellen Widmer is the Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies at Wellesley College. Her research fields include Chinese women’s literature of the Ming and Qing dynasties, history of the book, missionary history, and traditional Chinese fiction and drama. She is the author of two monographs, The Margins of Utopia: Shui-hu hou-chuan and the Literature of Ming Loyalism (1987), and The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth Century China (2006). Her edited volumes include Writing Women in Late Imperial China (with Kang-i Sun Chang, 1997), Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature (with Wilt Idema and Wai-yee Li, 2006); China’s Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections (with Daniel Bays, 2008); and The Inner Chambers and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming to Qing (with Grace Fong, 2010). Suzanne E. Wright received an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and the PhD from Stanford University with a dissertation on “Cultural Literacy and Social Identity in Woodblock-printed Letter Papers of the Late Ming Dynasty.” She is Associate Professor of art history at the University of Tennessee. She has published on late-Ming catalogues of letter paper designs, the life and work of the

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17th-century publisher Hu Zhengyan, and the use of letter paper-type designs in illustrated literature. She is currently researching woodblock-printed cards for drinking games and other images related to the themes of drinking and drunkenness and is co-curating an exhibition of Ming and Qing prints for the Huntington Library.

Introduction: The Study of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture* Antje Richter It would seem surprising that this book should be the first publication, in any language, dedicated to the study of Chinese epistolary literature and culture in its entirety; surprising because of the immense riches of a tradition of writing, transmitting, reading, and preserving letters that, in China, spans more than two millennia; surprising also because of the acute attention that scholars in other disciplines have been paying to letter writing for at least a century and a half—from the European Classics and ancient Near Eastern Studies to research on the dramatic changes in written communication we are witnessing in our day and age.1 One reason for the relative neglect of epistolary matters in China seems to be that letters do not play a significant role in the Confucian canon, in contrast to the epistles in the New Testament, whose cultural significance lead to a sustained scholarly interest in this medium of written communication. Another reason for the delay of attention to the Chinese epistolary world may be that letter writing was well and alive in China until rather recently, when it began to be substituted by digital media of written communication in the 1990s. In the West, the decline of handwriting as a means of communication was felt more than a century earlier with the spread of typewriters and telecommunication, which failed or were slow to gain a foothold in China.2 Meanwhile, nostalgia for the vanishing world of letter writing is growing in China, too, and along with it, scholarly interest. There has been a moderate rise in publications since the mid-1990s, both in China and the West, but much more is yet to be discovered in the long and incredibly rich history of Chinese epistolary culture. The present volume with its wide range of essays on a variety of epistolary matters from the third century BCE to the twentieth century clears and covers enormous ground and by this very act exposes the even larger * I would like to thank Brill’s anonymous reviewer for their appreciative, perceptive, and constructive reading of this introduction (not to mention every contribution in this volume!) and for their immensely helpful comments. 1  The bibliography of scholarship on Chinese epistolary literature and culture in the appendix includes a very brief section on seminal studies of letter writing in other cultures. 2  I have also written about this in the introduction to Antje Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 5–7.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_002

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Richter

uncharted territory that is still awaiting discovery and appreciation, thus highlighting the great potential for future research. The twenty-five essays collected in this book demonstrate the significance of written communication in China as well as that of our research in this field. They show letters to be all-important elements in the negotiation of societal as well as individual values and relationships in all kinds of situations and throughout Chinese history since at least the Han dynasty; they examine the literary and visual means by which letter writers attempted to do justice to this important role; they propose ways of understanding historical letters that largely came down to us not as original manuscripts but in edited form; they cast light on questions of authorial authenticity in the context of a genre regulated by normative discourses and employed for varying, often unknown agendas—to mention only the most crucial concerns. Not the least, they introduce dozens of letters, often the first translation into English, and thus make epistolary history palpable in all its vitality and diversity: letters written by men and women from all walks of life to friends and lovers, princes and kings, scholars and monks, seniors and juniors, family members and neighbors, potential patrons, newspaper editors, and many more. Among them are very personal documents that were never meant to be read by anyone but the addressee, but also explicitly open letters and circulars as well as letters that seem to hover between these poles. There are literary and non-literary letters; letters that came down to us as manuscripts written by obscure authors and letters transmitted from the greatest writers of their times; casual personal letters and letters polished to achieve maximum public effectiveness. In order to draw attention to the broad spectrum of linguistic conventions of letter writing and to familiarize readers with this language that is often regarded as difficult to access, all epistolary texts translated here are also provided in the original Chinese. Another strength of this volume is that its essays take very different approaches. This is not only due to the breadth of epistolary material they introduce, but also reflects the potential of epistolary material, which allows and calls for very different modes of scholarly inquiry.

Part 1: Material Aspects of Chinese Letter Writing Culture

The materiality of written communication is particularly pronounced. While the material form in which a poem, disquisition, or biography circulates may certainly influence its reception, the singularity of the exemplar we are reading is usually of little or no concern. A letter, on the other hand, is written both with a specific addressee in mind and with the intention and knowledge that

Introduction

3

it is this specific piece of writing—and physical object—that will finally reach the addressee. Since not only pieces of information but also material objects are passed on (in stark contrast to digital written communication), letters were often recognized and treasured beyond their sheer messages as tokens of the absent physical body of their writers; an idea that in China became especially powerful in the perception of handwriting. The distinct materiality of letters lends a weight to modes of transmission, handwriting, writing materials, and connections with other types of exchanges that is unparalleled by other genres. While these important areas of epistolary research are to some extent reflected in many of the contributions throughout this volume, they are at the heart of the four chapters in Part 1, Material Aspects of Chinese Letter Writing Culture. In the first chapter, Y. Edmund Lien explores archeological remains and textual evidence—including manuscripts and received texts—from Dunhuang in the Han and Tang dynasties to reconstruct the postal relay system of the time. His study clarifies terminological difficulties presented by historical documents about this important component of Chinese bureaucracy and casts light on the varied functions of postal stations, among them the transmission of official communications, reconnaissance activities, and the provision of transportation and lodging for traveling officials. Lien’s essay about aspects of the infrastructure and procedures of the transmission of official documents in early imperial China opens a wide field in the study of Chinese history and culture that is immensely worthy of future exploration.3 Amy McNair’s essay is dedicated to the tremendously important role that calligraphy plays in Chinese epistolary history. Based on the idea that handwriting expresses the personality and disposition of the writer, personal letters have enjoyed special calligraphic appreciation since the Han dynasty. Retracing the “long and eventful life” of a very brief letter by the celebrated Tang dynasty calligrapher Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿 (709–785), McNair explores the reception of this letter, which is famous for its characters in cursive script and its author’s reputation for loyalty, from the time of its writing in 775 up to the present day, demonstrating the extraordinary aesthetic power of a piece of epistolary calligraphy. Letter writing materials, and stationery in particular, are at the center of Suzanne E. Wright’s investigation of Ming dynasty decorated letter papers. Drawing on a number of historical and literary sources, the essay introduces 3  Scholars working in this field include Weipin Tsai, who studies the establishment of the modern Chinese postal system. See her article “Breaking the Ice: The Establishment of Overland Winter Postal Routes in the late Qing China,” Modern Asian Studies 47 (2013): 1749–81.

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techniques of enhancing the letter paper surface—from dyeing and coating to adding metal pigments, watermarks, and woodblock printed designs. Wright also analyzes the functions of popular paper designs and looks into the intriguing relationship between the images these letter papers feature and the texts that were written on them. Xiaofei Tian’s essay about letters accompanying or responding to gifts in early medieval China illuminates a further aspect of the materiality of letters (which have often been described as gifts in themselves, not the least in the context of calligraphy), namely their connection with other types of exchange. Her study of “material and symbolic economies” at Six Dynasties courts argues that letters contribute to the creation and interpretation of the meaning of a gift and illustrates that the exchange of letters could be part of social interactions of great complexity and sometimes fatal consequence for their immediate participants and beyond. It is evident that these four essays about material aspects of epistolary culture are waiting to be complemented by additional studies, not only of China’s long postal history, but also of the various letter writing materials, the relationship between letter writing and calligraphy, and the embeddedness of correspondence in a variety of material contexts.

Part 2: Contemplating the Genre

The generic field of the letter is vast and diverse. It accommodates a whole range of epistolary subgenres, has areas of overlap with other genres (such as poetry or disquisition), and includes the use of epistolary inserts in different types of texts. A genre definition will thus have to be very broad: a letter “is a communication written on a tangible medium by one historical person and addressed to another (or, as the case may be, by one narrowly circumscribed group to another), which, in order to reach its spatially removed addressee, undergoes some form of physical transmission involving a third party and is, more often than not, part of an exchange.”4 This very general epistolary situation results in a number of textual features that could at the same time be described as markers of the genre. The most obvious of those, resulting from the particular directedness of a letter, is its dialogic nature, whether we can or cannot situate a certain letter in a given correspondence—and typically we cannot. Regarding this lack of information Liz Stanley, a scholar of 4  I have suggested this definition in Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 37, where I also refer to other attempts at defining letters.

Introduction

5

a­ utobiographical literature, has pointed out that any “epistolarium” or corpus of extant letters is characterized by “fragmentation and dispersal,”5 an observation reiterated in one way or the other by every contributor to this volume. Another textual feature that is universal in letters, albeit less obvious, is their self-referentiality, or, to use the comparatist Claudio Guillén’s words, “writing proclaiming itself as writing in the process of correspondence.”6 Both dialogicity and self-referentiality of a letter thrive on another textual feature, that is, occasionality—a web of references to the multifarious circumstances of a correspondence that can fascinate in many respects, but is often difficult to decode for non-intended later readers who lack the necessary contextual knowledge.7 Although most chapters in this volume deal, in some form or another, with matters of genre, these concerns are especially prominent in the six chapters that form Part II, Contemplating the Genre. David R. Knechtges’s essay about the letters collected in the sixth-century Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan 文選) provides a comprehensive discussion of fundamental genre questions and criteria: what texts in Wen xuan can be described as letters and what are the genre designations under which they appear in this authoritative literary anthology? Following his demarcation of the genre, Knechtges also summarizes every individual letter in Wen xuan. Although several of these letters have been read and interpreted extensively—such Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (ca. 145– ca. 86 BCE) letter to Ren An 任安 (d. ca. 91 BCE), which comes closest to a canonical letter in the Chinese tradition8—the overwhelming majority of epistolary texts in Wen xuan has surprisingly not received the scholarly attention they deserve. In the next chapter, Antje Richter takes a closer look at one particular epistolary subgenre, letters of familial admonition. She reads them 5  “The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences,” Auto/Biography 12 (2004): 204. 6  Claudio Guillén, “Notes Towards the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 80. See also Patrizia Violi, “Letters,” in Discourse and Literature, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985), 160. 7  What I call occasionality has been described by other scholars of epistolary literature as well, e.g. Liz Stanley, who describes letters as “strongly marked by their quotidian present.” Stanley, “The Epistolarium,” 208. 8  The significance of this letter for Chinese literary history can hardly be overestimated. In this volume alone, it is mentioned in half a dozen articles; and a collection of studies in English will be published under the title Sima Qian and the Letter to Ren An by University of Washington Press in 2016 (co-authored by Stephen Durrant, Wai-Yee Li, Michael Nylan, and Hans van Ess).

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as documents of the interplay between social, familial, and individual concerns that, since they are communications to inferiors, moreover show an authorial self-presentation that is rare among transmitted letters. Presenting characteristics of both personal letters and non-epistolary genres, such as the testament, letters of familial admonition also call for the consideration of generic ambiguity and of the potential of the letter form for literary and pedagogic ends. Since certain letters of familial admonitions were clearly not meant to be sent to a spatially removed recipient but implicitly also addressed future generations in the writer’s family, this subgenre provides early evidence for the use of the letter form beyond the actual exchange of letters over a distance. Zeb Raft’s essay is an examination of early medieval epistolary poems of the “presentation and response” type (zengda shi 贈答詩). Emerging from poems written at parting banquets, this poetical subgenre later also included poems that were exchanged over a distance and thus provides a fascinating case of genre overlap between the banquet poem and the letter poem. Focusing on a pair of poems exchanged between Qiu Yuanzhi 丘淵之 (after 370–after 433) and Yang Hui 羊徽 (after 370–before 420), Raft’s essay examines the “space of separation” created and exploited by this kind of poem exchange and discusses three topics related to that space: the personal bond of the poets, the presence of the state, and the representation of a public space. The last three essays in Part 2 are dedicated to a distinct type of genre question, the continuum of personal letter writing and official communication. R. Joe Cutter studies examples from the transmitted correspondence of the Cao family, in particular epistolary writings of Cao Zhi 曹植 (192–232). He investigates the generic overlap and difference between personal letters and memorials with respect to form, which is in both cases dominated by parallel prose, and to their potential to express personal sentiments. Pablo Ariel Blitstein expounds the relationship between personal and official written communication from the perspective of literary thought delineated in Liu Xie’s 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 532) pivotal critical work The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍). Questioning the appositeness of the “private”-“public” dichotomy for discussions of Six Dynasties China, he also proposes to take representations of personal experience—in any genre— more seriously in the study of early medieval institutions. The following chapter by Lik Hang Tsui examines the impact of bureaucratic practices on the conventions of writing personal letters in Song China, especially those observed in extant manuscripts in an epistolary subgenre called zhazi 劄子. Problematizing a simplified, static approach to genre typology and instead arguing for a dynamic view of the epistolary genre, Tsui analyzes examples of the zhazi type itself and consults literati discourses on the transformation of

Introduction

7

the epistolary genre as they are expressed in letters, notebooks, and encyclopedias of this period. Again, the potential for future research is evident also in these areas. Very few of the numerous epistolary subgenres we know from different periods of Chinese history have been studied in detail: be they letters of condolence or recommendation or confession (to name only a few);9 the same goes for the use of letters or the letter form in other texts. The basic letter form can be easily appropriated by most other genres, either by fashioning an entire text as a letter or a correspondence (for instance a poem, disquisition, or novel) or by inserting epistolary elements into another text (for instance a song, biography, tale, or drama). Although the wide literary appropriation of the letter form— which has long been recognized outside of Chinese Studies—remains a little explored area in Chinese literary history, it promises not only a deeper understanding of many texts that employ epistolary elements, but also, indirectly, through their particular use of epistolary conventions and allusions, additional knowledge about the contemporary letter writing culture in all its facets.10

Part 3: Diversity of Content and Style

The fifteen essays in Part 3, Diversity of Content and Style, span more than two millennia and cover major developments of Chinese epistolary history from the third century BCE to the second half of the twentieth century. The extreme heterogeneity of the letters they introduce is representative of the enormous breadth of material gathered under the umbrella of letter writing in China. Broad as the spectrum offered here—and in Parts I and II—may already be, it nevertheless points to a much greater world of epistolary topics and writers that still expect discovery: letter inserts in drama and prose, the introduction of postcards in China, stamp-collecting, the rise of email and texting—to mention only a few promising topics. 9  For an exemplary study of a certain type of letter see Christian de Pee’s study The Writing of Weddings in Middle-Period China: Text and Ritual Practice in the Eighth through Fourteenth Centuries (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2007). 10  I have published on one aspect of this very comprehensive topic—the motif of the letter in early imperial Chinese poetry—see “Briefe und ihre Leser in der Dichtung der frühen Kaiserzeit [Letters and their readers in early imperial poetry],” in Aspekte des Lesens in China in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, ed. Bernhard Führer (Dortmund: Projekt, 2005), 122–44. I am also working at an expansion of this study, tentatively titled “The Literary Uses of Correspondence: Discovering Early Epistolary Fiction in Chinese Literature.”

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Coming to terms with the diversity of letters in form, content, and function is notoriously difficult. Among the possible classification schemes that help to make this diversity less unwieldy, a division based on intended audience seemed to be best suited to the epistolary material examined in these essays.11 The three sections in Part 3 cover the spectrum from “informal letters” with specific addressees to “literary letters,” in which the primary addressee may play an auxiliary role, to explicitly “open letters.” While the “informal letters” explored in the five chapters of this section differ greatly in authorship, time of writing, function, stationery, transmission, and literary accomplishment, most of them share other features that set them apart from the material discussed in Sections 2 and 3. Prominent among those features are a strong dialogicity—the particular addressees of these letters emerge quite distinctly—and a pronounced occasionality, which, alas, may pose obstacles to our understanding of these texts. The latter is particularly conspicuous in this section’s first chapter by Enno Giele, whose essay is dedicated to the earliest sources of Chinese epistolary history, private letters from the Han dynasty that were discovered as manuscripts roughly 2,000 years after they were written. Their mundane character, literary imperfections, and lack of association with important historical personages as writers or addressees prevented that any of these texts came down to us through literary transmission. Since they were never quoted in a historical work, collected in an anthology, or excerpted in an encyclopedia, they were not subjected to the editorial changes that have become an inevitable part of our understanding of epistolary culture.12 The coincidental preservation and archaeological discovery of the texts discussed by Giele evince the truly inconceivable multitude of letters that were written throughout history and are forever lost. The same circumstances also cast a stark light on the fundamental exceptionality of those few letters that survived through literary transmission: they were either written by or addressed to someone famous; or they reported something of general importance; or they were celebrated for their literary or calligraphic mastery. Because the overwhelming majority of letters ever written is lost, our notion of any historical period’s epistolary culture remains tenuous, to say the least. Manuscript finds are all the more significant since letters—unlike poems or disquisitions 11  Assuming a division between informal and literary letters has a long history in China. See, e.g., Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛, “Tan shu du” 談書牘, Wenxue zazhi 3.1 (1948.5). See also Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 164 n. 84. 12  On editorial changes to letters in the process of publishing see also Stanley, “The Epistolarium,” 205–07.

Introduction

9

or tales—are texts that were written by virtually everybody and on all kinds of occasions, and so tend to represent spheres in society and aspects in an individual’s life that were never meant to be preserved for posterity. Reading these early manuscript letters is also fascinating because they provide a muchneeded foil to the transmitted material, be it in their similarity—manuscript letters exhibit many nascent features that we know well from transmitted literature—or in the various ways in which they differ from the typical transmitted letter. Following Giele’s chapter about private letters written by historically inconsequential writers with limited literacy—and again evoking the breadth of epistolary texts covered in this volume—Ronald Egan’s essay is dedicated to the letters of one of the most celebrated poets of Chinese history, Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101). While this Song dynasty master’s poetical oeuvre and many of his more formal prose texts have received extensive scholarly attention and appreciation, the approximately 1,500 informal letters (chidu 尺牘) by his hand that have come down to us have seldom been studied for their own sake or for what they reveal about the genre in general. They are of great value indeed, not just as a source for our understanding of Su’s biography, thought, and even poetry, but, as Egan demonstrates, also for their inherent literary qualities, which, since they were contingent on the informality of the genre, would remain unrecognized if we chose to ignore Su’s informal letters. While family members and matters played a role in Giele’s and Egan’s chapters to some extent, the letters discussed in the last three chapters of this section about “informal letters” could all be described as “family letters” ( jiashu 家書). The striking differences between these texts demonstrate, on the other hand, how very inclusive our understanding of epistolary subgenres should be. The letters introduced by Janet Theiss were preserved as legal evidence in a lawsuit involving an elite family from Huzhou, Zhejiang, in the 1740s. Since the letters at the heart of this case were exchanged between illicit lovers— a gentry wife and the live-in tutor for her children—they were never meant to be read by anyone else but the addressees and certainly not intended for publication. Nevertheless, they ended up being copied into the Board of Punishments routine memorial (xingke tiben 刑科題本), along with several other letters that were exchanged amidst the ensuing crisis between family members and servants. Since the local adultery case soon became a corruption case involving officials in three provinces, Theiss shows how private letter writing can be intertwined with contemporary social affairs. She also discusses many issues that are of relevance for epistolary research in general, such as authenticity, forgery, and the expression of self, including transgressive emotion. Although the love letters between the main protagonists in this legal case

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lack conventional literary refinement, they are still expressive and moving in their immediacy. Rough and unpolished as they may be, they share certain features with the more literary letters that are examined in Bonnie S. McDougall’s chapter. Taking a comparative approach, McDougall takes a closer look at love letters in China and Europe, at the history of this epistolary subgenre, at its writers and readers, and at the circumstances and contents of their correspondence. She also reflects on the changes that “real letters” underwent when they were prepared for publication, focusing on the correspondence between Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) and Xu Guangping 許廣平 (1898–1967). McDougall’s observation that personal letters, among them love letters, “can also be seen as a form of creative expression,” certainly applies to many of the letters discussed in this volume and is expressed by other authors as well. In the case of Shen Congwen 沈從文 (1902–1988), whose Mao era family letters are introduced in Jie Li’s essay, private letters appear as the only creative outlet and literary arena still left to this writer—an outlet, however, that was ever more threatened by surveillance. Li closes in on three periods in the writer’s life when physical separation made family letters especially important: Shen’s participation in land reform in Sichuan from October 1951 to February 1952; the first years of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969, when his younger son was relocated to Sichuan; and 1969 to 1971, when Shen’s family were all living apart from each other. Li not only describes the writer’s “internal exile into private letters” as a harrowing journey of increasing professional and intellectual loss, but also shows the emotional deprivation that arises from self-censorship. When Shen’s wife and children appear to “be staging a revolutionary performance for the potential censors rather than reflecting their true feelings,” several crucial epistolary concepts emerge in their full complexity: the notion of epistolary authenticity, the dependence of the writer’s epistolary persona on the intended readership, and the private-public dichotomy. Although the “literary letters” written by scholars, monks, and women introduced in the following six chapters are again diverse in many respects, what most conspicuously connects them—and sets them apart from the majority of texts discussed in Section 1—is, what we may call their greater cultural claim. Written by authors who were conscious of their intellectual and literary importance in their own times and often had aspirations that went well beyond the present, these letters were clearly composed with a wider audience in mind. Written in a higher register—certainly not just “on the edge of literariness”13—they often show a diminished epistolarity. In those letters the 13  Claudio Guillén, “On the Edge of Literariness: The Writing of Letters,” Comparative Literature Studies 31.1 (1994): 1–24.

Introduction

11

addressee may play a lesser or different role than in informal letters, and the self-referentiality and occasionality that are so prominent in informal letters here usually recede in favor of longer, discursive passages, which appear as core messages of these texts. Matthew Wells’s inquiry into the modes of autobiographical expression focuses on some of the most famous and sophisticated pieces of early epistolary literature in China. Many of these letters were written at times of extraordinary personal distress for their literati writers or during political crises that triggered disruptions and dislocation of identity. Unlike the letters discussed in the previous section, these autobiographical letters, although addressed to a specific recipient, were unmistakably written with literary ambition and with an audience beyond the primary addressee in mind. Therefore they provide an excellent opportunity to ponder questions of epistolary authenticity and craft. How can we assess the authenticity of a particular letter on the spectrum from “real letters” to texts that skillfully make use of the letter form or certain epistolary features? How does the primary or merely purported addressee shape the letter? What is the particular potential of the letter form that makes it suited to certain rhetorical purposes? Deliberating issues such as these may help us to get a clearer understanding of the rhetoric and function of both real and literary letters. After all, counterintuitive as it may seem, “the real letter can be stiff, or pretentious, or artificial, or insincere. The literary one may appear more spontaneous, or friendly, or even intimate.”14 Alexei Ditter looks into the distinct use of the epistolary genre as part of a scholar’s preparation of the civil examinations. In the course of these preparations, candidates would, prior to the exams, submit a writing portfolio to the chief examiner or other influential officials in an effort to secure their patronage. Ditter provides a close reading of the cover letter that accompanied one writing portfolio, Dugu Yu’s 獨孤郁 (776–815) letter to Quan Deyu 權德輿 (761–818), as well as the response to this letter from Quan. The exploration of this correspondence allows not only insights into the rhetorical strategies employed in a particular type of letter, but also into the politics of patronage and the negotiation of interpersonal relation in the mid-Tang. Anna M. Shields offers a study of mid-Tang letters of a very different nature—letters between friends and colleagues of the same rank, among them the most famous poets of the time. Her investigation of the linguistic and rhetorical means used by Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846), Yuan Zhen 元稹 (779–831) and others to inscribe emotion into their letters, particularly anger and affection, emphasizes how valuable personal connections were for these writers 14  Guillén, “Notes Towards the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” 87.

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and how important it was for them to convince their readers of the authenticity and originality of their letters and of the necessity of their communication. Many of the rhetorical and literary features that Shields points out show that these writers were acutely aware of the means to emphasize the epistolarity of a letter—through its dialogicity, occasionality, and self-referentiality—and thus to enhance its rhetorical effectiveness both for the immediate addressee and a larger audience. That letter writing requires distinct personas depending on the intended readership has been pointed out by many scholars of epistolary literature. Liz Stanley spoke of letters as being perspectival and remarked that they “fascinatingly take on the perspective of the ‘moment’ as this develops within a letter or a sequence of letters, and may utilize a particular ‘voice’ adopted by the writer or a particular ‘tone’ rhetorically employed, such as humorous extravagance, strict formality or a particular ‘persona’ playfully adopted.”15 Natasha Heller’s exploration of “collections, networks, and epistolary practices of Chan monks” focuses on the letters of the most prominent monk of the Yuan dynasty, Zhongfeng Mingben 中峰明本 (1263–1323), to ordained disciples and lay followers and reads them as texts with a variety of social functions that were dependent on the letter form. These letters not only maintain social relations but also provide an opportunity for autobiographical reflection— particularly regarding the writer’s spiritual progress—as well as for the discussion of Buddhist teachings, instruction, and the arrangement of administrative tasks. The questions about how to deal with a corpus of transmitted epistolary texts that Heller raises throughout her essay are of significance well beyond Buddhist literature. The “halves and holes” of her title point to the fundamental incompleteness of our textual sources, to the role editors played in selecting and shaping this material, and to the necessarily provisional character of the account we are thus able to give. The following two chapters explore aspects of late imperial Chinese epistolary culture. Ellen Widmer’s essay reads surviving letters by female writers of the Ming and Qing dynasties as an avenue into traditional Chinese women’s literary culture. She first explores the increase in female letter writing that we see starting in the late Ming and then turns to the letters in the lives of three specific women of high cultural visibility: Liang Mengzhao 梁孟昭 (fl. 1630s), Gui Maoyi 歸懋儀 (1762–1835/6), and Wang Zhenyi 王貞儀 (1768–1797), emphasizing their literary accomplishments, social and artistic networks, and skill at argumentation, but also the restrictions under which women writers generally labored. Widmer concludes that preserved letters, despite their perceived 15  “The Epistolarium,” 202–03.

Introduction

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­ arginality within the hierarchy of literary genres in China, “can open our eyes m to a realm beyond poems,” a finding that closely resembles that of Ronald Egan regarding Su Shi. David Pattinson’s study of epistolary networks and practice in the early Qing does not focus on letters by any one writer, but rather on letters one writer received. The collection of approximately 750 letters written by over 250 correspondents to Yan Guangmin 顏光敏 (1640–1686), Yanshi jiacang chidu 顏氏家藏尺牘 (Letters kept at the Yan family home), provides an opportunity to study a collection of letters that were not significantly selected or edited. As these letters were very likely not written or even collected with a view to publishing them, they may give us a glimpse of relatively unguarded epistolary practices. Pattinson’s analysis of the profile of Yan’s correspondents along with the functions of their letters and the comparison of his findings with contemporary published letter anthologies demonstrates the potential of his approach. Section 3 of this inquiry into the Diversity of Content and Style is dedicated to “open letters.” What connects the diverse letters in the four chapters of this section and sets them apart from those in the previous ones, is their explicit, albeit limited openness in address. The letters by the early Tang poet Lu Zhaolin 盧照鄰 (ca. 635–ca. 684), introduced by Paul W. Kroll, present an interesting union of the personal and the public. These letters were not written to individual addressees but sent as broadcasts to an unspecified group of scholar-officials, both acquaintances of the author and strangers. They appeal to a select, but potentially open public for help in acquiring costly medicine for the ailing writer. Kroll suggests that Lu Zhaolin may have chosen the circular or open letter in the hope that it would bring about a “group dynamics” effect and thus be more effective in procuring donations. Lu may not have been the first letter writer to have employed this strategy, but he is certainly an early case. Imre Galambos introduces a unique type of letters found among the Dun­ huang manuscripts: circulars of local associations (shesi zhuantie 社司轉帖). “Open” only to a circumscribed group, these documents circulated among the members of associations to inform them about the details of upcoming meetings, about the contributions that were expected from them, and about penalties for late arrival or non-attendance at a meeting. The contents of these circulars are of great interest—revealing as they are about local culture and society—as well as are other aspects: how the circulars were transmitted from member to member; why these documents of a very special sub-branch of epistolary culture survived; and why several of them were written in a reversed direction, that is, in vertical columns going from left to right. Galambos interprets the latter as the result of foreign influence and thus evidence of Dunhuang’s multilingual local culture.

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Questions related to the publication of letters are at the heart of Suyoung Son’s chapter. Examining a long, conflictive letter written in 1703 by the renowned publisher Zhang Chao 張潮 (ca. 1650–1707) to his fellow publisher Zhang Yongde 張庸德, her essay sets out to explore the functions of letters during the late imperial letter-publishing boom. She discusses the legal matters concerning book proprietorship that Zhang Chao raises in his letter as well as the implication of this letter’s publication. Son argues that—in the absence of legal codes and institutional measures to secure property rights to books in seventeenth century China—publication transformed this piece of private correspondence into a social performance of these matters. Although it is difficult to assess its reach, the intended audience of this letter was much wider than that of those communications discussed in the two previous chapters. Straddling late Qing and Republican China, the following chapter by Natascha Gentz about “letters to the editor” in the first modern Chinese language newspapers in a sense presents the historical continuation of the problems discussed in Son’s essay. It would seem that newspapers such as Shenbao 申報 (Shanghai, 1872–1949) and Xunhuan ribao 循環日報 (Hong Kong, 1874– 1947) took over some of the functions of “open letters” in previous centuries, although they never entirely replaced public letter writing, but rather preserved it in the form of letters to the editor. Gentz analyzes this novel form of public articulation in China, paying special attention to its perception and adoption by the public or rather the readership of these newspapers and to the changes of epistolary style, narrative and contents that we see in this subgenre.



The belated appreciation of letters—be they Su Shi’s or Liang Mengzhao’s or Shen Congwen’s—and thus the full recognition of a writer’s literary oeuvre and mind may stand in as a metaphor of our equally belated appreciation of Chinese epistolary literature and culture. By acknowledging these non-canonical writings that were usually regarded as minor and marginal, not the least because they were seen “on the edge of literariness,” we gain invaluable additional, supplementary insights in times, people, and ideas that no other genre provides. Beyond the realm of the additional and supplementary, however, an equally fascinating and valuable realm appears, in which every surviving letter ever written—whether by a great thinker or a lowly clerk, a man or a woman, a celebrity or a nobody—emerges as an inimitable, unique document of human self-expression.

part 1 Material Aspects of Chinese Letter Writing Culture



chapter 1

Reconstructing the Postal Relay System of the Han Period Y. Edmund Lien From received classical texts alone, scholars can produce a rough outline of the postal system in ancient China. The ancient postal system was an organized government effort and structure to deliver official documents (mail) by either relays of runners or mounted carriers. The documents, mostly bamboo and wooden slips, were packaged in such a way that the addressees and delivery instructions were explicitly written on the packages or could be easily derived within the postal system. With the great archeological finds of the last eighty years, the artifacts, including letters, of the Han postal system and remains of a few postal relay stations have become available; as a result, this rough out­ line can be further refined. Manuscripts unearthed also revealed certain legal codes used to regulate the operation of the postal system in the Qin and Han periods. In 2003, Enno Giele reviewed the traditional textual sources useful for the understanding of the postal system and offered “new glimpses” of the early postal system by expanding the traditional view with contents from the bam­ boo and wooden slips found in Shuihudi 睡虎地, Zhangjiashan 張家山 and Liye 里耶, which were celebrated discoveries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 In this essay, I will expand further Giele’s effort in several directions: (1) an earlier textual source, Mozi 墨子, will be cited to show a rela­ tionship between you 郵 (post) and sui 燧 (beacon tower), (2) wooden and bamboo slips from Juyan 居延 and Dunhuang 敦煌 found between the 1930s and 1970s will be supplemented by wooden slips excavated from Dunhuang’s Xuanquan zhi 懸泉置 (Suspended Spring Postal Station) in the 1990s to recreate the Han postal stations and mail routes of the northwestern frontier,2 (3) information in Dunhuang gazetteers from Mogao Grottoes 莫高窟 will 1  Giele, “New Glimpses.” 2  Lao, Juyan Hanjian; Xie, Li, and Zhu, Juyan Hanjian shiwen hejiao; Zhongguo shehui kexu­ eyuan Kaogu yanjiusuo, Juyan Hanjian jiayi bian; Gansu wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo, Juyan xinjian; Hao and Zhang, Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu. See also Zhongguo jiandu jicheng etc., Zhongguo jiandu jicheng.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_003

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be used to show comparable but different mail relay routes used in the Tang period, and (4) with the route map, grades of mail delivery service, dimensions of some relay stations, and legal codes, a fuller picture of the Han postal system in the frontier region will be reconstructed. Prior to the third century BCE, which is the time that marks the beginning of the postal system under consideration, there had been two developments that may have influenced the design of later postal systems: the use of ri 馹 in the Spring and Autumn period, in which a messenger is sent by a king or a war lord to deliver a message quickly. In Erya 爾雅, the graph ri is glossed as zhuan 傳 (lit. to pass on, transmit), which probably means “relay horses or coaches.” Given the uncertainty in dating Erya, this gloss may not accurately reflect the technology of the Spring and Autumn period. Nonetheless, it is safe to assume that horses were in use at the time. The other development involves beacon signals, as evidenced by a passage in Mozi to be given later. With ri, point-topoint message transfer could be accomplished; with beacon signals, messages could be relayed through a series of stations. The rest of this essay starts with a brief review of the archeological source that will be used to create a description of the Han postal system. During the Qin and Han, words used to refer to different aspects of mail delivery were quite complex and confusing. A section will be dedicated to provide their his­ torical context and some clarification. Finally, I will present the mail route map, the operation and record keeping in mail delivery, and the codes govern­ ing the operation to complete the description of the Han postal relay system. 1

Han Slips as Sources

The wooden and bamboo slips, now known loosely as the “Juyan Hanjian” 居延漢簡 (Juyan Han slips), were excavated from lower reaches of the Ejina 額濟那 River of Ejina Banner, Inner Mongolia; about 11,000 slips excavated in the 1930s and 8,420 slips of the batch excavated in the 1970s have been tran­ scribed.3 The latter are sometimes designated as “Juyan xinjian” 居延新簡 (new Juyan slips). Another significant collection is the slips found in Dunhuang at Xuanquan Postal Station, consisting of about 23,000 slips. This site was exca­ vated extensively in 1990–92 and only a small collection of 271 slips have been

3  Online access to the transcriptions of the Han slips from Juyan has been made possible; see the bibliography in Xie, Li, and Zhu, Juyan Hanjian shiwen hejiao, for slips of the 1930s, and Gansu wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo, Juyan xinjian, for slips of the 1970s.

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transcribed.4 In this essay, the terms “Juyan slips” and “Xuanquan slips” will be used to refer to the slips of these two major collections respectively. Out of the twenty thousand Juyan slips, 1780 slips have been dated.5 The range of their dates, according to Li Junming 李均明, is between 90 BCE and 283 CE, stretching between the Western Han and early Jin.6 Most of the dated slips are from the Western Han and Wang Mang 王莽 periods—Li Junming numbers them from 1 to 1566. Slips numbered from 1567 to 1763 are dated to the reign of Emperor Guangwu (r. 25–57) of the Eastern Han. Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 similarly concludes that the Juyan slips discovered in the 1930s are mostly from the Western Han to the Wang Mang period.7 Over 17,900 of the Xuanquan slips have been catalogued and about 2,100 of them have specific dates ranging from 111 BCE to 107 CE.8 Organizationally, both Juyan and Dunhuang areas were under the admin­ istration of Liangzhou cishi bu 涼州刺史部 (Liangzhou Inspector Region) in the Western Han, with Juyan in the Zhangye 張掖 Commandery and Xuanquan in the Dunhuang Commandery.9 The governor of a commandery had both the military and civil responsibilities. The Juyan slips show frequent references to Juyan duwei 居延都尉 and Jianshui duwei 肩水都尉, the two defenders reporting to the Governor of Zhangye Commandery. The chain of command suggested by the information from the Juyan slips includes the governor, defender, lookout officer (hou 候), lookout head (hou zhang 候長), and beacon head (sui zhang 隧長). Their respective organizations are called the commandery, defender’s court (duwei fu 都尉府), lookout office (hou guan 候官), section (bu 部), and beacon (sui), with beacon as the lowest unit staffed by five to ten beacon soldiers (sui zu 隧卒).10 They were obviously set up as military units and Chen Mengjia uses the term houwang xitong 候望系統 (lookout and watch system) to describe the organization. From the Juyan slips, eight lookout offices, fifty-two sections, and about 260 beacons can be identi­ fied, although many more sections and beacons probably existed for the vast region of the lower reaches of the Ejina River. While the Juyan area was geographically in the proximity of the territory occupied by Xiongnu during the Western Han, Dunhuang on the other hand 4  5  6  7  8  9  10 

Hu and Zhang, Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui. Rao Zongyi 饒宗頤, “Rao Xu” 饒序, in Li Junming, Juyan Hanjian biannian, 1. Li Junming, Juyan Hanjian biannian, 1, 283. Chen, “Hanjian kaoshu,” 9–11. Hao and Zhang, Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu, 13. Tan, “Qin Xi Han Dong Han shiqi,” 13–14, 33–34. Chen, “Hanjian suojian Juyan biansai,” in Hanjian zhuishu, 37–95.

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was less directly threatened by Xiongnu from the North. Xuanquan Postal Station was under the administration of Xiaogu 效穀 County, which was one of the six counties of the Dunhuang Commandery. From the contents of the Xuanquan slips, seven postal stations can be identified and researchers con­ jecture that there were two more within the area of Dunhuang.11 Each postal station had a staff of approximately forty; one Xuanquan slip mentions that there were thirty-seven individuals counting “officers, soldiers, prisonerlaborers, chariot drivers.”12 In addition to the postal stations, sixty ting 亭 can be identified from the Xuanquan slips.13 Frequent mentions of jiu 廄, yi 驛, you 郵, and zhuanshe 傳舍 in addition to zhi 置 are also made on the Xuanquan slips.14 One problem encountered in the study of the Han postal system is that the words used for these units are often ambiguous. Our next task is to clarify the multiple uses of these terms in the Han period and they shall remain untranslated for now. These units, from zhi to ting, are what Chen Mengjia refers to as the communication system ( jiaotong xitong 交通系統). Although beacons also appear on some Xuanquan slips, they were less common among the published Xuanquan slips. The dominant terms seem to be those of the communication system. The fact that the Juyan slips and Xuanquan slips overlapped in time suggests that mail delivery was a shared activity between military and civilian functions. One term that is common to both domains is ting. It was used together with sui in both Han shu and Hou Han shu; for example, “castles and walls were destroyed; ting and beacons were eliminated.” 障塞破壞,亭隧滅絕 and “ting and beacons face each other” 亭燧相望.15 In both cases, ting is clearly used in a military context and prob­ ably refers to a “watch tower.” Its frequent use in non-military context will later become obvious when we focus on the terms yi and ting. Dunhuang in the Western Han was under the threat of another non-Han ethnic group, Xi Qiang 西羌. There is evidence that the Dunhuang postal system in place during the Western Han was used for both military and civil­ ian purposes. On the military side, Dunhuang had four defender’s offices in the Western Han and Xuanquan slips show that letters were sent to and from

11  Hao and Zhang, Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu, 21–22. One slip says that Dunhuang has nine stables and they assume that each stable is affiliated with a postal station. 12  Ibid., 24. 13  Ibid., 14. 14  Ibid., 26–32. 15  “Memoir on the Xiongnu” 匈奴傳, Han shu 94B.3804; “Memoir on the Western Qiang” 西羌傳, Hou Han shu 87.2878.

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21

some of these offices.16 Letters of non-military nature also passed through Xuanquan, for example, slip XQ 58 is about irrigation and XQ 64 about the meal service to county officials.17 Slip XQ 59 even mentions both junshu 軍書 (military dispatch) and youshu 郵書 (postal dispatch), suggesting that the latter is non-military. Between the Juyan slips and the Xuanquan slips, it is clear that the letter delivery system of the Western Han served both military and civilian offices, and at least for the systems in the Zhangye and Dunhuang commanderies, nei­ ther was used exclusively for civilian communications. To reconstruct the postal relay system of the Western Han, we have to take military communications into consideration. It may well be the case that mili­ tary mail delivery was what prompted the development of the postal system, which would eventually grow to include civilian applications. But, we shall digress and first clarify some of the keywords used to name the functions involved in the postal system. The real challenge is that many of these key­ words are semantically loaded: each of them has multiple distinct meanings, making it hard to determine what functions were in place during the Qin and Han periods. 2 Keywords: You 郵, sui 隧, yi 驛, ting 亭, zhuan 傳, and zhi 置 2.1 You 郵 The entry you 郵 in the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 reads “a station on the border for the forwarding of letters” 竟上行書舍.18 The Shuowen jiezi adds that the component 垂 means the border (bian 邊). Duan Yucai’s 段玉裁 (1735–1815) commentary adds that the graph 郵 is a loan word for you 尤 and 訧, which could mean either “passing by” 經過 or “fault” 過失.19 This use of the graph

16  E.g., slip XQ 109 contains a proclamation (xi 檄) issued from Dunhuang Governor and dis­ patched to Yihe defender 宜禾都尉 and a few lookout officers, and slip XQ 188 includes a letter from Yangguan defender 陽關都尉 and another letter addressing the field office (mufu 幕府) of Po Qiang General 破羌將軍. Any slip identified as from Xuanquan will be denoted by a prefix “XQ” followed by a serial number assigned in Hu and Zhang. See Hu and Zhang, Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui, 91, 133. 17  Ibid., 55, 62. 18  Duan zhu Shuowen jiezi 6B.24b–25a. 19  Ibid., 6B.25a. E.g., the term duyou 督郵, commonly seen in the Han and Sanguo periods, refers to a “local inspector,” a police chief of a sort—a low-level official in the vice squad of ancient times. It would be incorrect to read it as a “mail inspector.”

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you as a loan word clearly had no bearing on postal service and was synony­ mous with you 尤. Duan Yucai also cites a line from Mengzi 孟子 2A1 in which Mencius (372– 289 BCE) quotes Confucius (551–479 BCE) as saying, “the radiation of virtue is faster than the transmission of [imperial] orders by stages and couriers” 德之流行速於置郵而傳命.20 This quotation has been used frequently as evidence that stages (i.e. relay stations) and couriers existed in Confucius’ time. Legge read “zhi you” as referring to two distinct elements involved in transmit­ ting a king’s command. But, is “zhi” really a relay station and “you” a courier? As we shall soon see, the question cannot be easily answered. The transcription of a set of Guodian 郭店 slips labeled as “Zun deyi” 尊德義 includes this quoted Confucius’ line (without the character xing 行 and with yu 於 replaced by hu 乎).21 The graph you 郵 in the Guodian collection is written with two components: the top component is normally transcribed as 又 or 尤 and the lower component as 虫.22 Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭 adds a comment saying that the graph is to be read as a loan word for 郵.23 (Recall that in the term duyou 督郵, the graph 郵 was synonymous with 尤.) Guodian texts are generally assumed to be no later than 300 BCE. Among the slips dated to the Qin period, there are two instances of the graph you 郵 on the “Shuihudi Qin slips” 睡虎地秦簡. The first instance is in the lines “dispatch to the ranks in order; write them separately as a proclama­ tion in Jiangling and send it out by post” 以次傳,別書江陵布,以郵行. The second instance appears in the lines “for nearby counties, let fast runners transmit the letter; for counties faraway, send it out by post” 近縣令輕足行 其書,遠縣令郵行之.24 The image of the second instance shows that the graph you consists of two components arranged side by side, with the left com­ ponent in the form of chui 垂 and the right component in the form of the radi­ cal yi 邑, as in the modern graph 郵. It no longer includes the loan graph 尤. In both Shuihudi slips, the graph you clearly refers to some form of postal service for the transmission of government announcements. Shuihudi slips are nor­ mally dated to late Warring States period and within the reign of First Emperor

20  Legge, The Works of Mencius, 60. 21  Jingmenshi bowuguan, Guodian Chu mu zhujian, 57 (slip 28–29), 174, 175, n. 15. 22  With the 虫 radical, the graph can also be transcribed as 蚘, as in 蚩蚘 Chiyou (com­ monly written as 蚩尤), the archenemy of the legendary Yellow Emperor. See He Linyi, Zhanguo guwen zidian, 14. 23  Jingmenshi bowuguan, Guodian Chu mu zhujian, 175, n. 15. 24  Zhang Xiancheng, Qin jian zhuzi suoyin, 78, 119, 120.

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of Qin. In other words, the graph you had become much closer to the present form by about 200 BCE. From these instances of you, I conjecture that the postal system of later times was modeled after the postal system originally designed for military functions. This hypothesis is not at all unreasonable in light of a reference to youting 郵亭 in Mozi, which is attributed to the philosopher and pacifist Mo Di 墨翟 (ca. 479–403 BCE). The youting, which became known later as a basic element of the postal system, may have started as a beacon tower according to Mozi: To construct a youting, make it round. Its height is to be more than three zhang and its bottom is to be slanted. Make a ladder; let its two arms be three zhang in length and connect the arms with boards three chi in length, which are secured with ropes. Dig two moats and build a hanging bridge. Each ting has a [ridged?] stove and one drum. Beacon signals to report invaders, emergency, and riot, according to the level of urgency, are relayed until they reach the capital. For the situation that is critical, move the beacon signals up and down. After the beacon fire is raised, beat the drum signals five rounds and follow it by fire to indicate the incoming direction of the invaders and their size. Do not be lax in send­ ing off the signals; do not end the coming and going of the successive beacons. When the invaders are spotted, raise one beacon. When they enter the territory, raise two. When they reach sensitive strategic areas, raise three beacons and beat three rounds of drum. When they are at the outer city wall, raise four beacons and beat the drum four rounds. When they are at the inner city wall, raise five beacons and beat the drum five rounds. At night, use fire to signal with the same set of numbers. 築郵亭者圜之,高三丈以上,令倚殺。為臂梯,梯兩臂長三 丈,連版三尺,報[版?]以繩連之。塹再匝,為縣梁。壟灶,亭 一鼓。寇烽、警烽、亂烽,傳火以次應之,至主國止,其事急 者引而上下之。烽火已舉,輒五鼓傳,又以火屬之,言寇所從 來者少多,毋弇建,去來屬次烽勿罷。望見寇,舉一烽;入 境,舉二烽;射要,舉三烽三鼓;郭會,舉四烽四鼓;城 會, 舉五烽五鼓;夜以火,如此數。​25 The passage describes the construction of an ancient beacon tower and the use of beacon signals for various urgent situations. Both visual and aural­ 25  See “Zashou” 雜守 (Miscellaneous defensive tactics) in Mozi jiangu, 622–24.

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signals were implemented. The visual beacon signal in particular was sent out in smoke during the day and by fire at night. What is described in this passage could well be the prototypical sui widely in use during the Han. The curious part is the use of the word you 郵 here; Mo Di does not mention any mailforwarding aspect as often suggested in the translation of the line attributed to Confucius. The word youting in Mozi could be based on the narrower meaning of “passing by/on” of the graph 郵. It was probably meant to be a “tower to watch for passers-by” or even a “signaling tower.” Since Mo Di’s time was after Confucius and before Mencius, and since he (if not his disciples) uses the word you in the narrow sense of a beacon tower, I question if the compound zhiyou quoted by Mencius could really mean “sta­ tions and couriers.” Assuming that Mencius did not commit an anachronism in quoting Confucius and that the Mozi text is reliable, it seems justifiable to allow the possibility that zhiyou simply means “installing [beacon] signals,” with zhi taken as a verb. At least one other scholar has suggested a different inter­ pretation of zhiyou in which zhi is read as a verb and not as a courier station.26 2.2 Sui 隧 and feng 烽 Beacon towers used for signaling an emergency appear much earlier in litera­ ture, as we know from the famous tale of King You of Zhou 周幽王 (r. 782– 771 BCE), who teased the feudal lords by lighting the beacon fires as delib­ erate false alarms to amuse his concubine Baosi 褒姒.27 By Mo Di’s time, a beacon tower became known as youting and was an important component of a defense system. In the Western Han, the common terms in the defense system are sui 隧, tingsui 亭隧 and fengsui 烽燧.28 Based on the remains of the beacon towers in the area of Juyan and the col­ lection of Juyan slips uncovered from these sites, Chen Mengjia has studied extensively the system of fengsui of the Han period. The excavation team also mapped out the locations of these beacon towers along the Ejina River.29 In general, a beacon tower in this area is a building made out of local materials such as rammed earth mixed with weeds; it is usually rectangular in footprint with a raised platform (tai 臺) at one corner of the building. On the platform, which has a dimension of 5 to 9 square meters, a watchtower is constructed. 26  Liu, “ ‘De zhi liuxing su yu zhiyou er chuanming’.” 27  Shi ji 4.148. 28  The graph sui appears variably as 隧 or 燧 in Han slips. In this essay, I make no distinction between the two. 29  Chen, “Han dai fengsui,” 153–77, and fig. 1 in “Hanjian kaoshu,” 12–13. See also Gansu sheng wenwu gongzuodui, “Ejina he xiayou Han dai fengsui,” 62–84.

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According to Chen Mengjia, ting refers to the combined structure of the ­watchtower and the platform; it usually has a height of 12 meters from ground. The beacon fire is lit on top of the watchtower. Closely related to fengsui is the notion of sai 塞 (border), which is a connect­ ing section of the wall built to defend against invaders. In fact, a sai in the Han refers to a section of the Great Walls (Changcheng 長城), which was built over a span of many years starting from the Warring States period. On average, the Han military system installed a lookout office (hou guan mentioned earlier) every 100 li (41.6 km) of sai in the Han period. The lookout office is normally housed in a building called a zhang 障, which is essentially a small, square walled settlement with a size ranging from 15 × 15 m to about 100 × 100 m.30 On the staff of a lookout officer is a sai wei 塞尉 (border commandant), who is responsible for border security. The border commandant supervises all the lookout heads and beacon heads. The lookout officer is salaried at the “equiva­ lent of” (bi 比) 600 bushels and the border commandant at 200 bushels. Beacons were set up in the Han to guard the border. Each border unit of sai had to cover about 41.6 km of walls with beacons that can only communicate in case of emergency by beacon fire or smoke. The average distance between two beacons is about 3 to 4 li or around 1.3 km. If each beacon was staffed with ten soldiers, it is estimated that to guard 300 km of the Great Walls in Dunhuang as many as 2,400 soldiers and officers were needed.31 Soon we shall see that soldiers living in a beacon tower could also have been responsible for delivering mail. For an example of a specific beacon tower, we refer to an archeological study made in 1999 of tower T9 located on the west bank of the Yiken River 伊肯河.32 The overall fengsui building is 14 × 11 m and the ting portion (turret) is 4.5 × 3 m at the base. A few poles were left on the floor of the tower. They could have been used with levers to raise the beacon fire. T9 could accom­ modate ten soldiers. In room F2 a bucket containing horse manure was found, suggesting that a beacon tower might also have a separate stable or an area nearby to keep a few horses. In a separate survey of the twenty-one beacon towers located on the south slope of the Lang Mountains 狼山山脈 in Inner Mongolia, ten of those bea­ con towers were found to be severely eroded making it hard to determine their original shape.33 Out of the remaining eleven, seven were round and the rest 30  For more examples of the dimensions of a zhang, see Chen, “Hanjian kaoshu,” 5–6. 31  Li Zhengyu, “Dunhuang jun de biansai Changcheng,” 120. 32  Wei and Chang, “Juyan Han dai fengsui,” 115–25. 33  Luo, “Yinshan fengsui tanwei,” 77.

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were square. This shows that some beacon towers could indeed be constructed as the one described in Mozi. Also, the distances between two neighboring beacon towers in the Lang Mountains were about 400 to 600 meters in most cases. Luo Qingkang 羅慶康, the researcher who visited the Lang Mountain site, suggests that there was no such rule in the Han, as commonly believed, that “there is one ting in every ten li” 十里一亭. He assumes, correctly, that here li was a unit of distance. We will return to this line when we consider the notion of ting in a Han shu passage. 2.3 Yi 驛 A string of slips excavated in 1970s from Juyan tells of an unfortunate encoun­ ter between a soldier and four invading tribesmen: On the eighteenth day of the twelfth month of the fifth year in the Jianwu reign (29 CE), the Clerk files a charge against Bao and requests to move him to the prison of Juyan to be processed according to the law and decree. As is known, on the eleventh day of this month shortly before sundown, enemy soldiers entered the bare field of the Muzhong Beacon in the Jiaqu Lookout Region and attacked the Muzhong Beacon.34 The beacon head Chen Yang then raised two bucket-semaphores on the tower and one large banner at the fort, and burned one pile of firewood. Li Dan, a clerk of the Chengbei Beacon, was on watch duty and saw the smoke out of the Muzhong Beacon but not the bucket-semaphore [as expected].35 The lookout head Wang Bao immediately asked Li Dan to 34  A “bare field” is an area outside the wall where the land is covered with sand. When invad­ ers walk or ride on it, they would leave behind tracks. By checking the tracks, the defense would know that invaders have visited. Muzhong is the name of a beacon tower in the region overseen by the Jiaqu lookout office. 35  The situation is confusing here. Chen Yang is said to have raised three kinds of signals, feng, biao, and the effect of burning a pile of firewood. Biao is a colored flag. Firewood can produce both thick smoke and probably even flames visible at the next beacon. Since Li Dan saw the smoke, one wonders what the feng was that he did not see. The exact nature of feng has long been an open question among ancient and modern scholars. There is a general agreement that a feng is in the shape of a bucket. In one interpretation, the bucket contains fuel for generating fire and smoke. This possibility is seen in Wen Ying’s 文穎 (n.d.) interpretation cited in the Jijie 集解 commentary to the Shi ji 史記: “Build a tall wooden frame. On its top, build a lever. Tie a bucket to one end of the lever. Add firewood to the bucket. This is called a feng. Keep it low normally. When there are invaders, ignite it and raise it high to inform others.” 作高木櫓,櫓上作桔槔,桔槔頭兜零,以薪置其 中,謂之烽。常低之,有寇即火然舉之以相告. Shi ji 77.2378. A similar ­commentary

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ride a relay horse to investigate the problem.36 Before he could reach the Muzhong Beacon, four tribesmen entered on foot. They emerged from the river and went up the bank to chase after Li Dan. Two other tribes­ men on horseback came from behind. Together they surrounded Li Dan and captured him and his relay horse. They left with both. [lacuna] Note: Wang Bao as officer in charge ordered Li Dan to ride on a relay horse without authorization, resulting in his capture by the tribesmen and the loss of the horse. Wang Bao did not send out beacon signals in a timely manner and instead raised a torch and burned one pile of firewood. His signaling did not follow the [beacon fire] grade protocol; he took the bor­ der responsibility lightly. 建 武 五 年 十 二 月 辛 未 朔 戊 子 , 令 史 劾 將 褒 詣 居 延 獄 以 律 令  從事。廼今月十一日辛巳日且入時,胡虜入甲渠木中隧塞天 田,攻木中隧。隧長陳陽為舉堠上二烽,塢上大表一,燔一積 薪。城北隧助吏李丹候望,見木中隧有煙不見烽。候長王褒即 使丹騎驛馬一匹駛往逆辟。未到木中隧所,胡虜四步入,從河 中出,上岸逐丹。虜二騎從後來,共圍遮略得丹及所騎驛馬  持去。□案:褒典主而擅使丹乘用驛馬,為虜所略得,失亡 馬。褒不以時燔舉而舉堠上一苣火,燔一積薪。燔舉不如品 約,不憂事邊。(E.P.T68.81–92)37 This passage contains several interesting points not found in classical lit­ erature. It alludes to a “[beacon fire] grade protocol” ([ fenghuo] pin yue [烽火]品約); it points out that when a received signal is unclear, one may have

is also seen in Han shu 48.2241, n. 11. Another source cites Han shu yin yi 漢書音義, “Feng is like an overturned bamboo bucket used to wash rice. It is hung at the end of a lever. When there are invaders, raise it. Sui is a pile of firewood. When there are invaders, ignite it.” 烽如覆米䉛,縣著桔槔頭,有寇則舉之。燧,積薪,有寇則燔然之. Shi ji 117.3046, n. 1. The same lines are attributed to Meng Kang 孟康 (fl. ca. 220–250) in Han shu 57B.2579, n. 1. This second explanation does not say that feng has to be burned. Juyan slips also indicate that feng could be a signaling device used during the day without burning. See Wu, “Han dai fenghuo” and Chu Shibin, “Juyan fenghuo,” 235–40, 355–64. Therefore, I assume that feng here was simply a bucket shaped signaling device, with no fire involved in signaling. 36  The compound nipi is read as “to go forward to confront the enemy” in Xue, He, and Li, Juyan xinjian shicui, 61–62. Sending one soldier to meet the enemy seems reckless. I read 辟 as a loan word for pi 僻, a sense that the situation was erratic and out of the ordinary— Li Dan was sent to find out what had gone wrong. 37  The new Juyan slips cited in this essay are prefixed by E.P.T, E.P.W, and E.P.S4.T2.

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to resort to direct contact; and it confirms the availability of relay horses, yima 驛馬, within the beacon defense system. Wang Bao as lookout head had no authority to assign a relay horse to a beacon clerk. It is possible that a relay horse was not to be used for a reconnaissance assignment. The “beacon fire grade protocol” is essentially a legal document specify­ ing the grades of beacon signals to be released upon the detection of enemy intruders. The applicable grade depends on the size and closeness of the invad­ ers to the beacon station. A sighting of invaders is indicated by a combination of visual and aural signals and may involve both fire and smoke. The code dis­ tinguishes between daytime and nighttime signals. There is even a provision for the days with inclement weather that could hinder the delivery of signals. The significance of the beacon fire grade protocol is that it identifies the duty of the person in charge of the beacon and the punishment when the code is not strictly followed. If signaling by beacon fires had to be governed by a code, it is not surprising that later statutes and ordinances would be put in place to govern mail delivery. Joseph Needham, in his discussion of the post-station system in ancient China, cites the “Yiren” 遺人 section from the Zhou li 周禮: In principle, along all the roads of the Empire and the [feudal] States there is a rest-house (lu 盧) every ten li where food and drink may be had. Every thirty li there is an overnight rest-house (su 宿) with lodgings (lu shi 路室) and a [government] grain-store. Every fifty li there is a market (shi 市) and a station (hou guan 候館) with an abundant stock of supplies. Commentary: The lu was like our yehoutu 野候徒 with stables, and the su was like our ting 亭. The hou guan included a watch-tower. Between every two shi there were three lu and one su. 38 The commentary by Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200) provides an interesting pro­ file of these postal facilities of the Han. Needham’s translation of the commen­ tary is for the following original lines: 廬若今野候徒有庌也。宿可止宿,若今亭有室矣。候館樓可以 觀望者也。一市之間有三廬一宿。

38  Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 35. Romanization in the quoted original text here and later has been changed to pinyin. The original lines in the Zhou li are: 凡國野 之道:十里有廬,廬有飲食;三十里有宿,宿有路室,路室有委;五十里有 市,市有候館,候館有積. Zhou li zhushu 13.728.

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Zheng Xuan’s ting was decidedly different from the ting on the border. The bea­ con tower (tingsui) of the Western Han, which possibly had evolved from the youting in Mozi, seemed to have changed into an urban ting in the Eastern Han, as an “overnight rest-house.” The watch-tower of the hou guan 候館 retained its surveillance function very much as a legacy of the beacon tower. The look­ out office, or hou guan 候官, normally housed in a small walled settlement (zhang 障), had both a watch-tower and a stable for relay horses. Needham goes on to say: Broadly speaking the main roads were equipped from Han to Song times with a post-office ( you 郵) every five li, a cantonal office (ting 亭) every ten li, and a post-station (zhi 置) every thirty li. These short distances were undoubtedly chosen so that flag and drum signals, or the fire and smoke of beacons, could readily give and receive information. The postal clerks (chengyou li 丞郵吏) kept records of the dispatches which they transmitted—in Han times these xi 檄 were written on foot-long wooden strips contained in bamboo tubes closed with a spring lock contrivance— and the cantonal officers (tingzhang 亭長) policed the road and its neighboring districts with their guards. At the post-stations ( jiuzhi 廄置, zhuanshe 傳舍) there were stables and couriers in readiness for the relay service ( yi 驛, ri 馹) under the authority of a station-master (zhuanli 傳吏, zhizhang 置長.)39 In a civilian setting, a ting’s function to transmit imperial orders and other offi­ cial documents became more important than the reconnaissance functions on the border. Again, the Zhou li provides an early reference to zhuan 傳: in the “Autumn Office” 秋官, the term zhuanju 傳遽 is, explained Zheng Xuan, “like the person sent nowadays as a messenger in a chariot or on a relay horse” 傳遽,若今時乘傳騎驛而使者也.40 Zichan 子產 (d. 522 BCE) is said to have ridden a fast relay horse 乘遽而至 in order to prevent a killing.41 In both cases, ju 遽 is interpreted as a fast horse or a chariot drawn by a fast horse. Needham’s work, published in 1971, provides a good summary of the postal system in Han times and later. Juyan and Xuanquan slips add valuable details

39  Ibid. 40  Zhou li zhushu 38.899. The ancient dictionary Erya says that “Ri and ju are relay horses or coaches” 馹、遽,傳也. Erya zhushu 3.2581. 41  Duke Zhao, 2nd year, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 42.2029.

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about the administration of the postal service on the border. There are many instances of yi reported on the Juyan slips; only two are cited here:42 One relay horse; it consumes three dan and six dou of feed. Already have seventy-two dan and still need seventy-eight dan and six dou. 驛馬一匹,用食三石六斗,已得七十二石,少七十八石六 斗。(JY 192.024) Examined the horses, they are all too old, ultimately could not carry the load of a relay horse. 診視馬,皆齒長,終不任驛。 (JY 266.017) These slips show two administrative chores of keeping relay horses: the horses can be too old to serve and they have to be fed. In general, they have to be supervised by low-level officials and have to be inventoried. The Xuanquan col­ lection also makes frequent reference to relay horses, including a set of eleven slips that read like an inventory of relay horses.43 2.4 Ting 亭 Ting is one of the more confusing words in the Han period. In the compound tingsui 亭隧, ting refers to the watchtower of the beacon. The Shuowen says, “Ting has a tower; [the graph] is derived from gao” 亭有樓,从高. The compound tingsui appears frequently among Juyan slips. As the meaning of youting 郵亭 moved away from the watchtower of a beacon given in Mozi, ting became a node in the network of postal stations. The change in its basic meaning can already be seen in the Shi ming 釋名 by Liu Xi 劉熙 (late Eastern Han to Wei): “Ting is to stay; it is also where people gather and stay to rest” 亭,停也;亦人所停集也. By the end of Eastern Han the compound you­ ting had changed and now referred to an entity that was an integral part of a civilian postal system. The collection of Juyan slips reflects the state of co-existence of these two meanings of ting. Youting existed in the Juyan area and were used as a postal station for the transmission of text slips. The compound appears in slip 42  See also Juyan slips JY 018.018, JY 149.027, JY 173.002, JY 283.063, JY 284.002, JY 413.003, and JY 502.007. These slips are from the collection excavated in the 1930s and are denoted with “JY” followed by their standard identifiers, which are two three-digit numbers separated by a dot. A postfix of letter “A” indicates the recto of the slip and “B” for the verso. 43  Hu and Zhang, Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui, 81–82.

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JY 037.034, although the lines on the slip are fragmented and incomprehen­ sible. Ting was also used in conjunction with several other characters to form words with different emphases on the role of ting:44 (1) Suiting 隧亭 appears in Dunhuang slips collected by Stein in 1906–8, which should be synonymous with tingsui 亭隧, commonly seen on Juyan slips; (2) 肩水成亭二所 (JY 054.023) probably should read shuting 戍亭, a guard post on the border and an alternative way to refer to tingsui; and (3) Duting 都亭 (JY 074.017) refers to a lodging facility for visiting officials in a city. From the Xuanquan collection, Zhang Junmin 張俊民 finds over 160 slips that refer to ting, and he concludes that they involve at least three different kinds of ting: ting for lookout and watch 候望之亭, ting for administering public order 治安之亭, and ting for postal and courier service 郵驛之亭.45 The first kind is the beacon tower, the second kind is the cantonal office, and the third kind is the postal station. Chen Mengjia identifies the use of tingzhang 亭障, tingsai 亭塞, tingjiao 亭徼, tinghou 亭候, tingsui 亭隧, and tingzhuan 亭傳 in the Shi ji, Han shu, and Hou Han shu.46 The first five terms are all references to the beacon towers for lookout and watch in Zhang Junmin’s terminology, and only the last one is related to postal service. There is a confusing passage in the “Baiguan gong qing biao” 百官公卿表 (Table of officials, lords, and ministers) of the Han shu: “大率十里一亭, 亭有長,十亭一鄉.”47 In one translation, we have “Roughly speaking, ten neighborhoods make one ting, which has a head. Ten ting make one village.” This would imply that ting of the second kind, namely, the administrative unit for public order, was an entity between xiang 鄉 (village) and li 里 (neighbor­ hood) during the Han period. Wang Yuquan 王毓銓 was first to point out that contrary to this passage in the Han shu, there were only two tiers below a county (xian 縣) during the Han: village (xiang) and neighborhood (li), and ting was not part of the administrative hierarchy. Instead, a ting served as something 44  For a detailed study of the use of ting in Juyan, see Xu, “Juyan Hanjian suojian de bianting,” 298–334. Although some of the compounds with ting mentioned by Xu are the results of misreading the transcriptions, the article remains a useful reference. 45  Zhang Junmin, “Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian suojian de ting,” 10–21. 46  Chen, “Han Wu biansai kaolüe,” 206. 47  Han shu 19A.742.

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more like a police station, a unit in a different hierarchy. 48 Wang’s convincing argument is based on the analysis of texts in standard histories and the records of names and birthplaces of local residents on 674 Juyan slips. Wang concludes that “十里一亭” in the Han shu must mean “one ting every ten li [of distance],” and not “one ting for every ten neighborhoods.”49 2.5 Zhuan 傳 We have already encountered the term zhuanju 傳遽 in the Zhou li and noted that ju refers to a fast horse or a fast chariot. The Shuowen jiezi further explains that zhuan is the same as ju.50 Hence the first meaning of zhuan is a horse or a chariot normally used by a messenger. An early use of this meaning appears in Huainanzi 淮南子, which states that the First Qin Emperor “built great walls, constructed passes and bridges, established barricaded and walled settle­ ments, provided courier chariots, and installed border officers.” 築長城,修 關梁,設障塞,具傳車,置邊吏.51 The term zhuanshe 傳舍 appears in the Shi ji (“Duke Pei arrived at Gaoyang zhuanshe and asked someone to send for Master Li” 沛公至高陽傳舍,使 人召酈生) and also in the Zhanguo ce 戰國策 with the commentary, “lodg­ ing in a postal station for resting or overnight stay” 止息傳置之所.52 Between zhuanju and zhuanshe, the meaning of zhuan transformed from a horse or chariot to an installation that houses horses and chariots and provides room and board to visitors. In the Han, zhuan alone could be used to refer to a zhuanshe.53 Tingzhuan mentioned earlier was also used to emphasize the lodging aspect of a postal station. In the Juyan collection, we have not found any reference to ju 遽, but zhuanma 傳馬, zhuanche 傳車, and zhuanshe appear frequently (e.g., see Juyan slips JY 303.012, JY 010.017, JY 077.016, and JY 212.069). During the Han period, the word zhuan also denoted a tally issued by the authority granting the holder the permission to enter a specific area or to pass through a security checkpoint. The tally could indicate the level of services 48  Wang Yuquan, “Han dai ‘ting’ yu ‘xiang’ ‘li’,” 292–302. See also Li Bingcheng, “Han Dunhuang jun de xiang, li,” 65. 49  While Wang’s argument is convincing, it leaves the line 十亭一鄉 difficult to explain. Ban Gu also says that there were 6,622 xiang and 29,635 ting in the Western Han (Han shu 19A.743). The ratio between the two is hardly one to ten. Wang assumes that either the line 十亭一鄉 is incorrect or it has a very different interpretation than “ten ting in one xiang.” Wang Yuquan, “Han dai ‘ting’ yu ‘xiang’ ‘li’,” 300. 50  Duan zhu Shuowen jiezi 8A.25a. 51  Huainanzi jishi 12.894. 52  Shi ji 97.2692 and Zhanguo ce, 904, n. 5. 53  Han shu 74.3133, n. 2 and Hou Han shu 1A.12.

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in lodging and transportation its holder was entitled to. The tally has many forms; the terms that appear in the Han slips are xin 信, qi 棨, ru 繻, guosuo 過所, zhuan, and zhuanxin 傳信. Typically, a slip that records the passing of a visitor contains information about the holder’s name, position, purpose of the visit, time and date of the visit, destination of the visit, the kind of lodging and chariot(s) provided for the visitor, and the official who has authorized the tally.54 At present, 114 zhuanxin (tally) have been identified with 107 of those excavated from Xuanquan Postal Station and six from the Juyan area, suggest­ ing that monitoring the use of these tallies was a responsibility of a postal station.55 2.6 Zhi 置 Zhi appears in the Han slips mainly with the names of postal stations or other related facilities, such as Tunyuan zhi 吞遠置 in Juyan and Xuanquan Postal Station in Dunhuang.56 The character was also used in conjunction with other characters to indicate specific functions of these facilities. From the Han slips and traditional texts, we have terms like youzhi 郵置,57 zhuanzhi 傳置,58 jizhi 騎置,59 and jiuzhi 廄置.60 These terms cover the following four functions: transmission of official documents, provision of room and board for travel­ ers, provision of horses and chariots for transportation, and establishment of stables to house and care for the animals used in postal service. From the Xuanquan slips we can easily see that these four tasks indeed were the primary functions of Xuanquan Postal Station. They were integrated into a specialized organization, and this division of functions was probably the first step for the postal operation to move away from military supervision, although for many centuries to come, administration of postal services remained under the pur­ view of the Ministry of War, which could be either jiabu 駕部 or bingbu 兵部.61

54  For a detailed study of zhuanxin, see Hao and Zhang, Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu, 134–61. 55  Hou, “Xibei Hanjian suojian ‘zhuanxin’ yu ‘zhuan’,” 5–54. 56  The references to Tunyuan among Juyan slips include Tunyuan zhi, Tunyuan cang 倉 (storehouse), Tunyuan bu 部 (section, the office of a lookout head), Tunyuan hou 候 (lookout head), Tunyuan jiu 廄 (stable), and Tunyuan sui 隧. 57  The lines 立屯田於膏腴之野,列郵置於要害之路 appear in Hou Han shu 88.2931. 58  He Shuangquan, “Han dai xibei yidao yu zhuanzhi,” 62–69. See also Hu, “Ping ‘Zhuanzhi yu xingshu wuguan’ shuo.’ ” 59  Zhang Jingjiu and Zhang Junmin, “Dunhuang Han dai Xuanquan zhi,” 59–73. 60  Han shu 33.1851. 61  Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, 138–39, 384–85.

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Xuanquan Postal Station

Xuanquan Postal Station was an establishment that combined all the func­ tions associated with the four terms youzhi, zhuanzhi, jizhi, and jiuzhi. Its exca­ vation in the early 1990s revealed a rectangular building layout.62 The large square walled area on the top portion of the building layout is known as wu 塢 (fortified building). The fortified building resembles the Juyan tower T9 men­ tioned earlier. Its entrance faces east. Its dimension is about 50 × 50 m. At the northeastern and southwestern corners are two turrets, each with a footprint of 7 × 7 m. Their similarity to the turret of tower T9 suggests that one or both of the two turrets in Xuanquan could have been used as a beacon tower. The area next to the southwestern turret has been labeled fengsui by the excava­ tion team (between J1 and J2). Attached to the fortified building on the south side are the remains of a stable. The stable has two enclosures: the western one is 28 × 14.5 m and the eastern one is 11 × 17 m. The fortified building contains twenty-seven rooms. Some of the rooms have stoves at a corner (e.g., F4 and F17), probably for cooking. Separately, researchers have reconstructed a floor plan of a lookout office in a Juyan site, which has a fortified building of 47.5 × 45.5 m, comparable to the dimension of the fortified building at Xuanquan.63 At least thirty-seven rooms have been identified within the Juyan building. The northeastern corner inside the building was once used as a pen where horses might have been kept. The difference in the way animals were handled between Xuanquan Postal Station and this lookout office reflects their distinct functions: Xuanquan Station was a postal station designed to fulfill the four functions mentioned earlier, whereas a lookout office on the Juyan border had to be a defense unit first and foremost. In the Juyan area, beacon soldiers were mail carriers as well. This can be seen from two special kinds of slips, youshu ci 郵書刺 (mail record) and youshu ke 郵書課 (mail record with evaluation), found both in Juyan and Dunhuang, as below. 4

Youshu ci 郵書刺

The following example of a mail record shows its essential elements:

62  See the figure in Hao and Zhang, Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu, 11. 63  Gansu Juyan kaogudui, “Juyan Han dai yizhi,” 1–25. See fig. 14 for the reconstructed floor plan and the description of the lookout office on pp. 2a–3a.

Reconstructing the Postal Relay System of the Han Period The third day of the twelfth month, seven envelopes of letters heading north: of those, four have the seal of the Governor of Zhangye: one imperial edict, one letter,  both sent on the bingwu day of the eleventh month; one imperial edict,  sent on the jiachen day of the eleventh month; one envelope,  sent on the wuxu day of the eleventh month. All addressed to the Office of the Juyan Commandant. Two envelopes with the seal of the Governor of Hedong: both addressed to the Juyan Commandant,  one sent on the jiazi day of the tenth month,  one sent on the dingmao day of the tenth month. One envelope with the seal of the Governor, addressed to Jianshui. On the yimao day of the twelfth month, At the hour of sunset, [the package was] received by Soldier Xian  from Soldier Gong of Bujin; at the hour when the night becomes dark,  soldier Zhong of Shatou turned it over to  soldier Hu of Xinbei.

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十二月三日, 北書七封: 其四封皆張掖大守章 詔書一封, 書一封, 皆十一月丙午起; 詔書一封, 十一月甲辰起; 一封, 十一月戊戌起。​64 皆詣居延都尉府。 二封河東大守章 皆詣居延都尉, 一封十月甲子起, 一十月丁卯起。 一封府君章, 詣肩水。 十二月乙卯, 日入時,​65 卒憲受 不今卒恭; 夜昏時, 沙頭卒忠付 騂北卒護。 (JY 502.009, JY 505.022A)

Mail records, like the one above, show the senders and addressees of the let­ ters, the starting dates and the dates and hours when the letters passed through Xuanquan Postal Station, types of letters being transmitted, and the individu­ als who handled the letters and their affiliations. For the two slips above, the senders are the governors of Zhangye and Hedong and a nonspecific gover­ nor. The addressees are the Juyan Commandant and the office of the Jianshui Commandant. The clerks handling the letters are soldiers stationed at Bujin, Shatou, and Xinbei. There are references to Shatou and Xinbei ting, but also to Xinbei sui. It is unclear what type of facility Bujin was.6465 64  The previous line has jiachen as a day in the eleventh month, therefore, wuxu cannot be a valid date in the same month. It is likely that the date wushen 戊申 was misread in transcription. 65  In mail records, references to time are based on short phases like 日入 (sunset), 夜昏 (when the night becomes dark), 夜幾少半 (almost one third into the night), 夜少半

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From Juyan slips JY 502.009 and JY 505.022A, we see that some letters took months to deliver. The two letters from the governor of Hedong started in the tenth month and only reached Xinbei in the twelfth month. The following record, on the other hand, shows the rapid transfer of an imperial edict at Xuanquan Postal Station: One letter bag from the Emperor to the Governor of Dunhuang. On the guichou day in the eleventh month of the first year of the Yuanping reign (74 BCE), at the hour of almost one-third into the night, received by Relay Rider Chuan of Xuanquan from Relay Rider Guangzong of Wannian. At the hour of one-third into the night, handed over to the Relay Rider of Pingwang . . . 皇帝橐書一封賜敦煌太守。元平元年十一月癸丑夜幾少半時,​  縣 泉 驛 騎 傳 受 萬 年 驛 騎 廣 宗 , 到 夜 少 半 時 付 平 望 驛 騎  . . .  (XQ 110)66 Other Juyan slips show that suizu 隧卒 (beacon soldiers), in addition to their beacon watch and combat duties, also served as mail carriers.67 In addition to soldiers and relay riders, many other types of individuals participated in the postal relay: a convict serving a prison term (XQ 106), the head of a ting (XQ 108), a clerk working at a stable ( jiuzuo 廄佐, XQ 111), a postal station assis­ tant (zhizuo 置佐, XQ 111–12), a postal station bailiff (zhisefu 置嗇夫, XQ 137), a horse veterinarian (mayi 馬醫, XQ 146), a carriage driver ( yu 御) and in a few slips dated to the Eastern Han, a postman known as youren 郵人 or simply you 郵:68 Received eight letters heading west. Serviced at the post grade. . . . On the ninth day of the third month in the fifteenth year of the Yongping reign (72 CE), at the hour when people settle down to rest, received by Postman Sun Zhong from Postman Niu Qiang of Shimi.

(one third into the night), 人定 (when people settle down to rest), etc. For a detailed analysis, see Hao and Zhang, Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu, 68–105. 66  Hu and Zhang, Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui, 92. 67  For examples, see Juyan slips JY 161.002 and JY 163.019. 68  The Xuanquan slips can be found in Hu and Zhang, Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui, 88–111. For yu, see slip 33 in Hao and Zhang, 80. For youren as a profession, see Yu, “Qin Han shiqi de youren,” 34–41.

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入西書八,郵行。. . . 永平十五年三月九日人定時,縣泉郵孫仲 受石靡郵牛羌。 (XQ 116)69 We shall return to the “post grade” mentioned in this slip later. Among Juyan slips, there is also one slip, E.P.T51.6, referring to two youzu 郵卒 in the postal relay; they could be soldiers assigned to ting on the border. 5

Youshu ke 郵書課

In addition to the information provided in a mail record, “mail records with evaluation” ( youshu ke) include an assessment of the timeliness of delivery. One letter with the seal of the Juyan Commandant, addressed to the Office of the Governor. On the guimao day of the third month, at the hour when the rooster crows, received by Soldier Bian of Dangqu from Soldier Wen of Shouxiang. On the jiachen day, at the hour of late afternoon, turned over from Soldier De of Linmu to Soldier Sen of Chengbei in Sajing. The standard distance is ninety-eight li and actual travel time is ten Han-hours. Arrived in time. 書一封,居延都尉章,詣大守府。三月癸卯雞鳴時,當曲卒便 受收降卒文。甲辰下餔時,臨木卒得付卅井城北卒參。界中九 十八里,定行十時,中程。 (E.P.W:1) The assessment of timeliness may fall in one of the three categories: zhongcheng 中程 (in time), bujixing 不及行 (early), and liuchi 留遲 (late).70 The actual travel time, known as dingxing 定行, was measured against the prescribed travel time, dangxing 當行 (should travel), and excessive tardiness would be a cause for later investigation. For example:

69  Hu and Zhang, Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui, 95. 70  The phrase 不及行 taken as “early” seems counter-intuitive. Juyan slip E.P.T51:357 says that “The standard distance is eighty li. The actual travel time was five Han-hours. It arrived early by three Han-hours.” 界中八十里,定行五時,不及行三時. The delivery speed of ten li per Han-hour can be established by studying various slips. Hence, the distance of eighty li has the prescribed travel time of eight Han-hours. This delivery was carried out in five. Perhaps, one may read bujixing as “short of the prescribed travel time,” i.e., 不及當行. See also Song and Li, “Han dai Juyan diqu,” 29.

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The Governor’s Office is 159 li away from the Xianglu beacon. The pre­ scribed travel time is one and six tenth of one Han-hour. The actual travel time was five Han-hours; it was late by three and four tenths of one Hanhour. What is the explanation? 府去降虜隧百五十九里,當行一時六分,定行五時,留遲三時 四分。解何? (JY 181.001) The delivery record noted on JY 181.001 shows the speed of 100 li per one Han-hour. One li in the Han is about 416 m and one Han-hour is either 80 or 90 minutes.71 The delivery was carried out at a speed of about 27.7 kilometers per hour. Therefore, this particular delivery had to be by horse or chariot. In contrast, the delivery of the letter in E.P.W:1 was at about ten li per Han-hour, or 2.8 kilometers per hour, which is normal walking speed. A fine could follow an investigation. Another Juyan slip shows both a case to be investigated on one side of the slip and the penalty code on the other side: The distance from the [lookout] office to the [commandant’s] office is seventy li. A letter traveling one day and one night should cover 160 li. This letter took two and one-third days to arrive. What is the explana­ tion? Every location of this inquiry that this letter has reached must look into the matter. The arrival of this investigation is to be regarded as the order of the law. A meeting is called on the twenty-sixth of the month. [Any response to this inquiry] is due on the twenty-fourth. 官去府七十里。書一日一夜,當行百六十里。書積二日少半日 乃到,解何?書到各推辟界中,必得事。案到如律令,會月廿 六日,會廿四日。 (E.P.S4.T2:8A) The fine for missing the prescribed schedule is one half ounce of gold for 100 li; missing from 100 to 200 li, one ounce; missing over 200 li, two ounces. For a chariot that misses the prescribed schedule by one li, the clerk and the officer in charge would each forfeit one day’s pay; for two li, the magistrate and [lacuna] would each forfeit one day’s pay.

71  Chen Mengjia proposes that one day is 18 Han-hours in the Western Han, while recent studies point to 16 Han-hours for one day. Chen, “Hanjian nianli biaoxu,” 239–56. For recent studies, see Li Jiemin, “Qin Han shiqi de yiri,” 80–88; Hao and Zhang, Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu, 68–105.

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不中程百里罰金半兩;過百里至二百里一兩;過二百里二兩。​  不 中 程 車 一 里 , 奪 吏 主 者 勞 各 一 日 , 二 里 奪 令 □ 各 一 日 。​ (E.P.S4.T2:8B) When a carriage misses one li at the speed of 100 li in 90 minutes, it is late by less than one minute. Although we may question the accuracy of the tim­ ing device in this period of the Han, the severe penalty reflects the extreme urgency of the message to be delivered by chariot. The fact that penalties were defined in terms of distance not time also suggests that messengers could be more aware of the distance to destination and had no convenient way to know the time while on the road. 6

Relay Routes

Mail records and assessment records of delivery show that each letter has to follow a well-defined relay route. A mail record may indicate where the letter is received and where it is to be delivered. Based on the names of the relay sta­ tions in the mail records, scholars have pieced together the routes in the areas of Juyan and Dunhuang.72 The relay route in the Juyan area ran from the Tianbei lookout office 殄北候官 north of the Juyan Commandant’s Office to the Jianshui lookout office 肩水候官 for a total distance of 250 km. The lookout offices along the route are from north to south: Tianbei—Juyan—Jiaqu 甲渠—Sajing 卅井— Guangdi 廣地—Luotuo 橐他—Jianshui. To identify the locations of major Han postal stations in Dunhuang, we turn to the works of Li Bingcheng 李并成, who has been studying the locations of ancient cities, postal stations, lookout offices, and beacons of Northwestern China for more than two decades. He recently published the locations of major Han postal stations in the Dunhuang Commandery.73 Although some of the locations could no longer be precisely identified, most of the sites he identifies by information gleaned from Han slips, supplemented by his own fieldwork. Based on his results, I mapped the Han postal relay routes in Dunhuang and overlaid the routes on satellite images (fig. 1.1). For some of the stations, the ruins are still recognizable in the enlarged images.

72  For a route map in northern Juyan, see Song and Li, “Han dai Juyan diqu,” 28–36. For a relay route in southern Juyan, see Table 4 (郵站表) in Chen, “Hanjian kaoshu,” 23. 73  Li Bingcheng, “Han Dunhuang jun jingnei,” 70–77.

Figure 1.1 Dunhuang Relay Routes during the Han Period. 1 玉門關 2 陽關 3 龍勒置 4 破羌亭 5 古敦煌 6 甘井騎置 7 遮要置 8 效穀置 9 平望騎置 10 中部都尉府 11 懸泉置 12 萬年騎置 13 魚離置 14 廣至置 15 鎖陽城 16 冥安置 17 美稷亭 18 淵泉(四道溝) 19 玉門鎮

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Reconstructing the Postal Relay System of the Han Period

41

The Dunhuang postal routes extend from the Yuanquan 淵泉 Postal Station in the east to Yumen Pass 玉門關 in the west. Between the two, the total dis­ tance is over 270 km as the crow flies. At least nine postal stations are identi­ fied: Yumen 玉門 and Longle 龍勒 are the two on the western frontier. The remaining stations from west to east are Zheyao 遮要, Xiaogu, Xuanquan, Yuli 魚離, Guangzhi 廣至, Ming’an 冥安, and Yuanquan. These stations are all mentioned in the Xuanquan collection of slips. In addition, there are three jizhi 騎置: Ganjing 甘井, Pingwang 平望, and Wannian 萬年. Two ting are also prominent on the slips: Meijiting 美稷亭 and Po Qiang ting 破羌亭. Table 1.1 shows that a station may have served different functions. For exam­ ple, the name Xuanquan appears with zhi, yi, and ting; this has been under­ stood as referring to different units within the Postal Station. A name could also be shared by different entities; for example, Longle, Xiaogu, Guangzhi, Ming’an, and Yuanquan were also county names in the Han. Table 1.1

Multiple Functions of Postal Stations in Dunhuang.

Yumen 玉門 置,關

Longle 龍勒 置,驛

Zheyao 遮要 置,騎置,驛,亭

Xiaogu 效穀 置,驛,亭

Xuanquan 懸泉 置,驛,亭

Yuli 魚離 置,驛

Guangzhi 廣至 置

Ming’an 冥安 置,亭

Yuanquan 淵泉 置,亭

Ganjing 甘井 騎置,驛,亭

Pingwang 平望 騎置,驛,亭

Wannian 萬年 騎置,驛,亭

Table 1.2 gives the distances between pairs of neighboring nodes. Again, they are fly-line distances between pairs of points in question. When a distance is much longer than the average and beyond a reasonable distance for a mail carrier to make it in a day on foot, other stations must have existed in between the two nodes. For example, there should be one or even two stations between Yumen and Ganjing. These relay routes have to be viewed in the context of a larger, empire-wide network of postal stations. Two important slips were excavated, one from Juyan and the other from Xuanquan, and together they describe the Han cities

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Table 1.2

Distances between Han postal stations in Dunhuang in km.

Yuanquan–Meijiting Meijiting–Ming’an Ming’an–Guangzhi Guangzhi–Yuli Yuli–Wannian Yuli–Xuanquan Wannian–Xuanquan Xuanquan–Pingwang Pingwang–Zheyao Zheyao–Xiaogu

33 29 30 27 13.5 22.7 13 21.5 21 7

Zheyao–Ganjing Xiaogu–Ganjing Zheyao–Dunhuang Ganjing–Dunhuang Ganjing–Central Commandant Ganjing–Yumen Dunhuang–Po Qiang ting Po Qiang ting–Longle Longle–Yangguan Yangguan–Yumen

17 11.5 20 17 15 72 26 26 6 48

on the Silk Roads that served as nodes of this empire-wide network and the distances between two neighboring nodes.74 7

Tang Mail Routes

Some of the gazetteers found among Dunhuang manuscripts document the Tang postal stations in the Dunhuang area. In particular P. 2005 “Shazhou dudufu tujing” 沙洲都督府圖經 (A guide to the area command of Shazhou, with maps) lists nineteen courier stations ( yi) during the Tang period, includ­ ing the ones that were abandoned.75 These stations can be divided into two routes: the eastward and northward routes, both of which start from the seat of the Dunhuang Commandery and direct toward Guazhou 瓜州. In 691, dur­ ing the reign of Wu Zetian 武則天 as Emperor of the Zhou dynasty (r. 690–705), the eastern route was abandoned because “the mountain paths are winding, perilous, and close to rebels” 山險迂曲近賊.76 The courier stations along the northward route were established as an alternative. The eastward route fol­ lowed the same path along the Han route from the Dunhuang Governor’s seat, through Zheyao, Pingwang, Xuanquan, Yuli, and Guangzhi to reach Suoyang 鎖陽, which was part of Guazhou in the Tang.

74  He Shuangquan, “Han dai xibei yidao yu zhuanzhi,” 62–69. 75  Wang Zhongluo, “Dunhuang shishi,” 358–59. 76  Ibid.

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Reconstructing the Postal Relay System of the Han Period

The eastward route had an earlier reroute in 683 for almost the same secu­ rity reason. This change of route involved Xuanquan. Tang’s Xuanquan Postal Station was “relocated to the north side of a mountain, into the Xuanquan Valley” 移就山北懸泉谷置 from the south side of the mountain. The released information about the archeological finds of Xuanquan does not suggest any period of Tang use of the building. Furthermore, since the Han site was located on the north side of a mountain with vast flat land to its north, we can con­ clude that the Xuanquan Postal Station of the Han was not the same as the one in the Tang. Table 1.3 shows the changes of the eastward route from the Han to the Tang period. Table 1.3

Comparison of Eastward Routes in the Han and Tang in km. Han route

Dunhuang–Zheyao 20 Zheyao–Pingwang 21 Pingwang–Xuanquan 21.5 Xuanquan–Yuli 22.7 Yuli–Guangzhi 27 total 112.2

Tang route

州城驛—東泉驛 東泉驛—其頭驛 其頭驛—懸泉驛 懸泉驛—魚泉驛 魚泉驛—瓜州常樂 total

18 11 35 18 20

102

Zhoucheng yi 州城驛 was a station 200 steps east of the commandery seat. The Dongquan yi 東泉驛 station was two kilometers away from Zheyao. The last station Guangzhi in the Han route was in the proximity of Suoyang. Although the Tang route tracks closely the Han route, there is no evidence to show that the Tang used any of the Han stations. The density of postal sta­ tions along the Dunhuang-Guazhou run was little changed between the Han and Tang. 8

Grades of Postal Service

Juyan and Xuanquan slips show many grades of delivery service. The phrases used include: 以郵行, 以亭行, 以次行, 以亭次行, 以隧次行, 亭次行, 隧次 行, 縣次行, 廷次行, 亭次走行, 驛馬行, 吏馬行, 驛馬馳行, 吏馬馳行, and

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駙馬行. While the last five indicate the requirement of fast delivery by refer­ ring to the use of horses, those remaining suggest orders of delivery. There is probably no difference between 隧次行 and 以隧次行; both would mean the process of delivering in the order of beacons. From the list, we may also con­ clude that you, ting, and sui refer to different entities. Some scholars suggest that yi you xing first appeared in the Eastern Han since Xuanquan slips carry­ ing such a designation are rare and some of them could be dated.77 Juyan slip JY 062.002 shows yi you xing; however, it could be an Eastern Han slip. 9

A Han Statute Concerning Mail Delivery: Xingshu lü 行書律78

From Juyan and Xuanquan slips we find references to punishments meted out against those who failed their duties as mail carriers. An important legal document found separately is the one from the collection of bamboo slips unearthed in 1983 from Jiangling 江陵 in Hubei. The most relevant part of the Jiangling slips is the Ernian lüling 二年律令 (Statutes and ordinances of the second year), dated to no later than 186 BCE.79 Within the “Statutes and Ordinances of the Second Year” there is a set of rules governing the postal ser­ vice, known as the Xingshu lü (Statutes on the forwarding of writings). Some of the rules are cited below: Install one postal station every ten li. For the Nan Commandery, from south of the Yangzi River to the South River in Suo (modern Hanshou xian in Hunan), one postal station every twenty li. 十里置一郵。南郡江水以南至索 (?) 南水,廿里一郵。(XSL 264)80

77  Hu and Zhang, Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui, 95. 78  For a more detailed treatment of the codes that regulate mail delivery in the Han, see sections 8 and 10 of Giele, “New Glimpses,” 14–29, 32–33. Michael Loewe also describes briefly Han legal codes for mail delivery and postal service as components of the Han government. Loewe, The Government of the Qin and Han Empires, 106, 109, 160. 79   Jingzhou diqu bowuguan, “Jiangling Zhangjiashan sanzuo Han mu,” 1–8. See also Zhangjiashan ersiqihao Han mu etc., Zhangjiashan Han mu zhujian, 29–30, 169–71. 80  The slips XSL 264, XSL 265–67, XSL 272, and XSL 273 can be found in Zhangjiashan ersiqihao Han mu etc., Zhangjiashan Han mu zhujian (ersiqihao mu) (shiwen xiuding ben), 45–46. The question mark in XSL 264 indicates that the transcriber was unsure of the graph.

Reconstructing the Postal Relay System of the Han Period

45

Let the postman deliver imperial edicts and express letters. Exempt him from corvée and taxation, and assign no other tasks to him. For areas with concerns of danger or near the border that are unsuitable for setting up postal stations, let soldiers of ting at the gates or those responsible for catching bandits deliver letters. In the Beidi, Shang, and Longxi Commanderies, set up one postal station every thirty li. For areas danger­ ous and narrow that are impossible for a mail carrier to pass, choose suit­ able locations that are nearby. Every postal station is to furnish beds and be equipped with a well and a mill. For every visiting official with county business without a servant, the postman should cook for him. If the visi­ tor has a servant, they should be furnished with utensils and provided with water and soup. 令郵人行制書、急書,復,勿令為它事。畏害及近邊不可置郵 者,令門亭卒、補盜行之。北地、上、隴西,卅里一郵。地險 狹不可郵者,得進退就便處。郵各具席,設井磨。吏有縣官事 而無僕者,郵為炊;有僕者假器,皆給水漿。(XSL 265–67) If a letter is not urgent but [the postman] takes the liberty to send it by post, the fine is two ounces of gold. 書不急擅以郵行,罰金二兩。(XSL 272) The postman must travel 200 li for the duration of one day and one night. Tardiness by one half day is punishable by 50 cane strokes. The punish­ ment for one half day to a full day is 100 cane strokes. For over one day, the fine is two ounces of gold. 郵人行書一日一夜行二百里。不中程半日笞五十;過半日至盈 一日笞百;過一日罰金二兩。(XSL 273) The code above specifies the distance between two postal stations, taking local conditions into consideration. It defines the duty of a postman and his privi­ lege. Each postal station must offer accommodations to visiting officials for business travel with the postman serving as cook. The code further spells out the penalty for tardiness and improper use of the postal service.

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Contributions of Han Slips to the Understanding of the Han Postal System

We next review three examples where Han slips and fieldwork at archeological sites have helped to clarify our understanding of some general statements in classical texts. First, as Wang Yuquan has shown, in the lines “大率十里一亭,亭有長,​  十亭一鄉” in Han shu, the graph li is a unit of distance and should not be confused with li as “neighborhood.”81 It is unlikely for a Han village (xiang) to have 100 neighborhoods, since each neighborhood was assumed to have 100 households, making a xiang as large as a large county.82 From the remains of ting in archeological sites, we also learn that “十里一亭” is only an approxi­ mate statement. Second, the following passage in Han guanyi 漢官儀 (Han official ceremo­ nial) suggests that there were fewer ting than you: Install one ting in every ten li, with a ting leader and a ting lookout officer. Have one you in every five li, with an officer located at two and half li from the you to police evil-doing and burglary. 設十里一亭,亭長、亭候;五里一郵,郵閒相去二里半,司姦盜.83 From the “Statutes and Ordinances of the Second Year” cited earlier, we have learned that you could exist every ten, twenty, or thirty li depending on the region. Separately, on a slip unearthed from a Han tomb in Yinwancun 尹灣村 in Jiangsu, the numbers of ting and you in the Donghai 東海 Commandery are given as 688 and 34 respectively, with ting outnumbering you twenty to one.84 The entities that were spread with a density of one in every five li were most likely sui on the border and the Han guanyi could be referring to the inland counterpart of sui, which might have been called you at one time in history. The youting in Mozi could be its prototype. The notion of you in the Donghai Commandery is likely to be a large postal station; whereas the you in the Han guanyi is like a small police station.

81  See section 2.4 above. 82  Zheng Xuan cites the line “百戶為里” from the Wang du ji 王度記 of the Warring States in a commentary to Li ji zhushu 43.748b. 83  Hou Han shu 28.3624, n. 1. 84  The slip from Yinwancun is numbered YM6D1. See Lianyungangshi bowuguan, Yinwan Han mu jiandu, 61–67, 138–44.

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47

Third, the entry zhi 置 in a rhyme book of the Song has the following lines: “A courier station: to deliver by horses is called zhi and to deliver on foot is called you” 驛傳也,馬遞曰置,步遞曰郵.85 Xu Qian’s 許謙 (1270–1337) criticism of the last two lines, quoted in the Sheng’an jing shuo 升庵經說 by Yang Shen 楊慎 (1488–1559), calls the gloss “imagination and baseless talk” 想像妄說. “Since you is glossed as yi, if it were delivery on foot, why does the graph have horse as its radical?” 郵訓爲驛,若是步遞,字何以从馬乎.86 The argument offered by Xu Qian on the speed of you delivery is based on the radical of its gloss yi. From the Han slips in Juyan and Xuanquan, we find an element of truth in the rhyme book’s distinction between you and zhi. After all, in the early Han, zhi had relay horses and were separated by a distance longer than the distance of 30 li between two neighboring you. A courier traveling from one zhi to the next most likely did it on horseback. On the other hand, moving from one you to the next and back was entirely feasible on foot in a day. What Xu Qian identified was the discrepancy between two glosses. When you could be understood as “to deliver on foot,” it should not be glossed as yi. When you was merged into zhi, that distinction became invalid.



The postal system of the Han was an indispensable vehicle of communication between the imperial court and local governments. Radiant from the capital Chang’an (or Luoyang) was a network of probably thousands of relay stations. On the border, the postal system was integrated into the military defense sys­ tem with soldiers serving military duties and doubling up as mail carriers. If the evolution of the graph you 郵 is any indication, an early manifestation of a form of postal station, youting 郵亭, can be traced to the Warring States period, with its primary function being in reconnaissance and beacon signal­ ing. Postal relay of textual messages flourished later in the Qin and Han; and in the Han, its expansion in the west led to a network of beacons and postal stations. By the early Han, a postal station had to serve four essential functions: (1) transmitting of letters, (2) providing room and board to the visitor, (3) satis­ fying transportation needs of the visitor, and (4) maintaining a stable to house the animals used in postal service. When located on the border, a postal station is also part of the defense system. The interplay of these functions could be quite complex. A horse could be used to deliver official documents, to ­transport 85  Zengxiu huzhu Libu yunlüe 4.20a. 86  Sheng’an jing shuo 14.213.

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a visitor, or to draw a carriage for either purpose. A soldier could be a mail cou­ rier and a postman could also be a cook. Because of these four functions, a relay station had to have a stable to care for horses, and have rooms, a kitchen, a mill, and a well to accommodate visitors and to house its regular residents. A relay station on the border also had to be ready for beacon signaling. Because of its multiple functions, a relay station was at once a postal sta­ tion, or you 郵, a posthouse, or zhuanshe 傳舍, and a stable, or jiu 廄, with relay horses, known as ji 騎. When all these functions were present, it was a zhi 置, and the terms like youzhi 郵置, zhuanzhi 傳置, jiuzhi 廄置, and jizhi 騎置 were used to refer to its parts. Ying Shao’s 應劭 (fl. 173–91) Fengsu tong 風俗 通 is quoted in a commentary to the Hou Han shu to say “you was changed to zhi in the Han” 漢改郵為置.87 This line does not appear in the received ver­ sion of the Fengsu tong. Modern scholars generally agree now that you was not changed into zhi but was merged to become one of the functions of zhi.88 In spite of its inaccuracy, the line attributed to Ying Shao signifies that zhi became an important building block of the postal system of the Han Empire. Perhaps you was no longer sufficient to encompass all the functions of a postal station in the Han and zhi was a neutral word to cover all its functions. Without the Han slips excavated from Juyan, Xuanquan, and other sites, the source of our knowledge of the Han postal service would have been limited to the received historical and literary texts. Han slips help us to clarify our under­ standing and challenge conventional readings of received texts. Bibliography Chen Mengjia 陳夢家. “Han dai fengsui zhidu” 漢代烽燧制度. Hanjian zhuishu 漢簡綴述, 153–77. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980. ———. “Hanjian kaoshu” 漢簡考述. Kaogu xuebao 1 (1963). Rpt. in Hanjian zhuishu. ———. “Hanjian nianli biaoxu” 漢簡年曆表敘. Hanjian zhuishu, 239–56. ———. “Hanjian suojian Juyan biansai yu fangyu zuzhi” 漢簡所見居延邊塞與防禦 組織. Kaogu xuebao 1 (1964). Rpt. Hanjian zhuishu, 37–95. ———. “Han Wu biansai kaolüe” 漢武邊塞考略. Hanjian zhuishu, 206. Chu Shibin 初師賓. “Juyan fenghuo kaoshi” 居延烽火考釋. In Hanjian yanjiu wenji, 355–64. Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 春秋左傳正義. In Shisan jing zhushu. 87  Hou Han shu 68.2231, n. 1. 88  Hao and Zhang, Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu, 20, 32.

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Duan zhu Shuowen jiezi 段注說文解字. Compiled by Xu Shen 許慎 (ca. 58–ca. 147). Commentary by Duan Yucai 段玉裁 (1735–1815). Rpt. Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1969. Erya zhushu 爾雅注疏. In Shisan jing zhushu. Fan Xiangli 范香立. “Hanjian suojian cishi he duyou de zhineng chuyi” 漢簡所見刺 史和督郵的職能芻議. Daqing shifan xueyuan xuebao 28.1 (2008): 120–23. Gansu Juyan kaogudui 甘肅居延考古隊. “Juyan Han dai yizhi de fajue he xin chutu de jiance wenwu” 居延漢代遺址的發掘和新出土的簡冊文物. Wenwu 1 (1978): 1–25. Gansu sheng wenwu gongzuodui 甘肅省文物工作隊 and Gansu sheng bowuguan 甘肅省博物館, eds. Hanjian yanjiu wenji 漢簡研究文集. Lanzhou: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 1984. ———. “Ejina he xiayou Han dai fengsui yizhi diaocha baogao” 額濟納河下游漢代 烽燧遺址調查報告. In Hanjian yanjiu wenji, 62–84. Gansu wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 甘肅文物考古研究所, Gansusheng bowuguan 甘肅省博物館, Zhongguo wenwu yanjiusuo 中國文物研究所, and Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan lishi yanjiusuo 中國社會科學院歷史研究所, eds. Juyan xin­ jian 居延新簡. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994. Transcriptions of the slips from the 1970s can be found at http://ndweb.iis.sinica.edu.tw/woodslip_public/System/ Main.htm (accessed November, 2014). Giele, Enno. “New Glimpses of the Early Chinese Postal System,” unpublished manu­ script, 2004. An early version was presented at the Warring States Working Group (WSWG) Conference No. 17 on September 18, 2003 at Leiden, Netherlands. Translated by Tomiya Itaru 冨谷至. “ ‘Yū’ sei-kō—Shin Kan jidai o chūshin ni” 「郵」制考— 秦漢時代を中心に. Tōyōshi kenkyū 63.2 (2004): 203–39. Han shu 漢書. Compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Hao Shusheng 郝樹聲 and Zhang Defang 張德芳. Xuanquan Hanjian yanjiu 懸泉漢 簡研究. Lanzhou: Gansu wenhua chubanshe, 2009. He Linyi 何琳儀, ed. Zhanguo guwen zidian 戰國古文字典. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998. He Shuangquan 何雙全. “Han dai xibei yidao yu zhuanzhi: Jiaqu houguan, Xuanquan Hanjian ‘Zhuanzhi daoli bu’ kaoshu” 漢代西北驛道與傳置:甲渠候官、懸泉 漢簡《傳置道里簿》考述. Zhongguo lishi bowuguan guankan 1 (1998): 62–69. ———. “Han dai xibei yidao yu zhuanzhi” 漢代西北驛道與傳置. Zhongguo lishi bowuguan qikan 1 (1998): 62–69. Hou Han shu 後漢書. Compiled by Fan Ye 范曄 (398–446). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965. Hou Xudong 侯旭東. “Xibei Hanjian suojian ‘zhuanxin’ yu ‘zhuan’” 西北漢簡所見 ‘傳信’ 與 ‘傳.’ Wen shi 3 (2008): 5–54. See also http://www.bsm.org.cn/show_article .php?id=1358 (accessed November, 2014).

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Hu Pingsheng 胡平生 and Zhang Defang, eds. Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui 敦煌懸泉漢簡釋粹. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001. ———. “Ping ‘Zhuanzhi yu xingshu wuguan’ shuo’ ” 評‘傳置與行書無關’說. May 2010. http://www.bsm.org.cn/show_article.php?id=1255 (accessed November, 2014). Huainanzi jishi 淮南子集釋. Commentary by He Ning 何寧. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998. Hucker, Charles O. A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985. Jingmenshi bowuguan 荊門市博物館, ed. Guodian Chu mu zhujian 郭店楚墓竹簡. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1998. Jingzhou diqu bowuguan 荊州地區博物館. “Jiangling Zhangjiashan sanzuo Han mu chutu dapi zhujian” 江陵張家山三座漢墓出土大批竹簡. Wenwu 1 (1985): 1–8. Lao Gan 勞榦. Juyan Hanjian: Kaoshi zhibu 居延漢簡:考釋之部. Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan, Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1960. Legge, James. The Chinese Classics, etc.: Vol. 2, The Works of Mencius. London: Trübner, 1861. Rpt. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960. Li Bingcheng 李并成. “Han Dunhuang jun de xiang, li, nanjing saiqiang he fengsui xitong kao” 漢敦煌郡的鄉、里、南境塞牆和烽燧系統考. Dunhuang yanjiu 2 (1993): 65. ———. “Han Dunhuang jun jingnei zhi, jizhi, yi deng weizhi kao” 漢敦煌郡境內 置、騎置、驛等位置考. Dunhuang yanjiu 3 (2011): 70–77. Li ji zhushu 禮記注疏. In Shisan jing zhushu. Li Jiemin 李解民. “Qin Han shiqi de yiri shiliushi zhi” 秦漢時期的一日十六時制. Jianbo yanjiu 2 (1996): 80–88. Li Junming 李均明, Juyan Hanjian biannian: Juyan bian 居延漢簡編年:居延編. In Xianggang Dunhuang Tulufan yanjiu zhongxin yanjiu congkan 香港敦煌吐魯番研 究中心研究叢刊 1, edited by Rao Zongyi. Taipei: Xinwenfeng chuban gongsi, 2004. Li Zhengyu 李正宇. “Dunhuang jun de biansai Changcheng ji fengjing xitong” 敦煌郡 的邊塞長城及烽警系統. Dunhuang yanjiu 2 (1995): 120. Lianyungangshi bowuguan 連雲港市博物館, et al, eds. Yinwan Han mu jiandu 尹灣漢墓簡牘. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997. Liu Shihong 劉士紅. “ ‘De zhi liuxing su yu zhiyou er chuanming’ zhi ‘zhi’ zi bian ji qita” 德之流行速于置郵而傳命之置字辯及其他. Gansu lianhe daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 23.6 (2007): 80–84. Loewe, Michael. The Government of the Qin and Han Empires: 221 BCE–220 CE. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006. Luo Qingkang 羅慶康. “Yinshan fengsui tanwei” 陰山烽燧探微. Yiyang shizhuan xuebao 4 (1990): 77. Mozi jiangu 墨子閒詁. Commentary by Sun Yirang 孫詒讓 (1848–1908) and Sun Qizhi 孫啟治. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001.

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Needham, Joseph, et al. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4: Physics and Physical Technology, part 3: Civil Engineering and Nautics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Shi ji 史記. Compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–ca. 86 BCE). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959. Shisanjing zhushu 十三經注疏. Compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980. Song Huiqun 宋會群 and Li Zhenhong 李振洪. “Han dai Juyan diqu youyi fangwei kao” 漢代居延地區郵驛方位考. Henan daxue xuebao (Shehui kexue ban) 33.1 (1993): 28–36. Tan Qixiang 譚其驤, ed. “Qin Xi Han Dong Han shiqi” 秦西漢東漢時期. In Zhongguo lishi dituji 中國歷史地圖集 II. Beijing: Ditu chubanshe, 1982. Wang Yuquan 王毓銓. “Han dai ‘ting’ yu ‘xiang’ ‘li’ butong xingzhi butong xingzheng xitong shuo” 漢代 ‘亭’與 ‘鄉’ ‘里’不同性質不同行政系統說. Lishi yanjiu 2 (1954). Rpt. in Wang Yuquan shilun ji 王毓銓史論集, 292–302. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005. Wang Zhongluo 王仲犖. “Dunhuang shishi chu ‘Shazhou dudufu tujing’ canjuan kaoshi” 敦煌石室出《沙州都督府圖經》殘卷考釋. Zhongguo lishi dili luncong 1 (1992). Rpt. in Zhongguo Dunhuang xue bainian wenku: Dili juan 中國敦煌學百年 文庫:地理卷. Lanzhou: Gansu wenhua chubanshe, 1999. Wei Jian 魏堅 and Chang Shi 昌碩. “Juyan Han dai fengsui de diaocha fajue ji qi gong­ neng chutan” 居延漢代烽燧的調查發掘及其功能初探. In Ejina Hanjian shiwen jiaoben 額濟納漢簡釋文校本, compiled by Sun Jiazhou 孫家洲, 115–25. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2007. Wu Rengxiang 吳礽驤. “Han dai fenghuo zhidu tansuo” 漢代烽火制度探索. In Hanjian yanjiu wenji, 235–40. Xie Guihua 謝桂華, Li Junming, and Zhu Guozhao 朱國炤, eds. Juyan Hanjian shiwen hejiao 居延漢簡釋文合校. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1987. Transcriptions of these slips can be found at http://ndweb.iis.sinica.edu.tw/woodslip_public/System/ Main.htm (accessed November, 2014). Xu Leyao 徐樂堯. “Juyan Hanjian suojian de bianting” 居延漢簡所見的邊亭. In Hanjian yanjiu wenji, 298–334. Xue Yingqun 薛英群, He Shuangquan, and Li Yongliang 李永良. Juyan xinjian shicui 居延新簡釋粹. Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 1988. Yang Shen 楊慎 (1488–1559). Sheng’an jing shuo 升庵經說. In Congshu jicheng chu­ bian 叢書集成初編. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936. Yu Zhenbo 于振波. “Qin Han shiqi de youren” 秦漢時期的郵人. In Jianduxue yanjiu 簡牘學研究, vol. 4, edited by Xibei shifandaxue wenxueyuan lishixi 西北師範大 學文學院歷史系 and Gansu sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 甘肅省文物考古研 究所, 34–41. Lanzhou: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 2004.

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Zengxiu huzhu Libu yunlüe 增修互註禮部韻略. Commentary by Mao Huang 毛晃 (1151 jinshi). In Siku quanshu. Zhanguo ce 戰國策. Compiled by Liu Xiang 劉向 (ca. 77–6 BCE). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998. Zhang Jingjiu 張經久 and Zhang Junmin 張俊民. “Dunhuang Han dai Xuanquan zhi chutu de ‘jizhi’ jian” 敦煌漢代懸泉置出土的‘騎置’簡. Dunhuang xue jikan 2 (2008): 59–73. Zhang Junmin. “Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian suojian de ting” 敦煌懸泉漢簡所見 的 ‘亭’. Nandu xuetan 30.1 (2010): 10–21. Zhang Xiancheng 張顯成, ed. Qin jian zhuzi suoyin 秦簡逐字索引. Chengdu: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 2010. Zhangjiashan ersiqihao Han mu zhujian zhengli xiaozu 張家山二四七號漢墓竹簡 整理小組, ed. Zhangjiashan Han mu zhujian (ersiqihao mu) 張家山漢墓竹簡(二 四七號墓). Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2001. Zhangjiashan ersiqihao Han mu zhujian zhengli xiaozu, ed. Zhangjiashan Han mu zhujian (ersiqihao mu) (shiwen xiuding ben) 張家山漢墓竹簡(二四七號墓)​  (釋文修訂本)​. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2006. Zhongguo jiandu jicheng bianji weiyuanhui 中國簡牘集成編輯委員會, ed. Zhongguo jiandu jicheng biaozhu ben 中國簡牘集成標注本. Lanzhou: Gansu ren­ min chubanshe, 2001–2005. Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo 中國社會科學院考古研究所, ed. Juyan Hanjian jiayi bian 居延漢簡甲乙編. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980. Zhou li zhushu 周禮注疏. In Shisan jing zhushu.

chapter 2

Letters as Calligraphy Exemplars: The Long and Eventful Life of Yan Zhenqing’s (709–785) Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter Amy McNair Letters have been collected as examples of calligraphy since the Later Han dynasty (25–220), when cursive script became an art of the elite. For collectors, a letter’s significance lay mainly in the style of the brushwork and its perceived power to evoke the personality of the writer. Typically, to contemporaries, the style is admired as sophisticated and cutting-edge, the product of an insider group with access to the right models and plenty of time to practice the art, while to later collectors, the style represents the epitome of the age in which it was produced. Further, thanks to the traditional belief in graphology, the lines of the characters are seen as traces of the author’s being that allow the viewer to “see the man in his writing.” In addition, since the verbal content of letters can be of the moment and because cursive script is traditionally held to be unpremeditated and highly expressive, a further appeal of letters is the sense of emotion and immediacy felt by the viewer as he or she re-traces the progress of the brush on the page. When collectors have a letter mounted in the hand scroll or album format, it becomes the core of a living document as later viewers inscribe their responses to the letter in colophons. When the letter is mounted, it is given a name, typically two or three characters from the first or second lines of the letter. The mounting and the naming turn the letter into a work of art. The name is written on a label on the scroll and used to record the letter’s presence in a collection. Famous early letters were also reproduced within “model-letters compendia” ( fatie 法帖), in which copies were engraved into stone plates, from which ink rubbings were taken and distributed as elegant gifts. Finally, famous letters became the source texts for “innovative transcriptions” (lin 臨), rather like musical compositions that can be played many ways. Artists creatively re-interpreted certain letters as a way of demonstrating their competence in canonical calligraphy styles and their own ingenuity, transcribing what had been private documents in public art formats such as hanging scrolls and fans. My case study for these developments is the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter (Liu Zhongshi tie 劉中使帖) by Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿 (709–785), now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. This

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_004

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brief letter, which comments on military actions in 775, is exemplary not only for its extraordinary appearance—highly gestural cursive-script characters on blue paper—and the reputation of its author, a renowned loyalist statesman, scholar and aristocrat, but also for the rich documentation of its nearly thirteen-hundred-year life in the hands of numerous important collectors and the manifold responses by critics and artists. 1

Yan Zhenqing’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter

Though unsigned, the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter is nearly universally accepted as one of two extant ink-written autographs by the celebrated Tangdynasty calligrapher Yan Zhenqing.1 The letter comprises forty-one large characters in eight lines, written in a blend of running (xing 行) and cursive (cao 草) scripts, on a piece of dyed blue paper 28.5 cm high and 43.1 cm wide (fig. 2.1). It is undated, but an approximate date of the end of the year 775 may be deduced from the letter’s contents. In my translation, it reads: Recently, I heard that when Imperial Commissioner Liu arrived at Yingzhou, Wu Xiguang had already surrendered. This should comfort the hearts of those on the seaboard! I had also heard that though Cizhou was besieged by Lu Ziqi, the Sheli General had seized him alive. What a consolation! 近聞劉中使至瀛州,吳希光已降。足慰海隅之心耳。又聞 礠州 為盧子期所圍,舍利將軍捦獲之。吁足慰也。 Hou Yili, on the staff of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, has done an admirable job of researching the personages mentioned in the letter, which I will summarize in English here.2 The events described refer to the insurrection of Tian Chengsi 田承嗣 (704–778), which was a continuation of the catastrophic An Lushan Rebellion (755–62). After the deaths of the rebel leaders An Lushan 安禄山 (703–757) and Shi Siming 史思明 (703–761), several of their subordinates refused to submit to the throne and continued to drag out the uprising. In 763, in an attempt to pacify them, Emperor Daizong 代宗 (r. 762–79) appointed 1  Wang Zhuanghong 王壯弘 says it is a Tang copy, without explanation. See his Bei tie jianbie changshi, 113. Perhaps because the letter lacks a signature and an addressee, he considered it fragmentary, which could indicate a copy of a portion of a letter. 2  Hou Yili 侯怡利, entry on Yan Zhenqing’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter in Jin Tang fashu mingji, 177–81.

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Figure 2.1 Yan Zhenqing, Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, ink on paper, ca. 775. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

them Military Commissioner and put them in charge of the Defense Command in the areas they controlled. Tian Chengsi was made Military Commissioner over five prefectures centered on the command at Weizhou (modern Daming, Hebei), in the area that is now approximately northwest Shandong and southwest Hebei provinces.3 Instead of pacifying Tian, however, this evidently put him in a position to expand the areas under his control. In 773, Xue Song 薛嵩 died. He was another rebel leader turned Military Commissioner, and the court appointed his younger brother to succeed him in governing the area that is now northern Henan and southeast Shanxi provinces. The following year, Tian Chengsi began his plot to invade that territory by inciting the subordinate generals of that command to revolt. In 775, he reported to the throne that they had rebelled and that he was leading troops to save the situation! Under this guise, he seized Xiangzhou (modern Anyang, Henan). At the same time, he also ordered his own generals Lu Ziqi 盧子期 to take Mingzhou (modern Yongnian, Hebei) and Yang Guangchao 楊光朝 to attack Weizhou (modern Jixian, Hebei). In the fourth lunar month of 775, the central government sent troops against Tian. Duplicitously, he sent a memorial asking to submit while ordering his general Lu Ziqi to capture Cizhou (modern Cixian, Hebei). At the beginning of the tenth month, Lu attacked Cizhou, and the city nearly fell. Four days later, two other military commissioners came to its rescue, and Lu suffered a 3  See Zizhi tongjian 222.7141.

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great defeat at the Qing River. He was taken alive and brought to the capital, where he was beheaded. The line in the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter that says “though Cizhou was besieged by Lu Ziqi, the Sheli General had seized him alive” is a reference to this event. On the seventh day of the following month, Wu Xiguang 吳希光, who had been appointed prefect of Yingzhou (modern Hejian, Hebei) by Tian, surrendered the city.4 The person called Imperial Commissioner Liu in the letter was evidently sent to verify the return of Yingzhou to the imperial fold. He was very likely the renowned central official Liu Qingtan 劉清潭 (fl. late 8th c.).5 These events are referred to in the first line of Yan’s letter: “When Imperial Commissioner Liu arrived at Yingzhou, Wu Xiguang had surrendered.” Since both the capture of Lu and the surrender of Wu took place by the seventh day of the eleventh month of 775, the letter is considered to date to the end of that year. Although the events actually occurred in the reverse order from the sequence of references in Yan’s letter, Hou Yili explains this by suggesting that Yan, in his haste to write, may have dropped some verbiage before the sentence on Wu, such as riqian 日前 (earlier), that would have explained that this had happened prior. The last person mentioned in the letter is the Sheli General. According to the account given in the New Tang History (Xin Tang shu 新唐書), the general Wang Wujun 王武俊 turned over Lu Ziqi alive to Li Baochen 李寶臣, one of the Military Commissioners who came to the rescue of Cizhou.6 When Li moved to liberate Mingzhou, he displayed the captured Lu before the city walls, and the rebels surrendered the city. Hence, the Sheli General cited in Yan’s letter should be Wang Wujun. At the time the letter was written, Yan was serving in the south as Prefect of Huzhou, since he had been sent away from court by the grand councilor Yuan Zai 元載 (d. 777) to silence his outspoken criticism. Even though he was not personally involved in the events described in his letter, he still expresses considerable passion about the defense of the Tang state. To any contemporaneous reader, the text would have resonated with the emotions he felt and expressed in writing during his experience of the An Lushan Rebellion twenty years before, as shown in his other extant autograph work, the draft eulogy for his nephew Yan Jiming 顏季明 (d. 756), which expresses his anger and grief

4  Zizhi tongjian 225.7235 and Yu Xianhao, Tang cishi kao, 1388. 5  Given the name Zhongyi 忠翼 in 778, his role is described in Jiu Tang shu 119.3445 and Xin Tang shu 150.4809. 6  Xin Tang shu 210.5926.

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over the young man’s death in that war.7 To any knowledgeable later reader of this letter, it also summons up the image of Yan’s death ten years after this letter was written, when he was martyred for his loyalty to the state by yet another rebel leader.8 2

A Paragon of Loyalty

Though the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter is only four sentences in length, it is quite sufficient to summon up in the mind of the reader the personality and reputation of Yan Zhenqing. The scion of a family long distinguished for scholarship and service to the state, Yan counted among his ancestors the eminent official Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–ca. 591) and the historian Yan Shigu 顏師古 (581–645).9 After the early death of his father, Yan Weizhen 顏維貞 (670–712), he was educated by his mother, a member of the equally accomplished Yin 殷 clan, his uncle Yan Yuansun 顏元孫 (668–732) and his aunt Yan Zhending 顏真定 (654–737), and in 734, he earned the Presented Scholar ( jinshi 進士) degree by examination. He entered government service at the court of Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–56) in 736 with the prestigious post of Editor in the Palace Library, which was reserved for men of unusual literary promise. After passing the special Examination for Erudites of Outstanding and Extraordinary Literary Expression (boxue wenci xiuyi 博學文詞秀逸) in 742, he was appointed to serve as District Defender of Liquan, a coveted post near the summer pleasure palaces of the Tang emperors. Due to his success in a series of provincial and metropolitan offices, in 749, he was called to court to serve as a Palace Censor. It was in this post that Yan’s outspoken honesty in defense of other men of integrity began to earn him the enmity of the grand councilor Yang Guozhong 楊國忠 (d. 756). In 753, in retaliation, Yang recommended Yan for appointment as Commandery Governor of Pingyuan, a walled city close by the Yellow River in Dezhou Prefecture (in modern Shandong province), far from the western capital in Chang’an. Late in 755, the Military Commissioner An Lushan rose in revolt against the Tang throne and led his armies south through Shandong on his way to the 7  The subject of emotion in letter-writing from this time period is treated in Anna M. Shields’s essay in this volume. 8  The Draft Eulogy for Nephew Jiming (Ji zhi Jiming wen gao 祭姪季明文稿) also belongs to the National Palace Museum, Taipei. See Jin Tang fashu mingji, no. 12. 9  The principal biographical sources for the life of Yan Zhenqing are Xin Tang shu 153 and Jiu Tang shu 128; see also McNair, The Upright Brush.

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e­ astern Tang capital of Luoyang. As An passed through the area, he ordered Yan to submit his city, but instead, Yan organized the loyalist resistance efforts so successfully that An was forced to return from Luoyang to fight them. In that battle, Yan’s brother and nephew were killed. The Tang imperial armies came to their rescue, but were too soon diverted to defend the western capital, so many local officials switched allegiance to the rebels. Yan organized what was left of the loyalists, but they were defeated in the end. Yan escaped with his life and presented himself at court, prepared to accept the death penalty for his failure, but he was hailed by the court as a paragon of loyalty and given a high position. Yan’s reputation for loyalty only grew throughout the remainder of his life in service. By the age of seventy, Yan survived the tenure of Yuan Zai and returned to serve in high positions at court, where he wrote several important memorials on state ritual. Yet again, however, he ran afoul of powerful men who sought to silence him. Early in 783, the grand councilor Lü Qi 呂杞 (d. ca. 785) recommended that Yan—at the age of seventy-three—be sent out to Xuzhou to induce the rebel Li Xilie 李希烈 (d. 786) to surrender. Li captured Yan and tried to force him to serve in his own rebel court, asking him about the ritual to be used in his ascent of his throne. Yan rebuked him by saying, “I am an old man now, but once I did know state ritual. Now all I can remember is the ritual for a feudal lord’s audience of submission to the emperor.” In 785, the rebel leader, angry over the death of his brother, had Yan executed. When his death was reported to the emperor, he was granted the posthumous epithet of “Cultured and Loyal.” The content of this letter, then, encapsulates the entire career of Yan Zhenqing and his perfect record of unblemished loyalty to the state. Its joy over the defeat of rebels evokes the establishment of Yan’s reputation as a paragon of loyalty during the An Lushan Rebellion and its epiphany when he died as a loyalist martyr at the hands of another traitor. This is one reason why it was preserved. 3

“Seeing the Man in His Writing”

The feeling of communing with the personality of the writer is one of two traditional ways in which to appreciate a letter as calligraphy. The notion that writing expresses the personality of the author dates back to the Han dynasty at least. The scholar-official Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE) said it succinctly in this well-known statement, “writing is the delineation of the mind”

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書心畫也.10 This is a basic expression of characterology, which is the practice of judging the moral character of people.11 Characterology is based on the belief that the nature of the personality on the inside is inexorably expressed on the outside, so that a person’s character can be grasped from an examination of any of a person’s external manifestations, such as appearance, behavior, or written and spoken expression. A classic example of the sort of communion felt by those who accept the tenets of characterology is the statement by the historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–90 BCE), who said, “when I read the writings of Confucius, I can envision the kind of man he was.”12 This belief also extended to handwriting. Graphology, or handwriting analysis, is the practice of perceiving character traits from a person’s handwriting. “Seeing the man in his writing” is attested as early as the first century, in the practice of appreciating and collecting personal letters and other hand-written manuscripts as a souvenir of the writer. The Han History (Han shu 漢書) contains a record of the eccentric scholar Chen Zun 陳遵 (fl. early 1st c.) that reported that although Chen was naturally good at calligraphy, it was his commanding appearance and unorthodox character that impelled the recipients of his letters to save them, as traces of his personality: Chen Zun as a rule was always drunk, but he still managed not to neglect his business. He was more than eight feet tall and had a long head and big nose; his appearance was indeed extraordinary. He was fairly well read in history, was himself a prolific writer of prose and poetry, and was a born calligrapher. When he wrote letters to people, the recipients always kept them and stored them away, because they regarded them as something magnificent.13 A related idea is that a virtuous character produces superior art. This belief was expressed by the Han-dynasty philosopher Wang Chong 王充 (27–97), who wrote, “the greater a man’s virtue, the more refined is his literary work.”14 In a well-known anecdote from the Tang period, Emperor Muzong (r. 821–24) asked his policy advisor Liu Gongquan 柳公權 (778–865), who was famous as 10  Fayan 5.3b. See also Michael Nylan’s translation “writing, is [the heart’s] images”; Exemplary Figures, 76–77. 11  This practice is described by the third-century writer Liu Shao 劉邵 in his Renwuzhi 人物志. See also Shryock, The Study of Human Abilities. 12  Shi ji 47.1947. 13  Slightly amended from the translation in Ledderose, Mi Fu, 30. 14  Forke, Lun-heng, 2:229.

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a calligrapher, about the proper method for the brush. Liu replied: “The use of the brush lies in the heart. If your heart is upright, then your brush will be upright.”15 In other words, good art is founded on good character. The Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter has fourteen colophons appended to it, and most of the writers express one or both of these notions, that the personality of Yan Zhenqing is palpable in the calligraphy and that the letter is a fine artwork because of the noble character of the man who wrote it. Typically, the two sentiments are woven together. In the earliest colophon on the letter, the collector Wang Zhi 王芝 (d. ca. 1311) wrote: My lord’s heroism and righteousness may be imagined a hundred generations from now [from this letter], and it should be treasured. 公之英風義節可想見於百世之下,侅可寶也。 In the next colophon, the calligrapher and high official Xianyu Shu 鮮于樞 (1246–1302) said: His heroic spirit and valiant personality are manifest in every stroke of the brush. 然其英風烈氣見於筆端也。 In his colophon, the official Bai Ting 白珽 (1248–1328) wrote: It is in the Yingzhou Letter [i.e., the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter] that one may see the true expansiveness of Yan Zhenqing’s calligraphy; and as for its aura of loyalty and virtue, one is awestruck as though face to face with the living man himself! . . . The loyalty of Yan Zhenqing pierces the sun and the moon, and the quality of his skill was first-rate. His reputation as a master of calligraphy will endure for generations; how much more so his skill in ink and the marvels of his brush!16 瀛州帖視魯公它書特大而廪々忠義之氣如對生面。. . .魯公忠貫 日月,功載旂常。固不待 善書名于代。況筆精墨妙善是耶。 It can scarcely be a coincidence that these men who had witnessed the fall of the native Song dynasty in 1279 to the Mongol “barbarian” invaders were so 15  Jiu Tang shu 165.4310. 16   Translation by Chang Kuang-pin, “The Study and Influence of Yen Chen-ch’ing’s Work,” 196.

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enthusiastic in their appreciation for Yan’s loyalty and heroism. We need to remember that these colophons were written in a public setting at the behest of the owner. Because calligraphy scrolls such as Yan’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter were, in Ankeney Weitz’s fine formulation, “objects of public display and circulation, inscriptions and colophons were also public acts; thus, a seemingly personal sentiment became a statement of position.”17 Quite likely a public statement of admiration for the loyalist martyr Yan Zhenqing would have been seen as an expression of fidelity to the fallen Song dynasty (960–1279). 4

The Style of the Letter

The other principal reason for appreciating and collecting letters is the style of the calligraphy. Most personal letters were written in running script, cursive script or a blend of the two. As Qianshen Bai explains, in the first century, cursive script, which was commonly used to write letters, “had recently become a new vehicle for artistic expression among aristocrats.”18 Likely because cursive script uses the most organic gestures, it was seen as revealing the natural movements of the arm and hand and hence considered to have the greatest potential for self-expression. Unlike other formats that required writing in the more geometric regular script (kaishu 楷書), such as memorials, epitaphs or stele inscriptions, letters were the most elite format for calligraphy because they allowed the calligrapher to express his personality and showcase his ability at stylish, novel, advanced modes of cursive script. The most admired way to express one’s self artistically was to imitate the most sophisticated models. An anecdote from the Later Han History (Hou Han shu 後漢書) tells how Emperor Ming of the Han (r. 57–75) acquired such models from his cousin Liu Mu 劉睦 (fl. 1st c.): [Liu Mu] was good at calligraphy; his contemporaries took him as a standard and followed his model. When Liu was on his deathbed the emperor sent an express courier by horse to ask him to write ten letters in draft cursive script.19

17  Weitz, “Allegories, Metaphors, and Satires,” 167. 18  Bai, “Chinese Letters,” 381. 19  Ibid.

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Over the course of the Six Dynasties period (420–589), the style of the aristocrat Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303–361), his son Wang Xianzhi 王獻之 (344–388) and other relatives became the most exclusive and sought-after style. The collecting and display of letters by these men was restricted to select gatherings of the other elite families that had fled to the south at the fall of the Western Jin (265–317) and to emperors who collected and practiced their style as a way to establish their cultural supremacy, such as Emperor Ming (r. 465–72) of the Liu Song dynasty (420–79). Of the emperor’s substantial calligraphy collection, the pieces by Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi were considered most precious.20 The first emperor of the succeeding Southern Qi dynasty (479–502) employed the services of Wang Sengqian 王僧虔 (426–485), a descendant of the Wang clan, as his personal calligraphy connoisseur, as he re-gathered the Liu Song imperial collection dispersed by warfare. The first emperor of the Liang dynasty (502–57) also collected the works of the Wangs. This royal focus on the Wang style resulted in an ever-increasing exclusivity for the style, since the actual works were removed from circulation by being sequestered in the palace, at the same time that the style acquired even greater cachet thanks to imperial patronage. This exclusive circle was broken by the Buddhist monk Zhiyong 智永 (fl. ca. 557–617), a seventh-generation descendant of Wang Xizhi who undertook to make eight hundred transcriptions of the Thousand Character Classic.21 Each copy had the thousand unique characters of this children’s primer written out in the Wang version of both cursive and running scripts, and Zhiyong distributed them to the many monasteries in the regions of eastern Zhejiang where he lived.22 Placed in the libraries of these monasteries, the scrolls could be viewed and copied by visiting students and scholars, thus amplifying the audience for the Wang style and its practice throughout the south. Certainly the original readers of Yan’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter and quite likely most of the later collectors who owned it were aware of the filiations between Yan and the Wang tradition. The monk Zhiyong was the teacher of Yu Shinan 虞世南 (558–638), the high official and connoisseur of calligraphy for Emperor Taizong of the Tang dynasty (r. 626–49). Lu Jianzhi 陸柬之 (585–638) was the nephew and student of Yu Shinan, and his son Lu Yanyuan 陸彥遠 was the uncle and calligraphy teacher of Zhang Xu 張旭

20  Ledderose, Mi Fu, 41–42. 21  For a reproduction of a section of one of these, now in the Ogawa collection, Kyōto, see Nakata Yūjirō, Chinese Calligraphy, pl. 31. 22  Ledderose, Mi Fu, 20.

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(675–759).23 As a young man, Yan traveled to Luoyang especially to meet with Zhang Xu and learn his style. While the connection to the Wang lineage was important to Yan’s status as a calligrapher, it was his study with Zhang Xu that is shown in this letter. The influence from Zhang Xu is what makes this letter attractive as participating in one of the most up-to-date and exclusive styles of Yan’s generation, the cursive tradition begun by Zhang Xu. Zhang was known to Yan through family connections; Zhang’s friend and relative He Zhizhang 賀知章 (659–744) was a member of the social circle that included Yan Zhenqing’s father and his wife’s uncle Wei Shu 韋述 (d. 757).24 In another letter, Yan described his study with Zhang, saying modestly that though he had sought him out, he had failed to learn anything: Since the time of the Southern Dynasties, many of my ancestors have been famous in their own day for their cursive, clerical, small seal, and large seal scripts, but in their descendants, that path has fallen into disrepair. Yet I once met with Administrator Zhang Xu and demonstrated my youthful lack of expertise to him. But since he was loathe to part with [his method], I could not gain any skill [at calligraphy].25 Yet in his preface to a set of poems on the cursive script of his younger contemporary, the Buddhist monk-calligrapher Huaisu 懷素 (725–785), Yan suggests he did learn Zhang’s method after all: The writing of cursive drafts arose in the Han dynasty. Du [Bo]du 杜伯度 [fl. late 1st c.] and Cui Yuan 崔瑗 [77–142] were the first to gain fame by their marvelous ability. It then came to Boying [Zhang Zhi 張芝, d. ca. 192], who was particularly adept at its beauties. Then it descended to Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi, after which Yu [Shinan] and Lu [Jianzhi] together inherited it. The oral formula was manually received, until it got to the Administrator of Wu Commandery, Zhang Xu . . . When I was young, I once went to stay with him and many times met with him to implore and urge him to teach me his brush method.26 23  Lu Xie 陸拹 (d. 880), Lin chi jue 臨池訣, in Lidai shufa lunwenxuan, 1:293. 24  See Yan’s epitaph for his father in Yan Lugong ji 7.12b. Also see Jiu Tang shu 190C.5034; Xin Tang shu 199.5683. 25  See his “Cursive and Seal Script Letter,” Yan Lugong ji 4.7a. 26  Wenzhong ji 12.88. The well-known text called The Twelve Concepts of the Brush Method of Administrator Zhang, which purports to be Yan’s record of his dialogue with Zhang is a fabrication of the Song dynasty. See Yu Shaosong, Shu hua shu lu jie ti 9.5b.

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Huaisu also attested to Yan’s study with Zhang in this letter: When in my later years I took to roaming across China, what I regretted most was never having known Crazy Zhang the Administrator. Recently, in Luoyang I accidentally encountered Minister Yan Zhenqing, who said that he had received the Administrator’s brush method. Hearing this method [from Yan Zhenqing] was like having had the chance [to meet and hear it from Zhang Xu].27 Zhang Xu was a great celebrity of the High Tang period, and he was depicted by his contemporaries in the role of the artist whose genius is released by wine. In Du Fu’s 杜甫 (712–770) poem “The Eight Immortals in Drink” (Yinzhong ba xian 飲中八仙), the lines describing Zhang read: In Zhang Xu, three cups summon forth the Cursive Script Sage: he strips off his cap and bares his head before princes and lords, wielding his brush over the paper like clouds and mist.28 Based on this description, we should expect Zhang’s cursive script calligraphy to be highly gestural, daringly unbalanced, unrestrained by rules and flowing in an unbroken line. While no authentic ink-written work by Zhang survives, most scholars consider the engraved copy of his Stomach Ache Letter (Du tong tie 肚痛帖) to be a good representative of his style (fig. 2.2). Large, looselyorganized characters vary in size, several of which expand beyond the implied confines of their column into the one adjacent. Looping, circular forms dominate. Some characters that would seem unbalanced were they taken out of the column manage to seem balanced within its momentum. Straight lines are juxtaposed with curving strokes, creating an exciting tension. This could equally be a description of the style of Yan’s Imperial Com­ missioner Liu Letter. Even if we lacked the documentation, the fact of Yan’s practice of the cursive script manner of Zhang Xu is evident in the style of his letter. In addition, this manner is not unique to the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, which is one reason why it is considered genuine, even though unsigned. Another work in the same mode from the same period of Yan’s life is the Wenshu Letter (Wenshu tie 文殊帖, fig. 2.3), which survives only in ink rubbing form. It is signed, and a description of the original letter by Mi Fu 米芾

27  Cangzhen Letter (Cangzhen tie 藏真帖), in Tang Huaisu san tie, 31. 28  Quan Tang shi, 1223.

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Figure 2.2 Zhang Xu, after. Stomach Ache Letter, ink rubbing.

(1052–1107) reveals that it, too, was written on blue paper.29 This letter was also saved because his use of the exclusive cursive mode of Zhang Xu, celebrated by the greatest poet of the day and learned through considerable effort by Yan, made this letter much more than just a piece of news to a friend. It made the letter into a work of art. Even by 775, it would still have had considerable cachet as a representative example of a sophisticated metropolitan style. 5

History of Collection

The whereabouts of the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter from its creation in 775 to the early 1120s are unknown, but this is not unusual for Tang-dynasty letters, since the cataloging of imperial and private collections was not practiced much until the twelfth century. The letter is listed along with twentyseven other works by Yan in the catalogue of the Song government collection, Catalogue of Calligraphy in the Xuanhe Era 宣和 (1119–1125) (Xuanhe shupu 宣和書譜), which was probably completed around 1122.30 On the lower left corner of the work proper is a fragmentary seal impression reading Shaoxing 29  Zhongguo shufa quanji 26:437. 30  Cited with the running script works. See Xuanhe shupu 3.59.

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Figure 2.3 Yan Zhenqing, after. Wenshu Letter, ca. 775, ink rubbing. Song taben Yan Zhenqing shu Zhongyitang tie.

紹興, which demonstrates the letter remained in (or was returned to) government possession after the fall of Kaifeng in 1127 and was included in the Southern Song imperial collection in the Shaoxing era (1131–1162).31 The letter likely remained in the Song imperial collection until the fall of Hangzhou in 1279. One reason I think this is because the letter does not appear in the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium (Zhongyitang fatie 忠義堂法帖), the engraved letters compendium of works by Yan Zhenqing created by Liu Yuangang (1180–1268) in 1215, suggesting Liu had no access to it.32 Since the earliest colophon that follows the work is dated to the early Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), it appears Yan’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter 31  Jin Tang fashu mingji, 179. 32  Devoted to the calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing, the stone slabs of the compendium are not extant, but a unique surviving Song-dynasty ink rubbing is held by the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, reproduced as Song taben Yan Zhenqing shu Zhongyitang tie. See also Zhu Guantian, “Zhejiang bowuguan cang Song ta Yan Zhenqing ‘Zhong yi tang tie’.” On the history of the Compendium, see Lin Zhijun, Tie kao, 141–51 and Rong Geng, Cong tie mu, 3:1137–46.

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re-entered the public sphere with the violent end of the Song, like so many other objects from the imperial collection. The circle of friends and art collectors around Xianyu Shu and Zhou Mi 周密 (1232–1298) owned, traded and viewed many artworks, including Yan’s letter. In his colophon, Wang Zhi explains that the letter was in the collection of the high official Zhang Sili 張斯立 in 1286.33 Wang was obsessed with collecting art and may have been a small-time dealer.34 He says he acquired Yan’s letter by trading: To the right is the calligraphy of the Tang dynasty Grand Preceptor Yan Lugong [Zhenqing], the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, which is a genuine work. It is recorded in the Catalogue of Calligraphy in the Xuanhe Era, and after the move to the south, it was entered into the imperial collection during the Shaoxing era. In the bingxu year of the Zhiyuan era (1286), I traded two genuine works for it, the Orchid Pavilion Poems transcribed by Lu Jianzhi and the Bushang Letter by Ouyang Shuaigeng [Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢, 557–641], with Zhang Xiujiang [Sili].35 The virile and firm brushwork in this letter is not unique, for the same sort of nobility and ardor are seen in his other letters, such as the Letter to Cai Mingyuan and the Hanshi Letter.36 My lord’s heroism and righteousness may be imagined a hundred generations from now [from this letter], and it should be treasured. Reverently inscribed at the Studio for Treasuring Ink by Wang Zhi of Daliang on the 12th day of the 3rd month. 右唐太師顏魯公書劉中使帖真跡。著載宣和書譜。南渡後,入紹 興內府。至元丙戌以陸柬之蘭停詩,歐陽率更卜商帖真跡二局 易得於張繡江處。此帖筆畫雄健不獨。與蔡明遠,寒食等帖相 頡頏而書旨慷慨激烈。公之英風義節可想見於百世之下,侅可 寶也。三月十有二日大梁王芝再拜謹題于寶墨齋。 The next colophon on the scroll is a simple signature by Qiao Kuicheng 喬簣成 (d. ca. 1313), who wrote, “Viewed by Qiao Kuicheng, zi Zhongshan, of Beiyan.” Qiao was another well-known collector who took an official post in

33  For biographical information on Zhang Sili, see Weitz, Zhou Mi’s Record, 106, n. 449. 34  Ibid., 90, n. 352. 35  See Zhou Mi, “Zhang Keyu Sili hao Xiujiang suo cang,” Yunyan guoyan lu 雲煙過眼錄 17.46. 36  For the Hanshi Letter (Hanshi tie 寒食帖) see Zhongguo shufa quanji 26: no. 49; for the Letter to Cai Mingyuan (Cai Mingyuan tie 蔡明遠帖) see 26: no. 9.

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Hangzhou in 1289, where he became a friend of Xianyu Shu.37 In the opinion of Chang Kuang-pin and Hou Yili, Yan’s letter was probably still in the collection of Wang Zhi at this time, as well as when the next colophon, by the famous calligrapher, collector and high official Xianyu Shu was added.38 He wrote: Calligraphy by the Grand Preceptor Yan is rarely seen today. In my life, I have seen three genuine works: the Draft Eulogy for Jiming, the My Horse was Ill Letter and this letter.39 The Eulogy is in running-cursive, and the My Horse was Ill Letter is in running-regular; both are in small characters. This letter is in standard running script, and the characters are relatively larger. Although the script forms differ [from the first two], still his heroic spirit and valiant personality are manifest in every stroke of the brush. Looking at these words, how could one not know the ways of our forebears? Reverently written by Xianyu Shu. 顏太師之書世不多見。不肖平生見真跡三本,祭姪季明文,馬病 及此帖。祭姪行草,馬病行真,皆小而此帖正行差大。雖體製 不同,然其英風烈氣見於筆端也。此語豈可為不知考道哉。鮮于 樞拜手書。 In 1305, the high official Zhang Yan 張晏 (d. 1330) wrote the first of two colophons to the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter. In my opinion, he did not own the scroll at this time, despite the appearance of a seal impression on the work proper that reads “personal seal of Zhang Yan.” I believe this seal was added after he did come to own the scroll later, at which time he also wrote his second colophon. I base this opinion on the disparity in content and tone between the texts of the colophons, in addition to the difference in calligraphic manner between the two. Zhang’s first colophon is quite formal, and the use of his official titles suggests the owner expected him to add luster to the work with his high rank. He opens it by citing eight works by Yan that he had seen, including this letter, and then gives a conventional assessment of Yan’s style:

37  For biographical information on Qiao, see Weitz, Zhou Mi’s Record, 70, n. 251. 38  See Chang, “The Study and Influence of Yen Chen-ch’ing’s Work,” 192, and Jin Tang fashu mingji, 179. On Xianyu Shu, see Marilyn Wong Fu, “The Impact of the Reunification,” 371–433. 39  Zhou Mi noted that Qiao Kuicheng owned the My Horse was Ill Letter (Ma bing tie 馬病帖) in 1293 (Weitz, Zhou Mi’s Record, 298), and Xianyu himself acquired the Eulogy for Nephew Jiming in 1282 ( Jin Tang fashu mingji, 165).

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Looking at this brushwork, “the hooks are like bent gold [wire] and the dots like falling rocks.”40 Dongpo [Su Shi 蘇軾, 1037–1101] said “the apogee of calligraphy was reached by Yan Lugong.”41 How true are these words! Respectfully written by Zhang Yan, Academician in the Academy of Scholarly Worthies and Grand Master for Thorough Counsel, on the 25th day of the 10th month in the winter of an yisi year, the 9th year of the Dade era [1305]. 觀於此書端可為『鉤如屈金,點如墮石』。東坡有云『書至於 顏魯公』。誠哉是言也。時大德九年歲在乙巳冬十月廿五日,集賢 學士,通議大夫張晏敬書。 The next two colophons were written when Yan’s letter was in the collection of Shi Chuhou 史處厚 (fl. early 14th c.). The substance of Bai Ting’s colophon has been given above, but he was plainly not the owner. At the end he extols the character of Shi Chuhou in such fulsome terms it is obvious the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter has been brought out by its owner for an appreciative colophon to be inscribed on the scroll by the visitor.42 As an eminent personage of Hangzhou, whose handsome calligraphy followed the style of Mi Fu, Bai would have been well positioned to add value to the scroll with his inscription. The next colophon, by the official Tian Yan 田衍 (1258–1322), is dated to 1309 and has much the same feel. He wrote: To the right is the genuine work, the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter by Yan Zhenqing, whose style name was Qingchen, the Grand Preceptor and Dynasty-founding Duke of Lu Commandery of the Tang dynasty. It has forty-one characters. My lord once studied calligraphy with Zhang Xu and learned his method of “[stains on the wall made by] rain from a leaky roof.”43 When I traveled to the capital, I saw many works by Yan. The 40  This quotes part of the characterization of Yan’s style made by the Song critic Zhu Changwen 朱長文 (1039–1098), in the entry on Yan Zhenqing in his Xu Shu duan 續書斷 of 1074: “Dots like falling rocks, strokes like summer clouds, hooks like bent gold [wire].” See Lidai shufa lunwenxuan 1:324. 41  Dongpo tiba 5.95. 42  The complete text of Bai’s colophon is reprinted in Xu Bangda, Gu shu hua guoyan yaolu, 80. 43  This is a reference to a supposed conversation between Huaisu and Yan Zhenqing recorded in the informal biography of Huaisu attributed to Lu Yu 陸羽 (733–804), the famous tea master of Tang China: “Huaisu said, ‘When I see summer clouds that look like so many strange peaks, I try to imitate them and their swift movements, like birds flying from a grove, or startled snakes slipping into the grass. Or like cracks in the walls along a road—

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works I had in my collection included the Preface Sending off Xin Huang, the two Announcements of Office for Yan Zhaofu and Lady Yin, the Latter Half of the Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol, and the Return from Court [otherwise known as] the My Horse was Ill Letter.44 These had all been part of the imperial collection in Xuanhe and Shaoxing times.45 Yet none of them has the virile expression and heroic abandon of this letter. The only work it is comparable to is his [Eulogy for His Nephew] Jiming. The men of old said that calligraphy is a unitary art. If the man lacks character, though it be skillful, that would not be adequate to ennoble it. This is particularly true for my lord [Yan]. Respectfully viewed at the home of Shi Hou, Grand Minister of Langu, on a mid-autumn day in the jiyou year of the Zhida era [1309] by Tian Yan of Mengcheng. 右唐魯郡開國公太子太師顏真卿字清臣書劉中使帖真跡。四十 一字。公嘗學書於張旭,得屋漏雨法。衍游京師覽公書 最多。衍之所藏送辛晃序,顏昭甫殷夫人二誥,爭座後帖,朝 回馬病帖。皆經宣和紹興御府。然俱未若帖之雄放豪逸。豈特 入季明之室。將与元氣爭長。昔人云書一藝也。茍非其人雖工 不足貴也。惟公可以當之。至大己酉中秋日。拜觀於蘭谷大卿 史侯之第,蒙城田衍題。 The second colophon by Zhang Yan is the last by a Yuan-dynasty person, and it is significantly different from his first one. Not only is it three times the length, but the characters are larger and the calligraphy is inkier and more gestural. The content and style have a far more self-expressive, casual feel. After a long

all very natural.’ Yan Zhenqing asked, ‘What about stains from a leaky roof?’ Huaisu rose and grasped his hand, exclaiming, ‘You’ve got it!’.” See Lidai shufa lunwenxuan, 1:283. 44  The “announcement of office” for Lady Yin is actually the spirit road inscription for his aunt Yan Zhending; see Zhongguo shufa quanji 26: no. 35. The Return from Court and My Horse was Ill are two names for the same letter; see Zhongguo shufa quanji 26: no. 17. In the mid-Northern Song, the Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol belonged to a wealthy Chang’an family named An. When the sons came into their inheritance, they decided to split the family property, so they divided this long letter and had it remounted as two scrolls, according to Huang Tingjian. See his Shangu tiba 4.40. The Preface Sending off Xin Huang (Song Xin Huang xu 送辛晃序) is not extant. 45  The Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol (Zheng zuo tie 爭座帖), the Preface Sending off Xin Huang and the My Horse was Ill Letter are listed in the Xuanhe shupu entry on Yan, but not the two announcements of office. Perhaps they were in the Shaoxing era collection. See Xuanhe shupu, 59–60.

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discussion of various pieces by Yan that he had seen, including the size of the characters (“larger than a coin”) and the color of the paper (white or yellow), Zhang remarks that “seeing the movements of the brush and the dots and strokes is like seeing the man himself.”46 These are standard features of most colophons, but it is the closing statement that suggests he owned the scroll by this time. He describes the pleasure of unrolling the scroll at a quiet desk by a bright window to view it from time to time and how he “sighed deeply when he acquired this scroll.” He ends the colophon by saying that he has “reverently written this employing an inkstone once used by Su Shi and ink that belonged to Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 [1045–1105] at the Studio for Encouraging Learning [Quanxuezhai 勸學齋].” If these were his scholarly implements and his studio, then surely he owned the work. Following Zhang Yan’s second colophon is another work that appears at first to be another colophon but is actually another letter (fig. 2.4). Now called Letter to Hua Zhongfu (Zhi Hua Zhongfu chidu 致華中甫尺牘), it was written by the famous calligrapher, painter and man of letters Wen Zhengming 文徵明 (1470–1559) to his younger friend, the wealthy collector Hua Xia 華夏 (1490–1563), whose style name was Zhongfu.47 Evidently, Wen had borrowed the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter from Hua, but was not able to keep it as long as he desired, and he seems to say that one reason he would like it back is to fix the title slip. Wen’s letter reads as follows: In the time since it came, I was only able to glance at it hurriedly, with no chance to reply. I am so ashamed! I am much indebted for the loan of my lord’s letter by Yan, but since I am anxious to return it immediately, I will not get to examine it closely. Meanwhile, I will send it quickly, but another day I hope to come in to the city [of Wuxi] to take it back for another look. I will be sure to! The title slip also needs to be corrected later, but I cannot say all [I wish to say here]. Zhengming bows his head to the ground to you, Zhongfu. 早來左顧匆匆,不獲穎回。甚媿!承借公顏帖,適歸僕馬 遑遽,不及詳閱。姑随使馳納,他日入城更望帶至一觀。千萬 千萬!簽題亦伺後便,不悉。徵明頓首中甫尊兄。

46  A complete transcription of this colophon is in Xu, Gu shu hua guoyan yaolu, 80. 47  I am very grateful to Li Heyun 李鶴雲 of Suzhou University for transcribing this letter for me. The dates for Hua Xia’s life are taken from Cai Shufang, “Hua Xia Zhenshangzhai shoucang yu ‘Zhenshangzhai tie’ yanjiu,” 21–23.

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Figure 2.4 Wen Zhengming, Letter to Hua Zhongfu, ink on paper, Taipei, undated. National Palace Museum.

Brief as it is, this letter encapsulates Wen Zhengming’s relationship with Hua Xia. Wen was famously the scion of the literati society of fifteenth-century Suzhou, having studied literature with Wu Kuan 吳寬 (1435–1504), calligraphy with Li Yingzhen 李應禎 (1431–1493) and painting with Shen Zhou 沈周 (1427–1509), all of whom were illustrious friends of his well-placed father.48 Despite this ultra-elite education, Wen Zhengming took and failed the government examinations for office ten times and was only called to Beijing in 1523 to serve based on a recommendation. His sensitive and fastidious character found government office extremely trying, and he went home to Suzhou after only four years. Upon his return, he took up the role of educated gentleman in retirement, but while the ethos of literati life compelled him to reject the title of “painter,” lest he be mistaken for an artisan for hire, his situation none­ theless appears to have been that of a man who produced large quantities of calligraphy and painting as commodities for socially-sanctioned exchange.49 This letter is one such commodity-document, produced by a man of culture and reputation for a younger family friend of high social station and considerable wealth. Wen Zhengming had been a friend of the Hua family for three generations. The Hua clan was an eminent scholar-official family who had lived in Wuxi, Jiangsu, for close to a millennium. As an example of their social position and wealth, they are recorded as the largest contributors of grain to assist flood

48  Ming shi 387.7362. 49  See Shih Shou-ch’ien, “Calligraphy as Gift.”

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v­ ictims in their area in 1453.50 Thanks to the industry and connections of Hua Xia’s grandfather Hua Tan 華坦 (1452–1545) and his grandmother Qian Shuoren 錢碩人 (n.d.), the daughter of another elite local clan, the family fortunes were built even higher. Wen Zhengming was not only friends with Hua Tan, but also with his eldest son, Hua Qin 華欽 (1474–1554). He wrote Qin’s epitaph.51 Hua Xia was Qin’s eldest son and was granted a position as a National University Student (guozisheng 國子生). He, too, married a girl of the Qian clan. Xia used his wealth to continue the family tradition of collecting books, historical documents, calligraphy, model-letters compendia and other epigraphic works, ancient ritual bronze vessels and paintings, and he enjoyed a solid reputation as a connoisseur. His studio in Wuxi that housed his collections was called the True Appreciation Studio (Zhenshangzhai 真賞齋). From all accounts, Hua Xia was very generous with his art collection, happily showing pieces to visitors and even lending them out to friends. As another means of sharing his collection, he was the first private citizen in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to produce an engraved calligraphy compendium of pieces he owned, which he called Model-letters from the True Appreciation Studio (Zhenshangzhai tie 真賞齋帖).52 The engraved model-letters tradition was begun in the tenth century, by the second emperor of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), and most of the later Song-dynasty compilations were also government-sponsored publications of works in the imperial collection.53 After the works were selected, they were copied and the copies engraved into wooden or stone slabs, from which ink rubbings could be made. These ink rubbings were given out by the emperor as a token of high esteem. In this way, works that would not ordinarily be seen could re-enter the realm of the public through these lithographic prints. Nearly two dozen model-letters compendia were produced during the Song dynasty, both officially and privately. Very few were produced under the Yuan dynasty, and when they began to be created again in the early Ming, they were typically re-engravings of the early Song imperial compendia, sponsored by Ming royal princes.54 Hua Xia’s modelletters compendium was made in 1522, and it contained works not seen in earlier publications. It was just three volumes, containing what he likely considered his most valuable pieces, but the quality was very high, and it 50  Cai Shufang, “Hua Xia Zhenshangzhai shoucang yu ‘Zhenshangzhai tie’ yanjiu,” 12. 51  Ibid., 9–11. 52  Zhongguo fatie quanji 13:9. 53  McNair, “The Engraved Model-letters Compendia.” 54  Wang Jingxian, “Mingdai congtie zongshu,” in Zhongguo fatie quanji 13:1–24. Only one Yuan-dynasty compendium is included in this set, in vol. 12.

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was quite influential.55 Volume One contained a single work, the Memorial Recommending Ji Zhi (Jian Ji Zhi biao 薦季直表), said to have been written by Zhong You 鍾繇 (ca. 163–230). Zhong is generally considered the progenitor of the Wang tradition. The second volume contained one letter by Wang Xizhi, called the Yuan Sheng Letter (Yuan Sheng tie 袁生帖), which had belonged to the imperial collection in the late Northern Song. The third volume was much longer than the first two because it reproduced an entire scroll of letters by members of the Wang clan, called the Letters Submitted in the Wansuitongtian Era (Wansuitongtian jin tie 萬歲通天進帖). According to a Tang-dynasty source, in 697, Wang Fangqing 王方慶 (d. 702) submitted a collection of calligraphic works by twenty-eight of his illustrious ancestors to Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 (624–705).56 The empress had the scroll copied and returned to Wang Fangqing. The copy alone survived, to be known as the Wansuitongtian Era Album, and sections of what is believed to be this outline-and-fill-in copy are now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum. Hua had nine of these Wang family letters engraved in the third volume of his compilation. When the stone slabs were subsequently ruined in a fire, these same works were engraved again from the originals. For the second version, Wen Zhengming wrote a colophon for each volume. Wen Zhengming’s art appreciation activities with regard to Hua Xia’s calligraphy collection date back to at least 1519, when he wrote his earliest colophon for a work owned by Hua. This colophon was on an ink rubbing of volume six of the Model-letters in the Imperial Archives in the Chunhua Era (Chunhua ge tie 淳化閣帖), the initial Song-dynasty model-letters compendium, which may pinpoint the moment when Hua became interested in producing his own.57 In all, Wen wrote colophons for eight works of calligraphy owned by Hua. In 1549, he painted a picture of the True Appreciation Studio, with the master and a guest seated inside examining a scroll, set in a garden landscape with fantastical Lake Tai rocks, and in 1557, he added a long inscription at the end, entitled “Record of the True Appreciation Studio” (Zhenshangzhai ming 真賞齋銘), in which he extols the richness of Hua’s collections, lists the calligraphies and ink rubbings he possesses, and lauds his superb taste and connoisseurial acumen.58 Wen’s relationship with the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, however, 55  The edition held by the Beijing Palace Museum is completely reproduced in ibid., 13:1–56. 56  This story is told in the anonymous “Narrative Record of Calligraphy in the Tang Court” (Tangchao xushu lu 唐朝敘書錄); Fashu yaolu 4.164–65. 57  Cai Shufang, “Hua Xia Zhenshangzhai shoucang yu ‘Zhenshangzhai tie’ yanjiu,” 28. 58  See the description in Clunas, Elegant Debts, 135–37. A detail from the painting, now in the Shanghai Museum, is reproduced as fig. 46; the colophon as fig. 73.

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actually pre-dated his friendship with Hua Xia. Around the time Hua Xia was born, the letter was in the collection of Shi Jian 史鑑 (1434–1496), in Wujiang 吳江, Jiangsu, on the southern edge of the Suzhou metropolitan area. It was there that the young Wen Zhengming first saw the letter, in the company of his teacher Li Yingzhen. According to the colophon Wen wrote on the letter forty years later, which is translated below, he first saw it around the year 1490. The letter also bears the impression of a seal belonging to Shen Zhou, Wen’s painting teacher, which suggests Shen either saw it at the home of his good friend Shi Jian or that he once owned the work. Like the paintings he did for Hua Xia, the Letter to Hua Zhongfu is meant to be a work of art in its own right, as well as a commodity that strengthens bonds with the recipient and creates value for him. While it could be viewed as a simple note that accompanied the return of the borrowed letter, its style and composition declare it to be something of greater interest and worth. Wen Zhengming was renowned for his skill at various modes of calligraphy. He was best known for his very fine small regular script, his running script in the style of Huang Tingjian, his “mad cursive” also in the style of Huang Tingjian, and his cursive script in the classical Wang manner of Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254– 1322). In none of these modes, however, was he ever intentionally awkward. Awkwardness (zhuo 拙) is acceptable as an expression of sincerity in handwriting, but balance, evenness, and smoothness are generally the hallmarks of calligraphy by Wen. Yet in the Letter to Hua Zhongfu, he intentionally created characters of different sizes, some of which seem to collapse onto themselves, while others stretch and topple out of their columns. This is plainly a stylistic reference to the manner of Yan’s letter, with its awkward, leftward tilting, tumbling characters of differing sizes. The connoisseur Xu Bangda 徐邦達 (1911– 2012) pointed out how unusual this work is within Wen’s oeuvre: “This large running-cursive writing completely imitates the original letter, and such virile boldness is rarely seen.”59 Wen’s brush grip also echoes that used by Yan in his letter. Yan was famous for the use of the centered, or upright, brush, which creates blunt, unmodulated strokes. On this rare occasion, Wen also used the centered brushtip. Perhaps the most obvious reference to the Yan letter is the composition of the characters in Wen’s letter. Just as Yan’s letter is divided in the middle by the single character er 耳, which extends the full length of its column, so Wen’s letter is similarly divided by a full-column-length rendition of the word dai 帶. The modern artist and scholar Chang Kuang-pin 張光賓 described this very nicely: 59  Xu, Gu shu hua guoyan yaolu, 81.

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[Wen’s letter] shows a subtle response to the spirit of this particular example of the Yan style. The unique rhythm of Yan’s brush has brought a distinctive zest to Wen Zhengming’s own hand; his astonishment and wonder seem to free his calligraphy from vulgar restraints. The zenith of his inspiration seems to me to be attained in the wonderful 帶, springing downwards in one great vertiginous swoop to fill the whole line in precisely the same manner as the 耳 in Yan’s own letter.60 It is evident Hua understood this letter from Wen as an artwork that increased the value of the Yan letter because he had the scroll remounted to include it. This is revealed by the other writing by Wen Zhengming within the scroll, which actually is a colophon. Written in Wen’s more everyday small regular script, it follows the Letter to Hua Zhongfu on a separate piece of paper. From this colophon, we learn more about the life of Yan’s letter: To the right is the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter by Yan Lugong [Zhenqing]. When I was young, I once viewed it at the home of the Shi family of Wujiang, in the company of my lord, the Chief Minister Li Yingzhen. My lord Li said of it, “Of the genuine works by Lugong extant, this letter is the best.” At this time, I had no wisdom and did not understand what he meant. But now, forty years on, with my age over sixty, having looked at Yan’s calligraphy many times, indeed there is none that surpasses it. Now because Hua Zhongfu likes to display this work, I have unrolled and viewed it over and over again. Its spirit and personality are so brilliant, this letter truly has what Mi [Fu] said: “loyalty and righteousness are expressed with zeal, in the pauses and presses in the thick bends.”61 This shows me how right my elder was. There are six colophons following the letter. The first is by Wang Yingsun [sic], the next by Minister of Imperial Sacrifices Xianyu [Shu], next after that by Zhang Yanqing [Yan], Bai Zhanyuan [Ting] and Tian Shimeng [Yan], and at the end another written by Yanqing. Evidently, after this letter was in the collection of Yanqing, it was transferred to [Wang] Yingsun. The statements in the colophons reveal this. Noting that the date of Yingsun’s colophon is later, I do not know the reason why it appears before those of the other gentlemen. At first I suspected a mistake was made during the mounting process, but now that [Hua] is considering changing [the mounting], it does seem Mr. Zhang’s seal impressions have not been split apart. Thus 60  Chang, “The Study and Influence of Yen Chen-ch’ing’s Work,” 208. 61  See Mi Fu, Shushi, 19–20.

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I note this here until we have a broader understanding. Written by Wen Zhengming of Changzhou on the 1st day of the 8th month, in a xinmao year, which is the 10th year of the Jiajing era [1531]. 右顏魯公劉中使帖。徵明少時嘗從太僕李公應禎觀於吳江史 氏。李公謂:魯公真跡存世者,此帖為最。徵明時未有識,不 知其言為的。及今四十年,年逾六十,所閱顏書屢矣, 卒未有勝 之者。因華君中甫持以相示,展閱數四,神氣爽然,米氏所謂 忠義憤發,頓挫鬱屈者,此帖誠有之,乃知前輩之不妄也。帖 後跋尾六通,首王英孫,次鮮于太常,又次張彥清,白湛淵,​ 田師孟,最後亦彥清書。盖此帖曾藏彥清所易於英孫耳。觀跋 語可見。按英孫所跋歲月空在後,不知何緣出諸公之前。初疑 裝池之誤,欲今改易而張公鈐印宛然不可折裂。姑記於此以俟 博識。嘉靖十年,歲在辛卯八月朔,長洲文徵明 題。 Wen not only mistakenly identified Wang Zhi as a contemporaneous painter named Wang Yingsun 王英孫 (1238–1312), but it appears he also misread the date of Wang Zhi’s inscription. There was a second Zhiyuan period in the late Yuan dynasty, which lasted from 1335 to 1340. If Wang had written during this period, his colophon would be out of chronological order, but there was no bingxu year in that second Zhiyuan period, so 1286 is the correct date. Still, Wen admits he is confused, saying he first thought there was a mistake, but then noticed that Zhang Yan’s seal impressions had not been ruined in a remounting. He probably wrote down the original order of the colophons as a record to posterity because Hua intended to have the scroll remounted and change the order of the colophons. As the colophon by Wang Faliang reveals (translated below), Wen’s record was indeed utilized later to put the colophons back in their original order when the scroll was remounted as an album in the nineteenth century. Likely the reason Hua wanted to redo the scroll was to include the letter that Wen had produced for him, thereby linking two masterpieces of past and present in one setting. Sometime after Wen’s colophon of 1531, and perhaps upon the death of Hua Xia in 1563, the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter left the Hua family collection. A record by the collector and cataloguer Zhang Chou 張丑 (1577–1643) says his father Zhang Yingwen 張應文 (1535–1593) purchased the letter in 1564, but that it later entered the voluminous collection of Xiang Yuanbian 項元汴 (1525–1590).62 One need not read Zhang’s record to know this fact, however, since the scroll is covered in impressions of Xiang’s seals, the typical treatment 62  Zhang Chou, Qinghe shu hua fang, chen ce 辰冊, 7–8 and 1.

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for artworks he owned. Xiang was from a prominent family in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, which had grown wealthy over several generations of government service and business activity. He owned several pawnshops and amassed an extraordinary collection of important artworks, probably starting with objects that had been gathered by his father. In his collecting activities, Xiang was advised by the elder son of Wen Zhengming, Wen Peng 文彭 (1498–1573), who also carved some of the collector’s seals used by Xiang.63 The letter also bears the collectors’ seals of his older brother, Xiang Dushou 項篤壽 (1521–1586). Which brother owned it first is hard to say, though perhaps it came to Yuanbian after the death of Dushou. When Xiang Yuanbian died in 1590, his collection was distributed among his sons, at least three of whom were also well-known as collectors and connoisseurs: Xiang Dexin 項德新 (1571–1623), Xiang Deming 項德明 (ca. 1573–1630), and Xiang Dehong 項德弘 (b. 1573–1580, d. after 1630). It was probably while it was in the possession of Xiang Dehong that the next colophon was added to the scroll by the eminent artist and connoisseur, Dong Qichang 董其昌 (1555–1636). Information within the colophon tells us it was written sometime after 1603. In it, Dong says: Xianyu Boji [Shu] called the Draft Eulogy for Jiming “the second best calligraphy in the world and the best calligraphy in our family.”64 Here he says that the valiant brushwork in the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter expressed his personality. Its fame is not unearned. This scroll I have already had engraved in my Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose. 鮮于伯幾號祭季明文天下法書第二吾家法書第一。此又號劉中 使帖烈氣筆法傳有所自。名不虛得。此卷余已刻於鴻堂帖中。 Dong Qichang was the most influential artist and critic of the late Ming and early Qing (1644–1911) periods. He began his long relationship with the collector Xiang Yuanbian when he was still a student through his acquaintance with Xiang’s eldest son Dechun 德純 (b. 1551).65 Over many decades, Dong had unrestricted access to Xiang’s superb collection, and he learned how to paint from copying the works in it. Obsessed with improving his calligraphy, he also studied and copied the many works of calligraphy Xiang owned. Dong wrote 63  Wong, “Hsiang Yüan-Pien and Suchou Artists,” 155–58. 64  In a colophon on Yan’s eulogy for his nephew, which he owned, Xianyu wrote, “the second best running script calligraphy in the world and the best calligraphy in our family.” See the reproduction in Jin Tang fashu mingji, 159. 65  See Wai-kam Ho, The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, 2:394.

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Xiang’s epitaph, which still survives in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum.66 Later, Dong was closest to his fifth son, Xiang Dehong, who avidly followed his father’s passion for collecting calligraphy and was known as a fine connoisseur and a generous host of art viewings at his home.67 Since Dehong inherited part of his father’s collection, it might have been from him that Dong borrowed the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter for his engraved modelletters project, the Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose (Xihongtang tie 戲鴻堂帖) which was completed in 1603.68 The Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose stands in stark contrast to Hua Xia’s pioneering Model-letters from the True Appreciation Studio. Where Hua reproduced artworks in his own possession, all from the classical ZhongWang tradition, Dong’s compendium is more like a scrapbook of works he had seen in the collections of others, dating from the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420) through the Yuan (1279–1368). It even includes several items that were already engraved, such as works in earlier model-letters compendia or stele inscriptions, so that these pieces are actually re-engravings made from ink rubbings. While Hua’s compendium was universally admired for its high quality, Dong’s was generally derided. Wang Shu 王澍 (1668–1743), a connoisseur of modelletters compendia, said, “It’s a pity the carving was so bad and the characters so inaccurate, for now it stands as the worst model-letters compendium of all time.”69 Wang Kentang 王肯堂 ( jinshi 1589) said, “In my friend Dong Xuanzai’s Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose, the copying was sloppy and the stone engraving poor . . . Xuanzai was such a capable calligrapher, and he wanted this to be handed down for a hundred generations . . . what a shame!”70 Thanks to Dong’s tremendous critical and artistic influence, indeed, his modelletters compendium was in such demand that it was re-engraved after his death. Shen Defu 沈德符 (1578–1642) recorded an interesting anecdote that explains the poor quality of at least one piece in Dong’s compilation:

66  Ibid., 1: pl. 69. 67  Ibid., 2:395 and 2:471. 68  On Dehong, see Ho, The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, 2:497. For the contents of Dong’s Xihongtang fatie, see Rong, Cong tie mu, 1:262–69. A complete copy of the 16-volume compendium is held in the Shanghai Museum. The remains of the stones are in the Anhui Museum, Hefei. A few pieces from the copy held in the National Library, Beijing, are reproduced in vol. 13 of Zhongguo fatie quanji. 69  Rong, Cong tie mu, 1:270. 70  Ibid., 1:270–71.

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Dong Xuanzai’s engraving of the Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose remains popular to this day. But since he was anxious to announce its completion, the craftsmanship was not good, so that when you compare [works in it] to their originals, they are not even close. Among the works in small regular script are several lines of the Huangting neijing [by Yang Xi 楊羲 (b. 330), in volume one] from the family collection of Chief Minister Han, whose sobriquet was Jingtang [Han Shineng 韓世能, jinshi 1568], which recently has been promoted as the best calligraphy in the world.71 Yet the engraving in the Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose does not capture its likeness. Afterward, I met to discuss this with [our mutual friend] Han Zhoujun [fl. late 16th c.] to investigate the reason why. Han said, “When Dong came to borrow it to make a copy, I was afraid he would not return with it, so I made a free-hand copy of more than a hundred characters in order to satisfy him. I did not make a doubleoutline tracing copy and impress a seal on it because I never imagined he would so hastily have it engraved in stone.72 董玄宰刻戲鴻堂帖,今日盛行。但急於告成,不甚精工,若以 真蹟對校,不啻河漢。其中小楷有韓宗伯敬堂家黃庭內景數 行,近來宇內法書 , 當推此為第一。而戲鴻所刻幾並形似失 之。予後晤韓冑君,詰其故。韓曰『董來借摹,予懼其不歸 也,信手對臨百餘字以應之,並未曾雙鉤及過朱,不意其遽入 石也。』 A number of points of comparison indicate that the version of the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter engraved in Dong Qichang’s Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose was also a freehand copy, rather than a more accurate copy made by the double-outline, or outline-and-fill-in, method. In that method, a tracing copy is made by laying a sheet of paper over the original and tracing the outlines of the characters. The outlines are then filled in carefully with small ink strokes. Comparing the original of the letter (fig. 2.1) to the ink rubbing from Dong’s compendium (fig. 2.5) shows many areas where the two do not agree. For example, in the er 耳 element inside the character wen 聞 (second character in the first column), the vertical stroke on the right is straight up and down in the original, but curved in the copy. As another example, a ligature connects the characters liu 劉 and zhong 中 in the original (third and fourth

71  On the Huangting neijing, see Ledderose, “Some Taoist Elements,” 254. 72  Rong, Cong tie mu, 1:272, quoting from Shen Defu, Wanli ye huo bian 萬曆野獲編, ch. 26, 658.

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Figure 2.5 Yan Zhenqing, after, Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter. Compiled by Dong Qichang, ca. 1603. Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose.

characters in the first column), but not in the copy. Other infelicities include the inability of the copyist and/or the carver to render the scratchy ink texture called “flying white” in the long vertical tail of the character er 耳. It also appears the copyist filled in missing strokes of the characters suowei 所圍 (the last two characters in the third column from the left), unless the damage to the original was done after it was included in Dong’s compendium. In short, a close examination of the version of the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter in Dong’s compendium does nothing to change its reputation as substandard. Yet because numerous ink rubbings can be taken from engraved stones, probably many more people saw this version of Yan’s letter than the original. In a record dated to 1635, Wu Qizhen 吳其貞 (1607–after 1678) traced the history of the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter after Dong wrote his colophon.73 At some point after 1603, it left the Xiang family and was acquired by the collector Wu Yiming 吳翼明 (fl. 1573–1620) of Xin’an 新安. Xin’an is an archaic name for Shexian 歙县, Anhui province, famous as the home of fine ink-making, and evidently Wu Yiming was a maker of ink in the Wanli period (1573–1620).74 From there it went into the collection of Cao Rong 曹溶 (1613– 1685), and from there to a Yao Shuiweng 姚水翁 (n.d.). Wu Qizhen states that by 1635, the letter was in the possession of Zhang Yingjia 張應甲 (n.d.). This is corroborated by evidence on the scroll of the letter itself, where Zhang’s ownership seals can be seen impressed on the seams of the mounting at the front 73  Shuhuaji 書畫記, ch. 1, quoted in Xu, Gu shu hua guoyan yaolu, 81. 74  See Zhongguo gudai shougong yishujia zhi.

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end. Another impression at the front reads “seal of Zhang Qia,” indicating that Zhang Yingjia handed down the letter to his son, Zhang Qia 張洽 ( jinshi 1676). Around the time Zhang Yingjia passed the letter to his son, the Ming dynasty collapsed, and the Manchu government took control of the south. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the next record on the scroll, which was inscribed in 1677, was written in Beijing. The high official Shen Quan 沈荃 (1624–1684) wrote: Looking closely at the genuine work in this scroll, I understand whence the brush method of monk Cangzhen [Huaisu] and the four great masters of the Song came.75 The colophons by the earlier worthies shine like the sun and the stars. What a treasure! I inscribed this because I viewed it on the 1st day of the 5th month, in summer, of the dingsi year of the Kangxi era [1677], at Wanyuzhai, outside the Zhengyang Gate of Yandu [Beijing]. Supervisor of the Household Administration of the Heir Apparent and Academician Reader-in-waiting of the Hanlin Academy, Shen Quan of Huating. 細觀此卷真蹟,知藏真沙門與宋四大家筆法之所自。前賢題識 炳如星日。噫!可寶也!康熙丁巳夏五朔觀於燕都正陽門外宛 羽齋因為題此。詹事府詹事兼翰林院侍讀學士華停沈荃。 Wanyuzhai was a bookshop in Beijing, located outside Qianmen Gate (given its proper name of Zhengyang Gate by Shen), which was one of several to specialize in producing Manchu-language publications in the Kangxi period (1662–1722).76 Although a number of Shen’s seals are impressed on the scroll, which would normally suggest he owned it, the fact that he states he is viewing it at a bookshop, plus the inclusion of his formal official titles in his signature, along with the very impersonal nature of his inscription, suggest he did not own it and was writing for someone he did not know intimately. Shen was one of the most important calligraphers of the Kangxi era, who followed the calligraphy style of his fellow Huating native, Dong Qichang, and it was surely seen as appropriate that he write a colophon immediately following the one by Dong. Another colophon of the same size characters and length was added immediately after Shen’s by Li Laitai 李來泰 (1624–1682). He also states that he is viewing the letter at the Wanyuzhai, and it is possible he viewed it the same 75  The “Four Great Masters of Song” are Cai Xiang 蔡襄 (1012–1067), Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, and Mi Fu. 76  Manwen guji jieshao.

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day as Shen and simply allowed Shen’s very precise description of the date to stand for both colophons. Li wrote: I had seen the Yingzhou Letter [i.e. the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter] as an ink rubbing from the Hall of the Frolicking Goose. It and the Eulogy for Nephew Jiming are both praised as “divine works.” Now, thanks to Bolongzhai, I am able to see the original work for the first time.77 The paper and ink are in fine condition, and I can see it is the greatest treasure between heaven and earth. That I should be holding this divine object is no accident. Respectfully inscribed at Wanyuzhai by Li Laitai. 瀛洲帖向見戲鴻堂墨刻中。與祭侄季明 並稱神品。茲於伯龍齋 頭得覩真跡。楮墨完好,知至寶在天壤間。自有神物獲持,非 偶然也。李來泰敬識於宛羽齋。 Li Laitai, who earned the jinshi degree in 1651, served in several government positions in the south, but when he was put in charge of farm irrigation in Suzhou, his radical ideas got him dismissed. He would not be in office again until 1679, when he took the special Erudite Literatus (boxue hongci 博學宏詞) examination and was put to work writing sections of the Ming dynastic history. This may be why he cites no official titles in his signature. He was famous as a poet by this time, which would explain why a person with no official titles would be asked to write a colophon. No seals or colophons were added for the next two hundred years. This is remarkable especially because these years encompass the reigns of the Kangxi emperor and the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95). Shen Quan was the Kangxi emperor’s tutor in calligraphy, so it seems surprising he would not recommend to the owners that they submit this work to the throne. The Qianlong emperor was particularly renowned for gathering into the palace vast quantities of the finest calligraphy and painting.78 How this work by one of the greatest calligraphers, enriched with colophons by later well-known personalities, escaped being drawn into the Qing imperial collection is hard to imagine.79 It was not spirited away, however. It never left Beijing.

77  Neither a search of the electronic version of Siku quanshu nor the internet turns up any reference to a Bolongzhai. 78  See Elliott, The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures, 51. 79  Chuang Yen 莊嚴 (b. 1899), former Director of the National Palace Museum, said, “Most extraordinary is that it never entered the imperial collection after Song-Yuan times.” See

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The next colophon was written sometime after 1872 by Wang Faliang 王法良 (1848–1909) on behalf of his father, the high official Wang Jintai 王金臺 ( jinshi 1853). To encourage his son’s calligraphy study as a child, Wang Jintai purchased letters by famous calligraphers for him to copy, and the boy became obsessed with calligraphy practice.80 As an adult, Faliang was famous for his ability to write in the manner of Yan Zhenqing’s regular script, and he was asked by Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧 (1835–1908) to write the names on the placards for three buildings in the Forbidden City. His colophon reads as follows: To the right is Lugong’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter. In the renshen year of the Tongzhi reign [1872], [my father] obtained it from a shop in [Liuli]chang. The original mounting was silk, and the scroll was two zhang in length. It contained this extraordinary letter, and at the end were twelve colophons by ten men. First was [the one by] Tian, next Bai, next Zhang, next Zhang again, next Wang and between him and Xianyu was Qiao, and then was Dong. Following Dong were Wen’s [letter and colophon] in running and regular scripts, each a superb example. At the end were Shen and Li. It seems they guessed at the positions of the first six colophons before Dong’s, which were in the original mounting. Now we have paid careful attention to Wen’s colophon, which preserves the old sequence, and we also moved Dong to after Wen and before Shen when we had this remounted. [My father] has asked me to append this account here. Recorded at the end of the document by his son, Faliang. 右魯公劉中使帖。同治壬申得之廠肆。原裝係絹相,卷子長二 丈。有奇帖,尾題跋十二計人十。首田,次白,次張,又次 張,次王,與鮮于中間以喬,再次即董。董之次有文行楷各一 最。後為沈李。盖董之先文乃題於相絹而前六跋位置揆之。收 藏姓氏似尚參差。茲僅照文跋一仍舊次,竝移董於文後沈前改 裝成。附記數言命。兒子灋良錄於簡末。 According to the letter’s next owner, the Kuomintang official Li Shizeng 李石曾 (1881–1973), who had been a calligraphy student of Wang Faliang, the text of this colophon was transcribed by Wang Faliang but composed by

Chuang Yen, “Yan Zhenqing shu ‘Liu Zhongshi tie’ zhenji yu cangzhe Li Shizeng xiansheng,” in Shan tang qing hua, 173. 80  See “Wang Faliang shuxie Gugong san da dian bian’e.”

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his father, Wang Jintai.81 Indeed, the two seal impressions at the end of the colophon belong to Wang Jintai. Wang clearly indicates they had the various colophons re-arranged to match the original order listed by Wen Zhengming, and they moved Dong Qichang’s inscription to the correct chronological position between those of Wen and Shen Quan. He does not say he had the scroll remounted as an album, but we know this from Li Shizeng’s account. It is quite obvious Shen Quan’s colophon was moved, since the seal impressions on both sides of the piece of paper he wrote on have been split in half. That this is the present mounting can also be demonstrated because Li Shizeng’s seal on the edge of the Wen Zhengming letter is intact. Wang Faliang’s style imitates the regular script of Yan Zhenqing, which has a very distinctive appearance. The forms of characters are broad and even, filling the imaginary square allotted each one, and horizontal strokes do not tilt on the vertical axis, reinforcing the upright look of the characters. Thanks to the traditional belief in graphology, this four-square appearance is commonly taken as a sign of Yan Zhenqing’s moral character, especially his reputation for unswerving loyalty. Wang’s rendition of Yan’s style also highlights the famous “flaws” in Yan’s writing: the “silkworm head and swallow tail” and the tiaoti 挑踢, or “flicking and kicking.”82 The first is seen in pie 撇 strokes (upper-rightto-lower-left curved stroke), where the “head” at the upper right beginning of the stroke is too large and the “tail,” created as the stroke moves down and to the left, is too thin. “Flicking and kicking,” a phrase coined by Mi Fu to disparage Yan’s style, probably refers to the distinctive mannerism of the indentations in the underside of the na 捺 (upper-left-to-lower-right diagonal) and hooked shu 豎 (vertical) strokes produced by lifting the brush just before the end of the stroke.83 Imitation of Yan’s regular script began in the eleventh century, with the circle of Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 (1007–1072), but there was a resurgence of artists imitating Yan’s regular script with the conquest of China by the Manchus in the seventeenth century. Fu Shan 傅山 (1607–1684), for example, deliberately used the style of Yan Zhenqing to express his feelings of loyalty for the fallen native Ming dynasty.84 In every period, the regular script style of Yan Zhenqing symbolized loyalty and patriotism. By 1872, China was in the midst of the Self-Strengthening Movement (ca. 1861–95), during which many ­government 81  From a colophon Chuang Yen recorded (Shan tang qing hua, 173) that is not reproduced in Jin Tang fashu mingji. 82  This is Wen Fong’s translation. See his Images of the Mind, 90. 83  See Ledderose, Mi Fu, 58, and Mi Fu, Haiyue tiba, 16–17. 84  See Bai, Fu Shan’s World, 102–3.

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reforms were undertaken to modernize the country in the wake of the humiliating losses to the western powers in the Opium Wars. To espouse the calligraphic style of a man who stood up to the barbarian general An Lushan may not have been entirely unpolitical. The last private owner of the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter was Li Shizeng. Li was a protean figure of the twentieth century who began life as the son of Li Hongzao 李鴻藻 (1820–1897), a high ranking advisor to the Tongzhi emperor (r. 1862–74), well regarded for his calligraphy. In 1902, Li Shizeng was appointed attaché with China’s minister to France, but once there, he left official service to study agricultural science, where he engaged in research on soybeans and began to promote the production and consumption of soy-based foods in Europe.85 In 1906, he co-founded the first Chinese anarchist association and published the influential journal New Century, which criticized Manchu rule and promoted anarchism and revolution. When his old friend Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940) became chancellor of Peking University in 1916, Li returned to China to join the faculty as professor of biology. In 1924, Li was elected to the Central Supervisory Committee at the first congress of the Kuomintang, and he was appointed chair of the committee in charge of the palace treasures when Puyi 溥儀 (1906–1967) was evicted from the Forbidden City.86 Li proposed the idea of creating the Palace Museum, and when it was established in 1925, he was installed as chairman of the board. In 1949, when the victory of the Communist forces was imminent, Li fled Beijing for Geneva, and from there went on to Uruguay, taking his library with him. In 1954, he established a second home in Taiwan, where he served as a policy advisor to Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975). Li died in 1973, honored as one of the “four elder statesmen of the Kuomintang.” In 1947, Li described how he came into possession of the Imperial Com­ missioner Liu Letter: The collection of works by master Yan held by these two gentlemen [Wang Jintai and Wang Faliang] was rich and high quality, but this album was its crowning glory. When I was very young I met Master Xiaoyun [Wang Jintai]. I cannot recall his appearance, [but I remember] he and Master Bichen [Wang Faliang] regarded each other as brothers, and they spent all their time together. Their colophon to the letter was composed by the father and transcribed by the son. Twenty years ago, our family organized a memorial library for our Li clan of Gaoyang. None of Master 85  Biographical information on Li taken from Shurtleff and Aoyagi, Li Yu-ying. 86  Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary, 320.

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Bichen’s descendants were interested in continuing the former pursuits of their forebears, and so they gave this album to our library.87 兩先生收藏顏氏字帖既富且精,此冊為其冠。曉雲先生吾於幼 齡得見。不復憶其丰采,弼臣先生互相視如兄弟,恒朝夕相 處。此帖王氏跋,父為文,子作書。前二十年,吾家組織高陽 李氏紀念圖書館。弼臣子子方世兄以家人無復理其前人舊業之 意,遂以僅餘之冊歸圖書館。 From this account, it seems Li came into possession of the letter around 1927. He must have taken it with him when he fled Beijing and ultimately taken it to Taiwan. There is a short colophon written by him in late 1954 on the mounting to the left of Qiao Kuicheng’s signature.88 He appears to have willed it to the National Palace Museum, since museum publications say the album formally entered the collection in 1973, the year that Li died.89 6

Letters as Texts for “Innovative Transcription”

Yan Zhenqing’s letter began as a communication to a friend or colleague, which was probably saved as a memento of the man’s character, his skill as a calligrapher, and the dramatic events of the mid-Tang dynasty. In later centuries, it was collected as a valuable and meaningful art object and an art-historical monument embodying the cursive style of his teacher, Zhang Xu. It also became a canonical masterpiece to a wider audience as it was made into a multiple in a popular early seventeenth-century model-letters compendium. Although the original letter did not follow the conventional route into the imperial collection in the Qing dynasty, it ultimately did end up in the Palace Museum, and there—it might be thought—its life came to a peaceful end. Actually, it had already begun another existence in the eighteenth century, one which continues to flourish today. The creative re-interpretation, or “innovative transcription,” to use Katharine Burnett’s apt translation of a seventeenth-century meaning of lin 臨 (ordinarily read as “to copy”) 90 of famous letters was the last development in what is called the “letters tradition” (tiepai 帖派 or tiexue 帖學). In traditional

87  88  89  90 

Chuang, Shan tang qing hua, 173. See Jin Tang fashu mingji, 170. Ibid., 179. See Burnett, Dimensions of Originality, 210.

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accounts, the letters tradition began with personal letters written by Wang Xizhi, Wang Xianzhi, and other elites of the Eastern Jin dynasty, and it was perpetuated in the form of originals and ink-written copies, as well as in modelletters compendia, to the end of the eighteenth century, when it was engulfed by the “stele tradition” (beipai 碑派 or beixue 碑學), which is still dominant today. 91 Dong Qichang was a master at the art of “innovative transcription” of earlier works by canonical calligraphers. In Burnett’s description, Dong’s innovative transcriptions “maintain the originary text but transform the style, typically through use of a different script, and often with an aesthetic different from the originary work.” His Calligraphy in Running and Cursive Scripts (Xing cao shu 行草書) of 1603, now in the Tokyo National Museum, is a handscroll containing a series of inventive imitations of famous works of calligraphy by early masters.92 For example, Dong’s version of Yan Zhenqing’s Record for Sending off Liu Taichong (Song Liu Taichong xu 送劉太沖敘) reproduces the text of that work in a manner that imitates Yan’s distinctive running script manner but utilizes the thin, delicate brushstrokes of Dong’s highly recognizable personal style.93 Burnett describes Dong’s 1632 version of Yan Zhenqing’s Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol by noting that “although he faithfully transcribes Yan’s text . . . Dong deviates from his classical model to assert his own aesthetic independence.” 94 A further stage of “innovative transcription” was developed by another famous seventeenth-century calligrapher, Wang Duo 王鐸 (1593–1652). Wang was devoted to the practice of the Wang style, but he did not learn it from originals or ink-written copies.95 By the seventeenth century, Song-dynasty ink rubbings of the original Model-letters in the Imperial Archives in the Chunhua Era were rare, yet thanks to the re-publication of that compendium in later re-engravings, letters by the Two Wangs in ink-rubbing form were readily available for study. Since the canon of letters in Model-letters in the Imperial Archives in the Chunhua Era was limited (160 letters by Wang Xizhi and 73 letters by Wang Xianzhi),96 it was like any other classic text, in that it could be 91  See Ledderose, Die Siegelschrift, especially his translation of the seminal texts by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), “On Southern and Northern Schools of Calligraphy” (Nanbei shupai lun 南北書派論) and “On Northern Steles and Southern Letters” (Beibei nantie lun 北碑南帖論). 92  See The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, vol. 2, pl. 5, pp. 198–99. 93  The Record for Sending off Liu Taichong is only preserved as an ink rubbing. It is found in volume nine of Dong Qichang’s Xihongtang fatie, which is devoted to letters and other works by Yan Zhenqing. 94  Burnett, Dimensions of Originality, 211. 95  Bai, Fu Shan’s World, 42. 96  See McNair, “Engraved Model-letters Compendia,” 212–13, and Rong, Cong tie mu, 1:8–11.

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memorized. Artists who could reproduce any Wang letter from memory began to treat the texts of the letters as available for re-composition. One of the earliest and most creative artists in this vein was Wang Duo. Qianshen Bai has analyzed the composition of a hanging-scroll work by Wang Duo called Copy of Wang Xizhi’s and Wang Xianzhi’s Letters, done in 1643.97 Bai terms it a “collage scroll” and describes it as follows: The first thirteen characters of this cursive scroll are an excerpt from Xianzhi’s Baonu tie in juan eleven of the Calligraphy Model-Book from the Chunhua Archives; the next twenty-six characters are copied from Xizhi’s Wuwei bianbian tie in juan eight of the same model-book; and the last ten characters are taken from another letter by Xizhi in the same juan entitled Jiayue tie.98 Bai concludes by saying that the new text has become “nearly incomprehensible.” Any original meaning from the letters is gone. The meaning of Wang’s new work has become the creative bravado and erudition of the artist, and for the viewer, the thrill of puzzle-solving if he or she can identify the fragments from the canonical originals now re-ordered and transformed within Wang’s wildly looping, scarcely legible cursive script. An inheritor of the artistic strategies of “innovative transcription” was the high official Qian Feng 錢灃 (1740–1795), one of the most renowned interpreters of the calligraphic works of Yan Zhenqing. While most officials at the court of the Qianlong emperor followed the styles of Zhao Mengfu or Dong Qichang, who were favored by the Kangxi emperor, Qian spent many years studying Yan’s regular script and running script. Qian’s choice of Yan’s style and texts as his subject matter is not surprising, given that Qian also had the temerity to stand up to powerful, corrupt figures at court, in his case, the powerful Manchu bannerman Heshen 和珅 (1746–1799).99 One fine example of Qian’s work is a rendition he made of a selected passage from the earliest known stele inscription by Yan Zhenqing, the Stele for the Duobao Pagoda in Chang’an (Duobao ta bei 多寶塔碑) dated to 752.100 This is clearly meant as an “innovative ­transcription” because only one section of the original inscription was selected and not for any evident reason of its content. Further, the style, while 97  Reproduced in Bai, Fu Shan’s World, fig. 1.20. 98  Ibid., 40. 99  See entry no. 54 by Hyon-jeong Kim Han, in Kuo and Sturman, Double Beauty. 100  In the collection of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C. For a reproduction, see http://www.asia.si.edu/explore/china/calligraphy/F1998.83.asp (accessed November, 2014).

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r­ecognizably that of Yan Zhenqing, is at the same time obviously different enough from the original to make Qian’s creative intent plain. Qian accentuates the sharper, more modulated type of regular script that Yan employed as a young man at the Tang court, rather than the blunter, unmodulated, latelife mode more commonly used by artists working in the Yan style. Lastly, the transition in format is highly theatrical. The medium has changed from the original white-on-black of an ink rubbing of the stele inscription to the black ink on white paper of an ink-written work, while the original format in which the ink rubbing would have been studied—cut and pasted into a volume or album—was altered to a long hanging scroll. The difference in format means a difference in audience, as well. The ink rubbing would have been viewed by one or two people in a private setting, while a hanging scroll is generally displayed on the wall in a public room, which would allow for a larger, more diverse viewership. Qian also transcribed and transformed Yan’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter (figs. 2.6 and 2.7). Here the transition in format has gone one step farther, to a matched pair of hanging scrolls, or duilian 對聯, on brilliantly colored paper. Texts on duilian are usually couplets from a poem, with one line on each scroll, and they are often on brightly tinted or pattern-printed paper.101 Qian created many of these duilian, writing out lines of poetry in Yan’s regular script mode and in his running script mode.102 But since the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter is not a couplet, to turn it into two matched scrolls, Qian had to divide it in half. In the spirit of creative re-interpretation, he preserved the most recognizable aspect of the composition of the original letter—the dramatic er 耳 character that fills a whole column with its tail—while deliberately re-breaking the original columns to achieve a new composition that fits the long hanging scroll format. Notice that he intentionally broke the lines in the two scrolls so that the character zhi 之 is balancing the bottom of the second column in each one. He signs the right-hand scroll, even though the text ends in the middle of the letter, since the composition would look very ­off-balance otherwise.103 At the end of the left-hand scroll, he signs his personal name and impresses his seals to conclude the new work of art.

101  On letter papers, see also Suzanne Wright’s essay in this volume. 102  Two excellent examples are reproduced in Kuo and Sturman, Double Beauty, nos. 54 and 55. 103  It is possible these two scrolls do not form a set, which would explain why a signature appears on the scroll with the first half of the letter and the apparent difference in color. I have not been able to view these scrolls directly.

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Figure 2.6 Qian Feng, copy of Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, first half, ink on red paper.

Figure 2.7 Qian Feng, copy of Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, second half, ink on pink paper.

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I do not think Qian made his version of the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter based on having seen the original. Had he been shown it by a proud owner, surely he would have been asked to write a colophon for it, since he was a person of high rank and demonstrated expertise in the style of Yan Zhenqing. Further, the style he used is not the Zhang Xu mode of the letter. The brushstrokes are considerably less sharp and modulated than those in the original, and there is a sense of order and containment that are at odds aesthetically with the original. Compare, for example, the characters xi 希 and guang 光 (fig. 2.1, third and fourth characters in second column; fig. 2.6, first and second characters in second column). The blunt, unmodulated brushwork Qian used could be a reference to the manner seen in Yan’s draft Eulogy for Nephew Jiming, a running-script work that was not done in the bravura Zhang Xu mode, or it could be a reference to the bland running-script mode of Mi Fu. This kind of complete re-invention is far more likely when the artist is working from memorized texts in model-letters compendia. For someone of Qian’s era, the most readily available version of the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter was in the Compendium from the Hall of the Frolicking Goose.



Reinterpretations of Yan’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter continue today. Consonant with his life-long promotion of modern education and traditional Chinese culture, Li Shizeng made the letter available for publication. In 1967, it was photo-reproduced in a lurid blue color in actual size in A Garland of Chinese Calligraphy, an oversize, two-volume Chinese-English set, which was published in Hong Kong with the express purpose of publicizing works of art in private collections.104 After Yan’s letter was given to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, it was published in a better-quality color reproduction in 1973 in the Masterpieces in the National Museum series of books, which was also widely distributed.105 Suddenly, this letter that had been known to so few in the last dynasty, except through a poor engraved copy, gained a public audience again as a genuine masterpiece of classical Chinese art. Now, at the time of this writing, the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter is available for study, imitation, and reinterpretation to anyone with Internet access. Simply search the characters for Liu Zhongshi tie, and not only will you be offered a selection of photo-reproductions of the original work, but you will also find 104  See Yiyuan yizhen: Fa shu 1: no. 5. Also reproduced are the colophons by Tian, Bai, Zhang, Qiao, Xianyu and Wen. 105  See Masterpieces of Chinese Calligraphy, pl. 3.

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ink-written copies and “innovative transcriptions” by present-day calligraphy enthusiasts, who are the latest interpreters and admirers of this thirteenhundred-year-old letter. Bibliography Bai, Qianshen. Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. ———. “Chinese Letters: Private Words Made Public.” In The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection, edited by Robert E. Harrist, Jr. and Wen C. Fong, 381–99. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University Press, 1999. Boorman, Howard L. and Richard C. Howard, eds. Biographical Dictionary of Republican China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967–79. Cai Shufang 蔡淑芳. “Hua Xia Zhenshangzhai shoucang yu ‘Zhenshangzhai tie’ yanjiu 華夏真賞齋收藏與 «真賞齋帖 » 研究.” MA thesis, Zhongguo wenhua daxue shixue yanjiusuo, 2004. Chang Kuang-pin. “The Study and Influence of Yen Chen-ch’ing’s Work in the Yüan Dynasty.” In The International Seminar on Chinese Calligraphy in Memory of Yen Chen-ching’s 1200th Posthumous Anniversary, 187–210. Taipei: Council for Cultural Planning and Development, Executive Yuan, R.O.C., 1987. Chuang Yen 莊嚴 (b. 1899). “Yan Zhenqing shu Liu Zhongshi tie zhenji yu cangzhe Li Shizeng xiansheng” 顏真卿書劉中使帖真蹟與藏著李石曾先生. In Shan tang qing hua 山堂清話. Taipei: Guoli gugong bowuyuan, 1980. Clunas, Craig. Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming. London: Reaktion, 2004. Elliott, Jeannette Shambaugh. The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Fashu yaolu 法書要錄. Edited by Zhang Yanyuan 張彥遠 (ca. 815–ca. 880). Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1984. Fayan 法言. Compiled by Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE). Sibu beiyao ed. Fong, Wen. Images of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton Art Museum, 1984. Forke, Alfred, trans. Lunheng, pt. II. 2d ed. Rpt. New York: Paragon Book Gallery, 1962. Fu, Marilyn Wong. “The Impact of the Reunification: Northern Elements in the Life and Art of Hsien-yü Shu (1257?–1302) and Their Relation to Early Yüan Literati Culture.” In China under the Mongols, edited by John D. Langlois, 371–433. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Ho, Wai-kam, ed. The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1992.

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Jin Tang fashu mingji 晉唐法書名蹟. Edited by Wang Yaoting et al. Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2008. Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書. Compiled by Liu Xu 劉昫 (887–946) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Kuo, Jason C. and Peter C. Sturman, eds. Double Beauty: Qing Dynasty Couplets from the Lechangzai Xuan Collection. Hong Kong: Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. Ledderose, Lothar. Die Siegelschrift (Chuan-shu) in der Ch’ing-Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der chinesischen Schriftkunst. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970. ———. Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. ———. “Some Taoist Elements in the Calligraphy of the Six Dynasties.” TP 70 (1984): 246–78. Lidai shufa lunwenxuan 歷代書法論文選. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1979. Lin Zhijun 林志鈞. Tie kao 帖考. Hong Kong: Wanyou tushu gongsi, 1962. Manwen guji jieshao 满文古籍介绍. http://www.manchus.cn/plus/view.php?aid=1036 (accessed November, 2014). Masterpieces of Chinese Calligraphy in the National Palace Museum, Supplement. Taipei: Guoli gugong bowuyuan, 1973. McNair, Amy. “The Engraved Model-letters Compendia of the Song Dynasty.” JAOS 114 (1994): 209–25. ———. The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1998. Nakata, Yūjirō. Chinese Calligraphy. New York: Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1983. Nylan, Michael, trans. 2013. Exemplary Figures / Fayan. Seattle: University of Washing­ ton Press. Mi Fu 米芾 (1052–1107). Haiyue tiba 海岳題跋. In Songren tiba 宋人題跋, Yishu congbian edition. Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962. ———. Shushi 書史. Yishu congbian edition. Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962. Ming shi 明史. Compiled by Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 (1762–1755) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Quan Tang shi 全唐詩. Edited by Peng Dingqiu 彭定求 (1645–1719). Taipei: Fuxing shuju, 1961. Rong Geng 容庚 (1894–1983). Cong tie mu 叢帖目. Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1980–1986. Shi ji 史記. Compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (?145–?86 BCE). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959. Shih, Shou-ch’ien. “Calligraphy as Gift: Wen Cheng-ming’s (1470–1559) Calligraphy and the Formation of Soochow Literati Culture.” In Character and Context in Chinese

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Calligraphy, edited by Cary Y. Liu et al., 254–83. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1999. Shurtleff, William and Akiko Aoyagi. Li Yu-ying (Li Shizeng): History of His Work with Soyfoods and Soybeans in France, and His Political Career in China and Taiwan (1881– 1973). http://www.soyinfocenter.com/books/144 (accessed November, 2014). Shryock, John K., trans. 1960. The Study of Human Abilities: The Jen wu chih, by Liu Shao. New York: Kraus. Song taben Yan Zhenqing shu Zhongyitang tie 宋拓本顏真卿書忠義堂帖. Hangzhou: Xiling yinshe chubanshe, 1994. Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101). Dongpo tiba 東坡題跋. In Songren tiba 宋人題跋. Yishu congbian ed. Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962. Tang Huaisu san tie 唐懷素三帖. Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1982. “Wang Faliang shuxie Gugong san da dian bian’e” 王法良書寫故宫三大殿匾額. http://www.chinanews.com/zhuanzhu/2001-10-09/618.html (accessed November, 2014). Wang Zhuanghong 王壯弘. Bei tie jianbie changshi 碑帖鑑別常識. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1985. Weitz, Ankeney. “Allegories, Metaphors, and Satires: Writing about Painting in the Early Yuan Dynasty.” In Tradition and Transformation: Studies in Chinese Art in Honor of Chu-tsing Li, 163–73. Lawrence, Kans.: Spencer Museum of Art, 2005. ———. Zhou Mi’s Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Wong, Kwan S. “Hsiang Yüan-Pien and Suchou Artists.” In Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Paintings, edited by Chu-tsing Li, 155–58. Seattle: Publication of Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, in association with University of Washington Press, 1990. Xin Tang shu 新唐書. Compiled by Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 (1007–1072) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Xu Bangda 徐邦达 (1911–2012). Gu shu hua guoyan yaolu 古書畫過眼要錄. Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 1987. Xuanhe shupu 宣和書譜. Edited by Gui Dizi 桂第子. Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 1999. Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿 (709–785). Wenzhong ji 文忠集. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936. ———. Yan Lugong ji 顏魯公集. Edited by Huang Benji 黄本驥 (1781–1856). Rpt. Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1970. Yiyuan yizhen: Fa shu 藝苑遺珍:法書. Compiled by Wang Shijie 王世杰 (1891–1981), Na Zhiliang 那志良 and Zhang Wanli 張萬里. Kowloon: Cafa Co., 1967. Yu Shaosong 余紹宋 (1885–1949). Shu hua shu lu jie ti 書畫書錄解題. Rpt. Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1980.

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Yu Xianhao 郁賢皜. Tang cishi kao 唐刺史考. Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju Xianggang fenju, 1987. Zhang Chou 張丑 (1577–1643). Qinghe shu hua fang 清河書畫舫. Taipei: Xuehai chubanshe, 1975. Zhongguo fatie quanji 中國法帖全集. Edited by Qi Gong 启功 (1912–2005) and Wang Jingxian 王靖憲. Wuhan: Hubei meishu chubanshe, 2002. Zhongguo gudai shougong yishujia zhi 中國古代手工藝術家志. Compiled and edited by Zhou Nanquan 周南泉 and Feng Naien 冯乃恩. Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe, 2008. Zhongguo shufa quanji 中國書法全集, vols. 25–26: Sui Tang Wudai bian 隋唐五代編, Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿 1–2. Edited by Zhu Guantian 朱關田. Beijing: Rongbaozhai, 1993. Zhou Mi 周密 (1232–1308). Yunyan guoyan lu 雲煙過眼錄. Yishu congbian ed. Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962. Zhu Guantian 朱關田. “Zhejiang bowuguan cang Song ta Yan Zhenqing ‘Zhong yi tang tie.’ ” 浙江博物館藏宋拓顏真卿忠義堂帖 Shupu 43 (1980): 18–24. Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑. Compiled by Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1956.

chapter 3

Chinese Decorated Letter Papers Suzanne E. Wright Paper is one of the items traditionally classed as the Four Treasures of the Scholar’s Study (wenfang sibao 文房四寶), along with ink, brush and inkstone. It is not known when these four writing implements came to be regarded as a group, but the earliest treatise to deal with them as such is that written by Su Yijian 蘇易簡 (957–995), Wenfang sipu 文房四譜 (Four guides to the scholar’s study), which has a postface by Su dated to 986. This text collects together extracts from various sources that provide evidence of the history, manufacture, use and appreciation of the items. Ink, paper and inkstone are treated in one juan 卷, while the brush is treated in two, presumably because of the addition of a section on brush force, dealing with calligraphy.1 The invention of paper has been credited to Cai Lun 蔡倫 (fl. ca. 61–121), of ink to Wei Dan 韋誕 (179–253), and of the brush to Meng Tian 蒙恬 (d. 210), but archaeological evidence proves that these writings implements and materials existed long before their traditional dates of origin. Writing brushes have been excavated from several sites dating to the Warring States period (482– 221 BCE); a brush discovered in the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng, Hubei Province, datable to 433 BCE or later is believed to be the earliest such find.2 It seems likely, however, based on the existence of inscriptions that appear to have been written with a brush, that this implement was used long before the Warring States period. The methods of making brushes do not appear to have changed remarkably over the course of Chinese history; bamboo and wood have been the most common materials for the handle, while rabbit, deer and goat hairs have been most frequently used for the tip. The ink of the Four Treasures generally refers to that material in solid form, which was then ground with water to make a liquid. Most such ink was made using soot, combined with a glue of some type, preservatives and perfumes. An early recipe for making ink is included in Jia Sixie’s 賈思勰 Qimin yaoshu 齊民要術, a sixth-century treatise on agriculture, livestock and food

1 See Amy McNair’s essay in this volume for more on calligraphy in an epistolary context. 2 Tan Weisi, Zeng hou Yi mu, 143. The dating of the tomb is discussed on pp. 39–44. Early evidence regarding use of the brush is discussed in Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk, 176–82.

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preparation.3 Ink cakes have been excavated, however, from sites dating as early as the Warring States period; for example a small piece of solid ink was found together with an inkstone and grinder in a Warring States period tomb at Shuihudi, Yunmeng, Hubei province.4 As with the brush, the use of black and red ink in the Neolithic and Shang periods is inferred from painting on ceramic wares and writing on oracle bones.5 Among the Four Treasures, ink and paper are the two objects that were least likely to be preserved long term, and both were the subject of woodblockprinted catalogs in the Ming dynasty that were meant to draw attention to their aesthetic qualities and perhaps encourage owners to collect rather than consume them. The two largest and most copiously illustrated of the ink catalogs are Fangshi mopu 方氏墨譜 (Fang’s guide to ink) produced by Fang Yulu 方于魯 (fl. 1570–1619) in 1588 and Chengshi moyuan 程氏墨苑 (Cheng’s garden of ink) published by Cheng Dayue 程大約 (1541–ca. 1616) in 1605; both ink makers were from Huizhou, in present-day Anhui province, and they were business rivals.6 Such catalogs generally avoid direct mention of the commercial ventures with which they were linked, but one seventeenth-century woodblock-printed book of ink cake designs, Mo shi 墨史 (History of ink), authored by Cheng Yi 程義 (fl. 1662–1722), another Huizhou native, seems to have been produced specifically to promote the sale of Cheng’s product; in addition to information on the production of ink and encomia from friends of Cheng, a section titled “Wuxuezhai mo mu” 悟雪斋墨目 (Catalog of Wuxuezhai inks) lists ink sticks by their names and specifies the grade, weight and price of at least the better quality items.7 Once ink was produced in solid form it became necessary to grind and mix it with water to produce a liquid substance for writing. Inkstones were made for this purpose, most commonly of stone or ceramic, but also occasionally of metal or lacquer. Examples of this form consisting of a stone base and grinder have been found from the pre-Han periods, such as the set excavated together with the above-mentioned ink cake from tomb four at Shuihudi, which according

3  Qimin yaoshu, 538–39. This recipe is translated in Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk, 185. 4 “Hubei Yunmeng Shuihudi shiyi zuo etc.,” 53, plate 5. Tomb 4, in which these items were discovered, is dated to the late Warring States through comparison with tomb 7, which is dated to 256 BCE in an inscription, see p. 59. 5 Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk, 183. 6 The fullest discussion of these two works is found in Lin, “The Proliferation of Images.” 7 This catalog is described in Shu Chao, “Ji moshu sizhong,” 72–73.

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to the excavation report, was fashioned from cobblestones.8 Dating even earlier are simple grinding palettes that resemble mortar and pestle, which have been found at Neolithic sites.9 By the Han dynasty, inkstones seem to have been much more common judging from the frequency of archaeological finds and the larger numbers of Han-dynasty stones that were collected by connoisseurs. Su Yijian’s Wenfang sipu is the first study of inkstones, but it was followed by a number of specialist works in the Song dynasty, such as Yan pu 硯譜 (Inkstone guide) by Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072) and Yan shi 硯史 (History of inkstones) by Mi Fu 米芾 (1051–1107).10 While there were many other types of objects that one might find in a scholar’s study—brushrest, brushpot, water dripper, seal paste box, wrist rest, etc.— the concept of the Four Treasures groups together the essential items needed for writing or painting. Writings about brushes, ink, inkstones and paper focus on practical matters, such as production techniques, as well as connoisseurship of their aesthetic qualities, but surely the seminal factor in the emergence of the Four Treasures as a group is its capacity to emblematize literacy. 1

Techniques of Paper Decoration

Despite the attribution of the invention of paper to Eastern Han official Cai Lun in 105 CE, archaeological finds prove the existence of paper in the early Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), around three centuries earlier.11 While the development of the first techniques to enhance the letter paper surface 8 “Hubei Yunmeng Shuihudi shiyi zuo etc.,” 53, plate 7:5. Tsuen-hsuin Tsien (Written on Bamboo and Silk, 190) states that this inkstone is of Qin date, but as the authors of the excavation report place tomb 4 in the late Warring States period through comparison with another dated tomb at the site, it seems both ink and inkstone belong to the pre-Qin era. 9 Zhang Wei reproduces an inkstone excavated from Jiangzhai 姜寨 village, Lintong 臨潼 county in Shaanxi Province found with some pieces of black pigment in The Four Treasures, 37, 42. 10 Zhiyi Yang discusses the early history and connoisseurship of inkstones in her dissertation “Dialectics of Spontaneity,” 188–92. 11 Perhaps the earliest extant document on paper is a fragment of a map discovered in 1986 at Fangmatan 放馬灘, Gansu Province in a tomb dated to the early Western Han. Gansusheng Wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo etc., “Gansu Tianshui Fangmatan Zhanguo Qin Han muqun de fajue,” 9, color plate 1. The discovery of a tablet dating to the Qin dynasty that bears the character 紙 (paper) may push back the date of the invention of paper even further. Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk, 147.

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probably occurred during the Eastern Han, it is only in the post-Han period that we have evidence of this from contemporary historical texts and archaeological evidence.12 From the third century there is evidence of both the dyeing of paper and a technique called coating (tubu 涂布), in which powdered materials were applied to the surface with glue or similar materials. Both dyeing and coating were most commonly used to create a brighter, more even surface that would be suitable for writing or painting.13 By the fourth century at the latest, historical records indicate that papers were being made in multiple colors and with decorative, though probably not yet pictorial, patterns. Huan Xuan 桓玄 (369–404), the general who briefly dethroned Emperor An of Jin 晉安帝 in 403 and proclaimed himself emperor of a new dynasty named Chu 楚, ordered the office of Bureau of Standards to make “peach blossom paper” in blue, red, pale green and green 玄令平准作 青赤縹綠桃花紙. No doubt this order was related to Huan’s pronouncement in 404 CE that henceforth paper would be used for court documents rather than jian 簡, thin bamboo or wood strips that had been in use as a writing surface for centuries.14 Colored papers were also used in non-official contexts; in his preface to Yutai xinyong 玉臺新詠 (New songs from Jade Terrace), Xu Ling 徐陵 (507–583) describes in poetic language the process of compiling this text, mentioning the use of multicolored patterned or variegated paper, literally “five-color flower paper” (wuse huajian 五色花箋).15 Dyed papers for use by both government offices and private individuals continued to be made in the Tang dynasty. While we do not know if the colors of the papers ordered by Huan Xuan for use by his short-lived government were significant in any way, different colors of hemp paper had specific usages in the Tang. According to the Hanlin zhi 翰林志 (Record of the Hanlin [Academy]), during the Tang dynasty administrative codes required that imperial decrees having to do with conferrals, summons, regulations, and disciplinary actions were to be written on white rattan paper; all messages of comfort to the troops should be on yellow hemp paper; all recommendations to the Taiqing gong 12 Many modern writings cite the definition of the term huang 潢 as “to dye paper” in the Shi ming 釋名 as the earliest evidence for such embellishment. This definition is not found in the Shi ming as it exists today. Rather, it is found in juan 4 of the Song dynasty Guang yun 廣韻, where the Shi ming is quoted as the source. 13 The earliest evidence for dyeing and tubu 涂布 is detailed in Pan Jixing, Zhongguo zaozhi jishu shi gao, 65–66. See also Tsien, Science and Civilisation in China, 74 and 77. 14 Huan’s pronouncements are found in a passage attributed to the Jin Dynasty (265–420) figure Ying Dezhan 應德詹 in Chuxue ji 21.517. 15 Yutai xinyong, preface, p. 2. Translation from Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 340.

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Daoist temple should be written on blue rattan paper with red characters, and so on.16 It is in the Tang dynasty that we have the first solid evidence of the association of a specific type of decorated paper with an individual. The Tang female poet Xue Tao 薛濤 (ca. 768–ca. 831) is credited with the design of stationery paper that was smaller in size than most paper of the period and dyed red.17 Xue Tao sent her poems to writer and official Yuan Zhen 元稹 (779–831) stating, “I commit them to the red stationery that I always carry with me” 總向紅箋寫自隨.18 Not long after her lifetime, she was already associated with decorated paper as is evidenced by the poem “Qi cai jian ge” 乞彩箋歌 (Begging for color stationery: A song) by Wei Zhuang 韋莊 (ca. 836–910). In this poem Wei says he has no Pine Flower 松花 paper, the type of stationery modified by Xue Tao. He writes “I wouldn’t grudge a myriad gold pieces for one sheet” and explicitly makes the link with Xue Tao by saying, “Last night Xue Tao came to me in a dream”一紙萬金猶不惜。  薛濤昨夜夢中來.19 Eventually this type of paper came to be known as “Xue Tao paper”; frequent reference to Xue Tao’s paper is made in later writings, and in the Ming dynasty a facsimile of this stationery was produced, according to Fang Yizhi 方以智 (1611–1671).20 The Song dynasty is the earliest period from which we have extant examples of decorated paper. Two writings—Tongnian tie 同年帖, by Li Jianzhong 李建中 (945–1013), and Dong zhi tie 動止帖, a letter by Shen Liao 沈遼 (1032–1085)—employ paper decorated with a similar pattern.21 Tongnian tie is comprised of two letters written on different pieces of paper that have been mounted together; the first, larger sheet is undecorated, but the second, narrow strip of paper has a subtle, loose design of swirling waters. Shen Liao’s letter to a friend suffering from boils or sores of some sort is inscribed on paper bearing a more rigorous design in which sections of near-parallel curvilinear lines, punctuated with areas of bubbly froth, converge and diverge slightly to create an effect of three-dimensional, surging individual waves held in a careful 16 Li Zhao, Hanlin zhi, 3a. See Tsien, Science and Civilisation in China, 55. 17 An excellent summary of research on this topic can be found in Li-ling Hsiao, “Xue Tao Stationery.” 18 Hsiao, “Xue Tao Stationery,” 161. 19 A complete translation of this poem can be found in Hsiao, “Xue Tao Stationery,” 163–64. The original Chinese can be found in Quan Tang shi 20.8043–44. 20 Pan, Zhongguo zaozhi, 122; Fang Yizhi, Wuli xiaoshi, 8:1. 21 The Li Jianzhong calligraphy is reproduced in Qi and Shen, Song Jin Yuan shufa, plate 3; the Shen Liao calligraphy in Zhongguo shuji daguan, plate 12.

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balance with the overall two-dimensional, decorative pattern (fig. 3.1).22 Both of these designs, as well as others found on paper believed to date to the Song, are examples of shuiwen zhi 水紋紙 (watermark paper), also known as yahua 壓花 (pressed designs) paper, according to Pan Jixing.23 Historical records indicate that this type of design was produced in the Tang dynasty, although no examples survive.24 Watermark paper could be made either by weaving threads into a pattern or design and placing this on the screen used to make laid paper or by creating a wood or metal die and impressing the design directly into the paper surface.25 A few examples of paper bearing discrete pictorial watermark designs also survive from the Song and Yuan periods, when watermark paper continued to be popular. According to Pan Jixing, Han ma tie 韓馬帖, a letter by Mi Fu in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, bears a design of a building among clouds.26 A slightly later example is that of a painting of bamboo attributed to the late Song-early Yuan dynasty artist Li Kan 李衎 (1245–1320), executed on a sheet of what must have been intended as letter paper, decorated with images of fish swimming and geese in flight (fig. 3.2).27 This paper was coated with wax and was calendered; this may be why the designs seem 22 Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101) mentions paper with printed water designs ( yinban shuizhi) in a colophon to a painting by Pu Yongsheng 蒲永昇. Su Shi, Jingjin Dongpo wenji, 2:995. See also Su Bai, Tang Song shiqi de diaoban yinshua, 77. Wave designs remained popular as letter paper decoration in later periods, and a practice recorded by Zhou Lianggong 周亮工 (1612–1672) provides an example of one way that such paper might be re-purposed. Zhou states that poorer families in his home region around Kaifeng pasted sheets of waterpattern paper on their walls in the belief that images of water could prevent fire. Shu ying ze lu, 1:246. See Zhang Tiexian, “Cong shu jian tan dao shi jian,” 35. 23 Pan, Zhongguo zaozhi, 85. 24 Pan Jixing cites a passage in Li Zhao’s 李肇 (fl. 806–820) Tang guoshi bu 唐國史補 regarding such designs. Pan, Zhongguo zaozhi, 85. 25 Pan, “Zhongguo gudai jiagong zhi etc.,” 38. Liang Ying prefers the term yaguang 壓光, which he coined, rather than yahua. He discusses three possible methods for the production of this type of paper: a material containing wax or glue could be applied to a wood block and the paper pressed over it; paper could be pressed onto a wood block and the wax- or glue-based material brushed over it; or this material could be applied to the paper which would then be impressed onto the block. Liang Ying, “Manhua caijian,” 37–39. 26 Pan, Zhongguo zaozhi, 98. This design is not visible to me in available reproductions of this letter. 27 This painting is part of a composite handscroll titled Junzi lin 君子林 (Forest of gentlemen) that is comprised of seven paintings of bamboo by Yuan and Ming artists as well as a frontispiece and colophons by Qianlong and others. The scroll is fully reproduced and its various elements cataloged in Duan Yong, Qianlong “Simei” yu “Sanyou,” 110–21.

Chinese Decorated Letter Papers

Figure 3.1 Shen Liao. Dong zhi tie, detail. Album leaf, ink on paper decorated with wave pattern. 27.1 × 37.6 cm. Shanghai Museum.

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Figure 3.2 Li Kan, att. Ink Bamboo, section of Forest of Gentlemen, detail. Handscroll, ink on paper decorated with goose and fish design. H 32.5 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

to repel the black ink of the bamboo and appear in the negative within the superimposed painting.28 Another type of decoration that appeared in the Tang dynasty, but the earliest extant examples of which date to the Song, is the use of metallic materials including gold and silver foil, powder or pigments. Examples of non-epistolary calligraphic works by the Huizong 徽宗 emperor (r. 1100–1126) written on paper either printed or painted with a background design in gold pigment exist. A version of the Qianziwen 千字文 (Thousand character essay) in the Liaoning Provincial Museum is executed on a paper decorated with a pattern of dragons among stylized cloud motifs; the imperial associations of the The designs are more legible, however, in a black and white reproduction in Pan, Zhongguo zaozhi, 99. The associations of letters with birds and fish are discussed later in this essay. 28 Pan, Zhongguo zaozhi, 98.

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dragon make this an appropriate image for an imperial work and the use of gold pigment underscores the status and wealth of the writer. 29 Here, as in the Li Kan painting, the gold pigment repels the black ink, so the imagery emerges from within the characters. All of the above-mentioned methods of embellishing letter paper continued in use during the Ming dynasty with the addition of new type of decoration: woodblock-printed designs. The use of decorated papers increased markedly over the course of the Ming, judging from extant letters, reaching a peak in the last century of that period. This development was no doubt related to the increased interest in epistolary practice in general. From the sixteenth century on, a much larger number of publications consisting solely of letters, both historical and contemporary, appear in China; at the same time there appear greater numbers of letter-writing manuals, and encyclopedic publications including information about letter writing. Larger numbers of letters survive from the later Ming on, as well, perhaps indicating an increase in their collection. Sun Mou 孫謀, a resident of Nanjing, wrote in 1629 about the popularity of letters papers in that city and the development of stationery paper design during the Ming:30 I have heard members of the previous generation say that from the beginning of our dynasty that all “inquiries about the weather” and “impartings of feelings” were written to the left of the main text [of the letter], but if there was no secondary content, there might be [a design]. Beginning with Mr. [Wang] Yangming 王陽明, there were [designs], but only kuixing 魁星, qilin 麒麟, and chihu 螭虎.31 In the beginning there were no engraved designs. . . . From [1588–89], suddenly stationery began to have short lines of small, carved characters. The Ministry of Rites put forward a request for an imperial order that the style of letter papers should accord 29 Reproduced in Qi and Shen, Song Jin Yuan shufa, plate 45. Another work by the Huizong emperor that is also in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, Cai Xing chi 蔡行勅 (Imperial edict to Cai Xing), is written on paper decorated with the “eight treasures” in gold pigment. Reproduced in Song Huizong Zhao Ji shu Cai Xing chi. 30 Sun Mou was a painter and calligrapher from Lishui 溧水 in Zhejiang province. His biography is found in Chen Zuolin, Jinling tongzhuan, 2:657–58. 31 The kui star is the largest in the Big Dipper constellation; it is also considered a manifestation of the god of literature. Qilin and chihu are fantastic creatures. The philosophical ideas of Wang Yangming (1472–1529) and his followers were sometimes blamed for a perceived decline in morality at court in the late Ming. See Hucker, “The Tung-lin Movement of the Late Ming Period,” 161.

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with antiquity and exhibit frugality, etc., etc. From [1601–1602] many people from Xin’an [in Huizhou district of present-day Anhui province] engaged in trade in Baimen [Nanjing], and made a name for their letter paper. They added gorgeous images to [the papers] by first applying wax, then scraping away the designs and dyeing them in five colors. This shop aimed to exhaust its skill and to attain bewitching [effects]; then that household competed for rare and marvelous works, each topping the other. First it was flowers, birds and animals; later it was landscapes and figures, and finally heavenly phenomena, symbols and signs, clothing and regalia, and even sacrificial vessels and collectibles. They plumbed the absurd and the strange and all searched high and low for the new and unusual. [Their papers] changed from month to month and year to year. No doubt they dazzled the senses in order to make sales. So carts and horses dash to the important spots, and with perspiring faces people gaze at the such-and-such studio, the such-and-such hall, the such-andsuch pavilion, which fill the great marketplaces throughout the capital. Alas, ornamentation (wen 文) has achieved the upper hand and natural substance (zhi 質) been defeated. Elegance ( ya 雅) is appreciated, and simplicity (pu 樸) has been dispersed. All day within my bambooed windows and vined door, I receive cards and I seal letters; all are of this type. I have collected over four hundred of these papers. If one discarded the vulgar and inelegant, [they would number] eight or nine out of ten; only [what is left] is worth preserving. From this one can determine the depths reached by these latter-day extravagances.32 The variety, and occasional complexity and beauty, of letter papers from the time of Sun Mou on can still be seen due to the increasing popularity of the practice of collecting letters in this period. The simplest type of addition to paper is the pragmatic addition of lines dividing the surface into columns, either printed or hand-drawn. One popular variation on this was to print the letter paper surface with a schematized image of jian 簡, the bamboo or wood strips, tied together with cords, which were used for writing in the Han dynasty and later (fig. 3.3). Border designs were another popular type of decoration, usually consisting of botanical elements such as plum blossoms, bamboo, or pine, or cloud or water designs. The decoration on a letter by Lu Zhi 陸治 (1496–1576) is typical, consisting of a rectangular border design with images 32 This passage is part of an inscription dated 1629 recorded by Miao Quansun in Yun zi zai kan biji 9a–b.

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Figure 3.3 Bao Tingbo 鮑廷博 (1728–1814). Letter. Ink on paper with woodblock-printed design of bamboo or wooden strips. Shanghai Library.

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Figure 3.4 Lu Zhi. Letter. Ink on paper with woodblock-printed design of plum and bamboo. Shanghai Library.

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Figure 3.5 Wang Shizhen. Letter. Ink on paper with polychrome woodblock-printed design. H ca. 19 cm. Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, NY.

of bamboo and what appears to be plum blossoms sandwiched between the framing lines, printed in blue (fig. 3.4). A third type of decoration are discrete images of animals, figures, landscapes, or objects, placed somewhere on the page. A particularly spectacular example is found on a letter by Wang Shizhen 王士禛 (1634–1711) in the Princeton University Art Museum (fig. 3.5). This image of birds attracted to a seeding plant growing from a rock face is beautifully and crisply printed in multiple colors. While writers often wrote over designs on the page, whether they were framing elements or discrete pictures, here Wang deliberately avoids writing across the printed image.33 In the Qing period, epistolary arts seem to have thrived as the population grew and literacy rates continued to rise. Letter paper designs became ever more demanding of the viewer’s attention, increasing in size, variety, and intensity of color, their relationship with the letter text becoming more and more equal. Some letters come to resemble a layered combination of pictorial album and text, with a different image on each page, as in a letter written by the 33 See the catalog entry by Bai Qianshen in Harrist and Fong, The Embodied Image, 212–13. The same paper was used by one Gao Wentao 高文濤 to inscribe a poem for a friend, now in the Shanghai Library. Reproduced in Liang Ying, Chidu fengya, 219.

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Figure 3.6 Gao Shixian. Letter. Ink on paper with polychrome woodblock-printed design. Zhejiang Library.

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Figure 3.7 Zhang Zhaoxiang 張兆祥. Wenmeizhai baihua shijian pu. 1911. H 29.3 cm. Polychrome woodblock-printed design. National Library of China.

painter and calligrapher Gao Shixian 高時顯 (1878–1952) (fig. 3.6). The designs on this letter paper rival the images in the 1911 letter paper catalog Wenmeizhai baihua shijian pu 文美齋白花詩箋譜 (Guide to one hundred flowers poetry paper of Culture and Beauty Studio) in terms of their dominance on the page and prove that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, boldly colored, large designs were considered appropriate for stationery papers (fig. 3.7). Late Qing letter paper designs reflect the interests of literati, such as paleography and the study of antiquities, with numerous examples of letters penned across images of carved texts, jades and bronzes with their cast inscriptions. A letter by the painter, calligrapher and epigrapher ( jinshixuejia 金石學家, lit. scholar of metal and stone) Yu Shaosong 余紹宋 (1885–1949) is written on paper that bears what appears to be a reproduction of an inscription carved in stone (fig. 3.8). The text is a shortened version of the familiar exhortation based on the content of the Da xue 大學 (Great learning): “Cultivate oneself,

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Figure 3.8 Yu Shaosong. Letter. Ink on paper with design of woodblock-printed inscription in style of the Huashan stele. Zhejiang Library.

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r­ egulate the family, put the country in order, then pacify the world” 修身齊家 治國平天下.34 The caption to the design states that the text has been composed with characters plucked from the Xiyue Huashan Temple Stele (Xiyue Huashan miao bei 西嶽華山廟碑), from the Eastern Han dynasty, a favorite model among late imperial calligraphers. Some letter papers are printed with imagery that suggests China’s struggles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to find its place in the world. Jiang Biao 江標 (1860–1899) was the education commissioner for Hunan province in the 1890s where he promoted Western Studies, including the study of geography, foreign languages and the sciences.35 Reflecting these interests, he designed his own letter paper featuring a globe seen from two different perspectives, with the caption “Communication and transportation within the world” (fig. 3.9).36 In the twentieth century, due largely to the interest of the writer Lu Xun 魯迅 and the scholar Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸, letter paper designs began to be collected, reproduced and studied; new letter papers were created, often by well-known artists of the day, but many designs in the style of earlier periods became popular once again. 2

Function of Letter Paper Designs

The relationship of letter paper designs to letter text is multifaceted. Letter papers were used for a wide variety of purposes: short notes delivered to nearby friends or acquaintances within the same city, more formal letters written to keep in touch with family and others, messages written on specific occasions such as birthdays or weddings, and for non-epistolary reasons such as painting and calligraphic works. Publications devoted to letter paper designs were first produced in the late Ming, and these give the clearest indication of how specific designs might have been chosen to match the content of a letter or to pay homage to its recipient. Luoxuan biangu jianpu 蘿軒變古箋譜 (Trumpetvine Pavilion guide to variations on letter paper designs) was published in 1626 by Wu Faxiang 吳發祥 (ca. 1578–after 1657) and Shizhuzhai jianpu 十竹齋箋譜 (Ten Bamboo Studio guide to letter paper designs) in 1644 by Hu Zhengyan 胡正言 (1584/5– 1674), both in Nanjing, the same city where Sun Mou wrote of the fevered 34 Li ji zhushu 42.983. 35 Platt, Provincial Patriots, 76. 36 See Bai, “Chinese Letters,” 396. The translation of the caption is Bai’s.

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Figure 3.9 Jiang Biao. Letter to Shen Xuanhuai. Ink on paper with woodblock-printed image of globe. Qing dynasty, 1897–99. The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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c­onsumption of stationery papers.37 Relatively little is known about Wu Faxiang and his business establishment; the publishing career of Hu Zhengyan is better documented, and the Ten Bamboo Studio continued to publish, and probably to sell letter paper, in the early Qing.38 Comparison of five versions of Shizhuzhai jianpu in the National Library, Beijing proves that this work was issued twice, in close succession, probably in 1644 and then again in 1645.39 A third catalog, Yin shi jianpu 殷氏笺譜 (Master Yin’s guide to letter papers), which appears to date to the same period, reportedly is in a private collection in Japan.40 These compilations are among the very finest examples of late Ming woodblock printing, produced through a new technique, in which a separate block is carved to print each color or to layer colors. It is remarkable that three such publications, at least, were produced in such a short period, especially since it is not until 1911 that another catalog of letter paper, much more modest in scale, would be published, Wenmeizhai baihua shijian pu (fig. 3.7). 37 It is uncertain why two such publications appeared in the same city in such a short time span. Nanjing was well-situated in terms of access to materials and was one of several printing centers of the late Ming; it also served as the secondary capital of the Ming dynasty and attracted many scholars, merchants and artisans to live and work there, but it is not clear that decorated letter paper was particularly associated with this city. 38 Hu’s publishing career is discussed in Wright, “Hu Zhengyan.” 39 The five copies of Shizhuzhai jianpu in the collection of the Beijing Library are as follows: catalog no. 13130, one fascicle, the first of the four-fascicle edition, published separately, 1644–45, complete; no. 16298, four fascicles, 1644–45, incomplete but the best of the fourfascicle versions; no. 17002, four fascicles, 1644–45, incomplete second and third fascicles only; no. 01468, four fascicles, 1645–46, incomplete; no. 16998, four fascicles, 1645–46, incomplete. Two of these five are differentiated by the use of replacement blocks in some designs, by substitutions and additions of designs, and by changes in the spatial relationships of design and printed inscriptions and seals. Of particular significance is the addition at the end of the second fascicle of an entire section of motifs, titled “Like orchids” (Ru lan 如蘭). The “Like orchids” category is not listed in the table of contents for fascicle two in earlier printings, precluding the possibility that the designs are simply missing from extant copies of that volume, none of which are complete. Thus, this section must have been added at a later date. This discrepancy explains a problem in dating brought to public attention by Wang Bomin. Although the two prefaces to Shizhuzhai jianpu are both dated to 1644, Wang noticed that one of the designs in the “Like orchids” section had an inscription dated to 1645, suggesting that the work was not actually published until that year. Wang Bomin, Zhongguo banhua shi, 117, n.5. However, as the “Like orchids” designs have proven to be a later addition, the first printing of the catalog can be firmly dated to late 1644 or early 1645, with a second printing following closely thereafter. 40 Two designs from this catalog are reproduced in Kuroda and Okada, Shina kohanga zuroku, plate 59. One of these designs is also found in Luoxuan biangu jianpu.

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The designs in this book combine a framing band of cloud motifs with botanical imagery of a size and presence that would seem to preclude their actual use for writing, although, in fact, letters written on similar papers do exist. Both Wu Faxiang and Hu Zhengyan produced and sold individual letter papers. The prefaces to the two catalogs make clear that one of the aims of the publishers was to preserve these papers in a format that would not be so susceptible to destruction. In the preface to Luoxuan biangu jianpu, Yan Jizu 顔繼祖 (jinshi 1619) says, “how laughable that once used these papers are nothing but straw dogs,” a reference to the practice in ancient times of using straw figures in the shape of dogs as sacrifices.41 Yan draws attention to the ephemerality of letter papers; once used, they are rarely saved, except occasionally for their value as calligraphic works or historical documents. Likewise, in the second preface to Shizhuzhai jianpu, Li Kegong 李克恭 says, “This work is to be transmitted along with valuable legacies such as bronze vessels and the stone drums and not allowed to decay. Although this is just a remnant of [Hu Zhengyan’s] work, from it one can imagine how much of his art has sunk from view.”42 Both catalogs contain large numbers of designs categorized according to subject matter. All of the designs are discrete images: figures, butterflies, antiquities, flowers, landscapes, and so on. Many of the designs do not seem to have a particular meaning associated with them; these may be multivalent, auspicious images or objects associated with elite culture. A particularly intriguing group of motifs relate to historical anecdotes; these are unusual because, rather than illustrating the tales with narrative or figural imagery, an object or objects is isolated from the story. For example, a design in Shizhuzhai jianpu consists of a vivid green fish among green water grasses and bears the twocharacter title “Thinking of carp” (Si lu 思鱸, fig. 3.10). From this two-character phrase the viewer deduces that this is not merely a representation of a carp in its natural environment, but the image of a carp as remembered by some unnamed person. It is, in fact, a food dish of the Wu region longed for by Zhang 41 Yan Jizu’s preface is translated in full in Wright, “Visual Communication and Social Identity,” 24–27. For Yan’s biography see Ming shi 21.6424. The reference to “straw dogs” (chugou 芻狗) can be found in chapter 14 (天運) of the Zhuangzi, trans. Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 158–59. 42 Li Kegong’s preface is translated in full in Wright, “Visual Communication and Social Identity,” 47–52. Li Kegong was the grandson of Li Deng 李登 (zi Shilong 士龍, hao Ruzhen), a native of Shangyuan with whom Hu studied calligraphy in his younger days. Li Deng’s biography is included in Guo Tingxun, Ben (Ming) chao fensheng renwu kao, 12.41b–43a.

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Han 張翰 (3rd c. BCE) and for which he left the service of Prince Jiong 冏 (d. 302) of Qi 齊 to return south, and thus was not present when Qi fell and the Prince died.43 Thus, “thinking of carp” became a metaphor for retirement and the prescience to avoid political disaster.

Figure 3.10 Hu Zhengyan. Thinking of carp. From Shizhuzhai jianpu. 1644. Polychrome woodblock-printed design. From facsimile by Rongbaozhai. National Library of China. 43 Jin shu 8.2384.

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Other images relate to filial piety, virtuous wives and mothers, friendship, loyalty, and so on. We can gain a better understanding of how such designs might have been used as letter paper designs by looking at letter templates in letter-writing manuals of the period. One of the most substantial of such texts from the late Ming is Ru mian tan 如面談 (Like speaking face to face), which contains over 1,800 sample letters. A modern edition of this work, from an unidentified original, bears a preface ascribed to Zhong Xing 鍾惺 (1574–1625), the late Ming writer and official and the putative author or compiler of the publication.44 In the “Family and Dependents” section is a sample letter, titled “Letter from a younger brother away from home to his elder brother,” which reads in part: When our parents are in the [family] hall, there is only my brother to be relied upon for the morning and evening delicacies. It is as if you were bringing them happiness by dancing in motley {Lao Laizi wore multicolored clothing and played in motley.} Our parents’ hearts are brought delight. {Di means “come to”; Yu means “happiness.”} 二親在堂。朝夕甘旨。惟兄是賴。若舞綵  老萊子斑衣戲綵 承歡。親心底豫。底至也豫樂也45 The smaller characters—their translations are enclosed in curly brackets—are interpolated into the letter text to explain allusions or characters with which the reader might not be familiar, thus suggesting that this publication was meant for those not conversant with more abstruse textual references. This excerpt alludes to the story of Lao Laizi, the filial son who dressed in juvenile clothing and acted the child in order to make his parents feel younger. A letter paper design that relates to the same tale can be found in Shizhuzhai jianpu (fig. 3.11). It appears in the section titled “Ru mu” 孺慕 (A child’s adoration for a parent) and consists of a single item of clothing, made of several different patterned fabrics. The hem and sleeves fly out to one side as if blown by the wind, providing a sense of movement, a frequently used device in this catalog. The caption at the upper right reads “Lai’s garment” (Lai yi 萊衣), indicating that this is the “five-color garment” Lao Laizi is supposed to have worn to make his parents feel young again.

44 Another manual with the same title, attributed to Feng Menglong, also exists. 45 Zhong Xing, Ru mian tan, 1.11.

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Figure 3.11 Hu Zhengyan. Lai’s garment. From Shizhuzhai jianpu. 1644. Polychrome woodblock-printed design. From facsimile by Rongbaozhai. National Library of China.

We cannot assume, however, that the letter paper catalogs document the use of actual letter papers; Wu Faxiang and Hu Zhengyan may very well have augmented their normal stock of letter paper designs to enhance the promotional potential of these publications as advertisements for their other products. And while the designs in the catalogs sometimes convey specific messages— of congratulation, sympathy, wishes for long life—they more often seem to

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f­unction as generalized representations of cultural literacy or conventional virtue, illuminating attributes, qualities and interests with which the writer wished to be associated, a trend also seen in extant letters. No letters written on paper produced by the Trumpetvine Pavilion have come to light, and only a small number from the Ten Bamboo Studio. Of the extant Ten Bamboo Studio letter papers, all but one are simple framing devices: double lines with vaguely botanical elements at the cardinal directions; a rectangular frame around which winds a bare vine; and a double frame within which is interspersed stalks of bamboo, clumps of grass, orchids and unidentifiable floral elements, all printed in blue. Only the latter bears a descriptive caption: “Dreaming of bamboo paper” (Meng zhu jian 夢竹箋); however, this does not seem to refer to a specific anecdote or convey a specific meaning.46 The single extant letter written on paper with a design from Hu’s catalog was authored by Zou Zhilin 鄒之麟 (d. 1654), a 1610 jinshi who held office in Beijing for a brief period but then retired for several decades.47 When the Prince of Fu was enthroned as the Hongguang emperor in Nanjing in 1644, Zou came out of retirement to serve again until the fall of the city to the Manchus in the following year. The design on Zou’s letter, “Auspicious grain” ( jia he 嘉禾), is nearly identical to that in Shizhuzhai jianpu, although the placement of the caption and seal on the letter paper and in the catalog differ (fig. 3.12). The motif is not one that demands a specific type of usage. Nonetheless, the content of Zou’s letter, which apparently concerns his role as a middleman in the trade of antiquities, does not seem particularly well suited to the political symbolism of the multi-headed grain, which is supposed to appear during periods of good governance. It reads:48 The examination period has been extended. This will allow you quiet contemplation for a while longer. I happen to have a Xuande censer. Its color has the most ancient sheen. I am sending it over. See if you have some silver, then it can be pawned. He wants ten taels. I look forward to [?] Lin bows his head.

46 These are reproduced in Liang Ying, Chidu fengya, 28, 29, 32–25. 47 Sun Chengze, writing some time before 1660, said that Zou was removed from office because of his involvement in a heterodox group. This and other biographical information on Zou is fully translated in Little, “Notes on Zou Zhilin,” 338. 48 I am grateful for the assistance of Bai Qianshen and Tsao Hsingyuan in the transliteration and translation of Zou’s letter and that of Han Jing introduced below.

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Figure 3.12 Zou Zhilin. Letter. Ink on Ten Bamboo Studio paper with polychrome woodblock-printed design. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

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試期改緩似為 足下可靜攝以待適有宣爐一個其色 古潤之極奉過 首有銀可當之渠欲十金也 望□ 麟頓首 The line breaks, which are reproduced in the translation and transcription above, cannot be explained by the conventions of letter-writing in China, which require writers to begin a new line to indicate respect toward their correspondent or a third party.49 It seems that, as in the Wang Shizhen letter mentioned previously (fig. 3.5), Zou deliberately avoided writing over the printed design. This letter is undated and its recipient unknown, however, we can speculate that the paper was purchased during the one- to two-year period that Zou Zhilin spent in Nanjing at the Southern Ming court. Thus, Zou’s use of the image of double-headed grain may have been meant to commemorate an actual sighting of an auspicious omen, to communicate a sense of faith in the new regime, or perhaps even as to induce Heaven to bestow its mandate on the emperor. It is possible, too, that the letter was written some time after the fall of the Southern Ming and Zou’s return to his hometown of Wujin 武進 (modern-day Changzhou). Based on Zhou Lianggong’s 周亮工 entry on Zou Zhilin in his Du hua lu 讀畫錄 (Record of looking at paintings), Stephen Little speculates that in retirement Zou supported himself by selling his paintings and calligraphy, and his role as a dealer in antiquities or go-between may also date to this later period of his life.50 Occasionally one does find letters written on decorated paper where a clear relationship between the image and the letter text can be drawn. A letter by Han Jing 韓經 (fl. early 15th c.) provides an example of a letter for which the paper was carefully chosen to match its content.51 The letter concerns an elegy written by Han for the father of a friend:

49 Such conventions are also discussed in Lik Hang Tsui’s essay in this volume. 50 Little, “Notes on Zou Zhilin,” 338. Zou’s biography in Du hua lu is translated by Little, pp. 332–37; and by Kim, “Chou Liang-kung,” 2:54–56. For another interpretation of the relationship between the text of Zou’s letter and the design, see Hsiao Li-ling, “Yinyuxing de shengchan moshi,” 61–64. 51 This unpublished letter is in the collection of Princeton University Art Museum.

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I am presenting you with an elegy for your departed father. The vulgarity [of my effort] is shameful. Just read it [to discern] my feelings. For your farewell handscroll, besides that of Binzhi, I tried to get two more poems, but couldn’t get more. I am very [?] that we did not have time to hold a farewell banquet. The road is long. Take care of yourself. I send my best wishes. I’ll say no more. 5th month, 16th day. Jing bows his head. 今先翁輓詩舉 上鄙俚可媿姑見 情耳送行卷 賓之之外更索 得二首不能多也 □甚不及攀餞 遠道惟 保嗇乃至祝在 諸不二 五月十六日經頓首 The letter is written on paper decorated with a large picture of a day-lily. Also known by the name wang you cao 忘憂草, or “trouble-forgetting plant,” this flower was appropriate to use in the context of mourning. A paper to be used for a letter regarding a sensitive subject such as the death of a parent—an event fraught not only with personal but also social significance—was likely chosen with greater care than usual to achieve an appropriate correspondence in mood or theme with the content of the letter. There are also designs that frame, sometimes literally, the text as epistolary. The paper used by Li Kan for his painting of bamboo is of this type (fig. 3.2). The combination of geese among clouds and fish in water as a design, along with the caption “Geese fly and fish submerge” 雁飛魚沉, identify this as stationery paper. The goose motif is an allusion to the story of the Han general Su Wu 蘇武 (d. 60 BCE) who was captured by the Xiongnu. Years later, when the Han and the Xiongnu were at peace, the emperor asked for the return of Su Wu but the Xiongnu chieftain falsely reported that he had died. According to Han shu 漢書, the Han ambassador to the nomads learned that Su and others were still alive and used a ruse, saying that the emperor had shot down a goose to the foot of which was tied a letter saying that the Chinese captives were still

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being held. Confronted with this story, the Xiongnu released the prisoners.52 The image of a goose delivering a letter from afar became a popular trope in Chinese literature. The convention of the fish as letter carrier already appears in an ancient folksong, recorded in the early anthology Wen xuan 文選, which reads in part: 客從遠方來 遺我雙鯉魚 呼兒烹鯉魚 中有尺素書

A guest came from far away And gave me a pair of carp. I called the boy to cook the carp; In its belly there was a letter.53

This sort of indexical design was promoted by the late Ming/early Qing author and publisher Li Yu 李漁 (1610/11–1680) who followed in the footsteps of Wu Faxiang and Hu Zhengyan by producing letter papers that he sold, along with books, in a shop he opened in the Jiezi yuan 芥子園 (Mustard Seed Garden) whilst living in Nanjing, between 1657 and 1677. These seem to have contributed substantially to his income, and he warned others against copying his designs and directed readers to his shop.54 In the section on “Stationery” (Jianjian 箋簡) in Li’s book Xianqing ouji 閒情偶寄 (Casual expressions of idle feeling) he proposes a union of form and function in letter paper design:55 They are called jianjian 箋簡, and in these two characters—jian [writing paper] and jian [bamboo slip]—there is inexhaustible innate meaning. Besides “fish letters” and “goose silk,” can’t one employ the style of bamboo slips? Create a likeness of the form of books? Aren’t handscrolls, albums, fans, brocade screens and embroidered hanging scrolls the ground on which one wields the brush? One can leave an inscription on a stone wall, and banana leaves have served as paper; is this—my own personal theory—previously unheard of? 既名箋簡,則箋簡二字中便有無窮本義。魚書雁帛而外,不有 竹刺之式可為乎?書本之形可肖乎?卷冊便面,錦屏繡軸之

52 Han shu 8.2466. 53 Wen xuan 27.1277–78. 54 Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, 13–14. See also Chang and Chang, Crisis and Transformation, 72. 55 Li Yu, Xianqing ouji, 255. Patrick Hanan notes that this interest in form following function is seen in Li’s comments on other objects as well as notepaper. The Invention of Li Yu, 72.

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上,非染翰揮毫之地乎?石壁可以留題,蕉葉曾經代紙,豈意 未之前聞,而為予之臆說乎? Li produced two sets or categories of papers, “Refined events” (yunshi 韻事) in eight designs and “Brocade paper” ( jinjian 錦箋) in ten designs. What are “refined events”? Inscribing stone, inscribing a scroll, fans, book chapters, bamboo slips, snow on banana palm, scrolls, and albums. The ten types of brocade designs imitate the idea of brocade palindromes; the entire surface is brocaded, with an area of crepe-like patterns left for people to write. After one has written, there is no distinction between the writing and the woven palindrome.56 韻事者何?題石、題軸、便面、書卷、剖竹、雪蕉、卷子、冊 子是也。錦紋十種,則盡仿回文織錦之義,滿幅皆錦,止留 紋 缺處代人作書,書成之後,與織就之回文無異。 A few of Li’s letters written on his own papers survive, and these bear out the evidence of Xianqing ouji. A letter in the collection of the Shanghai Library is written on a printed paper designed to resemble a woodblock-printed book (fig. 3.13). At the far right is a blank section with a title slip within which is printed “Book chapter letter: Newly produced by the Old Man in the Fisherman’s Hat” 書卷啟:笠翁新制, Li Yu’s style name. The rest of the sheet is printed with framed sections of lined columns; these consist of two sets of five columns separated in the center by a narrower column that resembles the “central seam” (zhongfeng 中缝) that in printed books usually bears the title of the text and the page number. At the top of this column is printed “conducting business in 10 sections” 十部從事, presumably referring to the ten columns within which one would write one’s letter; at the bottom there are two rows of smaller characters that read: “blocks are the collection of the Mustard Seed Garden / those who steal and carve [this design] will be investigated” 芥子園藏板竊 刻者必究. While Li sold his notepaper and made gifts of it to friends and acquaintances, he did not follow in Hu Zhengyan and Wu Faxiang’s footsteps and produce a letter paper catalog.57 It is clear that the potential of letter paper design to provide a type of commentary on written text was perceived in the late Ming. A book that explicitly cites letter paper design as the source for one aspect of its illustrations is 56 Li Yu, Xianqing ouji, 255. 57 Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, 3, 5.

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Figure 3.13 Li Yu. Letter. Ink on Mustard Seed Garden paper with woodblock printed design of book format. Shanghai Library.

the anonymous historical novel Sui Yangdi yanshi 隋煬帝艶史 (The romantic history of Emperor Yang of the Sui); this work is attributed to one Qidong yeren 齊東野人, the “Rustic from the Sticks” in Robert Hegel’s translation, with prefaces dated to 1631.58 This work gives a fictionalized account of the life of Emperor Yang (569–618), the second and last emperor of the Sui dynasty (581–618), who was held responsible for the fall of the dynasty because of his licentious behavior and neglect of duty. In the first volume of the text are grouped eighty folios of illustrations, two for each chapter of the novel.59 The recto of each sheet bears a narrative illustration of an event in the 58 Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 85. Robert E. Hegel provides a synopsis of the entire novel and relates the content to events of the Ming dynasty. In addition, he describes the editions of the work that he has studied in an appendix. Reading Illustrated Fiction, 84–103, and 241–44. 59 The volume that I have studied most closely in the East Asian Collection of the Hoover Institution lacks illustrations for chapters 21 through 25, corresponding to juan three of the novel. William H. Nienhauser notes that a copy he consulted in the Graduate Library at National Taiwan University is missing the same set of illustrations. See his “A Reading of the Poetic Captions,” 20. The blocks from which the Hoover volume was printed were somewhat worn, judging from the fuzziness of some of the lines; they had also suffered numerous small losses. Possibly by the time of this issue some of the blocks had been completely lost and were not replaced. I was first alerted to the use of letter paper motifs in the illustrations to Sui Yangdi yanshi by Ma Meng-ching who had written an unpublished paper on this text. She has since published an article on this same topic, “Sui Yangdi yanshi de tushi pingdian.”

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c­orresponding chapter; in the margin at lower left is inscribed the chapter heading which indicates the subject of the picture. On the verso of each page are lines of poetry, not drawn from the text of the drama but from other sources, written in a variety of calligraphic styles. Each quotation is framed by a different decorative border, with a brief notation in the lower right margin to indicate the significance of the motifs used. Several items in the guidelines for readers explain the relationship of these different elements and explicitly state that the decorative frames on the verso sheets are derived from stationery paper designs: The lines of poetry have all been woven into borders in the fashion of Xue Tao and Raven Threads, etc. . . . These brocaded borders were all created to accord with the figural images. For instance, for the scene “Taking liberties with Xuanhua,” the pattern “twining vine” was used; for “Bestowing a double-diamond knot,” “linked rings” was used. . . . Not one is inappropriate. Although one might say this is minor entertainment, its significance is actually deep.60 In the recto illustration for the first half of chapter thirty-two, we see a narrative scene of Emperor Yang in dishabille enjoying the company of four equally scantily clad young women; in the foreground a fifth woman is rushed to the emperor’s chamber on horseback, accompanied by four male attendants (fig. 3.14, right). The title of the scene, at lower left, is “Cinnabar pills extend spring”; the chapter describes how the emperor begins to take cinnabar because his sexual activities are sapping his strength. On the verso is a portion of the poem “Four Seasonal Grievances of the Border Government” by the tenth-century poet Lu Rubi 盧汝弼 (d. 923), here identified as Lu Bi (fig. 3.14, left). It reads: “In the middle of the night a fire appears—I know the enemy is here. /In a moment they completely encircle the Helan Mountains” 半夜火來知有敵,一時齊保賀 蘭山.61 The juxtaposition of a nighttime scene of sexual excess, the emperor surrounded by female partners, with the literary image of an encampment 60 My translation was aided by Nienhauser’s rendering of the same four items (“A Reading of the Poetic Captions,” 20–21) and by the translation of some material not included in Nienhauser’s abridged version by Ma Meng-ching in “Verbal and Visual Modes of Commentary.” Ma also translates the other items in the reader’s guidelines, omitted by Nienhauser, in her Appendix II. “Raven Threads” refers to letter paper with column lines in black (wusilan 烏絲欄). 61 This poem is included in Wei Hu, Caidiao ji, 142–43, where Lu Rubi’s name is given as Lu Bi. A biography of Lu can be found in Jiu Wudai shi 60.809.

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Figure 3.14 Anonymous. Cinnabar pills extend spring. Sui Yangdi yan shi. 1631. H ca. 26 cm. Stanford University Library.

under attack is incongruous; it could be a purely satiric juxtaposition, but might also be read as a reference to the threat to the emperor’s health posed by his activities and to the imminent loss of his kingdom due, at least in part, to his self-indulgence. Framing the lines of poetry is a border of double lines enclosing blossoms interspersed with butterflies and bees; the caption at lower right reads “Bees clamor and butterflies cry” 蜂喧蝶嚷. Bees and butterflies attracted by flowers is a common metaphor for men’s sexual attraction to women, which here underscores the content of the recto scene. This layering of visual and poetic imagery to provide both illustration and commentary on the events of the book parallels the purpose of the novel itself, which, in Robert Hegel’s words, uses “the Sui as a metaphor for the crumbling Ming.”62 One can find numerous other printed texts from the seventeenth century that utilize such paired narrative and non-narrative images in a 62 For a discussion of the correspondences between events of the novel and the reign of the Wanli 萬曆 emperor of the Ming (r. 1563–1620), see Hegel, The Novel in SeventeenthCentury China, 91–103. My thanks to an anonymous reader who raised this point.

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similar fashion, although no others explicitly cite letter papers as the source for designs. Another use of the imagery of decorated letter papers to reference the act of letter-writing is found in a set of woodblock-printed illustrations for an edition of Xixiang ji 西廂記 (Record of the western chamber) published by Min Qiji 閔齊伋 (1580–after 1661) of Wucheng 烏程 (modern-day Huzhou), Zhejiang province, in 1640 or later. Besides the half-length portrait of the heroine Yingying, there are twenty leaves corresponding to the twenty acts of Wang Shifu’s 王實甫 (ca. 1250–1300) play.63 One of several leaves that use letter paper type designs is the ninth, which illustrates the penning of the hero Student Zhang’s first love note to Yingying, which is so admiringly described by the maid Crimson in the play (fig. 3.15). The imagery of the print is quite spare. On the right half of the folio page appears a partially unrolled paper scroll embellished with a decorative border of reserve wave and floral designs against a red ground, which frames six columns of neat characters, followed by two seals. These lines are taken directly from Wang’s play, but do not constitute the entire letter; rather, it is the poem appended to Zhang’s message that is quoted. On the left side of the composition is a carp rising out of water toward a bird in flight above, from whose feet dangle the ends of a ribbon—goose and fish—those conventional references to the delivery of letters. Drawing on motifs that refer to the delivery of letters across great distances by extraordinary means might seem hyperbolic for an illustration of the conveyance of a message by a maid-servant from one part of a temple compound, where most of the play takes place, to another. However, the carp and goose function not only as a pictorial sign that the text at right is epistolary, but also may be read as a reference to the omitted part of Zhang’s letter, the main body of which begins: “Since I have been separated from your mien, the geese have been rare, the scales have disappeared.” 自別顏範,鴻稀鱗絕.64 In this illustration, the illustrative modes of letter papers are the primary means for pictorial reference to the action of the play, suggesting a high degree of familiarity with this form of pictorial language on the part of the viewer.



63 All of the leaves except the portrait of Yingying are numbered. Edith Dittrich refers to the portrait as the twenty-first leaf, but presumably it would have served as the frontispiece to the illustrations, a practice we see in other illustrated texts of the period. Dittrich, “Ein frühes Album,” 33. See also the excellent study of these illustrations by Kobayashi, “Mindai hanga no seika,” 39. 64 Wang Shifu, Xixiang ji, 97; translated in Wang Shifu, The Story of the Western Wing, 195.

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Min Qiji. Leaf 9 from Xixiang ji. Polychrome woodblock print. Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln, Inv. Nr. R 62,1 (9). Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv, rba_c021074.

The appearance of letter paper design catalogs and the apparent popularity of decorated letter papers and their distinctive pictorial language are only one aspect of an interest in epistolary practices in the late Ming and early Qing. In this period there is an increase in the publication of letters and letter-writing manuals and expanded opportunities for writers to see their correspondence in print. A deepening self-consciousness regarding the act of letter-writing would have drawn greater attention to the materials used in writing: brush, ink, inkstone, paper, etc. This is apparent in the appearance of woodblockprinted catalogs of such objects, greater numbers of texts which discuss and evaluate scholars’ accoutrements, in the greater prestige of artists who created these items, and the involvement of well-known painters and calligraphers in their design or manufacture. After the seventeenth century, synecdochal designs that obliquely reference historical anecdotes seem to have fallen out of favor. Letter papers continued to be graced with pictorial designs, sometimes of impressive size in relation to the paper surface, of a variety of subjects. Figures, which are seldom seen on letters of the seventeenth century or earlier, perhaps because of the practice of over-writing the image, became more popular in the nineteenth.

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While some of the designs that appear in the Shizhuzhai jianpu were created by painters working in Nanjing at the time, it is not clear if these images were created for letter papers or were first made for Hu Zhengyan’s manual of calligraphy and painting, Shizhuzhai shuhua pu 十竹齋書畫譜 (Ten Bamboo Studio guide to calligraphy and painting), and then appropriated for the letter paper catalog as well. In the twentieth century, however, well-known artists such as Qi Baishi 齊白石 (1864–1957) created designs for stationery papers and earlier artists’ work was copied by producers of papers, at the same time that there was a revival of interest in earlier letter paper designs.65 Bibliography Bai, Qianshen. “Chinese Letters: Private Words Made Public.” In The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection, edited by Robert E. Harrist, Jr. and Wen C. Fong, 381–99. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University Press, 1999. Birrell, Anne, trans. New Songs from a Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986. Chang, Chun-shu and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang. Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China: Society, Culture and Modernity in Li Yü’s World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Chen Zuolin 陳作霖, ed. Jinling tongzhuan 金陵通傳. N.p.: Ruihua guan, 1904; rpt. Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970. Chuxue ji 初學記. Compiled by Xu Jian 徐堅 (659–729) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Dittrich, Edith. “Ein frühes Album chinesischer literarischer Farbenholzschnitte im Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Köln.” Beiträge zur Kunst Ostasiens, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, vol. 48. Tokyo: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, 1968. Duan Yong 段勇. Qianlong “Simei” yu “Sanyou” 乾隆〈四美〉與〈三友〉. Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe, 2008. Fang Yizhi 方以智. Wuli xiaozhi 物理小識. Siku quanshu zhenben shiyi ji 四庫全書珍 本十一集, vols. 131–32. Taipei: Shangwu chubanshe, 1981. Gansusheng Wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo and Tianshuishi Beidaoqu wenhuaguan 甘肅省 文物考古研究所、天水市北道區文化館. “Gansu Tianshui Fangmatan Zhanguo Qin Han muqun de fajue” 甘肅天水放馬灘戰國秦漢墓群的發掘. Wenwu no. 2 (1989): 1–11, 31, color plates 1 and 2. 65 See, e.g., letter paper designs by Qi Baishi and after Huang Shen 黄慎 (1687–1772) in Lai, Chinese Decorated Letter-Paper, 104, 105, 134.

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Guang yun 廣韻. Edited by Chen Pengnian 陳彭年 (961–1017) and Qiu Yong 邱雍. Taipei: Zhonghua shu ju, 1965. Guo Tingxun 過庭訓, comp. Ben (Ming) chao fensheng renwu kao 本(明)朝分省人 物考. Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1971. Han shu 漢書. Compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Hanan, Patrick. The Invention of Li Yu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Harrist, Robert E., Jr. and Wen C. Fong, eds. The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1999. Hegel, Robert E., Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ―――. The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Hsiao Li-ling 蕭麗玲. “Yinyuxing de shengchan moshi: Shizhuzhai jianpu de bianji yuanze” 隱喻型的生產模式—《十竹齋箋譜》的編輯原則. Hanxue yanjiu 28.2 (2010): 57–86. ―――. “Xue Tao Stationery: Delivering Love for a Thousand Years.” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 33 (2011): 160–68. “Hubei Yunmeng Shuihudi shiyi zuo Qin mu fajue jianbao” 湖北雲夢睡虎地十一座 秦墓發掘簡報. Wenwu 9 (1976): 51–62, plates 1, 6–7. Hucker, Charles O. “The Tung-lin Movement of the Late Ming Period.” In: Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank, 132–62. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Jin shu 晉書. Compiled by Fang Xuanling 房玄齡 (578–648). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Jiu Wudai shi 舊五代史. Compiled by Xue Juzheng 薛居正 et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju chubanshe, 1977. Kim, Hong-nam. “Chou Liang-kung and his ‘Tu-hua-lu’ (Lives of Painters): PatronCritic and Painters in Seventeenth Century China.” PhD diss, Yale University, 1985. Kobayashi Hiromitsu 小林宏光. “Mindai hanga no seika: Kurun shiritsu Tōa bijutsukan shozō Sūtei jūsan nen (1640) kan Min Seiki Seishō ki hanga ni tsuite” 明代版畫 の精華-ケルン市立東亞美術館所藏崇禎十三年(1640)刊閔齊伋本西廂記 版畫につイて. Kobijutsu 85 (1988): 32–50. Kuroda Genji 黑田源次 and Okada Isaburō 岡田伊三次郎. Shina kohanga zuroku 支那古版畫圖錄. Tokyo: Bijutsu Konwakai, 1932. Lai, T. C. Chinese Decorated Letter-Paper. Kowloon, Hong Kong: Swindon Book Co., 1978. Li Yu 李漁. Xianqing ouji 閒情偶寄. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000. Li Zhao 李肇. Hanlin zhi 翰林志. Baichuan xuehai 百川學海, 2. N.p.: Yiwen yinshuguan, n.d.

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Liang Ying 梁颖. “Manhua caijian (san)” 漫話彩箋 (三). Shoucangjia 135.2 (2008): 36–40. ―――. Chidu fengya: Ming Qing caijian tulu 尺素風雅:明清彩箋圖錄. Jinan: Shandong meishu chubanshe, 2010. Li ji zhushu 禮記注疏. In Shisanjing zhushu 十三經注疏. Compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849). Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1955. Lin, Li-chiang.“The Proliferation of Images: The Ink-Stick Designs and the Printing of the Fang-shih mo-p’u and the Ch’eng-shih mo-yüan.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1998. Little, Stephen. “Notes on Zou Zhilin.” Artibus Asiae 54.3–4 (1994): 327–46. Ma Meng-ching. “Verbal and Visual Modes of Commentary in the Sui Yang-ti Yen shih.” Unpublished paper, Stanford University, June 16, 1995. ――― 馬孟晶. “Sui Yangdi yanshi de tushi pingdian yu wan Ming chuban wenhua” 《隋煬帝豔史》的圖飾評點與晚明出版文化. Hanxue yanjiu 28.2 (2010): 7–56. Miao Quansun 繆荃孫. Yun zi zai kan biji 雲自在堪筆記. Guxue hui kan 古學彙刊, section 56, vol. 9. Shanghai: Guocui xuebaoshe, 1912. Ming shi 明史. Compiled by Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Nienhauser, William H., Jr. “A Reading of the Poetic Captions in an Illustrated Version of the ‘Sui Yang-ti Yen-shih’.” Hanxue yanjiu 6.1 (1977): 17–35. Pan Jixing 潘吉星. Zhongguo zaozhi jishu shi gao 中國造紙技術史稿. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1979. ―――. “Zhongguo gudai jiagong zhi shi zhong: Zhongguo gudai zaozhi jishu shi zhuanti yanjiu zhi wu” 中國古代加工紙十種-中國古代造紙技術史專題研 究之五. Wenwu 2 (1979): 38–48. Platt, Stephen R. Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Qi Gong 啓功 and Shen Peng 沈鵬. Song Jin Yuan shufa 宋金元書法. Zhongguo meishu quanji: Shufa zhuanke pian 中國美術全集:書法篆刻篇, vol. 4. Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1986. Qimin yaoshu 齊民要術. Compiled by Jia Sixie 賈思勰. N.p.: Zhong zixue mingzhu jicheng bianyin jijinhui, 1977. Quan Tang shi 全唐詩. Edited by Peng Dingqiu 彭定球. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960. Shu Chao 書巢. “Ji moshu sizhong” 記墨書四種. Wenwu 6 (1979): 72–75. Song Huizong Zhao Ji shu Cai Xing chi 宋徽宗趙佶書蔡行勅. Hong Kong: Shupu she, 1976. Su Bai 宿白. Tang Song shiqi de diaoban yinshua 唐宋時期的雕版印刷. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1999. Su Shi 蘇軾. Jingjin Dongpo wenji shilue 經進東坡文集事略. Beijing: Wenxue guji kanxing she, 1957.

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Tan Weisi 譚維四. Zeng hou Yi mu 曾侯乙墓. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2001. Tsien, Tsuen-hsuin. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, part I: Paper and Printing. Cambridge: University Press, 1985. ―――. Written on Bamboo and Silk. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Wang Bomin 王伯敏. Zhongguo banhua shi 中國版畫史. Shanghai: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1961. Wang Shifu 王實甫. The Story of the Western Wing, trans. Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ―――. Xixiang ji 西廂記. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1978. Watson, Burton, trans. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Wei Hu 韋穀. Caidiao ji 才調集. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993. Wen xuan 文選. Compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–531). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986. Wright, Suzanne E. “Hu Zhengyan: Fashioning Biography.” Ars Orientalis 35 (2008): 129–54. ―――. “Visual Communication and Social Identity in Woodblock-Printed Letter Papers of the Late Ming Dynasty.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 1999. Yang, Zhiyi. “Dialectics of Spontaneity: Art, Nature, and Persona in the Life and Works of Su Shi (1037–1101).” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2012. Yutai xinyong 玉臺新詠. Compiled by Xu Ling 徐陵. Beijing: Zhongguo shudian 1986. Zhang Tiexian 张鐵弦. “Cong shujian tandao shijian” 從書簡談到詩箋. Wenwu 1 (1961): 34–37. Zhang Wei. The Four Treasures: Inside the Scholar’s Studio. San Francisco: Long River Press, 2004. Zhong Xing 鐘惺. Ru mian tan 如面談. Shanghai: Zhongyang shudian, 1936. Zhongguo shuji daguan 中國書蹟大觀, vol. 6. Edited by Shanghai bowuguan 上海博 物館. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1988–89. Zhou Lianggong 周亮工. Shuying zelu 書影擇錄. Meishu congshu 美術叢書, vol. 1: 241–50. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1986.

chapter 4

Material and Symbolic Economies: Letters and Gifts in Early Medieval China* Xiaofei Tian This essay examines a group of letters in early medieval China, specifically from the turn of the third century and from the early sixth century, about gift giving and receiving. Gift-giving is one of the things that stand at the center of social relationships across many cultures. “The gift imposes an identity upon the giver as well as the receiver.”1 It both produces social relationships and affirms them; it establishes and clarifies social status, displays power, strengthens alliances, and creates debts and obligations. This was particularly true in the chaotic period following the collapse of the Han empire at the turn of the third century, often referred to as the Jian’an 建安 era (196–220), after the reign title of the last Han emperor. At such a time of social disintegration, gift-giving practices—along with feasting, a powerful social institution that brought people together and reinforced the values of fellowship and civility—constituted material and symbolic exchanges that fostered bonds, rebuilt hierarchical structures and reconstituted the community. Modern gift theory was largely initiated by anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) in the early twentieth century, and has subsequently become a subject of interdisciplinary inquiry in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, economics, folklore, history, and literary theory. The greatest contribution of Mauss was to situate the apparently simple exchange of gifts within a complicated network of social rules and obligations and to show that reciprocity is a key aspect of gift-giving, which operates as a process of exchange and circulation.2 Derrida extends the idea of reciprocity and argues that, since all * The draft of this paper was read at the Workshop “Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture in China” at the University of Colorado at Boulder in August 2012 and, in part, at the Medieval Workshop at Rutgers University in May 2013. I thank the participants of the workshops and my discussant at the Medieval Workshop, Professor Meow Hui Goh, for questions and comments. 1  Schwartz, “The Social Psychology,” 2. 2  Mauss’s most famous work is Essai sur le Don, Forme et Raison de l’Échange dans les Sociétés archaïques, translated by Ian Cunnison into English as The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_006

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gifts implicate the recipient in social obligations, a true gift must not appear as a gift, or it would not be a gift at all: “For there to be gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt.”3 Derrida’s argument about the impossibility of the gift draws attention to the gift’s aggressive nature: in that it implicitly demands a return, a gift is just like an insult or a blow. Indeed, sometimes a gift itself serves as an insult: in the early third century, the minister of the Shu-Han kingdom, Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234), once sent the gift of female clothes to his nemesis Sima Yi 司馬懿 (179–251), the Wei commander, in a desperate effort to challenge Sima Yi to military action; Sima Yi’s refusal to fight proved the best return gift because it matched Zhuge Liang’s present in its ill intention.4 To study gift-giving is therefore to study the process of exchange and circulation in which an object takes on additional value, economic or symbolic or both, besides its use value. The exchange of letters in many ways evokes the exchange of gifts. To address a letter to someone implicitly carries with it a request for timely response and reciprocation, and epistolary conventions create a complex system of rules and constraints that define and maintain social relations. Furthermore, a letter itself is also a material object. As Antje Richter states in her ground-breaking study of epistolary culture in early medieval China, “The materiality of letters is more pronounced than that of many other genres.”5 This fact is particularly important in the case of a famous calligrapher whose handwriting is prized for its aesthetic and commercial value.6 In a well-known story, the statesman Xie An 謝安 (320–385) deliberately wrote his reply in the blank end space of a letter from Wang Xianzhi 王獻之 (344–386), a celebrated calligrapher, and sent it back to Wang to show that he did not care to preserve Wang’s calligraphy, to Wang’s chagrin.7 This story underlines the physical nature of a letter and highlights the resemblance of the presentation of a letter to that of a gift. Thus, exchanging letters regarding giving and receiving a gift constitutes yet another 3  Derrida, Given Time, 12. 4 Sanguo zhi 3.103. The anecdote originally appears in Sun Sheng’s 孫盛 (302–73) Weishi Chunqiu 魏氏春秋, cited in Pei Songzhi’s 裴松之 (372–451) commentary to Sanguo zhi. In analyzing Gawain and the Green Knight, Britton J. Harwood remarks that “with insults, reciprocal blows, and gifts, the recipient controls not only the nature but the timing of the return.” Harwood, “Gawain and the Gift,” 487. 5  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 17. 6  For a description of the emergence and subsequent prevalence of this phenomenon in early medieval China, see the section on “Calligraphy and Letter Writing” in Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 23–26. 7  The anecdote can be found, among other early sources, in Zhang Huaiguan’s 張懷瓘 (fl. early 8th c.) Shu duan 書斷, which was completed in 724. Lidai shufa lunwen xuan, 205.

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layer of object transference, one that delimits and accentuates the symbolic significance of gift exchange. In the letters discussed in this essay, the transaction between letter writer and letter recipient happens on both the material and discursive level. The letters constitute a verbal and material economy that is closely tied to the production of value of the circulated objects, and enable a new balance to be established between donor and recipient. The presence of the letters gives nuances to and even defines the gifts, and infinitely complicates the concept of reciprocity in gift exchange as initially proposed by Marcel Mauss. 1

The Gift of Death and Life

Like any social action, the general significance of gift giving must be instantiated in specific contexts. The symbolic nuances of a gift vary in different situations, and letters accompanying gifts are often essential for the correct interpretation of the gifts. In this section I focus on a pair of letters exchanged between Cao Cao 曹操 (155–220), the powerful warlord, and Yang Biao 楊彪 (142–225), an eminent senior minister, as well as a pair of letters exchanged between Cao Cao’s wife, Lady Bian 卞 (159–230), and Yang Biao’s wife, Lady Yuan 袁.8 As we will see, the letters of the gift givers are not only crucial for the receivers to decipher the meaning of the gifts but also constitute a gift in themselves that requires proper encoding. Yang Biao was from an old elite family that had occupied prestigious official positions in the Han court for generations. Seeing that Cao Cao had become the sole power-holder at the court and the days of the Han dynasty were numbered, Yang Biao had retired under the pretext of frail health in 206. His son Yang Xiu 楊修 (d. 219), however, served on Cao Cao’s staff. Because of his impressive family background and outstanding talent, Yang Xiu was eagerly sought after by Cao Cao’s sons, Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226) and Cao Zhi 曹植 (192– 232), who competed fiercely with each other to be Cao Cao’s chosen heir and tried to gain personal influence by winning the allegiance of worthy men. In 8  The letters are preserved in juan 10 of Gu wen yuan 古文苑, a Tang/Song anthology of preTang literature. For a recent study of the making of Gu wen yuan, see Wang Xiaojuan, Gu wen yuan lungao. Fragments of Cao Cao’s letter are also seen in Sui, Tang, and Song encyclopedias such as Beitang shuchao 北堂書鈔, Chuxue ji 初學記 and Taiping yulan 太平御覽. The letters are preserved in an abbreviated form in Yin Yun’s 殷芸 (471–529) Xiaoshuo 小說, an anecdotal collection that is lost and has been reconstituted from various works. Yin Yun Xiaoshuo, 91–93.

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217, Cao Cao, already enfeoffed as King of Wei by the Han emperor, designated Cao Pi as the Crown Prince. Two years later, concerned that Yang Xiu’s intelligence and his friendship with Cao Zhi might cause political instability, Cao Cao had Yang Xiu executed.9 After Yang Xiu’s execution, Cao Cao sent a number of lavish gifts to Yang Biao and his wife along with the following letter.10 Cao lets you know: I share with you, sir, the great principle within the four seas. 足下不遺 You, sir, did not abandon me, 以賢子見輔 and sent your worthy son to assist me. 比中國雖靖 Lately, although the Central Plains have been appeased, 方外未夷 the distant regions are not yet pacified. 今軍征事大 The current military affairs are grave matters, 百姓騷擾 and the common folk are not at ease. 吾制鐘鼓之音 I set the tone of bells and drums, 主簿宜守 which my administrators should observe. 而足下賢子恃豪父之勢 And yet, relying on the influence of his powerful father, 每不與吾同懷 your worthy son frequently went against my wishes. 即欲直繩 I had wanted to regulate him with law, 顧頗恨恨 but found it too regrettable. 謂其能改 I had hoped that he would change his ways, 遂轉寬舒 but he only grew increasingly lax. 復即宥貸 If I should have forgiven him again, 將延足下尊門大累 he would have caused your honorable clan great trouble. 便令刑之 So I had him executed. 念卿父息之情 When I think of a father’s love for his son, 同此悼楚 I share your parental grief. 亦未必非幸也 Nevertheless, this is not necessarily a misfortune for you, sir. 操白 與足下同海內大義

9   Sanguo zhi 19.558–560. 10  “Yu taiwei Yang Biao shu” 與太尉楊彪書, Gu wen yuan 10.81. Quan Sanguo wen 3.1070. For modern annotations, see Cao Cao ji yizhu, 184–85; Cao Cao ji zhu, 174–76.

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Now I present you, sir, with two brocade coats, 八節銀角桃杖一枚 an eight-section peach wood staff with silver inlaid handle, 青氈床褥三具 three sets of blue felt beddings, 官絹五百匹 five hundred bolts of government silk, 錢六十萬 six hundred thousand cash, 畫輪四望通幰七香車一乘 a four-windowed curtained carriage made of seven aromatic woods with painted wheels, 青牸牛二頭 two black cows, 八百里驊騮馬一匹 one fine eight-hundred-league steed, 赤戎金裝鞍轡十副 ten sets of copper-decorated saddles and reins made of crimson flannel, 鈴眊一具 one tapestry with hanging bells, 驅使二人 and two servants. 並遺足下貴室 I also present your esteemed wife with 錯綵羅縠裘一領 one many-colored robe of thin gauze, 織成靴一量 one pair of brocatelle boots, 有心青衣二人 and two thoughtful maids 長奉左右 who will remain in her service. 所奉雖薄 Although my gifts are insignificant, 以表吾意 they are meant to convey my sentiments. 足下便當慨然承納 I ask you, sir, to accept them generously 不致往返 and spare the messenger from going back and forth. 今贈足下錦裘二領

If the rich gifts described in the letter had been sent without this letter, they most likely would have been construed as a gesture of consolation and placation, an expression of feelings of guilt on Cao Cao’s part and his attempt to compensate for the taking of Yang Xiu’s life, but the presence of the letter greatly complicates the picture. The letter opens with the assertion that he, Cao Cao, shares with Yang Biao “the great principle within the four seas.” What the “great principle” might be is anyone’s guess—the modern annotators take it to refer to Cao Cao and Yang Biao’s common vassalage to the house of the Han,11 and that might very well be the case, as Cao Cao kept up the appearance of being a subject to the Han emperor all his life. Rhetorically, the assertion places Yang and Cao on the same side, which is also the righteous side. This makes it difficult for Yang 11  Cao Cao ji yizhu, 185.

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to oppose Cao on ideological grounds. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the word “share” (tong) appears three times in the letter: the first time is in this assertion, and the third time is when Cao claims he shares Yang Biao’s grief as a father. These gestures of accord, sympathy, and pacification are, however, undercut by the ominous threat, not so thinly veiled, in the main body of the letter. Just as the second time Cao uses the word “share” is to denounce Yang Xiu for going against his wishes (bu yu wu tong huai, lit. “not sharing my concerns”), he intimates that any failure to “share” Cao Cao’s concerns leads to dire consequences. In the letter, Cao Cao describes the contemporary political situation as a precarious one. Under such circumstances, it is all the more important for his staff to strictly follow the orders of their leader, and any recalcitrance is understood not only as personally disrespectful to Cao Cao himself but also as implicitly endangering to the state. “And yet, relying on the influence of his powerful father, Your Lordship’s worthy son frequently went against my wishes.” To attribute Yang Xiu’s delinquency to a misplaced family pride and his reliance on an influential father is an important rhetorical move, for it directly connects Yang Xiu’s transgressions with Yang Biao himself. The inherent menace of such a claim is unmistakable. After stressing his forgiveness of Yang Xiu’s past offenses, Cao Cao declares: “If I should have forgiven him again, he would have caused Your Lordship’s honorable clan great trouble. So I had him executed.” Cao Cao turns everything around by showing Yang Biao how he has done him an enormous favor by executing his son. In order to drive the lesson home, Cao Cao reiterates it in no ambiguous terms: “this,” he says, “is not necessarily a misfortune for Your Lordship.” What follows is a list of lavish gifts for Yang Biao and his wife. It is worth noting that the gift of six hundred thousand cash is discreetly inserted in the middle of the inventory of clothes, carriage, horse, servants, and so on and so forth; as a result, even the monetary gift takes on the aura of an “object” for use in daily life like other things and loses some of its crassness. Nevertheless, the gift list raises the question of value: how much, after all, could be considered an adequate compensation paid to the parents for the taking of their son’s life? The answer is, obviously, nothing—or at least nothing of economic value. But Cao Cao’s letter makes it clear that the real gift he bestows on Yang Biao is the gift of life: by executing Yang Biao’s wayward son, Cao Cao has saved Yang Biao himself and his entire clan.12

12 The extermination of an offender’s whole clan was not an uncommon punishment, and indeed Cao Cao himself was known to mete out such punishment to his enemies, a fact that must have added weight to his words of intimidation. See Sanguo zhi 1.44, 1.53.

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In this case, it is evidently not possible, nor desirable, for Yang Biao to reciprocate Cao Cao’s gifts in any material form. The principle of reciprocity nevertheless holds true. In some ways, Cao Cao’s material gifts—money, clothes, horse, carriage, and other things—are return gifts for Yang Biao’s initial, equally physical gift of his “worthy son,” who, as Cao suggests at the beginning of the letter, was sent to Cao by Yang Biao himself. The material objects transferred from Cao Cao to Yang Biao are payment given as reparation for services and loss of life. But Cao’s letter constitutes a gift in a more immaterial form, which places Yang Biao under the obligation to acknowledge and give back something similar in nature to complete the gift-giving sequence. Yang Biao’s reply letter, as we will see, proves to be an adequate return gift. The two letters are placed side by side below to demonstrate the perfect symmetry between Cao Cao’s letter and Yang Biao’s reply.13 彪 白 。 雅 顧 隆 篤 , 每 蒙 接 納 ,  私自光慰。. Cao lets you know: I share with you, sir, Biao lets you know. You favor me the great principle within the four seas. deeply and sincerely. As I frequently have the honor of being received by you, I feel flattered and comforted in my heart. 小兒頑鹵,謬見采錄,不能期 效,以報所愛。 You, sir, did not abandon me, and sent My humble son was disobedient and your worthy son to assist me. dim-witted; he had been selected and appointed by mistake. I could not expect him to accomplish anything to repay those who loved him. 方 今 軍 征 未 暇 , 其 備 位 匡 政 ,  當 與 戮 力 一 心 , 而 寬 玩 自 稽 ,  將違法制。 Lately, although the Central Plains have The current military affairs are been appeased, the distant regions are extremely busy. As he was made not yet pacified. The current military to fill in a position and assist your

13  “Da Cao gong shu” 答曹公書, Gu wen yuan 10.81. Quan Hou Han wen 51.756.

142 affairs are grave matters, and the common folk are not at ease. I set the tone of bells and drums, which my administrators should observe. And yet, relying on the influence of his powerful father, your worthy son frequently went against my wishes.

I had wanted to regulate him with law, but found it too regrettable. I had hoped that he would change his ways, but he only grew increasingly lax. If I should have forgiven him again, he would have caused your honorable clan great trouble. So I had him executed.

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governance, he should have been of one mind with you. Instead, he was lax and careless in regulating himself, and violated laws and rules.

相子之行,莫若其父,恆慮小 兒必致傾敗。足下恩恕,延罪 迄今。 In observing and evaluating a son’s behavior, no one is better than his father. I had always worried that my son would one day meet with downfall. You, sir, had graciously tolerated him and postponed his punishment until now.

近聞問之日,心腸酷裂,凡人 情誰能不爾。深惟其失,用以 自釋。 When I think of a father’s love for On the day when I heard the news, his son, I share your parental grief. my heart was rent in pieces. This, I Nevertheless, this is not necessarily a am afraid, is human nature; who misfortune for you, sir. would not feel the same? All I can do is to reflect deeply on his wrongdoing and by this means console myself.

Now I present you, sir, with two brocade coats, an eight-section peach wood staff with silver inlaid handle, three sets of blue felt beddings, five hundred bolts of government silk, six hundred thousand cash, a four-windowed curtained carriage made of seven aromatic woods with painted wheels, two black cows,

所惠馬及雜物,自非親舊,孰 能至斯。 As for the horse and other miscellaneous things you presented me with, only relatives and old friends would do so much.

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one fine eight-hundred-league steed, ten sets of copper-decorated saddles and reins made of crimson flannel, one tapestry with hanging bells, and two servants. I also present your esteemed wife with one many-colored robe of thin gauze, one pair of brocatelle boots, and two thoughtful maids who will remain in her service. 省覽眾賜,益以悲懼。 Although my gifts are insignificant, they As I examine the various gifts you are meant to convey my sentiments. I have bestowed on me, they only ask you, sir, to accept them generously increase my sorrow and apprehension. and spare the messenger from going back and forth. In his reply, Yang not only responds to Cao point by point, but also elaborates on each statement made in Cao’s letter while following strictly, to borrow Cao’s musical metaphor, the “tone” set by Cao. To Cao’s reconciliatory remark about sharing the “great principle within the four seas,” he responds by expressing gratitude for Cao’s favor and reception. To Cao’s reference to Yang Xiu as his “worthy son,” he responds by describing Yang Xiu as “disobedient and dim-witted.” He echoes verbally Cao’s description of the contemporary political situation, and basically declares that Yang Xiu deserved his punishment. While Cao criticizes Yang Xiu for failing to share his concerns (tong huai), he agrees that Yang Xiu should indeed have been “of one mind” (yi xin) with Cao. He recognizes Cao’s “gracious tolerance” of Yang Xiu’s faults, and admits to feeling pain over his execution. His apologetic remark, “This, I am afraid, is human nature; who would not feel the same?” reverberates Cao’s comment on “a father’s love for his son,” but this remark is immediately followed by his admission of Yang Xiu’s wrongdoing, an act of reason to counteract the natural overflow of fatherly grief. As opposed to the detailed itemizing and description of the gifts in Cao’s letter, however, Yang Biao reduces the long list to a brief mention of “the horse and other miscellaneous things,” an understatement becoming his status as a senior minister from an old noble family. And yet, he shows his acute awareness of the symbolic value of the objects and his understanding of Cao Cao’s “sentiments,” of which the objects are a mere sign, by saying that the gifts “only increase my sorrow and apprehension.” In short, Yang Biao’s reply gives Cao

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Cao exactly what he wants and expects: an acknowledgement of the power imbalance between them and of total submission. Cao Cao’s gifts to Yang Biao, like the gifts given out by Merovingian and Carolingian kings and nobles, were meant to placate and subdue, and must be treated “as a category of power and as a political strategy.”14 Without his accompanying letter, however, the gifts might simply be regarded as compensation for a life taken and/or an expression of guilt. Cao Cao’s letter makes it clear that guilt is certainly not a part of the “sentiments” which he wishes to convey. Instead, he demonstrates to Yang Biao both his good will by giving lavish material gifts and the potentially dire consequences of rejecting his good will by bestowing the most costly gift of all: the gift of life. To refuse the material things would thus mean rejecting the gift of life that comes along with them. Yang Biao understands this well and duly fulfills the obligations Cao Cao’s giving creates in him: he accepts the gifts, and writes a reply letter affirming his submission as a gesture of reciprocation. It is intriguing to observe another pair of letters exchanged between Cao Cao’s wife, Lady Bian, and Yang Biao’s wife, Lady Yuan, under the same circumstances. The central question to be considered here is why it is apparently acceptable for Lady Yuan to reject Lady Bian’s gifts. Once again, the letters play a vital role in bringing out the meaning of the sending and refusing of the gifts. Lady Bian’s letter is as follows:15 Bian knocks her head on the ground. Your esteemed family did not abandon us, And your worthy son assisted in the governance of the state. 每感篤念 I was always moved by such profound concerns 情在凝至 And felt immensely grateful. 賢郎盛德熙妙 Your worthy son possessed bright and marvelous virtue, 有蓋世文才 And was endowed with a literary talent matchless in the world. 闔門欽敬 My entire family admired and respected him, 寶用無已 And treasured his service endlessly. 方今騷擾 The political situation today is turbulent, 卞頓首 貴門不遺 賢郎輔佐

14  Curta, “Merovingian and Carolingian Gift Giving,” 677. 15  “Yu Yang Biao furen Yuan shi shu” 與楊彪夫人袁氏書, Gu wen yuan 10.82. Quan Sanguo wen 12.1120.

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And the army is frequently deployed. The Recorder was like his lord’s arms and legs,16 And in planning for military campaigns, He should respectfully consult his superior. The gong and drum beat has been publically established, 而聞命違制 And yet he disobeyed an explicit order. 明公性急忿然 His Lordship, who has a short temper, was provoked to anger, 在外輒行軍法 And applied military punishment immediately in the army outside. 卞姓當時亦所不知 I did not know anything about it when it happened; 聞之心肝塗地 Then, upon hearing the news, my heart was broken. 驚愕斷絕 Shocked and grieved to no end, 悼痛酷楚 I felt such an incredible sadness 情自不勝 That it was unbearable. 夫人多容 You, madam, have a large heart, 即見垂恕 And deign to forgive me. 故送衣服一籠 Thereupon I present you with a case of clothes, 文絹百匹 A hundred bolts of patterned silk, 房子官錦百斤 A hundred catties of government brocade from Fangzi,17 私所乘香車一乘 My personal carriage made of aromatic wood, 牛一頭 As well as an ox. 誠知微細 I certainly know these gifts are very humble, 以達往意 But they are meant to convey my sentiments. 望為承納 I hope you, madam, will agree to accept them. 戎馬屢動 主簿股肱近臣 征伐之計 事須敬咨 官立金鼓之節

Lady Yuan’s reply letter reads:18 彪袁氏頓首頓首

Biao’s wife, Yuan, knocks her heard on the ground repeatedly.

16  Yang Xiu was serving as Recorder on Cao Cao’s staff at the time of his execution. 17  “Brocade” ( jin 錦) should be emended to “cotton” (mian 綿). Fangzi (in modern Hebei) was famous for its high-quality cotton in the Han. 18  “Da Cao gong furen Bian shi shu” 答曹公夫人卞氏書, Gu wenyuan 10.82. Quan Hou Han wen 96.991.

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Although the distance between us is short, I have not visited you for a long time. I suffer from longing for you, My pent-up feelings piling like mountains. Lord Cao has rectified and saved the world; Places near and far all rely on him for peace. People within the four seas turn to him for protection, 莫不感戴 And there is nobody who is not deeply grateful. 小兒疏細 My humble son was careless and shallow; 謬蒙采拾 He had been chosen for office by mistake. 未有上報 Indeed, he was unable to repay the favor 果自招罪戾 And only got himself in trouble. 念之痛楚 When I think of this, I am so pained 五內傷裂 That my inner organs are wounded and torn. 尊意不遺 You do not abandon me, 伏辱惠告 And stoop to write me about it. 見明公與太尉書 I have already seen His Lordship’s letter to the Grand Marshall,19 具知委曲 So I am well acquainted with the details. 度子之行 In evaluating a son’s behavior, 不過父母 No one is better than his father and mother. 小兒違越 My humble son transgressed by disobeying orders 分應至此 And received the punishment he deserved. 憐其始立之年 I only pity him for having ended his life 畢命埃土 When he was just turning thirty years old,20 遺育孤幼 And for having left behind a fatherless young child. 言之崩潰 Even as I speak of it, I am breaking down. 明公所賜已多 His Lordship has already bestowed many gifts on us, 又加重賚禮 To which you now add so much more. 頗非宜荷受 It is not appropriate for me to accept them. 輒付往信 I have asked the messenger to take them back.21 路跂雖近 不展淹久 歎想之勞 情抱山積 曹公匡濟天下 遐邇以寍 四海歸仰

19  Yang Biao was Grand Marshall, one of the “Three Dukes,” a prestigious title with little actual power. 20  According to Sima Biao’s 司馬彪 (243–306) Xu Han shu 續漢書, cited in the Hou Han shu commentary, Yang Xiu was forty-four years old (forty-five by Chinese reckoning) when he died. Hou Han shu 54.1789. 21  In punctuating the last four lines of the letter, I have followed Zhou Lengjia rather than Yan Kejun. See Yin Yun Xiaoshuo, 92–93.

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Compared with her husband’s letter to Yang Biao, Lady Bian’s letter is much more conciliatory in tone, praising Yang Xiu’s abilities and expressing sadness for his death. While she does defend the justice of Cao’s decision and her phrasing of the current military situation echoes Cao’s own, she is also apologetic about his “short temper,” hinting that if she had known in time, she might have tried to do something to help. The gifts she offers, consisting of clothes, textiles, and most notably her own carriage, are less extravagant compared with Cao’s gifts but more “feminine” and personal. Lady Yuan’s reply largely constitutes a mirror image of Lady Bian’s letter. If Lady Bian praises Yang Xiu and conveys regrets about Cao Cao’s temper, then she unsurprisingly eulogizes Cao Cao’s accomplishments and affirms that Yang Xiu did deserve his punishment. In contrast with the more restrained epistles of Cao Cao and Yang Biao, her letter lays stress on the emotional aspect of the incident, lamenting Yang Xiu’s premature death and his orphaned son; and yet, the intensely emotive tone is in sync with Lady Bian’s open expression of feelings. However, by refusing the gifts, Lady Yuan rejects Lady Bian’s attempt to create a social bond between the two of them. It is interesting to see how Lady Bian delineates a space for herself as an independent person, however delusional it might be, by distancing herself from her husband (“he has such a temper”; “I had no idea that he did that”; and “yes he sent gifts, but these gifts are mine”). Lady Yuan, on the other hand, defines herself entirely as Yang Biao’s wife and Yang Xiu’s mother: she refers to herself as “Biao’s wife, Yuan,” instead of simply “Yuan;” she reveals that Yang Biao has shared Cao Cao’s letter with her; she states that “no one knows [Yang Xiu] better than his own father and mother,” By doing so, she manages to escape from being drawn into a friendship “between the girls.” Again, power is at the roots of the issue. In describing gift giving practice in medieval Iceland, William Ian Miller observes that gift giving “gave rise to social relations and adjusted the status of the parties in relation to each other. The giver gained prestige and power from the exchange. He exacted deference from the receiver and obliged him to reciprocate.”22 By turning down Lady Bian’s gifts and emphasizing the prematurity of her son’s death, Lady Yuan denies Lady Bian the satisfaction of mollifying her guilty conscience, refuses to put herself in personal debt to Lady Bian and to be dominated, and insists on the irrevocable nature of her loss. Ultimately, of course, all this is acceptable only because they happen in the women’s quarters, the more private and personal world “inside,” in contrast with the “outside” mentioned in Lady Bian’s letter and represented by Yang Biao’s interaction with Cao Cao. 22  Miller, “Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid,” 23.

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One final point to make about Lady Yuan’s letter is a philological one embroiled with ideological implications. The last four lines of her letter could be easily punctuated as follows: 明公所賜已多 又加重賚 禮頗非宜 荷受輒付往信

His Lordship has already bestowed many gifts on us, To which you now add so much more. It is not quite right in terms of propriety. Upon receipt, I have asked the messenger to take them back.

That is, instead of reading li 禮 as “gift” at the end of the second line, we could read li as “[according to or in terms of] ritual propriety” at the beginning of the third line; and instead of reading he shou (to accept) at the end of the third line, we could read it as “[upon] receipt” at the beginning of the fourth line. If we adopt this reading, the tone of the letter is much more austere, even on the edge of being disrespectful, as Lady Yuan alludes to the ritual improperness of Lady Bian’s gift giving (in contrast, the other reading stresses the impropriety of the acceptance of the gifts). Since classical Chinese texts have no punctuation marks, it is up to the reader to punctuate a text according to her interpretation. The ambiguity of Lady Yuan’s phrasing further complicates the power struggle implicit in gift giving, and demonstrates the crucial role played by letters in the signification of the gifts. 2

Give and Take: Cao Pi’s Gift Politics

During the waning years of the Han dynasty, in a world torn apart by war, famine and plague, the foremost task facing a political leader was to rebuild the community and gather people around himself. Cao Cao and his sons were intent on collecting resources, both material and symbolic, in the form of people and objects. In the previous section we discuss Cao Cao and Lady Bian’s gift-giving; in this section we will examine another set of letter and object transactions initiated by their son, Cao Pi, beginning with an instance in which Cao Pi is the receiver of a gift. According to Wei lüe 魏略, Cao Pi learned that Zhong You 鍾繇 (151–230) had a valuable jade in his possession and coveted it; when Zhong heard of this, he gave the jade to Cao Pi, who subsequently wrote a letter to thank Zhong for his generosity.23 The letter, usually dated to 215, turns out to be a fascinating 23  Wei lüe, a history of Wei written by Yu Huan 魚豢 (fl. 3rd c.), is no longer extant. This incident and the letter are cited in Pei Songzhi’s Sanguo zhi commentary. See Sanguo

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demonstration and performance of political power. Both father and son were masters of making use of words as political strategies, but unlike Cao Cao, who spoke with the assurance of someone in charge when writing to Yang Biao, Cao Pi had to contend with the uncertainty of his own status at the time of writing to Zhong You. With his characteristic reflectiveness and delicateness, Cao Pi produces a verbally and psychologically intricate document. Effectively incorporating the classical and literary tradition, he crafts a voice that is both artful and human in its all too palpable desires and its aspiration to authority. 丕白 Pi lets you know: 良玉比德君子 A fine jade is compared to the virtue of a noble man; 珪璋見美詩人 Precious jade ritual vessels are eulogized by the Shi poet. 晉之垂棘 The jade from Chuiji of Jin, 魯之璵璠 The yufan jade of Lu, 宋之結綠 The Congealed Green of Song, 楚之和璞 And He’s Jade of Chu:24 價越萬金 Their prices exceed ten thousand gold pieces; 貴重都城 They are more valuable than great cities. 有稱疇昔 They were commended in the past, 流聲將來 And their reputation extends into the future. 是以垂棘出晉 Therefore when the Chuiji jade left Jin, 虞虢雙禽 The domains of Yu and Guo both fell;25

zhi 13.396. The letter is also included in Wen xuan 文選, compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–531), with some variants. “Yu Zhong dali shu” 與鍾大理書, Wen xuan 42.1899–1900. Also see Quan Sanguo wen 7.1088. See David R. Knechtges’ essay, “Letters in the Wen xuan,” in this volume. 24  “He’s Jade” is named after its discoverer, Bian He from Chu. Bian He found an uncut jade and presented it to the king of Chu, who had his jade craftsman look at it; the craftsman declared it to be a worthless piece of rock, and the king subsequently had Bian He’s foot cut off as a punishment for lying to the king. When the king died, Bian He presented the jade to his successor; the same happened, and Bian He lost his other foot. When the third Chu king was enthroned, Bian He held the jade and wept for days and nights until the king sent someone to cut open the stone and find a priceless jade inside. This jade later was owned by the King of Zhao (see below). 25  The domain of Jin was undertaking a military campaign against the domain of Guo, and offered its Chuiji jade to the domain of Yu as an exchange for giving the Jin army access to Guo. The ruler of Yu agreed against his minister’s advice; after conquering Guo, the Jin army on its way back took Yu as well. Zuo zhuan 12.199, Duke Xi, 2nd year.

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和璧入秦 相如抗節

When He’s Jade entered Qin, Xiangru remained steadfast to principle.26

Opening with allusions to the Classics, the letter immediately brings out the symbolic meaning of the material object being transferred, and draws the reader’s attention to the political consequences of the misplacement of a gift of jade. The Wen xuan commentator Li Shan 李善 (d. 689) identifies the first line of the letter as a reference to Li ji 禮記: “Confucius said, ‘A noble man’s virtue is compared to jade,’ ”27 and the second as a reference to a Shijing 詩經 couplet: “Gentle and dignified, / like jade ritual vessels.”28 While a commentator like Li Shan often only singles out the one line or couplet that bears directly on the text being annotated, the entire text surrounding that one line or couplet would have resonated with a well-educated reader from the third century. The Shijing poem from which the couplet is taken, “Juan E” 卷阿, is taken by the Mao school of Shijing commentary to be Duke Shao’s advice to the young King Cheng of Zhou to seek worthy men and employ them.29 While such exact contextualization is doubtful, in this case the poem itself does allude to the “many admirable officers” of the king, and so justifies a political reading of the poem. Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200), an older contemporary of Cao Pi and one of the most influential early commentators on Shijing, takes “gentle and dignified” (yongyong ang’ang 顒顒卭卭) as the qualities of a ruler; indeed, the Han dictionary Erya 爾雅 glosses yongyong ang’ang as descriptive of “the virtue of a king.”30 The intimate relation of a precious jade to the ruler, not to his advisors no matter how admirable they are, is not an insignificant issue. Its importance is borne out by the story associated with the second of the four famous jades of the past listed in Cao Pi’s letter, namely the yufan jade of Lu. According to Zuo zhuan 左傳, the yufan jade was customarily carried by the rulers of Lu, but the powerful minister Ji Pingzi 季平子 (d. 505 BCE) wore the jade when he was acting as regent; after Ji Pingzi died, his retainer Yang Hu 陽虎 wanted to bury 26  The King of Qin coveted the famous “He’s jade” of Zhao and offered to exchange fifteen cities for it. the Zhao minister Lin Xiangru took the jade to Qin, but knowing the King of Qin was being insincere in his offer of exchange, he secretly sent someone to smuggle the jade out of Qin and back to Zhao. Shi ji 81.2439–2441. 27  Wen xuan 42.1899; Li ji 48.1031. 28  Mao shi 17.628. 29  Mao shi 17.626. 30  Er ya 3.57.

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the jade with him, but was opposed by Zhongliang Huai 仲梁懷. Zhongliang Huai’s rationale was simple: the yufan jade belonged to the ruler; now that a new ruler was established, the jade should go to the new ruler instead of following Ji Pingzi, a minister, underground.31 A highly symbolic ritual object like jade must be kept in the right hand, otherwise the consequences could be disastrous, as illustrated by the example of the domain of Yu that was destroyed because it became greedy for the Chuiji jade, the state treasure of the domain of Jin, or, in the case of the ambitious Qin that tried to seize the illustrious “He’s jade,” the king of Qin set out to swindle but only wound up being swindled. The physical properties of a precious jade resemble the virtue of a “noble man,” who exerts rightful ownership over the jade because of this material/spiritual affinity. The “noble man” ( junzi 君子) is literally “the son of a lord,” the archaic meaning of the term junzi. Cao Pi was certainly worthy of such an appelation by virtue of his birth and his father’s status. The very enumeration of the four famous jades of the past in Cao Pi’s letter subtly conveys to Zhong You the message about rightful ownership, as the verbal structure echoes another letter in history—the one written by Fan Sui 范睢 to King Zhao of Qin (r. 306–251 BCE). Fan Sui, still a humble commoner at the time, is trying to persuade the king to give him an audience. He compares worthy men (such as himself) to precious jades that have been overlooked by good craftsmen before being recognized for what they truly are: Besides, I have heard that Zhou has Di’e, Song has Congealed Green, Liang has Xuanli, and Chu has He’s Jade. These four treasures came from the earth and were all misrecognized by fine craftsmen; but in the end they turned out to be famed vessels of the world. This being the case, might not those abandoned by sage kings bring profit to a state? 且臣聞周有砥砨,宋有結綠,梁有縣藜,楚有和朴,此四寶 者,土之所生,良工之所失也,而為天下名器。然則聖王之所 弃者,獨不足以厚國家乎? 32 Presumably, however, what really moved King Zhao is the remark immediately following the above passage, which makes a jab at the noble lords holding too much power at the expense of the king’s interest. This remark, slyly inserted in the middle of Fan Sui’s letter, would certainly strike a chord with King Zhao, 31  Zuo zhuan 55.958, Duke Ding, 5th year. 32  Shi ji 79.2405.

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who was contending with his powerful uncle and brothers for control over the state. I have heard that those who are good at profiting one’s household take from the state, and that those who are good at profiting the state take from the noble lords. When a wise ruler presides over the world, then the noble lords are unable to monopolize profit. Why is this? It is because they would have taken from the ruler’s glory. 臣聞善厚家者取之於國,善厚國者取之於諸侯。天下有明主則 諸侯不得擅厚者,何也?為其割榮也。 Both worthy men and precious jades—a figure of the worthy men—must become the possession of the ruler; only an unwise ruler would allow his courtiers to take for themselves what should belong to the ruler alone. This much is made clear by Fan Sui’s letter to the King of Qin—and through borrowing, echoing, and extending the classical and literary tradition, by the opening passage of Cao Pi’s letter to Zhong You. Then Cao Pi turns to speak of his own lack, and the desire borne out of the lack, in implicit contrast with Zhong You’s possession of the jade: 竊見玉書稱美玉 I have seen beautiful jade described in a book on jade:33 白如截肪 “The white ones are like sliced fat; 黑譬純漆 The black ones are like pure lacquer; 赤擬雞冠 The red ones may be compared to the crest of a rooster; 黃侔蒸栗 The yellow ones equal the color of steamed chestnut.” 側聞斯語 Though I have heard of such, 未睹厥狀 I have never actually witnessed it.

33  I suspect “a book on jade” ( yu shu 玉書) should read “Wang’s book” (Wang shu 王書), the characters for yu and wang resembling each other closely. “Wang’s book” would be a reference to the first-century scholar Wang Yi’s 王逸 work entitled Zhengbu lun 正部 論, which was lost in the 6th c. See Sui shu 34.998. A fragment quoted in the early Tang encyclopedia Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚 reads: “Someone asks me about the standard for jade. I reply, ‘The red ones are like the crest of a rooster; the yellow ones are like steamed chestnut; the white ones are like pork fat; the black ones are like pure lacquer. This is the standard for jade’ ” 或問玉符,曰:赤如雞冠,黃如蒸栗,白如豬肪,黑如純漆,玉 之符也. Yiwen leiju 83.1428.

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It is interesting to observe how desire is fanned by reading, with the textual “seeing” and the real-life “witnessing” paired off in contrast. Textual knowledge laid out in sensuous detail precedes actual knowledge, and acts as a powerful inducement to seek out the latter. 雖德非君子 義無詩人 高山景行 私所仰慕 然四寶邈焉已遠 秦漢未聞有良比也 求之曠年 不遇厥真 私願不果 飢渴未副

Although my merit is not that of a noble man, And I lack the qualities of a shi poet, A high mountain and a great thoroughfare Are what I have always admired and looked up to. However, those four treasures are already distant, And I have never heard of a good match for them in Qin and Han. I had been seeking it for many years, But never encountered its true form. My private desire remained unfulfilled, My hunger and thirst were never satisfied.

“A high mountain and a great thoroughfare” is another allusion to a Shijing poem, in this case the poem “Ju xia” 車舝, a poem that is traditionally interpreted as an officer’s expression of joy at the prospect of obtaining a beautiful and virtuous bride for his king. The phrase is taken from the last stanza of the poem, and, in a convoluted interpretation typical of the Han commentators, is understood as a metaphor for the virtue of the ancients admired by the king once the king comes under the influence of his virtuous queen.34 What deserves notice is that, through the use of such a phrase, Cao Pi once again creates a direct relation between jade and virtue, and reiterates the symbolic meaning of a precious jade through deliberate echoes of the classical tradition. More importantly, he places himself in the position of political authority such as that of a king, and the apparently modest claim—“Although my virtue is not that of a noble man”—produces, by way of negation, the very parallel between Cao Pi himself and a noble man figured as a precious jade. The Shijing poem speaks of the desire for a beautiful bride; Cao Pi’s passage cited above speaks of his desire for a beautiful jade. Both desires are articulated in the framework of “virtue.” Cao Pi’s phrasing throughout this passage echoes not only the Shijing poem seeking a worthy mate but also the political discourse of seeking worthy advisors. The keyword linking the material, erotic, and political spheres is the phrase “hunger and thirst.” Noticeably, the Shijing poem contains a couplet: “It was not hunger or thirst I felt; / I longed 34  Mao shi 14.484.

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for an encounter with [her] virtuous words” 匪饑匪渴, 德音來括. The couplet is ambiguous as to the exact rhetorical function of the phrase “hunger and thirst”: Zheng Xuan proposes that even though the officer was hungry and thirsty while fetching the beautiful bride for his king, he did not feel hungry or thirsty because he was so keen to bring her back.35 Alternatively, “hunger and thirst” could also be regarded as a metaphor for the desire for the virtuous and beautiful bride. The use of the phrase “hunger and thirst” to describe the ruler’s desire for worthy men is not at all uncommon in contemporary political discourse. Zhang Hong 張紘 (151–211), a southerner who had served under Cao Cao for some time, states in his letter to his son that the longing of a wise ruler for worthy men is “like hunger and thirst.”36 Ying Yang 應瑒 (d. 217), in a poem composed at a banquet given by Cao Pi, exhorts his colleagues to respect their positions in order to “answer your [Cao Pi’s] concerns of hunger and thirst.”37 In Cao Pi’s own discussion of Emperor Wen of the Han, he describes the Han emperor as follows: “Emperor Wen’s eager desire for worthy men was stronger than hunger and thirst; his employment of them was speedier than going with the current.”38 When Cao Pi’s desire for a beautiful jade is described in the same terms, the jade takes on a symbolic value much higher than its material value. While Fan Sui compares a worthy man to a (figurative) beautiful jade, Cao Pi is comparing a (real) beautiful jade to a worthy man. There are some further twists and turns in Cao Pi’s final attainment of the object of his desire. According to Wei lüe, when Cao Pi heard of the jade in Zhong You’s possession, “he wanted to have it, but found it hard to speak of it publicly, so he asked the Marquis of Linzi in private to convey his wish to Zhong You through someone else.”39 Here is Cao Pi’s version of the event: 近日南陽宗惠叔 Lately, Zong Huishu of Nanyang mentioned that40 稱君侯昔有美玦 Your Lordship had once come into possession of a fine jade ring. 35  Mao shi 14.484. 36  Quan Hou Han wen 86.941. 37  Ying Yang, “Attending at a Gathering Held By the Leader of Court Gentlemen for Miscellaneous Uses at Jianzhang Terrace” (Shi wuguan zhonglang jiang Jianzhang tai ji 侍五官中郎將建章臺集). Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 360. 38  Quan Sanguo wen 8.1098. 39  Sanguo zhi 13.396, cited in Pei Songzhi’s commentary. The Marquis of Linzi refers to Cao Zhi. 40  Zong has a variant, Song 宋, in Yiwen leiju.

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I was both surprised and overjoyed upon hearing of this, 笑與抃會 And I clapped my hands in laughter. 當自白書 I should have written you in person, 恐傳言未審 But I was worried that hearsay might not be accurate, 是以令舍弟子建 Therefore I asked my younger brother Zijian 因荀仲茂時從容喻鄙旨 To convey my sentiments through Xun Zhongmao at leisure. 乃不忽遺 You did not neglect my wish, 厚見周稱 But satisfied it most generously. 鄴騎既到 When the rider came from Ye 寶玦初至 And the precious jade ring first arrived, 捧匣跪發 I held the case with both hands, straightened up my back while on my knees to open it— 五內震駭 My five inner organs were shocked and stunned, 繩窮匣開 For as the rope was unfastened and the case opened up 爛然滿目 A brilliance filled my eyes. 猥以蒙鄙之姿 I, with my ignorant and base demeanors, 得睹希世之寶 Was able to see a treasure rare to find in the world, 不煩一介之使 Without troubling a single emissary, 不損連城之價 Without paying the price of many cities. 既有秦昭章臺之觀 While I possess the view enjoyed by King Zhao of Qin on Zhang Terrace, 而無藺生詭奪之誑 I never needed to perform Master Lin’s deceptive snatching. 聞之驚喜

Cao Pi describes his reception of the jade with much theatricality. His initial reaction to the information about the jade—laughing, clapping—might be very physical, even loud, but is nothing compared to his reaction upon actually seeing the jade. To straighten up one’s back while sitting (i.e., being on one’s knees) is a gesture that indicates great attention and/or respect. In sharp contrast with the sensuous language of colors and images used to describe beautiful jades earlier in the letter, he says nothing about the physical appearance of this jade; instead, the only term he uses is lanran, “brilliant,” a term depicting light. The rhetorical effect thus created is striking, as this jade is elevated to

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a level of ethereal beauty far above the norm of precious jades, and Cao Pi is apparently so dazed and overwhelmed by its splendor that he loses his ability for words. This prompts us to revisit his earlier remark that he had been seeking for years without encountering the “true form” (zhen 真) of a precious jade: the term, zhen, is the same term that is used to indicate immortal beings. The phrase, “the rope was unfastened and the case opened up,” on a verbal and structural level evokes a sentence from Shi ji that is so famous for the scene it depicts that it has become a common saying in Chinese: “The King of Qin opened the map; when the map was unrolled to its end, the dagger appeared” 秦王發圖,圖窮而匕首見.41 This is of course the scene of the King of Qin—later the First Emperor of Qin—receiving the map of the rich land that was given to Qin as a gift from the King of Yan, but the gift-bearer, Jing Ke 荊軻, turned out to be an assassin who made a failed attempt on King of Qin’s life. The verbal echo in Cao Pi’s letter is no doubt meant to be humorous and ironic. Nevertheless, it draws attention to the common issue of desire and power underlying the receipt of gifts in both cases. Cao Pi’s modest claim about his “ignorant and base demeanors” is undercut by his self-alignment with yet another Qin ruler, King Zhao, who was none other the recipient of Fan Sui’s letter cited earlier. What deserves note is Cao Pi’s changing reference to the role played by Lin Xiangru 蔺相如 in the recovery of He’s Jade: earlier in the letter, Cao Pi praises Lin Xiangru for remaining “steadfast to principle;” but now he portrays Lin Xiangru’s recovery of the jade in a negative light (“deceptive snatching”). It seems that in describing his own coming into possession of Zhong You’s jade, Cao Pi is wavering between identifying himself with King Zhao of Qin and with Lin Xiangru. The desire to represent himself as a ruler prompts him to choose the former identification, albeit (as he emphatically points out) without having to use the former’s ruses and pay his price, even though the claim that he did not have to deploy a single emissary contradicts the fact that he had indeed deployed not one, but two emissaries—Cao Zhi and Xun Zhongmao. And yet, his reference to Lin Xiangru, the crafty protector of “He’s Jade” against the Qin, seems to bespeak his anxiety about the manner in which he acquires Zhong You’s jade. With this rhetorical conflict unsolved, Cao Pi brings his letter to an end. As if to forestall any accusation that he has “deceptively snatched” Zhong’s jade, he stresses its nature as a “bountiful gift”—in other words, something freely given; he also presents Zhong with a return gift.

41  Shi ji 86.2534. The common saying is tuqiong bixian 圖窮匕見.

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嘉貺益腆 敢不欽承 謹奉賦一篇 以讚揚麗質 丕白

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Your bountiful gift is rich and magnificent, How dare I not receive it with deference? Now I respectfully present you with a poetic exposition, In order to praise its beautiful substance. Pi lets you know.

Only a fragment of Cao Pi’s poetic exposition ( fu) on the jade is still extant.42 The fragment is quite striking and deserves to be included here: 有昆山之妙璞 There is a marvelous uncut jade from the Kunlun Mountain, 產曾城之峻崖 produced under the steep cliffs of the Tiered Wall.43 嗽丹水之炎波 It is washed in the fiery waves of the Cinnabar River, 蔭瑤樹之玄枝 and shaded by the black boughs of the Jasper Tree.44 包黃中之純氣 Holding within the pure aura of the Yellow Center,45 抱虛靜而無為 it embraces empty quietude and non-action. 應九德之淑懿 Corresponding to the beauty of the Nine Virtues, 體五材之表儀 it embodies the manifestations of the Five Elements.46 The jade is praised for its celestial origin from the mythical land, a statement that corresponds to the indication in the letter that the jade transcends the standard precious jade of the mortal world. More importantly, the jade is shown to incorporate four colors: it is washed in the “Cinnabar River” and shaded by the “black boughs” of the Jasper Tree; the Yellow Center is a term for the human heart, the center of the five inner organs that is believed to correspond to the yellow “Earth” element of the Five Elements. Finally, the color white is implied in the Daoist statement about “empty quietude and non-action,” evoking a phrase from Zhuangzi: “An empty chamber gives rise to whiteness [i.e., a bright light]” 虛室生白.47 Thus the four colors of white, black, red, and yellow, each 42  Yiwen leiju 67.1186. 43  Kunlun Mountain is the legendary dwelling place of immortal beings and the Tiered Wall is its highest peak. 44  Many rivers are known as the Cinnabar River. See Shanhai jing, 16, 25, 27, 41, 90. Jasper Tree grows on the Kunlun Mountain. Huainanzi 4.133. 45  The “Yellow Center” refers to the heart, which, according to the theory of five elements and five colors, occupies the center and thus belongs to the element of earth and possesses the color of yellow. 46  There are various theories of what the Nine Virtues are. The Five Elements are: metal, wood, water, fire and earth. 47  Zhuangzi jishi 2.150.

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of which characterizes an individual jade in the book on jade Cai Pi has read, all find their expression in one single jade that embodies completeness and ultimate perfection. Zhong You loses his jade but acquires a literary representation of his jade as a return gift. He knows, however, that the real gift from Cao Pi is something else. His reply makes his gratitude quite clear. I once had the honor, of which I was completely unworthy, to serve near the throne, and was given this penannular jade ring. The elders from the Directorate for Imperial Manufactories, who were familiar with objects from old times, commended its pattern and texture, and predicted that it would eventually find its rightful place. However, I thought Your Highness must have far more precious jades in your possession, so I held it in contempt and did not present it to you. It is my fortune that Your Highness should lower yourself to express approval of it, which truly delighted me. In the past, Mr. He was solicitous and thoughtful, loyal and honest; I, on the other hand, had to wait for your instruction first [before presenting the jade to you], and for this reason I feel deeply ashamed. 昔忝近任,并得賜玦。尚方耆老頗識舊物,名其符采,必得處 所。以為執事有珍此者,是以鄙之,用未奉貢。幸而紆意,實 以悅懌。在昔和氏殷勤忠篤,而繇待命,是懷愧恥。 While Cao Pi makes generous use of the classical and literary tradition in speaking of jade, Zhong You only cites the story of Bian He 卞和. The ability to appreciate a beautiful jade and a worthy man are connected explicitly in the Bian He story, and the latter ability is a defining quality of a wise ruler. Thus Zhong You is implicitly acknowledging Cao Pi as a good ruler for his acuity of perception; he also apologizes deeply for his own failure as a subject, who should have presented the jade sooner without prompting. What is most remarkable about this letter is the fact that Zhong You is thanking Cao Pi for taking his jade. We must not regard this as a mere rhetorical flourish. The jade had been completely obscure while it was in Zhong You’s possession, and after it was transferred to Cao Pi, it fell into oblivion again; for a brief moment, however, during its transition from one owner to another, it shone forth with the dazzling brilliance created by Cao Pi’s letter. Without Cao Pi’s letter, we would never have known anything about the jade or about Zhong You’s one-time ownership of the jade. Paradoxically, Zhong’s ownership is only manifested through the very loss of his possession, as Cao Pi has made Zhong You the owner of the jade by taking it from him and expressing, in a

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well-crafted letter, his gratitude for the “gift.” Cao Pi’s desire for the jade also produces a surplus value inscribed on the material object that is brought out by his letter. In other words, Cao Pi’s letter augments the value of the jade by many times its original worth, whatever it had been. Georg Simmel (1858–1918), the German sociologist, accentuates the psychological aspect of economic exchange by stating, Exchange takes place not for the sake of an object previously possessed by another person, but rather for the sake of one’s own feeling about an object, a feeling which the other previously did not possess. The meaning of exchange, moreover, is that the sum of values is greater afterward than it was before, and this implies that each party gives the other more than he had himself possessed.48 This aptly describes the exchange taking place between Cao Pi and Zhong You. With its symbolic value, beautiful jade figured as worthy man would ultimately contribute to the expansion of Cao Pi’s political capital. Cao Pi needed to gather and collect, and thus to end the circulation of a precious object—or a talented man—by possessing it/him; a good example is his competition with his brother Cao Zhi for “possession of” Handan Chun 邯鄲淳.49 As Fan Sui’s letter to King Zhao of Qin suggests, hoarding is good for the prince but bad for the courtier. And yet, the prince must also balance the economy by bestowing gifts. As the medievalist A. J. Gurevich argues, “Generosity is an inseparable trait of the monarch,” who must distribute his wealth to retain “social influence.”50 While costly material gifts, land and titles are no doubt necessary, the prince’s gifts do not have to always possess a high economic value as long as they possess a high symbolic value. Among Cao Pi’s many extant missives to Zhong You, two are gift letters: in one case, he gave Zhong You a bouquet of chrysanthemum flowers; in another case, a “Five-Tastes Cauldron.” In each case the letter is crucial for foregrounding the symbolic value of the gift. The chrysanthemum letter is translated as follows:51

48  Simmel, “Exchange,” 44. 49  Wei lüe, cited in Pei Songzhi’s commentary, Sanguo zhi 21.602. The verb used for Cao Zhi’s asking for Handan Chun’s service is to “seek” (qiu 求), the same term used by Cao Pi for jade in his letter. 50  Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 252, 249. 51  “Jiu ri yu Zhong You shu” 九日與鍾繇書, Yiwen leiju 4.84.

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Years and months come and go, and suddenly it is the ninth day of the ninth month again. “Nine” is a yang number; now that both month and day happen to correspond to it, people cherish the name [of the “Double Ninth”] and believe it contributes to permanence.52 For this reason imperial banquet and sumptuous parties are held on this day. This month matches the musical pitch of “No Emergence,” which means that none of the various trees and plants come out and grow.53 And yet, the sweet-smelling chrysanthemum alone blooms profusely. If not for holding within the pure harmony of heaven and earth, and embodying the gentle energy of fragrant virtue, how else could this be? Of old, when Qu Ping lamented his gradual aging, he longed to ingest the fallen blossoms of autumn chrysanthemum.54 For sustaining one’s body and prolonging one’s life, nothing is more precious than this flower. I respectfully present you with a bouquet to help with the method of Pengzu.55 歲往月來,忽復九月九日。九為陽數,而日月並應。俗嘉其 名,以為宜於長久,故以享宴高會。是月律中無射,言羣木庶 草無有射而生。至於芳菊,紛然獨榮。非夫含乾坤之純和,體 芬芳之淑氣,孰能如此?故屈平悲冉冉之將老,思食秋菊之落 英。輔體延年,莫斯之貴。謹奉一束,以助彭祖之術。 The ingestion of chrysanthemum flowers is supposed to contribute to health and longevity. The gift of chrysanthemum flowers on the “Double Ninth” conveys Cao Pi’s good wishes for Zhong You. Cao Pi also invests the flowers with symbolic meaning, evoking the metaphorical value of the flower as a figure of virtue in the poem “Li sao” attributed to Qu Ping, better known as Qu Yuan. While Qu Yuan is supposedly lamenting his alienation from an unwise king in the “Li sao,” Cao Pi inserts himself in the position of a wise ruler who knows how to treat his worthy ministers. The Five-Tastes Cauldron is a ritual vessel divided into five segregated sections, with each section reserved for cooking one flavor. After Cao Pi was named heir by Cao Cao, Zhong You presented the mould of a Five-Tastes Cauldron to 52  That is, “nine” ( jiu 九) puns with “permanence” ( jiu 久). 53  “The pipe of the ninth month is called ‘Wu she.’ ‘She’ means emergence. ‘Wu she’ means that at the time the yang energy all rises up and myriad things are withdrawn and no longer come out” 九月之管名為無射,射者出也, 言時陽氣上升,萬物收藏無復 出也. Jin shu 22.679. 54  This refers to a passage from the poem “Li sao” 離騷 attributed to Qu Yuan 屈原 (Qu Ping). 55  Pengzu was famous for his legendary longevity.

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Cao Pi, who subsequently had a cauldron made on the mould and gave the cauldron to Zhong You with the following letter.56 In the past, the Yellow Emperor had three tripods, and the Zhou had nine precious cauldrons; but they each had only one body that was used to produce one flavor. How could they compare to this fu vessel that allows five flavors to emit aromas simultaneously? Cooking in a tripod is to feast the heavenly god above and to nourish the sage and worthy. In illuminating virtue and soliciting blessings, nothing could be more marvelous. Therefore, only a Grand Man can produce such a vessel, and only such a vessel is suitable for great virtue. Now this marvelous fu even exceeds the beauty of a tripod. The Zhou minister in charge, Kaofu of the state of Song, Kong Kui of Wei and Wei Ke of Jin: these four courtiers had had their names carved on bells and tripods on account of their eminent achievements and virtue. Your Highness respectfully serves the Great Wei to augment the sagely transformation of the common folk. When it comes to magnificent virtue, none could compare with you. This is truly what the Chamberlain for Ceremonials should write an inscription for and have it carved on the sacrificial vessels in the ancestral temple. Therefore I have composed this inscription and had it carved on the mouth of the fu. I hope it will be able to give adequate praise of your great merit and immortalize it. 昔有黃三鼎,周之九寶,咸以一體使調一味,豈若斯釜,五味 時芳?蓋鼎之烹飪,以饗上帝,以養聖賢,昭德祈福,莫斯之 美。故非大人,莫之能造;故非斯器,莫宜盛德。今之嘉釜,  有逾茲美。夫周之尸臣,宋之考父,衞之孔悝,晉之魏顆,彼 四臣者,並以功德勒名鍾鼎。今執事寅亮大魏,以隆聖化。堂 堂之德,於斯為盛。誠太常之所宜銘,彝器之所宜勒。故作斯 銘,勒之釜口,庶可贊揚洪美,垂之不朽。 This letter bears a remarkable similarity to Cao Pi’s jade letter in its rhetorical strategies, most notably its evocation of the classical and literary tradition, and its enumeration of examples from the past serves only to accentuate the superiority, completeness, and perfection of the present object. The tone of the letter is, however, much more confident and straightforward. Although the “Great Wei” was still a feudal fiefdom rather than a dynasty at the time of writing, Cao Pi, the newly designated heir apparent, was already speaking from 56  “Zhu wu shu fu cheng yu Zhong You shu” 鑄五熟釜成與鍾繇書, Sanguo zhi 13.394–395.

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the position of imperial authority, this time not nearly so subtly as in his jade letter. 3

A Man of Taste

The last two letters cited in the previous section both have to do with food: chrysanthemum, rather than an object of aesthetic appreciation, is meant to be ingested; the Five-Tastes Cauldron, like all the impressive bronze tripods from the classical period, is basically a cooking utensil, considered in modern Chinese pop culture to be the ancestor of the “hot pot.” Unlike his father Cao Cao, Cao Pi tried to represent himself as a man of refined taste, in food, drink, and clothes. It was not just a matter of personal difference, but also a matter of different political situation. Cao Cao, who himself came from a less than illustrious background, was eager for the endorsement of old families such as Yang Biao’s;57 but in a time of political instability and civil war, the service of talented people, regardless of their social status, was much more important to him. If the old families did not support him, he would not hesitate to use brutal force. His decision to execute Kong Rong 孔融 (153–208), an eminent member of the elite and the twentieth-generation descendant of Confucius, was a good example of his policy.58 He also issued several famous directives about seeking talented men regardless of their moral standing.59 As a dynasty founder ruling over a unified and stabilized north China, Cao Pi needed prestige and the backing of old families more than his father did; contending with the kingdom of Wu in the southeast and the kingdom of Shu in the southwest, he needed to also establish political legitimacy and cultural superiority—the two being regarded one and the same—over his rivals. What Cao Pi sought was a cultural aura, the aura of a “noble man” ( junzi). He prized himself on being a man with discernment, not just in the sense of recognizing worthy men, but also in the sense of possessing a sophisticated taste in literary, sartorial, and culinary matters. One way of establishing himself as an authority in such matters was to liberally offer appraisal of literary writings, clothes, food, and drink. Cao Pi’s attempt to represent himself as a judge of literary talents is best manifested in his “Discourse on Literature” (Lun wen 論文), which has been well translated

57  Cao Cao’s father, Cao Song 曹嵩 (d. 193), was the adopted son of a eunuch. Sanguo zhi 1.1. 58  Sanguo zhi 12.370–73. 59  Sanguo zhi 1.32, 44.49.

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and discussed.60 His statement on sartorial and culinary tastes is less known and deserves to be quoted here: Only someone from a family of gentry for three generations understands clothes; only someone from a family of gentry for five generations understands food and drink. This just goes to show how difficult it is to know anything about clothes, food, and drink. 三世長者知被服,五世長者知飲食,此言被服飲食難曉也。 61 In a propaganda war, Cao Pi repeatedly issued directives to his courtiers criticizing the foods and textiles of Shu and Wu. Gift exchange between the states became an occasion for flaunting wealth and power as well as disparaging one’s enemy states for their inferior products and poor taste. In these cases, gift giving was indeed “a form of surrogate warfare,” in which each side tried to impress and overcome the enemy state with competitive gift giving.62 In a banquet poem entitled “Grand” (Shanzai xing 善哉行), Cao Pi speaks of bountiful food and beautiful music being brought forth for his enjoyment.63 大酋奉甘醪 狩人獻嘉禽 齊倡發東舞 秦箏奏西音 有客從南來 為我彈清琴 五音紛繁會 拊者激微吟 淫魚乘波聽 踴躍自浮沈 飛鳥翻翔舞 悲鳴集北林

The Grand Steward offered sweet ale; The Royal Huntsman presented excellent fowl. Qi entertainers performed eastern dances, A Qin harp gave forth the tunes of the west. A guest came from the south And played the clear zither for me. The five notes were conjoined in abundance, The one who strummed it stirred a faint chant. Sturgeons were riding the waves to listen, They leapt up, diving and rising to the surface. Birds in flight danced, soaring around, They sang touchingly, roosting in the northern grove.

We notice that music is proffered from all four directions: the eastern dances, the tunes of the west, the zither-player from the south, and finally, the singing 60  “The Discourse on Literature,” included in the Wen xuan, is excerpted from a much longer treatise on literature in Cao Pi’s work known as Normative Discourses (Dian lun 典論). For a translation and discussion, see Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, 57–72. 61  Yiwen leiju 67.1187. Quan Sanguo wen 6.1082. 62  Curta, “Merovingian,” 698. 63  Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 393.

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birds in the northern grove. This effectively situates the poet himself in the center—the fifth direction—to which bounties flow from all around. The concept of the five directions, with the corresponding Five Phases, was a part of the Han cosmology that was inseparable from political philosophy and state ideology, and represented the mapping of the Han empire’s geography. The center is where political authority lies; in positioning himself at the center, Cao Pi takes advantage of the geographical location of the Wei on the traditional “Central Plains” (i.e., Chinese heartland in the Yellow River region) and repeatedly stresses in his writings, either explicitly or implicitly, the status of the Wei as the Central Kingdom (Zhongguo). This is clearly seen in Cao Pi’s gift letters to Sun Quan 孫權 (182–252), the ruler of Wu, as well as in his communications addressed to his courtiers disparaging the local products of Wu and Shu. Cao Pi’s gifts to Sun Quan were all chosen with care. In a number of letter fragments, we learn that he had sent Sun Quan one piebald horse, one white marten coat, five cakes of “rock honey,” and a thousand abalones.64 Whether these gifts were sent all at once is questionable, but considering the authority and power assumed in sending gifts to the head of a state, they seem to have all been sent after Cao Pi succeeded to Cao Cao or was enthroned as emperor. We will leave aside the piebald horse for the time being and examine the marten coat, the “rock honey,” and the abalones—in other words, gifts of clothes and food. Marten (hun 鼲) is popularly known as the “gray squirrel” (hui shu 灰鼠); it most likely refers to the sable, a marten species that inhabits the forest in northern China and other places across the northern hemisphere such as Mongolia and Siberia. Although sables are primarily brown in color, individuals may have a patch of fur on the throat that can be gray, white or pale yellow. A white sable coat is rarer and more valuable than a brown sable coat, but more importantly, it is an aggressively northern gift. “Rock honey” likewise 64  The letter fragments are preserved in different places in Taiping yulan. See Taiping yulan 694.3230 (horse and marten coat), 857.3941 (rock honey), and 938.4301 (abalone). Probably because all three fragments mention Zhao Zi 趙咨 as the messenger, Yan Kejun pieced them together into one missive. Quan Sanguo wen 7.1090. However, we do not know how many trips were undertaken by Zhao Zi and if the gifts were given to Sun Quan all at once. Wu li 吳歷, a historical work written by Hu Chong 胡沖 (fl. 243–80) and cited in Pei Songzhi’s commentary to Sanguo zhi, states that in the spring of 222, Sun Quan reported to Cao Pi that he had won a great military victory over Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223), the ruler of Shu; as a reward, Cao sent to Sun Quan “a marten fur coat, a set of ‘Bright Light’ armor and horse(s),” and “he also had his Normative Discourses as well as his poetry and fu copied out on silk and sent to Quan.” Sanguo zhi 47.1125.

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is marked by its geographical associations. It is cane sugar, which originated from India but came to China through the Silk Road. The Chinese term “rock honey” might have been a translation of the Sanskrit word śarkarā, which has the meaning of gravel, grit, and pebbles, and is referred to as the “rock honey of the Western Kingdoms” 西國石蜜.65 While the Wei was well positioned geographically to carry on trade relations with Central Asian states, the Wu would not have been able to do so easily. The case of abalone is intriguing. The History of the Southern Dynasties (Nan shi 南史) records the following story about Chu Yuan 褚淵 (435–82), a prominent Southern aristocrat:66 At the time, the land to the north of the Huai River belonged to [Wei],67 and there was no abalone in the south. Occasionally it made its way to the south, and a single piece was worth several thousand cash. Someone once gave Yanhui [i.e., Chu Yuan’s style name] thirty pieces of abalone. Though Yanhui was eminent, he lived in poverty, and one of his retainers suggested that he sell the abalone, saying, “You could get a hundred thousand cash that way.” Yanhui’s face dropped and replied, “I regard this as food, not as a commodity; I had no idea they could be exchanged for money. I have accepted the gift begrudgingly; now, even though I am not well-to-do, how can I sell food for money!” He shared the abalone with his relatives and friends and ate them up in no time. 時淮北屬[魏],江南無復鰒魚,或有間關得至者,一枚直數千 錢。人有餉彥回鰒魚三十枚,彥回時雖貴,而貧薄過甚,門生 有獻計賣之,云可得十萬錢。彥回變色曰:“我謂此是食物,  非 曰財貨,且不知堪賣錢,聊爾受之。雖復儉乏,寧可賣餉取錢 也。” 悉與親游噉之,少日便盡。 This fascinating story about gift, money, and commodity in the Southern Dynasties exemplifies A. J. Gurevich’s description of the medieval noble lords’ attitude toward wealth: “Wealth as seen by the lords was not an end in itself, nor was it something that should be accumulated or economic improvement or development;” rather, it was a way of widening his circle of friends and of 65  Cao Pi uses the phrase “the Western Kingdoms’ grapes and ‘rock honey’ ” 西國葡萄石蜜 in one of his letters to his courtiers. See below. 66  Nan shi 28.751. 67  The character “Wei” is present in the citation in Taiping yulan 938.4301. The Wei refers to the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534), not the Wei dynasty established by Cao Pi.

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reaffirming his power, and so it would be best to “squander it in spectacular fashion,” “in the full glare of publicity.”68 Chu Yuan’s act of conspicuous consumption affirmed his noble birth and distinguished him from a profit-seeking merchant. The story also conveys the scarcity and desirability of abalone in south China in the early fifth century. We do not know if this was the case in the early third century, but no matter whether abalone was easily obtainable in the kingdom of Wu or not, the gift of abalone from Cao Pi, just like marten and cane sugar, was meant to demonstrate the economic power and the bountiful natural resources of the “Great Wei”: the Wei had everything produced in north, south, and the Western Region. Apparently Cao Pi had also given Sun Quan more than once the gift of horses, another northern specialty and an important military and economic asset.69 His letter accompanying the gift of two horses survives in a better shape.70 Previously the emissaries Yu Jin and Guo Jitu had spoken [to you] of the Zou Wu and Tieli horses.71 Yu Jin was originally supposed to take them to you in person; but in case that you, General, want them sooner, Xu Feng is ordered to take them to you now.72 These two horses are Our personal mounts; they are quite tame and good at galloping. They are the best selections from several tens of thousands of horses. Truly it is pleasure 68  Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 247–48. 69  In contrast, Sun Quan gave Cao Pi ships, the southern equivalent of horses. This is reflected in Cao Pi’s letter of acknowledgement. Taiping yulan 770.3545. Quan Sanguo wen 7.1090. 70  The text used here is the Yiwen leiju version with one emendation adopted from Taiping yulan. Yiwen leiju 93.1623–624. It also appears, with some variants, in Taiping yulan 894.4102. Yan Kejun again did a reconstruction by combining those two versions. Quan Sanguo wen 7.1090. 71  For this sentence I have adopted the textual variant in Taiping yulan, which reads: 前使 于禁及王敦去時所道騶吾鐵驪馬. Zouwu is a mythical beast running at a very fast speed; Tieli refers to a black horse. This textual variant seems to work better than the Yiwen leiju version, because Cao Pi specifies two horses later in the letter. The phrase “wei wu” 遺吾 in the Yiwen leiju version might have been a scribal error for “Zouwu” 騶吾, which was not a common term. Yan Kejun’s version reads: “Previously the emissaries Yu Jin and Guo Jifu had spoken [to you] of my Xianli horse” 前使于禁郭及夫所道吾纖 驪馬. Yu Jin 于禁 (d. 221) was a Wei general. Neither Wang Dun nor Guo Jitu/Guo Jifu is attested to in other historical sources from this period. 72  The desire to identify every name leads modern commentators to take Xu Feng as a reference to Xu Sheng 徐盛 and Ding Feng 丁奉, both Wu generals. It is odd to refer to one by family name and another by first name. I take Xu Feng to be one person, who might very well be a Wei courtier. This line could also be parsed as “give them to Xu to present to you.”

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to ride them. Although the Central Kingdom is rich in horses, renowned fast-running steeds are few and far between. 前使于禁郭及土所遺吾纖驪馬。本欲使禁自致之,念將軍儻欲 速得,今故以付徐奉往。此二馬,朕之常所自乘,甚調良善 走,數萬匹之極選者,乘之真可樂也。中國雖饒馬,其知名絕 足,亦時有之耳。 The letter is remarkable in its conceit. Cao Pi first assumes that Sun Quan must be extremely eager to get the horses. Then, behind the two horses loom “several tens of thousands of horses,” a display of the Wei’s economic and military power; finally, he observes that the Central Kingdom is “rich in horses.” The last statement is framed in a modest claim, which, however, only serves to accentuate the preciousness and restricted accessibility of the horses being given, and to underscore the generosity of the giver. On the other hand, Cao Pi theatrically turns up his nose at gifts—especially food gifts—from Wu. Wu li records that Sun Quan once gave some large oranges to Cao Pi. Cao Pi addressed a communication to his courtiers, The south produces oranges. They are so sour that they ruin one’s teeth. Sweet ones are few and far between.73 南方有橘,酢正裂人牙,時有甜耳。 Ironically, apparently Cao Cao had once tried to have some orange trees transplanted to the Copper Bird Park in the city of Ye (in modern Hebei), but the botanical venture of the political and military genius turned out to be disastrous. According to Cao Zhi’s “Fu on the Orange” (Ju fu 橘賦), the orange trees all died in the cold climate of north China. Calling orange a “precious tree,” Cao Zhi laments: “I stroke its slim branches and heave a sigh, saddened by how difficult it is to transform plants and trees” 拊微條以歎息,哀草木 之難化.74 The lament sounds faintly comic because of its cosmic proportions, with hua implying the moral transformation of the common folk exercised by the Confucian monarch, even though Cao Zhi probably did not see the humor of it. In Cao Pi’s collection there are several communications addressed to his courtiers that disparage the food products of Wu and commend those of the “Central Kingdom.” These documents, referred to as “edicts” (zhao 詔) in their encyclopedic sources because of Cao Pi’s status as emperor, effectively 73  T  aiping yulan 966.4417. Yiwen leiju 86.1477. 74  Q  uan Sanguo wen 14.1129.

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function as public letters.75 These “edicts” are texts on the margins of the amorphous genre of “letter,” and it is entirely conceivable that they were issued with the full intention of receiving rejoinders from the courtiers that chime in with His Majesty’s wise judgment, although the imperfect textual record from this period prevents us from seeing the rejoinders today.76 One such edict from Cao Pi reads: The south produces longans and lychees; how can they compare with grapes and rock honey of the western kingdoms? They are quite sour, and their taste is inferior even to that of the ordinary date of the Central Kingdom, not to mention Anyi’s dates presented to the throne. 南方有龍眼荔枝,寧比西國蒲萄石蜜乎?酢且不如中國凡棗 味,莫言安邑御棗也。 77 An entry cited in Taiping yulan partially overlaps with the quotation above but includes an additional remark: The south produces longans and lychees; how can they compare with grapes and rock honey of the western kingdoms? Now We bestow the lychees on civil and martial officers, so that they shall all know this fruit has an bland flavor.

75  For the challenge posed by letters for genre typology across cultures, see Antje Richter’s lucid analysis in her study, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 38–40. While a letter was known by many names in early medieval China, varying by particular circumstances and the relationship between letter writer and addressee, what constitutes a “letter” has remained constant across time. I find the definition of a “letter” given in Richter’s study pertinent and useful: “It is a communication written on a tangible medium by one historical person and addressed to another (or, as the case may be, by one narrowly circumscribed group to another), which, in order to reach its spatially removed addressee, undergoes some form of physical transmission involving a third party and is, more often than not, part of an exchange.” Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 37. 76  A later example is that in the early 6th c. Emperor Wu of the Liang (464–549; r. 502–49) entrusted the monk Fayun 法雲 (467–529) to disseminate his rebuttal of a minister Fan Zhen’s 范縝 (ca. 450–510) anti-Buddhist treatise through letters, which received more than sixty rejoinders from princes and courtiers. The correspondences are all preserved in Hongming ji 弘明集, a sixth-century collection of writings on Buddhism. See Tian, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star, 59–60. 77  “Zhao qun chen” 詔群臣, Yiwen leiju 87.1486.

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南方有龍眼荔支,寧比西國蒲陶石蜜乎?今以荔支賜將吏,啖 之則知其味薄矣。 78 Another communication contrasts the best southern rice unfavorably with the best rice of the north: To the south of the Yangzi River only Changsha claims to have good rice, but how could they even hold a candle to the non-glutinous rice of Xincheng [in modern Henan]? When you cook it in the direction the wind is blowing, you can smell its fine aroma from five leagues away. 江表唯長沙名好米,何時比新城粳稻也?上風炊之,五里聞香。 79 Yet another communication sings the praises of the grape: There are many kinds of precious fruit from the Central Kingdom. Let us now speak of the grape for you. When the vermillion summer is transitioning into autumn but the remaining heat still lingers on, one gets drunk and wakes up with a hangover, and eats grapes covered with dews. They are sweet but not cloying, crisp but not acerbic, cool but not cold; with an enduring flavor and abundant juice they get rid of irritation and relieve nausea. One can also use grapes to make wine, which is sweeter than ale. One becomes drunk from it easily but recovers just as easily. Just talking about it makes one’s mouth water, not to mention actually eating it. How could fruits from other places match it? 中國珍果甚多,且复為說蒲萄:當其朱夏涉秋,尚有餘暑,醉 酒宿醒,掩露而食,甘而不䬼,脆而不酸,冷而不寒,味長汁 多,除煩解䬼。又釀以為酒,甘于麴蘖,善醉而易醒。道之固 以流羨咽唾,况親食之耶?他方之果,寧有匹者? 80 The most notable thing about the grape letter is the distinction made between the “Central Kingdom” and “other places” (tafang 他方), although the grape is no more of a native product of the “Central Kingdom” than cane sugar. All three communications cited above use rhetorical questions to dramatically emphasize the author’s point of view and leave little room for any counter 78  “Yu chao chen shu” 與朝臣書, Taiping yulan 971.4438. 79  Taiping yulan 839.3882. Also in Yiwen leiju 85.1449. 80   “Zhao qun chen,” Taiping yulan 972.4440. For another translation, see Knechtges, “Gradually Entering the Realm of Delight,” 238.

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argument. Unlike letters exchanged between equals, a public letter addressed by a ruler to his courtiers making a point usually expects a simple and positive response, but a response it expects nevertheless. In such letters Cao Pi also criticizes the textiles of Wu and Shu. “East of the [Yangzi] River produces hemp cloth; how could it compare with silk, gauze, damask and chiffon?” 江東爲葛,寧比羅紈綺縠.81 He expresses frustration with the unreliability of the famous Shu brocade: “The Shu brocade I have obtained at different times is never consistent in quality; it is quite shocking” 前後每得蜀錦殊不相比,適可訝. He belittles the gold foils used to decorate fabrics from Shu: “The gold foils from Shu that have come to Luoyang are all of a poor quality. The products of those outlying regions have nothing but an undeserving reputation” 蜀薄來至洛邑,皆下惡,是為下土之物,   皆有虛名.82 He gives a summary statement: “For precious objects, one must look to the Central Kingdom” 夫珍玩必中國.83 Cao Pi freely dispenses his opinions regarding food and clothes. In one communication he extols the pear of Zhending (in modern Hebei): “Zhending’s pears presented to the throne are as large as a fist, sweet like honey and crisp like icicles. They can relieve irritation and slake thirst” 真定御梨,大若拳,   甘若蜜,脆若凌,可以解煩釋渴.84 He also passes on to his court the unflattering assessment of Shu food products made by a former Shu general: “According to Magistrate Meng of Xincheng, Shu piglets, lamb, chickens and ducks all have a bland flavor, and that is why the Shu people love to use sugar and honey when they cook” 新城孟太守道蜀肫羊鶏騖味皆淡,故蜀人 作食,喜著飴蜜.85 In a letter to a courtier Liu Ye 劉曄 (d. after 234), Cao Pi teases him that “Mr. Liu’s cap is slightly on the short side, resembling that worn by a country bumpkin” 劉生帽裁製微不長,有似里父之服.86 81  “Zhao qun chen,” Taiping yulan 816.3758. 82  “Zhao qun chen,” Taiping yulan 815.3753. 83  “Zhao qun chen,” Yiwen leiju 67.1187. 84  “Zhao qun chen,” Taiping yulan 969.4429. 85  “Zhao qun chen,” Taiping yulan 857.3942. The Magistrate of Xincheng was Meng Da 孟達 (d. 228), who capitulated to Wei in early 220. Thanks to this remark, we learn that early medieval Sichuan cuisine was probably rather sweet. It was apparently not only devoid of the hot taste of the chili pepper of the New World, but perhaps not even “numbing,” ma 麻, a sensation in the mouth not unlike the effect of oral anesthesia achieved by the native Chinese huajiao 花椒 or fagara. See Knechtges’ discussion of the huajiao in “Food and Drink,” 233. 86  “Yu Liu Ye shu” 與劉曄書, Taiping yulan 687.3196.

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Liu Ye was, however, far from a “country bumpkin.” He was a scion of the imperial house of the Han. Cao Pi, the descendant of a son of a Han palace eunuch, turned the table around by representing himself as a true connoisseur of food, drink, and clothes. Tirelessly writing epistles to his courtiers as well as to his opponents, he sent them strategically chosen gifts for display and persuasion. Both the gift of his own writings, copied out on expensive silk, and that of costly material objects were meant to demonstrate the cultural power and political legitimacy of the Wei regime, which was repeatedly promoted as the center, the gathering place of cultural and material resources. Through passing literary, culinary, and sartorial judgment in his letters, Cao Pi showed himself to be the central figure in the center, a man of fine taste. 4 Relocation In the foregoing sections we have discussed a number of letters accompanying gifts or expressing thanks for gifts from the turn of the third century. Early medieval gift letters went into two distinct, though related, directions in the fifth century: one is the writing of verse epistles regarding gift giving and receiving; the other is the transformation of a prose letter form called qi 啟 or qishi 啟事 into an elaborate “thank-you note.” Although the former had a powerful impact on the later tradition, in the fifth and sixth century the dominant form of expressing thanks for gifts from a superior was the latter. While verse epistles regarding gift giving and receiving may be directed to a social equal, a qi is used to express thanks to a superior, often a member of the royal family. The qi began as a simple, straightforward communiqué about official business, not limited to the expression of gratitude for gifts. In its function as a thankyou note, however, it gradually became more and more refined and flowery, culminating in a well-crafted piece of parallel prose in the first half of the sixth century. In later times writing a poem to give thanks for a gift was extremely common, but judging from the textual evidence we have, this practice seems to start flourishing only in the late Southern Dynasties, i.e., the fifth and sixth century. Earlier Cao Pi had sent a poetic exposition to Zhong You to thank him for the gift of jade, but by this point poetry seems to have become the preferred genre as a return gift. The thank-you poem is also an off-shoot of the verse epistle known as zengda shi 贈答詩 (“presentation-reply poetry”), for when a late Southern Dynasties poet addresses a thank-you poem to a friend,

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s/he often seems to be responding to the friend’s poem accompanying the gift rather than to the gift alone.87 In one rare case, the poems from both gift donor and receiver have survived. Dao Gai 到溉 (477–548), a renowned man of letters, wrote a poem entitled “Giving a Mottled Bamboo Staff to Ren Xin’an and Presenting Him with a Poem” (Xiang Ren Xin’an banzhuzhang yin zeng shi 餉任新安班竹杖因贈詩). “Ren Xin’an” refers to Ren Fang 任昉 (460–508), a senior writer and scholar, who had served as Magistrate of Xin’an. Ren Fang replied with “In Response to Dao Jian’an’s Gift of Staff” (Da Dao Jian’an xiang zhang shi 答到建安餉杖詩).88 In most cases, however, only the poem from gift donor or receiver is still extant. For instance, Wang Yun 王筠 (481–549), a well-known court poet, sent a bouquet of chrysanthemum to Xie Ju 謝舉 (d. 548) along with a poem entitled “I Picked Chrysanthemums from My Garden to Give to Grand Councilor Xie Ju” (Zhai yuanju zeng Xie puye Ju shi 摘園菊贈謝仆射舉詩); on another occasion, he sent some pomegranates to Liu Xiaowei 劉孝威 (496?–549), also a renowned poet, along with an ardent poetic profession of friendship, “I Picked Pomegranates to Give to Liu Xiaowei” (Zhai anshiliu zeng Liu Xiaowei shi 摘安 石榴贈劉孝威詩). In both cases we do not have a thank-you poem from Xie Ju or Liu Xiaowei, if they had written any. An extant poem by Wang Yun gives thanks for some plums from a colleague, with the title “In Response to the Red Plums from Yuan the Grand Master of the Palace with Golden Seal and Purple Ribbon” (Da Yuan jinzi xiang zhuli shi 答元金紫餉朱李詩).89 Two gift poems by a woman poet named Liu Lingxian 劉令嫻, who was Liu Xiaowei’s sister, deserve special note.90 One is a quatrain accompanying a gift of gardenia presented to a Lady Xie, in which Liu makes a witty pun about the name of gardenia (zhizi 梔子) and “this person” (zhizi 之子): “the gardenia/this person touches my heart most of all” 梔子最關人.91 The other is a poem expressing gratitude to a Ms. Tang, an entertainer, for her gift of threaded needles.92 Threading needles was a custom observed by young women on the 87  See Zeb Raft’s essay on zengda shi in the four-syllable line, “The Space of Separation: Medieval Chinese Poetry of ‘Presentation and Response,’ ” in this volume. Also see Zhao Yiwu, Changhe shi yanjiu; Jiang Yaling, Wen xuan zengda shi. 88  Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1855, 1599. 89  Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 2019, 2017, 2020. 90  For women’s letters in late imperial China, see Ellen B. Widmer’s essay, “Letters as Windows on Ming-Qing Women’s Literary Culture,” in this volume. 91 “Zhao tongxin zhizi zeng Xie niang yin fu ci shi” 摘同心栀子贈謝娘因附此詩. Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 2132. 92 “Da Tang niang qixi suo chuan zhen shi” 答唐娘七夕所穿鍼詩. Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 2131.

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eve of the seventh day of the seventh month, a festival celebrating the reunion of the separated heavenly lovers, the Cowherd and the Weaving Girl. To thread needles with many-colored threads swiftly and successfully in the moonlight on this night was regarded as a good sign for obtaining dexterity in needlework. In her poem, after giving obligatory praises of Ms. Tang’s needlework skills, Liu Lingxian adds a personal touch by reflecting on her circumstances: “The widow’s boudoir is devoid of silks and damasks, / Holding your gift in my hands, I feel pity for myself” 孀閨絕綺羅,攬贈自傷嗟. Liu Lingxian was married to Xu Fei 徐悱 (495–524), himself a fine poet, who had died an untimely death while serving as administrator at Jin’an 晉安 (in modern Fujian). Xiao Gang 蕭綱 (503–51), also known by his posthumous title Emperor Jianwen of the Liang 梁簡文帝 (r. 549–51), once sent a poem to thank the Prince of Nanping for some cherries.93 倒流映碧叢 點露擎朱實 花茂蝶爭來 枝濃鳥相失 已麗金釵瓜 仍美玉盤橘 寧以梅似丸 不羡萍如日 永植平臺垂

Reversed in the currents: the reflection of a verdant grove; Sprinkled in dewdrops, scarlet fruits held high. When flowers are lush, butterflies vie to visit; Amidst leafy boughs birds lose one another’s tracks. It is not only lovelier than the Golden Hairpin melon,94 But also more beautiful than the orange in the jade plate.95 How could one compare bayberries to pellets?96 Nor do we covet the duckweed fruit as large as the sun.97 Always planted beside the Level Terrace,98

93 “Feng da Nanping wang Kang lai zhuying shi” 奉答南平王康賚朱櫻詩. Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1949. 94  “Gold Hairpin” is the name of a kind of melon. See Lu Ji’s 陸機 (261–303) “Fu on the Melon” (Gua fu 瓜賦). Quan Jin wen 97.2015. 95  Orange in the jade plate is an allusion to an anonymous “old poem” from the late Eastern Han. Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 335. 96  Bayberry is a subtropical tree, also known as Chinese Bayberry or popularly as “yumberry.” Shen Ying’s 沈瑩 (d. 280) Linhai yiwu zhi 臨海異物志 states: “Bayberry’s fruits are like pellets” 楊梅其子如彈丸. Taiping yulan 972.4442. Zhang Hua’s 張華 (232–300) Bowu zhi 博物志 also states: “As for cherries, some of them are like pellets” 櫻桃者或如彈丸. Yiwen leiju 86.1479. 97  When the king of Chu was boating on the river, the boatman obtained a fruit that was big, round, “red like the sun” and “as sweet as honey.” No one but Confucius could identify it as the “duckweed fruit,” which he said was a good omen for the king. Kongzi jiayu 2.18. 98  Level Terrace was part of the Prince Xiao of Liang’s park. Shi ji 58.2083.

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長與雲桂密 It forever remains intimate with cassias in the clouds.99 徒然奉推甘 In vain you have upheld the value of yielding the sweets, 終以愧操筆 For in the end I am ashamed in taking up the brush. Like Cao Pi’s fu on the jade gift that begins with a portrayal of the jade’s divine origin and extraordinary attributes, the poem offers a vivid depiction of the cherries replete with references to the literary tradition. It ends with a modest claim of the poet’s meager talent, implying that the textual representation of the thing does not do full justice to the real thing. Just as Cao Pi’s fu very much falls into the category of “poetic expositions on things” (yongwu fu 詠 物賦), Xiao Gang’s poem evokes the poetic subgenre known as “poetry on things” (yongwu shi 詠物詩), which showcases a poet’s erudition and descriptive power. The genre of qi as thank-you note, though a prose form, shares the characteris­ tics of poetry and poetic expositions on things. As mentioned earlier, a qi was an official communiqué addressed to superiors.100 The literary critic Liu Xie 劉 勰 (ca. 460s–520s) thus discusses qi in his work Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍: “Qi” has been very popular since the Jin dynasty, and its use overlaps with memorials (biao) and reports (zou). It is used to discuss matters of governance and affairs of the state, so it is an alternative of the report; it is also used to decline the conferral of official titles or express gratitude for imperial grace, in which case it is a substitute for the memorial. It must be restrained and observes the rules; its pace must be swift; it must be to the point, light, and clear; it must be embellished without being excessive: these are the general principles of a qi.101 自晉來盛啟,用兼表奏。陳政言事,既奏之異條;讓爵謝恩,亦表 之別幹。必斂轍入規,促其音節,辨要輕清,文而不侈,亦啟之 大略也。

99  See Guo Pu’s 郭璞 (276–324) encomium on the cassia tree: “The cassia grows in the southern frontier, towering above others on the high mountain. . . . Its aura dominates a hundred kinds of medicinal plants; lush and prosperous, it rises upright into the clouds” 桂生南裔,拔萃岑嶺 . . . 氣王百藥,森然雲挺. Quan Jin wen 122.2158. 100  According to Fu Qian’s 服虔 (fl. 2nd c.) Tongsu wen 通俗文, “official communiqués are called qi” 官信曰啟. Taiping yulan 595.2810. But all the extant early examples of qi are addressed to one’s superiors, including but not limited to the emperor, and the term qishi 啟事 (to report official business) clearly indicates reporting to superiors. 101  Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong 23.873. For Liu Xie’s work and early medieval Chinese letters, see Pablo Ariel Blitstein’s article in this volume.

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By the time when Liu Xie wrote his Wenxin diaolong at the turn of the sixth century, qi as a thank-you note had become so intricate that it seemed nothing but “excessive.” Though usually brief, it is densely allusive and applies strict parallelism. Its excessiveness is also embodied in an excess of meaning: by recreating the material gift with beautiful words drawn from the literary tradition, the author of a well-crafted thank-you note endows the gift with a surplus of symbolic value that far exceeds its economic value, so that a qi, as a textual representation of the gift and a return gift, constitutes an adequate repayment for the donor’s grace. The remainder of this section will be devoted to an analysis of three qi expressing gratitude for the gift of oranges written by courtiers of the Liang 梁 dynasty (501–57). The period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties was again a period of disunion; but unlike the Three Kingdoms period, the south now was dominated by a series of Han Chinese dynasties while the north was ruled by non-Han ethnic peoples. For the first time in Chinese history the south stopped being a peripheral region to the “Central Kingdom” and became established as a cultural center. The making of the south was very much a result of the successful literary and cultural programs of the sophisticated southern court, especially under the long rule of Emperor Wu of the Liang, who, along with his three talented sons, Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–531), Xiao Gang, and Xiao Yi 蕭繹 (508–555), actively promoted cultural enterprises. The Xiao princes, especially Xiao Tong and Xiao Gang, were fascinated with Cao Pi, Cao Zhi, and their literary coterie from the Jian’an era; Xiao Tong represented the Jian’an era in his monumental literary anthology Wen xuan in such a way that the selections created an idealized image of the Jian’an, which the Xiao princes upheld as their own model. This is the background against which we must read the three orange letters, which all evoke the writings of the Cao family and, through these allusions, demonstrate the working of the contemporary cultural politics. Liu Qian 劉潛 (484–550), better known as Liu Xiaoyi 劉孝儀, was the brother of Liu Xiaowei and Liu Lingxian. Translated below is his thank-you note to the Crown Prince for a gift of “sour-peel oranges growing by the city wall” (Xie Donggong ci cheng pang ju qi 謝東宮賜城傍橘啟):102 多置守民

Many people were assigned as guards of the orange trees—

102  Yiwen leiju 86.1479. The Crown Prince could be either Xiao Tong or Xiao Gang, who was designated as heir apparent in 531 after Xiao Tong’s untimely death.

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This was a lucrative office in the Jin;103 Fine silks were earned for nothing— During the Han owning orange groves was compared to enjoying a fief.104 固以 Indeed these oranges might 俛疋穰橙 Deign to be matched with the coolie orange of the Rang Prefecture, 俯連楚柚 And condescend to claim a connection with the pomelo of Chu.105 寍似魏瓜 But in no way should they be likened to the melon of Wei 借清泉而得冷 That must rely on a clear spring to become cool;106 豈如蜀食 And certainly they are superior to the food from Shu 待飴蜜而成甜 That only becomes sweet with sugar and honey.107 重似 Furthermore,108 晉為厚秩 坐入縑素 漢譬封君

103  According to Yang Fu’s 楊孚 (fl. 77) Yiwu zhi 異物志, “Orange tree has white blossoms and red fruits. The orange fruit has an aromatic peel and tastes good. An office with the salary of three hundred bushels of grain is established in the region of Jiaozhi [modern northern Vietnam] to supervise the presentation of oranges to the throne.” 橘白華赤 實,皮馨香有味,交阯有橘官長一人,秩二百石,主貢御橘. Yiwen leiju 86.1477; also cited in Taiping yulan 626.2936, with a variant: “three hundred bushels of grain.” The Nanfang caomu zhuang 南方草木狀, authored by the Western Jin writer Ji Han 嵇含 (262–306), includes a similar entry, but with the additional information that the orange officer was established “since the time of Emperor Wu of the Han” 自漢武帝. Han Wei liuchao biji xiaoshuo, 265. 104  “Those who . . . grow a thousand orange trees at Jiangling . . . possess the wealth that is equivalent of a fief of a thousand households” 江陵千樹橘 . . . 此其人皆與千戶侯等. Shi ji 129.3272. Li Heng 李衡 (fl. 3rd c.), a Wu magistrate, famously compared the thousand orange trees he owned to “a thousand wooden slaves” 木奴千頭 and said the orange grove would earn the family an income of over a thousand bolts of silk every year. Quan Sanguo wen 73.1444. 105  Rang Prefecture was in Nanyang 南陽 (in modern Henan). The coolie orange of Rang is lauded in Zhang Heng’s 張衡 (78–139) “Fu on the Southern Metropolis” (Nan du fu 南都 賦). Quan Hou Han wen 53.768. Lü Buwei, Lüshi chunqiu 14.741: “Among fruits, the most delicious ones are . . . the pomelos of Yunmeng” 菓之美者 . . . 雲夢之柚. 106  This refers to Cao Pi’s letter to Wu Zhi 吳質 (177–230), in which he recalls the pleasures enjoyed on their outings together: “We floated sweet melons in a clear spring” 浮甘瓜於 清泉. Quan Sanguo wen 7.1089. 107  This refers to Cao Pi’s recounting of Meng Da’s report about the bland food of Shu (see above). 108  Here si 似 should probably be emended to yi 以.

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They cast shadows in the sun-warmed moat, Their splendid blossoms hanging over the parapet wall of metal. 信可 Truly they are 珍若榴於式乾 More precious than the pomegranate of the Shiqian Palace,109 貴蒲萄於別館 And more prized than grapes planted at royal villas.110 倒影陽池 垂華金堞

Liu Qian’s thank-you note is a fine example of the epistolary genre of qi, characterized by its brevity and its use of parallelism throughout. It begins by tracing back to Han and Jin dynasties and stating the economic and political importance of the orange trees: orange groves, like a noble lord’s fiefdom, confer wealth on individuals; the presentation of oranges to the throne from the farthest south also demonstrates the far-reaching power of the empire. Next, the author praises the orange as being a sort of a “better equal” to fruits of both north and south, respectively represented by the coolie orange of the Rang Prefecture and the pomelo of Chu. This sets the stage for the next statement, which alludes to no less than two of Cao Pi’s letters and disparages the foods of Shu and Wei. Such a rhetorical move not only avenges the Wu orange once scorned by Cao Pi but also implicitly aligns the author’s position with none other than the kingdom of Wu. The Liang courtier, however, could very well take pride in the cultural and political resources of the south, and Liu Qian ends his note with an echo of the opening lines by claiming the orange’s superiority to the fruits—pomegranate and grape—cherished by the Jin and Han royalty. While pomegranate and grape were both imported exotic fruits, the orange was native to the south—as a matter of fact, grown right by the wall of the capital city. Indeed there was no need to look beyond one’s own backyard. The presence of textual references throughout the letter except in one sentence draws attention to that sentence: “They cast shadows in the sun-warmed moat, their splendid blossoms hanging over the parapet wall of metal.” The “sun-warmed moat” stresses the southern facing of the moat, a positioning well suited to the growth of orange trees; it also highlights the southern 109  The Shiqian Palace was a Wei and Western Jin palace in Luoyang. Fruit trees were apparently planted in front of it. One source mentions there were two cherry trees. Yiwen leiju 86.1479. Ying Zhen’s 應貞 (d. 269) preface to his “Fu on the Pomegranate” (Anshiliu fu 安石榴賦) states that when he was working in the Imperial Library, there was a pomegranate tree in front of the office where he was on night duty. Yiwen leiju 86.1481. 110  After grapes were introduced into China, they were “planted everywhere beside the imperial villas” 離宮別觀傍盡種蒲萄. Shi ji 123.3174.

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origin of the orange, which is considered a yang fruit of the sun; Cao Zhi writes thus in his “Fu on the Orange”: “It inherits the fiery energy of the great yang, and delights in the splendor of the bright sun” 稟太陽之烈氣, 嘉杲日之休 光.111 In Liu Qian’s couplet, the orange blossoms (hua) are placed in the corresponding position of “reflection/shadow” (ying). Since the orange blossoms are white, there is an implied color contrast: dark shadow cast in water vs. pale, sun-drenched blossoms. The black and white contrast is striking against the “metal parapet wall,” with “metal” being the same word as “gold/goldencolored” ( jin), the color of the orange fruit. The only parallel couplet devoid of textual allusions in the letter presents a charming vignette and showcases the consummate descriptive skill of an accomplished court writer. Another extant letter by Liu Qian is addressed to the Prince of Jin’an, Xiao Gang’s title before he was named the Crown Prince in 531, in which Liu Qian thanks Xiao Gang for the gift of citrus fruit.112 The fruit is gan, sweet-peel tangerine, not ju, sour-peel orange; but as we will see, the author does not care much about the botanical distinction when deploying literary allusions: 便得 削彼金衣 咽茲玉液 甘踰萍實 冷亞水圭 立消煩䬼

Right away one could Peel away its golden coat, And drink its jasper juice.113 Its sweetness exceeds the duckweed fruit,114 Its coolness is only second to the watery jade.115 It immediately gets rid of frustration and nausea,

111  Quan Sanguo wen 14.1129. 112  “Xie Jin’an wang ci gan qi” 謝晉安王賜甘啟. Yiwen leiju 86.1475–476. 113  Li You 李尢 (44–126), “Qi kuan” 七款: “Golden coat, vermillion interior” 金衣朱里. Quan Hou Han wen 50.747. “Jasper juice” usually refers to elixir. 114  For the “duckweed fruit,” see above. 115  For “watery jade” shui gui 水圭, Yan Kejun has “a jug of ice” (bing hu 冰壺). Quan Liang wen 61.3317. Shui gui, however, might be an error for bing gui 氷圭, which appears in “Fu on the Melon” (Gua fu 瓜賦) by Liu Zhen 劉楨, a member of Cao Pi and Cao Zhi’s literary coterie: “Its sweetness exceeds the honeycomb, and its coolness is second only to the icy jade” 甘逾蜜房, 冷亞冰圭. Quan Hou Han wen 65.829. These two lines also appear in a thank-you note attributed to Liu Jun 劉峻 (461–521), which is included in Quan Liang wen 57.3286. The compiler Yan Kejun cites as his source a work on oranges, Ju lu 橘錄, written by Han Yanzhi 韓彥直 (1131–after 1178), but the attribution is not attested in any earlier source.

Material and Symbolic Economies

頓除酩酊 追嗤齊相 進不剖之實 遠笑魏君 逢裂牙之味

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And cures the hangover at once.116 I snicker at the prime minister of Qi from long ago— Who ingested the fruit without cutting it open;117 I laugh at the emperor of Wei in the distant past— Who encountered the taste that ruined his teeth.

This letter mimics the process of the ingestion of the fruit by representing a movement from the exterior to the interior. It opens with an “opening” of the fruit, and, as the author takes in the juice of the orange, he finds it both sweet and cold, which eliminates physical and spiritual discomfort. With a renewed spirit he looks back at the minister and ruler of the past: northerners who did not know how to eat the orange properly or who “encountered” a poor specimen of the orange. He unabashedly celebrates the here and now, for his prince bestows a gift of orange far superior to the one given to the Wei ruler, and more importantly, the gift is lavished on a minister who understands how to appreciate it. Ironically, Liu Qian uses Cao Pi’s very words praising a northern fruit (i.e., the grape) to extol the southern produce, but in the end the joke is on Cao Pi, who ruined his teeth on sour oranges from the southern king. The letter ends with condemning the wrong kind of opening—the fruit that was not peeled, and the teeth that were literally “cracked”—and thus comes full circle by echoing the right kind of opening at the opening. The last orange letter to be discussed (“Xie lai ju qi” 謝賚橘啟) was written by Yu Jianwu 庾肩吾 (487?–551), one of the leading poets of the Liang court. 光分璇宿 影接銅峰

Its light is divided from the Northern Dipper;118 Its shadow touches the copper hills.119

116  This is an allusion to Cao Pi’s letter on the grape (see previous section). 117  According to a story recorded in Shuo yuan 說苑 compiled by Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE), Duke Jing of Qi sent his minister Yanzi 晏子 on a diplomatic mission to Chu. The king of Chu gave him an orange and a peeling knife, but Yanzi ate the orange without peeling it. When the Chu king reminded him of his faux pas, Yanzi replied that it was not that he did not know he should peel the orange before eating it, but that a subject should not cut open a fruit in front of a ruler unless the ruler ordered him to do so. Shuo yuan 12.406. 118  According to Chunqiu yundoushu 春秋運斗樞, a Han astrological work, “the Xuan and Shu Stars disintegrates and turns into oranges” 璇樞星散為橘. Yiwen leiju 86.1477. The Shu Star and Xuan Star are the first and second of the seven stars of the Northern Dipper, and “Xuan Shu” becomes a general reference to the Northern Dipper. 119  Yang Xiong’s 揚雄 (53–18) “Fu on the Shu Capital” (Shu du fu 蜀都賦) contains the line praising the local products of Shu: “Orange groves, copper-producing hills” 橘林銅陵. Quan Han wen 51.402.

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去青馬之迢遞 Having left the distant land of the black horses,120 服朱闉之爽塏 It grows accustomed to the sunny aridness of the vermillion barbican. 楚原洪筆 In an ode, the majestic brush of Qu Yuan of Chu 頌記不遷 Records its refusal to relocate; 陳王麗藻 The Prince of Chen’s beautiful rhapsody 賦稱遙植 Claims its transplantation from afar.121 昔 In the past, 朝歌季重 Jizhong, the Magistrate of Zhaoge, 纔賜海魚 Was only given some ocean fish;122 大理元常 Yuanchang, Chamberlain for Law Enforcement, 止蒙秋菊 Received nothing more than autumn chrysanthemums.123 The “Ode to the Orange” (Ju song 橘頌), attributed to Qu Yuan, is one of the “Nine Pieces” (Jiu zhang 九章) in the Lyrics of Chu (Chu ci 楚辭). As David Hawkes notes, the orange tree “was traditionally supposed not to grow naturally anywhere north of the River Yangtze.”124 The ode opens with these lines: 后皇嘉樹 橘徠服兮 受命不遷 生南國兮

This fine tree between heaven and earth, Orange it is, settling down and becoming accustomed to the soil here. It receives the command of heaven not to relocate, But only grows in the southern land.

These lines from a literary classic constitute the core around which Yu Jianwu structures his letter. Writing in the tradition of poems/poetic expositions on things, Yu Jianwu begins by recounting the origin of the orange. It is a mystical place in the celestial sphere, and the golden color of the orange is implicitly 120  Ying Shao 應劭 (fl. late 2nd c.) cites a lost work, Yi Yin shu 伊尹書: “To the east of the Ji Mountain, at the place where the black horses are, there are black kumquats that ripen in summer.” 箕山之東,青馬之所,有盧橘夏孰. Han shu 57.2559. There is a variant for qing ma that reads qing niao (blue birds). Shi ji 117.3028. 121  Cao Zhi was enfeoffed as the Prince of Chen. His “Fu on the Orange” contains the lines: “Transplanted from ten thousand leagues away, it was on display in the park of the Copper Bird.” 播萬里而遙植,列銅爵之園庭. Quan Sanguo wen 14.1129. 122  Jizhong is the courtesy name of Wu Zhi, a close friend of Cao Pi. He had served as magistrate of Zhaoge at one point, and during his term there Cao Pi addressed several letters to him. The gift of fish was presumably sent to him by Cao Pi. 123  Yuanchang is Zhong You’s courtesy name. 124  Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 178.

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conveyed in its “light,” which it receives from the Xuan and Shu stars. Fascination with the interplay of reflection/shadow ( ying) and light is a peculiar Liang phenomenon,125 and light is often portrayed by its opposite and negation. Sure enough, the next line in the parallel couplet turns from light to shadows, from heaven to earth, from a dazzling constellation to copper-producing mountains that cast dark shadows under the bright fruit-stars. As the letter shifts the viewpoint from the celestial to earthly realm, the orange too is shown to have relocated. It comes to settle in the part of the mortal world that is marked by the vermillion color, that is, the fiery south. Interestingly, the humid south is not traditionally characterized as sunny and arid (shuang kai 爽塏). Jiang Yan 江淹 (444–505), an older contemporary of Yu Jianwu, uses shuang kai to depict north China in his “Fu on Lamenting a Thousand Leagues” (Ai qianli fu 哀千里賦): “Although the north of the Yellow River is sunny and arid, / [I remain steadfast] like the oranges and pomelos that do not relocate” 雖河北之爽塏,猶橘柚之不遷.126 In his use of the compound Yu Jianwu may very well be focusing on the meaning of the first character, i.e., “shuang” as “brightly lit,” which is an attribute of the sunny south. By such a rhetorical shift of emphasis he manages to empower the south with a positive trait that is usually associated with the north. Once the orange settles in the south and becomes accustomed ( fu 服, evoking laifu 徠服 in the “Ode to the Orange”) to its soil, it finds its true home. Citing the “Ode to the Orange” and then Cao Zhi’s “Fu on the Orange,” Yu Jianwu makes a satirical jab at the Cao family. From this point on, the rhetorical move follows the same trajectory as that in Liu Qian’s second letter: not only are the Xiao princes, as opposed to the Cao family, blessed with the celestial fruit native to the southern land, but the Liang courtier also receives a gift far superior to those received by the Wei courtiers Wu Zhi and Zhong You. In these thank-you notes, the orange becomes the locus of an empiric discourse that attempts to establish the south as a new cultural and political center vis-à-vis earlier times and the present-day rival state in the north. The Cao Wei princes, frequently alluded to in these letters, constitute the very norm and standard against which the Liang princes and courtiers measure the present; they are both the role models to be emulated and the competitors to be surpassed. The three orange letters embody the contemporary cultural politics; more importantly, with their dense allusions and rhetorical flourishes, they

125  For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon, see Tian, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star, 211–59. 126  Quan Liang wen 33.3143.

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become a code language that can only be deciphered by insiders possessing the same level of erudition and literary training. By writing such letters to their princes, the courtiers show themselves to be men of fine taste who know how to properly savor the delicious princely gift; and the princes, in turn, are placed by these letters in the position of understanding readers who know exactly how to appreciate these delectable return gifts.



This essay considers the issue of material and symbolic economies underlying letters regarding the transfer of objects in early medieval China. While modern gift theory, initiated by Marcel Mauss, largely deals with the gift objects themselves, I argue that the letter accompanying a gift plays a crucial role in the creation and interpretation of the meaning of the gift object. Context can certainly shed much light on a gift-exchange, but the letter of the donor (and sometimes the letter of the receiver as well) helps us more than anything to decode the sign that is the material object being transferred from one person to another. A letter also constitutes a gift in itself. When it accompanies a gift of material object, this double gifting complicates the process of exchange and circulation, and prompts us to reconsider the workings of reciprocity in gift-giving. None of the gift recipients discussed in this essay is known to have sent a material return gift to the donor, but they all give back textual repayments. This is quite obvious in Cao Pi’s thank-you letter to Zhong You for the gift of jade, with which he encloses a poetic exposition praising the jade, and in the sixthcentury thank-you notes for the gift of oranges from the Liang princes. In other cases, one could argue that the gifts being given are already “return gifts” for services rendered. For instance, Cao Pi’s gift of chrysanthemum flowers and Five-Tastes Cauldron to Zhong You for being a loyal servant to the Wei, the Liang princes’ gifts of oranges to their courtiers, or even Cao Cao’s lavish gifts to Yang Biao, which could be read as a return gift for having had the “use” of Yang Biao’s son. There is no need to reciprocate with material gifts in such cases, although the donor might still expect to receive a letter of acknowledgment and appreciation. Indeed, sometimes one may legitimately wonder if a prince handed out food gifts to his literary courtiers just for the sake of getting a wellcrafted thank-you letter in return to satisfy his own aesthetic craving. In any case, the exquisite thank-you note of the late Southern Dynasties functions just like Cao Pi’s poetic exposition on jade: it is the textual substitute for the material gift and constitutes an adequate return gift because it creates a surplus value for the gift itself.

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The importance of the letter in deciphering the meaning of a gift is nowhere demonstrated so clearly as in a gift being offered under dubious circumstances with a short gift message. At the beginning of this essay I have mentioned Zhuge Liang’s insulting gift of female clothes to the Wei general Sima Yi, so it is fitting to end the essay with a gift message to Zhuge Liang from none other than Cao Cao himself. The message, most likely a fragment of the original letter, is simple enough: “I am presenting you now with five catties of cloves to convey my humble sentiments” 今奉雞舌香五斤,以表微意.127 The clove was an exotic product from the far south. According to Ying Shao, during the Han Dynasty members of the Imperial Secretariat would keep cloves in their mouths to sweeten their breath when reporting to the emperor. He records a humorous story involving cloves. Diao Cun 刁存, a senior Palace Attendant with bad breath, was given some cloves by Emperor Huan 桓帝 (r. 147–67). Not knowing what the clove was, Diao Cun thought it was poison and that he was asked to commit suicide. He went home to bid a tearful farewell to his family. When his colleagues and friends heard, they all came to visit him, and laughed heartily upon seeing the “poison.” They offered to take some of the “poison” themselves, and only then did Diao Cun recognize his ignorance.128 Cao Cao’s gift of cloves to Zhuge Liang—a high-level minister serving one of his arch-enemies—could be subject to various interpretations. It could be a simple demonstration of respect. Or, it could be a subtle gesture to win Zhuge Liang over to Cao Cao’s side: since Cao Cao remained a Han subject all his life, the cloves, which were the hallmark of a Han Secretariat Court Gentleman, could be construed as an invitation to Zhuge Liang to occupy a prestigious position at the Han court. Or it could be taken as an insult, as it implied that Zhuge Liang had bad breath—metaphorically (i.e., giving bad counsel to his lord) and/or literally. Without the context in which the gift-giving took place and without a more detailed letter accompanying the gift, we will never find out exactly what the gift meant or what it was supposed to mean, whether it was a “straightforward” gift or, since interpreting a gift symbolically was not an uncommon phenomenon in the third century, a sign that is deliberately left ambiguous and intended to elicit multiple readings.129 127  Quan Sanguo wen 3.1070. 128  Quan Hou Han wen 34.666. 129  A contemporary example of making symbolic interpretations of gifts can be found in the third-century historian Sima Biao’s work, Zhan lüe 戰略. Meng Da, the Shu general who capitulated to Wei in 220, later had second thoughts about it. He communicated with Zhuge Liang, who tried to persuade him to come back to Shu. Meng Da reportedly sent to

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Bibliography Cao Cao ji yizhu 曹操集譯注. Annotated by Anhui Bo xian Cao Cao ji yizhu xiaozu 安 徽亳縣曹操集譯注小組. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979. Cao Cao ji zhu 曹操集注. Annotated by Xia Chuancai 夏傳才. Henan: Zhongzhou guji shubanshe, 1986. Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 春秋左傳正義. In Shisanjing zhushu. Curta, Florin. “Merovingian and Carolingian Gift Giving.” Speculum 81 (2006): 671–99. Derrida, Jacques. Given Time. 1. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Camuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Er ya zhushu 爾雅注疏. In Shisanjing zhushu. Gu wen yuan 古文苑. Annotated by Zhang Qiao 章樵 (d. 1235). Sibu congkan edition. Gurevich, A. J. Categories of Medieval Culture. Translated by G.L. Campbell. London: Routledge, 1985. Han Wei liuchao biji xiaoshuo daguan 漢魏六朝筆記小說大觀. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999. Han shu 漢書. Compiled by Ban Gu 班固. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Harwood, Britton J. “Gawain and the Gift.” PMLA 106.3 (1991): 483–99. Hawkes, David, trans. The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Hou Han shu 後漢書. Compiled by Fan Ye 范曄 (398–446). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965. Huainanzi 淮南子. Compiled by Liu An 劉安 (179–122 BCE). Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1981. Jiang Yaling 江雅玲. Wen xuan zengda shi liubianshi 文選贈答詩流變史. Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1999. Jin shu 晉書. Compiled by Fang Xuanling 房玄齡 (579–648) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Knechtges, David R. “Gradually Entering the Realm of Delight: Food and Drink in Early Medieval China.” JAOS 117 (1997): 229–39.

Zhuge Liang the gifts of a jade ring ( jue 玦), a brocatelle (zhicheng 織成) safeguard and some storax incense (suhe xiang 蘇合香). A Shu officer leaked the information to Shen Yi 申儀, a Wei magistrate. According to the Shu officer, “Zhuge Liang said, ‘The jade ring ( jue) means Meng had made up his mind ( jue); zhicheng means a plan has been formed (cheng); storax incense (suhe xiang) means things have fallen into place (he)’.” 玉玦者巳 決, 織成者言謀巳成, 蘇合香者言事巳合. The story may be apocryphal, but it shows that giving symbolic interpretation of gifts was a distinctly acceptable possibility. Taiping yulan 359.1780.

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Kongzi jiayu shuzheng 孔子家語疏證. Annotated by Chen Shike 陳士珂. Shanghai shudian, 1987. Lidai shufa lunwe xuan 歷代書法論文選. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1979. Li ji zhushu 禮記注疏. In Shisanjing zhushu. Liu Xiang 劉向. Shuo yuan shuzheng 說苑疏證. Annotated by Zhao Shanyi 趙善詒. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1985. Liu Xie 劉勰. Wenxin diaolong yizheng 文心雕龍義證. Annotated by Zhan Ying 詹鍈. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989. Lu Qinli 逯欽立, ed. Xian Qin Han Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi 先秦漢魏晉南北朝詩. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995. Lü Buwei 呂不韋. Lüshi chunqiu jiaoshi 呂氏春秋校釋. Annotated by Chen Qiyou 陳奇猷. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1984. Mao shi zhengyi 毛詩正義. In Shisanjing zhushu. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Miller, William Ian. “Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies in the Negotiations and Classification of Exchange in Medieval Iceland.” Speculum 61.1 (1986): 18–50. Nan shi 南史. Compiled by Li Yanshou 李延壽 (fl. 7th c.). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Owen, Stephen. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Quan Han wen 全漢文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Hou Han wen 全後漢文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Liang wen 全梁文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Sanguo wen 全三國文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen 全上古三代三國六朝文. Compiled by Yan Kejun 嚴可均 (1762–1843). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958. Richter, Antje. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Sanguo zhi 三國志. Compiled by Chen Shou 陳壽 (233–97). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959. Schwartz, Barry. “The Social Psychology of the Gift.” American Journal of Sociology 73.1 (1967): 1–11. Shanhai jing jiaozhu 山海經校註. Annotated by Yuan Ke 袁珂. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980. Shi ji 史記. Compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–85 BCE). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959. Shisanjing zhushu 十三經注疏. Compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849). Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1955.

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Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Translated by Donald Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Sui shu 隋書. Compiled by Wei Zheng 魏徵 (580–643) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973. Taiping yulan 太平御覽. Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1975 reprint. Tian, Xiaofei. Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (501–557). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Asia Center, 2007. Wang Xiaojuan 王曉鵑. Gu wenyuan lungao 古文苑論稿. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2010. Wen xuan 文選. Compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–31). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1994. Yin Yun 殷芸. Yin Yun Xiaoshuo殷芸小說. Compiled and annotated by Zhou Lengjia 周楞伽. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1984. Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚. Compiled by Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢 (557–641) et al. Taipei: Wenguang chubanshe, 1974. Zhao Yiwu 趙以武. Changhe shi yanjiu 唱和詩研究. Lanzhou: Gansu wenhua chubanshe, 1997. Zhuangzi jishi 莊子集釋. Compiled by Guo Qingfan 郭慶藩 (1844–1896). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961.

part 2 Contemplating the Genre



CHAPTER 5

Letters in the Wen xuan David R. Knechtges The Wen xuan 文選 compiled at the court of the Liang prince Xiao Tong 蕭 統 (501–531) is the earliest extant Chinese anthology arranged by genre. It is one of the most important sources for the study of Chinese literature from the Warring States period to the Qi and Liang. The Wen xuan contains 761 pieces of prose and verse by 130 writers. The most commonly used version divides the works into thirty-seven genres: fu 賦 (exposition or rhapsody), shi 詩 (lyric poetry), sao 騷 (elegy), qi 七 (sevens), zhao 詔 (edict), ce (patent of enfeoffment), ling 令 (command), jiao 教 (instruction), cewen 策文 (examination question), biao 表 (petition), shang shu 上書 (letter presented to a superior), qi 啟 (communication), tanshi 彈事 (accusation), jian 箋 (memorandum), zouji 奏記 (note), shu 書 (letter), xi 檄 (proclamation), duiwen 對文 (dialogue), shelun 設論 (hypothetical discourse), ci 辭 (song/rhapsody), xu 序 (preface), song 頌 (eulogy), zan 贊 (encomium), fuming 符命 (mandate to rule based on prophetic signs), shi lun 史論 (disquisition from the histories), shi shu zan 史述贊 (evaluation and judgment from the histories), lun 論 (disquisition), lianzhu 連珠 (epigram), zhen 箴 (admonition), ming 銘 (inscription), lei 誄 (dirge), ai 哀 (lament), beiwen 碑文 (epitaph, stele inscription), muzhi 墓志 (grave memoir), xingzhuang 行狀 (conduct description), diaowen 弔文 (condolence), jiwen 祭文 (offering).1 Some editions of the Wen xuan have thirtyeight categories with the addition of yi 移 (dispatch) between shu and xi. Luo Hongkai 駱鴻凱 adds the yi 移 category because the “Yi shu rang taichang boshi” 移書讓太常博士 (A letter reprimanding the professors of the Ministry of Ceremonies) by Liu Xin 劉歆 (d. 23) and the “Beishan yiwen” 北山移文 (Proclamation on [or from] North Mountain) by Kong Zhigui 孔稚珪 (447– 501) should be separated from the shu 書 that precede it.2 A similar proposal was also made by the Qing scholar Chen Jingyun 陳景雲, who is cited in the

1  The standard edition of the Wen xuan is based on a printing done by the Song scholar You Mao 尤袤 (1127–1181) in 1181. This edition became the basis for the edition prepared under the direction of Hu Kejia 胡克家 (1757–1816) in 1809. The most useful modern printing of the Hu Kejia edition is Wen xuan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986). 2  Luo Hongkai, Wen xuan xue, 24.

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Wen xuan kaoyi 文選考異 of Hu Kejia 胡克家 (1757–1816).3 The contemporary Wen xuan scholar Fu Gang 傅剛 surmises that Luo Hongkai was following his teacher Huang Kan 黃侃 (1886–1935) who lists the Liu Xin and Kong Zhigui pieces under the genre yi 移.4 Although Chen and Huang do not state their reasons for their suggestion that the yi had dropped out of the text, they likely conjectured that because the Wen xuan preface says that pieces were arranged chronologically, there is a problem with the order of the pieces in the shu 書 section, for Liu Xin’s piece follows the “Chong da Liu Moling Zhao shu” 重答劉 秣陵沼書 (Letter replying to Liu Zhao of Moling) by Liu Jun 劉峻 (462–521). Liu Xin lived in the Former Han, and Liu Jun is from the Liang period. If Liu Xin’s piece belonged in the shu category, it should have been inserted with the Former Han shu presumably after the “Bao Sun Huizong shu” 報孫會宗書 by Yang Yun 楊惲 (d. 56 BCE). There is also textual support for the existence of the yi category. The Wuchen Wen xuan prepared by Chen Balang 陳八郎 in Shaoxing 31 (1161), which is held by the Taiwan Guojia tushuguan, places the Liu Xin and Kong Zhigui pieces in the yi category. A twenty-one juan Japanese manuscript of the Wen xuan also contains the yi category as does the Jigu ge 汲 古閣 edition of Mao Jin 毛晉 (1599–1659) printed sometime between 1621 and 1644, and the Korean edition of 1506–21, which has a textual filiation with the Chen Balang edition. In the woodblock edition of Chen Balang 陳八郎 of the Southern Song a thirty-ninth category, the nan 難 (refutation), is added. There were genre anthologies long before the Wen xuan was compiled in the second decade of the sixth century. Thanks to the “Jingji zhi” 經籍志 (Monograph on bibliography) of the Sui shu 隋書, compiled in the seventh century, we know the names of a large number of anthologies from the Wei, Jin, Nanbeichao period. According to this catalogue, 107 anthologies in 2,213 juan were still extant in the seventh century. It also mentions another 142 anthologies in 3,011 juan that were lost in the destruction of libraries that took place at the end of the sixth century.5 Only a small number of works listed in this catalogue has survived to the present day. In addition, a few of the works listed in the catalogue are not anthologies but treatises on literature. Virtually all of the anthologies listed in the “Jingji zhi” have long been lost. However, there are two anthologies for which partial information survives.

3 Wen xuan 43.1956. 4 Huang Kan and Huang Zhuo, Wen xuan pingdian, 46; and Fu Gang, Zhaoming Wen xuan yanjiu, 185. 5 Sui shu 35.1089.

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The first is the Wenzhang liubie ji 文章流別集 (Collection of writings divided by genre) compiled by Zhi Yu 摯虞 (d. 311).6 Zhi Yu was a famous historian, scholar, and writer of the Western Jin. Zhi Yu’s anthology was quite large. The original version consisted of sixty juan. However, the most common version that circulated from the Tang through Song, when it seems to have disappeared, was in thirty juan. This is the same size as the original version of the Wen xuan. Although Zhi Yu’s collection does not survive, we know something about its content from the “Lun” 論 or “Disquisitions” that he wrote for the work. Both from the title of the collection and from the extant portions of the “Lun” we also know that Zhi Yu arranged the works by genre, the names of which include: (1) song 頌 (eulogy); (2) fu 賦 (exposition or rhapsody); (3) shi 詩 (poetry); (4) qi 七 (sevens); (5) zhen (admonition); (6) lei 誄 (dirge); (7) ai ci 哀辭 (lament); (8) ai ce 哀策 (laments for members of the imperial family); (9) ming 銘 (inscription); (10) bei 碑 (epitaph, stele inscription); (11) she lun 設 論 (hypothetical disquisition); (12) shu 述 or 述贊 (evaluations or appraisals from the histories); (13) tu chen 圖讖 (prognostication texts). There undoubtedly were many more genres than these. The second anthology about which we have some information is the Han lin 漢林 (Grove of writings) compiled by the Eastern Jin scholar Li Chong 李充 (d. ca. 362).7 Like Zhi Yu, Li Chong also wrote lun 論 in which he discusses literary works and writers. The Han lin was lost by the early Tang. All that survived in the Tang were the lun 論 (disquisitions). Only a few fragments of the lun survive, but from them we know the names of some of the genres that it included: (1) fu 賦 (exposition or rhapsody); (2) shi 詩 (poetry); (3) zan 贊 (encomium); (4) biao 表 (petition); (5) bo 駁 (refutation); (6) lun 論 (disquisition); (7) zouyi 奏議 (presented opinion); (8) xi 檄 (proclamation). Like the Wenzhang liubie ji, the Han lin must have had more than these eight genres.

6 For reconstructed texts see Xu Wenyu, Wen lun jiang shu, 67–84; Tseng and K’o, Liang Han Wei Jin Nanbeichao, 184–86; Guo Shaoyu, Zhongguo lidai wen lun xuan, 1:190–205; Mu and Guo, Wei Jin Nanbeichao wenlun quanbian, 88–96; Yu and Zhang, Wei Jin Nanbeichao wenlun xuan, 179–184. For studies see Guo Shaoyu, “Wenzhang liubie lun”; Wang Gengsheng, “Zhi Yu de zhushu”; Kōzen Hiroshi, “Shi Gu Bunshō ryubetsu shi ron kō”; Allen, “Chih Yü’s Discussions”; Mou Shijin, “Wenzhang liubie zhi lun”; Deng Guoguang, Zhi Yu yanjiu; Lizhi, “Lun Wenzhang liubie ji; Hu Dalei, “Wenzhang zhi”; Yu Shiling, Xi Jin wenxue kaolun, 188–201; Wendy Swartz, “Classifying the Literary Tradition.” 7 For a reconstruction see Xu Wenyu, Wen lun jiangshu, 59–65; Mu and Guo, Wei Jin Nanbeichao wenlun quanbian, 100–102. For studies see Toda, “Ri Chū”; Funazu, “Ri Chū”; Yu Lixiong, “Lun Li Chong Han lin lun.”

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The Liu bie lun and the Han lin are the only two pre-Wen xuan anthologies whose contents are somewhat known. However, there was a number of large genre anthologies that were compiled from the time of Zhi Yu to the Liang period, when the Wen xuan was compiled. Some of them were large collections such as the Ji yuan 集苑 by Xie Hun 謝混 (d. 412) in 60 juan, Ji lin 集林 in 200 juan compiled at the court of Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 (403–444), and the Wen yuan 文苑 by Kong Huan 孔逭 (fl. ca. 480) in 100 juan.8 In its introduction to the anthology section of the catalogue, the Sui shu “Jing ji zhi” says the following about the development of the zongji 總集, which literally means “comprehensive collection”: After the Jian’an period, literature proliferated, and the collected works of many writers increased at a steady rate. Zhi Yu [d. 311] of the Jin, concerned that readers would become tired of reading so much, selected the best works, and pared down the weeds. Beginning with poetry and fu he made a systematic arrangement by genre, and compiled them together. He called it the Liu bie (Distinguished by type). Later authors of collected works and anthologies of literary extracts were created one after another. Men who composed literary works considered them as a profound resource, and they took them as a model.9 This passage is instructive. It tells us first of all that because so much writing began to appear beginning with the Jian’an period scholars felt obliged to provide selections of writings arranged by genre. It also tells us what Zhi Yu’s purpose was in compiling the Liu bie ji: the number of writings available for readers had increased to the point scholars began to compile small “reader’s digest” collections that allowed easier access to literary works, and also to provide a selection of what were deemed the best writings. However, the main function of compiling such works was not only just to supply reading material, but to select examples of writings in different genres on which people who were learning how to write could model their own compositions. Although the Wen xuan is the only pre-Tang genre anthology to survive, it is one of the latest anthologies that was compiled during the Wei, Jin, Nanbeichao period. However, the compilers of the Wen xuan do not mention what their sources were. Scholars have speculated that one of the main sources for material was the bieji 別集 or individual collected writings of a particular writer. 8 Sui shu 35.1082. The Sui shu does not record the name of the compiler of the Ji yuan. It is attributed to Xie Hun in the monograph on bibliography of the Xin Tang shu 60.1621. 9 Sui shu 35.1089–90.

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However, recently Professor Wang Liqun 王立群 has published a detailed study in which he argues that the main sources for the Wen xuan were such anthologies as Wenzhang liu bie ji, Han lin, and perhaps others. The evidence for this comes from citations of these works in the Wen xuan commentary of Li Shan 李善 (d. 689), who cites frequently from Zhi Yu and Li Chong. In his careful examination of these citations, Wang Liqun discovered that many of the pieces selected in the Wen xuan were also contained in the Wenzhang liu bie ji and Han lin. What is even more important about Wang Liqun’s discovery is that in a number of instances, he was able to show that the version selected in the Wen xuan must have come from one of these anthologies, rather than some other source such as the collected works of a particular writer.10 For example, in his introductory note to “Wei Cao Hong yu Wei Wendi shu” 為曹洪與魏文 帝書 by Chen Lin 陳琳 (ca. 160–217), Li Shan cites Chen Lin’s collected works as listing the title for this work as “Yu Wendi jian” 與文帝牋 (Memorandum to Emperor Wen).11 Wang Liqun suggests that this difference in title is evidence that the compilers of the Wen xuan did not take the text from Chen Lin’s collected works but from some other source.12 The most likely source is a general anthology. There may also have been another source used by the compilers of the Wen xuan: single genre anthologies. The “Jing ji zhi” of the Sui shu lists a large number of such works. These single genre anthologies include collections of letters. For example, already in the Jin period, Wang Lü 王履 (n.d.), who is not otherwise known, compiled a Shu ji 書集 (Collection of letters) in 88 juan.13 There were also collections of a single writer’s letters. One famous example is the Ying Qu shulin 應璩書林 (Grove of letters by Ying Qu) in 8 juan compiled in the Southern Qi by Xia Chisong 夏赤松.14 Ying Qu 應璩 (190–252) was perhaps the most prolific letter writer of the Wei, Jin, Nanbeichao period. The largest number of letters in the Wen xuan is in the shu section, which in the thirty-nine-genre version contains 22 pieces.15 However, this is not the only category that includes epistolary writing. For example, shu exchanged between Liu Kun 劉琨 (271–318) and Lu Chen 盧諶 (285–351) are attached to 10 11 12 13 14 15

Wen xuan chengshu yanjiu, 32–50. Wen xuan 41.1880. Wen xuan chengshu yanjiu, 37. Sui shu 35.1089. Sui shu 35.1089. On the shu in the Wen xuan see Guo and Li, “Lun Wen xuan zhi shuti”; Ding Liya, “Cong Wen xuan ‘shu’ lei”; Fu Gang, Zhaoming Wen xuan yanjiu, 298–99; Li Nailong, “Lun Wen xuan ‘shu’ lei”; Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 63–64.

194

Knechtges

poems, which are in the shi 詩 section of the Wen xuan.16 There are other genre groups that arguably are also letters in the proper sense of the word. One obvious example is jian 牋, which I render as “memorandum.” The main distinction between jian and shu is that the jian is a letter written by an inferior to a person superior in rank.17 The Wen xuan contains 9 pieces in this section. We have also mentioned the yi 移 (dispatch), which in many editions of the Wen xuan is placed in the shu section.18 I will discuss the two examples of the yi below. There are several genre categories that are admixtures of petition and letter. Of the Wen xuan genre groups, there two examples of these types, the qi 啟 (communication) and shang shu 上書 (letter of submission). During the Wei and Jin, and even into the Liu-Song period the qi was virtually indistinguishable from other petition forms such as biao and zou. However, already in the Liu-Song period, we begin to see a special type of qi, which is basically a kind of “thank-you note” or “letter of thanks.”19 For example, Bao Zhao 鮑照 (414?– 466) has a short piece titled “Xie ci yao qi” 謝賜藥啟 which I would propose to translate “Note of Thanks for a Gift of Medicinal Herbs.”20 There are three qi pieces in the Wen xuan that I will discuss below. The Wen xuan contains seven examples of shang shu.21 All but one of them are from the Qin-Han period. It is not entirely clear why the compilers of the Wen xuan placed them in this category. The one feature they share in common is that all but one are addressed to a person who holds the noble title wang 王, which depending on the period designates either a king or prince. (The one exception is the shang shu by Sima Xiangru, which he presented to Emperor Wu of the Former Han.) One could argue that these pieces are better thought of as petitions addressed to a royal or imperial court. Dr. Eva Yuen-wah Chung in her PhD dissertation on Han letters treats all of the Qin and Han pieces as letters.22 However, recognizing their affinity with the petition form, she translates the word shang shu as “memorial.” At the end of this article, I provide a list of the letters contained in the shu, jian, yi, qi, and shang shu categories of the Wen xuan along with a summary of their contents and bibliographical information. Here I will offer a brief review 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Wen xuan 25.1168–70, 25.1177–79. For a brief discussion of the jian section of the Wen xuan see Li Nailong, “Wen xuan ‘jian’ wen.” See Li Nailong, “Wen xuan ‘yi’ lei.” See Tao Peng, Liuchao pianwen yanjiu, 126–27 and Xiaofei Tian’s chapter in this volume. Qian Zhenlun, Bao Canjun ji, 2.32. On the shang shu in the Wen xuan see Li Nailong, “‘Shang shu’.” Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’.”

195

Letters in the Wen xuan

of this material in order to determine what this selection of works tells us about the early medieval Chinese letter as a genre. Fu Gang has prepared a table of the contents of the “prose” sections of the Wen xuan organized by period.23 If one extracts everything from the table but the epistolary genres, his table looks as follows: Period

Genre Name

Total

Western Han Eastern Han Sanguo Western Jin Eastern Jin Song Southern Qi Liang Total

上書 (6), 書 (3), 移 (1) 書 (1) 牋 (6), 書 (14) 書 (2) None None 牋 (1), 移 (1) 上書 (1), 啟 (3), 牋 (2), 書 (2)

10 1 20 2 0 0 2 8 43

What is immediately striking about this table is that almost half of the epistolary pieces come from the Sanguo period. This is somewhat misleading because most of these works were actually written in the Jian’an period, which is technically the last reign period of the Later Han. Fu Gang also has compiled another table that shows the distribution of prose genres by author.24 Here is his table minus the non-letter genres: Period

Writer and Genres

Total

Western Han

李斯 1 (上書), 鄒陽 2 (上書 2), 枚乘 2 (上書 2), 司馬相如 1 (上書 1), 李陵 1 (書 1), 司馬遷 1 (書 1), 楊惲 1 (書 1), 劉歆 1 (移 1) 朱浮 1 (書 1)

10

Eastern Han

23 24

Zhaoming Wen xuan yanjiu, 288. Zhaoming Wen xuan yanjiu, 290.

1

196

Knechtges

(cont.) Period

Writer and Genres

Total

Sanguo

孔融 1 (書 1), 曹植 2 (書 2), 楊修 1 (牋 1), 繁欽 1 (牋 1), 陳琳 2 (牋 1, 書 1), 吳質 3 (牋 2, 書 1), 阮瑀 1 (書 1), 曹丕 3 (書 3), 應璩 4 (書 4), 阮籍 1 (牋 1), 嵇康 1 (書 1) 孫楚 1 (書 1), 趙至 1 (書 1) None None 謝朓 1 (牋 1), 孔稚珪 1 (移 1) 任昉 5 (啟 3, 牋 2), 江淹 1 (上書 1), 丘遲 1 (書 1), 劉孝標 1 (書 1)

20

Western Jin Eastern Jin Song Southern Qi Liang

2

2 8

The only addition I would make to this table is the two shu by Liu Kun and Liu Chen that are contained in the shi section. Since they were written during the transition between the Western and Eastern Jin, they could be included in either period. The table given above shows that the writers with three or more letters are Ren Fang (5), Ying Qu (4), Cao Pi (3), and Wu Zhi (3). However, as we shall see, Ren Fang’s “letters” represent a special type of epistolary writing which I will discuss below. Thus, the vast majority of letter writers comes from the Jian’an and Wei periods. Another notable feature of the two tables is the paucity of letters from the Western Jin, and the total absence of letters from the Eastern Jin and Song periods. The most obvious omissions from the Western Jin are the letters of Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303) and his brother Lu Yun 陸雲 (262–303). Lu Yun has a large number of letters extant.25 Thirty-five of them are addressed to Lu Ji. Scholars have studied them as important sources for the literary thought of the Lu brothers.26 The Lu brothers’ letters contain many local expressions from their home Wu area, and it is very likely that the compilers of the Wen xuan excluded them on the grounds that this “low register” language was not appropriate for an anthology of “refined literature.” The only work in the Wen xuan that contains low-register language is “Zou tan Liu Zheng” 奏彈劉整 25

26

Liu Yunhao, Lu Shilong wenji jiaozhu 10.1211–1327. For studies see Kamatani Takeshi, “Riku Un ani e no shokan”; Satō Toshiyuki, Riku Un kenkyū; Sujane Wu, “Clarity, Brevity, and Naturalness,” 208–38. See Fu Gang “ ‘Wen gui qing sheng’ shuo.”

Letters in the Wen xuan

197

(Petition impeaching Liu Zheng) by Ren Fang 任昉 (460–506) which contains colloquial language depositions given by illiterate servants. However, the text of the piece contained in the original version of the Wen xuan compiled at Xiao Tong’s court excluded these portions. They were inserted into it by the Tang commentaor Li Shan.27 The deletion of the colloquial language passage by the Wen xuan compilers in this impeachment petition may indicate their aversion to low register language. Another important writer of letters in the Eastern Jin period is Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303–361). In addition to 11 shu and jian, Wang Xizhi is credited with almost 700 notes (shu tie 書帖), many of which may be in his original hand. Most of the notes are addressed to relatives and friends.28 The compilers of the Wen xuan did not select any writings by Wang Xizhi, including his famous “Lanting Preface.”29 As in the case of the letters of Lu Ji and Lu Yun, the compilers of the Wen xuan may have excluded Wang Xizhi’s shu tie because most of them are written in a low register language. The Wen xuan compilers also excluded notable letters from the Liu-Song period. One famous example is the “Yu zhong yu zhu shengzhi shu” 獄中與諸 甥姪書 (Letter from prison to my nephews) by Fan Ye 范曄 (398–446).30 This letter is an important statement of Fan Ye’s views on writing. Fan Ye claimed to shun the vocation of wenshi 文士 (literary man) and asserts that in writing yi 意 (thought, meaning) is the most important consideration. He implies that writing such as shi, fu, and some types of prose is inferior to writing that conveys a moral message. Although Fan Ye’s letter is a well-crafted work of parallel prose, perhaps because he denigrated genres that the compilers of the Wen xuan so highly valued they excluded it from their anthology. Another famous parallel prose letter that was not included in the Wen xuan is the “Deng Dalei an yu mei shu” 登大雷岸與妹書 (Letter to my younger sister upon ascending the bank of Thunder Lake) by Bao Zhao 鮑照 (ca. 414– 466).31 This letter is one of the first of a number of letters that use parallel prose to describe a landscape scene. Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 has deemed it not only the best of Bao Zhao’s writings, but the best prose work of the Liu-Song 27 28 29

30 31

Wen xuan 40.1809. See i.a. Morino Shigeo and Satō Toshiyuki, Ō Gishi zen shokan; and Antje Richter, “Beyond Calligraphy.” The exclusion of the “Lanting Preface” has long been a controversial issue in Wen xuan studies. See i.a., Knechtges, Wen xuan, Volume One, 42, 513–14; Shimizu Yoshio, “Ō Gishi ‘Rantei jo’.” For a translation see Egan, “The Prose Style of Fan Ye,” 339–42. For a study and translation see Su Jui-lung 蘇瑞隆, “‘Versatility within Tradition’,” 200– 213; “Bao Zhao: Letter to My Younger Sister.” See also Su Jui-lung, Bao Zhao shiwen yanjiu, 117–23.

198

Knechtges

period.32 Thus, it is difficult to explain why the Wen xuan compilers excluded a letter of such literary merit. The Southern Qi prose section contains only two putative examples of letters, one of which is a memorandum by Xie Tiao 謝朓 (464–499) written to his former patron Xiao Zilong 蕭子隆 (474–494), Prince of Sui 隨, whom Xie Tiao had served in Jingzhou. This is a personal piece in which Xie Tiao expresses his warm regard for Xiao Zilong. The other is the famous “Beishan yiwen” (Proclamation on [or from] North Mountain) by Kong Zhigui. This is one of the two yi in the Wen xuan. Although there is much scholarly discussion about the purpose of this piece, its form is quite clear. In the opening lines Kong Zhigui writes: The essence of Mount Zhong and the spirit of the Grass Hut monastery gallop through the mists on the post road and engrave a dispatch in the mountain courtyard. 鍾山之英,草堂之靈。馳煙驛路,勒移山庭。 Mount Zhong (modern Zijin 紫金 Mountain) was located north of the capital of Jiankang. This is the North Mountain of the title. The Grass Hut is the name of the hermitage on Mount Zhong that Zhou Yong 周顒 (441?–491?) lived in during official leaves or periods when not in office. According to the prevailing interpretation, which is disputed by some scholars, Zhou Yong had left Mount Zhong to take up office in Haiyan 海鹽 (modern Haiyan, Zhejiang).33 After his term had expired, Zhou Yong wished to visit his hermitage on his return to the capital. Kong Zhigui addressed the proclamation to the natural forces of Mount Zhong to prevent him from returning to Northern Mountain. Whatever the circumstances of the composition, unless one is prepared to consider a piece addressed to a mountain an epistle, this piece cannot be considered a letter in the conventional sense. The other yi in the Wen xuan is “Yi rang taichang boshi” 移書讓太常博士 (A letter berating the professors of the Ministry of Ceremonies) by Liu Xin 劉 歆 (d. 23). In 6 BCE, Liu Xin requested that the Zuo zhuan, the Mao version of the Shi jing, the remnants of the Book of Rites, and the old text version of the Classic of Documents be established as official texts in the national university. When he met with strong criticism from important officials, he submitted a letter to the professors of the national university, berating them for their stubborn opposition to his proposal. The word yishu 移書 in the title does not 32 33

Guanzhui bian 4:1313. See i.a. Wang Yunxi, “Kong Zhigui”; Cao Daoheng and Shen Yucheng, “Kong Zhigui.”

Letters in the Wen xuan

199

designate a genre, but simply means “to send a letter.” The phrase is taken from the biography of Liu Xin in the Han shu which writes: “Emperor Ai ordered Liu Xin and the professors of the Five Classics to discuss their meaning. Some of the professors were unwilling to offer a reply. Liu Xin then sent a letter to the professors of the Ministry of Ceremonies berating them” 歆因移書太常博士 責讓之.34 Liu Xin’s piece thus clearly is a letter. The five pieces by the distinguished prose writer Ren Fang present a special case. He has 17 prose pieces in the Wen xuan. Of the two pieces in the jian 牋 section, one is addressed to Xiao Yan 蕭衍 (464–549, r. 502–49) just before he was named emperor of the newly founded Liang dynasty. Xiao Yan had just appointed Ren Fang record keeper. In a short note, Ren Fang mentions that he has known Xiao Yan for almost twenty years. He expresses his admiration and gratitude to him for appointing him to this position. This piece can be considered a personal letter. Ren Fang’s second piece in the jian section is quite different. On 24 February 502 a group of court of officials wrote to Xiao Yan urging him to accept the title of Duke of Liang in preparation for eventually urging him to accept the abdication of the imperial throne from the Southern Qi emperor. Thus, this piece more properly belongs in the petition category. The same may be said of the “Wei Zheng Chong quan Jin wang jian” 為鄭沖勸 晉王牋 (Memorandum on behalf of Zheng Chong exhorting the Prince of Jin) by Ruan Ji 阮籍 (210–263), which Ruan Ji composed to urge Sima Zhao 司馬昭 (211–265) to accept the title of Duke of Jin and the Nine Bestowals. All three of the qi 啟 pieces included in the Wen xuan are by Ren Fang. Two are good examples of the thank-you note. In one letter, Ren Fang replies to an edict from Emperor Wu of the Liang who had requested him to write a matching piece to a poem on the subject of the Seventh Night of the Seventh Lunar month. In the note, he expresses thanks to the emperor for sending him a copy of the poem, and he expresses his admiration for the emperor’s poetic skill. Ren Fang wrote the second thank-you note on behalf of Bian Bin 卞彬 (fl. 480–500) who expresses gratitude to Emperor Wu for refurbishing the tomb of his great-great grandfather, the famous Eastern Jin statesman Bian Kun 卞 壼 (281–328). The third qi is addressed to the Grand Mentor Xiao Luan 蕭鸞 (452–498). Ren Fang had been in mourning for his deceased father and mother. In 494, Xiao Luan ordered him to take up a post as recorder on his staff. Ren wrote this qi requesting that he not be forced to curtail his mourning rites. The piece is more in the form of a petition than a letter. This is another example where the distinction between letter and petition is blurred. The following is a list of the letters in the Wen xuan. 34

Han shu 36.1967.

200 1

Knechtges

Letters in the Shu 書 Section

Li Ling 李陵 (d. 74 BCE), “Da Su Wu shu” 答蘇武書 (Letter replying to Su Wu) This letter is a reply to a letter from Li Ling’s friend Su Wu 蘇武 (d. 60 BCE), both of whom were held as captives of the Xiongnu. Most scholars do not consider this letter genuine. 1.1

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:510– 26; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2912–22; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1881–91; Whitaker, “Some Notes on the Authorship”; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 316–39; Feng Siyi, “Dunhuang xieben”; Zhang and Liu, “Guanyu Li Ling ‘Yu Su Wu shi’”; Wang Lin, “Li Ling ‘Da Su Wu shu’”; trans. Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 529–47.

Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 86 BCE, alt. birth year 135 BCE, alt. death year 90 BCE), “Bao Ren Shaoqing shu” 報任少卿舒 (Letter replying to Ren Shaoqing) In this letter Sima Qian replies to Ren An 任安 (d. 91/90 BCE) requesting him to recommend worthy and able men for office. In his reply, Sima Qian claims that as “punished remnant” 刑餘之人 and “remnant of the knife and saw” 刀 鋸之餘, he could not “recommend the empire’s most distinguished men” 薦 天下豪俊哉. He then devotes much of the letter to explaining why he had chosen to submit to the humiliating punishment of castration after he had come to the defense of Li Ling. His main concern was to complete the Shi ji 史 記, which he regarded as a filial duty bequeathed to him by his father. 1.2

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Wang Li, Gudai Hanyu, 2:855–71; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:527–55; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2923–44; Gao Buying, Liang Han wen juyao, 87–108; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1891–908; Chen Jinzhong. “Shi ‘Bao Ren An shu’ de jige wenti”; He Shihua, “‘Bao Ren An shu’”; Xu Shuofang, “‘Bao Ren An shu”; Cheng Jinzao, “Lun Wang Guowei”; Shi Ding, “Sima Qian”; Xue Zhengxing, “‘Bao Ren An shu’”; Fuehrer, “The Court Scribe’s Eikon Psyches”; Chen Zhisheng, “Sima Qian zhi xin”; Schaab-Hanke, “Anfechtungen eines Ehrenmannes”; Knechtges, “‘Key Words’”; trans. Chavannes, Les Mémoires historiques, 1:ccxxvi–ccxxxviii; Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 57–67; Dzo, Sseu-ma, 153–60; Hightower in Birch and Keene, Anthology, 95–102; Owen. Anthology, 136–42; Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, Han Dynasty II, 227–37.

Letters in the Wen xuan

201

Yang Yun 楊惲 (d. 54 BCE, alt. 56 BCE), “Bao Sun Huizong shu” 報孫 會宗書 (Letter replying to Sun Huizong) Yang Yun was the grandson of Sima Qian. After holding high positions at the imperial court, Yang Yun was dismissed from office. He moved to the countryside and engaged in money-making activities. His friend Sun Huizong wrote him a letter criticizing him for this conduct. In his reply, Yang Yun defends his actions. 1.3

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Wang Li, Gudai Hanyu, 2:871–75; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:556–63; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2945–50; Kong and Han, Liang Han zhujia sanwen xuan, 106–15; Gao Buying, Liang Han wen juyao, 160–161; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1908–14; trans. Margouliès, Le Kou-wen chinois, 101–5; Margouliès, Anthologie, 208–11; Watson, Early Chinese Literature, 116–19; rpt. in Birch and Keene, Anthology, 159–61.

1.4 Kong Rong 孔融 (153–208), “Lun Sheng Xiaozhang shu” 論盛孝章書 (Letter discussing Sheng Xiaozhang) This is a letter Kong Rong addressed to Cao Cao in 204 urging him to have Sheng Xian 盛憲 (d. ca. 204) invited to the Han court to serve as commandant of cavalry. Kong Rong had been concerned about Sheng Xian’s welfare because of animosity from the Wu military leader Sun Ce 孫策 (175–200). Cao Cao agreed to grant him the post, but before the commission reached him, Sun Ce’s younger brother Sun Quan 孫權 (182–252) had already executed Sheng Xian. The Wen xuan title for this letter probably is not the earliest title. In the Guiji dianlu 會稽典錄 of Yu Yu 虞預 (fl. early 4th c.) it is simply designated “Cao gong shu” 曹公書 (Letter to his excellency Cao). Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:564– 69; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2951–54; Gao Buying, Liang Han wen juyao, 284–86; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1914–18; Wu Yun, Jian’an qizi ji jiaozhu, 82–86; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:769–70.

Zhu Fu 朱浮 (d. 57), “Wei Youzhou mu yu Peng Chong shu” 與彭寵 書 (Letter to Peng Chong in my capacity as regional governor of Youzhou) Zhu Fu wrote this letter in 26 while serving as regional governor of Youzhou 幽 州 (modern northern Hebei). During this time he came into conflict with the governor of Yuyang 漁陽 (southwest of modern Miyun 密雲, Beijing), Peng Chong (d. 29). Peng Chong was an irascible, violent sort who was quite proud of his military achievements. He became increasingly resentful that he had 1.5

202

Knechtges

not been properly rewarded. Zhu Fu secretly reported to the throne a number of alleged crimes Peng had committed, including accepting bribes, killing a friend, and hoarding weapons and grain. Upon hearing of this, Peng Chong launched an attack on Zhu Fu. Zhu Fu then wrote a letter to admonish him. This letter is not in the proper sequence, for Zhu Fu lived long before Kong Rong. It should precede Kong Rong’s letter listed above. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:571– 77; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2955–60; Kong and Han, Liang Han zhujia sanwen xuan, 162–69; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1918–23; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 114–16; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:770–72.

Chen Lin 陳琳 (b. ca. 160, d. 217), “Wei Cao Hong yu Wen Wendi shu” 為曹洪與魏文帝書 (Letter on Behalf of Cao Hong to the Emperor Wen of Wei) Chen Lin wrote this letter in 215 to Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226) in the voice of Cao Cao’s cousin, Cao Hong 曹洪 (d. 232). The main portion of the letter is a refutation of a letter that Cao Pi had written to Cao Hong concerning the reasons why Cao Cao defeated Zhang Lu 張魯 (fl. 191–215), the leader of the Celestial Masters sect in Hanzhong 漢中 (modern Nanzheng 南政, Shaanxi). At the beginning of the letter Cao Hong says that Chen Lin was too busy to write anything, and he, Cao Hong, has dared to compose this letter. Later in the letter, he has Cao Hong say that his letter is not ghost-written, an accusation Cao Pi had made in a previous letter to him. 1.6

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:578– 90; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2961–69; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1923–29; Wu Yun, Jian’an qizi ji jiaozhu, 176–84.

Ruan Yu 阮瑀 (ca. 170–212), “Wei Cao gong zuo shu yu Sun Quan” 為曹公作書與孫權 (Letter written on behalf of Duke Cao to Sun Quan) Ruan Yu composed this letter in 212 in Cao Cao’s name to Sun Quan urging him to quit his alliance with Liu Bei and join Cao Cao. He also declares that Cao Cao has not been weakend by his defeat in the battle at the Red Cliff. He also subtly threatens Sun Quan by telling him that Cao Cao has constructed ships at his base in Qiao. 1.7

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:591– 612; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2970–82; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming

Letters in the Wen xuan

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wen xuan, 3:1933–43; Wu Yun, Jian’an qizi ji jiaozhu, 462–71; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:773–78.

Wei Wendi 魏文帝, Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226), “Yu Zhaoge ling Wu Zhi shu” 與朝歌令吳質書 (Letter to Magistrate of Zhaoge, Wu Zhi) This is a letter that Cao Pi wrote to Wu Zhi 吳質 (178–230) in the fifth lunar month of Jian’an 20 (215). This is the title given in the Wen xuan. There are several problems with this title. First, the position that Wu Zhi held at Zhaoge 朝歌 (modern Qi 淇 county, Henan) was that of zhang 長 (administrator) not ling 令 (magistrate).35 This is confirmed by the Wei lüe 魏略 by Yu Huan 魚豢 (3rd c.) cited in the Sanguo zhi commentary of Pei Songzhi 裴松之 (372–451) and the Dian lüe 典略 by Yu Huan cited in the commentary of Li Shan in the Wen xuan (42.1894). Second, according to the Wei lüe Cao Pi wrote this letter in 215 while residing in a “small fortress” in Mengjin 孟津 (northeast of modern Mengjin, Henan) when Cao Cao was waging his western campaign in Hanzhong. By this time Wu Zhi had left Zhaoge and taken up the post of magistrate of Yuancheng 元城 (modern Daming 大名, Hebei), which was located about 60 kilometers east of Ye 鄴 (modern Linzhang 臨漳, Hebei). Thus, his title should have been Yuancheng ling 元城令 when Cao Pi wrote this letter to him. In addition, Cao Pi in his letter mentions sending a courier to Ye and having him make a detour to carry the letter to Wu Zhi. Yuancheng was east of Ye, and thus the rider would have had to go all the way to Yuancheng and then circle back to Ye. This is further evidence that Wu Zhi was in Yuancheng at this time.36 In the You Mao version of the letter the date is given as the eighteenth day of the fifth month. This would correspond to 2 July 215. However, the Chen Balang, Chaling, and Mao Jin editions of the Wen xuan give the date as the twenty-eighth day of the fifth month, which is 12 July 215. Gao Buying considers this the more credible reading.37 In the letter Cao Pi recounts the outings he had engaged in with his companions at Nanpi 南皮, which was located about 200 kilometers northeast 1.8

35

36 37

In the Eastern Han, the position of ling was of higher rank than that of zhang. The former’s rank was from 600 to 1,000 bushels, while the rank of the latter was from 300 to 500 bushels. The ling governed a county of 10,000 households and more, while the zhang was responsible for a county of less than 10,000 households. See Bielenstein, The Bureacracy of Han Times, 100. For a detailed discussion of the problem of the correct title and the chronology involved in Wu Zhi’s official assignments, see Hsiang-Lin Shih, “Jian’an Literature Revisited,” 227–30. Wei Jin wen juyao, 2.

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of Ye. On these occasions they discussed the Classics and the Masters texts, played tanqi 彈棋 (pellet chess) and encirclement chess, engaged in lofty conversation, and listened to zither music. He also mentions that one of their dear companions, Ruan Yu, had passed away. Cao Pi was not yet emperor at this time, and thus the author’s name Emperor Wen of Wei in the title is anachronistic. This is the case for all of the other letters by Cao Pi in which he is designated Emperor Wen of Wei. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:613–18; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2983–86; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1944–46; Yi Jianxian, Wei Wendi ji quanyi, 178–81; Wei Hongcan, Cao Pi ji jiaozhu, 255–57; Chu Hsiao-hai, “Du Wen xuan”; Yu Shaochu, “‘Nanpi zhi you’”; Mei Zhengzheng, “Cao Pi”; Ding Hongwu, “Wen xuan”; trans. Cutter, “Cao Zhi’s Symposium Poems,” 3–4; Watson, “Cao Pi,” 7–11; Wang Ping, The Age of Courtly Writing, 127–28; Shih Hsiang-lin, “Jian’an Literature Revisited,” 230–31.

1.9 Wei Wendi, “Yu Wu Zhi shu” 與吳質書 (Letter to Wu Zhi) Cao Pi probably wrote this letter to Wu Zhi on the third day of the second lunar month of Jian’an 23, which corresponds to 18 March 218. At the beginning of the letter, Cao Pi laments that four years have passed since he has seen Wu Zhi. He then recounts the passing of Xu Gan 徐幹 (170–217), Chen Lin, Ying Yang 應暘 (d. 217), and Liu Zhen 劉楨 (d. 217), who all died in the epidemic of 217. Cao Pi tells of the merry gatherings and outings in which he and his courtiers engaged prior to this time. They drank wine, listened to zither and flute music, and composed poetry. He mentions that he has compiled a collection of the writings of these men. He follows with a series of comments on the writings of Xu Gan, Ying Yang, Chen Lin, Liu Zhen, and Wang Can 王粲 (177–217). Cao Pi ends the letter lamenting that he is growing old (he was only thirtytwo at the time), about the same age as Liu Xiu 劉秀 (5–57 BCE), the founding emperor of the Eastern Han. However, he does not consider himself a match for Liu Xiu in virtue. He also considers that whatever luster he has, he has borrowed from his father, Cao Cao. He states that because all of his movements are now being observed, he will never again be able to engage in the outings that he enjoyed in the past. In the final lines of the letter Cao Pi asks Wu Zhi if he has any new writings to show him. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:619– 26; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2983–86; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1946–51; Yi Jianxian, Wei Wendi ji quanyi, 182–87; Wei Hongcan, Cao Pi ji jiaozhu, 258–62; Matsumoto, “Sō Hi to Go Shitsu”; Fukui, “Sō Hi no ‘Yo Go Shitsu sho

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in tsuite”; Huang Shuling, “Cao Pi ‘Yu Wu Zhi shu’ jiao zheng”; Chu Hsiao-hai, “Du Wen xuan”; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:780–82; Miao, “Literary Criticism,” 1030–32; Holzman, “Literary Criticism,” 123–25; Watson, “Cao Pi,” 7–11; Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 65–66, 84–85, 123; Shih Hsiang-lin, “Jian’an Literature Revisited,” 231–34.

Wei Wendi, “Yu Zhong dali shu” 與鍾大理書 (Letter to Grand Judge Zhong) Cao Pi wrote this letter in 215 when he was in Mengjin. He had heard that Zhong You 鍾繇 (151–230) possessed a precious jue 玦 (jade circlet). In the first section of the letter he refers to four famous jades of antiquity. In the second section he recounts how he asked his brother Cao Zhi to use the good offices of Xun Hong 荀宏 to request the jade circlet from Zhong You. Zhong You then sent a courier from Ye to deliver the jade to Cao Pi in Mengjin. In the last part of the letter Cao Pi expresses his sincere gratitude to Zhong You for presenting him with this precious gift. 1.10

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:627– 41; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2993–96; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1951–53; Yi Jianxian, Wei Wendi ji quanyi, 188–92; Wei Hongcan, Cao Pi ji jiaozhu, 263–66; Chu Hsiao-hai, “Du Wen xuan”; trans. Debon, “Der Jadering des Chung Yu”; Xiaofei Tian’s chapter in this volume.

1.11 Cao Zhi, “Yu Yang Dezu shu” 與楊德祖書 (Letter to Yang Xiu) Cao Zhi probably wrote this letter to Yang Xiu 楊修 (175–219) in 216. Yang Xiu was one of Cao Zhi’s best friends and advocated his selection as heir designate over Cao Pi. In the first part of the letter Cao Zhi singles out six writers of the time whom Cao Cao has recruited to the court in Ye: Wang Can, Chen Lin, Xu Gan, Liu Zhen, Ying Yang, and Yang Xiu. However, he criticizes Chen Lin for his lack of skill in composing fu. Cao Zhi remarks that all writings have some flaws. The most important statement in the letter is Cao Zhi’s claim that the fu is a “minor art” 辭賦小道 because it cannot promote moral principles. He cites Yang Xiong’s 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE) famous claim that “a grown man does not compose fu” 壯夫不為. Although Cao Zhi was a skilled fu writer, he believed that composition of belles lettres was not as noble a calling as service to the state and the establishment of a legacy of achievement that could be handed down to later ages. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Zhao Youwen, Cao Zhi ji jiaozhu, 1.153–59; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:633–41; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi,

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4:2997–3004; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1954–60; Liu Yuanzhi, “Cao Zhi”; Sun Jing, “Wen xuan Cao Zhi”; Cui Jibao, “Cao Zhi”; Wu Weijie, “Sanguo shidai shuxin yanjiu”; trans. Holzman, “Literary Criticism,” 116–19; Miao, “Literary Criticism,” 1028–30; Wong, Early Chinese Literary Criticism, 27–37; Ho, “Cao Zhi,” 12–14; Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 82 (excerpt).

1.12 Cao Zhi, “Yu Wu Jizhong shu” 與吳季重書 (Letter to Wu Zhi) Cao Zhi probably composed this letter in 215 when Wu Zhi was serving as administrator of Zhaoge. Wu Zhi had visited Cao Zhi in Ye, and then returned to Zhaoge where he received this letter from Cao Zhi. At the beginning of the letter Cao Zhi mentions the joyful feasts that they engaged in at Ye. He describes Wu Zhi as “soaring like a hawk, sighing like a phoenix, and glaring like a tiger” 鷹揚其體,鳳歎虎視. Cao Zhi then declares that his grand ambition was “to lift up Mount Tai to use for meat, pour out the Eastern Sea to use for wine, fell the bamboo of Yunmeng to use for flutes, and chop down the catalpas on the banks of the Si River to use for zithers” 願舉太山以為肉,傾東海以為 酒,伐雲夢之竹以為笛,斬泗濱之梓以為箏. He also recounts the feasting and drinking in a hyperbolic, epideictic style: “Eating was like filling a giant ravine, drinking was like pouring into a leaking goblet” 食若填巨壑,飲若 灌漏巵. In the next section, Cao Zhi regrets that the time of their gatherings passed much too quickly. In the final section of the letter, Cao Zhi sings the praises of Wu Zhi’s writing skill displayed in his letter. He also comments on Zhaoge where Wu Zhi held office. This was a place where Mo Di, who disliked music, had turned his chariot around because the name Zhaoge meant either “singing in the morning,” or “singing at court.” Zhaoge was also the capital of King Zhou, the last ruler of the Yin, whose music was considered to be that of a fallen state. Cao Zhi remarks that unlike Mo Di, Wu Zhi enjoyed music. However, Wu Zhi apparently had indicated that he did not consider his post in Zhaoge prestigious enough. Cao Zhi urges him to work hard in this current position. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Zhao Youwen, Cao Zhi ji jiaozhu, 1.142–46; Xiong Yongqian, Wei Jin Nanbeichao pianwen, 14–28; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:642–47; Gao Buying, Wei Jin wen juyao, 44–48; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3005–9; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1960–64; Cao Haidong, Xinyi Cao Zijian ji, 455–60; Mu and Guo, Wei Jin Nanbeichao wenlun quanbian, 24–27, Matsumoto, “Sō Hi to Go Shitsu,” 292–322; trans. Cutter. “Cao Zhi,” 72–73, 136–39; Cutter. “Cao Zhi’s Symposium Poems,” 5–6; Shih Hsiang-lin, “Jian’an Literature Revisited,” 218– 19; R. Joe Cutter’s chapter in this volume.

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Wu Zhi, “Da Dong’e wang shu” 答東阿王書 (Letter replying to the Prince of Dong’e) This is a letter that Wu Zhi wrote in 215 replying to a letter that Cao Zhi had sent him after he had returned to his post in Zhaoge where Wu had been serving for four years as administrator. At the beginning of the letter, Wu Zhi praises the elegant style of Cao Zhi’s letter and expresses his gratitude for Cao Zhi’s sincere solicitude for him. In the next section of the letter, Wu Zhi declares that his status is more humble than that of a horse or dog, and that his virtue his slighter than goose down. Although he has been privileged to participate in the festive gatherings hosted in the Wei palaces in Ye, he claims that he lacks the talent and achievements of the three famous Warring States figures of Mao Sui 毛遂 who served the Lord of Pingyuan 平原, Feng Xuan 馮諼 who was a retainer of the Lord of Mengchang 孟嘗君, and Hou Ying 侯贏 who was an advisor to the Lord of Xinling 信陵君. At one point he even says that having serving the “supremely exalted” Cao Zhi, he finally realized how humble and insignificant his “hundred-league” post in Zhaoge was. This is clearly a subtle suggestion that Wu Zhi hoped for a position in a more prestigious place. Wu Zhi then repeats phrases from Cao Zhi’s letter in which Cao Zhi states that his ambition was to “pour out the sea to make wine, annex the mountains to make meat, fell the bamboo of Yunmeng, and cut down the catalpas on the banks of the Si River.” Wu Zhi declares that his ambition is not that bold. He would prefer to cast off his seals and seal cords, study the teachings of Confucius, and read the “essential words” of Laozi. He also states that he no longer wishes to enjoy the company of beautiful women (he says he will have only ugly women for companions!), and he resolves to intimidate the Sushen 肅愼 state north of the Yellow River and the Baiyue 百越 in the south, inducing the former to present the five-leaved chaste tree and the latter to send a white pheasant (an auspicious tribute item) to the Wei court. Having subdued these lands, “how would Sun Quan and Liu Bei be worth our consideration?” 又況權備,夫何足視乎. In the final section of the letter, Wu Zhi thanks Cao Zhi for the fu pieces he has given him. He praises Cao Zhi as the “patriarch of fu writing, and the mentor for writers” 實賦頌之宗,作者之師也. He compares the group composition gatherings at the Ye court to the recitation of Shi jing poems by seven courtiers of Zheng in the Chunqiu period at a feast given by the ruler of Zheng for the visiting chief minister of Jin, Zhao Meng 趙孟.38 Wu Zhi notes that men of Zhaoge are skilled in fu writing. Many of them are former court officials, who 1.13

38

Zuo zhuan, Xiang 27.

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also recite fu compositions. This is his of way saying that Zhaoge may not be such a backwater after all. However, Wu Zhi ends the letter by remarking that his small command does not provide sufficient opportunity for him to “make his name known” 不足以 揚名. Using phrases that Cao Zhi had used in his letter, Wu Zhi say “if one does not change his track and team, how can he exert his efforts on behalf of the state. Now, dwelling in this place and seeking great achievement is like hobbling the hooves of a fine steed and demanding that it run a thousand leagues, or putting a monkey in a cage and expecting it to perform ingenious tricks.” 若 不改轍易御,將何以効其力哉!今處此而求大功,猶絆良驥之足, 而責以千里之任;檻 猨猴之勢,而望其巧捷之能者也. Cao Zhi was not appointed Prince of Dong’e until 229, and thus this title is anachronistic. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:648– 56; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3010–17; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1964–69; Matsumoto, “Sō Hi to Go Shitsu, 292–322; trans. Shih Hsiang-lin, “Jian’an Literature Revisited,” 219–20.

Ying Qu 應璩 (190–252), “Yu Man Gongyan shu” 與滿公琰書 (Letter to Man Gongyan) This is a letter Ying Qu wrote to Man Bing 滿炳, whose zi was Gongyan. Man Bing was the son of Man Chong 滿寵 (d. 242), whose natal place was Changyi 昌邑 in Shanyang 山陽 commandery (south of modern Juye 巨野, Shandong). Man Chong was one of Cao Cao’s most trusted military leaders. During the early Wei dynasty he participated in campaigns against Wu. In 238, Man Chong was appointed defender-in-chief. During this time Ying Qu served on his staff. Little is known about Man Bing. Based on Ying Qu’s letter, we know that Man Bing had visited Ying Qu in Luoyang, where Ying Qu was serving as palace attendant. Lu Kanru dates this event to 239.39 After Man Bing left, Ying Qu was about to send a letter to Man Bing when a messenger arrived from Man Bing inviting Ying Qu to come to a gathering at the Zhang River. Because of pressing business, Ying Qu was unable to go. He wrote this letter instead. In the letter Ying Qu first thanks Man Chong for coming to visit him. He recalls the feasts that he enjoyed together with Chong Man. At the end of the letter he expresses regret that he cannot attend the gathering at Zhang Water 漳渠, which is another name for the Zhang River where the city of Ye was located. Ying Qu describes the scenery at the Boyang 伯陽 Lodge. Although 1.14

39

Zhonggu wenxue xinian 2:526.

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Li Shan seems to equate this with a temple dedicated to Laozi, it actually has nothing to do with the Taoist sage. Boyang rather refers to the ancient fortified city of Boyang.40 Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:657– 62; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3018–21; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1969–72; trans. Lin, “Rediscovering Ying Qu,” 56, 72 (excerpt).

Ying Qu, “Yu shilang Cao Changsi shu” 與侍郎曹長思書 (Letter to Attendant Gentleman Cao Changsi) Ying Qu wrotes this letter to Cao Changsi 曹長思 who is not otherwise known. From the letter we learn that Cao must have been one of Ying’s close friends. Thus, in the opening lines Ying expresses his longing and admiration for Cao. He follows by mentioning the great success that two of Ying’s contemporaries, Wang Su 王肅 (195–256) and He Zeng 何曾 (199–278) have had in their official careers. Ying complains that since he has no one to assist him in promoting his advancement, he will “fold his wings on an old branch” 歛翼於故枝 and dwell in solitude. In the next long section Ying Qu mentions four men of antiquity, Chen Ping 陳平 (d. 178 BCE), Yang Xiong, Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179–104 BCE), and Chen Zun 陳遵 (1st c. BCE). When Ying declares that he is inferior to them in virtue, learning, talent, and even ability to provide wine for guests, one senses that this is another complaint about his impoverished state. At this point he tells Cao that “a sad wind rises from his inner chambers, and red dust covers his armrest and couch” 悲風起於閨闥,紅塵蔽於机榻. One of his few companions is a man named Scholar Yuan 袁生, who is not otherwise known. He is only able to engage in “pure conversation” (qing tan 清談) with him. At the end of the letter Ying Qu asserts that success and failure is simply a matter of the natural course of things, and that there is nothing one can do about one’s plight. 1.15

40

According to the Kuodi zhi 括地志 by Li Tai 李泰 (618–652), another name for it was Hanhui cheng 邯會城 (southwest of modern Feixiang 肥鄉, Henan, see He Cijun, ed., Kuodi zhi jijiao, 2.83). It was located on the Zhang River about fifty kilometers northeast of Ye. This area was also the location of “stone-ink” or graphite wells and salt ponds. (See Zuo Si 左思, “Wei du fu” 魏都賦, Wen xuan 6.267–68, Li Shan commentary.) This site has recently been identified as located at modern Qingliu cun 清流村. The ancient site of Boyang cheng reputedly has been covered by the Yuecheng 岳城 Reservoir. See Tang Jigen, “Cao Cao mu zhenxiang,” 25.

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Annotations, Studies, Translations: Xiong Yongqian, Wei Jin Nanbeichao pianwen, 44–52; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wen­xuan yizhu, 5:648–56; Wei Fengjuan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhujia, 111–14; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3022–26; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1972–74; trans. Lin, “Rediscovering Ying Qu,” 56–57 (excerpt).

Ying Qu, “Yu Guangchuan zhang Cen Wenyu shu” 與廣川長岑文 瑜書 (Letter to Admininstrator of Guangchuan, Cen Wenyu) Ying Qu wrote this letter to Cen Wenyu, who was serving as administrator of Guangchuan (southwest of modern Jing 景 county, Hebei). During this time Guangchuan had been suffering from an extended drought. It was so hot, sand and pebbles melted, and plants were scorched and shriveled. There was absolutely no shade to be found. Guangchuan officials placed clay dragons and mud effigies in shrines to pray for rain. This went on for ten days with no effect. Ying Qu then declares that these were not the proper methods for obtaining rain. He cites the examples of ancient rulers such as Yu of Xia and Tang of Yin who exposed themselves to the sun and offered their bodies as sacrificial victims to end long droughts and immediately obtained the blessings of rain. He suggests that officials of his time lack the moral character of the ancients, and thus their methods of praying for rain are useless. 1.16

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:668– 72; Qu Shouyuan. Wen xuan daodu, 281–86; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3022– 30; You Zhicheng, Zhaoming wen xuan jiaodu, 1:131–35; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1974–76; trans. Lin, “Rediscovering Ying Qu,” 72–73 (excerpt).

Ying Qu, “Yu congdi Junmiao Junzhou shu” 與從弟君苗君冑書 (Letter to my cousins Junmiao and Junzhou) Ying Qu wrote this letter around 250 to his paternal cousins Ying Junmiao and Ying Junzhou. He begins the letter by recounting a recent excursion he had taken in the Beimang 北邙 hills north of Luoyang. After crossing the Yellow River, he found the view so vast and expansive, his visual acuity was sharpened. Upon arriving at his destination, he drank spring wine and strolled in thatched huts which were cooler than grand mansions. He also went boating on a pond, recited verse beneath willow trees, shot birds with corded arrows, and fished in deep pools. In the next section, Ying Qu tells of his return to Luoyang where he took up a solitary life style. He complains that from his house on the bank of the Luo River he was disturbed by the noise and dust of the city and marketplace. He considers emulating Confucius’ disciple Min Ziqian who declared he would become a recluse on the Wen 汶 River after he had been offered the 1.17

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position of steward in Qi.41 Ying Qu says he wishes to plow fields at Shanyang 山陽 (east of modern Jiaozuo 焦作 city, Henan), and fish in the waters of the Dan 丹 River which flowed west of Shanyang. In the last section of the letter, we learn that Junjiao and Junzhou had earned the respect of the residents of their district who wished to honor them with an official post and a fief. However, Ying Qu tells them that based on his long service in a military command, rarely did anyone meet with success in his official career. He complains that he did not have anyone to help him to obtain high positions, and he also lacked family assets that would have allowed him to enjoy a comfortable retirement. He urges them not to seek wealth and honor, but follow his example of “avoiding the toil of the heavy burdens” 免負 擔之勤 of official service. He declares that he will become a recluse who raises chickens, plants millet, and devotes his energy to reading texts in order to “establish his character and spread his fame” 立身揚名. The implication is that he wishes his two cousins to do likewise. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Xiong Yongqian, Wei Jin Nanbeichao pianwen, 29–43; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wen­xuan yizhu, 5:648–56; Wei Fengjuan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhujia, 115–21; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3031–36; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1976–81; trans. Lin, “Rediscovering Ying Qu,” 53–54, 72 (excerpt).

Xi Kang 嵇康 (224–263) “Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu” 與山巨源絕 交書 (Letter to Shan Tao severing friendship) Xi Kang wrote this letter to his friend Shan Tao 山濤 (205–283) in 261 or 263. Shan Tao was about to leave the Bureau of Appointments in the Department of Personnel, and he recommended Xi Kang as his replacement. Xi Kang wrote this letter in which he expressed indignation at being asked to compromise his principles by accepting high office. He then reputedly broke off his friendship with Shan Tao. However, recently Xu Gongchi has argued that this letter has nothing to do with severing friendship with Shan Tao. He adduces evidence to show that the received version of the title with the words “breaking off friendship” was probably added to the letter after the Liu-Song period or even in the Qi-Liang era. He also shows that Xi Kang continued to maintain a good relationship with Shan Tao, and even entrusted Shan Tao to care for his son Xi Shao 嵇紹 (252–304) who was only ten years old when Xi Kang was executed. 1.18

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Lunyu 論語 6.9.

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Annotations, Studies, Translations: Dai Mingyang, Xi Kang ji jiaozhu, 2:112–29; Wei Jin Nanbeichao wenxue shi, 210–27; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:682–701; Wei Fengjuan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhujia, 126–41; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3037–50; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1985–99; Han Geping, Zhulin qixian, 372–83; Cui Fuzhang, Xinyi Xi Zhongsan ji, 128–47; Zhou Xunchu, Tang chao Wen xuan, 2:469–503; Ōkawa, “Kei Kō no ‘Majiwari o tatsu sho’ ni tsuite”; Lü Lihan, “Lun Xi Kang”; Gu Nong, “‘Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu’”; Zhang Bo, “Xi Kang”; Jansen, “The Art of Severing Relationships”; Xu Gongchi, “Xi Kang”; Zhang Bo, “Xi Kang”; Tian and Xu, “‘Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu’”; Bao Xiuyan, “Xi Kang ‘Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu’”; Zeng Piaopiao, “‘Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu’”; Zhu and Xu, “‘Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu’”; trans. Meyer, Chinese Painting, 75–87; Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:783–89; Hightower in Birch and Keene, Anthology, 162–66; Bauer, Das Antlitz Chinas, 154–55.

Sun Chu 孫楚 (d. 293), “Wei Shi Zhongrong yu Sun Hao shu” 為石仲 容與孫皓書 (Letter written on behalf of Shi Bao to Sun Hao) Sun Chu’s natal place was Zhongdu 中都 in Taiyuan 太原 commandery (modern Pingyao 平遙, Shanxi). Both his grandfather Sun Zi 孫資 (d. 251) and his father Sun Hong 孫宏 served in official positions during the Wei. However, they were strong supporters of the Sima clan. Ca. 264, Sun Chu served as an aide to Shi Bao 石苞 (d. 272), who was one the most powerful generals under Sima Zhao. When Sima Zhao dispatched two emissaries to the court of Sun Hao (242–283), who had newly succeeded to the throne of the state of Wu, Shi Bao had Sun Chu compose a letter in his name. When he arrived in Wu, Sun Chu did not present the letter to Sun Hao. 1.19

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:701–20; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3051–63; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:2000–2013; Zhou Xunchu, Tang chao Wen xuan, 2:503–55; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:789–94; Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 94 (excerpt).

Zhao Zhi 趙至 (ca. 245–282), “Yu Xi Maoqi shu” 與嵇茂齊書 (Letter to Xi Maoqi) The Wen xuan contains the “Yu Xi Maoqi shu” 與基茂齊書 (Letter to Xi Maoqi) under the name of Zhao Jingzhen 趙景真. Jingzhen is Zhao Zhi’s zi. Maoqi is the zi of Xi Fan 嵇蕃, who was the son of Xi Kang’s older brother, Xi Xi 嵇喜 (ca. 220–ca. 290). However, the Wen xuan commentator Li Shan cites the Jin ji 晉紀 (Jin annals) of Gan Bao 干寶 (d. 336) which claims Lü An 呂安 (d. 263) wrote the letter to Xi Kang. Other early sources that attribute the letter to Lü An include the Wen xuan commentary of Li Zhouhan 李周翰 (fl. 718) and the Wen xuan chao 文選鈔, a Tang period commentary cited in the Wen xuan jizhu 1.20

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文選集注 manuscript. According to the Jin ji, Lü An’s older brother Lü Xun 呂 巽 (n.d.) seduced Lü An’s wife. When Lü An exposed his odious act, Lü Xun accused his brother of slandering him. Lü Xun was favored by Sima Zhao, and he ordered Lü An banished to a remote border area. From his place in exile he wrote a letter to Xi Kang in which he wrote: And then I look back at my shadow on the Central Plain, and my roused spirit wells up like clouds. I grieve for the people, lament the age, and my stirred feelings rage like the wind. Like a dragon I gaze at the great fields, like a tiger I howl at the world. My fierce spirit vigorously flourishes, my bold aspirations embrace the four directions. I long to ascend the cloud ladder, to traverse the eight extremities, push aside hardships, to sweep away filth, to shake the sea, to flatten mountains, to kick the Kunlun peaks so they lean westward, to step on Mount Tai so that it tilts eastward, to cleanse the nine regions, and to purge the universe. 若迺顧影中原,憤氣雲踊,哀物悼世,激情風烈,龍睇大野,虎 嘯六合,猛氣紛紜,雄心四據,思躡雲梯,橫奮八極,披艱掃 穢,蕩海夷岳,蹴崑崙使西倒,蹋太山令東覆,平滌九區,恢 維宇宙,斯亦吾之鄙願也。 Offended by these words, Sima Zhao had Lü An put into prison. Xi Kang tried to plead on his behalf, but Sima Zhao ordered both Lü An and Xi Kang executed. Li Shan also cites Xi Shao ji 嵇紹集, the collected works of Xi Kang’s son, who is quoted as writing that some people have erroneously claimed that Lü An wrote this letter to his late father Xi Kang. According to Xi Shao, Xi Fan was his elder cousin (as mentioned above he was the son of Xi Xi, Xi Kang’s elder brother). He and Zhao Zhi were the same age and on good terms. When Zhao Zhi went to Liaoxi, he sent this letter to Xi Fan. Li Shan did not commit himself on the authorship question. However, two Tang period sources claim right of authorship for Zhao Zhi The Jin shu includes the letter in the biography of Zhao Zhi. Lu Shanjing 陸善經 (fl. 742–58), whose commentary is preserved in the Wen xuan jizhu, argues that the part of the letter in which the author says “you sir plant roots in a fragrant garden” 吾子植根芳苑 clearly do not apply to Xi Kang. He specifically rejects Gan Bao’s assertion that it was written by Lü An. Modern scholars have debated the issue of authorship. Yu Jiaxi, Dai Mingyang, and Zhou Zhenfu have argued that the author is Lü An. More recently, Dong Hongqi, Fan Rongqi, and Chu Hsiao-hai assign authorship of the letter to Zhao Zhi.

214

Knechtges

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:721– 22; Gao Buying, Wei Jin wen juyao, 136–40; Qu Shouyuan. Wen xuan daodu, 287–95; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3064–71; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:2013–21; Zhou Xunchu, Tang chao Wen xuan, 2:556–85; Luo Guowei, Dunhuang ben wen xuan, 3–15; Tang Zhangru, “Jin shu Zhao Zhi zhuan zhong suojian de Cao Wei shijia zhidu”; Holzman, La Vie et la pensée de Hi K’ang, 40–41; Dai Mingyang, Xi Kang ji jiaozhu, 435–43; Ding Hongqi, “Wen xuan Yu Xi Maoqi shu kao”; Tong Qiang, Xi Kang pingzhuan, 141–45; Fan Rong, “‘Yu Xi Maoqi shu’”; Wang Shucai, “Wei Jin zhi ji wenxuejia Zhao Zhi shengping kaoshu”; Chu Hsiao-hai, “Zhao Zhi”; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:794–97; Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 102 (excerpt).

Qiu Chi 丘遲 (464–508), “Yu Chen Bozhi shu” 與陳伯之書 (Letter to Chen Bozhi) In 505, Emperor Wu sent Xiao Hong 蕭宏 (473–526) on a military expedition against the Northern Wei. Qiu Chi served as his aide and secretary. In 502, the Liang general Chen Bozhi (n.d.) defected to the Northern Wei. Xiao Hong commanded Qiu Chi to compose a letter persuading Chen to surrender to the Liang. Chen reputedly was so moved by the letter, he returned to the Liang bringing an army of 5,000 soldiers with him. 1.21

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Wei Jin Nanbeichao wenxue shi, 643–51; Chang Jen-ch’ing, Lidai pianwen xuan, 1:117–27; Xiong Yongqian, Wei Jin Nanbeichao pianwen, 139–56; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wen­xuan yizhu, 5:733–42; Wei Fengjuan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhujia, 308–16; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3072–79; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:2021–28; Gao Buying, Nanbeichao wen juyao, 1:478–89; Yu Dacheng. “Qiu Chi yu Chen Bozhi shu shuo yi”; Jiang Juqian. “Qiu Chi ‘Yu Chen Bozhi shu’”; Fukui, “Kyū Chi no Chin Hakushi ni atafuru sho” ni tsuite”; Lai Hanping. “Qiu Chi de yu Chen Bozhi shu”; Gu Nong, “Qiu Chi he tade ‘Yu Chen Bozhi shu’”; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:797–800; Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 80–81 (excerpt).

Liu Jun 劉峻 (462–521), “Chong da Liu Moling Zhao shu” 重答劉秣 陵沼書 (Letter again replying to Liu Zhao of Moling) In 502, shortly after Xiao Yan took the throne as emperor of the Liang dynasty, he summoned Liu Jun together with He Zong 賀踪 (n.d.), Ren Fang, and Yin Jun 殷鈞 (484–532) to edit books in the imperial collection. During the early years of his reign, Xiao Yan invited scholars to a gathering at which they were tested on the number of allusions they could recite on various topics. On one occasion, the scholars including Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513) and Fan Yun 范雲 (451–503) deferred to Xiao Yan. However, when it came to the topic of “bro1.22

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215

cade coverlet,” Liu Jun enumerated ten-plus allusions. Xiao Yan reputedly was deeply offended by Liu Jun’s impudence and never again invited him to the literary gatherings. Liu Jun then composed a long expository essay, “Bian ming lun” 辯命論 (Disquisition on fate), which is more than a disinterested disquisition on the way in which one’s life is controlled by fate, but mainly is a complaint about Liu Jun’s failure to obtain recognition in his time. At the end of the piece he resolves to be content with his lot and continue to cultivate his character. The magistrate of Moling 秣陵, Liu Zhao 流沼, disagreed with Liu Jun’s conclusion, and they exchanged a series of letters debating the matter. Liu Zhao died before he could send his last letter. Liu Jun wrote this letter in reply after Liu Zhao’s death. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Xiong Yongqian, Wei Jin Nanbeichao pianwen, 157– 65; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:743–46; Luo Guowei, Liu Xiaobiao ji, 23–26; Wei Fengjuan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhujia, 328–331; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3080–83; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:2028–31; Gao Buying, Nanbeichao wen juyao, 1:446–50; Chen Qingyuan, “Xuan jian kong long you hen ru he”; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:800–801.

2

Letter in the Yi 移 Section

Liu Xin 劉歆 (d. 23), “Yi rang taichang boshi” 移書讓太常博士 (A letter berating the professors of the Ministry of Ceremonies) In 6 BCE, Liu Xin requested that the Zuo zhuan, the Mao version of the Shi jing, the remnants of the Book of Rites, and the old text version of the Classic of Documents be established as official texts in the national university. When he met with strong criticism from important officials, he submitted a letter to the professors of the national university, berating them for their stubborn opposition to his proposal. 2.1

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:747–61; Gao Buying, Liang Han wen juyao, 188–98; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:3084–93; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:2031–43; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:801–5; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 482–95.

216

Knechtges

3

Letters in the Shi 詩 Section

3.1

Lu Chen 盧諶 (285–351), “Zeng Liu Kun shu” 贈劉琨書 (Letter sent to Liu Kun) Annotations, Studies, Translations

3.1.1

Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 3:524–36; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 3:541–59; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 2:1087–95.

Liu Kun 劉琨 (271–318), “Da Lu Chen shu” 答盧諶書 (Letter replying to Lu Chen) Liu Kun was a prominent writer and military leader during the transition between the Western and Eastern Jin. Lu Chen was a nephew of Liu Kun’s wife. In 314, The Xianbei Duan Pidi 段匹磾 (d. 322) assumed the position of regional inspector of Youzhou (modern southern Hebei). On 4 January 317, Liu Kun fled to Duan Pidi, who had sent Liu Kun a letter inviting him to join him at his administrative headquarters in Ji 薊 (southwest of modern Beijing). About the same time Lu Chen accepted a position on Duan Pidi’s staff as mounted escort. He wrote a letter to Liu Kun along with a long four-syllable-line poem in twenty eight-line stanzas to express regret that he must leave Liu Kun. In both the letter and poems, Lu Chen recasts phrases that were popular among the xuanxue 玄學 thinkers of the Wei-Jin era. However, instead of using them to make abstract philosophical points, Liu Kun employs xuanxue rhetoric to convey the depth of his regard for Liu Kun. Liu Kun wrote a letter in reply along with a set of eight twelve-line four-syllable-line poems. The letter is interesting for Liu Kun’s confession of his youthful attraction to the eccentric mode of conduct that prevailed among the elite in Luoyang in the 290s. He tells of his youthful interest in Zhuangzi’s theory of placing all values at the same level and not making distinctions and his admiration for the “unrestrained abandon” of Ruan Ji 阮生之放曠. Liu Kun says that these intellectual pursuits led him to disdain the conventional concern with good and bad fortune, life and death, good and evil. He also believed that one should be dispassionate and avoid feeling either sorrow or joy. In the next section of his letter, Liu Kun tells Lu Chen that he had changed his earlier view. He now considers that “Lao Dan and Zhuang Zhou put forth errant nonsense, and Ruan Ji engaged in reckless behavior” 知聃、周之為虛 誕,嗣宗之為妄作也. Why did he come to this conclusion? Liu Kun basically changed his mind because of his personal experience. He had seen the Jin state fall, and many friends and family members, including his parents, had been killed. As much as he tried to dispel his sorrow, he could not do so. 3.2

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217

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 3:524– 36; Wei Fengjuan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhujia, 193–97; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 3:524–36; Gao Buying, Wei Jin wen juyao, 141–44; Zhao Tianrui, Liu Kun ji, 66–78; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 2:1080–85; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:412–13, 418–19; Knechtges. “Liu Kun, Lu Chen,” 45–47, 57–58.

4

Letters in the Jian 牋 Section

Yang Xiu, “Da Linzi hou jian” 答臨淄侯牋 (Memorandum replying to the Marquis of Linzi) This is Yang Xiu’s reply to the letter that Cao Zhi had sent to him in 216. In the first part of the letter, he commends Cao Zhi for his praise of Wang Can, Chen Lin, Xu Gan, Liu Zhen, and Ying Yang, but denies that his writing is of the same worth as theirs. He lavishes praise on Cao Zhi’s writing. However, at the end of the letter he takes exception to Cao Zhi’s assertion that the fu is an inferior genre of writing, and he even insists that service to the state and leaving behind an outstanding reputation are not incompatible with mastery of writing (wenzhang 文章). 4.1

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:452– 57; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2866–72; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1844–49; Zhou Xunchu, Tang chao Wen xuan, 2:431–50; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:752–54; Holzman, “Literary Criticism, 120–21.

Po Qin 繁欽, “Yu Wei Wendi jian” 與魏文帝牋 (Memorandum to Emperor Wen of Wei) Po Qin wrote this letter to Cao Pi in 217 to report about a fourteen-year-old boy who was a skilled throat-singer. 4.2

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:458– 61; Wei Fengjuan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhujia, 40–44; Gao Buying, Wei Jin wen juyao, 58–60; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2873–76; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1849–53; Zhou Xunchu, Tang chao Wen xuan, 2:450–60; Fan Ziye, “Humai yu Hujia”; Gao Huaping, “Po Qin ‘Yu Wen Wendi jian’”; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:755–56.

218

Knechtges

Chen Lin, “Da Dong’e wang jian” 答東阿王牋 (Memorandum replying to the Prince of Dong’e) In this short letter Chen Lin thanks Cao Zhi for sending him a copy of his “Gui fu” 龜賦 (Fu on the turtle). 4.3

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:462– 65; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2877–79; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1852–53; Wu Yun, Jian’an qizi ji jiaozhu, 171–73; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:756–57.

Wu Zhi, “Chong da Wei taizi jian” 重答魏太子牋 (Memorandum again replying to the Crown Prince of Wei) Wu Zhi wrote this letter on 11 March 219 to reply to a letter that Cao Pi had sent him the previous year. In that letter Cao Pi had lamented the passing of Xu Gan, Chen Lin, Ying Yang, and Liu Zhen, who all died in the epidemic of 217. He also wrote of the festive gatherings that Cao Pi had hosted in Ye. At the beginning of his letter, Wu Zhi regrets the death of these men. He also wonders why he was the only one of their group who has been spared. In the next portion of the letter Wu Zhi praises the literary skill of Chen Lin, Xu Gan, Liu Zhen, and Ying Yang. However, he considers writing was their only talent, and they were deficient in military affairs. Wu Zhi ends his letter by praising Cao Pi’s literary accomplishments, but also declaring that his own aspirations were to offer loyal service to his lord. 4.4

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:466– 73; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2880–84; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1854–57; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:757–58; Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 85 (excerpt).

Wu Zhi, “Yuancheng yu Wei taizi jian” 元城與魏太子牋 (Memorandum from Yuancheng to the Crown Prince of Wei) Ca. 215, Wu Zhi was appointed magistrate of Yuancheng 元城. On his way to his post, he passed through Ye and bid farewell to Cao Pi. Once he arrived in Yuancheng, Wu Zhi wrote this letter to Cao Pi. As in previous letters, Wu Zhi recounts the merry parties that he had participated in with Cao Pi. These gatherings were even superior to those hosted by the Lord of Pingyuan during the Warring States period. In the second section of the letter, Wu Zhi states how he plans to govern Yuancheng. However, at the end of the letter, he says that he does not enjoy the prospect of continued service in the local administration, and he hopes that he will soon be able to return to office in Ye. 4.5

Letters in the Wen xuan

219

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:474– 80; Gao Buying, Wei Jin wen juyao, 61–65; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2885– 89; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1858–62; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:758–60.

Ruan Ji 阮籍 (210–263), “Wei Zheng Chong quan Jin wang jian” 為鄭 沖勸晉王牋 (Memorandum on behalf of Zheng Chong exhorting the Prince of Jin) Ruan Ji composed this memorandum in the tenth lunar month of 263. At this time, Sima Zhao was offered the title of Duke of Jin and granted the Nine Bestowals, but he refused them. The Minister of Works Zheng Chong 鄭沖 (d. 274) wished Ruan Ji to write a memorandum urging Sima Zhao to proclaim his acceptance of the titles and honors. At that time Ruan Ji was at the home of Yuan Zhun 袁準 (fl. 265–74). He had been drunk since the previous day, and they had to prop him up while he wrote the document on wooden slips. After completing his composition Ruan did not need to make any corrections. As I mention above, this piece is closer to the petition genre than the letter. 4.6

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Bojun, Ruan Jiji jiaozhu, 50–58; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:481–87; Gao Buying, Wei Jin wen juyao, 79–84; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2890–94; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1862–66; Han Geping, Zhulin qixian, 44–48; Lin Jiali, Xinyi Ruan Ji shiwen ji, 57–63; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:760–62; Mather. Shih-shuo Hsin-yü, 135.

Xie Tiao 謝朓 (464–499), “Bai Zhongjun jishi ci Sui wang jian” 拜中 軍記室辭隨王牋 (Memorandum bidding farewell to the Prince of Sui after being appointed record keeper of the capital army) In 491 Xie Tiao joined the entourage of Xiao Zilong 蕭子隆 (474–494), Prince of Sui 隨, who was the eighth son of Xiao Ze 蕭賾, Emperor Wu of the Southern Qi, r. 483–93. From 491 to autumn of 493, Xie Tiao resided in Jiangling 江陵, where Xiao Zilong was serving as regional inspector of Jingzhou 荊州 and General Defending the West. In Jingzhou, Xie Tiao soon became Xiao Zilong’s favorite. Xie Tiao’s position rose to that of wenxue 文學 or instructor. Xiao frequently held gatherings at which members of his staff wrote poems together. In autumn of 493, an officer on Xiao Zilong’s staff reported to the emperor that Xie Tiao was too intimate with Zilong and should be recalled to the capital. The emperor ordered his return. After he arrived in the capital, Xie wrote a long memorandum to Xiao Zilong, expressing his friendship and affection. 4.7

220

Knechtges

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:488–93; Wei Fengjuan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhujia, 289–94; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2895–99; Xu Zhengying, Zhaoming wen xuan jiaodu, 75–85; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1866–69; Gao Buying, Nanbeichao wen juyao, 1:176–83; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:762–64; Chennault, “Odes on Objects,” 343–46.

Ren Fang 任昉 (460–508), “Dao sima jishi jian” 到司馬記室牋 (Memorandum upon arriving at the post of record keeper for the Minister of War) In January 502, Xiao Yan assumed the position of minister of war, and he appointed Ren Fang his record keeper. This was just before Xiao Yan was about to be installed as emperor of the newly founded Liang dynasty. In this short memorandum Ren Fang notes that he has known Xiao Yan for almost twenty years. He expresses his admiration and gratitude to him for his appointment to this post. 4.8

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:494– 97; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2900–2902; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1869–71; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:764–65.

Ren Fang, “Baibi quan jin jinshang jian” 百辟勸進金上牋 (A memorandum from officialdom urging [Xiao Yan] to advance to the position of current sovereign) Ren Fang composed this memorandum on 24 February 502 on behalf of a group of court officials urging Xiao Yan to accept the title of Duke of Liang in preparation for his eventual acceptance of the abdication to him of the imperial throne from the last emperor of the Southern Qi dynasty. 4.9

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:498– 505; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2903–7; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1872–75; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:765–67.

Letters in the Wen xuan

5

221

Letters in the Qi 啟 Section42

Ren Fang 任昉, “Feng da chi shi qixi shi qi” 奉答勑示七夕詩啟 (Communication replying to the edict to show my ‘Seventh Night” poem) In 502, Xiao Yan, Emperor Wu of Liang, sent a poem in five couplets on the subject of the “Seventh Night [of the Seventh Month].” He presented him an edict ordering him to compose a matching piece. In his reply, Ren Fang praises Xiao Yang’s poem and thanks him for the favor that the newly enthroned emperor has bestowed on him. This piece is typical of the “thank-you-note” form. 5.1

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:402– 5; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2830–33; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1814–16; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:737–38.

Ren Fang, “Wei Bian Bin xie xiu Bian Zhongzhen mu qi” 為卞彬謝脩 卞忠貞墓啟 (Thank-you letter on behalf of Bian Bin for refurbishing the grave of Bian Zhongzhen) Ren Fang wrote this letter on behalf of Bian Bin 卞彬 (fl. 480–500) who was the great-great-grandson of Bian Kun 卞壼 (281–328), a famous Eastern Jin statesman who was killed during the insurrection of Su Jun 蘇峻 (d. 328). Bian Kun and his two sons were buried at Yecheng 冶城 (at the site of the Chaotian Palace 朝天宮 in Nanjing). Some seventy years after Bian Bin was buried, grave robbers ransacked the tomb. During the reign of Emperor An (r. 396–418) the tomb was re-sealed. It became damaged during the early Liang.43 Emperor Wu ordered it refurbished. In this letter Bian Bin thanks Emperor Wu for this act of imperial grace. 5.2

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:406–9; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2834–36; You Zhicheng, Zhaoming wen xuan jiaodu, 100–106; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1816–18; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:738.

42 43

On the qi form, see Xiaofei Tian’s chapter in this volume. On the history of this tomb see Zhang Dunyi (12th c.), Liuchao shiji bianlei B.49b.

222

Knechtges

Ren Fang, “Qi Xiao taifu guci duoli” 啟蕭太傅固辭奪禮 (Communication to Grand Mentor Xiao firmly declining to curtail mourning rites) Ren Fang wrote this communication to Xiao Luan 蕭鸞 (452–498), nephew of the Southern Qi founder Emperor Gao (r. 479–82). In 494 Xiao Luan was named grand mentor, which made him the de facto prime minister. From 492 to 494, Ren Fang left office to observe mourning for his deceased father, and from the tenth lunar month of 494 to 496, he was in mourning for his deceased mother.44 In 494, Xiao Luan wished to appoint Ren Fang a record keeper on his staff. In this letter, Ren Fang respectfully declines the appointment on the grounds that he does not wish to curtail the mourning rites. 5.3

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:410–15; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2837–41; You Zhicheng, Zhaoming wen xuan jiaodu, 107–13; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1818–20; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:739–40.

6

Letters in the Shang shu 上書 Section

Li Si 李斯 (d. 208 BCE), “Shang shu Qin Shihuang” 上書秦始皇 (Letter submitted to the Qin First Emperor) Li Si was the famous Qin minister who served under the Qin First Emperor. Li Si went to Qin just at the time of the death of its king, Zhuangxiang 莊襄 (d. 247 BCE). He first served as a houseman on the staff of the prime minister Lü Buwei 呂不韋 (290–235 BCE). Impressed with Li Si’s ability, Lü Buwei appointed him gentleman. In this capacity Li Si presented advice to the newly enthroned Qin king (the future First Qin Emperor, r. 221–210 BCE) on how to conquer the rival six states and create an empire under Qin rule. The King of Qin appointed Li Si senior scribe and granted him the title “guest minister” (ke qing 客卿). After Lü Buwei was removed from office in 237 BCE, the King of Qin ordered foreign officials expelled from the state. Li Si presented to the court a petition in which he convinced the king to rescind his order. This petition is the famous prose work “Shang shu jian zhu ke” 上書諫逐客 (Letter presented admonishing against expelling foreigners), the same piece that is titled “Shang shu Qin Shihuang” in the Wen xuan. 6.1

44

For these dates see Xiong Qingyuan, “Nanbeichao wenxue biannian shi shiwu lizheng.”

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Li Si begins the piece by enumerating the various officials and ministers from other states that provided wise advice and assistance to the four Qin rulers Duke Mu 穆 (r. 659–621 BCE), Duke Xiao 孝 (r. 361–338 BCE), King Hui 惠 (r. 337–311 BCE), and King Zhao 昭 (r. 306–251 BCE). Li Si argues that if Qin had expelled these men, it would not have achieved its present level of prosperity and strength. Li Si next lists a long catalogue of treasures that had come to Qin from other areas. This passage is a forerunner to the catalogues that are common in the Han dynasty fu compositions. Li Si argues that if Qin does not reject foreign treasures, why should it expel alien advisors? Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:334– 43; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2776–83; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1773–78; Chen Lifen, “Mingpian miao jian zhao qianqiu”; Hu Nengcheng, “Lun Li Si de ‘Jian zhu ke shu’”; trans. Giles, Gems of Chinese Literature (Prose), 51–53; Margouliès, Anthologie, 152–54; Bodde, China’s First Unifier, 15–21; Dawson, Sima Qian, 27–29; Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, Qin Dynasty, 181–84; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, Volume VII, 336–39.

Zou Yang 鄒陽 (ca. 206–129 BCE), “Shang shu Wu Wang” 上書吳王 (Letter submitted to the King of Wu) Zou Yang, whose natal home was in Qi 齊 (modern Shandong), joined the court of Liu Pi 劉濞, King of Wu 吳 (r. 195–54). Liu Pi had long harbored a grudge against the newly installed Emperor Jing (r. 157–141 BCE). Liu Pi reputedly began to plot revenge against Emperor Jing. Ca. 155 BCE Zou Yang sent him a letter admonishing him to desist from this venture, but Liu Pi did not take his advice.

6.2

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:344–53; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2784–91; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1779–84; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 266–87; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:719–22; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 435–45.

Zou Yang, “Yuzhong shang shu ziming” 獄中上書自明 (Letter submitted from prison to clarify myself ) Ca. 154 BCE Zou Yang left Wu to join the staff of Liu Wu 劉武, King Xiao of Liang 梁孝王 (r. 168–144 BCE), who was the younger brother of Emperor Jing (r. 157–141 BCE). After Zou Yang arrived in Liang, he did not get along with King Xiao’s advisors Yang Sheng 羊勝 (fl. 150 BCE) and Gongsun Gui 公孫 詭 (d. ca. 149 BCE), who slandered him to King Xiao. The king had Zou Yang 6.3

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put into prison where he was about to be put to death. While in prison, Zou Yang presented to Liu Wu a letter in which he argued that a ruler may lose his throne if he only listens to flatterers and ignores criticism of loyal officials. After reading the letter, the King of Liang immediately released Zou Yang and appointed him a high retainer. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Wang Li, Gudai Hanyu, 2:843–52; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:354–70; Kong and Han, Liang Han zhujia sanwen xuan, 54–70; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2792–2806; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1784–95; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:722–27; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 446–64; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, Volume VII, 287–92.

Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (179–117 BCE), “Shang shu jian lie” 上書諫獵 (Letter presented [to Emperor Wu] admonishing against hunting) Emperor Wu of the Former Han (r. 141–87 BCE) was an inveterate hunter who often engaged in excursions and hunting expeditions in the Shanglin Park south of Chang’an. Sima Xiangru presented this letter to him to dissuade him from this activity which he argues is fraught with danger. The emperor could be injured or killed by a wild beast, or even attacked by foreign tribesmen who were invited to participate in the hunt. The emperor also could be thrown from his horse or carriage. Emperor Wu reputedly was pleased with Sima Xiangru’s letter, but there is no evidence that he abandoned excursions and hunts after reading it. 6.4

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:371– 74; Gao Buying, Liang Han wen juyao, 76–77; Jin Guoyong, Sima Xiangru ji jiaozhu, 139– 43; Kong and Han, Liang Han zhujia sanwen xuan, 89–93; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2807–9; Zhu and Sun, Sima Xiangru ji jiaozhu, 96–99; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1795–98; Li Xianzhong 李孝中, Sima Xiangru ji jiaozhu, 66–68; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:728–29; Hervouet, Le Chapitre 117 du Che-ki, 175– 79; Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, Han Dynasty II, 2:293–94.

Mei Sheng 枚乘 (or Cheng), (d. ca. 140 BCE), “Shang shu jian Wu wang” 上書諫吳王 (Letter presented admonishing the King of Wu) In 195 BCE Liu Pi, who was the son of an elder brother of Liu Bang, was enfeoffed as King of Wu (r. 195–154 BCE). Mei Sheng served as gentleman of the palace at the court of Liu Pi. Liu Pi had long harbored a grudge against Emperor Jing (r. 157–141 BCE). While the emperor was heir-designate, he killed Liu Pi’s son 6.5

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with a game board. Wu was the strongest and richest of the vassal kingdoms (it had abundant copper reserves). Liu Pi began secretly to plan a revolt against the central authority. Ca. 157 BCE Mei Sheng presented the first of two letters to Liu Pi urging him not to take this action. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Wang Li, Gudai Hanyu, 2:853–55; Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:375–81; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2810–15; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1798–1802; Shih Chih-mien, “Mei Sheng jian Wu wang shu”; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 267–87, 675–95; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:729–31; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 465–72; Owen; Anthology, 130–33.

Mei Sheng, “Shang shu chong jian Wu wang” 上書重諫吳王 (Letter presented against admonishing the King of Wu) In 154 BCE Liu Pi led a revolt of seven kingdoms against Emperor Jing. Mei Sheng, who had left Wu to join the court at Liang, presented this letter to urge him to abandon his revolt. 6.6

Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:382– 89; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2816–2822; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1802–6; Shih Chih-mien, “Mei Sheng jian Wu wang shu”; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 267–87, 675–95; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:730–34; Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 473–81.

Jiang Yan 江淹 (444–505), “Yi Jianping wang shang shu” 詣建平王 上書 (Letter presented to the Prince of Jianping) In 465, Jiang Yan joined the staff of Liu Zizhen 劉子真 (457–466). He accompanied Liu Zizhen to his post as regional inspector of Nan Yanzhou 南兗州 (administrative seat Guangling 廣陵, modern Yangzhou). On 25 October 466, Emperor Ming (Liu Yu 劉彧 [439–472, r. 465–72], who wished to eliminate all of the sons of Emperor Xiaowu, had the nine-year-old Liu Zizhen put to death. Jiang Yan was not a prominent member of Liu Zizhen’s staff, and he thus escaped punishment. In 466, Jiang Yan obtained a position with Liu Jingsu 劉 景素 (452–476), Prince of Jianping 漸平. Liu Jingsu, who was fourteen at the time, was a grandson of Emperor Wen (r. 424–53). In 466, Liu Jingsu assumed Liu Zizhen’s post as regional inspector in Nan Yanzhou, and probably because Jiang Yan was on Zizhen’s staff, he was retained in Liu Jingsu’s service. Shortly after joining Liu Jingsu’s staff, the magistrate of Guangling 廣陵, Guo Yanwen 郭彥文, was charged with a crime, and in his confession accused Jiang Yan of accepting bribes. Jiang Yan was arrested and sent to prison. From prison, Jiang 6.7

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wrote an eloquent appeal to Liu Jingsu proclaiming his innocence. This is a skillful imitation of Zou Yang’s “Yuzhong shang shu ziming” (see above). The prince reputedly was so moved by Jiang Yan’s letter he ordered him released and restored him to his former position. Annotations, Studies, Translations: Chen Hongtian, Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu, 5:390–401; Zhang Qicheng, Wen xuan quanyi, 4:2822–29; Xu Zhengying. Zhaoming wen xuan jiaodu, 55–74; Zhou Qicheng, Xinyi Zhaoming wen xuan, 3:1806–13; Gao Buying, Nanbeichao wen juyao, 1:375–83; Fukui, “Kō En no ‘Kei Kenpei ō nikeishite jōsho’ ni tsuite”; Gu Nong, “Jiang Yan yu Jianping wang Liu Jingsu”; trans. Zach, Chinesische Anthologie, 2:734–37; Marney, Chiang Yen, 17–19.



The Wen xuan selection of shu and related epistolary writings shows that by the sixth century the letter was a major form of writing. Although we do not know the explicit criteria the Wen xuan compilers followed in selecting epistolary pieces for this anthology, based on numbers of pieces selected, it is clear they deemed this genre one of the most important genres of prose. For example, the shu category alone has 22 pieces. Many of the other genres such as edict, command, instruction, admonition, and grave memoir have only one example of the form. Only two other genres include numbers of pieces that approach that of the shu category. The petition has 19 pieces, and the disquisition includes 13. What the Wen xuan selections of epistolary writing first of all tells us about this genre in the medieval period is that there is a certain amount of fluidity in what exactly constitutes a letter. The fact that examples of the form can be found in five genre categories is evidence that epistolary writing was not limited to a single genre category. In addition, the distinction between so-called “personal” letters and “official” letters is often blurred as in the case of the shang shu written by Zou Yang, Mei Sheng, and Jiang Yan, which although written in their official capacities, express highly personal sentiments. As I have shown elsewhere, the Wen xuan contains two types of writings, those that are mainly concerned with teaching values that maintained the social and political order and those that express personal sentiments.45 The selection of both official

45

Knechtges, “Culling the Weeds,” 231.

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and personal epistolary writings may be a reflection of this dual emphasis in the Wen xuan. One also learns from the Wen xuan selection of letters that epistolary writing had attained relatively high status by the Liang period. I have mentioned that earlier anthologies had included the category of shu, and that there were even anthologies devoted exclusively to the shu form. Thus, the Wen xuan compilers were not the first to include the letter in an anthology. We do not know the contents of any of these earlier anthologies. However, we know from the Wen xuan preface that one of the important criteria for selecting works for the anthology was hanzao 翰藻 or “literary elegance.” Although this term has been much debated, there is general agreement that it designates high-register and high-status writing.46 There is nothing intrinsically elegant or high-status about epistolary writing. Most letters, including those written in early medieval China, are inelegant, perfunctory jottings. The letters selected for the Wen xuan were “la crème de la crème.” By virtue of their selection in what eventually became the Chinese anthology par excellence, a goodly number of these pieces became part of the Chinese epistolary canon. Bibliography Allen, Joseph Roe III. “Chih Yü’s Discussions of Different Types of Literature: A Translation and Brief Comment.” In Two Studies in Chinese Literary Criticism, 3–36. Parerga no. 3. Seattle: Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies, 1976. Bao Xiuyan 包秀巖. “Xi Kang ‘Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu’ lunxi” 嵇康〈與山巨源絕 交書〉論析. Shenyang shifan daxue xuebao (Shehui kexue ban) 154 (2009): 90–93. Bauer, Wolfgang. Das Antlitz Chinas: Die autobiographische Selbstdarstellung in der chinesischen Literatur von ihren Anfängen bis heute. München: Hanser, 1990. Bielenstein, Hans. The Bureacracy of Han Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Birch, Cyril and Donald Keene. Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Bodde, Derk. China’s First Unifier: A Study of the Ch’in Dynasty as Seen in the Life of Li Ssu, 15–21. Leiden: Brill, 1938; rpt. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967.

46

The classic discussion of hanzao is Zhu Ziqing, “Wen xuan xu ‘Shi chu yu chen si, yi gui yu hanzao’ shuo.”

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Cao Daoheng 曹道衡 and Shen Yucheng 沈玉成. “Kong Zhigui ‘Beishan yiwen’ ” 孔稚 珪〈北山移文〉. In Zhonggu wenshi ziliao congkao 中古文學史料叢考, 428–29. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003. Cao Haidong 曹海東, trans. and comm. Xinyi Cao Zijian ji 新譯曹子建集. Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 2003. Chang Jen-ch’ing 張仁青, ed. and comm. Lidai pianwen xuan 歷代便文選. Taipei: Taiwan Zhonghua shuju, 1965. Chavannes, Édouard. Les Mémoires historiques de Sseu-ma Ts’ien. 1895–1905; rpt. Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1969. Chen Bojun 陳伯君, ed. and comm. Ruan Jiji jiaozhu 阮籍集校注, 50–58. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987. Chen Hongtian 陳宏天, Zhao Fuhai 趙福海 and Chen Fuxing 陳復興, comm. and trans. Zhaoming wenxuan yizhu 昭明文選譯注. Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 1987–93. Chen Jinzhong 陳盡忠. “Shi ‘Bao Ren An shu’ de jige wenti” 釋〈報任安書〉的幾問 題. Xiamen daxue xuebao (1980: 3): 111–17. Chen Lifen 陳麗芬. “Mingpian miao jian zhao qianqiu: Li Si ‘Jian zhu ge shu’ shangxi” 名篇妙諫照千秋:李斯〈諫逐客書〉賞析. Henan daxue xuebao (Shehui kexue ban) (1987: 2): 42–44. Chen Qingyuan 陳慶元. “Xuan jian kong long you hen ru he: Du Liu Xiaobiao ‘Chong da Liu Moling zhao shu’ ” 懸劍空壠有恨如何:讀劉孝標〈重答劉秣陵沼書〉. Gudian wenxue zhishi (2004: 5): 23–26. Chen Zhisheng 陳芝生. “Sima Qian zhi xin: ‘Bao Ren Shaoqing shu’ xi lun” 司馬遷之 心:〈報任少卿書〉析論. In Jinian Qian Mu xiansheng shishi shizhounian guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwen ji 紀念錢穆先生逝世十週年國際學術研討會論文集, edited by Guoli Taiwan daxue Zhongguo wenxue xi 國立臺灣大學中國文學系. January 2001. Cheng Jinzao 程金造. “Lun Wang Guowei kaoding ‘Bao Ren An shu’ de shidai yu neirong” 論王國維考定〈報任安書〉的時代與內容. Shi ji guankui 史記管窺, 124–36. Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1985. Chennault, Cynthia L. “Odes on Objects and Patronage in the Southern Qi.” In Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History in Honor of Richard B. Mather and Donald Holzman, edited by Paul W. Kroll and David R. Knechtges, 343– 46. Provo, Utah: T’ang Studies Society, 2003. Chu Hsiao-hai 朱曉海. “Du Wen xuan zhi ‘Yu Zhaoge ling Wu Zhi shu’ deng sanpian zhi hou” 讀文選之〈與朝歌令吳質書〉等三篇之後. Guangxi shifan daxue xuebao 40.1 (2004): 70–75. Chu Hsiao-hai 朱曉海. “Zhao Zhi ‘Yu Xi Maoqi shu’ yiyun bianxi” 趙至〈與嵇茂齊 書〉疑雲辨析. Donghua Zhongwen xuebao (2011: 4): 1–24.

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Chung, Eva Yuen-wah. “A Study of the Shu (Letters) of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220).” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1982. Cui Fuzhang 崔富章, comm. and trans. Xinyi Xi Zhongsan ji 新譯嵇中散集. Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1998. Cui Jibao 崔積寶. “Cao Zhi ‘Yu Yang Dezu shu’ xinping” 曹植〈與楊德祖書〉新評. Beifang luncong 186.4 (2004): 27–30. Cutter, Robert Joe. “Cao Zhi (192–232) and His Poetry,” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1983. ———. “Cao Zhi’s (192–232) Symposium Poems.” CLEAR 6.1–2 (1984): 1–32. Dai Mingyang 戴明揚, ed. and comm. Xi Kang ji jiaozhu 嵇康集校注. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1962. Dawson, Raymond. Sima Qian: Historical Records. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Debon, Günther. “Der Jadering des Chung Yu (Wen-hsüan 42,4).” In Studia SinoMongolica: Festschrift für Herbert Franke, edited by Wolfgang Bauer, 307–14. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979. Deng Guoguang 鄧國光. Zhi Yu yanjiu 摯虞研究. Hong Kong: Xueheng chubanshe, 1990. Ding Hongqi 丁紅旗. “Wen xuan ‘Yu Xi Maoqi shu’ kao” 文選〈與嵇茂齊書〉考. Fuling shifan xueyuan xuebao 23.3 (2007): 68–72. Ding Hongwu 丁宏武. “Wen xuan suoshou Wei Wendi ‘Yu Zhaoge ling Wu Zhi shu’ pianming bianzheng” 文選所收魏文帝〈與朝歌令吳質書〉篇名辨正. Wenxian (2011: 2): 191–94. Ding Liya 丁莉婭. “Cong Wen xuan ‘shu’ lei kan Xiao Tong yu Liu Xie zhi wenxue guan yitong” 從文選「書」類看蕭統與劉勰之文學觀異同. Dangdai jingliren (2006: 2): 167–68. Dzo, Ching-chuan. Sseu-ma Ts’ien et l’historiographie chinoise. Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France, 1957. Egan, Ronald C. “The Prose Style of Fan Ye.” HJAS 39 (1979): 339–42. Fan Rong 樊榮. “ ‘Yu Xi Maoqi shu’ yiwen ying wei Zhao Zhi suoxie” 〈與嵇茂齊書〉一 文為趙至所寫. Mingzuo xinshang (2008: 4): 10–13. Fan Ziye 范子燁. “Humai yu Hujia: Zhonggu shidai de houyin yishu: Dui Po Qin ‘Yu Wei Wendi’ de yinyuexue chanshi” 呼麥與胡笳:中古時代的喉音藝術:對繁 欽〈與魏文帝箋〉的音樂闡釋. Zhongguo wenhua 29 (2009:1): 179–90. Feng Siyi 封思毅. “Dunhuang xieben ‘Li Ling yu Su Wu shu’ bian wei” 敦煌寫本 〈李陵與蘇武書〉辨偽. Guoli Zhongyang tushuguan guankan 27.1 (1994): 97–100. Fu Gang 傅剛. “‘Wen gui qing sheng’ shuo de shidai yiyi: Lüetan Lu Yun ‘Yu xiong Pingyuan shu’” 「文貴清省」說的時代意義:略談陸雲〈與平原書〉. Wenyi

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lilun yanjiu (1984: 2): 93–99; rpt. in Fu Gang. Han Wei Liuchao wenxue yu xianxian lungao 漢魏六朝文學與文獻論稿, 243–59. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005. ———. Zhaoming Wen xuan yanjiu 昭明文選研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2000. Fuehrer, Bernhard. “The Court Scribe’s Eikon Psyches: A Note on Sima Qian and His Letter to Ren An.” Asian and African Studies 6 (1997): 170–83. Fukui Yoshio 福井佳夫. “Kō En no ‘Kei Kenpei ō nikeishite jōsho’ ni tsuite” 江淹 の〈詣建平王上書〉について. Chūgoku shibun ronsō 10 (1991): 39–58. ———. “Kyū Chi no Chin Hakushi ni atafuru sho” ni tsuite” 丘遲の〈與陳伯之書〉に ついて. Chūkyō daigaku bungakubu kiyō 26.1 (1991): 87–153. ———. “Sō Hi no ‘Yo Go Shitsu sho’ ni tsuite” 曹丕の〈與吳質書〉について. Chūgoku chūsei bungaku kenkyū 20 (1991): 1–25. Funazu Tomihiko 船津富彥. “Ri Chū no Kanrinron ni tsuite” 李充《翰林論》につ いて. In Uchino hakase kanreki kinen Tōyōgaku ronshū 內野博士還曆紀念東洋學 論集, 217–33. Tokyo: Kan Gi bunka kenkyūkai, 1964. Gao Buying 高步瀛, ed. and comm. Liang Han wen juyao 兩漢文舉要. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990. ———, ed. and comm. Nanbeichao wen juyao 南北朝文舉要. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998. ———, ed. and comm. Wei Jin wen juyao 魏晉文舉要. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989. Gao Huaping 高華平. “Po Qin ‘Yu Wen Wendi jian’ de xiezuo shijian ji xiangguan wenti” 繁欽〈與魏文帝牋〉的寫作時間及相關問題. Gudian wenxian yanjiu (2009: 8): 572–76. Giles, Herbert A. Gems of Chinese Literature (Prose). Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1922. Gu Nong 顧農. “Jiang Yan yu Jianping wang Liu Jingsu” 江淹與建平王景素. Wen xuan luncong, 178–83. ———. “Qiu Chi he tade ‘Yu Chen Bozhi shu’” 丘遲與他的〈與陳伯之書〉. Mingzuo xinshang (2005: 19): 99–101. ———. “ ‘Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu’ zuonian kao” 〈與山巨源絕交書〉作年考. Jianghai xuekan (1998: 4): 169. Gu Zuyu 顧祖禹. Dushi fangyu jiyao 讀史方輿紀要. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005. Guo Dianchen 郭殿忱 and Li Hongguang 李紅光. “Lun Wen xuan zhi shuti” 論文選 之書體. In Zhaoming Wen xuan yu Zhongguo chuantong wenhua 昭明文選與中國 傳統文化, edited by Zhao Fuhai 趙福海, Liu Qi 劉琦, and Wu Xiaofeng 吳曉峰, 377–89. Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 2001. Guo Shaoyu 郭紹虞. “Wenzhang liubie lun yu Han lin lun” 《文章流別論》與《翰 林論》. Yanda yuekan 5.3 (1929); rpt. in Guo Shaoyu. Zhaoyu shi gudian wenxue lunji 照隅室古典文學論集, 146–48. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983.

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Zhu Jing 朱婧 and Luo Xu 羅煦. “‘Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu’ xiezuo shijian yanjiu zongshu” 〈與山巨源絕交書〉寫作時間研究綜述. Qingnian wenxuejia (2011: 14): 199. Zhu Yiqing 朱一清 and Sun Yizhao 孫以昭, eds. and comm. Sima Xiangru ji jiaozhu 司馬相如集校注, 96–99. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1996. Zhu Ziqing 朱自清. “Wen xuan xu ‘Shi chu yu chen si, yi gui yu hanzao’ shuo” 文選序 「事出於沈思,義歸於翰藻」說. Beiping guoxue jikan 6.4 (1946); rpt. in Zhu Ziqing. Wen shi lunzhu 文史論著, 88–101. Hong Kong: Taiping shuju, 1962.

CHAPTER 6

Between Letter and Testament: Letters of Familial Admonition in Han and Six Dynasties China* Antje Richter The Han dynasty (221 BCE–220 CE) with its centralized administration and complex bureaucracy witnessed an enormous development of written official communication. This process was characterized not only by an increase in quantity but also by typological diversification based on different functions of writing, which led to the establishment of numerous subgenres of official communication.1 Personal correspondence flourished, too, and letters began to be appreciated as a literary genre. Some of the most renowned letters in Chinese literary history are personal letters written during the Han dynasty, most famously the historian Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 86 BCE) magnificent letter to Ren An 任安 (d. ca. 91 BCE).2 The establishment of letters as a literary genre was accompanied by the emergence of distinct epistolary subgenres, again based on different functions, such as letters of thanks, condolence, recommendation, and, notably, of admonition.3 A subgroup of admonitions, those addressed to younger members of one’s family, form a prominent part of transmitted epistolary literature from the Han dynasty onwards. In * I would like to thank Xiaofei Tian and Ed Lien, co-authors of this volume, as well as Brill’s anonymous reviewer for their invaluable comments on this chapter. Before giving this paper at the workshop in Boulder in 2012, I presented a part of it at the meeting of the American Oriental Society (Western Branch) in Irvine in 2007 and the conference of the European Association of Chinese Studies in Lund in 2008; and on each occasion received crucial advice that helped me improve my grasp of this material. An early version of the article was published in German as “Familiäre Mahnbriefe” in 2006. 1 On official communication during the Han dynasty see Giele, Imperial Decision-Making and Metelmann, “Schriftverkehr der Han-Zeit.” 2 Sima Qian, “Letter in reply to Ren An [zi Shaoqing 少卿]” (Bao Ren Shaoqing shu 報任少 卿書), Wen xuan 41.1854–69; Quan Han wen 26.5a–9a. The letter has been frequently translated and discussed, see the lists in Fuehrer, “The Court Scribe’s Eikon Psyches,” 175 n. 29; Knechtges, “ ‘Key Words,’ Authorial Intent, and Interpretation,” 75 n. 1; as well as Knechtges’s article in this volume. See also Durrant, “Self as the Intersection of Traditions.” 3 See Eva Yuen-wah Chung’s classification of Han dynasty personal letters in her “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 123–52.

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these letters the writers address one or more family members, mostly their own children or those of their siblings, expressing a whole range of admonitory gestures from reassurance to advice, warning, and outright censure. While letters of familial admonition are still rare in the Han dynasty, they are more common in the following Six Dynasties (220–589), at least if the numbers of transmitted letters are any indication. What is more, the genre remained alive and vibrant in the Tang dynasty and much later, as we can see from the numerous anthologies of family admonitions published in China during the several last decades.4 This is no surprise, because the main concern of a letter of familial admonition—the instruction of the younger generation—is at the heart of the Chinese, and indeed any society’s value system.5 Letters of familial admonition are first of all compelling documents of the interplay between social, familial, and individual concerns that provide insight into an array of social and psychological phenomena, from instructional practices to problem solving strategies to character assessment, etc. Apart from their rich content, letters of familial admonition are also interesting because of their literary features, in particular their rhetoric of criticism. Most of the transmitted epistolary literature is effusively polite: reverential and selfdeprecating with an emphasis on what in Latin rhetoric is called captatio benevolentiae or “fishing for goodwill,” a rhetorical figure that aims to put the addressees “in a good mood that will make them receptive of the message.”6 Letters of familial admonition, on the other hand, as communications to inferiors, are not bound by these conventions and thus allow us to observe a very different authorial self-presentation: confident and assertive writers who can be quite blunt in the assessment and criticism of their addressees, usually their children or nephews, occasionally also their grandchildren or younger siblings. From a third, typological perspective, these letters present us with a fascinating case of generic ambiguity, since they show characteristics of both regular personal letters and non-epistolary genres, such as the testament or the treatise, and may originally not have been actual letters at all. While we have no way of 4 See, e.g., Wang Xiaoxiang, Lidai jiaxun xuanzhu; Lu Lin, Zhonghua jiaxun daguan; Xu Shaojin, Zhongguo lidai jiaxun daquan; Lu Zhengyan, Zhongguo lidai jiaxun guanzhi. Another indication of the continuing appeal of family letters is the popularity of the letters that the famous translator Fu Lei 傅雷 (1908–1966) wrote to his son. See also Li Jie’s remarks on Fu Lei in her chapter on Shen Congwen’s family letters in this volume. 5 For a fine American example of the familial admonition see George Washington’s (1732–1799) letter to George Washington Parke Custis, November 28, 1796. The Custis Family Papers, Mss1 C9698a 228. 6 Klauck, Ancient Letters and the New Testament, 33.

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knowing if this was the case or not, it is clear that the best letters of familial admonition masterfully employ the potential of the letter form towards their literary and pedagogic ends. The following exploration discusses typological, formal, and rhetorical features of transmitted letters of familial admonition as they appear in the about sixty transmitted pieces from the Han and Six Dynasties, with a focus on those pieces that actually show epistolary features. That this is not the case with all such texts is chiefly a result of their transmission history. Most letters or letter fragments from early and medieval China were preserved in standard histories, encyclopedias, or anthologies, where they were included because of their contents, their literary quality, or the fame of their authors. Accordingly, they were abridged or in other ways adapted to the needs of the editors of these compilations, which often involved the elimination of epistolary features such as the letter frame (which usually contains contextual and personal information), instances of personal address, indicators of hierarchy, and certain structuring elements.7 The titles that label them as pieces of correspondence are later additions, which were never part of an original letter. Some of the fragments resulting from this process of “de-epistolarization” are celebrated as outstanding letters of familial admonition, even if they are without any textual indication of ever having been a letter. Since these texts, as admirable as they may be in their admonishing power, paternal sentiment, or literary form,8 yield too little information about the epistolary culture from which they emerged, they will only be treated marginally here.9 1

Genre Questions: Letters, Family Instructions, Testaments

The focus on one subgenre provides ideal conditions for probing the generic field of the epistolary. What personal letters are may seem evident in everyday 7 Comparing manuscript finds of official communications and their counterparts in transmitted literature, Carsten Metelmann (“Schriftverkehr der Han-Zeit,” 264–65) observed that correspondence in standard histories appears to have been abridged (particularly regarding the epistolary frame) and edited (including literary refinement). Similar observations were made by other scholars concerning other historical periods, see, e.g. Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 608–9. 8 See, for instance, letters written by Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234) to his nephew and to his son (Jie waisheng shu 誡外生書, Jie zi 誡子), Quan Sanguo wen 59.4b. 9 Cai Yanbin’s article “Cong jie zi shu kan Wei Jin Liuchao xueshu wenhua zhi bianqian,” expressly dedicated to all kinds of writings that aim at educating the younger generation in one’s family, is not concerned with the fact that some of these writings are letters but exclusively with their educational values.

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speech, but they are notoriously elusive with regard to generic definition.10 If we take only textual properties into account, the genre proves to be chameleonic, and not only because it can assimilate a broad spectrum of other genres from love poem to political pamphlet to travelogue.11 Letter definitions such as “a written message from one to another actual historical person”12 are consequently broad and mostly refer to non-textual properties, such as writing on a tangible medium and the letter’s particular writer-addressee relationship. Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 532), in chapter 25 of his great critical work The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍), also takes this approach of regarding letters first of all as written messages.13 Another decisive characteristic of the genre is that letters, in order to bridge the spatial separation between the correspondents, have to undergo some form of physical transmission involving a third party, and that they are usually part of an exchange. Several features are derived from this basic epistolary situation, some of them textual, others extralinguistic. The most consequential of the extralinguistic features is the time lag, due to transmission, between writing, reading, and responding to a letter. It creates a distinct, staggered type of communication that in turn determines a number of textual features. Another important extralinguistic feature is the fact that letters are transmitted in envelopes, which marks the directedness and exclusiveness of epistolary communication, both of which are also expressed on the textual level. The most significant textual features of a letter are its inherent dialogicity and self-referentiality. While dialogicity denotes a range of textual characteristics that prove a writer’s sustained efforts to engage a particular addressee, selfreferentiality describes a letter’s peculiar “capacity to refer to itself and to its own communicative function independently of any propositional content it may express.”14 The comparatist Claudio Guillén made a similar observation when he described the letter as “writing proclaiming itself as writing in the process of correspondence.”15 Both dialogicity and self-referentiality are expressed through recurring and manifold references to the time, place, and 10 11

12 13 14 15

See also the chapter “The genre of personal letters” in Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 37–43. Heather Dubrow suggested the term “host genre” as referring to “those forms one of whose roles is to provide a hospitable environment for the other form or forms that are regularly incorporated within them.“ Dubrow, Genre, 116. Müller, “Brief,” 61. Similar definitions are common in Western epistolary research, see, e.g. Trapp, Greek and Latin Letters, 1. See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 49–62. Violi, “Letters,” 160. “Notes Towards the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” 80.

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other circumstances of its writing and expected reading, including references to the addressees and their world, to the spatial distance between writer and addressee, to the time lag between writing, reading, and responding, etc. It will be useful to keep these basic features in mind when assessing letters of familial admonition, especially because they overlap with two other genres: family instructions and testaments, which share common ground among themselves as well. The family instruction ( jiajie 家誡 or jiaxun 家訓) is commonly traced back to Zhou dynasty speeches in the Book of Documents (Shujing 書經 or Shang shu 尚書). Admonitory speeches of the Duke of Zhou 周公 (fl. 1042– 1036 BCE)16 or of King Cheng 周成王 (r. 1042/35–1006 BCE)17 are regarded as predecessors of the genre. After the emergence of family instructions proper in the Han dynasty the genre experienced its first apex in the late sixth century with the Family Instructions for the Yan Clan (Yanshi jiaxun 顏氏家訓) by Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–ca. 591), whose purpose Albert E. Dien aptly characterized as “to counsel his children how to maintain their favored status as potential candidates for official employment and to avoid sinking into the commoner class.”18 Liu Xie’s characterization of the genre jie 戒, “admonition,” in The Literary Mind is part of chapter 19, “Edicts and Patents of Enfeoffment” (Zhao ce 詔策), which is chiefly dedicated to genres of imperial communication, among them the imperial admonition ( jiechi 戒敕). It is probably on account of this context that Liu emphasizes rulers and fathers as particularly entitled to admonish. His literary examples, however, exclusively refer to admonitions within the family (even if the writer may have been an emperor) and also include one female writer, a mother. Liu singles out one treatise, Ban Zhao’s 班昭 (?48– ?116) “Admonitions for Women” (Nüjie 女誡), which were originally intended for her daughters,19 as well as three letters: Liu Bang 劉邦 (256–195 BCE, Han Gaozu 漢高祖, r. 206–195) writing to his son, Ma Yuan 馬援 (13 BCE–49 CE) to his nephews,20 and Dongfang Shuo 東方朔 (154–93 BCE) to his son. Incidentally, this last, fragmentary text is a perfect illustration for the fluidity

16  “Jun Shi” 君奭, Shangshu 44.40–41. 17 “Gu ming” 顧命, Shangshu 50.46–48. 18 Dien, “A Sixth-Century Father’s Advice,” 82. Yanshi jiaxun has received wide scholarly attention, see Teng Ssu-yü, Family Instructions for the Yen Clan; Dien, Pei ch’i shu 45; Lewis, “Writing the World.” 19 Hou Han shu 84.2786–91. See Swann, Pan Chao; Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 17–42. 20 On these two letters see below.

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and unreliability of genre labels, since different anthologies categorize it as a letter, a piece of prose, and a poem.21 The passage about admonitions in Liu Xie’s The Literary Mind reads: To admonish means to caution. [The legendary founder of the Xia dynasty] Yu said “admonish them with fine words.”22 The ruler and the father are the most respected among the “three from whom we receive boundless grace” [i.e. the ruler, the father, the teacher].23 The “Edict to the Crown Prince” by Emperor Gaozu of the Han dynasty and Dongfang Shuo’s “Admonishing his Son” are both works of “looking back on one’s life” [in the spirit of the Book of Documents’ chapter “Gu ming” 顧命, “The Testamentary Charge”]. After Ma Yuan’s [letter to his nephews], everyone left familial admonitions. Ban Zhao’s “Admonitions for Women” may well be called [the work of] a maternal teacher. 戒者,慎也,禹稱戒之用休。君父至尊,在三罔極。漢高祖之 敕太子,東方朔之戒子,亦顧命之作也。及馬援已下,各貽家 戒。班姬女戒,足稱母師也。24 For Liu Xie the admonition thus appears to be mainly distinguished by two aspects: the family sphere and an inclination towards the letter form. One letter, Ma Yuan’s admonition of his nephews, is even described as a prototype of “familial admonition.” Liu Xie’s approach remained valid for centuries to come. In the Ming dynasty, Wu Na 吳訥 (1372–1457) in his discussion of admonitions

21

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Properly recognizing the genre of a fragmentarily transmitted text may be difficult, especially if genre-specific features are missing. Dongfang Shuo’s text shows no indications of epistolarity at all, apart from the title, which differs in different sources and was a later addition anyway. Most modern anthologies regard this admonition as a letter (e.g. Lu Zhengyan, Zhongguo lidai jiaxun guanzhi, 279–80). In the early Tang encyclopedia Yiwen leiju (23.418) and in Yan Kejun’s 嚴可均 (1762–1843) Quan Han wen (25.12a) the text is titled “Admonishing his Son” (Jie zi 誡子) and is classified as a piece of prose writing, in Yiwen leiju under “admonitions” ( jie 誡). Zhang Pu 張溥 (1602–41) in Han Wei Liuchao baisan mingjia ji (1.37a–b) labels the text “Poem Admonishing his Son” (Jie zi shi 誡子 詩), a choice adopted in a few modern anthologies as well (e.g. Xu Shaojin, Zhongguo lidai jiaxun daquan, 695). Shangshu 3.4. Guo yu 7.1.251. Wenxin diaolong 19.360.

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remarked that the genre was used particularly for the admonition of children and grandchildren.25 Through his choice of literary examples, some of which were allegedly composed “on the verge of death” (lin ming/zhong/si 臨命/終/死), Liu Xie also implies the overlap between admonitions and testaments, a genre that is not among those explicitly introduced in The Literary Mind. Testaments or deathbed words (yiling/yan 遺令/言) are evoked through Liu’s reference to gu ming 顧命, which is a reference to the eponymous chapter of the Book of Documents, but can also be understood literally as “looking back on one’s life”—thus creating one of the many artful ambiguities that pervade The Literary Mind. Testaments usually offer advice or admonition, sometimes along with a review of the writer’s life and accomplishments, and may also give detailed instructions about the imminent burial.26 Testaments, like letters, may specifically address family members, but, unlike letters, the circumstances of their composition suggest that many of them were originally composed orally, and that the texts were written down later. This sketch of the generic field suggests that letters of familial admonition, although they may be “written messages from one to another actual historical persons” may differ from common personal letters in one important point: some of them are not so much concerned with bridging a spatial separation, as with the expressly written nature of this message, which is intended to be available for future re-reading, reference, and documentation. (To some letters of familial admonition, particularly those of the testamentary type, bridging time may thus have been more important than bridging spatial separations.) Writing provides the fixation of the text in a form that is “authorized” by the admonisher; it allows virtually endless actualizations of its message as well as the widening of its audience beyond the primary addressee. Since written documents moreover carried greater weight and status than the spoken word, writing was also seen as being able to lend additional authority and emotional emphasis to the words.27 Many of Liu Xie’s arguments in chapter 25 of The Literary Mind are concerned with just these aspects. Letters of familial 25 26

27

Wenzhang bianti xushuo, 45. For an example see Wang Xiang’s 王祥 (185–169) “Testament teaching his sons and grandsons” (Xun zisun yiling 訓子孫遺令), Quan Jin wen 18.6a–b, Jin shu 33.989. On the chapter giving directions for the burial in Yan Zhitui’s Family Instructions see Dien, “Instructions for the Grave.” Dorothy Ko, writing about an admonitory letter that Gu Ruopu 顧若璞 (1592–ca. 1681) wrote to her sons who were living in the same household, similarly assumed that Gu

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admonition may thus have been written to family members who were not separated by a physical distance but living close by, which also means that they did not have to undergo physical transmission involving a third party. It is nevertheless possible to see the idea of separation that is so essential in correspondence underlying these cases of letter writing as well, because the hope for the durability and resilience of the written word implicitly anticipates future separations, down to the unavoidable final parting by death.28 If familial letters of admonition can be written to someone who is not spatially removed, this raises another typological problem, that of the authenticity or fictitiousness of these texts. If some of them were not actually written as letters and sent as such, but arose from a conscious choice of genre based on the potential of the letter form for certain literary and educational ends, the epistolary situation would have to be created with literary means. In Western literature, epistolary fiction has played a remarkable role since antiquity, most notably in the genre of the novel. All forms of the “epistolary conceit” in literature are well-known and enjoy sustained scholarly attention in various branches of the humanities.29 In China, on the other hand, epistolary fiction is commonly believed to be an “imported novelty”30 that is absent from traditional literature and emerged in China only at the beginning of the twentieth century under the influence of Western literature, in particular translations of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s (1749–1832) epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.31 This astonishingly reductive view not only fails to recognize how artfully Chinese writers employed the epistolary conceit in a variety of genres, it also results in a simplistic understanding of “real” letters (as we find them incorporated in historical writings and elsewhere) as purely documentary in character, which disregards their dependence on literary creativity. As Claudio Guillén observed so perceptively, “there is hardly an act in our daily experience, rooted in life itself, that is as likely as the writing of a letter to propel us toward inventiveness and the interpretation and transformation of fact:

28

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“might have wanted to add weight to her words, or she might have been compelled to convince other family members.” Ko, “ ‘Letter to My Sons’,” 149. The absence of physical separation in some of the letters of familial admonition and the authoritarian stance that many of them take may explain why they are not part of a correspondence; they are neither written in response to a letter nor do they elicit a reply—at least there are no examples among transmitted literature. See, e.g., Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions; Rosenmeyer, Ancient Greek Literary Letters; Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe; Day, Told in Letters; Kauffman, Special Delivery. Han Rui, Geren de siyu, 2. See Yip, “The Reception of Werther” and Ng, “Li Ang’s Experiments.”

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hence the ambivalence of the product, on the razor’s edge between the fact and the interpretation.”32 Although the full exploration of the early epistolary imagination in China will have to be treated elsewhere,33 it is necessary to keep its existence in mind, particularly as far as authorial self-presentation is concerned, which is often discussed in terms of authenticity. As Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) once remarked about a writer of letters: “Others may think that this time he entered the stage stark naked, but in fact he is still wearing a fleshcolored, tight-fitting dress and even a brassiere, something he normally should never put on” 別人以為他這回是赤條條的上場了罷,他其實還是穿著 肉色緊身小衫褲,甚至於用了平常决不應用的奶罩.34 With the dress that pretends not to be there while presenting its wearer as he or she wants to be seen, Lu Xun has created a powerful counter image to the naïve identification of the actual, living writer of a letter and the first person narrator emerging in an epistolary text.35 Even if it is improbable that transmitted familial letters of admonition are not based on authentic writer-addressee relationships but sprung from an author’s imagination, it will still be necessary to treat these letters as more or less skillfully crafted literary texts, not only in their use of allusions and parallel style, but also in their presentation of the writer, the addressee, and their relationship. 2

Letters of Familial Admonition of the Han Dynasty: Interventional and Testamentary Type

Taking the genre ambiguities into account, we can identify about twenty letters of familial admonition in the received literature of the Han dynasty, some of them fragments consisting of a handful of characters only. Four of these twenty letters became especially famous: Liu Bang’s letter to his son and Ma Yuan’s letter to his nephews (both mentioned in Liu Xie’s Literary Mind) as well as letters by the eminent scholars Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 BCE) and Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200 CE) to their sons.36 The fame of these four letters has

32 33 34

Guillén, “On the Edge of Literariness,” 5. See my forthcoming article “The Literary Uses of Correspondence.” Lu Xun, “Preface to Kong Lingjing’s Letters of Contemporary Poets” (Kong Lingjing bian Dangdai wenren chidu chao xu 孔另境編當代文人尺牘鈔序, 1935) in Lu Xun quanji 6:409. 35  See also “Normativity and Authenticity” in Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 139–49. 36 On these two letters see below.

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been affirmed by a number of prestigious anthologies,37 although Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan 文選) remarkably does not include any of them, in fact it includes no letter of familial admonition at all.38 According to their “setting in life,” these four pieces may, as most other letters of familial admonition, be subdivided into two types—interventional and testamentary—that differ in motivation, intent, and in their rhetorical features, even if there is a certain overlap between these two. Letters of the interventional type are occasioned by an occurrence in the life of the addressee, often a kind of misconduct, which provokes the writer’s admonitory intervention. Letters of the testamentary type, in contrast, are precipitated by an existential experience of the writer, mostly the proximity of death. Interventional letters may be severe in their criticism and demands, which seek the prompt revision of certain faults or transgressions of the addressee. Testamentary letters, on the other hand, commonly operate with autobiographic retrospection and offer only mild advice, aiming at a long-term instructional effect on the intended readers, which quite possibly extended beyond the primary addressees. Owing to the anticipation of a wider audience—in the present or future, in one’s own family or outside—the testamentary letter would also appear especially suitable for the creation of an image of the self that conformed to the writer’s interests. These differences of intent go along with non-textual distinctions, especially concerning the epistolarity of the text. Interventional admonitions have a more pronounced letter character. They appear to have been composed in circumstances of spatial separation between writer and addressee, they operate with unmistakable and frequent references to the addressee, and they allude to the various aspects of the epistolary situation, which could be interpreted as indications that these texts were actual letters. Testamentary letters, in contrast, may lack decisive epistolary features such as dialogicity, self-referentiality, and occasionality. This could have been achieved deliberately, by composing a letter with a larger audience in mind, but it could also be an unintentional byproduct of the fact that testamentary letters are chiefly motivated by events in the life of the writer and thus focus less on the addressee. Another reason for the weaker epistolarity of testamentary letters could be that these texts were originally addressed by mouth to somebody who was present (not necessarily 37 38

The influential Qing dynasty anthology Guwen guanzhi 古文觀止 (1695), for instance, collects the letters by Ma Yuan and Zheng Xuan. While the genre jie does not occur in Wen xuan, the related zhen 箴 (admonition, exhortation) does. See David Knechtges in Chang and Owen, Cambridge History, 138–40. See also Knechtges’ essay, “Letters in the Wen xuan,” in this volume.

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the addressee of the message) and wrote the words down only later—as described, for instance, in the Book of Documents’ “Gu ming” chapter. Letters of familial admonition, interventional as well as testamentary, owe their literary appeal to their immediacy, directness, and urgency, but these same qualities may express very different literary atmospheres. While the interventional impulse usually leads to letters that are spirited and, despite the seriousness of the reproach, light in tone, testamentary letters tend to be pensive and deeper in feeling. The solemnity of testamentary letters along with their quotability—many appear marbled with pieces of pithy wisdom—seem to have made them more appealing for a general readership, which is probably why this type is prevalent among the received letters. Among the four famous Han letters of familial admonition those by Liu Bang and Zheng Xuan are testamentary. Both were written in the face of death and feature retrospective passages that support their writers’ admonitory intentions. However, they display two very different kinds of paternal affection: Liu Bang’s tone is authoritative and demanding, while Zheng Xuan’s epistolary self-portrayal is a rare example of personal closeness between a father and a son. The founder of the Han dynasty, writing during his final illness, contemplates his early years under the Qin dynasty’s ban on learning and explains why he chose his son Liu Ying 劉盈 (207–188 BCE), the later Han Huidi 漢惠帝 (r. 195–188 BCE), as his successor. Liu Bang’s main concern throughout the text is the future of the state, he treats the addressee in his function as the crown prince and future emperor without openly expressing affection or sentimental feelings for him, which appears to be appropriate for an edict.39 Paradoxically, the only indication of a closer relationship to his eldest son appears to be that he asks him at the end of the letter to take special care of one of his brothers, Liu Bang’s youngest son Ruyi 如意, and this son’s mother. Arguing with his own experience of a limited education, he urges his son to pursue learning— probably the most common element of letters of familial admonition40—and in particular to improve his poor writing through practice: 39

40

That this personal aloofness is not requisite in letters to a successor to the throne is demonstrated by the testament Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223, Shu Han Zhaoliedi 蜀漢昭烈帝, r. 221–23) left for his son Liu Chan 劉禪 (207–71, Houzhu 蜀漢後主, r. 223–63), see “Yizhao chi Houzhu” 遺詔敕後主, Quan Sanguo wen 57.1b. Apart from the concern it expresses for the addressee and his siblings, the text is famous for Liu Bei’s statement that “death at fifty is no longer called premature” 人五十不稱夭. Exhortation to learning and perseverance are ubiquitous topics in early Chinese literature, well beyond the genre in consideration here. See, e.g. hexagram 53 in the Book of Changes (Zhou yi 周易) and the Xunzi’s 荀子 “An Exhortation to Learning” (Quanxue pian 勸學篇).

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. . . When I look at your writing now, it is not even as good as my own. You should study and practice diligently. Whenever you submit a memorial, you should write it yourself, do not let someone else do it. . . . . . . 今視汝書。猶不如吾。汝可勤學習。每上疏宜自書。勿使人 也。. . .41 As the fragment of a letter, Liu Bang’s testament is convincing enough. There is no epistolary frame, but the text shows a strong and explicit dialogicity, apparent, not the least, in the profusion of second person pronouns (ru 汝, er 爾). Since “all socio-communicative verbal interaction, at whatever level of formality or complexity, reflects the distribution of power among the participants,”42 letters, too, indicate the hierarchical relationship between writer and recipient, mostly through different forms of address and self-designation and terms of respect. Letters to inferiors present a especially clear case, because they use the personal name (ming 名) of the addressee and second person pronouns to address children or other junior family members, which is taboo in letters to equals or superiors.43 About three centuries later, towards the end of the Han dynasty in 196, when the influential scholar and commentator Zheng Xuan wrote a letter to his only son Yi’en 益恩, he was also writing under the influence of a serious illness, although the dream of Confucius that would be interpreted as a prediction of his impending death was to come only four years later, in 200.44 Zheng Xuan dedicates most of the letter to his son to autobiographic retrospection— almost exclusively concerning his intellectual life and official positions—and admonishes very gently, almost pityingly. He mentions that he is seventy years old and that this, according to the Book of Rites (Li ji 禮記), is the appropriate age to hand over family matters to his son.45 The following translation of the admonitory part of the letter comprises less than a third of the whole text: . . . The great and small affairs of the family, you must shoulder them all. Ah, you solitary man, who never had brothers to rely on! Make every 41

Liu Bang, “Edict to the Crown Prince by his own hand” (Shou chi taizi 手敕太子, ca. 195 BCE), Quan Han wen 1.4b–5a; trans. Frühauf, Frühformen der chinesischen Autobiographie, 132–38. See also Pablo Blitstein’s chapter in this volume. 42 Watts, Power in Family Discourse, 53. 43 Yan Zhitui also uses this form of address in his Family Instructions, usually in the plural as ru deng/bei/cao 汝等/輩/曹. 44 See Hou Han shu 25.1211. 45 七十曰老而傳, Li ji 1.8.1.

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effort to seek out the Way of the gentleman, to study and advance incessantly. “Be devoutly heedful of dignified behavior, in order to draw near to those who are virtuous.”46 An illustrious reputation is made by colleagues and friends, but virtuous conduct starts with one’s own personal resolve. If one achieves fame and acclaim, this will also bring honor to one’s parents. How could you not keep this in mind! How could you not keep this in mind! [. . .] The sun is setting in the west, how could I make plans? Our family is now much better off than in the past. Work hard, be timely, and do not mind hunger and cold. Make light of food and drink and wear simple clothes—moderation in these two matters will lessen my worry. But if you forget [what I said] and do not keep it in mind, then indeed all will be over.47 . . . 家事大小。汝一承之。咨爾煢煢一夫。曾無同生相依。其 勗求君子之道 。研讚勿替。敬慎威儀。以近 有德。顯譽成于 僚友。德行立于己志。若致聲稱。亦有榮于所生。可不深念 邪。可不深念邪。[. . .] 日西方暮。其可圖乎。家今差多于昔。 勤力務時。無恤飢寒。非飲食。薄衣服。節夫二者。尚令吾寡 恨。若忽忘不識。亦已焉哉。48 Compared with the commanding tone of Liu Bang’s letter, Zheng Xuan writes with much more restraint and politeness, which results in a text that shows fewer epistolary features. He addresses his son directly only in the second part of the letter, using second person pronouns only four times (Liu Bang used nine in a text half as long) and couching his admonitions in expressions of sadness, affection, and solicitude, thus attenuating his demands. As far as epistolary style is concerned, this could almost be a letter to a friend. The text, despite the preponderance of the autobiographic part, which may well have been meant for a wider audience, does not read like a self-narrative in the disguise of a family letter, but achieves a stylistic unity that is convincing as a written message to Zheng Xuan’s son, even if strong markers of epistolarity are missing, whether on account of authorial decisions or editorial changes. As many other 46 47

A reference to Mao shi 253. The last phrase alludes to Mao shi 58 and is used by Tao Qian in his poem “Charge to my son” (Ming zi shi 命子詩), whose last couplet reads: “If you will not make anything out of yourself, all would be over” 爾之不才亦已焉哉. Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 971. 48  Zheng Xuan, “Letter admonishing his son Yi’en” (Jie zi Yi’en shu 戒子益恩書), Quan Hou Han wen 84.2b–3a; Hou Han shu 35.1209–10; Yiwen leiju 23.418–19. See Chung, “Study of the ‘Shu’,” 306–10, 503–10; Paul W. Kroll, “Literary Criticism and Personal Character,” 525; Frühauf, Frühformen der chinesischen Autobiographie, 213–19.

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letters, this one, too, certainly builds on the addressee’s external knowledge that later readers do not share, in this case the son’s familiarity with facts about his father’s life that are not made explicit in the text itself. A very different spirit animates Ma Yuan’s letter to his nephews. Its vigorous expressions of annoyance and impatience clearly emanate an air of intervention, which obviously was caused by a specific incident. It was written while Ma Yuan was on a military mission in what is now northern Vietnam, where he had got word of his nephews’ unsatisfactory conduct. Because Ma’s letter is such an influential text for the later development of the genre, I quote it in its entirety: I wish that for you hearing about someone’s mistakes may be like hearing the [tabooed] names of your father and mother: your ears can hear them, but your mouth must not articulate them. To enjoy the discussion of other people’s rights and wrongs and the presumptuous criticism of the proper law, these are things which I greatly detest, and I would rather die than hear that members of the younger generation in my family are behaving like that. You already know how much I detest these things, but I am repeating my words as parents [repeat] their admonitions [to their daughter] while arranging her [wedding] dress. I only wish that you may never forget my words. Long Bogao is honest, sincere and perfectly cautious. No reckless word ever comes out of his mouth. He is modest and frugal, morally pure and thrifty, incorrupt and impartial. He inspires awe. I like and esteem him, and I wish that you may take him as a model. Du Jiliang is bold, chivalrous and fond of justice. He shares other people’s sorrows and joys, no matter whether those people are superior or inferior. That’s why guests from several commanderies came to his father’s funeral. I like and esteem him, but I do not wish that you may take him as a model. If you try to model yourselves after Long Bogao and fail, you can still be circumspect and well-behaved, as the saying illustrates: “If you do not succeed in sculpting a swan, the result will still look like a duck.” But if you try to model yourselves after Du Jiliang and fail, you will sink down to the level of notorious wasters, as another saying illustrates: “If you try to paint a tiger and fail, the picture will look like a dog.” So far, one cannot properly assess Du Jiliang. When the magistrate took up office in the commandery [where Du resides], he ground his teeth [in frustration because he perceived Du as a local strongman and a problem]. Word about this spread in the regions and commanderies. I am constantly anxious on his

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behalf. That is why I do not wish that the younger generation in my family take him as a model. 吾欲汝曹聞人過 失。如聞父母之名。耳可得聞。而口不可得 言也。好論議人長短。妄是非正法。此吾所大惡也。寧死不 願聞子孫有此行也。汝曹知吾惡之甚矣。所以復言者。施衿結 褵。申父母之戒。欲使汝曹不忘之耳。龍伯高敦厚周慎。口無擇 言。謙約節儉。廉公有威。吾愛之重之。願汝曹效之。杜季良 豪俠好義。憂人之憂。樂人之樂。清濁無所失。父喪致客。數 郡畢至。吾愛之重之。不願汝曹效也。效伯高不得。猶為謹敕 之士。所謂刻鵠不成尚類鶩者也。效季良不得。陷為天下輕薄 子。所謂畫虎不成反類狗者也。訖今季良尚未可知。郡將下車 輒切齒。州郡以為言。吾常為寒心。是以不願子孫效也。49 Ma Yuan is absolutely outspoken about his interventional purpose and makes sure that it is not lost on his addressees. He speaks to his nephews directly throughout, using second person pronouns, and expresses his wishes straightforwardly, frequently using words such as yu 欲 and yuan 願 (I wish), which usually indicate the beginning of an actual admonition.50 The use of these signal words—another one would be wen 聞 (I have heard), often introducing a piece of information that triggered the letter—is common in letters of familial admonition but absent from most other personal letters. In this respect, letters of familial admonition with their unambiguous agenda resemble official communications, whose clearly structured main bodies consisting of opening, middle, and closing parts, are supported by signal words and phrases.51 The strong dialogicity of Ma Yuan’s note ensures that it evidently reads like a letter, despite the absence of an epistolary frame. Surprisingly, at least for a text that achieved so much literary distinction, the letter appears to do without any literary or historical references. Where Zheng Xuan’s text is interspersed with allusions to canonical literature, Ma Yuan—probably adjusting his rhetorical strategy to his nephews’ personalities, experience, and learning (or lack thereof)—resorts to popular proverbs and local celebrities with archetypal 49  Ma Yuan, “Letter admonishing his nephews Yan and Dun” (Jie xiong zi Yan Dun shu 誡 兄子嚴敦書), Hou Han shu 24.844–45; Quan Hou Han wen 17.9a–b; Yiwen leiju 23.422–23. See also Chung, “Study of the ‘Shu’,” 148–49 and the translation by Hans H. Frankel in Renditions 41–42. 50 Yan Zhitui uses similar phrases in his Family Instructions, e.g. “I do not wish you to do this” 不願汝輩為之, “you should” 汝曹宜以, etc. 51  See Klauck, Ancient Letters and the New Testament, 33–36.

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characters, which are less likely to remain undetected by addressees without a proper education. Cautioning the addressee about their relations with certain people is a recurring motif in letters of familial admonition. Zheng Xuan expressed this concern in his testamentary letter, encouraging his son to “draw near to those who are virtuous,” while Ma Yuan’s main argument revolved around the idea of whom to choose as a proper model to emulate, which is a common concern in Chinese writings about self-cultivation. The warning to consort with certain people is also key to Liu Yi’s 劉廙 (181–221) letter to his younger brother Liu Wei 劉偉 (d. 219): The best thing about making friends is acquiring worthies. Be not negligent about this! In our age, however, people are not careful in choosing friends [according to this principle], but strive to form factions. This violates the meaning of what Confucius said about making friends and can neither be called doing oneself a favor nor does it “support one’s benevolence.”52 As I see it, Wei Feng does not cultivate his moral conduct but has instead made it his business to band together [a faction]. Although he may appear glorious, he has no substance. He is nothing but a trouble maker in pursuit of fame. Be wary of him and no longer associate with him. 夫交友之美。在于得賢。不可不詳。而世之交者。不審擇人。 務合黨眾。違先聖人交友之義。此非厚己輔仁之謂也。吾觀魏 諷不修德行。而專以鳩合為務。華而不實。此直攪世沽名者 也。卿其慎之。勿復與通。53 Liu Yi’s letter of familial admonition is most famous because it displays shrewd foresight into the political fate of Wei Feng 魏諷 (d. 219), who would eventually plot rebellion and, after the conspiracy was leaked, be executed with several followers, among them Liu Wei himself. Liu Yi himself escaped his younger brother’s fate although he was initially under suspicion, too, and it is an intriguing question whether and how this letter—after all a piece of written evidence of loyalty—may have helped him clear his name.54 If so, how was the 52  This is a reference to Zengzi’s 曾子 dictum that the gentleman “relies on friends to support his benevolence” 以友輔仁, Lunyu 12.24. 53  Liu Yi, “Letter admonishing his younger brother Wei” (Jie di Wei 戒弟偉), Quan Sanguo wen 34.4b. 54 A case where a letter helped to clear a name is that of Du An 杜安 (zi Boyi 伯夷), who left letters unopened because he feared they might politically compromise him. When he was

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letter produced, because it was found among the possessions of the addressee or as a draft or copy kept by the writer? And how did the letter then circulate so that it could be included in Pei Songzhi’s 裴松之 (372–451) commentary to the History of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi 三國志)?55 Unfortunately we have very little knowledge about how personal letters (and other texts) were preserved and spread. Liu Yi’s letter to a younger brother differs from those to the next generation in a formal feature: its form of address. Liu Yi addresses his brother not with a second person pronoun, but with a more polite substitute, the intimate qing 卿, a term of address that is derived from an official title (“minister”) and frequently used among equals. Although Liu Xiang’s letter to his youngest son, Xin 歆, is also motivated by interventional purposes, the occasion for writing—the son’s appointment to the position of Gentleman Attendant at the Palace Gates (huangmen shilang 黃門侍郎)—offers a stimulus of a very different kind. Accordingly, Liu Xiang’s letter is rather concerned with cautioning his son in the face of success at a young age, probably before he was twenty: [Liu Xiang] notifies [his son] Xin. Do not take this lightly: Without possessing any unusual virtues, you have still been the recipient of [Emperor Cheng’s] extreme favor. How could you respond to this? Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 [179–104 BCE] has this dictum: “When mourning is at the door, congratulations are at the gate,” meaning that sorrow leads to wariness and anxiety, so that one will handle one’s affairs with dedication. Handling one’s affairs with dedication will necessarily lead to good deeds which in turn bring about good fortune. But Dong Zhongshu also has another dictum: “When congratulations are at the door, mourning is at the gate,” meaning that good fortune can lead to pride and extravagance, which in turn will bring about misfortune. [. . .] Now, while you are still very young, you have secured the position of Gentleman Attendant at the Palace Gate, which is a powerful and influential office. As someone who is newly appointed, you should thank all the powers that be and prostrate yourself before them. If you are extremely cautious and tremble with fear, then you may avoid [misfortune].

55

able to produce the unopened letters they helped him prove his innocence. Hou Han shu 57.1839. Sanguo zhi 21.616.

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告歆無忽。若未有異德。蒙恩甚厚。將何以報。董生有云。弔 者在門。賀者在閭。言有憂則恐懼敬事。敬事則必有善功而福 至也。又曰。賀者在門。弔者在閭。言受福則驕奢。驕奢則禍 至。[. . .] 今若年少。得黃門侍郎。要顯處也。新拜皆謝貴人叩 頭。謹戰戰慄慄。乃可必免。56 Knowing that he is writing to a man of excellent learning who is familiar with scholarly rhetoric, Liu Xiang composes his letter, which was probably not written while father and son were separated, as a perfect piece of persuasion, starting out from a cautionary dictum ascribed to the great Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu57 and continuing with a historical example from the Warring States period to illustrate the point (not translated above). Of the letters introduced so far this is the first one to preserve the opening part of the epistolary frame. It shows two features that are characteristic of letters of familial admonition as communications with inferiors. The first is a special form of prescript, to be found in the small number of letters that were transmitted with this part of the text still present. In early medieval letters, the prescript commonly consists of the date of writing, a self-designation of the writer and a predicate expressing the communicative function of writing or the writer’s respect for the addressee, for instance: On the 15th day of the 7th month [Wang] Xizhi lets you know. . . . 七月十五日羲之白。. . .58 In letters of familial admonition, however, the prescript not only contains a superscriptio (the writer’s self-designation) but also an adscriptio, a designation of the recipient, which later, during the Tang dynasty, became the epistolary standard in regular letters. Prescripts of this type in familial admonitions regularly use the verb gao 告 (“to tell, announce, notify”), which is usually followed by the personal name of the addressee, as in Liu Xiang’s letter above and the following example:

56

Liu Xiang, “Letter admonishing his son Xin [ca. 46 BCE–23 CE]” (Jie zi Xin shu 誡子 歆書); Quan Han wen 36.11a–b; Yiwen leiju 23.422; Chuxueji 12.283; trans. Li, Essence of Chinese Civilization, 344–45. See also Chung, “Study of the ‘Shu’,” 146. 57 Gai Xun 蓋勳, who also uses this dictum in a letter to Dong Zhuo (d. 192), does not associate it with Dong Zhongshu (Yu Dong Zhuo shu 與董卓書, Quan Hou Han wen 84.1a). 58  Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303–361), “Qiuri ganhuai shen tie” 秋日感懷深帖, Quan Jin wen 24.2a.

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On the 10th day of the 7th month [Xie] Wan notifies [Xie] Lang [and his other sons]. . . . 七月十日萬告朗等。. . .59 Apart from using this particular prescript Liu Xiang’s letter also demonstrates that familial admonitions lack a standard element present in other letters, namely the proem, the introductory passage between the prescript and the main body of the letter. The proem is commonly dedicated to the recollection of the correspondents’ preceding relationship and tries to secure the goodwill of the addressee. In letters to younger members of one’s family the absence of the proem indicates the superior authority of the writer who can take the relationship with the addressee for granted and thus come straight to the point, without any detours on account of politeness. Accordingly, Liu Xiang also uses second person pronouns (the less common ruo 若) to address his son, but no signal words such as yuan or wen. The lack of apparent politeness that is common in letters to younger members of one’s family does not mean that these letters completely disregard persuasive techniques that would be appropriate in situations demanding more politeness. A letter by Kong Zang 孔臧 (fl. 171–126 BCE) to his son, for instance, operates with praise and proves that less well-known familial admonitions can be original and poignant as well. Kong’s letter, written in about 150 BCE, resembles that of Liu Xiang in being also motivated by pleasant information, in Kong’s case concerning his son’s scholarly endeavors. The interventional current running through this letter is directed against learning per se and advises not to lose sight of the application of knowledge and of the necessity to consequently transform it. Kong Zang supports his argument with similes and quotations from canonical literature—the Odes (Mao shi 毛詩 or Shijing 詩經) figure prominently—and finally advises his son to emulate famous family members from the contemporary scholar Kong Anguo 孔安國 to Confucius himself,60 in a similar way as Ma Yuan had done in his letter, whose chief advice was to model one’s behavior on certain exemplary people, even if they were not family.

59 60

Xie Wan 謝萬 (320–361) “Letter to Lang and his other sons” (Yu zi Lang deng shu 與子朗 等疏), Quan Jin wen 83.4a. Another father’s letter that expresses pride in his family’s accomplishments spanning many generations is Wang Yun’s 王筠 (481–549) “Letter to his sons discussing the family’s collection of literary works” (Yu zhu er shu lun jiashiji 與諸兒書論家世集, Quan Liang wen 65.2b, see Tian, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star, 48.

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[Kong Zang] notifies [his son] Lin: Recently I heard that you and your friends have been studying and discussing the Book of Documents and its commentaries. You are eager day and night, cheerful and never idle. How felicitous! [. . .] The Instructions say: “Studying something just for the sake of knowing it is not very accomplished. Only carrying it out and practicing it can be called good enough.” That is why knowledge is the adornment of all practice. Palace Attendant Ziguo’s [i.e. Kong Anguo’s]61 brilliant intelligence is profound, his refined learning is unsurpassed. His words are not concerned with profit, his conduct does not angle for reputation. He follows the rites in everything he does, and has been superior in doing this since he was a child. That is why he, although he is serving together with the other ministers, is treated with the highest courtesy. Because he was never discourteous in serving [the emperor],62 he alone became keeper of the imperial spittoon. Among the gentlemen at the court there is none who does not honor him. You have seen this yourself. Do the Odes not say this? “Never forget your ancestors, cultivate their virtue,” and “wielding an axe to hew an axe-handle, the model is not far away.”63 The faraway model is Father Ni [i.e. Confucius],64 the model nearby is Ziguo. If you take these models to establish yourself, the result will not be far off the mark. 告琳。頃來聞汝與諸友講肄書傳。滋滋晝夜。衎衎不怠。善 矣。[. . .] 訓曰。徒學知之未可多。履而行之乃足佳。故學者所 以飾百行也。侍中子國。明達淵博。雅學絕倫。言不及利。行 不欺名。動遵 禮法,少小長操。故雖與群臣並參侍。見待崇 禮。不供褻事。獨得掌御唾壺。朝廷之士。莫不榮之。此汝親 所見。詩不云乎。毋念爾祖。聿修厥德。又曰。操斧伐柯。其 則不遠。遠則尼父。近則子國。於以立身。其庶矣乎。65 61

Kong Zang refers to his famous cousin Kong Anguo using his official title Palace Attendant (shizhong 侍中) and his courtesy name Ziguo 子國. 62  An allusion to Li ji 33.27.151 (不敢以其私褻事上帝). 63 Mao shi 235 and 158. The most obvious reading of wu nian 毋/無念 in Mao shi 235 is, of course, “do not think of.” Following this reading, Qu Wanli convincingly interprets the line as addressing the Shang people who should not think of their ancestors (Shijing quanshi, 453). Kong Zang’s letter follows the tradition of interpreting the phrase as wu wang 毋/無 忘 (do not forget) that already existed in the Han dynasty. 64 Referring to his revered ancestor, Kong Zang uses part of Confucius’ courtesy name Zhongni 仲尼. 65 Kong Zang, “Letter to his son Lin” (Yu zi Lin shu 與子琳書), Quan Han wen 13.5b–6a, Yiwen leiju 55.990, Kongcongzi 7.1.7.70, trans. Ariel, K’ung-ts’ung-tzu, 109–10. See also Chung, “Study of the ‘Shu’,” 147; Ariel, K’ung-ts’ung-tzu, 96–97.

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Reading Kong Zang’s text as an interventional letter of familial admonition we notice the characteristic prescript and lack of proem, but also that Kong uses personal pronouns sparingly. He moreover offers his already mild advice in the form of suggestions rather than wishes (never using signal words like yuan), an impression that is supported by the writer’s curious absence from the text. Kong Zang did not incorporate reflections on his own life, nor assert his authority in any other way. Even the one crucial exception to this restraint—that he is, after all, presenting himself as a member of a most illustrious lineage—is made only implicitly, apparently out of politeness. All this gives Kong’s letter something of the flavor of a letter of friendship, even more so than in the case of Zheng Xuan’s letter with its strong autobiographic elements. A letter of familial admonition that the late Han general Zhang Huan 張奐 (104–181) wrote to his nephew also sets out from hearsay, but as the information prompting the letter is unpleasant, Zhang Huan’s tone is quite severe. He mentions reports about his nephews’ behavior that reach him in Dunhuang, where he held office: while one of his nephews is unanimously praised, another one—the addressee of this letter—is persistently criticized for his misconduct. Zhang Huan quotes the Analects (Lunyu 論語), bringing up the addressee’s father, a teacher in canonical studies, and, through the allusion to a historical role model, highlights the perpetual possibility to correct one’s mistakes at any time in life: You two have not been blessed. You lost your worthy father at an early age, your fortune is small and your talents are limited. Now, while I have just had a respite, I heard that you, Zhongzhi, are irreverent and arrogant towards your elders and disrespectful and teasing towards your peers, that you are reckless in your words and deeds. To treat the elder and younger generation with respect means to restrain oneself according to the rites. Whoever comes to Dunhuang, they all tell me the same. They all call [your brother] Shushi generous and benevolent. When I hear these reports, I am both happy and sad. I am happy because Shushi has made such a good name for himself, and I am sad because you are discussed in such a bad light. The canon says “Confucius, at home in his native village, was deferential.”66 “Deferential” means a respectful and modest behavior. The canon is difficult to understand, but you had your worthy father as a teacher. Is it conceivable that your father would have taken people of his hometown lightly? When one’s years are few, one’s mistakes are many. But to mend one’s ways is what counts most. When Qu Boyu was fifty 66

Lunyu 10.1 (孔子於鄉黨,恂恂如也).

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years old he looked back on forty-nine years of wrongdoing, but he was able to mend his ways.67 You just have to consider my words! If you do not employ self-criticism but claim that Zhang A has slandered you and Li B has a grudge against you, and this was not your fault, then you are done for. 汝曹薄祐。早失賢父。財單(蓺)〔藝〕盡。今適喘息。聞仲 祉輕傲耆老。侮狎同年。極口恣意。當崇長幼。以禮自持。聞 敦煌有人來。同聲相道。皆稱叔時寬仁。聞之喜而且悲。喜叔 時得美稱。悲汝得惡論。經言孔子鄉黨。恂恂如是也。恂恂 者。恭謙之貌也。經難知。且自以汝(資)〔賢〕父為師。汝 父寧輕鄉里邪。年少多失。改之為貴。蘧 伯玉年五十。見四 十九年非。但能改之。不可不思吾言。不自克責。反云張甲謗 我。李乙怨我。我無是過。爾亦已矣。68 Zhang Huan’s letter resembles that of Ma Yuan: both were written on account of a concrete occasion and obviously bridge a physical distance between writer and addressee, thus heightening the epistolarity of the piece. Both are open about their interventional purpose—that is, unvarnished criticism—and come straight to the point, which they support by outside references, either popular proverbs and common acquaintances, as in the case of Ma Yuan, or historical and literary allusions, as in the case of Zhang Huan. Although Zhang Huan concedes that his nephews were disadvantaged in many ways, from the early loss of their father to their bluntly acknowledged lack of fortune and talent, his main argument rests on the observation that these equally severe impediments resulted in very different outcomes for the two brothers. For Zhang Huan family is still important, even if it is not as illustrious as Kong Zang’s: he compares the brothers with each other and repeatedly evokes their late father, while keeping himself in the background. Zhang Huan’s optimistic outlook that accepts youthful failure and emphasizes the possibility to change for the better—regardless of early misfortunes, poverty, and even meager abilities—is certainly one of the main reasons that this letter was transmitted as an outstanding piece of familial admonition.

67

On Qu Yuan 蘧瑗 (courtesy name Boyu 伯玉), a contemporary of Confucius’ who is mentioned in the Analects (Lunyu 14.25 and 15.7) and other pre-imperial texts see, Declercq, Writing Against the State, 380–81. For Qu Yuan’s willingness to change see Zhuangzi 25.75. 68  Zhang Huan, “Letter admonishing his nephew” (Jie xiong zi shu 誡兄子書, written before 168 CE), Quan Hou Han wen 64.3b–4a; Yiwen leiju 23.422. See also Chung, “Study of the ‘Shu’,” 149.

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Another letter, written about half a century later, can be regarded as a combination of the testamentary and the interventional, which were, of course, not mutually exclusive. Wang Xiu’s 王脩 (ca. 170–ca. 230) letter to his son was triggered by the separation of father and son, obviously following the son’s official appointment, and the father’s concern for his son’s conduct far away from him. As Wang Xiu obviously has no specific reason for distress, the admonition is purely precautionary and mild in tone. The resemblance to a testament is effected by the father’s lament of his old age, by his elaborations on the transience of life and fleetingness of time, and by the unspecific nature of his advice to “cultivate his character” and become “a good man”: Since you have gone I have been full of regret and bereft of joy. Why would that be? I have really become old and dependent on you all. If I don’t have you all around me, my mind is uneasy. Man’s life in this world passes in a hurry and is then over.69 Because days and months are precious, the Great Yu did not care for jade discs, even if they were a foot in diameter, but he cared for time, for every inch of it.70 Time that has passed cannot be brought back. Once you are old, you cannot become young again! I wish you to make haste, not necessarily reading books, but by learning to cultivate your character. You have now crossed the border of our county and prefecture and travelled across mountains and rivers. You have taken leave from your brothers and parted from your wife and children. I wish to make you understand how to behave appropriately. Emulate the farranging integrity of superior men. “Hearing about one thing, deduce three others.”71 Be devoted to becoming a good man. You must not be careless [in the choice of] those around you; whether you become a good man or not rests on this criterion. In your interactions with others strive towards leniency. Your words should be based on consideration, your conduct on deliberation. Always adjust your principles to the actual situation. If you are violating these ideas you will fail. A father wishes his son to become a good man. Apart from sacrificing one’s own life, there is nothing one would spare [in order to attain this goal].

69

On this and other similes of the type “Man’s life is like . . .” see Kroll, “Literary Criticism and Personal Character,” 529–32. 70 See Huainanzi 1.5 (聖人不貴尺之璧,而重寸之陰). 71 A composite allusion to three passages in the Analects that address the ability to draw appropriate conclusions. See Lunyu 5.9 (聞一以知十), 7.8 (舉一隅不以三隅反), and 16.13 (問一得三).

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自汝行之後。恨恨不樂。何者。我實老矣。所恃汝等也。皆不 在目前。意遑遑也。人之居世。忽去便過。日月可愛也。故禹 不愛尺璧。而愛寸陰。時過不可還。若年大不可少也。欲汝早 之未必讀書。并學作人。汝今踰郡縣。越山河。離兄弟。去妻 子者。欲令見舉動之宜。效高人遠節。聞一得三。志在善人。 左右不可不慎。善否之要。在此際也。行止與人。務在饒之。 言思乃出。行詳乃動。皆用情實道 理。違 斯敗矣。父欲令子 善。唯不能殺身。其餘無惜也。72 Even if the father’s age should be taken with a grain of salt, since professions of feeling like an old man are an established literary practice, Wang Xiu achieves a convincing self-portrait as a man who is aware of his mortality and growing emotional dependence on his family. The first part of his letter does not sound like a letter of familial admonition at all. Although we cannot be sure if the beginning of the transmitted text was the beginning of this letter as well, the beginning we have reads very much like a proem dedicated to what is probably the most common epistolary topos, the lament of separation.73 As the letter continues, however, the tone changes. Wang Xiu expresses explicit wishes (using yu) and advice, which in the last sentence of his letter cumulate in a surprisingly strict demand that counterpoints his introductory expressions of tenderness. 3

Letters of Familial Admonition of Early Medieval China

The four centuries following the Han dynasty left us about forty letters of familial admonition in a variety of transmitted sources. They resemble the Han dynasty examples in character, theme, and rhetorical approach, which is probably not only due to genre similarities or the lasting influence of Han dynasty literature, but also to the literary tastes of later collectors and editors, whose preferences were shaped by the canonical power of Han dynasty texts and who thus preserved pieces that resembled them. As with all of epistolary literature, we can be sure that the letters of familial admonition that were transmitted are only a tiny and perhaps not even representative fraction of all such letters that were written at the time.

72 73

Wang Xiu, “Letter admonishing his son” (Jie zi shu 誡子書), Quan Hou Han wen 94.7b; Yiwen leiju 23.423. See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 119–27.

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Although Liu Xie did not mention post-Han letters in the discussion of admonitions in his Literary Mind, there are several pieces that are usually considered excellent examples of the genre. One of them is Tao Qian’s 陶潛 (365– 427?) testamentary letter to his five sons, who are also known from Tao’s poem “Blaming My Sons” (Ze zi shi 責子詩).74 The letter is the moving legacy of a father, gentle in its explicit and implicit admonitions, that emphasizes companionship among the brothers. The following translation passes over the long autobiographic section—which Tao Qian’s letter is justly most famous for— focusing on the rhetorical structure and the admonitory passages: [Tao Qian] notifies [his sons] Yan, Si, Fen, Yi, and Tong: Heaven and earth bestow life. Where there is birth there must also be death. Of the ancient sages and worthies, was there a single one who could escape this fate? Zixia’s words are: “Death and birth are destined by fate, wealth and rank by heaven.”75 As one of the four friends [of Confucius] he personally heard the master’s voice and received his purport. Didn’t he say these words because failure and success cannot just be claimed? Because there is no agency from whom long life and early death can be requested? I am more than fifty years old. My youth was destitute and tormented. [. . .] Since I have been ill I have increasingly become decrepit. Relatives and friends have not forgotten me, they have all come with medicine and remedies to make me better. But I myself fear that my life is drawing to a close. It distresses me that you are still so young and that our family is too poor to keep a servant. Will you ever be able to escape the hard work of gathering firewood and fetching water? Thoughts about this fill my mind, but how could I fully express them? Although you were not born of the same mother, you should keep the meaning of [another saying by Zixia] in mind: “Within the Four Seas, everyone is my brother.”76 Bao Shuya and Guan Zhong shared their wealth without suspicion [although Guan Zhong took a greater share for himself],77 Gui Sheng and Wu Ju spread 74 75 76 77

Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1002–3. Lunyu 12.5. Zixia 子夏 is the courtesy name of Bu Shang 卜商 (507–ca. 420 BCE). Another reference to Lunyu 12.5. This is an allusion to Guan Zhong’s words as reported in Shi ji 70.2131 (嘗與鮑叔賈,分 財利多自與,鮑叔不以我為貪,知我貧也). Both men are frequently mentioned because of their friendship. Guan Zhong 管仲, also known as Guan Yiwu 管夷吾 (?–645 BCE), minister of Duke Huan of Qi 齊桓公 (r. 685–643 BCE) and alleged author of

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twigs [on the ground] by the side of the road [where they had met] and [talked like] old friends [although Wu Ju was on his way into exile].78 As a result, they could turn defeat into accomplishment [when Guan Zhong, on account of Bao Shuya’s recommendation, became minister of his former enemy Duke Huan of Qi] and build success on loss [when Wu Ju, on account of Gongsun Guisheng’s recommendation, was recalled]. If they can act like that [although they are not related], how much more so brothers born to the same father! There was Han Yuanchang from Yinchuan, a famous scholar who served in a high position at the end of the Han dynasty and lived to the age of eighty. He and his brothers lived together all their lives [lit., “until their teeth had fallen out”].79 There was Fan Zhichun from Jibei, a man of high integrity during the Jin dynasty. Although they had shared their possessions for seven generations, none in his family ever had a resentful look on their face.80 An Ode says: “Look up to [worthy men as to] high mountains, walk the great road [of propriety].”81 Even if you cannot fulfill this [ideal], embrace it with all your heart. Heed my words! What more can I say? 告儼、俟、份、佚、佟。夫天地賦命。有生必有終。自古聖 賢。誰能獨免。子夏言曰。死生有命。富貴在天。四友之人。親 受音旨。發斯談者。豈非窮 達不可妄求。壽夭永無外請故 邪。吾年過五十。少而窮苦荼毒。[. . .] 疾患以來。漸就衰損。親 舊不遺。每以藥石見救。自恐大分。將有限也。恨汝輩稚 小。家(岔)〔貧〕無役。柴水之勞。何時可免。念之在心。若 何可言。然汝等雖不同生。當思四海皆兄弟之義。鮑叔管仲。分 財無猜。歸生伍舉。班荊道舊。遂能以敗為成。因喪立功。他 人尚爾。況同父之人哉。潁川韓元長。漢末名士。身處卿佐。八 十而終。兄弟同居。至于沒齒。濟北氾稚春。晉時操行人

78

79

80 81

Guanzi 管子, famously said about Bao Shuya 鮑叔牙 “Those who have brought me into this world me are my father and mother, the one who knows me is Baozi” 生我者父母, 知我者鮑子也. Shi ji 70.2132. Another famous pair of friends, Gongsun Guisheng 公孫歸生 (also known as Shengzi 聲 子) and Wu Ju 伍舉 (6th c. BCE). See Zuozhuan Xiang 26 (伍舉奔鄭,將遂奔晉。聲 子將如晉,遇之於鄭郊,班荊相與食,而言復故). Han Rong 韓融 (zi Yuanchang 元長) served as Chamberlain of Dependencies (dahonglu 大鴻臚) under Han Xiandi 漢獻帝 (r. 189–220). According to a brief entry in his father Han Shao’s 韓韶 biography he lived to the age of seventy. Hou Han shu 80.2063. See the biography of Fan Yu 氾毓 (zi Zhichun 稚春) in Jin shu 91.2350–51. Mao shi 218.

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也。七世同財。家人無怨色。詩云。高山仰止。景行行止。雖 不能爾。至心尚之。汝其慎哉。吾復何言。82 The first and largest part of the letter is dedicated to a very personal selfnarrative that spans Tao Qian’s life from his youth to the time of writing. Office is only mentioned as something that the writer soon abandoned, and the pursuit of learning he describes is not presented as a conscious self-fashioning to achieve conformity with certain social values, but as a self-cultivation leading to all-encompassing happiness. In this respect, Tao’s autobiographic account could also be read as the implicit presentation of himself as a model for his sons: neither wealthy nor high-ranking,83 but able to feel intense pleasure when reading a book or being fully aware of the natural world. As far as explicit admonitions are concerned, Tao Qian’s letter stands out for its single focus, particularly compared with Wang Xiu’s letter introduced above. Where Wang Xiu piles up recommendations for his son’s behavior, Tao Qian singles out one concern—the solidarity among his sons—as his one pervasive advice. Although he does not urge his sons to study, he obviously assumes them to have learning, since he supports his argument with examples from canonical and historical literature throughout the text. So far, this is the first letter that does not in one way or the other express the hope that that its addressees may thrive as officials. Wang Sengqian 王僧虔 (426–485) in a long letter to his eldest son is open about office as the most important goal and about the difficulties of obtaining and keeping a position, which he most of all sees as attainable in sufficient learning: . . . Why do a father and son differ in their social standing or brothers in their reputation? [This difference is brought about] by nothing else but the personal experience of having thoroughly read several hundreds of books. Since I regret now that I never achieved this, I wish to use my own

82

Tao Qian, “Letter to Yan and his other sons” (Yu zi Yan deng shu 與子儼等書, ca. 415), Quan Jin wen 111.7b–8a; Song shu 93.2289–90; Yiwen leiju 23.424; trans. Davis, T’ao Yüanming, 228–30; James Hightower in Renditions 41–42; Frühauf, Frühformen der chinesischen Autobiographie, 287–88. See also Tian, Tao Yuanming, 50–53. 83  Poverty is mentioned frequently in letters of familial admonition. Of the letters discussed here, see also those by Zheng Xuan and Zhang Huan. Other prominent examples include Sima Hui’s 司馬徽 “Letter admonishing his sons” (Jie zi shu 誡子書), Quan Hou Han wen 86.2b, and Xu Mian’s 徐勉 (466–535) “Letter admonishing his son Song” (Wei shu jie zi Song 為書誡子崧), Quan Liang wen 50.6b–8a.

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example to admonish you. You are now entering your fourth decade,84 an appropriate age for being in office and taking care of a family. . . . . . . 或父子貴賤殊。兄弟聲名異。何也。體盡讀數百卷書耳。吾 今悔無所及。欲以前車誡爾後乘也。汝年入立境。方應從官。 兼有室累。. . .85 Another testamentary letter that achieved fame—not the least because of the painful circumstances of its composition—is Fan Ye’s 范曄 (398–445) letter to his nephews, written in prison, expecting his own execution and that of his sons and collaborators.86 Given their particular air of apologia and offense in the face of death, “letters from prison” may be regarded as a subgenre of their own.87 In China, they appear in the Han dynasty and remain present throughout Chinese history.88 Unlike Tao Qian’s very personal letter to his sons, Fan Ye’s letter is basically a literary testament without any references to its addressees and no autobiographical information beyond the writer’s intellectual and literary development. It is admonitory only insofar as Fan Ye urges his nephews to rectify the negative reputation that, he feared, would remain after his execution and to ensure that his History of the Later Han Dynasty (Hou Han shu 後 漢書) would be properly appreciated. The fame of this letter, however, mainly rests on its statements about literature and learning, just like a third, prominent admonitory letter written by Xiao Gang 蕭綱 (503–551, Liang Jianwendi 梁簡文帝, r. 549–51). Xiao Gang’s letter to his son seems to be interventional— although this is difficult to tell, since it is only fragmentarily received: You are still young and in need of learning. Everything lasting and great depends on learning. That is why Confucius said: “I once spent a whole day without eating and a whole night without sleeping in order [to have 84  Lunyu 2.4 (三十而立). 85  Wang Sengqian “Letter admonishing his son” (Jie zi shu 誡子書), Quan Qi wen 8.13b–14b; Nan Qi shu 33.598–99. Yu Yingshi’s study “Wang Sengqian ‘Jie zi shu’ is not concerned with the text as a letter, but dedicated to identifying the date of composition of this letter (476–77) and historical persons mentioned by Wang Sengqian. 86  Fan Ye, “Letter to his nephews written in prison” (Yuzhong yu zhu shengzhi shu 獄中與 諸甥姪書), Quan Song wen 15.11b–12a; Song shu 69.1829–31; trans. Egan, “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh,” 339–42. See also Song shu 69.1827–29. 87 Nickisch, Brief, 63–64. 88 The Han dynasty archetype could be Zou Yang’s 鄒陽 (2nd c. BCE) “Memorial of selfexplanation written in prison” (Yu zhong shangshu zi ming 獄中上書自明). Shi ji 83.2469–78; Han shu 51.2343–52; Quan Han wen 19.8b–11a; Wen xuan 39.1766–77; trans. Chung, “Study of the ‘Shu’,” 446–64. See also Chung, “Study of the ‘Shu’,” 271–74.

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more time] to think. It did not do any good, I had better spend the time learning.”89 I would not want you to “stand facing a wall” [like someone who has not studied the Odes]90 or be “a macaque [who lacks cultivation even when] wearing a hat.”91 The way to establish oneself is different from the way to write. For establishing oneself one needs first of all to be cautious and serious, for writing one further needs to be unconventional and unrestrained. 汝年時尚幼,所闕者學,可久可大,其唯學歟!所以孔丘言: 吾嘗終日不食,終夜不寢,以思,無益,不如學也;若使牆面 而立,沐猴而冠,吾所不取。立身之道,與文章異,立身先須 謹重,文章且須放蕩。92 This fragment demonstrates the limits of literary transmission and thus our knowledge about epistolary culture (and so much more) in ancient China. Preserved in the chapter “Warning and admonition” (Ming jie 鑒誡) of the early Tang encyclopedia A Collection of Literature Arranged by Categories (Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚), the only indication of the text’s epistolarity is the first sentence with its direct address using a second person pronoun. Apart from this weak indication—which is, after all, also used in non-epistolary forms of admonition (e.g. Yan Zhitui’s Family Instructions)—nothing else suggests that this may have been a letter. The thematic break towards the end of the text (just before “the way to establish oneself”) could even indicate that what we are reading as one continuous text is the result of internal abridgement. The epistolary character of the next piece, written by the eminent general Yang Hu 羊祜 (221–278) in the second half of the third century, either addressing his sons or his nephews, is very pronounced.93 Although the circumstances of its composition are not known, its testamentary character suggests that it was written at the end of Yang Hu’s life:

89 90 91 92

93

Lunyu 15.31. Lunyu 17.10. Shi ji 12.315. Xiao Gang, “Letter admonishing [his son] Daxin, Duke of Dangyang [Xiao Daxin 蕭大心, 523–551]” (Jie Dangyang gong Daxin shu 誡當陽公大心書), Quan Liang wen 11.1a; Yiwen leiju 23.424; trans. Marney, Liang Chien-wen Ti, 95; Tian, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star, 173–74. Because Yang Hu appears to have had no sons ( Jin shu 34.1024), Zhou Yiliang (Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 42) suggested that the title of this letter, as it appears in Yiwen leiju 23.423 and Quan Jin wen 41.7b, is corrupt and should read “Letter admonishing his nephews” (Jie xiong zi shu 誡兄子書).

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As a child I was instructed by my late father. At the age when I could speak, he introduced me to the standard texts, and when I was nine he taught me the Book of Odes and the Book of Documents. But I had no reputation among the men of my hometown yet; I had not made a distinct and outstanding name for myself. My current position was bestowed upon me through incongruous kindness. I could never have achieved it by my own strength. I am by far inferior to my late father and you are again inferior to me. Great schemes are something that you brothers, I am afraid, are not able to come up with, and astounding achievements will, as far as I can see, not be your lot. Respectfulness is the beginning of virtue, caution the basis of conduct. I wish that you may be “faithful and trustworthy in your words, sincere and respectful in your deeds.”94 Do not promise other people riches, do not spread unfounded rumors, do not listen to slander or flattery. When you hear of a mistake committed by somebody, “your ears can hear it, but your mouth must not articulate it.”95 Think before you act. If your words and deeds lack trustworthiness, you will personally suffer disgrace and incur punishment. How could I still have pity on you if you brought disgrace upon your ancestors! Ponder your father’s words, connect with your father’s instructions! May each of you recite this. 吾少受先君之教。能言之年。便召以典文。年九歲。便誨以詩 書。然尚猶無鄉人之稱。無清異之名。今之職位。謬恩之加 耳。非吾力所能致也。吾不如先君遠矣。汝等復不如吾。諮度 弘偉。恐汝兄弟未之能也。奇異獨達。察汝等將無分也。恭為 德首。慎為行基。願汝等言則忠信。行則篤敬。無口許人以 財。無傳不經之談。無聽毀譽之語。聞人之過。耳可得受。口 不得宣。思而後動。若言行無信。身受大謗。自入刑論。豈復 惜汝。恥及祖考。思乃父言。纂乃父教。各諷誦之。96 The admonition is moving in its solicitousness, which is heightened by Yang Hu’s disillusioned view of his obviously mediocre sons or nephews. There is not the slightest air of captatio benevolentiae in this letter: Yang Hu expresses his less than favorable opinion of the addressees in a straightforward, blunt manner that is hardly alleviated by the letter’s passages in parallel style. After 94 95 96

Lunyu 15.6 (言忠信,行篤敬). See the beginning of Ma Yuan’s letter to his nephews quoted above. Yang Hu, “Letter admonishing his sons” (Jie zi shu 誡子書), Quan Jin wen 41.7b; Yiwen leiju 23.423.

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a brief autobiographic retrospection, an evaluation of the personalities of the addressees, and an instructive maxim, the signal word yuan (I wish) marks the beginning of the actual admonitory passage. The writer’s wishes for the young men’s behavior are well within the frame of Confucian ethics, not the least because they ultimately appeal to the central Confucian value of filial piety. An interesting literary feature of Yang Hu’s letter is that it contains a potential intra-epistolary allusion, that is, an allusion used in a letter that goes back to another letter. Yang Hu’s warning to engage in slander is couched in words that are very similar to those Ma Yuan used in the letter to his nephews written about 200 years earlier—the same letter that another 200 years later was to be canonized by Liu Xie in his Literary Mind as the prototype of the letter of familial admonition. Regrettably, our lack of knowledge about the preservation, circulation, and collection of personal letters in early medieval China also affects our understanding of the reasons for this parallel. Is the phrase in Yang Hu’s letter just owing to a stock saying? Perhaps even a stock saying recommended by an epistolary guide? Or is it an allusion to Ma Yuan’s letter? This would mean that Yang Hu knew Ma Yuan’s letter and expected his sons to know it as well, which would imply that the older letter had already become part of the literary canon.97 Another interesting feature of Yang Hu’s letter is its last sentence, which calls upon the addressees to recite or even memorize it, depending on the interpretation of the compound fengsong 諷誦. This intensification of reading is also occasionally mentioned in non-admonitory letters from friends or family members, where it is described as a joyful and voluntary response to receiving a letter. In a familial admonition, such as Yang Hu’s letter, the same feature emphasizes the documentary, testamentary character of the letter that is intended to be available not just upon a first reading but also for future reference, even after the writer’s death.98



Letters of familial admonition of early and early medieval China were transmitted because of their distinguished writers, because of their literary qualities, or because they express societal values in an especially effective way. Many of these values could be described as Confucian in character, such as 97 98

It is not unlikely that Ma Yuan’s letter was widely known even in his lifetime, since we know that it was brought to the attention of the emperor. Hou Han shu 24.845. See also Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 127–34.

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the dedication to learning, the focus on self-cultivation and humility as well the choice of worthy friends, all of which were seen as contributing to the honor of one’s family as well as the state. Although some of the texts that came down to us in encyclopedias, anthologies, or historical writings were stripped of their epistolary features and are thus hardly recognizable as personal letters any more, others still retain vestiges of their past as personal letters. Despite their ample recourse to conventional patterns or even clichés—for instance the encouragement of learning or the warning of inopportune friendships— these letters bear testimony to diverse familial relationships and authorial personalities. The ways in which every writer, on behalf of their families, connects with their cultural and literary heritage, also on a local level, can be interpreted as an impressive reminder of the rise of individualism in China, which made families feel the need to “individualize” their heritage, that is, to adapt it to their own situation and times. As restricted as our knowledge of early medieval letter writing may be, relying so much on the vagaries of historical transmission, reading these letters provides a perspective that undeniably enriches our understanding of culture and literature well beyond the epistolary sphere. Focusing on one particular subgenre of letter has also provided an opportunity to pursue typological questions. Despite a certain degree of generic ambiguity, which is part and parcel of any discussion of genre, this approach has helped to throw the generic features of these text into sharper relief. Showing them to be infused with epistolary features—such as frame, dialogicity and address, occasionality, signal words—or exposing the absence of anything that is characteristic of letters, the genre perspective has helped to get a better understanding of the writer’s persona and authorial intention as they are presented in each text. Bibliography Ariel, Yoav. K’ung-ts’ung-tzu: A Study and Translation of Chapters 15–23 with a Reconstruction of the Hsiao Erh-ya Dictionary. Leiden: Brill, 1996. Beebee, Thomas O. Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cai Yanbin 蔡雁彬. “Cong jie zi shu kan Wei Jin Liuchao xueshu wenhua zhi bianqian 從誡子書看魏晉六朝學術文化之變遷.” Xueren 1998. 13:405–36. Chang, Kang-i Sun and Stephen Owen, eds. The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Chung, Eva Yuen-wah. “A Study of the ‘Shu’ (Letters) of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220).” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1982.

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Chuxueji 初學記. Compiled by Xu Jian 徐堅 (659–729) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Davis, A. R. T’ao Yüan-ming (AD 385–427): His Works and Their Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Day, Robert Adams. Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. Declercq, Dominik. Writing Against the State: Political Rhetorics in Third- and FourthCentury China. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Dien, Albert E. Pei ch’i shu 45, Biography of Yen Chih-t’ui. Bern: Lang, 1976. ———. “Instructions for the Grave: The Case of Yan Zhitui.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 8 (1995): 41–58. ———. “A Sixth-Century Father’s Advice on Literature: Comments on Chapter Nine of Yanshi jiaxun.” AM 13.1 (2000): 67–82. Durrant, Stephen W. “Self as the Intersection of Traditions: The Autobiographical Writings of Ssu-ma Ch’ien.” JAOS 106 (1986): 33–40. Dubrow, Heather. Genre. London: Methuen, 1982. Ebrey, Patricia. “T’ang Guides to Verbal Etiquette.” HJAS 45 (1985): 581–613. Egan, Ronald C. “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh.” HJAS 39 (1979): 339–401. Frankel, Hans, trans. “Ma Yuan: Letter to His Nephews Ma Yan and Ma Dun.” Renditions 41–42 (1994): 4–6. Frühauf, Manfred W. Frühformen der chinesischen Autobiographie. Frankfurt: Lang, 1987. Fuehrer, Bernhard. “The Court Scribe’s Eikon Psyches: A Note on Sima Qian and His Letter to Ren An.” Asian and African Studies 6.2 (1997): 170–83. Giele, Enno. Imperial Decision-Making and Communication in Early China: A Study of Cai Yong’s Duduan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006. Guillén, Claudio. “Notes Towards the Study of the Renaissance Letter.” In Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, edited by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, 70–101. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. ———. “On the Edge of Literariness: The Writing of Letters.” Comparative Literature Studies 31.1 (1994): 1–24. Guo yu 國語. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1978. Han Rui 韓蕊. Geren de siyu: Zhongguo xiandai shuxinti xiaoshuo yanjiu 個人的私 語:中國現代書信體小說研究. Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 2009. Han shu 漢書. Compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Han Wei Liuchao baisan mingjia ji 漢魏六朝百三名家集. Compiled by Zhang Pu 張 溥 (1602–1641). Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 2002. Hightower, James R., trans. “Tao Qian: Letter to His Sons.” Renditions 41–42 (1994): 15–17.

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Hou Han shu 後漢書. Compiled by Fan Ye 范曄 (398–446). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965. Huainanzi 淮南子: D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds. A Concordance to the Huainanzi. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992. Idema, Wilt and Beata Grant, eds. The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Jin shu 晉書. Compiled by Fang Xuanling 房玄齡 (578–648). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Kauffman, Linda S. Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Klauck, Hans J. Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006. Knechtges, David R. “‘Key Words,’ Authorial Intent, and Interpretation: Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An.” CLEAR 30 (2008): 75–84. Ko, Dorothy. “‘Letter to My Sons’ by Gu Ruopu (1592–ca. 1681).” In Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, edited by Susan Mann and Yu-yin Cheng, 148–53. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Kroll, Paul W. “Literary Criticism and Personal Character in Poetry ca. 100–300 CE.” In China’s Early Empires, edited by Michael Nylan and Michael Loewe, 517–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kongcongzi 孔叢子: D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds. A Concordance to the Kong­ congzi, Dengxizi, Yinwenzi, Gongsun Longzi. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1998. Lewis, Mark Edward. “Writing the World in the Family Instructions of the Yan Clan.” EMC 13–14.1 (2007): 33–80. Li, Dun J. The Essence of Chinese Civilization. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967. Li ji 禮記: D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds. A Concordance to the Liji. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992. Lu Lin 陸林, ed. Zhonghua jiaxun daguan 中華家訓大觀. Hefei: Anhui renmin chubanshe, 1994. Lu Qinli 逯欽立, ed. Xian Qin Han Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi 先秦漢魏晉南北朝詩. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983. Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973. Lu Zhengyan 盧正言, ed. Zhongguo lidai jiaxun guanzhi 中國歷代家訓觀止. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2004. Lunyu 論語: D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds. A Concordance to the Lunyu. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1995. Mao shi 毛詩: D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds. A Concordance to the Maoshi. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1995. Marney, John. Liang Chien-wen Ti. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

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Metelmann, Carsten. “Schriftverkehr der Han-Zeit.” PhD diss., Hamburg University, 2001. Müller, Wolfgang G. “Brief.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 2, edited by Gert Ueding, 60–76. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994. Nan Qi shu 南齊書. Compiled by Xiao Zixian 蕭子顯 (489–537). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. 1972. Ng, Daisy Sheung-yuen. “Li Ang’s Experiments with the Epistolary Form.” MCL 3.1–2 (1987): 91–106. Nickisch, Reinhard M.G. Brief. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. Quan Han wen 全漢文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Hou Han wen 全後漢文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Jin wen 全晉文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Liang wen 全梁文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Qi wen 全齊文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Sanguo wen 全三國文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen 全上古三代三國六朝文. Compiled by Yan Kejun 嚴可均 (1762–1843). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958. Quan Song wen 全宋文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Richter, Antje. “Familiäre Mahnbriefe: Die Herausbildung eines epistolaren Subgenres in der Han-Zeit [Letters of Familial Admonition: The Emergence of an Epistolary Subgenre in the Han Dynasty].” In Han-Zeit: Festschrift für Hans Stumpfeldt aus Anlaß seines 65. Geburtstages, edited by Michael Friedrich et al., 379–95. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006. ———. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. ———. “The Literary Uses of Correspondence: Discovering Early Epistolary Fiction in China.” (unpublished manuscript) Rosenmeyer, Patricia A. Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. Ancient Greek Literary Letters: Selections in Translation. London: Routledge, 2006. Sanguo zhi 三國志. Compiled by Chen Shou 陳壽 (233–297); commentary by Pei Songzhi 裴松之 (372–451). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. 1959. Shangshu 尚書: D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds. A Concordance to the Shangshu. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1995. Shi ji 史記. Compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (?145–?86 BCE). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959. Shijing quanshi 詩經詮釋. Edited by Qu Wanli 屈萬里. Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1989.

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chapter 7

The Space of Separation: The Early Medieval Tradition of Four-Syllable “Presentation and Response” Poetry* Zeb Raft Chinese poetry as a whole could be considered under the rubric of letters, insofar as so many poems are “addressed” to another person, and as this intersubjective quality is such a prominent feature of Chinese poetry even in the absence of a named addressee. Of course, it is rather easy to expand the concept of letters to accommodate any kind of literature, or even anything put in writing, and while Chinese poems were frequently objects of exchange over distance, letters can be distinguished for always being part of such an exchange.1 The pair of poems studied in this essay can indeed be considered letters, as can many specimens of the general type to which they belong, “poetry of presentation and response” (zengda shi 贈答詩). Presentation and response poetry covers a wide swath of early medieval (and later) Chinese poetry— at seventy two poems, it is the second largest shi-category in the Wen xuan 文選, early medieval China’s most representative anthology.2 The poems studied here belong to a sub-type, presentation and response poetry in the foursyllable meter, that possesses a more natural coherence than the category as a whole. Presentation poems of this sort are generally long, stanzaic compositions, beginning with a eulogistic treatment of the recipient, continuing with a narrative account of the shared friendship, and concluding with a message for the recipient, with the response poem requiting in close parallel. This welldefined structure evinces a kinship with medieval prose letters.3 * Research for this paper was conducted using Academia Sinica’s Scripta Sinica text database (http://hanchi.ihp .sinica.edu.tw). All references, however, are to the print editions cited. 1 For an extended definition of the letter and discussion of its manifestations in early medieval China, see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 37–42. 2 For an overview, see Jiang, Wen xuan zengda shi. For this statistic, p. 25; on the overlap between this category and other poetic categories, preface p. 1 and pp. 166–78. 3 On the structure of early medieval prose letters, see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, Chapter Three and 140–45.

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This essay focuses on what I call the “space of separation” opened up by this kind of poem, with specific discussion of three topics that enter into that space in one particular pair of poems—the intimate bond of the poets, the presence of the state, and the representation of a public space. I begin with a brief account of the history of four-syllable presentation and response poetry and the formation of its special “space.” I then present the poems in translation, followed by an inquiry into the lives of the poets that lays the ground for the thematic discussion. In conclusion, I reconsider the relationship of letter and poem in the Chinese “letter poem.” 1

Four-Syllable Presentation and Response Poetry and the “Space of Separation”

By all appearances, the four-syllable presentation and response poem is a phenomenon distinctly associated with early medieval China, existing only from the mid-second through mid-seventh centuries. It arose late in the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220), although the extant examples do not allow us to determine how prevalent a practice it was at that time. It achieved maturity and even grandiosity with the Western Jin (265–316), when strong classicist currents tended to favor the stately, archaic cadence of the four-syllable line.4 It continued to be used by literati in the Yangtze river region after the establishment of the “Eastern” Jin (317–420), but though we now—thanks to a Tang compendium partially preserved in Japanese monasteries5—have quite a few such poems it is still difficult to know how extensively or consistently it was practiced. The poems studied here date from this period, and come from this source. Judging from extant materials, in the mid-fifth century this kind of poetry seems to fade away before a brief revival in the court-dominated literary culture of the turn of the sixth century. By the Tang (618–907), four-syllable presentation and response poetry appears to have disappeared completely. The reasons for this disappearance, to the extent that we believe in reasons for historical facts, are probably two. First, literary culture from the mid-fifth century onwards showed a decided preference for the more modern five-syllable line, and the poetic formulated in that culture had five-syllable verse at its center. Second, with the rise to ubiquity of the epitaph (muzhiming 墓誌銘) in the late fifth century, the four-syllable line became almost exclusively associated 4 For a paradigmatic example of the grand imperial style under the Western Jin, see Knechtges, “Sweet-peel Orange.” 5 This is the Wenguan cilin 文館詞林, originally in 1,000 scrolls, compiled in 658.

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with the eulogistic mode, as it remains to this day. Thus it slipped forever from the domain of “poetry” to that of “functional verse”—though we should not forget to acknowledge the underappreciated pleasures of functional eulogistic verse. Three things should be said from the outset if we are to treat presentation and response poems from the perspective of letter writing: that in their roots they were not letters but rather poems from parting banquets; that this kind of poetry came to be used for letter writing, that is, the poems came to be exchanged over a distance; and that there was an important conceptual overlap between these two functions, the banquet poem and the letter poem. In this overlap we find the “space of separation” central both to our interpretation of this poem exchange and to consideration of the genre’s broader cultural significance.6 The parting banquet is the site of our earliest examples, the fragments from Cai Yong 蔡邕 (133–192) and the (presumably) complete poems by Wang Can 王粲 (177–217), and it continues to be a regular site for later works. The scene is well epitomized in the closing verse of a poem presented by Sun Chuo 孫綽 (314–371) to the potentate Yu Bing 庾冰 (296–344): For the ancients, parting was a weighty affair, Without fail would they make a present to the traveler. A gift of a thousand pieces of gold— How could that compare to a few pithy words? Watch yourself, Master Yu! Strive to keep up with the former worthies. With what, then, do I send you on your journey? Draw [your lessons] from this poem. 古人重離,必有贈遷。千金之遺,孰與片言。 勵矣庾生,勉蹤前賢。何以將行,取諸斯篇。7 The banquet is not itself a point of focus in such banquet poems. Rather, the parting scene is present as a fulcrum for the elevation of a few carefully chosen words (the irony being that these poems are anything but “pithy”) that may shape memories of the past and influence relationships of the future.

6 Separation is also a topic of special significance in prose letters of this period; see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 119–27. 7 Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 899.

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The poem, presumably presented in its author’s calligraphy, becomes a talisman consecrated at the parting ceremony.8 This detachment from the direct circumstances of composition facilitated the development of an epistolary function, by the Western Jin at the latest. Several of Lu Yun’s 陸雲 (262–303) poems note explicitly that the participants in the exchange are separated, and one of them refers to itself as a letter (chidu 尺牘).9 Cao Shu 曹攄 (d. 308), another Western Jin poet, mentions having been apart for “two weeks” (er xun 二旬, twenty days).10 By the Eastern Jin separation seems almost to be the norm. Both of Wang Huzhi’s 王胡之 (fl. mid4th c.) extant poems are “mailed” ( ji 寄, here used in the literal sense).11 Sun Chuo has banquet poems to Wen Qiao 溫嶠 (288–329) and Yu Bing (quoted above), but writes over a distance to Xu Xun 許詢 (fl. mid-4th c.) and to Xie An 謝安 (320–385) after a separation of three years.12 The poems studied in this essay were sent over a distance, and of Xie Lingyun’s 謝靈運 (385–433) five extant poems in the genre four appear to have the poet separated from his correspondent.13 There are examples from the late fifth century, like Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513), who “sends it by flying goose” 寄之飛鴻, though one senses that by then it had again become more court- and banquet-centered.14 Rather than call these poems “letters,” it might be better to regard them as part of an epistolary process. Lu Chen’s 盧諶 (284–350) poem to Liu Kun 劉琨 (271–318), for instance, comes with a letter, as Liu Kun makes clear in his letter in reply.15 Zhi Yu’s 摯虞 (d. 311) poem to an official on his way to the Sichuan basin ends “There are messengers, / To transmit your voice [via letter], / [But] southern tortoise and elephant tusk, / Truly will be my heart’s delight” 既有 8 The final line alludes to the “Appended Phrases” commentary of the Classic of Changes, describing how the sage made the eight trigrams: “Close at hand, he drew from his own experience” 近取諸身; see Zhou yi zhengyi 周易正義 (Shisanjing zhushu ed.) 8.4b. Here, the poet has drawn the poem from his own experience, and the recipient should in turn draw from the poem as he physically carries it with him. 9 See Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 712 (stanza 5); also 706 (stanza 5), 714 (stanza 10), 716. In addition, see p. 723 (stanza 4), where Lu’s interlocutor specifies that they have been apart for three autumns. 10 Ibid., 755 (stanza 8). 11 Ibid., 886–87. 12 Ibid., 898–901. 13 Ibid., 1154–57. Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 (365?–427) three extant examples (ibid., 971–72), also from this period, were exchanged in person, possibly suggesting that the epistolary side of the genre was exploited by people connected to the court. 14 Ibid., 1629 (stanza 5). 15 Ibid., 850. For a detailed study of this distinctive pair of poems, see Knechtges, “Liu Kun.”

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行李,以通其音。南龜象齒,實將云心, which when we recall that letters, in medieval China and elsewhere, are often notes accompanying gifts, suggests that a poem might be accompanied by something even more substantive than a letter.16 Furthermore, even poems “presented” in person often contain the expectation of a reply from a distance, be it a prose letter or one in verse, blurring the line between banquet poem and letter poem. Thus one of our earliest samples, Wang Can’s poem to Shisun Meng 士孫萌 (fl. late 2nd c.), closes with the admonishment “Do not hide away the sound of your voice” 無密爾音, which is to say, keep in touch,17 and Xie Lingyun closes the banquet poem mentioned above with “We part and you follow the river’s isles, / As I cup my ears [awaiting] your gentle voice” 分手遵渚,傾耳淑音.18 Just as letters are defined by being part of a set, so the presentation poem anticipates reciprocity. To put it another way, a banquet poem should elicit a letter poem, making the former an equal constituent of the letter set. These connections in practice between presentation and response poetry and letter writing are supported by a conceptual commonality. The banquet is a pivotal moment because it is the moment of parting, but this moment itself possesses its own significance. Parting is not merely the “efficient cause” for the composition of the poems. Rather, it is a kind of “formal cause,” essentially “informing” the whole of the poem, because the space that separates (or is about to separate) the two poets gives shape to the poems they produce. The significance of this aspect of parting stands out in the letter that prefaces Lu Chen’s poem to Liu Kun. Leaving “against his will,” Lu Chen reflects on the moment: That the beginning could be the same but the end so different made Yang Zhu sad [when he reached a fork in the road], and that [silk is] white but can then become dark made Mo Di sob. [But] everyone can sigh sadly at the moment of parting [like Yang Zhu], and of those ways of bringing on sad feelings there would seem to be some more severe than this

16 Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 759 (stanza 4); Zhi Yu may intend this figuratively: a letter from you would be like a precious gift. On the relationship of gifts and letters, see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 133–34, and Xiaofei Tian’s contribution to this volume. 17 Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 358. 18 Ibid., 1155; also 1154 (stanza 4). See also Tao Yuanming’s poem to the Duke of Changsha on p. 972. The examples of Lu Yun and Cao Shu, mentioned above, are with one exception all “response” poems, suggesting that, in this early period at least, the first poem of a pair was likely to be a “banquet poem” and the second a “letter.”

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[i.e., Mo Di’s darkened silk]. Indeed, why should one cry out only when standing before a road [about to start his journey], and why sob only upon seeing silk? 蓋本同末異,楊朱興哀;始素終玄,墨翟垂涕。分乖之際,咸 可歎慨;致感之途,或迫于茲。亦奚必臨路而後長號,覩絲而 後歔欷哉? 19 Parting is in fact the motivating moment for Lu’s letter and poem, the hook on which he hangs his reflections on his personal history, but he here makes a point of recognizing that as an efficient cause parting is trivial. Though moments of parting and change may make us sad, the deeper significance is to be found in the vicissitudes of human experience and relationships that take their shape from parting and change. Thus, the moment of parting is the point of inception of the “space of separation” that is the central domain of the letter, and this space possesses its own conceptual valence. In the passage above, parting is paired with change for the worse: silk begins white and Mo Di (the philosopher Mozi 墨子) sobs when it is colored, that is, changed forever. This ominous sensibility, of irreparable change in the unknown future, is the fear that accompanies separation: one of the parties might die, or do something that sullies his reputation, or dilute the relationship by allying with or harming some third party, etc. But when separation becomes a literary space in a letter poem, the forces of fate are weakened. Within the literary space of separation, where separation leaves “life” and enters “discourse,” all squalls can be calmed, or at least serve in a symbolic capacity. This space serves to produce what one recent author has called “a primary fantasy of epistolary discourse,” namely, that “communication by letter may be experienced as more authentic and intimate than communicating face-toface.”20 In short, letters simplify things. Simple rhetorical figures used by Lu Chen notwithstanding, parting and change are not simple. They are discomforting human events embedded in complex contexts. But when the events of parting and change are winnowed and hewed by a literary discourse, a space of fantasy emerges. This is the intersubjective realm exemplified by presentation and response poetry.

19 Wen xuan 25.1179; see also Knechtges, “Liu Kun,” 47. 20 Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email, 72, also citing in this context work by William Decker.

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The Poems Qiu Yuanzhi 丘淵之 (after 370–after 433), “Presented to Secretarial [Adjutant] Yang Hui 羊徽 [after 370–before 420], Who Is Ill and Abroad (One Poem)” (Zeng jishi Yang Hui, qi shu ji zai wai, yi shou 贈記室羊徽 其屬疾在外一首)21 In natural inclination we respond to each other ethereally, [And] our interlocked fate has taken its course in human experience. [We are] like gold and orchid: Strength and fragrance explicate one another.22 [But you are gone, so] the craftsman of Ying rests his axe, And there is no one to query on Hao ford.23 Who, then, shall be my sublime confidant? Without you, indeed [my heart] is bound up.24 趣以冥感,契以情運。譬彼金蘭,堅芳互訓。 郢夫寑斤,濠津闕問。孰是超賞,非爾殆薀。25  

(Stanza 1)

[We took] lithesome pleasure in leisurely office,26 And toiled together [on campaigns] in two regions. 21 The base text is the manuscript reproduced in Abe, Bunkan shirin, 61–62; also Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1217. By “abroad” is meant “out of the capital,” or at least outside the imperial city. “One poem” ( yi shou) is likely the anthologist’s note, not an integral part of the title. 22 The associations of gold and orchid with deep friendship derive from the “Appended Phrases” commentary to the Classic of Changes; see Zhou yi zhengyi 7.18ab. 23 The craftsman of Ying was able to use his axe to scrape chalk from his friend’s nose without doing any bodily harm, but claimed to have lost the ability to do so after his friend’s death; Zhuangzi invokes this story on a visit to the grave of his confidant, Huizi. See Zhuangzi jishi, 843 (徐无鬼). Also the use in two poems by Wang Huzhi in Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 886 and 887, which both close with this allusion. “Hao ford” refers to Zhuangzi’s famed conversation with Huizi by the river Hao; see Zhuangzi jishi, 606 (秋水). 24 The line borrows from Mao shi 毛詩 147 素冠: “My heart is bound up, oh! / Let me for a moment be as one with you, oh!” 我心慍結兮,聊與子如一兮. 25 In line 4, the manuscript has the graphically and phonetically similar 乎 for 互. 26 “Lithesome” (wanwan; 元部) is part of a family of words (e.g. 婉婉, 婉孌, 燕婉, 嬿婉, 宴婉) describing gentle, generally feminine, beauty; for related words in the Classic of Poetry, see Mao shi 43, 94, 102, 106, 151. As wanluan 婉孌 (also 元 rhyme) it is paired with “toiled together” (qikuo; line 2 here) in a memorial by Cai Yong (Quan Hou Han wen 79.3b,

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[Our horses ran] bridle by bridle on the northern plains, Our oars lined up on the Yangtze and Xiang.27 In winters we exchanged our warmth, In summers we shared the cool. Was there not [hardship, travelling through] much dew? [Yet] our feelings grew deep as we tread the frost.28 婉晚閑暑,契闊二方。連鑣朔野,齊棹江湘。 冬均其溫,夏共其涼。豈伊多露,情深踐霜。29  

(Stanza 2)

[But now] divine martiality has cleansed the distant lands, The great way is now being spread.30 [Hoers] and plowmen take joy in their work,31 Not one little thing going amiss. [And you] in your leisurely garden, in your back lane,32 [Your] wine cup and zither string limpid and excellent.33 How I rejoice for [your friends] those Two Zhong, To have gone with you into retreat.34 with 孌 written as 戀); it appears as yanwan 嬿婉 in medieval poetry, describing fond friendship as it does here (e.g., Cao Zhi’s poem at Wen xuan 20.974). 27 The poets are on campaign with Liu Yu, preeminent power of the day. From the reference to Mt. Tai, the first line of this couplet should refer to the northern expedition of 409–10. The second line likely refers to the Yangtze river campaign of late 410, although 412 and 415 are also possibilities. See also stanzas 2 and 3 of Yang’s poem. 28 Travel through dew is a kenning for hardship from the Classic of Poetry (Mao shi 17 行露). Treading through frost may allude to Hexagram 2 in the Classic of Changes, where a similar term (lü shuang 履霜) symbolizes the beginnings of a great enterprise; the figure also appears in Mao shi 107, 129, 203. “Feelings” (qing) is the same word as “human experience” in stanza 1, line 2 above. 29 In line 1, the manuscript has 暑 for 署. 30 This couplet refers to the accomplishments of Liu Yu. See the discussion of the poems. 31 The text reads tu (“butcher”; dɑ, 魚部). I tentatively emend to chu 鋤 (“hoe”; dẓɑ, also 魚 rhyme), for the attested medieval compound chulei. 32 Taking 菀 as 苑. Alternatively, xianwan 閑菀 might be a relative form of the attested xianyan 閑宴, thus: “[And you] leisurely lithe, in your back lane”; see n. 26 above. 33 Wine cup and zither string (shang xian) are metonymy for wine and zither: the wine is limpid and the zither excellent. Compare the fourth of Tao Yuanming’s “Miscellaneous Poems” (Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1006), where the same cup and string symbolize a man aloof from worldly cares. 34 The Han era recluse Jiang Xu 蔣詡 had only three paths to his cottage, reserved for himself and his confidants Yang Zhong 羊仲 and Qiu Zhong 求仲. Thus the “Two Zhong”

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神武遐滌,大衢方揮。屠耒晏業,介焉靡違。 閑菀敝徑,觴弦湛徽。欣彼二仲,與子俱歸。

(Stanza 3)

A friendship will not always be fulfilled, [We] rejoice [together] but despair [from separation] always follows.35 You have fallen ill, And I, through worry, grow old. It is not that scratching my head [awaiting you] is toilsome, But in sooth my bosom is entwined [with yearning].36 I long for my beautiful one, And verily does the churning in my heart increase. 願言無必,欣慨屢造。爾疾既纓,余憂用老。 搔首匪勤,寔纏中抱。言念佳人,祗增心攪。

(Stanza 4)

The Way of Heaven may be far, far in the distance, Yet one can expect goodness to be rewarded:37 Today, my dear sir, You should have been here from long ago. Riding with Truth, you shall be unimpeded [in your recovery], With limpid [thoughts in your] breast, you shall naturally be at ease. [And] once you have walked through this Thrice Broken [illness],38

became a poetic metaphor for partners in reclusion. For a contemporary example, see Xie Lingyun’s poem at Wen xuan 30.1397. 35 “A friendship” ( yuanyan) is literally “desiring” for one’s friend, from the Classic of Poetry: “Desiring, I long for you, / And my heart inside goes aflurry” 願言思子,中心養養 (Mao shi 44 二子乘舟); see also Mao shi 30, 62. The phrase appears again in stanza 1 of Yang’s poem. The second line here is literally “happiness and despair arrive many times.” 36 To scratch one’s head is a figure for fretting, from Mao shi 42 靜女, where a man awaits his lover: “Enamored of her and yet I see her not / I scratch my head and pace about” 愛而不見,搔首踟躕. 37 That heaven will reward good conduct with good fortune is a maxim voiced in the Classic of Documents (Shang shu 尚書; Shang shu zhengyi 8.10b 湯誥), but in medieval literature the ideal is regularly questioned (e.g., in stanza 2 of Liu Kun’s “Poem in Reply to Lu Chen,” Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 851). 38 “Thrice Broken” (sanzhe) invokes an ancient maxim, cited in the Zuozhuan (Ding 13) and elsewhere: break your arm three times and you will have enough experience to become a good doctor.

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You ought to brood [again] upon the Five Virtues.39 天道雖緬,福善可期。今唯吾子,久應在茲。 乘理載遂,沖衿自怡。三折既履,五德宜思。

(Stanza 5)

In self-cultivation [I can boast] nothing lofty, Frequently harnessed in the dusty [world of] service.40 You strive hard in your toil for simplicity, [While] I undeservedly [serve amongst these] tomes and documents.41 Knowing you as [a hermit worthy of] Rong Qiqi,42 My [shamed] face has accumulated a thick [skin to write to you].43 [Yet] I hope I might rely on your acceptance of this stained [gift], And I stand here awaiting the Three Beneficences [of your friendly tutelage].44 39 “Five Virtues” (wu de, or five “powers”) can refer both to a set of personal moral virtues and to the cycle of “five elements” (wu xing 五行) associated with the rise and fall of imperial dynasties; see the discussion of the poem below. Compare the “Five Difficulties” in Yang’s closing stanza. 40 Ye (“self-cultivation”; also “heritage”) is the Chinese word Buddhism adopted for karma and it may carry some of that sense here. Qiu may also be alluding to his less prestigious family background. For an analogous but positive use in a contemporary poem exchange, see Xie Lingyun’s praise for his cousin Hongyuan in Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1154 stanza 1. “Dusty” (chen) in the following line is also a word with religious connotations. 41 The manuscript writes xian 險 but this should be emended to jian 儉, as it apparently has been in the text Lu Qinli worked from. “Toil for simplicity” ( jianqin, lit. “parsimony and toil”) is a term connected to the medieval culture of reclusion. See, e.g., Yan Yanzhi’s “Dirge for Tao [Yuanming] the Summoned Scholar”: “In his daily life he knew all toil and restraint (qinjian), / In his body he experienced both poverty and illness” 居備勤儉,躬兼貧病 (Wen xuan 57.2473); and the similar term jianku in one of the Song shu hermit biographies: “[his wife] willingly dwelt with him through parsimony and hardship” 共安儉苦 (Song shu 93.2284). The source of the expression is the appearance of “parsimony” as a “virtue” of the gentlemen who secludes himself in times of disorder in Classic of Changes Hexagram 12: “Through the virtue of parsimony ( jiande), the gentleman can escape difficult times” 君子以儉德辟難 (Zhou yi zhengyi 2.24a). 42 Rong Qiqi is a hermit with a witty response to Confucius in Liezi (Liezi jishi 1.22–23), regarded as a Daoist sage in early medieval times. 43 “Thick-skinned face” is a figure for the shameless from Mao shi 198 巧言; for a contemporary example in association with the indignities of government service, see stanza 6 of Xie Lingyun’s four-syllable response poem to Xie Zhan in Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1155. 44 The poem itself is the gift in question. The “Three Beneficences” are the qualities Confucius, in Analects (Lunyu 論語) 16.4, attributes to a good friend: rectitude, trustworthiness and broad learning. To “stand awaiting” (here zhu) is a common motif in prose

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予業弗高,屢羇塵役。勉彼儉勤,忝此墳籍。 識以榮期,顏以厚積。庶憑納汙,佇規三益。

(Stanza 6)

Yang Hui, “In Response to Qiu [Yuan]zhi (One Poem)” (Da Qiu Quanzhi, yi shou 答丘泉之一首)45 In [the realm of] Truth, one may rely on things, But once a [mundane] matter goes by, there is nothing more to expect.46 From yesteryear we have enjoyed friendship— Asleep and awake I have longed [for you].47 When shall I meet my bosom friend? Oh that the one I esteem should be here. [Then] my judgments shall be grasped, my meaning followed: At that time shall my lacking be fulfilled.48 理矚有待,事過無期。自昔願言,寢興伊思。 爰遘懷人,載欽在茲。賞得意從,無闕惟時。

(Stanza 1)

The path of kings is long and winding, Our marches to war toilsome indeed. In yesteryear we followed along on campaign, Just as the troubles were at their height. Dark and deep, the shadows of Mt. Tai, letters (see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 106) and in four-syllable exchange poetry as well. 45 Abe, Bunkan shirin, 56; Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 940–41. I have consulted, but not always followed, the annotations and Japanese translation in Hasegawa, Tōshin shi yakuchū, 448– 53. Qiu’s name is written Qiu Quanzhi 泉之 in our manuscript, but a variety of evidence shows that this is a Tang avoidance character. 46 The term youdai (“rely on things”) is a common conceit in fourth-century philosophical poetry, derived from the Zhuangzi and often developed in contrast with wudai, “not relying” (here corresponding to wuqi, “nothing to expect”). For a full series of examples, see Kroll, “A Poetry Debate.” Yang’s usage seems rather prosaic, reversing the “expectations” (qi) assumed in the first couplet of Qiu’s stanza 5. See also below, stanza 3 lines 5–6. 47 Here and in stanzas two and five, the hyperbole of “yesteryear” (xi) elevates their friendship by placing it in an idealized past. For qinxing (“asleep and awake”), see in particular Mao shi 128 小戎, where the speaker longs for the “virtuous voice” (deyin 德音) of the “good friend” (liangren 良人). 48 Que (“lacking,” here as wuque, a lack resolved) echoes line six of Qiu’s first stanza, treating Qiu as his Zhuangzi.

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Roiling and rushing, the banks of the Yangtze.49 Bound together, we became dear [friends]—50 Together with you, pacifying the difficulties. 王路威夷,戎役孔勤。昔從經略,方難之殷。 悠悠岱陰,滔滔江濆。綢繆成說,與子夷屯。

(Stanza 2)

The waters of the Yangtze were [long and] rolling indeed,51 Then there were waves, then it was still. And so we removed our armor in times of leisure,52 Smiles loosened our faces as we released [feelings of] sincerity. In [pursuit of] Truth, [we] devoted ourselves to the roots, In [mundane] matters, we paid solemn attention to [our] human experience of things.53 Oh how it was when we were toiling together, Truly we were close, [like] lifelong friends.54 江之泳矣,載瀾載清。俛冑時暇,解顏舒誠。 理既睦本,事亦敦情。永言契闊,實深平生。

(Stanza 3)

[But] from that point we separated from each other, The time came to part.55 49 “Roiling and rushing” appears three times in the Classic of Poetry, with a close parallel to this line in Mao shi 204 四月. 50 Choumou derives from the title of Mao shi 118 綢繆, an ode about the union of friends or lovers. Chengyue is from Mao shi 31 擊鼓, a battle poem. 51 This line is a near quote from Mao shi 9 漢廣 (where 泳, “rolling,” is written 永, “long,” but appears in the poem one line prior). Xie Lingyun uses a variation of the line twice in his four-syllable poetry and it is best regarded as a convenient classical allusion for poets living on the Yangtze, but there may also be a light allusion to the import of the original poem, which the Mao commentary associates with the spread of King Wen’s virtue. In that sense, the good auspices of Liu Yu have fostered their friendship. 52 Taking 俛 as 免, for the attested compound mianzhou. 53 This “human experience of things” (qing) is that mentioned in Qiu’s stanza 1 (line 2) and stanza 2 (line 8, rendered as “feeling”). 54 “Lifelong friends” (pingsheng) is a trope derived from Analects 14.12, commonly used in this sense in presentation and response poetry (e.g., in three poems by Xie Lingyun, see Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1154–56). 55 The language echoes Wang Can’s four-syllable presentation poem to Cai Mu 蔡睦 (Wen xuan 23.1103), which may already have been canonical at this time.

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And I truly was unworthy, Deeply sick for a full year.56 But who should remember me in his bosom? It was only you, my dear sir. And did you not indeed have the king’s business to do? Racing about ceaselessly on your mount.57 自茲乖互,屬有逝止。余實無良,沈痾彌祀。 孰是懷之,則惟吾子。豈微王事,驟駕無已。 58

(Stanza 4)

I begged off on account of my laggard state, But then I received such a succoring bounty:59 We came together in the ranks of the prominent, Sharing in the same official duties.60 Our pleasures of yesteryear, Thus were taken up again: I entrusted myself to the glow of your spring foliage, That brought comfort to this tumbleweed of autumn. 疲殆既謝,惠澤是逢。顯列斯偕,厥司攸同。 疇昔之歡,於焉克從。託曜春藻,慰此秋蓬。

(Stanza 5)

Yet though old pleasures were taken up, In the course of things dispersal did come,

56 Yang may be expressing deference by implying Mao shi 49 鶉之奔奔: “An unworthy [wu liang] man, / Yet I (here understood as Qiu) take him as my elder brother” 人之無良,我以為兄. “A full year” (mi si) might be “many a year.” 57 “The king’s business” (wang shi) appears in a number of poems in the Classic of Poetry, in the context of the hardships a loyal servant must suffer; see Mao shi 40, 121, 162, 167, 168, 169, 205. Driving one’s chariot is also a campaign figure in the Poetry, and Mao shi 162 has the toiling servant “racing” (zhou) to do the king’s bidding. 58 In line 7, the manuscript writes 徽 for 微. 59 I render this stanza and the one that follows as a narrative, but they might be read as the imagination of what a reunion might be like: “Were I to join you in the ranks of the prominent . . . Yet dispersal would come.” 60 The word xie (“come together”; also below at stanza 6, line 4) is generally associated with friendship in the Classic of Poetry (e.g., Mao shi 133 無衣, a paean to friendship) and used in this sense in medieval poetry (e.g. Cao Zhi’s poem to Cao Biao, see Wen xuan 24.1123; Xie Lingyun, Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 1155 stanza 8).

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And the joys of [reclusion in] hut-and-brook,61 Are not such that we might come together on regular days of rest.62 The winter days are harsh and hard, The gusting wind cold and sharp:63 [And I imagine you] facing your shadow [alone] in your flowery office—64 How could I but harbor longing in my bosom?65 雖則克從,遞來有乖。衡泌之娛,休沐末偕。 冬日烈烈,飄風淒[淒]。對影華署,如何勿懷。 66

(Stanza 6)

In those bosom thoughts I indeed have toiled, And I have [duly] gathered up [your] orchid remnants.67 You succor me with your fine words, Deep sincerity in your brush[strokes].68 I dare forget about the Thrice Broken—

61 “Hut-and-brook” (hengbi) is drawn from Mao shi 134 橫門, which describes reclusion in a hut with a single-plank (heng) door, by a babbling (bi) spring. 62 “Regular days of rest” is literally days for “rest and washing” (xiumu). One day of five in the Han dynasty, it is uncertain how such vacation days were apportioned in this period. 63 These two lines are very close to a couplet in Mao shi 204 四月: “The winter days are harsh and hard, / The gusting wind whooshing” 冬日烈烈,飄風發發; qiqi (“cold and sharp”) appears in the parallel couplet of the poem’s preceding stanza. Thus Yang may be comparing himself to the forlorn speaker of that poem, and alluding to the contrasting figures with which Mao shi 204 closes, a bird flying high and a fish lingering in a pond—common medieval figures for official service (here, Qiu) and reclusion (Yang). These contrasting figures are made explicit in the use of this allusion in Wang Can’s poem to Cai Mu (Wen xuan 23.1103). 64 “Flowery office” (huashu) is apparently unattested, but there are a number of similar terms dating to the Tang, including “jade office” yushu 玉署, “cloud office” yunshu 雲 署, and “fragrant office” xiangshu 香署. See the related “leisurely office” (xianshu) in Qiu stanza 2. 65 Here and in line one of the following stanza, the subject may be Qiu: you long for me. 66 The final character of line 6 (qi) has dropped out of the manuscript. 67 “Orchid” is a figure for a poem received in a Pan Ni 潘尼 (247?–311?) poem to Lu Ji (Wen xuan 24.1158; Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 764 stanza 6), and ji is used in the sense of “collect your righteous advice” in a reply from Sun Chuo to Xu Xun (Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 900 stanza 9). That is, your poem, which of course is no replacement for the person, who is the full “orchid.” 68 Lu Qinli follows an emendation of “sincerity” (cheng 誠) to the graphically similar “admonition” ( jie 誡).

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I shall reverently brood upon the Five Difficulties [instead].69 I will take your gift, my gentleman, And read it over and again, into the year’s cold end.70 懷亦勤止,戢此餘蘭。惠以好言,深誠在翰。 敢忘三折,敬思五難。君子攸贈,復之歲寒。 3

(Stanza 7)

The Poets

Given the length of these poems a brief summary may be helpful. Qiu Yuanzhi’s presentation poem begins with an affirmation of the friends’ intimate bond (stanza 1), and stanza two relates their shared experience in the political realm. The third stanza finds the recipient in reclusion, and in the fourth he is described as ill. In stanza five he is encouraged to return—to good health and, as I will explain below, to government service. The sixth and final stanza relays the writer’s hope for a letter poem in response. The response poem follows a parallel progression, starting from their ethereal friendship (stanza 1) and continuing to recount their shared experience (stanzas 2 and 3). The fourth stanza has Yang taking leave on account of illness. The narrative of the ensuing two stanzas is not entirely clear, but by the interpretation I have adopted here Yang has returned to office (stanza 5) before again leaving for a life of determined 69 Gan can mean “dare” or “dare [not],” but the point of this couplet is the shift from Qiu’s “Five Virtues” (stanza 6) to the “Five Difficulties” here. The “Five Difficulties” of selfcultivation are described by the third-century philosopher-poet Xi Kang 嵇康 (223–262) as extinguishing one’s interest in worldly fame and profit, eradicating the emotions, doing away with pleasures of music and sensuality, eschewing rich foods, and finally dispersing all worry; see Quan Sanguo wen 48.8b. These “five difficulties” appear elsewhere in period literature (e.g. Fu Liang’s essay at Song shu 43.1339, and Jiang Yan’s poem at Wen xuan 31.1470), but Hasegawa (Tōshin, 453) connects this line to a political “five difficulties” (of lacking the advisors, leaders, plans, followers, and virtue that an aspiring ruler needs to successfully take the throne) from Zuozhuan Zhao 13, see Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, 1350–53. This seems unlikely. 70 “The year’s cold end” alludes to Analects 9.27, where the “true colors” of the gentleman only show when the times are most difficult: “Only when the year reaches its cold end do you see how the pines and cypresses are the last to wither away” 歲寒,然後知松 柏之後彫也. The implication is that both poets are gentlemen. For reading it “over and again” (here fu) as a characteristic part of the “epistolary experience,” see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 130–32. It is also a common motif in “presentation and response” poetry.

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reclusion (stanza 6). In the final stanza Yang thanks Qiu for his letter, while courteously resisting his entreaties. The basic historical background can be summed up in briefest fashion. In the late fourth century the Eastern Jin court reached its nadir. Factionalism opened a path to power for Huan Xuan 桓玄 (369–404), who established his own ephemeral new dynasty in 403–4. Huan was immediately deposed by one Liu Yu 劉裕 (363–422), a middle (or lower-middle) elite figure who restored the Jin in name and spent the following fifteen years gradually building his own dynastic credentials. Liu’s Song dynasty was established in 420 and would last sixty years. Both our poets were involved in his rise to power. Qiu Yuanzhi 丘淵之 (after 370–after 433) was a native of Wucheng 烏程 district in Wuxing 吳興 prefecture.71 On the south bank of Lake Tai, Wuxing was a key region in the increasingly rich lower Yangtze delta, the hub of a wheel that included Wu 吳, a wealthy old southern prefecture, to the east; Guiji 會稽, also wealthy and featuring a mix of prominent northern émigré families, to the southeast; Jinling 晉陵 prefecture, where northern émigré families constituted a majority, to the north; and the capital area to the west. Directly south offered access to the seclusion of the scenic mountains of the Zhe 浙 river valley. The Qiu family of Wuxing does not enter the historical record until the late fourth century, but the earliest record is informative: a member of the clan, one Qiu Wang 丘尫, joined the messianic rebellion of Sun En 孫恩 (d. 402) and was made “prefect of Wuxing” by Sun. Qiu Wang’s head was sent to the capital the following year, but the fact that he was given charge of his home area likely reflects the Qiu clan’s local clout.72 Around the turn of the century there is mention of “Director of the Palace Library Qiu Jizu” 秘書監丘繼祖, the context making clear that he was a notable in the Wuxing area.73 Of perhaps more significance is a record of one Qiu Huan 丘洹 helping Liu Yu’s faction attack the character of Liu Yi 劉毅 (d. 412), the rival general, in 411—not 71 Cao Daoheng and Shen Yucheng’s biographical dictionary (Cao and Shen, Zhongguo wenxuejia, 81) suggests a date of death past 433, based on a reference to the death of Xie Lingyun in a catalog attributed to Qiu. His birth date is unknown, but from Yang’s response poem (stanza 5) we learn that he was younger than Yang, who was born sometime after 370. 72 Jin shu 100.2632; Song shu 100.2445. That they continued as a local power is suggested by the court’s recruitment of a certain Qiu Xian 丘顯 to put down a rebellion in the area in 424; see Song shu 52.1504. 73 Song shu 91.2248. This is the grandfather of the late fifth-century literatus Qiu Lingju 丘靈鞠.

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long before our exchange of poems took place.74 These data, however slight, suggest that the Qiu clan, or at least some of its members, had one foot in the enclave of Wuxing and one in the middle rungs of officialdom, and the case of Qiu Huan suggests that by 411 some members of the family at least were aligning themselves with Liu Yu. Qiu Yuanzhi was among them. The History of Song’s (Song shu 宋書) very brief biographical note simply groups Qiu Yuanzhi with several other southerners who achieved prominence in the Liu-Song, his eminence attributed solely to the “patronage obligations” ( jiu’en 舊恩, lit. “former kindnesses”) he acquired in the service of Liu Yilong 劉義隆, the future Emperor Wen 文帝 (407–452; r. 424–52).75 It is certainly true that Qiu’s high offices after 424—including a small fief and posthumous honors as “Grand Master for Splendid Happiness” (guanglu dafu 光祿大夫)76—were due to the relationship he established with Yilong in 417, when the prince was stationed in Pengcheng and Qiu served as his Senior Aide (zhangshi 長史). But Liu Yilong was eleven years old (sui) in 417, and Senior Aide is not an entry level appointment. The biographical note’s omission of any official career for Qiu’s father and grandfather may mean that they never held significant office, but Qiu certainly had experience in officialdom before 417, and he had distinguished himself enough to be handpicked by Liu Yu for a responsible position in the northern campaign’s base camp, with a precious ward in his care. Our poem can serve as evidence from Qiu’s earlier service under Liu Yu, where his literary talents were evidently put to use drafting documents (see Qiu’s stanza 6).77 The addressee of Qiu’s poem, and author of the response, is one Yang Hui 羊徽 (after 370–before 420).78 Yang was a native of Taishan 泰山, originally a 74 Song shu 64.1695. 75 Song shu 81.2078–79. 76 The posthumous honors are mentioned his Song shu biography, the fief in an alternative Song shu quoted in the Jiatai Wuxing zhi (Gazetteer of Wuxing from the Jiatai reign [1201–4], 16.34b). 77 It is strange that the historian, Shen Yue, who had a distinct interest in literature, does not here note that Qiu was the author of a bibliography of Eastern Jin literary collections, the “Record of New Collections” Xinji lu 新集錄 (cited in Shishuo xinyu commentary; see Shishuo xinyu jianshu 2.108). It is possible, however, that Qiu’s literary endeavors are the reason for his being given any mention at all here. The alternate Song shu mentioned above claims a collection in 100 scrolls, perhaps indicating a version of the Xinji lu as an anthology; the Sui shu catalog (35.1072) lists his collection as 15 scrolls in the Liang, a respectably sized individual corpus. On Qiu’s works, see Cao and Shen, Zhonggu wenxue shiliao, 352–54 and 370–71. 78 Song shu 62.1662.

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prefecture near its namesake mountain on the Shandong peninsula but relocated to the south as a “lodged” unit in the Jingkou 京口 (modern Zhenjiang) area, a key garrison on the south bank of the Yangtze, downriver from the capital. In contrast to the Wuxing Qiu, the Taishan Yang was a prominent clan with old connections to the Jin court. Yang Hu 羊祜 (221–278) was a grandson of Cai Yong and brother-in-law to Sima Shi 司馬師 (the court power in the 250s, posthumously recognized as the Jin Emperor Jing), and the family established an empress for Emperor Hui (r. 291–306). A number of Yang family members appear at the side of Emperor Yuan (r. 317–23), the first Jin emperor in the south, and the family was related to Wang Dun 王敦 (266–324), a powerful figure early in the transition.79 But perhaps because of the relation to Wang Dun, a loser in those initial power struggles, or perhaps because they never sufficiently fortified themselves in the émigré world, by the middle of the fourth century the Yang are no longer a family of any particular prominence. Yang Hui’s grandfather was a palace official and his father rose to prefect (taishou 太守), “upper middle-class” jobs that were likely integrated into much richer lives that our sources are unable to relay to us. We know little of Yang Hui’s first thirty years. Passing over his entry into officialdom in silence, Yang’s biographical note says only that he was “recognized” (beiyu 被遇, another patronage term) by Liu Yu sometime after 405 and served as his “secretarial adjutant” ( jishi canjun 記室參軍, an upper staff position for men with literary skill) early in Liu Yu’s rise.80 In 415, or perhaps as early as 412, Yang was assigned an important posting in the secretariat, in charge of drafting documents for the imperial court.81 Sometime around 418 he was placed on the staff of Liu Yilong, Qiu Yuanzhi’s patron, then twelve years old and regional commander of Jingzhou 荊州 (modern Hubei area). He might well have been there together with Qiu. By 420 he was dead.82 What, then, was the relationship of these two poets? Two rather different views can be admitted. A contrastive view will see Qiu as a southerner from a family with no national reputation, while Yang hailed from a northern émigré 79 Wang’s mother was a Yang. 80 On the prestige of the position of Secretarial Adjutant, see Tongdian 20.524. 81 Yang’s biography says that this appointment occurred in 412, but the biography of Fu Liang 傅亮 (375–426) puts it at 415; see Song shu 43.1336, and Cao and Shen, Zhonggu wenxue shiliao, 253, for a discussion of relevant materials. As the more detailed account, Fu’s biography is more likely correct, and there is an easy explanation for the error: there were Yangtze river campaigns in both years. It is also likely that the historical record does not fully reflect the complexity of Yang’s political career. 82 We know Yang died before the foundation of the Liu-Song because he is listed as a Jin figure both in our manuscript and in the Sui shu bibliography (35.1070).

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family of high pedigree. No member of the Qiu family was praised for their talents by illustrious members of the Wang and Xie clans, but several Yang received this cultural imprimatur, including Yang Hui’s older brother Yang Xin 羊欣 (370–442), a celebrated eremite of whom more will be said below.83 Perhaps most tellingly, our sources state clearly that from the beginnings of his ascent Liu Yu sought to cultivate the two Yang brothers, while Qiu’s associations with Liu Yu go entirely unmentioned. On this view, Yang Hui’s family background gave him a certain “cultural capital,” and Qiu’s poem to Yang looks very much like an appeal, on Liu Yu’s behalf, to a figure of higher status. The poems’ profession of an intimate friendship may even appear contrived. From another point of view, however, many factors mitigate against taking Yang’s family prestige as a decisive indicator of his standing in society and vis-à-vis Qiu. Fame is never as weighty as it presents itself to be. All the famed clans were filled with quite ordinary families and family members; the famed members of those clans participated in many ordinary activities; and as a token passed around in period discourse the famous person was not necessarily better off than the ordinary one. More specifically, we have seen that Qiu’s family was probably well established, perhaps even eminent, in its home region, and that the eminence of Yang’s family was rooted in an ever more distant past. Whatever deference we find in Qiu’s poem may be better explained by the fact that Qiu was the younger of the two than by any salient difference in social station. Nor should we assume that “northerners” and “southerners” necessarily experienced decisively different social realities in this time, roughly a century after the former’s flight from their old homeland.84 One piece of evidence even suggests a direct social connection between the two men: Yang’s father, Yang Buyi 羊不疑, served as magistrate of Wucheng, Qiu Yuanzhi’s hometown, for a period beginning in 381. From an anecdote in Yang Xin’s biography we may infer that the family settled there, and Yang Xin’s long association with the prefecture of Xin’an 新安, a scenic spot in the Zhe river valley, south of Wuxing,

83 See Song shu 62.1661–62. Additionally, a sister of Xie An, the preeminent cultural figure of the mid-fourth century, married a Yang and Xie was said to have shown special attachment to his nephew Yang Tan 羊曇 ( Jin shu 79.2077). 84 The gulf between the “southerners” (themselves immigrants from the north a few centuries prior) and the “northerners” (those who fled south in the early 4th c.) is a commonplace in southern dynasties sources. While modern scholarship has generally emphasized the realities of this distinction, I view it as a discourse based on a much more complicated set of facts.

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suggests that they may well have remained in the area.85 This local connection may have provided a basis for the friendship narrated in our poems. To recapitulate, from a sociological perspective Yang Hui may have had a certain prestige that Qiu lacked, but from a cultural perspective the two men very possibly belonged to the same world. It may be best to combine these two views. In this way, our poem exchange reflects both the contrast, with Qiu Yuanzhi helping Liu Yu lure a valued gentry family to his cause, and the commonality, with Qiu and Yang affirming friendship and shared ideals. Indeed, it would be very difficult to separate these two strands: gentry prestige was a birthright only because it was assumed that a good member of a good family upheld good cultural ideals shared by all good men. The poem exchange is a testament to these shared ideals. 4

In the Space of Separation: Intimacy and the State

By identifying separation as a “formative cause,” we stress the fact that the “space of separation” is not just a space created by separation but a space in which separation itself has a presence. What develops in this space does so not in a vacuum, but in interaction with separation, the essential quality of the space. Here I identify two key themes in the poem, intimacy and the state, and show how they are developed in this way. Affirmation of the poets’ intimate bond is central to the purpose of this poem exchange. That intimacy can be and is stated outright, as when Yang Hui repeatedly (stanzas 1, 4, 6, and 7) speaks of their mutual “longing” (huai), but the power of the letter poem resides rather in the structuring of this longing within the epistolary space of separation. We can identify two key “separations” of intimacy in the exchange. The first occurs in the opening stanzas, where Qiu speaks of the “ethereal” nature of their bond, and Yang requites in kind. This is a permanent connection, but also one that is infinitely distant from the human world in which they live, and in both opening stanzas this spiritual unity is explicitly paired with physical separation in the human realm. In Qiu’s poem, ideal unity and physical separation are neatly balanced, two couplets given to each. In Yang’s response the transition comes immediately—cosmic truth acknowledged in the first line, the limitations of human experience announced in the second—but balance is preserved in the end of that stanza, 85 The family of Wang Shaozhi 王韶之 (380–435), a contemporary of similar background and career trajectory, settled in Wucheng when his father served there; see Song shu 60.1625.

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where he imagines their reunion. Qiu establishes the separation. Yang sees it through to the fantasy of reunion, “sublime” (Qiu) and “complete” (Yang). The great fault of an ethereal bond is a narrative one, that there is no room for development. For this, human experience is necessary, and this is the site of the second separation of intimacy: between the leisure in which friendship is enjoyed and the hardship in which it takes shape. This separated space is outlined clearly in Qiu’s second stanza, where “leisure” (xian 閑) is raised in line one and paired with “toil” (qikuo 契闊) in line two. In the remainder of the stanza they dwell in this space, the hardships of cold and heat providing circumstance for shared enjoyment, the frosts they tread forging the “depth” of their bond. This is the world not of leisure but of qikuo, a poetic word that can convey both time apart and time together. Yang likewise anchors his depiction of their time together (stanza 3) in the balance of leisure and hardship— the “leisure” (here xia 暇) found in the pauses of battle. Echoing Qiu, Yang observes the “depth” derived from their time “toiling together” (qikuo again), and throughout both poems the balance of leisure and hardship swings hard toward the latter—in addition to qikuo, both poets refer twice to a “toiling” of the heart (qin 勤, Qiu stanzas 4, 6, Yang stanzas 2, 7). This is because while leisure is an ideal space in human experience, the space where friendship is enjoyed, in the mundane world it is hardship that provides the “deep” common experience that catalyzes the development of friendship, and in the fantastic space of letters it, stripped of the realities of hardship, becomes its own leisurely space. Whence this hardship and toil? Surely, from their activities and their thoughts, but what is the more general cause? It is the state, the second major theme in these poems. Although it is certainly true that the prominence of dynastic politics in medieval Chinese historiography can blind us to the social diversities of the period,86 that prominence is not a distortion but an index of the immense ideological and practical importance of the state in elite life. In these poems, the state is the most important ground of intimacy, and like intimacy it is animated by the space of separation of the letter poem. Two specific mechanisms of separation, illness and eremitism, serve to inflate this notion of the state. Illness is the mundane mechanism. A common topic in early medieval letters and early medieval poetry generally,87 illness was a key facet of medieval 86 For a strong critique of modern scholarship’s tendency to over-emphasize the role of the state in this period, see Lewis, China Between Empires, 45. 87 On its pervasive presence in early medieval letters, see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 90–92.

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elite culture because it practically facilitated the individual’s disengagement from the state. Illness is a personal kind of separation, the separation of the body from the state of good health, that produces social separation. Its consequences can be dire, but functionally it is a positive, positioning the individual between the complications of an engaged life and the null simplicity of death. This function is on plain display in our poems, where illness is given as a reason for Yang’s absence from state service. Looking more closely, we find across the pair of poems an elegant structural development of the topic. “You have fallen ill,” states Qiu in his fourth stanza, continuing, “And I, through worry, grow old.” As before, the two men share hardship, albeit in separation. Illness has taken Yang away from state service. Worry and rapid aging, Qiu’s sympathetic reaction, mimic illness, and such sympathy brings Qiu closer to Yang in spirit. Thus drawn toward Yang’s life in reclusion, Qiu is granted an abstract degree of removal from the state. Here we find a central tension of letter writing—that the special space of the letter exchange is predicated on the desire to close the state of separation that in fact informs that space. Proceeding from this ideal “bond of separation” of illness and worry, Qiu arrives at a logical but unsatisfactory resolution in his fifth stanza: Yang will recover from illness and, by implication direct or indirect, rejoin Qiu in public life. Rather than unsatisfactory, we might call this resolution provisional, a foil for Yang’s perfect response. When Yang broaches the topic of illness, in his stanza four, he pairs it not with Qiu’s worry but with the latter’s continued toil in the service of the state, “racing about on his mount.” This creates a bond of hardship, but differently valorized, with Qiu firmly identified with the state. This disparity is maintained through the end of the poem, as Yang replaces focus on illness with his dedication to the eremite’s life (stanza 7, lines 5–6). The space is maintained. The recluse is immune to cures. And this is the second mechanism at work here. Illness can be described as a distance from physical health, or the ordered state of the body, that facilitates distance from the state. Eremitism is distance from the state, or the realization of an ordered society.88 Like illness, reclusion can have serious consequences (death for the ill, the penury of one’s family for the recluse), but symbolically it is also a positive. Like illness, the life of reclusion puts one just on the margins of the world, apart from it but within it. This is the perfect balance between the tendency to close the space of separation and the need to sustain, on display in these poems. 88 For an introduction to the Chinese eremitic tradition, see Vervoorn, Men of the Cliffs and Caves. Briefly put, the lofty moral ideals to which the Chinese eremite dedicates himself are presumed to preclude normal participation in the dusty world of politics.

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The dynamics of reclusion here are best understood by going “outside” the poem, to an aspect of the poems’ biographical background omitted from the discussion above—the life of Yang Hui’s brother Yang Xin. The History of Song’s brief biographical note on Yang Hui is in fact a short appendix to the biography of Yang Xin. In that biographical note, Yang Hui receives the backhanded compliment that “his renown amongst his contemporaries (shi yu) was greater than Yang Xin’s” 世譽多欣, and Yang Xin’s biography has Liu Yu remark that while Yang Hui is “a fine ‘vessel’ suitable to current times” 一時美器, “contemporary opinion” 世論 reserves greater esteem for Yang Xin.89 According to the historiography, whatever fame Yang Hui enjoyed was an alloyed sort, in the shadow of his brother’s purity. In our poem exchange, by contrast, the image of Yang Hui is precisely that of Yang Xin in the history, the lofty eremite too ill to be burdened with the duties of governance. The actual story of Yang Xin is hardly so pure, and this side of the eremite also sheds light on our poem exchange. His biography pointedly emphasizes his ability to keep a distance from the factional disorders of the late 390s, but it is apparent that he was active in the political world. During Huan Xuan’s momentary rise, Yang Xin joined in his cause, serving as his chief of staff (zhubu 主簿), and in this capacity it is said that “he was involved in [Huan’s] major decisions” 參預機要. Elsewhere we learn that a number of other Yang were associated with Huan Xuan, including their cousins Yang Fu 羊孚 and Yang Xuanbao 羊玄保.90 Whether or not Yang Hui was himself drawn into Huan Xuan’s enterprise (the sources are silent), the memory of his family’s unfortunate experience may have fed the reticence he expresses in our poem exchange. The account of this episode in Yang Xin’s biography provides important context for our poems: [However,] wishing to distance himself from Huan, Yang would at times let secret information leak out. [But] Huan Xuan understood what Yang’s intentions were and valued him even more highly. [Thus] Huan appointed him Director of Palace Affairs on the Secretariat of his Chu [shadow] cabinet, saying to him: “The Secretariat is the root of all matters of governance, and Music and Rites[, the most fundamental basis of governance,] issue forth from the Director of Palace Affairs. You have been 89 Song shu 62.1662. The reference to a “fine vessel” is an allusion to Analects 2.12, by which Liu Yu, and/or our historiography, suggests that Yang Hui is not a true gentleman. 90 On Yang Fu’s relations with the powers of the day, see Shishuo xinyu jianshu 2.104, 2.105, 4.62, 17.18, 22.6. The heir of the Western Jin statesman Yang Hu also had his family fief revoked for his associations with Huan; see Jin shu 34.1024.

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acting as my right-hand man, but this indeed is a more weighty posting.” Yang took the office and resigned it after a few days, on grounds of illness. He then secluded himself in the wards and alleys [of private life], not emerging for more than ten years. 欣欲自疏,時漏密事,玄覺其此意,愈重之,以為楚臺殿中 郎。謂曰:「尚書政事之本,殿中禮樂所出。卿昔處股肱,方 此為輕也。」欣拜職少日,稱病自免,屏居里巷,十餘年不 出。 91 The courteous historiography makes no mention of Huan Xuan’s fall, and Huan Xuan, according to this telling, is not angered by Yang Xin’s betrayal. The historiography’s claim that Huan “valued him even more highly” (yu zhong zhi) may specifically refer to Huan’s estimation of Yang as an individual, but its greater referent is something quite different: Huan saw even more symbolic value in Yang than he had before and he undertook to better utilize that value within the political culture of the time. In the immaculate choreography of that culture, Huan moves Yang from a position of real consequence, chief of staff, to an ideal one that satisfies both parties. Huan gains a prominent name on his shadow cabinet and asserts his acknowledgment of the legitimizing powers of “ritual and music,” while Yang is able to move to a position in which he is in charge of nothing and from which he can easily extricate himself in an affirmation of his personal integrity. His means of extrication, illness, are exactly those deployed in our poem exchange. Furthermore, the relationship of Yang Xin and Huan Xuan functions as a model for that of Yang Hui and Liu Yu a decade later: the courtier distinguishes himself by distancing himself from the political power of the day, who in turn seeks creative means to reattach the courtier to his cause. Qiu Yuanzhi’s poem may and indeed should represent his own personal testament, but it is also a means of granting Yang Hui the ideal existence that historiography would bestow upon his elder brother, and bringing that idealized personage into Liu Yu’s fold. The passage quoted above quietly adumbrates Yang’s return to state service, and “ten years later” corresponds to the same period from which our poems date. Emerging from seclusion to accept a variety of positions given him by Liu Yu, but only with due reticence, the History of Song places Yang Xin’s biography in a chapter with two other high-minded—perhaps even haughty— men whose presence both challenged and lent luster to the young Liu-Song

91 Song shu 62.1662. The association of the Director of Palace Affairs with ritual knowledge is also evident in Jin shu 51.1435–36.

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dynasty. The culmination of his career was an irregular appointment to the scenic prefecture of Xin’an, which he held for thirteen years, and when he was finally transferred to a more mundane post he petitioned for release, claiming “severe illness.” Continuing his life apart from society, he was renowned—his biography tells us—for appreciation of landscape, studies in the Dao, calligraphy, and pharmaceutical knowledge.92 When he travelled, he never entered the town walls. Though they appointed him to numerous offices, he refused to appear at court and neither Liu Yu nor Liu Yilong ever met him in person. Returning now to our poems, in Qiu’s third stanza we find this eremitic ideal represented in perfect balance with the state. While the two couplets of the stanza’s first half extol the sovereignty of the state, newly reinvigorated under Liu Yu’s stewardship, the second half of the stanza turns to a different kind of sovereignty: the “limpidity and excellence” (zhan hui 湛徽, to allow Yang Hui’s wine and zither to stand for his character) of the eremite. What then is the quality of the space between these two halves of the stanza? Does it separate, or stitch together? In one sense, it is a chasm between two opposing forces, the state and the non-serving subject. The “king’s path” that Yang himself invokes in his second stanza bridges all distances except this one. Yet in another sense, the gap is the generic essence that unites the two sides of the stanza as a matching pair. The establishment of imperial order is not merely a matter of putting the peasants back to work, the figure Qiu deploys here. That is a mere “property” of good governance. Lasting order, or true sovereignty, comes only when governance is established on some ideal, and the “space of eremitism” in the middle of the stanza is a formal cause for both the hermit in the second half and the ideology of sovereignty in the first half. The legitimate state is defined as a government grounded in the moral order, the eremite as the man who best preserves (and symbolizes) that order, and in the letter poem these two ideals are brought into suspended separation. 5

A Public Space

This essay has attempted to advance the following view. With parting as a “formative” moment, the presentation-response poem (or its four-syllable variety) opens up a “space of separation.” Separation has its own ideal value, conditioning the themes that are developed in that space. Intimacy is the point of departure in our poems, and their ostensible end. Developed in that space, 92 For a translation and discussion of one of Yang Xin’s prose letters, transmitted as a calligraphic specimen, see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 146–48.

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intimacy gains its power from distances ethereal and mundane. The locus of the mundane is the state, which has in turn its own presence in the space of separation. Practically through illness and ideally through eremitism, the individual distances himself from the state, and the latter distance affirms the moral standard in which the state grounds its legitimacy. This view will now be pursued two steps further. Intimacy and the state both take shape in spaces of separation, but they do so as a connected pair. As such, they are projected on a new space of separation, and this space has its own atmospheric quality. I account for it in this section as a public space. The conclusion will treat this public space as an essential quality of the poetic aspect of the Chinese letter poem. Early medieval letters were, in the words of one recent study, “commonly seen as public documents, and it was expected that these letters would circulate more widely.”93 In our exchange we can identify three specific points at which such a public space is opened up within the poems. The first is the title of the presentation poem, “Presented to Secretarial [Adjutant] Yang Hui, Who Is Ill and Abroad.” While we cannot say with absolute certainty that the title is original to the poem, there are strong indications from contemporary poets (Tao Yuanming, Xie Lingyun) that titles and prefaces (our “title” might be a short title with a prefatory note) providing contextual information were becoming a part of the poetic tradition. As the use of the third person pronoun (qi 其, here translated as “who”) suggests, the “addressee” of this heading is not the poem’s recipient, or not just him, but some broader community to whom this letter would constitute testimony. This frames the poem as a public document, a “superposition of private communication and public exhibition,” the poets positioning themselves not only toward each other but toward society at large.94 This public frame prompts us to read the poem’s subject matter from a different perspective. The basic posture adopted here, deference, has the poets deferring to one another’s good characters, and Yang deferring in the face of a call to service, but from the perspective of a readership at large this deference has more significance, placing the two men in a hoary cultural tradition of political deference—the practice of rang 讓—that stretched back to the legendary sage kings Yao and Shun. In Qiu and Yang’s own age, their demonstration of rang would have connected them to their community, where 93 Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter Writing in Han and Six Dynasties China,” 16; also on this point Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 42–43. See also the essay by Pablo Blitstein in this volume. 94 Quotation from Guillén, “On the Edge of Literariness,” 7.

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declining office was a regular practice even when the office (as here) was going to be accepted, and more particularly to the rise of Liu Yu, who was practicing rang at every step of the way in his ascent, and whose demonstration of rang would require exchanges of decorous edicts and memorials composed by “ghostwriter” documentarians—a cohort that included Yang and probably Qiu as well. Here they are composing a more personal, yet equally public, set of documents. Yang gets to play emperor, as the reticently ascending dynastic founder plays the eremite. A second emergence of public space occurs with the delivery of and response to the didactic message in the poems’ closing stanzas. The key term here is “five virtues” (wu de; Qiu stanza 5). On a personal level, the five virtues refer to some set of moral qualities an individual ought to cultivate.95 Such moral self cultivation, however, is not exactly a private affair, as these are moral qualities with which a good servant of state will better the world. The “five difficulties” (wu nan) Yang substitutes in his reply (stanza 7) are, by contrast, aspects of self-cultivation that take the individual deeper into the eremite’s domain, away from state service. Extinguishing one’s interest in worldly fame does not coincide with a political career. On a philosophical level, the contrast between the two is clearer still. The most common medieval usage of “five virtues” occurs in the context of dynastic legitimacy, where they are associated with the cosmic trends (the “five elements,” wu xing) that lead to the rise and fall of imperial lines.96 Working on behalf of Liu Yu, Qiu Yuanzhi is calling on Yang Hui to rejoin the “revival” of the Jin—or to participate, as both men indeed would, in the imperial mandate’s transfer to a new caretaker. Citing the recluse’s “five difficulties,” Yang insistently preserves his personal integrity in the face of the vicissitudes of an age of disorder. For the time being—for here we may recall the political circumstances of the age. From the very beginnings of his rise to power, with the overthrow of Huan Xuan in 404, Liu Yu sought to establish authority over the official ranks. In 407 he took full control of the capital region, exterminating the old order of court powers. In 411 he asserted suzerainty over unheeding gentry in the empire’s rich and powerful southeast, and in the same year awarded himself the right to examine the qualifications 95 The Hanyu da cidian, the most comprehensive modern dictionary, offers at least three possibilities, the most likely reference being Analects 1.10—though the qualities are not there labeled “five virtues.” 96 For a representative example, see Zuo Si’s 左思 (252?–306?) “Rhapsody on the Wei Capital,” Wen xuan 6.286–87, and Knechtges, tr. Wen xuan, 463. For examples in four-syllable verse, see Wen xuan 20.953, Lu Qinli, Xian Qin Han Wei, 838, and Quan Jin wen 94.7a and 146.5b.

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of all appointees to the imperial bureaucracy. In 412 he vanquished his only legitimate rival, Liu Yi, and the court faction that had supported him, and in 413 he ordered the re-registration of the empire’s population, a sign of total dominance. When, in 415, he successfully challenged the remnant powers of the Jin imperial family, the writing was on the wall for all forward-looking gentry to read.97 This is the fabric of public events on which our poem exchange was written. As suggested in the excerpt of Sun Chuo’s banquet poem given earlier in this essay, four-syllable exchange poetry was supposed to contain a didactic message, to delight and instruct. That, perhaps, was what was to distinguish it as poetry, as opposed to pure eulogy. This message is a fundamentally public one in two senses. First, ethical admonition marks the poem as public property by providing a respectable horizon toward which the two participants, and their audience, can share a dignified gaze. The good toward which the recipient is directed is a common good, and when Yang responds with an eremite’s recalcitrance he is affirming himself as public exemplar of a recognized moral tradition. Second, the handling of the didactic portion is an opportunity for the public display of the wit and craftsmanship that constitute the literary courtier’s stock in trade. Qiu admonishes with a velvet glove, and Yang shows himself capable of deftly shifting the grounds of debate to his own space.98 Working in concert, Yang and Qiu put on a refined literary performance of the eremitic space of separation described above. Finally, there is a moment in which the public enters into the poetic narrative itself. Allusion to historical or legendary figures in Chinese poetry can generally be said to be a way of binding poet and reader together in a transtemporal cultural community, but in Qiu’s poem the figure of the “Two Zhong” (stanza 3) has a more specific effect. The Han dynasty recluses who are depicted as following Yang into “retreat” (gui, “return,” a related ideal space of separation) may stand for actual people known to the two poets, or even for the men delivering Qiu’s letter. More generally, however, they also stand as figures for any reader of the poem who has the good fortune to associate with a lofty man like Yang. The narrative presence of a public again takes the poem out of the hands of Qiu and Yang and delivers it into the broader community, 97 See Song shu 1.9 (straightening the post-Huan Xuan court), 1.14 (execution of remaining Huan faction), 2.27–28 (suppression of Guiji gentry), 2.28 (defeat of Liu Yi and associates), 2.29–30 (re-registration order), 2.31–35 (defeat of Sima Xiuzhi). 98 The final stanza of Lu Ji’s response to Pan Yue 潘岳 (247–300) and Jia Mi 賈謐 (d. 300) features a similar if perhaps more antagonistic riposte; see Knechtges, “Sweet-Peel Orange,” 36–42.

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where it stands as a manifold testament: to Yang’s lofty character, to Qiu’s ability to appreciate and care for his friend, to the ideal relationship they profess, to their literary prowess, and finally as a eulogy for anyone in their readership who is able to share in their appreciation of the ideals expressed therein. In sum, these poems are not “private” letters but public pronouncements, just as calligraphy (the “brushwork” in Yang’s final stanza) of the time was a public representation of something taken to be the very essence of the personal. Suspended in the space of separation, the relation of the correspondents is not simply their relation, but a relation on display. The value of a pair of letters lies in the inherently public space between that makes them a pair.



The approach of this essay to the pair of letter poems in question has been epistolary, rather than poetic, because the “space of separation” held to have informed the poems is an essentially epistolary quality. In conclusion, I turn briefly to the other side of the question. In what sense has poetry informed these poems, or the medieval Chinese letter poem generally? The most salient point of overlap between letter and poem is the basically public nature of the early medieval letter, discussed above. This is an epistolary phenomenon insofar as a public relationship is established between two correspondents, but it is also a poetic one. In a narrow sense, the specific contribution of “poetry” to the four-syllable Chinese letter poem includes two technical aspects: the use of stanzas, which shape the narrative in a predictable fashion that enables readers to accommodate “poetic” elisions; and the use of isometric lines, which give the letter a declamatory rhythm with deep roots in classical learning, canonical poetry, and formal court speech. Poetry’s more significant contribution to this space of fantasy, however, derives from the most influential conception in Chinese poetics—that poetry is the use of figured language in the public presentation of the normative self.99 Thus, the poetic element in presentation and response poetry serves as a “warrant” on the truth of the letters’ testimony, and adds cultural value to the letters by formulating them in the most honored voice of emotional expression. Where the epistolary process lends the poetry rhetorical focus and offers an effective means for “publication” to contemporary society, the poem as a poem is a public act that guarantees and enhances the display of normative values, lending gravity to the “fantastic” possibilities of the space of separation. This is Poetry, Shi with a capital “S”—in the great 99 My gloss of shi yan zhi 詩言志, “poetry voices intention,” the canonical “definition” of poetry from the Classic of Documents (Shang shu zhengyi 3.26a 舜典).

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tradition of The Classic of Poetry (Shijing 詩經). As much ideal as it is art, in this sense Poetry is indeed a kind of letter, constituting its own separate space. Bibliography Abe Ryūichi 阿部隆一 et al., ed. Bunkan shirin: Ei Kōnin bon 文館詞林:影弘仁本. Compiled by Xu Jingzong 許敬宗 (592–672). Tokyo: Koten kenkyūkai, 1969. Cao Daoheng 曹道衡 and Shen Yucheng 沈玉成. Zhonggu wenxue shiliao congkao 中 古文學史料叢考. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003. ―――. Zhongguo wenxuejia dacidian: Xian-Qin Han Wei Jin nanbeichao juan 中國文 學家大辭典:先秦漢魏晉南北朝卷. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996. Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu 春秋左傳注. Edited by Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 (1909–1992). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990. Guillén, Claudio. “On the Edge of Literariness: The Writing of Letters.” Comparative Literature Studies 31.1 (1994), 1–24. Hasegawa Shigenari 長谷川滋成. Tōshin shi yakuchū 東晉詩訳注. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1994. Jiang Yaling 江雅玲. Wen xuan zengda shi liubian shi 文選贈答詩流變史. Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1999. Jiatai Wuxing zhi 嘉泰吳興志. Compiled by Tan Yue 談鑰 (Song dynasty). Rpt. in Zhongguo fangzhi congshu 中國方志叢書. Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1966. Jin shu 晉書. Compiled by Fang Xuanling 房玄齡 (578–648) et al. Edited by Wu Zeyu 吳則虞. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973. Knechtges, David R. “Sweet-peel Orange or Southern Gold? Regional Identity in Western Jin Literature.” In Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History in Honor of Richard B. Mather and Donald Holzman, edited by Paul W. Kroll and David R. Knechtges, 27–79. Provo, Utah: T’ang Studies Society, 2003. ―――. “Liu Kun, Lu Chen, and Their Writings in the Transition to the Eastern Jin.” CLEAR 28 (2006): 1–66. ―――. Wen xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, Volume One. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Kroll, Paul W. “A Poetry Debate of the Perfected of Highest Clarity.” JAOS 132 (2012): 577–86. Liezi jishi 列子集釋. Edited by Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 (1909–1992). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979. Lu Qinli 逯欽立, ed. Xian Qin Han Wei Jin nanbeichao shi 先秦漢魏晉南北朝詩. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. London: Routledge, 2011.

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Nan Qi shu 南齊書. Compiled by Xiao Zixian 蕭子顯 (d. 537). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972. Pattinson, David. “Privacy and Letter Writing in Han and Six Dynasties China.” In Chinese Concepts of Privacy, edited by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, 97–118. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Quan Hou Han wen 全後漢文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Jin wen 全晉文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan Sanguo wen 全三國文. In Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen. Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen 全上古三代三國六朝文. Compiled by Yan Kejun 嚴可均 (1762–1843). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958. Richter, Antje. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Shisanjing zhushu 十三經注疏. Compiled by Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849). Rpt. Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1965. Shishuo xinyu jianshu 世說新語箋疏. Compiled by Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 (403–444); edited by Yu Jiaxi 余嘉錫 (1884–1955). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993. Song shu 宋書. Compiled by Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513). Edited by Wang Zhongluo 王仲犖 (1913–1986). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Suishu 隋書. Compiled by Wei Zheng 魏徵 (581–618) et al. Edited by Wang Shaoying 汪紹楹. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973. Tongdian 通典. Compiled by Du You 杜佑 (734–812). Edited by Wang Wenjin 王文錦 et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988. Vervoorn, Aat. Men of the Cliffs and Caves: The Development of the Chinese Eremitic Tradition to the End of the Han Dynasty. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1990. Wen xuan 文選. Compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–531). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986. Zhuangzi jishi 莊子集釋. Edited by Guo Qingfan 郭慶藩 (1845–1891). 2nd ed. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2004.

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CHAPTER 8

Letters and Memorials in the Early Third Century: The Case of Cao Zhi Robert Joe Cutter The more we learn about early medieval Chinese literature, the more conscious we are of how much is missing and how bereft we are of a store of materials adequate to lend real clarity to our assertions. Fluctuations in taste and the ravages of time have depleted what was once a more varied and robust corpus, and what remains, of course, presents with all of the philological symptoms and infirmities of authenticity that come with great age. Xiaofei Tian has invoked the image of an iceberg to refer to “the vast textual world of early medieval China which is largely lost to us but whose traces nevertheless remain in the form of fragments, prefaces, postscripts, bibliographies in dynastic histories, random mentions in letters, discussions, or the like.”1 Robert Alter’s analogy of “walking through a great museum on a very gloomy day with all the lights turned out” is also apt.2 Yet while we may not have as rich a trove of sources as we might desire, especially in comparison to later periods, we do have a substantial amount in a variety of literary forms. The difficulty is always in determining the extent to which these represent the values and practices of the literary culture of the time. The compilation of anthologies and the gradual appearance of letters, essays, poetry (in the broad sense) and, finally, books dealing with writing clearly indicate that the need to get a handle on literary genres became acute during the Wei Jin Nanbeichao period (3rd to 6th c.). Classifications of genres were made earlier, but largely in an embryonic way. The institutional requirements of a bureaucratic government and the social, ritual, and aesthetic needs of a sophisticated élite, coupled with the convenience and availability of paper, led to a burgeoning of writings and literary forms during the Han and post-Han periods.3 This explosion in literary production and preservation meant that there was a vast amount of writing that had to be organized in some way. The 1 Xiaofei Tian, “The Twilight of the Masters,” 471–72. 2 Alter, Genesis, x. 3 See Zhao Ming, Liang Han da wenxue shi, 865–67; Cutter, “Personal Crisis and Communication,” 149; Knechtges, “Culling the Weeds,” 202.

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problem faced by readers finds expression in a statement by Emperor Yuan of Liang 梁元帝 (Xiao Yi 蕭繹, r. 552–55): Philosophers flourished during the Warring States, while collections of poems and belles lettres filled the two Hans. It reached the point where every family had written something, every individual had his own collected works. Among these the finest may express well their emotions and ambitions, honoring custom, but the lesser serve only to clutter up the books and wear out those of us born later. So much has accumulated from those now dead, and yet future generations continue without end. Though one may anxiously set one’s mind to study, one’s hair may turn white without having read them all. 諸子興于戰國,文集盛於二漢,至家家有制,人人有集。其美 者足以敘情志,敦風俗;其弊者祗以煩簡牘,疲後生。往者既 積,來者未已。翹足志學,白首不遍。4 Contributing to this proliferation of writings were various epistolary genres, both personal and official in nature, which already by Liu Xie’s 劉勰 (ca. 465– ca. 532) time were numerous and diverse.5 In anthologies, the collected works of individual writers, and treatises on literature, epistolary works fall into a number of genres. It is not always clear why a particular piece is assigned to one category or the other, but in the case of the works treated here, there is not much question about this issue. Despite distortions resulting from the loss of materials that make us wary of broad generalizations, and despite the existence of the much earlier “Letter in Response to Ren An” (Bao Ren An shu 報任安書) by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–86? BCE), it can be argued that the early third century, specifically the Jian’an 建安 period (196–220), was a time when personal letters—and here I am referring to shu 書—began to flourish to a degree not seen before.6 In 4 Owen, The Poetry of the Early T’ang, 6–7; Jinlouzi jiao jian 9A.852. The passage is also translated in Tian, “The Twilight of the Masters,” 484 and Wang Ping, The Age of Courtly Writing, 61. Later, with the advent of printing, there was an even greater proliferation of works, which to some minds exacerbated the problem; see, e.g., Chen, “On the Act and Representation of Reading,” 57–58. 5 See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 49–62. See also Cutter, “Personal Crisis and Communication,” 149 and Pablo Ariel Blitstein’s article on Wenxin diaolong in this volume. 6 Chu Binjie, Zhongguo gudai wenti gailun, 377. Regarding the loss of letters, see also David Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter Writing,” 98–99. On epistolary genres see also Antje Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 37–43. As a literary period, Jian’an begins earlier and ends later than the reign period dates given here; see Cutter, “To Make Her Mine,” 39–40.

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addition, it is when memorials (biao 表) of personal expression begin to appear.7 To elucidate this stage in the development of personal expression in these two different epistolary genres, what follows contains a translation and discussion of an exchange of letters from the Jian’an period between Cao Zhi 曹植 (192–232) and Wu Zhi 吳質 (177–230), followed by an examination of four memorials written by Cao Zhi to the throne, all of them dealing—often with marked feeling—either directly with a personal crisis in his life or exploiting advice on policy as a way to try to attain personal goals and satisfy his desires and expectations. 1

Early Parallel Prose in Epistolary Writings

It is worth noting first that the letters to be discussed here are written in a kind of early parallel prose. We can think about genre in various ways in premodern China. With regard to prose compositions, a common formal distinction is between pianwen 駢文 (parallel prose) and sanwen 散文 (free prose), but it is important to note that this is a distinction that is not always as clear as might be thought.8 Furthermore, as implied above, there is sometimes significant similarity between works traditionally placed in different genres, and in such cases function is a major determining factor in the delineation and differentiation of genres. The three characteristics of mature pianwen are attention to parallelism; regularity in the number of characters per sentence or clause; and an emphasis on tonal patterning. These characteristics were evolutionary, with the stress on tonal prosody not arising until the time of Zhou Yong 周顒 (d. 488) and Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513).9 Sometimes this fact has eluded observers. Kūkai 空海 (774–835) criticized the following lines from one of Cao Pi’s 曹丕 (187–226) letters to Wu Zhi 吳質 (177–230): 同乗並載 以游後園 輿輪徐動 賓從無聲

Sharing a carriage we rode together To tour the rear garden. Carriage wheels moved slowly, Guests and attendants were silent.

7 Knechtges, “Han and Six Dynasties Parallel Prose,” 66. 8 Cao Daoheng, “Guanyu Wei Jin nanbeichao de pianwen he sanwen,” 30–31. 9 Ibid., 31. See also Branner, “Tonal Prosody in Chinese Parallel Prose,” 93. On the “invention” of tonal prosody, see Meow Hui Goh, Sound and Sight, 21–39.

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清風夜起 悲笳微吟

A fresh breeze arose by night, A sad flute softly moaned.10

Kūkai wrote, However, as for the various kinds of prose that are not bound by rhyme, they require that the last word of the second line not be in the same tone as the last word of the fourth. This is popularly called “raised tail every two lines.” One should not commit this fault. Consider for example Cao Pi’s (187–226) “Letter to Wu Zhi” [here he quotes the lines from Cao Pi’s letter]. Liu Tao [fl. 574] says: “The final syllable of the even-numbered line is the rhyme-word in poetry and the pivot-word in prose. In poetry, one cannot take away the rhyme, and in prose one cannot take away the use of tones. Now two lines of prose are equivalent to one of poetry. What verse does in three lines, prose does in six, and the final syllables of the second, fourth, and sixth lines should not violate each other (by being the same tone).” This is correct. 若諸雜筆不束以韻者,其第二句末即不得與第四句同聲,俗呼 為隔句上尾必不得犯之。 . . . 劉滔云:『下句之末,文章之韻, 手筆之樞要。在文不可奪韻,在筆不可奪聲。且筆之兩句,比 文之一句,文事三句之內,筆事六句之中,第二、第四、第 六,此六句之末,不宜相犯。』此即是也。11 Yuan 園, sheng 聲, and yin 吟 in the even lines of the passage from Cao Pi’s letter are all ping 平 tone words. But as Cao Daoheng pointed out, Kūkai’s critique is anachronistic when applied to the Wei Jin period, when tonal prosody was not yet a feature of parallel prose.12 To distinguish it from later prose that employs tonal prosody, David Branner has suggested calling this early style “ordered prose.”13 Whatever we call it, this is the form, too, of the works by Cao Zhi to be considered here.

10

Wen xuan 42.1895. See Cutter, “Cao Zhi’s Symposium Poems,” 4; Watson, “Cao Pi: Two Letters to Wu Zhi,” 8. 11  Bodman, “Poetics and Prosody in Early Medieval China,” 278–79 (translation modified). See Wenjing mifu lun, 183–84. 12 “Guanyu Wei Jin nanbeichao de pianwen he sanwen,” 32. 13 “Tonal Prosody in Chinese Parallel Prose,” 97.

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A Correspondence Between Cao Zhi and Wu Zhi

Cao Zhi’s letter to Wu Zhi goes by the title “Letter to Wu Jizhong” (Yu Wu Jizhong shu 與吳季重書), which was likely supplied by Wen xuan. Jizhong was Wu Zhi’s byname. To judge from his correspondence with Cao Zhi and Cao Pi, as well as other sources, he was well acquainted with the brothers and was a Cao Pi partisan. In Jian’an 16 (211), he left the court to serve as administrator of Zhaoge 朝歌.14 According to what he says below in his reply to Cao Zhi’s letter—which goes by the title “Letter Replying to the Prince of Dong’e” (Da Dong’e wang shu 答東阿王書)—he had been in Zhaoge for four years when this exchange of correspondence took place, making the date sometime in Jian’an 19 (214/215). Li Shan’s 李善 (d. 689) commentary to this piece in Wen xuan, quoting the Dian lüe 典略 of Yu Huan 魚豢 (3rd c.), says that when Wu was magistrate of Zhaoge, the marquis of Linzi 臨淄侯 wrote to him.15 Cao Zhi became marquis of Linzi in the first half of Jian’an 19 (214) but still resided in Ye 鄴.16 The two letters seem to be part of an ongoing conversation, a part of which—as is also true of other letters of the period—had to do with belletristic matters. But even without knowing the full context, the letters provide an interesting glimpse into the epistolary practices of the day.17 Cao Zhi’s “Letter to Wu Jizhong” [Cao] Zhi states: To the Honorable Jizhong, In former days, though due to frequent merry-making,18 we were able to sit close together, and though the feasting and drinking lasted all day, 14 15

16 17

18

Zhang Keli, San Cao nianpu, 137. Wu Zhi’s biography is in Sanguo zhi 21.607–10. Zhaoge was a Han prefecture in the vicinity of modern Qi xian 淇縣, Henan. Wen xuan 42.1905. The sentence quoted by Li Shan seems not to appear in any of the passages from Dian lüe contained in Pei Songzhi’s 裴松之 (372–451) commentary to Sanguo zhi. Sanguo zhi 19.557; Zhang Keli, San Cao nianpu, 133–34. See also David Knechtges’s introduction of these two letters (as well several others mentioned here) in his chapter about the letters in Wen xuan in this volume. They are also partially translated and discussed in Hsiang-Lin Shih, “Jian’an Poetry Revisited,” 217–26. Following the explanation of Lü Xiang 呂向, who says that chang diao 常調 means chang xi 常戲; Liu chen zhu Wen xuan 42.21b. Chang diao might also be understood as “routine reappointment,” as in Shih, “Jian’an Poetry Revisited,” 217–18.

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compared to the distance of our separation and the infrequency of our meetings, these still do not dispel my melancholy. When with bowls and cups riding wavelets in front,19 pipes and flutes playing music behind, you held your body like a hawk in flight, sang like a phoenix and glared like a tiger. I daresay even Xiao and Cao could not have equaled you, Wei and Huo could not have matched you.20 You looked left and glanced right, acting as though no one else was about. Was this not due to your heroic aspirations?21 Like chomping away while passing a butcher shop, though I got no meat, I prized it and was blissfully happy.22 At that moment we wanted to lift Mount Tai to use as meat, drain the Eastern Sea to use as ale, cut the bamboo of Yunmeng to use for flutes, chop the catalpas on the banks of the Si to use for zithers.23 We ate as though filling a great gorge, drank as though pouring into a leaky cup. Our joy was truly hard to estimate. Was this not the joy of real men? 植白:季重足下。前日雖因常調,得爲密坐,雖燕飲彌日,其 於別遠會稀,猶不盡其勞積也。若夫觴酌淩波於前,簫笳發 音於後,足下鷹揚其體,鳳歎虎視,謂蕭曹不足儔,衛霍不 足侔也。左顧右眄,謂若無人,豈非吾子壯志哉!過屠門 而大嚼,雖不得肉,貴且快意。當斯之時,願舉太山以爲 肉,傾東海以爲酒,伐雲夢之竹以爲笛,斬泗濱之梓以爲 19

On Cao Zhi’s association with the tradition of floating cups on water at drinking parties, see Wang Ping, “Culture and Literature in an Early Medieval Chinese Court,” 252–53, n. 681. 20 Xiao He 蕭何 (d. 193 BCE) and Cao Shen 曹參 (d. 190 BCE) were famous officials who served the Han founder Liu Bang 劉邦 (r. 206–195 BCE), who is also known by his temple name Gaozu 高祖; Wei Qing 衛青 (d. 106 BCE) and Huo Qubing 霍去病 (d. 117 BCE) were famous generals in the time of Emperor Wu of Han 漢武帝 (r. 140–87 BCE). For the former pair, see, e.g., Aihe Wang, “Creators of an Emperor,” 33–36; on the latter pair, see Chun-shu Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire, 181–82. 21 The wu chen 五臣 text of Wen xuan reads junzi 君子 (lordly man) instead of wuzi 吾子 (you); Liu chen zhu Wen xuan 42.22a. 22 Huan Tan’s 桓譚 Xin lun 新論 uses the butcher shop metaphor to express admiration and vicarious pleasure: “The smell of meat is pleasant, so they stand in front of a butcher’s shop, chewing vigorously;” trans. Pokora, Hsin-lun, 71. 23 The great marsh of Yunmeng, perhaps originally two marshes that straddled the Yangzi, with Yun to the north and Meng to the south, later became the name of the great Yunmeng preserve of the state of Chu 楚 that is described in Sima Xiangru’s 司馬相如 (179–117 BCE) “Rhapsody on Sir Vacuous” (Zi xu fu 子虛賦). See Knechtges, Wen xuan, vol. 2, 53–71. The Si River rises in Shandong. Both Yunmeng (or Yun and Meng) and the banks of the Si are mentioned in the “Tribute of Yu” (Yu gong 禹貢) chapter of the Shang shu 尚書 (Hallowed documents). Shang shu Kong zhuan 3.2b, 3b.

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箏,食若填巨壑,飲若灌漏卮,其樂固難量,豈非大丈夫之樂 哉! But the days were not with us, and the radiant spirit [i.e., the sun] quickened its pace. Our encounters have a velocity faster than light; our partings the boundless space betwixt Orion and Scorpio.24 I long to hold back the heads of the six dragon steeds, stay the reins of Xihe, break off blossoms from the Ruo tree, block the valley of the Edge of the Meng.25 But the route to the heavens is high and distant; for a very long time it has not been taken. I toss and turn with nostalgic longing. What to do? What to do? 然日不我與,曜靈急節,面有逸景之速,別有參商之闊。思欲 抑六龍之首,頓羲和之轡,折若木之華,閉濛汜之谷。天路高 邈,良久無緣,懷戀反側,如何如何! I received the message you sent; its literary brilliance is intricate, sparkling like spring blooms, fresh as a cool breeze. I recited it over and over and felt as cheerful as though we were meeting again. As for the pieces written by all those worthy gentlemen, presumably you will repeatedly recite them upon your return to the place you govern, and you can have some minion memorize and chant them. 得所來訊,文采委曲,曄若春榮,瀏若清風,申詠反覆,曠若 複面。其諸賢所著文章,想還所治,複申詠之也,可令憙事小 吏諷而誦之。 As for the difficulty of literary works, this is not something solely modern; gentlemen in antiquity also worried over it. Were every household to have a thousand-li horse, then a thoroughbred would not be prized by them; were everyone to possess over a foot [of jade], then He’s would not be valued by them.26 夫文章之難,非獨今也。古之君子,猶亦病諸。家有千里,驥 而不珍焉;人懷盈尺,和氏無貴矣。

24 On Shen (Orion) and Shang (Scorpio), see Schafer, Pacing the Void, 127. 25  This is a series of allusions to Chu ci 楚辭, all of which are used here to express the desire to hold back time. Chu ci bu zhu 16.28a, 1.21a–b, 3.7b, 3.3b. 26 For one important version of the story of He’s jade, see Han Feizi ji shi 4.238; trans. Watson, Basic Writings, 80.

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{As for being a gentleman but not understanding music,27 a widespread opinion of old deemed it being knowledgeable but deluded.28 Mo Di did not like music, so why did he turn his carriage around when he came to Zhaoge? You like music and are on duty precisely in the prefecture where Mo Di turned around his carriage, so I think you have helped open my eyes.29 夫君子而〔不〕知音樂,古之達論,謂之通而蔽。墨翟不好 伎,何爲過朝歌而迴車乎?足下好伎,值墨翟迴車之縣,想足 下助我張目也。}30 I have also heard that there where you are there is, as a matter of course, good governance. Now, there have been cases of seeking this but not attaining it, but there has never been a case of attaining it without seeking. Moreover, to proceed by altering one’s route is not the driving of a Liang or Le; to rule by changing people is not the governance of Chu or Zheng.31 I just desire that you do your best.

27 28

29

30 31

The negative is inserted following Liu chen zhu Wen xuan 42.23b. It also appears in the letter in editions of Cao Zhi’s works. See the text and note in Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 1.144. Given what will be said about this section shortly, it is possible that Cao Zhi had in mind the Xunzi 荀子 chapter “Jie bi” 解蔽 (“Undoing Fixation” in Hutton’s translation; “Dispelling Obsession” in Watson’s). See Xunzi ji shi, 386–410; trans. Hutton, “Xunzi,” 272–78; Watson, Basic Writings, 121–38. Reference to Mo Di turning his carriage around at Zhaoge is seen in Zou Yang’s 鄒陽 (206–129 BCE) “Memorial of Self Explanation Written in Prison” (Yu zhong shangshu ziming 獄中上書自明) and Huainanzi 淮南子. The former says, “When the hamlet was called Morning Song (Chao-ko), Mo-tzu turned his carriage around” (Wen xuan 39.1772, trans. Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 453, 464), while the latter states, “Mo-tzu, who criticized music, did not enter the hamlet called ‘Morning Song.’” (Huainanzi 16.11b; trans. Major, The Huainanzi, 657). This section is in curly brackets because there is a possibility that it was not originally part of the letter as sent to Wu Zhi. More will be said about this. Wang Liang 王良 and Bole 伯樂 were two legendary charioteers. See, e.g., Knoblock, Xunzi, 314–15, n. 61. According to Li Shan, the reference to Chu and Zheng alludes to a passage in Shi ji 史記—one that is not in the text as we have it—that concerns the administrations of Sunshu Ao 孫叔敖 in Chu and Zichan 子產 in Zheng. See Wen xuan 42.1907. Li Shan is known often to quote historical texts like Shi ji inaccurately. Judging from Wu Zhi’s reply, Cao Zhi seems to be suggesting to Wu that he should remain in Zhaoge for the time being.

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又聞足下在彼,自有佳政。夫求而不得者有之矣,未有不求而 得者也。且改轍易行,非良樂之禦;易民而治,非楚鄭之政, 願足下勉之而已矣。 Just now I have guests, so what I am dictating is not all I have to say. Let us often correspond back and forth. Stated by Cao Zhi. 適對嘉賓,口授不悉。往來數相聞。曹植白。32 Wu Zhi’s “Letter Replying to the Prince of Dong’e” [Wu] Zhi states: Your courier arrived. I respectfully received what you so kindly sent, opened the envelope, and spread out the paper. What immense beauty of literary brilliance and warmth of regards! Only one who has climbed Mount Tai knows how twisty and winding are most mountains; only one who has served the most high knows the insignificance of one who administers a hundred li. 質白:信到,奉所惠貺。發函伸紙,是何文采之巨麗,而慰喻 之綢繆乎!夫登東嶽者,然後知衆山之邐迤也;奉至尊者,然 後知百里之卑微也。 When he first returned from there, your humble servant pondered for five or six days, and at the end of ten days, his spirit was sapped and his thoughts scattered. I felt dazed, as though something was missing. It is not that I dare covet the pleasures of favor and honor or envy the wealth of an Yi Dun33—I honestly consider my person as lowly as a dog or horse, my virtue as light as goose down—but I did get to pass beneath the Dark Gatetower, push open the Bronze Gate, ascend the Jade Hall, lean on a fretted balustrade at the Front Basilica, and set bowls of ale afloat beside

32  Wen xuan 42.1905–7. The letter, with variants, also appears in the various editions of Cao Zhi’s collected works. Two of the most useful texts are Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 1.142–46, and Cao ji quan ping 8.147–49. The latter edition is reproduced in Diény, Concordance des oeuvres completes de Cao Zhi. 33 Yi Dun was a rich man of old whose name was used synecdochically, like the name “Rockefeller,” to refer to a tycoon. See Kongcongzi zhu 5.6b–7a. See also Shi ji 129.3259; trans. Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, 2:439.

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the Serpentine.34 My dignity fell short and my words were crude and vulgar. Although I have relied on the grace of a Pingyuan’s patronage, I am ashamed that I lack the talent of a Mao Sui’s gleaming point;35 although I have richly received a Duke of Xue’s vouchsafed courtesy, I lack the success of a Feng Xuan’s three burrows;36 although I have repeatedly benefitted from the kindness of a Xinling’s vacant left seat, I also lack Master Hou’s exemplary behavior.37 These several examples are the reason frustration grows in my breast and that when recalling your affection, I am melancholy. 自旋之初,伏念五六日,至於旬時,精散思越,惘若有失。非 敢羨寵光之休,慕猗頓之富。誠以身賤犬馬,德輕鴻毛,至乃 曆玄闕,排金門,升玉堂,伏虛檻於前殿,臨曲池而行觴,既 威儀虧替,言辭漏渫,雖恃平原養士之懿,愧無毛遂燿穎之 才。 深蒙薛公折節之禮,而無馮諼三窟之效。 屢獲信陵虛左之

34

Here Wu Zhi draws on the names of structures in the western Han capital of Chang’an 長安. Dark Gatetower refers to Xuan wu que 玄武闕 (Dark Warrior Gatetower); Bronze Gate to Jin ma men 金馬門 (Bronze Horse Gate); Jade Hall to Yu tang dian 玉堂殿 (Jade Hall Basilica). The Front Basilica (Qian dian 潛殿) was the principal official court structure of the Weiyang Palace 未央宮. The Serpentine (Quchi 曲池 or Qu jiang chi 曲江池) was the scenic body of water near the southeast edge of the city. See Zhang Yonglu, Han dai Chang’an cidian, 147, 148, 153, 193–94; Liu and Li, Han Chang’an cheng, 58–67. Yang Xiong writes in his “Jie chao” 解嘲: “Much time has passed since you crossed the Bronze Gate and entered the Jade Hall, but you have never drafted a single ingenious plan or offered a single scheme;” trans. Knechtges, The Han shu Biography of Yang Xiong, 46. 35 This is an allusion to the famous story of the Lord of Pingyuan 平原君, who was going on a mission to Chu but needed one additional man to accompany him. Mao Sui, who had not previously distinguished himself, asked to go. The Lord of Pingyuan likened a worthy man to an awl in a sack—he would, like the tip of the awl, soon be seen. Mao Sui replied by asking to be put in that sack, and said that if it had been done sooner, more than just a tip would have emerged. See Shi ji 76.2366. 36  Duke of Xue refers to the Lord of Mengchang 孟嘗君. In the account in Zhan guo ce 戰國 策, referring to his strategems to ensure the safety of the Lord of Mengchang, Feng Xuan is reported to have said, “A wily rabbit must have three burrows, and only then can it avoid its death. Now you have one burrow. . . . Let me dig you two more” 狡兔有三窟僅得免其 死耳。今君有一窟 . . . 請為君復鑿一窟. Zhan guo ce, 399. 37 Xinling refers to Noble Scion of Wei Wuji 魏公子無忌, who was enfeoffed as Lord of Xinling 信陵君. He showed his respect for the recluse Hou Ying 侯嬴 by reserving for him the honored left side position in his vehicle. Hou Ying went on to offer a plan that helped the Noble Scion at a critical juncture. See Shi ji 77.2378–81; trans. Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, 215–18.

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德,又無侯生可述之美。凡此數者,乃質之所以憤積於胸臆,懷 眷而悁邑者也。 If I think back to our former feast, I would say you have missed something. As for draining the sea to use for ale, seizing a mountain to use for viands, cutting bamboo at Yunmeng, chopping catalpas on the banks of the Si, and then pursuing refined interests to the ultimate, carrying the joyful mood to the utmost, in truth this was the grand appearance of milord and was not something to which I could aspire. With regard to my own ambition, it is in fact set on [serving] the one who is as heaven to me.38 I long to cast off my seals and remove my ribbons, morning and night to sit in attendance, to delve into the teachings left by Confucius, to peruse the essential words of Laozi, to face clear ale yet not drink it, to curtail fine viands and not enjoy them, to cause Xishi to leave my bed, and Momu to serve by my side.39 This is where the man of ample virtue treads, what a man of enlightened wisdom upholds. As for that recent scene, it truly stirred my humble heart. Qin zithers issued beautiful [sounds], two octets [of dancers] performed in turn. Ocarinas and pipes swelled in the ornate room, divine drums resounded to the right of the seating: my ears were dinned and deafened till I lost my hearing, my feelings leapt and jumped more than riding a horse.40 I would say it could have cowed the Sushen in the north and made them offer in tribute their thornwood arrows; awed the Baiyue in the south and made them offer in tribute their white pheasants.41 To say nothing of Quan and Bei, who do not deserve regard.42 若追前宴,謂之未究,傾海爲酒,並山爲肴,伐竹雲夢,斬梓 泗濱,然後極雅意,盡歡情,信公子之壯觀,非鄙人之所庶幾 也。若質之志,實在所天。思投印釋黻,朝夕侍坐,鑽仲父之 遺訓,覽老氏之要言,對清酤而不酌,抑嘉肴而不享,使西施 出帷,嫫母侍側,斯盛德之所蹈,明哲之所保也。若乃近者之 觀,實蕩鄙心。秦箏發徽,二八叠奏。塤簫激於華屋,靈鼓動

38 39 40 41

42

It is not clear who is meant here (his own father, Cao Zhi, the emperor?), but it seems likely that it is Cao Zhi. Xishi and Momu are archetypes of feminine beauty and homeliness, respectively. On “divine drums” (ling gu 靈鼓), see Knechtges, Wen xuan, vol. 1, 264, n. 274. On the Sushen, see Keightley, “A Measure of Man in Early China,” 34; Schaberg, A Patterned Past, 132. On the term Bai Yue, see von Falkenhausen, “The Use and Significance of Ritual Bronzes,” 194–95, 198. A reference to Sun Quan 孫權 (182–252) and Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223), the leaders of Wei’s rival states of Wu (222–80) and Shu Han 蜀漢 (221–63).

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於座右。耳嘈嘈於無聞,情踴躍於鞍馬。謂可北懾肅慎,使貢 其楛矢;南震百越,使獻其白雉;又況權備,夫何足視乎! Upon returning to my prefecture, I memorized and absorbed what you had written, saw and scrutinized the blossoms and gems. These are truly masterworks of the rhapsody and eulogy, models for writers.43 As for what the numerous worthy gentlemen wrote, each indeed has its intent. Of old, when Zhao Wu visited Zheng, seven peers recited poems; the Spring and Autumn records and cites them, and it makes a fine story.44 I am just a petty man and lack the wherewithal to undertake [such an] assignment. Moreover, regarding my letters back to you, the language is inferior and the sense unsophisticated. Reading them over again, I blush and sweat pours down.45 The people of this area are well versed in the rhapsody. Of the three high ministers, there are none who cannot recite them from memory.46 How would I only have a minion [do this]? You have generously favored me with bitter words,47 instructed me on governmental matters. Your compassionate kindness is embodied in your writing. Mozi turned back his carriage, but I have been here four years. Although I have no virtue to share with the people, they sing and they dance. That Confucians and Moists differ has ever been thus. But a crowd of five hundred people is not enough to make a name [for oneself]; a speck of land is not enough to show one’s talent.48 If one does not alter his route and 43

On the flexibility in the use of the terms fu and song (“rhapsodies and eulogies”) in the early imperial period, see Kern, “Western Han Aesthetics,” 399–400. 44 On the court recitation of poems in Zheng at the request of Zhao Wu, see Chen, The Poetics of Sovereignty, 209–10. As Chen notes, it is in this narrative in Zuo zhuan 左傳, Xiang 27, that “poetry (shi) is first defined in terms of ‘aims’ (zhi),” or, as translated here, “intent.” See also Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past, 399. 45 See Han shi wai zhuan 韓詩外傳 10.845, which says, the Lord of Mengchang “blushed and the sweat poured off him to his heels. He said, ‘I was wrong, I was wrong;” trans. Hightower, Han shih wai chuan, 332. 46 See Mao shi 194: “The three high ministers/All refuse to meet in the morning or at night” 三事大夫莫肯夙夜; trans. Waley, The Book of Songs, 173. It is not clear to whom Wu Zhi is referring by his use of this term, but he is perhaps using it allusively to refer to the heads of the bureaus under him in Zhaoge. 47 The Shi ji biography of the Lord of Shang quotes him as saying, “bitter words are medicine, sweet words sickness” 苦言藥也甘言疾也; See Shi ji 68.2234; Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, 93. 48 Li Shan’s commentary quotes Du Yu’s 杜預 (222–285) commentary to Zuo zhuan, which says that one lü 旅 was five hundred people; Wen xuan 42.1911. See also Chunqiu Zuo

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change his driving, then how does he ply his strengths? Now I am stuck here yet seek major accomplishments—this is like hobbling the feet of a fine thoroughbred, then requiring it to run a thousand li; caging the power of a gibbon or monkey, then expecting to see its talent for nimbleness and agility.49 I have been treated with unusual solicitude, and sincerely taking the opportunity to send this response, I dare not be too prolix. Stated by Zhi. 還治諷采所著,觀省英瑋,實賦頌之宗,作者之師也。衆賢 所述,亦各有志。昔趙武過鄭,七子賦詩,春秋載列,以爲 美談。質小人也,無以承命。又所答貺,辭醜義陋,申之再 三,赧然汗下。此邦之人,閑習辭賦,三事大夫,莫不諷 誦,何但小吏之有乎!重惠苦言,訓以政事,惻隱之恩,形乎 文墨。墨子回車,而質四年,雖無德與民,式歌且舞。儒墨不 同,固以久矣。然一旅之衆,不足以揚名,步武之間,不足以 騁迹,若不改轍易禦,將何以效其力哉!今處此而求大功,猶 絆良驥之足,而責以千里之任;檻猿猴之勢,而望其巧捷之能 者也。不勝見恤,謹附遣白答,不敢繁辭。吳質白。 The background of these letters is the salon-like milieu of the Cao court, with its feasts and outings, conducted against a backdrop of competition and warfare with rival polities, for which the Jian’an period is famous. In fact, in addition to poems, rhapsodies, and other prose writings, these two letters are elements in the construction of that image. As noted above, the section of Cao Zhi’s letter to Wu Zhi that is here in curly brackets may not be original to the letter. That is not to say that it is not by Cao Zhi—it surely is—but it may not have been in the original letter that Wu Zhi received. Li Shan says that in Cao Zhi’s collected works, as they existed in his day, these lines were a separate entry with almost exactly the same wording. He quotes the lines from the collected works and speculates that Xiao Tong incorporated them into the letter when he included it in Wen xuan in order to

zhuan zhu, 2:1606 (Zuo zhuan, Ai 1). “Speck” here translates buwu 步武, which refers to a very short distance. 49 See Huainanzi 2.14b: “To blame yourself for the Way’s not being practiced while trapped in a corrupt age is like double-hobbling (the famous horse) Qiji and asking him to travel a thousand li. If you put an ape in a cage, it will be just like a pig. It is not that it is no longer clever or agile but that it has nowhere to give free rein to its ability.” 身蹈于濁世之中而 責道之不行也是猶兩絆騏驥而求其致千里也置猿檻中則與豚同非不巧捷也無 所肆其能也; trans. Major, The Huainanzi, 106–7.

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create an antithesis for Wu Zhi’s reply.50 This adds another layer of complexity to the problem outlined at the beginning of this essay: in addition to the loss of material, readers of the earlier early medieval texts are indebted to, and at the mercy of, later editors, especially those of the fifth and sixth centuries.51 Whether or not the letter was modified when it was included in Wen xuan, it is noteworthy that Li Shan assumed this practice. Like so many textual tics, this one caught the attention of Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 (1910–1998), who suggests an interesting and plausible explanation.52 Wu Zhi’s reply seems uncomfortable with Cao Zhi’s depiction of his ebullience at the feast and says that what he really wants is to live a life of study and abstinence. He does, though, admit that he had a good time—that the music, including deafening drums, stirred him to the point that he felt he could defeat the rival separatist states of Wu and Shu that were in conflict with the Caos. This is a pledge of fealty and fits with the appeal for an opportunity to “ply his strengths” that comes near the end of the letter. This is actually similar to the kind of appeal that Cao Zhi himself was to make a few years later in the memorials discussed below. Qian Zhongshu suspects that after Cao Zhi received Wu’s reply, with its sanctimony and its reference to Mozi’s avoidance of Zhaoge he wrote a postscript to his original letter. The purpose was to counter Wu Zhi’s braggadocio in talking about “ample virtue” and “enlightened wisdom.” In his postscript, Cao Zhi is playing on Wu Zhi’s professed resolve versus the associations of the name of the place he administered. Qian’s argument is that Cao’s lines about Mozi make no real sense as part of the original letter; that would be “to shoot an arrow without a target” 無的放矢 and “to scratch before you itch” 預搔 待癢. Qian thinks that Cao Zhi detected hidden feelings in Wu and thought that Wu Zhi—and Mozi, for that matter—were drawn to the pleasures they wanted to deny themselves and only avoided them out of fear. This explains Cao Zhi’s statement in the bracketed text that “you have helped open my eyes,” and it offers a rational explanation for Li Shan’s note regarding the presence of the doubtful passage appearing separately in the edition of Cao Zhi’s works that he knew. Even if this scenario is accurate, it does not mean that Cao Zhi did not look favorably on Wu Zhi.53 Clearly there is some tension in the letters—the 50 51 52 53

Wen xuan 42.1907. See also Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 1.146. See, for example, Owen, The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry, 4ff. Qian Zhongshu, Guanzhui bian, 3:1074–75. One recent article attacks the centuries-old notion that these are letters between friends and holds that Cao Zhi and Wu Zhi were hostile to one another. See Xing Peishun, “Cao Zhi yu Wu Zhi jiao’e kaobian.”

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rhetorical gymnastics and self-deprecation of a supplicant writing to a superior, the critique of an inferior writer by a vastly superior one—but these appear to be letters between men who, if not very close, were on friendly terms and moved in the same court circle. Both letters are allusive and have a performative quality. As is often the case with letters, the full context of these pieces is not accessible to us. There had been earlier correspondence involving a discussion of literature and an exchange of compositions, certainly fu 賦 and perhaps other works. So the letters both discuss literature and are literary. The communicative functions of correspondence are inseparably couched in the culture of medieval literary rhetoric. At one point in his letter, commenting on an earlier letter from Wu Zhi, Cao writes, “I felt as cheerful as though we were meeting again” 曠若 複面. Antje Richter writes of “the power of a letter to simulate the presence of its writer in the mind of the reader (parousia).”54 The power of writing—the calligraphy of an absent person, the material object on which it is preserved, the content conveyed—to move a friend or loved is widely attested in other early medieval and medieval genres. Pan Yue’s “Dirge for Yang Zhongwu” (Yang Zhongwu lei 楊仲武誄) has these lines: 披帙散書 屢睹遺文 有造有寫 或草或真 執玩周復 想見其人 紙勞于手 涕沾于巾

I open a wrapper and unroll your writings, Hastily scan texts you have left, Some written, some copied, Some in cursive, some in regular script. Taking up and enjoying piece after piece, I envisage the one who wrote them. The paper is worn from my touch, My tears soak into the kerchief box.55

The same topos appears in the first of his “Poems on the Departed” (Dao wang shi 悼亡詩): 翰墨有餘跡 流芳未及歇

There are remaining traces of her brush and ink. Her lingering fragrance has yet to fade;

54 Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 127. 55 Wen xuan 56.2447. For jin 巾 as “kerchief box,” see Xie Zhuang’s 謝莊 (421–466) “Dirge for Honored Consort Xuan of Wu the Filial of Song” (Song Xiaowu Xuan guifei lei 宋孝武宣 貴妃誄): “In her kerchief box are found remaining scrolls” 巾見餘軸; Wen xuan 57.2480. Li Shan glosses jin as jin xiang 巾箱. Cf. Cutter, “Threnodic Writings,” 298.

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遺桂猶在壁

The hangings she left behind still remain on the walls.56

And something similar, involving the power of reading (and calligraphy) is at work in a pair of poems from the year 815 by Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846) and Yuan Zhen 元稹 (779–831) entitled, respectively, “Reading Yuan Ninth’s Poems aboard a Boat” (Zhou zhong du Yuan Jiu shi 舟中讀元九詩) and “Responding to Letian’s Poem on Reading My Poems at Night on a Moored Boat” (Chou Letian zhou bo ye du Weizhi shi 酬樂天舟泊夜讀微之詩).57 In Bai Juyi’s poem, he reads a scroll of Yuan Zhen’s poems through the night, and in Yuan’s response, he pictures Bai Juyi at a moorage reading his poems all night. 3

Cao Zhi’s Memorials

Given the indeterminate boundaries of epistolary writing, memorials—which bear a variety of names, such as biao (“memorial”) and shangshu 上書 (“letter of submission”)—must count as a form thereof.58 Memorials frequently involve but are not limited to official communications regarding governmental matters. Such works are often eloquent in expressing personal feelings.59 As mentioned earlier, Cao Zhi was an early exploiter of this potential in the genre. A list of Cao Zhi’s extant memorials would contain over two dozen items, including requests to perform sacrifices or go hunting; works accompanying the presentation of gifts; expressions of gratitude for appointments to various noble ranks and titles; thank you notes for gifts received; pieces presenting other written documents; and advice regarding policy. Among the memorials by Cao Zhi that are the most personal and expressive are “Memorial Presenting the Poems ‘Blaming Myself’ and ‘Responding to an Edict’” (Shang “Ze gong” “Ying zhao” shi biao 上責躬應詔詩表), “Memorial Seeking to Prove Myself” (Qiu zi shi biao 求自試表), “Memorial Seeking to Convey Familial Affection” (Qiu tong qin qin biao 求通親親表), and “Memorial Explaining Judicious Appointments” (Chen shen ju biao 陳審

56 57 58 59

Lai, “The Art of Lamentation,” 423. See Wen xuan 23.1091. See also Cutter, “Saying Goodbye,” 126–28. Bai Juyi ji jian jiao, 2:947; Yang Jun, Yuan Zhen ji biannian jian zhu, 656. Thanks to Anna Shields for bringing these poems to my attention. On types of memorials, see, e.g., Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 14, 42, 753–54. See Knechtges, Wen xuan, vol. 1, 43; Cutter, “Personal Crisis and Communication,” 149–50.

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舉表). The last of the four is in the biography and editions of Cao’s works.60 The first three are preserved in his Sanguo zhi biography, in Wen xuan, and in editions of Cao’s works.61 These four memorials all date from after Cao Zhi’s brother Cao Pi had engineered the abdication of the last Han ruler and had himself declared emperor of Wei (Emperor Wen 文帝, r. 220–26). Three of them, in fact, date from the reign of Cao Rui 曹叡 (Emperor Ming 明帝, r. 226–39), Cao Pi’s son and successor. As is well known and amply documented, the policies of Cao Pi’s bureaucracy toward his brothers was harsh. Right after Cao Pi became emperor, he made all of his brothers go to their fiefs, instead of allowing them to reside in Ye, as they had done till then, in order to prevent them from being in contact with one another. Cao Zhi was targeted for particularly close scrutiny and severe treatment, and close associates of his were killed. There were essentially two reasons for this: the first was that Cao Zhi was not always circumspect in his behavior; the second was that he was seen as a threat to Cao Pi’s position due to his status. He had once been the favorite of their father Cao Cao 曹操 (155–220), who was then the most powerful man in the empire; he was also talented and popular, and there were those who had wanted him rather than Cao Pi to succeed Cao Cao.62 “Memorial Presenting the Poems ‘Blaming Myself’ and ‘Responding to an Edict’” and the poems themselves were written to Cao Pi to atone for a transgression that almost resulted in Cao Zhi’s execution. Since this has been written about elsewhere, the context of this set will not be rehearsed here. But it is worth noting that in addition to their intrinsic value as literature and as historical documents that shed light on both the Cao court and the life of one of the most famous figures in the Chinese past, these poems and the accompanying memorial have literary historical value: 1) the poems—in the tetrasyllabic-line form and full of historical exempla and allusions to canonical texts—are perhaps the earliest examples outside of fu of an autobiographical poetry of self-justification; 2) although for obvious reasons not classified as presentation and response (zeng da 贈答) poems, the poems are, in fact, examples of verse as epistolary

60  See Wen xuan 20.927–35, 37.1675–90; Sanguo zhi 19.562–64, 565–68, 569–74; Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 2.268–78, 3.368–79, 3.436–43, 3.444–52. Cutter, “Personal Crisis and Communication,” 155–60, contains a translation of “Memorial Presenting the Poems ‘Blaming Myself’ and ‘Responding to an Edict’,” as well as the two poems. 61 See Wen xuan 20.927–35, 37.1675–90; Sanguo zhi 19.562–4, 565–8, 569–71; Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 2.268–78, 3.368–79, 3.436–43. 62 See Knechtges, “The Rhetoric of Imperial Abdication and Accession,” 4; Cutter, “The Incident at the Gate,” 228–40, and “Personal Crisis and Communication,” 151, 164 n. 21.

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writing;63 3) the memorial, in effect, serves as a prose preface for the poems, thus sharing a feature with the fu genre, while at the same time acting as a precursor to later poems with prefaces and also to such important pairings of prose and poetry as Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 (365–427) “Record of Peach Blossom Spring” (Tao hua yuan ji 桃花源記) and its partner poem.64 Yet at the same time, its epistolary function sets it off as distinct from the latter. “Memorial Seeking to Prove Myself” was written to Emperor Ming. We know this because of its position in Cao Zhi’s Sanguo zhi biography, as well as from internal evidence. One sentence says, “I am moved by the demise of the former emperor and the passing away of Prince Wei” 臣竊感先帝早崩,威王棄世, a clear reference to Cao Pi and to their brother Cao Zhang 曹彰, who had died in 223.65 The memorial may date from 228. In it—as did Wu Zhi in his letter above—Cao Zhi seeks to be employed usefully on behalf of the state. Despite his ability and fame as a writer, literature was never quite enough for him, as evidenced in another of his letters, perhaps the most famous of all, “Letter to Yang Dezu [Yang Xiu 楊修]” (Yu Yang Dezu shu 與楊德祖書).66 “Memorial Seeking to Prove Myself” is partly autobiographical, emphasizing the influence of his father Cao Cao. It also is heavily laden with historical exempla, including Mao Sui, almost obligatory in such a situation and, as we have seen, also used by Wu Zhi in his appeal asking Cao Zhi to help him get out of Zhaoge and into a position more appropriate to his ostensible talents. Cao Zhi closes his piece with an allusion to Lun yu 論語. He writes, “I certainly know I will be laughed at by the officials at court, but the sage ruler does not reject the words because of the man” 必知為朝士所笑,聖主不以人廢言.67 “Memorial Seeking to Convey Familial Affection” dates from 231. It begins by talking about the legendary Yao having laid the foundations for the importance of family and then moves on to the Zhou as an example. Cao Zhi praises the addressee, his nephew Emperor Ming, extravagantly, but then immediately complains about his isolation from both his brothers and his relatives by mar63 64 65

66 67

See Zeb Raft’s chapter on zeng da poetry in this volume. Cutter, “Personal Crisis and Communication,” 160–61. Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 3.370. Wei 威 was the posthumous name given to Cao Zhang; Sanguo zhi 19.556. On the death of Cao Zhang, see Cutter, “Shishuo xinyu and the Death of Cao Zhang,” 403–11. Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 1.153–59. There are several published translations; see, e.g., Holzman, “Literary Criticism,” 116–19. Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu. Lun yu 15.23: “The Master said, ‘The lordly man does not raise up the man because his words, nor does he reject the words because of the man’.” 子曰君子不 以言舉人不以人廢言.

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riage. He clearly wants to go to court, and again is seeking in this memorial a chance to display his worth. Quoting Mengzi 孟子 near the end he writes, “Not to serve one’s prince in the way Shun served Yao is not to respect one’s prince” 不以舜之所以事堯事其君者,不敬其君者也.68 We have Emperor Ming’s response in an edict (zhao 詔), which reads in part:69 At present it has gotten so that all of the brother princes have been heedless of feelings, and towards the families of their consorts and concubines, they have been remiss [in the gifting of] oils and shampoos. Even if We have not been able to make their feelings deep and harmonious, the significance of the ancient exempla you have cited is exhaustive, so how can one say that absolute sincerity is not sufficient to affect Us? To distinguish the high from the low, to exalt loving one’s relatives, to respect the worthy and good, to set precedence between young and old, these are the governing principles of the state. There is no edict prohibiting the various princedoms from corresponding with one another. In correcting what was wrong, things went too far the other way, and minor officials feared reprimand, so we have reached this state. I have already ordered those who have jurisdiction to do as you petitioned. 今令諸國兄弟,情理簡怠,妃妾之家,膏沐疏略,朕縱不能敦 而睦之,王援古喻義備悉矣,何言精誠不足以感通哉?夫明貴 賤,崇親親,禮賢良,順少長,國之綱紀,本無禁固諸國通問 之詔也,矯枉過正,下吏懼譴,以至於此耳。已敕有司,如王 所訴。 Another exchange of written communications between Cao Zhi and his imperial nephew began with the memorial later known by the title “Memorial Explaining Judicious Appointments.”70 In this memorial Cao Zhi deploys a variety of allusions and exempla to criticize the emperor for making inferior appointments to civil and military office while ignoring members of his own family, especially Cao Zhi himself, who claims he has both the talent and desire to serve Wei effectively. Cao Rui did write back, for Sanguo zhi reports, “The emperor thereupon replied with a laudatory text” 帝輒優文答報.71 But 68 Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 3.438. See Mengzi 4A2. 69 Sanguo zhi 19.571. 70 Sanguo zhi 19.571–74; Cao Zhi ji jiao zhu 3.444–52. 71  Sanguo zhi 19.574. It is possible that Cao Rui’s response has been preserved; see Sanguo zhi ji jie 19.1600.

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nothing of substance came of this latest epistolary exchange, and Cao Zhi died the following year.



What is it that distinguishes the letters discussed above from the memorials? It can be argued that Cao Zhi’s memorials and Emperor Ming’s responses do not, as communications in nominally instrumentalist official genres, qualify as personal letters. However, context is important, and the relationship of the writers, along with the unmistakable intentions of the pieces, point to their essentially personal nature.72 Genre requires the memorials to be in a higher register, with much greater density of allusions and exempla. Absent are the sense of familiarity and references to occasions of conviviality shared by the correspondents seen in famous Jian’an personal letters, including the exchange between Cao Zhi and Wu Zhi. Antje Richter notes that one of the most celebrated Jian’an epistolary works, a letter by Cao Pi to Wu Zhi, “is a gentle and very personal celebration of friendship, unencumbered by any ancillary communicative agenda.”73 Although the Cao Zhi/Wu Zhi letters do incorporate—in Wu Zhi’s quest for patronage—an ancillary agenda, the letters are more intimate, the agenda less conspicuous than Cao Zhi’s aims in the more official missives discussed here. Even given the relationship between Cao Zhi and his audiences and the personal nature of the memorials, they stand as discrete pleas from a supplicant to his superior. The exchange between Cao Zhi and Wu Zhi, though also between a superior and an inferior, are not freestanding. They are the self-referential, lapidary remains of a chain of ongoing communication that involved text in the form of the letters themselves, literary works, and face-to-face encounters. More contingent and open-ended than the memorials, the letters are but two fragments of a complex relationship carried out through writing, oral conversation, gesture, and demeanor. Yet both, the letters and the memorials are important sources for understanding early medieval epistolary practice.

72  See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 41–42. 73 Ibid., 122. The letter in question is “Letter to Wu Zhi, Prefect of Zhaoge” (Yu Zhaoge ling Wu Zhi shu 與朝歌令吳質書), found in Wen xuan 42.1895–96.

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Shi ji 史記. Compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–85 BCE). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959. Shih, Hsiang-Lin. “Jian’an Literature Revisited: Poetic Dialogues in the Last Three Decades of the Han Dynasty.” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2013. Tian, Xiaofei. “The Twilight of the Masters: Masters Literature (zishu) in Early Medieval China.” JAOS 126 (2006): 465–86. Waley, Arthur, trans. The Book of Songs. Edited by Joseph R. Allen. New York: Grove, 1996. Wang, Aihe. “Creators of an Emperor: The Political Group behind the Founding of the Han Empire.” AM 14.1 (2001): 19–50. Wang, Ping. “Culture and Literature in an Early Medieval Chinese Court: The Writings and Literary Thought of Xiao Tong (501–531).” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2006. ———. The Age of Courtly Writing: Wen xuan Compiler Xiao Tong (501–531) and His Circle. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Watson, Burton, trans. Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. ———. Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty, rev. ed. Hong Kong and New York: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Translation and Columbia University Press, 1993. ———. “Cao Pi: Two Letters to Wu Zhi, Magistrate of Zhaoge.” Renditions 41–42 (1994): 7–11. Wen xuan 文選. Compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–531). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1994. Wenjing mifu lun 文鏡秘府論 [Bunkyō hifuron]. Edited by Bianzhao Jingang 遍照 金剛 [Henzō Kinkō; i.e., Kūkai]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1975. Yang Jun 楊軍, ed. Yuan Zhen ji biannian jian zhu 元稹集編年箋註. Xi’an: San Qin chubanshe, 2002. Xing Peishun 邢培順. “Cao Zhi yu Wu Zhi jiao’e kaobian: Yi dui Cao Zhi ‘Yu Wu Jizhong shu’ de jiedu wei zhongxin” 曹植預與質交惡考辨:以對曹植與吳季重書的解 讀為中心. Shandong daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 4 (2010): 151–56. Xunzi ji shi 荀子集釋. Edited by Wang Xianqian 王先謙 (1842–1918). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988. Zhan guo ce 戰國策. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985. Zhang Keli 張可禮. San Cao nianpu 三曹年譜. Ji’nan: Qi Lu shushe, 1983. Zhang Yonglu 張永祿, ed. Han dai Chang’an cidian 漢代長安詞典. Xi’an: Shaanxi Renmin chubanshe, 1993. Zhao Ming 趙明, Yang Shuzeng 楊樹增, and Qu Delai 屈德來, eds. Liang Han da wenxue shi 兩漢大文學史. Changchun: Jilin daxue chubanshe, 1998.

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Liu Xie’s Institutional Mind: Letters, Administrative Documents, and Political Imagination in Fifth- and Sixth-Century China* Pablo Ariel Blitstein Letters are private; administration is public. Letters are for family and friends; administration is for bureaucrats and public servants. These are widespread assumptions. However, when we look at letters and administrative documents from early medieval China, we find that the boundaries between private and public are blurred. As David Pattinson has argued, early medieval letters seem—as administrative documents—to be devoid of “private matters.”1 He gives some major reasons for this absence: self-protection (quite necessary in a period of social and political turmoil), etiquette (letters were highly codified ways of keeping social relations) and literary concerns (letters could be read as stylistic models by a wider audience than the intended addressee). Here I propose to look at this absence from a different point of view. If early medieval letters look as “public” as administrative documents, is it because “privacy” existed somewhere other than in letters, or it is simply that our public-private dichotomy does not apply to social institutions in early medieval China? Furthermore, if that dichotomy is not an appropriate framework of analysis, what were then the specific boundaries between letters and administrative documents? Although the public-private dichotomy has been interpreted in different ways,2 in modern political language it has come to convey a very specific meaning opposing the “impersonal” sphere of the state to the “personal” sphere of

* I am very grateful to Leigh Jenco, Antje Richter, and Hans Steinmuller, as well as to the colleagues and PhD students of the Chair of Intellectual History at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at the University of Heidelberg, for reading this chapter and making insightful comments and highly valuable suggestions. 1  Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter Writing,” 97–118. 2  Following Julie Inness’ “intimacy-based account of privacy,” Pattinson defines it as “the ability of people to control access to things they regard as intimate.” Inness, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation, 138; Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter Writing,” 97.

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family and friends.3 The modern distinction between “private” letters and “public” administration is based on this differentiation of two “spheres” of social relations. Here, I will argue that the public-private dichotomy, in this specific meaning of an opposition between “personal” and “impersonal,”4 did not have a place in early medieval China, and so could not define the way written genres—especially letters and administrative texts—were codified and organized. After showing in the first section the evidence that letters and administrative documents were conceived of as contiguous genres, I will contend that, rather than being differentiated on the basis of the public-private dichotomy, these genres bear different names because of the ritual distinctions necessary to mark the personal and hierarchical relations between the senders and addressees. These ritual distinctions of genres are related to the general demand of verbal ritualization and, more generally, to the personal nature of authority, which makes impossible any distinction between “private” and “public” social spheres and, as a consequence, between “private” and “public” types of writing. I do not intend to deny the existence of personal experience in early medieval China. On the contrary, since I suggest the public-private dichotomy is heuristically limited as a framework of historical analysis, my intention is to give the self-representations of personal experience a more fundamental role in the study of early medieval institutions.5 One of our main sources in the study of the epistolary and administrative genres, Liu Xie’s 劉勰 (465–522 ?) The Literate Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍),6 provides valuable information that 3   For the historical development of the public-private dichotomy, see Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, esp. 107–16; Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft, 91–94; Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 16–24; Bourdieu, Sur l’État, 24–25. About the establishment of this dichotomy in Chinese discourses, see Zarrow, “The Origin of Modern Chinese Concepts of Privacy,” 121–46. 4  Inspired by Gary Hamilton’s distinction between “role” and “person,” I will understand “person” and “personal” in two different senses: in the sense of person as such (with his or her particular psychical, physical and social characteristics) and in the sense of personal role (“father,” “mother,” or “lord”). Hamilton, “Patriarchy, Patrimonialism, and Filial Piety,” 92–97. I use “personal” in these two senses as opposed to “impersonal,” that is, as opposed to institutions which, as the so-called “modern state,” are not supposed to be identified with any person or personal role. Persons can indeed hold a position in the state, but they cannot be the state (as they can be fathers or lords). 5  For some reflections on the relation between secrecy and privacy, see McDougall, LoveLetters and Privacy, 187–90 (with many references to sociological studies about secrecy). 6  This famous treatise on different aspects of writing, written by Liu Xie in the late 5th c. for the literate circles at Jiankang 建康 (Nanjing), became later one of the main references for any

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many scholars have nevertheless found confusing. Vincent Shih says that the chapters on memorials make “unscientific” classifications of genres,7 while Zhang Siqi says that Liu Xie’s definitions of letters are so general that, if we follow them, any written text should be considered a letter.8 However, we should perhaps rethink this response to Liu Xie’s definitions and classifications. I will attempt to show that what has been taken for a confused account is in fact a coherent representation, and that this representation becomes easily comprehensible when we analyze it in the context of early medieval institutions. The paradox is that, by the end of my analysis, I will perhaps unintentionally agree with Zhang Siqi: in fifth- and sixth-century China, every text was indeed, in a way, a letter.9 1

Letters, Memorials, and Status

In early medieval China, letters and administrative documents seem to have been closely related. This is at least what Liu Xie suggests in the “Written

discussion about writing in imperial times. Since Wenxin diaolong had the most complete expositions on genre, style, textual history and functions of writing, it is no wonder that it became one of the major sources of inspiration in later ages, both in imperial and modern times. Wenxin diaolong dedicates its first chapters to the origin and models of writing, the following chapters to the history and function of different genres and textual types, and the last chapters to different questions regarding technique, writing process, etc. For the position in the treatise of the chapter about epistolary writing, see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 49–50. 7  Shih, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, 151–52. To avoid the modern connotations of the word “literature,” I propose to translate the first part of the title as “literate mind.” For an analysis of the title, see Valérie Lavoix, “Un dragon pour emblème,” 197–247. 8  Zhang, Liuchao sanwen bijiao yanjiu, 102. Antje Richter has criticized Zhang Siqi for his misunderstanding of the word taken to mean “letter” in Wenxin diaolong. Instead of taking Liu Xie, the author of the treatise, as a lazy thinker who would not have been able to establish a clear distinction between letters and other genres, she argues that Liu Xie used the word shu both in its general meaning of writing on a material support and its specific meaning of using this writing for personal correspondence. Richter, “Notions of Epistolarity,” 146–57. 9  Zhang Siqi thinks that Liu Xie has failed to develop a clear definition of letters. But, as I suggest, this lack of definition is not a “failure”; it is a meaningful fact we should understand in its own logic. Even though Liu Xie does not seem to go as far as suggesting that everything written is a letter, he seems to be closer to this conception than to the clear-cut definition of “letter” assumed by Zhang Siqi. For the modern idea of writing as “letter,” see Altman, Epistolarity, 212.

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Records”10 chapter of his treatise, in which he deals extensively with letterwriting.11 The following passage formulates a minimal characterization of the epistolary genre: If we attempt to synthesize in an exhaustive way the genre of letters [shu],12 we should say that its roots are in the exhaustive rendition of words. [Through letters], words disperse melancholy feelings and convey stylistic ornamentation. That is why they must be orderly so as to release one’s intentions, gentle so as to cheer up the hearts. Ornamented and unrestrained, [letters are] thus a response from the voice of the mind. 詳總書體,本在盡言,言以散鬱陶,託風采,故宜條暢以任 氣,優柔以懌懷。文明從容,亦心聲之獻酬也。13 This general characterization of the genre could take us far beyond the limits of the epistolary genre: to be exhaustive, to add stylistic ornament or to express one’s own feelings are common topics in imperial China’s discourses on writing.14 However, Liu Xie does not intend to make a scholastic definition 10  The title of the chapter, “Shuji,” can be translated either as “letters and registers” or, following Antje Richter’s suggestion, as “written records.” Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 50–52. I follow Richter’s translation. 11  It would of course be bold to assert that his ideas were widely shared by the literate society of the Southern Qi (479–502). Liu Xie came from the lowest strata of the literate elites and had to go through the patronage of Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513) before he could start a career in the imperial administration. Besides, precisely because of his marginal position within the elites, in the beginning his treatise did not receive enough attention. Nevertheless, since Shen Yue, by then an important minister and a “master of letters for a whole generation” (Liang shu 14.253), had a great esteem for Liu Xie’s treatise, we can be certain that Wenxin diaolong conveyed ideas that were at least acceptable for contemporary elites once it had won the enthusiastic approval of a central figure at the imperial court. See Liang shu 50.712 and Nan shi 72.1781. 12  For the interpretation of this shu 書 as “letters,” I follow Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 58. 13  Wenxin diaolong yizheng 25.933. See also Richter’s translation of this passage in Letters and Epistolary Culture, 58–59. 14  Both “to exhaust words [with writing]” and to express one’s own feelings through writing are reformulations of two ancient topics on writing. The first one can be traced back to the “Attached Commentary” (Xici 繫辭) of the Changes (Zhou yi 周易), which says that “writing cannot exhaust words, and words cannot exhaust meaning” 書不盡言, 言不盡意. Zhou yi zhengyi 7.82c. Liu Xie seems to implicitly complete this phrase: letters are there to exhaust words, or to say more than what is allowed in other genres. The second topic has a double filiation. On the one hand, the “expression of one’s own ambi-

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of the genre. Letters seem self-evident to him. What matters is something else: on the one hand, the utility of epistolary writing (disperse melancholy feelings, exhaust words), and, on the other, the style of the text (ornamentation). Letters are characterized on the basis of what they do, not what they are. They act as an appropriate vehicle for the feelings of the sender. This seemingly “expressive” function of letters is not in contradiction with the administrative genre of memorial.15 On the contrary, right after this general characterization of letters, Liu Xie emphasizes the genetic filiation between the two genres: The hierarchical order among the venerable and the noble lies in the solemn attitude with which one displays ceremonial patterns [of behavior].16 Before the Warring States, both lords and ministers wrote “letters” [shu].17 Only when the Qin and the Han set the ceremonies [was there the generic distinction] between memorials18 [as specific names for textual types]. In the principalities and duchies, they also had the name of “memorial letters” [zoushu]. 若夫尊貴差序,則肅以節文,戰國以前,君臣同書,秦漢立 儀,始有表奏,王公國內,亦稱奏書。19 From here on, and for many lines, the “Written Records” chapter follows the historical relationship between letters and memorials. Their genetic filiation explains the social uses letters and memorials share in early medieval elite society: communication between persons who, most of the time, do not have tions” through poetry goes as far back as the Documents (Shu 書); on the other hand, the “expression of one’s own emotions” has been, since Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303), the core of reflections about poetry and writing in general. See, e.g., Cai Zongqi, “Wen and the Construction of a Critical System,” 26. 15  This is something Thomas Jansen has already pointed out in the conclusion to his article about what he calls “texts on severing relationships.” Jansen, “The Art of Severing Relationships,” 361–62. 16  For the interpretation of jiewen 節文 as “ceremonial patterns,” see Wenxin diaolong yizheng 25.935–36, n. 8. 17  Since the previous paragraph of the chapter is dedicated to epistolary writing, I consider that the word shu has here the meaning of “letter.” 18  The zou 奏 here corresponds to “memorials,” and not to hezou 劾奏 (“denunciations”). On the zou in Han times, see Giele, Imperial Decision-Making, 115–28. Giele reserves “memorials” only for this term, and uses “presentations” for biao 表. For the sake of the exposition, I use “memorial” for both zou and biao. 19  Wenxin diaolong yizheng 25.933.

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the same status in the hierarchies defined by office and familial origin. So when they are the vehicle for communication between unequal persons (who take part in the “hierarchical order among the venerable and the noble” 尊貴差 序), these texts need be distinguished in their names: letters to princes cannot bear the same name as letters to an emperor. The “ceremonial patterns” ( jiewen 節文) demand indeed a distinctive treatment of “venerable and noble” men. This fundamental unity of letters and memorials is then, as a consequence, not just a trace of remote origins, but something Liu Xie still finds in his present. A letter to a superior ( jianji 牋記), for example, is for Liu Xie both a letter and a memorial at the same time. Further on in the “Written Records” chapter, he says of this textual type: If we search [the principles] of the type of the letter to superiors, [we will find them in the fact that their writers20] peep upwards at memorials [as a model from the top of imperial hierarchies] and look downwards at letters [as a model of hierarchically lower forms of writing], so that they show respect without fear, simplicity without arrogance; they are clear and beautiful in order to show wisdom21 in [the writer’s] talent and full of ornament in order to embellish his sound. This is the particular characteristic of letters to superiors. 原牋記之為式,既上窺乎表,亦下睨乎書,使敬而不懾,簡而 無傲,清美以惠其才,彪蔚以文其響,蓋牋記之分也。22 Letters to superiors stand as a bridge between letters and memorials. Intermediary between the two genres, they show that letters and memorials share a common space (the imperial court with its hierarchical relations), common features (ritual marks of status) and a common origin (they were all letters in the beginning). The hierarchical differentiation between letters and memorials seems clear: “upwards” (shang 上) and “downwards” (xia 下) imply the upper-lower differentiation of writing forms.23 Without confusing 20  Here I use “writer” both in the sense of the sender and of the actual writer (who are not always the same person). I will not deal in this article with the authorial connotations of this word. 21  This hui 惠 is an equivalent of hui 慧, which seems to be used as a factitive verb. Wenxin diaolong yizheng 25.942, n. 3. 22  Wenxin diaolong yizheng 25.941. 23  Shang and xia seem to adopt the point of view of the sender, who looks “upwards” at a textual type addressed to the emperor and “downwards” at a type addressed to equals and inferior people, and then writes a text which—expressed in these vertical, hierarchical

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both types of texts in a single genre, Liu Xie places letters and memorials in a generic spectrum in which different subgenres, such as letters to superiors and the other genres we will discuss below, can belong to both types. Intermediary textual types act as a link in a continuous generic chain. Do intermediary textual types such as letters to superiors act as a ceiling that sharply separates the “private” genre of letters, addressed to persons who have a status closer to the one of the sender, from the “public” genre of memorials, addressed to the emperor? Or are they, on the contrary, a necessary link to keep letters within the “public” sphere of administrative documents? Both questions suppose that “public” or “private” spheres would have had enough social strength as symbolic mechanisms to organize the way persons communicate with each other through writing. However, when we take a closer look at the social meaning given to letters and administrative documents, the distinctions between genres seem to be related to a different mechanism of social organization: the ritual codification of status and rank. 2

Ritualized Language

Letters and memorials are attached to each other; Liu Xie sees them connected formally, semantically and genetically. What creates this connection is, as he says, ceremonial patterns that serve to identify the relative social status of the senders and addressees of these texts. And since letters and memorials are involved in the same continuous generic spectrum, they cannot be considered separate, but are knitted together by the same ritual codes that organize social relations among the elites. These shared ritual codes are apparent when we compare the generic features and style of letters and memorials. Both genres demand a specified addressee; both demand an indication of the day and month when the text is written. Both use similar terms of salutation, such as dunshou 頓首 (I bow my head) when the addressee is an equal or a superior or sizui 死罪 (I deserve the death penalty) when the addressee is an equal, an important minister or the emperor.24 Both use specific terms of address according to the addressee, terms—would be in the middle (since it is not as constraining as a text written to the emperor, but also not as unconstrained as a text written to an inferior). 24  The memorials we find in the Selection of Refined Literature (Wen xuan 文選) most usually suppress the long phrase “I really feel fear, I really feel terror, I bow my head, I deserve the death penalty” 誠惶誠恐,頓首死罪, and replace it with the phrase “here he thanks” 中謝 (similar to zhonghe 中賀, “here he congratulates,” which serves

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and both have very strict rules for formulating questions, for giving a piece of information or for any other speech act that needs written communication.25 Ritual codes are also manifest, as we saw, in the meta-language used for letters and administrative genres: the differences between the names of genres correspond to the hierarchical relation of senders and addressees, as well as to their respective status. For example, a memorial addressed to the emperor is called biao 表, but when such a text is addressed to a prince, it is called jian 牋.26 These names distinguish, according to Liu Xie’s interpretation, memorials from regular letters (shu), which can be addressed to equals (in a non-administrative context) or to members of one’s own family.27 Different names are not only related to status, but also indicate different functions. For example, Liu Xie suggests that imperial thank-you letters (zhang 章), since they are used to thank the emperor for a favor,28 deserve a different name to distinguish them from a memorial to the emperor (biao) (even though the as an abbreviated congratulation phrase). Wen xuan 37.1691. In the memorials (sometimes just called shu, “letters”) addressed to ministers, these phrases are simplified. E.g., a letter (shu 書) written by two “former officials” (guli 故吏), Yu Yi 庾翼 (305–345) and Liu Xia 劉遐 (?–326), to their patron (probably Tao Kan 陶侃, 259–334) just uses “I deserve the death penalty” once, and a “princely memorial” ( jian 牋) from Xie Tiao 謝 脁 to Xiao Zilong 蕭子隆, prince of Sui 隨, uses it twice, both without the other verbal components of the formula in memorials to the emperor. Xie Tiao’s letter can be found in Wen xuan 40.1835; and Yu Yi and Liu Xia’s in Quan Jin wen 34.1675.7b–8a. For a discussion on the translation of sizui, see Giele, Imperial Decision-Making, 92–94. 25  See Richter, “Letters and Letter Writing,” 15–22; Letters and Epistolary Culture, 75–116; and Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 581–613. I just mention here some of the similarities between them. This does not mean that there are no differences between the genres that compose the continuous spectrum between epistolary and administrative genres. But, as I will argue further below, the different writing styles—from dating, formulae, and codes to rhetorical strategies—have to be analyzed with that spectrum in mind, and not from the point of view of a dichotomy between “private” and “public” writing. 26  This ritual differentiation of genres is clearly stated in standard histories. E.g., when the first emperor of the Southern Qi, Xiao Daocheng 蕭道成 (427–482; Gaodi 齊高帝, r. 479–82), demotes the last emperor of the Liu-Song 劉宋 (420–79) to the rank of prince of Ruyin 汝陰, his annals in the Book of Southern Qi say “memorials addressed to [the demoted emperor] are not called biao any more, nor are his answers called zhao” 上書不 為表,答表不稱詔. Nan Qi shu 2.32. For jian, see infra. 27  When there is an exchange between equals in an administrative context, the “letters” naturally bear administrative names. A report to the Chancellery (menxia 門下), e.g., is called guan 關. For the letters to younger members of one’s own family, and particularly admonition letters, see Antje Richter’s chapter in this volume. 28  Enno Giele has shown that zhang 章 were actually petitions (that is the translation he adopts); the idea was to thank for a favor and create a good atmosphere for a request.

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word biao is sometimes used for such thank-you letters).29 This difference in function nonetheless does not cancel hierarchy: zhang is specifically used for the emperor; other thank-you letters are simply called shu.30 This ritual differentiation between generic names seems to go hand in hand with the differentiation in the forms of salutation used in the whole spectrum of letters and memorials. If we go from the top to the bottom in the social rank of the senders and addressees, and so in the hierarchy of textual types from administrative genres to letters, we find that some formulations disappear or become less frequent. “I deserve the death penalty,” for example, is more common in memorials than in letters to members of one’s own family,31 and “I bow my head” is sometimes completely omitted in letters to younger members of the family. The terms of address also change according to the relations of the persons involved: one would use one’s own name for self-address before a superior, and the more familiar wu 吾 for a closer relationship.32 These Imperial Decision-Making, 102–6. Translating zhang as “imperial thank-you letter,” I intend to stress that such texts were a formal way of showing gratitude to the emperor. 29  It is sometimes difficult to understand the differences between zhang 章 and biao 表 in the chapter. According to Liu Xie, the distinction was very clear in the Han: zhang was an imperial thank-you letter and biao a petition. But, as Zhan Ying suggests, biao became a general form that included imperial thank-you letters. Wenxin diaolong yizheng 22.820. 30  See, e.g., Jin shu 34.1030, where a thank-you letter addressed to Du Yu 杜預 (222–285) is called just shu. The qi 啟, another administrative genre, could be used as a thank-you letter as well. See Xiaofei Tian’s chapter in this volume. 31  This does not mean that sizui was exclusively used for memorials or for other texts addressed to superiors in office. As other formulaic prescripts, sizui seems to have been also used in letters between equals (either in family origin or in office), e.g., in letters of condolence and mourning. See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 78. 32  In the two letters quoted above, “I bow my head” is absent, while it is present in letters addressed to people who are designated as zuxia 足下. In her recent book about epistolary writing in early medieval China, Antje Richter has a full section on the most common terms of address and self-designation of the period. See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 110–16. We know, thanks to Ebrey’s analysis, that later letters omit systematically some of these terms of address according to status. An elder brother, e.g., is not expected to use this phrase in a letter to his younger brother, while his younger brother cannot be exempted when writing to the elder one. (“T’ang Guides,” 605–06) I have not been able to analyze systematically the terms of address in extant letters of the early medieval period. But I assume, from Yan Zhitui’s account in the “Exemplary Customs” (Fengcao) chapter of his Family Instructions, that the degrees of familial hierarchy were as well codified in “writing etiquettes” as they were in Tang times. This hypothesis is confirmed by the terms of address one can find in letters with unidentified addressees: e.g., terms for “you” such as ru 汝 and zuxia 足下, as well as the more respectful prefix zun 尊, “Your Venerable,” must have had the same function of marking the hierarchy between family members and

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codes were in constant change, both in space and time, as Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–591) repeatedly says by the end of the sixth century in his Family Instructions (Yanshi jiaxun 顏氏家訓): Every time one speaks to someone and mentions the addressee’s grandparents, paternal elder uncles and aunts, parents and eldest aunts, he must add the word “Your Venerable” [zun], whereas for the younger uncles and aunts and lower members of the family, he must add the word “Your Virtuous” [xian]. This is to mark the differences in status. When Wang Xizhi 王羲之 [303–361] wrote his letters, he always mentioned the addressee’s mother in the same terms as he mentioned his own; he would not use the word “Your Venerable.” This is something one does not do nowadays. 凡與人言,稱彼祖父母、世父母、父母及長姑,皆加尊字,自 叔父母已下,則加賢字,尊卑之差也。王羲之書,稱彼之母與 自稱己母同,不云尊字,今所非也。33 Yan Zhitui’s examples illustrate both the precision and the constant change of terms of address. Although we cannot be sure if the “nowadays” ( jin 今) would apply to Liu Xie’s time—Wenxin diaolong was written roughly one century before Yan Zhitui’s Family Instructions and almost two after Wang Xizhi’s letters—this concern with linguistic distinctions of status seems to have been pervasive during the whole period. Whatever the differences in language codes, we can be certain of two things. First, letters and administrative documents used these codes for status distinction: the variations in terms of address were related to the social distance between sender and addressee. Second, as we saw in Liu Xie’s treatise, the meta-language used to categorize genres (biao, zhang, jian, shu, etc.) was also marked by hierarchical distinctions: generic labels marked status. In short, hierarchical distance and social role determined both the way texts were written and the way textual types were labeled. These linguistic and meta-linguistic codes were indeed conceived as “rites,” as li 禮 and yi 儀. They were not considered mere “legal” codes (lü 律), because one was expected, as in any ritual performance, to give emotional con-

friends. See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 113. It seems that in Wang Jian’s writing etiquette textbooks, e.g., a father would be called daren 大人. See Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 594 and infra. 33  Yanshi jiaxun jijie 2.76.

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sent to them.34 In the case of letters, the ritual codes of speech were established in special textbooks called shuyi 書儀 or “writing etiquette.” Yan Zhitui mentions the importance of these textbooks in the “Exemplary Customs” (Fengcao 風操) chapter of his Family Instructions: In the South, each status in hierarchy deserves a different term of address; these [terms] are included in the writing etiquettes. 江南輕重,各有謂號,具諸書儀。35 In this single phrase, Yan Zhitui summarizes the use of these textbooks: to distinguish different terms of address (weihao 謂號) according to status (qingzhong 輕重). Writing etiquette textbooks seem indeed to have circulated widely among the literate elites of the Southern Dynasties. We know, for example, that Wang Jian 王儉 (452–489), contemporary of Liu Xie and one the most important ministers in the beginning of the Southern Qi dynasty (479–502), wrote a highly influential Writing Etiquette for Auspicious Occasions (Ji shuyi 吉書儀) and an Etiquette for Condoling and Thanking (Diao da yi 弔答儀).36 These books are not extant. But we can imagine, thanks to later textbooks found at Dunhuang or preserved in the tradition, that the codes and models of those textbooks were used for different sorts of letters: to members of one’s own family, to friends and officials, or within the imperial household.37 Since these codes varied according to family and imperial customs, textbooks on writing etiquette must have provided useful models for written communication within literate circles. Or, perhaps, they were much more than just useful.

34  How to give emotional consent to ritual (the relation between qing 情 and li 禮) was indeed a constant subject of discussion in the Southern Dynasties. See Yu Yingshi, Shi yu Zhongguo wenhua, 377–83. 35  Yanshi jiaxun jijie 2.78. 36  Sui shu 33.971. I assume that the shu in shuyi goes beyond “letters” and extends to writing in general. Yan Zhitui’s assertions seem moreover to suggest that some of these textbooks were not only for written etiquette, but for verbal etiquette in general, oral or written. This might have been especially the case of the second of Wang Jian’s books (which does not have shu in its title), but probably also of those which only addressed writing codes (since many of those codes must have been used for oral communication). 37  See Zhou Yiliang and Zhao Heping’s classification of the different “writing etiquettes” found at Dunhuang in their Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu, 38–39; Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 581– 613. For the Six Dynasties period, see Zhou and Zhao, Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu, 94–96.

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As later examples analyzed by Patricia Ebrey,38 some of them must have had, de facto, the same authority as a code sanctioned by the emperor. As for administrative writing etiquette, Shen Yue’s 沈約 (441–513) Book of Song (Song shu 宋書) provides a detailed account of codes. Similar to the textbooks on epistolary etiquette, these codes for administrative writing were in the domain of ritual: they are documented in the “Monograph about Rites” (Lizhi 禮志) and classed as yizhu 儀注 or “Annotations to Etiquette.”39 Shen Yue’s source seems to have been a text delivered in 449 to the crown prince, who had briefly taken charge of the imperial palace when his father, emperor Wen 宋文帝 (407–453; r. 424–53), was on a journey to the East of the empire. 40 The following is a model of the so-called “etiquette for memorials [addressed to a prince]” ( jianyi 牋儀):41 The Vice director(s) of the Department of State Affairs and the Assistants of the Right and of the Left of the Department, So-and-So (moujia), deserve the death penalty, deserve the death penalty. Something, etc., etc. We have discussed, and consider that the document should be approved and executed in this way. Year, month, day. Agency So-and-So reports. 尚書僕射、尚書左右丞某甲,死罪死罪。某事云云。參議以為 宜如是事諾奉行。某年月日。某曹上。42 38  Later textbooks, analyzed by Patricia Ebrey, were written on imperial command. The purpose was to create a standard norm between the different and, if we are to believe Yan Zhitui, ever changing terms of address. “T’ang Guides,” 594. 39  In “T’ang Guides”, Ebrey translates yizhu as “annotations and etiquette.” But since this genre is, in fact, an explanation of different rules of etiquette, I understand it as “annotations to etiquette.” 40  Song shu 17.381–84. These pages of the Book of Song are a useful source to identify the codes associated to different administrative textual types. Even if they were conceived as an aid for the crown prince, these codes are very far from the ones used in regular memorials and other administrative documents. For a short analysis of these codes, see Zhu, Liang Han Wei Jin, 301–04. 41  The jian 牋 to a prince seems to be closely related to the above mentioned jianji 牋記 or “letters to superiors”, which are addressed to superiors in general. In his Wenzhang yuanqi 文章緣起, Ren Fang 任昉 (460–508) illustrates the jian with the example of a memorial addressed to a prince. But Chen Maoren 陳懋仁 (active in the Ming dynasty, 1368–1644), in his note to this example, quotes Liu Xie’s passage about jianji as an explanation. This would suggest that jian and jianji are the same genre. See Wenzhang yuanqi zhu, 6. In spite of this possibility, we keep a different translation for jian and jianji to show the singularity of each of the contexts. 42  Song shu 17.381. For the interpretation of shinuo 事諾, see Zhu, Liang Han Wei Jin, 302. I assume that fengxing 奉行, “execute (an order)”, refers to the execution of the order after

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This is just one model of administrative etiquette; there are many others in the Book of Song. Since these rules apply only to the documents produced under the exceptional rule of the crown prince, we cannot expect other equivalent imperial documents to adopt exactly the same format. But Shen Yue’s source also mentions a “yellow record” (huang’an 黃案) which, as Zhu Zongbin suggests, must have contained models for the administrative documents produced in normal times.43 Whatever the degree of resemblance between princely and other documents, it seems to be clear that at least part of the etiquette codes for memorial writing was composed not just of customary codes, but of sanctioned norms recorded in an institutional register. It would be difficult to determine whether the textbooks on writing etiquette had the same authority as the records of administrative codes. Most probably they did not. But, in some cases, they certainly had de facto authority. This might have been the case of Wang Jian’s textbooks on writing etiquette. Wang Jian, who belonged to one of the most prestigious and powerful families in the South, was considered an authority in ritual matters since his youth.44 He even organized the imperial rituals once the Southern Qi dynasty was founded in 479.45 So even if we do not know the date of Wang Jian’s writing etiquette textbooks, we can assume that, since he belonged to an illustrious family famous for its ritual traditions, his purpose was to establish codes that were destined to become authoritative rules among the members of the literate elite.46 If he wrote them when he was a minister, they must have become authoritative texts right away; if he wrote them before, his authority in ritual matters must have made his early achievements an authoritative standard.47 Even though Wang Jian’s codification of writing etiquette does not seem to approval. As a consequence, I changed the punctuation of the Zhonghua shuju edition. 43  The document is mentioned in Song shu 17.382. After exposing some of the rules of reports (called guan), the text says: “the rest is as in the rules in the yellow record” 餘皆 如黃案式. A “yellow record” is also mentioned in Nan Qi shu 16.321. See also Zhu, Liang Han Wei Jin, 303. 44  According to Ren Fang’s biography of Wang Jian for the latter’s complete works. Wen xuan 46.2074. 45   Nan Qi shu 23.434. Wang Jian is described as zuoming 佐命, the one “who assists the emperor in receiving the Mandate [of Heaven].” 46  On the authority of the Langye Wang clan for any ritual question, in particular for the writing etiquette, see Zhou and Zhao, Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu, 95. 47  As Ren Fang asserts in the biography he wrote for Wang Jian’s posthumous compilation of works. Wen xuan 46.2074. An anecdote of the History of the South shows Wang Jian evaluating both learning and linguistic abilities in a client who asks him for a post. Nan shi 22.592.

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have been as compulsory as the administrative codes at court, other members of the elites must have felt the weight of Wang Jian’s rules when writing to each other. This weight was not just a matter of prestige. Since the Wang of Langye 琅琊, Wang Jian’s family, had had for generations a stronghold on the criteria of recruiting or promoting officials, faults in writing etiquette could mean the stagnation of a career for someone whose destiny depended on this family, even for a member of the elites.48 The bibliographic monograph of the Book of Sui (Sui shu 隋書), written a century and a half later than Liu Xie’s treatise, seems to confirm the common ritual ground of letters and administrative texts, because the category “Annotations to Etiquette” encompasses both textbooks on writing etiquette and records of administrative codes. This bibliographic category, as all the others in the monograph, includes an attached explanation, which emphasizes the hierarchical dimensions of ritual performance in general, and, by extension, of verbal ritual: The origin of “Annotations to Etiquette” goes far back in time. The relations between lord and minister and between father and son, the six degrees of familial proximity, the nine degrees of one’s own linage, and so on,49 convey the distinction between closer and further relatives and between upper and lower [in status]. To support one’s own parents and to organize their funeral, as well to comfort others and give one’s condolences, [all this] demanded numerous rules of etiquette. 儀注之興,其所由來久矣。自君臣父子,六親九族,各有上下 親疏之別。養生送死,弔恤賀慶,則有進止威儀之數。50 48  Qiu Lingju’s 丘靈鞠 (?–484 ?) biography, e.g., associates lack of success with his lack of etiquette: he is described as “lacking body etiquette” 無形儀. Nan Qi shu 52.890. 49  With Kōzen, I assume that the zi 自 means that the enumeration could go on. See the Japanese translation in Kōzen and Kawai, Zui sho, 356. 50  Sui shu 33.971. This category probably comes from Ruan Xiaoxu’s 阮孝緒 (479–536) Seven Registers (Qilu 七錄, of which only the preface is extant), written during the Liang dynasty (502–57) and from Wang Jian’s earlier Seven Records (Qizhi 七志, now lost), written towards the end of the Liu-Song dynasty. In Ruan’s Seven Registers, the subcategory “Annals and Biographies” ( jizhuan 紀傳) has a subcategory “Canon of Etiquette” ( yidian 儀典), which could have been the precedent for the Sui shu’s “Annotations to Etiquette” in the category “History,” which again may have been inspired by a subcategory in Wang Jian’s Seven Records. For a reconstruction of these catalogues and their relation with the bibliographical treatise of the Book of Sui, see Yao Mingda, Zhongguo muluxue shi, 60–66; Kōzen and Kawai, Zui sho, 24–29.

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To distinguish upper and lower: this is a very widespread description of the traditional function attributed to ritual, but as a general introduction to this bibliographic category, it reminds us that texts on epistolary and administrative writing etiquette are not different from other kinds of texts on imperial ritual. Their specificity resides on their object: language. As such, these textbooks inevitably overlap, since the multifaceted verbal codes that distinguish different hierarchical positions from a father to a prince and from a prince to an emperor resemble one another. Patricia Ebrey uses Erving Goffman’s felicitous expression of “interaction rituals” to characterize verbal etiquette.51 However, while Goffman deals with the decentralized social patterns of face-to-face performance, writing etiquette books were intended to be a standard that held centralizing control on verbal interactions. If we wish to understand the reason behind this control, we must bear in mind the place that constituted the implicit common reference for the literate elites: the court, both as a physical place and as a social force. It was in the shared space of the court where epistolary and administrative writing were, so to speak, forced to develop their common ritual codes. For the elites, the social life of the court, where imperial administration and illustrious families converge, set the standards of writing etiquette either for “public” administrative writing or “private” epistolary writing. The central space of the imperial court, which linked the ministerial house to the imperial palace, was the place where “interaction rituals,” and so verbal etiquette codes, were negotiated. These common codes and standards of writing etiquette should not be taken as a sign of a lack of boundaries between genres or styles. A simple shu, for example, would certainly have more problems than a biao if it had to go through the complicated procedures of imperial administration; administrative procedures indeed have their own demands on generic labels and on the language that is used. Such constraints cannot be avoided. The different generic names, even if necessarily imprecise in regard to actual writing practices, represent limits to what a writer can do and to what a reader can find under a particular genre label, and ritual rules imposed by social distance, institutional restrictions and the particularities of a situation determine to a certain extent the choice of genre and style. However, since letters and administrative texts belong to the same spectrum, there is a fluid circulation of similar codes of writing etiquette from one genre to the other. A shu full of administrative codes might be too cold for a close friend, but not necessarily for a written exchange between two officials, even if they were to make the exchange outside regular procedures; 51  Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 581.

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an emperor might be angry at the neglect of administrative codes in a memorial sent by some official, but he might be angry as well if a close minister and old friend of his did not use a more friendly language in his administrative reports.52 Beyond evident restrictions as to what someone can do with genres and social distance, many ritual codes circulate across the whole spectrum from letters to administrative texts. This gives a common belonging to the textbooks and records that deal with both epistolary and administrative writing etiquette. In sum, the common grounds of both forms of etiquette can only be explained by the fact that, at court, the intended addressee is always a person— not an abstract, anonymous embodiment of the “public” institution we call “State,” but a person with a particular status and with a particular relationship to the sender. 3

Ritual, “Ornament” and Style

The stylistic perfection of many extant letters and administrative documents is also related to the ritual institutionalization of written language. Similar to other forms of ritualized language, the beauty of these texts is not only—as David Pattinson has argued—a sign that they were meant to be read by a large audience, but also served as a way of marking the social superiority of the persons involved in writing and reading them. Stylistic perfection is neither the consequence of the “public” character of these texts, nor of a “private” game between sender and addressee. Rather, it is the sign of a hierarchical personal relation that cannot be reduced to either a “public” or a “private” sphere of social life. Some scholars have attempted to explain the beauty of these texts as a product of the emerging “literary consciousness” of the period.53 However, this stylistic beauty might perhaps have another meaning. It is not that letters and administrative documents could not have become exemplary models of good writing—quite the contrary—but despite their exemplary value, they could 52  On these shared features between memorials and letters, see also Robert Joe Cutter’s article in this volume. 53  Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter Writing,” 114; Luo Zongqiang, “Shi ‘Zhangbiao’ pian,” 85–86. Luo Zongqiang intends to show that the beautiful style of this text is related to an impure “conception of literature.” The idea that this period has witnessed the emergence of “literary” or “aesthetic consciousness” has a long tradition that goes back to Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936).

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never become “literature”; indeed, no separate discipline such as modern “literature” existed to claim jurisdiction on these texts. The reasons for this beautiful writing are rather to be found in the specific nature of ritual institutions. According to the canonical books and texts of the masters, ritual institutions had an aesthetic dimension, mostly described in terms of “ornamentation” or “decoration.” These “ornaments” had two different uses in ritual contexts. The first was emotional: the beauty of performance would help engage the feelings of the participants and thus contribute to the efficacy of the ceremony or rite. The second use was representative: decoration, ornaments, and elegant patterns of behavior served to distinguish the status of each participant of the performance.54 Verbal etiquette seems to have been rationalized in these terms. When Liu Xie demands “ornamentation” (wen 文, cai 采, etc.) for letters and memorials, he highlights not just aesthetic appreciation, but also the hierarchical meaning that is embedded in the idea of “ornament.”55 The following passages are explicit on this subject. Memorials (biao) and imperial thank-you letters (zhang), according to Liu Xie,

54  About the representative and emotional functions of aesthetic experience in ritual performance, see, e.g., Joachim Gentz, “Ritus als Physiognomie,” 330–32 (about Xunzi); Shen Wenzhuo, Zong Zhou Liyue, 5–6. For a profound reflection on the representative function of ornament in pre-imperial China, see Powers, Pattern and Person, 23–46. About the aesthetic relation between ritual and writing, see Michael Nylan’s “Toward an Archeology of Writing,” 10–11. The hierarchic function of “ornaments” appears everywhere in the canonical books and the masters, so references to it usually take the form of an allusion. E.g., in the “Qingcai” chapter of his Wenxin diaolong, Liu Xie quotes two verses from the Odes (“Shuoren” 碩人, Mao 57; Mao shi zhengyi 3.2.322b) that, in the Analects, are used in a dialogue between Zixia 子夏 (507–? BCE) and Confucius to make a comparison between a woman’s make-up, painting, and ritual. The conclusion of Zixia and Confucius, as well as that of Liu Xie, is that ritual performance demands as much moderation as make-up and painting. See Lunyu zhushu 3.2466b–c. Other examples of the role of aesthetics in ritual performance are Li ji zhengyi 37.1528b–c (chapter “Yueji” 樂記) and Xunzi jijie 13.362–66 (chapter “Lilun” 禮論). 55  “Ornament” translates here different words, such as cai 采, wen 文, or shi 飾. Each of those words has its own semantic nuance, but they are clearly associated to ornamentation. In Liu Xie’s treatise, e.g., we find different metaphors taken from handicraft that associate wen and cai to decoration and ornamented patterns, which are compared, among others, to “red lacquer” (see infra) or to the decoration on a recipient (Wenxin diaolong yizheng 49.1867.). The hierarchical connotations of ornament are extensively treated in Powers, Pattern and Person.

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. . . are the ornament of the person and the flowers of the kingdom.56 Since imperial thank-you letters are used to reach the imperial palace, their wind and norms should be glittering; since memorials are [also] used to reach the imperial palace, their bones and ornaments57 have to shine. 既其身文,且亦國華。章以造闕,風矩應明;表以致禁,骨采 宜耀。58 Stylistic ornamentation is needed to mark the social superiority of the addressee—the emperor, whose presence is suggested here by the place where he dwells, that is, the palace. Nothing seems to manifest a concern for “literature” as a discipline or as a substantial form of “aesthetic consciousness.” Rather, good style seems to have the same role as “ornaments” in ritual performance: to show the superiority of the official, of the emperor or of the empire as a whole.59 “Ornaments” have to do with respect, with status, with distinction. Liu Xie uses a similar syntactic construction and analogous lexical units to explain the reason why letters, just as memorials, also demand stylistic perfection:

56  The expression “flowers of the kingdom” is generally used to refer to virtue. See, e.g., Yan Yannian’s 顏延年 (384–456) “Poem Presented to Great Chancellor Wang” (Zeng Wang taichang shi 贈王太常詩). Wen xuan 26.1201; Wenxin diaolong yizheng 26.1201. The parallelism between wen and hua 華 suggests their common reference to “ornament.” The idea that words are the “ornament of a person” comes from the Zuo zhuan 左傳. Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 15.1817a–b, Duke Xi, 24th year. 57  The parallel between fengju 風矩 and gucai 骨采 has to be understood within the frame of Liu Xie’s ideas about the “wind” and the “bones” of a text. Wenxin diaolong yizheng 22.843, n. 4. 58  Ibid., 22.843. 59  It is not only the superiority of the addressee that justifies the beauty of the memorials. Since most of the administrative texts, either memorials to the emperor or edicts, are read by other ministers or even circulate further among literate men, good writing is taken as a sign of the superiority of the minister. This does not only concern the administrations of the Southern Dynasties. Wang Rong’s 王融 (467–493) “Preface to the Collection of Poems from the Ceremony of the Sinuous Brook Celebrated on the Third Day of the Third Month” (Sanyue sanri qushui shi xu 三月三日曲水詩序), e.g., was considered by ministers of the Northern Wei a sign of the splendor of the Southern Qi dynasty. Nan Qi shu 47.821–22.

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Words are the ornament of the person and letters are an auspicious omen of the kingdom. Men of letters should be thoughtful of the organization and the subject [of the text]. 言既身文,信亦邦瑞,翰林之士,思理實焉。60 Once again, writing cannot be separated from what it conveys: the social superiority of its writer and/or sender and the splendor of the empire. Aesthetic demands are embedded in social representation and personal status; it is the splendor of the kingdom and the magnificence of its ministers that are at stake, not the seemingly detached concern for “literature” and “art” that is traditionally attributed to Six Dynasties literate elites. This representative use of “ornaments” is further attested in the chapter dedicated to “Feelings and Ornaments” (Qingcai 情采) in Liu Xie’s treatise. The first lines of the chapter say: The writings of the Sages and of virtuous men are called wenzhang. How could this be possible if [those writings] were not full of ornament? Water is by nature formless, and ripples take their form in it; the constitution of wood is solid, and flowers bloom from it. The ornament is attached to the matter. If the tiger and leopard had no patterns, their pelts would be the same as those of dogs and sheep; the rhino has a hide, and ornament is supplied by red lacquer [for armours]. The matter expects the ornament.61 聖賢書辭,總稱文章,非采而何?夫水性虛而淪漪結,木體實 而花萼振,文附質也.虎豹無文.則鞹同犬羊;犀兕有皮,而 色資丹漆:質待文也. The metaphor of sheep and dogs explains the meaning of stylistic embellishment: if one wants to show superiority, as the sages and virtuous men, one’s writings must be full of ornament (wen 文 or cai 采). It is an allusion to a passage of the Analects in which Zigong stresses the importance of wen, “ornament,” to distinguish the superior from the lowly man.62 Huang Kan 皇侃 (488–545) has a similar interpretation of this passage of the Analects, and he is even more explicit about the use of “ornament” to distinguish status. “Ornament” (the expression is wenhua 文華) has for him a wider sense than

60  Wenxin diaolong yizheng 25.969. 61  Wenxin diaolong yizheng 7.1147–48. 62  Lunyu zhushu 12.2503b.

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for Liu Xie; it is not the ornament of a written text, but “ornament” in the more general sense of elegance, presentation, and behavior: Pelt is the name for skin without its fur. What makes tigers and leopards more valuable than dogs and sheep is that the abundance of ornament [wen] in their furs makes a difference. Now if we take tigers and leopards as well as dogs and sheep, and we take off their furs, and only their skin is left, then who will be able to recognize the noble and the mean and distinguish tigers and leopards from dogs and sheep? It is a metaphor to say that the value of the superior man is that he uses ornament [wenhua] to make distinctions. Now if we just take matter [zhi] without ornament [wen], how can we distinguish the superior man from the masses? 鞹者,皮去毛之稱也.虎豹所以貴於犬羊者,政以毛文炳蔚為 異耳.今若取虎豹及犬羊皮,俱滅其毛,唯餘皮在,則誰復識 其貴賤,别於虎豹與犬羊乎.譬于君子所以貴者,政以文華為 别.今若遂使質而不文,則何别於君子與衆人乎.63 Liu Xie and Huang Kan give the same connotations to “ornament” (wen and cai for the former, wen and wenhua for the latter): it serves to distinguish vertical differences, to display status, and to show superiority. The “ornaments” of letters and administrative documents have the same representative use: they contribute to show the superiority of the writer and, more generally, of the whole kingdom. Good style is not just related to the aesthetic pleasure of the reader, but also to a “dramaturgy of power”64 that creates appropriate patterns for social distinctions. In this dramaturgy, “ornament” marks the superiority of a person, in a letter or in an administrative document, and goes beyond the public-private dichotomy. Language rites and status markers are certainly common in many societies; they are not unique features of the written language of early medieval literate elites in China. Modern societies have these language rites as well. However, the respective social meanings of language rites in early medieval China and modern societies are not the same. While many modern administrative languages seem to reduce the personal connotations of their terms of address, administrative language in early Medieval China is quite the opposite: terms of

63  Lunyu yishu, “Yan Yuan,” 28a. 64  Cohen, The Politics of Elite Culture.

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address not only are more varied, but also strongly personal.65 This is because authority is not bestowed on an impersonal fiction such as the “state,” but on personal roles such as “emperor,” “father,” and “master.”66 This personal character of authority is precisely—as we will see in the following section—what made impossible the existence of a dualistic opposition between a “public” and a “private” sphere of life and, as a consequence, between administrative documents and letters. 4

Personal Relations and Textual Types

The emperor’s authority was indeed a personal one. Some scholars describe it as a patriarchal authority: the emperor ruled his empire as a father rules his family.67 What exactly did that patriarchy mean? And how was it related to the organization of written genres? The emperor was not confused with a father. The emperor assumed paternal prerogatives because the role of the father was a model both for family and for imperial organization. At the Southern Qi court, just as in most of the medieval dynasties, the father of an illustrious family68 had the privilege of promoting

65  If we take a quick look at a report of the present French Republic, we will certainly find personal terms of address such as “nous avons l’honneur de soummettre à votre approbation” and “veuillez agréer, Monsieur le Président, l’assurance de notre profond respect.” See, e.g., the report in the Journal Officiel de la République Française, 2012 (21 December), text no. 10. However, “respect” and “honneur” lack the patriarchal connotations of the formulaic expressions of fear and terror in the administrative language of early medieval China. 66  The modern public-private dichotomy is indeed closely related to the idea of “state,” which, as a juridical and institutional construct, is a modern invention. See Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” 58–89; Osiander, Before the State, 1–25; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 368–413; Reinhart Koselleck, “Staat und Souveränität,” 1–4. For contemporary China, see Zarrow’s book, After Empire. 67  See, e.g., Hamilton, “Patriarchy, Patrimonialism, and Filial Piety”; Kawakatsu, Liuchao guizuzhi, 187–220, esp. 217–20; Ochi, “The Southern Dynasties Aristocratic System,” 55–77; Yan Buke, Zhongguo gudai guan jie, 64–74. 68  These illustrious families were called shizu, a homophone for different compounds: “families of imperial servants” (shizu 士族), “the [illustrious] families of the time” (shizu 世 族), “powerful families” (shizu 勢族). These families were not just prestigious; their status gave them rights to occupy a position in the administration.

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his sons to key administrative posts.69 This privilege implied, on the one hand, an extension of the jurisdiction of the father into the imperial administration, and, on the other, a factual involution of the power of the emperor. At the same time, the emperor’s power was also a familial one, as his son, the crown prince, would inherit the empire upon the death of his father. The imperial position, with all the man-power and the resources under its jurisdiction, was in a way the property of the dynastic linage. Thus fathers had an authority that went far beyond their own domestic space. Their position defined the mechanisms both of institutional organization and of power transmission. The Southern Qi did everything they could to foster the institutional role of the father. Xiao Daocheng, the founder of the dynasty, and Wang Jian, his powerful minister, agreed that the Book of Filial Piety (Xiaojing 孝經) deserved a privileged position among the canonical books.70 More than other texts, the Xiaojing insists on the central role of the father both for the household and for the kingdom. It says, for example, that They [the officers] take what is good to serve their fathers in order to serve their mothers; but their love is equal for both. They take what is good to serve their fathers in order to serve their lord; but their respect is equal for both. Thus a mother enjoys the love that is due to the father and a lord enjoys the respect that is due to the father; but the father enjoys both.

69  This privilege was related to the system of selection and promotion of imperial officers. A specialized official, the impartial (zhongzheng 中正), would customarily attribute the children of important ministers the right to a post that was five ranks below the one occupied by their father. The most important posts in the imperial administration were thus appropriated by powerful families, whose rights to a position de facto limited the emperor’s power. About this system, called jiupin guanren fa 九品官人法 or “system for selecting officials according to the nine administrative ranks,” the classical reference is Miyazaki Ichisada, Jiupin guanren fa yanjiu. See also Tang Changru, Wei Jin Nanbei chao shi luncong, 81–94; Yan Buke, Pinwei yu zhiwei, 313–76. 70  There are, in the Book of Qi, some episodes which are very telling about the importance of this canonical book at the Qi court: from recitations in banquets and ceremonies to discussions at the imperial academy, the book is always a major subject. See, e.g., Nan Qi Shu 23.435–36; 39.683–85. Liu Xie also mentions it many times and considers it, with the Analects, as a “clearly structured” (zhaoxi 昭皙) book. See Wenxin diaolong yizheng 4.99–100, with n. 2 for the meaning of zhaoxi.

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資於事父以事母,而愛同;資於事父以事君,而敬同。故母取 其愛,而君取其敬,兼之者父也。71 It is because the power of both is conceived as a personal, “domestic” one, that a father can lend some of his prerogatives to a lord. The “Liyun” 禮運 chapter of the Book of Rites (Li ji 禮記), often quoted in early medieval court discussions, says it clearly: the realm is to be governed as a household (天下為家).72 Father and lord represent two specific forms of authority. They cannot be subsumed under the modern concepts of family and state, which convey a specific juridical meaning in modern times (in Europe since the end of the eighteenth century and in China since the nineteenth and twentieth century).73 In early medieval China, both roles were attached to what one could call different regimes of domesticity: the domesticity of the father on the one hand and the domesticity of the lord on the other—that is, two forms of patriarchal

71  Xiaojing zhushu 2.2548b. 72  Li ji zhengyi 21.1414b, chapter “Liyun” 禮運. According to this chapter, the empire had to be ruled as a “house” since the end of the period of “great equality” (datong 大同) and the beginning of the period of the “small tranquility” (xiaokang 小康). This domestic representation of power is related to other political metaphors which can be found in canonical books and other authoritative texts. It is the case of the metaphors of subordinates or ministers as “wives,” as “servants” or as “guests.” The metaphor of the minister as “guest,” widely used in the texts of the period, comes from an old tradition that goes as far back as the poem “Luming” 鹿鳴, of the Odes (Mao 161, Mao shi zhengyi 9.2.405b–406b). For a parallel between ministers and servants (pu 僕), see Li ji zhengyi 21.1418a (chapter “Liyun”). The metaphor of the minister-wife has a long tradition as well. One can trace it back to “Encountering Sorrow” (Lisao 離騷), where Qu Yuan 屈原 (340?–278?BCE) sees himself as a woman who provokes jealousy in her rivals (the other ministers). See Wen xuan 32.1492, with Wang Yi’s 王逸 (90?–160?) commentary and Schimmelpfennig, “Die verborgene Kommentierung,” 58–59. This metaphor is also related to the yin 陰 force within the minister (facing the yang 陽 force of the king or emperor), whose “way” (chen dao 臣道) is explicitly associated in the Changes to the “way of the wife” (qi dao 妻道) and the “way of the Earth” (di dao 地道). See Zhou yi zhengyi 1.19a, hexagram kun 坤. See also Yuri Pines’ analysis of the metaphor of the minister-friend in the pre-imperial period in his “Friends or Foes,” 35–74. 73  This dichotomy between family and state has a complex history in Europe. See, e.g., Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten, 465–85. For the transformations of the relation between family and State in late 19th and early twentieth-century China, see Zarrow, After Empire (chapters 3 and 4).

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jurisdiction on resources and people.74 As chief of the extended family (clan) and head of the ancestor’s cult, a medieval father ruled over his wife, his children and his servants, and could dispose of the material resources and wealth that are under the jurisdiction of his household. If he became a minister, he also ruled on part of the imperial administration through the privilege of designating his own son for a ministerial position. A medieval lord certainly had a larger jurisdiction. Besides ruling over his own household, he ruled over his officials, his clients and his protégés, and, when this lord happened to be the emperor, he ruled, theoretically, over the whole realm. But even the sovereignty of the emperor sometimes vanished when, in the selection of officials, it affected the privileges of the father. That is why, in this period, we often find ministers involved in a clash of loyalties: loyalty to the emperor and loyalty to the father.75 Since lord and father overlap, paternal and lordly jurisdictions coincided in some areas of imperial power and were a potential source of conflicts. As in a household, relations in medieval Chinese society were determined by the personal role of each of its members.76 Everything was “private,” attached either to the “privacy” of the emperor or to the “privacy” of the father, to the domestic jurisdiction of the former or to the domestic jurisdiction of the latter. In this context, we cannot expect Liu Xie to deal with administrative documents as if they were deprived of any personal mark. On the contrary, it is precisely the personal mark of these documents—the mark of a minister or of 74  I borrow the word “jurisdiction” from Andrew Abbott, who refers with this term to the rights of a particular profession on a range of expert knowledge–thus going beyond its legal meaning. Here the “jurisdictions” of a “father” and of a “lord” imply rights that are customary, institutional and ritual. See Abbott, The System of Professions, 59–85. 75  See Ochi Shigeaki, “The Southern Dynasties Aristocratic System,” 62–63 and 67–72; about the contradiction between loyalty to the father and loyalty to the emperor, see also Zhen Jing, “Lun Wei Jin Nanchao shiren,” 63–67. In Hanshi waizhuan 韓詩外傳 (7.237), an anecdote illustrates very accurately this conflict of loyalties. King Xuan of Qi 齊宣王 (r. 319–301 BCE) asks Tian Guo 田過 who is more important, a father or a lord. Tian Guo answers that the father is more important. “Then”, asks the king, “why leaving one’s own father to serve one’s lord?” Tian Guo answers: because everything he gets from the lord— land, emoluments, and titles—is precisely what he needs to serve his own parents. So anyone who serves his lord serves at the same time his parents. However, things do not go that smoothly when one’s own father acts against one’s own lord, as it often happens in medieval courts. 76  Liu Xie gives the Book of Filial Piety equal importance, mentioning it together with the Analects and the other canonical books. Wenxin diaolong yizheng 4.99. For someone like Lu Cheng, on the contrary, the Book of Filial Piety was a text for elementary learning (xiaoxue 小學). Nan Qi shu 39.684.

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the emperor—that guarantees their authority. That is the reason why Liu Xie depicts imperial edicts (zhao 詔) and diplomas (ce 策) as the “words” ( yan 言) of the most respected person in the realm: The emperor holds sway over his dwelling [i.e. the empire] and his words [ yan] are divine. Even if he remains deeply silent before an embroidered screen,77 his voice resonates everywhere, thanks to the edicts and diplomas! 皇帝御寓,其言也神。淵嘿黼扆,而響盈四表,唯詔策乎!78 Edicts and diplomas are the personal words of the emperor. The word yu 寓 (a variant of 宇), which I have translated as “dwelling,” has in fact many different connotations. The word could be translated as “world” or “realm,” and this seems to be its intended meaning.79 But it is also very telling that a word that can mean “dwelling” would be associated with the representation of the empire as the domestic space of the emperor, as it is in the Book of Rites and the Book of Filial Piety. This could suggest that the emperor expected to be served as a father is served in his own house. This domestic representation of the imperial domain is even more clearly embedded in a subgenre of edicts and diplomas, the “admonitions” ( jie 戒),80 which is related both to the emperor and to the father: Lord and father are two of the most venerated [roles]; they are [along with the role of master] among the “three from whom we receive boundless grace.”81 The “Admonition to the Crown Prince” of the emperor Gaozu of Han 漢高祖 [Liu Bang 劉邦, 256–195; r. 202–195 BCE] and the “Admonition to My Son” of Dongfang Shuo 東方朔 [160–93 BCE] are similar to the “Testamentary Charge” [of the Documents].

77  It is an ornament in the shape of an axe, fu 黼. 78  Wenxin diaolong yizheng 19.724. 79  The word yu (in both forms, 寓 and 宇) means the “realm” or the “universe,” just as the compound yuzhou 宇宙. More specifically, yu means the spatial realm (the four corners, top and bottom), and zhou 宙 means the temporal one (past, present and future). But it is also related to the meaning of “residence” or “dwelling.” 80  About letters of familial admonition, see Antje Richter’s chapter in this volume. See also Giele, Imperial Decision-Making, 285–98. 81  Wang ji 罔極 refers to the three mostly respected social roles: lord ( jun 君), father ( fu 父) and master (shi 師). Wenxin diaolong yizheng 19.751, n. 2.

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君父至尊,在三罔極,漢高祖之《敕太子》,東方朔之《戒 子》,亦顧命之作也。82 Both the “Admonition to the Crown Prince” and “Admonition to My Son” are texts written from a father to a son; they follow, according to Liu Xie, the model of the “Testamentary Charge” in the Documents (Shu 書), which contains the admonitions from King Cheng of Zhou 周成王 (r. c. 1042–1021 BCE) to his successor. But each of the two admonition texts bears a different name. The “Admonition to the Crown Prince” is the text of a lord ( jun 君), the emperor Gaozu of Han, who writes as a father to the future emperor. His text, as a consequence, is called a chi 敕. The “Admonition to My Son” is a text produced by a “father” ( fu 父), who admonishes his son about how to protect himself in ministerial life. Liu Xie refers to it only as a jie 戒. The content of each admonition letter betrays the domestic and personal nature of the authority of both the lord and the father. The “Admonition to the Crown Prince” is Liu Bang’s advice to his son about the importance of writing, and in particular of being able to write one’s own memorials. The “Admonition to My Son” is Dongfang Shuo’s advice to his son on how to protect one’s self at court: he advocates the life of a “court hermit” (chaoyin 朝隱), one of the characteristics that made him famous. In the first case, the father, Liu Bang, is the highest lord of the realm, while the son is at the same time the lord-to-be of the empire.83 In the second case, Dongfang Shuo is a both a father and a minister (and, as such, a lower level lord), and his admonitions make no distinction between family and ministerial instructions, between the house and the court.84 If both texts are classified differently (chi and jie), and if the first sender is more a lord than a father and the second more a father than a lord, it is not because the admonitions have different functions (they are always an admonition from a father to a son), but because of the relative status of the senders: one is the emperor, the other his minister. In both cases, political authority coincides with a personal, domestic, patriarchal one. 82  Ibid., 19.751. 83  For this text, see Quan Han wen 1. 130.4b–5a. Although for Liu Xie it belongs to the genre of admonitions ( jie 戒), the text is called a chi 敕. While the first example corresponds to the admonitions of a “lord,” the word chi indicates here that the text is classed as an imperial document, and so a text the emperor produces as “emperor,” not as “father.” See Zhou Zhenfu’s explanation in Wenxin diaolong zhushi 223. For the fluctuating semantics of admonitions, see Giele, Imperial Decision-Making, 285–98. 84  For Dongfang Shuo’s text, see Quan Han wen 25.267.12a. We can just reconstruct the letter on the basis of the commentaries in his biography in Han shu 65.2874. He advocates the life of the “court hermit” more explicitly in an anecdote in the Records of the Grand Historian (Shi ji 史記). See Shi ji 126.3205.

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Family and state overlap. As a consequence, Liu Xie makes no distinction between “public” and “private” genres. The reason why Liu Xie gives both types of admonition a different name is the same as in the case of memorials and letters: written admonitions must convey the ritual marks of a hierarchical distinction between father and lord. Their genre, however, is the same. Admonition letters reveal the personal foundations not only of early medieval political imagination and institutions, but also of the general organization of written genres. Letters to a member of one’s own family, letters to superiors, thank-you letters, memorials to princes, memorials to the emperor, edicts— all of those genres follow, as admonition letters do, personal distinctions that resist any dichotomous separation between “private” and “public.” All of those texts are letters; they are all the products of personal affairs, and, in that sense, should be considered “private.” At the same time, that “private” shares many features with what we would call “public.” As David Pattinson has shown, ritualized ways of communicating with superiors and codified restrictions on individual decision about style and content make letters as well as administrative documents look more “public” than “private.” Yet, if “private” genres look “public,” what is the meaning of the term “private”? Maybe we should distinguish “privacy”—a modern idea—from the other three different concepts that are encompassed by this word: the concept of “personal,” the concept of “secret,” and the concept of “intimate.” A study of these different concepts would deserve a separate article; since I have already shown that letters and administrative documents are all “personal” genres, in this last paragraph I will limit myself to some short comments on secrecy and intimacy. Precisely because imperial authority was personal, secrecy and intimacy were not the exclusive privilege of “private” contexts—or those that are nowadays taken to be so, such as the house. We may, in fact, find traces of secrecy and intimacy in a “public” context similar to the relation between an emperor and his favorite ministers, and, at the same time, we will not always find intimacy and secrecy in the “private” familial relation between the emperor and his wives, as one would expect in modern times. This institutional distribution of secrecy and intimacy could also be valid for epistolary and administrative writing. Despite their place in the “public” context of the minister-emperor relationship, these texts could easily become secret and, in some cases, even intimate. In the “private” relationship between the emperor and his wives, writing could become the object of a “public” discussion at court.85 Whatever the results of research on this topic, we can be certain that 85  See Patricia Ebrey’s reflections on the imperial harem and the representative uses of wives as an “ornament” of the palace in Women and Family, 189–90. For the topic of the intimate relation between the emperor and some officers, a classical text is Shen Yue’s

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the public-private dichotomy will not provide an appropriate framework of analysis for understanding the social meaning of personal, intimate, and secret relations in the elite society of early medieval China.



If, as David Pattinson argues, there seems to be no trace of privacy in early medieval letters, it is probably because both writing and institutions were, in a way, “private” matters, as everything was under the personal domestic jurisdiction of a lord or of a father. If everything can be called “private” in the world of early medieval elites, then should we not abandon the public-private dichotomy as a framework of historical analysis? “Privacy,” in fact, becomes an empty word when we discover that no “public” sphere exists to be opposed to it. Instead, we should focus on the important role of the “personal” in medieval institutions. Since there was no institution from which personal relations were excluded, we must expect marks of personal experience—either feigned or felt behind formulae and rhetorical strategies—to appear in contexts which only through anachronistic analogy could be equated with the “impersonal” realm of the modern state. We must also expect expressions of what we would consider “private” (even seemingly intimate emotions) to take a “public” role when they emerge in the texts of important ministers.86 Epistolary and administrative texts were shaped by the personal nature of social and political institutions. As a consequence, the forms of writing we classify as “epistolary” and “administrative” had a continuous relation within a spectrum of personally marked genres: personal marks which stemmed, in the social experience of medieval elites, from an intimate unity between the house and the court.

very negative introduction to the section of his Book of Song dedicated to the biographies of favorite ministers. Song shu 94.2301–02. As for letters, we could say, with Antje Richter, that variations in the use of epistolary topoi reveal different experiences, and that even highly formalized writing can be the means of intimate or secret communication. Richter, “Letters and Letter Writing,” 22–29 and Letters and Epistolary Culture, 145–49. 86  I am of course not suggesting that early medieval elites are representative of some anonymous “Chinese way” of dealing with social relations. Practices and representations did not forcibly reach every member of the elites and did not forcibly extend to other social groups. Bonnie McDougall has already argued against the idea of a “Chinese concept of privacy” in “Particulars and Universals,” 4.

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———. Pinwei yu zhiwei: Qin Han Wei Jin Nanbeichao guanjie zhidu yanjiu 品位與職 位:秦漢魏晉南北朝官階制度研究. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009. Yanshi jiaxun jijie 顏氏家訓集解. Compiled by Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–ca. 591); commentary by Wang Liqi 王利器. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993. Yao Mingda 姚名達. Zhongguo muluxue shi 中國目錄學史. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002. Yu Yingshi 余英時. Shi yu Zhongguo wenhua 士與中國文化. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2003. Zarrow, Peter. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885– 1924. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Zhang Siqi 張思齊. Liuchao sanwen bijiao yanjiu 六朝散文比較研究. Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1997. Zhou Yiliang 周一良 and Zhao Heping 趙和平. Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu 唐五代書儀 研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995. Zhou yi zhengyi 周易正義. In Shisanjing zhushu. Zhen Jing 甄靜. “Lun Wei Jin Nanchao shiren zhongxiao guan de daocuo” 論魏晉南 朝士人忠孝觀的倒錯. Qinghai shifan daxue xuebao 6 (2007): 63–67. Zhu Zongbin 祝總斌. Liang Han Wei Jin Nan Bei chao zaixiang zhidu yanjiu 兩漢魏晉 南北朝宰相制度研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1990.

Chapter 10

Bureaucratic Influences on Letters in Middle Period China: Observations from Manuscript Letters and Literati Discourse* Lik Hang Tsui In this study, I will argue for a dynamic view of the epistolary genre in middle period China, with the hope that it replaces the static view of a fixed typology of subgenres. I do this by examining the influences of bureaucratic documents on the writing conventions of letters in Song China (960–1279), especially those observed in extant manuscripts in an epistolary subgenre called zhazi 劄子, and also by studying how notebooks and encyclopedias of this period described these influences. By doing so, I aim to shed light on one of the universal aspects of Chinese epistolary culture, namely, the impact of bureaucratic writing practices on the conventions of writing personal correspondence. In a period when most of the highly literate members of the empire served the government or were aspiring to forge a career in officialdom, it is nearly impossible to draw a clear distinction between the writing practices of bureaucratic correspondence and personal letters. Although letters are seldom studied as a subject in Chinese literary studies, existing secondary studies on classical Chinese literature do provide convenient explanations for understanding the wide range of epistolary subgenres by outlining and explaining their key features.1 The explanations in these studies are helpful in making sense of the main differences between subgenres, but their basic assumptions more or less represent a static and fixed view of epistolary subgenres. To be sure, taking epistolary subgenres as * Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the “Letters and Epistolary Culture in China” workshop at the University of Colorado at Boulder, August 17–18, 2012 and the “Conference on Middle Period China, 800–1400” at Harvard University, June 5–7, 2014. I am grateful to Antje Richter and the participants of these events for their invaluable comments and suggestions. I would also like to express my gratitude to Chen Ling, Chen Yunju, Deng Xiaonan, Hilde De Weerdt, Barend ter Haar, Philip Watson, Samuelson Yin, and two anonymous reviewers who have commented on various drafts of this article. Any remaining errors and inadequacies are of course my own. 1  E.g., Zhao Shugong, Zhongguo chidu wenxue shi. See esp. 1–14.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_012

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well-demarcated literary units is problematic because this view often assumes little or no overlap in the formal, rhetorical, and thematic features of subgenres. It does not reflect the reality of Chinese epistolary texts because a fluid genre such as letters can often be placed in multiple categories of subgenres which span across the personal-public spectrum in their usages.2 Consequently, a clear-cut arrangement of subgenres cannot be possibly achieved. Theorists on genre have in fact warned against the risk of taking genre as a “rigid transhistorical class exercising control over the texts which it generates.”3 For studying a genre that is as adaptable, malleable, and engaged with social relationships as letters, an alternative approach is much needed.4 In order to place more emphasis on the dynamic literary context of Chinese letters, one of the more refined approaches to the epistolary genre, in my opinion, would bear strong resonance with what Hans Robert Jauss proposed in his seminal essay, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” According to Jauss, it is advisable to “ascribe no other generality to literary ‘genres’ . . . than that which manifests itself in the course of its historical appearance.” Genres “cannot be deduced or defined, but only historically determined, delimited, and described.”5 When scholars deal with the problem of genre, they should not only “relinquish the substantialist notion of a constant number of unchangeable essential characteristics for the individual genres,” but also “dismantle the correlative notion of a sequence of literary genres closed within themselves, encapsulated form one another.” Jauss therefore suggests to “inquire into the reciprocal relations that make up the literary system of a given historical moment.”6 Even though the considerations of Jauss mainly lie in approaches to the vernacular literatures of medieval Europe, they are also instructive when applied to traditional Chinese letters, including to those from middle period China which are studied in this article. In it I place the zhazi subgenre within a system of subgenres that included letters as well as bureaucratic documents in Song China. Not only did these epistolary and bureaucratic subgenres influence each other, but the writing conventions of these two changed throughout the course of Song history; I try to investigate both of these aspects in this study.

2  For example, epistolary works fall into multiple genres in Liu Xie’s 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 532) Wenxin diaolong. Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 49–62. See also the articles by Pablo Ariel Blitstein and Robert Joe Cutter in this volume. 3  Frow, Genre, 23. 4  See the reflection on letters as a genre in Jolly and Stanley, “Letters As / Not a Genre.” 5  Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” 79–80. 6  Ibid., 105.

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It is with this awareness about the dynamic nature of genre that I set out to study letter writing in middle period China. I place most of my focus on the example of the zhazi subgenre of letters, which was a subgenre that emerged primarily as a result of the influence of bureaucratic documents. The bureaucratic influence was a reflection of the close relationship between genre and politics in the literary world of traditional China. Most genre systems emerged in relation to—and were shaped to a considerable extent by—the imperial administration and its elite members.7 In examining the epistolary genre in particular, I believe a close analysis of the genre dynamics behind the introduction of bureaucratic conventions into non-official epistolary exchanges will facilitate our understanding of the shaping forces that sculpted the Chinese epistolary genre. It will also be beneficial for placing relevant genre theories within their social-political context in Song China.8 In the first section of this study, I will introduce the zhazi subgenre and explain its bureaucratic origins. Then I examine how actual texts in that subgenre fulfilled the needs of epistolary communication by providing a close reading of two manuscript letters from the Southern Song dynasty. In the third section, in order to discover how contemporaries described and reflected on changes in the writing conventions of letters, I pay attention to literati discourse on the transformations of epistolary subgenres. The goal of combining these three parts of analysis is to provide multiple perspectives for studying the problem of genre in historical letters from middle period China. 1

Zhazi Documents: An Overview of Bureaucratic Uses

Throughout most of Song history, officials relied on the courier-transport system operated by the imperial government to carry messages to their acquaintances afar, who were often serving in officialdom as well.9 Many of the letters that they exchanged through this system, however, were not bureaucratic documents, and served little or no administrative purposes. Those correspondences resembled what we today would call “personal letters” rather than bureaucratic documents. What makes zhazi interesting and worthy of 7  Rydholm, “Genre Theory in China,” 95–104, esp. 96–99. 8  For a useful overview of genre theory in Song China, see Ren, Songdai wenti xue. Although slightly dated, studies on other genres from traditional China still deserve attention, e.g., Birch, Studies in Chinese Literary Genres; Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry. 9  Zhao Xiaoxuan, Songdai yizhan zhidu, 25–30; Liu and Zhao, Zhongguo gudai youyi shi, 254– 56, 327–29; Golas, “The Courier-Transport System,” 2–3; Cao, Songdai jiaotong, 149–51.

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study is that it referred to texts from both sides of this spectrum: it originally referred to a range of official documents including memorials and orders10— but it also became the name of a type of personal correspondence between literati officials by the twelfth century. In this study, I will refer to the former as “zhazi documents” and the latter as “zhazi letters.” What do we rely on to decide whether a text was a zhazi or not? I must stress that ideas about the identity of genres often arose from categories in anthologies in traditional China. As a result of this, the shaping of genre theory went hand in hand with anthology making. The close relationship between the two goes back at the very least to the Wen xuan 文選 compiled in the sixth century, if we focus specifically on the genre of letters.11 Genre labels and titles were often assigned when the texts were edited and anthologized, and not when they were initially composed by writers. Therefore if one takes the genre labels and titles of Chinese letters as they can be seen in anthologies uncritically, and uses them as the sole criteria for genre classification, there would be the risk of jumping to conclusions.12 For this reason, the zhazi letters referred to in this study are always texts designated as such by Song authors, rather than by posthumous editors or anthologists. I will only be discussing texts as zhazi letters if I have proof that the writers intended to write them in that form.13 Building on existing research in Chinese on institutional history and Song official documents, I will explore the nature of zhazi by asking the following questions: how was a zhazi historically defined? How did its functions change and what do we know about the genre-consciousness of zhazi in the Song period?14 Not surprisingly, the compound “zhazi” was derived from the word “zha” 劄. Glossed as “a thin wooden tablet,”15 zha refers to the writing material for written correspondence. During early medieval China, compounds containing zha 劄 (including the alternative character 札) were used to denote

10  Edwards, “A Classified Guide,” 774, 776. 11  Hightower, “The Wen Hsüan and Genre Theory,” 512–33. On letters in Wen xuan, see David R. Knechtges’ chapter in this volume. 12  This point is also stressed in Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 40. 13  Usually this is most certain when the writers themselves referred to their texts as zha or zhazi in the closing section of the text, which is true for the two zhazi letter manuscripts that I examine and all the other examples that I cite in my paper. Out of literary considerations, letter writers used various names in the main text to refer to their letters, but the mention of zha or zhazi in the closing section was unique to the format of zhazi letters. 14  On genre-consciousness, see Duff, Modern Genre Theory, xiii. 15  Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary, 9.

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written communication directed to others, such as the category bizha 筆札 in Liu Xie’s magnum opus of literary theory, Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍.16 To explore the bureaucratic uses of zhazi, it will be useful to explore the range of documents that were associated with zha and zhazi in middle period China. During the Tang, there already appeared bureaucratic documents that were regarded as a form of zhazi, but they were mostly called by different names. Ministers wrote these documents for reporting to the core policymaking offices in the central court.17 Chaoye leiyao 朝野類要 (Important affairs at court and in the country), a glossary to administrative terms first printed in 1236, provides information about names and functions of the main document types in the Song dynasty.18 In its “Documents” (Wenshu 文書) section, terms that were associated with zha and zhazi include the following: A. yuzha 御劄 (supreme imperial mandate)19 B. shengzha 省劄 (Secretariat order)20 C. zouzha 奏劄 (memorial)21 D. tangzha 堂劄 (Administration Chamber order) E. bai zhazi 白劄子 (expository dispatch) F. shuaizha 帥劄 (Military Commission order)22 From the glossary’s explanations of these various types of documents, a general picture of their functions can be deduced. Types A and B were characterized as administrative orders that were sent downwards in government, such as those drafted in the name of the emperor and councilors from top government agencies. They became imperial edicts upon being signed by the Grand Councilors, and would then be announced. From the 990s onwards, the administrative orders Song Grand Councilors issued relied heavily on zhazi documents.23 Types C to F were statements and recommendations submitted by high 16  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 57. 17  For a Song perspective on this, see Ouyang Xiu, Guitian lu 2.29. 18  See the index of this title by Stephen Hsing-tao Yü. 19  Zhao Sheng, Chaoye leiyao 4.83; Hartwell, “A Guide to Documentary Sources,” 182. 20  Zhao Sheng, Chaoye leiyao 4.85. See Li Quande, “Cong tangtie dao shengzha,” 110–14; Zhang Yi, “Zhongshu, Shangshu,” 50–66. 21  Zhao Sheng, Chaoye leiyao 4.86. These were also called “memorials for palace meetings” (shangdian zhazi 上殿劄子). See Zhou Jia, “Bei-Song shangdian zhazi tanyan,” 34–39. 22  Zhao Sheng, Chaoye leiyao 4.88. The “Bureau of Military Affairs order” (shumiyuan zhazi 樞密院劄子) is mentioned under “Tangchu” 堂除 (Departmental appointment) in 3.68, but does not have an entry of its own. 23  Zhang Yi, “Zhongshu, Shangshu,” 50–53.

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officials to their superiors at court, such as those to Military Commissioners (anfu zhizhishi 安撫制置使) in Type F. Many of these were policy recommendations that high level officials (usually above the rank of Prefects [zhizhou 知 州]) submitted to the throne.24 From this we see that zha/zhazi documents had extensive uses within the imperial government, including in both upward and downward communication between the decision-making agencies and government officials. The elasticity of the subgenre label zhazi for referring to various kinds of documents is a key phenomenon for understanding how the writing conventions of these documents influenced personal letters. 2

Zhazi Letters: Historical Examples in Manuscript Form

Having explained the uses of zhazi documents, I will devote this section to the discussion of the content and writing conventions of two zhazi letters from the thirteenth century. The original manuscripts of these two texts are still available to us, making it possible not only to examine its content, but also the formal features of a zhazi in their original state. Peter Lorge summed up the merit of utilizing calligraphic pieces in his study of letters by Song Gaozong (1107–1187, r. 1127–63): These fine pieces of calligraphy are not only of tremendous aesthetic value, they are also, setting aside the important issue of forgery, some of the most primary of primary sources. Historians frequently overlook these sources, perhaps because they are more associated with art history.25 Moreover, a recent study by Deng Xiaonan and Zhang Yi also made use of extant manuscripts to examine Song bureaucratic documents.26 Inspired by these scholars, I would like to stress the usefulness of examining manuscripts in the study of Chinese letters.27 Epistolary manuscripts are valuable sources 24  On their specific uses, see Hu Yuande, Gudai gongwen, 121–24. On the role of zhazi documents in local administration, see Pingtian Maoshu, “Songdai difang zhengzhi guanjian.” 25  Lorge, “Song Gaozong’s Letters to Yue Fei,” 169. 26  Deng and Zhang , “Shufa zuopin yu zhengling wenshu”. 27  My approach to epistolary manuscripts here is thus similar to that of Christopher M. B. Nugent in his recent study on the material and cultural history of poetry in Tang China, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper, which examines poetry in the light of the materiality of manuscripts. For an insightful discussion of Nugent’s approach, see McMullen, “Boats Moored and Unmoored”.

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not only because they are primary documents that provide useful historical information, but also due to their preserved form. We are able to consider their physical and visual attributes, and can be more certain about the formats of Song zhazi letters than by only consulting transmitted texts, which were often heavily edited.28 Given the body of extant epistolary manuscripts from Song China, especially the increasing number of zhazi letters since the early Southern Song, a closer look at the various kinds of information they offer will hopefully provide a useful addition to our understanding of historical letters.29 The two manuscript examples that I examine here reveal how elements of bureaucratic documents were introduced in the zhazi letter subgenre.30 The first of my two examples was written by the minister Zhao Ding 趙鼎 (1085– 1147). According to modern scholar Xu Bangda, it is the earliest zhazi letter still extant in manuscript form (see fig. 10.1): 1  鼎以罪名至重, Because of my extremely serious transgressions, 不敢復當郡寄。 I did not dare to serve again as Prefect. Soon after I 尋具 2 奏陳,未賜 reported this to the court, I was not granted 3 俞允。區區之私, permission. It is therefore unavoidable that I set 不免再陳悃愊。 forth my sincerity in this trifling personal matter 伏望 again. I humbly 4 鈞慈,曲垂 ask you to gracefully grant 5 贊助。俾遂所請, your endorsement. If my request is fulfilled, it will 實荷 really be because of 6 終始之賜。 your constant favor. I am still put out of favor, so I do 鼎方在罪籍, not dare to send letters regularly to 不敢時以書至 7 行闕。倂幸 your residence. I hope you will grant 8 憐察。 your sympathetic understanding when you read this. 28  The epistolary texts in transmitted collections are often abridged versions of original letters. Other aspects of letter writing, such as the way of inscribing envelopes, are only rarely preserved. Zhu Huiliang, “Songdai ceye zhong de chidu shufa,” 14. 29  A complete list of extant epistolary manuscripts is yet to be compiled, but the number of epistolary manuscripts from the Southern Song is estimated to be under a hundred. See Xia, “Shi xi Nan-Song de ji zhong shuxin,” 25. For an incomplete but extensive collection of reproduced images of such manuscripts from the Song and Yuan periods, see Song-Yuan chidu. On zhazi letters specifically, see Xu Bangda, “Chidu xiaokao,” 32–34; Lü, “Songdai zhazi,” 23. 30  For other Southern Song zhazi letter manuscripts that follow similar writing conventions, see He, Nan-Song yishu, 352–55.

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Figure 10.1

9 10 11 12

Zhazi by Zhao Ding. 33 × 50.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

右謹具 呈,伏候 鈞旨 八月□日特進 知泉州軍事趙 鼎劄子

Carefully preparing the above for submission, I humbly wait for your important orders. [lacuna] day of the eighth month, Zhao Ding (signed), Specially Advanced Military Prefect of Quanzhou.

Xu Bangda suggested that the manuscript could have been written to the minister Zhang Jun 張浚 (1097–1164) in 1139, when Zhang was administering Fujian.31 In this period of Zhao Ding’s life, he had already been removed from important posts at court. He asked to retire in late 1138 and was granted a sinecure, and then served as Prefect of Quanzhou in 1139 for about a year. He confronted the minister Qin Gui 秦檜 (1090–1155) and his men who had growing influence in the court, but Zhao Ding later found himself in a very frustrating position; he was charged with using too many guards on his journey to the Quanzhou post, and was therefore forced into retirement in 1140. This partly explains why he told the addressee that he desired to resign from his post, and why he regarded himself as having fallen “out of favor.”32 The significance of this zhazi letter to our discussion here is that it shows how a zhazi letter could be different from a zhazi document. Unlike what we 31  Xu Bangda, Gu shuhua guoyan yaolu, 422–23. 32  Kaplan, “Chao Ting,” 78–80; Liu, China Turning Inward, 122–28, esp. 122–23.

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would expect to see in a zhazi document, it was not a piece about any specific policies but was written to a colleague in a personal capacity. Composed in a very polite manner, Zhao Ding in this zhazi asked the recipient, possibly Zhang Jun, to accept and endorse his resignation from his post as Prefect. By writing in such a subgenre, he made his message more reverential and polite. This is an understandable choice as he was making a request to the addressee in the letter. Apart from what was explicitly said in this zhazi, its formal features provide its recipient (and other potential readers) cues for putting the message in perspective. Although scholars David E. Pollard and Eva Hung remarked that “the greatest merit of letters is the liberty they enjoy, for the writer suffers no constraint of form and little of convention,”33 I would argue that this is a rather romantic and unrealistic view of much of traditional Chinese letter writing. Conventions do exist in many of the highly formalized epistolary subgenres, and writers observed them in most cases. Some of the features in bureaucratic documents have become an essential practice for writing a zhazi letter to an acquaintance. An important convention includes spacing (pingque 平闕) in letters, where line breaks (ping) and blank spaces (que) were introduced in a document to express respect and emphasis. Spacing was observed by writers as early as the third century BCE in letters on wooden tablets.34 The formal practice continued during imperial times; for example, early medieval writers such as Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303–361) also followed this practice occasionally, as can be seen in copies of his letters.35 The practice of spacing was institutionalized in state regulations on bureaucratic documents in Tang ritual codes,36 and later in history, Song literati officials also observed this in the documents they wrote to fulfill their official duties. In instances where letters were written to colleagues in government, especially those of a superior rank, spacing was very common. Apart from zhazi letters, spacing is also seen in letters of other subgenres, as it is in some of the epistolary manuscripts from the 1160s discovered on the reverse side of the pages of an edition of Wang Anshi’s collected writings.37 The fact that those letters were used as recycled paper along with other bureaucratic documents in producing an edition of Wang’s collected writings is particularly 33  Pollard and Hung, “Editor’s Page,” vi. 34  Peng, “Chidu shufa,” 95–99. See also Enno Giele’s article in this volume. 35  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 114–16. 36  Peng, “Chidu shufa,” 98–99. 37  Shanghai shi, Songren yijian. In this collection, texts that can be identified as zhazi letters include three letters by Li Jian 李簡 (j. 1), two letters by Zhang Jie 張傑 (j. 2), four letters by Guan Zhen 管鎮 (j. 4), and one letter by Cai Changmin 蔡長民 (j. 4).

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suggestive; they were personal letters exchanged by literati officials, but they shared the bureaucratic features of some government documents. In Zhao Ding’s piece specifically, the verbs that are referring to the letter recipient’s side were followed by line breaks—such as “grant permission” (yuyun 俞允), “endorse” (zanzhu 贊助), and “understand sympathetically” (liancha 憐察).38 In the closing section of the letter, there are also additional blank spaces before the formulaic expression in the closing of a zhazi letter (“carefully preparing the above for submission”) and the writer’s self-designation (see fig. 10.1). These measures originally adopted in bureaucratic documents (such as memorials) represented a way to express reverence through the letter’s format, and often resulted in large blank spaces on the letter paper. The second text I am examining in order to explain the writing conventions of zhazi letters is by the major Southern Song writer Lu You 陸游 (1125– 1210) (see figs. 10.2 and 10.3). This text demonstrates how a conventionalized “personal touch” was instilled into a zhazi letter even though it was not addressed to someone very close to the writer: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

游近者奏 My recent letter39 記,方以草率 was shamefully unpolished. It was by special 為愧。專使奉 envoy that 馳翰,所以 you sent me the letter, showing how 動問甚寵, you ask after me with affection. The way I am 感激未易名也。 touched is not easy to express. 蹔還 From your return 展省,此固 for grave visitation I indeed see 龍圖丈襟懷 your Excellency the Dragon Diagram Hall 本趣。 Academician’s sentiment and intentions. 道中春寒,不至 I hope the spring coldness during your journey did not make you catch a chill. 衝冒否?詔追度 I assume it will not be long before your official 不遠,旬挾或已被 promotion; in ten days there may already be 新渥矣。 new imperial favors. 下諭舊貢院已為 I know that the old examination office has already 中丞蔣丈所先。 been taken by Elder Jiang the Vice Censor-in-chief,40

38  Ibid., 100–104; Zhu Huiliang, “Songdai ceye zhong de chidu shufa,” 13–14. 39  Zouji 奏記 refers especially to official letters written to a superior and therefore constitutes a polite expression here. 40  Lu You’s acquaintance Jiang Jizhou 蔣繼周 (1134–1196), who lived in Yanzhou in the final decade of his life. See Lu You’s epitaph for him, “Zhongcheng Jiang gong muzhiming” 中 丞蔣公墓志銘, in Lu You ji, 35.2335.

Bureaucratic Influences on Letters in Middle Period China

Figure 10.2

12 13 14 15 16

373

Zhazi by Lu You (1). 33.1 × 29 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

新定驛舍見空閑, but there are vacancies in Xinding lodging station 或可備 where 憩泊。已令掃 you may stay.41 I have already ordered that it be 灑矣。它 tidied. As 委悉俟 for all your other instructions, let me wait for them 面請。游蒙 when I see you in person. The fragrant ink 賜香墨,皆珍絕, that you gave me is extremely precious and will 足為蓬戶之光。 lighten up my ramshackle household. 下情

41  Xinding was the old name of the administrative region of Yanzhou. Official travelers of the time usually stayed in government lodging stations. See Zhang, Transformative Journeys, 101–10.

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Figure 10.3

17 18 19 20

Zhazi by Lu You (2). 33.1 × 29.3 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

感荷之至。 I am deeply touched. As for other matters, let me 它俟續上狀次。 continue in my next dispatch. 右謹具 Carefully preparing the above for 呈 submission: 朝請大夫、 Zhazi by Lu You, Grand Master for Court Audiences, 權知嚴州軍州 Provisional Military Commander of Yanzhou.42 事陸游劄子。

42  My transcription is mostly based on Xu Bangda, Gu shuhua guoyan yaolu, 491 (with modifications).

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This zhazi letter was written to greet a colleague who traveled to Yanzhou, the place where Lu You was serving as Prefect from 1186 to 1188 while he was in his 60s. One scholar suggests that Lu You wrote it in early 1187.43 The identity of the recipient of this letter was referred to by Lu You as one of the Academicians in the Dragon Diagram Hall at court.44 Lu You’s strategy of personalization in the zhazi letter requires a closer look. Even though it was written to an official of a higher rank, there is a strong personal tone and an eagerness to instill Lu You’s own emotions. This was not the first of his correspondence with the Academician. Apart from expressing thanks for receiving a letter from the Academician, Lu You also expressed gratitude for receiving fragrant ink from him, indicating the existence of an exchange of both correspondence and gifts between the two. Lu You showed his concern for the Academician by inquiring about his journey, and he also explained to the Academician that he could stay in a lodging station during his time in Yanzhou and that it had already been arranged. Apart from this, he was also expecting the Academician’s promotion in the imperial government. This way of writing personalized letters was not at all uncommon. Even emperors, such as Huizong (1082–1135, r. 1100–1126) and Gaozong of the Song dynasty wrote letters instilled with personal opinions and emotions. Examples would be the dozens of letters Huizong wrote to the Mount Mao Daoist patriarch Liu Hunkang 劉混康 (1035–1108). The emperor expressly ordered Liu not to engrave the letters on stone. Patricia Ebrey suggested that “Huizong would not have been so open in his letters to Liu if he had expected them to be carved on stone for all to read.”45 She also writes that “we see Huizong writing letters that are much like the letters educated men of his era wrote to each other—Huizong is not denying his rank as emperor, but he tries not to let it interfere with his relationship with a man he holds in high esteem.”46 It is clear that there was a certain degree of personalization

43  On Lu You’s posting, see Jonker, “Lu Yu,” 697. On the dating of this letter, see Yu, Lu You nianpu, 310, 312 n. 1. 44  A modern scholar, Liu Kan, speculates that the recipient of this zhazi was Han Yuanji 韓 元吉 (1118–1187). See Liu Kan, “Lu You ‘shang yi’ de shufa,” 35. This is unlikely because Lu You had not met Han in person during the five or six years before Han’s death, as mentioned in Lu’s eulogy for Han, “Ji Han Wujiu shangshu wen” 祭韓無咎尚書文, in Lu You ji 41.2393. Another possible recipient of this letter is Qiu Chong 丘崈 ( jinshi 1163), who was an Auxiliary Academician of the Hall at the time. On his correspondence with Lu You, see Yu, Lu You nianpu, 311, 316 n. 10. 45  Ebrey, “Taoism and Art,” 99. 46  Ebrey, Emperor Huizong, 148.

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in Huizong’s letters to Liu Hunkang, even though they were of disparate status. Needless to say, this personalization also existed in letters exchanged between literati officials who often had formal working relationships in officialdom, but also had many opportunities to interact personally via written communication. Let us go back to discuss Lu You’s zhazi letter. Although Lu You personalized the content of his letter, he chose specifically to write to the Academician in the zhazi subgenre and not in any other subgenre. This gives us clues about their relationship, because a zhazi letter would have required him to include his official titles in the closing of the text. This writing convention would of course be unnecessary and will even be too ceremonial if the letter was written to a close friend, especially when we consider that there were other epistolary subgenres from which to choose. His alternative options also included the short informal notes that other Song writers have written, which are sometimes rather difficult to place in any kind of epistolary subgenre. Since letter writing was heavily influenced by bureaucratic documents, the choice of subgenre and the writing conventions that followed were closely related to how literati relationships were maintained, as my discussion in the next section will show. 3

Spillover Effects of Bureaucratic Writing Conventions and Genre Transformation in Literati Discourse

3.1 The Admonitions of Ouyang Xiu and Lü Zuqian To place the features of zhazi letters in the larger context of genre developments throughout the Song period, it will be necessary to go beyond actual zhazi letters and investigate what writers have written about the transformation of epistolary subgenres. In this section, I will discuss the admonitions on letter writing in a letter by Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072), a towering figure in Northern Song literati culture. The letter reflects his reaction to the adoption of bureaucratic writing conventions in personal letters. I also analyze admonitions by the Daoxue teacher Lü Zuqian 呂祖謙 (1137–1181) on how his students ought to correspond. Then, in the next section, I will examine the discourse about this tendency and other transformations in epistolary subgenres in two types of texts that contain material from the literati tradition in middle period China: notebooks (biji 筆記) and encyclopedias (leishu 類書). As early as in the mid-Northern Song, Ouyang Xiu already wrote about how bureaucratic gestures and writing conventions were “spilling over” into the

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personal written correspondence between literati officials.47 As a response to how his acquaintance Magnate Chen had written to him, Ouyang Xiu wrote a letter to criticize Chen for writing him in an improper way and to express that he was disappointed by how Chen had adopted etiquette from bureaucratic documents for a non-official letter. To Ouyang Xiu, this was totally unacceptable among brotherly friends. He stressed the value of writing sincere letters: Fundamentally, I am incomparably foolish and could not hope for friendly interaction with you. But in my regular life, I have had the luck of receiving a letter of comfort from you, to whom I bow and live with like brothers. I expected it to bear your heartfelt feelings aiming for congeniality; unfortunately, you began with the name [of the addressee] and followed it with the letter, as if you were writing a zhuang or a die to submit to a state agency. Taking a step back, I reflect on it and it must either be due to modesty or estrangement. These are for vulgar relationships and those who flatter each other. It was not something you ought to have sent to me. 修本愚無似,固不足以希執友之遊。然而羣居平日,幸得肩從齒 序,跪拜起居,竊兄弟行,寓書存勞,謂宜有所款曲以親之之意, 奈何一幅之紙,前名後書,且狀且牒,如上公府。退以尋度,非謙 即疏。此乃世之浮道之交,外陽相尊之為,非宜足下之賜修也。48 He assigned this spillover effect of bureaucratic writing conventions to earlier times, particularly the Tang period. To substantiate his argument, he recounted the history of the various forms of written correspondence: The only writing tools in antiquity were lead knives, bamboo, and wood. Carving wooden tablets into visiting cards was for communicating names;49 putting writing on bamboo and wood was for expressing intentions and for polite greetings. When clerks in government offices dealt with official matters, the correspondence sent from higher to lower ranks were called fu and jiao. Those for delivering messages and providing opinion from lower to higher ranks were called zhuang, and those for interactions between the equal ranked were called yi and die. If matters 47  On Ouyang Xiu’s letter writing practices, see Chen, Ouyang Xiu de wenxue, 16–89; Li, “Goutong yu rentong,” 59–68. 48  Ouyang Xiu, “Yu Chen yuanwai shu” 與陳員外書, Ouyang Xiu quanji 69.1007–8. 49  For excavated examples of these, see Korolkov, “ ‘Greeting Tablets’ in Early China.”

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were not official, when a senior notified his intention personally to his inferiors so as to warn or laud them this was called a jiao. When lower clerks communicated personal affairs to their superiors to greet and congratulate, it was called jianji and shuqi. Therefore, the etiquette for zhuang and die should not be applied to non-official matters. What is practiced nowadays originated with ministers from the Tang who were of high rank and powerful at that time. Those who flocked to their gates considered the old etiquette to be inadequate and took it upon themselves to add to it. They began to include greetings on visiting cards—this made a zhuang. By the Five Dynasties, they then used the etiquette of zhuang and die to greet as if it was about official business, but only applying this to superior officials and older clerks. These falsities and errors go very far back, but the world does not trace the ancient ways and consequently thinks they are natural. 古之書具,惟有鉛刀、竹木。而削札為刺,止於達名姓,寓書 於簡,止於舒心意、為問好。惟官府吏曹,凡公之事,上而下者 則曰符,曰檄;問訊列對,下而上者則曰狀;位等相以往來,曰 移、曰牒。非公之事,長吏或自以意曉其下以戒以飭者,則曰教; 下吏以私自達於其屬長而有所問候請謝者,則曰牋記,書啟。故 非有狀牒之儀,施於非公之事。相參加今所行者,其原蓋出唐世 大臣,或貴且尊,或有權於時,搢紳湊其門以傅,嚮者謂舊禮不 足為重,務稍增之,然始於刺謁,有參候起居,因為之狀。及五 代,始復以候問請謝加狀牒之儀,如公之事,然止施於官之尊貴 及吏之長者。其偽繆所從來既遠,世不根古,以為當然。 Ouyang Xiu then evaluated his interactions with Magnate Chen again, propounding how inappropriate it was for Chen to send him a letter that resembled an official dispatch, rather than a personal note: There is no one who does not know this nowadays. The reason why it has not changed is because it has already become a custom deeply rooted in people’s habits, so there is no way of changing it. When gentlemen establish interactions and share common pursuits with their teachers and friends, they are still expected to exchange sincere handwritten notes. This is still close to the practices of antiquity. Alas! Greeting and bidding farewell do not belong to official business; adopting the etiquette of zhuang and die for superior officials was already inappropriate according to ancient practice, not to mention using it for close friends and social equals who bow to and live with each other like brothers! Is

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Your Excellency going to treat me with the moral behavior of a friend and yet begrudge the trouble of a handwritten note? Do you intend to treat me with constraining customs and deep-rooted habits, and try to repay my sincerity by adopting conventional etiquette? If not, then you are going with vulgar ways of superficial flattery. So here I lay out my sincere thoughts to you. 居今之世,無不知此,而莫以易者,蓋常俗所為積習已牢,而不 得以更之也。士或同師友、締交遊、以道誼相期者,尚有手書勤 勤之意,猶為近古。噫!候問請謝,非公之事,有狀牒之儀以施 於尊貴長吏,猶曰非古之宜用,况又用之於肩從齒序、跪拜起居 如兄弟者乎!豈足下不以道義交遊期我,而惜手書之勤邪?將待 以牽俗積習者,而姑用世禮以遇我之勤邪?不然,是為浮道以陽 相尊也。是以不勝拳拳之心,謹布左右。50 From the perspective of scholar-officials who were familiar with the literary features of epistolary subgenres, which subgenre to use for different occasions and to what formal features to adhere reflected precisely how one preferred to interact and one’s views on relationships. Without doubt, those who were adopting the “vulgar ways” in their correspondence were equipped with the classical literary training to write in different subgenres according to their purposes. This explains why choices pertaining to subgenres and writing conventions mattered in interactions. Chen’s choice of epistolary subgenre certainly resulted in embarrassment in his interaction with Ouyang Xiu. Although Ouyang Xiu’s expressed his criticisms elegantly, he contended that Chen was overly polite and formal in his writing, and hence Chen’s letter was a disappointment. He argued that the conventions for writing about “official” and “non-official” matters should be clearly distinguished. The writing conventions for official correspondence were too formal and bureaucratic, and should not be used when writing to peers who share honest friendship. Basically, the etiquette involved in this kind of correspondence was only meant for the vulgar purpose of shallow flattery. In practice, however, the bureaucratic logic was obviously seeping into the writing conventions of literati officials, as Ouyang Xiu observed. This kind of bureaucratic influence on letter writing continued throughout the subsequent periods in the Song dynasty, and the zhazi as a subgenre of letter writing emerged within this context. The writing conventions and etiquette that elevated the addressee seemed to have an impact even outside 50  Ouyang Xiu, “Yu Chen yuanwai shu,” Ouyang Xiu quanji 69.1008.

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officialdom. In the tenth month of 1169, Lü Zuqian, as the Instructor of the prefectural school of Yanzhou, announced seven rules as part of his school regulations (xuegui 學規) for students and requested them to spread the news among their peers. Most of the rules concerned letter writing, including the following: When registered students are to correspond, they should only use one sheet [of paper]. Empty formalities (such as “your learning ranks between heaven and man,” “you are soon to receive imperial favors,” “your respectful, heavenly appearance,” “I prostrate a hundred times,”51 and exaggerating one’s official titles) should not be adopted. When corresponding, the format of zha is not allowed. Names [of the addressee] should not be altered. Only correspond to discuss issues in doubt. When writing about oneself, write only about concrete matters (when writing about one’s movements and whereabouts). When corresponding, do not exchange money, silk, playthings, and objects as tokens (“playthings” refer to illustrations, paintings and recreational objects for the desk; “objects” refer to inkstones, fans, and similar miscellaneous objects). 在籍人將來通書止用一幅,不許用虚禮(謂如“學際天人”及 “即膺召用”、“台𠉀神相”、“百拜”、過呼官職之類)。 通書不許用劄目,不許改名。 通書止許商搉所疑,自叙實事(謂自叙出入行止之類)。 通書不許以幣帛玩物為信(玩謂圖畫及几案玩具,物謂研扇凡 什物之類)。52 By this time, the conventions of writing letters in the zhazi format even influenced students in prefectural schools who were preparing for examinations and government service. Since the students that Lü Zuqian was teaching were not all staying in the same locality but scattered in various prefectures, the students had to communicate by writing letters.53 Lü Zuqian forbade them to adopt excessive etiquette in their letters; this included the number of the sheets of paper used for a letter, the polite expressions adopted in the letters, how the letter recipients were addressed, the format of the letter, and the content of 51  On the use of this phrase, also see Zhu Yi, Yijueliao zaji, 71. 52  Lü Zuqian, Donglai bieji 5.3a–b. I am grateful to Liu Ching-cheng for drawing my attention to this source. 53  Chen Wenyi, You guanxue dao xueyuan, 81–82.

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the correspondence. As we shall see in the following section, writers from middle period China were quite aware of the changes in all of these aspects. 2

Discussions in Notebooks and Encyclopedias

I now turn to other discussions of epistolary subgenres, which not only explain the different kinds of influences from official documents, but also attribute those influences to high level officials who had control over state power and hence exerted influence on bureaucratic writing conventions of literati officials. These discussions, drawn from literati discourse in notebooks and encyclopedias, reveal contemporary views on the transformations of epistolary subgenres. Letter writing was not a topic that warranted systematic analysis in the literary culture of the time. The epistolary genre was often traditionally regarded as a marginal literary genre, and discussions about letter writing seldom made their way into specialized works of literary theory in middle period China.54 For example, a work on rhetoric by Chen Kui’s 陳騤 (1128–1203), Wenze 文 則 (Rules of writing) only contains passing mention of the origins of correspondence in the Zuozhuan, but does not go into the specific ways of writing letters.55 The Song literati did discuss epistolary subgenres in jottings on miscellaneous matters, however. Notebook jottings were appropriate for these kinds of discussions because letter writing conventions involved topics such as recent political history, literati interactions, as well as the collection of manuscripts by famous figures. These were all of interest to literati scholars who were recording hearsay and their observations in the notebooks they kept.56 An important example of these is from Zhao Yanwei’s 趙彥衛 ( jinshi 1163) notebook Yunlu manchao 雲麓漫鈔 (Casual notes from the Cloudy Foothill). He opened his account by tracing the old standard of letter writing and explaining how it changed to the zhuang subgenre: The ancient standard of correspondence was to use either “I kowtow” or “I prostrate again” or “I present” [at the end]. People of the Tang began the switch to zhuang and wrote at the end: “Earnestly submitting this zhuang of greetings, I cannot go into detail. I end this zhuang earnestly.” 54  See Ronald C. Egan’s chapter in this volume. 55  On Wenze and its discussion on genre, see Kirkpatrick, “China’s First Systematic Account,” 103–52, esp. 145–46; Cai, Chen Kui, 543–59. 56  Zhang, “To Be ‘Erudite in Miscellaneous Knowledge’,” 43–77.

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Or: “Earnestly submitting this zhuang, I cannot go into detail. I end this zhuang earnestly. Month and date. Official so-and-so, zhuang submitted to official so-and-so.” 古尺牘之制,「某頓首」、或「再拜」、或「啟」。唐人始更為 狀,末云:「謹奉狀謝,不宣,謹狀。」或云:「謹上狀,不宣, 謹狀,月日,某官姓名,狀上某官。」57 To explain how later developments differed from this, Zhao Yanwei then paraphrased Sun Guangxian’s 孫光憲 (ca. 900–968) notebook Beimeng suoyan 北 夢瑣言 (Miscellaneous conversations from dreams of the north) to explain changes in the Tang period. They originated in an official’s correspondence with his superior:58 Lu Guangqi of the Tang was put in a post by Zhang Jun, the Commissioner for State Revenue. While [Zhang] Jun was on an expedition to Bingzhou and Fenzhou, whenever Lu [Guangqi] wrote him a letter he would use a new sheet [of paper] for every matter he discussed. 唐盧光啟受知於租庸使張濬,濬出征并汾,盧為致書疏,凡一 事別為一幅。 This type of correspondence was composed of multiple sheets of paper, and each sheet was intended for a separate issue. This was during a time when the delivery of letters was probably not too reliable due to the wartime situation. Writing in such a way made it possible for Lu Guangqi to discuss a particular issue on a sheet of letter paper, write whenever there was something to report to Zhang Jun, and send the sheets of letter paper off in a stack whenever convenient. Even if not all the sheets were successfully delivered, Zhang Jun could still comprehend parts of the message with the sheets that he received. When put together, the sheets of paper formed an interlinking flow of written messages.59 This prompted the later practice of using multiple sheets of letter paper instead of only one. Sun Guangxian then added that the candidates of the civil service examinations in the late Tang period followed this way of letter writing. Since they aspired to enter officialdom, they often put much effort in sending greetings to government officials. While doing so in order to

57  Zhao Yanwei, Yunlu manchao 4.63 (with modifications in punctuation). 58  On this work, see Halperin, “Heroes, Rouges, and Religion,” 413–16. 59  Sun Guangxian, Beimeng suoyan 4.26. See the explanation in Wu Liyu, “Zai lun fushu yu biezhi,” 116–21.

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make themselves known, they applied the writing conventions of bureaucratic correspondence.60 After quoting Lu Guangqi’s impact on letter writing practices, Zhao Yanwei goes on to explain changes in letters of greeting: I have not heard any other person doing the same since then. Since the late Tang, ceremonial letters and celebratory writings have been called qi. The official title of the recipient was omitted at the beginning of the first sheet, and then another sheet was used for communicating greetings. And then a sheet for expressing good wishes from afar and asking the recipient to take care of themselves [lit.: to have a good appetite]. Each of the [latter] two sheets contained six lines; there were three sheets in total. During the Xuanhe [1111–18] and Zhenghe [1119–25] reigns, the titles of the recipient were stated before the qi and that was for one envelope. The aforementioned two sheets with six lines each formed an official qi. Another stack of seven sheets was for another envelope. 後不聞他人為之。唐末以來,禮書慶賀為啟,一幅前不具銜, 又一幅通時暄,一幅不審邇辰,頌祝加飡,此二幅每幅六行, 共三幅。宣政間,則啟前具銜,為一封,又以上二幅六行者同 為公啟,別疊七副為一封。 The qi, “ceremonial letters and celebratory writings,” were greetings exchanged between officials whose content mainly dealt with non-official matters.61 Zhao Yanwei then explained subsequent developments, including the emergence of zhazi and its conventions: While Qin Zhongxian [Gui] held state power and a zhazi was submitted to him, the format was to omit “I kowtow” and “I prostrate again” at the beginning, and to add: “Carefully preparing the above. Submitted on date. Name of official.” A zhazi can use as many as ten sheets and more. The word “submitted” was omitted when writing to someone on equal terms. In the third year of the Qingyuan reign [1198], the ban on using multiple sheets of paper was reinforced; only three sheets were used. After that, only one sheet was used. It was especially simple and convenient. 60  Sun Guangxian, Beimeng suoyan 4.26. This is comparable to the letters studied in Mair, “Li Po’s Letters in Pursuit of Political Patronage,” 123–153. Also see Alexei Ditter’s chapter on cover letters in this volume. 61  Zeng, Song wen tonglun, 444–78. On qi in earlier periods see Xiaofei Tian’s article in this volume.

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秦忠獻當國,有投以劄子者。其制:前去『頓首』、『再拜』,而 後加『右謹具,申呈月日,具官姓名』,劄子多至十餘幅,平交則 去 『申』字。慶元三年,嚴疊楮之禁,祗用三幅云。後又祗許用 一幅,殊為簡便。62 The format of a zhazi letter put forward here is in line with that of the zhazi letters examined in this study. Unlike most other epistolary subgenres, the most common format of a zhazi letter was to leave out the formulaic greetings at the beginning of the letter, and to begin directly with the main content. Also, full official titles were usually given in the closing section of the letter.63 Lu You, who wrote the second zhazi letter examined earlier, also reflected on the shifting uses of epistolary subgenres during his time. He described how the conventions of letter writing became difficult to handle for writers of different times: During the Xuanhe reign, although people’s customs already tended towards flattery, they still favored simplicity. As time passed, there appeared at the same time the parallel prose jianqi and shoushu. The jianqi was the mainstay, therefore the shoushu was seen as the shorter note [xiaojian]. They were still in separate envelopes though. Occasionally, the letters would not reach the recipient together due to problems in delivery by courier clerks, so both were put in the same envelope. These were called “double letters.” In the early years of the Shaoxing reign [1131– 62], Grand Councilor Zhao Yuanzhen [Ding] was powerful and the times were troublesome. People were worried that he would not have the time to read both of the “double letters,” so they put their titles and native place on a separate sheet of paper, directly stating for what they were asking and submitted it together [with the “double letters”]. This was called the “triple envelope.” Later, they reverted to using only “double letters”, but as for the shorter note, the number of sheets used increased to as many as ten sheets. When Qin [Gui] the Grand Preceptor was managing the state, some adulator held power and became Regent of Jiankang. Whenever he sent a letter, he would draft as many as a hundred sheets but use a tenth of them. Therefore people could no longer bear the trouble and became

62  Zhao Yanwei, Yunlu manchao 4.63–64 (with modifications in punctuation). 63  Lü, “Songdai zhazi,” 23. Also, compare with examples from early medieval China in Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 76–78.

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fed up with it. All of a sudden they switched to using zhazi, and everyone thinks it is a bit more convenient. 宣和間,雖風俗已尚諂諛,然猶趣簡便,久之,乃有以駢儷牋啟 與手書俱行者。主於牋啟,故謂手書為小簡,然猶各為一緘。已 而或厄於書吏,不能俱達,於是駢緘之,謂之雙書。紹興初,趙 相元鎮貴重,時方多故,人恐其不暇盡觀雙書,乃以爵里或更作 一單紙,直敘所請而並上之,謂之品字封。後復止用雙書,而小 簡多其幅至十幅。秦太師當國,有諂者嘗執政矣,出為建康留 守,每發一書,則書百幅,擇十之一用之。於是不勝其煩,人情 厭患,忽變而為劄子,眾稍便之。64 The zhazi subgenre, which Lu You considered to be more convenient when writing about government affairs, appeared to have been conceived as a solution to this problem in letter writing conventions. However, as the following remarks of Lu You show, the writing of zhazi later also ran into problems: In just a while, zhazi expanded from two sheets to ten sheets, and every sheet had to bear the official title of the recipient. This made it even more troublesome, but “double letters” were still considered natural for congratulations and the like. Towards the end of the Shaoxing reign when the Duke of Wei, Shi [Hao, 1106–1194], was the Grand Councilor, he ordered scribal clerks to print according to gazettes provided by clerks stationed in the capital65 and not from “double letters.”66 People in later times followed this practice, so “double letters” were no longer used in government. Yet the jianqi was not abandoned. It contained small, tightly spaced handwriting on one or two small sheets of paper, just like in a zhazi. It was then sealed in the regular manner.67 Now it is still done in this way. But as for local governments, “double letters” are still used.68 64  Lu You, Lao xue’an biji 3.37. 65  These referred to personnel who manned the representative offices of their local authority in the capital. 66  On gazettes disseminated by the Song court, see Zhu, Songdai xinwen shi, 24–37; You, “Songdai liuzhuan,” 379–410; De Weerdt, “Court Gazettes,” 167–99. 67  The meaning of the term “bofeng” 博封 is not entirely clear to me. I follow William H. Nienhauser’s reading of the same term in his translation of Liu Zongyuan’s 柳宗元 (773– 819) “Biography of ‘Red’ Li” 李赤傳, 190. Some of the letters found in Dunhuang provide important evidence on how letters were sealed, see Zhou and Zhao, Tang-Wudai shuyi yanjiu, 59–61; Wu Liyu, Tang li zhiyi, 245–46. 68  Lu You, Lao xue’an biji 3.37.

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俄而劄子自二幅增至十幅,每幅皆具銜,其煩彌甚。而謝賀之 類為雙書自若。紹興末,史魏公為參政,始命書吏鏤版從邸吏 告報,不受雙書,後來者皆循為例,政府雙書遂絕。然牋啟不 廢,但用一二矮紙密行細書,與劄子同,博封之,至今猶然。 然外郡則猶用雙書也。 Lu You reported on how the formal features of the epistolary subgenres were regularly changing. This dynamic process cannot be stressed more in his treatment of the topic, with parts in which he described the fluctuations as happening in “all of a sudden” or only in “just a while.” Another important phenomenon that Lu You described about literati letters of his time is that the dividing line between the official and the non-official spheres was blurred and fluctuating. As both he and Zhao Yanwei recorded, the writing conventions of letters were often shaped by political circumstances of the time and how literati officials interacted with the main political actors at court, such as Zhao Ding, Qin Gui, and Shi Hao 史浩. The ways in which officials wrote to those influential figures spilled over into the personal letters that they exchanged with their colleagues. These transformations were also noted in literati’s notebook entries about the letters they collected, for instance in a notebook by Zhang Shinan 張世南, a less known scholar of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, who collected literati correspondence.69 Some of the letters he wrote about originally belonged to the Northern Song official Peng Ruli 彭汝礪 (1042–1094). Zhang admitted that he was surprised by the discrepancies between Peng’s letters, which all dated from 1067, and correspondence of his own time. He explained how Peng received letters from others: “During the winter solstice, the New Year Festival, and the first day of every month, the officials who were in posts outside the capital would send him a zhuang” 如冬至、年節、月旦,凡在 外官,皆以狀至. Quoting one of them in full, Zhang remarked that the way literati officials greeted each other with zhuang letters was “very different from present-day [conventions]” 與今大異.70 Discussing the zhuang subgenre rather than zhazi,71 Zhang demonstrated that the dynamic character of epistolary subgenres was not confined to zhazi letters, but was shared by other sub-

69  On this notebook, see Zhang, “To Be ‘Erudite in Miscellaneous Knowledge’,” 65–77. 70  Zhang Shinan, Youhuan jiwen 1.8. 71  See the types “congratulatory petition” and “thank-you petition” in Hartwell, “A Guide to Documentary Sources,” 154–56. On the zhuang subgenre, also see Wu Liyu, “Xia qing shang da,” 65–70.

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genres of correspondence. Writers obviously noticed the changes in how the subgenres of zhazi, qi, and zhuang were written and used in social interactions. The transformations that the literati scholars were recounting, however, did not merely regard the material form of a letter. Conventions including the number of sheets of letter paper used, and whether the correspondence was handwritten by the writer himself also mattered: My grandfather has handwritten prescriptions of medicine written in albums of old letter paper. From them I see that in the Yuanyou reign [1086–94] even monks and Daoist priests . . . did not exaggerate the official titles [of their addressees]. In the early years of the Shaoxing reign, literati officials still wrote shouzhuang to communicate their names [in visits], and they handwrote them on small bamboo paper.72 None of the letters that they exchanged were not written by themselves, even when high officials were writing to their subordinates. Since zhazi were used, it fulfilled the formalities but it made people emotionally detached from each other. Sima Wengong [Sima Guang, 1019–1086] once said, “It is not prudent to use more than three sheets of paper in a letter to a superior official.” . . . The letters he wrote are only one or two sheets. This can be seen in his many letters engraved in stone. 大父有手札藥方,乃用舊門狀紙為策䙡。見元祐間雖僧道謁 刺 . . . 官稱略不過呼。紹興初,士大夫猶有以手狀通名,止用小 竹紙親書。往還多以書簡,莫非親筆,小官於上位亦然。自行劄 子,禮雖至矣,情則反踈。司馬溫公嘗言:「與貴官書簡,有采 紙數過三,皆不謹。」. . . 所書止一兩幅,世多石本,可見也。73 It was preferable for letters to be written by oneself rather than a clerk. Also, it was regarded by some to be troublesome to use too many sheets of paper in a letter since it might appear excessively polite and thus run the risk of alienating close acquaintances. That the form of address used in a letter could also be regarded as overly polite is discussed in another notebook entry in Yunlu manchao:

72  According to a 10th c. account, writing letters on bamboo paper was a guarantee for confidentiality as the letter paper would easily break upon opening. Tsien, “Raw Materials for Papermaking,” 82. 73  Zhou Hui, Qingbo zazhi jiaozhu 11.479 (punctuation modified).

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Before the Xuanhe reign, literati officials who were on equal terms addressed each other with their style names. Even when they interacted with superior officials they did not exaggerate the superior officials’ titles. If it was someone who belonged to the rank of Grand Master or above, then they only addressed him as “Grand Master Assistant.” In Qin Zhongxian’s [Gui] letters to others he often addressed them as “elders.” People of the time imitated this. Even when writing a letter to someone younger, they addressed him as an “elder.” Those above the rank of Prefect were addressed as “Grand Masters for Court Discussion,” and those below it were addressed as “Academicians.” After Qin [Gui] died, ministers indicted him. Not long after that, those who were addressed as “Grand Masters for Court Discussion” in the past were advanced to “Superior Grand Masters of the Palace,” and the “Academicians” were advanced to “Grand Masters for Court Discussion.” This problem has become even more serious in recent years. All those with the rank of Prefect and above are now called “Superior Grand Masters of the Palace” or “Grand Masters for Thorough Service.” 宣和以前,士大夫輩行相等,皆稱字,雖通上官,亦不過呼;若 大夫以上,祗云「運判大夫」之類。秦忠獻與人簡尺,多云 「丈」,世俗傚之,雖貽晚進書,亦云「丈」。知州以上則稱 「朝議」,以下皆稱「學士」。秦薨,臣寮論列。未幾,昔日之 「朝議」進而為「太中」,「學士」進而為「朝議」。近年尤 甚,知州以上,皆有「太中」、「通奉」之稱矣。74 This account specifically focused on the official titles that were used to refer to letter recipients. The general trend was an inflation of those titles as a result of trying to be polite in letters. Again, shifts in the writing conventions of letters were observed to be associated with Qin Gui. Powerful politicians like him were described to have a big impact on the manner in which officials wrote to each other and also the perversion of names and titles in their correspondence.75 After examining sources from notebooks, I now turn to briefly discuss the discourse on epistolary subgenres in an encyclopedia. A number of household encyclopedias during the late Southern Song and Yuan periods served the function of epistolary manuals and spread literati knowledge about correspon-

74  Zhao Yanwei, Yunlu manchao 4.63 (with modifications in punctuation). 75  The attribution of these influences to Qin Gui also had to do with his vilification after his death. See Hartman, “The Making of a Villain.”

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dence to wider circles.76 These collections anthologized letter templates and model letters that could have been practical for readers who routinely needed to write letters. I draw my sources from an encyclopedia attributed to the late Song figure Liu Yingli 劉應李 (1247?–1324?). In explicating epistolary subgenres, the editor of the encyclopedia provided the following account for zhazi: The zha genre did not exist in writings before the Tang. In the collected writings of Ou [-yang Xiu] and Su [Shi] there appeared zouzha, which were words of ministers reporting to the emperor. There were no letters of the zha genre among their other pieces of correspondence [in their collected writings]. If multiple paper sheets and line breaks were used in a letter, then those were just called chidu or shoujian. Recently, the zha subgenre is always adopted when writing a qi. Its use of line breaks and multiple sheets of paper is exceedingly troublesome. Those who in the future put effort in composition should reform this genre. 劄,唐以前文無此體,至歐、蘇集中有奏劄,乃臣告君之辭。其餘 書翰往復亦不見有劄躰,凡疊幅提頭只曰尺牘、手簡。如近體用啟 必用劄,提頭疊幅不勝煩瀆,後之用工翰墨者宜變此體矣。77 The first half of the passage was referring to zhazi documents, but the second half was about zhazi letters. Again, this represented another indication of the close relationship between the two. The editor also noticed the problems with the contemporary writing conventions of zhazi letters; writing according to its usual conventions had become increasingly difficult. The number of sheets of letter paper in particular received mention in multiple entries. One mentioned: Several sheets of paper were used. Each was for writing a paragraph of the zhazi. . . . After that, literati officials found it troublesome to write, so they used just one sheet for qi and zha. And small handwriting in chancery regular script was preferred. 用紙數幅,一幅寫一段劄子...後士夫以其文繁,啟劄各只用紙 一幅,並吏楷小書為尊。78

76  On these encyclopedias, see De Weerdt, “The Encyclopedia as Textbook,” 77–79; West, “Time Management and Self-control,” 113–18. 77  Liu Yingli, Xinbian shiwen leiju 1.18. See also Tong, “Xinbian shiwen leiju.” 78  Liu Yingli, Xinbian shiwen leiju 4.35.

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In another instance, the editor wrote again about the reform in the use of letter paper: Since multiple sheets were troublesome, later only one sheet of paper was used. 盖疊幅既繁,後只用紙一幅.79 As hinted in these comments from the editor, although the use of zhazi had already become the convention, it no longer met the needs of contemporary writers. If this persisted, it would soon have been replaced by other subgenres with higher suitability or it would itself be adapted into a form that was more acceptable for writers. This echoes Lu You’s account in his notebook cited earlier, in which he indicated the conventions that zhazi letters entailed solved some of the problems. However, in the account in Liu Yingli’s encyclopedia, a zhazi letter had become too troublesome to write even at that time. These show how epistolary subgenres were actually constantly transformed by writers and their conventions.80 All these discussions validate the view that epistolary subgenres are not typified objects that do not change over the course of history. Letter writers were quite conscious of these changes in writing conventions and had to make decisions while they wrote. As a reappraisal of genre theory suggests: Logically, since they reflect their cultural, situational, and generic contexts, and since those contexts change over time, genres, too, must change over time. Since groups of people use genres to suit their purposes, and since those purposes change as the groups change, genres, too, must change in their purposes. Since people use and recognize genres as they go about their daily lives, and since the nature of those daily lives changes over time, genres, too, must change in their daily uses. Since people use genres to construct recurring situations out of variable events, genres, too, must adapt to variation. If they are to survive, genres must change. . . . Genres must be flexible synchronically and changeable diachronically.81 79  Ibid., 4.39. 80  In fact, this process of constant readjustment was also reflected in the etiquette manuals called shuyi 書儀, which were mostly discovered at Dunhuang. See Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 581–613 and Anna Shields’ chapter in this volume. On the reforms that occurred in the writing conventions of letters and the use of letter paper, see Wu Liyu, Tang li zhiyi, 252– 58, 278–90; Wu Liyu, “Zai lun fushu yu biezhi,” 107–22. 81  Devitt, Writing Genres, 89.

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The literati discourse on epistolary subgenres that I have examined is a reflection of this dynamic at work. How letters ought to be written constantly changed, and writers were fully aware of this fact. When literati officials communicated official matters to their colleagues and interacted with them regularly, the need to adapt an epistolary subgenre like the zhazi to their own practical needs would have been quite natural. While I have examined how official documents impacted the writing conventions of letters in this study, I would like to end this section by noting that the influences did not only come from one direction. Letter writing also affected how works in other genres were written in traditional China, but this would deserve a study in its own right.82



In this study, I analyzed the bureaucratic influence on Chinese letters in the middle period. Using two zhazi manuscripts as examples, I demonstrated how the zhazi epistolary subgenre was subject to the influence of bureaucratic documents. I also explored literati discourses on genre transformation involving shifts in writing conventions. It is hoped that this investigation shows why any study of classical Chinese letters should give consideration to the dynamic nature of the subgenres involved and the possible impact from the writing conventions of other genres, especially from bureaucratic documents. These kinds of bureaucratic influences on letter writing in middle period China are not too surprising, if we consider the fact that most literati scholars were eagerly seeking for or had already begun their political careers. The rise of a politically engaged literati official community was one of the most remarkable characteristics of Song society. Given their multiple identities in the imperial bureaucracy, scholarly learning, and social life across many regions in China, the elites often met with multi-faceted needs to communicate with each other in different capacities. They needed to maintain bonds with other men in officialdom. The rise to power of powerful councilors during the Southern Song also fueled this need, and definitely influenced letter writing between officials in the period.83 Facing such needs, the literati officials borrowed the writing conventions from what they adopted in their work on a 82  An interesting point of comparison is that letters played a critical role in the formation of genres throughout history in the West. For an overview, see Bazerman, “Letters and the Social Grounding.” 83  On how the politics of the Southern Song gave rise to a sycophantic culture in literary circles, see Shen, Nan-Song wenren, 426–63.

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regular basis as government officials. When adapting the zhazi subgenre to their needs, they gradually developed new norms of writing letters. This fluidity and instability of epistolary writing conventions was recognized and recorded by writers, and their descriptions provide us with valuable information about how literati officials actually wrote to each other and how they reflected on this activity. They also enable us to better understand what a “personal” letter meant historically for literati officials in middle period China. Bibliography Bazerman, Charles. “Letters and the Social Grounding of Differentiated Genres: Letter Writing as a Social Practice.” In Letter Writing as a Social Practice, edited by David Barton and Nigel Hall, 15–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000. Birch, Cyril, ed. Studies in Chinese Literary Genres. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Cai Zongyang 蔡宗陽. Chen Kui “Wenze” xin lun 陳騤《文則》新論. Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1993. Cao Jiaqi 曹家齊. Songdai jiaotong guanli zhidu yanjiu 宋代交通管理制度硏究. Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2002. Chang, Kang-i Sun. The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry from Late T’ang to Northern Sung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Chen Wenyi 陳雯怡. You guanxue dao xueyuan: Cong zhidu yu linian hudong kan Songdai jiaoyu de yanbian 由官學到書院:從制度與理念的互動看宋代教育 的演變. Taipei: Lianjing chuban, 2004. Chen Xianglin 陳湘琳. Ouyang Xiu de wenxue yu qinggan shijie 歐陽修的文學與情 感世界. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2012. De Weerdt, Hilde. “Court Gazettes and ‘Short Reports’: Official Views and Unofficial Readings of Court News.” Hanxue yanjiu 27.2 (2009): 167–99. ———. “The Encyclopedia as Textbook: Selling Private Chinese Encyclopedias in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 1 (2007): 77–102. Deng Xiaonan 鄧小南 and Zhang Yi 張禕. “Shufa zuopin yu zhengling wenshu: Song ren chuanshi moji juli” 書法作品與政令文書:宋人傳世墨蹟舉例. Gugong xueshu jikan 故宮學術季刊 29.1 (2011): 81–100. Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Duff, David, ed. Modern Genre Theory. London: Longman, 2000. Ebrey, Patricia B. “T’ang Guides to Verbal Etiquette.” HJAS 45 (1985): 581–613. ———. Emperor Huizong. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014.

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———. Gu shuhua guoyan yaolu ( Jin, Sui, Tang, Wudai, Song shufa) 古書畫過眼要錄 (晉、隋、唐、五代、宋書法). Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 1987. You Biao 游彪. “Songdai liuzhuan wanglai de guanfang ‘wenzi’ ” 宋代流轉往來的官 方‘文字’. In Zhengji kaocha yu xinxi qudao: yi Songdai wei zhongxin 政績考察 與信息管道——以宋代為中心, edited by Deng Xiaonan 鄧小南, 379–410. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2008. Yu Beishan 于北山. Lu You nianpu 陸游年譜. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985. Yü, Stephen Hsing-tao. An Index to the Ch’ao-yeh lei-yao: A Thirteenth-Century Glossary of Bureaucratic Terminology Compiled by Chao Sheng. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1974. Zeng Zaozhuang 曾棗莊. Song wen tonglun 宋文通論. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2008. Zhang Shinan 張世南. Youhuan jiwen 游宦紀聞. Compiled by Zhang Maopeng 張茂鵬. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981. Zhang Yi 張禕. “Zhongshu, Shangshu sheng zhazi yu Songdai huangquan yunzuo” 中書、尚書省劄子與宋代皇權運作. Lishi yanjiu 5 (2013): 50–66. Zhang, Cong Ellen. “To Be ‘Erudite in Miscellaneous Knowledge’: A Study of Song (960–1279) Biji Writing.” AM 25.2 (2012): 43–77. ———. Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011. Zhao Sheng 趙昇. Chaoye leiyao 朝野類要. Compiled by Wang Ruilai 王瑞來. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007. Zhao Shugong 趙樹功. Zhongguo chidu wenxue shi 中國尺牘文學史. Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1999. Zhao Xiaoxuan 趙效宣. Songdai yizhan zhidu 宋代驛站制度. Taipei: Lianjing chuban, 1987. Zhao Yanwei 趙彥衛. Yunlu manchao 雲麓漫鈔. Compiled by Fu Genqing 傅根清. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996. Zhou Hui 周煇. Qingbo zazhi jiaozhu 清波雜誌校注. Compiled and annotated by Liu Yongxiang 劉永翔. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994. Zhou Jia 周佳. “Bei-Song shangdian zhazi tanyan” 北宋上殿劄子探研. Shixue yuekan 4 (2012): 34–39. Zhou Yiliang 周一良 and Zhao Heping 趙和平. Tang-Wudai shuyi yanjiu 唐五代書儀 研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996. Zhu Chuanyu 朱傳譽. Songdai xinwen shi 宋代新聞史. Taipei: Zhongguo xueshu zhuzuo jiangzhu weiyuanhui, 1967.

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Zhu Huiliang 朱惠良. “Songdai ceye zhong de chidu shufa” 宋代册頁中的尺牘書 法. In Songdai shuhua ceye mingpin tezhan 宋代書畫册頁名品特展, edited by Guoli Gugong bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院, 10–20. Taipei: Guoli gugong bowuyuan, 1995. Zhu Yi 朱翌. Yijueliao zaji 猗覺寮雜記. In Quan Song biji 全宋筆記, 3:10. Zhengzhou: Da xiang chubanshe, 2008.

part 3 Diversity of Content and Style



section 1 Informal Letters



chapter 11

Private Letter Manuscripts from Early Imperial China Enno Giele 1

Topic and Theoretical Considerations

My task in this volume1 is to describe a group of archaeologically retrieved ancient Chinese manuscript sources that stand out among manuscript material because they exclusively share specific elements of form and content. I call this group ‘letters’ because apparently they are written communications sent—or meant to be sent—to recipients,2 or at least drafts or copies thereof (which were in fact neither sent nor meant to be sent), and because they are usually categorized by modern Chinese research as xin 信, shuxin 書信, xinzha 信札, and the like, all of which usually translates as ‘letter.’ I also call them ‘private’ to mark them as different from official communications, and again because they tend to be referred to as sixin 私信 in Chinese with si being the antonym of gong 公, ‘official/public.’ Others prefer the term ‘personal,’ perhaps so as to avoid having to deal with notions of privacy that must have been different in ancient times, but this general problem that our modern terminology invariably carries anachronistic notions also pertains to the word ‘letters’ used for a time when there was no regular postal service available outside the delivery organization for official mail. Moreover, ‘private’ seems better as an antonym to ‘official,’ whereas ‘personal’ allows to better distinguish between official communications that were personally addressed to specific officials and those that were addressed to the whole status groups or the populace at 1  I would like to thank Antje Richter and the participants of the workshop Letters and Epistolary Culture in China (August 17–18, 2012 at the University of Colorado, Boulder) for constructive comments and the discussion on my presentation, which served as the starting point for this article. The meticulous comments and criticisms by Antje Richter and an anonymous reviewer were very helpful to improve upon this version and ready it for publication. I also thank Nick Vogt and Guo Jue 郭珏, who have read versions of this article for very helpful discussion, advice, and resources. 2  Compare the Webster’s definition of ‘letter’ as “written or printed communication sent to a recipient.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_013

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large. There is more to say about such categorizations and especially about the notion of ‘letter,’ but this is not the place for me to do so. For practical purposes at any rate, the choice of words used here to designate the source material should be admissible. Whether or not it is equally admissible to compare this set of sources to other sets that have been labeled in a similar way—letters identified as such in traditional sources, for instance—or to use, as I will below, classificatory schemes developed on the basis of those other sets of sources for the analysis of these manuscript sources, remains to be decided upon the outcome of the comparison or analysis. 2

The Source Material

Among the manuscripts recovered from the deserts of the Chinese northwest, from border fortification sites that are summarily named after two of the biggest sites in the area, Dunhuang 敦煌 in Gansu and Juyan 居延 in Inner Mongolia, the great majority are either archival lists of equipment, personnel, or activity logs, or they are official correspondences, reports to superiors or orders addressed to specific offices for immediate execution or further promulgation. The official correspondences are typically headed by a date, mention the sender and the addressee, both with official titles, and contain a number of formulaic expressions, particularly verbs that signify the hierarchy between the parties involved, such as xia 下, ‘hand(s) (this) down to (s.o.)’; wei 謂, ‘tell(s)’ someone of the same rank; or gan gao 敢告, ‘dare(s) to inform (the authorities)’; direct speech markers, such as gan yan zhi 敢言之, ‘dare(s) to report this,’ which typically occurs twice, at the beginning and at the end of direct speech, so that it could also be paraphrased more freely as ‘beginning’ and ‘end of report’; or chen jin an 臣謹案, ‘let me subjoin that . . .,’ which usually occurs after a black dot (●) and sets apart a commentary of someone, usually a highranking official, who has just cited a subordinate’s statement, and wants to ‘put’ his own suggestion ‘on the table’ (an 案). Almost equally frequent are stock phrases of humility, especially sizui 死罪, ‘(to risk) capital offense (in saying)’; as well as stock phrase instructions, such as xie yi shu 寫移書, ‘copy and transmit (this) document’; or shu dao 書到, ‘when (this) document arrives, . . . (do this or that).’ Among the manuscripts from Dunhuang and Juyan, however, there are also a number of correspondences that are clearly different. They never carry a date, nor hardly ever an official title, nor do they contain any of the formulas

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mentioned above, with the exception of an occasional sizui. Instead they are characterized by other formulas, such as . . . zuxia . . . 足下, ‘at . . .’s feet’; fudi 伏地, ‘(I) prostrate’; zaibai 再拜, ‘(I) salute repeatedly’; qing 請, ‘regards’; yuan 願, ‘I wish that . . .’; wuyang 毋恙, ‘(may . . . be) without harm’; or xingshen 幸甚, an expression of auspiciousness that can mean anything from ‘very happy’ to ‘good luck.’ These formulas are only rarely seen in official correspondences.3 The senders as well as the recipients of this type of manuscripts are usually identified by names, not only their personal names (ming 名) but also quite often by their style names (zi 字). If not by name, recipients and other persons in these texts are often addressed or referred to by their status as relative within the family, such as ‘uncle’ or ‘younger wife.’ In fact, women are seen mentioned quite often in these documents as compared to the official correspondences, although it is not always possible to decide on the basis of a name alone whether it belonged to a male or female.4 It is these and similar manuscripts found at other sites (see below) that shall be analyzed here as private letters. Sources One through Four translated and discussed below derive from Dunhuang, Sources Five and Six from Juyan. Τhe finds at the Dunhuang and especially the Juyan area in the Northwest, that were made during numerous archaeological campaigns throughout the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, account for the largest number of private letters extant by far—more than forty more or less complete texts and innumerable fragments.5 However, similar documents from about the same time have also been found elsewhere, in fact all over China.

3  In addition, there are some formulas, such as koutou 叩頭 or dunshou 頓首, that are seen in all kinds of correspondence, whether official or private. 4  See Liu Zenggui, “Funü de mingzi.” 5  For the Dunhuang materials, see Dunhuang Hanjian and “Xuanquan shiwen” (esp. pp. 39–40 and inside front cover). Standard publications for the Juyan materials found in the 1930s campaign are Lao Gan, Juyan Hanjian: Tuban (the 1957 ed., not the later reprints) and Jiayibian for black-and-white photographs and Shiwen hejiao for transcriptions. For black-and-white photographs and transcriptions of Juyan manuscripts found during the 1970s campaigns, see Juyan xinjian. Much better photographs, often in color, of some of the Dunhuang and Juyan materials are found in publications for calligraphers (see notes to respective translations below). For newer materials from the Juyan area that are not cited in Li Junming, Jiandu wenshu fenlei and Yang Fen, “Shuxin huijiao,” see Ejina Hanjian and Jianshui jinguan Hanjian.

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The earliest private letter manuscripts discovered so far date to the Qin period. Except for two letters found in a tomb at Shuihudi 睡虎地, Yunmeng 雲夢 County, in the central Chinese province of Hubei, numerous letters have recently also been found in an ancient well at Liye 里耶 in Hunan province. These sources have been dated to the year 223 BCE and 222 to 208 respectively.6 These will be translated and discussed below as Sources Seven and Eight. One of the more recent finds of private letters was made in 2004 in a tomb in Jizhuang 紀莊 Village, near Anle 安樂 Township of Tianchang 天長 City in the Eastern Chinese province of Anhui. The site yielded at least eight private letters.7 Of these one will be translated here as Source Nine to show the affinity of the genre to that of greeting tablets. In the very same year that the finds at Tianchang were made, about a dozen private letters from the very end of the Han period (perhaps from the 180s CE, to which two accompanying manuscripts were dated) were excavated from an ancient well (designated J7) on Wuyi guangchang 五一廣場 (May 1st Plaza) in Changsha 長沙 City center in the Southern Chinese province of Hunan. The materials are commonly known under the name of the building whose construction led to the discovery of the well: Dongpailou 東牌樓.8 These are not translated here. Transcriptions and annotations of a large number of the private letters have been conveniently assembled by Li Junming 李均明 and Yang Fen 楊芬.9 The select translations and annotations proffered here owe much to Yang Fen’s seminal work. Before going into the texts themselves, I shall try to give a summary analysis of the physical and formulaic aspects of the material.

6  For the dating and some background discussion of the Shuihudi finds, see Huang Shengzhang, “Liangfeng jiaxin.” Other literature for this and the Liye finds will be listed in the commentary to the translation below. 7  See “Tianchang” for the temporary archaeological report, transcriptions, and color plates of the manuscripts. 8  See Dongpailou. 9  Li, Jiandu wenshu fenlei, 109–28; Yang, “Shuxin huijiao.” There is also a master’s thesis by Zhang Rui, “Siren shuxin,” that seems to stay well within the limits of Yang’s work, but contains some potentially useful tables and lists. Note that Yang also introduces to what she calls letter fragments from yet another site in Hunan province, called Zhangjiajie Gurendi 張 家界古人堤. The texts from that site, however, are so fragmented and mostly so devoid of the respective terminology discussed here that, to my mind, they do not warrant inclusion here, since one cannot be sure about their nature.

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Summary Analysis

3.1 Material Physically and formally, the material can be divided into two basic types and a miscelleaneous category: silk sheets, wood boards, and other wooden formats. Possibly, paper could be added to this list at least from the end of the Han onwards if not earlier, but this falls outside the scope of this study.10 Textually or terminologically, there seems to be no basic difference between these types, i.e., the formulas and contents used can appear in any of these categories. While the size of the characters is the same on silk and wood, a tendency for neat script on silk manuscripts and often somewhat cursive script on wooden stationery may be registered, but this is not absolute, and the sample size for silk manuscripts is also too small to be statistically significant. Nevertheless, the general characteristics of the three types may be summarized as follows. 3.1.1 Silk Sheets The oblong sheets of silk are about 23 cm long—roughly one Han foot or chi 尺—and of non-standard width. With one exception, the width of the known specimens varies between approximately 5 and 11 cm, holding 6 to 10 vertical columns of writing on one side.11 If the silk is of fine semi-translucent quality, there is usually no writing on the verso side. Coarser, non-translucent silk, however, did allow for writing on both sides. A good example can be observed with an unnumbered manuscript from Xuanquanzhi 懸泉置.12 10  For early paper letters, one would have to consult the Loulan and Xuanquan materials, see Conrady, Handschriften- und Kleinfunde, 78–113 and pls. II–XXXVIII; and “Xuanquan yizhi,” 11–13, figs. 11–13 and 15, and inside back cover. For color photographs, see Li Yongliang, Helong wenhua, 137. 11  The exception is the square-cut Dunhuang manuscript shown as Source Three (b) below. Seam stitches all around its fringes and around a central, circular hole, that cuts through part of the writing, show that this manuscript—much like its companion Source Three (a)—was reused, perhaps as garment, after having been inscribed and, perhaps, used as communication. But even from its present state it is clear that originally it had been much wider—at least about 20 cm wide—than other surviving private letters on silk. The left half of it, however, remained uninscribed, so it carries only five columns of writing. It is not known whether it was inscribed as a clear copy. If it was only meant to be a draft or writing exercise, it would certainly not have had to follow any formal standards. But it could also be an indication that there really was no standard limit to the width of silken stationery beyond the width of the loom. 12  This is only reproduced as a calligraphic example in Kantoku meisekisen 7, 30–31. No number is given. The description on p. 70 only discloses that this is a silk manuscript from

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Figure 11.1 Letter on coarse silk from Xuanquanzhi, recto (right) and verso (left). Kantoku meisekisen 7, 30–31.

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The usually extreme thinness and lightness of the material is also responsible for the contortion, creases, and multiple fragmentation that appear on the published photographic reproductions of most silk manuscripts. In some cases, the creases and fissures clearly follow a regular pattern of segmentation of the manuscript surface into upright rectangles of about 6 × 3 cm or squares of about 3 × 3 cm (2–3 columns of writing with 8–10 or 4–5 characters each), in others they do not. Where there is such a regular pattern, it clearly means that the silk sheet had once been folded. In at least two cases—Sources One and Three (a)—it can be further observed that the sheet was first folded along its vertical middle axis because that crease is the most pronounced. For Source One, this contention is further strengthened by the fact that the writing on the two halves has left its mirror image on the respective opposite half.13 On Source Three (b) from Dunhuang there are concentrical (on manuscript Yifu 51 from Juyan very pronounced), more or less vertical crinkles but no regular folding creases.14 These observations carry potentially important consequences for how we imagine these correspondences on silk to have been transported. This will be discussed in the excursus on transport containers below. As mentioned before, silk manuscripts rarely show extremely cursive or sloppy forms of writing unless they are written on coarse scrap material or sheets of irregular formats, such as Source Three (b), in which a place name

Xuanquanzhi. The writer was obviously making use of scrap silk which was originally fragmented, showing an oblique cut at the bottom, when it was taken up and inscribed, the characters being squeezed in as the space allowed. This can be known because despite the irregular form there seems to be no textual loss. The length of the piece, given as 13.2 cm, probably at its longest side, is also not standard, and the script becomes somewhat sloppy on the backside, as if finished in haste. 13  It is not known whether this is the result of the sheet being folded when the ink was still wet or because it has remained in a folded state and perhaps under some pressure over two millennia. No in-depth archaeological report is as yet available that would disclose in detail the circumstances of the discovery and subsequent restoration of this rich source. Source Two also shows traces of a vertical middle crease but has two more pronounced horizontal creases at both the top and bottom part, so that it is difficult to tell which were produced first. 14  Yifu refers to an appendix in the “Yibian” of Jiayibian. Jiafu and Yifu manuscripts do not appear in Lao, Juyan Hanjian: Tuban. For reasonably good photographs see Tanaka, Chugoku hoshosen, 20, fig. 1, and 21, fig. 4.

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(Jincheng 金城) is vigorously crossed out with a correction (Dingxiang 定襄) written next to it.15 Once dried, Chinese ink is not water solulable again and it is difficult to scrape it off a textile surface, let alone one so fragile as silk, without damaging the surface. This, together with the fact that silk is a comparatively expensive material, may be the reason that for writing on silk extra care was taken. This could also be done by hiring a professional—or at least very skilled—scribe. An example is again Source One, which is at once the longest and most complete among the texts discussed here, and the one with the neatest script, to which at the end a half-length column headed by “self-written” (zishu 自書) in an extremely scrawly, if not necessarily untrained, hand has been added. Even more interesting, if enigmatic, is that two further additions to this letter can be observed that may represent a third hand or at least a third (or even fourth) occasion at which the writer added text. If, as seems possible, we interpret the first of these additions (“Yuan fudi zaibai zaibai,” “My very best regards!”) as a kind of signature, it may even be conjectured that the text originally ended shortly afterwards (with “Zifang zuxia,” “Dear Zifang”) and the following three postscripts, that reflect requests by two other persons and are each set off by a black dot, were added only later. In any case, whether these different hands are an indication of repeated proofreading or different phases of original textual production, they do betray the great care that was taken to ensure that this piece came out as flawless as possible. They also indicate that the production of at least this ancient letter was a highly complex social affair involving unrelated, probably professional, personnel that is not even mentioned by name. In fact, personal mentioning in a letter of the person who wrote it has so far only been observed on two wooden letters (Sources Six and Seven), in both cases presumably the senders. But whether this indicates that whoever wrote on silk had the economic means to buy the services of a scribe, instead of relying on help from a family member or friend, and thus not feel obliged to personalize this purchased service as neither emotions nor further obligations were invested, must remain speculation. 3.1.2 Wooden Boards Although early Chinese writing materials are traditionally—and synecdochically—known as ‘bamboo slips and silk sheets’ ( jianbo 簡帛), I have not found any example of a private letter being written out on bamboo stationery. 15  The Xuanquan letter on thick scrap textile shown in fig. 11.1 above contains not only some very cursive characters but also two characters that are crossed-out.

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Instead wood, especially in the form of wooden boards, is the most widespread format.16 The wooden boards are of about the same length as the silk documents, but usually of less width, holding only about 2 to 5 columns of writing. Unlike the silk sheets, wooden boards were nearly always inscribed on two sides. That is, the amount of text on a wooden board is not necessarily less than on a standard size silk sheet. The writing on the wooden board sources is often considerably more cursive than on silk, which probably stems from the relative carelessness with which a writer on wood could approach his or her task, both from the availability of the materials and the ease of correction. Mistakes on wooden stationery, if thick enough, could just be scraped or peeled off with a knife. I have not found examples where this actually happened on a board, but this may be just due to too small a sample size and the poor quality of the photographs. 3.1.3 Other Wooden Formats Finally, we do find the texts of private letters in some exceptional cases also on other media, such as on a wooden rod (gu 觚) like Source Four or on narrow wooden strips that carried only a single column of writing. These show all the signs of a secondary use, that is, they are either copies of texts that originally were written out on another medium and possibly in another format, or they are examples of documents that have been collected after use for storage purposes. This is especially clear in the case of the rod introduced below as Source Four, for the correspondence text in question directly follows another text that is totally unrelated and clearly of a different nature, a kind of literary deathbed lament. Therefore, it is most probable that the private letter text on this rod represents a writing exercise, i.e., someone copied or drafted it onto this rod that by nature of its thickness allowed corrections through scraping off the surface multiple times without endangering the physical stability of the 16  Since boards were sometimes made of bamboo and used for other types of texts (such as the official letter to the netherworld discovered in Western Han tomb no. 168 at Fenghuangshan 鳳凰山, Hubei Province; see Fenghuangshan, 181), it is not inconceivable that private letters, too, may occasionally have been written on bamboo as well, just as many ancient texts were written on narrow slips (not boards) of bamboo, which were then bound together to form a scroll. But inasfar as private letters in the Han were habitually inscribed on both sides of the stationery and as bamboo is not as conveniently inscribed on both sides (the Fenghuangshan bamboo board is not either), bamboo board letters were probably the exception rather than the rule.

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manuscript body.17 Similar writing exercises using private letters as models have also been found elsewhere.18 This, of course, is highly interesting culturally as well as socially, as it throws light on how wide-spread and important this form of text production was. The relatively low-ranking personnel at the frontier obviously thought it worthwile to practice this type of text alongside primers, official correspondence templates, and much more high-brow philosophical texts, such as the Analects.19 As for the single-column strip format, Yang mentions a multi-strip document (ce 冊) from the Wang Mang period collected as a stray find in 1988 at the Rentou geda 人頭疙瘩 tower ruin near Dunhuang, that carries one complete letter per strip.20 Unfortunately, no picture is available but according to Yang’s description the four single strips originally had been bound together with strings to form a kind of letter collection scroll, with one letter per strip. If this is true, this would also indicate a secondary use. After all, these single-column wooden strips much like the multi-column wooden boards were inscribed on both sides and to be read consecutively from recto to verso, not from the recto of one strip to the recto of the next. Therefore, stringing them together cannot have had any other purpose than to store them, definitely not to send or read them. 3.2 Contents Beyond their many formulas and stock phrases, which will be explained in more detail below, the sources under review exhibit surprising similarities in content and concern, although due to fragmentation, weathering and unknown contexts not all contents are equally transparent. But what can be gleaned from these texts is the eagerness of people from all ranks, simple 17  This, in fact, seems to have been one of the main uses for such rods as is indicated by primers occuring mainly in such a form, as well as by hundreds of whittlings made from these (see the Dunhuang and Juyan materials passim, a large collection of such whittlings is kept by the British Library). 18  See, for instance, Ejina Hanjian, 277; Jianshui jinguan Hanjian 2, 161. 19  Templates for private letters or letter writing guides are not known from Early China, unless one wants to see the text on this rod as a template or sample text with which the users would not just practice writing but analyze, understand, and train to compose letters. If so, it would be the oldest known template of its kind. But the possibility is remote at best. At the time there were already more clearly marked templates for other forms of writing, including official ledgers and reports, using variables that could be exchanged for real content. It is not clear why letter templates should not have made use of variables, too. 20  Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 62–63.

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soldiers as well as provincial governors, to connect with relatives, friends, and acquaintances, often just to express well-wishes and gratitude, or convey greetings and inquire about health, sometimes across considerable distances. This is surprising especially given the fact that there probably was no postal service supporting these private contacts.21 In some instances, we also see real emergencies, requests for monetary aid or active help, indications of trouble, be it of a financial or a legal type and the efforts of people to share information on these concerns and coordinate actions through the medium of written correspondence. But the perhaps astounding realization is that, apart from Sources One and Seven, these matters often took the backseat against the exchange of formal niceties and adherence to a rigid comme-il-faut structure.22 How this played out in detail shall be analyzed with the help of the structural model that Antje Richter has laid out on the basis of much more diverse sources.23 The intention here is not to show only similarities or to relegate differences only to a development over time, but to provide a foil against which structure can be more easily recognized and discussed (and integrated with other research), even if in the end one does not follow to this particular model. It is relatively easy to notice that the biggest differences between the sources analyzed here exist between the Qin manuscripts (Sources Seven and Eight) on the one hand and the Han manuscripts on the other. I want to resist the

21  Beyond the statements in the sources translated below, direct evidence for the delivery of private mail in general is hard to find. There may have been many different ways to deliver private letters and the occasional use of the official postal system by officials for sending private mail, whether legal or not, cannot be completely discounted. Overall, most indirect evidence points to delivery that had to do without a regular postal service. For a brief review of opinions and some evidence, see Li Xinke, “Shuxin de chuanbo,” 66–67. On the official postal system, see Giele, “ ‘Yu’ seiko,” and the contribution of Edmund Lien in this volume. 22  Or were veiled expressions a means of security and encoding of otherwise sensitive information? 23  Richter claims global validity for a “tripartite composition that emerges in letters all over the world,” consisting of “salutation with an introductory part, [. . .] the relevant core information,” and “closing words.” The five-fold scheme created by further subdividing the first and last parts into prescript and proem and epilogue and postscript, respectively, goes back to a rhetorical model of the European Middle Ages that, according to Richter, “has been found productive in the analysis of non-Western letters as well,” especially in the absence of any indigenous and contemporaneous, i.e., early medieval Chinese model. Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 75.

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urge to see this difference necessarily as a sign of development from the Qin to the Han. The statistical basis is just too small to draw this conclusion. 3.2.1 Prescript This part may contain information about the when, who, and to whom of a letter. As far as the prescripts in the letters analyzed here go, only two of the Qin letters are dated. The most ubiquitous formula is {personal name of the sender} + fudi zaibai qing 伏地再拜請 or yan 言 + {name of the recipient} + zuxia 足下. Usually the first half is set off by a column break from the second half and the rest of the text. Variations include {personal name of the sender} + koutou duo wen 叩頭多問 or gan zaibai wen 敢再拜問 + { name of the recipient}, which is not separated by a column break. 3.2.2 Proem Almost without variance, in the letters at hand the following proem begins with an inquiry about the well-being (wuyang 毋恙) of the recipient and his immediate environment or with the assertion or the explicit assumption that the recipient must be very busy and be having a really hard (ku 苦) time. The lament about the long intervening time during which one has not seen the other or about the weather which is either too hot (shushi 暑時) or too cold (hanshi 寒時) follow suit as do exhortations or the hope ( yuan 願) that the recipient may pay proper attention to or be blessed with good food and wine (qiangshi 強食, xing jiushi 幸酒食) and sufficient clothing (zuyi 足衣, shiyi 適 衣), and successfully attend to his professional duties (chashi 察事). This part often closes with the universal formula xingshen 幸甚. It is shortest in the Qin letters. 3.2.3 Letter Body The main concerns of the manuscripts have been summarized above, and are naturally as manifold as there are letters. It is interesting to note that Source Four does not seem to have a main body at all. Here it is difficult to define where the proem ends and the epilogue begins. This is only logical, if we remember that Source Four is in fact a writing practice, or perhaps some kind of template. In other cases, such as with Sources Five or Six the main concerns are extremely terse—just one or two sentences—and are situated almost at the very end of the letter. 3.2.4 Epilogue Whereas the formal closing parts (epilogue and postscript) of Sources One and Seven are adhortational ( jiji 急急, liuyi 留意, wuhu 毋忽, yanjiao 嚴教, mianli

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勉力), if at all existent, the epilogues of Sources Two and Three are almost textbook-like. In both cases, the request to write is followed by further valedictions, particularly of the recipients’ family members. In this Source Seven is remarkable as well, providing a list of well-wishes (duowen 多問, duoqing 多請, wuyang 毋恙) that occupies almost the entire width of one side of the document. 3.2.5 Postscript Richter only mentions occasional dates, repetition of verbs from the prescript, and writers’ names under this rubric, but I think this part could also include the many references to how the correspondences were written and to be delivered either by others (jin yin 謹因, feng shu 奉書) or by the author (. . . ji 記), as well as addenda to the contents that were sometimes written at the very end, just like postscripts to modern letters. Apart from this scheme, it can be noticed that our sources frequently (Sources One, Two, Five, and Six) make use of black dots (●) to flag added information. 3.3 Containers Although postscripts sometimes give relevant information on the messenger, how private letters were actually delivered is still mostly unknown. In a recent study focusing on wooden sealing labels ( fengjian 封檢) Akira Momiyama has come up with a suggestion.24 He distinguishes four different types of sealing labels. The four types are of different dimensions and shapes, but all of them basically are a rectangular or trapezoid piece of wood with a large, smooth surface that carries a large, bold inscription on one—often raised—side stating someone’s title, name, and/or unit and sometimes also some kind of object or document title. Strings would have been fastened around both the label and anything attached to it, with wet clay being put on top of the strings—usually into a small cavity in the raised part—before this was stamped with a personalized seal stamp that identified the sender and prevented any undetected opening of the bundle once the clay had dried. Various kinds of these sealable address labels had been found early on in great numbers at the archaeological sites of Juyan, Dunhuang, and further west as well recently also in Changsha, where for the first time a complete Chinese official correspondence was found written onto the backside of such a label 24  Momiyama, “Gi Shin Roran kan,” 148. For this and other suggestions about containers for official and private correspondence, see also Li, “Shuxin de chuanbo,” 65–66.

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Figure 11.2 Sealing label from Niya with seal intact and Kharoshti writing on the concealed surfaces. Niya iseki, pl. 33.

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and continuing on another wooden board or receptacle that had obviously been bound together with the label in such a way that the inscribed sides of the two boards were facing each other and were thus concealed when bound together. Figure 11.2 shows a particularly clear example, albeit not with Chinese but Kharoshti inscription.25 Momiyama now contrasted the dimensions of these labels with the standard folding patterns of paper manuscripts from Wei-Jin period Loulan, and found them largely compatible (fig. 11.3). In some cases both form upright rectangles of about 7 × 2.6 cm, although most labels are twice as long and a bit wider, roughly 15 × 3 cm. This had led him to speculate that these labels were not always directly inscribed in the above-mentioned fashion but could instead serve to enclose official paper documents. To this end, the paper would have been folded to the same or half the size of the label and sandwiched in between the two boards.26 Momiyama explicitly limits the use of these sealing labels to paper and official correspondence. But what about silk manuscripts and private letters? It has already been conjectured that use of ‘envelopes’ of some sort is the reason that we do not find certain information specified in the texts of the letters themselves.27 In fact, address inscriptions on Han wooden sealing labels like the two following, from Juyan cited by Momiyama (fig. 11.4), do seem to refer to private correspondence because the sender is named without any title and the recipient is addressed by the non-official honorific jun 君 (Sir).28

25  See Oba, “ ‘Ken’ no saikento,” 216; Dongpailou, manuscript no. 1005. Before the Dongpailou find, complete, even unopened labels of this kind had been found only with Kharoshti inscriptions; the Chinese examples had all been opened and scattered. See Oba, “ ‘Ken’ no saikento,” 211; Niya iseki, 29–43. 26  Momiyama, “Gi Shin Roran kan,” 157–58. 27  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 78. Note, however, that this still would not explain why most letters discussed here do not contain a date, for the above-mentioned address labels do not carry a date either. 28  Momiyama, “Gi Shin Roran kan,” 154–55. It seems that in the context of the frontier society jun was regularly used for company commanders, whose official title was houguan 候官. In the following transcription, 回 signifies the sealing receptacle.

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Figure 11.3 Dimensions of sealing labels plotted over the folding creases of paper manuscripts. Momiyama, “Gi Shin Roran kan,” 148.

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Record of what Gao Ren respectfully told to the attention of Sir Cao, Commander of First Canal [Company] 回 高仁叩頭白記 回 甲渠候曹君門下EPT40:7 Wu Yangshu29 salutes and submits [this] to the attention of Sir Cao, Commander of First Canal [Company] 回 吳陽書再拜奉 回 甲渠候曹君門下EPT40:8 Yet Momiyama, who also mentions and shows Source One, surprisingly points to the following small silk fragment from Dunhuang, which measures just 6.5 × 4 cm and is inscribed with text very similar to the address labels. This, he claims, belonged to a silk pouch that was used to contain silk letters.30 Record of what Ning Zun respectfully told to the attention of Sir Wang 寧尊叩頭白記 王君門下

DHHJ 1983

Momiyama even suggests that silk was exclusively kept and transported in silk pouches.31 But this argument is not very compelling. Even if the above fragment was part of a silk pouch, there is no hard evidence that it contained a silk letter. In sum, the existence of some type of transport container for the private letters on silk and wood we are dealing with can be assumed for textual and practical reasons. Candidates for containers of a sort are found mainly among wooden sealing labels with inscribed addresses and other delivery information. Similar inscriptions exist on other materials, including silk fragments, 29  Alternatively perhaps, “Wu Yang writes to salutate and submit [this],” although one would expect the honorific zaibai to precede any action, including the writing. 30  Momiyama, “Gi Shin Roran kan,” 155–56. 31  After mentioning a conjecture by Édouard Chavannes that silk letters were inserted into silk pouches, Momiyama (ibid.) states: “Therefore, during Han times, there had already long since been letters of two different formats. Namely, wooden boards, to which sealing labels were attached and silk letters inserted into a silk envelope.”

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Figure 11.4 Two wooden sealing labels from Juyan with address inscriptions. Juyan xinjian, 2:68.

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Figure 11.5 Silk pouch from Dunhuang inscribed with a letter address. Momiyama, “Gi Shin Roran kan,” 156.

but whether these are remnants of pouches cannot be verified. We are as yet unable to say exactly how these sealing labels were used with letters or whether there was a standard of using certain letter formats only with certain types of containers. It remains an interesting observation, however, that the average dimension of Han time wooden sealing labels (15 × 3 cm) could have accommodated most of the extant silk documents that were folded to a similar or half the size (6 × 3 cm or 3 × 3 cm) of later paper manuscripts, at least as far as we can judge by the remaining folding patterns. Future finds may put us in a better position to reevaluate this finding. 3.4 Delivery of Greetings Finally, there is circumstantial evidence of another sort about the delivery of letters. As mentioned above, each of the narrow strips from the Rentou geda 人頭疙瘩 site near Dunhuang contains a text that has been identified as a ‘letter.’ For example, the third of the Rentou geda strips reads:32 32  First published in Zhongguo jiandu jicheng, 4:2, 11–12. Here cited after Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 63; punctuation slightly adapted; reduplication marks assumed. The translation is tentative, several other solutions are thinkable and some elements of the transcription seem doubtful to me, but there is no point in discussing these as long as no photographs are available to check.

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Kindly allow me, Wang Xi, at your service, to attend at your doorstep, teacher Wu, and, while you must be terribly busy with far more important worries, extend my greetings. [Your] extreme generosity is a great honor [for me]! Yuan’s small ailing has not yet improved, I am afraid. [So, I have] come out to call upon [you]. Tell me please, whether everything is as before and [I did] not completely miss the appropriate period. If so, [I would feel] guilty because of it. [Having] witnessed the good deeds of [my] two former teachers [I shall] in turn accommodate them. 弟子王習詣吳師門下,叩=頭=(叩頭叩頭)!煩勞遠苦,問之,   甚厚意,大佳!元小疾未平復。叩=頭=(叩頭叩頭)!出謁。 88DYTGC:5A 告 弟 子 , 皆 如 前 , 甚 毋 失 期 。 有 者 坐 之 。 交 故 兩 師 循 行 ,  互處之。88DYTGC:5B Whether this transcription and this very tentative translation are correct in every detail or not, it is clear that here someone made a courtesy call and put his concern in writing. This is very similar to a greeting tablet or visiting card with an added note. These tablets or cards, called ye 謁 or ci 刺, were produced at the gate of the host during a visit (also called ye 謁) to either announce the guest’s or his messenger’s presence through an usher (called yezhe 謁者), who would receive the tablet or card, or to leave proof of the visit by leaving the card or tablet in case the host was not at home.33 In fact, the last two characters on the recto, chu ye 出謁, instead of “[So, I have] come out to call upon [you],” could also directly be understood as, “[So, I am] sending out [this] greeting tablet,” which would then not only imply the use of a messenger but probably also identify this very manuscript as a type of slightly more elaborate greeting tablet. Except for the last part, the action reflected here is indeed reminiscent of that seen in a greeting tablet, such as this one measuring 23 × 7 cm from the late Western Han tomb no. 6 of Yinwan 尹湾 in Jiangsu Province.34

33  The best recent study of this genre is Korolkov, “Greeting Tablets.” Korolkov situates these examples well in their cultural context and tries to pinpoint the exact difference between ye 謁 and ci 刺 cards. 34  Yinwan Hanmu jiandu, 32.

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Forwarded to: Shi Junxiong.35 The noble of Liangcheng is pleased to be able to send a clerk to submit a greeting tablet and respectfully inquire about [your] illness. 進 師君兄:YM6:D21A 良成侯願謹使吏奉謁,再拜 問 疾。YM6:D21B Another tablet reports the personal delivery of a note ( ji 記). Rao, Director of the Bureau of Merit under the Governor of Donghai salutes and calls upon [you]. —One enclosed note, submitted to the Governor’s office. Sincerely, Rao. 東海太守功曹史饒再拜 謁。●奉府君記一封。饒叩頭,叩頭!YM6:D22B36 However one classifies the Rentou geda strips—as letters or as greeting tablets or visiting cards—these two kinds of materials do not only share a good portion of their terminology37 but also a method of delivery. As has been mentioned above, there is little evidence that greeting tablets and private letters were delivered by the regular postal service for official mail. Instead, many of these texts make mention of a messenger of some kind who was to deliver them. In the case of letters sent over longer distances this could perhaps have

35  These were probably the family and style name of the tomb occupant. His personal name was Rao 饒. On other tablets he is also addressed as Shi qing 師卿, “[my] friend Shi.” Alternatively, Junxiong 君兄 could also mean “my good brother.” While this tablet was apparently one he received as host, the next one was obviously one he was prepared to give out himself as a guest. Note the different use of names in this respect. 36  In Yinwan Hanmu jiandu, 33, this side is designated as the verso. In fact, the so-called recto of this piece is probably uninscribed; a large dark smudge in the middle may have been generated by prolonged contact with the ink on another tablet that lay on top of this. Note that koutou 叩頭 is written out twice without reduplication marks. 37  This also concerns the use of the humble term dizi 弟子, “at your service,” that is otherwise seen only on visiting cards dating after the Han period (for examples, see “Nanchang Jinmu,” 375 and pl. 9, fig. 2; “Dong Wu Gao Rong mu,” 226 and pl. 11, fig. 5), which, of course, begs the question of whether the Rentou geda materials are really of Han origin.

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been a traveller, more or less well-known to the sender, who happened to travel to the direction which the mail was to go. If we imagine private letters to be delivered by an acquaintance, a close friend, or relative, the question of containers and address labels does, of course, pose itself in a different light. The exigencies of transport still might have demanded some kind of bag or container, but not necessarily an inscribed one. And with the address and identity of addressee stored in the mind of the messenger, writing it down might also have been superfluous. 4

Annotated Translations

The methodological problem of classifying our material as ‘private letters’ and fully grasping what exactly the ancient Chinese were doing and understanding themselves as doing when they produced the materials presented here, is doubly underscored by the difficulties we face when we try to translate these materials. The conventions of formulaic language, of appropriate content, as well as the social relations between the senders and recipients were clearly different from what we are used to. That is the reason that many of the nuances that these sources carry simply cannot be literally translated, sometimes not even be translated at all, but only paraphrased and described in footnotes. An inkling of this problem can of course be experienced in the translation of any kind of ancient text, but it seems to be particularly pronounced in the case of private letters. Here the gap between the literal meaning and a stylistically and culturally sensitive modern rendering is particularly large, the difficulty of understanding the intricacies of each letter’s contents often so seemingly unsurmountable, that one is reminded of that other nuance of ‘privacy,’ seclusiveness. Nevertheless, it would certainly also be a mistake to assume a complete lack of commonalities between ancient and modern human experiences in this area, and to the extent that we assemble more sources, subject them to a close reading and compare them to one another, it should be possible to improve our understanding not only of the texutal genre but also the social practice of ancient Chinese private letter writing. Thus the remainder of this article will try to do just that and back up the preceding statements with concrete evidence. The translations here are purposefully free. The aim was to render the text as natural-sounding as possible, making it similar to our own epistolary language, even though this is much less rich in expressing social relations than the language of the sources. A literal translation would brim with unfamiliar,

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emotional expressions such as “under the hooves of your horses,” “banging my head to the ground,” “becoming culpable of a capital crime [by addressing you],” and the like. The content of most texts, however, betrays that the relation between their senders and recipients has been quite close and friendly. Therefore, these dramatic expressions must have become largely formulaic even at the time they were used, and a literal translation would, in fact, risk giving the casual reader a completely wrong picture of the social context of these texts. At the same time, I have tried to preserve the ubiquitous element of a formulaic use of language by translating the same formula in the same way, if contextually possible (sometimes two or even three different renderings of a Chinese term are necessary; occasionally I have retained the literal meaning). A glossary of some of the more common expressions follows: Formulaic term

Literal meaning

Standard rendering here

bai 白 chashi 察事

to express, make plain to investigate affairs

to tell, to let know successfully attend to your business to submit dearly (hope); (convey) regards

feng 奉 fudi 伏地

to hold up with two hands to lie prostrate on the ground furen 夫人 wife gan 敢 to dare bu gan 不敢 do not dare gong 公 Mr. (friendly address) hanshi 寒時 the cold season ji 急 to hurry; urgent jin shi 進食 bring in food (xing) jiushi (幸)酒食 (blessed) wine and food

jun 君 (postpositional) Lord (friendly or respectful address) jun 君 (prepositional) koutou 叩頭 to knock one’s head (on the ground) li 力 strength

(your) wife; Mrs. . . . to send (greetings) I will not . . . Mr. during this cold season important eat well may you enjoy good wine and food; take care to eat and drink well Sir; my good . . . Lady allow me to . . . / I am very sorry / I am afraid being healthy

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(cont.) Formulaic term

Literal meaning

Standard rendering here

menxia 門下 qing 請

beneath/at the door to request; to ask; to beg; to invite minister, high officer (endearing address) to force/strengthen with a meal appropriate dress, comfortable clothing hot season the one whom s.o. addresses through those serving in front of him (see also menxia, zuxia, bixia 陛下, “at your footsteps”) crime punishable by death to ask; to inquire (may you) be without harm

to the attention of . . . to inquire; to convey (regards etc.) (my) friend

qing 卿 qiang fan 強 / 彊飯 shiyi 適衣 shushi 暑時 shiqian 侍前

sizui 死罪 wen 問 wuyang 毋恙 xing 幸 xingshen 幸甚 yan 言 yin 因 yuan 願 zaibai 再拜 zi 子 zuxia 足下 ma zuxia 馬足下

take care to eat well; remain in good health (hope that you can) dress comfortably during this hot season you (honorable)

unforgivable greetings how are you? (hope) that you are well; be alright luck(ily), fortuitous please; kindly; be lucky extreme luck that would be great; thanks a lot; very happy to say; to report to say; to transmit (regards etc.) to rely on to use (s.o. to transmit a letter) to wish I hope; could you, please to salute repeatedly; to best (regards, greetings, etc.); transmit salutations salute Master Master (my) dear under (your) feet my very dear under the hooves of your horses

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Beyond the formulas, epistolary language is also particularly hard to interpret because it is often elliptical, assuming the reader’s intimate knowledge of the matters touched upon as well as of the language employed, whether it is in-group lingo, dialect, sociolect, or otherwise non-standard. On top of this, manuscripts from a rather harsh and poor frontier environment are not always written by the intellectual—or even just very literate—elite, so faulty language and orthographic mistakes are to be expected and accounted for. For practical purposes, I have numbered the columns of each manuscript in the transcription. Parts that appear to be written by a different hand are set in italics. All translations are my own, except where I have built upon and adapted an existing translation.38 The sequence of manuscripts presented is roughly according to region and physical material; a chronological organization that would be desirable is hardly possible because almost no manuscript can be dated with any certainty. The following source texts are presented: 1. DXT114(3):611 Dunhuang (Gansu) silk letter from Yuan to Zifang (Han period) 2. DXT114(3):610 Dunhuang (Gansu) silk letter from Jian to Sir Zhong and his wife (Han period) 3a. DHHJ1871 (T13ii.1a/C.398) Dunhuang (Gansu) silk letter from Zheng to Youqing and Junming (Han period) 3b. DHHJ1872 (T13ii.1a/C.398a) Dunhuang (Gansu) silk letter fragment to Youqing and Junming (Han period) 4. DHHJ1448e–g Dunhuang (Gansu) wooden rod with a copy of a letter from Shi to Old Mi (Han period) 5. A8–157.25AB Juyan (Inner Mongolia) wooden board letter from Zheng Hong to Li Zizhang (Han period)

38  Sources One, Three and Seven (b) have been translated by other scholars before; for references, see below.

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6. A33–16AB Juyan (Inner Mongolia) wooden board letter from Xuan to Yousun and his wife (Han period) 7a. SHD M4:11AB Shuihudi (Hubei) wooden board letter from Heifu and Jing to Zhong (Qin period) 7b. SHD M4:6AB Shuihudi (Hubei) wooden board letter from Jing to Zhong (Qin period) 8. LY J1 8–659+8–2088 Liye (Hunan) wooden board letter from Gong to Mangji (Qin period) 9. TC M19:40-5 Tianchang (Anhui) wooden board letter or greeting tablet from Wan Heng to Xie Meng (Western Han) For the transcriptions, the following conventions are used: I have seen fit to change the modern punctuation found in the scholarly literature (such as ,。、:;!?(⋯)「⋯」), in some cases without making a note of it. On the other hand, I retain or re-introduce with the help of photographs of the manuscripts the ancient punctuation, which leads to both systems of punctuation occuring together (such as 。●). Ancient punctuation furthermore often includes reduplication marks (=), after which the reading is spelled out in parentheses, such as 忽=(忽忽)or 建=,(建,建)​or 幸=甚=(幸甚,幸甚); and separator marks (∟) to separate words or phrases that could otherwise be read together. Editorial marks include the lacuna mark (□) signifying one character that cannot be deciphered, a mark signifying an unknown number of characters that cannot be deciphered (⋯), a mark signifying physical fragmentation (□), and an encasing of uncertain readings ( 毒 ). Western square brackets [] are used instead of parentheses inside parentheses or to enclose a character that is not found in the original, but can be inferred from context, in other words, a character that presumably has been forgotten by the original scribe. Eastern square brackets 【】 are used to indicate characters by writing out their components. Pointed brackets <>are used to highlight a presumably intended character by modern orthographic standards, in other words something that one could call a ‘mistake,’ if this term were not so problematic because of our insufficient knowledge of ancient orthographic standards.

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Figure 11.6 Silk letter from Yuan to Zifang found at Xuanquanzhi, Dunhuang. Kantoku meisekisen 7, 19.

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4.1 Source One: The Silk Letter from Yuan to Zifang This manuscript was found at an ancient relay station designated Xuanquanzhi (DX) near Dunhuang.39 This, together with the script style, is the basis for its being dated to Han times. The manuscript itself is not dated. The manuscript was written by a certain Yuan, who was stationed in Dunhuang, to a certain Zifang, who may have been his senior or superior in rank but definitely also a rather close relative or friend—close enough at any rate that he could ask him for numerous favors, the straightforwardness of which cannot really be concealed by the only superficially polite wording. After having given Zifang detailed instructions about what he wants for himself (shoes and brushes) and for others (a seal and a whip), how to buy these things, and where to get the money for them, he even exhorts him to be extra careful and not to disappoint him. The letter makes it sound as if Zifang was far away and—given the fact that he was effectively handed a shopping list—perhaps in some larger town, where resources were richer than in Dunhuang. However, the fact that the manuscript was found in Dunhuang should not be overlooked. It could mean that, for whatever reason, it was never sent or came back, perhaps together with the person delivering the purchases, maybe as a kind of checklist. It definitely does not look like a draft or even a copy. It could also be, however, that ‘Dunhuang’ for Yuan just meant the area at large and that he was writing Zifang from some outlying beacon tower station, whereas Zifang himself was actually stationed in the Xuanquan relay station, that lay at the crossroads of major routes in the area, especially those that envoys from foreign states and trading posts along the Silk Routes frequented. Such a place must have had the means to procure what Yuan demanded. The text is laid out on a rectangular sheet of silk, 23.2 cm long and 10.7 cm wide. The folding pattern of the manuscript—the entire sheet is divided by

39  This is one of the most frequently reproduced and mentioned letter texts, ever since the first news about the excavation between 1990 and 1992 leaked. To date, no full excavation report has been published, but the preliminary report as well as transcriptions and a few images of the tens of thousands of manuscripts found were published in “Xuanquan yizhi” and “Xuanquan shiwen.” The best color photograph reproductions— both in original size as well as conveniently enlarged—are found in Kantoku meisekisen 7, 19–25. For transcriptions with useful annotations, see Wang Guanying, “Yuan yu Zifang boshu xinzha;” Hu and Zhang, Xuanquan shicui, 187–91; and Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 57–62. See also Sanft, “Send Shoes,” for an unannotated, literal translation.

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three vertical and seven horizontal folding creases into 32 squares—as well as the resulting mirroring of characters have already been mentioned. Another fascinating detail of this manuscript is that it contains very obvious later additions which in turn give hints as to its production process. There are different types of additions: a) In the last three columns (8–10), black dots, three in all, mark the beginnings of different topics. 1. A specification of how the pair of shoes that the sender asks for is to be delivered, 2. an additional request for the production of one seal by one Lü Zidu or Lü An with specifications, 3. a specification for yet another request by an official named Guo. It seems likely that all three parts were added, albeit by the same hand and perhaps even at the same time, after the main body of the text had been written out. The end of the main body is indicated by the formula fudi zaibai Zifang zuxia 伏地再拜,子方足下, which is also seen at the very beginning of this and most other source texts and has a framing function for the core part of the text. b) In one place (column 6) one character (ru 孺) has been squeezed in, probably because it had been forgotten in the first place. As the script does not otherwise differ from the deep black, orderly script that characterizes the main body of text in general and because the character is part of a name, without which the text does not make sense, it may be safely assumed that this is an ad hoc correction on the part of the scribe. c) One other character (gui 龜) has obviously been inserted into a blank in column (8) that had been left at first to be filled out later. This is clear by the fact that this character appears much less carefully executed and with much fainter color. Also, it is rather large so that it fills out the blank that has been left in such a way that it still looks squeezed in. Like the addition mentioned above, this one is absolutely necessary and logical for the text to make sense, since it specifies a type of seal knob design that was to be custom-made, and it may safely be assumed that the decision about this design was made only after the document had basically been written out and only then added to the text. d) Also in faint grey color and comparatively sloppy execution is a polite phrase (Yuan fudi zaibai zaibai 元伏地再=拜=) that is added at the end of column (7). At first sight, this does not immediately seem as necessary, contentwise, as the other two additions mentioned above, but if we take into account that the textual, formulaic ‘frame’ that defines the main text was already applied earlier in the text (see under a), it may in fact have been required to fulfill conventions of politeness and mark the first addition. Although there is little evidence to compare, it seems that this addition is of the same hand as the second one, but different from the main text.

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e) Finally, and most conspicuously, there is an additional column (10) at the very end of the letter that is self-identifying as “self-written.”40 This is done in slightly more deeply black ink and a decidedly less careful, if not totally untrained, hand. Presumably, this is the hand of Yuan. By this, it also becomes clear that the main part of the letter was written up by some professional scribe. Yuan conveys his best regards. Dear Zifang! How are you? An arduous road you are embarking upon.41 That I cannot be there to see you off or accompany you on your way is unforgivable. How are your parents, wife, and children? I hope that your parents and wife do not cause you any worries. I will not imprudently neglect [my] duties [of] taking care of the warehouse, [for which] I am eagerly awaiting your instructions.42 During this hot season I dearly hope 40  Since there is so much at stake with this rare utterance, it may be worth at least a fleeting moment of consideration whether this really means what everyone spontaneously thinks it means, “self-written (by the author).” Formally, no subject is specified. Thus, could zi shu suo yuan 自書所願 not equally be offering, “Write down (your-)self what (you) want (for yourself)”? Probably. But even if such an offer of gifts in return is grammatically and semantically possible and would feel like a nice touch to us, the context does not really make that a very persuasive option. 41  Lit., “bitter way, Zifang set off,” without a clear marker of grammatical tense or an indication of what dao, ‘way,’ refers to. In light of the following text, especially the third paragraph, however, I think that this letter, found in Dunhuang, had been originally sent from there to the recipient in some far away city, probably a friend, colleague or close superior of the sender on home leave, and traveled back with him to Dunhuang. Sanft, “Send Shoes,” understands Kudao (‘bitter way’) as a place name and an object or adverbial to fa. He translates, “When you left Kudao, I missed the time and did not attend your departure.” This sentence seems very natural, but I have not found Kudao evidenced as a place name anywhere else and its emphatic position at the beginning of the sentence seems unmotivated, although the same could perhaps be said for my literal translation. In any case, a transitive fa (‘leave a place,’ ‘set out from a place,’ ‘embark upon a way’) is unusual. 42  This sentence has been parsed and understood differently by different scholars. Hu and Zhang, “Xuanquan shicui,” 188, n. 4, leave out 兒子毋恙, read 丈人、家室元不敢忽驕 together, and understand this as a polite remark that Yuan does not dare to be disrespectful towards Zifang’s relatives, before he goes on to talk about his duties. Sanft’s understanding is the same. He translates this and the following: “I would not dare be careless or proud toward your parents or household. I am now respectfully receiving instruction as manager of an armory.” Grammatically, this is very well possible, but I find it too selfevident a statement to be compelling. Antje Richter (personal communication) prefers

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that you can dress comfortably, be blessed with good wine and food, and sucessfully attend to your business! Take care on the road!43 It happens that now that I am about to be stationed at Dunhuang, I am lacking shoes. You know that. If you allow me to be direct, I would like to ask that you please be so kind as to buy a pair of shoes for me, [made of] thin but strong silk and soft leather, a feet and two inches long [27.7 cm];44 [also] five brushes, fine ones. I would be very happy! As for the money, I request to pay it at your home when next convenient.45 I do to interpret shi 事 as Zifang’s responsibilities: “I dare not be presumptuous, I know about your service at the storehouse, I am awaiting your instructions.” This would make sense not only because the text continues to revolve around Zifang’s life, but also because as a warehouse manager he would be a natural target to be approached by someone who needs wares as Yuan does. However, zhishi 知事 is a well-established binom meaning ‘duties’ and does probably not mean, ‘[I] know [your] job.’ Also, if Yuan is not talking about his own responsiblities, why would he be emphasizing that he is awaiting instructions and does not dare to be presumptuous? 43  Jin dao 謹道; Hu and Zhang, “Xuanquan shicui,” 189, n. 7, and Sanft, “Send Shoes,” 9, understand this as a polite speech marker: “I respectfull say: . . . .” Especially if my conjecture that Zifang is about to set out on a long journey is not correct, this is perhaps the only way to understand jin dao correctly. 44  This assumes that ta 沓 stands for ta 鞜, which was glossed in the early Tang period as ‘shoes of rawhide’ (shengge zhi lü 生革之履). Since rawhide is not very suitable to make shoes or boots other than the sole, and since in this case the term is directly followed by juan 絹, ‘coarse fabric of plain silk,’ and wei 韋, ‘processed, and therefore soft, leather,’ presumably so as to indicate the materials of which the shoes were to be made (or just with which they were to be adorned?), it is not easy to exactly picture what is meant here. Common sense as well as a statement in the next column suggest that Yuan needed practical shoes or boots that were suitable to travel in the rough, hot, and dry terrain of the Gobi desert around Dunhuang. It is also uncertain, whether the length given here, refers to the inner, outer, or some other kind of measurement of the shoes. The inner measurement or the length of the feet would be most exact and useful for customized shoemaking, of course, but 27.7 cm (modern sizes 44 or 10.5–11) is rather on the larger side considering the supposedly smaller measurements of ancient people in general. Therefore it may mean the outer size, perhaps even with a prolonged design. For the respective terms and instructive illustrations of Han time shoes and boots, see Hayashi, Bunbutsu, 35, 107, 140, pls. 1–57. 45  This follows Sanft, “Send Shoes,” 9. Hu and Zhang, “Xuanquan shicui,” 189, n. 11, add that 屬 is to be read zhu and means jiaofu 交付, ‘to hand over.’ Although in standard dictionaries zhu is not found as ‘to hand over’ but mostly as ‘to entrust to (somebody’s care)’ or ‘to commission,’ it is difficult to translate it as such here. The term occurs two more times in this source and once more in the next source, where I have opted to follow the sugges-

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not want to owe you. Could you please pay attention to the shoes? I want to get thick ones, which are good for traveling on foot. You know that I have had trouble several times [because] it is so hard to procure shoes,46 so I would really appreciate it! As to Ciru, to whom to forward a note and to whom to deliver [it] I am relying on you,47 could you, when you set out, pass by his place and ask for a reply? If Ciru isn’t there, go and see Ciru’s wife, Rongjun, and ask for the reply. That would be great! Best regards my dear Zifang! —Those shoes you will kindly buy for [me], could you please ask the next officer who comes here to take care of them [and deliver them], so that they arrive [in time] to be used.48 That would be great! I send my best regards! —Lü Zidu wants to have a seal carved but he does not dare to approach [you in writing?]. He is unaware that I am incompetent [myself],49 so he is making me asking you, hoping that you could have a prosecutor’s seal of 0.7 inches50 carved for him, with a turtle knob, and an inscription that reads: “Seal of Lü An.” Hopefully you will pay attention. This matter has to work out with you, [I]51 don’t want to ask anybody else to take care of this.

tion of the anonymous reviewer and translate zhu as ‘to ask (s.o.) to take care of (sth.). Also, although she 舍, ‘residence,’ has been used as a humble term for one’s own home or family at the beginning of the 3rd c., in the letters assembled here it is clearly used as a honorific term for someone else's residence. 46  Hu and Zhang, “Xuanquan shicui,” 189, n. 13, explain fanrao 煩擾 as ‘to disturb’ instead of ‘feel disturbed,’ and wei 為, ‘to make,’ as de dao 得到, ‘to obtain.’ They also imply a causal structure such as: ‘You know that I am bothering you repeatedly because it is so hard to obtain satisfying shoes.’ I am not so sure about this use of wei but have tried to choose a verb that is a bit ambiguous on this point. 47  The 差 here is tricky. I am following a suggestion by Antje Richter and read it chai, ‘to dispatch,’ although this, again, is only evidenced for the middle of the 3rd c. at the earliest, two to three hundred years after this letter, if it dates to the early Han, which is possible, but not certain. Sanft, “Send Shoes,” 9, seems to take it as a noun (‘official’), which is even later, combines this with ji 記 and translates, “As for the amanuensis you recommended, Ciru: . . . .” Hu and Zhang, “Xuanquan shicui,” 189–90, n. 14, leave out 差 completely. 48  Sanft’s solution (“Send Shoes,” 9) is much more elegant: “Those shoes you will favour me by buying—I hope you will entrust them to the first officer coming here, so I can put them to use in good time.” 49  It is not clear what the ‘incompetence’ here is refering to. Could it refer to literacy? 50  That means ca. 1.61 cm side-length. 51  Or “He dares not . . .,” as Sanft (“Send Shoes,” 9) puts it.

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—As for the purchase of a whip for two hundred cash that camp sergeant Guo entrusted [us] with, please get a fine cracking whip, please pay attention! Self-written: With the purchases that I am asking you, please pay attention! Don’t be careless! Be different from the others! 元伏地再拜請 (1) 子方足下:善毋恙。苦道子方發,元失候不侍駕,有死罪。 丈人、家室、兒子毋恙,元伏地願子方毋憂丈人、家室。(2) 元 不敢忽驕,知事在庫,元謹奉教。暑時元伏地願子方適衣、幸 酒食、察事幸甚!謹道!會元當從屯 (3) 敦煌,乏沓(鞜),子 方所知也。元不自外,願子方幸爲元買沓(鞜)一兩,絹韋, 長尺二寸;筆五枚,善者,元幸甚!錢請 (4) 以便屬舎,不敢 負。願子方幸留意,沓(鞜)欲得其厚、可以歩行者。子方知 元數煩擾,難爲沓(鞜)幸=甚=(幸甚,幸甚)! (5) 所因子 方進記差次孺者,願子方發過次孺舎,求報。次孺不在,見次 孺52夫人容君求報,幸甚!伏地再拜 (6) 子方足下。●所幸爲買沓 (鞜)者,願以屬先來吏,使得及事,幸甚!   元伏地再 = 拜 = (再拜,再拜)!(7)   ● 呂子都願刻印,不敢報。不知元不肖,使元請子方,願子 方幸爲刻御史七分印一,龜上,印曰:「呂安之印」。唯子方 留 (8) 意,得以子方成事,不敢復屬它人。●郭營尉所寄錢二百 買鞭者,願得其善鳴者,願留意。(9) 自書:所願以市事幸留 = 意 = (留意,留意) ,毋忽,異於 它人。(10)IIDXT0114(3):611 4.2 Source Two: The Silk Letter from Jian to Sir Zhong and His Wife This document has been found at the same site and together with Source One.53 As it is, the piece is 19 cm long but seems to have been originally longer, since at its lower end characters are cut off in the middle. It is not known how much has been lost. The sheet may also have been originally wider. Due to this fragmentation and due to what looks like insect holes, the overall state 52  Obviously, this character had been forgotten at first and was later squeezed in between the preceding and following characters, after the mistake had been discovered. 53  Transcriptions are found in “Xuanquan shiwen,” 39; and with commentary in Hu and Zhang, “Xuanquan shicui,” 184–87; and Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 54–57.

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Figure 11.7 Silk letter from Jian to Sir Zhong and his wife found at Xuanquanzhi, Dunhuang. Kantoku meisekisen 7, 26.

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of preservation, and consequently the degree to which the meaning can be reconstructed and understood, is less ideal. The text is addressed to a couple; the man, already advanced in age, seems to have once been a high-ranking official, perhaps even the governor, not only because his and his wife’s conduct is likened to (or described as?) a provincial governor’s, but also because the sender seems to have owed the recipient his present position in the imperial palace. The main motivation for writing the letter seems to have been to say thank you, inquire about the well-being of the benefactor and his family—a part that is dwelt on here much more than in other manuscripts—and ask him for writing more often. In other words, this letter was meant predominantly for the upkeep of good social relations, not for spreading news or information, nor for satisfying more practical needs. It seems that the different forms of address and politeness as compared to the first source reflect the differences in social standing and relationship as well as in content, but it is difficult to exactly pinpoint and mimick the linguistic register. Jian conveys his regards. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Zhong.54 How are you? You must be very busy!55 If it were not for your abundant favors, Mr. Zhong, I would not have been so lucky, [even if] undeserved, as to obtain a position as prosecutor on probation serving in the palace.56 For quite some time [I] have not heard from you . . . neglectful. Several times [I have] asked Dunhuang’s . . . Sir He to take care of you and Zihui,57 not daring to be neglectful! The deputy 54  I take Zhong 中 as a family name even if it is unusual—though not unheard of—because the following gong 公 is usually added to a family name, if not a profession. Also, unusual names in this border region may well reflect foreigners’ names, even if they are part of the Chinese rank and file. Other options would be to see it as an epithet or perhaps a style name, in which case furen 夫人 would not be “Mrs. Zhong” but just “your wife.” 55  Lit., “toiling hard in attending to [your] duties, [are you] well and without harm”? 56  Lit., “I, Jian, unworthy slave that I am . . . relied on Mr. Zhong’s abundant favors and luckily obtained [a position as] serving prosecutor awaiting indictment.” As Ma Yi pointed out (cited in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 55, n. 4), this whole narrative is probably not to be taken at face value, but instead fulfills the role of setting the tone of the letter by way of routine compliment. Reference to the sender’s own incompetence (buxiao 不肖) and precariousness of situation (daizui 待罪) are starkly exaggerated and not to be taken literally. 57  I suspect that the two lacunae between “Dunhuang” and “Sir He” were originally filled with an official title such as taishou 太守, ‘governor.’ However, database searches for ‘Dunhuang + {official name} + He jun’ did not produce any results. For the meaning of zhu 屬 see annotation to Source One. Yang’s explanation at this point (“Shuxin huijiao,”

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commander of Dunhuang received a letter from the governor [/from you?] and gave it to me. I have asked the deputy commander and told [him] that you for quite some time . . . you are ever more advanced in age, and [your] sons and grandsons have not yet good . . . you lead Mrs. Zhong day and night to apply yourself to the meritorious fame and deeds of a governor. What concern would not turn out to be good [this way]?! During this cold season, . . . carefully conduct official business. [If] later [you] will give me notice from time to time, kindly allowing me to keep informed about your well-being, that I hope for so much, I shall be very delighted! [This, I] allow myself [to forward to you] through the deputy commander of Dunhuang, dear Mr. Zhong. —Be so kind, as to give my respects to Zhangqing,58 his wife and children, as well as all the brothers, cousins, women, and sons of Zi Hui. [May they] all . . . be in good health! —Later tell Zhangjun and Cigong . . . 建伏地請 (1) 中公、夫人足下。勞苦臨事,善毋恙。建不肖奴□59賴中公 恩澤,幸得待罪侍御史。頃闕希聞中公□□ (2) 忽也。數屬中公 及子惠於敦煌□□何君,不敢忽=(忽忽)。敦煌卒史奉太守 書賜建=,(建,建)問卒史,言中公頃□ (3) 中公年60益長 矣,子孫未有善□□將61率夫人日夜有以稱太守功名行者,何 患不得便哉?寒時□□ (4) 慎察吏事。來者數賜記,使建奉聞中 公所欲毋恙,建幸=甚=(幸甚,幸甚)!謹因敦煌卒史。 □ (5)

55, n. 6) is problematic, effectively translating zhu twice, once as ‘rely upon’ (拜託) and once as ‘inquire about’ (打聽). 58  This could also be translated as “my friend Zhang/Chang” or “my old (or senior) friend.” 59  Ma Yi (cited in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 55, n. 4) reads this as dun 頓 and from there infers that 奴頓 should stand for 駑鈍, ‘of inferior talents’; however the right half of the graph after nu 奴 is eaten away by insects, only the left side is visible and clearly shows a 土 graphem, not a 屯. What is more, the term nudun 駑鈍 is known only from the Sanguo period. 60  The transcriptions read xìng 幸, but the photograph (Kantoku meisekisen 7, 27) shows nian 年 without doubt. Compare the many examples in Chen and Xu, Jiandu boshu zidian, 278–84. 61  The transcriptions read sui ci qian 歳賜錢, ‘annually granted money,’ but this is clearly wrong. The first character is just too fragmented and weathered to be recognizable, whereas of the second and third, enough remains to exclude ci qian as a viable option. The third character may be jiang 將.

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中公足下。●幸爲建多請長卿、夫人、諸子及子惠諸弟、婦62、   兒子,悉□63彊(強)飯。●來者言長君、次公□□□。(6) IIDXT0114(3):610 4.3 Source Three: The Silk Letters to Youqing and Junming The first of these two manuscripts is very similar to Source Two, also found near Dunhuang, but in this case at a beacon tower site (T13ii). It consists of two fragments, a longer main part measuring 15 × 6.5 cm64 and a much smaller part measuring ca. 3.5 × 4 cm, that preserves two to five characters each of the bottom of columns 2–5. A seam running along the left and the lower border of the main fragment tells us that this piece was reused (as clothing?) at some point, at which presumably the smaller part at the bottom was intentionally ripped off. The other, related manuscript has obviously been reused after serving as a letter or a draft or copy thereof at some point. In its present shape it is square with a round hole in the middle. There are seams all around the rims and around the right hand part of the round central hole. This hole has resulted in a loss of text in the final column of the original text. The hand seems to be different from the one in the first manuscript.65 The left side of the piece was originally uninscribed. Both manuscripts were found in 1908 and originally published and translated into French by Édouard Chavannes in 1913. They are kept in the British Library, and are shown side by side in numerous publications.66 62  Probably not difu 弟婦, ‘the brothers’ wives,’ as this would be too specific. 63  The official transcription reads □謝. Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 56, n. 15, suggests xiwei 悉為, but her case for wei is weak resting only on an unconvincing claim of similarity between two characters in this manuscript. However, xie 謝 is not necessarily a convincing reading either. 64  According to Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 206. 65  Mark especially the tendency of the writer of the second, square manuscript to prolong strokes to the lower left of characters, such as in 力, 子, 幼, 者, and 為. Also, the script on the second manuscript seems more heavy-handed, whereas that on the first is composed and more carefully executed; compare especially the graph 長. 66  Chavannes, Les documents chinois découverts par Aurel Stein, 89, pls. 398 and 398a, cit. after Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 238, n. 80–81. According to the finding list in the modern standard publication Dunhuang Hanjian, the two manuscripts had been given the same archaeological number (T13ii.1a) originally, but where redesignated nos. 1871 and 1872 then. I have not been able to consult Chavannes’ work, but I suspect that the black-andwhite plates there must be superior to most of what has been published later, especially including Dunhuang Hanjian, which even fails to show the small fragment belonging to

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Figure 11.8 Two silk letters to Youqing and Junming found at Dunhuang. Tanaka, Chugoku hoshosen, 20 (left) and (right).

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If the interpretation of the toponym Chengle in this text is correct, then this letter was written in what is today Central Inner Mongolia, roughly 2,000 km away from Dunhuang whereto the letter was addressed and where it was eventually found. However, I cannot exclude the possibility that there was a unit, otherwise unknown to us, called Chengle in western Inner Mongolia or even Gansu, much closer to the Dunhuang area. In any case, the sender of this letter

manuscript 1871. The best photograph of both letters that I have seen is Tanaka, Chugoku hoshosen, 20. This also provides punctuated transcriptions and translations into Japanese (p. 102). Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 50–53, provides punctuated transcription with extensive commentary for manuscript no. 1871 and a punctuated transcription of no. 1872. Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 206–7, 238, 775 offers a short description, transcription, copied photograph, and translation of the main fragment of manuscript no. 1871. Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk, 131–32, has a transcription and a small image. He also claims that both manuscripts were originally folded and inserted into a 6.7 cm wide ‘silk envelope.’ He gives no original reference for this information.

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deplores—perhaps a bit stereotypcially—the perceived fact that he has been effectively cut off from communication for the last five years since being stationed in the place called Chengle. His social contacts are similar to those of the author of Source Two, made up of company commanders and provincial Governors, i.e., the local and regional military elite. Zheng transmits his best regards. My dear friend You and Lady Ming.67 How are you? For a long time we have not heard from or seen each other. During this hot season, I dearly hope that you, my friend, and Lady Ming [are able to] dress comfortably and eat well while considering provincial business. I have lived in Chengle68 for more than five years and have not been transferred. The roads [leading here] are long and far off, traffic is rare, [My] official position is inconsequential and my status low. Letters do not get through. Kindly allow me to rely on my young colleague Wang Zifang who is now being appointed as the probationary deputy to the commander of Yuze [company]69 of Dunhuang [province to deliver this letter to you], and allow me to express the wish that you may be so kind as to inquire with Yang [?]70 Junqian. Not . . . living in shabby quarters at the northern 67  This string could be taken in many different ways, as one name or as two; as two men’s names, two women’s names, or as a man’s name and a woman’s name. (On women’s names, see Liu, “Funü de mingzi,” 45–47). Jun and qing could be both titles, or friendly forms of address, or parts of names, or one could be a title, the other part of a name. My translation follows the suggestion in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 51, n. 1, to assume that a couple is addressed here, whose children are referred to at the end of the letter with she zhong zhuzi 舍中諸子, “the children at your home,” and three names that contain sequential birth markers. Again, different interpretations are possible. The fact that at the end of the second column both addressees are exhorted not only to dress and eat well, but also to “be diligent in discharging provincial duties” (cha junshi 察郡事) may be taken as an argument in favor of Youqing and Junming being, after all, two (male) officers, or as an indication that couples during the Han period or perhaps generally in the border society were seen as both having job-related duties, even if just one of them held the position officially. Compare in this regard the sentence, “you lead Mrs. Zhong day and night to apply yourself to the meritorious fame and deeds of a governor,” in the Second Source. 68  Probably the administrative seat of Dingxiang 定襄 Province, close to modern Holin Gol, north of Hohhot, in Inner Mongolia. See Tan, Lishi dituji, 18, grid square (2) 9. From there to Dunhuang, where this letter was found, the distance is about 2,000 km. 69  Yuze was a company fort, i.e., a rampart garrisoned with roughly 100 men, about 50 km due east of Dunhuang. 70  This sentence is the most problematic for translation due to fragmentation and uncertainty of deciphering the faint traces of several of the characters. The rendering here is

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frontier, [I] have not yet submitted an account, I am very sorry. Governor Renjun became sick in the first month and unfortunately died. Governor . . . Meng. If I could regularly obtain enlightening news from you, my friend and Lady Ming, and [learn] how your children at home are,71 that would make me very happy! I would like to rely on . . . [submitting this letter to you,] My dear friend You and Lady Ming! Please give my regards to [your] young lads Zhangshi, Zizhong, and Shaoshi.72 政伏地再拜言 (1) 幼卿、君明足下,毋[恙]73。久不明74相見。夏時,政伏地願 幼卿、君明適衣,進 75食,察郡事。政 (2) 居成樂五歳餘,未 得遷。道里遠辟,回往來希,官薄身賤,書 不通。叩 = 頭 =

an attempt to provide an alternative to Yang’s reading (“Shuxin huijiao,” 51), who punctuates: . . . 遷為敦煌魚澤候守丞,王子方,政叩頭願幼卿幸爲存請。□君倩不曾 御不北邊居,歸未有奉奏,叩頭叩頭。Yang suggests (p. 53, n. 10–11) that Zheng is asking Youqing to take care of Wang Zifang and that the name Junqian 君倩 refers to Yang Junqian, Magistrate of Guangyan 廣衍 County in Xihe 西河 Province, who is mentioned as such in the related letter fragment no. 1872. The last sentence of her transcription would have to be translated as: “Junqian never managed not settling at the Northern frontier and since [he?] came back no memorial [or letter?] was submitted,” perhaps suggesting that Junqian did not write after parting with Zheng, although Yang (n. 13) seems apprehensive to take zou as ‘private letter.’ It may be added that Guangyan County was situated about 150 km southwest of Chengle, where this letter was presumably written. See Tan, Lishi dituji, 18, grid square (3) 8. 71  More literally, “[If I,] Zheng, obtain constantly holding in awe and hearing Youqing’s and Junming’s rigorous instructions [and whether] all the sons/masters in the living quarters are well, . . . .” 72  These three names contain sequential birth markers: ‘eldest’ (zhang 長), ‘middle-born’ (zhong 仲), and ‘youngest’ (shao 少), which underscores the impression that these three are siblings, probably the children of Youqing and Junming. 73  Although the published transcriptions stoutly write 毋恙 without any comment, the second character is in fact either not there or possibly written in very small size between 毋 and 久. What is visible there even on the best of the published photographs, however, just looks like an ink blotch. 74  Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 51, n. 2, suggests that this is a character with a 門 signific and she compares this with jiu kuo bu xiang jian 久【氵門舌】(闊)不相見, “. . . have been separated long ago and did not see each other,” on Juyan strip EPT65:332. What is visible on the best photographs does not support her reading. 75  The masu mark □ here identifies the division between the main part and the fragment on the bottom in columns 2–5. In this case no textual loss seems involved.

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(叩頭,叩頭),因 (3) 同吏郎今置76爲敦煌魚澤候守丞王子   方。政叩頭願幼卿幸爲 存請□(楊?)君倩,(4) 不□御□77 北邊居陋78,未有奉奏,叩=頭=(叩頭,叩頭)。太守任君正 月中病,不幸死。 太守□ (5) 猛。政得長(常)奉聞幼卿、 君明嚴教,舎中諸子毋恙,政幸甚!謹因 (6) 幼卿、君明足下,因請長【入負】79、子仲、少【入負】諸 弟。(7)T13ii:D1871 The translation and transcription of the second manuscript shall be given here largely unannotated, for ease of reference and to show the peculiarities of original textual correction and reuse of manuscripts: . . . [I hope that] you, my friend You, and Lady Ming are healthy and the sons at home are well. Incompetent as I am . . . the diligent service to Yang Junqian, the Magistrate of Guangyan. Annually [?], [I] may together with you . . . receive generous blessings. Allow me to express my deepest gratitude. Previously, I repeatedly submitted a letter [?] . . . to the governor of Jincheng Dingxiang . . . You, my friend, please send me a note. . . . regards. □□□幼卿、君明力,舍中兒子毋恙。政不肖□ (1) □□所厚 事廣衍長楊君倩。歲 得與糼卿□ (2) □□得蒙厚恩。政叩=頭= (叩頭叩頭),幸 (3) □□   =甚=(幸甚幸甚)!前政數 奏  書   為金城定襄太守□願幼卿賜記。(4) □拜  □□ (5)T13ii:D1872

76  Dunhuang Hanjian writes qian 遷, ‘transferred,’ but considering the differences to qian 遷 in the third column, I think that Luo and Wang, Liusha zhuijian, 225, were right in writing zhi 置, ‘appointed.’ 77  The transcriptions all read bu ceng yu bu 不曾御不 . . ., but the photographs do not support this reading and the resulting sense is unsatisfying; see note above. 78  Dunhuang Hanjian writes gui 歸, ‘return home,’ but the photograph clearly supports the earlier transcription by Luo and Wang, Liusha zhuijian, 225: ( ju)lou 居陋. 79  The published transcriptions read this variously as Shi 實 or Bin 賓, although this character here and in the third name rather looks like 負 with 入 on top. If this is just a more cursive version of 實 or 賓, one could conclude that the last column was written in a different hand because no other graph with the 宀 signific is written as cursively in this manuscript.

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4.4 Source Four: The Letter Copy on a Wooden Rod from Shi to Old Mi This peculiar manuscript, also from Gansu, is written on the three last writing surfaces or columns (e–g) of a rod with seven surfaces. On the first four surfaces (a–d), in a different hand, there is a deathbed edict of an early Han emperor to his son. This draft or copy of a letter is directly following. It is probably just a writing exercise as reportedly whittlings have been found together with the rod that show part of the same text, that was perhaps written over and over again, the surface being scraped clean each time. The last four characters do perhaps still represent such an earlier phase, in a different hand, although the text does match up with the preceding one.80 The content is a general wellwishing and exhortation to take care. Shi would like to sincerely convey his best regards. Dear Old Mi, how are you? As you have very hard guard duties and Spring has only just begun and it is not yet warm, I do hope that you will make use of warm [?] clothes and be blessed with wine and [good] food, successfully attend to the duties of signal-giving, be broadly circumspect against81 the pettyminded people and do not put into practice, what [they, i.e., the petty people] ask for. That would make me really happy! With best regards! I do hope that you will find some traveller who will kindly bring me a note [from you]. Let me receive news about your experiences and instructions. 80  The text is reproduced differently in Dunhuang yanjiu and in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 47, and again in Kantoku meisekisen 6, 63–64. Scrutiny of the superb photographs in Kantoku meisekisen (or in Dunhuang Hanjian) allows one to arrive at a rectified transcription. The original shows a number of very unorthodox—or perhaps simply wrong—characters even by the standard of the time and place, that can be interpreted correctly only by the context. 81  This follows Antje Richter’s suggestion and is based on the literal meanings of the single words kuan 寬 and ji 急. A binom kuanji, however, is not attested anywhere else. An alternative interpretation is offered by Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 48, n. 6, who assumes that the irregularly written ji here is a clerical error for ren 忍, ‘to tolerate.’ Equally, one could assume that the ancient writer meant to write mian 免, ‘to exempt.’ Both kuanren and kuanmian are attested as binoms. In both cases, the sentence would turn into an exhortation to be lenient with the petty people. Another interpretation altogether is offered by Kantoku meisekisen 6, 64: 明察蓬火,事邊急,小人毋行, “pay good attention to the beacon signals, serve [well in case of?] an emergency at the frontier, and do not let the petty people travel.” But this does not seem a viable option, not only because kuan 寬, although written in a very unusual way, is still far from bian 邊, but also because the content does not really fit the context of a private letter and does not allow a good transition to the following sentence.

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Figure 11.9 Letter copy on a wooden rod found at Yumen, Huahai, Dunhuang, column 1 (left) and columns 2 and 3 (right). Kantoku meisekisen 6, 60.

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賤弟時謹伏地再拜請:翁糸足下,善毋恙。甚苦候望事,方春 不和,時伏【嬽(﹣女)頁】82(願)翁糸 (1) 將侍 近83 衣, 幸酒食,明廢<察>蓬火事,寬急小人,毋行所海<請>84。   時幸[=]甚=(幸甚,幸甚)!(2) 伏地再拜請。85 時伏【嬽 (﹣女)頁】(願)翁糸有往來者幸賜時記。令時奉聞翁糸   【糸 反】 (緩)急、嚴教。   (3)86  D1448e–g Source Five: The Wooden Board Letter from Zheng Hong to Li Zizhang Although this source was found at Juyan, in what today is Inner Mongolia, the context of a border fortification site and cultural background is the same as it is for the finds from Dunhuang. This letter on a wooden board inscribed on both the front and back sides displays several unorthodox, if not faulty characters as well. Due to the severe weathering on the backside, the meaning is not entirely clear. But it seems to touch upon some financial issue or economic agreement between two acquaintances from the same home-town.87 An aspect particularly visible in this letter is the identification, or rather self-identification, of the writer at the end: “Zheng Ziming wrote this down.” It may be that this is the signature of a scribe whom the sender Hong employed, 4.5

82  Probably not a mistake for fudi yuan 伏地願, as this shorter expression can be found in other Han sources as well, including traditional sources. But note that in both cases of its occurrence in this manuscript, yuan 願 is written with an unorthodoxically abbreviated version of its ancient form. 83  A space of about nine characters is left blank at the beginning of this column and again a space of about two characters between 侍 and 近. The reason may be that the width of the writing surface at the upper end is too small. 84  Instead of suo hai 所海 where not only the hai must be a mistake for qing 請, but also the suo 所 is written very unorthodoxically, Dunhuang Hanjian writes bi’an 庇洝, lit. ‘shadowed warm water.’ Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 48, n. 7, explains this as a metaphor for ‘being overly enthusiastic’ but does not follow this reading, instead transcribes □□. Kantoku meisekisen 6, 64, writes 所, but misses the following character. 85  This sentence is written, isolated, in smaller and more cursive script, presumably by a different hand, in the middle of a knothole at the top of the rod. It could be just a writing exercise with no direct relation to the letter. 86  The last four characters are much fainter, larger and probably belong to a different hand. They are also set apart by a diagonal cut mark, as if a part of the surface had been scraped off and this is part of an older text. However, the text can be read continuously. 87  The best published images of this board may be found in the first edition of Lao, Juyan Hanjian: Tuban pls. 473–74. But Jiayibian, vol. 1, pl. 113, may be fruitfully compared. For a transcription, see Shiwen hejiao; for a punctuated transcription and commentary, see Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 74–76.

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Figure 11.10 Letter from Zheng Hong to Li Zizhang found at Juyan recto (right) and verso (left). Infrared image, courtesy of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica.

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just as we assume a scribe to have written out Source One, albeit without leaving his name. Another possibility, however, is that it is Hong himself who signed here. In other Han letters as well as greeting tablets Ma Yi has already noticed that senders give their personal name at the beginning, but ultimately sign with their family and style names (xing 姓 and zi).88 I assume this to be the case here as well. That two different names given at the beginning and end of a letter really belong to the same person is of course impossible to prove when we do not have external confirmation on the identity of individuals and their names, which is true for the vast majority of manuscript letters. However, since we also have letters in which the sender identified at the beginning ends the letter with the same name and a ji 記, ‘wrote this down,’ the notion that this kind of signature—that we also see in this letter of Hong to Zizhang—can indeed belong to the sender is certainly valid.89 I have changed the title of this letter accordingly, so as to make this possibility more noticeable. Hong offers many greetings to Zizhang! You must be terribly busy with official duties, [and I hope that] lately you have not been pressed with other matters. When the two of us, my dear fellow citizen,90 received [?] New Year’s [allowances from the authorities?], we could not exchange New Year’s [gifts] with each other. Allow me to express the wish that you will remain in good health and take care of yourself. Make sure that you serve the authorities right, do not slacken in [observing] the rites and regulations, and if you see the way barred, hide your intentions. Good luck to you! I am offering my greetings to you! . . . you and I . . . already. Matters of debt and the submission of disbursments of cash [should] be reported about each season. On the 10th day of the 1st [?] month, I want to [go to your] place. Allow me to . . . taken on. —I have respectfully requested Uncle Nie to receive [this] writing and submit it to you, Li Zizhang. Zheng Zimeng wrote this down.

88  Ma Yi, “Chi yu duyou shu,” 180–81. The sources that Ma draws upon are a letter described in the Han shu biography of Kuang Heng 匡衡, the Juyan wood board letter A8–142.28AB, as well as greeting tablets from Yinwan 尹灣 and the tomb of Xiguo Bao 西郭寶, both in Jiangsu. 89  See Juyan manuscript EPT50:42AB, cited by Ma, “Chi yu duyou shu,” 182. 90  Yizi 邑子 is a person from the same hometown.

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弘叩頭多問子長:甚勞苦官事,閒者得毋它急。弘與子長邑 子二人耳<取>臈91,不得 (1) 相與共臈。弘叩頭願子長強飯,   自愛,謹事吏已。禮節毋已,見竟護意92, 幸==(幸甚,幸 甚)93!(2) A8-157. 25A 弘叩頭94問子長,□□95前96弘與子長□已。責事、奉錢出已 (以)時言之。弘欲已<正?>97月十日   (1) [往之子長]98所。   [叩]頭99. . .100有載●謹請聶伯奉書奏李子長。 鄭子孟記 (2) A8-157. 25B Source Six: The Wooden Board Letter from Xuan to Yousun and His Wife This is the second find from Juyan to be discussed here. The relationships between the different actors in this letter are particularly difficult to establish.101 Previous research is divided over whether the addressee is one or two persons and who he, she, or they might be. A context, that cannot be reconstructed, as well as our insufficient knowledge about the exact semantic implications 4.6

91  A variant of la 臘, ‘New Year ritual’ or ‘festivities.’ The reading of qu 取 for er 耳 is tentative. 92  The cursive script also allows to read qie jing fa yi 且竟發意, ‘and always be creative,’ but the above solution fits the context better. In any case the translation is tentative. 93  Shiwen hejiao reads cucu . . . 卒卒□, ‘hurry, hurry, . . . .’ But this is hardly possible. First, the character in question is a far cry from 卒 even in the most cursive variants. Second, the structure of the string with a character and two (!) reduplication marks would have to be read 卒卒卒 or whatever the character is read as in triple. I tentatively read the character and the first reduplication mark as a ligature of xingshen 幸甚, which is then doubled by the second reduplication mark. 94  Shiwen hejiao reads 【糸示】來, but koutou 叩頭 makes much more sense and is also implied by a comparison with the koutou on the recto. 95  Shiwen hejiao reads bu bian 不辨, ‘to not discern.’ This is problematic. Almost nothing remains of the first character, and what is left of the second would rather support an interpretation as bian 辯, ‘to argue,’ if at all. But a host of other possibilities cannot be ruled out either. 96  Could also be jie 節, compare this character on the recto side. 97  Unusual way to write zheng 正, could this perhaps be si 四 or even wu 五? 98  Nothing useful remains of these four characters on the photograph to verify the reading. 99  Shiwen hejiao reads Hong zhuang 弘狀, ‘Hong is grown-up.’ The first character is basically gone, but the second looks like tou 頭, so I assume this to be koutou again. 100  Shiwen hejiao reads 子長所寫□□必, but this cannot be verified on the photograph. 101  For a published image of this letter, see Lao, Juyan Hanjian: Tuban, pls. 67–68. For transcription, see Shiwen hejiao. For transcription with commentary, see Lao, “Kaozheng,” 74; Lin, Jiandu gaishu, 147–49; Chen, Juyan Hanjian yanjiu, 492–93; Ma, “Xuan yu Yousun Shaofu shu,” as well as Yang, “Shuxin huijiao.”

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Figure 11.11 Letter from Xuan to Yousun and his wife found at Juyan, recto (right) and verso (left). Infrared image, courtesy of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica.

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of the terms used in this letter make it all but impossible for us today to convincingly settle the issue. Hence, many different interpretations are thinkable, depending on what one chooses to assume as premises. The basic assumptions that inform my translation are as follows (alternatives are noted either here or in the notes): 1. The letter has been sent by a man identifying himself at the beginning by his personal name Xuan 宣. Because of the practice, explained for Source Five, of starting a letter with one’s personal name and ending it with one’s family and style name followed by a verb, such as ji 記 (‘written out by . . .’), I assume that Xuan is identical to Zhu Youji 朱幼季 who appears towards the end of the letter as having ‘written’ (shu 書) it. 2. The string “Zhu Youji shu” marks the beginning of a different part of the letter that is concerned with its delivery. I assume that this part, too, has been written by the same person as the first part, i.e., by Zhu Xuan/Youji, because I cannot make out any differences in handwriting between the two parts (except for the very last sentence) and because the use of emotional vocabulary such as xing 幸, ‘fortunately,’ would seem to speak against this being a record by a person charged with delivering the letter. 3. The letter is addressed to one Yousun 幼孫 and a woman, who is addressed as shaofu 少婦, ‘junior wife’ or ‘young (married) woman.’102 Yousun is not likely the name of a woman because in the second part of the letter Yousun’s office (zhisuo 治所) is mentioned and it is unlikely that there were female officers. Yousun’s office also seems to be specified as the destination for the messenger who is to convey the letter, which is why I am inclined to think that the woman was not the main recipient of this letter and the appelations are indeed coordinated (‘Yousun and junior wife’) and not subordinated (‘Yousun’s junior wife’), which also is grammatically possible. 4. The structure and semantics of the names Youdu 幼都, Youji, and Yousun suggest that these are brothers, with -du, ‘large,’ signifying the eldest,103 -ji, the ‘youngest,’ in this case perhaps the second, and -sun, ‘grandchild,’ probably the youngest.104 102  Lao, “Kaozheng,” 74 (followed by Ma, “Xuan yu Yousun Shaofu shu,” 1, and Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 65) assumes that Yousun and Shaofu are a couple and the recipients of this letter; Lin, Jiandu gaishu, 148, n. 4, and Chen, Juyan Hanjian yanjiu, 493, have interpreted Yousun shaofu as ‘Yousun [my] wife,’ i.e., the wife of Xuan, the sender, whom they identify as the Cao Xuan 曹宣 from another Juyan document that cannot be verified. Antje Richter has suggested (in private communication) to understand the recipient as ‘wife of Yousun’ instead of ‘Yousun and wife.’ 103  Ma, “Xuan yu Yousun Shaofu shu,” 3. 104  Ji is a common birth sequence marker, du and sun are not, but it would seem to make sense to use ‘grandchild’ as an irregular marker for an unexpected third child when the regular

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5. That Youdu is the eldest of the brothers incidentally also fits with the fact that he seems to hold the highest position (being close to or in the service of a senior provincial officer) and that he apparently lives with or close to the parents or father (zhangren 丈人) of the siblings, hence his being able to bring news about their/his well-being. 6. From the fact that this letter was found at the site of Diwan 地灣 or Ulandurbeljin (A33), which has been identified as the ruins of Jianshui 肩水 company fort (a unit housing about 100 soldiers and officers), it can be assumed— if the letter was duly sent and eventually discarded at its destination—that the recipient Yousun was stationed there, perhaps even as the commandant (hou 候) of that fort. Linqu 臨渠 tower, which is mentioned in connection with the delivery of this letter, was a beacon station (a unit of about five to ten men) under the command and somewhere in the vicinity of Jianshui company.105 Today, A33 is situated within the boundaries of Gansu province, where it extends out northward around the Ejina River. The Juyan 居延 oasis, where the Han had built a town with a prefectural seat to house agricultural garrisons was located roughly 200 km to the north, in what today is Inner Mongolia. I assume that the sender of this letter, Xuan/Youji, was stationed near Juyan because he apparently had a chance to briefly talk to his elder brother, Youdu, after Youdu “went to Juyan.” Since the verb is ‘went’ (zhi 之) and not ‘came’ (lai 來), I assume that Youji was not stationed directly in the town Juyan but somewhere nearby. As Youdu was accompanying the zhangshi 長史 or provincial deputy commander on his way to Juyan, it can be assumed that they had originally set out from the provincial capital Lude 觻得 because that is where the provincial deputy commander would normally have been stationed. Ancient Lude was located in the Gansu Corridor near modern Zhangye 張掖, more than 500 km travel distance to Juyan.106 On their way north through the Gobi desert, Youdu and the deputy commander would have been bound to travel along the Ejina River and thus would have naturally come by Jianshui, where Yousun was presumably stationed.

marker for ‘youngest’ has already been used. A problematic point with the assumption that Youdu, Youji, and Yousun are brothers is that Youji is thought to be a style name, whereas the generational naming practice of siblings only makes sense with personal names acquired shortly after birth, not with style names acquired only after maturity. 105  Nagata, Kyoen Kankan, 435. 106  See Tan, Lishi dituji, 33, grid square (3) 6; and Han shu 28B.1613, on the administrative geography of Zhangye; and An and Xiong, Guanzhishi, 2:77–82, on the position of zhangshi.

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Xuan conveys his best regards. Dear Yousun and the young lady!107 [Life] at the frontier is very hard; I hope that during this hot season you both have sufficient108 clothing and good food, and are careful at the frontier. I was lucky to perceive your health, Yousun, [when I was] stopping by on [my] way to the border; [I am also] doing well.109 On the 7th day of the intercalary month, Youdu together with the honorable deputy of the provincial commander went to Juyan. He reported that [our] parents110 are doing well. [He was] in a hurry. I don’t know

107  Note that my assumption that the sender is Yousun’s elder brother implies that the term shaofu could be used as an address for ‘sister-in-law.’ I think this possible, but have not found any evidence for it. For a list of regular addresses of wives of younger brothers throughout history, see Liang, Chengwei lu, 43. 108  Perhaps zu 足, ‘sufficient,’ is understood here as ‘appropriate’ (shi 適), or the idea is that one had to often change sweaty clothes during the summer, hence the need for many (‘sufficient’) clothes. 109  This rendering is tentative, especially the interpretation of li 力, ‘strength,’ which occurs in manuscript D1872 (see Source Three) and Source Eight in a context that apparently is a well-wishing for someone’s strength, i.e., health. An alternative translation could perhaps be, “My only concern [wu ta ji 毋它急] is that Yousun stays healthy [li 力], when [he] travels along the border.” Or, as the explanation by Lin (Jiandu gaishu, 149, n. 6) and Chen (Juyan Hanjian yanjiu, 493) implies: “I was lucky to receive Yousun’s help [li 力] [when I was] stopping by on [my] way to the border, [so I am] doing well [wu ta ji 毋它急].” 110  Liang, Chengwei lu, 8 and 17, records only daren 大人 instead of zhangren 丈人 as a Han time address and designation of children towards their own father and mother. However, zhangren (perhaps also related to zhang 杖, ‘staff of honor to support the elderly’) also appears in sources since the Warring States time as a designation for elderly people in general as well as for the master of the household, i.e., one’s own father or perhaps both parents. Since the 2nd or 3rd c. at the latest the term zhangren could also mean ‘fatherin-law’ or ‘husband.’ This letter probably dates two or three centuries earlier. If zhangren was nevertheless referring to a husband here, this would force us to reconsider Yousun as being this husband and ‘Yousun’s shaofu,’ his wife, as the main recipient of this letter. With this a number of assumptions would have to be changed, including those about the subjects and objects of the last sentence in column two, which could then be rendered: “I was lucky to perceive Yousun’s health, when he was stopping by on his way along the border; he was doing well.” His well-being, however, would then again be mentioned in the following, where it now reads, “He reported that [our] parents are doing well,” but would have to read then, “He reported that he is doing well.” One would also have to assume Yousun’s wife to be literate and her brother-in-law (or even just an unrelated male acquaintance) to be on close terms with her. All of this is possible but not more probable than the version proffered above.

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whether, after all, he saw you, Yousun. [He] cannot frequently send letters.111 On the 11th day, I [am to] call at [your?] company, [but it is] not yet decided. [Therefore] I would like to entrust [this] writing to a messenger, with my best regards! Dear Yousun and the young lady! Zhu Youji has written [this.112 I hope that Xing, the supervisor of the station [here], will deliver [this] to the tower captain of Linqu. [He will?] call at your office. —The writing [shall be] sent out today. The company is forwarding [it, but] messenger Xing has not yet arrived.113 I hope that [you] are happily ordering [your] own [affairs].114 Don’t be the last among all the sections! 宣伏地再拜請 (1) 幼孫、少婦足下:甚苦塞上。暑時願幼孫、少婦足衣,強 食, 慎塞上。宣 幸 得幼孫力過行邊,毋它急。(2)   幼都以閏月七日 與長史君俱之居延,言丈人毋它急。發卒,不審 115得見幼孫不 也?不足數來 (3) A33–10.16A 111  Ma Yi (cited in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 67, n. 7) reads ⋯不?它不足。數來記, “. . . did he? Other matters [I] will not mention in detail. Write me more often!” That in clerical script ta 它 and ye 也 cannot be clearly distinguished is a perennial problem. The request to the recipient to write more often would be very natural, but it seems to me that for Ma Yi’s reading one would expect bu xiang 不詳 instead of bu zu 不足. 112  Taking shu as a noun instead and “Zhu Youji shu” as ‘Zhu Youji‘s letter,’ which is equally possible, does not necessarily change the assumption that (Zhu) Xuan and Zhu Youji are identical, unless one assumes that “Zhu Youji shu” refers not to this but to a separate letter. This would open up the additional problem as to whether it refers to a ‘letter by Zhu Youji’ or a ‘letter to Zhu Youji.’ I do not share Ma Yi’s considerations (as cited in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 67, n. 9) that in the latter case Zhu Youji would have to be the captain of Linqu tower, who is mentioned later as the (intermediate?) recipient of this letter. 113  Ma Yi (as cited in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 68, n. 12) transcribes and punctuates 書即日 起候官。行兵使者幸未到 and explains this as, “Today [this] letter is being sent out from the company. Luckily, the messenger who is to mobilize the soldiers has not yet arrived.” 114  Alternatively, “I hope that you will be prepared to argue for yourself.” Or even, “I hope that Yu is prepared to argue for himself.” This sentence together with the next apparently is a postscriptum, possibly in another hand, which alludes to some external situation that cannot be known from this letter. 115  These four characters are not clearly visible on the published photographs, their reading and the parsing of the text therefore are guesswork. (Even Lao’s first transcription was based on photographs.) Some scholars have read bu dang 不當, ‘should not [have

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記。宣以十一日對候官,未決。謹因使奉書,伏地再拜。(1) 幼孫、少婦足下。 朱幼季書,願亭掾幸為到臨渠隧長。(2) 對幼孫治所。 ●書即日起。候官行矣。使者幸未到。 願豫自 辯 116,毋為諸部殿。(3)A33–10.16B 4.7 Source Seven: The Wooden Letters from Heifu and Jing to Zhong With Sources Seven and Eight we leave not only the regional context of the Northwestern Provinces, jumping far to the south, but also the period of the Han, looking at three of the earliest letter sources that we have from ancient China. Whether differences found between these three sources and those discussed above are due to the intervening hundred or two hundred years or to the roughly 2,500 km between Gansu/Inner Mongolia and Hubei/Hunan or both is difficult to establish on the basis of the existing material. From tomb no. 4 at Shuihudi 睡虎地 in Yunmeng 雲夢 County, Hubei, we have two Qin letters, one of them fragmented.117 Like Source Six, they show the life of brothers in the military. In this case two brothers on campaign wrote back home. Deployed several hundred kilometers from their home town, the been able to see you],’ instead of bu shen 不審 ‘do not know. . . .’ Moreover, fa cu 發卒, ‘make haste,’ could be read fa zu, ‘deploy soldiers,’ but this does not fit the context assumed here. 116  Some scholars have transcribed this as ban 辦 or 辨. The photograph clearly suggests bian; compare the examples in Chen and Xu, Jiandu boshu zidian, 804–5. 117  Both letters have been transcribed without annotation and shown in black-and-white photographs in “Shuihudi,” 61, pl. 6, and Yunmeng Shuihudi Qinmu, 25–26 and pls. 167–68. The photographs in both cases are deplorably blurred, but nevertheless valuable, as they show the manuscripts shortly after their excavation, when the writing on them was still legible. A much better color photograph (and transcription) of the first letter has been published in Shuxie lishi, 75, but here the writing on the verso has all but disappeared. A slightly different translation, that misses the entire third sentence of the first letter, is found in Li and He, Sanjian, 83–84. Copiously annotated transcriptions of both letters are found in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 11–23; see also Ma, “Chi yu duyou shu,” 177. The second, fragmented, letter has been translated in Shaughnessy, “Military Histories,” 181–82. His translation has been adapted here with considerable changes, so as to provide an alternative rendering and to integrate the terminology used here. Yates, “Soldiers, Scribes, and Women,” 362–63, n. 74, gives a brief summary for both letters and alludes to an unpublished translation by Anthony Barbieri-Low, who was kind enough to provide what he called his ‘draft translation’ shortly before this article went to the press. Despite the selfdeprecating designation, I found his translation very much up to his usual high standards and used it to improve upon an expression in the second letter. I am very grateful to the author for allowing me to do so.

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two brothers are expressing themselves in a most personal and s­ traightforward fashion, and show themselves primarily concerned with the well-being of family members and friends. Note that the first, complete, letter is dated to the month and day and that this is also the case for the following example from Liye, but not with the Han time letters found so far. 2nd month, cycle day 18.118 Heifu and Jing119 send their best greetings to Zhong.120 How is mother? We are fine. Recently we were split up, [but] now we are reunited. Heifu is entrusting me with begging [you for help]121 and putting the following122 into writing:123

118  On typological grounds related to the burial goods, “Shuihudi,” 59, dates Shuihudi tomb no. 4 to before the Qin unification. Huang, “Liangfeng jiaxin,” 75, dates this document to 223 BCE, based on the assumption that the wars alluded to in here are those between Qin and the state of Chen. If so, the day would be the 19th day of the second month in the 24th year of the Qin King Ying Zheng 嬴政, or April 6 (see Xu, Lipu, 1237). 119  Although it is not explicitly said, it can be infered that Heifu and Jing are brothers or at least half-brothers because they seem to call the same person ‘mother’ (and other relatives ‘sister’). It has also been assumed that also the recipient of this (and the next) letter, Zhong, was their brother, although the evidence for this is not as strong. 120  A separator hook mark inserted by the original hand underscores the nature of this first line as a kind of preamble and avoids misunderstanding the string . . . wen Zhong mu 問中 母 . . . as ‘ask/greet the mother of Zhong.’ 121  The published transcriptions read yì 益, ‘to increase, benefit,’ but what little is left does not seem to match this; see Chen and Xu, Jiandu boshu zidian, 573; Lu Xixing, Caozibian, 92. I think, with Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 14, n. 1, that this should read qi 乞. Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 14, n. 5, also reports that Tang Yuhui 湯餘惠 reads zou 走, ‘to run,’ instead of yi, but that does not seem a better choice. He also misunderstands ji 寄 in the modern sense of ‘sending’ (a letter). Grammatically possible, however, would be the solution of Huang (Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 14, n. 5) to read Yi Jiu 益就 (just as Qi Jiu 乞就) as a name, who would then be someone who was entrusted (ji 寄) with the writing. 122  The inclusion of a marker for direct speech (yue 曰) at this point is surprising. A wellknown device in official letters, it is usually matched by other markers that define the end of direct speech. Here, there seem to be no clear end markers. Among several options, I have decided to take the beginning of the well-wishes in the second column of the backside of this board, where both Heifu and Jing are named together again, as an indicator that this is not part of the direct speech of Heifu alone any more. 123  Jiushu 就書, alternatively perhaps: ‘to send a letter.’

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Figure 11.12 Two Qin letters from Shuihudi, recto (right) and verso (left). b/w: Yunmeng Shuihudi Qinmu, pls. 167–68; color: Shuxie lishi, 75.

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“Send me [i.e., Heifu] cash, do not bring summer clothes.124 Now when this writing arrives, Mother, look in Anlu125 for silk cloth that is cheap. If there is some that can be made into an unlined skirt and shirt, be sure to make that and let it be brought together with the cash. If silk cloth is too expensive, only bring the cash. I will [then] make [the clothes] myself with [hemp] cloth. I and the others are about to help126 at Huaiyang127 attacking rebel cities; [whether I will be] captured or wounded cannot be known yet.128 I hope, Mother, that you will not provide too little for my expenses. When you receive the letter, [please], all of you, reply! In the reply make sure to say whether Xiang Jiajue has come or not.129 Tell me, if he has not yet come.130 Have you heard whether Wang De is alright? Has he told131 Xiang

124  According to the “Statutes on Currency” (Jinbulü 金布律) found in tomb no. 11 at Shuihudi, xiayi 夏衣, ‘summer clothes,’ were handed out in the military between the 4th and the 6th month. 125  An ancient city near Yunmeng in northwestern Hubei, where this document was found, see Tan, Lishi dituji, 12, grid square (2) 5. 126  Zhi zuo 直佐, Tang Yuhui as cited in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 15, n. 12, reads this as zhichai 值差, which he glosses as ‘render military duty.’ He gives neither reason nor evidence for this reading, however, and even if 佐 and 差 are related in some way, the reading of 差 as chai, ‘military duty’ seems to be anachronistic for this Qin text. Nevertheless, the context, if nothing else, does of course strongly imply that what Heifu did in relation to Huaiyang was effectively military service. 127  On this locale, see Huang, “Liangfeng jiaxin,” who identifies it with modern Huaiyang in Henan. This is situated more than 300 km north of Anlu. 128  Alternatively with jiu 久 for ru 入: “. . . Huaiyang. Attacking cities takes a long time. Losses cannot be known yet.” 129  I take 相家爵 as a name. It could be read literally as an ‘order [of merit] for household management’; see Yates, “Soldiers, Scribes, and Women,” 362–63, and Yin Zaishuo 尹在碩 (cited in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 16, n. 16). However, for an order of merit the verb lai 來 would be too unusual. Instead one would expect shou 受 or ci 賜. 130  Slightly repetitive but apparently the only grammatically viable solution, unless one is to follow Tang Yuhui (cited by Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 16, n. 16) who claims that weilai zhuang 未來狀 means ‘the future situation.’ But how was Heifu’s family back home supposed to know his future situation? Huang Shengzhang’s explanation (as cited by Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 16, n. 18)—‘tell him the reason for [my] not coming’ 告訴他不來的原 因—mixes up the indirect object of gao (Heifu) and the third-person subject (qi 其) of the dependent clause wei lai 未來. Besides, zhuang 狀 does not mean ‘reason.’ 131  Ci 辭, also ‘taken leave from,’ ‘apologized to,’ or ‘relinquished,’ depending on what 相家爵 means.

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Jiajue or not? The letter and clothes go to the Southern Army, not . . . or not?”132 Give Auntie,133 sister Kangle,134 aunt Gushu,135 and the other relatives136 . . . our best regards137 . . . . Give sister138 at the eastern wing our best regards. Is she alright? Give young Ying Fan our best regards. What about that thing? Is it settled? Give Lü Ying from Xiyang and old Yan Zheng from Bing Neighborhood our best regards. How are they? . . . Jing gives Xinfu and Wan139 his best wishes. How are you? Xinfu, do your best to look after [my] parents. Don’t give . . . give your best.

132  This part of the transcription cannot be verified by any published photograph. 133  Guzi 姑姊, ‘elder paternal aunt,’ i.e., ‘elder sister of the father.’ That she is the first in the list of people to greet may either be a sign of seniority or of special intimacy. Besides, it is only to be expected that this and the following appellations of Heifu’s and Jing’s relatives and friends are highly individualized, so we cannot precisely reconstruct the relationship in all cases. 134  There are no comments on Kangle in the literature which is an indication that either everyone knows what it means or nobody does. For want of a better alternative I assume it is the sister’s name. The exact translation of jixu would be ‘youngest of the elder sisters,’ with xu allegedly being a Chu term for ‘elder sister,’ see Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 17. 135  Gushu zhanggu 故術長姑: Same consideration as for Kangle above. Zhanggu is usually glossed as ‘senior paternal aunt,’ which would make it basically the same as guzi or as ‘mother-in-law’ of a wife. 136  Wainei 外內 (also neiwai) are presumably the additional blood and in-law relatives except the immediate core family of parents, wives, and children. Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 17, n. 19, explains wainei as ‘the entire family,’ suo you jiaren 所有家人, which is a bit ambiguous considering the different conceptions of jia in antiquity and nowadays. 137  為黑夫、驚多問 . . ., lit., ‘For Heifu and Jing give many regards to. . . .’ 138  Again, this is a jixu, a ‘youngest elder sister.’ 139  Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 18, n. 26, on the basis of previous scholarship and the comparison with the second letter makes the persuasive case that 新負, lit. ‘new burden,’ stands for the homophonous xinfu 新婦, ‘new wife.’ If so, ‘new’ perhaps means new in the sense of new addition to the family or as compared to the wives of the elder brother(s). But this cannot be known for sure. Alternatively, it has been argued—certainly not on phonological grounds—that it meant xifu 媳婦, ‘daughter-in-law,’ thus basically signifying the same family relationship as for Jing’s wife, but taking the perspective of Jing’s parents. I use Xinfu as a quasi-name for stylistic reasons. Wan 妴 has been assumed to be Jing’s daughter. That it is not simply the name of the wife is clear from a similar string in the second letter below that is followed by a jie 皆, ‘both.’

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二140月辛巳,黑夫、驚敢再拜問中∟:母毋恙也?黑夫、驚毋恙 也。前日黑夫與驚別,今復會矣。(1) 黑夫寄乞就書曰:「遺黑 夫錢,毋操夏衣來。今書節<即>到,母視安陸絲布賤141,可 以為禪 (2) 帬襦者,母必為之,令與錢偕來。其絲布貴,徒操142 錢來,黑夫自以布此<作>143 。(3) 黑夫等直佐淮陽攻反城,入 144傷未可智(知)也,願母遺黑夫用勿少。書到,(4) 皆為報= (報,報)必言相家爵來未來,告黑夫其未來狀。聞王得苟   得 (5) SHD M4:11A 毋恙也?辭相家爵不也?書、衣之南軍,毋 . . . . . . 不也?」(1) 為黑夫、驚多問姑姊、康樂季須(嬃)、故術長姑、外 內 . . . . . . (2) 為黑夫、驚多問東室季須(嬃)苟得毋恙也?(3) 為黑夫、驚多問嬰氾145季事可(何)如?定不定?(4) 為黑夫、驚多問夕陽呂嬰、【匣(甲=丙)】里閻諍146丈人得 毋恙 . . . . . . 矣?(4)147 驚多問新負(婦)、妴得毋恙也?新負(婦)勉力視瞻丈人,  毋與 . . . . . . 勉力也。(5) SHD M4:11B Of the second Qin letter unfortunately only one half is preserved.

140  The published photographs do not allow one to check the transcription of this first character, the last three characters in the first column, as well as large tracts on the verso, especially its lower portion. 141  These five characters are squeezed into the column with much less spacing than the rest of the text shows—perhaps a later correction? 142  “Shuihudi,” 61, has 〔以〕, Sanjian, 83, has □. I follow Shuxie lishi, 75, and Ma, “Chi yu duyou shu,” 177. 143  Ci 此 here looks like a mistake for the graphically similar zuo 作, for the structure of the sentence requires a verb at this point. 144  All other transcriptions read jiu 久, ‘(taking) a long time.’ But the character in the photograph could just as easily be read ru 入, which fits the context better. 145  “Shuihudi,” 61 has si 汜 and Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 17, n. 22, reports the reading ji 記. 146  “Shuihudi,” 61, and Sanjian, 83, have wen wu 聞誤. I follow Shuxie lishi, 75. 147  Explicitly on the basis of the photograph in Shuxie lishi, Yang (“Shuxin huijiao,” 12 and n. 24–25) adds □□ 皆 毋恙也,毋 錢 用、衣 , “How are all [?] . . .? [I] do not have money [?] to use [?], clothes [?] . . .” between 丈人得毋恙 and 矣. Something like 皆毋恙也 is indeed faintly visible in Shuxie lishi, but it is hard to verify whether this has to be added to or is substituting the original transcription. In any case the difference seems insignificant.

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Jing is happy to send Zhong148 his greetings! How is mother? How are the wives and kids, the other relatives, and the [house]mates [?]149 . . . give to [?] Zhong. Is mother healthy and well? I am with the troops on campaign, staying together with Heifu and both of us are fine. . . . cash and clothes. Could mother please send five or six hundred cash and double-layered150 cloth, fine one, mind you, and no less than twenty-five feet [long] . . . use the cash from Yuan Bo! If you really don’t send it, I will just die. It is very, very important! To Xinfu and Wan my very best wishes. How are both of you? Xinfu, do your best to look after the two old [parents] . . . because I am far from home. You, Zhong, should teach Wan well, tell her not to dare go too far away, like when she’s gathering firewood; and, Zhong, let . . . have heard that among the cities of the new territories there are many that are empty and not filled [with people]. Moreover they are letting those among the former freemen151 who have come into conflict with the law fill . . . do the shrine sacrifices for me; if they are greatly lacking, it’s because I’m living in a rebel city. Jing is happy to send Auntie his greetings! Auntie, how was your giving birth? Robbers have entered the new territories. Zhong, would that you are not right now traveling to the new territories. This is very important!

148  Zhong 衷; Huang, “Liangfeng jiaxin,” 74, thinks that this is the same individual that is named Zhong 中 in the other letter and that, moreover, he is the occupant of the tomb, in which the two wooden documents were found. As 衷 and 中 share the same reconstructed ancient pronunciation (see Zheng Zhang, Shanggu yinxi, 567) that is possible. It would be another argument for the two letters having been written by two different persons. 149  For wainei, see n. 136. The fragmented tong 同 may stand for tongju 同居, those ‘living together’ under the same roof but not related, such as guests, servants, slaves, etc. who also counted as members in the household at large. 150  This is a guess based on the two elements of the character. I have not been able to locate this character elsewhere. 151  Gumin 故民 were free-born people who were enslaved later in life in contrast to people who were born into slavery. Alternatively, the term could mean the original Qin population in contrast to those populations that came under Qin domination only through conquest. See Lau and Lüdke, Exemplarische Rechtsfälle, 148, n. 792.

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驚敢大心問衷:母得毋恙也?家室、外內、同〔居?〕 (1) 以衷,母力毋恙也?與從軍,與黑夫居,皆毋恙也。 (2) 錢衣,願母幸遺錢五、六百,【糸咅】布,謹善者,毋下二丈 五尺 (3) 用垣柏錢矣,室<實>152弗遺,即死矣。急==(急急急)!(4) 驚多問新負(婦)、妴,皆得毋恙也?新負(婦)勉力視瞻兩 老 (5) SHD M4:6A 驚遠家故。衷教詔妴,令毋敢遠就若取新(薪)。衷令 (1) 聞新地城多空不實者,且令故民有為不如令者實 (2) 為驚視祀,若大發(廢)毀,以驚居反城中故。(3) 驚敢大心問姑=秭=(姑秭[姊],姑秭[姊])子產得毋恙?(4) 新地入盜,衷唯母<毋>方行新地,急=(急急)!(5)153  SHD M4:6B 4.8 Source Eight: The Wooden Letter from Gong to Mang Ji Only very recently, the number of extant Qin letters has multiplied through the finds made in the ancient well no. 1 at the site of Liye 里耶 in Hunan Province, that is dated to between 222 and 208 BCE.154 Like in Dunhuang or Juyan, the bulk of the Liye documents consists of administrative and legal documents with some private letters interspersed between them. Like in the northwest most of them are so severely fragmented that one cannot always be certain about their letter nature. But overall, I reckon, there must be at least a dozen private letters in various states of preservation.155 Whether because they are contemporaneous or because they hail from more or less the same geographic and regional cultural background, there are striking similarities between the Liye and the Shuihudi letters, which also speaks for the Shuihudi specimen being genuine letters used in real life, not texts written as part of a funerary rite.

152  Following Huang, “Liangfeng jiaxin,” 74. See also Bai, Tongjiazi zidian, 219. 153  The published transcriptions regularly neglect to properly reflect original reduplication marks. I infer this reduplication mark by way of analogy with the fourth column on the recto where it is visible on the photograph. 154  See Liye fajue baogao, 749, for the dating; Liye Qinjian for photographs and unpunctuated transcriptions of the finds; and Chen, Liye jiaoshi, for improved, punctuated, and annotated transcriptions. Liye jiaoshi also identifies many fragments that belong together but are still shown separately in Liye Qinjian, among them most of the private letters. 155  Four better preserved private letters from Liye are 8-650+8-1462, 8-659+8-2088, 8-782+8810, 8-823+8-1997. But even these are invariably broken in the middle, which is why their numbers consist of two parts.

Private Letter Manuscripts From Early Imperial China

Figure 11.13 A letter (three pieces on the left, A: recto, B: verso) and a label from Liye. Liye Qinjian, 92, 228, 253.

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Similar to the first Shuihudi letter, the single example from Liye translated below starts out with a date. It also shares other formulas seen in the letters from Shuihudi, such as gan daxin duo wen 敢大心多問. The tablet is broken in a peculiar way: of the bottom half (8-659) only the right hand part has been preserved. It has been broken (or cut?) off vertically so neatly that it now looks more like a narrow wooden strip with only two columns of writing than a board with four like the upper half (8-2088). If the characters that were broken in two did not match so well, one could almost doubt whether these two fragments belong together. 7th month, cycle day 29. Gong happily sends his very best greetings to Mang Ji. I pray that you are not [troubled]156 by [your] duties . . . living deep in the mountains, there is nothing that [I] could offer as a greeting gift, [so I] send a letter to [just] express [my] reverence. Your parents, Bo, as well as . . . how are [they]? That, luckily, you are young157 and from time to time give. . . . . . . because [it is not clear] whether the . . . clerk comes or not, I venture to pay him a visit . . . 七 月 壬 辰 , 贛 敢 大 心 再 𢱭 ( 拜 ) 多 問 芒 季 : 得 毋 為 事 [䜌 (亂)]   (1) 居者(諸)深山中,毋物可問,進書為敬。季丈 人、柏及 (2) 毋恙殹。季幸少者,時賜 (3) 史來不來之故,敢 謁之 (4) LY J1 8-659+8-2088A The back side seems to have not been inscribed except for an address or perhaps even unrelated note, that is written upside down from the perspective of the front side.  . . . office. 官158 

LY J1 8-659B

What appears to be an address label or record of reception for this letter has been found on another wooden strip. This betrays not only the official position 156  Luan 䜌 for luan 亂; this character is not preserved on this strip, but as Chen, Liye jiaoshi, 195, n. 2, points out, there is a parallel on the Liye board J1 8-823+8-1997, that suggests that de wu wei shi luan 得毋為事䜌 was a formula. 157  Alternatively, “Father Ji, Bo, as well as . . . how are [you]? You are getting close to the young ones,” and so on. This seems to be the preferred reading in Chen, Liye jiaoshi, 195, n. 7, where xing 幸 is glossed as qinjin 親近, ‘to get close to,’ ‘intimate.’ This interpretation would also mean that this is a letter from someone to his father. 158  The direction of script on this side is reversed as compared to the recto.

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of the recipient but also the fact that already at that time private and official correspondences were clearly separated and the secrecy of private letters observed. Privately sent in to the directing clerk Mang Ji, [to be] opened by himself.159 私進令史芒季,自發。 LY J1 8-1817 Source Nine: The Wooden Letter or Greeting Tablet from Wan Heng to Xie Meng The site Tianchang in Anhui Province is again almost 700 km away from Yunmeng in Hubei. Here, a single tomb (no. 19) recently brought to light a number of letters on wooden boards. The tomb was dated on stylistic grounds to approximately the middle of the Former Han period, roughly contemporaneous with the letter finds from the Northwest. The great majority of the Tianchang letters are addressed to a person called Meng—probably Xie Meng 謝孟 with his full name—a one-time official in Dongyang 東陽 prefecture. The two most complete of these manuscripts, the letters from Bing Chongguo 丙充國 (TC M19:40-5) and from Ben Qie (or Fei Ju) 賁且 (TC M19:40-10AB), offer interesting cases of private communication, the latter also insights into a historical event. Formally, they are more closely related to the Han letters found in the far-away Northwest than to the Qin letters from the Hubei-Hunan area, which speaks for a unified empire-wide letter writing culture by mid-Han times. Whether the use of formulas such as . . . ma zuxia 馬足下, literally ‘at the hooves of (your) horse,’ instead of just zuxia, ‘at (your) feet,’ are due to individual predilections or to regional habits is again difficult to decide. But what appears as a prominent feature of the larger eastern region are the frequent finds of greeting tablets in tombs.160 The following text is different from all the letters discussed so far. It completely dispenses with the usual formulas in the beginning,161 yet the rest of the text brims with epistolary formulas. One particular remark self-identifies this manuscript as a greeting tablet ( ye) rather than a letter (shu) or note 4.9

159  For fa 發 as a request to ‘open (a letter)’ see Lau and Lüdke, Exemplarische Rechtsfälle, 104–5, n. 614. 160  These derive predominantly from mid to late Western Han tombs in Jiangsu and southern Shandong; see Korolkov, “Greeting Tablets;” Giele, “Excavated Manuscripts,” 131–32; and section 3.4 above. 161  I do not assume that the text is incomplete because the board is inscribed on two sides, which speaks against it having been bound together with another board or strip, and because the text makes perfect sense as it is.

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Figure 11.14 A letter or greeting tablet from Tianchang, recto (right) and verso (left). “Tianchang,” 14–15.

( ji), another indicates that this manuscript was delivered in exactly the same fashion as a greeting tablet. However it also seems to have been written as an answer to a letter and it is much more elaborate than other greeting tablets that have been found so far. As such, this manuscript is testimony to the noteworthy affinity of the two genres of letters and greeting tablets in early China that has been mentioned in the introduction.162 [Despite] your inconvenient physical condition, my friend, you have been so kind lately as to write a letter and ask bureau head Song to take care of it, sending him to me inquiring [about my well-being. 162  Transcription and photographs of this manuscript are found in “Tianchang,” 18 and 14–15, figs. 28–29. However, I mostly use the superior transcription in Yang, “Shuxin huijiao,” 31–32. For the translation, I have benefitted much by a joint reading of this and other Tianchang letters with Guo Jue and Maxim Korolkov in May 2014. I am grateful to both for allowing me to use our joint translation as a base for the adapted version I present here.

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As] deputy magistrate of Dongyang, [I,] Wan Heng, would have been obliged to personally attend at [your] bedside, [but] was so busy that [I] failed to do so. [I am] respectfully asking the supervisor of public works Fu Fei163 to present [you this] greeting tablet, convey [my] regards and salutation, and apologize [to you].164 [I] am using [him/ this opportunity], with best regards to inquire about [your] illness, My very dear . . . ! 卿體不便,前日幸為書屬宋掾使橫請:(1)東陽丞莞橫宜身至牀165 下,敀(迫)166不給,謹請司空伏非奉167謁,伏地 (2) 再拜謝,   因伏地再拜請病,(3) □馬168□足下 (4) TC M19:40-15A Deliver to Mr. Xie. 進 (5) 謝卿。(6)

TC M19:40-15B

Bibliography An Zuozhang 安作璋 and Xiong Tieji 熊鐵基. Qin Han guanzhishi gao 秦漢官制史 稿. Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1984–85. Bai Yulan 白於藍. Jiandu boshu tongjiazi zidian 簡牘帛書通假字字典. Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 2008. Chavannes, Édouard. Les documents chinois découverts par Aurel Stein dans les sables du Turkestan oriental. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913.

163  Alternatively, if one reads, with Yang (“Shuxin huijiao,” 31–32), fei 非 as zui 罪, this sentence could perhaps mean, ‘. . . asking the supervisor of public works to [go and] admit to [my] transgression [on my behalf] and. . . .’ 164  Alternatively, ‘to thank you (for your letter).’ 165  “Tianchang,” 18, has □; it may be that the original writes the variant form 床 instead of 牀. 166  “Tianchang” (ibid.) has gan 敢. 167  “Tianchang” (ibid.) has xing 幸. 168  Although the outline of this character looks like ma 馬, its structure is not very clear and the context speaks against it, as there should be no other character between ma and zuxia.

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Chen Jiangong 陳建貢 and Xu Min 徐敏, eds. Jiandu boshu zidian 簡牘帛書字典. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1991. Chen Wei 陳偉, ed. Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi (di yi juan) 里耶秦簡牘校釋(第一卷) . Wuhan: Wuhan daxue chubanshe, 2012. Chen Zhi 陳直. Juyan Hanjian yanjiu 居延漢簡研究. Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe, 1986. Chung, Eva Yuen-wah. “A Study of the ‘Shu’ (Letters) of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220).” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1982. Conrady, August. Die chinesischen Handschriften- und sonstigen Kleinfunde Sven Hedins in Lou-lan. Stockholm: Generalstabens Litografiska Anstalt, 1920. Dongpailou = Changsha Dongpailou Dong Han jiandu 長沙東牌樓東漢簡牘. Edited by Changsha shi Wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 長沙市文物考古研究所. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2006. “Dong Wu Gao Rong mu” = Jiangxi sheng lishi bowuguan 江西省歴史博物館. “Jiangxi Nanchang shi Dong Wu Gao Rong mu de fajue” 江西南昌市東吳高榮墓的發掘. Kaogu 3 (1980): 219–28 and pls. 10–12. Dunhuang Hanjian 敦煌漢簡. Edited by Gansu sheng Wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 甘肅 省文物考古研究所. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991. Ejina Hanjian 額濟納漢簡. Edited by Wei Jian 魏堅. Guilin: Guangxi Shifan daxue chubanshe, 2005. Fenghuangshan = Jiangling Fenghuangshan Xi Han jiandu 江陵鳳凰山西漢簡牘. Edited by Hubei sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 湖北省文物考古研究所. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2012. Giele, Enno. “Excavated Manuscripts: Context and Methodology.” In China’s Early Empires: A Re-appraisal, edited by Michael Nylan and Michael Loewe, 114–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. “ ‘Yu’ seiko: Shin Kan jidai wo chushin ni” 「郵」制攷──秦漢時代を中 心に. Translated by Tomiya Itaru 冨谷至. Toyoshi kenkyu 東洋史研究 63:2 (2004): 1–37. Han shu 漢書. Compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Hayashi Minao 林巳奈夫. Kandai no bunbutsu 漢代の文物. Kyoto: Kyoto daigaku Jinbun kagaku kenkyujo, 1976. Hu Pingsheng 胡平生 and Zhang Defang 張德芳. Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui 敦煌懸泉漢簡釋粹. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001. Huang Shengzhang 黃盛璋. “Yunmeng Qinmu liangfeng jiaxin zhong youguan lishi dili de wenti” 雲夢秦墓兩封家信中有關歴史地理的問題. Wenwu 8 (1980): 74–77. Jianshui jinguan Hanjian 1–3 肩水金關漢簡(壹—參). Edited by Gansu jiandu baohu yanjiu zhongxin 甘肅簡牘保護研究中心 et al. Shanghai: Zhongxi shuju, 2011–13.

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Jiayibian = Juyan Hanjian jiayibian 居延漢簡甲乙編. Edited by Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan Kaogu yanjiusuo 中國社會科學院考古研究所. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980. Juyan xinjian: Jiaqu houguan 居延新簡:甲渠候官. Edited by Gansu sheng Wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 甘肅省文物考古研究所 et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994. Kantoku meisekisen 6: Kanshuku hen 1: Shin, Kan I, Shin: Tensui Shinkan, Bakenwan zen Kankan, Echina Kyoen zen Kankan hoka 簡牘名蹟選 6:甘肅篇(一):  秦.漢 I.新:天水秦簡.馬圈湾前漢簡.額濟納居延前漢簡他. Edited by Nishibayashi Shoichi 西林昭一. Tokyo: Nigensha, 2009. Kantoku meisekisen 7: Kanshuku hen 2: Kan II, Shin: Kensenchi zen Kan kan/hakusho, Bakenwan Kankan, Bui O Mo Shinkan hoka 漢 II.新:懸泉置前漢簡/帛書.馬 圈湾漢簡.武威王莽新簡他. Edited by Nishibayashi Shoichi. Tokyo: Nigensha, 2009. Korolkov, Maxim. “ ‘Greeting Tablets’ in Early China: Some Traits of the Communicative Etiquette of Officialdom in Light of Newly Excavated Inscriptions.” TP 98 (2012): 295–348. Lao Gan 勞榦. Juyan Hanjian: Tuban zhi bu 居延漢簡:圖版之部. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1957. ———. “Juyan Hanjian kaozheng” 居延漢簡考證. Juyan Hanjian: Kaoshi zhi bu 考釋 之部. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1960. Reprint, 1986. Lau, Ulrich and Michael Lüdke. Exemplarische Rechtsfälle vom Beginn der HanDynastie: Eine kommentierte Übersetzung des Zouyanshu aus Zhangjiashan/Provinz Hubei. Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa Monograph Series 50. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2012. Li Junming 李均明. Qin Han jiandu wenshu fenlei jijie 秦漢簡牘文書分類輯解. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2009. Li Junming and He Shuangquan 何雙全, eds. Sanjian jiandu heji 散見簡牘合輯. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1990. Li Xinke 李新科. “Handai siren shuxin de chuanbo yanjiu zongshu” 漢代私人書信的 傳播研究綜述. Chichihar daxue xuebao (Zhesheke ban) 齊齊哈爾大學學報(哲 社科版)9 (2009): 65–67. Li Yongliang 李永良, ed. Helong wenhua: Lianjie gudai Zhongguo yu shijie de zoulang 河隴文化:連接古代中國與世界的走廊. Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1998. Liang Zhangju 梁章鉅. Chengwei lu 稱謂錄. 1848. Reprint, Changsha: Yuelu shuyuan, 1991. Lin Jianming 林劍鳴. Jiandu gaishu 簡牘概述. Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1984.

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Liu Zenggui 劉增貴. “Handai funü de mingzi” 漢代婦女的名字. Xin shixue 新史學 7:4 (1996): 33–94. Liye fajue baogao 里耶發掘報告. Edited by Hunan sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 湖 南省文物考古研究所. Changsha: Yue Lu shuyuan, 2006. Liye Qinjian 1 里耶秦簡〔壹〕. Edited by Hunan sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 湖南 省文物考古研究所. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2012. Lu Xixing 陸錫興. Handai jiandu caozibian 漢代簡牘草字編. Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1989. Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 and Wang Guowei 王國維. Liusha zhuijian 流沙墜簡. Kyoto, 1914. Reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993. Ma Yi 馬怡. “Du Dongpailou Hanjian ‘Chi yu duyou shu’: Handai shuxin geshi yu xingzhi de yanjiu” 讀東牌樓漢簡《侈與督郵書》 :漢代書信格式與形制的研究. In Jianbo yanjiu 2005 簡帛研究 2005, 173–186. Guilin: Guangxi shifandaxue, 2008. ———. “Juyan jian ‘Xuan yu Yousun Shaofu shu’: Handai biandi guanli de siren tongxin” 居延簡《宣與幼孫少婦書》 :漢代邊地官吏的私人通信. In Chungguk kojungse sa yongu 中國古中世史研究 20. Seoul: Gwanaksa, 2008; cited here is the pagination of the reprint in Nandu xuetan (renwen shehui kexue xuebao) 南都學壇(人文社會科學學報)30:3 (May 2010): 1–9. Momiyama Akira 籾山明. “Gi Shin Roran kan no keitai: hoken wo chushin toshite” 魏晋楼蘭簡の形態:封検を中心として. In Rusha shutsudo no moji shiryo: Roran, Niya monjo wo chushin ni 流沙出土の文字資料:楼蘭.尼雅文書を中 心に, edited by Tomiya Itaru 冨谷至, 135–60. Kyoto: Kyoto daigaku gakujutsu shuppankai, 2001. Nagata Hidemasa 永田英正. Kyoen Kankan no kenkyu 居延漢簡の研究. Kyoto: Dohosha, 1989. “Nanchang Jinmu” = Jiangxi sheng bowuguan 江西省博物館. “Jiangxi Nanchang Jinmu” 江西南昌晉墓. Kaogu 6 (1974): 373–78 and pls. 8–10. Niya iseki = Chunichi Nitchu kyodo Niya iseki gakujutsu chosa hokokusho 中日、日 中共同尼雅遺跡學術調査報告書, vol. 1. Edited by Zhong Ri gongtong Niya yiji xueshu kaochadui 中日共同尼雅遺迹學術考察隊 and Nitchu kyodo Niya iseki gakujutsu chosatai 日中共同ニヤ遺跡學術考察隊. Kyoto: Hozokan, 1996. Oba Osamu 大庭脩. “ ‘Ken’ no saikento” 「検」の再検討. Kankan kenkyu 漢簡研 究, 210–46. Kyoto: Dohosha, 1992. Richter, Antje. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Sanft, Charles. “Send Shoes: A Letter from Yuan to Zifang.” Renditions 79 (2013): 7–10. Shaughnessy, Edward L. “Military Histories of Early China: A Review Article.” Early China 21 (1996): 159–82.

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Shiwen hejiao = Xie Guihua 謝桂華, Li Junming 李均明, and Zhu Guoshao 朱國炤, eds. Juyan Hanjian shiwen hejiao 居延漢簡釋文合校. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1987. “Shuihudi” = Hubei Xiaogan diqu dierqi yi gong yi nong wenwu kaogu xunlian ban 湖北孝感地區第二期亦工亦農文物考古訓練班. “Hubei Yunmeng Shuihudi shiyizuo Qinmu fajue jianbao” 湖北雲夢睡虎地十一座秦墓發掘簡報. Wenwu 9 (1976): 51–62 and pls. 1, 6, 7. Shuxie lishi: Zhanguo Qin Han jiandu 書寫歴史:戰國秦漢簡牘. Edited by Hubei sheng bowuguan 湖北省博物館. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 2007. Tan Qixiang 譚其驤, ed., Zhongguo lishi dituji, di er ce: Qin, Xi Han, Dong Han shiqi 中 國歴史地圖集,第二冊:秦、西漢、東漢時期. Shanghai: Ditu chubanshe, 1982. Tanaka Tochiku 田中東竹. Chugoku hoshosen 10: Mokkan, chikkan, hakusho. Sengoku, Shin, Kan, Shin 中国法書選 10:木簡.竹簡.帛書:戰国.秦.漢.晋. Tokyo: Nigensha, 1990. “Tianchang” = Tianchang shi Wenwu guanlisuo 天長市文物管理所 and Tianchang shi Bowuguan 天長市博物館. “Anhui Tianchang Xi Han mu fajue jianbao” 安徽天 長西漢墓發掘簡報. Wenwu 11 (2006): 4–21. Tsien, Tsuen-hsuin. Written on Bamboo and Silk. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Wang Guanying 王冠英. “Han Xuanquanzhi yizhi chutu Yuan yu Zifang boshu xinzha kaoshi” 漢懸泉置遺址出土元與子方帛書信札考釋. Zhongguo lishi bowuguan guankan 1 (1998): 58–61. Webster’s New College Dictionary, Third Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005. Xu Xiqi 徐錫祺. Xi Zhou (Gonghe) zhi Xi Han lipu 西周(共和)至西漢歴譜. Beijing: Beijing kexue jishu chubanshe, 1997. “Xuanquan shiwen” = Gansu sheng Wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 甘肅省文物考古研究 所. “Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shiwen xuan” 敦煌懸泉漢簡釋文選. Wenwu 5 (2000): 27–45 and inside front cover. “Xuanquan yizhi” = Gansu sheng Wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo. “Gansu Dunhuang Handai Xuanquanzhi yizhi fajue jianbao” 甘肅敦煌漢代懸泉置遺址發掘簡報. Wenwu 5 (2000): 4–20 and inside back cover. Yang Fen 楊芬. “Chutu Qin Han shuxin huijiao jizhu” 出土秦漢書信滙校集注. PhD diss., Wuhan University, 2010. Yates, Robin D. S., “Soldiers, Scribes, and Women: Literacy among the Lower Orders in Early China.” In Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar, edited by Li Feng and David Prager Branner, 339–69. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. Yinwan Hanmu jiandu 尹湾漢墓簡牘. Edited by Lianyun’gang shi bowuguan 連雲港 市博物館 et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997.

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Yunmeng Shuihudi Qinmu 雲夢睡虎地秦墓. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1981. Zhang Rui 張蕊. “Chutu Handai jianbo siren shuxin yanjiu” 出土漢代簡帛私人書信 研究. MA diss., Beijing Shoudu shifan daxue, 2011. Zheng Zhang Shangfang 鄭張尚芳. Shanggu yinxi 上古音系. Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003. Zhongguo jiandu jicheng 中國簡牘集成. Edited by Chu Shibin 初師賓. Lanzhou: Dunhuang wenyi chubanshe, 2001.

Chapter 12

Su Shi’s Informal Letters in Literature and Life Ronald Egan The “informal letters” that are my subject are some fifteen hundred documents that survive in Su Shi’s 蘇軾 (1037–1101) complete works. These are classified as belonging to the form of informal notes or letters (chidu 尺牘) and are to be distinguished from his “formal letters” (shu 書). The latter are longer and considered “literary writings.” As such they were included in Su’s “literary collection” (wenji 文集). Not so with the chidu, which hereafter I will refer to as “informal letters” or simply “letters.” These are mostly extremely short, often no more than fifty to seventy-five characters in length, although some long pieces are found mixed among the others. These are informal messages and their subject matter tends to be very practical and mundane. Hence they were traditionally not thought of as “literary writings” and were not included in Su’s literary collection as it was first constituted. Yet a case can be made for considering these informal letters a key part of Su’s output; important not just as an invaluable source for our understanding of Su’s biography, which they undeniably are, but even important in his output as a writer. There are two considerations that bear mentioning here. We need not, first of all, be bound by the traditional view that these works are not “literary.” We may bring a different understanding of what constitutes literary work than that found in traditional conservative Chinese literary thought, something that has happened over time with many genres of Chinese writing. Actually, some Chinese scholars and critics in the Ming and Qing dynasties already began to break free of traditional notions in this regard, and began to appreciate Su’s letters for their literary qualities. It is exemplified, for example, in the selection of the letters by Su Shi and Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 compiled by the early Qing scholar Huang Shi 黃始 (fl. 1684), Su Huang chidu xuan 蘇黃尺牘選, and reprinted many times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 Huang’s annotations on the letters he presents primarily draw attention to their literary qualities. The repeated reprinting of Huang’s selection suggests the enthusiasm readers in the late imperial period felt for this previously overlooked segment of Su’s output as a writer. By Huang Shi’s time, of course, Su had taken his place among a handful 1  Huang Shi’s anthology has been republished under several different titles. One modern one is: Su Dongpo Huang Shangu chidu hece.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_014

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of the “greatest writers” of the entire sweep of China’s literary history, so that anything from his hand was considered worthy of attention. Second, the sheer quantity of this type of writing that Su Shi produced suggests that it may have played a role of some significance in his life and identity as a writer. Fifteen hundred examples in a single form is not a small number. In a recently published new edition of Su Shi’s complete works, these informal letters fill three of the total twenty volumes, or more than one-seventh of the total.2 This same new edition marks the first time, to my knowledge, that these letters have been made available with explanatory commentary and collation notes. This scholarly apparatus renders Su’s letters more accessible to our understanding than they have been previously. The moment may be right, then, for a new consideration of these remarkable documents, which is what I attempt in this paper. It is not that Su Shi’s informal letters have not been studied previously. They often been read by scholars for the many ways that they supplement biographical information about Su that is found in other sources, whether written by him or someone else. But his letters have seldom been studied for their inherent interest or for what they reveal about the letter form generally. Still less have Su’s letters been read against his writing in other forms for what they reveal, directly and indirectly, about the ways genre affects Su’s self-expression and how a consideration of that issue affects, in turn, our larger understanding of Su Shi. These are the matters I hope to begin to explore in this chapter. There are obvious reasons Su’s letters are of interest. The first is the large quantity of them. It is doubtful that we have such a large corpus of letters from any earlier figure in Chinese history. If such a corpus survives, it is not from the hand of a writer of Su’s stature. No earlier major Chinese writer left more than a fraction of the number of letters that survive for Su Shi. Naturally, the size of Su’s corpus of letters alone does not guarantee their literary quality, but it does mean that this portion of his output has a certain substantiality that a small collection of letters could never have, and this bodes well for the possibility of meaningful analysis. Second, we have in Su’s letters a large corpus that stands apart from his great achievement in shi 詩 poetry, song lyrics (ci 詞), and literary prose. Su’s letters thus offer the possibility of reading across genre, that is, of comparing how the same writer who is recognized as a master in other literary forms expresses himself when writing in this distinctive form. We may expect, then, that Su’s letters will be particularly valuable for what they reveal about the form itself and how it may lend itself to a different manner of expression or possibly different subjects or perspectives than we find in the more prestigious forms of writing. 2  The letters are contained in Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 蘇軾文集校注, in vols. 16–18 of Su Shi quanji jiaozhu.

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It may be helpful to summarize briefly Su Shi’s biography here, since the majority of his letters are intimately grounded in the immediate circumstances of his life, as they kept changing. National fame came early to Su, as a result of his and his younger brother’s outstanding performance on the civil service examinations of 1057, when the two brothers both placed in the highest rank and Su Shi placed second overall. The decade thereafter was largely spent fulfilling mourning rites for Su’s parents, but in the 1070s Su became a constant and vocal critic of Wang Anshi’s reform program. Su’s opposition to the New Policies ensured that he be relegated to posts in the provinces during these years. But his removal from the capital did not silence his political dissent. If anything, first-hand experience of the effects of the reforms in the provinces hardened Su’s opposition, and his criticism began to be voiced outside the normal forms and channels for policy criticism: now in poetry and other personal writings, often cloaked in satirical poetic lines and snide asides. Eventually, powerful ministers back in the court ran out of patience with Su and he was arrested and brought by armed guard back to the capital, where he was thrown into prison and tried for having defamed the emperor and his court. His incrimination for these crimes did not result in the death penalty that his harshest critics were calling for, but it did result in demotion and exile to a forlorn spot on the Yangzi, Huangzhou, far from any cultural center, where Su would be kept for five years (1080–84). This was the first of his exile periods, during which, unexpectedly, Su found his voice as poet, free spirit, and political outcast that cemented his fame. A change of leadership and policy brought Su Shi and other fellow anti-reformers back to power in 1085. But for Su Shi this new ascendancy was short-lived, as he soon had a falling out with members of his own Yuanyou Party, as he now defended certain of the long-reviled reforms that they were dismantling. Su Shi would later explain that he was not simply being argumentative or contrary, as his former partisans charged. His new opposition stemmed, he said, from discomfort with any rush to unanimity among those in power and the principle of ensuring tolerance for loyal opposition. The falling out with his own party led Su Shi once again to request reassignment to the provinces, and this new period of provincial appointments included his celebrated governorship of Hangzhou and the dredging and recovery he supervised there of West Lake. Soon, however, court politics turned against the Yuanyou Party, and a new regime began retaliating against the enemies of reform. Su Shi was singled out, again, for various of his writings. But this time, unlike in 1079, offense was perversely detected where actually there was none, and certainly none intended. Su Shi himself pointed out this difference, characterizing the latest campaign against him as equivalent to “saying black is white and white is black.” In 1094 the purges of Yuanyou partisans led

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to numerous exiles. As usual, Su Shi’s sentences were the harshest. He would spend seven years in distant southern exiles, first in Huizhou (east of modern Guangzhou) and then, when as the story goes his poetry from Huizhou sounded still too carefree to those back in the capital determined to silence him, incredibly he was sent “across the sea” to Hainan Island. This last exile was very close to a death sentence. It did not quite achieve its intended goal, for Su was still alive, although very sickly, in 1100, when he was finally allowed to return to the mainland. He died a few months later, in 1101. Yet during the years of this Lingnan exile, he had once again demonstrated to everyone, not the least his enemies, through his unflagging poetic output and experimentation with other literary forms, that his spirit and creativity were indeed beyond the reach of any brand of persecution. 1

Revealing New Layers of Thought and Activity

Su’s letters bring to light a wide ranging number of actions and thinking by Su Shi that would not know about from his poetry or his prose in other forms. The letters, even the most prosaic and quotidian of them, that is, those that might be considered devoid of literary interest, enhance our understanding of Su Shi the poet by providing a context in which his poetry may be set. It is a different type of context from that provided by the poetry itself, considered as a integral body of material, or that constituted by the voluminous secondary sources from the period that record Su’s activities or report other’s observations concerning him. The letters provide a new way of gauging what Su Shi says and what he does not say in his poetry and other literary works. In this section I will discuss four general subject areas in which the letters serve this function: persecution, personal finances and the economics of daily life, circumstances in exile, and social welfare initiatives. 1.1 Political Persecution3 Su’s letters frequently express his anxiety and apprehensions over the persecution that dogged him for the second half of his life, essentially through all the years after his arrest and trial in 1079, right down to his final exile in Hainan Island from 1097–1100. Throughout this entire period, many of his letters to friends and relatives end with a common injunction that the message or communication must be kept secret. The injunction is typically expressed in one of a few ways, for example: “when you finish reading this 3  For letters written under conditions of political persecution see also Jie Li’s article about Shen Congwen in this volume.

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letter, burn it” 看訖, 便火之;4 “after you read this once, give it to Master Ying for safe keeping, you must not show it to anyone else” 只一讀了,付穎師收, 勿示餘人;5 “this poem [that I’m sending you], you must not show to anyone else” 此詩慎勿示人;6 “I hope you will act on this advice [or plan for local improvements I have presented here], but whatever you do you must not tell anyone it originated with me” 此事切勿令人知出不肖之言也.7 Su’s arrest and trial in 1079 made it abundantly clear that he could no longer assume that anything he wrote would not circulate far beyond the purview of the recipient for whom the writing was intended. It is true that many of the writings used as evidence of slander and defamation against him were “public” writings such as inscriptions for buildings. But several of the writings marshaled as evidence against him were poems that had been written for and sent to particular friends. Some of these presumably were writings that Su never expected to be seen by anyone other than the recipient (an issue to which we will return below). But such was Su Shi’s fame by the mid 1070s that there was a small industry of collecting his writings together, especially his poems, and printing them. It was book sellers who printed them, but these merchants were aided in their efforts by others, including men Su hardly knew, if at all, who took it upon themselves to go around to his real friends, persuading them to share with them whatever Su had recently sent them. It was printed collections of his writings that got Su in political trouble in 1079. The formal indictments against him specifically refer to the existence of printed copies of his works, and it is clear that the court authorities viewed these as a particular and new kind of threat to their authority.8 We know that such second-hand collecting of Su’s works was going on from communications that some of these persons sent to Su. Some of these persons even thought they were doing Su Shi a favor by gathering together his recent poetic compositions. In one such case, when a certain Chen Chuandao 陳傳道 sent to Su a collection he had made of Su’s poems written in Hangzhou in the 1070s, which he planned to have printed, Su’s reaction was a sharp rebuke: . . . My Qiantang (i.e., Hangzhou) poems were all written carelessly, with­ out forethought. Now you have gone to the trouble of collecting and recording them, one by one. All you’re doing is exposing their shortcomings! I have recently been annoyed that merchants, out for profit, like to 4  “Yu Li Gongze shiqi shou” 與李公擇十七首, no. 11, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 51.5617. 5  “Yu Canliaozi ershiyi shou” 與參寥子二十一首, no. 18, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 61.6723. 6  “Da Fan Chufu shiyi shou” 答范純夫十一首, no. 11, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 50.5424. 7  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou” 與程正輔七十一首, no. 49, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.6021. 8  See Egan, Word, Image, and Deed, 46–53; Hartman, “Poetry and Politics in 1079.”

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print copies of my unworthy writings, and have wanted to destroy all the woodblocks. How could I allow someone else, like you, to print them? . . .9 . . . 錢塘詩皆率然信筆,一一煩收錄,只以暴其短耳。某方病市 人逐利,好刊某拙文,欲毀其板,矧欲更令人刊邪!. . . (Throughout this chapter, ellipsis marks in the translation indicate that the passage translated is not the entire letter. Where there are no ellipsis marks, the entire letter is translated, at least the entire letter as it has been preserved. It is possible, even likely, that some letters were excerpted in the transmission process, either by Su himself or later editors.) It was not only communications by Su sent to other persons, whether poems or letters, that somehow entered into general circulation. As Su frequently observes, all sorts of things that he wrote down, even presumably drafts of various kinds of documents, kept disappearing.10 People around him made off with them. Su’s fame, after all, was not just as a poet. He was a famous calligrapher as well, and was also simply a famous personality. All sorts of people would have liked to boast that they had a page with writing on it by Su Shi. One might be tempted to think that in his insistence that friends destroy the letters he sends them, or at the least that they take care not to show them to anyone else, that Su Shi was being paranoid. But Su would reject this conclusion. He specifically says, in a letter of 1091 to his good friend Wang Gong 王鞏, that completely innocent words he exchanges with friends are now being used by his enemies against him.11 This was a man who would eventually have an extremely serious charge brought against him for writing poetic lines about enjoying bird songs in spring. The charge was that those lines, written around the time of the death of Emperor Shenzong in 1085, were a veiled repudiation of that ruler by celebrating nature’s renewal upon his death.12 Eventually, those charges were dropped, but at the time they were made they constituted a serious threat to him. Earlier, during his Huangzhou exile, Su reports to another friend the news that he has just heard from one of his sons when the son joined 9  “Yu Chen Chuandao wu shou” 與陳傳道五首, no. 2, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 53.5905. 10  “Da Li Fangshu shiqi shou” 答李方叔十七首, no. 2, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 53.5913; “Yu Huang Dong xiucai er shou” 與黃洞秀才二首, no. 1, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 57.6333; “Yu Wang Dingguo shishiyi shou” 與王定國四十一首, no. 13, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 52.5696. 11  “Yu Wang Dingguo sishiyi shou,” no. 26, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 52.5716. The commentators plausibly suggest that Su is referring to the charges brought against him that year for supposedly having colluded with Qin Guan 秦觀, sharing privileged court information with him, see 5717–18, no. 2. 12  Egan, Word, Image, and Deed, 102–3.

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him from the capital: Su’s enemies up north were just waiting to get their hands on any new composition by him so that they could write their “commentaries” on it and use it against him.13 It is little wonder, then, that upon Su’s exile to Huangzhou, his family and friends repeatedly urged him to stop writing altogether. His brother pleaded with him, Su tells another relative, not just to stop writing but to burn all his brushes and inkstones, so he would not fall back into his old habits.14 Without Su’s letters, we would never perceive the extent of Su’s feeling of besiegement at the hands of his enemies. It is in his letters that Su is able to step outside of conventions that would mitigate against including anything so personal and desperate in, for example, the more decorous form of poetry as a plea that a written communication be destroyed as soon as it had been read. If we found such an injunction in a poem at all, which is unlikely, it would be hard to know how seriously it was intended. When we find it time and again in his letters, coupled with similar requests that secrecy be maintained, that poems not be shown to others, that Su not be identified as the source of an innocuous idea for a public works project, etc., we have no trouble taking it seriously.15 Extrapolating from such demands in his letters, we see that Su’s own perception of the political forces arrayed against him was profound. That perception may have been at a level of paranoia, but it does not seem to have been a paranoid one. 1.2 Personal Finances It is hardly surprising that Su’s letters reveal aspects of his personal finances and the economics of daily life that are likewise missing from other of his writings. The letters are the closest we get in any writing produced by Su to the mundane exigencies of day-to-day living. A host of topics that are rarely if ever broached in literary writings, including domestic disputes, illness, childbirth and death, etc., regularly occur in them. The attention that a head-of-household and the sole salary earner in his nuclear family would almost inevitably give to family finances are among this range of concerns. We might expect that in elite society, the level of high official rank in the imperial government, individuals would be free from worries about having enough money to support themselves and their families. We would be wrong. Any man who managed to earn himself a place in the imperial bureaucracy, 13  “Huangzhou yu ren wu shou” 黃州與人五首, no. 2, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 60.6665. 14  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” no. 16, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.5968. 15  That letters “can open our eyes to realms beyond poems” is also stressed in Ellen Widmer’s article in this volume.

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whether by arduously climbing up through the multi-tiered examination system, or by some other means, was likely to find himself the sole holder of such appointment among his generation of his clan and expected to use to official salary and other perks to provide financial support not only to his immediate family but to other clan members as well. It was, furthermore, a rare career in the bureaucracy that did not include setbacks and periods of demotion, when the salary earned during the high points of one’s career would be drastically reduced. Then there lurked in every career the possibility of incrimination, whether warranted or not, humiliation, or even exile, when one’s official salary might be effectively cut off altogether. The moment of first entry into official service was, it is true, a personal financial bonanza. But it did not mean that one could look forward to a lifetime free of fiscal worries or calamities. Su Shi had his share of both. His extended periods of exile were particularly difficult for him financially. During these periods (including five years in Huangzhou, four years in Huizhou, and three years in Hainan Island) he seems to have received no official salary at all, although he always retained at least a nominal level of appointment, even in exile. Of course Su had savings from his years of prior official service. But since his exiles were for unspecified periods of time, he had no way of knowing when he might return to regular service and begin receiving again some semblance of the official salary he had formerly enjoyed. Su Shi’s best-known statement about coping with his fiscal difficulties in exile is an amusing account he put into a letter to Qin Guan 秦觀: . . . When I first arrived at Huangzhou, since my salary was cut off and my household still had many mouths to feed, I was very distressed. I decided I’d have to economize stringently and not allow myself to spend more than 150 cash per day. On the first day of each month I set out 4,500, which I divide up into thirty portions. I put each in a bag and hang it from the roof beams. Each morning I use a painted pole with a hook to take down one portion, then I hide the pole away. I store whatever I don’t spend that day in a large bamboo chest, so that I have something when guests come calling. I learned this method from Jia Yunlao. I figure that my savings are enough to hold me over a year and some. After that I’ll make another plan. Flowing water digs its own channel: there’s no reason to worry in advance about the future. Because I think this way, my heart is free of any concern. . . .16 16  “Da Qin Taixu qi shou” 答秦太虛七首, no. 4, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 52.5754.

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. . . 初到黃,廩入既絕,人口不少,私甚憂之,但痛自節儉,日用 不得過百五十。每月朔便取四千五百錢,斷為三十塊,掛屋梁 上。平旦,用畫叉挑取一塊,即藏去叉,仍以大竹筒別貯,用不 盡者,以待賓客,此賈耘老法也。度囊中尚可支一歲有餘,至時 別作經畫,水到渠成,不須預慮,以此胸中都無一事。... This is obviously intended to be humorous and probably crafted in an attempt to reassure Qin Guan about his welfare. Su actually put this account of his “roof beam financing” into two different letters, this one to Qin Guan and another one to Wang Gong.17 The repetition suggests that Su was pleased with what he had written. There is often a jocular element in Su Shi’s references to his financial plight in exile. But that does not mean the plight was not real or that he did not have well-founded worries about how he would continue to support his family if the exile dragged on for a lengthy period. Years later, early in his Huizhou exile, Su writes with trepidation about the prospect of his family members, including his sons and their families, on the eve of their arrival to live with him. You tell me that my younger family members have already reached you [in Boluo], the news is truly a source of joy to me in my exile. Yet young and old there are so many of them: the mouths are many and food is scarce. Now I think that maybe my former solitude and loneliness weren’t so bad after all! 示諭幼累已到,誠流寓中一喜事。然老穉紛紛,口眾食貧,向 之孤寂,未必不佳也.18 The following letter, also from Su’s Huangzhou exile period, reveals a more complex mix of emotions concerning the new frugality that the loss of his official salary forced upon him: I bow to you. I know that as you prepare for your trip it is not easy to curtail your expenses. I was fifty years old before I learned how manage my daily affairs. Essentially, it is a matter of stinginess, but we beautify it with a nice sounding name, calling it “being frugal and simple.” Still, when our 17  “Yu Wang Dingguo sishiyi shou,” no. 8, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 52.5686. 18  “Yu Lin Tianhe ershisi shou” 與林天和二十四首, no. 12, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 55.6079. Lin was then serving as magistrate of Boluo (near Huizhou), and Su’s family must have passed that place en route to Huizhou. Lin had evidently written to Su to tell him of his family’s arrival there.

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kind does it, we are not like the commoners. In our case, it truly can be called “what is plain but still has flavor”! Moreover, the Classic of Poetry says, “If he does not restrict himself and does not endure hardship, he will not receive good fortune.” As for the desires of mouth and body, what limit do they have? And so we need to regulate ourselves and be frugal; this is the way to cherish good fortune and extend long life. This practice resembles the ways of crude commoners and it is borne of necessity. But I consider it the best plan anyway. I don’t dare to keep it to myself, and so I present it now to you. When you take up residence in the capital, you’ll find this a particularly good strategy. Ha-ha! Ha-ha!19 某頓首。知治行窘用不易。仆行年五十,始知作活。大要是慳 爾,而文以美名,謂之儉素。然吾儕為之,則不類俗人,真可謂 淡而有味者。又《詩》云:「不戢不難,受福不那。」口體之 慾,何窮之有,每加節儉,亦是惜福延壽之道。此似鄙俗,且出 於不得已。然自謂長策,不敢獨用,故獻之左右。住京師,尤宜 用此策也。一笑!一笑! This was sent to Li Chang 李常 in 1083, soon after Li was recalled to the court from a provincial post. Su Shi is writing to send Li good wishes on his upcoming return to the capital, and to share with him some wisdom he has learned in his newly reduced situation in exile. This letter has considerably less of the bravado evident in the letter to Qin Guan. By now Su was in his third year in Huangzhou. He had begun farming a piece of land there to grow his own food, his saving having been depleted. He is no longer boasting about how amusing and clever is his strategy for economizing. In this letter Su Shi vacillates between candor (it is “stinginess” but we call it by another name), pride (we’re not like those tight-fisted commoners), stoic acceptance (such restrictions are good for us in the long run), anxiety and shame (we are just like those commoners and we have no choice), and denial (this is all just a joke!). It is evident that his newfound poverty or sense of selfdiminution worries him considerably, and he does not know exactly what to make of it or even how to represent it to himself and his friend. An interesting aspect of references to finances in Su’s letters concerns the economics of art. This is a subject on which literati of Su’s day are almost uniformly silent in their more formal writings. Even in informal letters, it surfaces but rarely. We do not get nearly enough information to actually reconstruct a good picture of the economics of art production and the art market of the time. 19  “Yu Li Gongze shiqi shou” 與李公擇十七首, no. 10, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 51.5615.

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What we get instead are tantalizing glimpses of the monetary value of calligraphy and painting, as the subject pops up randomly in Su’s life and letters. As mentioned earlier, Su Shi keeps referring to how whatever he writes keeps disappearing. People take his writing away, partly for its monetary value as a specimen of the great man’s calligraphy. Once we know this, we are less surprised to read about the practice of actually using calligraphy as currency to pay for services. Su Shi says in a letter that he was accustomed to giving the Huangzhou doctor Pang Anchang 龐安常 a few pages of calligraphy in running or draft script in exchange for medical care. The Jiujiang doctor Daoist Hu 胡道師 was similarly compensated by Su for his services. Knowing of this habit, when Su’s friend, the Buddhist monk Canliao 參寥 wanted to consult Daoist Hu about a medical problem and had no cash, he wrote to Su Shi to ask for some calligraphy to give the man. Su wrote back, partly in jest no doubt, suggesting that since Caoliao was a poet in the mode of celebrated Tang monkpoets, he compose some “enlightenment poetry” to pay the doctor with.20 Another intriguing letter broaches the monetary value of paintings by Su Shi. A commoner friend of his, Jia Shou 賈收 (Jia Yunlao 賈耘老) used to complain to Su of his poverty (Jia was the man who taught Su the roof beam economizing technique, as we saw earlier). After he left Huangzhou, Su Shi once sent him a painting of a strange rock and old tree, a favorite subject of his. The accompanying letter is this: Today on my boat I had nothing to do and my ten fingers felt like a drumstick suspended. Someone happened to send me some tasty wine, and drinking a cup alone by myself, I became tipsy right away. Recalling that you, Recluse Jia, are so impoverished and have nothing to console yourself with, I drew this painting of a strange rock and old tree. Whenever you are hungry you can unroll it to take a look at it. I wonder if it will suffice to fill you up? If there is a devotee of such things in Wuxing who will supply you every month with three catties of rice and three measures of wine until the end of your days, then you should give it to him. Otherwise, you can have Double Lotus Leaves pack it away, until Tianding grows up, and give it to him.21 今日舟中無他事,十指如懸槌,適有人致嘉酒,遂獨飲一杯,醺 然徑醉。念賈處士貧甚,無以慰其意,乃為作怪石古木一紙,每 遇饑時,輒一開看,還能飽人否?若吳興有好事者,能為君月致

20  “Yu Hu daoshi si shou” 與胡道師四首, no. 1, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 60.6682. 21  “Yu Jia Yunlao si shou” 與賈耘老四首, no. 4, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 57.6324.

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米三石酒三斗終君之世者,便以贈之。不爾者,可令雙荷葉收 掌,須添丁長,以付之也。 Having recently been recalled from his Huangzhou exile, after being kept in the dark about his political future for five years, Su Shi had reentered officialdom and elite society again. He probably had a new appreciation of his national fame, especially since the New Policies had now fallen out-of-favor. As a long-time critic of those policies, it must have seemed to Su now that his future at the court was bright indeed. Remembering his old impoverished friend, Jia Shou, whom Su Shi could not help in officialdom because Jia had never entered the bureaucracy, Su has the idea of sending him a painting. His choice of subject matter would have had new significance now, because it took on new meaning, suggesting Su’s successful endurance of a long and trying exile in Huangzhou, having cultivated a “craggy” personality that did not seek to ingratiate itself with those in power and his ability to sustain himself in adversity like an old tree. Perhaps Su Shi is half-serious when he suggests that Jia Shou might keep the painting and use it to fortify his soul when he is feeling hard-pressed and hungry. Perhaps Su means it when he mentions that Jia might have his concubine (that is who Double Lotus Leaves must be) put it away and give it to his son. But I strongly suspect that Su Shi expected Jia Shou to sell the painting, knowing that it might bring him a small fortune, as Su Shi himself describes in his letter. Of course Su Shi cannot bring himself to name a price the painting might fetch. He describes its value only in terms of how “a devotee of such things” might be willing to compensate Jia for such a treasure. Essentially, Su Shi is thinking that the painting might have enough value to provide the impoverished Jia with adequate food and drink for the rest of his life. Is this hyperbole, intended to bring a smile to Jia Shou’s face when he reads it? For a recluse living in an out-of-the-way countryside home, it may not be. 1.3 The Deprivations of Exile Su’s predominant reaction to the calamity of exile was to write poetry that shows him to be upbeat in the face of the humiliation, to be adjusting readily to his new life in a remote place he had never expected to be sent, and even to be exploring with curiosity and interest his new surroundings (as we have already seen). We can point to a few factors to account for this tone and outlook that he generally maintains in his exile poetry. One is his belief that a man of moral character and cultivation should not be affected by reduced circumstances. This is the same commitment to large-minded transcendence of mundane deprivations that is widespread in literati (wenren 文人) thinking of his time. Accordingly, when Li Chang persisted in commiserating with Su Shi

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over his plight in exile in Huangzhou, Su Shi runs out of patience with him and sends back this sharp reply: I report: The new poems that you sent all express your despondency over our distant separation. I know you care deeply for me, but I always reciprocate toward you with a “heart of iron and viscera of stone.” Why? Although our kind may be aged and hard-pressed, the Way and principle permeate our hearts and livers, and loyalty and rightness fill the marrow of our bones. We chat and laugh as we come face to face with death. If you feel pity for me when you see me caught in hardship, then you are acting not unlike someone who has never studied the Way. . . .22 某啟:示及新詩,皆有遠別惘然之意,雖兄之愛我厚,然僕本 以鐵心石腸待公,何乃爾耶?吾儕雖老且窮,而道理貫心肝, 忠義填骨髓,直須談笑於 死生之際,若見僕困窮便相於邑,則 與不學道者大不相遠矣。... Second, there is an element of defiance in Su Shi’s persistent buoyancy in the midst of his exiles (as I have discussed elsewhere).23 Su knows there is a good chance that any poem he writes will, sooner or later, come to the attention of his political enemies back in the capital. He writes as he does partly to show them and everyone else that his enemies have not succeeded in breaking his spirit. He wants them to see their failure in this matter. Third, the fatalism that informs so much of Su’s literary expression served him well during periods of political setback and deprivation. He was not going to give himself up to despair as a poet because he had long since become comfortable with the idea that the vicissitudes of his life were beyond his control. As he says in a poem written on the eve of returning from Hainan Island, “Life, death, and dreams in this life of mine,/ Are no longer distinguished as good or bad” 平生生死夢, 三者無劣優.24 Yet in his informal letters, unlike in his poetry, Su Shi occasionally lets his guard down and writes candidly about the deprivation and humiliation he felt in exile. His circumstances in Hainan Island were particularly grim. This is how he describes them in a letter to a young man he had befriended the year before in Huizhou, which now seemed attractive to him by contrast:

22  “Yu Li Gongze shiqi shou,” no. 11, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 51.5617. 23  Egan, Word, Image, and Deed, 250–61. 24  “Bie Hainan Limin biao” 別海南黎民表, Su Shi shiji 43.2363.

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. . . Where I am now, there is no meat for meals, no medicine for sickness, no rooms in my dwelling, no friends when I go out, no coal in winter, and no cool springs in summer. It is not easy to make a complete list. Basically, there’s none of anything. There’s only one good thing: there’s not much malaria either. Recently, my youngest son and I built a hut for ourselves a few spans wide out of reeds tied together. It barely protects us from the wind and rain, and yet the expense of building it was considerable. We relied on some ten students to help with the labor. Mucking about in the mud as we worked, the humiliation of it cannot be described. . . .25 ...此間食無肉,病無藥,居無室,出無友,冬無炭,夏無寒 泉,然亦未易悉數,大率皆無耳。惟有一幸,無甚瘴也。近與 小兒子結茅數椽居之,僅庇風雨,然勞費已不貲矣。賴十數學 生助工作,躬泥水之役,愧之不可言也。... Yet this degree of candor and discouragement is unusual in Su’s letters. It is more common for him to write with a certain wry wit about his deprivations. Consider this letter to his younger brother, Ziyou, sent in 1095, his second year in Huizhou: The market in Huizhou is dismal. Still, everyday they slaughter one goat. I don’t dare to compete with the officials to buy any of the regular meat from it, but from time to time I tell the butchers that I’ll buy the backbone. There’s a bit of meat between the vertebrae. First, I boil the backbone in water and take it out as soon as it’s cooked (if you don’t take it out right away, the meat will hold water and never dry out). Then I soak it in wine, add a little salt, and roast it until it’s slightly charred before I start eating it. I pick away at it all day long, getting one morsel after another from among the sinews and tendons, as pleased as I can be. It’s like eating crabs. I eat one every few days, and feel it is very beneficial for my health. Ziyou, for three years you ate in the court dining hall. You could sink a whole tooth into the rich meats you ate there without ever encountering a bone—when did you ever enjoy such a delicious flavor? I write this out in jest to send to you. Although it’s written in jest, the usefulness of what I’m describing is real enough. Nevertheless, if my method catches on, the stray dogs here will not be happy!26

25  “Yu Cheng xiucai san shou” 與程秀才三首, no. 1, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 55.6068. 26  “Yu Ziyou di shi shou” 與子由弟十首, no. 7, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 60.6638.

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惠州市井寥落,然猶日殺一羊,不敢與仕者爭買,時囑屠者買 其脊骨耳。骨間亦有微肉,熟煑熱漉出 (不乘熱出,則抱水不 乾),漬酒中,點薄鹽炙微焦食之。終日抉剔,得銖兩於肯綮之 間,意甚喜之。如食蟹螯,率數日輒一食,甚覺有補。子由三 年食堂庖,所食芻豢,沒齒而不得骨,豈復知此味乎?戲書此 紙遺之,雖戲語,實可施用也。然此說行,則眾狗不悅矣。 Given the detail Su includes about how he prepares the goat backbone, there is no doubt this is something he actually did. Yet as Su writes about it, the goat meat becomes more than just a food. It takes on meaning as revelatory of a frame of mind Su adopts in exile, a determination to find unexpected pleasures amid an almost unimaginable diminution of life circumstances. Su is also developing here a contrast between court life and existence in exile (between Ziyou’s previous three years of supping at the court dining hall and Su Shi’s goat backbone), in which the latter is said to be preferable to the former. Doing this, Su Shi turns the long poetic tradition of the exile’s self-pity on its head. In exile, remarkably enough, Su Shi found a way to free himself of the poet’s obsession with the court that had banished him. Once thus liberated, his mind was free to explore what new distractions and pleasures might be found in this region he never expected to inhabit. Yet at some level he remains conscious of the injustice of it all, and wants his reader to be too. The closing reference to the stray dogs is pure Su Shi. He told us in the letter’s opening that he does not dare to compete with the local officials for this crude meat. Now he reminds us whom he is really competing with, over the portion of the butchered carcass that would normally get thrown away: the stray dogs. Su’s informal letters also allow us to glimpse the emotional and psychological impact that the experience of exile had upon him. Exile did not simply mean material deprivation for Su Shi. In addition, exile caused Su Shi to rethink who he was and who he had been. This it another facet of the liberation just mentioned. We see something of this reevaluation of the self in a section of a letter Su sent from Huizhou to Wang Xiang 王廂: . . . Old and infirm now, I abandoned my studies long ago. In recent times I don’t go near my brush and inkstone. When I see the writings I composed as a young man, it is like they are from another lifetime, like they were written by someone else. Now you want me to discuss them with you, this is to expect a thousand mile gallop from a horse resting in its stable. In my youth all I wanted was to go into hiding in the hills and woods, but my father and elders would not permit it, and pressured me to marry

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and enter officialdom, and so I’ve been engulfed in such matters down to today. Since transferring south, I have discharged all my worldly affairs. Now I am empty and have not a single possession to entangle me, just like an itinerant Buddhist monk. . . .27 ...老朽廢學久矣,近日尤不近筆硯,見少時所作文,如隔世 事、他人文也。足下猶欲使議論其間,是顧千里于伏櫪也。軾 少時本欲逃竄山林,父兄不許,迫以婚宦,故汩沒至今。南遷 以來,便自處置生事,蕭然無一物,大略似行腳僧也。... Those who have studied the lifelong literary output of Su Shi know how key his exile periods were to his development as poet. It was exile periods that accelerated his creativity as shown in exploration of new genres and modes of expression. We infer from his innovations as a poet the importance the experience of exile had upon him as a writer. But in his informal letters such as this one, we see more directly the rethinking of his identity and self-image that exile occasioned in him. 1.4 Local Social Welfare Initiatives Su Shi’s activities in national politics, which landed him in so much trouble both with his political opponents and his erstwhile allies, are well known. They are the basis of accounts of the political side of his biography. Less well known is the long string of social welfare initiatives he took in one after another provincial locale, either as a local official (e.g., governor) or even as a banished official stripped of high office.28 Here, I want to focus on the ways Su’s letters shed light on these local initiatives of his, particularly during his exile periods. It should first be said that we would not know about many of the initiatives Su undertook in the provinces, especially those when he was in exile, if not for the survival of his letters. Su does not bring these matters up in other of his writings, his more formal ones. As an exile Su Shi was prohibited from “speaking out” on government affairs—this stipulation was explicitly put in certain of his exile decrees (e.g., the one to Huangzhou). Naturally, then, Su Shi would not bring up any ideas he had for local improvements in his poetry or formal prose writings. He could only do so in a form of writing that he expected to be a private and confidential communication between himself and his addressee, who was typically a local governor or other official who was in a position to adopt the measures that Su was suggesting.

27  “Yu Wang Xiang wu shou” 與王庠五首, no. 1, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 60.6585. 28  For an earlier discussion of these, see my Word, Image, and Deed, 108–33.

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The most remarkable aspect of these initiatives is that as an exiled official and one who was formally prohibited from “speaking out” on any issue of governance or policy that Su would do so at all, and risk doing so in writing. He clearly sensed that there was risk involved because so many of these letters end with injunctions that they not be shown to anyone or that the recipient never reveal that Su was the originator of the idea. To suggest the range of initiatives that Su Shi came up with, I list here those we find in letters written during his four-year Huizhou exile:

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rebuilding hundreds of residences in the town of Boluo 博羅 that had been destroyed in a fire.29 raising money to help a monk construct a life saving pond 放生池 in a newly renovated monastery. The pond was to be over one li long (onethird of a mile), and Su estimates that several dozen thousand fish could be released annually into it.30 construction of military barracks, to provide better housing for local militia and to diminish incidents of disaffected soldiers taking out their frustrations on the local populace.31 construction of two floating bridges (New East Bridge, and New West Bridge) at Huizhou river crossings, as a alternative to dangerous ferry crossings.32 relief for residents of Guangzhou, after a typhoon destroyed some two thousand homes there.33 price stabilization measures in an attempt to prevent the price of rice in Huizhou from falling to such low levels that farmers would be unable to support themselves.34 piping fresh drinking water into Guangzhou from nearby mountains. The people of Guangzhou lack suitable drinking water.35 construction of a hospital in Guangzhou. It is a city that traders from many places regularly converge, and outbreaks of disease are common.36

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29  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” no. 18, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.5972–73. 30  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” no. 23, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.5978–79. 31  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” no. 30, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.5987–90. 32  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” nos. 27, 30, 31, 60, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.5983, 5987–88, 5994, 6040. 33  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” no. 41, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.6007. 34  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” no. 47, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.6012–13. 35  “Yu Wang Minzhong shiba shou” 與王敏中十八首, nos. 11, 15, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 56.6238–39, 6243. 36  “Yu Wang Minzhong shiba shou,” no. 9, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 56.6237.

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To these, we may add the best-known of Su’s exile initiatives, the proposal to curb female infanticide in Ezhou (adjacent to Su’s Huangzhou), a proposal that Su made to the prefect there, by creating through private donations a fund to provide temporary relief to expectant impoverished families.37 There were also more modest plans to distribute medicine in Danzhou, Hainan Island (as he had done in Huizhou), where Su says, the people have no medicine of any kind to speak of.38 There is a persistent almost obsessive quality to these initiatives that Su kept coming up with. Among his hundreds of informal letters, it is precisely the ones proposing local building projects and reforms that are the longest, running to several thousand characters. Whether the challenge at hand is stabilizing local rice prices, building soldier barracks, or piping in fresh drinking water from the mountains, Su Shi tries to cover the logistical, fiscal, and social considerations in exhaustive detail. Interestingly, it also tends to be with the longest and most detailed plans that Su Shi is most insistent that he not be identified as the person who came up with the idea.39 If we are looking for an explanation of Su’s persistence in his efforts to improve the lives of commoners where he found himself living, we may find something of that in his letters too. There is, first, the Buddhist aspect to these projects. Nearly all of them are intended, ultimately, to save life (of people, mostly, or even fish). The bridge project or projects in Huizhou, for example, should not be thought of simply as civil engineering meant to facilitate travel and transport. On the contrary, Su makes it clear in his letters on the subject that the river was so rough and the boat crossing so difficult that boats were capsizing regularly and people were drowning. In one of his Huizhou letters to the monk Nanhua Bianlao 南華辯老 Su explicitly cites Buddhist intentions behind several of his welfare undertakings in Huizhou, including the building of bridges, the construction of lodgings, the dispensation of medicine, and the interment of exposed corpses. By arranging such acts, Su says, he tried to use up his surplus cash and thus rid himself of worldly impediments.40 But to credit all of these efforts that Su undertook to Buddhism is too simplistic. There is something else at work here, though it is not as readily named 37  See my Word, Image, and Deed, 128–30. 38  “Yu Cheng Quanfu shier shou” 與程全父十二首, no. 12, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 55.6067. 39  See, on militia barracks, “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” no. 30, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.5987–90; on rice price stabilization, “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” nos. 47 and 49, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.6012–14, 6018–21; and, on fresh drinking water, “Yu Wang Minzhong shiba shou,” no. 11, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 56.6238–39. 40  “Yu Nanhua Bianlao shisan shou” 與南華辯老十三首, no. 12, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 61.6750.

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or recognized as the Buddhist impulse to safeguard life. It too is broached, with varying degrees of directness, in Su’s letters. It is Su’s commitment to “involvement with things” 及物 (also “involvement with the people” 及民), which for him means bringing benefit to the local populace.41 The Daoist Deng 鄧道士 took the lead in fund-raising for the bridge-building project, and Su praises him for “always being intent on self-sacrifice to benefit others” 常欲損己濟物.42 Su similarly praises Lin Tianhe 林天和, the magistrate of Boluo County (the site of the fire mentioned above), for “working for the people without a thought for himself” 忘己為民.43 We might call this a Confucian commitment to benefit the populace under one’s charge, although as we see with Daoist Deng the impulse is hardly found only among Confucian bureaucrats. It was, for Su Shi, a life-long orientation. When his friend Wang Gong wrote to Su Shi in Hangzhou in 1090 to explain that he has, late in life, resigned himself to quietude and does not seek to be involved in worldly affairs anymore, Su writes back showing his disapproval.44 Many “great men” in history performed deeds of outstanding merit in their later years, Su observes. We need not go looking for things do so, he allows, but when an opportunity comes along to do something beneficial we seize upon it, no matter how trivial or how much trouble it may be. Su is thinking of the extensive efforts toward famine relief and lake dredging he was just then undertaking in Hangzhou.45 Su looked upon social aloofness for members of his class as self-indulgence. Finally, these letters from exile periods proposing local improvements put Su’s long record as initiator of projects and reforms as a prefectural official in a new light. Those reforms include, in addition to the famine relief and lake reconstruction just mentioned, debt abatement in Hangzhou and Yangzhou, dike building in Xuzhou, the construction of barracks for the militia in Dingzhou, improving medical care for prisoners in several places, the establishment of a public hospital in Hangzhou, etc.46 The exile initiatives suggest how deep-seated was Su’s commitment to social involvement, so much so that periods of removal from office and the resultant termination any personal or institutional responsibility for the betterment of local conditions did not bring it to an end. If one is inclined to view Su’s record as a local governor with 41  Word, Image, and Deed, 76–81, 127–28, 135–36. The phrase jimin 及民 occurs in “Yu Zhang Junyu wu shou” 與張君予五首, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 55.6126. 42  “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou,” no. 38, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 54.6003. 43  “Yu Lin Tianhe ershisi shou,” no. 6, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 55.6075. 44  “Yu Wang Dingguo sishiyi shou,” no. 21, Su Shi quanji 52.5710. 45  Word, Image, and Deed, 108–22. 46  Ibid., 122–27.

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skepticism, supposing that it might have been largely calculated to win him local acclaim and thus embarrass his national political enemies, it becomes more difficult to maintain such doubts when we see that he sustained his efforts as local improvements even when he had to act anonymously, keeping his role as initiator of social reforms secret to everyone except the local official to whom he addressed his ideas for initiatives. Another possibility suggests itself here. We know in general that letters that announce themselves as private or even covert communications may, in fact, be intended to circulate widely. In other words, the appearance of private communication may be nothing more than a cultivated pose calculated to persuade a larger audience that what they are reading is the writer’s innermost thoughts, not intended to be shared with anyone but the recipient. In this case, the rhetoric of privacy between writer and his recipient is being exploited by the writer for ulterior motives. We know that this often happens in letters, or perhaps we should say that we suspect that it is a strategy often employed by letter writers. It cannot be denied that many of Su Shi’s letters, particularly those on local public works initiatives under discussion above, show Su in a very favorable light. They show him risking, as exiled official, further incrimination for involving himself in local governance, and doing so because he is so intent on improving local conditions and saving lives. Is it not possible that he wrote such letters knowing that they would eventually circulate (either sooner, in his own lifetime, or later, posthumously, as they indeed did), and that they would serve to vindicate him, highlighting estimable impulses that he retained even while in political disgrace? This is a question that is ultimately unanswerable, as it often is in personal letters written in many different periods and cultures. Of course it is true that Su Shi knew well that anything he wrote was likely to circulate and not be read solely by the person he sent it to. The fact that so many of his letters survive despite ending with the injunction that the document should be destroyed upon reading, or at least that it should not be shared with anyone else, shows that Su’s explicit requests that privacy be maintained were regularly disregarded. It would have been naive of Su not to realize this. On the other hand, political repression in Su Shi’s life was not an imaginary or distant force. It was very real and, during his periods of exile, must have seemed like the omnipresent aspect of his existence. As a writer who had repeatedly seen words he had written used against him by his political enemies, often after far-fetched interpretations of those words were forced upon them, Su had good reason to try to keep communications with friends private.

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There are, then, points favoring both possibilities: that he did write “private” letters with his mind set on a larger readership, and that he did not. It seems plausible to assume that both types of letters exist, side by side, in his collection. The problem, unfortunately, is that there is no objective criteria for deciding, regarding particular letters, which are which. The issue is further complicated when we realize that Su, like any writer, may have had multiple motives in mind, or some in mind and some he was not conscious of, any particular time he picked up a brush to write. We should recognize that we are venturing into very murky territory when we try to pinpoint a particular motive or range of motives that account for the genesis of any particular letter that Su (or any writer) composed. Yet we should also note how unusual it was for such a large corpus of informal letters to be gathered together posthumously and transmitted to posterity. There was really no precedent for the scale on which this occurred with Su Shi’s letters, partly because there were probably few persons who produced so many of this type of document, especially few who would eventually became so renowned. In other words, it seems unlikely that Su Shi could have anticipated that so many of his letters would eventually circulate publicly (just as it is unlikely he could have anticipated that he would become the iconic “Su Dongpo” of literary history). This consideration lends support to the possibility that many of the letters were written without one eye on posterity. 2

Literary Qualities

Su Shi’s large corpus of informal letters also has literary qualities that warrant our attention both for their inherent interest and the ways they complement his literary achievement in other forms. As mentioned earlier, these letters were excluded from Su’s “literary collection” as it was first constituted, because the form of chidu was not traditionally considered fit for inclusion in such a collection. That need not stop us from recognizing the literary interest and appeal that the letters have, as it has not stopped open-minded Chinese commentators and readers of pre-modern and modern times. The letters, indeed, have their own style and literary appeal. They stand apart from Su’s work in other genres, as we might expect, because the conventions of the form gave Su opportunities to develop in them a special manner of expression. The letters thus fill out the range of Su Shi’s work as a poet and prose stylist, exemplifying their own aspect of his literary skill. We may readily discern connections between the style of these letters and what Su cultivates

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in the canonical literary forms—in the other forms, that is, we often catch glimpses of the literary excellences found in the letters—but what the letters achieve as an expressive form is distinctive nonetheless. In the foregoing section we examined aspects of Su’s mundane existence revealed in the letters that are seldom if ever revealed in his other writings. As we turn now to the literary qualities of this corpus, we move somewhat further away from concern with the realia of his daily existence and closer to his affective life. In this section we will not draw a sharp distinction between literary style and the sentiments of the writerly persona. The two are inextricably bound together and expressed in tandem. Literary effect is largely personal affect in this form, and the analysis will move freely from one to the other. I will take up three topics, the first two more centered on language and writerly style and the last more centered on the emotions expressed: brevity and elegance of expression, literary allusion, humility and affection for friends. 2.1 Brevity and Elegance Unlike the more elevated “literary” forms, the informal letter exploits the expectation of directness and succinctness, making a virtue of brevity. The aesthetic of the letter is to strike a balance between verbal economy and meaning effectively conveyed. The goal is to have no wasted words while at the same time expressing thought in phrases that are learned, balanced, and decorous. The terseness expected in these informal communications, rightly employed, often produces an effect of nimble if not spontaneous expression. We might suppose that the lowliness of the form and the mundane nature of so much of the subject matter would result in language that verges on the colloquial or ordinary, careless organization, or the mere repetition of conventional sentiments in hackneyed phrases. In fact, those qualities are rarely evident in letters from Su’s hand. Instead, we find a rigorousness of thinking and trenchant meaningfulness of expression, even in just a few lines, combined with a certain formality of tone that lifts the letters well above anything that could be considered prosaic and ordinary. Three examples are given below: I report: exile and banishment are events I have brought upon myself because of my own foolishness and stupidity. My crimes are great and my punishment light. Apart from gratefulness for imperial benevolence and mindfulness of my own culpability, I do not harbor any other feelings in my chest. Gain and loss, after all, are universal principles in life, just as when you did not succeed in your examination attempt. As for the instructions you gave me in your farewell letter, that is certainly not

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the way to show affection for me. I hope you will refrain from using such language from now on. As for the rest, I cannot discuss it until we meet face to face.47 某啟。貶竄皆愚暗自取,罪大罰輕,感恩念咎之外,略不置胸 中也。得喪常理,正如子師及第落解爾。如別紙所諭,甚非見 愛之道。此等語切冀默之。余非面莫悉。 South of the city wall is the tomb of Yafu [Fan Zeng 范增, 277–204 BCE]. But it is not the real one. His actual tomb is found in Juchao.48 North of the city wall is the tomb of Liu Zizheng [Liu Xiang 劉向, 77 BCE–6 CE]. Years ago I wanted to build a shrine for him there, but because of flooding I was not able to do so. If you have any extra resources and are able to do so for me, it would be a wonderful thing. West of the city wall is the tomb of King Yuan of Chu [Liu Jiao 劉交, d. 179 BCE]. Once when I went out hunting, I passed before it. Stone Buddha Mountain is also a fine sight.49 城南有亞父塚,然非也。塚在居巢。城北有劉子政墓,昔欲為 起一祠堂,以水大不果。公若有餘力,為成之,亦佳。城西有 楚元王墓,曾出獵, 至其下。石佛山,亦佳觀。 I report: I understand that your grand banquet has ended early. Would you be able to come to my kitchen where we can cook some vegetables and talk into the night? Written hurriedly, please forgive me.50 某啟:知盛會早散,能過家庖煑菜夜話否?怱怱,不罪。 The first of these examples is a letter Su sent from his Huizhou exile to Du Yu 杜輿, a younger man Su had first met during his years in Huangzhou. The two were not particularly close. When Su was on his way to Huizhou, Du Yu must have sent him a message commiserating with his new banishment and probably expressing outrage with Su’s political enemies who had masterminded his demotion. Su rebuffs this expression of sympathy and support. He wants none of Du’s pity and even writes as if he really believes he deserves to have been sent into exile. Su must have felt it would be dangerous to accept Du’s assessment of the injustice that had been done to him, because such acceptance could get him in further trouble. Also, Su would have been constitutionally averse to such an expression of sympathy, particularly coming from someone 47  “Yu Du Zishi sishou” 與杜子師四首, no. 3, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 56.6188. 48  In modern Chaoxian 巢縣, Anhui. 49  “Yu Yang Yuansu shiqi shou” 與楊元素十七首, no. 12, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 55.6138. 50  “Yu Qian Mufu ershiba shou” 與錢穆父二十八首, no. 26, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 51.5659.

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he hardly knew. To accept what Du had written would amount to self-pity, and Su bristles at the prospect. Su’s impatience is most clearly shown by the reference he makes, quite unnecessarily, to Du’s failure to pass the exams. Receipt of this response must have been very deflating to the younger Du. The second letter above, which may have lost its opening, was sent to Yang Hui 楊繪 in 1086. Su was on his way back to the capital from a prematurely terminated appointment in Shandong, and Yang Hui, an old friend, was about to take up a new position as prefect of Xuzhou 徐州. Su himself had served as prefect in Xuzhou years before. Hearing that Yang was about to assume office there, Su writes to him about the historical sites that Xuzhou has, by way of introducing Yang to some of Xuzhou’s attractions. The letter concentrates on three tombs of prominent Han dynasty figures: Fan Zeng, a leading advisor to Xiang Yu, contender for the throne after the fall of the Qin, Liu Xiang, an important scholar and bibliographer, and Liu Jiao, younger brother of the Han founder, Gaozu. The letter is densely structured. Su permits himself only to identify the location of each tomb outside the city, and then to provide a little additional information of interest, either about the tomb itself or Su’s previous experience regarding it. This is essentially a letter conveying an insider’s information to a friend who is about to take up a position of authority in the locale. In the process of informing Yang Hui about the tombs, Su manages also to convey a correction of a common historical misidentification, suggest a worthy shrine project Yang might undertake, and lets Yang know where he might go hunting and visit other nearby sights worth seeing. The third letter was sent in 1093, while Su was serving in the capital, to his longtime friend Qian Xie 錢勰. The content and purpose of the letter are selfexplanatory. Qian Xie was a friend that Su Shi sometimes felt compelled to cheer up. The previous New Year’s, Qian had sent Su Shi a poem that contained a line about him being “a sad person with tears in his eyes.” Su wrote back mildly reproving him. It’s New Year’s, Su observed, a glorious time of year. You shouldn’t be sullen. I wish you a smile and a good time!51 Perhaps on the occasion of this letter Su was worried that Qian was similarly morose. The beauty of this short invitation, regardless, lies in the contrast Su constructs between the “grand banquet” Qian had just hosted (or attended) and the intimate and humble late-night get-together he envisions between the two friends. The reference to the two of them cooking vegetables and chatting together in Su’s kitchen could hardly stand in sharper juxtaposition to the formal banquet that Qian has just left. 51  “Yu Qian Mufu ershiba shou”, no. 21, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 51.5654.

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2.2 Allusion One of the ways that Su Shi cultivates a learned style in this humble form is to regularly use one of the staple techniques of the more prestigious genres, that of literary and historical allusion. He does this with great facility, drawing upon his encyclopedic knowledge of earlier writings, making the reference to the past seems effortless and natural, when in fact it is anything but. Two examples of letters with allusions follow. In each case, I present and translate the entire letter. I report: Zhang Shengtu visited me and I learned something about your recent activities, which was a source of consolation to me. What Tuizhi [Han Yu 韓愈, 768–824] regretted with a sigh, today I witness for myself. As the great craftsman looks on from the side, I am deeply ashamed of all the perspiration! Hurried as I am with my official travels, I cannot fully express my insignificant thoughts.52 某啟:張聖途來,稍聞動止,為慰。退之所歎,乃今見之。大 匠旁觀,愧汗深矣。行役怱怱,不盡區區。 When I saw Zhang Junyu, I first learned that petty men had used pretexts to attack you. Clerks and their underlings, naturally, do not know of Tuizhi’s “On Taboo Names,” but now we see that vice grand councilors are just the same! Nevertheless, promotion and demotion are determined by fate. How could such men constrict you for long? Knowing how extraordinary you are, I’m sure you will not let them cross your mind. As for me, although the hair at my temples is all white, my physical strength is undiminished from before. So long as I do not die soon, blessed as I am with the abundance of our sage ruler’s benevolence, which has brought me one more pardon, I may be allowed to retire as a farmer. Then, together we might carry hoes under the moonlight. Originally I thought only of going home to Shu, but now I do not know if I can really manage to do that or not. If I cannot go back to Shu, Hangzhou will be the best alternative. As Zhu Yi said, “My sons and grandsons will not sacrifice to me in the afterlife so well as the people of Tong County.” This unworthy man thinks the same. But nothing is certain in external affairs, and I will need to adjust to circumstances as I encounter them. So long as I do not die soon, I am sure to retire to a farm, one place or another. You say you want to follow me into the hills and streams, and I imagine this is what you truly desire. But flowing water digs its own channel, and there is no need to 52  “Yu He Zhengtong sanshou” 與何正通三首, no. 2, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 53.5902.

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worry in advance over what course events will take. This life, after all, resembles dewdrops and lightning. It is not something amenable to manipulation! I bow to you.53 某見張君俞,乃始知公中間亦為小人所捃摭,令史以下,固不知退 之《諱辨》也,而卿貳等亦爾耶!進退有命,豈此輩所能制,知公 奇偉,必不經懷也。某鬢髮皆 白,然體力原不減舊,或不即死, 聖澤汪洋,更一赦,或許歸農,則帶月之鋤,可以對秉也。本意專 欲歸蜀,不知能遂此計否?蜀若不歸,即以杭州為佳。朱邑有 言:「子孫奉祠我,不如桐鄉之民。」不肖亦云。然外物不可必, 當更臨時隨宜,但不即死,歸田可必也。公欲相從于溪山間,想是 真誠之願,水到渠成,亦不須預慮也。此生真同露電,豈通把玩 耶!某頓首。 In the first of these, the allusion is to a statement Han Yu made in his prayer tribute to Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819): as an unskillful woodworker cuts and chisels away, his face is covered with sweat. A skilled woodworker looks on from the side, keeping his hands in his sleeves.54 Han Yu means that he and his colleagues who were appointed to prestigious court positions for their writing ability were, compared to Liu Zongyuan, who never won such appointment, unskillful writers. It is a pity, Han Yu means, that the man of real talent had to idly watch us struggling with our duties from the side. Su Shi’s letter was sent to He Qufei 何去非, who in 1092 was serving as an instructor in the provincial academy in Xuzhou. Su Shi, when he wrote this letter, had just been recalled to the capital from Yangzhou, and was going to join the court as minister of the Ministry of War. In Su’s reformulation, Su himself is the perspiring unskillful worker, while He Qufei, lamentably underemployed in officialdom, looks on from the side. Su has added the thought that all his sweating, as he labors crudely at the tasks that He Qufei would discharge more skillfully, occasions him great shame.55 In the second letter above, the first allusion, again to an essay by Han Yu, works much like that in the first letter. Han Yu’s essay, “On Taboo Names,” was written in support of his friend Li He 李賀. In it, Han Yu argued that Li’s critics were wrong to say he should not take the jinshi examination out of respect for his father, who had not sat for the exam owing to a name taboo (the first syllable of his personal name, Jinsu 晉肅, was homophonous with jin 進 in the 53  “Yu Zheng Jinglao sishou” 與鄭靖老四首, no. 4, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 56.6195. 54  Han Yu, “Ji Liu Zihou wen” 祭柳子厚文, Han Changli wenji zhushi, 5.486. 55  For an even more elaborate use of allusions to Tang sources, see “Yu Jia Yunlao si shou” 與 賈耘老四首, no. 3, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 57.6323.

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term jinshi 進士). Su Shi’s letter was addressed to his friend Zheng Jinglao 鄭 靖老. Su means that there were petty men using flimsy excuses to block the advancement of his friend (just like those who had tried to block Li He), and that this time the troublemakers were powerful court officials, not just lowly clerks. But the more effective allusion in this letter is the later one. Zhu Yi 朱邑 was a Han dynasty figure whose first official appointment was as a tax official in Tong County (in northern Zhejiang), where he had a reputation for fairness and leniency. He later rose to high office at the court, but when he was about to die he directed his sons to bury him back in Tong County. The people there so esteemed him, he explained, he was confident that they would observe the ritual sacrifices to his spirit more dutifully even than his descendants would (if he were buried in his ancestral tomb in his native place, near Hefei in Anhui). The sons respected their father’s dying wish, and the people of Tong did, as predicted, attend diligently to his memory, building a shrine to honor him.56 Su Shi had served twice as official in Hangzhou, once as an assistant prefect in the 1070s and later as prefect from 1089 to 1091. It was during this later term of office in Hangzhou that Su had fought vigorously to avert famine in Hangzhou, after a string of natural disasters, by keeping the price of rice under control, dredged and reconstructed West Lake, so that a new dike stretching across the lake was named after him. Su’s letter to Zheng Jinglao was written in 1100, in the final months of his life, when he was returning north from his Hainan Island exile. He had not yet determined where he would settle, but he knew he probably did not have long to live. He would eventually settle in Changzhou, near Lake Tai, but when he wrote the letter he was still thinking of settling in Hangzhou. In any case, the prospect of dying and not being buried in one’s native place (distant Emei in Sichuan [Shu] for Su) would have been difficult to face. As he explained his options to Zheng Jinglao, Su recalled reading the biography of Zhu Yi, an obscure historical figure, in the Han Dynasty History (Han shu 漢書), and suggested a parallel between Zhu Yi’s connection to Tong County and his own to Hangzhou. It is a very unexpected comparison (Zhu Yi being so obscure and living so long before), yet it is completely apt, given the affection that each place had for their former local official. By the way, Su was not kidding himself about the affection the people of Hangzhou had for him. At the southern terminus of the dike he built across West Lake there stands today a small museum dedicated to his memory. There are many types or layers of allusive language, and not all are so obvious or explicit as those discussed above. They include uses of words and phrases drawn from earlier literature that may make sense without the reader 56  Han shu 59.3635–37.

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recognizing the earlier usage. Yet such recognition, once it is pointed out, unquestionably adds a layer of interest to the text. It shows that the author is writing with one eye (or ear) on the literary past and is eager to pepper his text with echoes of it, demonstrating his learning, the affinity of his text with earlier parallel ones, and its membership in a diachronic community of writings with shared values. Numerous examples of this occur in various letters translated earlier, even if most of them went undiscussed. In the letter to Zheng Jinglao immediately above there are at least three instances of this kind of allusion or borrowing. When Su says he is sure that Jinglao will not allow those who would vex him to “cross his mind” (bu jinghuai 不經懷) he echoes a statement made in the commentary on Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 in praise of the eccentric intellectual Wang Dao 王導: although he was poor, he remained joyful and carefree, and never allowed worldly concerns “to cross his mind.”57 The similarly between the way the phrase is used in the commentary, which Su Shi surely knew, and Su’s usage is too close to be a coincidence. Later, when Su imagines that he and Jinglao might both retire as farmers, and carry hoes under the moonlight (daiyue zhi zhu 帶月之鋤), he is borrowing language from Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 description of his own idyllic farming in his well-know poem, “The Return” (Gui chu lai xi 歸出來兮).58 Finally, when Su observes that life is as evanescent as dewdrops and flashes of lightning, his phrase is based on a statement in the Diamond Sutra, as duly noted in the modern commentary on Su’s letter. All such borrowings in Su’s letters complement the more explicit literary and historical allusions. Together, these “indebted phrases” or phases with a prior history of usage, as we might think of them, impart a literary and learned tone to the style of the letters that becomes one of their distinctive traits. Su may be writing in a humble form that was traditionally not viewed as “literary,” but the way he goes about expressing himself in the form keeps reminding us that this author is steeped in the literary past. 2.3 Humility, Humor, Friendship Aspects of Su’s personality, or at least of that of his persona in these letters, come through very clearly in this corpus of writing. Among the most memorable of these are Su’s affections for the friends he writes to. His expressions of caring and concern for his friends are often mingled with self-deprecatory remarks and humorous asides. Here are two examples, memorable for their spontaneity and how freely the affection and good wishes are expressed: 57  See Liu Xiaobiao’s 劉孝標 commentary in Shishuo xinyu jianshu 1.27 (p. 28). 58  Su Shi modifies the language. Tao’s original wording is: “In the moonlight, I carry my hoe and go home” 帶月荷鋤歸.

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Last night I happened to drink several cups of wine together with guests, then beside my lamp I composed a letter to Li Duanshu [Li Zhiyi 李之 儀] and another to you, Taixu [Qin Guan], after which I slept. Today, looking again at those two letters, the calligraphy of the one to Duanshu is more or less regular and correctly formed, but the one to you is completely irregular and haphazard. I was really very drunk last night! My first thought was to make a clean copy of it, but then it occurred to me that if I sent it as is to you a thousand miles away, it would bring a smile to your face to see my drunken manner! When you have time kindly send me a word in reply, to relieve my loneliness. No more.59 某昨夜偶與客飲酒數杯,燈下作李端叔書,又作太虛書,便 睡。今取二書覆視,端叔書猶粗整齊,而太虛書乃爾雜亂,信 昨夜之醉甚也。本欲別寫,又念欲使太虛於千里之外,一見我 醉態而笑也。無事時寄一字,甚慰寂寥。不宣。 . . . When I wrote to this point [in this letter] I suddenly received the report that you’ve been selected as emissary to Gaoli [the Korean kingdom]. In the midst of my pleasure that they had found the right person, I heard that you had declined the appointment. Why? Has your request to decline it been approved? Originally, they had meant to send me, your unworthy younger brother, but then the appointment was transferred to you, my dear elder brother. Still, by the time you return, I won’t need to worry anymore about your impoverishment! Haha! Kindly send me a few words, so that I may know the final decision regarding your trip. If you cannot avoid going, then you will float out on the dark green sea, observe the place where the sun rises, and cause distant lands to learn about the existence of Master Lin! It would be a wonderful thing in this life!60 . . . 寫書至此,忽見報,當使高麗。方喜得人,又見辭免,何也? 不知得請否?此本劣弟差遣,遂為老兄所挽,然比公之還,僕亦 不患貧矣。呵呵。且寄數字,貴知此行果決如何?若不能免,遂 浮滄海、觀日出,使絶域知有林夫子,亦人生一段美事也。 The first letter above, sent to Qin Guan, was written in 1078 or 1079, shortly after Su Shi had met the younger Qin Guan for the first time in that earlier year in Xuzhou. It is chronologically only the second letter Su sent to Qin, at least only the second that survives. What is remarkable is how quickly the two poets seem to have struck up a special bond, after just meeting, so much so 59  “Da Qin Taixu qishou” 答秦太虛七首, no. 2, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 52.5751. 60  “Yu Lin Zizhong wushou” 與林子中五首, no. 3, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 55.6145.

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that Su Shi feels he can be as familiar and humorous with Qin Guan as he is in this brief letter. The two would maintain this particularly close relationship throughout their lives, through the vicissitudes of their careers, which moved in tandem, as Qin Guan suffered for his association with Su Shi. The second letter, excerpted above, is the second half of a message to Lin Xi 林希. As for the mission to Korea that Su mentions, we know from other sources that Lin Xi was “frightened” at the prospect of sailing across the sea to Korea, and consequently declined the appointment. Emperor Shenzong is said to have been angered by this timidity and unwillingness and punished Lin Xi, who was then a court official, by sending him to a perfunctory post in Hangzhou.61 Also, there is evidence to support Su’s assertion in the letter that Su himself was at first supposed to be the one sent on this mission, but for reasons that are unclear his appointment was later shifted to Lin Xi, who proved reluctant.62 Knowing that Lin Xi was fearful of the sea voyage makes the ending of Su’s letter all the more remarkable. Su is doing his best to encourage and reassure Lin, trying to get him to see the positive side of the prospective trip. It is an historical irony that this relationship between Su and Lin Xi, that appears to be so friendly in this letter, was to take a nasty turn. Years later, Lin Xi joined the attack upon Yuanyou period officials during the later years of Zhezong’s reign. In fact, Lin Xi is said to have been the one who drafted the decree denouncing Sima Guang, Su Shi, and dozens of others, using condemnatory language so strong that he himself is said to have later regretted it.63 There are also letters that exemplify Su’s concern for those he did not know well, including men of lowly stature who somehow came into his life. We can only call these expressions of compassion, since the relationship was not between friends on a more or less equal social footing. There were, for example, two total strangers who sought to pay their respects to Su during his distant southern exile, traveling hundreds of miles by foot to do so. One was a seventy-six year old man named Xu Zhong 徐中, who came looking for Su in Huizhou. Apparently the man was simply determined to meet Su Shi, and after he did so had no idea what to do with himself. Su took pity on him (“I myself am a white-haired wanderer, how could I commiserate with others? 61  See Lin Xi’s biography in Song shi 343.10913. 62  See poems by Qin Guan that refer to Su’s appointment, offered then withdrawn. Qin Guan, “Ke you chuan chaoyi yu yi Zizhan shi Gaoli . . .” 客有傳朝議欲以子瞻使高麗 . . ., Huaihai ji jianzhu 8.347–49. Cf. the discussion of this event in Su Shi’s life by Wu Xionghe 吳熊和, “Su Shi fengshi Gaoli yishi kaolüe” 蘇軾奉使高麗一事考略, Hangzhou daxue xuebao 25.1 (1995): 48–55. 63  Song shi 343.10913.

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But I myself weep when I look at him.”) and wrote a letter to a local monk, begging him to allow the man to reside in his monastery in his final years, “so that he will not die along the road. Isn’t this consistent with the basic teachings of your dharma?”64 Another seventy year old, a recluse named Chao Gu巢谷, was from Su’s native place of Meishan (in distant Sichuan). Incredibly, Chao Gu decided to travel on foot from Meishan to go visit Su Shi in Hainan Island. He got as far as Xinzhou 新州, just southwest of modern Guangzhou, where he died. Somehow, Su Shi learned about what had happened, and wrote to his son to tell him and urged him to come collect his father’s remains and take them back to Meishan. Su had already been pardoned and was on his way back north from Hainan when he heard that Chao Gu’s remains were not being properly safeguarded, awaiting the son’s arrival, and so he wrote to a circuit official he knew stationed in Guangzhou and asked him to send someone to Xinzhou to look into the matter and make sure the remains were properly cared for until the son arrived.65 In one late letter (also written in 1100) Su Shi broaches an awkward topic in his relationship with friends: the calamity that association with him had been for so many of those who knew him, since they were implicated in Su’s political offenses and suffered accordingly. This letter was written to Li Zhi 李廌, who was one of Su’s young followers and protégés, one who, despite his talent, had never managed to pass the jinshi examinations and enter officialdom. This letter was written soon after the death of two other of Su’s protégés, Qin Guan and Fan Zuyu 范祖禹. Both had died untimely deaths (Qin was 51 and Fan 58) during southern exiles that resulted directly from their association with Su Shi. I report: recently you deigned to send me your personal instructions [i.e., a letter]. What have you been doing in the meantime? What I regret is that my own person has been insufficient to fully contain my crimes and keep them from spreading, so that I have implicated my friends in my wrongdoing. Even you, Fangshu, a commoner who floats freely above world concerns, nearly did not escape such punishment. Chunfu [Fan Zuyu[ and Shaoyou [Qin Guan] calmly accepted the crimes they were found guilty of and their lives were cut short. What good does it do to speak of it? Let enlightened opinion have the final say. Although the disaster is over now, I cover my mouth to live out my remaining years in peace. Forgive me! Forgive me!66 64  “Yu Quanlao yishou” 與泉老一首, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 61.6795. 65  “Yu Cheng Huaili liushou” 與程懷立六首, no. 5, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 56.6200–6201. 66  “Yu Li Fangshu shiqi shou” 與李方叔十七首, no. 17, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 53.5926–27.

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某啟。比辱手教,邇來所履如何?某自恨不以一身塞罪,坐累 朋友。如方叔飄然一布衣,亦幾不免。純甫、少游,又安所獲 罪,遂斷棄其命,言之何益,付之清議而已。憂患雖已過,更 宜掩口以安晚節。不訝!不訝! Finally, there are letters that do not say anything of particular consequence or reveal no tantalizing new detail of Su Shi’s life or thought but which are, nevertheless, literary gems in their own right. I close here with an example. This is a letter that Su Shi sent from his Huizhou exile 1097 to Wang Gu 王古, who was then serving as prefect in nearby Guangzhou. Su had just made Wang’s acquaintance; the two men certainly were not close friends and perhaps had never even met. This is just the second of eight letters Su sent to Wang that survive. Its style is distinctly formal. This must have been because Su did not know Wang well, and also presumably because as the prefect of a major region nearby, Wang would have had considerable influence over the officials in Su’s Huizhou. Newly arrived as an exile in Huizhou, and finding that the local officials there were anything but welcoming to him, Su Shi needed whatever powerful ally he could find. This is the letter to Wang Gu: I report: Twice I have received your instructions, which have comforted me and made me grateful to an extreme. Previously, when Zhou of Xunzhou was leaving, I sent a message with him. Humbly, I imagine it has already tarnished your sterling perusal. How have you been, sir, these days? People of the south particularly enjoy pleasure outings in the springtime. Your lofty self condescends, I suppose, to share the joys of the season with others. It is just at this time, too, that the weather is clear and genial. Unable to attend upon you in a rear carriage, I am filled with longing as I gaze westward. I hope you will protect and care for yourself, a prospect that brings consolation to my unworthy mind. No more.67 某啟。兩蒙賜教,慰感深至。曾因周循州行,奉狀,伏想已塵 清覽。即日台候何似?越人事嬉遊,盛于春時,高懷俯就,想 復與眾同之,天色澄穆,亦惟此時也。莫緣陪後乘,西望增 慨。尚冀保練,慰此區區。不宣。 As for its content, the letter is perfunctory and lacking in substance. Having received recent communications from Wang Gu, Su, probably not knowing quite what to make of these unexpected inquiries from a high-ranking local official, when most of the officials in Su’s Huizhou were doing all they could to 67  “Yu Wang Minzhong shiba shou,” no. 2, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 56.6230.

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be inhospitable to him, writes back most politely and cautiously. But the way he writes, while saying next to nothing, is memorable nonetheless. These few sentences are a model of decorum and formality in this informal genre. The banished official says nothing about his own situation and predicament. The focus is entirely upon the situation of the recipient and his imagined enjoyment of the spring season. The Qing anthologist Huang Shi was particularly enthusiastic about this letter, commenting, “The words need not be many. This one resembles a potted plant of shimmering blossoms, with its own inherent exuberance” 語不必煩。似盆花灼灼,自有生趣.68 Bibliography Egan, Ronald. Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1994. Han Changli wenji zhushi 韓昌黎文集注釋. Edited by Yan Qi 閻琦. Xi’an: Sanqin chubanshe, 2004. Han shu 漢書. Compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Hartman, Charles. “Poetry and Politics in 1079: The Crow Terrace Poetry Case of Su Shih.” CLEAR 12 (1990): 15–44. Huaihai ji jianzhu 淮海集箋注. Edited by Xu Peijun 徐培均. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1994. Shishuo xinyu jianshu 世說新語箋疏. Compiled by Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 (403–444); commentary by Liu Xiaobiao 劉孝標; edited by Yu Jiaxi 余嘉錫. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983. Song shi 宋史 (1345). Compiled by Tuo Tuo 脫脫 (1313–1355) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985. Su Dongpo Huang Shangu chidu hece 蘇東坡黃山谷尺牘合冊. Edited by Huang Shi 黃始 (fl. 1684). Taipei: Taishun shuju, 1970. Su Shi quanji jiaozhu 蘇軾全集校注. Edited by Zhang Zhilie 張志烈 et al. Shijia­ zhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 2010. Su Shi shiji 蘇軾詩集. Edited by Kong Fanli 孔凡禮. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982. Wu Xionghe 吳熊和. “Su Shi fengshi Gaoli yishi kaolüe” 蘇軾奉使高麗一事考略. Hangzhou daxue xuebao 25.1 (1995): 48–55.

68  Comment on the above, quoted from Su Huang chidu, Su Shi wenji jiaozhu 56.6231.

Chapter 13

The Letter as Artifact of Sentiment and Legal Evidence Janet Theiss This article pursues a close analysis of letters included in the Board of Punishments routine memorial (xingke tiben 刑科題本) presenting a lawsuit involving an elite family from Huzhou, Zhejiang in the 1740s. Among them are sixteen love letters exchanged between a gentry wife and her lover who was the live-in tutor for her children, and several other letters exchanged amidst the ensuing crisis between her husband who is an expectant official awaiting appointment in Beijing, his older brother who is the head of the family confronting the affair in Huzhou, and her eldest son still resident in her household. Preserved as legal evidence, these letters were never intended for public view unlike other extant published letters. They pose many complex problems of interpretation. From the beginning, their authenticity is called into question as the putative authors assert that the love letters are forgeries designed to slander them. There is copious supporting evidence beyond this case memorial that the affair in fact happened. But I am intrigued also by what these letters tell us about private emotions and motivations that were not packaged for viewing by anyone other than the recipient. Both sets of letters offer us unique insight into the role of the written word in shaping feelings and relationships, fostering intimacy, and sometimes also reifying distance within and beyond the household. Although they were written with an assumption of privacy these letters are infused with the values and concerns of their day manifested in thematic and stylistic points of resonance with published epistolary rhetoric, fiction, and medical discourse. Yet even as they attest to the salience of cultural norms in everyday elite life, their departures from public forms of discourse reveal the limitations of idealized values like family harmony and emotional authenticity (qing 情) in real life and the pain caused by this disjuncture. The letters are the textual traces of an adulterous affair between Fei Li Shi 費李氏, wife of Fei Yuyou 費豫游, an expectant ministerial official, and Xu Yantan 徐延菼, the live-in tutor employed to educate their sons, that erupted into public view in the spring of 1739. Over the next two years this scandal became a cause célebre for the urban public of Zhejiang and within elite and government circles as it destroyed the Fei family and became entangled with

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corruption charges leveled against the popular Zhejiang governor, Lu Zhuo 盧焯 (d. 1767), after Fei Li Shi bribed him to prejudice a lawsuit she filed against the head of her husband’s family to salvage her reputation. In 1741, Governor Lu was impeached and exiled for taking bribes in this and several other cases. These intertwined adultery and corruption cases were the subject of local and regional gossip in the Fei hometown of Huzhou and the Zhejiang provincial capital of Hangzhou. They were investigated and interpreted by numerous officials at every level of the imperial bureaucracy from the county magistrates who first encountered the case to ministers in the capital at the Board of Punishments and Board of Rites, imperial censors, grand secretaries, and the Qianlong Emperor. News of the adultery spread across the empire with announcement of Fei Li Shi’s lawsuit in the official newsletter the Peking Gazette. The story of the adultery spread further through the investigation into the charges of bribery and corruption against Lu Zhuo, which involved officials at various levels in three provinces and depositions from over 100 people. In the midst of the investigations, demonstrations broke out in the streets of Hangzhou in support of Governor Lu and in protest against the way the investigation was being carried out. Biographies of Lu Zhuo written decades later by the eminent Chen Hongmou 陳宏謀 and Yuan Mei 袁枚 attest to the empirewide visibility of the case and ongoing chatter about it. The Fei case, richly attested in bureaucratic and legal documents as well as county gazetteers and private writings, touches on numerous themes from imperial and local politics to elite family life.1 For the purposes of this volume, I will focus on what the letters tell us about the functions and meanings attached to private epistolary communication in the mid-Qing. The case demonstrates the porousness of the inner-outer divide that allegedly structured elite family life and defined respectability. Although the letters were meant to be private, they became after their discovery the mechanism for the exposure of the secret affair to an ever-widening audience, circling out from extended family members to neighbors to official networks, the bureaucracy, and the Zhejiang public. For an elite family like the Feis, full of men in public office and servants, it was near impossible to maintaining the privacy of inner family life. As we will see, both the love letters and those written by Fei Li Shi’s husband evince constant anxiety about the affair becoming public. Ironically, despite assumptions of the possibility of privacy in these letters, the inevitability of exposure shapes their rhetoric and the intimate feelings expressed within them. 1  The many dimensions of the case will be explored more fully in a book-length study that is currently in progress. See also Theiss, “Elite Engagement with the Judicial System.”

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The Narrative of the Scandal

Given the overwhelming complexity of the story itself and of the paper trail that documents it, I will begin, for the sake of clarity, with a core, if perhaps imperfect, sequence of events. I have pieced this together by reading the original case file on Fei Li Shi’s lawsuit in the context of documentation on Lu Zhuo’s impeachment and later comments on the scandal in biographies of Lu Zhuo and Fei Li Shi’s eldest son, Fei Shupian 費樹楩.2 The adultery had its origins in 1733 (Yongzheng 11), when Fei Yuyou, three years after the death of his father who had just been appointed Governor of Hunan Province, left his home in Huzhou to become an expectant official awaiting a ministerial vicedirector’s position in Beijing. He left behind his wife, Fei Li Shi, two sons, two daughters, and a daughter-in-law. In 1737 (QL 2) he arranged to hire a tutor for their sons back home. The tutor, a married stipend student (shengyuan 生員)3 named Xu Yantan who was a maternal cousin of his two charges, Fei Shupian and Fei Shunan 費樹楠, moved into their quarters to take up his duties. At some point within the first year of his service in the Fei household, Xu Yantan and Fei Li Shi began an illicitly intimate relationship. Suspicions about their relationship surfaced the second month of 1739 (QL 4) when several of Fei Li Shi’s servants, including a senior servant named Wang Wancheng 汪萬程 who disliked his mistress and the tutor, saw the tutor leaving Fei Li Shi’s quarters. A couple of weeks later an old family servant discovered that Wang Wancheng was having an affair with one of Fei Li Shi’s maids, Guan Hua 官花, when she saw her leaving Wang Wancheng’s bedroom. The servant told Fei Li Shi, who had both of them beaten and dismissed them from service shortly thereafter. That very day, a sixty-year-old servant who had been in the service of the Fei family since 1728 (Yongzheng 6), spewed out news of illicit goings on in the household in the midst of a supposed bout of mental illness during which he climbed over the neighbor’s wall. The neighbors accused him of being 2  All quotations from case testimony and letters are from one case file, preserved as a Board of Punishments routine memorial presented by Zhejiang Governor Lu Zhuo to the Board of Punishments for review. Lu Zhuo, Xingke tiben, hunyin jianqing lei 刑科題本,婚姻姦 情類, Qianlong (QL) 5.7.8. The subsequent routine memorial presented by the Board of Punishments to the Emperor for his final review on QL 5.9.24 is also extant. As is typical for routine memorials at these two stages of review, the two documents are entirely identical except for the addition onto the latter of the Board’s recommendation concurring with Lu Zhuo’s final verdict. 3  The term is also translated as Government Student or licentiate, referring to a subsidized student who is eligible to compete in the Provincial Examinations.

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a thief, triggering an altercation in the street between them and Xu Yantan and Fei Shupian, followed by a lawsuit. Fei Li Shi’s children were also well aware of the affair and at some point her eldest son, Fei Shupian, informed the family head, his uncle Fei Qianliu 費謙流, and asked that he do something about it. When the feud with the neighbors erupted, Qianliu tried to pressure Xu Yantan to resign “to avoid a scandal,” but he refused. One month later, Wang Wancheng, who had been taken in by Fei Qianliu after his dismissal by Fei Li Shi, took seven love letters to his master claiming that he had seen Guan Hua carrying them back and forth between his mistress and the tutor and copied them in his own hand. Qianliu immediately led a posse including his brother Fei Zifu 費滋復, his nephew Fei Lüxiang 費履祥, and several servants including Wang Wancheng to confront Xu Yantan and Fei Li Shi with the letters as evidence of their adultery. He forced the tutor at sword-point to sign a letter of resignation. Fei Li Shi defended herself, claiming vociferously that the letters were forged by Wang Wancheng to get revenge on her for firing him. She returned the next day to her parent’s home to seek their support and Qianliu moved her children to his house. In the midst of the move, a servant packing up their belongings discovered nine more love letters in Xu Yantan’s hand under Fei Li Shi’s mattress. This prompted Fei Qianliu to send a letter to her father forbidding her return to her marital home. He then sold Fei Yuyou and Fei Li Shi’s house and since there was not enough room for their children at his own house, he claimed, he rented another one nearby for them. Fei Li Shi and Tutor Xu denied the charge that they were having an affair, insisting that the love letters had been forged by Wang Wancheng and Fei Qianliu, each of whom had numerous personal grievances against them. According to the Governor-General of Zhejiang and Fujian, Depei 德沛, who was assigned to lead the investigation on Lu Zhuo’s corruption, Fei Li Shi consulted with a pettifogger when her affair was discovered, who advised her that her daughter-in-law’s mother, Wang Sun Shi, had successfully bribed the governor’s staff in her own inheritance case and was thus “familiar with the narrow paths around the Governor” 因爭產行賄熟悉迴撫路竇. Wang Sun Shi, worried about a female relative’s adultery damaging the family reputation, “naturally wanted to overturn the case and cleanse her reputation, so she represented her in squandering money” 孫氏以親姆犯姦有傷體面必欲 翻洗其事因代為揮金. In the tenth month of 1739 (QL 4), she had a relative who was from Yangzhou and knew a Yangzhou man who worked as one of Lu Zhuo’s secretaries act as a go-between to present Lu Zhuo’s inner secretary with 160 taels of silver. After he accepted the case, they sent another 300 to the

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secretary. Fei Li Shi was afraid of arousing public anger in Huzhou so she sent another 120 taels and requested that the case be tried in Hangzhou instead.4 Before the titled men of the Fei family accused by Fei Li Shi could be tried, the governor had to get the permission of the Board of Punishments in the capital and request that the Board of Rites remove their degree titles. Both sets of capital officials agreed and the Qianlong Emperor concurred so the case went to trial. Governor Lu’s final ruling vindicated Fei Li Shi’s chastity, though he did not affirm her accusation that Fei Qianliu had masterminded the slander, nor that he and his brother Fei Zifu and nephew Fei Luxiang had confiscated her property. Instead he deemed the servant Wang Wancheng to be solely responsible for forging the letters, finding Qianliu guilty only of believing his servant without checking the facts himself and finding the other two Fei men without blame because they were simply following the orders of their family head. Depei concludes, Knowing that popular opinion would see his judgments as unjust, he requested restoration of the degrees of Zifu and Luxiang. But public sentiment was furious with the confounding of right and wrong and there were people writing jokes about it everywhere. 雖自知眾論不平將滋復履祥等附請開復而顛倒是非。輿論共憤 有徧作戲文者.5 Six months after Lu Zhuo submitted his memorial on the case to the Board of Punishments suggesting that Wang Wancheng be sentenced to military exile, Board officials reviewed the case and found the sentence, which was in accord with the substatute on commoners committing slander, to be too light. They recommended in a memorial passing the case up to the Qianlong Emperor for review that Lu Zhuo reconsider the sentence given the gravity of a servant slandering his mistress’s chastity. The emperor’s rescript concurred with the Board’s finding. A year and a half later, in the summer of 1741, Governor Lu Zhuo was indicted by an imperial censor for accepting bribes in the cases of Fei Li Shi and Wang Sun Shi, and in several promotion cases. He was impeached, had his property confiscated, and spent the next twenty years in political exile. We know nothing further of the fate of Fei Li Shi or Xu Yantan.

4  Lufu zouzhe 錄副奏摺, file copy of a memorial of Depei, QL 6.6.23. 5  Ibid.

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Letters as Legal Evidence

Exchanges of letters are a critical component of this story and of its handling in the judicial system for two reasons. First, the love letters are the only concrete evidence of the adultery, beyond hearsay, and their authenticity is called into doubt immediately with Fei Li Shi’s accusation of the forgery. The case as presented in Lu Zhuo’s routine memorial prepared for review of judicial officials in the capital ultimately turns on the assessment of the relative capacity of the senior servant Wang Wancheng and his mistress to read and write such letters. Letters are also central to the unfolding of the crisis since Fei Li Shi’s husband, Fei Yuyou, is posted far away in Beijing throughout and can only be informed of the scandal and consulted via letters that, according to comments Yuyou makes in them, often take over a month to travel between Huzhou and Beijing and often cross each other in the mail. The routine memorial contains twenty-one private letters exchanged between various parties to the case. These include sixteen love letters exchanged between Tutor Xu and Fei Li Shi. Four in Tutor Xu’s hand and eleven said to have been copied out by Wang Wancheng are presented as evidence at the beginning of the investigation. When he arrives from Beiing to participate in the investigation, Fei Yuyou brings one love letter in Tutor Xu’s hand and four others that he says he copied. There are also four letters sent by Fei Yuyou to his eldest son, Fei Shupian during the crisis; and one letter from Tutor Xu to Fei Yuyou chatting about prospects for success in the examinations and the Fei sons academic progress that were presented as evidence of the tutor’s handwriting. These letters were all presented as evidence in the courtroom and thus, along with all other components of the case file including lists of property, testimonies, confessions, case summaries and verdicts of the officials who tried and reviewed the case at the county, prefectural and provincial levels, were copied by a scribe into a single document, packaged for review up the line. According to Qing judicial procedure, all documents presented in the courtroom were required to be transcribed into the case memorial. That said, the only private documents that occur frequently in such files are contracts. Letters of any sort are rare. As we will see, the letters were initially intended only for their recipients. But once they were introduced as evidence, their audience expanded to include all officials involved in adjudicating, reviewing, and transcribing the case up to the Qianlong Emperor himself. With the impeachment of Governor Lu Zhuo, the entire case file was viewed by yet another set of officials involved in the investigation. At the conclusion of Lu Zhuo’s case, the files were archived in Beijng along with thousands of other case files and the letters were presumably never viewed again until archivists catalogued them in

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recent decades. Although gossip about the case was clearly rife beyond judicial circles at the time of the impeachment proceedings and as late as Lu Zhuo’s death in 1767, there is no evidence that the letters themselves circulated outside the bureaucracy. One of the sections of the case file that shows the most obvious manipulation of the narrative in the wake of Fei Li Shi’s bribe is the interrogation of the servant Wang Wancheng and others about the alleged forgery of the love letters. He initially insists that Fei Li Shi’s maid, Guan Hua, gave him the first seven letters and he simply copied them to show Qianliu. Under threat of torture he then reverses himself completely and claims that he forged the letters himself. The first seven he wrote in his own hand, telling Qianliu he had copied them. The latter nine, he produced in Tutor Xu’s hand, which he says he “saw everyday and was familiar with.” He claims he wrote these after the tutor’s expulsion and planted them under his mistress’s pillow because the tutor had insisted that since the handwriting was not his there was no proof of their authenticity and he worried that Qianliu would start to doubt his slander. The assessment of his guilt turned ultimately on an evaluation of his literacy level in comparison with that of Fei Li Shi, never engaging the issue of how Wang could have produced nine new letters in the course of a busy day. The descriptions of their respective literacy are full of contradictions. The Qiantang County magistrate asks Wang to write out in front of him several of the letters that were copied in his handwriting. This he does and the handwriting matches. Justifying his failure to question the authenticity of the nine letters written in Tutor Xu’s handwriting, Qianliu states that they were “written in a lucid style and the calligraphy was not vulgar.” Making a similar assessment of the literary quality of the letters, the magistrate questioned Wang Wancheng, “How could you, a servant, write these nine love letters? Clearly your master wrote them and told you to place them under your mistress’s pillow.” Wang insisted that he forged the letters himself without Qianliu’s knowledge noting that he had done a stint of work in a county yamen as proof of his literacy level. He stated, “One of the letters has a poem in it, ‘A Fu Written After Midnight When You Failed to Come Despite Our Agreement’ (Youyue bulai guoyeban fu 有約不來過夜半賦) that I copied out of a book.” The magistrate confirmed the citation, checking the book, Collection of Writings from the Hall for Pondering Beauty (Siqitang wenji 思綺堂文集) published in 1722 by a Qing poet, Zhang Zaogong 章藻功 ( jinshi 1703) from Qiantang, known for his accomplishment in writing this difficult genre of poetry. Then he asked Wang to copy out several of the letters in front of him. He queried Wang as to why only three or four characters out of every ten matched the original. Wang replied,

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I studied a bit in my youth and am able to write. The language of those love letters is merely everyday talk. I can handle that sort of writing. I did worry that Master [Fei Qianliu] would not believe me, so I copied a published poem into them. Today only three or four of my characters match because I have been in prison for a long time and haven’t been writing and my hand is shaking a bit. Also, writing in court is not like writing at home where you can concentrate on what you’re doing. 小的幼年讀過書,原會寫字的。那情書內字句不過是家常話。 小的寫出來的。恐怕大主不信又抄一篇刻賦在內。如今小的寫 的字內止有參肆字相像皆因小的監禁久了久不寫字。手有些 科。又在當堂寫不比在家可以用心幕做。 Next, the magistrate had Wang write something completely new to assess the lucidity and coherence of his style. He concluded that the writing showed that he “has a bit of knowledge. There were no fill-ins or erasures” 其文理果屬 組通, 並無添註塗抹, a rather minimalist assessment given the potential for doubt. Finally, the magistrate questioned Wang about the household events and people mentioned in the letters and he explained “I wanted Master to believe them so I randomly wrote in this everyday talk” 要大主兒相信所以 把家常話在意都寫在面的. The level of Fei Li Shi’s literacy remains suspiciously vague in the case record. The letters written in her voice were all in the batch copied by Wang Wancheng, so no handwriting samples of hers are brought into evidence, nor does she comment on her own literacy level in her testimony. In her defense she testifies, “I have never met [the tutor], so how could there have been an exchange of letters between us? This was all a slander by Wang Wancheng because of a grievance” 小婦人從不與先生見面。如何有書札往來呢? 這都是汪萬程挾讎捏害. She could easily have stated that her own literacy level was too poor to have written or read the letters, but does not. Indeed, she testifies that she sent a letter to her husband 小婦人寄信與丈夫 to ask for permission to sue her elder brother-in-law. The magistrate then asks her, According to what you have said, you received a response to the letter you sent to your husband only in the ninth month. With this kind of thing going on in your household, your Elder Brother-in-Law naturally also wrote to your husband. How were the letters exchanged between you and your husband written? 據你說寄信與你丈夫直到九月纔有回信。你家中有這樣事情 你大伯自然也有字與你丈夫的了。你丈夫與你回字是怎麼 寫的呢?

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Evading the questions, she replies, The letters that my husband wrote home from the capital all said that [Fei Qianliu] did not inform Mother-in-Law and mistakenly listened to people’s gossip. See here for your inspection are successive letters from the capital sent home by my husband. 丈夫在京寫回家信俱說大伯不稟明婆婆誤聽人言的話。見有丈 夫歷次寄回京信呈電。 Here she hands over four letters sent by her husband Fei Yuyou to his eldest son, Fei Shupian during the prolonged crisis. While these letters do convey Yuyou’s support for her and his fury at his brother, they also, as we will see, reveal his gradual acceptance of the fact of his wife’s misconduct and other indications of her guilt. The magistrate pursued the issue of her literacy at length with her son Fei Shupian, asking, “Is your mother, after all, capable of writing in a coherent style?” 究竟你母親會寫字文理通徹的麼. Shupian replied, “Mother can write a few characters, but only enough for household registers and daily accounts. Her writing style is not coherent or grammatical” 母親會寫幾個字 只好家庭登記日用賬目。文理是不通的. The magistrate questioned him further, “Your father has been in the capital for seven or eight years. Who wrote the family letters that were sent to him?” 你父親在京家中奇去書札是何人 寫的呢. Shupian answered, “The letters we sent to Father in the capital were all dictated to me by Mother” 父親在京家中奇去書信是母親命生員代 筆的. Yet the letters from Yuyou to his son that are included in the case file include references to letters from her specifically and instructions for him to pass letters on to his mother to read ( yue kan 閱看). In his own testimony, Yuyou says that when his brother first wrote him about the adultery, he was dubious because he had not seen letters in Tutor Xu’s handwriting, but when Qianliu sent him five letters in Xu’s hand, he was convinced that his wife was having an affair. He never mentions the possibility that his wife was not literate enough to have carried on such a correspondence. Explaining the content of the letters written to his son, he testifies, In the fifth month of QL 5 [1740], I received Elder Brother’s [Fei Qianliu] letter saying that Li Shi and Xu Yantan had illicit [relations] and the maid Guanhua had transmitted love letters that were re-copied by the servant

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Wang Wancheng.6 There was another servant, Xu Lun, who had also spread word of this outside [the household]. [Elder Brother] had already dismissed Xu Yantan and then found nine more letters written in his hand in Li Shi’s room. Following Mother’s instructions, he wrote a letter to Li Qingyun [Fei Li Shi’s brother] telling him that Li Shi was not allowed to return. In the sixth month, the Li family wrote me a letter saying that Elder Brother had mistakenly listened to people’s gossip and that there was no other evidence [of the affair]. At that time, since I had not ever seen Xu Yantan’s handwriting, I was a bit suspicious. So when my son Shupian wrote that Li Shi should be taken back, I replied telling him to report this to his Grandmother and Senior Uncle. In the thenth month, Elder Brother sent me five love letters in Xu Yantan’s own hand so in the eleventh month I wrote to my son Shupian again with the words “spilt water cannot be gathered up” and “honor will not allow reconciliation.” In the twelfth month, I saw in the Peking Gazette that the case had been brought to the provincial court. I informed the Board [at which he worked] that I was going home. See here are the five love letters in Xu Yantan’s hand sent by Elder Brother Fei Qianliu. First I am handing one letter over for inspection. I have also brought one of the letters that Xu Yantan regularly sent to me. I request that you compare them. The handwriting is the same. 五月間接到大哥子來字說李氏與徐延菼有私使女官花傳遞情書, 被僕汪萬程抄下。又有家人徐倫涕楊出來。已將徐延菼辭去。 又在李氏房中檢出徐延菼親筆情書玖紙。奉母命寫出告訴李卿 雲叫李氏不許回去。到陸月裏李家寫字來說哥子誤聽人言益無 影響的話。豫游那時因沒有見過徐延菼親筆心裏有些疑惑,所 以兒子樹楩信內要接回李氏。豫游回字叫他稟明祖母伯叔的。 到拾月裏哥子將徐延菼親筆情書伍紙寄來所以拾一月內又寫字 與兒子樹楩說覆水難受義無復合的話。到拾貳月裏豫游見邸抄 上撫院具題這案豫游呈明內部回來的見有哥子費謙流寄到徐延 菼親筆情書伍紙。先將一紙呈驗。又徐延菼平素與豫游字扎一 紙亦帶在這裏。求對驗筆蹟就是了。

6  It is not clear here whether the sentence is referring to Guanhua’s carrying of letters between the lovers or turning them in to Fei Qianliu. From other sections of the testimony it is clear that she did both.

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Despite the compromised and contradictory evidence on the literacy of both Fei Li Shi and Wang Wancheng, the magistrate, no doubt under pressure from Governor Lu Zhuo after his bribe, finally accepted the story of the forgery, giving Fei Li Shi the benefit of the doubt. Governor-General Depei in his report on his investigation of Lu Zhuo’s corruption dismisses out of hand the idea that a servant could have written the letters, commenting that the governor’s greed and resentment of Qianliu led him to “attribute responsibility for forging the eleven love letters that were obviously written in Xu Yantan’s hand to a household servant named Wang Wancheng who only knew a few characters.” Depei exclaims, “this was extremely unbelievable” 情書十一紙顯係徐延菼文筆乃 卸肩謹識數字之家人汪萬程。造殊非信. 3

Love Letters and Embodied Presence

Intriguingly, aside from Wang Wancheng’s statement that he included references to daily life happenings in the allegedly forged letters to heighten their air of verisimilitude for his master, no one comments on the tone or emotional content of the letters as a possible gauge of their authenticity. Yet I find that it is precisely their style and the sentiments and values they convey that makes the forgery scenario impossible. The love letters depict a deep, passionate, yet quotidian affection rooted in the small intimacies of daily life. They lack the typical letter-framing greetings, perhaps because they were exchanged within the household like passed notes, or perhaps because they were excerpted for the case file. Most of them are not dated and their sequence is not entirely clear, but they appear to have been written from about a month before Fei Qianliu confronted his sister-in-law and the tutor in the third month of 1739 (QL 4), to the weeks after the affair was revealed. Presumably, the lovers felt the need to communicate through letters that were carried back and forth by Fei Li Shi’s maid Guanhua because in a household with strictly gendered living quarters and densely populated by family members and servants, it was not easy to meet in person. While the letters mention face-to-face visits, they also contain frequent discussion of whether servants saw them together on such and such an occasion. The passing of written messages via servants to facilitate an illicit affair is, of course, a common trope in fiction, notably in the relationship between Pan Jinlian and Chen Jingji in Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅.7 However, as we will see below, these letters were not, for the most part, poetic expressions of love and requests for trysts, but prosaic substitutes for face-to-face conversations about the lovers’ circumstances. 7  Roy, The Plum in the Golden Vase, chapters 82–83.

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In her study of late Ming love letters, Kathryn Lowry suggests that they highlight the degree to which “skill in literary writing was deemed necessary to create ordinary (as well as extraordinary) sentimental attachments.” She describes them as a genre dedicated to making emotion tangible. Like other kinds of letters, she suggests, the love letter’s form was supposed to “embody the spirit and voice of the writer who cannot physically attend to the reader.”8 The letters exchanged between Fei Li Shi and Xu Yantan similarly invoked bodily presence. They were exchanged sometimes two or three times a day, as though literally substituting for conversation and physical presence. Although the lovers did have trysts in person, it was often difficult for them to meet and when they did they were in constant danger of discovery. Filled with expressions of pain and longing at every separation, the letters reveal that the lovers’ attachment was marked by such obsessive intensity that they could not bear a day without seeing each other. Their stress and distress over various partings, sightings by servants, and ultimately the exposure and impending end of their relationship is somaticized in illness and other physical symptoms: rashes, vomiting, coughing blood, fever, exhaustion, insomnia, all of which are described with such frequency and detail that it seems the lovers sought to recreate their physical intimacy for each other in the text of the letters.9 In one of several examples, when his father summons him to come home when he suffers a financial crisis after being swindled, Tutor Xu writes, If I don’t go, I fear my Father will take offense. I can only harden my heart to leave and be parted from you. Tomorrow I will definitely hurry back. . . . Just now my entire body is breaking out in a rash. How can I not be pitiful. You must take very good care of yourself to the hundred thousandth degree. Do not become angry with me for leaving. I will surely see you tomorrow evening and we will immediately drink a toast to our heartfelt commitment. 若不去猶恐老人見怪,只得忍心客舍而去。明日一定趕來 . . . 正 在徧身發斑。豈不可憐。汝千萬好好調護。勿以我去之故或致 動氣。明晚准看汝也參須即進爵兌付。10 Fei Li Shi writes in response that after his departure, she coughed up blood. Their descriptions of their physical symptoms are strikingly reminiscent of literary depictions of lovesickness (xinbing 心病). Tracing the rich intertextual movement between fiction and actual love letters as epistolary guides and 8  Lowry, “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter,” 49. 9   See also Bonnie McDougall’s article in this volume. 10  Letter from Xu Yantan to Fei Li Shi, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8.

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collections incorporate samples from fiction and drama, Lowry observes that “literature provides the model for desire” and describes how “the model letters excerpted from vernacular fiction and drama in the how-to guide on romance could provide a means to chart the course of a love affair. Love letters printed in this format might serve as a reference that adds depth and resonance to the words and actions of lovers. The excerpts from fiction show the integral link between reading about sentiments and the conduct of private life.”11 It is worth noting that such letter writing guides would have been readily available to Wang Wancheng to use as the basis for forgeries of love letters, yet the letters in the case record do not follow standard patterns. While the love letters Lowry considers incorporate fictional tropes and poetry, often composed by the letter-writers, to authenticate expressions of desire and longing by casting them in appropriate literary modes, Fei Li Shi and Tutor Xu’s letters engage familiar fictional tropes of pathologized desire—lovesickness—that in the mid-eighteenth century was tinged with impropriety. Fictional lovesickness, often manifested in lack of appetite, insomnia, listlessness, and delirium leading sometimes to death, is typically caused by the absence of the lover (as with Bridal Du in Mudanting 牡丹亭 or Pan Jinlian in Jin Ping Mei) or love that is unrequited or unfulfillable (as in the case of Lin Daiyu or Jia Rui in Honglou meng 紅樓夢). But in these letters exchanged by two people in the midst of their affair, the symptoms of lovesickness are brought on by the fear of discovery and of the consequences of their illicit behavior on the one hand, and depression at the prospect of inevitable separation on the other. For all the thematic resonance the letters have with fiction and model letters, they are strikingly undisciplined by genre or etiquette. They exhibit a frantic, desperate tone, repetitiveness, and raw expression of emotion unconstrained by the aesthetic and literary paradigms that governed the production of fiction and letters intended for publication. In this case, illicit desire is inseparably intertwined with anxiety and pathologized as physical suffering. Fei Li Shi refers to her lack of appetite, general feeling of illness, and the urgency of resting and taking care of her health. After one parting with Xu she writes to him that she “could not stop coughing up blood” 別後身子如何吐紅止否. She is also “agitated and unsettled” 徬徨無定. After the servants discover Xu leaving her quarters one night, she writes, “When I received your letter, I several times fainted and my spirit was shaken with fear. I don’t know what to do” 接字幾番死去完魂心震不知所為. In the same letter she confronts the prospect of the end of the relationship and pledges the sexual loyalty of a wife to Xu, writing, 11  Lowry, “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter,” 53. Lowry also explores the use of poetry, fiction an drama in love letters in “Duplicating the Strength of Feeling.”

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Truly Heaven does not allow us two any pity. We must not see each other. The pain kills me. . . . After having this scare, I will surely cough blood again. You must not be anxious. It is most important that you take care of yourself, spend the remaining years of your life reading books and advancing yourself so as not to let me down. We must boldly turn away from [this relationship]. We cannot continue this secret affair. When I die, I will requite you and will not have any regrets. I vow that I will never have clouds and rain [sexual intercourse]. When my friend from the north [her husband] comes, I will not lie next to him. . . . What are we two to do? Matters have already come to this. Still we must patiently swallow food and drink, otherwise we will feel even more that our steps are in vain. 天不容我貳人可憐。不得見面。痛殺我也 . . . 受驚後想必又吐紅 矣!汝不必心焦,保重為要。留得殘生讀書上進與我爭氣。須 猛回頭再不可做此暗事矣。我當一死報汝即無怨悔。誓不雲雨。 北友來亦不進身矣 . . . 我貳人奈何?事已如此。且吞飲食寬心否 者更覺腳虛。 Later that day, she writes, “As I bitterly plan out the path to come, my head is constantly feverish. What to do? What to do?” 我腹痛畧好下路不止頭元發 熱。奈何奈何. In a letter written before the exposure of their affair, Xu Yantan alludes to Fei Li Shi’s poor health and writes of his own ailments, Now what is happening to me? I do not sleep peacefully at night for brooding. Old Heaven will not forgive my inability to serve you medicine. I really want us to take care of each other in the same room. I often ask for news [of you] but I cannot get any. It’s killing me. 本身何如?夜來安睡否念極念極!老天不諒不能奉待湯藥幷欲 一室相守。時聞消息亦不可得。若殺我也。 As suspicions increase among the servants, Xu writes, The affairs of the past are not important. I think again and again of our troubles. When I received your letter, I was filled with sorrow. We are separated like clouds from mud. Truly it is as if a torrent of arrows was aimed at my mind. I don’t know how to express my love in writing. Notoriety spreads on all sides. I repeatedly receive letters from home and I almost cannot bear the pain. My tears are deep and flow from the pit of my stomach. . . . I know, moreover, that there is no one else to tell our grievances to. . . . I cannot eat and drink normally. Inside the pillows and sheets, I

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feel that I am in a foreign land. . . . For several nights I have not been able to sleep soundly. Amidst the sound of sprinkling rain, in the light of the turning moon there is nothing but cruel circumstances. I don’t know how I will endure the future. How pitiable! 往事俱非大,思難再思,接音容邈,若雲泥之隔,真有如簡攢 心。不知一部相思從何處寫起也。惡名四播。屢得家書,幾有 無可容身之痛,眼淚汪汪只從心坎中流入。所謂爾知我知此外 更無人可以訴苦矣  ...飲食依舊否,衾枕中人竟同異域 ...數夜 以來不能成寐。殊雨聲中月輪照裏觸處無非慘境。不知將來怎 樣挨過光陰也。可憐哉! In these letters, description of bodily ailments is intertwined with affirmations of love and expressions of deep anxiety, all of which is embedded in discussion of the events leading to the exposure of their affair and speculation about servants and family members who might suspect them. Charlotte Furth reminds us that traditional Chinese medical thought was “somatically psychic” because it did not separate mind and body. Thus “emotions were always linked with physical manifestations. Sometimes psychic phenomena were discussed as if they caused morbid body changes.”12 Emotional extremes could cause bodily imbalance in women or men, but women, understood in medical terms to be “ruled by blood,” were particularly prone to extremes of “resentment, anger, jealousy and envy” manifested in numerous physical symptoms. Among these were “depletion and wasting disorders”—Yin deficiencies brought on by emotional excess and immoderate living, among other things. They manifested in many symptoms including “irregular menses, emaciation, and recurrent fevers and chills; dizziness and fainting spells, cold extremities, hot sensations in the ‘Five Hearts’ (wu hsin 五心, the heart region, palms of the hands, and soles of the feet); and serious respiratory symptoms such as chronic coughing, aching ribs, and spitting blood.” Sexual dreams involving intercourse with ghosts for women and spontaneous seminal emissions for men were also linked to Yin deficiency: “Sexual dreams, medical wisdom had it, were especially likely to trouble celibate women, such as widows, nuns, palace women, and those whose marriages were too long delayed.” Through such dreams, “sexual essence was drained away and lost in the course of uncontrollable, pathological erotic excitation.”13 Sexual activity was vital for health, but if excessive or path-

12  Furth, “Blood, Body and Gender,” 59. 13  Ibid., 61.

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ological, could trigger the same sort of depletion disorders by leading to sexual exhaustion. Andrew Schonebaum traces the emergence of the notion of consumptive lovesickness in which the category of symptoms medically associated with tuberculosis, including appetite and weight loss, listlessness, chronic coughing and expectoration of blood, are used to characterize an archetypal female character who is beautiful and sensitive and suffers from emotional or sexual excess.14 He describes Honglou meng as a veritable casebook for this syndrome of illness as personality type with Lin Daiyu as its quintessential example. In the novel, Doctor Wang’s diagnosis of the consumptive heroine identifies the cause as “deficiency of Yin in the liver”: This condition should manifest itself in the following ways: dizzy spells, loss of appetite, frequent dreams, and fitful sleeping in the early hours; during the daytime a tendency to take offence for no reason and a generally nervous and apprehensive attitude towards other people. Some might attribute all these to a peculiarity of temperament, but they would be mistaken. They are organically related to a deficiency of Yin in the liver, with a concomitant diminution of cardiac vitality.15 這病時常應得頭暈,減飲食,多夢,每到五更,必醒個幾次。 即日間聽見不干自己的事,也必要動氣,且多疑多懼。不知者 疑爲性情乖誕,其實因肝陰虧損心氣衰耗,都是這個病在那裡 作怪。 Chi-hung Yim explains that the liver organ system in Chinese medical discourse is linked to what Western medicine would call psychosomatic illnesses. “Unreleased emotion” causes disharmony in the liver organ system that manifests in psychological and physical symptoms like those exhibited by Lin Daiyu. The particular assortment of physical and psychological symptoms manifested by the two lovers matches Daiyu’s diagnosis almost perfectly. Linking medically defined pathology to character traits, Yim quotes Leon Hammer’s portrait of a “Yin deficient” personality: “His ego is always on the

14  Schonebaum, “Fictional Medicine,” 205–40. There is a large and growing body of scholarship on the relationship between medical discourse and fiction. See, e.g., Idema, “Diseases and Doctors, Drugs and Cures”; Cullen, “Patients and Healers in Late Imperial China”; Chen Hsiu-fen, “Between Passion and Repression.” 15  Hawkes, The Story of the Stone, 78–79.

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line, always the prime consideration, and, in any controversy, retreat is impossible. Retreat means defeat and humiliation. He has no choice but to stand, to meet force with force, to struggle and fight, even when such behavior is totally self-destructive.” Such people are also often beset with anxiety and depression.16 This perfectly describes the behavior not only of the fictional Lin Daiyu, but of both Fei Li Shi and Tutor Xu, who repeatedly express their complete lack of regret about their actions and their defiance of Wang Wancheng, Fei Qianliu, and the neighbors with whom they have a feud, even when they know they have no future together. After the incident when servants discover them together, Xu writes, “You stand firm and do not waver. If it comes to committing suicide, then we will face death to defend each other” 汝立身不穩或致輕生 故冒死相守. Fei Li Shi replies, “You are ill and now also face this unexpected turn of events that is deeply painful. . . . You must not be ashamed or have a guilty conscience. I have already plucked up my courage to put up a fight to the death” 汝身有病又遭此變深為內痛 . . . 汝不必慚愧心虛 . . . 我已放膽 拼命. Fei Li Shi’s refusal to accept defeat culminates, of course, in her lawsuit against her elder brother-in-law. In fact, in one letter, Fei Li Shi makes her own connection between emotional strain brought on by confrontation and liver system disharmony when she admonishes Xu Yantan to take care of his own health and cautions him about the potential for his “anger to cause excess Yang in the liver” 惱怒肝陽, in other words to cause a relative deficiency of Yin in the liver. Within Chinese medical thought, male and female desire was natural, inevitable, and integral to reproductive processes. Repression of desire, noted as a typical problem for widows and nuns, was seen as unhealthy and “responsible for bodily imbalance and vulnerability.”17 But sexual excess and dissipation was also extremely harmful to health. Charlotte Furth describes Chinese medical discourse on sexual desire as a “moral psychology of emotions” based on the understanding that “Heart, seat of consciousness (shen [神]), impressionable and easily stirred to sensuous heat, could flare up and go astray, igniting the fires of sexual desire and turning generative forces into selfdestructive forces.” Doctors called for restraining lust, but not for abstinence: “the management of desire was a moral enterprise of self-cultivation, channeling the sexual powers of the body according to a telos of human reproduction in a universal continuum of life linking progenitors and descendants.”18 Furth also quotes the Ming medical expert Zhu Zhenheng’s description of the link 16  Chi-hung Yim, “The ‘Deficiency of Yin in the Liver’,” 90. 17  Furth, A Flourishing Yin, 91. 18  Ibid., 149.

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between moral self-cultivation and bodily health: “When man’s Heart assents to the will of Heaven according to the Way, it is governed by tranquility. The motions of the five Fires will be controlled within and one’s Ministerial Fire will simply support the creative principle enacting the succession of human lives without end in their cyclical functioning.”19 In fiction, the moral and medical danger of excessive sexual desire tainted the frail beauty with impropriety even when she did not engage in sexual intercourse. Schonebaum notes, for example, that although Lin Daiyu is chaste, Grandmother Jia links her consumptive condition to improper passions, commenting that “if her illness is of a respectable nature, I do not mind how much we have to spend to get her better. But if she is suffering from some form of lovesickness, no amount of medicine will cure it and she can expect no more sympathy from me either.”20 Adulterous sex, of course, was the immoral result of the Heart system going astray, improperly “igniting the fires of sexual desire, and turning generative forces into self-destructive forces.” For Xu Yantan, whose home was close enough to the Fei household that he could go home to see his wife, succumbing to his attraction for Fei Li Shi was clearly a manifestation of excess and uncontrolled desires. During the seven long years of her husband’s absence, Fei Li Shi, in contrast, like a widow, had no proper or healthy way to assuage her desire. We do not know whether she dreamed of having sex with ghosts during her husband’s long absence from her bedchamber, but her adulterous affair can be understood as a parallel kind of symptom of repressed sexual desire, resulting in precisely the same sort of “uncontrollable, pathological erotic excitation” caused by sexual dreams. For both lovers, illicit sex was, as moralized medical logic predicts, injurious to health and ultimately self-destructive. In the context of medical paradigms of sexual health, their symptoms of lovesickness read like a fictional casebook of the physical consequences of excessive and inappropriate desire. 4

Confessions of Moral Failing

The letters suggest that the lovers felt keenly the disjunction between their passion for each other and the proper sentiment that had structured their lives before the affair. For not only was their love in itself illicit, but it was far more intense than their feelings for anyone else, including parents, spouses, and children. In the letter just quoted, Tutor Xu’s devotion to his lover clearly took 19  Ibid. 20  Schonebaum, “Fictional Medicine,” 238.

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emotional precedence over his affection for his father, though he reluctantly did his filial duty. Similarly, as the crisis comes to a head Fei Li Shi expresses concern about the effects of the affair on her children. “My sons are constantly distracted. I want to settle their minds. Tomorrow, I want you to help them write something. It is best that I avoid going over to the west gate [the quarters of her sons and the tutor]” 南兒 (sic) 往反心野。我欲令靜心。明日 要汝補做文字。寧我免強至西門走走.21 She could not but recognize that by bringing disgrace to the family she was jeopardizing her children’s future. Yet some of her comments in the letters show a strange disregard for the consequences of her actions. She instructs Xu, “You must patiently study and strictly instruct my two sons. Even if the activities of childish play are not without reason, gods and men clearly instruct [us to pursue] both wealth and office” 汝須寬心讀書嚴訓兩兒。幼戲之事即不無因,神人明示財官同得. With similar optimism, she tells him to “spend the remaining years of your life studying and advancing yourself so as not to let me down” 留得殘生讀書 上進與我爭氣. She also underestimates the long term effects of the scandal on her sons, commenting about Shupian, “In the summer, he will perhaps be occupied with reading books and suffer through. Surely by year’s end or next year or so, he will not be so deeply distressed” 夏間或至他處讀書挨下去, 必要終年明年大約不能傷感已極.22 She writes at length about her father’s poor health and eventually understands his death to have been brought on by the stress of her disgrace, yet here too, her filial anxiety does not lead her to end the affair. Intriguingly, Fei Li Shi does seem to have had some shred of “chastity conscience” that is in tension with her passionate love for Yantan. As she becomes increasingly nervous about what the servants might know of them, she argues that they must end their affair to avoid full discovery: If we are discovered by the servants, it will be difficult to be a person.23 Every time I speak with you, the servants behave badly. They have long suspected something. Yesterday evening, it so happened that the doors connecting the rooms were all open. There was no way to deny

21  Letter from Fei Li Shi to Xu Yantan, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8. These comments hinting at her close involvement in her sons’ education may also support the idea that she was highly literate. 22  Ibid. 23  See Theiss, Disgraceful Matters, 198.

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anything. . . . We must boldly turn away. We cannot continue to do these secret things. 被奴輩捉破難以為人。每與汝云賤人行為不好。早已疑心。昨 晚偏生連房門俱開無從抵賴真 . . . 須猛回頭再不可做此暗事。24 The comment that “it will be difficult to be a person” was typical of the language used by women whose chastity had been impugned to express their sense of shame. My very literal translation of this phrase comes out of extensive examination of its use in criminal cases. It was commonly used by women to describe their feelings in the wake of sexual insult, harassment, or assault.25 Fei Li Shi’s use of the phrase in a private letter to her lover suggests that she was, to a degree, genuinely concerned about the inevitable destruction of her reputation that would come with the public exposure of her adultery. She is concerned enough to insist they must give up the relationship. Yet her love for Yantan is so deep that she cannot overcome her own passion for him, even if she were never to see him again. In the Confucian climate of eighteenth-century elite society such a collision between love and morality created a personal impasse. Discovery was inevitable in a crowded household full of suspicious and resentful servants. Unlike lower class lovers of their day, Fei Li Shi and Xu Yantan could not simply disappear into the fluid society of sojourners in another part of the country, nor was it even thinkable for an elite husband to sell his wife to her lover, a common practice among the poor.26 Once their affair was revealed, the best they could hope for was private punishment and isolation within the lineage. At worst, they risked official punishment by the magistrate and complete destruction of reputation and career prospects for themselves and their families. Noting the numerous ways in which the form and content of love letters blurred into fiction, Kathryn Lowry notes, “such letters might be regarded as a source for social history, providing, as they do, examples of the strategies used to maintain and create sentimental attachments. However, qingshu 情書 often posit new forms of relationship and emotions that stand in sharp counterpoint to the social reality, what could be termed a ‘social imaginary’.”27 As expressions of illicit sentiments, the letters exchanged by Fei Li Shi and Xu Yantan quite

24  Letter from Fei Li Shi to Xu Yantan, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8. 25  Theiss, Disgraceful Matters, chapter 6. 26  On wife-selling, see Sommer, “Qingdai xianyade mai qi anjian shenpan,” 345–96. 27  Lowry, “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter,” 52. See also Zeb Raft’s article in this volume.

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literally create a “social imaginary,” not because the lovers are geographically distant from each other and can only achieve communion in the imaginary, but because their relationship is legally, morally, and practically impossible. Filled with discussions of the affairs of the servants and the children, financial management, the health and financial troubles of their aging fathers, and their own health, the letters create the illusion of a normalized domestic partnership. Although we would associate such matters with marriage it was in fact highly unusual for elite married couples to routinely share such everyday concerns since men were posted away from home for long periods of time and women handled household affairs amongst themselves and servants. More critically, as adultery, the relationship was utterly unsustainable. Realization of the impermanence of their love pervades the letters. Yet the two remain unrepentantly committed to each other even as they realize that they have no future together in this life. After several servants see him leaving her quarters, Xu writes, “Although we were not caught in the act, it is best that we see each other in the life to come” 雖非當場見獲只好來生相矣.28 She writes back, When we were caught, you could tell what the servants were thinking behind their words. . . . If [Wang Wancheng] ruthlessly spreads news of this, then it will be necessary to kill four servants. But I fear that he will boldly expose [us] if the letters that have been lost by the servants come into his hands. If he has no proof, then I do not fear rumors. Even if the east and west wings [the women’s and men’s quarters] know of it, I think there is no capital crime. But if the two of us cannot move back and forth as before, it is best to look past [the vanities of this mortal life]. Take pity on me. You must be sure not to be angry and sorrow-stricken. If you fall, my life will cruelly cease. Thinking carefully about this matter, it is best to wait calmly. The servants are not good. They are very clever. At the very least, I will not allow you to come into the inner quarters, run into [them] unexpectedly, and be questioned about matters. But it is urgent that we two hide our sense of shame. 撞見時奴輩如何口氣可實失知 . . . 他若很播揚必要處死肆奴,但 恐平時被賤人失落字在他手放膽大捉破。若無憑據在他手亦不 怕楊開,即東西貳處得知料無死罪。但若貳人不能往常走動只 好看破。可憐我汝切勿惱怒肝陽。倘即臥到我命傾刻休矣。細

28  Letter from Xu Yantan to Fei Li Shi, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8.

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絲此事只好靜待。下人不好十分出跳只不過不許汝進內撞見索 物。但我貳人須遮廉恥。   29 Fei Li Shi, as depicted in numerous case testimonies, was an intelligent, tough, and controlling person who did not shrink from conflict and had a reputation for being hard on her servants. This contradictory passage displays her hardheaded attempt to strategize around the disaster that confronted her and, in the line threatening the servants (it is not clear which four she is referring to beyond Wang and Guanhua) with death, her assumption that she was powerful enough to make them keep her secret.30 Despite the confident rationalizing tone here, though, she also knows that matters are already beyond her control. Her desperation comes through in her admonition to look beyond the affairs of this world. And while her advice to Yantan not to feel or appear guilty is quite practical, she clearly also believes that on some level they have done nothing wrong. Xu Yantan also insists on the rightness of their love. In a letter written after their exposure, he expresses his indignation that Wang Wancheng sought to make it impossible for them to “share the intimacy of conjugal love” 近身恩愛, as though somehow this kind of love was legitimate for adulterers. He proclaims not only that he has no regrets, nor any intention of giving up on her, but that their love was in fact fated and thus inevitable, indestructible, and does not warrant shame or regret: I have harmed you to the utmost degree, but my love for you surpasses the utmost degree. Although certain kinds of people have long defamed [you], I never once thought about disrespecting you or abandoning you at all. Moreover, this was determined before by fate. In the end we are inseparable and I will never have any regrets. It is not proper to say such things to you, but matters have come to this. I am paying careful attention to everyone’s demeanor. How dare I risk death to speak directly? Yet I cannot be more ashamed because of the consequences of this [speaking directly]. As for dying of a broken heart, this I want to say, but do not dare to say. Alas! We two have one heart and one fate. You can dissect everything and see that you throughout your life you have never offended against me in the least. I must tell you directly, in the end, your heart is 29  Letter from Fei Li Shi to Xu Yantan, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8. 30  The specter of harsh punishment for servants who reveal the affair is again reminiscent of Pan Jinlian’s treatment of servants who betrayed her.

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my heart. My knowledge is your knowledge. I will absolutely never love you less because of rumors. And you must not come to reproach yourself more because of the accusations. 我之害汝已至萬分,我之愛汝亦出萬分。雖此輩早有謗讟而我 心決無半毫輕汝棄汝之念。此亦前緣分定固。結難解總無怨悔 也。此等言語不當聞之與汝,然事以至此。諸人意態盡出我察 言觀色得其大槩。敢不冒死直言,但不可因此之後日益愧恧。 致自傷心殞命,此我所欲言而不敢盡言者耳。嗚呼!我貳人幷 心合命。原可各剖相示汝生平全無絲毫違我。我亦不得不直告 之汝,總之汝心即我心,我知即汝知。我絕弗因所聞稍減愛汝 之念。汝亦弗因所告轉增自悔之心也。31 Wrestling with the thought of an end to the relationship, Xu too seems to invoke an alternate moral universe in which Heaven might be sympathetic to improper sentiments: After reading your letter, my teardrops fell like rain. . . . Human beings are not grass and trees. How can I endure this? Have these two years have been real or unreal? I think if it was a dream, I believe it all the more. . . . For over a month I have been in deep anxiety. Our enemies will chatter after today. This is very dangerous. You are my heart and belly, so speaking these words of separation is, as they say, bringing domestic turmoil on oneself. This is truly hard to endure. If there were a hole in the ground, I would just throw myself into it and die. . . . In a moment my heart will break into one hundred pieces with pain. I call out to Heaven but there is no reply and I don’t know what to do. . . . I write this through gentle tears. 閱手書後涕零如雨 . . . 人非草木,何認出。此兩載之中是真是 假,懸思若蒙益信 . . . 月餘焦急不過。外讎今日以後忉?殆甚。 汝為我心腹亦出此決絕之語所謂內患自作。此事真正難挨。若 有地孔早投入殞命耳 . . . 頃刻之間寸心百碎痛。自敲搥呼天不 應,幷我亦不自知所謂矣。透出和淚而寫此。   32 He suggests here that a life in denial of emotional reality is not worth living. This is one of the central themes of the late imperial discourse extolling the importance of qing in human life. While the realignment of moral order 31  Letter from Xu Yantan to Fei Li Shi, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8. 32  Ibid.

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around qing has long been recognized in fiction, these private letters attest to the deep resonance of the ethical logic of qing in people’s lives. Xu Yantan even expounds in almost philosophical terms on the contradiction between orthodox norms and values and moral and emotional authenticity.33 Sounding strikingly like a voice from Honglou meng, which was conceived in roughly the same time period as this case, he takes up its insight that the collision of passions and morality, of inner truth and the requirements of the outer world, creates an almost schizophrenic sense of self and blurs the distinction between real and unreal. He writes, In human life, moral reputation, character and behavior are most important. Life is secondary. If reputation can surely be preserved, then what person would not respect a good reputation and perversely take pleasure in a bad one? If reputation has in fact already been destroyed, yet one still loses what is real because of reputation, then wouldn’t this be holding on to hollow reputation in vain? In the end, although you have lost what is real, you still cannot save your reputation. . . . Now if we unfeelingly separate out of respect for life, in the end we will separately die of broken hearts. . . . Rather than die separately without each other’s friendship, wouldn’t it be better to die together face to face? For if we part, then I know I will die. If we are together, then there is a chance of survival. I want to lose my life in order to preserve my life. We separate to preserve reputation, but reputation cannot be preserved. We separate to protect our lives, yet our lives cannot be protected. So what purpose is there in enduring this separation? 人之一生,名節品行為重,性命次之。名果可全,豈有不惜美 名,反樂惡名之人?名即敗矣,而又因名而失實受此空名豈非 徒然,究之其實雖失,其名仍不可救。且因欲全名而兩下各處 終使名不可全而其名轉甚所謂讎人有口乘虛易止謗無心得間難 必然之理也。況惜命而忍心分手,究至分手而傷心殞命同歸于 死,與其離而死兩不相知不如聚而死兩猶相顧也。且離則自知 必死,聚則萬一生機,則欲全我命正所以喪我命耳。分而全 名,名不可全,分而保命,命不可保。我何為而認于分處載!34 Like many proponents of the value of qing, Xu posits the possibility of a disjuncture between the ethics that make a good reputation (ming 名) and what 33  Epstein, Competing Discourses, passim. 34  Letter from Xu Yantan to Fei Li Shi, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8.

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is real or authentic—that is, in this context, an emotionally fulfilling love relationship. He does not envision a resolution to this contradiction, but he reasons, not unrealistically, that once reputation has been sullied, there is no way to redeem it, so one might as well hold tightly to the authentic relationship even unto death, however unorthodox, for it might well be vindicated in the next life. 5

Divulging Mental Instability

In the midst of the affair, prior to its exposure, Fei Li Shi becomes obsessed with the idea that there is a hoard of silver buried somewhere in her courtyard, left by a previous owner of the house. She writes at length to Xu Yantan about her efforts to find it, which are unsuccessful in the end. To bolster the story that he forged the love letters, Wang Wancheng testifies that everyone in the household knew of her quixotic determination to find this silver so he inserted details of her quest into the letters to enhance their believability. In one letter, dated about ten days before Wang and two other servants see Xu Yantan leaving her quarters, she writes, At midnight, the maid came with the reply that up to perhaps four feet was still mud. You can see that this spot is useless. The fortuneteller is uncertain. Hopefully he is not completely believable. There is no harm in asking a servant to do a similar divination. . . . How are you now? Can you eat heartily or not? See that you calm down and recover in peace. The eighth in the afternoon. 夜分婢來回說至肆尺須尚是泥土,可知此處無益。卜士依稀幸 不全信。央及下人猶算無損于事也 . . . 今身子如何能健飯否寬心 靜養為矚。初八日午後。 In another letter, a few days later, she writes, Are you in good health today? I am thinking of you. That Father’s condition is gradually improving makes me completely happy indeed. You must patiently study and strictly discipline my two sons. Even if the activities of childish play are not without reason, gods and men clearly instruct [us to pursue] wealth and office together. Also, we got another divination in the third month. I cannot avoid being childishly impatient. Yesterday I stuck a sharpened bamboo stick a foot or so from the flowering [bush]. Women lack strength but I reached something. The object was definitely

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astride the base of the wall. Whoever buried it would certainly have buried it deep, definitely not shallow. Besides, we repeatedly divined the well hexagram. We surely want to make a big effort to uncover whatever is beneath. Yesterday, we did not dig it up and I really feared that we were trying to draw a tiger but couldn’t finish it [i.e., failed to achieve what we set out to do]. . . . I think that this flowering [bush] must be several decades old. The roots are deep and long. We plotted to take up weapons and go to war. Our band of women, that is, the four household servants, all came to help, but they could not break the wall and uproot the tree. I just now heard that Daughter-in-Law [Shupian’s wife] is about to go to Tongxiang on the 20th or so. I am extremely happy. As of today, I have a subtle plan that is also very appropriate. There used to be two stonemasons from Qiaomushan who broke up mountains and rocks, causing the rocks to fly upward and making rooms out of mud. They often laid courtyards for [my father] and in the past I have seen them. In fact, they laid the courtyard in front of my rooms. We will commission them to repair the stones in the courtyard above the hall and ask the two of them to come and destroy the wall saying that the camellia is touching the cassia tree and it would be best to move it across [to the other side]. If in sifting through the bottom of the roots there is really something hidden, it will be revealed and we can get it without much trace. When the hole is paved over then no one will know the reason [for the digging]. What do you think? My sons are constantly in a state of distraction. I want to make them tranquil. Tomorrow I want you to help them write something. I would rather avoid being forced to go over to the western gate [the quarters of her sons and the tutor]. In bitter grief I plan out the path to come. My head is constantly feverish. What to do? What to do? Tomorrow night I will see you for sure. 今日身子健旺否念念老人病勢漸好良足樂也。汝須寬心讀書言 訓兩兒。幼戲之事即不無因,神人明示財官同得。況卜卦又在 参月應得,我未勉稚氣性急。昨下千子離花尺。須女人力弱, 際得甚事事。此物決在牆底騎伏。當時埋物之人定是深藏,決 不是浮淺。況屢卜井掛必欲費力掘下之象。昨未掘開猶恐盡虎 不成,反留形跡姑俟緩商。我看此花必有數拾年之久,根深長 遠。大動干戈莫說女??即家中肆女聚來動手亦不能破牆起樹 矣。頃聞媳婦即在貳拾左右往桐鄉。我甚樂。及今有一妙計亦 甚妥協。尚有喬木山貳石匠。他慣打山石弄石如飛。勝于泥作 間。常在滋蘭砌天井。我尚見他的即我房前天井是他砌的。托 云要將廳上天井補砌石子,喚貳人來令伊破牆說茶花接著桂花 種移對面便可窮其根底。果有物遷葬便開, 即取無甚形跡。將月

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洞砌過伊亦不知其姑。汝以為何如?南 (sic) 兒往反心野。我欲 令靜心。明日要汝補做文字寧我免強至西門走走。我腹痛畧好 下路不止頭元發熱。奈何奈何?明晚會汝此訂。 This letter reads like a stream-of-consciousness glimpse into Fei Li Shi’s state of mind. Her thoughts wander from one concern to another, all of which appear in other letters. The letter begins and ends with reference to her own ill health and the “bitter grief” caused by anxiety about the potential consequences of her affair and the difficulty of sustaining it. Her ailing father’s health is another constant source of worry; having supported her claim to chastity, he dies within months of her banishment from the Fei family, his illness allegedly exacerbated by the strain and humiliation caused by the exposure of her affair. Her children’s awareness of her affair and its effect on their mental states and their studies is another major source of concern for Fei Li Shi throughout her letters, although her comment here about their pursuit of wealth and office suggests that she is in a state of disbelief about the potential affects of her disgraceful actions on their career prospects and reputation. She is happy about the prospect of her daughter-in-law’s absence because their relationship was not a harmonious one, perhaps because she knew of the affair and disapproved of it. The comment makes sense only in the context of another letter to Xu Yantan in which she hinted at tensions with her daughter-in-law, Wang Liang,35 commenting, “Daughter-in-Law is making secret plans and in her callousness is surely planning with the Master to do you harm” 媳婦陰謀心毒決于夫打算 必要害汝.36 Embedded in the midst of these scattered musings is her lengthy, detailed report on her search for hidden silver, which she never finds. Given the magnitude of the troubles confronting her, the intensity of her belief in the existence of the silver and her desire to uncover it seem excessive and misplaced. The well hexagram—the forty-eighth hexagram in the ancient divination manual Yijing 易經 (Book of changes)—that emerges in her divination on the silver quest follows the hexagram for impasse and connotes, among other things, the purity, constancy, and persistence of natural wells, but also the importance of pursuing an endeavor to the end. According to the Yijing,

35  Wang Liang was the granddaughter of a renowned bibliophile and calligrapher, Wang Wenbo, see below. 36  It is not clear here who Fei Li Shi thinks is plotting with her daughter-in-law. The term fu 夫 implies that it is either Shupian, her son, or her own husband, Yuyou, but there is no other reference to such plotting.

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The Well nourishes yet is never exhausted. “One might change a city, but one does not change a Well,” for this is to occupy a central position with hardness and strength. {When one “occupies a central position with hardness and strength,” one can fix the place in which he dwells so that it never changes.} “One may have almost got it there, but that is not the same thing as actually hauling it out of the Well,” that is, the merit remains unrealized.37 The divination may have suggested to Fei Li Shi that an impasse may be overcome, but only through persistent and thorough effort. Perhaps she hoped that discovery of the treasure would somehow help her to get past her impossible situation. If she understood the divination as a broader commentary on her life at that moment, she might have seen her defiant devotion to Xu Yantan as the unmovable position she had to occupy with “hardness and strength.” Indeed, her obsessive insistence on this quest is matched only by her obsessive attachment to her lover Xu Yantan. Fei Li Shi’s fetishistic obsession with the putative and unattainable hidden silver can also be read as a metaphor for a love that can never be attained; much as she loves Xu Yantan, their illicit and illegal relationship is utterly unsustainable. The domestic intimacies they share—concerns for the children’s education and health, worries about aging parents, management of servants, household repairs—create a fiction of marriage that cannot exist in the real world. The pathology and the moral and social impossibility of their relationship lead to fixation on the unattainable and the illusory expressed in the form of letters. For Fei Li Shi this manifests in domestic and economic form in the fetishization of the hidden treasure in the courtyard. For Xu Yantan it manifests more cerebrally as existential angst. 6

The Limits of Letters for Family Communication

Fei Li Shi’s discussion of her search for hidden silver is one of several moments in the case where money is entangled with sex. To punish Fei Li Shi’s adultery, the family head Fei Qianliu not only divorces her on the family’s behalf, but also takes possession of her moveable property and her house, which he sells to a relative for six-hundred taels of silver. Her lawsuit thus charges him with sexual slander and illegal confiscation of property. Fei Li Shi purchases the vindication of her chastity in the lawsuit with bribes to Governor Lu Zhuo and his staff 37  Lynn, The Classic of Changes, 438.

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totaling six-hundred taels of silver. The bitter animosity between Xu Yantan and Wang Wancheng derives from the intertwining of sexual rivalry and competition for influence over household financial management that comes to a head when Xu accuses Wang of embezzling rent monies. And finally as a result of the adultery and the lawsuit, the Fei family loses not only its reputation for propriety but its assets as well. The suggestions of embezzlement or mismanagement of rents indicate that family’s financial health was weakened already before the lawsuit. From the writer of Fei Shupian’s eulogy, Qian Chenqun 錢 陳群 (1686–1774), we know that the lawsuit was followed by feuding among the Feis over property that resulted in the complete loss of their patrimony.38 As with the roughly contemporaneous demise of the fictional Jia family in Honglou meng, sexual excess and impropriety combined with financial malfeasance and mismanagement to destroy a prominent family. In an important sense then, the Fei scandal affirms the core assumptions of what we might term the Confucian economy of desire which links morality and attitudes toward money and in which a family’s moral and fiscal health are inseparable. In the highly competitive society of late imperial China, where downward mobility was a constant threat for middling and elite families, the interrelated importance of sexual virtue (chastity), respect for elders (filiality), and sound financial management (frugality) became a cliché, reiterated ad nauseum in family instructions and moral handbooks. Keith McMahon explains how the fiction of time idealized a model of self-containment, echoing the medical logic of bodily balance and sexual restraint, that conflated moral and economic values in a wholistic notion of temperance implying frugality with money, emotions, desires, and pleasures.39 Playing with the homonym in the Chinese words for silver ( yin 銀), for the feminine principle (Yin 陰) that must be in balance with Yang, and for licentiousness ( yin 隱) one might say that Fei Li Shi and Xu Yantan’s licentiousness ( yin) created a deficiency of Yin in the liver and the family’s parallel deficiency in terms of yin (silver). Medical and fiscal health mirrored each other and both, as moralized elements of containment, were destroyed by illicit sex. This conflation of moral and economic anxieties pervades the extant letters that Fei Yuyou wrote to his eldest son, Fei Shupian, as the adultery crisis unfolded. Like other examples of letters from parents, especially fathers, to sons, these show how such anxieties informed both the emotional content of family sentiment and shaped its expression. At the time when his mother’s lawsuit was filed, Fei Shupian was a twenty-one-year-old government student 38  Qian Chenqun, Xiangshuzhai wenji xuchao, 2:25a–26b. 39  McMahon, Causality and Containment, 10.

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(shengyuan) on the path toward examination success and married to the highly accomplished granddaughter of the renowned poet, bibliophile and calligrapher Wang Wenbo 汪文伯 (b. 1659) from Tongxiang 桐鄉, scion of an extremely wealthy family of Huizhou salt merchants. We know from various testimonies that during some eight years of Yuyou’s posting in Beijing, letters were the main mode of communication between him and his family. While this was, if anything, the norm for literati families, this case allows us to see the effect that the lack of personal contact had on relationships. Since none of the letters exchanged between husband and wife are extant, the letters to Shupian preserved in the case file also provide most of what we know about Yuyou’s relationship with his wife. The marital relationship between Fei Li Shi and Fei Yuyou was, like that of most literati couples, profoundly shaped by the absence of a husband posted far from home. Fei Yuyou, whose grandfather had been a Hanlin Compiler and whose father had attained the position of Governor just before his untimely death, was dutifully pursuing an official career, and had been named expectant Vice Director of a ministry (houxuan yuanwai 候選員外) in Beijing. Kathryn Lowry has noted that commentaries appended to model letters between spouses highlight the conflict between literati career success and intimate marital companionship.40 Deferral of marital fulfillment—emotional and physical—was an integral component of elite family life. We do not know how this physical separation affected Yuyou or whether he kept company with a concubine or courtesan at his house in Beijing. But the fact that Fei Li Shi was willing to risk an affair suggests that whatever affection she might have originally had for her husband was waning and she was lonely. Ironically, given her betrayal, the letters demonstrate that Yuyou was far more attached to Fei Li Shi and his children than he was to his brothers. Marital loyalty in this case appears to have deepened because of animosity between Yuyou, the son of a concubine, and his elder brother, Fei Qianliu, the son of their father’s first wife. Probing Fei Li Shi’s startling accusation that her husband’s elder brother was slandering her, the magistrate asks, “Even though your husband was distinguished from his brothers Fei Qianliu and Fei Zifu by virtue of being the son of a concubine, they are still all brothers. How could there have been such ill will that they would slander you?” 你丈夫雖與費謙流費滋復有嫡庶之分但同 屬兄弟。何致結怨將你汙衊. Fei Li Shi replied, Since he was a concubine’s son, my husband feared his elder brother. My father-in-law went away to take office and my brothers-in-law followed 40  Lowry, “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter,” 58.

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him in official careers away from home. At home, I am the one who, for twelve years, managed the household, but not without inciting animosity. So my husband’s older brother harbored resentments against me and listened to the slanders of that refractory servant Wang Wancheng.41 因丈夫是庶出故丈夫怕大伯的。小婦人公公出任,伯叔隨任在 外。家中是小婦人當了拾貳年家,不無招怨。所以大伯懷恨小 婦人,聽了逆僕汪萬程捏造這事出來的。 This charge of disharmony among the brothers, implying, as it did, a great moral failing, was resisted by all of them, including her husband, who said in his testimony that he and his brothers “always got on well, and my legal mother also always showed very deep love for me” 素來和好的,就是嫡母待豫遊 也是極鍾愛.42 Yet the brothers had divided the family property while their mother was still alive and lived in separate houses. In response to interrogation about the division, which constituted a serious breach of propriety, especially for such a prominent literati family, Fei Qianliu insisted that he and Yuyou were “like blood brothers” 與同胞一般的, explaining defensively, “We divided households because the compound we lived in was very small” 因住房狹窄 各自分開.43 Although no one, including Fei Yuyou, was willing to affirm Fei Li Shi’s assessment of the family divisions, the accumulated testimonies of family members and their servants amply attest to longstanding resentments and suspicions between the households of Yuyou and Qianliu. Whatever his original feelings about his brother, Yuyou’s long absence from home—not to mention Qianliu’s years of service away prior to that—seems to have weakened his relationship with Qianliu, which came to be mediated by his wife and the senior servant Wang Wancheng. Numerous testimonies hint at the intense mutual dislike between Fei Li Shi and Fei Qianliu. Shortly after her husband was summoned to the capital to await appointment in 1733, Fei Qianliu was cashiered from his post as Nanru Circuit Intendant (nanru dao 南汝道) in Henan Province for mishandling a homicide case and came home to live as family head in the household that Fei Li Shi had been managing for many years on her own. The division of the households appears to have occurred some time after Qianliu’s return. The tension between the households of the two brothers was exacerbated by the meddling of the senior family retainer, the forty-three-yearold Wang Wancheng who was far closer to Qianliu than to his brother Yuyou. 41  Testimony of Fei Li Shi, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8. 42  Testimony of Fei Yuyou, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8. 43  Testimony of Fei Qianliu, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8.

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Throughout these letters it is clear that it was extremely difficult for Xuyou to process and deal with the exploding scandal at home from his remote distance. They also suggest he was at a loss to understand his brother Qianliu’s motivations and mindset. He wrote in one letter to his son Shupian, I am confronted with the cruelty of personal humiliation and family destruction. I cannot bear to think about the past. Human beings simply cannot get along without being mean and trifling. When I first heard that [Fei Li] Shi had been slandered by an evil servant, I was overcome and gnashed my teeth. But recently I have made careful inquiries about public opinion and carefully read the two letters from Zilan [Fei Li Shi’s father] and [Fei Li] Shi explaining the facts. 我慘遭身辱家破,不堪回首。凡人根本處不可涼薄。氏被惡奴 之謗我初聞之不勝切齒。但近來細紡眾論幷細閱滋蘭及氏兩次 來字所敘情節。44 Convinced that Wang Wancheng must have forged the love letters, Yuyou in this and a second letter to Shupian reveals an underlying lack of trust in his brother as he vents his anger at Qianliu for “stirring up friends and relatives” and abruptly expelling Fei Li Shi without giving Yuyou a chance to return home and deal with the matter himself. These actions, he says, “destroy harmonious feeling” 致傷和氣 and “do not balance human feeling with moral principle” 似非情理之平. Although he accepts the theory that Qianliu was “deceived by the ruse of that adulterous servant,” he condemns Qianliu’s unquestioning acceptance of the authenticity of the letters as “blind recklessness” 一味鹵莽. He admonishes his son Shupian for avoiding confrontation with his uncle for fear of “damaging good relations.” “You are her son,” Yuyou writes, “how can you so shamelessly forget your roots and not ask questions?” 汝係人子,豈可靦 顏忘本竟置不穩. He repeatedly advises Shupian to seek guidance from his grandmother, the family matriarch, and to negotiate with Qianliu, hoping he would, as he put it “repent and allow you all to come back.”45 Given everything else we know about Qianliu’s personality and the dysfunctional family politics that seem to have been the norm in the Fei family, Yuyou’s ongoing shock at Qianliu’s actions indicates that his brother was almost a stranger to him. He is also clearly unaware that his son, Shupian, had a hand in bringing his mother’s adultery to Qianliu’s attention. His criticism of Shupian’s lack of defense of his mother also speaks to Yuyou being deeply out of touch with his family. Given 44  Letter from Fei Yuyou to Fei Shupian, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8. 45  Letter from Fei Yuyou to Fei Shupian, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8.

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Yuyou’s responses to Shupian’s letters, his son appears to be packaging a story for him about his mother’s innocence, perhaps because matters were rapidly spinning out of control in ways that would damage the careers and reputations of everyone in the family. At this point Yuyou reluctantly authorized his son to lodge a complaint with the magistrate’s yamen about the false accusation of adultery and the lack of eyewitnesses required by statute to pursue the case. As discussed earlier, Yuyou testified that after receiving five letters written in Xu Yantan’s hand from Qianliu in the tenth month, he came to suspect that his wife was guilty, yet he remained furious with his brother for handling the situation without consulting him and in a manner that maximized damage to the family. He continued to find his brother’s behavior incomprehensible. In the eleventh month he wrote back to Shupian, saying, Your maternal grandfather’s death was entirely brought on by [Fei Li] Shi’s guilt. It is impossible to evade this. Spilt water cannot be gathered back. As far as I am concerned there can be no reunification [with Qianliu]. But this matter started with a recalcitrant servant, truly a case of the tail wagging the dog. After [the tutor’s] dismissal, [Fei Li] Shi went to her natal home and presented a complaint and things could have been resolved. Instead we are at the point where we must fight or die [because Qianliu stood his ground]. Cutting off the path to returning home, leading a mob to search and plunder property—with this kind of behavior, if your uncle examined himself, would he not find his own actions to be shameless? Expelling [your mother] is such an extreme action. And he didn’t even inform Mother or myself, but plunged forward recklessly not caring for the past or the future. This truly is beyond human feeling or moral principle. 外祖之病故俱由於氏之致罪,更難逭夫。覆水難收。在我原無 復合之義。但此事起于逆僕,尾大實甚。既逼令寫字辭去之後 氏赴母家申訴,事可得已,乃必欲置之死地。擮其歸率眾抄 奪,此種情形伯叔問心無歉否耶?且擯斥係何等大事。竟不稟 明滋蘭竝不通知于我,率意忘形不顧前後實出情理之外。46 As he was about to send this letter, Yuyou got one from his wife and her brother saying that they wanted to file a lawsuit against Qianliu. He then appends his impassioned response to what he thinks is a horrible option:

46  Letter from Fei Yuyou to Fei Shupian, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8.

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[Fei Li] Shi is routed and defeated and the rupture has come to this. This is so detestable. In his letter, Elder Brother persists in his extreme resolve. I fear now that this will all be detrimental to you. It would be imprudent to try to evade [the consequences of] this calamity. [Fei Li] Shi’s plan to commit suicide is the best. Becoming a nun takes second place. Preserving her life in a cowardly manner indulging in peace and quiet and inaction at her natal home is the worst option. Yesterday I received the letter from [Fei Li] Shi and her brother saying that they wanted to file a lawsuit. As an official, I am already culpable in this matter. This would only pile disgrace upon disgrace. How can we act recklessly? Now she can only blame and criticize herself and industriously and frugally engage in women’s work to supplement our income into our closing years. In the future if you and your brother can advance in office, perhaps you can take care of us in your place of appointment. 氏潰敗決裂至于如此。實可痛恨!大伯來信力持甚堅。且恐不 利于汝為辭則自難冒昧,為氏之計自盡為上,為尼次之,若在 母家偷生縱安靜無為以屬下策。昨接上 . . . 氏來信意欲控訴。當 途則此事以屬犯,實徒醜上加醜而已。豈可妄為。今只可自怨 自艾,勤儉女工以佐薪水以延殘生。將來汝兄弟輩若能發達或 可就養。47 In the twelfth month, Yuyou saw in the Peking Gazette that his wife’s case had been presented to the Zhejiang Provincial Yamen. At this point, as the scandal became visible to the empire-wide public of officialdom, he decided finally to return home. We know nothing more of his thoughts about his wife or the fate of his marriage. Even after he is convinced of her guilt and despite his disconnection from daily family affairs, Yuyou’s loyalty to his wife and concern for the welfare of his own children were far greater than his loyalty to his half-brothers. Surprisingly, although Yuyou clearly indicates that suicide is the most honorable option for Fei Li Shi, his comments to his son about her living out her days occupied with women’s work suggests that he does not appear to expect that she will kill herself. The reasons for this assumption are not clear. Given her domineering personality, perhaps he did not think he could convince her to commit suicide. Maybe he felt her suicide would have created problematic tensions with her natal family or pain for his children. Or perhaps, like many cuckholded men in the criminal case record, he himself does not really want her to take the most honorable path thus depriving him of her companionship in old age. The fact 47  Letter from Fei Yuyou to Fei Shupian, Xingke tiben, QL 5.7.8.

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that he does not suggest divorce either may support this last interpretation. Instead, he resigns himself to the demise of his career and envisions a future of quiet retirement. Yuyou expresses his concern (perhaps not necessarily affection?) for his family using the rhetoric of moral and economic containment. His pain at what he saw as his brother’s betrayal was compounded by his anxiety over the consequences of the scandal and the lawsuit for the financial stability and reputation of his own immediate family. He warned his son that it was imperative that he keep word of the slander from getting outside the family and counseled him to be frugal in managing the household, dismissing unnecessary servants and diligently pursuing uncollected rents. Perhaps his desire to keep Fei Li Shi as his wife was motivated by the sense that this was the best way to diminish the consequences of the scandal for his children. Ironic as it was, given his wife’s adultery, Yuyou’s commitment to his own nuclear family in defiance of the patrilineal authority represented by Qianliu highlights the fault lines between the patrilineal family centered on brothers and their relationship to parents, and the conjugal family centered on the marital relationship that emerge in other more ordinary legal case records with striking frequency in this period. In this marriage, though, the potency of the conjugal bond was inspired not by spousal love, but devotion to children and resentment against brothers. Unlike Tutor Xu, Yuyou, as he constructs himself in these letters, in the aftermath of his betrayal by his wife and his half brother, is not the least concerned with emotional authenticity and the superficiality of a good name and career success. The “human feeling and moral principle” he invokes in his criticism of Qianliu’s behavior are the tempered family sentiments that are supposed to keep passionate love, anger, and hatred under control in the interest of family stability and success. In a letter written to his son, Shupian before the lawsuit was filed, Fei Yuyou admonishes him to adhere to the orthodox paradigm of self-containment: As the property is being whittled away on a daily basis and incoming profits are daily diminishing, you must pay special attention to put affairs in order and manage the household in a frugal manner. Select your friends with caution. In matters great and small you must be discerning and not allow yourself to be fooled. You must urgently demand payment of land rents in arrears and tax debts. You cannot be careless, procrastinate and fritter away your time. In managing those below you, you must be even more strict and not the least lenient.

The Letter as Artifact of Sentiment and Legal Evidence

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至產進益日減須加意整頓節儉持家。擇交宜慎。事無巨細俱宜 親自照察,即所去田產之拖欠祖息更須上緊催索,不可因循悠 忽馭下更須嚴厲,不可一味寬和。 Such Confucian fatherly sentiments seem, of course, on one level to be rather hackneyed and were certainly common features of published family correspondence.48 But in the context of all we know of the Fei family dysfunction, the scandal, and the family’s subsequent demise, there was nothing pro forma about them. Yuyou was desperately trying to hold together a family that was collapsing in all possible ways, and his long-term absence from home played no small part in his failure to do anything to abate the disaster. In contrast with the adulterous lovers, for him, in the end, letter writing was no substitute for face-to-face consultation and confrontation, in-person fact-finding, and personal knowledge of family personalities and dynamics. While Xu Yantan and Fei Li Shi’s intra-household letters deepened their affection, intimacy and mutual trust, Yuyou’s letters home indicate that his absence diminished his intimacy with his wife, son, and half brother and eroded the trust between them.



Like other, more public, letters, those considered here are expressions of self. But the private, indeed, secret and even embarrassing, sense of self conveyed in these letters presents a stark contract with the cohesive, carefully constructed selfhood found in published letters. The love letters, lacking the aesthetic structures of their literary counterparts and marked by repetition and awkward syntax, record the deconstruction of selves who find their existence untenable and their lives falling apart. Even Fei Yuyou’s more carefully crafted letters to his son reveal an inner self shaken by the collapse of a family order he took for granted, uncertain and anxious about the future, and ineffectively admonishing his son with orthodox mantras belied by the fragility of “human feeling and moral principle.” His letters cannot contain his own passionate rage at his family for their transgressions and betrayals and perhaps at himself for his failure to rein them in like a good patriarch ought to do. Written by highly literate

48  See the article about letters of familial admonition by Antje Richter in this volume.

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people familiar with the conventions of proper self expression, all of the letters presented as evidence in this case remind us of the depths of transgressive emotion, moral contradiction, personal confusion, and failure that published letters and letters intended for publication elide. Yet paradoxically they also suggest the impossibility of truly private communication, let alone secrecy.

Cast of Characters in the Fei Case

Fei Li Shi 費李氏 Fei Yuyou 費豫游

The adulteress, wife of Fei Yuyou Husband of Fei Li Shi, younger brother of Fei Qianliu Fei Qianliu 費謙流 Head of the Fei family, Elder brother of Fei Yuyou Fei Shupian 費樹楩 Eldest son of Fei Li Shi and Fei Yuyou Fei Shunan 費樹楠 Youngest son of Fei Li Shi and Fei Yuyou Fei Zifu 費滋復 Younger brother of Fei Qianliu and Fei Yuyou Fei Lüxiang 費履祥 Nephew of Fei Qianliu and Fei Yuyou Xu Yantan 徐延菼 Live-in tutor of Fei Shupian and Fei Shunan, Fei Li Shi’s lover Wang Wancheng 汪萬程 Senior retainer in the Fei family, loyal to Fei Qianliu Guan Hua 官花 Fei Li Shi’s maidservant Wang Sun Shi 汪孫氏 Mother of Fei Shupian’s wife, Wang Liang 汪亮 Lu Zhuo 盧焯 Governor of Zhejiang Province Depei 德沛 Governor-General of Zhejiang and Fujian Provinces Bibliography Chen, Hsiu-fen. “Between Passion and Repression: Medical Views of Demon Dreams, Demonic Fetuses, and Female Sexual Madness in Late Imperial China.” LIC 32.1 (2011): 51–82. Cullen, Christopher. “Patients and Healers in Late Imperial China: Evidence from the Jinpingmei.” History of Science 31.2 (1993): 99–150. Epstein, Maram. Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Furth, Charlotte. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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———. “Blood, Body and Gender: Medical Images of the Female Condition in China, 1600–1850.” Chinese Science 7 (1986): 43–65. Hawkes, David, trans. The Story of the Stone, vol. 4: The Debt of Tears. London: Penguin Books, 1980. Idema, Wilt. “Diseases and Doctors, Drugs and Cures: A Very Preliminary List of Passage of Medical Interest in a Number of Traditional Chinese Novels and Related Plays.” Chinese Science 2 (1973): 37–63. Lowry, Kathryn. “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter in Late Ming.” Ming Studies 44 (2001): 48–77. ———. “Duplicating the Strength of Feeling: The Circulation of Qingshu in the late Ming.” In Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, edited by Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu, 239–72. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. Lynn, Richard John. trans., The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Keith McMahon. Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Leiden: Brill, 1988. Qian Chenqun 錢陳群. Xiangshuzhai wenji xuchao 香樹齊文集續鈔. In Xiangshuzhai quanji 香樹齊全集 (n.p. 1885 ed.). Roy, David Tod, trans., The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, vol. 5: The Dissolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Schonebaum, Andrew David. “Fictional Medicine: Diseases, Doctors and the Curative Properties in Chinese Fictions.” PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2004. Sommer, Matthew [Su Chengjie 蘇成捷]. “Qingdai xianyade mai qi anjian shenpan: Yi 272 jian Ba, Nanbu, yu Baodi xian anzi wei lizheng” 清代縣衙的賣妻案件審 判:以272件巴縣、南部與寶坻縣案子為例證 (The Adjudication of WifeSelling in Qing County Courts: 272 Cases from Ba, Nanbu, and Baodi Counties), translated by Lin Wenkai 林文凱, in Ming Qing falü yunzuo zhong de quanli yu wenhua 明清法律運作中的權利與文化 (Power and Culture in Ming-Qing Law), edited by Qiu Pengsheng 邱澎生 and Chen Xiyuan 陳熙遠, 345–96. Taipei: Lianjing chuban gongsi, 2009. Theiss, Janet M. Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ———. “Elite Engagement with the Judicial System in the Qing and Its Implications for Legal Practice and Legal Principle.” In Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s to 1950s, edited by Chen Li and Madeleine Zelin, 124–147. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Yim, Chi-hung. “The ‘Deficiency of Yin in the Liver’: Dai-yu’s Malady and Fubi in Dream of the Red Chamber.” CLEAR 22 (2000): 85–111.

Chapter 14

Infinite Variations of Writing and Desire: Love Letters in China and Europe* Bonnie S. McDougall Love letters can be found among all literate civilizations, although literacy is not a prerequisite for sending or receiving them. They are among our most treasured possessions, although their materials are often commonplace and pass through others’ hands. While we may wish to hide ours from others’ eyes, we read others’ letters with shameless pleasure. The real and imagined love letter has exerted an enduring fascination across the ages, but understanding has lagged behind practice; for all their moment in our intimate lives, love letters have seldom been analyzed or theorized in any systematic way. Even their history is obscure: there is no way of telling when the first love letters were written. European and Chinese love letters both have long indigenous traditions: a comparison of their writers and readers, frequency and duration, topics and themes, media and materials, functions and values, reveals infinite combinations of writing and desire occupying a common space. One significant difference between the two traditions is that while it is possible to find many genuine, unedited examples of European or American love letters as well as edited or fictional versions, relatively few authentic love letters in Chinese have been published unedited or made available in archives. (By “authentic” or “genuine” I refer to letters that have not been edited for publication or that are not intentionally fictive; it does not imply that the * The first version of this paper was presented at a conference in Slovakia in 2003 and published in Monumenta Serica 2006. I am most grateful to Monumenta Serica for permission to re-publish in revised form. The focus in both versions is on comparisons between Chinese and European letters. For more detail on Chinese letters, see two of my earlier publications: Love-Letters and Privacy and “Revealing to Conceal.” I apologize for the overlap between these two publications and the present version, each of which were prepared for different audiences. I remain most grateful to Antje Richter for her generous comments, to the two anonymous internal reviewers, and to the workshop participants, for suggesting new topics and directions. I also wish to thank Anders Hansson for his invaluable assistance, technical and otherwise.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_016

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sentiments expressed in these letters are authentic. Authenticity in sentiments is a judgment that may be impossible to verify.) Many of the examples cited in this article are from Western writers, chiefly British; whether taken from collections, anthologies or biographies, they are in the main presented as authentic by their publishers and apparently free of editorial intrusion.1 Although there are many anthologies of Chinese letters, examples of real-life love letters in China are relatively few, there is much less information available about them, and they still lack a general history or survey; with rare exceptions,2 researchers are obliged to turn to published compilations and to fiction to understand when, how and by whom love letters were written. Do Chinese lovers value their love letters less, not bothering to keep them? Or do they value their privacy more, not allowing others to see their love letters? These questions are too general to yield simple answers, although a possible line of investigation is the traditional avoidance in Chinese prose writing of what is highly personal and subjective. Love poetry addressed by the writer to the beloved may serve as the preferred alternative in Chinese.3 Letters are often described as dialogic by nature, although in some respects they can be understood as an exchange of monologues. For the intended reader of love letters, their dialogic aspect may be taken for granted. Other readers, including researchers and translators, are often left with only one side of the exchange and must imagine the other side. A more troublesome question for unintended readers, especially for readers from other times and cultures, is that letters assume a reader who is familiar with their personal and historical background: crucial information is not stated because that knowledge is held by both parties, while the perplexity of an unknown reader unfamiliar with this information is not an issue for either writer or intended reader. 1  The best short account of European and American love letters is in Peter Gay, The Naked Heart, 311–29. The introduction to Fraser, Love Letters also contains a good short analysis of major characteristics of love letters in English. 2  An exception from premodern China is discussed at length in an essay by Janet Theiss in this volume. Theiss presents a case study of a Qing dynasty love letter exchange that was tested in court for its authenticity. A modern example is discussed below. In a rare example of an intimate autobiography, the Qing dynasty Fu sheng liu ji 浮生六記 (Six chapters of a floating life) by Shen Fu 沈復 (1763–1825), the author describes passing love letters to his wife. See McDougall, “Introduction” and “Function and Values of Privacy in the Correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, 1925–1929” in Chinese Concepts of Privacy, 18–20 and 162–65. 3  For an elaboration of the relationship between poetry and letters in medieval China, see Zeb Raft, “The Space of Separation: The Early Medieval Tradition of Four-Syllable ‘Presentation and Response’ Poetry” in this volume.

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A special awkwardness that confronts the translator of private letters is that while many literary texts speak with several voices (a technique that translators of fiction and drama learn to master), the voices of the two parties in a typical letter exchange seem to require the services of two translators. This certainly appeared to be the case in the most famous collection of love letters in modern Chinese literature, the correspondence between Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881– 1936) and Xu Guangping 許廣平 (1898–1967) first published in 1933 under the title Liang di shu 兩地書 (Letters between two). The difference between the two writers’ voices is great: when they first began to correspond, she was a student in her late twenties, he was her teacher in his mid forties; she was single and unknown outside her immediate circle, he was married and one of China’s most famous living writers; he was formal, rational and cautious; she was impulsive, emotional and defiant; he edited the collection for publication, she was his assistant. Not surprisingly, most of the editorial deletions that Lu Xun made were to her letters; equally unsurprisingly, it was she who instructed their son to publish the original letters in full.4 The Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, obtaining authorization to publish an English translation of Liang di shu, decided one translator was enough, so that inevitably the two voices were to some extent elided.5 The contribution of letters to understanding Chinese culture and society and the variety of research methodologies in letters research apply equally in other cultures and societies, reinforcing the desirability of comparative approach. For it appears to be undeniable that letters, including love letters, are a universal phenomenon in all literate societies. It is equally undeniable that with respect to their historical traditions, writers, functions and so on, there are constantly reoccurring patterns as well as infinite varieties both within a single culture and between cultures. Where there are differences, they give grounds for speculating on how they reflect aspects of the cultures from which they stem; where there are similarities, there is a strong affirmation of the centrality of written expression, communication, love, imagination, and creativity in human experience.

4  Lu and Jing, Lu Xun, Jing Song tongxin ji. Their son later authorized a facsimile version of the letters: Lu and Xu, ‘Liang di shu’ zhenshu. 5  McDougall, Letters between Two. These challenges go some way to explaining the twenty years it took my translation to reach publication. It remains a distant hope that one day someone (preferably two) may translate into English the full original letters.

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Origins and History

Letters are such familiar, everyday things that people often overlook their ancient heritage. There does not seem to be much point in attempting to define letters as a genre: even within a single country or period there are differences in language, sentiment, and style. Despite this variety, some features of letter writing are found repeatedly down the centuries and across the world; some are obviously learned behavior, others are apparently spontaneous rediscoveries. Extended into metaphor, letter writing becomes synonymous with writing itself. Love letters also enjoy significance beyond the physical object; literally or symbolically, they appear in fiction, drama, and poetry, and the term itself is common in the titles of literary and performance works, including popular songs. The earliest surviving letters of any kind date back more than two thousand years BC to ancient Mesopotamia; they include official, business, and private letters but not love letters.6 In classical Greece and Rome, however, there is evidence that love letters were already part of daily life. Heroides, the first literary work composed entirely in letter form, consists of a series of fifteen letters in verse by Ovid (43–18 BC) purporting to be written by women lamenting their seduction, betrayal, or abandonment.7 According to Patricia Rosenmeyer, one of the poems in Heroides is based on an earlier work by the Greek poet Callimachus (310/305–240 BC), which featured a love letter (possibly better described as a courtship letter) inscribed on an apple.8 A real-life example is Cicero’s correspondence with his wife Terentia, from 58 BC where she was the ‘loyalest and best of wives’ to his final curt letter to her in 47 BC anticipating their divorce (a post-love letter?).9 Between Roman times and the twelfth century few examples survive of authentic love letters in Europe: the earliest known love letter in English dates from 1399.10 Again, we can only speculate on the reasons for this scanty record: love letters were either too precious or else too trivial to survive. 6  See Oppenheim, Letters from Mesopotamia. 7  See Showerman, Ovid in Six Volumes, 1–311. For a general discussion see Jacobson, Ovid’s Heroides; for its place in epistolary literature, see Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, 17–18, 30–61. See also the poetical letters, Epistulae, by Horace (65–8 BC). 8  Rosenmeyer, “Love Letters in Callimachus, Ovid, and Aristaenetus.” I am grateful to Antje Richter for having brought this article to my attention. 9  Both letters are included in Shackleton Bailey, Cicero, 62 and 162. For commentary see Hutchinson’s Cicero’s Correspondence, 28–32; see also the review of Cicero’s Correspondence by Mary Beard. 10  Fraser, Love Letters, 109.

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The oldest surviving letters in China were written about public affairs by members of the educated élite; there are no love letters among them. Early personal letters from obscure individuals, often dictated to scribes, were not intentionally preserved. The earliest personal letters in China are those found in an archeological site dating 224–223 BC; they were written on two wooden strips, from two soldiers writing home to their families asking for clothes and money.11 The most famous early personal letter is by the historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–90 BC), written in response to a friend on the events leading up to his castration and probably intended for wider circulation.12 One of the earliest and perhaps the most famous Chinese love letter (qing­shu 情書) is fictional: it occurs in a famous Tang dynasty prose romance, “Yingying zhuan” 鶯鶯傳 (The story of Yingying) by Yuan Zhen 元稹 (779–831).13 In this story, which is thought to be autobiographical, Zhang 張, an upright young scholar, is seduced by the beauty of the 17-year old Cui Yingying 崔鶯鶯 and sends her two verses via her maid, Hongniang 紅娘. Further exchanges, when they become lovers, take the form of prose letters as well as poems. When they finally separate, Cui sends him a long letter in prose. He shows the letter to his friends and the affair becomes widely known. Distrustful of his own virtue, however, Zhang has already decided that her wickedness makes her unsuitable to be his wife, and he hardens his heart against her. Love letters figure prominently in the depiction of life in the Japanese imperial court in the tenth-century Pillow-Book (Makura no Sōshi 枕草子) of Sei Shōnagon 清少納言,14 where an elaborate etiquette determined their form and content. The actual letters themselves were not preserved, again suggesting that their absence from the archives is not proof that such letters did not exist. The emergence of love letters as a distinct literary genre in Europe can be attributed to the accidental discovery of the correspondence between the scholarly monk Abelard (1079–1142) and the abbess Heloise (1101–1164), lamenting their lost love when she was a brilliant young scholar and he was her tutor. Originally written in Latin in the twelfth century, these love letters were circulated and then published in French and other languages in the seventeenth 11  Wilkinson, Chinese History, 158. 12  Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter Writing,” 100. In his essay “Captured in Words: Functions and Limits of Autobiographical Expression in Early Chinese Epistolary Literature” in this volume, Matthew Wells considers the possibility of Sima Qian’s letter not having been sent but kept among his own papers. 13  Translated in Birch, Anthology of Chinese Literature, 302–10, and Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 540–49. 14  Translated by Arthur Waley.

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century. They remain the most famous example of love letter exchanges in European languages.15 In a remarkable instance of parallel timing, love letters were also published as a literary genre in China in the seventeenth century.16 By this time the term qingshu in its current sense appears in written fiction. Like the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, these qingshu are written in a formal style and are destined for readers other than the original couple. Without heroic personalities and tragic narratives behind them, however, these letters failed to launch a literary tradition, and love letters in China continued for the next two centuries to be an art enclosed in secrecy. 2

Writers and Recipients

In principle, the writers and recipients of love letters include the whole population of a literate culture. They do not have to be literate themselves, since professional or amateur scribes can act on their behalf, so that writers and recipients can be found in all social classes. In recent times, examples of love letters by people without high social status can sometimes be found in biographical writing, such as the pioneering collection of memoirs by working class women in the anthology Life as We Have Known It, edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies (1861–1943) with an introductory letter by Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), which enjoyed an enthusiastic reception on publication by Hogarth Press in 1931.17 Although this collection does not contain letters, the women refer to love letters written by themselves and their friends and to a collection of published love letters, George Egerton’s Rosa Amorosa (1901).18 It is now standard practice in European countries for 15  There are many translations of these letters; see, e.g., Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. For their enduring appeal and a new discovery, see Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard. 16  Kathryn Lowry has examined love letters and manuals from the late imperial period in “Personal Letters in Seventeenth-Century Epistolary Guides” and “The Space of Reading.” Lowry notes that qingshu at this time “explore sentiments that inhere in various types of social relationship, not restricted to romantic or conjugal love as the English suggests” (“The Space of Reading,” 35). 17  Co-operative Working Women, Life as We Have Known It, 86, 92. See also Woolf, A Reflection of the Other Person, 65, 192–93, 228–29, 286–87, 340–41. 18  George Egerton is the pen-name of Chavelita Dunne (1859–1945), a well-known writer around the turn of the century who is now almost entirely forgotten; Rosa Amorosa is an edited collection of her letters to a Norwegian lover. See A Leaf from The Yellow Book, 57.

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compilations of love letters to include letters written by people of humble origins and obscure lives. While there is no way of proving it, it seems likely that the publication of all such love letters came about as the result of accident (that is, including archival discovery). This kind of record is missing from the Chinese sources, even in modern letter collections. The poor and socially deprived in twentieth-century China were encouraged to speak of their politics but rarely of their private lives. Only with the close of the century and the development of popular mass media and the internet have less privileged members of society been able to air public displays of love and affection.19 The writer and his or her intended recipient are commonly romantic couples, whether heterosexual or homosexual,20 in a licit or illicit relationship, married or single, happy or unhappy. On rare occasions, a third voice may be heard, as in the case of a deserted wife: for example, the wife of the painter Augustus John (1878–1961) writing to his mistress in 1905,21 and Zhu An 朱安 (1879–1947), Lu Xun’s wife, who only wrote to his mistress Xu Guangping after his death and only about practical matters. A rather different triangulation was made by Laurence Sterne, who notoriously copied love letters to his mistress from ones he had written, years before, to his wife.22 To the published love letters between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, themselves the subject of bitter exchanges, there can now be added the correspondence of Constance Wilde to her husband during their courting days, to her new (also married) lover Arthur Humphreys, and to her new mother-figure, Lady Mount-Temple.23 Letters between mothers and sons or daughters are common,24 although fathers and their children are less frequent and more formal correspondents.25 Fathers’ letters tend to be didactic and in the public realm, like the letters from Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) to his son and by Zeng Guofan 曾國蕃

19  See Li Jie’s article in this volume. 20  See, e.g., Turner, Dear Sappho. 21  See the letter from Ida John in Fraser, Love Letters, 87–88. 22  The claim of self-plagiarism is cited by Thomas Mallon (Stolen Words, 20) from W. B. C. Watkins, Perilous Balance, 154. 23  For the Wilde–Douglas correspondence, see Love-Letters and Privacy, 88 and “Revealing to Conceal,” 288. For Constance Wilde’s correspondence, see Moyle, Constance, 74–75, 78 (letters to Wilde); 241–45 (letters to Humphreys); see also the review by Colm Toibin. 24  The most famous letters from mothers to their daughters are by Mme de Sévigné and Lady Mary Montague; for correspondence between mothers and sons, see Gordon and Johnson, My Dear Mother. 25  One example only is given by Fraser; see Love Letters, 27.

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(1811–1872) to his.26 In more recent times, Harry Truman wrote affectionate letters to his daughter and only child Margaret; Asquith to his elder daughter Violet Bonham Carter; and Winston Churchill to his youngest child Mary. The extent to which inter-familial expressions of love may or may not contain an erotic undertone (that is, short of incestuous) is another issue where the dividing lines are not clear. The former prime minister of Australia, Robert G. Menzies (1894–1978), addressed his only daughter in his long letters to her as ‘My sweet’, ‘Darling Heather’, ‘My darling Heather’, ‘Heather darling’ and ‘My dearest Heather’, including sentiments such as “As always, my love, I think of you every day, and miss you terribly.”27 Towards the end of his life, when he was approaching eighty, Menzies finished a letter to his daughter as follows: “And, of course, give my love to yourself, who remains the great unalloyed joy of my life. A neglectful father, as you might say, but one whose love for you is the really great emotion of his life.”28 The valediction, it might be wondered, is more usual for a wife (who in this case was still living at the time) than a daughter. It is frequently claimed that letter-writing in general is especially suited to women. Such statements can be found in both Chinese and Western sources and are made by both men and women, including radical Western feminist scholars.29 There is little evidence for this claim and much to contradict it. Since other forms of published writing are dominated by men, it may well be that a rough equality between male and female letter-writers is seen as female dominance. Collections of letters by women, starting from the Ming and Qing dynasties,30 cannot be said to dominate Chinese letter-writing but do represent changing social factors including a rise in female literacy and other forms of enhanced personal liberty for educated women. Age is no bar to passionate declarations. Children write love letters to their classmates (or to their teachers), passing notes in classrooms and playgrounds. The anthropologist Christine Oppong observed that school children in Accra write love letters in class, where it is impossible that they learned to do it from 26  For early examples of letters from fathers to their sons see Antje Richter’s essay, “Between Letter and Testament: Letters of Familial Admonition in Han and Six Dynasties China” in this volume. 27  Menzies, Letters, 64. 28  Menzies, Letters, 258. 29  E.g., Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print, 89. 30  See Widmer, “The Epistolary World of Female Talent” and Widmer’s essay in this volume; also Yu-Yin Cheng, “Letters by Women of the Ming-Qing Period” and works by Katherine Lowry.

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European models.31 The spontaneity and universality in children’s love letters provide the clearest evidence we have that, given literacy, the urge to write, like desire itself, is irrepressible. Elderly lovers may be even more obsessive than adults in their prime. The celebrated scholar Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋 (1903–1987) shocked his colleagues by remarrying not long after the death of his first wife. Liang was seventy at the time, and his new wife, Han Jingqing 韓菁清, was thirty years younger and famous in her own right as a singer. Their marriage lasted thirteen years and seems to have been happy, despite opposition from friends and former students. Taiwan’s academic world was even more appalled when Han sanctioned the publication of their love letters after his death.32 Leonard Woolf at age sixty-four was only slightly younger when he began writing passionate love letters to Marjorie Ritchie [Trekkie] Parsons, twenty-two years his junior, a few months after Virginia Woolf died in 1941.33 The survival of these intimate letters was accidental, the result of litigation about Leonard Woolf’s will. To defend herself as the rightful inheritor, Parsons was obliged “to say on the stand that there had been no ‘improper relationship’ between herself and Leonard,” and towards the end of her life she claimed again that their relationship was not sexual. The letters’ editor, Judith Anderson, believes that letters from Woolf by 1943 had become “playfully amorous” and thereafter deepened until “their love was passionate . . . and erotically charged,” and wonders if Parson may have valued the couple’s “privacy above truthfulness.”34 As Lu Xun also advises, it is foolish to imagine that every private expression in or about love letters should be regarded as true witness.35 It tends to be taken for granted that professional writers and their partners are naturally given to writing love letters, as well as public figures whose eminence is due at least in part to their writing skills. There are no grounds, however, for imagining that the obscurity or fame of the writer, or the writer’s literary skills, are the chief factors in letters that appeal most to the unintended

31  Personal communication, January 2001. 32  Liang and Han, Liang Shiqiu, Han Jingqing qingshu xuan. It was Liang’s editor who suggested publication, referring to Liang di shu as a model, and Liang had agreed. 33  Anderson, Love Letters; reviewed by Hermione Lee. 34  Anderson, Love Letters, xi–xiii, xvii, xxii. 35  In his preface to the published correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, Lu Xun notes that in his letters “what I say [in letters] is not what is in my mind”; see McDougall, Letters between Two, 12. For a more pungent expression of the same advice, see Richter’s essay “Between Letter and Testament.”

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reader: both have their own kind of charm.36 It is similarly awkward to declare a preference between expressions of sentiment that are couched in conventional terminology and presentation and those that are more original: conventions that the unintended reader may find of little interest do not necessarily bother the intended recipient, who may not even notice. The least worthy of attention, the evidence suggests, is fan-mail addressed to celebrities. Fan-mail may include passionate declarations but the responses, if any, would be cordial at best. Perhaps because the emotions they express, no matter how fervent or sincere, are not regarded as dignified enough to qualify, examples of fan-mail do not figure in letter anthologies. Love letters are usually addressed to a single person but may reach many more. They may be passed around to others, out of pride in one’s ability to express or attract affection, as in Yuan Zhen’s “Story of Yingying,” or in order to ridicule writer or recipient, as in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). They may be inherited or found by accident, or they may be bought or sold by the sender, the recipient, or some other person with or without the consent of the sender and/or recipient. Some love letters end up without a reader: they may not be delivered, or they may be left unsent, as in the case of Beethoven’s 1812 letter to his Immortal Beloved37 and (possibly) Sima Qian’s rambling account of his castration (which although not a love letter may be regarded as a personal letter). But letters that go astray or are kept only within the writer’s own papers, are not wasted effort, because writing performs a function for the writer beyond that of communicating with another person. 3

Media and Materials

Love letters can be written on almost any kind of surface with any kind of writing instrument, including computers and mobile telephones. Callimachus’s hero wrote to his beloved on an apple, which she picked up and read aloud, thereby making his sentiments appear to be hers. Abelard and Heloise wrote on wax tablets, which could be erased and re-inscribed or returned with the original and a response; they also transcribed the letters they wrote or received on parchment for a more durable record. This process is remarkably similar 36  Aldous Huxley found love letters “commonplace” except for an anonymous suicide note he read in a newspaper; quoted in Fraser, Love Letters, xx. It is possible to feel sympathetic to this viewpoint without agreeing with it. 37  Beethoven, The Letters of Beethoven, 1, 373–76.

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to emailing, the bond paper for the printout serving as today’s equivalent of parchment. Whether sent through the post or by email, love letters may be embellished with drawings or sketches: Winston Churchill and Lu Xun both drew animal caricatures of themselves in the text or as signatures.38 The post has one great advantage over email: envelopes not only protect the letters inside but also allow love-tokens such as coins, jewelry, or a lock of hair to be enclosed.39 They also signal “keep out” to all but the person addressed, although to some readers this is more of a challenge than a deterrent. In my childhood, envelopes could declare their intent with the letters S.W.A.L.K. (Sealed With A Loving Kiss) on the reverse, but I have not seen such an inscription for many years. In modern China, where it is widely believed that letters are routinely opened by the post office, love letters are less likely to be signaled to outsiders. Love letters are often written during a journey, usually with materials that are purposely brought along. Lu Xun and Xu Guangping began to write to each other more or less immediately after boarding their separate boats from Shanghai to Amoy and Canton in 1926, in full knowledge that it would be several days before the letters could be posted and weeks before they would be delivered. Graham Greene (1904–1991) began his practice of writing love letters on trains in 1925, on visits to his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, when he was living in London and she was in Oxford. According to his biographer, Greene wrote his best letters to her on trains.40 In the first of these letters, he counts down the time until the train arrives at Oxford: half an hour, nineteen minutes, fourteen minutes, six minutes, four minutes . . . After one such meeting, he left Oxford, not, as had been intended, onwards to Liverpool and thence to a job with British American Tobacco in China, but back to London. Here he received a note and a photograph from Vivien; she asked that her note be destroyed, and while the material loss was painful, he nevertheless took comfort in her words: “My lashes are all clogged up . . . though I’ve had to throw the writing and the paper and the envelope into the black stream, the words 38  For Churchill’s sketches, see the illustrations in Soames, Speaking for Themselves, starting in 1909 and continuing sporadically throughout their correspondence, see also p. 19; Lu Xun’s sketches and Xu Guangping’s elaborations of them are omitted from the published version of their correspondence but can be found in the facsimile edition. 39  Fraser reports Byron’s delight at finding a lock of hair in Lucrezia Borgia’s letters to Cardinal Bembo; Love Letters, xviii. 40  Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, 208.

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haven’t gone . . . You’ve given trees shade, and the flowers scent, and the sun a gold it’s never had before.”41 4

Topics and Themes42

One of the major topics of love letters is the correspondence itself: letters received, letters sent, what was in the last, what will be in the next, the imagined impact of this letter, and the difficulties in communicating by letter. The information thus disclosed is not necessarily intimate, but the anxiety of the writer to account for every item is an indication of the letters’ importance. It is also one of the dullest features of love letters to unintended readers, and wellmeaning editors sometimes delete them. This redaction serves as a reminder of the need to be cautious in drawing conclusions about letter writing in actual life from edited letter collections and anthologies. It also tends to make authentic (but edited) love letters more closely resemble fictional letters. The other most common topic in love letters is the exchange of information about the writer’s intimate thoughts and feelings about him/herself and speculation about the other’s thoughts and feelings. The expression of these emotions is usually intense, as in vows of undying love, and is more likely to dwell on romantic interludes rather than sexual arousal. There are several interpretations of reticence in respect to sexual detail in love letters, such as prevailing literary and social conventions present at the time and place of writing. However, conventions in regard to sexual conduct are flouted often enough in literature and in society, and letter-writers who expect their missives to be private might well be even more unconventional in writing than in real life. Twentieth-century fiction writers have won allowances not enjoyed by their predecessors to describe sexual conduct in frank, even obsessive, detail, but twentieth-century love letters do not follow suit. Further, there are no grounds for expecting lovers to aim for sexual arousal either in the recipient or in the writers themselves: detailed descriptions of real or imagined sexual encounters are more likely to lead to frustration than emotional or physical relief, and sublimation is a more common goal. Explicit 41  Ibid., 209–10. 42  Theiss provides examples and analyses of the topics in a set of genuine Qing dynasty love letters in “The Letter as Artifact of Sentiment and Legal Evidence”; the circumstances in which these love letters were written and received in some ways were quite exceptional, but there is still much that they have in common with letters by lovers whose fate is less doomed.

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references to remembered or expected sexual intercourse with the intended recipient are most likely to be absent in letters whose writers may have plans for later publication or that appear in edited compilations; references to other sexual relationships or about sex in general are rare.43 Letter writers sometimes use secret codes to refer to sexual matters,44 and Virginia Woolf and Xu Guangping both hint in their letters to masturbating while thinking of the absent husband or lover. Letters written by people who have no reason to think that they might ever be published may be more indiscreet. Even politicians can be taken unawares, as happened in Romania when their sexually explicit love letters were published in newspapers in the 1990s. Terms of endearment often occur in the body of the letter as well as in the opening address and sometimes form a topic for discussion. Many love letter sequences begin with formal addresses and proceed to more intimate terms. Leonard Woolf addresses Trekkie Parsons first as “Dearest Tiger,” and as the letters become openly amorous this becomes “Dearest of Tigers,” while the term “Tiger” itself becomes a topic in further playful exchanges.45 Lu Xun eventually dropped his formal signatures and terms of address for the kind of playfulness that Xu Guangping more readily adopted, although many of these affectionate nicknames were replaced in the published version of their letters. Descriptions of the letter-writer’s own physical state (usually less than satisfactory) and enquiries into the health and well-being of the beloved indicate both the writer’s own vulnerability and their anxiety for the distant other; they also suggest that the lovers are seeking to recreate their own and the other’s physical presence.46 Some but not all intimate bodily functions come under particular attention in correspondence that is not intended for

43  For published and unpublished comments on sex and sexual relationships in the correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, see McDougall, Love-Letters and Privacy, 141–51. 44  Graham Greene uses the word “stars” for kisses; ibid., 347. Xu Guangping uses the expression “silent meditation” for unspecified sexual activity or thoughts. Peter Gay gives many examples of such codes in diaries as well as letters. 45  Anderson, Love Letters, 17, 37, 55. 46  See Theiss, “The Letter as Artifact of Sentiment and Legal Evidence,” in this volume, for examples of the doomed lovers’ anguished depictions of the physical manifestations of their sufferings. In his essay “Aid and Comfort: Lu Zhaolin’s Letters,” also in this volume, Paul W. Kroll notes that while “one of the most commonly mentioned topics in personal letters of all times and places is the health of the writer, especially if it gives cause for complaint,” the self-revelation in Lu Zhaolin’s letters of the pain and grief caused by his illness is rare in medieval and other premodern Chinese texts.

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publication.47 Remarks about sleep and ablution are common ways of demonstrating care or vulnerability, but references (apart from asides) to the excretion of bodily waste are rare in published letters. A possible exception is Yu Dafu’s 郁達夫 discreet reference in a letter to Wang Yingxia 王映霞 to “washing his hands” after a meal and strolling in the courtyard. Virginia Woolf refers to urination, defecation and menstruation in her letters to her sister and close friends but not in her letters to her husband. I have not come across any mention of menstruation in either European or Chinese love letters, although a tampon features prominently in a reportedly intercepted telephone call (a spoken love letter?) between Britain’s Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles in the 1990s. Lu Xun goes into some detail on his urinary habits in Amoy to Xu Guangping and retains these passages mostly untouched in the published version of their correspondence; in contrast, Xu Guangping rarely refers to hers (but see her letter of 20 May 1929, translated below), and neither of the two ever mentions defecation. They both mention taking baths, but while his baths are retained in the published version, hers are deleted from their published correspondence along with her remark about picking her nose. Their attitudes toward Lu Xun’s heavy drinking and smoking undergo significant change as their relationship becomes more intimate: in 1925 she romanticizes these habits; by 1929 she shows wifely concern. In contrast to matters of personal hygiene, there is rather less attention to general health or illness in their letters; perhaps health, whether good or bad, does not seem as intimate as hygiene. Domestic details about meals, living quarters, and servant problems crop up in letters between married couples. Interest in domestic matters by lovers is likely to be a sign that they are exploring the possibility of living together, as seen in Part Two of Letters between Two. When Lu Xun and Xu Guangping moved to their new locations in Amoy and Canton, their letters became loaded with details of their daily surroundings and routines in an almost obsessional attempt to place the other in the same place and time. The recipient’s typical response was encouraging, with comments on the other’s details and offering a similar account in return.48 Although such exchanges may seem boring to third parties (and thus subject to editorial excision), there is poignancy about the implied anxiety and desolation in their separation. 47  For published and unpublished descriptions of bodies, bodily functions and activities, and hygiene in the correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, see McDougall, Love-Letters and Privacy, 152–57. 48  For published and unpublished descriptions of their domestic life and habits in the correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, see McDougall, Love-Letters and Privacy, 158–59.

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Non-intimate thoughts on topics such as literature and politics are most likely to feature in the correspondence of established couples or of friends who are not yet lovers. Yu Dafu, for instance, leaves little room in his love letters to Wang Yingxia for abstract ruminations, although when their relationship is illicit (that is, it took place when he was married to another woman), he records his thoughts on morality. The letters between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, on the other hand, discuss at great length contemporary literary issues and political events and thinking throughout their correspondence.49 One possible reason is the continued influence on both of their original teacher-student relationship, one that remained in place even when they lived as a family in Shanghai from 1927 to his death 1936. Gossip about other people’s love-lives, one of the most common topics in general letters, is not often found in love letters; Simone de Beauvoir (1908– 1986), relaying scandals in Parisian literary circles in her letters to Nelson Algren (1909–1981), is unusual in this respect.50 On the whole, lovers do not want to be distracted from their own affairs by others’. In the case of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, the rumors and gossip that surrounded their relationship were to him a frequent source of anger and perhaps fear of consequences, while she was less concerned.51 In the end it was mainly to put an end to this gossip that impelled Lu Xun to publish their correspondence in 1933, with extensive editing (including added as well as excluded material), to demonstrate the seriousness and sense of high purpose in their relationship. 5 Value It is tempting to regard letters as a kind of gift, not just because of the value that writers and readers attach to them but also with reference to the similar expectation of reciprocity in letter-exchange and gift-exchange.52 Like gifts, letter reciprocity is not always effected: letters may languish unanswered and even unsent, by intention as well as by accident. Reciprocity, in both gift and 49  For published and unpublished descriptions of their literary and political opinions, observations, and activities in the correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, see McDougall, Love-Letters and Privacy, 170–81. 50  Simone de Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man. 51  For published and unpublished descriptions of these rumors and gossip in the correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, see McDougall, Love-Letters and Privacy, 182–86. 52  See Xiaofei Tian’s essay, “Material and Symbolic Economies: Letters and Gifts in Early Medieval China,” in this volume.

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letter exchange, is usually assumed to be automatically good, although the evidence shows otherwise: the reaction of the letter recipient may be secondary to the letter-writer, less important than his or her own expression of emotion. On the other hand, letters resemble gifts in that their value commonly exceeds that of the material object itself.53 Couples whose marriage lasts are more likely to keep their love letters than couples who part; disconsolate widows and widowers find comfort and occasionally profit in those treasured letters. The value that couples, especially letter recipients, attach to their love letters can be seen in the care they take to preserve them, whether cherished in special boxes, wrapped in tissues and ribbons, or tucked away in the underwear drawer. Least likely to be kept are the notes that children write during class, even if the teacher does not confiscate them: we know of the practice by recollection and observation, not by its material traces. The writers and recipients who are most likely to preserve their love letters are professional writers and their partners. During his many changes of residence between his early maturity in 1902 and his death in 1936, Lu Xun lost many of the letters sent to him, and because of the danger they might occasion the writers, he also made regular bonfires of the others. Letters from Xu Guangping, on the other hand, were not listed in his diary (as were other letters sent or received), and he carefully preserved all of his and hers except two or three of the most indiscreet. Famous literary couples in twentieth-century China whose love letters were not published during their own lifetimes but appeared later in more or less intact form include Yu Dafu and Wang Yingxia, Xu Zhimo and Lu Xiaoman, Shen Congwen and Zhang Zhaohe,54 and Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun. In a letter to Wang Yingxia in 1927, Yu Dafu wrote that he hoped she would keep his letter as a memento and gave explicit permission for her to circulate it both during his own lifetime and after his death.55 A special case is Hu Shi’s English-language correspondence with Edith Clifford Williams: it began when he was a student at Cornell University, engaged since the age of thirteen in an arranged marriage sponsored by his mother, while she was the daughter of a retired professor at Cornell, at the time living a bohemian life as a painter in New York. Hu Shi omitted this exchange when he published his letters from the 1920s and 1930s although both kept their letters intact; in contrast, his letters to the 53  For a discussion on the nature of reciprocity in gift-exchange and translation, see McDougall, Translation Zones in Modern China, 13–21. 54  For the long and complicated story of their publication, see McDougall, “Revealing to Conceal,” 325, n. 158. 55  See Jie Li’s chapter about Shen Congwen’s letters in this volume.

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younger sister of his elder brother’s wife, with whom he had an affair in 1923, were burned by her when their affair came to an end.56 Literary writers who preserve their own love letters are a special case in that the intention of publishing may have been present at the time of writing: such writers (and often the recipients of their letters) would have a keen appreciation for the literary possibilities of letters. Other famous men or women may also consciously or otherwise be aware of possible publication after one or both parties’ death, whether at the instigation of their offspring or other relatives, or of scholars who may or may not have known one or both parties during their lifetime. It is impossible to judge whether people who publish their own or their lover’s letters value them more or less highly than people who keep them from the public gaze. Certainly there are enticing prospects in publishing, not just for financial profit but an enhanced reputation or added notoriety, as in the case of Yu Dafu. Even a self-consciously upright public intellectual like Hu Shi was not able to resist the temptation to keep his and his American lover’s letters despite the risk of posthumous publication. In earlier centuries, writers and other public figures could rely on traditional reticence to keep their personal letters private, at least for a generation or two after their deaths. This reticence was fatally undermined during the twentieth century, when people who would not publish their own love letters seem to have no compunction in regard to those written or received by their parents or grandparents. Not only relatives now rush into print, but scholars both sympathetic and otherwise have lost all reserve in publishing the personal correspondence of the dead. The dead, after all, have no rights to privacy. The characteristics of love letters intentionally seen into print are so diverse that the topic needs separate treatment. Published love letters, for instance, may be edited by one or both parties during their lifetimes or transformed more or less transparently into fiction. As a literary genre, letters have a unique feature: a response, usually in the form of another letter in reply, is expected and often anticipated. An extended correspondence has narrative and dramatic potential, shown in changes over time in tone and register: passion may change into coziness; lovers may go from being hopeful to ecstatic to wretched. These attractions are especially obvious in epistolary fiction, a phenomenon that originated in Europe and was successfully transplanted into modern China in the Republican period. Early examples include Clarissa (1747–48) by Samuel Richardson, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; rev. ed. 1787) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Les Liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos (1782); all were popular and influential in nineteenth- and twentieth56  Ibid., 331–33.

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century Europe, although only Werther provided a model to Chinese writers in the 1920s and 1930s (for examples see below). The boundaries between real and imagined love letters, especially inserted letters, are porous. George Sand’s novel Elle et lui (1883) begins with an exchange of love letters between ‘her’ and ‘him’ that are believed to be authentic letters between Sand and Alfred de Musset written fifty years earlier. According to a disapproving Henry James in 1897, “The lovers are naked in the market-place and perform for the benefit of society.”57 A recent English novel by Esther Freud, dedicated to her father Lucian Freud, draws on the real-life letters of her grandfather, Ernst, the son of Sigmund Freud.58 Letter manuals and compilations further served to blur the distinction between real and imagined letters. Especially in premodern times, the actual public availability of letters cannot be neatly divided into the categories published or unpublished. Modern love letters (xin qingshu 新情書) appeared in print in China in the early Republican period. An inserted love letter appeared in the novel Yu li hun 玉梨魂 (Jade pear spirit) in 1912;59 a column devoted to love letters became a feature of a new magazine for and by women, Meiyu 眉語 (Eyebrow talk), in 1915;60 manuals to encourage readers to become writers themselves began to appear around the same time;61 and epistolary fiction in the European mode became a new subgenre in the 1920s with short stories by male writers including Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, and Xu Zuzheng as well as female writers like Shi Pingmei, Huang Luyin (aka Lu Yin) and Lu Jingqing.62 Less dramatic, and much older in both traditions, is the use of inserted love letters in drama and fiction: Chinese examples range from the Tang “Story of Yingying” to Ling Shuhua’s 1928 story “Shuo you zheme yi hui shi” (Once upon a time)63 and beyond. A bizarre episode in the late 1920s and early 1930s was the sudden appearance in China of love letters by literary couples published by the authors themselves.64 The most famous of these couples was Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, but Lu Xun took care to delete any hint of erotic or heightened emotions 57  James, “She and He,” 736–55, quotation 744. 58  Freud, The Sea House; see the acknowledgements in the book’s back matter and reviews by Kellaway and by Clark. 59  For details see McDougall, “Revealing to Conceal,” 313–14. 60  See Hockx, “Raising Eyebrows.” I am grateful to Professor Hockx for allowing me to cite his paper. 61  McDougall, “Revealing to Conceal”, 313. 62  Ibid., 314–21. For examples of stories by women writers, see Dooling and Torgeson, Writing Women in Modern China. 63  Dooling and Torgeson, Writing Women in Modern China, 184–95. 64  Findeisen, “From Literature to Love,” 79–112.

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between them in the published version of their letters. Whether the publication of this bowdlerized correspondence in 1933 dampened the public’s enthusiasm or for other reasons, the practice soon came to a halt. These love letter collections, along with the epistolary fiction that immediately preceded them, are a useful reminder of the prevalence of subjective writing in the 1920s and 1930s, often overlooked in orthodox histories of the period. 6

Frequency and Duration

The frequency of love letter exchanges and the length of time that writers and recipients spend on them are another measure of their value to the correspondents. Frequency of writing may seem to be dependent on the postal service, but some lovers write once or more a day regardless of any post office’s ability to pick up and deliver. Even in modern times, letters may be handed over in person or left in a secret hiding place for collection. There are many examples in traditional Chinese and English-language fiction and drama where a servant acts as a messenger, while in L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953), a young boy used by the clandestine lovers becomes himself corrupted in the process; his Chinese counterpart several centuries earlier is the maid Hongniang in the “Story of Yingying.” Letters may also be entrusted to friends although this is a risky procedure inviting discovery. Lovers may spend several hours a day writing love letters, even when occupied with affairs of state or other pressing duties; some look forward the whole day to the indulgence of spending the private evening hours writing to the beloved. Xu Guangping complained in her letters from Canton that her teaching and other school activities kept her too busy, but she still wrote to Lu Xun almost every evening. She often noted the time when she started and stopped writing, especially if she was interrupted, so we know that she spent several hours a day on them. Her letters become less frequent and shorter when she is cross with him. Recipients may also spend long periods of time reading and re-reading their love letters, even many years later; John Ruskin (1819–1900) claimed to have learnt by heart his letters from his wife to be, Euphemia (Effie) Chalmers Gray.65 Some people may send or receive love letters only during an exceptional period in their lives, during times of personal or social upheaval, such as prisoners or front-line soldiers. In such cases, the frequency and length of their letters fail to convey the importance they have to both parties. 65  Fraser, Love Letters, xxi.

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Lovers who are separated by long distances have until very recently been dependent on letters to stay in touch at all, but overcoming physical distance is not a necessary condition for writing love letters.66 Abelard and Heloise began their first exchange of letters while they were living in the same house; for Winston and Clementine Churchill, a married couple who occupied separate bedrooms in a grand country house and rarely met before lunch, letter-writing was a convenient mode of communication; Lu Xun and Xu Guangping began writing to each other when they met frequently at her school or his home. When lovers have the opportunity to meet in person but still write love letters, it becomes evident that simple communication is not their sole or most important function. 7 Functions One of the main functions of love letters in the early stages of courtship is to provide a means by which lovers can define at leisure their identities, especially their sexual identities. Lovers ask each other: what kind of person am I? what kind of person are you? Closely related is the use of letters to explore each other’s roles in the relationship: who are you to me? who am I to you? These are questions that may be easier to write about than to talk about in person, not least because there is no fear of interruption, whether by a third person or by the beloved. Couples who are apart may see in their separation an opportunity to affirm the strength of their feelings towards each other, and letters provide the means by which these affirmations can be made, whether in truth or otherwise.67 In one sense, love letters always presuppose separation, since there is a both a spatial and a temporal distance between the writer and the recipient (letters are not normally written and exchanged in the same place at the same time). Even when the actual distance between writer and recipient is short, it allows time and space for the expression of intimate feeling, imagination, and manipulation.68 66  Richter’s essay “Between Letter and Testament” in this volume explores the possibility that writers and recipients not separated at the time of writing may be anticipating a time of separation to come. 67  In William Wordsworth’s letters to his wife Mary these sentiments are most likely genuine; see William and Mary Wordsworth, The Love Letters, 183. 68  See Raft’s article “The Space of Separation” in this volume for a different interpretation of this point.

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Where there are complications, such as when a third person is involved, lovers need to test their mutual commitment. It may seldom be mentioned openly but testing is one of the main functions of love letters between couples who are not separated by distance. The tension caused by Lu Xun’s marriage can be discerned in the first stage of his correspondence with Xu Guangping: it rarely surfaces but is ever-present. A further complication in their case was their former relationship as teacher and student: in the original versions, their letters reveal how a former student may struggle to escape and her teacher be reluctant to relinquish altogether their former roles of submission and dominance (suppressed in the published letters). Ovid declared that “Lovers pave the way with love letters.” Courting couples use love letters to exhibit what Erving Goffman calls backstage behavior; lovers willingly expose their vulnerability by being foolish (e.g. in their use of pet-names) and confessing minor misconduct (e.g. admitting to bad temper). Lovers may try to establish their spontaneity and sincerity by not correcting errors as they write, as in Xu Guangping’s letters. Love letters are manipulative: the writer creates two semi-fictional characters, the sender, who is worthy of loving and being loved, and the recipient, who is to be flattered, soothed, or provoked into responding. Letters also have magical qualities. They act as a charm, to cause the beloved to reciprocate. They serve as a talisman: written assurances are more binding than oral ones.69 Portable and concealable, they are an ideal love-token, and, in time, a souvenir of lost or damaged love.70 Writing allows masks to be assumed, as Lu Xun warned his own public readers. Letters can also be used for profit, as blackmail and as saleable property, as when love-rat James Hewitt put up for sale his letters from Diana, Princess of Wales. One of the most intimate and personal forms of expression and communication, love letters are also documents of social and cultural history. Lu Xun’s caution in writing to Xu Guangping in 1926–27 about his marriage and his fears of gossip about their affair may be an expression of his own reserved character, in contrast to her emotional impulsiveness. Set alongside Xu Zhimo’s flight to Europe in 1928 when his adulterous love-life in China became too notorious, Lu Xun’s caution also indicates the division between the new morality of per69  Zeb Raft in his chapter in this volume also refers to letters in the form of poems (or poems in the form of letters) about parting as talismans. 70  William wrote to Mary that their correspondence could serve as a bequest to the one who survived. Mary duly preserved the letters, but after her death they were separated from the other family papers and sold as scrap to a stamp dealer. See William and Mary Wordsworth, The Love Letters, 7, 60.

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sonal freedom in early Republican China and the harsh moral stance against adultery of Qing law that remained in force until the early 1930s. A rather different kind of insight into British history is provided by the deeply affectionate love letters sent by William Bligh to his wife Elizabeth that are hard to reconcile with his depiction as a shipboard tyrant whose bad language sparked the famous mutiny of 1789. A recent new biography by Anne Salmond, Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas, provides several of these letters and other evidence of a loving relationship that lasted throughout the couple’s lives.71 In her review of this book, Joyce Chaplin speculates on the “changing norms of masculine identity and behavior in the long eighteenth century that, if fully explained, would chart the multiple and competing demands on manhood that Bligh could never quite navigate.”72



The indisputably independent origins of Western and Chinese love letters is a deeply satisfying affirmation of our common human nature. Twentiethcentury globalization encouraged interaction, although in the case of China and English-speaking countries, interaction has tended to be one-way. Most obviously, modern Chinese love letters import formal characteristics such as salutations and valedictions from European models. Whether the emotional and sexual explicitness in love letters by writers such as Yu Dafu is due to their knowledge of Western love letters or to general exposure to Western or Japanese confessional fiction and autobiography is impossible to establish. In today’s world, it hardly seems worthwhile to speculate whether the letters published in a series of compilations in Taiwan in the last few years as models for young lovers are more or less Chinese or Western. While traces of formal influence, whether intra-cultural or transcultural, will always be of interest to literary and cultural historians, issues of function and value demand more general attention. As long as children across the world pass notes in class and adults fashion messages from whatever media— including electronic—come to hand, writing and desire are mutually reinforcing imperatives which share common ground; and where literacy is limited or other barriers separate, the bond between writing and desire is so powerful that ingenuity generally finds a way. 71  Salmond, Bligh, 101, 229, 338, 425, 459. 72  Joyce Chaplin, review of Bligh, 30–31. In his article in this volume, Wells examines in detail the proposition that other people’s letters can let readers know what people are really like.

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From the examples raised above, it becomes clear that the concept of letters as primarily a means of communication needs modification: most letters, especially personal letters and more especially still love letters, can also be seen as a form of creative expression, whether or not the writers themselves are literary professionals. There is in any case a strong argument for considering letters as a form of literary writing alongside other kinds of literary prose. In the case of literary professionals, there is evidence that their love letters to some degree may be influenced by the expectation, conscious or not, that they will eventually, within or beyond the author’s lifetime, reach publication. Love letters have their own economics (including the history of postal delivery) and politics (interception and censorship). Inventions such as the typewriter, telephone, email, social websites, text messaging and twitter have all been accused of expelling personal letters from people’s lives, but love letters continue to be exchanged. A topic of endless interest, celebrated throughout the twentieth century in popular song, film and television, there is no reason to think that lovers can make do without them in the twenty-first. 7.1 Translations The following two letters, numbers 132 and 136, are from the correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping in May 1929, when Lu Xun was obliged to visit his mother in Beijing. Lu Xun and Xu Guangping had been living in the same house in Shanghai since late 1927 but up till then had been able to conceal from most of their friends their actual relationship. When Guangping became accidentally pregnant in early 1929, they realized that their secret would soon be public knowledge, and one reason for Lu Xun’s visit was his wish to let his mother know before the news spread. During his stay in Beijing, Lu Xun moved back into his old house where his mother and wife still lived (which may have caused Xu Guangping some anxiety). Lu Xun was at his most affectionate in these letters: for both it was their first child, making separation especially hard to bear. 7.1.1

Letter 132 Dear Little White Elephant: (Your nose is not as raised as in [blank space] your drawing; it should be hanging down) The letter you wrote on the night of the 15th, your brother handed over to me when he came back at lunchtime today (the 20th). The letter must have been sent on the 16th and arrived five days later: such a clever post office. Of course you should also then have received the letter I sent on

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the 14th before today. I had thought I would only get a letter from you around the 22nd or 23rd, because it could easily have been delayed for up to eight days on the way here. Seeing your letter today was an unexpected joy, I was so happy I shed tears, I couldn’t help myself, there was nothing I could do. It’s very good that you run into familiar faces when you’re out, to stop you from feeling lonely, and even better that you’re able to sleep. I hope when you’re at home you will also devote some time to sleep. And don’t wear yourself out writing, working, thinking . . . Over the last few days, for the most part, my experience has been to wake up either at one or two am or at four or five am. I usually have an urge to wake up at these two times, which is appropriate, and if I happen to wake up two nights in a row, on the third night I might sleep until dawn to make up. Even if I fell asleep about ten last night and didn’t wake up until after six o’clock this morning, it’s more than enough for one sleep, and I got out of bed at seven o’clock. I don’t like sleeping in the daytime, I’m afraid that if I sleep too long, I won’t want to sleep at night. But I’m in good spirits, not tired as I was a few days ago, and usually during the day I get on with my work, and at night after reading for a while I fall asleep. The weather’s turned warm, so my nose doesn’t get cold, and if I don’t have to get up at night to go for a pee it’s even less likely to be cold. If you’ve got people at home running in and out and putting everything topsy-turvy, you may as well check through your things and put them in order, and why don’t you bring more of what you need back south. Expensive old books you should either lock up or bring with you, so you won’t lose them. There’s no way of stopping visitors from coming, and you are only back for a short time, so it’s best if you can manage not to interfere and save getting upset and affecting your nerves, which would be even worse. In any case you are doing all that you can do as a son, and the rest you don’t have to worry about. Your dear girl is being a good, clever girl, this I am willing to guarantee; and her being good lies in being obedient, taking care to understand the Little White Elephant’s heart, to look after herself properly, and to be prepared to spend money on buying food, and not go flying to and fro all day outside, and not let her tire herself out, and to look after herself properly, so that she is strong and healthy, and when the Little White Elephant comes back she will be happy and keep him company in even better spirits, and she will also certainly look after herself properly and be calm and agreeable, and should he return later than the time set for his return she

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must certainly not get thin, he has already travelled far on his arduous journey, with great worry and anxiety on top of that, and for her to get ill, that would surely be too much! When your brother comes over for meals he always has news to tell me, and Wang is also exceptionally attentive. The child sometimes knocks things over downstairs but an adult soon puts a stop to it, so it’s all right. In my letters to you I tell you one thing after another about my situation here and make a point of giving you every detail, but on the whole it’s fine. Even if I sleep a little less it is quite normal, not exceptional, and when I get tired I sleep more. You absolutely must not try to read between the lines, as when you say in your letter that I’m not yet asleep at twelve, when the fact is that I am always fast asleep at twelve. Today I received a letter from Ruilin in Peiping, saying that people up there can wear unlined clothing, so you can also wear a little less. The weather has been clear the last two days in Shanghai, even warm, but once it starts raining there’s a difference of more than 20 degrees. Little Hedgehog 2 pm, May 20 (I also sent a letter this morning)73 小白象:(你的鼻子并未 如你所繪的仰起,還是垂下罷) 你十五夜寫的信,今午飯(廿日)三先生回來時交給我了, 信必是十六發,五天就到了,郵局懂事得很。我十四發的信, 自然你也於今天之前收到了,我先以為見你信總在廿二三左 右,因路上有八天好停頓的,今日見信,意外歡喜,同時喜極 淚下,情不自禁者沒奈何也。 你路上有熟人遇見,省得寂寞,甚好,又能睡更好,我希望 你在家時也挪出些工夫睡覺,不要拼命寫,做,幹,想,. . . . . . 我這幾天經驗下來,大概,夜裏不是一二時醒,就是四五時 醒,平常這兩個時候我總有醒的必要,這是應該的,偶然連夜 的醒,第三夜就可一直睡至天亮補足,即如昨夜約十時睡,至 今早六時多纔醒,一睡甚足,七時即起床了。晝間我不想睡, 怕睡太多夜裏不要睡也,但精神甚好,不似前些天的疲勞,通 常日裏做々生活,夜裏讀々書然後就睡,天氣暖了,鼻子不致 凍冷,而且夜裏也不須起來小解,更不會凍冷了。 73  Lu Xun zuopin quanbian “Liang di shu,” 616–17; for the edited version, see Liang di shu no. 124 in Lu Xun zuopin quanbian “Liang di shu,” 358–59, translated in McDougall, Letters between Two, 362–63; for commentary, see Wang Dehou, “Liang di shu” yanjiu, 205–7 and McDougall, Love-Letters and Privacy, 148 et passim.

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家裏人雜,東西亂翻,你不妨檢收停妥,多帶些要用的南 來,值錢的古書,或鎖起來,或帶來,免失落難查。客人來是 無法禁止的,你回去短時間,能不干涉最好,省得淘氣傷精神 更為失算,反正盡了你做兒子的心,其他不必問了。 你的乖姑甚乖,這是敢擔保的,他的乖處就在聽話,小心體 諒小白象的心,自己好好保養,也肯花些錢買東西喫,也并不 整天在外面飛來飛去,也不叫身體過勞,好々地,好々地保養 自己,養得壯々的,等小白象回來高興,而且更有精神陪他。 他一定也要好々保養自己,平心和氣,渡過豫定的時光,切不 可越加瘦損,已經來往跋涉,路途辛苦,再勞心苦慮,病起來 怎樣得了! 三先生喫飯見面時總找些時事和我談々,王也格外照應,小 孩有時候在樓下翻々東西,但不久也為大人制止,還算好的。 我寫給你的信,把生活狀況一一說了,務求其詳,但大體是 好的,即如少睡些,也是照常,并非例外,睏起來就更多睡 了,你切不可言外推測,如來信所云,我十二時尚未睡,其實 我十二時總在熟睡中的,今日接北平常妹信,說那面可穿單 衣,你也可少穿些了。上海這兩天晴,甚和暖,一到落雨,又 相差廿多度了。 小刺蝟 五,廿,下午二時 (今早也發了一信) 7.1.2 1.

2.

3.

Notes to Letter 132 This letter is the first by Xu Guangping sent in reply to one of Lu Xun’s letters from Peking. Her salutation is preceded by her clumsy drawing of an elephantlike animal, followed by an aside by Xu Guangping containing her version of the elephant-like creature used by Lu Xun as his signature in his letter to her of May 15; see figs. 14.1 and 14.2. “Little White Elephant,” Xu Guangping’s nickname for Lu Xun in this part of the correspondence, has several meanings: by “white elephant” she refers to his status as a (useless) national treasure and also possibly to their sexual habits; to this, she added “little” as a way of making fun of Lu Xun’s sensitivity to his short stature. For the terms of address used in the letters, see McDougall, Love-Letters and Privacy, 106–11. Xu Guangping refers to Zhou Jianren, Lu Xun’s youngest brother, as “Master Three” in this letter; it is a polite but friendly term of address. References to Jianren here and in Lu Xun’s following letter are deleted in Liang di shu. Zhou Jianren at the time was living next door to Lu Xun in Shanghai and the brothers

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mcdougall shared a common kitchen and dining room; like Lu Xun, Jianren was separated from his wife and living with a former student, Wang Junru; they already had one child. Wang Dehou guesses that Jianren probably picked the letter up at the Commercial Press, whose branches in Beijing and Shanghai Lu Xun used as his postal address (see also Letter 36). A lot of the detail about Xu Guangping’s sleeping habits is deleted in Liang di shu, lessening the impression given in the original that she is anxious for him to believe that she is well. Ruilin is Chang Ruilin, Xu Guangping’s oldest friend; Guangping refers to her as “Chang mei” (younger sister Chang). This sentence is deleted in Liang di shu.

Letter 136 Dear Little Hedgehog, It is now half-past ten on the night of the 23rd, and I’m sitting alone at my desk against the wall, where Little Hedgehog used to sit at my side, but at this moment she’s in Shanghai. All I can do is to write a letter as if I’m talking to her. This morning six student representatives from the Chinese Department at PU came to see me. They wanted me to go and teach there but I promptly declined. They then accepted that I would return to Shanghai but wanted me to fix in advance a few subjects and I could begin whenever I returned to Peking, but I didn’t promise anything. I summed up by saying that today’s L. is not the L. of three years ago, that I had my reasons but was not going to speak of them at this moment, that in future they may find out, but that in short I was no longer willing to be a teacher. They had to leave empty-handed but hoped that I’d give a lecture, so I have promised to speak next Wednesday. In the afternoon I went out, taking my letter to my little and good Hedgehog to put in the postbox. Next was a visit to the dentist to have a tooth extracted. It didn’t hurt in the least. He made an appointment for me to go for a filling on the morning of the 27th; one visit will probably do it. Next I went to the Commercial Press where I withdrew my brother’s remittance, which wasn’t any trouble at all. Then I went to three paper shops, where I collected several dozen kinds of Chinese notepaper. I spent about seven dollars, although none of them was particularly marvelous. The kind used in this letter is one of the best looking. There were still two or three shops I didn’t visit, and if the opportunity arises I should go once more. With another four or five dollars I will probably have collected a full set of the better kind of notepaper in Liulichang.

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Counting the ten days since I’ve been in Peiping, apart from rickshaw fares I’ve only spent fifteen dollars, half on notepaper, half on stone rubbings. As for old books, they are still very dear, so I haven’t even bought one. Tomorrow I have to go out again in order to find a rice bowl for Shiheng; I’m also thinking of going to the Western Hills to see Shuyuan; from his friends’ tone of voice, I’m afraid he’s not recovering. Wei Congwu has grown slightly. After I’ve been to PU to talk on the 29th, I’ll start making arrangements to return to Shanghai. I’ve heard there’s a Japanese boat called the “Tientsin maru” which sails from Tientsin to Shanghai. It’s definitely not a roundabout route but I don’t know whether it will be in service at the time I want to leave. Today my way took me past Qianmen Station where I saw the memorial arch festooned with white streamers, but it seems that only a minority of people are engaged in these ceremonies. My return here has happened to coincide with the approach of the summer vacation, so that several places have offered me a rice bowl, but I regard this kind of position as being without the slightest attraction. If you’re set on peace and quiet, it’s not a bad idea to live in Peiping, but there’s almost a feeling of an other-worldly Peach Spring about it, it’s so different from the south. Although I’ve been here for ten days I haven’t become irritated—there would indeed be a fear of falling behind if you’re not careful. Although Shanghai is in turmoil, it also has vitality. More in my next. I am very well. Little White Elephant May 2374 小刺蝟: 此刻是二十三日之夜十點半,我獨自坐在靠壁的桌前,這旁 邊,先前是小刺蝟常々坐着的,而她此刻卻在上海。我只好來 寫信算談天了。 今天上午,來了六個北大國文系的代表,要我去教書,我即 謝絕了。後來他們承認我回上海,只要豫定下幾門功課,何時 來京,便何時開始,我也沒有答應他們。我總結的話,是今之 L,已非三年前之 L,我有緣故,但此刻不說,將來或許會知

74  Lu Xun zuopin quanbian “Liang di shu,” 621–22; for the edited version, see Liang di shu no. 122 in Lu Xun zuopin quanbian “Liang di shu,” 353–54, translated in Letters between Two, 359–60; for commentary, see Wang Dehou, “Liang di shu” yanjiu, 205–7 and McDougall, Love-Letters and Privacy, 148 et passim.

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道,總之是不想做教授了云云。他們只得回去,而希望我有一 回講演,我已約于下星期三去講。 午後出街,將寄給乖而小的刺蝟的信投人郵箱中。其次是往 牙醫寓,拔去一齒,毫不疼痛,他約我于廿七上午去補好,大 約只要一次就可以了。其次是到商務印書館,將老三的匯款取 出,倒也并不麻煩。其次是走了三家紙鋪,搜得中國紙的印箋 數十種,化錢約七元,也并無什麼妙品,如此信所用這一種, 要算是很漂亮的了。還有兩三家未去,便中當再去走一趟,大 約再用四五元,即將琉璃廠略佳之箋收備矣。 計到北平,已將十日,除車錢外,自己只化了十五元,一半 買信箋,一半是買碑帖的。至於舊書,則仍然很貴,所以一本 也不買。 明天仍當出門,為侍桁的飯碗去設設法;將來又想往西山一 趟,看看素園,聽他朋友的口氣,恐怕總是醫不好的了。韋叢 蕪卻長大了一點。待廿九日往北大講演後,便當作回滬之準 備,聽說日本船有一隻叫「天津丸」的,是從天津直航上海, 並不繞來繞去,但不知向滬的時候,能否相值耳。 今天路過前門車站,看見很紮著些素綵牌坊了,但這些典 禮,似乎只有少數人在忙。 我這次回來,正值暑假將近,所以很有幾處想送我飯碗,但 我對於此種地位,總是漠然。為安閒計,北平是不壞的,但因 為和南方太不同了,所以幾有世外桃源之感,我來此雖已十 天,幾乎毫無刺戟〔激〕,略不小心,確有落伍之懼的。上海 雖繁〔煩〕擾,但也別有生氣。 再〔下〕次再談罷。我是很好的。 小白象 五,二三 7.1.4 1. 2.

3. 4.

Notes to Letter 136 This letter is dated three days after Xu Guangping’s letter of May 20, but Lu Xun would not have received hers at the time of writing. “Little Hedgehog” in the address was changed in Liang di shu to D.H.M., variations of which are used in the published version throughout the 1929 correspondence. It is short for “Dear Harmful Mare,” a term first used by Lu Xun as an affectionate nickname in his 1925 letters. Lu Xun first used “Little Hedgehog” in the 1929 correspondence: for possible meanings, see Love-Letters and Privacy, 148. “Little Hedgehog” in the first sentence was changed into “a certain person” in Liang di shu. PU refers to Peking University; Peiping is the Post Office romanization of Beiping, the official name of Peking when Nanking was the national capital.

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

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The sentence beginning “I summed up” is deleted from Liang di shu. The expression “my little and good Hedgehog” (more literally, “my darling and Little Hedgehog”) at the beginning of the third paragraph was changed to “you” in Liang di shu. Lu Xun here uses the customary family term “Lao San” (old third) to refer to Zhou Jianren. The notepaper on which this letter is written is decorated with a lotus flower on the first page and a lotus pod on the second page. The lotus pod, with its many seeds, is a symbol of fecundity, here referring delicately to Xu Guangping’s pregnancy. Xu Guangping acknowledged her understanding in a subsequent letter. See fig. 14.3 for Lu Xun’s letter. Liulichang, then as now, was an old street in Qianmen (the area around the old southern gate in Peking) specializing in art works and antiques. “Rice bowl” is a customary term for a salaried job (e.g. an iron rice bowl is a tenured job). The three friends referred to in this passage, all writers and close colleagues, are Han Shiheng (1908–1987), Wei Suyuan (1902–1932) and Wei Congwu (1905–1978). The memorial arch at Qianmen Station was erected to mark the removal of Sun Yatsen’s corpse for burial in Nanking on 26 April 1929; the white streamers denote mourning. The previous year the Communist writer Feng Naichao (1901–1983) had claimed that Lu Xun’s works reflected the tragedy of those who had “fallen behind” in a period of social change. Peach Spring, or Peach Blossom Spring, refers to a legendary place where people lead a peaceful existence in harmony with nature. “Little White Elephant” is changed to L in Liang di shu.

Bibliography Anderson, Judith, ed. Love Letters: Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie Partons, 1941–1968. London: Chatto and Windus, 2001. Beard, Mary. Review of Cicero’s Correspondence. Times Literary Supplement, 29 May 1998: 6. Beauvoir, Simone de. Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947–64. London: Gollancz, 1996. Beethoven, Ludwig von. The Letters of Beethoven. Edited by Emily Anderson. London: Macmillan, 1961. Birch, Cyril, ed. Anthology of Chinese Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Chaplin, Joyce. Review of Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas by Anne Salmond. London Review of Books, 24 May 2012: 30–31.

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Figure 14.1

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Last page of Lu Xun’s letter to Xu Guangping, dated May 15 [1929], with Lu Xun’s “elephant” signature. The notepaper shows a lotus pod. See Letter 127 in Lu Xun zuopin quanbian “Liang di shu,” 610–11. Reproduced from Lu Xun zhi Xu Guangping shujian, frontispiece.

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Figure 14.2

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Xu Guangping’s letter to Lu Xun, dated May 20, which she wrote on receiving his letter of May 15. It shows her drawing of an “elephant” and leaves a space into which Lu Xun’s drawing is not copied. See Letter 132 in Lu Xun zuopin quanbian “Liang di shu,” 116–17. Reproduced from ‘Liang di shu’ zhenshu, 2:334.

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Figure 14.3

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The first page of Lu Xun’s letter to Xu Guangping, dated May 23; the notepaper shows a lotus flower. See Letter 136 in Lu Xun zuopin quanbian “Liang di shu,” 621–21. Reproduced from Lu Xun zhi Xu Guangping shujian, frontispiece.

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Mews, Constance J. The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France. London: Macmillan, 1999. Moyle, Franny. Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde. London: John Murray, 2011. Oppenheim, Leo A., ed. Letters from Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Owen, Stephen, ed. and trans. An Anthology of Chinese Literature. New York: Norton, 1996. Pattinson, David. “Privacy and Letter Writing in Han and Six Dynasties China.” In Chinese Concepts of Privacy, edited by Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson, 97–118. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon. Translated by Arthur Waley. London: Allen and Unwin, 1928. Radice, Betty, ed. and trans. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974. Rosenmeyer, Patricia A. “Love Letters in Callimachus, Ovid, and Aristaenetus, or, the Sad Fate of a Mail-order Bride.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 36 (1996): 9–31. Salmond, Anne. Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas. Auckland: Penguin Viking, 2011. Sand, George. Elle et lui. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883. Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene, Volume One 1904–1939. London: Penguin, 1989. Showerman, Grant, trans. Ovid in Six Volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1977. Soames, Mary, ed. Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill. London: Black Swan, 1999. Toibin, Colm. Review of Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle. London Review of Books, 10 May 2012: 3–8. Turner, Kay, ed. Dear Sappho: Lesbian Love Letters. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Watkins, W. B. C. Perilous Balance: The Tragic Genius of Swift, Johnson, and Sterne. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939. Widmer, Ellen. “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China.” LIC 10.2 (1989): 1–43. Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: A New Manual. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asian Center, 2013. Woolf, Virginia. A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV, 1929–1931. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1978. Wordsworth, William, and Mary Wordsworth. The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth. Edited by Beth Darlington. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Chapter 15

Writing from Revolution’s Debris: Shen Congwen’s Family Letters in the Mao Era Jie Li More than six decades have passed. Looking at the papers on my desk that I have finished copyediting, I do not know if I am in a dream or reading someone else’s story. What we went through was absurd and strange, and yet it was utterly ordinary for our generation of intellectuals. . . . What Congwen and I shared—this life—was it ultimately happy or unhappy? This is a question that cannot be answered. I didn’t understand him, not fully. Later I began to understand him a little, but it is only now, after compiling and editing the papers he left behind, that I really came to comprehend who he was, and the heavy burdens he bore throughout his life. . . . The more of his writings in this moldering pile of papers I flip through, even if they are fragmented or unfinished, the more I realize how precious this man was. Too late! . . . I respectfully offer this book to those readers who loved him. At the same time, I will lay bare a little of my own feelings. 六十多年過去了,面對書桌上這幾組文字,校閱後,我不知道 是在夢中還是在翻閱別人的故事。經歷荒誕離奇,但又極為平 常,是我們這一代知識分子多多少少必須經歷的生活 . . . 從文同 我相處,這一生,究竟是幸福還是不幸?得不到回答。我不理 解他,不完全理解他,後來逐漸有了些理解,但是,真正懂得 他的為人,懂得他一生所承受的重壓,是在整理編選他遺稿的 現在 . . . 越是從爛紙堆裏翻到他越多的遺作,哪怕是零散的,有 頭無尾,有尾無頭的,就越覺斯人可貴。太晚了!. . . 謹以此書 奉獻給熱愛他的讀者,並表明我的一點點心跡。1 In 1949, Shen Congwen’s 沈從文 (1902–1988) renowned literary career terminated with an attempted suicide, exclusion from the Chinese Writers’ Association, and, a few years later, the destruction and prohibition of his works in both Mainland China and Taiwan. Thus erased from Chinese literary histories, Shen Congwen devoted the second half of his life, the next forty 1  Zhang Zhaohe, “Afterword” (Houji 後記), in Shen Congwen jiashu, 740.

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years, to the preservation and study of archeological artifacts, writing cultural historical books and articles, personal and professional letters, a few classical-style poems (which were intended to be, but failed as, propaganda) as well as the requisite “dossier genres” of reports and confessions. Beyond a few self-criticisms published in newspapers, Shen Congwen’s audience shrank from the broad reading public to a small number of cultural bureaucrats, a handful of friends and family members, and the policing eyes of authorities in successive political campaigns. Posthumously published in The Complete Works of Shen Congwen (Shen Congwen quanji 沈從文全集) in 2002, Shen’s post-1949 writings have only recently begun to receive some scholarly attention—as clues to his biography, as evidence of his literary death, and as fragmented reflections of his historical and aesthetic vision.2 It is difficult to draw a clear line between Shen Congwen’s private letters as biographical sources and his published writings as “literary works.” Rather than reclaiming his letters as works of literature in their own right, I propose an epistolary reading method that takes into account not only the form and content of the letters, but also the circumstances of their production, transmission, and reception. This reading method attends to the intersubjective nature of these literary artifacts that melds together the subjectivities of the author, his subjects, and his readers, so that even misreading and belated recognition become essential parts of their story. For almost six decades, Shen’s wife Zhang Zhaohe 張兆和 (1910–2003) was the primary recipient of his letters, but as she suggests in the “Afterword” cited in the epigraph, her reading and understanding of them was often belated. As well as a recipient, she turned out to be a trustee of these letters. In selecting, editing, and publishing them for a wider readership of later generations, she also served as a “postal service”— a medium through which these letters were transmitted, filtered, and alloyed with historical patina and sentiments of her own. This essay examines Shen Congwen’s correspondences with his wife and children in the Mao era, as published in his Complete Works as well as in a separate volume entitled The Family Letters of Shen Congwen (Shen Congwen jiashu 沈從文家書), edited by Shen Congwen’s second son Shen Huchu 沈虎雏.3 2  Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation”; Li Yang, Shen Congwen de zuihou sishi nian; David Wang, Shuqing chuantong yu Zhongguo wenxue, 3–130; Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face, 54–107; Zhang Xinying, Shen Congwen jingdu, 173–275. 3  Even taken together, the Complete Works and Family Letters only provide us with a fraction of the total correspondence between Shen Congwen and his family. Both sources have also transcribed rather than made facsimiles of the original manuscripts, so I do not know if the editors have also excised passages within the letters.

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It focuses on his three most prolific periods of family letter writing: the three months between October 1951 and February 1952, when Shen participated in land reform in Sichuan; the first three years of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969, when Shen was under investigation by his work unit in Beijing and when his younger son joined his factory at the “Third Front” (sanxian 三線) in the hinterland; and the two years from 1969 to 1971, when Shen, his wife, and their two sons were all separated from each other in Beijing, Sichuan, and two locations in a May Seventh Cadre School (wuqi ganxiao 五七幹校) in Hubei. Unlike his professional letters or the confessional genres he wrote for the authorities,4 Shen Congwen’s personal letters convey intimacy, spontaneity, and vulnerability. As the most literary of his post-1949 works, these letters, even more so than his memorandum-like diaries, provide readers with a glimpse into Shen’s inner world and material surroundings. Besides the well-known narrative of Shen’s transformation from writer to connoisseur in 1949, Shen Congwen the public writer underwent an internal exile into private letters— an ever-threatened sanctuary of individual thoughts and feelings. Although stamped with the “revolutionary” marks of their time and overshadowed by censorship, these family letters still bear intimate testimony to historical scenes and personal experiences never documented in the era’s published literature. Like many literary scholars, Zhang Zhaohe “used to think that, as a writer, it is enough to have one work worth passing onto posterity,” but it is in the excavation of written fragments “without starts or ends” that she truly came to discover and value his person. To be Shen Congwen’s “knower of the tone” (zhi yin 知音), to be a reader of his oeuvre-as-letter, it is not enough to canonize his “best” works, but also to reckon with inchoate fragments, interrupted thoughts, repetitive rambling, and other traces of his hopes and fears. Revealing his literary ambitions and inhibitions after 1949, these letters show the physical, material, and spiritual conditions in which Shen wrote or failed to write—conditions emblematic of the literary production and censorship of the Mao era. Although the new regime destroyed his literary works, Shen still expressed hopes to write about and for the new nation. Yet even when he was part of a land reform work team in the early 1950s, Shen’s letters to his family identified less with the revolutionary storm itself than the debris it had left behind. By the Cultural Revolution, many of his private letters were censored, confiscated, and destroyed, not only by the authorities but also by his family and himself. While Shen’s family, friends, and he himself occasionally took on 4  Such works are mostly collected in volume 27 of Shen Congwen quanji.

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censoring roles, the censoring authorities sometimes became their intended, even hoped-for, readers. Beyond discovering literary fragments and understanding censorship, we can also read in these letter exchanges the experiences of displacement by an “utterly ordinary” family, as Zhang Zhaohe put it. The collectivist campaigns of the Mao era displaced millions from their homes and loved ones for months, years, or decades. Physical separation gave rise to the widespread practice of letter writing, which served to network families scattered all over the country. As intertwined strands of individual destinies are woven into a larger historical fabric, letters also exchanged news and rumors about local and national politics as well as accompanied material commodities to cope with the inadequate distribution of goods under a planned economy. More poignant than the physical separation was the emotional disconnect between extant family letters—the ascetic denial of private sentiments in order to serve sublime yet hollow collective causes. As suggested by Zhang Zhaohe’s “Afterword” and a few letters she wrote in the Mao era, at the time of receiving her husband’s letters, she had not “read” them so much as “scanned” them for trouble or mistakes. She was an editor by profession, a revolutionary by ideological inclination, and a mother with a keen instinct to preserve her family from harm. As the father of her children, Shen was a family responsibility and liability, a “backward element” who could not keep up with the times. Holding more revolutionary grit than private affection, the infrequent and short letters from Zhang Zhaohe and her children may well be staging a revolutionary performance for the potential censors rather than reflecting their true feelings. Although equally aware of censorship, Shen’s letters often showed greater ambivalence and inner struggle. Thus the pathos of these exchanges arises from the initial dissonance between his intimacy and their distance, as well as from the belated and posthumous resonance of Shen’s letters with his family and other readers.5 1

Land Reform Letters as Literary Embryos

After Shen Congwen fell in love with his student Zhang Zhaohe in 1929, he wrote her several hundred letters over four years, finally convincing her to be his wife.6 Only a handful of these letters survived the wars and political 5  See also Ron Egan’s article about Su Shi’s letters written under polital persecution in this volume. 6  Shen Weiwei, “From Country Bumpkin to Gentleman,” 33–39.

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movements of the following decades, mostly in the form of Zhang Zhaohe’s hand copies in her diary.7 Still blissful over his new marriage in January 1934, Shen took a month-long trip to his hometown to visit his sick mother—his first trip home since 1922. He wrote Zhang Zhaohe more than 50 letters along the way, which became the basis of the essay collection Random Sketches on a Trip to Hunan (Xiangxing sanji 湘行散記, 1934). These travels also helped inspire Shen’s best known work, Border Town (Biancheng 邊城, 1934). Shen sometimes referred to these epistolary travel sketches as “reading materials for Sansan’s eyes only” 三三專利讀物, Sansan (“Three-three”) being one of Zhang Zhaohe’s nicknames. In 1937, after the Japanese army occupied Beiping, Shen Congwen took flight with other intellectuals first to Wuhan and later to Kunming, while his wife and their two young sons stayed behind. These southward travels gave birth to the essay collection West Hunan (Xiangxi 湘西, 1938) and the novel Long River (Changhe 長河, 1943). In the few extant letters from this yearlong separation, Shen urged his wife to join him, but she kept postponing her move south on account of the children and their home in Beiping. Above all, she seemed to fear for the loss of his letters and manuscripts: Second Brother: . . . As I sorted through our letters the past few days, I became even more reluctant to leave. We have so many beautiful and lovely letters. It would be difficult to take them at this time but a pity to discard them. Aside from the letters there is also that messy pile of your books and manuscripts. If I were to leave for the south now, nobody would take care of these things, and we would have to abandon them forever. . . . San. 二哥 . . . 前兩天整理書信,覺得更不願意走了,我們有許多太美 麗太可愛的信件,這時候帶著麻煩,棄之可惜,這還只是書信 而言,另外還有你一大堆亂七八糟的書籍文稿,若我此時空身 南下,此後這些東西無人清理,也就只有永遠放棄了。. . . 三8 Reporting the joy that greeted the arrival of his letters, Zhang Zhaohe’s responses gave a meticulous account of which of his letters arrived when, via which routes, and how long it took, so that family letters became intertwined 7  Shen Congwen jiashu, 1–27. 8  Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to Shen Congwen, September 24, 1937, Shen Congwen jiashu, 60–61. In their correspondence, Zhang often addressed Shen as “Second Brother” as he was the second-born of his family whereas Shen called her “Third Sister” because she was the third-born of her family.

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with the war’s battlefronts.9 She wrote: “In this time, when ‘a family letter is worth ten thousand in gold,’ I must be the richest person in all of Beijing.” 在這 種家書抵萬金的時代,我應是全北京城最富有的人了. He in turn complained that “You love me, but you love me more for my letter writing than for who I am as a person.” 你愛我,與其說愛我為人,還不如說愛我寫信.10 As muse, reader, copier, and trustee of her husband’s writing, Zhang Zhaohe saw all of Shen Congwen’s writings in epistolary terms and made no sharp distinctions in genre between his letters, manuscripts, or published works. In his study of Shen Congwen’s works from the 1930s and 1940s, David Wang pointed out an intertextual relationship between his travelogues and his fiction as concurrent and symbiotic literary creations.11 As the travelogues grew out of his letters to Zhang Zhaohe, we might also reconsider his Mao-era family letters as a nascent stage of literary creation. When writing home from his participation in land reform in Sichuan, Shen Congwen often referred to his 1930s travels to Hunan that resulted in the book Random Sketches on a Trip to Hunan. In the same vein, he planned on revising these 1950s family letters into a new collection called Random Sketches on a Trip to Sichuan as well as several new works of fiction.12 Thus Shen Congwen’s “letters from the south”—written in 1934, 1937–38, and 1951–52—all began in the same genre of travel sketches testifying to the vitality of the rural folk13 and addressed to a beloved reader. The eventual abortion of these last literary embryos, however, is symptomatic of the hostile literary environment under the new regime. Following his attempted suicide and exclusion from official literary circles in 1949, Shen Congwen began a new career at the Palace Museum located inside the former Forbidden City.14 In 1950, he underwent ten months of thought reform at the Northern China Revolutionary University in Beijing’s Western suburbs. In his diary, Shen wrote of his weariness with “an ox pulling a rickety cart-style bureaucratic routine, completely dogmatic studies, too much sleep, meaningless idle conversations, as well as pure wastes of time.” 老牛拉車式 9  Ibid., 61. 10  Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to Shen Congwen, January 31, 1938; and Shen, Letter to Zhang, August 19, 1938, Shen Congwen jiashu, 86, 108. 11  David Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China, 247–89. 12  Shen Congwen, Letters to Zhang Zhaohe, November 8, 1951 and January 24, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.156, 309. 13  In The Odyssey of Shen Congwen and “Shen Congwen and the Uses of Regionalism in Modern Chinese Literature” (157–58) Kinkley points out that the description of the “vitality” of the country people was a salient feature of Shen’s writing. 14  See Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face, and Jenny Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation,” for detailed accounts of Shen Congwen’s career change in 1949.

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的辦公,完全教條的學習,過多的睡眠,無益的空談,以及純粹的 浪費.15 Only occasional conversations with the cook lifted his spirits. In late October 1951 to February 1952, however, Shen Congwen joined a land reform work team in rural Sichuan and wrote of his experiences in nearly 50 letters to his wife and their two sons. The first letter of this series considered the upcoming journey an important transition in his life, helping him to break out of his claustrophobic despair: Third Sister: . . . I hope to learn from this great historical transformation to draw close to the people, to acquire a new kind of courage from doing this work, to labor on behalf of the nation for several years with discretion and sincerity, and to once again learn, to once again wield my pen, to write one or two new books about the new people of this new era, to make up for my mistakes in the nonsense I have written in my study over the past twenty years . . . Second Brother. 三姐 . . . 希望從這個歷史大變中學習靠攏人民,從工作上,得到 一種新的勇氣,來謹謹慎慎老老實實為國家做幾年事情,再學 習,再用筆,寫一兩本新的時代新的人民作品,補一補二十年 來關在書房中胡寫之失。. . . 二哥16 This letter takes on the tone of “self-criticism” by an intellectual undergoing “thought reform,” but there is reason to believe that the southward journey was therapeutic for Shen Congwen, as it brought back fond memories from his 1930s travels and opened up new and broader vistas. Painting panoramic scenes along the Yangtze River, Shen Congwen wrote of how moved he was to see the type of small boats that first carried him from his hometown, the sailors with familiar accents: “In the last three decades, the world has been completely transformed. Only these boats and the lives of those who live upon them have not changed for a thousand years.” 這卅年來世界變了樣,中 國也變了樣,這些船隻和船上人的生活,卻千年不變.17 With loving attention to local sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures, Shen used an external, concrete world to overcome his personal sorrows. The ethnographic details in these writings also served as a kind of field research for future writing, as one constant refrain in these letters was Shen Congwen’s vow to write again, “about the people” and “for the people.” 15  Shen Congwen, Diary at Revolutionary University, September 3, 1950, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.77. 16  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, October 25, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.121–22. 17  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, October 30, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.128.

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Shen Congwen’s wish to write again was not entirely opposed to the Chinese Communist Party’s new policies toward art as a form of propaganda. Expressing eagerness to catch up with the times, he tried writing a song in praise of land reform and saw his own role as a “propagandist” (xuanchuan yuan 宣傳員) and “agitator” (gudong yuan 鼓動員) for the present and future of the new nation when he engaged in conversations with the local folks.18 He tried writing about the cook at the revolutionary university and wept afterwards: “Surprisingly I can still use my mind and my pen” 我頭腦和手中筆居 然還得用. He saw this piece as an “experiment” and a “new beginning,” as “its point of view is that of the people and sings the praises of a new generation.” 觀點是人民的,歌頌新的一代的.19 For Shen, his teenage sons—Shen Longzhu 沈龍朱, nicknamed “Dragon,” and Shen Huchu, nicknamed “Tiger”—embodied this new generation. His letters admonished them to be patriots above all, to study hard, work hard, and be ready to make sacrifices for this fledgling nation.20 He described all that he had witnessed in vivid language, so that his children might see, hear, and empathize with the rural folks, particularly with regard to the hardships they endured to enable urban privileges. He urged them to go to the countryside at every future opportunity to learn to love the nation and to understand why its people are admirable. In writing to his sons, Shen Congwen also planned on writing for the “tens of thousands of passionate and brave youths” who must take up the task of nation building through improving production and education after land reform and class struggle. So he proposed to write ten short stories, ten “sculptures in words,” about model figures developed on the basis of Mikhail Kalinin’s (1875–1946) educational theories.21 Referring to not only Soviet theorists but also Mao Zedong’s writings, Shen Congwen published two self-criticisms in Guangming Daily (Guangming ribao 光明日報) in June and November of 1951. It is unclear whether Shen performed submission to the new regime out of self-preservation or out of genuine conviction, but he does repeatedly express deference toward the steep 18  Shen Congwen, Letters to Zhang Zhaohe, November 4, 5, 8, 1951 and January 29, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19:142, 149, 154–6, 327. 19  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, November 13, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.157– 58. The resulting story, “Old Comrade” (Lao tongzhi 老同志), was only posthumously published in Shen Congwen quanji, 27.463–78. 20  See Antje Richter’s chapter on letters of familial admonition in this volume. 21  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe and their two sons, Shen Longzhu and Shen Huchu, December 12–16, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.231. Shen is here referring to Kalinin’s On Communist Education.

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human price for the revolution’s present success. Asking his children whether they had read his self-criticism, Shen went on to explain: “The individual is quite insignificant. The nation however is something that has been built upon the excellent foundation of the millions of people who have sacrificed their lives and suffered so much. My work had been too detached from this development.” 個人小得很,國家是萬萬千千人犧牲了生命,吃盡了苦,  才奠定下那麽一個好基礎的。我的工作和這個發展遊離了. As Jenny Huangfu points out, such feelings of “remorse and guilt” pervaded the public writings of liberal intellectuals at the time as they “reflected on their political enfeeblement” while “the Communists were taking bullets in battle.”22 Yet rather than merely reiterating the Party line, Shen Congwen appears to have given much more thought to the concrete implementations of sublime goals. Answering his wife’s admonishment for him to “wholeheartedly serve the people,” he wrote that he saw his task as mainly to learn and to empathize with the rural cadres and peasants, to fathom the working method of “from the masses and to the masses”: Shuwen:23 . . . Didn’t I tell you that the impression I give others while working is easily mistaken for the laissez faire of a liberal? In fact, with regard to every single situation I’ve run into—great or small—I have taken an attitude of utmost seriousness in trying to understand it, to get to know it, because their significance in my education will be far deeper and more far-reaching than any written works. What’s more, while I know that working [in the countryside] will have a lifelong impact on every comrade from Beijing, the moment they depart from the countryside they will undoubtedly also lose any connection to the future fortunes of this place. I, however, am somewhat different—at the very least, the work [I do] this year cannot be separated from the future development of this land and these farmers. . . . Congwen. 叔文 . . . 我不是說在工作中給人印象,易如一個“自由主義”者 對事的不關心嗎,事實上這裏接觸到的大小事情,我卻用得是 一種嚴肅到極點的態度來理解,來認識。因為比任何文件書本 對於我教育意義都深遠得多!我且明白,這次工作,對於每個 北來同志,都有終生影響,但一和農村離開時,即必然也和這 裏得將來榮枯失去聯系。我倒稍稍不同,至少有一年工作要和 這片土地這些農民的發展分不開。. . . 從文24 22  Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation,” 52. 23  Shuwen is Zhang Zhaohe’s penname. 24  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, December 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.257.

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Shen Congwen describes the land and its people as a living organism, a fertile and resilient vital force deeply intertwined with his own life and work. He cared not only for their conditions in the present historical moment, but also for their past and future, for their “flourishing and withering” in the long run. The folks he met in the countryside reminded him of his own fictional characters from more than a decade ago, and he wanted to write about how they were faring in a revolutionary age. As he wrote to Zhang Zhaohe, “the countryside is in motion but the natural world is so still. I am positioned between them, and from here this movement and stillness seem to be gestating something that, so long as it is given time, will grow and mature.” 農村在動中,自然 景物那麼靜,我置身其間,由此動靜總似乎在孕育一種東西,只要 有時間,即可生長成熟.25 Literature for him was a crop borne out of the union between historical change, natural landscape, and the writer’s own subjectivity: “My life thus merges into this reality and its myriad histories of joys and sorrows. . . . It destroys me, but also re-creates me.” 我生命即融合到這個 現實萬千種歷史悲歡裡 . . . 在摧毀我又重造我.26 Afire with the passions, hopes, and ideals of this momentous historical transformation, Shen Congwen used family letters, especially letters to his children, to mediate these lively scenes across time and space: Little One: . . . The sugar mills are in full operation these days, using the same technology from a thousand years ago to produce white sugar. As soon as evening falls, hundreds of people gather under a large bell-shaped lamp in the sugar-drying yard to conduct revolutionary class struggle of twentieth century China . . . Old women in their seventies also come with their hand warmers; by the time they return to their neighboring villages it might already be past midnight. Heading home, they use all sorts of torches, bamboo lanterns, and flashlights, which wave around on the ridges of rice paddies as the villagers, laughing and quarreling, take their leave. The voices of the cadres are all raspy because they have said so much and are so tired. . . . Congwen. 小小 . . . 這幾天各個糖房都在開工,用一千年前老方式生產白 糖。曬糖的大院子,一到晚上,就有幾百人在一盞大鬥篷燈 下,進行二十世紀中國革命的土地改革鬥爭。. . . 七十多歲的老 太太,也帶了烘籠來說話,回到三五裏村子去時,可能已過了 夜半。回去時,是用大小種種火把和竹絲燈籠,手電筒,在田 25  Shen Congwen, Letters to Zhang Zhaohe, November 19–25 and 30, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.175, 177–78, 191. 26  Ibid., 19.172, 180. See Zhang Xinying’s analysis in Shen Congwen jingdu, 204–18.

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坎上晃來晃去,一面說笑一面爭吵走去的。領導幹部共通都是 喉嚨嘶啞啞的,因為說話太多,太累。. . . 從文27 What seems to move Shen Congwen here are the juxtaposition of stillness and movement, of ancient traditions and contemporary upheaval, as well as the vivid sights and sounds that can capture the atmosphere of a fleeting scene. Shen explicitly advocates such a lyrical approach to even a subject like class struggle: [If one] cannot write about uneventful times, cannot write about calm, cannot write about everyday life, and due to this writes ony about extraordinary events, or about activity, or about suffering, then one will also lack contrast, and will err towards hyperbole and be incapable of achieving an accurate and vivid result. 不會寫平凡時,不會寫靜,不會寫家常,因之寫特別事,寫 動,寫變故,也無個對比,易失於誇,而得不到準確生動效 果。28 In his own letters home, Shen was keen to note such juxtapositions between quietude and violence: At struggle sessions, a woman might rock the baby on her back while jabbing her needle into a shoe sole, one stitch at a time, and then, at a certain point of time, she would abruptly walk over to the landlord and strike him—smack—with her shoe sole. 鬥爭會上婦女,一面背著個孩子搖蕩,一面一針一針戳,到某 一時,卻會忽然走過去吧的打了地主一鞋底。29 At these struggle sessions, which also took place in ox sheds and local theaters, Shen Congwen claimed to find peasant women’s ‘speaking bitterness’ more mesmerizing than Russian novels or Shakespeare, and lamented their reduction to dry meeting minutes.30 He often wrote his children that what he 27  Shen Congwen, Letter to his son Shen Huchu, December 23, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.241. 28  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe and their sons, December 12–16, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.224. 29  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, January 15, 1952, Shen Congwen jiashu, 19.287. 30  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, November 19–25, 1951; and Letter to Zhang, Longzhu, and Huchu, Shen Congwen jiashu, 19.183, 221.

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had encountered was much more lively, intricate, and moving than what they could read in the officially acclaimed land reform fiction by Zhou Libo 周立波 (1908–1979), Zhao Shuli 趙樹理 (1906–1970), or Ding Ling 丁玲 (1904–1986).31 Instead of following a teleological narrative from peasant suffering and outrage to violent revolution, Shen Congwen’s own depiction of land reform was often highly ambivalent, as indicated by this letter to his two sons: Dragon, Tiger: Today is the fourth [day of the month]. We went to a sugar mill on a hill to attend a meeting for 5,000 people, where the local tyrant was executed right on the grounds outside his sugar mill. . . . The masses attending the rally also escorted a big group of landlords (about 400), tied up with ropes thick and thin. Some were dragged along only by nooses around their necks, and others were fully bound. The peasants in military attire escorting the landlords, male and female alike, were fully equipped, with many carrying swords and spears with bared blades. Some had escorted landlords from villages some twenty kilometers away. The landlords were for the most part clad in extremely tattered clothes with nothing remarkable about them. If anything, most of them looked shabbier than the peasants—I heard that some clothes had been exchanged. The crowd wore mostly blue shirts and white turbans. When they arrived along various mountain paths, they stretched out in extremely long lines. Led by a big red flag, they crossed through fields of rapeseed, beans, and wheat—a truly historical spectacle. . . . Dad. 龍龍,虎虎:今天四號,我們到一個山上糖房去,開一個五千 人大會,就在那個大惡霸家糖房坪子里,把他解決了 . . . 來開 會的群眾同時都還押了大批地主(約四百),用粗細繩子捆綁,  有的只縛頸子牽著走,有的全綁。押地主的武裝農民,男女具 備,多帶刀矛,露刃。有從廿裏外村子押地主來的。地主多已 穿得十分破爛,看不出特別處。一般比農民穿得臟破,聞有些 衣服是換來的。群眾大多是著藍布衣衫,白包頭,從各個山路

31  Shen Congwen, Letters to his son Huchu, December 27 and January 19 and 23, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.250, 292, 303. Paradigmatic land reform fiction included Zhou Libo’s Hurricane (Baofeng zhouyu 暴風驟雨, 1948) and Ding Ling’s 丁玲 (1904–1986) The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (Taiyang zhao zai Sanganghe shang 太陽照在桑乾河上). For a thoughtful analysis of such socialist novels, see King, Milestones on a Golden Road, 15–70.

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上走來時,拉成一道極長的線,用大紅旗引路,從油菜田蠶豆 麥田間通過,實在是歷史奇觀。. . . 爸爸32 Unlike the land reform fiction promoted by the authorities at the time, Shen Congwen refrains from second-guessing the psychology of the “masses” and reserves sweeping judgments, but instead re-creates the color, texture, and intricate dynamics of this violent scene with just a few broad strokes and material details. Rather than a melodramatic polarization of the reader’s sentiments along class lines, he renders the scene with vibrant images and arranges his sentences like melodies in counterpoint. Amidst his marvel at the newfound power of the peasants—moving because of their vindication of past injuries— is also pity for the current abjection of the landlords, who had to kneel on the plaques that once graced their own halls or were tied together en masse in a bamboo forest.33 His sympathies for these class enemies, so misplaced in light of contemporary politics, extended to the confiscation, exhibition, and redistribution of the landlords’ belongings: silver dug out of their walls and from underground betrayed their paranoia of pillage, whereas the large number of coffins they found spoke of an enduring obsession with the afterlife. The majority of landlords proved to be hoarders who hid rather than flaunted their wealth, and the pathetic junk carried out of their homes suggested thrifty and meager lives rather than evil and extravagance.34 Indeed, Shen Congwen’s letters could not quite turn away from the debris left behind by the revolutionary storm. Having discovered in a small restaurant a little wine jug in the style of the Six Dynasties that used to belong to a landlord, he laments that many old and beautiful things were thus wasted and spoiled in the revolutionary chaos when they ought to have entered museums to inspire new generations of artisans.35 The same went for local architecture such as memorial arches, temples, theaters, and landlord’s old manor. Much as these might be “feudal artifacts,” Shen found in them the wisdom of the people and a tradition worth preserving and developing for the new nation.36 If land reform was the pang of labor that gave rise to a new order, the toddling new nation ultimately had to 32  Shen Congwen, Letter to his sons Longzhu and Huchu, January 5, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.267. 33  Ibid., 19.267–68; Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, January 24, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.311. 34  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe and their two sons, February 2, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.340–41. 35  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, December 3, 1951, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.201. 36  Shen, Letter to his wife and two sons, December 12–16, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.219.

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rely much more on construction rather than destruction. Shen Congwen’s letters suggest that violent struggle could only be the beginning, and not the end, of the nation’s development—a development to which he hoped to contribute with his future literary creations. Yet the literary buds in these letters, as well as the nascent hopes Shen Congwen saw in the new nation, were soon nipped. Despite being inspired by the vitality of the people amid revolutionary changes, Shen never managed to share with the public any literary works based on his land reform experiences. He did send a literary essay entitled “The Brigade: Miscellaneous Sketches from Land Reform in Southern Sichuan” (Zhongduibu: Chuannan tugai zaji 中隊 部:川南土改雜記) and a short story entitled “The Landlord Song Renrui and His Son” (Caizhu Song Renrui he ta de erzi 財主宋人瑞和他的兒子) to various journals, but none would publish them.37 Written in a style resembling Lu Xun’s 魯迅 (1881–1936) “True Story of Ah Q” (A Q zhengzhuan 阿Q正傳) the landlord in Shen Congwen’s story is miserly, superstitious, and grotesque, but not evil, degenerate, or inhuman, thus evoking more ironical pity than plain hatred.38 Such characters and their feelings had no place in a revolutionary narrative of class struggle. In a letter to his younger son, he wrote that it would be far easier for artists and composers to adapt their techniques to a new regime than for writers: My language is too affected by the colors of painting, by the structure of music, such that my work becomes constrained by formalism and is perceived as a luxurious waste. 文字受繪畫中顏色影響過大,受音樂中組織影響過深,工作反 而受了形式限制,成為一種奢侈浪費了.39 Even when visual art and music served politics, Shen suggests, it was still possible for formal beauty, nuance, and their associated subjectivities to operate at a subterranean level. When literature served politics, on the other hand, any individual sentiments that did not line up perfectly with collective ideology might be construed as political dissent, and Shen Congwen expressed no intention of becoming a dissident. In the 1930s, a symbiosis between Shen’s personal letters and published writing was possible because literature for him was the public articulation of 37  Huangfu, “Road to Salvation,” 60. The two stories are posthumously published in Shen Congwen quanji, 27.479–508. 38  See a more detailed analysis by Zhang Qianfen, Shen Congwen jianguo chuqi de tugai shuxie. 39  Shen, Letter to his son Huchu, January 23, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.305.

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private feelings: the life force of the writer mingled with the heterogeneous humanity around him to produce writings or “letters” that resonated with many readers as individual human beings. Yet by the 1950s, such humanist literature was definitively weeded out and replaced by people’s literature or proletariat literature, so that the individual no longer existed except in terms of his or her “class” and place in the “collective.”40 Having tried and failed at such “literature for the masses,” Shen Congwen also recognized that his family letters could no longer serve as literary embryos, but instead treated them as an asylum for personal sentiments that could no longer be expressed in public. In the tumultuous years to follow, however, even this private sanctuary of personal correspondences came increasingly under siege, as the censorship that existed since 1949 became harsher and more intensive during the Cultural Revolution. 2

Letters under Surveillance, 1966–1968

In autumn 1965, Zhang Zhaohe joined a work team in a suburb of Beijing’s to implement the “Four Clean-ups” campaign, a rural prelude for the Cultural Revolution that began a few months later. In a letter to her husband, she advised him to “collect letters into one envelope. People are already talking about the ‘frequency of my family letters.’ This may be in jest, but we should still take care” 信最好裝在一個信封里寄來,已經有人說我“家信頻繁” ,雖屬笑話,也應注意.41 Once the gladdest recipient and most devoted reader of Shen Congwen’s letters, Zhang Zhaohe had now to consider what these letters meant for her public persona as a revolutionary cadre. In this volatile time when the private realm came under increasing attack, family letters were not so much treasures “worth ten thousand in gold” as they were potential weapons that could endanger their writers and recipients. The very act of personal letter writing seemed suspicious, and all letters were written under censorship, where censors were not only the cadres but also one’s family and friends and oneself. On May 16, 1966, Shen wrote to his friend Shao Xunmei 邵洵美:

40  I borrow this distinction from the 1947 essay by the modernist poet and theorist Yuan Kejia, “Ren de wenxue yu renmin de wenxue.” Shen himself wrote in 1948: “For these twenty or thirty years my writing has been based on si (contemplation). Now, however, one has to start everything from the perspective of xin (conviction).” See Wang Xiaojue’s analysis of this distinction in Modernity with a Cold War Face, 55. 41  Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to Shen Congwen, October 14, 1965, Shen Congwen quanji, 21.483.

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In the last half year I have read the papers daily. The daily growth of new happenings has of course not failed to startle my heart and soul. In ordinary times I used to feel as terrified as if I were walking on thin ice, but it looks as if the turbulence of this “Cultural Revolution” has turned [this ice] into foam and sludge. 半年來日讀報刊,新事新聞日多,更不免驚心動魄,平時懷如 履薄冰惶恐感。在此“文化大革命”動蕩中,成浮沫沈滓,意 中事也。42 On July 4, he urged his elder brother Shen Yunlu 沈云麓 to avoid going out and talking to people, to keep up with the latest news, and to keep studying Mao’s “three old essays,” for if obsolete intellectuals like themselves “were not careful, [they would be] ground into powder” 小不謹慎,即成碎粉.43 In September, Shen Congwen was denounced and detained with others in his work unit in Beijing, leaving little textual traces for the rest of 1966 beyond fragmented notes of his colleagues’ trivial and ungrounded denunciations.44 Shen was never the primary target of any denunciation sessions but always an “accompaniment” (peidou 陪鬥). Due to his fragile health, he was sometimes allowed to sit in a small room next to the denunciation auditorium with a loudspeaker that shouted shrill speeches in his ear.45 It took nearly three years before his name was cleared. Meanwhile, in July 1966, Shen’s younger son, Shen Huchu, and daughter-inlaw Zhang Zhipei 張之佩, both workers, relocated with their machine tools factory to Zigong, Sichuan, in support of the “Third Front,” taking along with them their little daughter Shen Hong 沈紅 or Honghong.46 In a letter to them on August 18, 1966, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Zhaohe wrote: Zhipei, Little Brother: . . . [Your] father’s head carries a heavy load of old bourgeois thoughts. He has a very muddled understanding of himself and doesn’t understand the movement at all. When it comes time for a broader “sweeping,” he must be forged through the conflagration of the revolution. The thought reform of bourgeois intellectuals would be 42  Shen Congwen, Letter to Shao Xunmei, May 15, 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 22:16. 43  Shen Congwen, Letter to his brother Shen Yunlu, July 4, 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.20. 44  Shen Congwen, Diary, September 15, 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.21–24; Shen Congwen, Draft for a big character poster, July 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 27.171–241. 45  Li Yang, Shen Congwen de zuihou sishi nian, 187. 46  Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Yunlu, July 4, 1966, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.18.

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hopeless without painful thought struggle. In past political campaigns he was always protected; this time, if they were to show consideration due to his heart problems, it would do his thought reform no good. / Will send Honghong’s cotton pants by the end of the month. If you need anything else, write me. Mom. 之佩,小弟 . . . 爸爸腦子裏的舊的資產階級包袱很重,對自己 很不清醒,對運動很不理解,將來在橫掃時,應當在革命的烈 火中好好燒一燒。資產階級知識分子的思想改造,不經過痛苦 的思想鬥爭是沒有希望改造好的。過去歷次運動他都是保護過 關,這次如果因為心臟有病,加以照顧,對他的改造沒有好 處。/ 紅紅棉褲月底月初寄來,還需要什麽,來信。媽媽47 We will never know if Zhang Zhaohe really meant what she wrote here, or if she was writing for potential censors, in which case the private letter became yet another stage for the public performance of revolutionary sentiments. Remarkably, the discussion of her husband’s thought reform shifts abruptly to her granddaughter’s prosaic material needs. In fact, much of the family letter exchange in the next three years would revolve around this child, her words and activities, her wants and wishes. Perhaps this child was the only node of innocence and authenticity in letters that suffered various degrees of duplicity, hypocrisy, and absurdity. In a letter to his mother three months later on November 13, 1966, Huchu wrote: Mother’s last letter mentioned the raids on our home in Beijing. This is an excellent rebellion . . . The material and spiritual Four Olds that we brought along [from Beijing to Sichuan] are plenty, yet here are no Red Guards to come and help us make revolution, so we must take action on our own initiative. 媽媽上次來信說到北京抄家的情況,這個反造的好 . . . 我們帶自 貢來的物質和精神上的四舊也不少,紅衛兵在這裏不會來幫助 我們革命,只有自覺行動起來.48 From 1966 to 1968, Shen Congwen’s home was raided eight times,49 and the “investigation teams” (zhuan’an zu 專案組) confiscated several letter frag47  Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to her son Shen Huchu and daughter-in-law Zhang Zhipei, August 18, 1966, Shen Congwen jiashu, 412–14. 48  Shen Huchu, Letter to his mother Zhang Zhaohe, November 13, 1966, Shen Congwen jiashu, 415. 49  Shen Congwen zishu, 189.

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ments before Shen Congwen had a chance to finish them.50 According to Shen Huchu’s editorial comments, he and his brother sent all their letters through Zhang Zhaohe’s work unit for “safety reasons.”51 So when Shen Longzhu wrote from his “long march” to revolutionary base areas in November and December of 1966, or when Shen Huchu or his wife wrote from their factory in Sichuan over the next two years, they all addressed “Mother” and never directly “Father.” If one were to exclude the parts that talked about Honghong the child, these letters—often accompanied by official documents, little red books, and revolutionary songbooks—almost sound like military dispatches on the development of the Cultural Revolution in different regions and arenas.52 Even though his children never wrote him directly, Shen Congwen wrote three dozen letters to his son and daughter-in-law from 1967–68, interweaving national and regional news and rumors with first-hand observations of everyday life and reports on families and friends. The revolutionary storm swirled everyone into its orbit, but its impact still varied greatly across geographic regions, institutions, and time. The absence of a free press and the very uneven access to news also made personal letters an especially precious source of information exchange. As a target of struggle and suffering from a weak heart, Shen Congwen rarely left his cramped home except for grocery shopping or hospital visits, whereupon he would come across an “ocean of bigcharacter posters and the huge crowds reading them.”53 His wife and elder son spent their days going to large and small meetings, reading and summarizing big character posters, and contributing to mimeographed publications of their own work units.54 From these and from the parades of “capitalist-roaders” on the street they learned of the latest political winds and of factional violence in the provinces, which made Shen Congwen worry about family and friends in those regions.55 50  Footnote to an unfinished letter Shen Congwen wrote to his acquaintance Cheng Yingquan 程應銓, December, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.86, 90. 51  See explanatory note in Shen Congwen jiashu, 401. 52  Shen Longzhu, Letter to his mother Zhang Zhaohe, November 28, 1966, Shen Congwen jiashu, 418–20. 53  Shen Congwen, Letter to his daughter-in-law Zhang Zhipei, May 11, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.36, 38. 54  Shen Congwen, Letter to his younger son Shen Huchu and daughter-in-law Zhang Zhipei, March 25, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.29, 32; Letters to Zhang Zhipei, June 1 and August 5, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.44, 54; Letter to Shen Huchu, November 14, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.71. 55  Shen Congwen, Letters to Shen Huchu, November 27, 1967 and March 29, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.74–77, 127.

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In Everyday Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote of Soviet readers of newspapers who “looked for hints and subtexts to divine exactly what was intended by the often obscure “signals” that came down from on high.”56 In a similar vein, Shen Congwen carefully scrutinized newspapers and listened to the radio to speculate about his own imminent plight and to put it into a larger context. He recognized that “old intellectuals probably cannot work as before; their elimination is necessary, inevitable” 舊知識份子,大致不能如過去工作,消 滅是必然的,無可避免的.57 While shocked and shaken by the arrests of “traitors” and “enemies” around him, Shen still wrote of his “gratitude” to “the Party and the masses” for “protecting” him and sparing him the large denunciations held for other famous writers who had continued their literary careers into the People’s Republic, such as Ba Jin 巴金 and Lao She 老舍. 58 A letter from March 1968 to his son provides a self-deprecating report of his psychic state and everyday life: Little Brother: . . . Every now and then, I would hear news of this or that famous personage being “seized”—probably already “old news” by the time they reach us. These people are either old power-holders or new careerists, or otherwise associated with Chiang Kai-shek. Our close friends and family mostly do not qualify. Yet my nerves are not quite sound, and insomnia inevitably creates hallucinations (like early symptoms of schizophrenia). Sometimes I am afraid of going outside and seeing strangers. Children shouting in the courtyard also frighten me. I even feel frightened when your mother speaks. . . . The weather is gradually getting warmer; next week the coal stove will move outdoors. Cooking under the eaves is naturally a bit trickier than in the room. On most days the sun is strong, and when it rains I have to rescue the briquette, or carry an umbrella while stir-frying dishes. But with the passage of time, I’ll get used to it. . . . Our mixed courtyard has one advantage: since there are many residents, there are paradoxically fewer unexpected outside disturbances. Good neighbors lessen our worries . . . I keep tidying up the courtyard, gutters, and toilet several times a day, yet there will always be a new mess, which perplexes me. Recently I discovered that the “little generals” have been waging endless battles, so they simply help themselves to the weapons in the trash, like burnt briquette and vegetable dregs—

56  Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 187–89. 57  Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu and Zhang Zhipei, May 15, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.41–42. See similar sentiments in the same volume on pages 41, 51, 58–61, 66. 58  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhipei, February 16, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.108–9.

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whatever they could use without causing real injuries. After this realization, my “spirit of service” could not rise as it should. Only a few old women understand the situation. Meanwhile, the wars of the “little generals” will continue until middle school. 小弟 . . . 我在這裏,間或可聽到某某知名人物“捉去”消息,對 我們雖近於新聞,事實上或已是“舊聞” ,這些人不是舊當權 派,即是新野心家,又或和過去蔣記有關系人物。相近親友中 多無此資格。但不大健全神經,一到失眠,即不免有些錯覺產 生(近於神經分裂癥的前期征兆)。有時上街見生人即害怕,  小孩子在院中叫嚷也感到害怕,甚至於媽媽說話也害怕 . . . 天氣 已日益暖和,再下禮拜就得移爐子了。在檐下做飯,自然不如 房中方便。平時陽光直射,大雨中還得搶救煤塊,或扛著雨傘 炒菜。不過日子一久,也就習慣了 . . . 這裏大雜院好處,即因人 口眾多,反而不至於增加外來意外幹擾。同院住的關系一好,  什幺通通不用擔心了 . . . 院子和地道、毛房,一天我經常不斷 去打掃,總還是有可掃除的東西,有些不理解。近來才發現原 是小將們長時期不停的戰鬥,隨手從垃圾箱取了些應用武器,  煤球和菜根,凡是可以使用又不至傷人的,統統用得上。這一 來,我的服務精神不能不相應提高了。只有幾個老大媽明白情 形,小將戰鬥卻將依舊繼續下去,到升中學為止。59 As the games of the children in his courtyard mimicked the arbitrary violence and factional warfare beyond the courtyard, the world around him was turning into a battleground and trash heap. The world’s madness permeated his neighborhood, his home, and his dearest kin, terrifying him toward a near relapse of schizophrenia that had in 1949 led to his attempted suicide.60 Compared to such psychological pressure, it was much easier for Shen Conwen to adapt to material adversities. Doing his best to get along with his neighbors, he even saw overcrowding as a sort of protection against intruders and did not seem to suffer a loss of dignity from cleaning communal spaces. Shen Congwen’s own circumspection, low-key profile, and lack of ambition and opportunism translated into lessons for his children, conveyed time and again in his letters. In these turbulent times, he often suggested, individuals are tiny and insignificant, and one can never be too careful. Even his younger son was imprisoned for twenty-some-days as a “counterrevolutionary” before 59  Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, March 23, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.122–25. 60  In Modernity with a Cold War Face, Xiaojue Wang discusses Shen Congwen’s schizophrenia and attempted suicide in 1949 at length and compares him to Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) Lumpensammler or trash collector in terms of his art historical praxis. See pp. 70–80.

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being rehabilitated in 1967.61 Shen advised his son and daughter-in-law to subscribe to Beijing’s publications like People’s Daily and Beijing Worker so as to keep up with the latest political trends, as well as to find out more from factory colleagues who received letters reporting on Beijing’s industrial sector.62 Much as he thought they should inform themselves of what was going on, Shen urged his daughter-in-law to dissuade his son from working for their factory newspaper: Zhipei: . . . There are many things that Party members understand that ordinary cadres do not. Some things are only privy to a certain level of Party members. . . . Newspapers are the Party’s throat and tongue; only Party members working under Party leadership could hope to make fewer mistakes, or to make smaller mistakes. [emphasis in the original] . . . Your big brother worked for the Youth League since middle school. His character is so righteous, honest and unselfish, yet in the Anti-Rightist Movement, a small mistake affected the rest of his life! . . . I go all out to “do my duty,” yet people think I “have ambition.” . . . Congwen. 之佩 . . . 有許多事黨員懂,普通幹部不懂。有的某級黨員懂,一 般黨員也不可能懂 . . . 報是黨的喉舌,只有黨員在黨的領導下工 作,才可望少犯錯誤,或犯錯誤較少,較小 . . . 大哥從中學即搞 團工作,人又那麽正派,老實,不自私,結果在反右中小有差 錯,即影響到一生!. . . 我拼命在“盡義務”,人卻認為我“有 野心”。. . . 從文63 In such admonishment, one might see the Chinese tradition of using family letters as a channel of moral education. Whereas renowned family letter writers such as Zheng Banqiao 鄭板橋 (1693–1765) and Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811–1872) sought to instill ethical values in their children through positive examples of family history,64 Shen’s letters presented his own and other family members’ experiences as “cautionary tales.” These lessons of self-preservation were also lessons of modesty, diligent study, and hard work. Shen certainly never spoke of “filial piety,” yet he always asked his son to write more often for his mother’s sake, to show that they care and to reassure their worries in unpre61  Shen Congwen, Letters to Zhang Zhipei, May 11 and June 1, 1967, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.36, 43. 62  Shen Congwen, Letters to Shen Huchu and Zhang Zhipei, October 21, 1967, Shen Conwen quanji, 22.65; Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, January 20, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.91. 63  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhipei, February 16, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.110–11. 64  Liu, Transnational History of a Chinese Family, 135–39.

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dictable times.65 Yet Shen was also painfully aware that letters could cause worries as much they might soothe them. In spring 1968, he wrote to his son about his increased blood pressure and premonition of death. Then he added: “You may want to sift through the letters I wrote you over he years. What does not need to be kept should be thrown away to avoid any future provocations. The rest you could keep as a souvenir, because I have little else to pass on to you.” 年來給你們的信,可注意一下,不必要留的,即處理一下,免得反 而在另外一時引起是非。可留的即作個紀念,因為別的什麼也沒 有給你們.66 These instructions reflect the ambivalence Shen Congwen felt toward his own letters as both a legacy and a liability for his children. In the Cultural Revolution, it was all too commonplace for intellectual families to destroy personal correspondences in order to avoid difficulties with Red Guards. If they did not do so in time, then the raiders of their homes could become readers of those letters, as was the case of the renowned translator Fu Lei’s 傅雷 letters to his children. For over a decade Fu Lei and his wife Zhu Meifu 朱梅馥 wrote over a hundred letters to their son Fu Cong 傅聰, who left China to study in Poland in 1954 and fled to London in 1958. During the Cultural Revolution, Fu Lei and Zhu Meifu committed suicide, and Red Guards from the Shanghai Conservatory confiscated the back copies of their letters. Later, Red Guards borrowed the letters under the guise of investigation to read them. After the Cultural Revolution, Fu Lei’s second son Fu Min 傅敏 brought back the original letters from his brother and published them as The Family Letters of Fu Lei (Fu Lei jiashu 傅雷家書), which went on to sell over two million copies in China.67 Shen Congwen’s family certainly did not undergo such sensational tragedy, yet their letter exchanges under surveillance tell a more nuanced story about censorship in the Cultural Revolution. In fact, self-censorship played a role in the very composition of these letters, a tension made visible when Shen Congwen himself crossed out words and sentences in his letter drafts, reproduced in his Complete Works. In six such instances in the surviving letters from 1967 and 1968, the few crossed-out sentences could be construed as a critique of the broader status quo, expressing, for example, a general sense of fatigue with mass movements and the poor quality of literary production.68 Not so much in precaution against censors as to lessen his children’s worries about

65  Shen Congwen, Letters to Shen Huchu and Zhang Zhipei, December 25, 1967; early January 1968; May 16, 1968, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.82–84, 89, 134–35. 66  Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, March 23, 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22.122. 67  Roberts, Friendship in Art, 165–79. Krauss, Piano and Politics in China, 93–98. 68  Shen Congwen quanji, 22.31, 117, 126, 134, 135, 151.

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himself, Shen also crossed out pessimistic assessments of his own health: “Here life goes on as usual. This year might bring some changes, so life might become simpler. My head is not feeling so well, perhaps because the other day, I lifted a garbage bin that was too heavy.” 這裡生活一切如常。今年有可能 會變變,生活更簡化。我頭部不大好受,或因日前抬垃圾箱,過重 出的毛病。69 The following instance of self-censorship falls more subtly between the personal and the political, exemplifying the maxim that the personal is the political: “Everyday life at home also underwent some adjustments. All our savings have been turned over to the authorities. Starting in June, I will only receive a stipend, a paltry sum of twenty yuan or less, this is most reasonable.” 家中 生活,也起了些應由變化,存款全已上繳,我從六月起,只能領一 點生活費數目恐只一二十元,這是極其合理的事.70 After a sentence on his heart condition, he crossed out the following: I will suddenly expire, yet have no particular regrets. In the last fifty years since leaving home, in the Old Society I did my utmost. Though my thoughts were on the conservative side, I never engaged in political opportunism. These past two decades in the New Society, since I didn’t have the ambition of XX. Because of my conservative thoughts and timid nature, in the past two decades I haven’t been able to avoid making mistakes both large and small that await investigation and criticism. 我會忽然完事的,也沒有什麽遺憾,因為出來五十年,在舊社 會工作,已盡了自己能盡的力,思想上雖比較保守,卻從未搞 政治投機。新社會近廿年,因為無XX野心。我因思想保守又膽 小怕事, 廿年來工作上不可免會犯了些大小錯誤,一一待檢查批 判。71 The letter is haunted by the compulsion of self-criticism, the practiced genre of intellectuals in successive movements of the Mao era. Shen himself had to write more than 60 self-criticisms while under investigation from 1966 to 1968, which often teetered between authentic feelings and performative posturing,

69  Shen Congwen, Letter to his son Shen Huchu, March 29, 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22. 126. 70  Shen Congwen, Letter to the Revolutionary Committee at the Historical Museum, May 6, 1967, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22.35. 71  Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, May 16, 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22.135.

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between justification and denunciation of his past.72 Since everything he wrote could be seized and confiscated, family letters also had the authorities in charge as implicit audiences. Yet like many other accused intellectuals eager to prove their innocence, Shen faced the looming censors not only with fear of damnation, but also with hopes for salvation. As he wrote in a letter to his elder brother in December 1968: Big Brother: . . . Society has undergone total renovation; most acquaintances from my generation have passed away. As for my own minute merits, hardly any of my colleagues of the past two decades understand them. I thought my plans were quite ordinary and reasonable, but perhaps it’s only natural that they cannot be fulfilled. There is just one chance for their “realization:” when my case files are sent to the Central Cultural Revolution Committee, if by some unlikely chance Premier [Zhou Enlai], Kang Sheng, or Jiang Qing see my name and recognize that I am “still a good person” who hasn’t made “big mistakes” . . . If my work is still meaningful to “the research of Chinese cultural history” that the Chairman once mentioned, then I will surely be saved. 大哥 . . . 社會已完全翻新,舊時代同時數人多已謝世,我的一點 點長處,在廿年同事中即已少有人懂得。因此一切本來極其平 常合理的打算,今後恐不能實現,也極其自然。也有可能居然 還能成為“顯示”,那就是當我被整的材料送到中央文革時,  偶然的偶然名字為總理,康生或江青三人之一看到,承認我 仍然“是個好人”,並未犯過什麼“大過錯”. . . 我搞的研究工 作,對於主席提起過的“中國文化史研究”更有意義,那我一 定就得救了。73 In other words, Shen Congwen hoped for an unlikely zhi yin amid the top national authorities. His case file was in the hands of young people in their twenties with no memory of the Republican era, young people who could not possibly understand the historical context of his works and criticized without bothering to read them.74 Hence Shen Congwen placed his hopes in the memories of an older generation of authorities. He did not regard them as his 72  About 20 confessions Shen Congwen wrote for the authorities can be found in Shen Congwen quanji, 27.169–280. 73  Shen Congwen, Letter to his brother Shen Yunlu, October 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22.146. 74  Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu and Zhang Zhipei, December 4, 1968, in Shen Congwen quanji, 22.152.

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persecutors, but rather potential saviors who might “recognize” the goodness of his person and the value of his work. After all, it was Premier Zhou Enlai who first commissioned his research into the history of Chinese costumes. Shen Congwen also knew Jiang Qing from the early 1930s, when she sat in on his class at Qingdao University. Hoping that she might remember him, he wrote her a petitioning letter at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, seeking her help to keep his niece in Beijing. Yet these letters disappeared and Shen never received a reply.75 3

Cadre School Letters as Fragile Memories, 1969–71

After almost three years of investigation and occasional incarceration, Shen Congwen was finally “liberated” in June, 1969. In November, the revolutionary authorities at his work unit told him to pick up a selection of his confiscated papers, including personal photographs, notebooks, and materials related to two decades of cultural historical research for the museum. In a letter to his wife, Shen noted that the investigation team sorted his papers into neat files and seemed to have even perused them: “One responsible cadre asked me: ‘How come you wrote so much?’ I could only smile.”76 While rejoicing over the survival of these papers, Shen Congwen quietly lamented the loss of his letters and literary works from the Republican era. He dared not ask for the English and Japanese translations of his books as souvenirs, but comforted himself by saying that the doctor advised him against brain-intensive work anyway, so the “disinfection” of his works helped rid him of all vain hopes of writing fiction ever again.77 Reading over his returned papers in the next few days, Shen Congwen was glad to reaffirm their value for future cultural historians and felt all the more upset that the museum authorities had sold his cultural historical books at seven cents per kilo.78 Seeking to preserve cultural memories in the autumn of 1969, however, was an impossible task. As Sino-Soviet relations worsened and a potential nuclear holocaust threatened to wipe out civilization itself, Shen notes in his letters how everyone in Beijing was either busy digging bunkers or being collectively 75  Shen Congwen adopted his niece Shen Zhaohui after her father’s death in 1959. When the Cultural Revolution started, Shen Zhaohui was forced to leave Beijing and “return” to her “original” household registration in Manchuria. See Li Yang, 188–90. 76  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, November 2, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.201. 77  Ibid., 22.202. 78  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, November 10, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.208.

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evacuated. The “Third Front” had already sent workers like Shen Congwen’s younger son and daughter-in-law to the mountainous interior. The sent-down youth movement mobilized young people in their teens to rural areas while cadres and intellectuals were sent to militarized camps in the countryside known as the “May Seventh Cadre Schools.” So many people were on the road that it was hard to procure ropes to bind luggage, as Shen observed in a letter to his wife, who had left in September with her work unit to the Cadre School in Hubei Province.79 Nearly 70 years old and ranking among the “old, weak, ill, or disabled” 老弱病殘, Shen initially hoped to stay in Beijing and continue working at the museum.80 Yet on November 17, only two weeks after his confiscated papers were returned, Shen was summoned to a mobilization meeting that exhorted him and others to leave Beijing for a Cadre School by the end of the month. On November 22, Shen Congwen wrote to his younger son: Little Brother: By the time you receive this letter, I may be on my way to Xianning. The museum decided on it yesterday. Your mother’s departure was relatively unhurried, but ours was very rushed and chaotic. It’s six o’clock in the afternoon. The sight of my desk, full of papers, makes me very sad. Despite their promises that they will be kept safe, I will probably not have a chance to go through them ever again. How sad that the work of the last twenty years will be gone overnight. Actually, many parts of it could not be recovered even if young people worked on it for another twenty or thirty years. Or perhaps nobody will work on it ever again. Yet hundreds of thousands of artifacts in the museum are also rotting away! Naturally, I am in no position to say anything. . . .  小弟:你們收到這個信時,有可能我已上咸寧的車了。這是館 裡昨日通知決定的。媽媽走時,還比較從容,我們可不免相當 忙亂。這時正下午六點,一桌文稿,看來十分難過,雖允為好 好保存,我大致已無可望有機會再來清理這一切了。比較難 過,即近廿年搞的東西,等於一下完事,事實上有許多部分卻 是年輕人二十三十年搞不上去的。也可能以後永遠不會再有人 搞的。但是庫藏中還有十萬八萬實物等著霉爛!我自然說不上 什麼了。81 A fresh sense of trauma greeted every instance of destruction of his manuscripts, metonymical of Chinese cultural heritage at large. One of the recurring 79  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, October 28, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.197. 80  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, October 25, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.192. 81  Shen Congwen, Letter to Shen Huchu, November 22, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.234.

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lines in Shen Congwen’s post-1949 writings was “Things are hard to make but easy to ruin” 物難成而易毀,82 which is a direct antithesis to Mao’s maxim “Without destruction there can be no construction” 不破不立. Shen used the phrase to refer to the fragility of his own life around his attempted suicide in 1949, to the destruction of his books in China and Taiwan 1950s, and to the negation and confiscation of his work along with artifacts in 1966. He was speaking not only of his own autobiography, but also of his generation of May Fourth intellectuals, of the cultural achievements over centuries, and of Socialist construction prior to the Cultural Revolution, which considered even the most recent efforts at cultural renewal “poisonous weeds” to be uprooted. As Shen prepared for departure to the Cadre School, his wife’s sister Zhang Yunhe 張允和 stopped by to visit him. She recalled that his room was so messy that there was no place to sit. When she was about to say goodbye, he took out a wrinkled letter from an overstuffed pocket. Smiling in a manner that looked as if he was about to cry, he said to me: “This was the first letter Third Sister (he also calls my third younger sister “Third Sister” out of respect) wrote to me.” He held up the letter, his expression timid and tender. I said: “Can I see it?” Second Brother Shen put down the letter and I couldn’t tell if he wanted to hand it to me or not. He warmed the letter against his chest and did not relinquish it, but instead stuffed it back into his pocket, his hand still clutching the letter. I thought: How silly of me to ask to see their love letter! While I looked at him bemusedly, Second Brother Shen said suddenly: “Third Sister’s first letter—her first letter.” Then he began to snivel and weep, a man nearly seventy years old crying as full of sorrow and joy as a child. I didn’t know what to do, so I left him intoxicated in the “bittersweetness” of his youth. 他從鼓鼓囊囊的口袋裡掏出一封皺頭皺腦的信,又像哭又像笑 對我說: “這是三姐(他也尊稱我三妹為‘三姐’ )給我的第一封 信。”他把信舉起來,面色十分羞澀而溫柔。我說: “我能看看 嗎?”沈二哥把信放下來,又像給我又像不給我,把信放在胸 前溫一下,並沒有給我。又把信塞在口袋裡,這手抓緊了信再 也不出來了。我想,我真傻,怎麼看人家的情書呢,我正望著 他好笑。忽然沈二哥說: “三姐的第一封信——第一封。”說著 就吸溜吸溜哭起來,快七十歲的老頭兒像一個小孩子哭得又傷

82  This line first appeared amidst what appear to be politically compliant pieces of writing, such as “One Year after Liberation: One Year of Study” (Jiefang yinian xuexi yinian 解放 一年學習一年, 1950), in Shen Congwen quanji, 27.49.

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心又快樂。我站在那兒倒有點手足無措了。我悄悄地走了,讓 他沉浸、陶醉在那春天的“甜澀”中吧!83 On November 30, 1969, Shen Congwen boarded a train for Xianning county, Hubei province, and learned that only he and three others from his work unit obeyed the mobilization directives. When they arrived at the Cadre School, the local authorities had no idea they were coming, and none of the existing production brigades wanted to take him because he was too old and weak to engage in physical labor. His wife Zhang Zhaohe belonged to the same Cadre School, which was associated with the Ministry of Culture, but she lived in a collective dormitory and could not take him in either. Shen had to move several times in the first few months until he “settled down” in an abandoned elementary school in Shuangxi, a township 30 kilometers away from his wife. This separation prompted Shen to write over 60 letters to his wife in the next year and half, testifying to the daily experiences of material shortage and the sense of homelessness from the Cultural Revolution’s mass mobilizations. Even though war had not begun, everyone was treated like a soldier of a military unit, so it was actually the exception rather than the norm for urban families to stay in one piece. To borrow a phrase from Ellen Widmer as she described epistolary collections of the Ming-Qing transition, “many letters traveled across unaccustomed distances, between people uprooted by events.”84 From the end of 1969 to mid-1971, Shen Congwen, Zhang Zhaohe, their older and younger sons were scattered between four different locations, each relaying the letter he or she received from one family member to another. As Haiming Liu points out in a Chinese diasporic context, “family correspondence is not necessarily a communication between one individual and another, but rather a vehicle networking the entire family.”85 In the Cultural Revolution, this network of letters remained the only antidote against the atomization of individuals into shiny revolutionary “bolts” at the disposal of the state. At the same time, the family correspondences from this period continued to reflect a tug of war between family and revolutionary ethics. Living amidst cobwebs, mosquitoes, mice, and other creatures under a leaking roof, Shen could “raise frogs” and make “pickled tofu” in the dampness of his room.86 His letters detailed the material bases of his daily existence from food to clothing, housing to transportation—a haphazard and creative 83  Zhang Yunhe, “Cong di-yi feng xin dao di-yi feng xin.” 84  Widmer, “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China,” 6. 85  Liu, Transnational History of a Chinese Family, 138. 86  Shen Congwen, Diary, September 18, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.379; 23.84.

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bricolage with scarce resources and the kindness of strangers. He appreciated every minor improvement, such as getting a hand-made oil lamp so that he didn’t have to spend long nights in the dark, or moving to lodgings a few hundred meters away from the local loudspeakers that used to blare in his ears. The rainstorms posed the direst challenges, so that even after sweeping out dozens of basins of water, he had to lay down bricks in order not to walk around in puddles. While “griping” about such dilapidated material circumstances, Shen Congwen’s letters to his wife still contain moments of poetic allegory: Zhaohe: With recent rainstorms, I can well imagine the strenuous toil of thousands of comrades at your place. Is your lodging also turning into a disaster zone? . . . When you wade through water, you must be extra careful. You must face reality. Old women cannot compete with the young, and you must take care even when crossing with a boat. I have spent four or five years on a boat, floating here and there, so I know how boats are. You must not move capriciously, even when you’ve reached the shore. Let other people go first—you are not competing for this one moment. . . . Congwen. 兆和:這幾天大風雨,湖邊大幾千同誌的辛苦,可想而知。你 們住處不知是不是也有點成災景象?. . . 涉水務必要謹慎為是。  要承認現實。老太太不比青壯。即過渡也必得特別小心。我是 住過四五年船在水上飄來飄去的,更明白船中規,不宜亂動,  即攏岸時也不宜粗心大意!讓人先上不爭此一刻。. . . 從文87 With high blood pressure and fainting spells, Shen Congwen had great difficulty taking care of himself and naturally longed to have his wife come live with him. Yet he also did not want to take her away from her colleagues, her work unit, and her “masses.” Responding to one of her letters in March 1970, he agreed with her that “private interests should not harm public interests” 不宜以私害公. Subsequent letters further vacillated between asking her to come and asking her to stay put. In her letter to him in October 1970, Zhang Zhaohe approved of the success of his thought struggle so that “public triumphed over the private” 公字戰勝了私字. She went on to write in an almost patronizing tone: Congwen: . . . Last Sunday, kindergarten teachers propagated the spirit of Dazhai to the children: “Your mommies and daddies are busy learning from Dazhai and have no time to take care of you. This week we will 87  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, September 17, 1969, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.375.

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not go home to Mommy, alright, everyone? . . . This new generation of children already receives a Socialist education starting in kindergarten. Compared to our children, they are much better off. . . . San. 從文:. . . 上個禮拜天,老師對幼兒園的孩子宣傳大寨精神,說 爸爸媽媽學大寨,沒有功夫照料你們,咱們這個禮拜不去看媽 媽,大家同意不同意?孩子們說同意!. . . 這一代的孩子從幼兒 園就接受社會主義教育,比起龍龍虎虎一輩又優越多了。. . . 三88 Two weeks later, Shen Congwen was hospitalized for 40 days for severe stomachache, and Zhang Zhaohe took time off from work to care for him. In a letter written shortly after her return to her brigade, Shen Congwen reflected on their differences: Zhaohe: . . . You grew up in a collective, and have thrived in a collective. You are respected and recognized by people. . . . You cannot create, but you can preserve and adapt. Yet I am a creative personality. . . . Even when I give an ordinary report, I make a hundred mistakes. Last time, when you said that I “dragged on your hind leg,” it is in some measure true. Your words tormented me, but I am the one who ought to apologize, not you. . . . Congwen 兆和:. . . 你是在集體中長大,從集體中得到發展,受人尊重,  得人認可的 . . . 不能創造,卻能守常,應變。我卻是個創造型人 物 . . . 作個普通發言,也毛病百出。所以你上次所說“拖你後 腿” ,也有部分是實情,話說得使我極痛苦,應抱歉得還是我,  而不是你。89 As this correspondence suggests, the revolution not only split apart families physically but also psychologically, so much that even individual subjectivities became conflicted and fragmented. It was not that Shen explicitly “resisted” the revolution’s hegemonic discourse: he even tried to write classical-style propagandistic poems in this period to celebrate national events. Still, he knew that these are “just writing and reading for myself; at most a few others might look at them (even a wall poster wouldn’t publish [my poetry]—even there they might find mistakes.)” 事實上,只是自己寫寫讀讀,至多三五個人 看看而已。(即作為墻報,也不會用上的。也會犯錯誤的).90 The readership of his writing shrank over time from the broad reading public to an academic audience and now to just a few family members, whose 88  Zhang Zhaohe, Letter to Shen Congwen, October 31, 1970, Shen Congwen jiashu, 506. 89  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, February 21, 1971, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.443. 90  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, September 10, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.367.

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worries often outweighed their appreciation. In April 1970, his elder brother Shen Yunlu died, and his sister-in-law promptly burned Shen Congwen’s last letter to him at his grave.91 Shen expressed his disconsolation in a letter to his old friend Xiao Qian, whom he addressed as “classmate” because they were both in the cadre school: 92 Classmate Bing Qian: I received your latest letter and thank you for your sentiments. Recent troubles with my heart and the high blood pressure oppressing my brain have left me dazed and befuddled. I can no longer hope to return to work. My amnesia is also shocking. Had your letter not reminded me, I could not have remembered what I wrote you last. To make things simpler, please send me back my earlier letter—thank you very much. [My elder brother] passed away, and another close family member suddenly died as well. It is only a matter of time until I myself will be thrown on the scrapheap. All my works have been destroyed; even in Taiwan they have been banned from circulation since 1953. Three decades’ worth of correspondence kept at my brother’s place were all destroyed, lest there be needless difficulties for his family and others. My children keep telling me: “Do not carelessly correspond with people in your illness. Avoid trouble.” They are absolutely right. . . . Congwen. 秉乾同學:得近信,謝謝厚意。近因心臟不好,腦子又被高血 壓威脅,弄得昏昏沈沈,一切工作希望,已難說上。頭腦善 忘,即得驚人程度,不是來信提起,已難於記憶給你信中內 容。為省事計,望把前信寄還,十分感謝。雲六故走,另一至 親又忽然故去,我報廢將是遲早間事。所有習作已全毀,臺灣 也在五三年即禁止流行。大哥處保存卅年信件亦全毀,免生無 意義是非,為子弟累,為他人累。孩子們一再囑咐“病中不宜 和人隨便通信,免除麻煩”,所說十分有道理。. . . 從文93 With the decline of his own health and the passing of his brother, Shen Congwen became keenly aware of his own mortality. Yet it was not so much death that he feared as it was the loss of memories, both his personal memories mediated through letters and the cultural memories mediated through his literary and cultural historical corpus. He regarded all of his writing as a repository for what fragile fragments he was able to salvage, and he would spend 91  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, April 30, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.303. 92  See Huangfu, “Roads to Salvation,” for a detailed account of Shen Congwen’s relationship to Xiao Qian from the Republican period through the 1950s. 93  Shen Congwen, Letter to Xiao Qian, October 17, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.405.

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the remainder of his life in valiant struggle against both physical and cultural amnesia. After his release from the hospital in January 1971, he began anew to sort through his art historical papers, copying over his manuscript of the history of Chinese costumes with a shaky hand, in case the original became lost or wet. He also worked on other projects from memory alone, without the aid of books or photographs. As he wrote to Zhang Zhaohe in March, 1971: Over several rainy days, I completed in bed a first draft of an article entitled “The Historical Development of Employing Horses.” It was all based on memory. Hundreds, even thousands of horse images have been running around in my mind. I was able to recognize their historical periods, properties, and characteristics, and relate them to a hundred cultural historical issues. 連日陰雨中,在床上已初步完成了《關於馬的應用歷史發展》  一文,一切全憑記憶,大幾百匹,甚至於過千匹馬的印象,在 頭腦中跑來跑去,且能識別他們的時代,性能和特徵,和相關 文化史百十種問題。94 Meanwhile, he wrote many letters petitioning authorities to allow him to return to Beijing to finish working on his art historical projects. It was not until the spring of 1972 that he was finally permitted to return to Beijing on account of illness, where he seemed to race with life itself in order to rescue what fragments of cultural memory he could from the debris of revolution. He completed his monumental study Research of Ancient Chinese Costume (Zhongguo gudai fushi yanjiu 中國古代服飾研究) after the Cultural Revolution, yet it is his letters that provide us with an encounter with the history that allowed these art historical works to be passed on to our own age. As Stephen Owen writes of Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao’s afterword to her dead husband’s monumental study of epigraphy Records on Metal and Stone, “Judgments on the histories of dynasties are embedded not only in the records themselves but also in the story of their composition and their tenuous survival.”95 Shen Congwen’s family letters remind us that cultural memory is mediated by vulnerable bodies and flimsy artifacts, yet it was precisely such fragile media that proved to be the most enduring.

94  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, March 30, 1970, Shen Congwen quanji, 22.466. 95  Owen, Remembrances, 82.

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Conclusion: Belated Letter Readers

In January 1951, while participating in land reform in rural Sichuan, Shen Congwen found a copy of Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 Historical Records (Shi ji 史記) amid the debris of an executed landlord’s possessions. He passed his long and lonely nights reading this ancient book and wrote to his wife of his thoughts: Historical eras have gone by. Heroes and kings, generals and ministers, beauties and celebrities have all turned to dust and lost their meaning. Yet what a few solitary individuals had preserved in words became the only vehicles to link past and present and to connect self and other. They make historical continuity possible, so that feelings constrained by a specific time and space could still be re-enlivened, as though face-to-face, after a thousand years and a hundred changes. 時代過去了,一切英雄豪傑,王侯將相,美人名士,都成塵成 土,失去存在意義。一些生死兩寂寞的人,從文字保留下的東 東西西,卻成了唯一聯接歷史溝通人我的工具。因之歷史如相 連續,為時空所阻隔的情感,千載之下百事之後還如相晤對。96 It was as if Sima Qian had sent out a letter in a bottle that floated across two millennia, and Shen Congwen was the letter’s most recent recipient. The power of literature lies in its epistolary capacity to bridge self and other across time and space. While firmly grounded in specific historical and personal contexts, letters at their best convey the vitality of their author and subject over to their readers, however belatedly. Of course Shen had read Sima Qian’s canonical work before and was conscious of the ancient master’s influence on his literary techniques, but as he re-read The Historical Records in epistolary terms under the oil lamp at night in rural Sichuan, he felt the deep resonance of Sima Qian’s person, his life and his feelings (qing 情), which only matured and crystallized after great suffering. This qing was a profound empathy, deep love, understanding and recognition beyond a history of feats, so that even a portrait of someone in three or five hundred words reflected the harmonious union of the author and his subject.

96  Shen Congwen, Letter to Zhang Zhaohe, January 24, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.312.

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由痛苦方能成熟積聚的情—這個情即深入的體會,深至的愛,  以及透過事功以上的理解於認識。因之用三五百字寫一個人,  反映的卻是作者和傳中人兩種人格的契合於統一.97 Beyond expressing appreciation of Sima Qian, this may also have been Shen Congwen’s message to his future readers as they peruse through his posthumously published writings. The literary critic Chen Sihe considered Shen Congwen’s private letters a prime example of what he termed “subterranean writing” (qianzai xiezuo 潛在 寫作), writings from the Mao era that could not be published in their time but still constituted an “organic component of the spiritual life of that historical period.”98 This critical intervention to examine invisible, marginal, and nonofficial writings may help resurrect the literature of the Mao era from easy dismissals of poverty and propaganda and help us see “the variety and richness of the spiritual pursuit of the people from that period.”99 Indeed, Shen Congwen’s family letters, even while stamped with the “revolutionary” marks of their time and overshadowed by censorship, still bear intimate testimony to historical scenes and personal feelings never documented in the era’s published literature. Beyond engaging in a similar project of reclaiming these letters as literature, I have argued for an epistolary reading of Shen Congwen’s oeuvre, which allows us to approach Shen’s writings as a lifelong quest for readership, for a “knower of the tone” (zhi yin), a quest frustrated and impeded by historical circumstances. In contrast to the closure of canonization, letters are open-ended fragments awaiting understanding and reverberation from their readers. We are all belated recipients of Shen Congwen’s letters. The way his public loved him, attacked him, forgot him and revived him paralleled the relationship his family had with him and his letters. The portrait that emerges from Shen Congwen’s family letters in the Mao era is not so much that of a hero or martyr but rather that of a vulnerable yet resilient survivor, whose dignity is inseparable from his meekness and whose humanity is inextricable from his fears. Instead of radical postures, his life under the Maoist regime was full of inner struggles and everyday compromises. As Zhang Zhaohe recognized while sorting through her husband’s papers, despite enormous political pressure, this was a man who had never ceased to feel for the world around him.100 97  Shen Congwen, Letter to his wife and two sons, January 25, 1952, Shen Congwen quanji, 19.318. 98  Chen Sihe, “Women de chouti,” 68. 99  Ibid., 69. 100  Zhang Zhaohe, “Houji.”

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Shen Congwen could not help but attend to the revolution’s missed opportunities as well as its human and cultural costs. Even as such indiscriminate empathy ruined his public literary career, it was to preserve and to convey such feelings that he had never stopped his private letter writing. Bibliography Chen Sihe 陳思和. “Women de chouti: Shi lun dangdai wenxue shi (1949–1976) de ‘qianzai xiezuo’ ” 我們的抽屜:試論當代文學史 (1949–1976) 的潛在寫作. In Tan hu tan tu 談虎談兔. 61–80. Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue. Ding, Ling. The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River. Translated by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1984. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Huangfu, Jenny. “Roads to Salvation: Shen Congwen, Xiao Qian and the Problem of Non-Communist Celebrity Writers, 1948–1957.” MCLC 22.2 (2010), 39–87. Kalinin, Mikhail Ivanovich. On Communist Education: Selected Speeches and Articles. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1950. King, Richard. Milestones on a Golden Road: Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945–80. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012. Kinkley, Jeffrey. The Odyssey of Shen Congwen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. ———. “Shen Congwen and the Uses of Regionalism in Modern Chinese Literature.” MCL 1.2 (1985): 157–83. Kraus, Richard. Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Li Yang 李揚. Shen Congwen de zuihou sishi nian 沈從文的最後四十年. Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 2005. Liu, Haiming. The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Owen, Stephen. Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Roberts, Claire. Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. Shen Congwen 沈從文. Shen Congwen quanji 沈從文全集. Compiled by Zhang Zhaohe 張兆和. Taiyuan: Beiyue wenyi chubanshe, 2002. ———. Shen Congwen zishu 沈從文自述. Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2006.

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Shen Congwen jiashu 沈從文家書. Edited by Shen Huchu 沈虎雛; with an afterword by Zhang Zhaohe 張兆和. Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2005. Shen, Weiwei. “From Country Bumpkin to Gentleman: Reading Shen Congwen’s Letters to Hu Shi.” Chinese Studies in History 38.2 (2005): 21–68. Wang, Xiaojue. Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across the 1949 Divide. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Wang, David Der-wei. Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. ———. 王德威. Shuqing chuantong yu Zhongguo wenxue xiandai xing 抒情傳統與 中國文學現代性. Bejing: Xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2010. Widmer, Ellen. “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China.” LIC 10.2 (1989): 1–43. Yuan Kejia 袁可嘉. “Ren de wenxue yu renmin de wenxue” 人的文學與人民的文學. In Lun xinshi xiandaihua 論新詩現代化. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1988: 112–24. Zhang Qianfen 張謙芬. “Shen Congwen jianguo chuqi de tugai shuxie” 沈從文建國 初期的土改書寫. In Zhongguo xiandai wenxue luncong 中國現代文學論叢. 3.1 (2008). http://www.njucml.com/news_detail.asp?id=1060 (accessed November, 2014). Zhang Xinying 張新穎. Shen Congwen jingdu 沈從文精讀. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2005. Zhang Yunhe 張允和. “Cong diyi feng xin dao diyi feng xin” 從第一封信到第一封信. In Zhang jia jiu shi 張家舊事. Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 1999: 131–35.

section 2 Literary Letters



Chapter 16

Captured in Words: Functions and Limits of Autobiographical Expression in Early Chinese Epistolary Literature Matthew Wells Despite the judgment of the Zhou yi “Xici zhuan” 繫辭傳, attributed to Confucius, that “writing does not fully capture words, words do not fully capture meaning” 書不盡言,言不盡意,1 literati in early China struggled to make themselves known through text. Accordingly, the study of autobiographical letters from the period, which we may define as letters that take the self as the primary subject of discourse, provides us with an opportunity to reexamine many of the central assumptions about self-narrative, personal identity, and genres of autobiographical writing from a different cultural and temporal perspective. Although autobiographical letters from China’s early period were not used to recount a narrative of the author’s life in exhaustive detail, for many readers this seemingly more intimate, personal material may be regarded as capable of revealing more of the complex, quintessential nature of the author than the official biographies (liezhuan 列傳) of early historiography. In contrast to the formulaic and didactic accounts of official biographies, for which continuity and coherence were among the chief aims of the historian, autobiographical letters may reveal striking disruptions and dislocations of identity, often through moments of extraordinary personal stress or political crisis in which literati composed many of the most well-known autobiographical, personal letters from early China. Autobiographical letters written during such crucial life junctures demonstrate the rhetorical strategies their authors used to orient themselves within their political, social, and textual worlds. Because the authors of such letters in early China were subject to the power of state institutions and autocratic rulers, they provide a unique look at the way in which consummate insiders and social elites adopted the position of the outsider, approaching their circumstances and, by extension, the political and moral landscape, simultaneously as distant critics and as participants. Such letters also demonstrate how individual identity in early China was negotiated and contextualized within 1  Zhou yi jin zhu jin yi, 408.

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a web of interlocution that included both contemporaries and a rich textual and historical world. The carefully crafted self-images found in autobiographical letters allow us to examine the cultural resources and values available for constructing individual identity and the way in which the author attempted to control his own life narrative, and by extension his personal identity, in extraordinary circumstances. These texts also demonstrate the way in which early Chinese authors viewed and understood the self as an object of discourse that extended through time. Autobiographical letters provided the authors with a chance to construct a self-portrait not only for their contemporaries, but for future readers and the historical record as well, ultimately demonstrating the way in which autobiography claims to be about the past, but its underlying trajectory is always pointed toward the future. Rather than focus on letters from a single author, a narrow time period, or a specific genre, this chapter seeks to draw attention to the topic of letter writing as a medium for autobiographical expression in early Chinese literature. In order to demonstrate how this approach can be fruitful for the specialist and general reader alike, we will focus on several prominent, well-known texts from the Han and Early Medieval periods, asking what these letters have to tell us about the conditions and limitations of autobiography in early China. Toward the goal of providing a foundation for reading Chinese epistolary literature within the broad field of auto/biographical studies, we will first summarize notions of biography and autobiography in early China, analyzing how these forms of life writing approached issues of individual identity and selfpresentation. This will form the background to a broader discussion of autobiographical and personal letters in early China, examining how letters satisfy or complicate our expectations for autobiographical literature. Finally, we will discuss how early Chinese autobiographical letters may help us refine our thinking about autobiography in different national literatures and the study of “life writing” as a general body of criticism. I hope to show the way in which autobiographical letters from early China provide another avenue for considering questions of the role of biographical narrative in different genres of autobiographical text, for exploring the boundary between the public and private self, and finally for advancing our understanding of the manner in which performativity informs self-construction. 1

Biography and Autobiography

During China’s early imperial period, life writing was dominated by a rich tradition of biographical narrative (zhuan 傳, lit. “commentary” or “tradition”),

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which had been firmly established as a central mode of historical discourse by Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (ca. 145–86 BCE) Shi ji 史記 (Grand Astrologer’s Record) and proliferated during the next few centuries. For early Chinese biographers and historians, revealing autobiographical correspondence constituted the raw material for constructing and validating a life narrative that often took the form of an extended description of the subject’s character—revealed at an early age—and the encounter between these qualities and historical events. Biographical writing was not typically concerned with registering the effects of time and change as a central mode of individual experience,2 but in fashioning a presentation of the subject that was socially proper, coherent, and connected to his or her historical context. Thus, biographies found in court and local histories were primarily concerned with transmitting to posterity didactic accounts of individual lives that supported the author’s overarching vision of the time period or the local region in question. In the early medieval period, as standards of character evaluation evolved away from Han formalism, more idiosyncratic “unofficial biographies” 別傳 (biezhuan) concerned themselves with displays of erudite scholarship, moral character, and anecdotes for the purposes of careerism, building reputation, and influencing the historical record.3 Each genre of biographical narrative mingled accounts of the subject’s life with historical and literary allusions, as well as narrative conventions to various degrees, which acted as a built-in hermeneutic for the reader by infusing the narrative with drama, irony, and meaning.4 This tendency was most pronounced in collective biographies, in which the lives of categories of people such as women, recluses, filial children, and so forth acquired historical meaning and moral significance in their aggregate, becoming archetypes of specific virtues and role models for behavior. China’s elites were not only aware of the role models to which they were indebted, but also understood that they, too, could be regarded as models for their contemporaries and remembered by future generations.5 In Zuozhuan 左傳, Xiang 襄 24.1 we are told that an individual had three means at his disposal to accomplish this goal, by virtue of their moral power (de 德), actions (gong 功), and words ( yan 言), and if “after a long time these are not discarded, 2  Eakin, Living Autobiographically, 3–4, 29–30. 3  One of the best accounts of this genre during the early medieval period remains Lu Yaodong’s Wei-Jin shixue de sixiang. 4  Rogers, The Chronicle of Fu Chien, 33. 5  Mann, “Scene-setting,” 631. Mann discusses this idea in the context of late imperial (Ming and Qing) biographies, but the observation is, I believe, equally relevant to the Han and early medieval period.

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this is what is called ‘not to decay’ ” 雖久不廢,此之謂不朽.6 This old aspiration toward lasting fame and prominence was rearticulated over the centuries in different contexts by various literati. Within the didactic universe of the Zuozhuan, there is a clear hierarchy among the three methods, with moral power and deeds occupying a superior position to words. In the context of early historiography, we might assume that the preeminence of virtue and action provided the chronicler with considerable impunity over what, exactly, constituted exemplary action worth transmitting to posterity. In this way, historical narrative, especially biography, not only memorialized the dead but also contextualized them within the moral and ethical landscape of history. In a culture in which prominent individuals referred to the lives of historical figures who had shaped their own, and who in turn sought historical prominence, the proliferation of biographical narrative is hardly surprising, but it was by no means the only recourse toward achieving lasting notoriety. Early paragons of virtue included individuals who, faced with insurmountable obstacles, resorted to writing as a means to establish a place within the historical record and to transmit some portion of their character to posterity.7 This notion became even more prominent during the later Han and early medieval periods, in which writing a discourse of one’s own became a more common means to propagate one’s reputation over time.8 Although they rarely divulged abundant biographical detail, works of verse and discursive prose were meant to express the author’s “intent” or “vision” (zhi 志, sometimes rendered as “will”) and subjective emotional state (qing 情).9 Biographers frequently included in their narratives excerpts from the subject’s literary works as a means of strengthening their account of the subject’s intentions, aspirations, or intellectual and emotional qualities.

6  Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu Xiang 24.1/1087–88. 7  Invoking the frustrations of eminent figures such as Confucius and Qu Yuan (ca. 339–278 BCE), Sima Qian proclaimed, “in all these instances, men had ideas that were stifled and did not manage to disseminate their doctrines; thus they narrated past events and thought of those to come” 此人皆意有所鬱結,不得統其道也,故述往事,思來者. Shi ji 130.3295. 8  Tian, “Twilight of the Masters,” 468–69. Writing at the beginning of the 3rd c., Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226) reflected this idea in his Discourse on Literature (Lun wen 論文), stating, “a time will come when a person’s life ends; glory and pleasure go no further than this body. To carry both to eternity, there is nothing to compare with the unending permanence of literary work” 年壽有時而盡,榮樂止乎其身. 二者必至之常期,未若文章之無窮. Trans. Owen, Chinese Literary Thought, 68. 9  Owen, “The Self’s Perfect Mirror,” 74.

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The autobiographical undercurrents of early Chinese literature speak to the unusual critical problems that plague the study of autobiography and life writing in any national literature, chief among them that there are no general rules available to authors or critics when attempting to define or identify autobiography. Although some modern critics may regard biographical narrative as the norm for Western autobiography, in truth the lack of formal requirements for the genre reflects the broad scope of available material, including literary “life works” such as those found in early China.10 However, in both China and Europe, such life works are frequently read in the context of other biographical information about the author, whether this takes the form of popular traditions about the author’s life or biographical data found in historical texts or other sources.11 In terms of early Chinese texts, over the centuries this hermeneutic has given rise to fascinating readings of literary works, but also to strained interpretations that attempt to see the stamp of the author’s self-image within texts that are highly resistant to such readings. Chinese literati reading the works of other elites brought to bear a not insubstantial set of assumptions about the authors in question, including widely circulated knowledge about their biographies and conventional wisdom regarding the meaning or significance of their literary output. Some of the biographical information used as a basis for interpreting literary works in early China came from the authors themselves. By the Han period, a rich trove of autobiographical writing had appeared within several genres, including the authorial postface, self-disclosure in verse, and autobiographical letters.12 These texts differed from an author’s life work in that they took the self as the primary subject of discourse.13 In some genres, such as epistolary literature, autobiographical statements became a “genre feature,” which in turn supported the efforts of some authors to employ letters as autobiographical statements to an even greater degree. In other genres, such as the authorial 10  The Collected Poems (1933) of W. B. Yeats, the novels of James Joyce, and the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche all have been studied as autobiographical works alongside the more familiar autobiographical narratives of Augustine of Hippo and the seventh epistle of Plato. See James Olney’s “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment” for a general overview of the scope of the field in the late 20th c. The importance of non-narrative autobiography is especially pronounced when examining the autobiographical works of non-literate cultures, such as pre-contact Plains Native American “bragging biographies” depicted as murals painted on shields, tipis, cloth, or hide. Wong, “Pictographs as Autobiography,” 297–98. 11  McGill, “Epistolary Autobiography,” 35. 12  Durrant, “Self as the Intersection of Tradition,” 33. 13  Lejeune, On Autobiography, 12.

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postface, autobiographical information was less common but still used with great effect to define the author and his work.14 Some authors seemed acutely aware of the influence such texts might have on future historians, while others feigned subordination to the historical record.15 Like authors of biography, authors of autobiography frequently fashioned a literary subject composed of trivia and biographical data, mingled together with historical allusion and literary convention. In many cases the author’s self-image was highly constructed and designed to convey moral truths rather than the details of lived experience. The self that emerged from such autobiographies was more metaphor than historical figure, a portrait of the author at the summary moment of composition that acted as a hermeneutic for understanding the author or a body of literary works.16 Literary conventions were not evenly applied, and some texts were highly circumstantial—focusing on social and material conditions—while other authors focused on identification with intertextual references that suppressed ties to ancestry, social position, and place.17 The contexts of these autobiographical works thus become very important for their interpretation, as autobiographical detail and self-presentation took on different dimensions depending on the circumstances and needs for each author. They were no more intended as transparent narratives of the author’s life than were their counterparts in pre-modern Europe, but rather sought to convey selected truths and character traits about the author to contemporaries and posterity. 2

Epistolary Literature and Autobiography

If biography memorializes the dead, and autobiography allows the dead to speak, then how much more so does a letter, with its proximity to the people and events it relates, lay claim to autobiographical authenticity?18 In early China, the letter was not merely a communicative space between two people but a substitute for face-to-face communication; to receive a letter was to be

14  Knechtges, “The Liu Hsin/Yang Hsiung Correspondence,” 324; Larson, Literary Authority, 13; Durrant, “Self as the Intersection of Tradition,” 34; Wells, To Die and Not Decay, 12–13. 15  Wells, To Die and Not Decay, 97, 118–19. 16  Durrant, “Self as the Intersection of Tradition,” 36; Owen, “The Self’s Perfect Mirror,” 74; Olney, Metaphors of Self, 35. 17  Larson, Literary Authority, 12. 18  McGill, “Epistolary Autobiography,” 43.

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in the presence of another.19 In material terms, literary critics such as Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 465–532) regarded writing (in terms of both style and calligraphy) to be an effective means to evaluate the author’s personality.20 As a trope employed both by writers and readers, letters could overcome a sense of separation between individuals through the language of immediacy and metaphors for speaking and hearing, and Liu Xie praised letters that conveyed a sense of the absent author or revealed aspects of subjective, interior life.21 Modern scholars of autobiography also value such material for its ability to convey a sense of the author. In the introduction to his unprecedented and influential 1937 collection, Self-Narratives and Autobiographies Throughout the Ages (Lidai zixu zhuan wenchao 歷代自敘傳文鈔), Guo Dengfeng 郭登峰 writes that in addition to being artful works, autobiographical texts such as letters may convey the philosophy of conduct, spirit, erudition and career of the author. In contrast, reading official biographies to investigate an author’s character or life experience can be shallow and unrewarding, like “scratching an itch from outside one’s boot.”22 The autobiographical aspects of epistolary literature were only enhanced by genre conventions such as quotidian information about the health of the author or the weather, or rhetorical and personal flourishes that ostensibly conveyed the author’s emotional state.23 However, although a collection of such letters may, in aggregate, provide valuable evidence for the life and times of the author,24 the presence of personal details as a convention of genre does not necessarily signal an autobiographical turn. For Guo, the texts included in his collection went further than providing basic, quotidian details as revealed through formulaic phrases; they revealed essential information about the life experience of the author, taking the self as the subject of discourse and narrating the individual in terms sufficient to represent some aspect of the person’s character. Although he acknowledges that not all of the texts narrate a significant span of time in the subject’s life, he distinguishes personal letters from texts such as the authorial postfaces (zixu 19  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 56–57. Liu Xie in his Wenxin dialong 文心雕龍 commended letters from the Three Dynasties whose words resembled those spoken face to face 辭若對面. See Liu Xie’s chapter 25, “Written Records” 書記, Wenxin diaolong yizheng, 920. 20  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 58–59. 21  Ibid., 127. Letters that were clear (ming 明) and unfettered (cong rong 從容) could potentially represent the voice of the mind (xin sheng 心聲). Ibid., 53–55. 22  Guo Dengfeng, Lidai zixu zhuan, 2. 23  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 68, 90. See also Knechtges, “The Liu Hsin/Yang Hsiung Correspondence,” 310. 24  See the article by Ronald Egan in this volume.

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自序) of Ban Gu 班固 (32–92 CE) and Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513 CE), which only narrate the accomplishments and composition of the author’s ancestors but neglect the author himself.25 Epistolary collections can also reveal the contradictions, paradoxes, and problems with which scholarship on autobiography is frequently engaged. As a communicative space between a sender and a receiver, an autobiographical letter may provide us with an opportunity to comment on the boundaries, real or imagined, of self-disclosure within personal communication.26 However, the difficulty of reconstructing the communicative context of surviving material may make some letters difficult to understand. Edited and assembled into collections, letters may have undergone redaction, addition, and alteration by the editor, and surviving material that has been collected for its remarkable content may not resemble the more mundane uses of epistolary literature as a genre.27 More importantly, collected material loses its context, and its manner of presentation becomes homogenized. The juxtaposition of letters with other examples of the genre, or altogether different genres of autobiographical writing as in Guo Dengfeng’s Self-Narratives and Autobiographies Throughout the Ages, further removes them from the realm of communication and elevates them to the level of art, which may result in an “autobiographical effect” that over-emphasizes the importance of their biographical narrative.28 The nature of the biographical information contained in the letter, and the context in which it is used, thus become important—if at times irresolvable—issues. Epistolary literature also provides critics with an opportunity to consider important questions related to the reception and circulation of autobiographical texts. Although a letter may be defined very broadly as a work in which the writer directly addresses an intended reader, the reality of their widespread circulation, both during and after the author’s lifetime, suggests that they also functioned as public documents. Critics who argue for the early emergence of the epistolary mode in the Shang shu 尚書 as oaths (shi 誓) and royal decrees (gao 誥) cite the public nature of these “letters,” which paralleled the public function of writing in other genres.29 We need not take a strong stand for or against the view that recorded speech in the Shang shu represents the earliest letters in the Chinese tradition to grasp the point that authors of autobiograph25  Guo Dengfeng, Lidai zixu zhuan, 2–3. 26  Haboush, Epistolary Korea, 2. 27  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 9, 64. For thoughts on letters and literary anthologies, see the article by David Knechtges this volume. 28  McGill, “Epistolary Autobiography,” 41–42. 29  Haboush, Epistolary Korea, 1–2.

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ical letters did necessarily intend such works to remain private, or to understand that modern notions of public and private may have little relevance in the context of pre-modern East Asia.30 The epistolary communicative space in early China was potentially quite broad, encompassing not only the named recipient but also larger audiences, posterity, the political realm, and so forth. Letter-writing was thus filled with potential risks, for once one offered the text to another, the author could no longer control the range of the letter’s communicative reach. The possibility that autobiographical letters circulated widely suggests that authors at least considered the likelihood that any biographical information contained in the letter, and any sense of oneself the author wished to express, would be read by an audience other than the reader to whom the letter is ostensibly addressed. Conveying a sense of oneself through writing by transmitting one’s intent (zhi) or emotional disposition (qing) to contemporaries or posterity was always one of the principal tasks of literature. By the end of the second century, one’s ability to communicate his character through literature was considered by some to be governed by the qi 氣 of the author. The quality of the author’s qi— clear (qing 清) or turbid (zhuo 濁)—helped determine the success of the literary work as a vehicle for the author’s self-image.31 In commenting on letters from the Han period, Liu Xie concurred, remarking that differences in their aesthetic thrust were a product of the author’s qi.32 In practical terms such evaluations were nearly always made in the context of authors for whom there was abundant biographical information or strong traditions for the interpretation of their work. Regardless, an autobiographical letter implies the desire of 30  Haboush contends that Chosŏn literati wrote letters that were intended to be shared within a circle of readership and to be copied among friends. Haboush, Epistolary Korea, 8. Richter demonstrates how letters were both circulated and emulated in the 5th c., and provides the earlier example of Wang Xianzhi 王獻之 (ca. 344–386) who wrote a letter to the eminent minister Xie An 謝安 (320–385 CE) hoping the latter would share his calligraphy. Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 33. Paul Goldin’s discussion of gong 公 and si 私 during the late Warring States period suggests that modern notions of public and private may distort our understanding of these important ideas in the context of early China. Goldin, After Confucius, 59–61. See also Pablo Ariel Blitstein’s article in this volume. 31  In his Discourse on Literature, Cao Pi remarked, “In literature qi is the dominant factor. Qi has its normative forms—clear and murky. It is not to be brought by force” 文以氣為 主,氣之清濁有體,不可力強而致; trans. Owen, Chinese Literary Thought, 65. Thus, although letters were expected to have structure (li 理), there would also be variety based on the qi of the author. See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 47. 32  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 57; Wenxin diaolong yizheng, 914.

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the author to establish a framework for evaluation and interpretation on his or her own terms, using biographical data to embody a specific ideal or a cluster of archetypical qualities. Similar to other biographical and autobiographical texts, verisimilitude may have been less important than the meaning of the individual life conveyed by the text. Autobiographical letters in early China constituted the lives they described and they possessed a performative function akin to biography and other genres of autobiographical writing.33 Anecdotes from childhood, descriptions of the manner in which the author discharged familial or political roles, or personal accounts of specific events provided an opportunity for these authors to define themselves and defend their conduct. In these letters, the communicative space between the author and the reader—whether the intended recipient, a broader contemporary audience, or posterity—represents a venue for debate about personal identity and individual character. Sometimes a letter may reconfirm what the reader may already know; at other times, the content of the letter appears to be in conflict with a previously formed impression, identity, or public role. Unlike the biographies of classical historiography, such letters are not predicated on a coherent view of the subject, but rather provide the reader with an authorial self-image that reflects the circumstances of and motivations for their creation. Although there is an individual identity at work, there is also a negotiated, corporate self. Situated at the intersection of biography and autobiography, personal letters raise fascinating questions about who owns and controls a life and gives it meaning, the relationship between the author and text, and the role played by biographical data in the context of early Chinese literary theory.34 In the following pages, I hope to address several of these themes by focusing on issues of subjectivity, identity, and narrative. 3

Identity and Crisis

Lacking a chronological structure and an emphasis on memory, autobiographical letters from early China do not seem to fit easily into notions of autobiography as it is popularly conceived.35 However, they do focus on a pivotal moment—often a crisis or other life altering event—either in the text or as an impetus for the letter itself, a feature that is notable for its consistency with autobiography in other genres and national literatures. Many of the more well33  McGill, “Epistolary Autobiography,” 38. 34  Ibid., 32. 35  Ibid.

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known and oft transmitted autobiographical letters from early China were written at the point of or beyond some summary moment of crisis, a pivot point from which the author may view his past and present and thus provide some understanding of his life to the reader. This is perhaps the most common trope of autobiographical writing in any genre, which lacks biography’s perspective on a life in its totality and so must interpret a life’s meaning from another vantage point.36 In a narrative more lengthy than a brief letter, an author may have the luxury of recounting a substantial portion of their personal chronology and thus take the opportunity to portray the meaning of personal experience as it developed over a significant length of time.37 However, most of the autobiographical letters from early China recount only short periods of time or discuss isolated events, suggesting that their attraction for later generations of readers may have lain in their emphasis on such seminal moments in which the author was compelled to take stock of his life or life’s work.38 It is this feature more than any other that distinguishes well-known autobiographical letters from other examples of personal letters in early China and the practice of letter writing more generally. Sima Qian’s “Letter in Response to Ren Shaoqing” (Bao Ren Shaoqing shu 報任少卿書), perhaps the best-known autobiographical letter from early China, is also the preeminent example of an author who utilized a personal crisis as the catalyst for an autobiographical account. The occasion of the letter was ostensibly a request from Ren An, who was under sentence of death, to intervene on his behalf. Sima Qian felt unable to help his condemned associate, and instead spent a large portion of his reply explaining the circumstances of his own punishment. Some years before writing his famous letter, Sima Qian defended a disgraced general, Li Ling 李陵, in court and subsequently incurred the enmity of the Emperor, who ordered him to be executed. Because Sima Qian was unable to pay a fine, he was willing to commute his sentence by undergoing the humiliating punishment of castration. Rather than commit 36  Durrant, “Self as Intersection of Traditions,” 34. 37  Goodwin, The Self Made Text, 11; Wells, To Die and Not Decay, 20. 38  Several letters from the period appear to have been in response to impending mortality, such as Tao Qian’s “Letter to His Sons” (Yu zi Yan deng shu 與子儼等疏), written when the author was over fifty, and Zheng Xuan’s 鄭玄 (127–200) “A Letter of Warning to My Son, Yi En” (Jie zi Yi’en shu 戒子益恩書), written when the author was over seventy years old (both are discussed by Antje Richter in her article in this volume). In each case, the author appears to anticipate his approaching death after prolonged periods of illness. See Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 308; Hou Han shu 35.1209–10; Hightower, “Tao Qian: Letter to His Sons,” 16; Tao Yuanming ji jiao jian 7.441–50.

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suicide in disgrace, Sima Qian persisted to work at court in his mutilated state. In his letter to Ren An, he wrote: But the reason I have not refused to bear these ills and have continued to live, dwelling in vileness and disgrace without taking leave, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart that I have not been able to express fully, and I am ashamed to think that after I am gone my writing will not be known to posterity.39 所以隱忍苟活, 幽於糞土之中而不辭者,恨私心有所不盡,鄙 陋沒世,而文彩不表於後世也.40 By claiming that his motivation for bearing this punishment was his desire to use his writing to make his private thoughts known to posterity, Sima Qian at once embraces and flouts the convention that “words do not fully capture meaning.” His disgraceful punishment provides the impetus for completing the Shi ji and the opportunity to contextualize his efforts through an autobiographical account. Sima Qian’s account of his defense of the disgraced general Li Ling and subsequent punishment provided him with “a coordinate point at which Sima Qian examines his life.”41 This life-altering event provided Sima Qian with a kind of fictive death, a moment of the self transformed, quite literally in this case, around which he organized a brief mention of his youth and early career, and an account of his literary ambitions after his castration as yet another frustrated literati who “retired to compose books in order to set forth their thoughts and indignation, handing down their writing so they could show posterity who they were” 退論書策以舒其憤,思垂空文以自見.42 Although Sima Qian did not retire, as a “remnant of knife and saw” 刀鋸之餘 he had little to offer Ren An in his time of need. Instead, Sima Qian used the occasion of the letter to more deeply embed himself within a web of literary and intellectual tradition to justify his extraordinary historical work. For Fan Ye 范曄 (398–445), who wrote his “Letter to My Nephews from Prison” (Yuzhong yu zhu sheng shu 獄中與諸甥侄書), the catalyst for his letter was surely his arrest and impending execution for plotting to assist his old patron, Liu Yikang 劉義康, to usurp the throne in 445 CE. Like many of 39  Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, 235. 40  Han shu 62.2733. 41  Durrant, “Self as Intersection of Traditions,” 34–35. 42  Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, 236; Han shu 70.2735.

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the other autobiographical letters from early China, Fan’s letter contains fewer details than that of Sima Qian, but it opens by contrasting the incident leading to his arrest with his life before his involvement in the plot and his heretofore lofty personal character. “I am, of course, mindful of my lifelong conduct, but you can determine that for yourselves. However as for my innate abilities and how I interpret what is in my mind, these things you may not yet fully understand” 然平生行己任懷,猶應可尋,至於能不,意中所解,汝等或不 悉知.43 Awaiting execution, Fan Ye seemed chiefly interested in establishing an interpretive frame for his life work, especially the Hou Han shu 後漢書 which he described as the zenith of his thinking and writing.44 For this reason, the bulk of the autobiographical detail in the letter is largely concerned with establishing the authorial persona of a man who has been entirely self-fashioned and out-of-step with more common narratives of intellectual development for literati of his era. According to his letter, Fan only discovered his “true inclinations” after the age of thirty, and his intellectual development was guided by none other than himself. “Whatever learning I have, I acquired from within myself” 至於所通解,皆自得於胸懷耳.45 Consequently, his work, like the author, is also unique, and Fan’s letter claims that Hou Han shu is unparalleled in terms of its “grand plan” and “careful deliberation” 自古體大而思精,未 有此也.46 Fan Ye thus dispensed with the traditional, Han period models of conduct and education that were central to Sima Qian’s autobiographical writing and authorial persona.47 However, Fan seemed equally concerned with the future circulation and reception of his work. “When this work circulates, I am convinced that there will be those who truly appreciate it” 此書行,故應有賞 音者.48 The letters of both men suggest that they hoped to redeem their present circumstances with lasting notoriety through their literary efforts. For both authors, a summary moment of personal crisis became a pivotal point from which to reflect on and reframe the past, and a boundary beyond which there was only text.

43  Egan, “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh,” 339; Song shu 69.1829. 44  Extolling his own eulogies (zan 贊), Fan states, “Even I do not know how to praise them” 乃自不知所以稱之. Egan, “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh,” 342; Song shu 69.1831. 45  Egan, “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh,” 340; Song shu 69.1830. 46  Egan, “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh,” 342; Song shu, 69.1831. 47  Durrant, “Self as the Intersection of Tradition,” 36. 48  Egan, “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh,” 342; Shen Yue, Song shu, 69.1831.

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The Public and the Private

The preservation of the letters of Sima Qian and Fan Ye in their official biographies raises questions regarding the public nature of personal letters, for if such correspondence was truly intended to remain private, how and why did it circulate after their deaths? How were personal letters preserved, and how did they come to be revealed publicly? If personal letters circulated during the lifetime of the author, what does their dissemination suggest about the ways in which authors used the genre of the personal letter to orient themselves in political, social, and textual space? As Antje Richter suggests, these questions are very difficult to answer definitively. Although we know that the communicative space of letters in early China could be quite broad, and later writers could and did cite earlier authors in their own personal letters, we have little information about their circulation and in many cases are left only with speculation.49 Questions surrounding the preservation of Sima Qian’s letter to Ren An exemplify many of these issues. Sima Qian’s letter is replete with humility and shame over his punishment after the Li Ling affair, and it frequently calls attention to Sima Qian’s political impotence and to his status as court laughing-stock. The level of embarrassing detail in the letter about his punishment and present circumstances provides far more information than we find in the more reticent postface to the Shi ji, demonstrating the differences in expectations between the two genres for self-disclosure. The personal detail may suggest that Sima Qian might not have expected the letter to circulate during his lifetime,50 or that, to the contrary, knowing the letter would be circulated widely, he was at great pains to provide sufficient detail to defend his actions. Because Ren An was in prison at the time the letter was written, it seems likely that Sima Qian must have assumed the contents of the letter would become known, possibly to the court itself.51 For this reason, we might infer that the

49  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 70–71. 50  Knechtges, “Key Words,” 77. 51  According to Lu Yaodong, based on the size of the document alone, the letter would have been virtually impossible to deliver to a man awaiting execution without knowledge of the authorities. However, Lu’s assumption that the letter would have constituted a large juan 卷 of nearly 100 bamboo strips seems exaggerated. Assuming the letter was composed on bamboo strips, even at 2.000 characters, the entire manuscript would have fit on a mere 30–70 strips, depending on their size. Even 100 thin bamboo strips would have been a fairly small bundle. Lu Yaodong, Sima Qian yu Han Wudi, 415.

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details and literary persona crafted by Sima Qian in this letter were intended for both Ren An and a broader audience of contemporaries. We may also consider the further possibility that the letter was never sent. Although it may have been prompted by the arrival of Ren An’s letter, the reply may have been intended for an altogether different audience. Perhaps the rambling content of the letter was intended more for posterity as a kind of public document.52 In this case, the letter might have been preserved by his family, perhaps stored among his collected works and discovered by his grandson Yang Yun 楊惲 (d. 54 BCE),53 or cached in an imperial archive and later accessed by Ban Gu. Either theory—that Sima Qian knew the letter would become public or that he intended the letter to become public posthumously—helps to explain the carefully constructed statement of Sima Qian’s circumstances, ideals, and literary works, yet raises questions about the public nature of personal letters that are difficult to resolve with any finality. Although some letters may have been intended to be truly private, there seems to have been no guarantee that they would remain so. Responding to the concerns of an old friend, Yang Yun’s “Letter in Reply to Sun Huizong” (Bao Sun Huizong shu 報孫會宗書) is a bitter letter, the tone of which suggests that it may not have been intended for anyone other than the intended receiver. Yang, who was Sima Qian’s grandson, served at the court of Han Emperor Xuan 漢宣帝 (r. 74–49 BCE) and distinguished himself early in his career by bringing to light a plot to overthrow the emperor.54 He was later slandered and imprisoned, and after his release he moved to the country and became a farmer. Sun Huizong wrote to Yang and scolded him for his alleged excesses as an exiled official.55 Unlike Sima Qian’s letter, which is filled with contrite acknowledgment of his own missteps, Yang’s sarcastic reply is unapologetic. Although it has been well regarded for its spirited style and its defense of Yang’s eremitic lifestyle, it was not well received by the court.56 The letter reportedly enraged Emperor Xuan when it came to his attention, and Yang was executed soon after in 54 BCE.57 The question, then, is not whether personal letters served a public 52  Knechtges, “Key Words,” 84. 53  Lu Yaodong believes the letter was influential for Yang Yun’s “Letter in Reply to Sun Huizong,” a fact he believes was recognized by Xiao Tong when the latter included both letters in the Wen xuan. Lu Yaodong, Sima Qian yu Han Wudi, 419–20. 54  Han shu 66.2889. Yang Yun’s biography, which includes the letter, is in Han shu 66.2889–97. The letter has been translated by Burton Watson in Birch’s Anthology of Chinese Literature, 159–61. 55  Han shu 66.2894. 56  Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’,” 127; Vervoorn, Men of the Cliffs and Caves, 94. 57  Han shu 66.2896.

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function, but the extent to which authors such as Sima Qian and Yang Yun used letters to perform a particular self-image for specific ends, and the degree of control they exercised over the social and political impacts of such documents. 5

Epistolary Performance

Xi Kang’s 嵇康 (223–263) “Letter Breaking Off Relations with Shan Tao” (Yu Shan Juyuan jue jiao shu 與山巨源絕交書) illustrates the variety of ways personal letters could be used as public documents, and how they could provide a stage on which authors could perform social roles for a broader audience than the ostensible receiver. The dating of the letter remains problematic but it was probably written in 262, shortly after Xi Kang’s friend, Shan Tao 山濤 (205– 283 CE, courtesy name Juyuan 巨源) left his post as Attendant in the Board of Officials 吏部郎 and recommended Xi for the office.58 The suggestion presented a difficult problem for Xi. Ever since 249, when Sima Yi 司馬懿 (179–251) staged a palace coup and executed the regent Cao Shuang 曹爽 and numerous literati including He Yan 何晏, the state of Wei had been under the control of the Sima family. Xi, who had married a Cao princess, refused to serve the Sima usurpers. When Xi Kang received news of Shan Tao’s recommendation, he wrote a letter breaking off their friendship. The letter eventually became public and made its way into the hands of Sima Zhao 司馬昭 (211–265), who was angered by its contents.59 It was shortly thereafter that Xi Kang was executed for charges ostensibly unrelated to the letter. Xi Kang’s letter shares with Sima Qian’s text a curious turn toward selfdescription that seems unrelated to the task at hand. The first and last lines of the letter would have been more than sufficient if all Xi Kang had wanted to do was to break off his friendship with Shan. Indeed, another example of Xi Kang’s use of a letter to break off a friendship, “Letter Breaking Off Relations with Lü Changti” (Yu Lü Changti juejiao 與呂長悌絕交), consists only of a description of Xi’s role in the events at hand, indicating that the task of severing ties could be accomplished without recourse to the extraordinary self-description

58  For a discussion on the problems with dating the letter, see Henricks, “Life, Literature, and Thought,” 127–29, and Jansen, “The Art of Severing Relationships,” 356. 59  Henricks, “Life, Literature, and Thought,” 132. Henricks cites Pei Songzhi’s 裴松之 (372–451) commentary to Sanguo zhi 三國志 21, which draws upon the Weishu chunqiu

魏氏春秋.

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found in his letter to Shan Tao.60 Instead, Xi Kang devotes the majority of the text to a rich and well-known self-description as a reclusive figure who not only seeks to avoid political office, but also is unfit to reside in society and seeks to transcend the world. Moreover, my taste for independence was aggravated by my reading of Zhuangzi and Laozi. As a result any desire for fame and success daily weakened, and my commitment to freedom increasingly firmer. In this I am like the wild deer, which capterured young and reared in captivity will be docile and obedient. But if it be caught when full-grown, it will star wildly and butt against its bonds, dashing into boiling water or fire to escape. You may dress it up with a golden bridle and feed it delicacies, and it will but long the more for its native woods and yearn for rich pasture.61 又讀莊老,重增其放。故使榮進之心日穨,任 實之情轉篤。此 由禽鹿少見馴育,則服從教制,長而見羈,則狂顧頓纓,赴蹈 湯火,雖飾以金鑣,饗以嘉肴,逾思長林,而志在豐草也.62 In both Sima Qian’s and Xi Kang’s autobiographical letters, the excessive selfdescription suggests that the ostensible purpose of the letter is merely a frame, and that the real purpose of the letter must lie elsewhere.63 With no information as to how Shan Tao received the letter, or how or why the contents of the letter became public, we are left with a handful of theories. Beyond Xi Kang’s refusal to assume office, was the extreme self-denigration in his letter intended as an insult to Shan Tao? Was his uncouth self-image as a lazy, lice-infested wastrel intended to anticipate and mirror criticism by detractors who were loyal to the Sima clan? Was his purpose to protect Shan Tao by

60   For a discussion and translation of this letter, see Jansen, “The Art of Severing Relationships,” 361. See also Henricks, “Life, Literature, and Thought,” 135–36. 61  Hightower, “Letter to Shan T’ao,” 163. 62  Xin yi Xi Zhongsan ji, 134. A truncated version of this letter appears in Xi Kang’s biography in Jin shu 49.1369–74. 63  Jansen “The Art of Severing Relationships,” 357. Based on Jin shu 43, “Shan Tao zhuan” 山濤傳 , Jansen also suggests that the two friends may have in fact remained close, as before his execution Xi Kang told his son Shao 紹 “[As long as] Juyuan is here, you will not be alone” 巨源在,汝不孤矣. Jin shu 43.1223. As Robert McGill cautions, the textual relationship between two individuals may bear little correspondence to their real relationship. McGill, “Epistolary Autobiography,” 42.

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distancing himself from his friend?64 All of these possibilities suggest that the interpellation of the recipient is a ruse, and that Xi Kang in reality intended the letter for Sima Zhao or else expected the letter to become public. Moreover, Xi Kang’s embodiment of the eremitic ideal carried significant political overtones in a society which upheld as paragons of virtue those who refused political office on moral grounds.65 Xi’s letter expresses admiration for famous recluses while simultaneously disparaging the founder of the Shang dynasty, Tang 湯, and the founder of the Zhou, King Wu 武, both of whom were rebels who had usurped the authority of a prior dynasty. For those who laid claim to the tradition of reclusion, the challenge was to communicate one’s eligibility for office while refusing to serve.66 Shan Tao’s recommendation provides an opportunity for Xi Kang to redefine himself in terms of a tradition of moral conduct and reclusion, reintroducing himself to an old friend who “really did not understand me at all” 故不知之.67 The performativity within the letter transcends the personal considerations of the authors to reveal broader significance for society.68 Other autobiographical letters from the early period display a similar tension over identity. Sima Qian, for example, takes great pains to identify himself as a useless old horse (pinu 罷駑) to Ren An. A laughing-stock and “mutilated being who dwells in degradation” 身殘處穢,69 Sima Qian has been quite literally transformed. His autobiographical writing represents an attempt to define himself within a lineage of exemplars who have overcome similar obstacles in order to validate his literary work, and establish a context for his reemergence in literature and rectification of the self.70 Yang Yun’s letter is also a debate over the identity of the author; is he constrained as a court gentleman in exile, or is he a common farmer living a new life away from the slander of the capital? In both letters, the authors confront the assumptions of others through distortion, symbolism, and metaphor in order to make a persuasive case for an alter64  Jansen provides a brief summary of several of these theories (“The Art of Severing Relationships,” 358–59). Wang Yi and Fu Xiaowei write that Xi Kang “was sure to make every effort to protect his friend from possible political harm due to his own refusal of position, even at the cost of his own life” (“Sincere Treatment or Severing Friendship,” 250). 65  This idea has been explored in numerous publications including Wolfgang Bauer’s “The Hidden Hero” and Alan Berkowitz’s volume, Patterns of Disengagement. 66  Jansen, “The Art of Severing Relationships,” 358. 67  Hightower, “Letter to Shan Tao,” 162; Jin shu 49.1370. 68  Jansen, “The Art of Severing Relationships,” 361. 69  Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, 228; Han shu 63.2725. 70  Larson, Literary Authority, 13.

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native identity. The performance of the self within the text not only reflects the author’s circumstances but is also an ambitious act of self-creation. Each letter employs autobiographical information in an attempt to embody specific ideals or prototypical qualities that were linked to literary and historical traditions to form a new grammar of understanding about the subject and their respective roles in their social context.



Like many genres of biography and autobiography from early China, these well-known and widely transmitted autobiographical letters eschew documentary style verisimilitude in favor of rich literary tropes and intertextual allusions. As sites of biographical knowledge, they are contested spaces of argument, defense, and persuasion. Sometimes they reconfirm what the reader may already know, at other times they are vehemently at odds with a previously formed impression, identity, or assumed social role. The self that emerges from such texts is not necessarily cohesive, but a metonym for the author, a textual subject that embodies specific qualities through which one may define and express the self to the reader. Autobiographical letters thus manufacture different selves according to the intended recipient, creating a kind of “Frankenstein’s Monster,” a subject that does not resemble what we might understand to be lived experience.71 The ambiguities of the documents suggest that the process of self-disclosure was difficult to control. Though self-expression may be personal, it may not be private, and we must ask what advantage such communication held for the sender and receiver, and ask who else occupied the communicative space. The autobiographical letters discussed in this chapter demonstrate the extent to which some authors exaggerated the genre conventions for selfdisclosure native to personal letters of the period to reveal something of their philosophy, conduct, spirit, and erudition. Such letters do more than provide quotidian and formulaic personal detail, instead revealing individuals who, when faced with a personal crisis, attempted to remain true to some set of values or greater good, whether it was located in the literary traditions of downtrodden officials, the alternative rubric of the recluse’s moral authority, or the consistency of one’s character when awaiting execution. They are texts that redeem the past rather than abandon it by reframing the author’s identity so that it remains consistent with the author’s moral convictions, despite changing political or personal circumstances. As the ground shifts beneath the 71  McGill, “Epistolary Autobiography,” 32.

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author’s feet, the textual subject remains fixed in moral space, even if the social role performed in the text has completely changed. Their attempt to seek meaning for a particular event, or struggle to understand life in the context of situations beyond their control, may be the single defining characteristic of these letters when read as autobiography. Bibliography Bauer, Wolfgang. “The Hidden Hero: Creation and Disintegration of the Ideal of Eremitism.” In Individualism and Holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist Values, edited by Donald Munro, 157–91. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1985. Berkowitz, Alan. Patters of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China. Standford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Chung, Eva Yuen-wah. “A Study of the ‘Shu’ (Letters) of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220).” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1982. Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu 春秋左傳注. Edited by Yang Bojun 楊伯峻. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000. Durrant, Stephen W. “Self as the Intersection of Traditions: The Autobiographical Writings of Ssu-ma Ch’ien.” JAOS 106 (1986): 33–40. Eakin, Paul John. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Egan, Ronald C. “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh.” HJAS 39 (1979): 339–401. Goldin, Paul. After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Goodwin, James. The Self Made Text. New York: Twayne, 1993. Guo Dengfeng 郭登峰, ed. Lidai zixu zhuan wenchao 歷代自敘傳文鈔. Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1965. Haboush, Jahym Kim, ed. Epistolary Korea: Letters in the Communicative Space of the Chosŏn, 1392–1910. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Han shu 漢書. Compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Henricks, Robert Guy. “Hsi K’ang (223–262): His Life, Literature, and Thought.” PhD diss. University of Wisconsin, 1976. Hightower, James R., trans. “Hsi K’ang: Letter to Shan Tao.” In Anthology of Chinese Literature, edited by Cyril Birch, 162–68. New York: Grove, 1965. ———. “Tao Qian: Letter to His Sons.” Renditions 41–42 (1994): 15–17. Hou Han shu 後漢書. Compiled by Fan Ye 范曄 (398–446). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965.

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Jansen, Thomas. “The Art of Severing Relationships ( juejiao) in Early Medieval China.” JAOS 126 (2006): 347–65. Jin shu 晉書. Compiled by Fang Xuanling 房玄齡 (578–648). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Knechtges, David R. “The Liu Hsin/Yang Hsiung Correspondence on the Fang Yen.” MS 33 (1977/78): 309–25. ———. “Culling the Weeds and Selecting Fine Blossoms: The Anthology in Early Medieval China.” In Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600, edited by Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, 200–241, 322–34. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. ———. “ ‘Key Words,’ Authorial Intent, and Interpretation: Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An.” CLEAR 30 (2008): 75–84. Larson, Wendy. Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Lu Yaodong 逯耀東 Wei-Jin shixue de sixiang yu shehui jichu 魏晉史學的思想與社 會基礎. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006. ———. Yi yu yu chao yue: Sima Qian yu Han Wudi shidai 抑鬱與超越: 司馬遷與漢武 帝時代. Taipei: Dongda tushu gufen youxian gongsi, 2007. Mann, Susan. “Scene-Setting: Writing Biography in Chinese History.” American Historical Review 114.3 (2009): 631–39. Mather, Richard B. The Poet Shen Yüeh. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. McGill, Robert. “The Life You Write May Be Your Own: Epistolary Autobiography and the Reluctant Resurrection of Flannery O’Connor.” The Southern Literary Journal 36.2 (2004): 31–46. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. ———. “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, 3–27. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Owen, Stephen. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. “The Self’s Perfect Mirror: Poetry as Autobiography.” In The Vitality of the Lyric Voice: Shih Poetry from the Late Han to the T’ang, edited by Shen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen, 71–102. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Richter, Antje. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Rogers, Michael C. The Chronicle of Fu Chien: A Case of Exemplar History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Shi ji 史記. Compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (?145–?86 BCE). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.

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Song shu 宋書. Compiled by Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Tao Yuanming ji jiao jian 陶淵明集校箋. Edited by Gong Bin 龔斌. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999. Tian, Xiaofei. “Twilight of the Masters: Masters Literature (zishu) in Early Medieval China.” JAOS 124 (2006): 465–86. Vervoorn, Aat Emile. Men of the Cliffs and Caves: The Development of the Chinese Eremitic Tradition to the End of the Han Dynasty. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1990. Wang Yi and Fu Xiaowei, “Sincere Treatment or Severing Friendship? The Chinese Original Value in Ji Kang’s Letter to Shan Tao.” In The Yields of Transition: Literature, Art and Philosophy in Early Medieval China, edited by Rošker, Jana S. and Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, 241–60. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Watson, Burton, trans. Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993. ———. “Letter to Sun Hui-tsung.” In Anthology of Chinese Literature, edited by Cyril Birch, 159–61. New York: Grove, 1965. Wells, Matthew V. To Die and Not Decay: Autobiography and the Pursuit of Immortality in Early China. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2009. Wenxin dialong yizheng 文心雕龍義證. Compiled by Liu Xie 劉勰, commentary by Zhan Ying 詹鍈. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1989. Wu Pei-yi. The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writing in Traditional China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Wong, Hertha D. “Pictographs as Autobiography: Plains Indian Sketchbooks of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” American Literary History 1.2 (1989): 295–316. Xin yi Xi Zhongsan ji 新譯嵇中散集. Edited by Cui Fuzhang 崔富章. Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1998. Zhou yi jin zhu jin yi 周易今註今譯. Edited by Nan Huaijin 南懷瑾 and Xu Qinting 徐芹庭. Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan gufen youxian gongsi, 2007.

Chapter 17

Civil Examinations and Cover Letters in the Mid-Tang: Dugu Yu’s (776–815) “Letter Submitted to Attendant Gentleman Quan of the Ministry of Rites”* Alexei Ditter Those who pass the civil examination rely, if not on family ties, then on coercion, and if not on bribery, then on friends. 得擧者不以親,則以勢;不以賄,則以交 Wang Lengran 王泠然 (ca. 698–742), “Letter Discussing Recommendation” (Lun jian shu 論薦書)1

Contemporary accounts of the experiences of candidates participating in the presented scholar ( jinshi 進士) examinations during the latter half of the Tang dynasty often expressed a belief that “success or failure [in the civil examinations] was not due to human effort” 得喪非人力也; outcomes depended instead as much on luck, fate, or karma as on education, moral integrity, or literary virtuosity.2 These accounts, despite their often sensational nature, nonetheless communicated a general truth about the civil examination in the Tang dynasty: pass lists (bang 牓) were in large part predetermined. Prior to their even sitting for the examinations, intense negotiations between interested and influential parties had for the most part already decided which candidates would

* I would like to express my thanks to Lu Yang for the opportunity to present an earlier ver-

sion of this paper at the Tang and Five Dynasties Workshop in Kansas City in 2010 and to my discussant, Wendy Swartz, and the other participants there who offered me much-welcomed critique, advice, and encouragement. I am grateful as well for the useful comments received from the two anonymous readers. Finally, I would like to thank Antje Richter for her leadership in editing this volume and for her many helpful suggestions for improving my paper. 1  Quan Tang wen xinbian 294.3318. 2  See, e.g., Tang zhiyan jiao zhu 8.159, 8.164; Tang shi jishi, II.52.1427; Taiping guangji 167.1221–22, 177.1316.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_019

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pass and what their respective ranking would be.3 It was therefore essential for candidates hoping to find their names on the pass list to cultivate close relationships with influential patrons willing to promote candidates’ names and circulate copies of their writings to illustrious peers or examination officials.4 One practice for acquiring examination patronage that became common during the mid-Tang was that of “circulating scrolls” (xingjuan 行卷).5 This involved candidates selecting, editing, and recopying portfolios of their best compositions to submit to the chief examiner and influential members of society. Some of these portfolios of writing were accompanied by what we might today call a “cover letter.”6 These missives, extant examples of which are typically titled “submitted letter” (shang shu 上書), “submitted note” (shang qi 上啓), or simply “written to” ( yu 與), served an important role in attracting the interest of prospective patrons. They demonstrated an author’s unique literary style, ambitions, and character, advertised his potential usefulness to prospective patrons, and attempted to convince them why it would be worth their while to invest social capital and material resources into the fledgling careers of their authors.7 3  Unlike in the Song and later periods, civil examinations in the Tang dynasty did not “conceal the names” (hu ming 糊名) of the examinees from their examiners. One outcome of this practice, as Victor Mair pointed out in his article “Scroll Presentation in the T’ang Dynasty,” was that given enough support, the examination itself “became an empty exercise, even the rankings being determined beforehand.” Mair, “Scroll Presentation,” 39. 4  An anecdote describing how a patron might negotiate on behalf of a candidate can be seen in the 9th c. Tang zhiyan 唐摭言. In this anecdote, Wu Wuling 呉武陵 (d. 834) passes on a copy of Du Mu’s 杜牧 (803–853) “Fu on the Ebang Palace” (Ebang gong fu 阿房宫賦) to the chief examiner Cui Yan 崔郾 (768–836) and in doing so secures for him the fifth place position in the upcoming exams. Tang zhiyan jiao zhu 6.118. 5  On the Tang practice of circulating scrolls, see Mair, “Scroll Presentation,” 35–60; Cheng Qianfan, Tang dai jinshi xingjuan; Fu Xuancong, Tangdai keju, 247–86; Luo Liantian, “Lun Tangren shangshu,” 33–135; Wu Zongguo, Tangdai keju, esp. 222–36. In addition to these works, this article has also benefitted from recent studies on the social and cultural experiences of Tang examination candidates. See Moore, Rituals of Recruitment; Shang Yongliang, Keju zhi lu; Yang Bo, Chang’an de chuntian; and Liu Qinli, Tangdai juzi kekao. 6  Because many of these texts were not preserved, it is difficult to determine how often circulated scrolls were accompanied by cover letters. Luo Liantian, “Lun Tangren shangshu,” 89–109; Fu Xuancong, Tangdai keju, 263–64. 7  Despite the common perception that candidates were successful in the “Presented Scholar” examination because of their mastery of poetic forms, in fact, following the An Lushan rebellion, mastery of prose writing was far more important. As Wu Zongguo has argued, from the Zhenyuan reign period (785–805) onwards, the practice of “selecting successful candidates on the basis of poetry and rhapsody” 詩賦取士 was gradually replaced by the practice of “selecting successful candidates on the basis of prose” 文章取士, and superior content in a

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Although scholars have long been familiar with the extant corpus of Tang cover letters, they have for the most part used them primarily as sources offering contemporary perspectives on candidates’ experiences of Tang examination culture or for biographical evidence about their authors. Only rarely have they been read as literary works in their own right, and even basic questions about the exigencies motivating their composition, the rhetorical tactics they employ, or the specific aims they seek to realize have yet to be addressed in any depth.8 In the following, I begin by first distinguishing the cover letter as a genre from that of letters (shu 書), noting that although these two genres share many traits, cover letters were nonetheless distinct in terms of how they constructed the identity of the communicants, the rhetoric that they employed, and the aims that they wanted to realize. Following this, I then translate and discuss a cover letter written by Dugu Yu 獨孤郁 (776–815) in 797 to Quan Deyu 權德輿 (761–818), his “Letter Submitted to Attendant Gentleman Quan of the Ministry of Rites” (Shang libu Quan shilang shu 上禮部權侍郎書). Close examination of Dugu’s cover letter reveals concrete examples of rhetorical strategies prospective candidates could employ in their epistolary writings and the objectives they sought to realize in producing them. I subsequently examine Quan’s response to Dugu’s missive, his “Letter in Reply to Cultivated Talent Dugu” (Da Dugu xiucai shu 答獨孤秀才書). Together, these letters represent the only extant Tang dynasty example (of which I am aware) of an examination candidate’s cover letter and a written response to that letter. Careful reading of Quan’s response thus offers a rare opportunity to explore how cover letters may have been read and responded to by potential patrons and how successful the rhetorical strategies used by candidates may have been in achieving their aims. More broadly, these letters allow us to get a sense of the politics of patronage and the ways in which interpersonal relations were cultivated and negotiated in the mid-Tang. 1

The Genre of Cover Letters in the Mid-Tang

Although the epistolary culture of medieval China has received only scant attention in modern scholarship,9 some contemporary scholars have argued that the political and social significance of letters in the Tang dynasty arguably prose composition was valued much more highly than beautiful diction. See Wu Zongguo, Tangdai keju, 159. 8  See, e.g., Fu Xuancong, Tangdai keju, 264–70. 9  One notable recent exception is Antje Richter’s Letters and Epistolary Culture.

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far surpassed that of poetry.10 Throughout the medieval period, letters served as “textualized ritual etiquette” 形成文字的禮儀, playing a significant role in constructing and maintaining social relationships across space and through time.11 Cover letters, as an epistolary genre specifically adapted to the culture of the examination system, shared several textual and material conventions with letters.12 At the same time however, cover letters were in other ways distinctly adapted to the cultural field of the Tang civil examination and the practice of circulating scrolls. As testified to by the many Tang dynasty letter-writing manuals, letters responded to specific, socially-recognized exigencies. In addition to formal occasions—congratulations or condolences for births, marriages, and funerals, exchanges of gifts, or celebrations of changes in season—letters were also written for more incidental situations, such as “borrowing a horse” ( jie ma 借馬), “inquiring about a fall from a horse” (wen ma zhui 問馬墜), “sending something” ( yi wu 遺物), or “requesting something” (qiu wu 求物).13 Irrespective of the exigency to which letters responded, however, one primary objective of their production was maintaining existing social ties. Like all letters, cover letters were concerned with social connections. Rather than maintaining existing ties however, authors of cover letters typically sought to develop new relationships with individuals whose wealth, reputation, and social connections might help them achieve their career ambitions. Since shameless displays of crass opportunism were socially unacceptable, writers of cover letters tried to disguise their blatantly, self-serving objective— i.e., to obtain the patronage and support needed to compete successfully in the exams—by redefining their letters as responses to a far more acceptable 10  Wu Liyu, Tang li zhi yi, 117. 11  Ibid., 546. 12  Although not discussed here, there were at least two other contexts within which cover letters were circulated during the Tang dynasty. One was subsequent to successfully passing the jinshi degree examination but prior to having received an appointment. A second was when the writer was banished from the capital. See Luo Liantian, “Lun Tangren shangshu,” esp. 46–89. Although these letters share traits with the cover letters described within this paper (letters by those first seeking appointment in particular), there were also clear differences. The letters written by those in exile, e.g., were typically more obsequious and desperate in tone than other letters. Their objective was also less about creating a presence than invoking an absence. Their included materials were also, I believe, intended to remind their addressees of what they might be able to offer in terms of texts and textual services to those who helped them or to serve as “payment” for favors requested. See also Paul W. Kroll’s chapter in this volume. 13  See Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 597–601; Zhao Heping, Dunhuang xieben shuyi, 309–16.

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exigency, namely the desire to find “the one who knows me” (zhi ji 知己), a sage-like mentor who could “resolve doubts over whether to advance or withdraw” 以進退之疑取決14 or “use [his] critical acumen” 殫鑒 in order to “[help] the writings be judged with proper discrimination” 可以辨文.15 A second characteristic shared by letters and cover letters was the need to be persuasive. To preserve a relationship, letters not only needed to express the appropriate sentiments at the right time and in the correct fashion but to do so in a convincingly sincere manner. Writers of cover letters to an even greater degree needed to be persuasive in order to construct new ties and convince their addressees that it was worth their while to give the cover letter writers and their careers the attention and support candidates required in order to progress within the imperial bureaucracy. Although letters and cover letters shared analogous objectives and rhetoric, they were in other regards quite distinct. Letters functioned to maintain existing relationships between communicants. In those social situations requiring a physical presence, letters remedied the problem of their writers’ absence through substitution of a textual persona.16 As attempts to make up for a writer’s physical absence, letters strove to create the illusion that the author and recipient were “talking face to face” 辭若對面.17 The unstated assumption underlying the letter nevertheless was that the physical presence of the author was preferable to his disembodied voice. For cover letters, a face-to-face meeting was not necessarily preferable to a text-based exchange. In their cover letters, candidates could carefully edit their speech to ensure that they did not inadvertently violate taboos specific to their particular addressees.18 They could also avoid having themselves judged for their appearance, eloquence, or accent.19 Meeting in person moreover 14  Bai Juyi ji jianjiao 44.2776–78. 15  Li Guan, “Letter to Supernumerary Chen of the Catering Bureau” (Yu shan bu Chen yuanwai shu 與膳部陳員外書), Quan Tang wen xinbian 533.6196. 16  Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–ca. 591), e.g., in the “Miscellaneous Skills” chapter of his Family Instructions wrote that: “a proverb from South of the Yangtze states: ‘Letters and notes from one thousand li allow others your face to see” 江南諺云:尺牘書䟽,千里面目 也. Yanshi jiaxun jijie 19.507; cited in Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 606. 17  Wenxin diaolong zhu, 461–62. 18  Oliver Moore, in his study of Wang Dingbao’s Collected Statements (Tang zhiyan 唐摭言), comments that a candidate had “to take lengthy precautions each time he submitted his writings to a potential patron” (Ritual of Recruitment, 150) and that “failure to sidestep the dangers of taboo offences led to ignominy” (152). 19  Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819) complained in his “Note Submitted to Rectifier of Omissions Quan Deyu, Warming my Scrolls so as to Determine whether to Advance or

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increased the possibility of committing some sort of faux pas, thus ruining the good impression made through one’s writings, or, in the worst case, even losing a patron’s support entirely.20 Even a productive initial meeting did not guarantee that one could continue to maintain a good impression through subsequent encounters, and candidates feared that “the second time to go and see someone sometimes was not as good as the first time, or the third time going to see someone was not as good as the second” 再往見之,或不如其初, 三往見之,又不如其再.21 Common maxims thus advised candidates to be “often heard but seldom seen” 聞多見少 or to “seldom show their faces but get their name mentioned often” 見面少聞名多.22 Within the culture of the civil examination, a well-crafted written persona and widespread renown were actually preferable to being present in person. Letters and cover letters also differed in their construction of the respective social identities of the communicants. In letters, these identities were comparatively stabilized. Long-standing ritual precedents and a rich corpus of existing models provided conventions for the expression of sentiment and diction appropriate for any particular exigency given the relative hierarchical status of writer and recipient and the specific nature of their affiliation. Violating these conventions could have serious social consequences: because letters typically circulated amongst a much broader audience than their nominal addressees, failure to act or acting inappropriately could greatly humiliate the discourteous writer and destroy the relationships.23 Withdraw” (Shang Quan Deyu buque wen juan jue jin tui qi 上權徳輿補闕温卷決進 退啓) of being dismissed because of his youth. Liu Zongyuan ji 36.909–11. Li Guan 李觀 (766–794) in another apologized for his failure to be articulate in his earlier meeting with a desired patron. See his “Letter to Supernumerary Xi of the Ministry of Works” (Yu libu Xi yuanwai shu 與吏部奚員外書) in Quan Tang wen xinbian 532.6187–88. 20  See Moore, Rituals of Recruitment, 150–52. 21  Li Ao 李翱 (772–841), “Letter Expressing Gratitude to Director Yang [Yuling]” (Xie Yang langzhong shu 謝楊郎中書), in Quan Tang wen xinbian 635.7176. 22  Tang zhiyan jiao zhu 15.306; trans. Moore, Rituals of Recruitment, 148. 23  In his chapter titled “Customs and Manners” (Fengcai 風操) Yan wrote that: “Whenever people South of the Yangtze met with deep bereavement, if friends living in the same city did not go to console them in three days, the friendship was severed. After the funeral such friends would be avoided whenever they were met, in resentment for their lack of sympathy. Those who were prevented by long distance or other reasons would be excused if they sent a letter [of sympathy]; otherwise they would be treated equally [as strangers].” 江南凡遭重喪,若相知者同在城邑三日不弔則絶之。除喪雖相遇則避之,怨 其不已憫也。有故及道遥者致書可也,無書亦如之. Yanshi jiaxun jijie, 6.96; translation modified from Teng, Family Instructions, 35; see also Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” 585.

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Cover letters on the other hand were associated with a practice whose conventions by the mid-Tang had not yet been fully and definitively codified. Their writers therefore had relatively greater independence in how they represented themselves and their addressees. At the same time, however, candidates were constrained by their need to maximize their chances of obtaining patronage. Writers conventionally described their addressees in terms of stereotypical identities likely to be recognized and accepted. Candidates for example often described themselves as poor students, highlighting their youth, family background, and education. In turn, they typically portrayed their addressees as individuals of exceptional talent, integrity, and perspicacity—“glorious and wonderful, heroes among men” 光大威重,人之傑者24—emphasizing their capacity to help provide candidates with the guidance and advice they needed to succeed. Since cover letters, like letters, circulated among a broader audience, the choices made by authors of cover letters regarding how to construct their own identities and those of their addressees to some degree can be understood as attempts to take advantage of this wider readership to pressure addressees to respond. One final important difference between letters and cover letters was that the latter were cover letters.25 In addition to marketing their authors to potential patrons, cover letters by Tang examination candidates were written in order to provide a context from which to read their submitted texts. In his 813 “Letter to the Examination Official of Tongzhou” (Yu Tongzhou shiguan shu 與 同州試官書), for example, Shen Yazhi 沈亞之 (fl. 815–25) wrote: “By means of my [submitted] writings, I sought the one who knows me in the persons of the Office Managers of Commanderies” 以文求知己於郡之執事.26 Even more explicitly, Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824) in his “Letter Submitted to [Governor] Jia [Dan] of Huazhou” (Shang Jia Huazhou shu 上賈滑州書) wrote “I humbly submit that the literary style of this insignificant person can be perceived from these fifteen texts, and that the ambitions of this insignificant person can be perceived in this letter” 伏以小子之文,可見于十五章之內;小子之 志,可見於此書.27 Whereas the submitted writings of a candidate might demonstrate his mastery of individual genres and his unique literary style, it 24  Li Guan, “Letter to Supernumerary Xi of the Ministry of Works,” Quan Tang wen xinbian 532.6187–88. 25  Certain material conventions might also have served to distinguish cover letters. Mair, “Scroll Presentation,” 39; see also Han Yu, “Letter to Supervising Secretary Chen” (Yu Chen jishi shu 與陳給事書), Han Yu guwen jiaozhu huiji, 846. 26  Quan Tang wen xinbian 735.8537. 27  Han Yu guwen jiaozhu huiji, 3402–6.

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was in the cover letter that he communicated his ambitions, his character, and his ability to be of service to the prospective patron and at the same time provided a context for the addressee to read his other texts. 2

Dugu Yu’s “Letter Submitted to Attendant Gentleman Quan of the Ministry of Rites”

In 795, Dugu Yu and his older brother Dugu Lang 獨孤朗 (775–827) arrived in Chang’an to take part in the civil examinations. Although Dugu Lang enjoyed temporary examination success in the spring of 797,28 Dugu Yu repeatedly failed to pass. In the fall of 797, he submitted several of his compositions to the famous and well-regarded official Quan Deyu. His choice to approach Quan was well considered. To begin with, Quan had in the recent past demonstrated his willingness to advocate for the sons of close friends. Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫 (772– 842), for example, who passed the jinshi examination in 793, was the son of Quan’s friend Liu Xu 劉緒 (n.d.), who Quan remembered fondly in the parting essay he wrote for Liu after his success in the examinations, “Sending off Cultivated Talent Liu, Following his Success in the Civil Examinations and as an Attendant Travels to the Eastern Capital to Visit His Parents” (Song Liu xiucai dengke hou shicong fu dongjing jinsheng xu 送劉秀才登科後侍從赴東京 覲省序).29 Quan moreover was regarded as someone who promoted others based on their talents and qualifications rather than their social background. In his “Tomb Stele for the Former Prime Minister, Sire Quan [Deyu]” (Tang gu xiang Quan gong mubei 唐故相權公墓碑), Han Yu wrote that when Quan served in the Ministry of Personnel in 802, “if scholars who were recommended to him were men of their word, he would not exclude them just because they were commoners. But if they were untrustworthy, he paid them no heed 28  According to the tomb epitaph inscription (muzhiming 墓誌銘) written for him by Li Ao, Dugu Lang had been among those who had originally passed the jinshi examination in 797. His name, along with those of ten other successful candidates, was subsequently removed when Dezong 德宗 (742–805, r. 779–805) ordered that the number of successful candidates be trimmed. See Dengkeji kao buzheng, 597; Li Ao, “Tomb Epitaph Inscription for the Late Sire Dugu, Former Chief Military Training Commissioner and Surveillance and Supervisory Commissioner for Fujian and other Prefectures, Concurrently Palace Aide to the Censor-in-Chief, Posthumously Titled Policy Advisor of the Right of the Tang” (Tang gu Fujian deng zhou du tuan lian guancha chu zhi deng shi jian yushi zhongcheng zeng you san qi changshi Dugu gong muzhiming 唐故福建等州都團練觀察處置等使 兼御史中丞贈右散騎常侍獨孤公墓志銘), in Quan Tang wen xinbian 639.7206. 29  Quan Deyu shi wen ji 38.567; see also Yan Guorong, Quan Deyu yanjiu, 65.

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whatever, even though they be high officials and influential people” 薦士於 公者,其言可信,不以其人布衣不用;即不可信,雖大官勢人交言, 一不以綴意.30 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Quan had demonstrated his effectiveness as a patron. Both Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819)— who also passed the jinshi examination in 793—and Liu Yuxi had circulated their scrolls to Quan in the months prior to their successful examinations. The portfolio of compositions that Dugu Yu submitted to Quan Deyu was accompanied by a cover letter. This letter began as follows:31 On a day in the eighth month of the thirteenth year of the Zhenyuan reign period [8/27/797–9/24/797], I, Dugu Yu, respectfully submit a letter to His Excellency, my third elder brother, the Secretariat Drafter:32 It is because our families have been friends for generations that I, Yu, was thereby able to obtain an audience with you to share family stories. You, the great worthy, also didn’t refer to our interaction as ordinary, because at that point in time your affectionate favor was clearly obvious. 貞元十三年八月日,獨孤郁謹上書於舍人三兄閣下:郁以世 舊,遂獲謁見敘故,大賢之遇郁也,亦不以常交言之,際眷意 甚露。 At first glance, the opening lines of Dugu’s cover letter seem quite ordinary: he gives the date, respectfully identifies his letter’s recipient, and expresses his gratitude for a recent audience. These same opening lines moreover characterize the interaction between the communicants as that of junior and senior members of the same family. Nominally identifying the relationship between cover letter writer and addressee within the cover letter served at least two 30  Han Yu guwen jiaozhu huiji, 2233; trans. Hartman, Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity, 138. 31  In doing this translation, I have relied on the text for this letter found in Quan Tang wen xinbian 683.7713–14. I have also consulted the version found in Quan Deyu shi wen ji 42.642–46. 32  In 794 Quan Deyu was appointed Imperial Diarist Managing Proclamation Drafting (qiju sheren zhi zhigao 起居舍人知制誥). In 795 he became Vice Director of the Bureau of Equipment Managing Proclamation Drafting ( jiabu yuanwailang zhi zhigao 駕部員外 郎知制誥), an appointment he held until early 798, when he was made Director of the Bureau of Merit Titles Managing Proclamation Drafting (si xun langzhong zhi zhigao 司 勳郎中知制誥). Later that same year he was promoted to the position of Secretariat Drafter Managing Proclamation Drafting (zhongshu sheren zhi zhigao 中書舍人知制誥). In 802 he was appointed Director of the Ministry of Rites and Examination Administrator (libu shilang zhi gongju 禮部侍郎制公舉). Quan’s title also could mean “retainer” and thus subtly allude to Quan’s relationship with Dugu Yu’s father, Dugu Ji 獨孤及 (725–777).

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important rhetorical purposes: first, it redefined what might otherwise be viewed as a crass and mercenary attempt to curry favor with the powerful into a more socially acceptable interaction; second, it attempted to increase the likelihood of obtaining a response by characterizing the relationship as one in which there was greater social obligation on the addressee to respond. This tactic of attempting to define the interaction between communicants within their cover letters was regularly used by candidates seeking examination patronage. For many examination cover letter authors, this relationship had to be manufactured wholesale, often from existing tropes such as “the one who knows me,” an individual capable of immediately recognizing the talents of others.33 In Dugu Yu’s case there was no need to fabricate a relationship since ties already existed between Dugu’s family and Quan Deyu. In 774, when Quan Deyu was fifteen years old, he had been accepted as a retainer in the household of Dugu Yu’s father, Dugu Ji 獨孤及 (725–777); years later he still acknowledged his reverence for Dugu Ji as his former patron and teacher.34 Dugu’s letter thus instead draws attention to existing bonds: he addresses Quan as an “honorary” member of Dugu’s family (his “third elder brother,” san xiong 三兄), notes the decades of shared history and friendship that exist between Quan Deyu and the Dugu family, and finally acknowledges Quan’s exceptionally kind treatment in having met with him in person. In the next passage, Dugu begins to lay out his motivation for writing to Quan: I, Yu, am filled with doubt and at an impasse. It has been three years yet I am unknown. What makes me feel like a broken-winged bird and leaves me unhappy is not that I have been unable to realize my ambitions nor that I blame others; it is just that I blame myself for the situation I am in and so am unhappy. 郁瑣瑣鬱堙,三年無聞,摧頹折羽而不喜者,非失意之謂,非 尤人之謂,蓋將因事自罪而不喜也。

33  See, e.g., Huangfu Shi 皇甫湜 (777?–835?), “Letter Submitted to Grand Master Li of Jiangxi” (Shang Jiangxi Li dafu shu 上江西李大夫書) in Quan Tang wen xinbian 685.7762–63; Shen Yazhi 沈亞之 (fl. 815–25), “Letter to the Examination Official of Tongzhou” (Yu Tongzhou shi guan shu 與同州試官書) in Quan Tang wen xinbian 735.8537. 34  Yan Guorong, Quan Deyu yanjiu, 50. In his “Sacrifical Prayer to Dugu [Ji] of Changzhou” (Ji Dugu Changzhou wen 祭獨孤常州文) dated December 6, 804, Quan referred to Dugu as his “former master” (xianshi 先師). Quan Deyu shi wen ji 49.772–73.

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In this passage, Dugu articulates to Quan the doubts and frustrations he is feeling with his lack of success. The specific terms he uses in giving voice to his plaint are richly connotative. The phrase suosuo 瑣瑣, for example, in addition to “doubt,” can also mean “common” or “insignificant”; in both these latter senses it already alludes to the fears Dugu expresses in the following passage that the reason he has yet to become famous is because his talents are in fact unexceptional. Yuyin 鬱堙, meaning “at an impasse” or “stuck,” was often used in the context of being unable to get ahead because one’s talents were unrecognized.35 The phrase “broken-winged bird” in turn alludes to abandonment and forlornness and in particular was often associated with frustrated ambition.36 That Dugu should express these concerns in his cover letter was not unusual. Candidates often voiced many of these same fears—reservations over their own ability or education, frustration with their as yet unsuccessful attempts to acquire the recognition they felt they deserved, and uncertainty about how best to proceed—in their cover letters to prospective patrons. His concluding assertion in this passage, namely that he himself is to blame for his current straits, is no doubt intended to arouse the curiosity of his reader, immediately begging the question, why does Dugu blame himself? And, given that the root of his unhappiness is of his own making, how does he hope that writing to Quan can help him resolve his impasse?37 Dugu goes on to articulate an answer to the first question in the next section of his letter: Let me make the following analogies: A camphor tree grows amidst swollen and gnarled saplings.38 Whenever even woodcutters see it, they all react with sighs of pleasure. The moment they do not sigh, it surely must 35  See, e.g., Liu Yuxi, “Memorial to the Office of the Counselor-in-Chief Discussing Matters of Learning” (Zou ji cheng xiang fu lun xue shi 奏記丞相府論學事), in Liu Yuxi quanji, 1071. 36  See, e.g., their use in Lu Zhaolin’s 盧照隣 (ca. 635–ca. 684) poem “ A Wildgoose Lost from Its Flock, with a Preface” (Shi qun yan, bing xu 失羣鴈并序, Lu Zhaolin ji, 69–73), a poem discussed in Paul Kroll’s contribution to this volume. 37  Blaming oneself for one’s inability to succeed on the exams because they followed the models of conduct described in the classics too closely was a rhetorical tactic often used by authors of cover letters. See, e.g., Han Yu’s “Letter Submitted to [Governor] Jia [Dan] of Huazhou” mentioned above. 38  The entry “camphor tree” ( yuzhang 豫樟) in Taiping guangji (406.3275) states: “The camphor tree can only be recognized after it has grown for seven years” 豫樟之為木也,生 七年而後可知也.

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be because the difference between itself and the swollen and gnarled saplings is not so much after all. A small pearl39 lies hidden amongst river pebbles. Whenever even children handle it, they all react with amazement. The moment they are not amazed, it surely must be because the difference between itself and those river pebbles is not so much after all. The sword Moye40 lies beneath dull leaden blades. Whenever even inexpert craftsmen glimpse it, they undoubtedly recognize it. The moment they do not recognize it, it surely must be because the difference between itself and the dull lead blades is not so much after all. Mao Qiang41 trails behind the Lump-Necked Woman.42 Whenever anyone with eyes catches sight of her, they undoubtedly can tell her apart. The moment they cannot tell her apart, it surely must be because the difference between herself and the Lump-Necked Woman is not so much after all. If, when put together with the likes of swollen and gnarled saplings, river pebbles, dull lead blades, and the Lump-Necked Woman, they were truly dissimilar, then would it not be impossible for them to avoid being picked out by even those with ordinary eyes, let alone escape the gaze of a skilled master craftsman43 or a person of discernment? The gaze of the current Attendant Gentleman of the Ministry of Rites is undoubtedly the gaze of one who is one of our empire’s skilled master craftsmen and persons of discernment. If selection is once again made from amongst the midst and I am once again missed, then truly I am already one of those swollen and gnarled saplings, river pebbles, blunt lead blades, or the Lump-Necked Woman, for how could it not be that the difference between [myself and] these is not so much? This is why I blame myself for the situation I am in and am unhappy.

39  In addition to meaning precious jewel, jade, or pearl, the term zhuji could also be used as a metaphor for a finely crafted work of literature or art. 40  Moye was one of two legendary swords forged by the master smith Gan Jiang 干將 for the King of Wu 吴. Dugu alludes here to a couplet in Jia Yi’s 賈誼 “Lament for Qu Yuan” (Diao Qu Yuan fu 弔屈原賦): “Moye is taken to be dull, and leaden blades taken to be sharp” 莫邪為頓兮,鉛刀為銛. Shi ji 84.2493. 41  Mao Qiang was a famous beauty of the Spring and Autumn period. 42  The Lump-Necked Woman of Qi is one of the figures described in Liu Xiang’s 劉向 Biographies of Virtuous Women (Lienü zhuan 列女傳). She was so named because of a large tumor on her neck. Lienü zhuan buzhu 6.264–67; trans. Kinney, Exemplary Women, 126–28. 43  A more literal translation of lianggong qiaoye 良工巧冶 would be “expert craftsman and skilled smith.”

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借如豫章生於擁腫小木之中,樵蘇見之,亦以嗟矣,一有不 嗟,則必自與擁腫者亦不多遠也;珠璣隱於礫石之中,童子弄 之,亦以驚矣,一有不驚,則必自與礫石者亦不多遠也;鏌鋣 臥於鉛鈍之下,下工覩之,固亦知矣,一有不知,則必自與鉛 鈍者亦不多遠也;毛嬙後於宿瘤而行,有目者睹之,固即分 矣,一有不分,則必自與宿瘤亦不多遠也。苟與乎擁腫、礫 石、鉛鈍、宿瘤輩,果殊異,則不能移凡眼所擇,況逃乎良工 巧冶、有識者之目哉?今禮部侍郎之目,固亦國之良工巧冶、 有識者之目也,於中再擇再不中,是真已為擁腫、礫石、鉛 鈍、宿瘤矣,何止與斯不遠哉。此所以因事自罪而不喜也。 The argument that Dugu makes using these four analogies here hinges on the idea that although each pair he compares shares superficial similarities—they both might be trees, small objects, swords, or women—, nonetheless those that possess value should be readily and easily differentiated from those that lack it.44 When these objects cannot be distinguished from one another, there must be a reason. Dugu immediately dismisses the possibility that it is a problem with the perception of others because, he argues, even a cursory visual or tactile inspection by the least perceptive or experienced individuals would immediately register a difference, let alone if the individual in question were especially astute or discerning. Instead, Dugu suggests, the problem must be one of unreliable self-perception. These extraordinary objects were in fact never distinct from their more pedestrian counterparts in the first place; they have merely deceived themselves into thinking that they were not alike. Bringing the discussion back to himself, he suggests that given that 44  Candidates often used similar analogies about the failure to properly recognize precious objects to express their fear of remaining unknown. Li Guan, e.g., in his “Letter to Supernumerary Zhao of the Right Office” (Yu yousi Zhao yuanwai shu 與右司趙員外 書) warned that if those in positions of authority did not expeditiously act to remedy the failure to properly recognize men of worth, then “the heavenly jade chime would decrease in value and lose its luster. The sword Moye would not be considered precious and would lose its keenness” 天球減價而喪色,鏌鋣不寶而奪銳. No longer valued as they should be, Li argued, these precious objects would be “consigned to the inside of the jewelry box” 委以櫝中 and “could not be relied upon in unexpected circumstances” 未 倚於天外. Quan Tang wen xinbian 533.6198. In his “Letter to Supernumerary Chen of the Catering Bureau” Li Guan strongly admonished his addressee to carefully reflect on those candidates for whom he advocated: “The jade of Jing Mountain becomes worthless and the wufu [a common stone easily confused with jade] becomes lustrous. We look to you, Office Manager, to give thoughtful consideration in comparing them.” 荊璆無價,珷玞 有輝。仰惟執事,坐而相之. Quan Tang wen xinbian 533.6196.

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the chief examiner is indeed one of the most discerning individuals in the empire,45 then should Dugu once again be overlooked, as he has in the past two years, it must surely be because he is unworthy of passing and has in fact only deceived himself in believing that he is different from those crowds of candidates who have also failed. This, he states, is why he blames himself for his current situation. In the next section of Dugu’s letter, he continues to elaborate on this problem of self-evaluation, introducing as well questions regarding the proper conduct of a candidate in seeking to promote himself and clarifying how he hopes Quan might help him: Someone advised me, saying, “The Way of our times is to esteem the illustrious. The reason that you do not flourish is because you are hidden and concealed, [and because] your way is ‘to make abundant your curtain.’ What’s more, you truly posses fine timber that scrapes the sky yet grow it in secret, possess a carriage-illuminating precious pearl yet furtively hoard it away, possess a jade-slicing keen saber but warily keep it sheathed, possess city-toppling good looks yet veil them away in hiding. Even though Li Lou46 himself were holding up the light on the left and peeling his eyes on the right, doing his utmost to search you out, he doubtlessly would still be unable to know of you. So why not just transplant the timber, expose the glow, unsheathe the sharp blade, and show off your good looks, and cause men of discernment to catch sight of them and be astonished?” What he admonished [me to do] however is something that I, Yu, am without a doubt incapable of doing. For if [what I have] is indeed not “fine timber,” is indeed not “precious,” is indeed not “keen,” is indeed not 45  Praising the chief examiner in a cover letter written to a third-party was another rhetorical tactic used by examination candidates who, assuming that their cover letters might circulate beyond their intended recipients, used them to covertly flatter those in a position to influence the examination results. See, e.g., Bai Juyi’s 白居易 (772–864) “Letter to Supervising Secretary Chen” (Yu Chen jishi shu 與陳給事書) in which he writes “Now Attendant Gentleman Gao [Ying] of the Ministry of Rites is the chief examiner hence [the examinations will be] completely impartial” 今禮部高侍郎為主司,則至公矣. Bai Juyi ji jianjiao 44.2776–78. 46  In his commentary to the “Li Lou” 離婁 chapter of the Mengzi 孟子, the Han commentator Zhao Qi 趙岐 (108–201) described Li Lou as an ancient, probably from the time of the Yellow Emperor, who was famed for his keen vision: “he could discern the tip of a hair at a distance of more than one hundred paces” 能視於百步之外,見秋毫之末. Mengzi zhushu 7.218.

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“lovely,” yet I nonetheless everywhere pass by the gaze of those men of discernment, then I am merely showcasing my own shortcomings. If [what I have] is indeed “fine timber,” is indeed “precious,” is indeed “keen,” is indeed “lovely,” then although I have only barely displayed the glow, the sharpness, the branch, or the appearance to a single individual, there would already be many who were amazed by me. The reason then that no one is amazed is because in these four respects I am after all not so different from the common run of the mill. I suffer from being direct and unsophisticated, and only you, the great worthy, can distinguish whether or not I am different. If it cannot be done expeditiously [by you], then how much [more impossible is this] for those who are merely ordinary? 或諭之曰:「今之道尚光,子之所以不振者晦遏也,子之道豐 蔀也。子且真有崒天之材而隱植之,有照乘之珍而密櫝之,有 切玉之利而謹橈之,有傾都之 艷而深帷之,雖使離婁左執光而 右拭眥,迫而索之,固亦不能知子矣。子何不移植露光,披鋒 示貌,使識者睹而駭之?」 彼之所誨,固亦郁所不能焉。己必不材也,必不寶也,必不 利也,必不姝也,且遍過於有識者之目,是自揚其短也;己必 材也,必寶也,必利也,必姝也,雖小示其光鋒幹貌於一人, 驚我亦已多矣。所不驚者,是予四事果不足異於族凡也。 郁病直拙,獨大賢於郁分殊,尚不能以亟,況悠悠者與? Dugu’s passage opens by first narrating the advice he had received from an anonymous friend. The use of reported third-party speech within a cover letter—sometimes quoting a conversation with or advice from friends, former employers, or family members—was a tactic often used by examination candidates in their cover letters to provide a justification for writing to a particular addressee, to improve chances that the addressee might feel socially obligated to respond, or to indirectly flatter the letter’s recipient.47 In this instance, the role of the reported speech serves to offer an alternative explanation for why Dugu continues to remain unknown, to help rationalize Dugu’s subsequent request to Quan to evaluate whether or not he truly has any talent, and to serve 47  See, e.g., Liu Zongyuan, “Note Submitted to Grand Councilor Zhao of Jiangling in which I Deliver Texts that I Have Written” (Shang Jiangling Zhao xianggong ji suo zhu we qi 上江陵趙相公寄所著文啟) and “Note Submitted to Rectifier of Omissions Quan Deyu, Warming my Scrolls so as to Determine whether to Advance or Withdraw” (Shang Quan Deyu buque wen juan jue jin tui qi 上權徳輿補闕温卷決進退啓) in Liu Zongyuan ji 36.909–11; 922–23.

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as a bridge to the following section of his cover letter in which he offers a critique of contemporary examination culture and patronage practices. Dugu’s friend argues that Dugu is indeed at fault for his own situation, not because he lacks talent, but rather because he has failed to display his talents properly and in so doing attract the attention he rightly deserves.48 The problem, Dugu’s friend claims, is that “your way is ‘to make abundant your curtain’,” a phrase that refers to Hexagram #55, Feng 豐 (Abundance), in the Classic of Changes (Yijing 易經), where it appears in the Second Yin, Fourth Yang, and Top Yin lines. The Line Statement to Second Yin reads: “This one has his abundance screened off, so the polar constellation could be seen at midday. If he were to set forth, he would reap doubt and enmity, but if he were to have sincerity and develop accordingly, he should have good fortune” 豐其蔀。 日中見斗。往得疑疾。有孚發若。吉. The Line Commentary to Fourth Yang reads: “This one has his Abundance screened off, so the polar constellation could be seen at midday. He meets a master who is his equal, which means good fortune” 豐其蔀。日中見斗。遇其夷主。吉. Finally, the Line Commentary at Top Yin reads: “This one keeps his Abundance in his house, where he screens off his family. When he peers out his door, it is lonely, and no one is there. For three years he does not appear, which means misfortune” 豐其屋。蔀其家。闚其戸。闃其无人。三嵗不覿。凶.49 Using this particular phrase to characterize Dugu’s reluctance to seek fame accomplishes more rhetorically than merely describing his reticence. It reinforces the portrayal of Dugu Yu in his cover letter as a man possessing “abundant” talent, re-interprets his fruitless years in Chang’an as biding his time until he would encounter the right patron and change his fortune, and validates his submission of cover letter and writings to Quan as an attempt to avoid the misfortune he will suffer if that encounter does not occur within the allotted three year period. The use of this allusion not only enhances the persuasiveness of Dugu’s cover letter, it also allows him to simultaneously flatter his addressee and hint towards his willingness to accept him as his patron. His choice of allusion and his skill in adapting it to suit the particularities of his current circumstances

48  The acknowledgement of the difficulty of standing out from the crowd was one echoed in many of the cover letters of Dugu’s contemporaries. Li Guan, e.g., in his cover letter to Supernumerary Xi mentioned above lamented how difficult it must be for Xi to “know where to gaze” 將何望 to perceive Li “from amongst this multitude of young men, who number in the millions with each glance” 營營之子者,觸目千萬. Quan Tang wen xinbian 532.6187–88. 49  Lynn, The Classic of Changes, 487–93.

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moreover admirably showcases Dugu’s literary virtuosity and his mastery of a complex and challenging classic. Dugu’s express refusal to behave as his friend had admonished speaks to another anxiety shared by many candidates, namely how they should act in order to best improve their chances of examination success.50 Dugu’s refusal to parade himself before the eminent and influential however, while in part due to differences of opinion between Dugu and his friend over proper kinds of conduct, was more directly linked to the fear Dugu expressed earlier in his letter that he was in fact no different from those he viewed as lesser talents. Doubting his own self-assessment and unwilling to accept his friend’s exaggerated praise, the only reliable course for him to determine whether or not his talents are exceptional or merely ordinary is to have himself evaluated by a third-party whose opinion would be infallible, namely Quan Deyu. Dugu’s tactic of asking his addressee to assess his qualifications and advise whether or not he should advance or withdraw was one often used by examination candidates in their cover letters. Li Guan 李觀 (766–794), for example in his “Letter Submitted to the Attendant Gentleman [Lu Zhi 陸贄 (754–805)] on the Day of the ‘Pasting the Classics’ Examination” (Tie jing ri shang shilang shu 帖經日上侍郎書), stated “If I am unable to obtain your recommendation, I will subsequently withdraw from the examination; if I obtain your recommendation, I will subsequently advance” 得不言之而後退,言之而 後進.51 In a different cover letter, his “Letter to Supernumerary Chen of the Catering Bureau,” Li similarly claimed that he had written his cover letter in order to “resolve doubts over whether to advance or withdraw” 以進退之 疑取決.52 Liu Zongyuan in his “Note Submitted to Grand Councilor Zhao of Jiangling in which I Deliver Texts that I Have Written” (Shang Jiangling Zhao xianggong ji suo zhu wen qi 上江陵趙相公寄所著文啟) wrote that he submitted his “ten pieces of miscellaneous writings” 雜文十首 in the hopes that Zhao might “confirm what is good and bad about them” 定其是非.53 Requests such as these, in which the cover letter writer is seeking the sage advice of a known worthy, provided a socially palatable justification for candidates to submit compositions to their addressees. They also established the grounds 50  See, e.g., Liu Zongyuan’s “Note Submitted to Rectifier of Omissions Quan Deyu,” Liu Zongyuan ji 36.909–11. 51  Quan Tang wen xinbian 533.6195–96. 52  Quan Tang wen xinbian 533.6196. 53  Liu Zongyuan ji 36.909–11. See also the above mentioned “Note Submitted to Rectifier of Omissions Quan Deyu” in which Liu asked that Quan help him determine whether he should “depart or draw closer” qu jiu 去就. Liu Zongyuan ji 36.910.

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for a relationship based on obligation: should an addressee choose to respond, the candidate would be in his debt. Finally, the request may have been subtly coercive, since failure to respond to a candidate whose qualifications were otherwise apparent to all implied that the addressee either was not as discerning as the candidate claimed or had failed to perform responsibly in his position of authority. In the next section, Dugu moves from discussing his qualifications and conduct as an examination candidate to expressing his unease with the conduct of those in a position to recommend them: I frequently move amongst my peers, often evaluating what is good or bad in their speech and accordingly amending and revising my own. If their ideas are even slightly remarkable, I dare not but to speak of them with “those who are permitted to speak.” Among the younger generation of scholars today there are those who sigh and exclaim, “Alas, to whom should a young scholar [like myself] give his allegiance?”54 On the one hand it is inappropriate for the honored elder to hear this, but on the other hand it is inappropriate for the honored elder to not hear this. The problem with the foremost personages of the court today is that they either are unable to be impartial or are able to be impartial but unable to be influential. [The former,] when they read others’ writings, praise their excellence and sigh in admiration; there are none that are not outstanding. But they nonetheless distinguish from among them which are good or bad, to be disdained or valued, [or whether their authors should be] promoted or demoted based on whom they favor. It is in such a way that they are unable to be impartial. Seldom is there someone who recognizes another is indeed good and drums up support for him as if it came from his own mouth. It is in such a way that they are impartial but unable to be influential. This has led those who are insecure, and even those of inferior talent among them, to exclaim, “Of those currently in positions of power, are there none who are impartial? Are there none who are without favorites?” There are those who are never willing to express admiration for even a single positive quality, with the idea that [promoting others] is “none of my business.” What’s more, they worry those with whom they converse are not equally well-disposed towards them. This leads the various 54  The phrase suo gui 所歸, lit. “[the place] to which one might return,” was an oft-used euphemism for patronage. See, e.g., Han Yu’s “Letter Submitted to [Governor] Jia [Dan] of Huazhou” mentioned above. Han Yu guwen jiaozhu huiji, 3402.

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gentlemen [of my generation] to think to themselves privately that their lacking a reputation is not disgraceful. One after another they choose shortcuts and follow crooked ways, gathering en masse and stalking the steps of the chief examiner. So long as those who are close [to the chief examiner] can become famous, then no one questions whether those who have thus become famous are worthy or unworthy, but instead flock to imitate their method. This truly is the current trend of being impatient for advancement and of [hoping] to obtain [it] through improper means. 郁常行乎時輩之間,多酌其言語善者鄙者,而自減盈消息, 其旨稍有可驚,不敢不於許言者言之。今之後學者,或歎曰: 「吁!後學何所歸哉?」此且非宜長者所當聞也,亦非宜長者 所不當聞也。今朝廷先達,病在不能公也,或能公而不能為力 也。覽其文,則讚美稱嗟,無不至也;其間善惡輕重進退,則 心以別矣,此其所以為不能公也;鮮有知其必善而風鼓之,不 啻若自其口出,此其所以為公不能為力。55致使遑遑之倫,其 下才者亦曰:「今夫在位者,其無公歟?其無心歟?」 有一善未嘗肯稱也,意曰非我事也,又慮與之談者不與我符 愛也。是使諸子竊竊然自以無聞為不辱,遂相與擇捷趨邪,紛 屯於主司之跡。親者苟能致譽,則不詰其所以致譽者之賢不 肖,而曹趨之矣。此實今之躁進苟得之風也。 In this passage, Dugu Yu judiciously offers a critique of contemporary examination culture and patronage practices. He opens by narrating his frequent interaction with his peers, his careful evaluation of their strengths and faults, his use of those observations for his own self-improvement, and his practice of praising candidates whose ideas had especially impressed him to those who might be in a position to advance their prospects. This preface serves on the one hand to demonstrate that the critiques he voices in what follows do not originate from him but are instead his reporting of what he has heard from others. On the other hand, it subtly models how Dugu feels patrons should themselves act: engaging in discussions with the younger generation of scholars, recognizing talent when it is encountered, and seeking to recommend those who possess it to men in positions of power. After having acknowledged the potential impropriety of discussing proper patronage practices with Quan, Dugu identifies two problems with the current system. The first problem is that most of those willing to promote candidates 55  The version of this cover letter that appears in Wenyuan yinghua (679.3469) and Tang wen cui (83.549) has shen li 甚力 in place of wei li 為力. I note this because when Quan’s letter paraphrases Dugu’s letter he uses the former. Quan Deyu shi wen ji 42.646 n. 25.

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did so based on their own biases and preferences; those few who were indeed perspicacious and objective were unfortunately ineffective in promoting those they wished to help. The second problem is there were many individuals in a position to offer patronage who were unwilling to do so, either because they believed that promoting others was not their responsibility or because they worried that they were being deceived. The uncertainty candidates felt, magnified by the inconsistent feedback or lack of response they received from prospective patrons, had, Dugu argued, the deleterious effect of leading candidates to believe that success on the civil examinations did not derive from the objective evaluation and recognition of candidates with superior talents but rather arose out of having the right connections. Candidates raced to attach themselves to the cliques of recently successful candidates, calculating that the success of those recent graduates demonstrated they had the connections and skills needed to pass and perhaps, in turn, could help others to pass.56 Rather than focusing on self-improvement and serious study, they instead invested their energies in seeking out shortcuts and improper paths to success.57 In pointing out problems like the above in their cover letters, candidates were often attempting to do more than merely express their dissatisfaction with how difficult it was to find a proper patron or offer their objective evaluation of how these problems negatively influenced the behavior of candidates. This sentiment was particular well expressed in a letter Li Ao 李翱 (772–841) wrote to his patron Yang Yuling 楊於陵 (753–830): “In my humble opinion, the shi at this time whose established conduct was open-hearted and who could be relied upon and given allegiance by the younger generation of scholars were no more than ten people” 竊惟當茲之士,立行光明,可以 為後生之所依歸者,不過十人焉. Li moreover claimed that “Five or six of these people completely lacked any interest in encouraging and guiding others, so that although one might possess talents and virtues that are outstanding or exceptional, it was nevertheless impossible to become known [through them]” 56  This is exactly what happened with Yin Yaofan 殷堯藩 (n.d., jinshi 814). Although the examiner, Wei Guanzhi 韋貫之 (760–821), had originally failed Yin, he reversed himself after having received a strong endorsement of Yin from Yang Hangong 楊漢公 (d. 862?), a student that Wei had passed in the examinations of the previous year. Tang zhiyan jiao zhu 8.167. 57  Bai Juyi offered a similar critique of the behavior of other candidates in the opening of the above-mentioned “Letter to Supervising Secretary Chen,” writing “those requesting an audience at the gates to the residence of the Supervising Secretary are as numerous as trees in a forest and those writings submitted are like a cloud” 給事門屏閑請謁者如 林,獻書者如雲. Bai Juyi ji jianjiao 44.2776–78.

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其五六人,則本無勸誘人之心,雖有卓犖奇怪之賢,固不可得 而知也.58 Cover letters, as with letters in general, were often written with an eye towards their circulation among a wider audience than their nominal addressee. By pointing out within this potentially public forum problems existing within examination culture, candidates were subtly alleging that their addressees could be to some degree complicit in perpetuating those problems. The addressees of cover letters that used this strategy could no longer plausibly deny awareness of these problems. Failure to act “appropriately” demonstrated the addressee’s lack of integrity, a fault that could be aired or exploited by disgruntled candidates. As Li Ao pointed out in his “Letter Expressing Gratitude to Director Yang [Yuling],” when candidates could not find patrons willing to promote them, it was “not merely a problem of later students possessing shallow learning and poor vocabularies” 非獨後進者學淺詞陋之罪也; it was also a problem with “the way of worthies’ lauding and commending, recommending and advancing, having not been achieved” 先達稱譽薦進之道有所不至也.59 In this sense, these observations served an important rhetorical function in candidates’ attempts to get their addressee to respond, even if only to defend themselves or the system against the charges being leveled against them. Dugu continues in the next passage by further elaborating on the potential social repercussions of failing to properly mentor the younger generation of scholars and praising Quan who, contra current custom, follows the model of active patronage practiced by Confucius. He writes: At court you, the great worthy, name what is most important and rectify that which deviates. With those who are already excellent, [you] support them and assist them. With those who are excellent but not yet fully developed, [you] enlighten them and guide them. This lets students everywhere know the proper course to follow. How can this be compared to those who say “This is none of my business”? For if even a single person were to say “this is none of my business,” then ten people will say “this is none of my business,” and then the entire court will say, “this is none of my business.” But if this is none of my business, then there is nothing that is not ‘none of my business.’ If there is nothing that is not ‘none of my business,’ then would not the whole world already have become a

58  Li Ao, “Letter Expressing Gratitude to Director Yang [Yuling]” (Xie Yang langzhong shu 謝楊郎中書), in Quan Tang wen xinbian 635.7176. 59  Ibid.

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desolate and lonely place? In the past Confucius edited the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of Documents, the Record of Rites, and the Canon of Music in order to transform and harmonize his disciples and then the world. If Confucius were also to have said that “this is none of my business,” then how could people today all know of the superior virtue of those seventy disciples or the magnificence of the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of Documents, the Record of Rites, and the Canon of Music? If the seventy disciples were also to have said “this is none of our business,” then who would have advertised the sageliness of Confucius to such a great degree? This is true as well of our culture today, true as well with the great worthies of the court, and it will be true as well with the great men of future generations. If they do not mutually advertise to one another, then won’t the way of culture, propriety, intimate friendship, and reciprocity all be more or less extinguished? 在朝廷大賢,主而名之,驅而正之。於其善者,扶之持之。有 善而未具者,之決導之,使四方學士,知嚮方焉。何如其曰非 我事也?若使一人曰非我事也,十人曰非我事也,舉朝廷皆曰 非我事也,苟非我事,則無所不非我事,無所不非我事,則天 地之間,無乃已寂寥乎?昔孔子飭《詩》 《書》 《禮》 《樂》 ,以 化齊弟子,而至天下。使孔子亦曰非我事也,則今者安盡聞夫 七十子之賢,《詩》 《書》 《禮》 《樂》之盛?七十子亦曰非我事 也,又孰為播孔子之聖如此其大乎?今文亦如是,朝廷先達亦 如是,後之達者亦如是,若不相播,則人文禮義,知己復往之 道,不幾乎息乎? Dugu begins this passage by flatteringly describing Quan as a singular example of a mentor who actively engages with the younger generation, clarifies what is truly important, guides those who have not yet fully developed their talents, and promotes those who are truly deserving. Dugu continues by arguing that engaging with the younger generation of scholars does not merely benefit them; it is also necessary for the continued existence of civilization. Neglecting one’s responsibility to mentor, guide, and recommend the younger generation is ultimately self-destructive: if even this basic responsibility can be shirked, then any responsibility can be disregarded as well, and society ultimately will fall apart. By contrast, fully investing oneself in educating and properly socializing the younger generation, as Confucius did, will have tremendous benefit. It was in seeking to fulfill his responsibilities as a mentor that Confucius not only produced a generation of virtuous exemplars but also the corpus of classical learning that continues to be studied, followed, and admired centuries

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later.60 None of these, Dugu claims, would have been produced if Confucius, like those in power today, had claimed that mentoring the younger generation properly was not his responsibility, and the loss—culture, propriety, friendship, and proper relations—would have been tremendous. In addition to arguing for the immense value of active patronage to society as a whole, Dugu also highlights the immediate value to the patron personally as well: as he points out, the posthumous renown and fame that Confucius enjoyed resulted from the diligent efforts of his many worthy disciples. Establishing a patron-client relationship with talented individuals such as himself, Dugu insinuates, could also serve Quan’s personal interests, enhancing his good reputation among contemporary and future audiences. This argument for the value of the cover letter author to the potential patron was often made in cover letters, with differing degrees of directness. Huangfu Shi 皇甫湜 (777?–835?), for example, claimed in his “Letter Submitted to Grand Master Li of Jiangxi” (Shang Jiangxi Li daifu shu 上江西李大夫書) that patrons needed talented subordinates in order to accomplish great deeds: Even a sage like Tang Yao, if he had not gotten the right person, would not have controlled the flood and dispelled the calamity. How much more so in the case of those who do not equal him? 人無所知,雖賢如仲尼,窮死而道屯,況其下者乎?未得其 人,雖聖如唐堯,水不抑而凶未去,況其下者乎.61 This assertion on the part of the cover letter writers seemed to have not been entirely inaccurate; talented literati were often responsible for publicly lauding the virtues of their patrons at social gatherings or commemorating their words and deeds after they had died. Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–864), for example, publicly praised the examiner who passed him, Gao Ying 高郢 (740–811), in a poem of congratulations written when Gao was promoted in early 801 to the 60  Confucius is often cited in cover letters as an example of a model patron. Li Ao in his letter to Yang Yuling, e.g., cited Confucius in describing his ideal patron: “Confucius said, ‘Promote those you know.’ The ancient gentlemen, with regard to the excellence of people, feared that they would not know them. Once they knew them, they were ashamed if they were unable to promote them. When they were able to promote them, they were ashamed if they were unable to make them successful” 孔子曰:舉爾所知。古君子 於人之善,懼不能知;既知之,恥不能舉之;能舉之,恥不能成之. Quan Tang wen xinbian 635.7176. 61  Quan Tang wen xinbian 685.7762–63.

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position of Chamberlain for Ceremonials 太常卿.62 The value of patronage even extended beyond the life of the patron himself. The posthumous record of Li Ao’s patron, Yang Yuling 楊於陵 (753–830), relies in part on the tomb epitaph inscription and a sacrificial oration that Li Ao wrote for his patron after Yang passed away.63 Dugu’s cover letter closes with a final explanation of his motives for writing his letter as well as one additional request: I, Yu, am unworthy, and am ashamed for the profound favor I have received from you, the great worthy. I do not dare on top of this to recommend myself [to you] by means of false analogy. Rather it is my hope that you, the great worthy, will select a group of worthies like the seventy disciples. This is why I also make comparisons between Confucius and you, the great worthy. What do you think? I say no more. Yu bows twice. 郁不肖,辱承大賢之心深矣,非又敢以假喻自薦也,意欲以大 賢擇眾賢,如七十子之徒,是亦方孔子於大賢也。何如?不 宣。郁再拜。 Dugu’s closing lines echo the opening lines of his letter, reiterating the gratitude he feels for the support he has received from Quan. Dismissing the idea that his letter represents an attempt to further ingratiate himself with Quan, he expresses his desire to enter into a relationship with Quan analogous to that of Confucius with his disciples. His appeal attempts to recast what might otherwise be viewed as the exact kind of favoritism he rails against in his cover letter into something more socially acceptable, that of an honored teacher and 62  Bai Juyi, “With My Fellow Same-year Graduands Celebrating the Appointment of our [Former] Chief Examiner, Vice Minister [Gao Ying] to the Position of Chamberlain for Ceremonials, Feasting Together in the Pavilion of Minister Xiao [Xin 昕 (702–791)]” (Yu zhu tongnian he zuozhu shilang xin bai taichang tong yan Xiao shangshu ting zi 與諸同 年賀座主侍郎新拜太常同宴蕭尚書亭子), Bai Juyi ji jianjiao 13.716–17. 63  Li Ao, “Tomb Epitaph Inscription for the Late Sire Yang, Retired Grand Master of the Palace with Golden Seal and Purple Ribbon and Vice Director of the Right in the Department of State Affairs, Supreme Pillar of State and Dynasty-Founding Duke of Hongnong Commandery Granted Fief over Two Thousand Households, Posthumously Titled Minister of Works of the Tang” (Tang gu jinzi guanglü dafu shangshu you pushe zhi shi shang zhuguo Hongnong jun kaiguo gong shi yi er qian hu zeng Sikong Yang gong muzhiming 唐故金紫光綠大夫尚書右僕射致仕上柱國弘農郡開國公食邑二千戶 贈司空楊公墓誌銘) and “Sacrificial Prayer to Vice Director Yang” (Ji Yang pushe wen 祭 楊僕射文), in Quan Tang wen xinbian 639.7206–8 and 640.7222 respectively.

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diligent student.64 The cover letter ends conventionally, with Dugu acknowledging that he has nothing more to say and so closes the conversation by “bowing twice.” 3

Quan Deyu’s “Letter in Reply to Cultivated Talent Dugu”

Not long after Quan received Dugu’s letter, he brushed a reply. I have considered the letter you sent on the fourth day [of this month] and the new compositions you shared. They are erudite and exceptional, possessing ideas that will establish your reputation far and wide. With regard to kindness and benevolence, [the compositions] are sincere and prudent in the minutest details. [They are] truly excellent, truly excellent. As for your talent, ambition, and years, my son, all three are rich. You will reinvigorate your family’s reputation as easily as water pouring from the tiled drainspout65 and [the patronage of] great smiths and expert craftsmen will surely arrive without your seeking them out. This is especially so when each and every day brings [you] new greatness! As for the camphor tree, the small pearl, the sword Moye and the [Lady] Mao Qiang, in the end do not fear that concealing it, boxing it, scabbarding it, or screening it will bring them ill or that they are being obscured by the swollen and gnarled saplings, the river pebbles, the dull copper blades, and the Lady Residing Tumor. It is merely that success can come at a fast or slow pace and that’s all. Your letter asks, “if one person were amazed by me then there would already be many who were. How can I be compared to the common run of the mill?” This sincerely gets it. 省四日書問,兼示新文,閎博峻異,有立言致遠之旨焉。其於 惠愛,纖悉厚重,甚善甚善。以吾子才志與年,三者皆富,以 家聲自振,若建瓴決水,大冶良工,必有不蘄至而至者。況以 日日新、又日新之盛哉? 64  Dugu’s characterization of Quan as Confucius is another example of how a candidate might attempt to redefine the relationship with a patron in more socially acceptable form, in this case by characterizing Quan as a contemporary Confucius. In so doing Dugu is also performing the same kind of “advertising” of the reputation of his patron that he claimed Confucius’ disciples had done for the Sage. 65  That is, it is easy to accomplish something from an advantageous position. See Shi ji 8.382; trans. Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, II.71.

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夫豫章、珠璣、鏌鋣、毛嬙,終不慮隱之、櫝之、襓之、帷 之之為患,而為擁腫、礫石、銅鈍、宿瘤之排蔽,但發有疾徐 耳。來問云:「一人驚之,亦已多矣。豈與族凡校耶?」此誠 得之。 From even a cursory reading of Quan’s response to Dugu’s cover letter, it is clear that Quan had carefully considered the concerns Dugu expressed and the questions he had raised, addressing them one by one in his own letter. In the first half of his letter, Quan first responds to Dugu’s question about whether he was ordinary or exceptional. He repeatedly reassures Dugu that his writings are indeed “truly excellent” (shen shan 甚善),66 that they would soon bring fame and honor to his family, and that, without needing to seek them out, he would undoubtedly soon acquire the support of “great smiths and expert craftsmen” (daye lianggong 大冶良工). Quan then continues by further attempting to allay Dugu’s fears that his reluctance to flaunt himself before the eminent and powerful has harmed his chances of success in the examinations or caused his talents to be hidden from view behind the throng of those with more modest endowments but more active social calendars. Men of talent, Quan claims, will inevitably be recognized; this, he points out, is something that Dugu also already understands. The fact that Dugu does not yet enjoy the fame that his talents merit is merely because recognition can happen quickly or slowly. In so claiming, Quan at the same time neatly disavows any favoritism on his part: Dugu’s talents are selfevident and will in due course be recognized, regardless of Quan’s assistance. The bulk of the remainder of Quan’s letter responds to Dugu’s reported critiques of examination culture and patronage practices. He writes: Your letter also stated, “The problem with the foremost worthies is that they are unable to be impartial, or are able to be impartial but are unable to be very influential.” Nowadays as for the torrents of those [who call on the foremost worthies], one cannot make it to the point of distinguishing [between them] and therefore for the time being can only treat everyone courteously. When it comes to elevating prestige and advancing reputation however, one then clamps shut one’s mouth and binds up one’s tongue. This is a problem common throughout the world. The direct influence 66  I wonder if Quan’s praise here is somewhat tongue in cheek, in that one of Dugu’s complaints was that when they read the writings submitted by examination candidates, those foremost personages of the court would always “praise their excellence and sigh in admiration” 讚美稱嗟.

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of a humble fellow like myself is insufficient [to promote someone] yet even I still dread those who come constantly seeking favor with me, to serve them as a ford or a branch. Those who have managed to acquire my favor have been only very few, yet even so how I could put a stop to this? Since ancient times, those who have not yet made it look for help from those who have made it; when was it ever not like this? As for comparing me to the Master and his seventy disciples, I dare not accept this. I have read your letter over and over again with awe, lacking the words to give shape to my bosom feelings. [The discussion of] everything else that is admirable and important [in your letter] will have to wait until our next conversation. Deyu bows his head. 又云:「先達病不能公,或公而不能甚力。」今夫滔滔者,或 辯之不至,而苟善待之。及揚聲延譽,則鉗口結舌,大凡舉世 之病也。如鄙夫者,直力不足耳,亦懼招倈奔走,為津為岐, 至有竊所愛者則寡矣,又豈能廢是也?從古未達者之望達者, 何嘗不如是耶?先師七十子所儗,豈敢當也。 三復戁然,無言喻懷,其他慕重,續俟會話。德輿頓首。 In this section, after having reiterated the critique made by Dugu in his cover letter, Quan seeks to explain why those in positions of authority act as they do. He begins by acknowledging some of Dugu’s claims: foremost worthies do indeed seem to treat everyone with equal courtesy, fail to make distinctions among those who call on them, and remain silent when the time comes to offer recommendations. This problem however arises from the sheer number of visitors they receive; it is just not possible for them to fully evaluate everyone that comes to see them. Even someone like himself, who he humbly claims occupies too lowly a position to directly influence the outcome of civil examinations, is forced to deal with far more visitors than he likes. He states however that this practice is not going to change: it has always been the case that those who have not yet established themselves in society seek the help of those who already have. Quan also notes that, while not many, there have also been those who he himself has favored in the past. Quan’s claim highlights the very reasonable concern on the part of potential patrons for their need to be judicious in selecting who they would support.67 Patrons often had to deal with candidates 67  Barrett mentions the idea of circulated writings before the exam and the exam itself as a form of “continuous assessment.” He moreover writes that “indeed, so prevalent were the principles of collective responsibility and guilt by association in traditional China that no

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who attempted to pass off excellent examples of writing as their own,68 or claimed to be better students than they really were.69 Examination officials in particular were also subject to the wishes of those more powerful than themselves. As described in a later Song account, in selecting who would pass, [examiners] would take into consideration their fear of the comments and critiques of the many powerful individuals, or perhaps [they] would be coerced by the politically powerful, or bound by [their ties with] friends and relatives, or worn down by the younger generation; all were common scenarios that were unavoidable. 故其取人也,畏於譏議多公而審,亦或脅於權勢,或撓於親 故,或累於子弟,皆常情所不能免者。70 Even when an examiner wished to be entirely “impartial” in his evaluation of candidates, he was not always able to do so; Quan Deyu himself was once given a list of twenty candidates by his superior, Li Shi 李實 (d. 815), and told, “You should pass them in this order. If you don’t, then you will be exiled, and then it will be too late for regrets” 可依次第之; 不爾,必出外官,悔無及也.71 The current practices and culture of the examination, Quan thus suggests, while not perfect, can nonetheless not be discarded. In the final lines of his letter, Dugu once again reiterates his admiration of Dugu’s talents and literary skill and states that he is looking forward to continuing their conversation when next they meet. It is in the conclusion to Quan’s letter that we see that Dugu has indeed realized the objectives of his previous letter: Quan has not only written him a letter in response to his, answered the questions he posed and rendered the positive evaluation of his talents and one was likely to take a chance by furthering the career of a complete stranger whose later conduct might have unfortunate repercussions.” Barrett, Li Ao, 59. 68  Tang zhiyan jiao zhu 9.176. 69  One example that Li Shangyin 李商隱 (ca. 813–ca. 858) cites under the category of “Misleading Statements” (Man ren yu 謾人語) in his Miscellanea (Zazuan 雜纂) is “To say of oneself that one studies hard” 自說勤苦讀書. See Mair, “Scroll Presentation,” 635. Another example of misrepresentation is that of the candidate who unsuccessfully attempted to pass of a scroll of writings that he had purchased on the market as being of his own composition. His plagiarism failed because he unfortunately submitted this scroll to the original author who recognized his own work. See the entry “Cultivated Talent Li” (Liu xiucai 李秀才) in Da Tang xinyu, 205; Taiping guangji 6.261.2036–37. 70  “Han Yu Recommends Scholars” (Han Wengong jian shi 韓文公薦士), Rongzhai suibi, 686–87. 71  Jiu Tang shu 135.3731–32. For other examples of the coercion of examination officials, see Tang zhiyan jiao zhu 8.157 and 9.186.

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abilities that he was hoping to hear, he has also invited Dugu to continue their conversation in the future.



Dugu’s “Letter Submitted to Attendant Gentleman Quan of the Ministry of Rites” is in many regards a very conventional example of the cover letter genre. As with many other cover letters, it identified the exigency motivating its composition as the only possible recourse for trying to determine whether they truly possessed the qualifications necessary to succeed in the jinshi examination. It used the cover letter as a means to showcase the candidate’s erudition and literary skills and to communicate his goals and ambitions. Finally, it employed a variety of rhetorical tactics—framing the relationship between writer and addressee in ways designed to flatter the recipient, encourage a response, and make their interactions more socially acceptable, using reported speech to introduce topics of a delicate or critical nature, expressing worries about recognition, proper conduct, and the presence of bias in the selection process, and insinuating the invaluable services a talented protégé would be able to provide—to enhance the persuasiveness of the letter and increase the likelihood of achieving its objective, namely to elicit a response from the addressee and in so doing further establish the network of support required in order to pass the civil examination. At the same time, the existence of Dugu’s letter poses an important, albeit separate, question about the role of the cover letter, and more broadly of circulating scrolls, in the mid-Tang. Most candidates who circulated scrolls did so in an attempt to acquire the social connections they lacked. This was not an issue for Dugu Yu, whose father was one of the most eminent literati of his generation and who included among his associates many of the most prominent literary figures of the time. Did he circulate his scrolls therefore because circulating scrolls had become so common that, regardless of necessity, candidates needed to follow this practice as well? Was it seen as another means by which to avoid charges of favoritism, by offering concrete evidence that graduands like Dugu Yu, who might easily be suspected of having relied upon pre-existing relationships with influential figures in order to pass, were indeed actually qualified to do so on their own? Quan’s response indicates that many of the conventional rhetorical strategies used by letter writers provided, at the very least, a reason for the addressee to respond. In his letter, Quan answered many of the questions posed or implied in Dugu’s letter: Does he possess talent? Why has he not yet been recognized? Has his conduct made him easier to ignore or overlook? And why do patrons act as they do towards those who circulate their scrolls among them?

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He did not accept Dugu’s flattery comparing him to Confucius but maintained the relationship of senior to junior family member in addressing Dugu as “my son” (wu zi 吾子). Dugu’s successful effort to cultivate the patronage of Quan Deyu seems to have paid off. Dugu obtained the jinshi degree in his next attempt; along with nineteen others, he passed the examinations in 798. He moreover seems to have impressed Quan Deyu to an even greater degree than he had perhaps originally intended: shortly after he passed the examinations he married Quan’s eldest daughter.72 Bibliography Bai Juyi ji jianjiao 白居易集箋校. Edited by Zhu Jincheng 朱金城. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1988. Barrett, T. H. Li Ao: Buddhist, Taoist, or Neo-Confucian? New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Cheng Qianfan quan ji 程千帆全集. Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000. Cheng Qianfan. Tang dai jinshi xingjuan yu wenxue 唐代進士行卷與文學. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980. Da Tang xinyu 大唐新語. Compiled by Liu Su 劉肅 (fl. 806–20). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984. Dengkeji kao buzheng 登科記考補正. Compiled by Xu Song 徐松 (1781–1848); edited by Meng Erdong 孟二冬. Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chubanshe, 2003. Ebrey, Patricia. “T’ang Guides to Verbal Etiquette.” HJAS 45 (1985): 581–613. Fu Xuancong 傅璇琮. Tangdai keju yu wenxue 唐代科舉與文學. 2nd ed. Xi’an: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1986. Reprint, 1995.

72  Han Yu guwen jiaozhu huiji, 2113. It does not seem to have been uncommon for the patrons of examination candidates or their friends to marry their daughters to successful graduands. Liu Zongyuan who also wrote to Quan before passing the jinshi examination in 793 married the daughter of Quan’s close friend Yang Pingzhi 楊凴之. In an anecdote recorded in the Tang shi jishi, a man named Lu Chu 盧儲 was brought to the attention of Li Ao because of the actions of Li’s daughter. Lu presented his scrolls to Li Ao, who accepted them but laid them aside without reading them. His eldest daughter did read them however and told her maid that their author would one day rank first in the imperial examinations. Li Ao subsequently married his daughter to Lu Chu, and the following year Lu did indeed pass the palace examination with top honors. See Mair, “Scroll Presentation,” 52; Tang shi jishi 52.1427.

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Han Yu guwen jiaozhu huiji 韓愈古文校注彙輯. Edited by Luo Liantian 羅聯添. Taipei: Guoli bianyi guan, 2003. Hartman, Charles. Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Kinney, Anne Behnke. Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü zhuan of Liu Xiang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Lienü zhuan buzhu 列女傳補注. Edited by Wang Zhaoyuan 王照圓 (1763–1851). Shanghai: Huadong shifandaxue chubanshe, 2012. Liu Qinli 劉琴麗. Tangdai juzi kekao shenghuo yanjiu 唐代舉子科考生活研究. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2010. Liu Yuxi quanji biannian jiaozhu 劉禹錫全集編年校注. Edited by Tao Min 陶敏 and Tao Hongyu 陶紅雨. Changsha: Yuelu shu she, 2003. Liu Zongyuan ji 柳宗元集. Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju, 1979. Lu Zhaolin ji jiao zhu 盧照鄰集校注. Edited by Li Yunyi 李雲逸. Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju, 1998. Luo Liantian 羅聯添. “Lun Tangren shangshu yu xingjuan” 論唐人上書與行卷. In Tangdai wenxue lunji 唐代文學論集, 33–135. Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1989. Lynn, Richard, trans. The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Mair, Victor. “Scroll Presentation in the T’ang Dynasty.” HJAS 38 (1978): 35–60. Mengzi zhushu 孟子注疏. In Shisanjing zhushu zhengli ben 十三經注疏整理本, edited by Li Xueqin 李學勤. Taipei: Taiwan guji chuban, 2001. Moore, Oliver. Rituals of Recruitment in Tang China: Reading an Annual Programme in the “Collected Statements” by Wang Dingbao (870–940). Leiden: Brill, 2004. Nienhauser, William H., ed. The Grand Scribe’s Records. Taipei: SMC Publishing, 2002. Quan Deyu shi wen ji 權德輿詩文集. Edited by Guo Guangwei 郭廣偉. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2008. Quan Tang wen xinbian 全唐文新編. Edited by “Quan Tang wen xinbian” bianji weiyuanhui 全唐文新編編輯委員會. Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 2000. Richter, Antje. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Rongzhai suibi 容齋隨筆. Compiled by Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123–1202). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006. Shang Yongliang 尚永亮. Keju zhi lu yu huanhai fuchen: Tangdai wenren de shihuan shengya 科舉之路與宦海浮沉:唐代文人的仕宦生涯. Taibei: Wenjin chubanshe, 2000. Shi ji 史記. Compiled by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (?145–?86 BCE). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.

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Taiping guangji 太平廣記. Compiled by Li Fang 李昉 (925–996) et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, rpt. 1994. Tang shi jishi 唐詩紀事. Edited by Ji Yougong 計有功 (fl. 1121–61). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju , 1965. Tang wen cui 唐文粹. Compiled by Yao Xuan 姚鉉 (968–1020). Taibei: Jinxiu, 1992. Tang zhiyan jiao zhu 唐摭言校注. Compiled by Wang Dingbao 王定保 (870–940). Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2003. Teng, Ssu-yü, trans. Family Instructions for the Yen Clan: Yen-shih chia-hsün by Yen Chihtui. Leiden: Brill, 1968. Wenxin diaolong zhu 文心雕龍註. Compiled by Fan Wenlan 范文瀾 (1891–1969). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1958. Wenyuan yinghua 文苑英華. Compiled by Li Fang 李昉 (925–996) et al. Taibei: Zhong yan yuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 2008. Wu Liyu 吳麗娛. Tang li zhi yi: Zhonggu shuyi yanjiu 唐禮摭遺: 中古書儀硏究. Beijing: Shangwu yinshu guan, 2002. Wu Zongguo 吳宗國. Tangdai keju zhidu yanjiu 唐代科舉制度研究. Shenyang: Liaoning daxue chubanshe, 1992. Xu Song 徐松. Deng ke ji kao bu zheng 登科記考補正. Edited by Meng Erdong 孟二 冬. Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chu ban she, 2003. Yan Guorong 嚴國榮. Quan Deyu yanjiu 權德輿研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006. Yang Bo 楊波. Chang’an de chuntian: Tangdai keju yu jinshi shenghuo長安的春天: 唐代科舉與進士生活. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007. Yanshi jiaxun jijie 顏氏家訓集解. Compiled by Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–ca. 591); commentary by Wang Liqi 王利器. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993. Zhao Heping 趙和平. Dunhuang xieben shuyi yanjiu 煌寫本書儀研究. Taibei: Xin wenfeng chuban, 1993.

chapter 18

The Inscription of Emotion in Mid-Tang Collegial Letters Anna M. Shields Ah, Ziqing! In knowing others, we most value knowing one another’s hearts and minds. 嗟乎子卿!人之相知,貴相知心。 1 In his “Letter in Reply to Director Xue of Daozhou Discussing the Etiquette of Letters,” the mid-Tang writer Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫 (772–842) left us a tantalizing fragment in which he worries about the altered styles of letter-writing in recent decades. Although he appears most interested in the correct terms of address for men of different ranks, he notes that, “after I had been in exile for a decade, I dwelled in obscurity and meanness, hearing nothing of the world, and the only people to whom I wrote letters of inquiry were intimate relations and close friends, those who would not change [their styles]; but contemporary styles [for letters] were changing, and I had no way to learn them.”2 Liu’s concern about the changes in letter conventions expresses not merely the distress of an exile long out of the capital hoping not to embarrass himself in correspondence; it also points to a broader interest in the early ninth century for socially and culturally “correct” writing, an interest indicated also by the proliferation of etiquette manuals (shuyi 書儀) in the second half of the Tang dynasty.3 Liu’s offhand comment that the styles of letters that he exchanged with his “intimate relations and close friends” did not change is equally illuminating, since it suggests quite reasonably that the social interactions of letters to those recipients were more important than attention to changes to formal 1  From “Letter [att. to Li Ling] in Reply to Su Wu [Ziqing]” (“Da Su Wu shu” 答蘇武書), Wen xuan 41.1848. 2  Liu Yuxi ji jianzheng, 1:267. 3  As Zhao Heping demonstrates, Liu was right to worry: in his analysis of terms of address for officials in three Tang shuyi, Zhao shows that within a century (the span of time covered by three Tang shuyi he examines), those conventions shifted significantly. See Zhao, Dunhuang shuyi yanjiu, 190–91. This 2011 volume is Zhao’s expansion on some of the same research topics found in Zhou and Zhao, Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_020

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epistolary etiquette. Since his emotional ties with those people did not change, he implies, he had no need to alter his customary style in writing them. Liu Yuxi’s anxiety was focused on the proprieties for addressing those outside his close circle, and therefore, his brief remarks tell us little about the stylistic or rhetorical expectations of letters sent to friends and colleagues in the mid-Tang period, or the influence of the style of those more familiar letters on epistolary practices more broadly considered. The collections of mid-Tang writers contain many more letters, and many more “collegial” letters (which I define below), than the collections of individual writers either before the An Lushan Rebellion (755–63) or from the last few decades of the dynasty, a period for which letters in general are relatively scarce. Some of the largest individual collections from the entire dynasty date from the mid-Tang, including those of Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846), Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元  (773–819), Yuan Zhen 元稹 (779–831), and Liu Yuxi, and letters are wellrepresented in those collections, particularly those of Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan. With respect to their role in culture, letters became an important venue for mid-Tang intellectual and literary debate, and for many ninth-century political exiles (which includes all of the major mid-Tang writers at one moment or another), letters were sometimes the only means by which they could conduct those debates. Moreover, evidence found within mid-Tang letters suggest that shu 書 (letters) of various sorts, along with a greater variety of prose genres, were becoming more prominently featured in the literary portfolios men used to seek patrons and forge reputations.4 Most extant mid-Tang letters are, like most extant letters from before the era of printing, both formal and political, concerned with an individual’s career and official duties. But we also find in mid-Tang corpora more letters sent to colleagues and friends alongside the many letters sent to patrons and political superiors. The prominent presence of letters in certain mid-Tang collections and the discussions of letter exchanges found within the texts themselves reveal that mid-Tang literati circulated their letters, even ones addressed to individual colleagues or friends, within their circles and beyond them, deploying them as proof of their literary talents and intellectual interests. Letters to colleagues and friends were also critical social tools for negotiating delicate

4  See, e.g., the letter by Li Guan 李觀 sent to then-Chief Examiner Lu Zhi 陸贄, in which he lists ten pieces he is submitting for Lu’s perusal; of the ten, three are letters on different topics. Quan Tang wen 533.5415; see also Fu Xuancong, Tang dai keju, 264–65; Moore, Rituals of Recruitment, 142–43; Ditter, “Genre and the Transformation of Writing,” 138–39.

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relationships over distance and time.5 The presence in mid-Tang corpora of more familiar letters—such as those written to colleagues and friends—suggests that mid-Tang literati had a greater interest in preserving texts that documented private life and sentiments, an impression confirmed by the greater presence of episodes from private life in other mid-Tang literary genres, such as poetry, funerary texts, and parting prefaces.6 At the same time, the etiquette manuals that included models for letters to friends (pengyou shuyi  朋友書儀) or even the letter models in more comprehensive manuals for “auspicious and inauspicious [occasions]” ( jixiong shuyi 吉凶書儀), though rich in both literary and social detail, bear almost no resemblance to the extant letters to friends and colleagues in mid-Tang corpora.7 This study examines the linguistic and rhetorical features used to inscribe emotion in mid-Tang “collegial” letters, focusing on anger and affection in particular. I define “collegial letters” as letters sent between men of similar rank and status who were already known to one another. The goal is not only to learn more about the function of emotion in the genre of letters specifically, but also to contribute to our understanding of emotional expression in literary writing in the mid-Tang period more broadly. Given the turn towards private life that we see in poetry and other texts from the era, what degree of personal detail, including personal feeling, was common to collegial letters? How might we reconstruct the conventions for emotional expression in such letters? What larger objectives of collegial letters might have influenced the expression of 5  For a discussion of the conventions and circulation of Tang letters and the subgenre of “cover letters” in particular, see Ditter, “Genre and the Transformation of Writing,” 101–7 and Ditter’s essay in this volume. 6  On the greater presence of private life in mid-Tang writing, see Owen, The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’ and McMullen, State and Scholars in T’ang China. 7  Patricia Ebrey notes this in her important early article, “T’ang Guides,” 604, 608–9. Wu Liyu in Tang li zhiyi has examined a number of pengyou shuyi from Dunhuang, dating to the early medieval period and to the Tang, and transcribes and analyzes a number of the monthly correspondence models, which rely heavily on parallel prose and formulae for expressing feelings towards the friend, as I will discuss below. She also notes, judging both from extant examples from Dunhuang as well as the bibliographical evidence for Tang shuyi, that the earlier forms of pengyou shuyi do not seem to have been especially popular in the 9th c., despite ninth-century authors’ interest in other issues of social ritual and etiquette, as evidenced by the many titles for shuyi texts dating to the first half of the 9th c. (pp. 4–29). Wu also points out that letters by ninth-century writers such as Li Shangyin and Linghu Chu, advocates of parallel prose style in other forms as well, tend to show greater resemblance to shuyi models, and that the so-called guwen writers of the mid-Tang seem to have had little influence on letter styles in the succeeding generations. The question of the longterm influence of mid-Tang collegial letters (e.g., on letter-writers in the Northern Song) remains unexplored.

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emotion? I propose that the pervasive concerns expressed by mid-Tang literati about sincerity, cheng 誠, authenticity, zhen 真, and trust, xin 信, and their concomitant suspicion of hypocrisy and falseness, led many writers to strive for an affective style in collegial letters that avoided the emotional excess and parallel prose form of conventional social letters. The extant letters also reveal that mid-Tang writers did not avoid affective display altogether, as they might in letters sent to superiors, but instead experimented with a variety of syntactic and rhetorical techniques, using emotional expression to support intellectual content, and weaving their emotional dispositions into the fabric of the text as a whole. The styles we find in these letters can be read collectively as a powerful counter-aesthetic that set itself not only against the parallelistic style that was expected in many mid-Tang prose forms, including letters, but also against the relative lack of affect in the more formal, political letters of Tang public epistolary culture. These mid-Tang collegial letters draw upon emotional responses as a way to frame their self-representations and intellectual debates, and in so doing, they intensify the urgency of the concerns that writers hoped to convey. Perhaps more than any other genre, medieval letters functioned as sociotexts, used both to communicate information and to negotiate and sustain social relations. In fulfilling those roles, letters required an appropriate expression of feeling from the writer towards the recipient, whether of humility, concern, affection, shame, or any other emotion, and the feelings expressed had to match the needs of specific social situations.8 My focus on emotions in letters draws on recent research in the humanities on the critical relationship between emotion and intellect,9 as well as the ancient Chinese link between qing 情, the emotions, and literary creativity, whether defined as poetry, shi 詩, or more broadly as wen 文.10 In the case of emotions in Tang letters, I focus less 8   For a useful discussion of early modern letters’ function as sociotexts, see Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 15–18. 9   There are many different versions in the humanities and social sciences of “the affective turn.” Contemporary approaches to affect and the emotions range from the social constructionist (inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, e.g.) to those that draw on research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (such as Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling or Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions), with many other positions in between. Scholars of Chinese literature and culture have in recent decades begun to historicize the study of qing for different eras and texts; see, e.g., the essays collected in Eifring, Love and Emotions and Santangelo, Love, Hatred and Other Passions. 10  The traditional theoretical link between qing and wen (that literature was born out of one’s responses to circumstances) appears very early in the tradition, perhaps most famously codified in the “Great Preface” to the Classic of Poetry, and was a commonplace

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on the theory of emotional states—what were called either the “Six Emotions” or “Seven Emotions” in medieval texts11—and instead consider the controlled display of affect in crafted literary utterances. The degree to which literati believed that literary writing should express feeling—especially personal feeling—varied widely in Chinese history not just from period to period but also according to social occasion, as well as according to the gender and class of writers and recipients.12 As I discuss below, medieval etiquette guides for letters were filled with forms for both positive and negative emotional expression (affection and grief, for example). Their models suggest that statements of feeling were expected in letters written for occasions such as betrothal, mourning, and separation, and furthermore, that the specific terms for degrees of feeling had to be chosen carefully for one’s audience and one’s relationship (superior/ inferior, familiar/distant) to the addressee. However, in contrast to the need for affect in letters for social occasions, the great body of letters concerning official matters extant from the Tang and earlier periods suggests that emotional display—like personal information more generally—was either absent or greatly attenuated in letters. Letters composed for formal political contexts emphasized persuasion and evidence as well as appropriate politeness and deference; they contain few references to personal of medieval literary culture; see, e.g., mid-Tang writer Liu Mian’s 柳冕 comment in his “Letter to Lu of Huazhou Discussing wen” (Yu Huzhou Lu dafu lun wen shu 與滑州盧 大夫論文書): “Now wen is born from qing, and [the various forms of] qing are born from grief and joy. Grief and joy are born out of order and disorder. Therefore the junzi is moved by grief and joy and thereby composes writing in order to understand the root of order and disorder” 夫文生於情,情生於哀樂,哀樂生於治亂。故君子感哀樂而 為文章以知治亂之本. Quan Tang wen 527.12a. 11  A search of the Quan Tang wen yields almost even numbers of uses of 六情 and 七情, although the “seven emotions” term appears more frequently in texts from the mid- and late Tang. The “Liyun” chapter of the Li ji is often noted as the source of the “seven” list; it includes happiness, anger, grief, fear, affection, hate, and desire (喜, 怒, 哀, 懼, 愛, 惡, 欲); Xunzi gives both a list of six (without affection, ai 愛) and a list of seven (with le 樂 in place of the Li ji’s “fear”). For a good introduction to the early sequences and expansion of the basic emotions, see Middendorf, “Basic Emotion Terms.” Many modern scholars of emotions consider love or affection to be a secondary or social emotion rather than a primary or basic emotion; however, Middendorf’s research suggests that the emotion sequences and lists in early China tended to develop conceptually as positive/negative binaries, and ai appears paired with wu early in Warring States texts (yu, “desire,” was latest and without a pair; p. 138). For a study of the broader range of the term qing in early China, see Harbsmeier, “The Semantics of Qíng.” 12  David R. Knechtges discusses this in his study of anthology compilation in the early medieval period, “Culling the Weeds,” 207–11.

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feeling unless they were immediately relevant to the topic under discussion. Mid-Tang collegial letters, however, fall between these two major types of letters both socially and linguistically. They were of non-specific occasion (could be written for any purpose) and therefore opened up a greater range of style registers and affects; they were composed within a relationship where excessive attention to politeness and deference was unnecessary, even unwanted, and direct speaking more possible; and they often concerned issues whose meaning was under discussion, allowing writers to offer more questions, doubt, and reflection in lieu of reporting, flattery, or persuasion. The more open social space of collegial letters also gave writers greater room for literary experiment since, from the perspective of medieval genre conventions, letters were among the least regulated of any prose form widely practiced in the Tang. The inscription of emotion in mid-Tang collegial letters also raises the question of representing the public and private spheres in Tang literary writing, and where letters were conceptualized with respect to those realms. David Pattinson has argued that one reason we have few “private letters” extant from the early medieval period was that the wide circulation of letters discouraged writers from entrusting truly private matters to such texts; furthermore, if trivial or personal matters were entrusted to letters, that might also have made them less likely to be preserved in collections. Regarding letters to friends, he notes, “well-written letters expressing friendship were preserved, but the tone was often morally uplifting rather than intimate, and they were anyway not numerous.”13 The question of the ways that emotional expression intersected with the issue of public and private spheres in medieval China is important but as yet little-studied. It is certainly the case that most Tang letters on political and official matters tend not to include expressions of sentiment other than the merely conventional, usually at the openings and closings of letters. However, the many extant medieval letters expressing sorrow, longing, and grief—which would have been shared with contemporaries even before being placed into collected works—demonstrate clearly that emotional expression was not limited to private or intimate exchanges, nor was it a marker of informality. We may simply not possess enough evidence of familiar letters from medieval corpora to conclude more about the question. But this returns us to the significance of mid-Tang letters in the history of epistolary practices in China. If, as we know, a bibliographical distinction between formal and informal letters does not emerge until the Northern Song, with the preservation of

13  Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter-Writing,” 97–98.

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brief letters known as chidu 尺牘 or shujian 書簡,14 the range of emotional expression found in mid-Tang letters strongly suggests that the mid-Tang was a transitional moment in the history not merely for the forms and expectations of letters but also for their preservation. With respect to the collections of Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, we know that both authors were meticulous about the selection (and deletion) of items in their corpus, and therefore that the letters that have survived represent deliberate choices.15 In the cases of Liu Zongyuan and Han Yu, on the other hand, we know less about the authors’ own preservation of materials but can assume that in the process of collecting their works undertaken by Liu Yuxi for Liu Zongyuan and by Li Han 李漢, Han’s son-in-law, and others for Han Yu,16 the intellectual content and literary merit of certain letters addressed to friends and colleagues were seen as worthy of preservation and transmission despite—perhaps even because of—the glimpses of the author’s personal feeling they revealed.17 At the very least, this suggests a changing ninth-century view of the boundaries of an author’s identity that a literary collection was intended to transmit. Beyond that, the extraordinary diversity of letters we find within the corpora of a few authors such as Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan—letters to patrons, monks, higher-ranking officials, as well as to relatives, friends, and students— demonstrates the power of letters to capture the complexity of unique personalities and talents. 1

Emotion in Medieval Models from the Wen xuan and Tang shuyi 書儀

When considering the style and moods of mid-Tang letters, it is important to consider the possible influence of medieval models for letter-writing on mid14  For this shift, see Zhao Shugong, Zhongguo chidu wenxue shi, 236–85; Egan, “Su Shih’s ‘Notes’,” 561–88; and Egan’s article in this volume. 15  For the work of Bai and Yuan on their own corpora and the practices of compiling individual collections more generally in the Tang, see Nugent, Manifest in Words, 236–84. 16  See Wan Man, Tang ji xu lu, 167–83 and 188–200, for brief discussions of the compilation, transmission, and editions of their collections. 17  The exclusion of some letters that were later collected in Han’s works that survived outside the main collection (waiji 外集) sheds light on this issue as well—e.g., the letter that prompted Liu Zongyuan’s outrage (see below) against Han’s positions, “Letter to Floriate Talent Liu [Ke],” has been much criticized by later readers for its weak argument and position on historiography. See the comments collected by Luo Liantian in Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 4:3438–40.

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Tang writers. Although it was but one anthology among many, the highly influential model of the Wen xuan gave mid-Tang writers examples of literary letters exchanged among medieval elites.18 But the letters collected in shu category in the Wen xuan are largely formal and political in nature; they provide only a few examples of emotion directed at the recipients of letters, and they are generally quite constrained, consistent with the “moderate” vision of belles lettres that this anthology transmitted.19 In strong contrast, models of letters for social occasions found in jixiong shuyi, etiquette manuals for letters for specific “auspicious and inauspicious” occasions, and pengyou shuyi, manuals for composing letters during the year and at specific seasons, are replete with emotion, and in fact seem characterized by an excess of sentiment. The Wen xuan models may have been less influential to the routine exchange of collegial letters in Tang culture, but they certainly were widely known among Tang literati due to their standing in the medieval curriculum. Their model of literary style in letters, including their preference for a formal and reserved register, surely shaped Tang writers’ understanding of the degree of emotion appropriate to letters they considered to be “literary writing,” wenzhang 文章. Conversely, the high degree of sentiment in models for letters exchanged between friends, as captured both in seasonal pengyou shuyi and the social occasions on which friends would exchange letters, might have acted as a negative influence on emotional expression in collegial letters. Many examples of medieval letters will need to be examined in order to understand the variables affecting emotional expression in letters; my discussion should therefore be seen as preliminary step in this research. The twenty-four Wen xuan letters preserved as shu (in contrast to other letter forms such as qi 啓) include many that can be considered “collegial” or exchanged among colleagues and friends, but we find few examples of emotional expression directed at the recipients of the letters. Two important exceptions are found in the Han general Li Ling’s 李陵 letter to Su Wu 蘇武, cited in the epigram, and a Jin-era letter from the official Zhao Zhi 趙至 to his friend and colleague Xi Fan 嵇蕃,20 both of which use parallel prose, numerous 18  See also David Knechtges’s article on the Wen xuan letters in this volume. 19  See Knechtges, “Culling the Weeds,” 207–12. In a future expansion of this research, I plan to consider the influence on Tang letter-writing of medieval letters outside the Wen xuan, particularly the influence of letters transmitted in widely-read texts such as the standard histories of the pre-Tang dynasties. 20  Zhao Zhi’s letter is also cited in full in his Jin shu biography (92). He is said to have died from frustration and sorrow at age 37. Both letters are introduced in David Knechtges’s article in this volume.

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allusions, and phrases for feeling in a manner similar to conventions found in medieval etiquette manuals. The Wen xuan letter from Li Ling was suspected by Tang and later readers, including the Tang historian Liu Zhiji 劉知 幾 (621–771), to be a later forgery, an opinion debated by many scholars since that time; some have suggested that its use of parallel prose and its high degree of emotional expression filiate it to a later period style.21 In both of these letters, the writers explain their particular extreme situations (for Li Ling, a life exiled among the Xiongnu; for Zhao Zhi, service in Liaodong), and both writers lament the separation from their friends in highly emotional and dramatic terms. For example, in the Li Ling letter, the writer exclaims in his closing: Ah, Ziqing! What else is there left to say? We are ten thousand li apart, cut off from each other, on different roads. In this life, I have become someone parted from our generation; in death, I will become a ghost in foreign lands. I bid farewell to you in life and death forever. 嗟 乎 子 卿 , 夫 復 何 言 ? 相 去 萬 里 , 人 絕 路 殊 。 生 為 別 世 之  人,死為異域之鬼,長與足下生死辭矣。 22 Zhao Zhi closes his letter in a similar fashion: I am gone from you, Master Xi, parted far, and forever cut off! Alone and solitary, I am whirled away, to the edge of the desert sands! Stretching into the distance three thousand li, the road is hard to cross! As for a meeting when we could clasp hands again, it is remote, no day that I can 21  An early discussion of this in English was that of Whitaker, in “Some Notes on the Authorship.” Chinese scholars continue to debate the question; a recent article rehashes some of the most prominent positions (the majority of which tend to argue for a post-Han date of composition), but goes on to argue that it is a Western Han piece. Ding Hongwu, “Li Ling ‘Da Su Wu shu’.” Stephen Owen notes that the Li Ling-Su Wu story, as one of parting and separation of friends due to political conduct, “was a topic that invited persona composition, as can be seen in the song in the [Han shu] biography and in the famous letters, of uncertain date, supposedly exchanged between the two men.” The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry, 244. 22  “Da Su Wu shu” 答蘇武書, Wen xuan 42.1853. Throughout this essay, I cite the Chinese text with the punctuation given in modern editions, since that punctuation reflects the opinions of modern Chinese commentators on the vehemence of an utterance, in the case of exclamation points, or the interrogative intent, as in the case of question marks. For authors without modern punctuated editions, I use only periods and commas to mark sentence structure in the Chinese, but I introduce exclamation marks and question marks in the English where they seem appropriate.

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foresee! My feelings of longing tie me ever closer to you—who could say they would ever dissolve? 去矣嵇生,遠離隔矣。煢煢飄寄,臨沙漠矣。悠悠三千,路難 涉矣。攜手之期,邈無日矣。思心彌結,誰云釋矣!23 In these two letters, the intensity of the writers’ emotion seems to come from the finality and peril of the separation between two friends, a situation in which elaborate displays of sorrow and distress would be expected. The letters thereby fulfill the social function of performing grief at parting, rhetorically identical to the function of parting poems. More commonly, however, expressions of emotion in Wen xuan letters come from the writer in regard to a situation that does not directly affect the recipient of the letter—as in Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 letter to Ren An 任安, which is of course filled with anguish, regret, and bitterness. Cao Pi’s 曹丕 and Cao Zhi’s 曹植 letters to Wu Zhi 吳質, on the other hand, articulate a milder feeling of melancholic nostalgia that is largely directed outward at a group of men and a moment in time, rather than being a personal response directed toward Wu Zhi himself. As an example of a letter exchanged within a dyadic relationship, the letter from Ji Kang 嵇康 to Shan Tao 山濤 severing their friendship displays little anger or emotion of any sort.24 Although Ji Kang does reveal indignation and resentment of the Sima regime, as Thomas Jansen has shown in his research on medieval “severing friendship” letters, by cutting off his relationship with Shan Tao, Ji Kang presents a highly political argument about service to a corrupt court and the need to choose his own path of personal integrity. Compared to the letters of parting, the letter severing friendship is remarkable for its reserve about the personal dimension of the mens’ relationship; Jansen suggests that this stems directly from the public nature of the social ­interaction.25 Furthermore, one could argue that writers might be averse 23  “Yu Xi Maoqi shu” 與嵇茂齊書, Wen xuan 43.1942. 24  The twenty-four shu collected in the Wen xuan are found in j. 41–43; see Knechtges’s essay on these letters in this volume. The letter from Li Ling to Su Wu leads off the collection (Wen xuan 41.1847–53); Sima Qian’s very long letter follows (“Bao Ren Shaoqing shu” 報任 少卿書, 41.1854–66); Cao Pi’s two letters to Wu Zhi are very brief (“Yu Zhaoge ling Wu Zhi shu” 與朝歌令吳質書, “Yu Wu Zhi shu” 與吳質書, 42.1894–98); Cao Zhi’s letters to Wu Zhi is also short (“Yu Wu Jizhong shu” 與吳季重書, 42.1905–7). Ji Kang’s letter to Shan Tao is among the longer letters in the shu collection (“Yu Shan Juyuan juejiao shu” 與山 巨源絕交書, 43.1923–30). 25  Jansen, “The Art of Severing Relationships,” 356–61. Of the letter by Han dynasty literatus Zhu Mu on severing friendship, Jansen also argues, “in the Han discourse on human relations the termination of a friendship is not a matter of private concern only, but a political

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to showing excessive sentiment in such letters. In letters composed in such serious political and social contexts, we would expect literati to defend their choices with arguments more substantial than mere personal feeling, explaining their reasoning gravely and with sufficient evidence. In contrast to the relatively unemotional quality of anthologized literary letters, medieval etiquette models found in the Dunhuang manuscripts, particularly the forms preserved in pengyou shuyi, overflow with repeated expressions of affection, longing, and wishes to be reunited. (There are no examples for the expression of anger, however, in the seasonal friendship letters.) Although the Dunhuang fragments of etiquette texts date from different eras—the earliest is dated to the Western Jin—scholars have pointed out that the mid-Tang appears to have been a significant transitional moment in the interest in and production of such texts.26 The Dunhuang copy of a shuyi text composed by the mid-Tang literatus Zheng Yuqing 鄭餘慶, The Newly Established Auspicious and Inauspicious Letters and Etiquette for the Great Tang, Da Tang xinding jixiong shuyi 大唐新定吉凶書儀 (S 6537), shows the wide range of social occasions and interactions that Zheng’s manual was meant to address, with six broad categories of events for which the work provided letter models. Notably, Han Yu, one of the most innovative mid-Tang authors of letters, is listed as one of the compilers of this text.27 Zhao Heping argues in fact that the flowery expression of sentiment through specific formulae is a constitutive element of the models.28 Parallel prose in the four-six form is a consistent formal feature of all of the models. Examples from these texts are filled with repeated parallel phrases about separation and longing, such as the following statements from different letter models, taken from the Texts Exchanged through the Twelve Months (Shi’er yue xiangbian wen 十二月相辯文): From afar I think of my friend—when could I ever forget? 遠念朋友,何時可忘?

statement that resonates with the overall political situation by which it is influenced and which it itself tries to affect.” (p. 355) 26  Wu Liyu, Tang li zhiyi, 16–17; Jin Chuandao, “ ‘Shuyi’ neirong bianzheng,” 127–30. See also Huang Zhengjian, Zhong Wan Tang shehui, 209–43. 27  Jin, “ ‘Shuyi’ neirong bianzheng,” 126. The compilers are also listed in Zheng’s Jiu Tang shu biography, 158.4165. The work was completed in 811 or 812, but Zhao notes that the Dunhuang copy was made, according to the text’s internal date, in 827. 28  Zhao, “Dunhuang xieben ‘pengyou shuyi’,” in Zhao and Zhou, Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu, 110–12.

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My sorrow flies up as qi, increasing the clouds; my tears fall as pearls, adding to the dew. 愁飛氣而添雲,淚垂珠而益露。 I think of you across a thousand li, despising that letters from friends are cut off. 千里相思,恨朋書之隔絕。 In the desolate court, I sigh alone, holding back tears as I think on my companion; in the thatched hut, I lament in solitude, tears running down as I remember my friend. 荒庭獨嘆,收淚思朋,草室孤嗟,行啼憶友。 29 In these models, emotional expression is foregrounded through direct statements of the sentiments “I am thinking of you” and “I am sad without you,” and with images of separation sorrow being realized materially or physically through sighing, tears, and the “sending” of thoughts across long distances. Although here I have only selected phrases from the texts, the models consistently employ strings of such phrases, a pattern that only heightens the emotional tenor of the letters. The question remains, however, as to the influence of such models on elite letter-writing in the early medieval period and the Tang. Were these in fact generally observed conventions for the expression of sentiments towards friends, or do they represent prescriptive texts that, while significant as models for conducting friendship in texts, had a limited impact on epistolary practice among elites? The question may in fact be one of intended audience and the writer’s ambitions for the text: would such conventions have been adapted by elite men and women for their own social purposes, but largely avoided by literati attempting to compose letters with greater literary, intellectual, or philosophical content? The Wen xuan texts suggest that emotional statements in letters should be restricted to close relationships and extreme situations; but in those contexts, feeling should then be expressed clearly and in multiple ways. The shuyi models concur with this position in some respects, in that they suggest that statements of affection and longing had to appear in letters between friends composed at any time. In mid-Tang collegial letters, in contrast, we find writers being both more creative and indirect with their expressions of affection and displeasure. They also avoid parallel prose almost entirely, composing in a looser, sometimes more narrative style; and yet they 29  Ibid., 118–29.

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very clearly convey the overall mood of the author and his disposition towards the recipient. The question then becomes, what epistolary techniques did midTang writers extend or create to do so, and how did those feelings support the other objectives of the letters? 2

Methodology and Questions of Evidence for Mid-Tang Letters

My analysis is based on three stages of reviewing mid-Tang texts: compiling a corpus of collegial letters, identifying within that corpus letters that displayed anger and affection towards the recipients, and then analyzing the two sets of texts for lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical patterns for the respective emotional expressions.30 Out of the texts titled shu 書 in 270 juan of Quan Tang wen ( j. 440–710, or in terms of approximate dates, roughly the 780s to the 830s), I identified forty-four texts by nine writers as “collegial letters” according to the following criteria: the letter’s mode of salutation and closing indicated that it was addressed to a peer (someone of similar official rank or age, or perhaps some combination);31 and the addressees were already known to the writer, a fact either revealed in the letter (in statements such as “when I saw you last a few years ago . . .” or “we’ve been separated for a long time . . .”) or established from external evidence. These criteria therefore eliminated letters to patrons or to men seeking to meet and study with the writer, as well as formal letters reporting on political affairs or making official requests. Only two letters that I include deviate from these criteria slightly. One was Han Yu’s letter to a young man he had not yet met, but because he had been “introduced” to the young man and his literary work via a close friend, Li Guan (who was deceased at the time of the letter), Han takes pains to assure the man that he feels as if he already knows him, and addresses him in the same manner as he addresses colleagues and friends already known to him. The second was Li Ao’s letter to his younger male cousin, which, though in the tradition of “family instruction” 30  For the importance of focusing on the lexicon for emotions in this kind of cross-cultural analysis, see the discussions in linguist Anna Wierzbicka’s Emotions Across Languages and Cultures. 31  Ebrey, “T’ang Guides,” notes the plainness of salutations and closings for peer-to-peer letters in one extant Tang shuyi (604); the models given in Zhao Heping are equally simple and brief (such as “surname, personal name reports” 姓名白), in comparison to the longer and more honorific or humilific conventions for superiors. I also eliminated letters without either a salutation or a closing from the analysis, even in the case (as in Huangfu Shi’s letters to Li Ao) where we know from external evidence that the writer was a peer of the recipient.

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letters, seems to violate the expectations of that subgenre by speaking to the young man as if he were a member of Li Ao’s literary circle.32 Within this corpus, I identified five letters that expressed some degree of anger and fourteen expressing affection towards the recipient of the letter, and examined these two sets of “anger” and “affection” letters for consistent lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical patterns. As I will show, using indirectness to convey emotion was common to both sets; however, the rhetorical, syntactical, and lexical techniques used to suggest anger or affection rather than state it explicitly were surprisingly distinct. In working with texts from before the era of printing, we must keep in mind potential problems of textual integrity, both in the collections and in individual texts. As noted above, the largest mid-Tang corpora tend to preserve more letters, and thus the probability of finding collegial letters in those corpora increases. As a consequence of the relative size of collections and other biographical and textual transmission issues, certain writers are better represented than others in the group of forty-four collegial letters. Han Yu’s corpus, with fifty-four texts titled shu, yielded nine collegial letters; Liu Zongyuan’s, with thirty-five shu, yielded eleven; Bai Juyi’s corpus, with over 3400 poetic and prose texts, contains only nine shu, and yielded three collegial letters; Yuan Zhen’s corpus, which suffered significant losses after the Song, has only four letters, and yielded none.33 The question of the textual integrity of mid-Tang letters is especially troublesome in part due to the diverse forms for letters in the medieval period. To what degree were letters—perhaps letters containing personal information in particular—truncated, edited, or otherwise altered before being placed in literary collections? Unlike the case of poetry, we have little evidence from the Dunhuang material (or elsewhere) that would help us understand the transmission practices for letters; however, some internal features of these letters at least allow us to speculate. Two features of this group of collegial letters would suggest that they are largely intact internally, that is, not abbreviated or excerpted. First, of the fortyfour I examined, all but five contain salutations and closings appropriate for letters between peers, according to models found in etiquette manuals and 32  See the essay by Antje Richter in this volume. 33  There are some obvious reasons for these different ratios: Liu Zongyuan’s long exile, e.g., meant that his letter-writing was largely addressed to people he already knew or in response to younger literati seeking to study with him. Han Yu’s body of letters includes several letters sent to members of his close circle, making them easily recoverable for his collected works, if Han himself did not have a copy. For losses to Yuan’s corpus, see my article “Defining Experience,” 62–66.

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used consistently in the letters themselves. Second, the letters’ overall tendency towards hypotaxis and tightly structured arguments would be likely to reveal a “missing” component, unless that were a brief paragraph of incidental personal detail that might be placed at the end of a letter and excised without disrupting the flow or coherence of the text. The collegial letters are among the most personal of extant mid-Tang letters; however, as a rule, they contain very little information about daily life of the kind found in Song and later informal letters (chidu).34 It seems at least possible that brief sentences on mundane affairs might have been omitted in the final transcription of letters, but it seems unlikely that editorial excisions would have included the writers’ expressions of feeling. More critical is the fact that the corpus of forty-four yielded texts by such a small number of writers, many of whom were known to one another and shared intellectual positions, and that these texts fell within a time frame of roughly twenty years, despite the larger initial scope of the search. In other words, this corpus is coherent in ways that may shed light only on the epistolary practice of several writers rather than a sense of period style or preferences. 3

“In my heart, I am deeply displeased” 私心甚不喜: Expressing Anger and Disagreement

The social norms for expressing anger or other negative emotions in Tang culture are difficult to reconstruct, given the nature of the sources we have. Although third-person historical accounts and anecdotes record many incidents of rage and violence, particularly in martial settings, we rarely find first-person utterances of anger or even irritation in literati writing, and fewer instances still of such feelings communicated directly towards the reader or intended recipient. Xunzi’s admonition to keep anger out of noble conduct—the junzi 君子 “does not become angered yet maintains his authority” 不怒而威35—was entirely consonant with other social conventions of medieval culture that were shaped by the Confucian discourse of moderation, ­self-control, humility, and deference, as well as by Daoist and Buddhist teachings that advocated quietude, stillness, and imperturbability. Anger in social intercourse signaled a loss of control and face on the part of the one angered. Although righteous anger, or moral outrage, had 34  On the prominence of mundane detail in the chidu of Su Shi, see Egan, “Su Shih’s ‘Notes’ ” and his essay in this volume. 35   Xunzi, “Wang xiao,” 8.11.

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considerable rhetorical power and could be a sharp tool in political discourse, that degree of emotion was unlikely to appear in the kinds of texts most common to Tang social interaction—exchange poetry, letters, parting prefaces, and funerary compositions, among others. When we see traces of anger in such texts, as in these five mid-Tang letters, the source is frequently the writer’s disagreement with the recipient on a matter of consequence. In these letters, the terms, syntax, and rhetorical devices serve to express anger along a spectrum of mere vexation to moral outrage, but they never spill into violence or threat. However, given that each writer felt justified in revealing more emotion in each of these contexts, we need to consider the risks and rewards they weighed in their letters, and what they might have seen as the ultimate goal of the epistolary exchange. In contrast to the performance of separation sorrow or mourning, two emotional displays of great social importance for which we have many ritual and literary texts, we have no surviving cultural script for the expression of anger in medieval China. As one historian of early modern England has written of English letters, “anger was a forceful invitation to renegotiate unsatisfactory aspects of relationships. It spotlighted deficiencies in duty, unacceptable conduct, disrespect, broken promises, and frustrated expectations.”36 To express anger or annoyance in a text was also to seize the right to criticize and rebuke others. Expressing anger, therefore, could be a claim of moral superiority, one supported by indignation. But in the context of the collegial relations of these letters, expressing anger may also have been a sign of familiarity and intimacy; the risk of losing face by giving way to anger could be mitigated in a relationship in which there was some trust or at least an expectation that whatever provoked the anger could be resolved. In these letters, the driving issue is conduct: the letter-writer criticizes the conduct of the recipient, supporting his arguments with reason, historical precedent, appeals to common sense, and personal experience. At the same time, each writer uses every technique possible to avoid directly stating his anger towards the recipient. The five letters give us a truly narrow slice of mid-Tang literati culture—they were exchanged within a very small group of people, and Han Yu is a party to four of the five exchanges—and yet we should keep in mind that these were likely read well beyond the circle of close acquaintance, and thus were providing models for other writers to consider. There is also a clear pattern here of what we might call “annoyance at having to repeat oneself,” in that three of the letters (by Li and Han) are apparently the second in a series of rebuttals or responses to the recipient. Such letters must have been quite common; but 36  Pollock, “Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships,” 568.

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these are among the few extant examples of “second replies,” di er shu 第二書 or chong da 重答, from ninth-century corpora.37 Author

Recipient Date Title (est.)

815

“Yu Han Yu lun shi guan shu” 與韓愈論史官書38 (Letter to Han Yu discussing the [duties of] the Historian)

Liu utterly rejects Han’s position on the role of the historian, mocks his statements and position, criticizes his conduct

Hou Gao Bef. 侯高 805

“Da Hou Gao di er shu” 答侯高第二書39 (Second Letter in Reply to Hou Gao)

Second letter to Hou (first is not extant) rejecting his advice to “go along with the world”; Li defends “my Way” (吾道), gives historical, philosophical, and personal reasons why Hou Gao is wrong

Liu Han Yu Zongyuan

Li Ao 李翱

Content Summary

37  One excellent example of a letter that was clearly one in a series of exchanges can be found in Liu Zongyuan’s corpus, in his “Letter [in Reply] to Du Wenfu’s Multiple Letters” (Fu Du Wenfu shu 復杜溫夫書, which also contains strong expressions of annoyance and anger at Du. I excluded this piece from my analysis since the relationship between Du and Liu appears to be that between a prospective student (Du) and master (Liu), rather than a collegial relationship, along the lines of many relationships documented in Han Yu’s corpus; nor can the relationship between the two men be more clearly elucidated, since there is neither internal nor external evidence for it beyond the single letter. Liu calls Du “student,” 生, throughout, and castigates him severely for seeking him out (and Liu Yuxi and Han Yu) to preach of “the Zhou” and “Confucius.” The letter also contains a useful point of medieval grammar, when Liu takes Du to task for not distinguishing clearly between particles expressing doubt or question (疑辭: 乎, 歟, 耶, 哉) and particles expressing definition or completion (決辭: 矣, 耳, 焉, 也). Liu Zongyuan ji, 3:889–891. 38  Ibid., 3:807–11; Quan Tang wen 574.2b–4b. 39  Quan Tang wen 635.15a–17b.

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(cont.) Author

Recipient Date Title (est.)

Content Summary

Han Yu

Zhang Ji 798 張籍   (ca. 766– ca. 830)

Second letter to Zhang in response to Zhang’s criticism of Han’s idle, unserious behavior (gambling, making jokes, telling stories); much shorter than first letter, a more pointed rebuke of Zhang

Han Yu

Li Yi 李翊

801 or “Chong da Yi shu” 802 重答翊書41 (Second Reply to a Letter from Yi)

Second letter to Li (following the first letter on 文); Han criticizes Li for his attitude and conduct, presumption of special treatment

Han Yu

Li Ao

800

Response to Li Ao’s letter in which Li urged Han to return to the capital; outrage and affection mixed as Han tries to convince Li of the correctness of his position (this letter also contains expressions of affection, and is examined in both sets)

“Chong da Zhang Ji shu” 重答張籍書40 (Again Replying to a letter from Zhang Ji)

“Yu Li Ao shu” 與李翱書42 (Letter to Li Ao)

Three considerations seem to shape the relative force of anger or irritation expressed in a given letter: the nature of the disagreement or criticism and 40  Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1333–41; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 3:564–73; Quan Tang wen 551.3a–4b. 41  Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1460–61; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 3:738–41; Quan Tang wen 552.6a–6b. 42  Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1386–91; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 3:773–86; Quan Tang wen 552.10a–11b.

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whether it implicated both parties’ personal conduct; the degree of intimacy between the two writers; and the ultimate object of the letter in the mind of the letter writer—that is, did the writer wish to convince the recipient of his faults or bring the relationship to an end? In all five cases, the issue of personal conduct comes into play at some point—either the recipient’s conduct towards the letter writer or, in two cases, some actions of the letter writer that had previously been criticized by the addressee (Han Yu’s responses to Zhang’s and Li’s criticism and advice). In other words, it appears there needed to be some interpersonal conflict, not merely intellectual debate, for disagreement to require emotionally charged language. Not surprisingly, greater intimacy in the social relationship seems to have allowed for more vehemence in terms of exclamation, as we see most vividly in Han Yu’s letter to Li Ao. But formal techniques in a less familiar letter, such as the repetition of fixed phrases and the recipient’s name in Liu Zongyuan’s letter to Han Yu, could create a sarcastic, caustic tone that both mocked the recipient and closed the distance between the two men. Finally, a writer’s ultimate objective in composing the letter, insofar as we can determine it, seemed to play a critical role in the modulation and display of anger, particularly in the opening rhetorical moves and in the closing of a letter where the optative mood often appeared, and where a writer could amend or recuperate the tone.43 The most negative closing of the five appears in Li Ao’s letter to Hou Gao, which ends abruptly (and is perhaps truncated) with, “As for your Way, you should follow it yourself—but do not lecture me with it” 子之道,子宜行之者也,勿以誨我.44 This closing and Li’s defensive statements leading up to it imply that there was little left to lose in his relationship with Hou Gao. We find examples of both positive and negative goals in Han Yu’s second letters to Zhang Ji and Li Yi, both of whom were students of his (Li Yi may have been merely a prospective student) when the letters were written. In Han’s second letter to Zhang, his irritation at Zhang’s persistent criticism is offset by the reasoned manner in which he offers historical evidence to defend his actions, and by his calling Zhang “my fellow/my follower/student” (wu zi 吾子), though he does take one parting shot at Zhang’s lack of reflection 43  In a study of displays of anger among European medieval aristocrats, Richard E. Barton has argued that “the performance of lordly anger was frequently linked to compromise and negotiation . . . [and that] anger signaled the initiation of a process of restructuring social relationships.” Barton, “ ‘Zealous Anger’,” 162. Although here the anger in question is aimed at men of roughly equal status, the desire to renegotiate or shift the relationship between writer and recipient emerges both implicitly and explicitly in the letters. 44   Quan Tang wen 635.17b.

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on the issue: “How could [laughter and teasing] harm the Dao? How could you, my fellow, not have considered this?” 惡害於道哉?吾子其未之思乎.45 But in his second letter to his student Li Yi, Han Yu’s obvious annoyance at what seems to have been Li’s presumption or demands for attention seems in no way tempered by concern at losing a student—the criticism of the closing, in fact, seems aimed at driving Li Yi away. There is truly a distinction between worthiness and meanness; how can you be so anxious to get something by which you can be established, and not disregard it if people do not know you? I have never heard of [someone] making a great echo with a tiny sound, let alone with [the help of] my being so earnest on your behalf? I have had a stomach illness of late, and I am in poor spirits, therefore I do not write this myself. Yu reports.46 賢不肖固有分矣,生其急乎其所自立,而無患乎人不知己,未 嘗聞響大而聲微者也。況愈之於生懇懇耶?屬有腹疾,無聊。​  不果自書。愈白。 47 In all five letters, the writers’ display of emotion blends highly literate strategies, such as hypotaxis, rhetorical questions, logical reasoning and evidence, with features that imitate oral discourse, such as exclamations, calling the recipient’s name, and posing a rapid series of questions that mimics the behavior of “talking over” someone in argument. However, the choice to color a disagreement with some kind of anger, beyond mere differences of intellectual or philosophical opinion, had to be made carefully. If the emotional expression were too excessive, a letter could devolve into mere feeling and fail to be persuasive. For this reason, the prominent features of these letters are those that exercise tight control over the argument in order to place the fault of poor conduct or misguided criticism firmly onto the recipient. Only rarely do we see what we might think of as a lexicon for anger in the letters, terms for annoyance, displeasure, or similar negative emotions used by the writers to describe their own states. As the historian of early modern English letters cited above notes, “sentiments could be conveyed without being named. Writers of letters rarely stated ‘I am angry’ in the letter; rather, they vented their complaints and accusations with sufficient vehemence so that the 45   Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1341; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 3:571. 46  Han Yu uses the term sheng, “student,” to address Li in both letters, rather than zuxia 足下, wuzi 吾子, or Li’s personal name. 47   Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1461; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 3:741. Early editions of the text do not have the word guo in the final line, and commentators suggest it is an inserted error.

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recipient would be fully cognizant of their state of mind.”48 In Liu Zongyuan’s letter to Han Yu about the duties of a historian, Liu’s unusually flat statement of displeasure, shen buxi 甚不喜, sets the tone for his attack on Han Yu’s words, conduct, and potential influence: In the letter I obtained earlier that spoke of matters concerning history [historiography and the duties of the historian], you said that you had detailed all of it in your “Letter to Floriate Talent Liu”; now that I have seen the original draft, in my heart I am seriously displeased, and I think that it is even more erroneous than the previous year’s letter on the duties of the historian.49 前獲書言史事,云具與柳秀才書,及今乃見書稿,私心甚不 喜,與退之往年言史事甚大謬。 50 This is the only declarative statement of personal displeasure in the five letters; however, words for negative emotions are used often, usually in response to the action or words of the recipient, and positive emotions are scarce (except in Han’s letter to Li Ao, which is why it is also considered in the affection letters). For example, in this letter Liu Zongyuan goes on to caricature Han’s worry about the burden of “praise and blame” (baobian 褒貶) that was the historian’s duty, accusing Han five times of “being afraid” (kong 恐, ju 懼, and kongju  恐懼) to speak. In effect, Liu charges Han with moral and personal cowardice: “[You] Tuizhi should reflect on this again, and what you can do, you should do swiftly; but if in the end you do not dare because of your fear, then within a day you can resign—so then why do you speak of ‘going along but planning [to resign]’ [citing a phrase from Han Yu’s earlier letter]?” 退之宜更思,可為速 48  Pollock, “Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships,” 523. 49  Liu’s reference to seeing an original draft (presumably in Han’s hand) of Han’s letter after seeing what was presumably a copy is a tantalizing and rare clue about the ways in which letters circulated among circles of friends and acquaintances during the mid-Tang. In his letter to Li Jian of 809, Liu mentions receiving one letter from Li directly from a messenger and two others, presumably copies, via Liu Yuxi, their mutual friend; in the same letter, Liu also protests that he cannot write directly to someone higher in rank (Li Jian’s brother) from whom he has not first received a direct letter; and finally he bids Li Jian to copy out his letter and show it to another mutual friend, Cui Qun, who cannot receive letters at his post. Elsewhere, he tells a recipient not to circulate his letters for fear of attracting ridicule. Liu Zongyuan ji, 3:801–2. Brief statements such as these indicate that mid-Tang literati expected their letters to be regularly shared within a circle of friends and would often make copies for others to do so. 50   Liu Zongyuan ji, 3:810–11.

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為,果卒以為恐懼不敢,則一日可引去,又何以云行且謀也.51 Other negative feelings of plaint and grief appear as responses to actions or words of both parties, as when Han Yu acknowledges four times Li Ao’s “anguish,” bei 悲, for him; or when, in his letter to Hou Gao, Li Ao admits that Hou “will surely resent me and repeat your words [of criticism]” 必將憤予而復其辭 when he reads Li’s letter. Liu Zongyuan accuses Han four times of being “deluded,” huo 惑, and Han Yu suggests that others will accuse him of being both “foolish” and “wild,” kuang 狂, in his letter to Zhang Ji. The few appearances of “joy,” le 樂, in these letters come in negative rhetorical questions, such as Han Yu’s repeated question to Li Ao, “How could I be happy [doing the thing you recommend]?” 吾豈樂於此乎哉? Beyond these content words for negative emotion, however, the most prominent and consistent lexical feature of the five letters is their use of emphatic particles, both exclamation particles and question final particles used repeatedly and in conjunction with exclamations. This feature of the text is not only a consequence of the writers’ constant use of rhetorical questions, but is also a reminder of the letters’ latent orality, the fact that they would often be read aloud. Whether or not the writers were aware of it, when read aloud, exclamations and question particles effectively forced the reader to perform the anger inscribed in the text through multiple exhalations of qi 氣, the embodiment of fa fen 發憤. The frequency of these specific particles in only five letters is astonishing, particularly when we compare the use of the same particles in the letters of affection. There are eighteen uses of the exclamation particle zai  哉 (compared to only three uses in the set of fourteen affectionate letters); thirty-two uses of hu 乎 as a final particle in both questions and exclamations (compared to forty-one in fourteen affectionate letters, but fourteen of those appear in Han Yu’s letter to Li Ao, included in both sets); and fourteen uses of ye 耶 as a question final particle (compared to three).52 (The exclamation 51  Han’s “Letter in Reply to Floriate Talent Liu” was only transmitted in the waiji of Han’s collection; later commentators largely agree with Liu Zongyuan’s criticism of Han’s statements in that letter. Liu Zongyuan’s repeated taunts about the “fear” Han has seem somewhat unfair, given that Han Yu uses the phrase weiju 畏懼, “to be awed and fearful,” only once, and with respect to the weighty responsibility of writing Tang history. Overall, Han’s tone in the letter to “Floriate Talent” Liu is more self-deprecating—appropriately for a response to a young man who had clearly asked him for advice and guidance about history—and less intellectually engaged with the topic of history than Liu’s attack suggests. Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 4:1920; see especially the comments collected in Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 5:3426–39. 52  Moreover, all of these particles have mid- or open vowel finals—using David Branner’s reconstruction, we have tsei 哉, ghuo 乎, and ya 耶—adding to the sense of exhala-

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“Ah” or “Alas,” jiehu 嗟乎, appears four times also in Han’s letter to Li Ao.) At the very least, the frequency of these particles made for rather noisy readings; more speculatively, they served to articulate the vexation of the writer, fulfilling the promise of letters to convey the intentions and the presence of the writer in the text. But expostulation alone did not suffice in these letters. In order to demonstrate the moral integrity of one’s anger, the relationship between the addressee’s conduct and the writer’s response had to be extremely clear and grounded not only in personal but also contextual and even historical evidence. We find this concern for evidence and clarity reflected consistently in the syntactic patterns of the letters: first, the writers show an overall preference for hypotaxis, including carefully constructed, often long complex sentences. Hypotaxis in these letters is indicated by the frequency of subordination, most often in conditionals (if-statements with 若 / 如 / 苟; “then” clauses with 則 / 乃), concessives (use of 雖 and 非 in “even though X [is or is not the case] . . .”), and counterfactuals (if-then statements with the premise in the subjunctive and the consequence in the condition, used to refute unacceptable or unrealistic possibilities, as in “if it were the case that . . .”; often introduced with 若使 / 使 / 設使).53 The writers also use syntactical variation as a way to bolster the strength of their argument: throughout the letters, we find writers varying strong declaratives, especially true/false statements using fei X ye 非 X 也and A, B 也, with interrogatives (both real and rhetorical questions) and exclamations in rapid series, a technique that affirms the writer’s position while simultaneously calling into doubt the recipient’s views.54 Finally, the intensity and frequency of questions grows in each of the five letters as the writer approaches the close, which adds to the urgency of the writer’s feeling as well as rhetorically “silencing” the recipient. With respect to the features of hypotaxis and syntactical variation, and even to shifting the argument (“X is wrong, [my position] Y is correct”), these are also common to political discourse, critiques of policies or tion that would appear at the end of multiple sentences. (Yintong database accessed November 2014: http://yintong.americanorientalsociety.org/public/index.php). 53  On the debate over counterfactuals and their use in classical Chinese, see Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, 116–18. As Harbsmeier notes, jiashi 假使 and ruoshi 若使 always mark counterfactual clauses; in Liu Zongyuan’s letter to Han Yu, we see sheshi 設使, and in Li Ao’s letter to Hou Gao, we find shi 使 and rushi 如使 used in sequence. 54  From the perspective of speech act theory, rhetorical questions can also function as constatives; the variation in syntax that we see when the writer alternates assertions of fact (constatives) with rhetorical questions does not necessarily alter the illocutionary act.

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others’ views; the notable difference in these letters is the way the friend or colleague is being personally attacked, doubted, or refuted by the writer. Li Ao’s opening discussion of his “Way” demonstrates the syntactic patterns of complex, hypotactic sentence structure and the alternation of truth claims with questions aimed at the recipient: My Way is not the Way of a single school; it is the Way that derives from the ancient sages. If my Way is blocked, then the Way of the superior person will disappear; if my Way is made manifest, then the Way of Yao, Shun, King Wen and King Wu, and Confucius has not yet been cut off from the world. If, blurring matters, I had agreed with the words of your last letter, that would have been like calling gong and shang the same note, and by what means would the Way become clear? Therefore I refuted your words, even knowing that you would surely resent me and repeat your words [of criticism]. As for your repeatedly instructing me to go along with the times to follow the Way—your so-called “times,” are they the times of humaneness and rightness? Or are they the crass, frivolous “times”? If they are humane and right, then how could my Way be obscured in them? If I were to go along with crass, frivolous times, then I would surely be riding their waves to follow the flow, watching how the wind blows while rising and receding. If this is [what you mean], then although you see me, you indeed do not recognize [understand] me. How much more so for other people in the world? 吾之道非一家之道,是古聖人所由之道也。吾之道塞,則君子 之道消矣。吾之道明,則堯舜文武孔子之道未絕於地矣。前書 若與足下混然同辭,是宮商之一其聲音也,道何由而明哉?吾 故拒足下之辭,知足下必將憤予而復其辭也。足下再三教我適 時以行道,所謂時也者,乃仁義之時乎?將浮沈之時乎?苟仁 且義,則吾之道何所屈焉爾。如順浮沈之時,則必乘波隨流望 風而高下焉。若如此,雖足下之見我,且不識矣。況天下之  人乎?55 By alternating his strong claims about his Way with rhetorical questions aimed at exposing Hou Gao’s ignorance, Li Ao’s tone turns sarcastic, a quality heightened by his quoting of Hou’s words. The strategy of repeating the other’s words in order to attack him is found in four of the five letters, and is especially fre55   Quan Tang wen 635.15a–15b.

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quent in Liu Zongyuan’s attack on Han Yu, as in this passage (Liu cites words and phrases from Han’s “Letter to Floriate Talent Liu,” which is extant in Han’s collection, throughout his letter). Liu Zongyuan at this time had been in exile for a decade and was writing to Han Yu in Chang’an. Now you have said, “I’m but one person—how can I make it clear [praise and blame of human conduct, as a historian]?” If all your fellow [historians] also were to say the same thing, and those to come after them also were to say the same thing, and everyone all said, “I’m just one person,” then in the end who would be able to record and transmit [history]? 今退之曰,我一人也何能明?則同職者又所云若是,後來繼今 者又所云若是,人人皆曰,我一人,則卒誰能紀傳之耶? In throwing Han’s words back at him, Liu Zongyuan here and through his closing arguments constructs a reductio ad absurdum, suggesting the collapse of Tang historiography under Han’s influence: Now if [everyone] were to be as learned as [Han] Tuizhi, speak and write like Tuizhi, enjoy debating like Tuizhi, valiantly calling themselves correct and upright, “bold and soldierly,” like Tuizhi,56 and yet still spoke in this manner [“fearing” to assign praise and blame], then will there not ultimately be no one to whom the writing of Tang history can be entrusted? 今學如退之,辭如退之,好議論如退之,慷慨自謂正直行行焉 如退之,猶所云若是,則唐之史述,其卒無可託乎? The personal nature of the charge and the fact that Liu Zongyuan sees Han Yu as the emblem of a larger cultural failing are made even more clear by Liu Zongyuan’s use of Han’s style name, Tuizhi (rather than zuxia, which Liu Zongyuan uses for other peers and colleagues), which he repeats no fewer than sixteen times in the letter. The importance of indirectness in expressing anger is best demonstrated by the frequent use of rhetorical questions throughout the letters, often in rapid series with question particles that expect a negative response, such as 豈 . . . 乎 / 耶, or 豈 . . . 乎哉, and 安 . . . 耶 / 乎? This technique communicates 56  Liu Zongyuan alludes here to a description of Confucius’s disciple Zilu (from Analects 11.13), who stood in a “bold and soldierly” fashion (hang hang 行行), when the Master commented, “Someone like Zilu will not get to live out his years.” Liu appears to be mocking Han Yu’s self-representation (zi wei . . .) as well as commenting on his impetuosity.

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negative emotion indirectly in two ways. First, the repetition of questions suggests that the recipient is foolish enough to hold the positions the writer is questioning and needs to be instructed multiple times (thereby implicitly insulting him); second, the piling up of a string of questions in the text mimics the effect of a rising voice in a debate, intensifying the speaker’s demands on the listener without allowing for response or a break in the attack. Han Yu’s questioning of Li Yi’s motives conveys his annoyance and his suspicion in this manner. In the preceding sentence, Han Yu suggested that he has welcomed Li Yi like Mencius did his students, “not refusing any who come” 來者不距.57 Nevertheless, is it your intention to seek knowledge of me? Or to seek profit from me? Is it that you think to spread the Way of the Sages? Or is it that you desire to improve yourself so that other people cannot match up to you? 雖然,生之志求知於我耶?求益於我耶?其思廣聖人之道耶? 其欲善其身而使人不可及耶?58 In the center section of a different letter, that to Li Ao, Han Yu’s repeated questions capture not only his frustration with Li Ao’s lack of understanding but also his distress about his lack of choices at the time: But this is only one issue—what benefit would there be in my going to the capital as you said? If in my relationship with you there are still things you do not understand, then how can other people know me? To gather up all I have and rush off, fleeing to mingle with officials and ministers, opening my mouth to debate and discuss—how could I possibly fit in? . . . Those who know me are certainly few, and those who know and love me and yet are not spiteful towards me are even fewer. So if I had nothing with which to support my family, and I had no one to follow [in some employ], how in the end would I manage? 此一事耳。足下謂我入京城,有所益乎?僕之有子猶有不知 者,時人能知我哉?持僕所守,驅而使奔走伺候公卿閒,開口

57 Mencius 7B30. One of Mencius’s followers said of him, “When you give lessons, Master, you do not chase after those who leave, nor refuse any who come. You simply accept anyone who comes with the right heart.” Han Yu refers to Li as “one who comes,” laizhe, twice in the letter, implying that Li does not in fact have the “right heart.” Translation from Van Norden, Mengzi, 191. 58   Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1461; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 3:740–41.

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論議,其安能有以合乎?. . . 其知我者固少,知而相愛不相忌者 又加少,內無所資,外無所從,終安所為乎? This letter in particular shows us how a disagreement that may have originally been a matter of philosophical or practical concerns could escape the boundaries of the intellectual and spill into the realm of the two men’s personal relationship in the context of a collegial letter. When charges and rhetorical questions are aimed at the recipient’s own words, views, or former actions, as they commonly are in these letters, the force of the writer’s anger or irritation tightens the textual focus on the dyadic relationship of writer and addressee. The immediate anger of the text could also obscure other resentments and jealousies latent in the collegial relationship that the writers do not acknowledge. We do not have the subsequent responses from the recipients for any of the five letters, but we do have Liu Zongyuan’s subsequent letter to Han Yu, in which he implicitly apologizes to Han by moderating his tone, acknowledging Han’s own trials, keeping to a discussion of facts, and even including comments on his illness and disgrace (he had at that point been in exile for a decade) and inability to serve as a historian ever again.59 Certainly Han Yu and Li Ao continued to be close companions in subsequent years, despite this emotional dispute. This ability to compromise, or to reexamine the source of conflict, may indeed have been prompted by the strength of the feelings provoked by conflict.60 In these mid-Tang letters, it appears that expressing anger in disagreement was allowable within limits; the posture of moral superiority and indignation, if grounded in evidence drawn both from personal experience and from history or social context, could justify emotional outbursts and make them more persuasive—if not to the recipient, then to a broader group of readers the writers hoped to convince. This points to what was surely a positive function of medieval letters as sociotexts: letters could serve as “social buffer,” a means of negotiating conflict that did not require face-to-face shouting, in the same way that shame or disgrace might also be more easily acknowledged in texts than

59   Liu Zongyuan ji, 2:811–12. Jo-shui Chen argues that this later period of the two men’s relationship, during Liu Zongyuan’s time in Yongzhou, was a period in which Han came to admire Liu’s writing, despite his opposition to Liu’s activity in the Shunzong regime. Han Yu certainly defended Liu’s talent and character vigorously in his 819 epitaph for Liu. Chen, Liu Tsung-yuan, 74 n. 30. 60  One scholar of anger in medieval European texts and society makes this link as well, see Barton, “ ‘Zealous Anger’,” 162–63.

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by bowing and weeping in person.61 But these letters also show that allowing anger to creep into disagreement, even in its milder versions, required a highly self-conscious and crafted rhetoric—from careful lexical choices, to varied syntax, to finely tuned strategies of repetition and recursion—to be acceptable among close colleagues in mid-Tang literati society. In this way, the writers were able to display precise control of their language while they were venting disruptive emotion. 4

“All I had stored up in my heart I then wished to quickly tell you” 心所蓄者便欲快言: Affection and Self-Representation

Disagreements over conduct or ideas could provoke caustic language, even when writing to correspondents far away, but the work of sustaining social relations, one of the key functions of letters, required a softer tone, one that could express affection, commitment, and concern for friends and colleagues. Rather than being prompted by a particular season or extreme event, as we saw in the etiquette manuals and in the Wen xuan letters, or aroused by a personal conflict, mid-Tang collegial letters in which we find expressions of affection were largely composed for non-specific occasions. The openings to these letters indicate that they were part of an ongoing if sometimes sporadic correspondence between men known to one another for some time who were (in all but a few cases) separated by great distances. Liu Zongyuan’s opening to his letter to Li Jian 李建 captures the pleasure and the value of this kind of exchange and reminds us of the ways letters could be exchanged within a circle of acquaintance: To Biaozhi [style name of Li Jian]: the provincial courier arrived unexpectedly, and I received your letter, and I also received through Liu Yuxi your letter from before that; your thoughts in both of them were earnestly generous. Zhuang Zhou said, ‘Those who withdraw to wild, brambled places, hearing the tramping sound of human footsteps, are indeed happy.’ Since I have been among the southern barbarians, obtaining your two letters was better than the best medicine, making me more happy than I can say.

61  Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, 132.

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杓直足下。州傳遞至,得足下書,又於夢得處得足下前次一 書,意皆勤厚。莊周言,逃蓬藋者,聞人足音則跫然喜。僕在 蠻夷中,比得足下二書,及致藥餌,喜復何言。 62 As Liu’s Zhuangzi reference confirms, letters embodied the person of the writer, and this particular epistolary trope emerges prominently in letters expressing affection, which are filled with rhetorical techniques that invoke or replicate the presence of the friend. The acknowledgement of receipt of letters was not merely practical information—it also affirmed connection and continuity, and expressed gratitude implicitly without having to resort to more formal thanks.63 Nine of the fourteen letters here refer to receiving a letter (or not receiving one, and regretting that fact) from the addressee, and seven of those go on to cite directly from the letter or to discuss its contents. Letters in these collegial relationships were of course gifts, a fundamental currency of friendship, and responding with a letter both repaid the gift and continued the exchange. The underlying dynamic of gift exchange could color the letters in unexpected ways.64 Although the letters do on occasion contain requests or responses to requests (for opinions on literary work and one request from Liu Zongyuan for books), the letter-writers generally portray themselves as making no demands of the reader, depicting the recipients as the perfect audience, the ones who will listen sympathetically and understand completely. Within the texts, expressions of affection and trust helped to create a rhetorical space in which writers could naturally unburden themselves. However, this unburdening was frequently intended as an implicit request for aid, particularly for those in political exile. Through the content and the physical text of the letter, the writers’ self-revelation became a burden of knowledge that the recipient had to manage carefully and circulate appropriately. As we saw in the shuyi models, constructing the distant friend as the zhi yin 知音 was a standard convention of friendship letters, as was the practice of assuring the recipient that he was remembered and missed. The existence and the likely pervasiveness of these conventions for expressing affection between 62   Liu Zongyuan ji, 2:801. The passage Liu paraphrases from Zhuangzi comes from chapter 24, “Xu Wugui” 徐無鬼, Zhuangzi jiaoquan, 3:921. 63  On the importance of conventions for acknowledging letters within a social community, see Schneider, Culture of Epistolarity, 15–16. The acknowledgement often continues within the body of the letter, as the writer cites or refers to parts of a previous letter in discussion. 64  On this issue, see Xiaofei Tian’s article in this volume.

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friends presented mid-Tang literati with competing social and literary imperatives: although they needed to sustain emotional ties with their colleagues in friendly letters, they had to do so in a way that seemed authentic, original, and in no way perfunctory. As Liu Zongyuan’s description of receiving letters from Li Jian tells us, this was emotional expression intended to be seen by others; Liu Zongyuan’s happiness at receiving Li Jian’s letters as well as the sense of humiliation he describes later in the text would also have been conveyed to Liu Yuxi and others in their circle. What we find in these letters, therefore, is a common set of gestures and tropes for expressing affection among friends and colleagues, a set also found in abbreviated forms in medieval etiquette manuals, that mid-Tang writers adapted and transformed. Some consistent gestures beyond portraying the recipient as the perfect listener included: referring to previous meetings or memories of the recipient; expressing a wish to be reunited in the future; and suggesting unsettled feelings at being separated from the recipient. However, the two conventions we saw in the pengyou shuyi as well as the Wen xuan examples—direct statements of sorrow and a physicalization of feeling through sighing and weeping—are notably absent in these letters. These rhetorical patterns of the collegial letters should make us even more aware of their literariness, their representation of the writer’s craft. Furthermore, their avoidance of the many mundane details that must have been negotiated by letters with friends shows the likely bias for selecting and transmitting only letters that captured ideal versions of the author’s literary talent, not simply his character—or perhaps a later process of editing letters that were to be included in collected works. The letters are also coherent with respect to their overall avoidance of parallel prose, again with the exception of certain passages in Bai Juyi’s letter. Until we can analyze a broader selection of Tang collegial letters, I do not think we can conclude that this is necessarily a guwen 古文, “ancient-style prose,” choice, particularly since the set of fourteen letters includes texts by Bai Juyi and Pei Du 裴度 (765–839), both of whom knew Han Yu but were not associated with his literary style; but it is clearly a conscious decision. This style choice alone may have seemed sufficient to convey authenticity, since avoiding the metric regularity and ornament of parallel prose required writers instead to reference real-life events, people, and places in their communication, though allusions are still very common. In addition to style choices, the writers’ context also shaped the content of the letters: twelve were written to friends or colleagues who were at a great distance from the writer, a fact that surely heightened the communicative urgency and possibly the emotional burden of the texts.

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Author

Recipient

Date (est.)

Title

Content Summary

Liu Zongyuan

Xiao Mian 蕭俛

811

“Yu Xiao Hanlin Mian shu” 與蕭翰林俛書65 (Letter to Xiao Mian of the Hanlin Academy)

(in exile) Received letter with good news of Xiao’s promotion, writing to congratulate; sharing his state of mind and current unhappiness with Xiao

Liu Zongyuan

Li Jian

809

“Yu Li Hanlin Jian shu” 與李翰林建書66 (Letter to Li Jian of the Hanlin Academy)

(in exile) Acknowledging exchange of letters, happiness of hearing from Li; sharing his current state

Liu Zongyuan

Lü Wen 呂溫

808–11 “Yu Lü Daozhou lun Fei Guoyu shu” 與呂 道州溫論非國語書67 (Letter to Lü Wen of Daozhou on [my] Against the Discussions of the States)

Liu Zongyuan

Yang Huizhi 811 or 楊誨之 812

65  Liu Zongyuan ji, 2:797–800. 66  Ibid., 2:800–803. 67  Ibid., 2:822–24. 68  Ibid., 3:847–49.

(in exile) Brief letter ostensibly about his reasons for writing the Fei Guoyu, but also a discussion of his disgrace, expresses need to have Lü Wen to listen to him

“Yu Yang Huizhi shu” (in exile) Brief personal letter accompanying 與楊誨之書68 (Letter to Yang Huizhi) longer letter containing the parable of the cart, an allegory of how to get along in contemporary

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(cont.) Author

Recipient

Date (est.)

Title

Content Summary

society, and explaining why Liu wrote this story for Yang (who was known to Liu since childhood) Liu Yuxi

Liu Zongyuan 808?

“Da Liu Zihou shu” 答 柳子厚書69 (Letter in Reply to Liu Zihou)

(in exile) Brief response to Liu Zongyuan about his recent work, which LZY asked him to evaluate

Pei Du

Li Ao

801

“Ji Li Ao shu” 寄李翱書70 (Letter Sent to Li Ao)

Praise of Li Ao’s recent work and modest praise of Li as a person (they are cousins by marriage); discussion of good writing (wen) and its qualities; criticism of Han Yu’s frivolity and fondness for unusual language (Pei accuses Han of “making a game out of literary writing” 以文為戲)

Bai Juyi

Yuan Zhen

815

“Yu Yuan Jiu shu” 與元九書71 (Letter to Yuan the Ninth)

(in exile) Long discussion of literary writing, prefaced and concluded by personal exchange

69  Liu Yuxi ji jianzheng, 1:265–66. 70  Quan Tang wen 538.1b–4a. 71  Bai Juyi ji jianjiao, 4:2789–2905.

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Recipient

Bai Juyi

Date (est.)

707

Title

Content Summary

Yang Yuqing 816 楊虞卿

“Yu Yang Yuqing shu” 與楊虞卿書72 (Letter to Yang Yuqing)

(in exile) Long selfexplanation and defense of actions that had him demoted in 815; discussion of Yang’s worthiness, character; Bai describes his resignation to current fate

Bai Juyi

Yuan Zhen

818

“Yu Yuan Weizhi shu” 與元微之書73 “Letter to Yuan Weizhi”

(in exile) Emotional letter sent to Yuan after 3 years apart, two years without contact

Han Yu

Cui Lizhi 崔立之

795

“Da Cui Lizhi shu” 答崔立之書74 “Letter in Reply to Cui Lizhi”

Written to peer after multiple failures to pass the selection exam (xuan 選) or gain a post; need to explain himself, express his despair and loss of hope for future, despite Cui’s praise of him as an “uncarved jade”

72  Ibid., 4:2769–75. 73  Ibid., 4:2814–17. 74  Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1261–68; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 1:691–711.

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(cont.) Author

Recipient

Date (est.)

Title

Content Summary

Han Yu

Meng Jiao 孟郊

800

“Yu Meng Dongye shu” 與孟東野書75 “Letter to Meng Dongye”

(in separation) Brief note praising Meng, expressing sadness at separation, description of current life, plans for future

Han Yu

Li Ao

800

“Yu Li Ao shu” 與李翱書 (Letter to Li Ao)

(in separation) Response to Li Ao’s letter in which Li urged Han to return to the capital; outrage and affection mixed as Han tries to convince Li of his position

Han Yu

Cui Qun 崔群

802

“Yu Cui Qun shu” 與崔群書76 (Letter to Cui Qun)

Long, crafted text sent to a “same[examination pass] year” (tongnian 同年) friend, senior official, discussion of friendship, social knowledge, praise of Cui; Han expresses concern about his own future, current difficult circumstances

75  Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1425–30; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 1:574–78. 76  Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1532–39; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 1:803–21.

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Author

Recipient

Date (est.)

Title

Content Summary

Han Yu

Feng Su 馮宿

807

“Da Feng Su shu” 答馮宿書77 (Letter in Reply to Feng Su)

Brief note sent to a tongnian, pained at hearing criticism and unpleasant gossip from Feng, but thanking him for trying to help and requesting that he listen and pass on anything else

As we saw in the letters expressing anger, the expressions of affection in these letters tend to be indirect, even on a lexical level. Terms for happiness—both “pleasure,” xi 喜, and “joy,” le 樂—are common in the letters; there are eighteen uses of xi and twenty-four of le, including the negative version bu le, compared with three and four appearances, respectively, in the letters with anger. Stating pleasure or other positive emotions inspired by the recipient’s communication or memory is one common convention, as we saw in Liu Zongyuan’s letter. Positive words of praise for the recipient are also frequent, but neither affection nor praise is given gratuitously in these letters; on the contrary, the letter writers often take pains to describe the specific causes of pleasure and praise. In Liu’s letter to Yang Huizhi, for example, he recalls seeing Yang mature physically and in his literary talent: “At first I did not know you, and then I arrived in Tanzhou, where I saw that your spirits had become more calm, your work more focused; your demeanor was more weighty, and you spoke less. And in my heart I was happy.” 僕未始知足下,及至潭州,乃見足 下氣益和,業益專,端重而少言,私心乃喜. In Pei Du’s letter to Li Ao, Pei praises Li’s work in conventional terms as “truly excellent, truly excellent” (shen shan shen shan 甚善甚善), then goes on to substantiate his assessment of Li’s work with a cautious evaluation of his character: “However, in knowing you, I have not yet come to know more than [what you disclose in your literary work], that you are diligent in your learning, delight in writing, and rectify yourself through the Six Classics . . . I presume to think that you are to 77  Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1711–15; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 1:853–61.

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be treated with directness and honesty and not to be handled with pleasing flattery” 然僕之知弟也,未知其他,直以弟敏於學而好於文也,就 六經而正焉 . . . 竊料弟亦以直諒見待,不以悅媚相容. By explaining his personal understanding of Li Ao, Pei Du forestalls suspicions that his words might be taken as mere “pleasing flattery,” which would give his assessment even more weight as testimony to others, a fact that Pei Du surely realized. In his lengthy letter of 816 discussing literature, Bai Juyi’s statement to Yuan Zhen, “since I love your poetry . . .” 僕既愛足下詩, becomes the pretext for his encyclopedic discussion of literary history, poetic values, and their shared poetic tastes. Expressing praise and pleasure towards the recipient, in other words, was often the starting-point of these letters, not the final goal. Recalling the emotional charge of a shared event at the opening or close of a letter was another indirect technique to convey affection, establish a mood of intimacy, and also underscore social bonds between writer and recipient, as in Bai Juyi’s letter to Yang Yuqing: When I returned to the capital again [in 814, after mourning for his mother], you had been posted in Hu district and were fettered with official work, so we rarely saw one another; within the space of a half a year or so, we only met to talk and laugh three or four times. But when the order for my demotion came down, I had to head east the very next day; you came from the western part of the city to see me, all the way to Zhaoguo ward, but you did not make it in time. Riding your horse all the way to the Chan river, we were finally able to clasp hands; with pity you bade your farewell, and we spoke of nothing but that. 自僕再來京師,足下守官鄠縣,吏職拘絆,相見甚稀。凡半年 餘,與足下開口而笑者,不過三四。及僕左降詔下,明日而 東,足下從城西來,抵昭國坊,已不及矣。走馬至滻水,才及 一執手,憫然而訣,言不及他。 In the next section of the letter, Bai states that because their parting had been so urgent, he is now forced to write in order to explain his actions and the consequences more fully. The memory of their parting therefore stages Bai’s subsequent self-revelation as yet another intimate encounter between close friends. In an even more indirect fashion, Han Yu opens his letter to Meng Jiao by suggesting that the bond between himself and Meng, who Han claims knows him so well, is so deep that they mirror one another and can understand each other’s emotions without stating them directly:

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I’ve been parted from you a long time now. From my own longing for you, I know that you must be anxiously worried about me. We are both bound by work, and can’t get together. When I am around others, since I do not get to see you and spend my days with you, you know if my heart is happy or not! 與足下別久矣。以吾心之思足下,知足下懸懸於吾也。各以事 牽,不可合并,其於人人,非足下之為見而日與之處,足下知 吾心樂否也。 In both his letters to Yuan Zhen, Bai Juyi makes a similar claim about their intimate understanding of one another’s emotional states, though without expressing affection directly. His 816 letter discussing literature includes the repetition of the exclamation (read either as a question or an imperative), “Weizhi, Weizhi, do you know my heart?” 微之微之,知我心哉. Although they avoid direct utterances of affection towards the recipients, in these letters, the writers use key terms for feeling and mutual understanding so as to establish the emotional conditions—not simply the practical reasons—for the selfdisclosure that follows. Whereas in the letters expressing anger we found a consistent preference for hypotaxis, repetition, and recursion, in these letters we see a greater variation of parataxis and hypotaxis from letter to letter, which seems largely to be a consequence of the writer’s choice of style register and degree of intimacy with the addressee. Affection, in other words, could appear in many forms and in letters of many different styles. The style register of the letters is communicated in many linguistic features, but modes of first- and secondperson address are critical to establishing the relative distance or closeness of a relationship. One feature that indicated intimacy was shifting in and out of more informal or intimate terms for “you,” as Han Yu does in his letter to Li Ao, as he moves back and forth between the default term for “you” in letters to peers, zuxia, and zi 子, thereby shifting his tone towards Li from that of teacher to student to that of friend to friend.78 Letters that aim for a more 78  Three letters use only a single mode of address for the recipient and for themselves throughout the letter (zuxia 足下 and pu 僕), which is also the most common choice in the larger body of collegial letters. However, in the letters with affection, shifting down in register with pronouns (addressing the recipient as zi 子 and referring to oneself as wu 吾, wo 我, or yu 余), which occurs in nine letters, seems to have been a simple way to vary the register and also the intimacy of address. The repetition of the recipient’s style name has the same effect on register. Perhaps the most telling is the use of multiple terms of address

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formal style register overall, such as Han Yu’s letter to Cui Qun (which addresses the topic of friendship and knowledge in both a personal and theoretical manner) or Liu Zongyuan’s letter to Xiao Mian (in which Liu congratulates Xiao on being appointed to the Hanlin Academy and laments his own fate), tend towards hypotaxis, longer sentences, and more complex chains of argument. Conversely, letters to friends with a lower, more informal style register (such as Han Yu’s letter to Meng Jiao or Liu’s letter to Li Jian) tend to have shorter, less clearly connected sentences. Thus in Han’s letter to Cui Qun, we see Han’s argumentation laid out elaborately (using constructions that highlight Han’s reasoning, such as 雖 . . . 抑 . . .; 以此而退之 . . .; 所以言者 . . .), to the point where Han seems somewhat defensive in explaining his praise of Cui: In my humble foolishness, there is nothing I truly understand, and yet there are no works of the sages that I have not read. Although I am not exhaustively familiar with their precision and breadth, their scope and details, you also could not say that I haven’t entered deeply into their flows. Thus, if we use [my learning] to examine this issue [of valuing you], use it to assess this question, then I truly know that your greatness stands above the crowd, but do not ask where I attained this knowledge. Given the true feeling between us, is it even necessary for me to say this and only then have you understand it? The only reason I say all this is that I fear you’ll think I have too many deep friendships, and that I do not take to heart the difference between white and black. 僕愚陋無所知曉,然聖人之書,無所不讀。其精麤巨細,出入 明晦,雖不盡識,抑不可謂不涉其流者也。以此而推之,以此 而度之,誠知足下出群拔萃,無謂僕何從而得之也。與足下情 義,寧須言而後自明耶?所以言者?懼足下以為吾所與深者? 多不置白黑於胸中耳。 In Liu Zongyuan’s letter to Li Jian, in contrast, the simple paratactic style manages to make Liu’s state of mind equally clear: Even if I could get rid of my illness, and my body were strong again, I am far away from this age, and I could not overcome the fact of being a forty-year-old traveler [an exile]. I just passed my thirty-seventh year, and suggesting familiarity or intimacy, as we see in Liu Zongyuan’s letter to Lü Wen, where he calls Lü zuxia and by his style name, Huaguang 化光, and also calls him junzi and zhi wo zhe 知我者, “one who knows me.” Liu Zongyuan ji, 2:822–23.

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it was no different from the blink of an eye. As for the worthlessness of what I have gotten thus far [in life], I have indeed already laid this out. Biaozhi, do you not think this is true? 假令病盡已, 身復壯, 悠悠人世, 越不過為四十年客耳.79 前過三十 七年, 與瞬息無異. 復所得者, 其不足把翫, 亦已審矣。杓直以為誠 然乎? The conclusion of Han Yu’s letter to Meng Jiao proceeds in a similarly plain manner, providing important information in a way that resembles the more quotidian style of later chidu, including the conventional comments on the weather, a wish for Meng, and Han’s health: Li Xizhi [Ao] is to marry my deceased brother’s older daughter a month from now—we are waiting for him to arrive soon. Zhang Ji is in Hezhou, in mourning, and his family is very poor. I feared that you would not know, and so I tell you all this. He hopes that you will come so you can see one another. From there to here is a long way, but if you travel by boat all the way, you can get here. My hope is that you’ll plan this quickly. Spring is almost over, and the seasonal weather is turning hot; I wish you good fortune. My eye problem is worse, which is really a bother; but I will not detail everything here. Yu bows twice. 李習之娶吾亡兄之女,期在後月,朝夕當來此。張籍在和州居 喪,家甚貧,恐足下不知,故具此白。冀足下一來相視也。自 彼至此雖遠,要皆舟行可至。速圖之,吾之望也。春且盡,時 氣向熱。惟侍奉吉慶。愈眼疾比劇,甚無聊。不復一一。愈再 拜。 In contrast to these uses of parataxis in letters to familiar friends, which more resemble oral discourse, Bai Juyi includes sections of paratactic parallel prose into his 817 letter to Yuan Zhen, opening his letter with lines of affection and longing that seem close to shuyi models in some ways: Weizhi, Weizhi! I have not seen your face for three years now; I have not received your letters for almost two years now. How long is human life? That the distance between us be so broad! It’s even worse for us, whose hearts are bonded like lacquer, bodies consigned to the far realms of Hu and Yue; when we were near, we could not get together; now secluded, 79  The original text reads “thirty” 三十, but the editors of Liu Zongyuan ji note that some editions have the variant “forty” 四十, which I adopt here.

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we cannot forget each other. Bound and tied together yet blocked and divided, we each are growing white-headed. Weizhi, Weizhi—how can it be like this! How can it be like this! 微之微之!不見足下面已三年矣。不得足下書欲二年矣。人生 幾何?離闊如此。況以膠漆之心。置於胡越之身,進不得相 合,退不得相忘。牽攣乖隔,各欲白首。微之微之,如何如 何!80 Interestingly, though Bai Juyi uses this parallel style to lament the distance between them and evokes the intimacy of the friendship with the image of “hearts bonded like lacquer,” he utters no direct statements of affection for Yuan here or elsewhere in the letter. He says that he feels “anguished,” cece 惻惻, when he reads Yuan’s descriptions of his illness and poor conditions, and yet Bai avoids words for longing or sadness, such as si 思, huai 懷, or chou 愁. Even in this dramatic piece, one that we recognize to be replete with feeling, Bai Juyi closes with the indirect utterance that is as much question as wish: “Weizhi Weizhi, do you understand my heart on this night?” 微之微 之,此夕此心,君知之乎. Throughout the letters, emotional indirectness appears to be a constant, no matter whether a writer adopts a hypotactic or a paratactic style. The ultimate goal of many of these letters that express affection, which the writers make explicit at different points in the texts, is for the writer to express his feelings, his recent history, and his current condition to the addressee and, presumably, to the larger circle of people who might read the letter. Eight of the fourteen contain a direct statement of that goal, as when Bai writes to Yuan upon his receipt of a bundle of Yuan’s writings: . . . upon opening the scrolls and understanding their meaning, suddenly it was as if I saw your face; and all that I had stored in my heart, I wished to quickly tell you. Though I often doubted myself, I did not feel that we were separated by ten thousand li. But soon I felt a spirit of sad vexation, and I wished to have some way to release it, so I went back to reflect on my former ambitions, and endeavored to write this letter. . . . 開卷得意,忽如會面。心所蓄者,便欲快言,往往自疑,    不知相去萬里也。既而憤悱之氣思有所洩,遂追就前志,勉為  此書。 81

80   Bai Juyi ji jianjiao, 4:2814. 81  Ibid., 4:2790.

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In his letter to Li Ao, even though his wish to defend himself (as well as express his anger at Li Ao’s proposals) is perfectly clear, Han Yu closes his letter with a similar gesture: “I have therefore tasked a courier to deliver this, awaiting your thoughts [in reply], and also explaining myself” 故專使馳此候足下意,并 以自解.82 In his letter to Cui Lizhi, Han Yu even implies that a fuller discussion of their personal experience (and not merely their intellectual positions) is needed for the two men to understand one another: “However, there still seems to be areas where we don’t understand one another; is this not why you intentionally sought to provoke me [to reveal my thoughts]? If not, then why do you not treat me as a man of substance? I cannot remain silent and would like to clarify myself.” 然尚有似不相曉者,非故欲發余乎?不然,何子 之不以丈夫期我也?不能默默,聊復自明.83 Han Yu then proceeds to give Cui a history of his trials by fire, as his youthful learning and his beliefs about success and failure were tested in what he sees as the biased, ludicrous process of the placement examination, which he had failed repeatedly at the time of writing the letter in 795. Where the writers had goals in addition to recounting their personal feelings and circumstances, such as giving their addressees instruction or assessment, they explain those carefully as well, framing their advice in ways meant to lessen any sting of rebuke. When writing to Yang Huizhi, Liu Zongyuan first notes his concern for Yang’s impetuous character, fearing that Yang would suffer a fate similar to Liu’s own, and he prefaces the advice with implied affection: Good people are few, and bad people many, and therefore those who care for you are few, whereas those who would harm you are many. I truly wish you to make yourself square in the middle but round outside [moral but flexible with others, in order to get along], so I have written you this “Discussion of the Cart” for you to read closely. This discussion of the cart will benefit you in your dealings with the world. 善人少,不善人多,故愛足下者少,而害足下者多。吾固欲其 方其中,圓其外,今為足下作說車,可詳觀之。車之說,其有 益乎行於世也。 84 These gestures also underscore the reciprocity expected in the back-and-forth of letters, and the assumption that the exchange of knowledge about one

82   Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1388; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 1:784. 83   Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1261; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 1:691. 84   Liu Zongyuan ji, 2:848.

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another would continue, even if that exchange required sometimes painful self-examination. As the examples demonstrate, affection expressed in letters was ultimately only one component of the larger structure of the social relationships, but it was essential to creating the climate of trust and security that writers invoked so often. References to trust also reveal the potential burden of self-disclosure on the recipient, in that he then had to decide how best to handle the knowledge or implied request contained in the letter, and whether or not to share the letter with those who might be of help. This issue particularly affected men writing from political disgrace or poor circumstances, as is the case for twelve of the letters. The rhetorically bounded space of the collegial letter allowed for direct speech, and the exchange of letters provided both the pretext and the stage on which a writer could unburden himself. As Han Yu concludes in his letter to Cui Lizhi, “The scholar indeed trusts in those who know him; if it were not for you, I would not have had reason to utter my wild [intemperate] words.” 士固信於知己,微足下無以發吾之狂言.85 In Bai Juyi’s long defense of his actions to Yang Yuqing, Bai proclaims his trust and intimacy with Yang: “Shigao! As for these words of mine, I do not utter them to other people—I only utter them to you, Shigao. You, Shigao, are one who knows me; how can there be shame between us? If I were to feel shame before you, then I certainly would not utter these words.” 師臯!僕之是言,不發於他人,獨發於師 臯。師臯知我者,豈有愧於其間哉?苟有愧於師臯,固是言不發矣. Since just prior to this statement Bai Juyi had regaled Yang Yuqing with a list of high-ranking colleagues to whom he had turned for help, we are not meant to take this as a serious request for secrecy. Rather, Bai Juyi is using the rhetorical framework of speaking “privately” to the trusted friend—one before whom he need not feel shame, despite his public humiliation—as the condition for a full disclosure of the events he had witnessed and the reasons for his actions, which he hopes will then be more widely circulated in his defense. In the expressions of affection to their friends and colleagues, these midTang letters appear to work against medieval conventions that exaggerated feelings of longing and affection and conveyed them in fixed phrases and terms. However, the situations in which the letters were composed made expressing affection or any positive feeling towards the recipient a delicate matter: in the case of Liu Zongyuan’s letters, for example, all four were written during Liu’s years of demotion to Yongzhou. Although only Li Jian and Xiao Mian would have been in a position to aid Liu politically, Liu Zongyuan had no way to ensure a “safe” circulation of his writing. The same is true of Bai 85   Han Yu quanji jiaozhu, 3:1263; Han Yu guwen jiaozhu, 1:704.

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Juyi’s letters, which were all composed during a two-year period at the start of his five-year demotion. Han Yu, in his letters to Cui Qun, Li Ao, and Meng Jiao, was still struggling to find supporters and an official post in the ranks. The challenge for these men when writing to friends and former colleagues, therefore, was to avoid the appearance of flattery, hypocrisy, or begging while still defending themselves and reassuring the recipients of a continued bond. Being reserved in showing affection was thus critical; but at the same time, since they were writing from a place of political, social, and even economic vulnerability (none except Liu Zongyuan had a substantial income), these writers had few resources other than personal feeling and literary talent to draw on. Ensuring that their letters of self-expression also reinforced their bonds with friends and colleagues or displayed their sincere feeling to others, at a time in Tang political history when those assets were essential for survival, was at the very least a wise strategy.



At the core of this research lies the very question Bai Juyi posed of Yuan Zhen in his letters: “do you know my heart?” 知我心哉. How did mid-Tang writers convey their “hearts”—and how can we be sure we understand them? In these mid-Tang collegial letters, we find ambitious and diverse goals, including selfrevelation, intellectual debate, political positioning, and social role negotiation. The writers’ awareness of the larger audience for their letters shapes their literary craft at every level, and certainly led to the preservation of the texts in their collected works. If, as I have suggested, medieval models for letters between friends and colleagues were focused on ritual occasions and constrained by formulaic expressions of sentiment, we can better see how difficult mid-Tang writers might have found the task of expressing emotions with sincerity and clarity in these epistolary contexts, and how concerned they might have been about being misread. Their goal was to convince their readers— both the intended recipient and the wider group of readers beyond him—of their authenticity, their originality, and the necessity of their communication. By inscribing feeling indirectly at many levels, from rhetorical techniques down to a careful choice of emotion words and question particles, these midTang writers attempted to make their inner states clear without risking either hypocrisy or coldness. They did so by referring to specific people and events from their lives, including memories of past encounters or references to certain actions and words they found objectionable, to reinvigorate the sense of immediate understanding that letters sent over long distances had to convey. They used a flexible, vigorous prose style that varied significantly within the

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letters and from letter to letter in order to signal originality and to surprise the reader, who could have no way of predicting from the form or style of the text what information or revelation would appear at any given moment. And they heightened the communicative urgency of the letters by engaging the recipient constantly in the exchange with questions, reassurances, critiques, and exclamations. As the many letters here that are titled “reply” and “second reply” remind us, these mid-Tang letters were part of exchanges; perhaps even more than the letters expressing anger, the letters that suggest affection give us the sense of hearing just one side of an ongoing conversation, one that continued in the many texts now lost to us. The narrowness of this set of letters may, in the end, only tell us about these mid-Tang letters and writers. It is to be hoped that future research on emotions in Song and later texts will allow us to compare mid-Tang letters to a broader set of exchanges, or even to emotions expressed in other literary forms, and show us the ways that anger and affection could be negotiated over time and within a broader range of social relationships. Bibliography Bai Juyi ji jianjiao 白居易集箋校. Edited by Zhu Jincheng 朱金城. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 2003. Barton, Richard E. “ ‘Zealous Anger’ and the Renegotiation of Aristocratic Relationships in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France.” In Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, 153–70, edited by Barbara H. Rosenwein. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Chen, Jo-shui. Liu Tsung-yuan and Intellectual Change in T’ang China, 773–819. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ding Hongwu 丁宏武. “Li Ling ‘Da Su Wu shu’ zhenwei zai tantao” 李陵 “答蘇武書” 真偽再探討. Ningxia daxue xuebao 34.2 (2012): 47–53. Ditter, Alexei. “Genre and the Transformation of Writing in Tang Dynasty China.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2009. Ebrey, Patricia. “T’ang Guides to Verbal Etiquette.” HJAS 45 (1985): 581–613. Egan, Ronald C. “Su Shih’s ‘Notes’ as a Historical and Literary Source.” HJAS 50 (1990): 561–88. Eifring, Halvor, ed. Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Fu Xuancong 傅璇璁. Tang dai keju yu wenxue 唐代科舉與文學. Taipei: Wenshizhe, 1994.

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Han Yu guwen jiaozhu huiji 韓愈古文校注彙輯. Edited by Luo Liantian 羅聯添. Taipei: Guoli bianyi guan, 2003. Han Yu quanji jiaozhu 韓愈全集校注. Edited by Qu Shouyuan 屈守元 and Chang Sichun 常思春. Chengdu: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 1996. Huang Zhengjian 黃正建. Zhong Wan Tang shehui yu zhengzhi yanjiu 中晚唐社會與 政治研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006. Jansen, Thomas. “The Art of Severing Relationships (juejiao) in Early Medieval Culture.” JAOS 126 (2006): 347–65. Jin Chuandao 金傳道. “ ‘Shuyi’ neirong bianzheng” 書儀內容辨正. Nei Menggu daxue xuebao 42:5 (2010): 127–30. Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Knechtges, David R. “Culling the Weeds and Selecting Fine Blossoms: The Anthology in Early Medieval China.” In Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600, edited by Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, 200–241, 322–34. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Liu Yuxi ji jianzheng 劉禹錫集箋證. Edited by Qu Tuiyuan 瞿蛻園. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989. Liu Zongyuan ji 柳宗元集. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006. McMullen, David. State and Scholars in T’ang China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Moore, Oliver. Rituals of Recruitment in Tang China: Reading an Annual Programme in the Collected Statements by Wang Dingbao (870–940). Leiden: Brill, 2004. Harbsmeier, Christoph. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7: The Social Background, part 1: Language and Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Nugent, Christopher M. B. Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Owen, Stephen. The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. ―――. The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pattinson, David. “Privacy and Letter Writing in Han and Six Dynasties China.” In Chinese Concepts of Privacy, edited by Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson, 97–118. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pollock, Linda A. “Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern England.” The Historical Journal 47 (2004): 567–90. Quan Tang wen 全唐文. Compiled by Dong Gao 董誥 (Qing). Rpt. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983. Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Santangelo, Paolo, ed. Love, Hatred and Other Passions: Questions and Themes on Emotions in Chinese Civilization. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Schneider, Gary. The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter-Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Shields, Anna M. “Defining Experience: The ‘Poems of Seductive Allure’ ( yanshi) of the Mid-Tang Poet Yuan Zhen (779–831).” JAOS 122 (2002): 61–78. Thrailkill, Jane. Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Van Norden, Bryan, trans. Mengzi. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing, 2008. Wan Man 萬曼. Tang ji xu lu 唐集敘錄. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980. Whitaker, K. P. K. “Some Notes on the Authorship of the Li Ling/Su Wu Letters.” BSOAS 15 (1953): 113–37, 566–87. Wierzbicka, Anna. Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Wu Liyu 吳麗娛. Tang li zhiyi 唐禮摭遺. Beijing: Shangwu yinshu, 2002. Wen xuan 文選. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986. Zhao Heping 趙和平. Dunhuang shuyi yanjiu 敦煌書儀研究. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2011. Zhao Heping and Zhou Yiliang 周一良. Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu 唐五代書儀研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995. Zhao Shugong 趙樹功. Zhongguo chidu wenxue shi 中國尺牘文學史. Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1999. Zhuangzi jiaoquan 莊子校詮. Edited by Wang Shumin 王叔岷. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1988.

chapter 19

Halves and Holes: Collections, Networks, and Epistolary Practices of Chan Monks Natasha Heller Of the many different kinds of writing collected in the Buddhist canon, letters stand out as a category of writing that is not marked as specifically Buddhist. Students of Buddhism are taught the three “baskets” of the Buddhist canon: sūtras, abhidharma (treatises), and vinaya (monastic regulations). In Chinese canons, added to these basic categories are monastic biographies, ritual texts, and “records of speech” ( yulu 語錄), to name just a few important types of text. Some of these genres, such as biographies, had secular origins, and were reshaped in various ways to suit Buddhist subject matter. Likewise, letters were an example of social writing that could be put to Buddhist ends. As “Buddhist” literature letters often reflected the priority doctrine held for the monastic elite. For example, an early, famous exchange of letters between Buddhist monks is that of Huiyuan 慧遠 (334–416) and Kumārajīva (344–413), in which the Chinese monk asks for clarification on a number of issues from the Indian scholarly authority. This exchange, as it appears in the modern Buddhist canon, points to some of the problems in studying letters: the set of letters was edited so that Kumārajīva’s responses follow the questions of the original letter, making Huiyuan look somewhat obtuse.1 What began as an epistolary exchange became an artificially constructed doctrinal dialogue. In this case, the work done by later Buddhists, in their capacity as compilers and editors, complicates what we can know about how letters were used by monks, even as letters came to be more commonly included in the literary collections of monks. That is, collections of individual monks likely give us a skewed view of epistolary practices. To take another famous example, some five dozen letters of Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 (1089–1163) make up the last five fascicles of his “records of speech.” The first examples of the “records of 1  Zürcher, e.g., writes, “it is interesting to note how the two partners continually misunderstand each other.” Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, 229. Against this view, Wagner argued persuasively that the Dacheng dayi zhang 大乘大義章, in which the letters appear, is a “collation from two series of questions and answers” that “were matched by editors,” and “not pairs of letters following each other in sequential order.” Wagner, “The Original Structure,” 30–31.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_021

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speech” were compilations created retrospectively decades or centuries after their subject had died, culling their anecdotes from biographies and other sources. The materials included were fairly limited,2 but as Chan developed a more distinct institutional identity in the Song dynasty, “records of speech” were often compiled shortly after the death of an eminent monk, usually by one of his disciples. The material they admitted also changed, as “records of speech” came to resemble the literary collections (wenji 文集) of the monks’ secular peers. Such collections included inscriptions, commemorations, poetry, and letters; these types of writings were often those that reflected a social connection or occasion. In the case of Dahui, the large number of letters assembled, making up approximately a sixth of his collection, suggests that his disciples saw them as an important part of their teacher’s identity. Dahui wrote more than one letter to many of the recipients, and through these letters he had sustained conversations about Buddhist teachings and practice. All but two of these letters, however, are to lay followers. This raises some questions: are we to believe that Dahui’s letter-writing was heavily skewed towards the laity? Or were letters to lay followers privileged during the collecting process? Setting aside the way in which the letters between Huiyuan and Kumārajīva are presented, we might identify a good deal of overlap between how they used letters and how Dahui did, even though they were separated by several centuries, and had entirely different doctrinal agendas. For these monks, letters were a way of carrying out instruction and inquiry between two people with shared interests but separated by distance. Looking at the letters in the collection (guanglu 廣錄) of Zhongfeng Mingben 中峰明本 (1263–1323), presents a different picture. If we were working solely from Mingben’s collected works we would conclude that letters were an insignificant part of his relationship with students. Most of the letters are short, and based on the collection there is only one example of a person who received two letters. There are no sustained conversations reflected in the epistolary network expressed through the letters in Mingben’s collection. Again this raises questions about the role of letters for Chan monks: did they serve a different purpose in Mingben’s life than they did for Dahui? Did those disciples in charge of collecting Mingben’s writings and compiling his Expansive Record take a different view of which letters merited inclusion?3 I would argue that the latter is more likely to be the case: judging 2  See the discussion of the definition of yulu in Welter, The Linji lu, 47–49. 3  David Pattinson’s essay in this volume raises the same issue with reference to the collection of letters sent to Yan Guangmin 顏光敏 (1640–1686). Pattinson notes that it is impossible to determine how collected letters might relate to all letters received by Yan.

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from the recipient and the content of the letters, the compilers seem to have included these letters in order to represent Mingben’s relationship with eminent literati or to serve as evidence of important parts of Mingben’s biography.4 Dahui died a hundred years before Mingben was born, and thus the distance in time separating the two men may invalidate the comparison between them. Even with further study, it may be difficult to assess whether epistolary practices changed, or whether the process of writing letters changed, or whether both were so idiosyncratic and individual that we cannot generalize. Further, most of the letters included in these two collections are missing salutations and valedictions. Such greetings and closes were certainly there in the original letters, as manuscript letters confirm, but were removed by an editor or compiler at the point at which the letters moved from social exchange to literary work. Although salutations and valedictions are important to the function of the letter, their removal suggests that they were not seen as intrinsic to the letter for the purposes of a literary collection. For the editor or compiler of a literary collection, the letter retained its defining quality and significance without some of the verbal signals that it was a letter. Individual collections thus present fairly significant problems when trying to grasp the function of letter-writing for Buddhist monks. There is a gap between how letters were used and how they were collected, resulting in a series of fragments that cannot make a whole. As a way to construct a more robust picture of epistolary practices of late Song and Yuan dynasties, I propose to look at the letters of three generations of monks in a single lineage as a set, drawing from these letters their key themes and functions. These three monks are Gaofeng Yuanmiao 高峰原妙 (1238–1295), Zhongfeng Mingben 中峰明本 (1263–1363), and Tianru Weize 天如惟則 (d. 1354). Making up three generations of masters and disciples, these men overlapped in time and space, and maintained similar networks. That is, they knew many of the same people—both lay and ordained—and were active in the same geographic area. Further, they were part of a sublineage of Chan that was conscious of its identity, and had shared attitudes toward Chan practice, Buddhist institutions, and interaction with society beyond temple walls. Gaofeng Yuanmiao was an eminent Chan master of the late Southern Song, and established a teaching center at Mount Tianmu, not far from the capital at Hangzhou but far enough to serve as a true retreat. Yuanmiao had a typical career: he entered into monastic life at fifteen and two years later received

4  The process of collecting letters, and the choices made by compilers in this process, likely explains the general absence of letters referring to donations, either solicited or received.

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the full precepts.5 He first studied the Tiantai tradition, before seeking out the Chan master Duanqiao Miaolun 斷橋妙倫 (1201–1261).6 After several years with little progress, Yuanmiao went to study with Xueyan Zuqin 雪嚴祖欽 (d. 1287), a prominent and cosmopolitan Chan master who promoted the contemplation of a single key phrase from a gong’an 公案.7 Yuanmiao adopted this practice, and became Zuqin’s dharma-heir. One of the notable features of Yuanmiao’s biography is his retreat into the mountains for periods of protracted self-cultivation, and his own heirs continued this practice. In Yuanmiao’s “Essentials of Chan” (Chanyao 禪要), a supplement to his collected writings, there are just two letters. Both letters are very similar to other types of sermons and instruction, and, I believe, were included as much for their content as for the social connections that they reflected. Zhongfeng Mingben was Yuanmiao’s most famous disciple, and perhaps the most prominent monk of the Yuan dynasty. He continued Yuanmiao’s practice of focusing on the key phrase from a gong’an, and like his teacher believed that long periods of reclusion were critical for religious practice and development. Mingben moved around frequently in the Jiangnan area, and some of the retreats he established became cloisters large enough to have their own community guidelines. Mingben was the Buddhist teacher to the famed painter, calligrapher, and statesman Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254–1322), and through him was drawn into contact with the imperial house as well as with other national elites. His literary collection includes two letters to a dispossessed Korean royal, a letter to a Korean monk, one to a poet, and one to another monk. The recipients of his letters are thus evenly split between lay followers and monastics, but do not reflect any exchanges with his closest lay disciple, Zhao Mengfu. That the two men were frequent correspondents is known from the letters Zhao wrote to Mingben, preserved and valued as examples of Zhao’s calligraphy. Tianru Weize was one of Mingben’s closest disciples. Weize’s early years are unclear; he was born in Ji’an 吉安 prefecture in a family surnamed Tan 譚.8 5  For more details on Gaofeng Yuanmiao’s life, see the biographies appended to his Gaofeng Yuanmiao Chanshi yulu, in Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, 70:698c–701b; henceforth all works in this collection with be indicated with Z. His biography is also redacted in Jideng lu, Z 86:529b–530a, and Nan Song Yuan Ming Chanlin sengbao zhuan, Z 79:621b–622b. 6  Duanqiao Miaolun is a monk in the lineage of Wuzhun Shifan; his biography is appended to his discourse record. See Duanqiao Miaolun Chanshi yulu, Z 70. 7  Zuqin was focusing on the character wu 無 when he had his first major breakthrough. See Wu, Confucian’s Progress, 82 and Xueyan Zuqin Chanshi yulu, Z 70:607a. 8  Xudeng cungao gives his hometown as Luling 廬陵, while Jingtu shengxian lu and Wudeng huiyuan xulue have Yongxin 永新. Both are in Ji’an prefecture. Wudeng yantong has Yongan 永安 as his hometown; this appears to be an error.

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He is said to have taken the precepts on Mount He 禾山, an important Chan site in Jiangxi, and later received Mingben’s dharma-transmission. After Mingben’s death he lived a peripatetic life, refusing positions at prominent monasteries, claiming that his virtue was not sufficient for such an undertaking.9 He was a popular teacher among the literati, and respected by local administrators. In the later years of his life he retreated to the Suzhou area, where his disciples built him a garden abode named Shizi Lin 獅(師)子林 (Lion grove), where he resided for thirteen years.10 According to one biography, in addition to Chan he also promoted the Tiantai teachings of Yongming Yanshou and propagated Pure Land practice.11 These interests are apparent in his letters, and Weize follows Mingben in both. The letters collected in his “records of speech” number fifty-three, the highest number of these three monks’ collections. They include letters to lay followers, monks, and to his own brother. As is apparent by the large difference in the number of letters included in their literary collections, the networks suggested by their letters are very different. Yet I do not think we can conclude that the nature of their social and scholarly networks diverged so very greatly. These three men would have had similar needs: living outside the institutional mainstream of public monasteries they were all reliant on the support of lay donors.12 They also needed a means to carry out instruction at a distance, facilitated through epistolary contacts. Therefore, the vast differences between the letters collected from these three monks support the notion that these literary collections are not reliable reflections of how letters actually functioned in their lives. However, the content of these epistles provides another perspective about how monks used letter-writing. One way of categorizing letters has been to divide them between public, ritual, and personal types of letters. Public letters function much as essays do, aiming to persuade or explain a matter to an audience beyond just the recipient. Ritual letters are sent on social and family occasions, intended to affirm relations rather than convey intimacies, while personal letters express emotions and ideas without intending a larger readership.13 Although some letters in these Chan collections may come to 9    Tianru Weize Chanshi yulu, Z 70:716c. 10   Xudeng cungao, Z 84:746c. 11   Jingtu shengxian lu, Z 78:261a. For a summary of Weize’s life and thought see Ren, “Tianru Weize Chanshi,” 145–50. 12  Although the importance of lay support seems clear in these three cases, Schlütter argues that lay people had most reason to support local public monasteries because of the prestige they brought to the region. Schlütter, How Zen Became Zen, 43–44. 13  On the idea of public letters, see especially Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter Writing,” 113 and passim and Pattinson, “Market for Letter Collections,” 127–59. For a discussion of ritual letters, see Ebrey, “T’ang Guides.”

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function as public letters, most seem to haven been personal in initial intent. These letters serve a wide range of epistolary relationships: between family members, between monks of the same lineage, between monks in the same region, and between master and disciple, to name a few. Taking the letters of these three Chan masters as a whole, we can identify four primary functions of letters for these monks of the late Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. Letters serve 1) as places where monks reflect on their spiritual progress and careers; 2) as a means of teaching both ordained disciples and lay followers; 3) to facilitate the administration of Buddhist institutions and related tasks; 4) to carry out social interactions, often with a ritual component. While many letters tend to have a primary function, there can be substantial overlap between these categories. The interpretation of letters is complicated by the fact that most letters are preserved as one part of dialogue, and missing half the conversation limits our ability to understand how a discussion unfolded or practical business was carried out. Yet examining these various functions across the collections of these three men can provide at least a provisional account of epistolary practice in this period. 1

Reflective Letters

The lengthiest letter in the three sets considered here is that from Gaofeng Yuanmiao to his own teacher. Although this letter best exemplifies the reflective mode, as it is one of only two letters included in Yuanmiao’s collection there is little context for it. This letter has been studied by Pei-yi Wu as an example of autobiography; its content focuses entirely on Yuanmiao’s own understanding of his spiritual development. Pei-yi Wu notes that the autobiographical nature of the letter is rather unusual, finding precedents for this type of letter in Sima Qian’s famous letter—no doubt known to Yuanmiao, but distantly removed from his own situation—and in a letter Yuanmiao’s teacher sent to a lay follower.14 The letter is given a title in Yuanmiao’s collection, and this indicates it was written so that the younger monk might express his doubts about succeeding his teacher. In it, Yuanmiao recounts his training within the Chan tradition, starting from his decision to be a monk and continuing through his tutelage under the letter’s addressee, Xueyan Zuqin. Yuanmiao includes conversations between himself and his teacher, and describes two awakening experiences. Both elements are found in Chan biographies and “records of 14  Wu, The Confucian’s Progress, 91–92. For a more extended discussion of autobiographical letters, see the essay by Matthew Wells in this volume.

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speech”; indeed, absent the conventions of salutations and valedictions, only the first-person narration marks a significant difference from these genres. As Wu argues, Yuanmiao’s teacher Zuqin was at the center of a Southern Song trend of self-revelation. Zuqin’s account of his journey toward awakening, however, was part of a sermon: his own struggles offered an example to his students, and also provided the Chan master with an opportunity to distinguish between sudden and gradual paths, and different types of student.15 The function of Yuanmiao’s letter is not explicit, but as it is directed toward his elder, it cannot be the same as Zuqin’s. Yuanmiao opens the letter: In the past when I have had faults I have personally exposed them before you; now I again have doubts, and cannot but bring forth [my experience] from the beginning. 昔年敗闕,親曾剖露師前。今日重疑。不免從頭拈出.16 What these faults or failures are is not made explicit, but interestingly Yuanmiao uses the word nian 拈, meaning to “pick up.” In Chan contexts this verb is used with reference to old cases, which are “picked up” by the Chan master for analysis and discussion. Yuanmiao thus seems to be raising his own experiences for consideration and evaluation by his teacher. He concludes the letter with very polite language: “I humbly hope that my kind teacher will favor me with a careful reading” 伏望尊慈,特垂詳覽.17 Yuanmiao seems to expect that his teacher will treat his epistolary reflections like the accounts of awakening found in Chan collections, and to offer him an interpretation or advice on his experience. As neither Zuqin’s nor Yuanmiao’s collections include the teacher’s reply—if any—to his student, there is no way to assess how the letter was read by its recipient.18 There is a performative aspect to Yuanmiao’s letter that raises the question of whether it was intended to function as a personal letter in fact, or whether it may have taken on this form for style or rhetorical effect. Although the subject matter of this letter seems personal, as it concerns Yuanmiao’s own spiritual struggles, but the rhetorical choice to treat his own experience as a topic of inquiry like those of past Chan masters suggests that Yuanmiao may have expected a wider readership for his letter. In this case, the letter would function as a site of reflection and as a means of instruction.

15  Ibid., 86. 16   Z 70:711c23. See Wu’s translation in The Confucian’s Progress, 239. 17   Z 70:712c1. See Wu’s translation in The Confucian’s Progress, 242. 18  It is worth noting that Zuqin’s collection contains only letters to lay followers.

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Although this letter is exceptional in both its length and the degree to which it focuses on Yuanmiao’s own experiences, it does offer us some insights into the reflective mode of letter-writing. First, it is important to note that this letter is from someone with less knowledge or experience to someone with more, in contrast to the majority of letters in collections, which are answers to letters. Responses, as we shall see in the next section, often take the form of instruction. The compilers of monastic collections may have found it more appropriate, generally speaking, to include letters that show their teacher in a position of authority. On the other hand, reflection on the author’s own experiences may be better suited to letters looking for advice. We have some hints of this in letters that respond to questions: as we will see, lay disciples often express concern about the difficulty combining secular life with Buddhist practice. Speculating from these responses, the letters of layman to their Chan teachers seem to have contained reflection on their experiences, followed by solicitations of instruction. The letters from Zhao Mengfu to Mingben follow this pattern, with the layman writing of his recent experience with the hope of receiving guidance from his teachers.19 Several of Zhao’s letters offer passages in which he contemplates the death and loss of family members, such as this letter telling of his son’s illness and passing: In the twelfth month, my eldest son contracted a serious cough, and suffered from chills and sweats. On the third day of the second month, he died. In sixty years of life, and traveling thousands of miles from my home, I have [now] met with this calamity, and it is a sadness that is difficult to overcome. Although I understand [the fact that all things] illusorily arise and are illusorily extinguished should not be enough to cause deep sadness because my perception of the Way is not thorough, however, when my thoughts arise I am again pained, and my eyes are clouded by a profusion of tears. 十二月間,長兒得嗽疾寒熟。二月十三日,竟成長往。六十之 年,數千里之外,罹此荼毒,哀痛難勝。雖明知幻起幻滅不足 深悲。然見道未徹, 念起便哀,哭泣之餘,目為之昏。 20

19  Zhao’s letters to Mingben were preserved as examples of calligraphy. For a discussion of this practice, see Amy McNair’s contribution to this volume. 20  Inoue, Shodō geijutsu, vol. 7, 208.

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Written in 1311, in this letter Zhao ties his emotional experiences following the tragedy of losing a child to the teachings he has received from Mingben.21 Attached to the letter was a copy of the Diamond Sūtra, which Zhao had copied on the occasion of sending his son’s coffin back to their hometown. The inclusion of this piece of calligraphy points to the way in which letters was both communication and gift. The letter goes on to request the monk to carry out rituals on the son’s behalf, and to note that the son was reciting the name of Amitābha as he approached death. A letter from late the following year (chronologically the next letter in the series of letters written by Zhao that survive, although we cannot know whether there were intervening exchanges) acknowledges receiving instructions from his teacher, which perhaps offered a Buddhist perspective on Zhao’s loss. Zhao writes, I have also received your instruction through dharma words, and was very moved by your care. I immediately read it with my wife, and we have only the greatest respect for you. 外蒙誨以法語。尤見愛念。即與老妻同看。唯有頂戴而已. 22 These letters from Zhao suggest that extended passages of reflection are more likely to appear in letters to a monk perceived of as higher in spiritual status, and that these contemplations were intended to elicit instruction from the addressee. This is not to say, however, that the reflective mode is absent from exchanges between near-equals. For example, we might identify traces of the reflective mode in comments, often brief, about the passage of time and concerning time spent together in the past. Such themes are a common element in letters. In one missive, Weize writes of how difficult it is to see off a fellow monk (“the whole way I could not bear to say goodbye” 一路不忍別) and links this to the swiftness with which people are separated by death.23 It is a meditation on friendship, the passing of time, and impermanence.24

21  For another example of letter written about the death of a child, see Xiaofei Tian’s piece in this volume, in which she discusses Lady Yuan’s letter about the loss of her son. 22  Liu and Huang, Zhongguo shufa quanji, vol. 43–44, 467–68; also Li, Quan Yuan wen 19:40. 23  For a discussion and examples of letters noting the pain of separation, see Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 119–27. 24   Z 70:824a.

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Teaching Letters

As we have seen in the examples of Dahui and Mingben, letters were essential for maintaining relationships between teacher and students, especially, it seems, with the lay followers of these Chan masters. Not only do these letters strengthen relationships by their very exchange, but also letters appear to have been an important teaching mode. Besides the letter to his own teacher, the only other letter that appears in Yuanmiao’s collection is one offering instruction to a lay follower, who had inquired whether “ordinary mind” or “no mind” better expressed the Way. Yuanmiao advises him that both terms can be helpful or they can serve to elude students, and promotes the importance of a firm will in one’s practice.25 The letter combines Yuanmiao’s discussion of key Chan terms, and represents important themes in his teaching. Instruction likewise is a major focus of the limited number of letters that made their way into Mingben’s collection. For example, when writing to the exiled Korean monarch, King Ch’ung-sǒn 忠宣 (1275–1325, referred to as King Shim 瀋王 in the letters), the monk offers advice on contemplation of the key phrase (kanhua 看話): First, one cannot seek out other expedients. Second, one cannot blame the conditioned realm. Third, one cannot even momentarily produce a single thought of bewilderment. 第一不許別求方便,第二不可歸咎於緣境,第三不得瞥起一念 惑情.26 A letter to the literatus Feng Zizhen 馮子振 (1257–1337?) focuses on the obstructions caused by knowledge, a trope common in Chan writings to lay followers. Mingben writes to Feng about the importance of faith and perseverance in practice, and urges the layman on towards an experience of awakening.27 These letters, too, seem to merit preservation as concise expressions of Mingben’s teachings. In Tianru Weize’s collection, extended discussions of practice appear more frequently in letters to literati followers than they do in letters to fellow monks. One, to a layman with the Buddhist sobriquet “Awakening Mind,” discusses the Chan practice of contemplating the key phrase of a Buddhist anecdote. From Weize’s reply, it is clear that this layman is concerned about being able to prac25   Z 70:711b–c21. 26   Tianmu Zhongfeng Heshang Guanglu, 32098c. 27  Ibid., 32109a.

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tice contemplation of the key phrase, but pressed with worldly obligations, he finds himself distracted. In one section of the letter, Weize assures him that this state is utterly normal, and offers practical advice: In the middle of the night when you cannot sleep, or when you first arise in the morning, take common affairs and family authority and do your utmost to set them aside, only raising the critical phrase (huatou) that you contemplated originally, rousing your spirit to cause it to completely fill [your mind] without any gaps. Since there are not gaps in the critical phrase, then distracted thoughts naturally do not arise, and when distracted thoughts do not arise then [your mind] will become a single piece. If you wanted to find the least sign of movement or stillness in this one piece, you couldn’t. After a long time, you will suddenly set it off, and with the piece completely turn it over—this is the time of complete awakening. 深夜未睡之時。清晨初起之際。將俗務家權盡情撥退。單單提 起本參話頭。抖擻精神使之綿綿密密無絲毫間斷。話頭既無間 斷。雜念自然不生,雜念不生即成片段。要於片段之中覓一毫 動相靜相俱不可得, 久之忽然觸發,和箇片段盡底掀翻。便是了 悟時也。28 Another lay follower, Administrator of the Branch Secretariat Tulu 禿魯 (fl. mid-13th c.), was the recipient of three letters in Weize’s collection.29 Known to the Chan monk as “Layman Marvelous Emptiness” (Miaokong jushi 妙空居士), Tulu wondered about the possibility of combining secular life with Buddhist cultivation. Weize assured him that such was possible: Public affairs and private affairs; worldly teachings and the teachings of the Buddha—if one is understood, then all are understood, and afterwards you will be able to grasp the guiding principles of our way, and encourage all the living beings of the triple realm. 公事私事世法佛法一了一切了。然後總握吾道之紀綱,風厲三 界之群有.30

28   Z 70:821a5. 29  His name also appears as 圖魯, and he was a prominent Uyghur official. See Yang, “Yuandai neidi weiwuer,” 12. 30   Z 70:824c13.

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In the third of three letters to Tulu, Weize notes that he can hear military riders heading south in pursuit of bandits, and this prompts him to think of one of Mingben’s maxims, that one should undertake Chan practice like a lone man fighting an army of ten thousand. Weize moves from this military association to one of the parables in the Lotus Sūtra, that of the king saving the jewel in his topknot to bestow as a reward on his greatest soldiers. Weize writes The armies of a wise person go into battle with all the demons of the five aggregates, and breaking the net of the demons one emerges from the triple realm. There will be great merits from one’s efforts, and one will attain the valuable jewel in the topknot of the wheel-turning king. In the role of layman, this is not difficult at all. 用賢聖軍與五陰諸魔共戰,破魔網出三界。有大功勳。得受輪 王髻裏寶珠者。在居士分上皆不難矣,31 Weize apparently expected that this parable will speak effectively to this government official. Indeed Weize feels that he can push the layman further, and after confirming the closeness of their relationship, concludes the letter by challenging the dualism created by the idea of demons and buddhas: When I speak of the demons of the five aggregates, now where are they? If you say another is a demon, then oneself also is not a buddha. If you say someone else is a buddha, then oneself becomes a demon. It is just that the positions of demon and buddha are confused in the human realm— ultimately who are you yourself? Also, if the human world completely eliminates “buddha” and “demon,” where would you yourself return? Think about this. 且道五陰諸魔即今在甚麼處?若言他是魔,自己亦非佛。若言 他是佛,自己卻成魔。政當佛魔兩立人境交參。畢竟誰是自己?​ 又若人境俱奪佛魔兩忘。自己還在甚麼處?參。 32 In contrast to the practical advice above, the conclusion of this letter problematizes the use of value-laden terms such as “buddha” and “devil.” Weize summarizes three arguments here: First, that the terms “buddha” and “devil” are contingent on each other and have no inherent meaning. Second, the use of such terms cannot reveal the true nature of an individual. Finally, Weize concludes by suggesting that this true nature is enmeshed within a human world 31   Z 70:825a21–23. 32   Z 70:825b1–3.

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of contigent terms. Although the letter opened with parables that had some connection to the secular realm, it ends with instructions that would be wholly at home in instruction to Chan monks. The language, too, is the type of language frequently seen in Chan instructions: it mixes vernacular elements with a more formal prose. This captures the conversational aspect both of Chan exchanges and of letters, which attempt to preserve personal interactions in written form. Weize treated these two lay followers as serious practitioners engaged in the investigation of the key phrase just as monks would have been. Weize was capable of addressing other kinds of lay practice as well. A distinguishing characteristic of Weize’s letters is the inclusion of two letters to his brother; although many monks kept in close contact with their families, this is not always apparent from literary collections. Weize’s letters to his brother show his concern over the health of his mother, and, surmising that at her advanced age she may well be approaching death, the Chan monk instructs his sibling on how his mother should practice. Weize begins by noting the immutability of life, suffering, and death, and observing that their father had little time to consider future effects of karma. The monk observes that his parents are not suited for Chan practice, and that he is unable to help them understand. Using the metaphor of medicine, Weize writes that a Chan “prescription” could cause illness and that he instead promotes the method of “attentive recitation” (xinian 繫念) of Amitābha’s name.33 This practice is ideal for someone of his mother’s advanced age, as it required no particular physical position or movement, and indeed could be undertaken silently so that his mother did not need tax her breathing with speech. Weize charges his brother with conveying this message, stepping outside the role of Chan master to participate in the religious life of his natal family. The letters to his brother show another dimension to lay instruction. 3

Administrative Letters

These three monks all lived in small cloisters apart from major monasteries, and often these were at a distance from population centers. At times all three undertook individual retreats as well, further removing them from social interaction. As a consequence, matters that in other circumstances may have happened through face-to-face contact were undertaken through epistolary exchanges. In the case of Tianru Weize, it was through letters that he coordinated 33   Z 70:819c.

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the compilation and printing of the collected works, or “Expansive Record,” of his teacher Mingben. Weize wrote a letter to the monk Yihai 義海 (n.d.) in which he apologized for not being able to receive his co-practitioner. He focused his attention on the compilation of Mingben’s works, writing in part: The reputation of our former teacher Huanzhu should not be hidden away. In his wisdom, our learned emperor has given him the posthumous title of ‘State Teacher of Universal Response,’ and granted that his Broad Records be published and entered in the canon. At the beginning of the fifth month, our fellow monks, elder and younger, led lay and clergy to my gate in order to edit, compile, and classify [his writings]. 幻住先師聲光不能盡掩。遠達聖主之知,諡以普應國師之號,​ 賜廣錄刊板入藏。五月初同參弟兄率諸道俗排闥而入,以編集 校勘見屬。 34 It is likely that this gathering was organized through letters as well. Another letter was written to an elder monk, perhaps an abbot, by the name of Haiyan 海巖 (n.d.) who has been entrusted with bringing Mingben’s collection to publication. As compiler and one of Mingben’s closest disciples, Weize retained interest and control over the project, as we see in his directions, excerpted from one of his letters: The Expansive Record was compiled based on my opinion, and it seems that there are no large errors. I do not know if you have met with experts and discussed the details again or not. Songjiang is far and out-of-the-way, travelers are few, and so messages do not get through. It has been several months since the printing blocks were complete, but I don’t know how many. Unfortunately I am unable to personally undertake checking [the blocks]. I must rely on you to take care of the affair and plan well; you are meticulous in temperament and your knowledge is complete; what you do will be careful and intelligent without cause for regret. When the carving is complete, first I hope you will print and send me a copy, so that we can correct any carving errors. Afterwards we should circulate it widely. 廣錄據鄙見勘校,似無大誤。未審別遇老成,重與細論否。松 江僻遠,往來者稀絕音耗。又數月刊板成者,不知幾何。惜不 得親預點對。賴足下臨事好謀,意度周密,所作必精敏無遺憾 矣。刊畢先望印寄一部,更正刀誤,然後廣行。 35 34   Z 70:816b20–c8. 35   Z 70:817c.

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We see in this letter not only the process by which these Chan works came into circulation, but the difficulties monks faced in conducting large projects when separated by space, even in a region as densely settled and frequently traveled as Jiangnan. As these three monks conducted and discussed Buddhist business through the exchange of letters, they touched on other topics: lineage and dharma inheritance, the solicitations of funds, and construction projects such as the rebuilding of a temple destroyed by fire. Many of these letters could serve to represent their author’s status. For example, letters from Weize about the compilation of Mingben’s record are evidence both of his position as dharmaheir and his contribution to a project sanctioned by the emperor. The lineage succession discussed in a letter of Mingben’s became a key moment in the narrative of his life, showing Mingben’s concern with proper modes of transmission. Weize’s letter about rebuilding a temple after a fire combines practical encouragement with a message on the transience of worldly things. In other words, these letters were probably preserved for reasons other than the hints of how Chan institutions were managed, and we might predict that many more such letters—more routine in their contents and their style—passed between monks. Indeed a letter-writing guide offers evidence to support this surmise. Xin bian shi wen lei yao qi zha qing qian 新編事文類要啓箚靑錢‬, a letterwriting manual dating to the 1320s, lists a whole series of Buddhist occasions that might prompt letters: offering congratulations on ordination; on becoming an abbot or accepting a new disciple; on receiving honors from the emperor such as a title or a purple robe; on setting up a new temple or bell tower. These letters might be written from a lay person to a monk, but the next section concerns invitations to Buddhist events, and would seem to be models that were more useful to monks themselves. Examples in this category include inviting people to the founding of a temple or library, or inviting someone to travel in the mountains. There are also model letters for returning ritual implements and scriptures, and condolence letters on the death of a teacher. Although these model letters engage both social and administrative functions, inviting people to monastic events was an important administrative task in the work of ensuring that Buddhist institutions thrived.36 Based on letter-writing manuals, these may have been highly formulaic letters, but, as in the case of the letter Weize wrote concerning the temple fire, personal elements could be introduced into prescripted exchanges. 36   Xin bian shi wen, j. 5.

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Ritual and Social Letters

Reading through letters by these monks, especially the larger set from the hand of Weize, references to the unlikelihood of personal contact, are ubiquitous. Letters were used in substitution for social interaction: a number of them acknowledge not being able to meet, or not being able to attend an event or ritual.37 An eloquent example of this theme is found in Weize’s close to a letter to a fellow monk: In the coolness of autumn I must take up my staff, and I do not know when or where we will meet again, and so leaning over my paper I am disappointed. 秋涼杖錫必動。未知再見何處何時。臨楮悵悵.38 Substitution for personal interaction is one the primary functions of letters; in this way letters are themselves ritual interactions.39 That letters do the work of rituals is clear in the salutations and valedictions—even though these are often eliminated when the letters are incorporated into literary collections. Zhao Mengfu’s letters to Mingben, preserved because they were from the hand of a master calligrapher, provide a glimpse of this ritual aspect.40 The phrase henan zaibai 和南再拜 and close variants of it appear in both the salutations and benedictions of Zhao’s letters.41 Henan is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word vandana, meaning an expression of ritual respect. In letters to monks and others, the opening “I knock my head and bow twice” (dunshou zaibai 頓首再拜) is used, and it likewise refers to a physical expression of respect. Henan, however, is a term specific to Buddhism, adding a devotional cast to the letters. The verbal expression of ritual respect is echoed in the sizing and spacing of characters. A letter written around the third month of 1319 shows Zhao Mengfu writing his own name in smaller, and therefore more deferential, characters,42 something that is also repeated in other letters. 37  This is also true of secular letter-writers; see Richter, “Letters and Letter Writing,” 24–26. 38   Z 70:822b. See the discussion of this closing in Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 137–38. 39  See Pablo Blitstein’s lengthy discussion of “ritualized language” and writing etiquette in his essay in this volume. 40  I discuss the letters between Zhao and Mingben in more detail in “Between Zhongfeng Mingben and Zhao Mengfu.” 41  See the undated letter preserved in Shodō geijutsu 7208–9. 42  Liu and Huang, Zhongguo shufa quanji, 43–44:466. The letter also appears in transcription in Quan Yuan wen 19:40.

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In this same letter there is also a break before zunzhe 尊者, or “venerable one,” a treatment of an epithet that parallels that of mention of the emperor in official sources.43 Letters were also used to set up participation in rituals, again reflected in the letters Zhao Mengfu sent Mingben. Zhao deeply wished for Mingben’s participation in rites following the deaths of members of the Zhao family, and was frustrated when these did not come to pass. Instead, Mingben sent substitutions in the form of objects and texts, as Zhao acknowledges in this letter: I have received the incense and offerings, and already placed them before [my wife’s] spirit tablet. As for the kindness [of sending] statues for the feast, often I have received your sympathy, and I thank you for these. But if I again accept [your gifts] I will truly tremble in shame. I respectfully entrust them to Yizhong to return to you, and earnestly thank your for your sympathy. 過蒙香奠,即已白之神主前矣。所以齋像之惠,孟頫尋常蒙老 師哀憐,拜賜不一而足,今若又拜受,實是惶愧。謹附以中歸 納,切告矜察。 44 Post-mortem rites, often the purview of Buddhist monks in this period, are the most frequent, and most important, sort of rituals mentioned in the letters of these three Chan monks. Among the letters in Weize’s collection is one written in response to a man about to rebury his father. Weize lauds the family’s success, and acknowledges the importance of burial rituals, but also tells the son that he need not wait for a written commemoration to begin the reburial rites. Weize reminds the son, too, that the family’s afterlife aspirations should be focused on the Pure Land.45 As we have seen in the mention of statues that Mingben sent to Zhao Mengfu, and in the case of the copy of the Diamond Sūtra included with Zhao’s letter discussed above, very often letters were accompanied by gifts. In his study of Su Shi’s letters, Ronald Egan notes that these were “mostly quite humble items” and that “the exchange of these things was important, perhaps as important

43  On spacing in bureaucratic letters, see Lik Hang Tsui’s contribution to this volume. 44  Translation adapted from that of Shane McCausland in Harrist and Fong. The Embodied Image, 126. See also Jiang, “Zhao shi yimen hezha yanjiu,” 25 and Nakata and Fu, Ōbei shūzō, 146. 45   Z 70, no. 1403, p. 829b.

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as the notes themselves, in affirming affection and friendship.”46 In one letter Zhao writes that he will include a copy of the Lotus Sūtra in his own hand, a work that had material value, because of Zhao’s prominence, as well as personal significance.47 In this letter and others we learn of the range of objects that accompanied Zhao’s missives: copies of other sutras, a grave inscription, ginseng, mushrooms, and five-flavor medicine. From Mingben, Zhao received eulogies and ritual texts, as well as incense. Letters were not solely texts, but served as part of gift exchanges. Such gifts prompted reciprocation, sometimes explicitly. In letters written by Weize, he mentions being sent paper in conjunction with being solicited for calligraphy or “dharma words.” Beyond the material dimension, and beyond reinforcing existing bonds of friendship or discipleship, letters also served to created new connections. Letters from Zhao Mengfu indicate that both he and Mingben acted as intermediaries, facilitating contacts and exchanges between their acquaintances. Letters were a key way of strengthening and building social networks. Their social function, the way in which they replaced personal meetings, and the language giving them a ritual cast, all marked the genre of the epistle as distinct. Letters were distinct, too, in how they fit into Chan ideas of language and its use. In the manual I discussed earlier, the section on how to write on different Buddhist occasions is followed by a section devoted to Chan prayers. The compiler of the manual recognized that there was something unique about Chan linguistic style, and this Chan flavor is present in the set of letters I have considered here. We have seen in letters on teaching descriptions of how best to practice contemplation of the key phrase, and living in retreat was part of the Chan lifestyle for this sublineage. The Chan tradition was known for taking the position—oftentimes only rhetorically—that words were entanglements that could do little to guide students to any insight. Literary entanglements, to judge from the writings of these three men, were a particular problem for lay Buddhists, who as cultured elites necessarily drew upon their skills as readers and writers every day. So what then of letters? How did they fit into Chan critiques of language? Two of Weize’s missives touch on this issue. In one letter, Weize notes at the open, “It has been ten years since I have retreated to the shadows of rocks and trees; and it has been a long time too since I have cut off the exchange of writings” 避影林壑間今十年,絕交文字亦已久矣. He does not say what kinds of writings, wenzi 文字, he means, but the term jiao 交 signals that these 46  Egan, “Su Shih’s ‘Notes’,” 574. See also Egan’s contribution to this volume. 47  Huang, “Lun Zhao Mengfu de xiejing,” 41.

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words pass back and forth between people. In this passage, the cutting off of words is presented as parallel to his physical reclusion. Reclusion, as we know from other sources, did not mean being utterly cut off, and nor did cutting off writing mean cutting off all forms of writing. Weize goes on to observe that the famous monks of the past did not establish their reputation through writing, but that seeking out writings (and presumably collecting them, as he himself had done) was “something the hearts of filial sons and compliant grandsons cannot bear not to do” 此蓋孝子順孫之心不忍不為者.48 In other words, Weize believes—or presents himself as so believing—that writing was not a chief component of a Chan career, but that the writings of monks come to be important for later generations. Literary composition is a peripheral activity, Weize argues in this letter. Another letter goes into more detail about Weize’s decision to free himself from certain kinds of writing: However, from the fourth month on, I put an end to all social back-andforth through writing. I have said that scholars in recent times are not willing to make efforts where there is nothing to rely on, and are not willing to put their lives in the place of greatest danger. 況自四月以來文字應酬一皆杜絕。嘗謂近時學者不肯向無依倚 處著工夫,不肯就最險峻處放身命。 49 Weize implies that words provided a way for educated men to avoid what really needed to be done: to take a stance that would emancipate them from all attachments. In Chan texts from this circle of monks, literature—both read and written—is blamed for this problem. Here, Weize suggests that social interaction facilitates this entanglement: From time to time we meet on a narrow road, and then are pulled into a rotting net of vines, buried until we are completely covered, wound up with no place to stick out our heads. The former Old Man Illusion was pained over this fault, and therefore his whole life he exhausted his speech-karma in using words to banish words, much like the turtle cannot help but drag its tail. If one carefully considers the ancients, how can they be as far from us as heaven is from earth? That today I have cut off written exchanges is because I intend to reduce my own conditions and also avoid drawing people into the weeds. 48   Z 70:822b. 49   Z 70:823b.

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偶爾狹路相逢便牽引爛葛藤窠沒頭罩卻,彼此纏繞無出頭 分。 先幻翁痛嫌此獘,故一世費盡口業以言遣言,大似靈龜曳 尾無可奈何。以區區視古人,奚止天地懸隔?今之所以杜絕應 酬者,且圖自家省緣亦免引人入草。 50 The first sentence here can be understood as a Chan reference: meeting someone on a narrow road is an impasse, and may yield a challenge between master and student. Such an encounter might then result in a back-and-forth in words. However, the “narrow road” can also be read without Chan overtones, and here may refer to a simple social encounter. Meetings such as these would lead to exchanges of greetings and words, drawing both participants into a network of social exchanges that could prevent them from doing anything else. Weize says that addressing this problem was the life-work of his own teacher, Mingben, who did so through his speech rather than through written words. Weize himself is, of course, attempting to cut off words through the use of words. Weize was not alone in fasting from words: in one of his letters Mingben noted that he was abstaining from the brush and could not write personally 予因有筆 戒不克親染.51 In this view of writing, letters have a special status. Cutting off social writing may be a form of reclusion, and ceasing one’s own literary efforts may be the best way to pursue the awakening prized in Chan, but letters took the place of encounters that could not happen in person. Perhaps it was this ritual aspect—the way in which a literary gesture substituted for a bodily gesture— that made letters not wholly wenzi (writings).



I began with a discussion of the difficulties in drawing conclusions from the letters appearing in the literary records of monks. The reasons for selecting letters appear to have varied among compilers, but overall the content of a letter was more important to these compilers than its epistolary characteristics. Letters may have merited inclusion in literary collections as evidence of key relationships, and indeed a primary function of letters to and from monks was the maintenance of social relations. Used for this purpose, letters from monks do not differ from letters from non-clergy. Likewise, in both secular and monastic contexts letters were used to arrange administrative tasks, like the compilation of Buddhist writings. Letters that were designed to instruct had their analogues

50   Z 70:823b. 51   Z 70:743b.

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in secular letters, but discussions of spiritual struggles and Chan practice gave them a distinctly Buddhist cast. As these letters were prized for their content more than for the social relations they attested, epistolary features such as salutations and valedictions are often not included when they appear in collections. Other surviving letters, however, show the importance of their ritual and social aspects through epistolary conventions, calligraphy, and the role of letters in gift-giving. These types of letters show how they enacted in text a relationship impossible in person. The social function of letters also seems to have exempted letters from Chan concerns about the role of words and from the writing “fasts” of monks. Letters, it seems, sat somewhere between writing and ritual. This ambivalent position allowed monks to see correspondence as something other than literary entanglement, yet left letters in half-light when monastic writings were compiled. Bibliography Duanqiao Miaolun Chanshi yulu 斷橋妙倫禪師語錄. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 70. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. “T’ang Guides to Verbal Etiquette.” HJAS 45 (1985): 581–613. Egan, Ronald C. “Su Shih’s ‘Notes’ as a Historical and Literary Source. ” HJAS 50 (1979): 561–88. Gaofeng Yuanmiao Chanshi yulu 高峰原妙禪師語錄. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 70. Harrist, Robert E., Jr., and Wen C. Fong eds. The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1999. Heller, Natasha. “Between Zhongfeng Mingben and Zhao Mengfu: Chan Letters in their Manuscript Context.” In Buddhist Manuscript Cultures, edited by Juliane Schober, Claudia Brown, and Stephen Berkwitz, 109–23. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Huang Chi-chiang 黃啟江. “Lun Zhao Mengfu de xiejing yu qi Fojiao yinyuan: Cong Qiu Ying de ‘Zhao Mengfu xiejing huancha tujuan’ shuo qi” 論趙孟頫的寫經與其 佛教因緣:從仇英的《趙孟頫寫經換茶圖卷》說起. Jiuzhou xuelin 九州學 林 2.4 (2004): 2–63. Inoue Yasushi 井上靖 et al., comp. Shodō geijutsu 書道藝術, vol. 7. Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1971. Jiang Yihan 姜一涵. “Zhao shi yimen hezha yanjiu” 趙氏一門合札研究. Gugong jikan 故宮季刊 11.4 (1977): 23–50. Jideng lu 繼燈錄. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 86. Jingtu shengxian lu 淨土聖賢錄. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 78.

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Liu Zhengcheng 劉正成 and Huang Dun 黄惇, eds. Zhongguo shufa quanji 中國書法 全集, vols. 43–44. Beijing: Rongbao zhai chubanshe, 2002. Nakata Yūjirō and Fu Shen, eds., Ōbei shūzō Chūgoku hōsho meisekishū 欧米収蔵中国 法史書名蹟集. Tokyo: Chūōkōron-sha, 1981–83. Nan Song Yuan Ming Chanlin sengbao zhuan 南宋元明禪林僧寶傳. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 79. Pattinson, David. “Privacy and Letter Writing in Han and Six Dynasties China.” In Chinese Concepts of Privacy, edited by Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson, 97–118. Leiden: Brill, 2002. ―――. “The Market for Letter Collections in Seventeenth-Century China.” CLEAR 28 (2006): 127–59. Quan Yuan wen 全元文. Edited by Li Xiusheng 李修生. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1999. Ren Yimin 任宜敏. “Tianru Weize Chanshi Chanxue sixiang xilun” 天如惟則禪師禪 學思想析論. Renwen zazhi 人文雜志 5 (2003): 145–50. Richter, Antje. “Letters and Letter Writing in Early Medieval China.” EMC 12 (2006): 1–29 ―――. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Schlütter, Morten. How Zen Became Zen: The Dispute Over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in Song Dynasty China. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008. Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō 新纂大日本續藏經. Edited by Kawamura Kōshō 河村 孝照. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 1975–89. Shodō geijutsu 書道藝術, vol. 7. Edited by Inoue Yasushi 井上靖 et al. Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1971. Tianmu Mingben Chanshi zalu 天目明本禪師雜錄. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 70. Tianmu Zhongfeng Heshang Guanglu 天目中峰和尚廣錄. In Zhonghua Dazang jing 中華大藏經 1:74. Taipei: Xiuding Zhonghua Dazang jing hui, 1965. Tianru Weize Chanshi yulu 天如惟則禪師語錄. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 70. Wagner, Rudolf G. “The Original Structure of the Correspondence Between Shih HuiYüan and Kumārajīva.” HJAS 31 (1971): 28–48. Welter, Albert. The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wu, Pei-yi. The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Wudeng yantong 五燈嚴統. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 81.

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Xin bian shi wen lei yao qi zha qing qian 新編事文類要啓箚靑錢. Dongjing: Gu dian yan jiu hui, 1963. Xudeng cungao 續燈存稿. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 84. Xueyan Zuqin Chanshi yulu 雪嚴祖欽禪師語錄. In Shinsan Dai Nihon zoku zōkyō, vol. 70. Yang Fuxue 楊富學. “Yuandai neidi weiwuer sengtu foshi huodong jikao” 元代內地 畏兀兒僧徒佛事活動輯考. Pumen xuebao 普門學報 19 (2004): 1–16. Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China, 3rd edition. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

CHAPTER 20

Letters as Windows on Ming-Qing Women’s Literary Culture Ellen Widmer Might letters be a relatively untapped means of access into traditional Chinese women’s literary culture? There are at least two reasons for so imagining. Both are somewhat problematic. One has to do with China; the other with cultures outside China. The first derives from Chinese stories in which letters play a role. Yingying’s letter to student Zhang in the Tang tale “The Story of Ying Ying” (Yingying zhuan 鶯鶯傳 and later works based on this story), as well as Feng Xiaoqing’s 馮小青 letter to Madame Yang in the various Ming “Biographies of Feng Xiaoqing” (Xiaoqing zhuan 小青傳 and affiliated works) are examples of what I mean. More likely than not, the first or even both of these letters were authored by men, but the fact that the fictions or dramas in which they appear had such staying power could mean that they seemed at least moderately plausible to readers. Conceivably, real women, too, wrote in such a vein. However few such letters that are clearly the work of women survive. Family censorship would normally have prevented either letter from escaping into the public realm had they been genuine. That a whole set of letters by Liu Rushi 柳 如是 (1618–1644) managed to survive to this day may have several causes, not least her fame and her talent for literature; it must also have helped that she was a courtesan and therefore less subject to family control. The second reason comes from women’s writing in the “early modern era” in England and continental Europe. For example, students of China will enviously contemplate the kind of scholarship that can be done on British materials of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Because actual letters survive, not just compendia thereof, it becomes possible to analyze the kinds of ink and paper used and the handwriting as well as what the letters say.1 Furthermore, letters from many different classes of woman can be found.2 No such richness of data is known to exist in China, but similar caches might emerge later on. What I shall argue in this paper is that even without such archival plenty, letters are still an important means for understanding more about Chinese 1  Daybell, “Letters,” 181–93. 2  Ibid., 190.

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women of the Ming and Qing. Love letters by courtesans and others from this period have already shown their value as a field of study, as Kathryn Lowry has demonstrated,3 but I will focus here on the letters of three talented women of the upper classes (guixiu 閨秀 or cainü 才女). I do not necessarily seek the rich expressivity of an Yingying or Xiaoqing, nor do I propose taking up such matters as paper, ink, or writing style, as none of the letters I consider are original documents, and some may have been heavily edited. My chief aim is to consider what the versions of letters that do survive add to our store of knowledge of particular individuals and what they might tell us about women’s writing culture as a whole. Their potential contribution to a larger conversation about letter culture generally would be another reason to pursue this topic, but this is only a preliminary inquiry, and I shall confine myself to a narrower field. Before I get to my main subject, let me review some other difficulties in this type of study. The first is that, whether written by Chinese men or women, letters were often not as highly regarded as other genres. The point is convincingly raised in David Pattinson’s doctoral dissertation on the chidu 尺牘, which focuses on mid-seventeenth-century letter collections.4 Pattinson scarcely mentions women in his study, but his observations can be applied to women as well as men. He provides evidence to the effect that editors of such collections could wax defensive about their subject matter and sometimes resorted to classical precedents in order to raise the genre in their own or others’ eyes.5 It may that women, too, looked down on letters. Perhaps we have evidence of a similarly dismissive attitude in the case of noted woman anthologist Wang Duanshu 王端淑 (1621–ca. 1680),6 who left several letters behind. These letters are not found in Wang’s own collected writings. As far as I know they survive only in Wang Qi’s 汪淇 mid-seventeenth-century letter collection Chidu xinyu guangbian 尺牘新語廣編 (Modern letters, expanded collection), on which more below.7 The reason for inferring dismissiveness is that Wang Duanshu’s collection Yinhongji 吟紅集 (Collected red chantings) 3  “Duplicating the Strength of Feeling”; see also “Personal Letters in Seventeenth-Century Epistolary Guides.” 4  “The Chidu in Late Ming and Early-Qing China.” 5  His points are more complicated than this, but the general argument runs along these lines. 6  Wang’s date of death is often set in the early 18th c. My reasons are detailed in The Beauty and the Book, 306. 7  This collection was printed in 1663, 1667, and 1668. For the 1667 collection I have used a reprint: Chidu xinyu (Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1971). For the 1663 collection I have used a copy of Chidu xinyu chubian; for the 1668 collection I have used a copy of Guangbian chidu xinyu. Both are originals held in the Nanjing Library. I have written more on the three collections, see “The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou.”

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of the early Qing Dynasty is a compilation of her works in twenty-three genres, but letters are not among those genres. In other words, Wang Duanshu could and did write letters, but she did not include them in Yinhong ji, quite possibly because she did not value them highly as literature. If so, her attitude could be compared with one once voiced by Virginia Woolf: “Letters do not count as literature.”8 Here, however, our interest is less in letters as literature but in what they tell us about women’s practices in the Ming and Qing. Perhaps as a result of the relatively low esteem in which letters were held by at least some Chinese men and women, and no doubt for many other reasons (among them the vast destruction wrought by the Taiping Rebellion of 1850– 64), we can be sure that great numbers of letters by women did not survive to the present day.9 It would not be surprising if the loss of letters by women were far greater than with men, but certainly great numbers of letters by men were also destroyed. When literary standards are uppermost, letters by women seem to decline in importance. Perhaps the most important of the three important letter collections of the mid-seventeenth century, Zhou Lianggong’s 周亮工 (1612–1672) Chidu xinchao 尺牘新抄 (Newly transcribed writings), only published the works of two women (Gu Ruopu 顧若璞, 1592–1681, and Zhou Geng 周庚) on the grounds that other letters by women were wanting in literary merit.10 Much later, Hu Wenkai’s 胡文楷 and Wang Xiuqin’s 王秀琴 two important retrospectives of the 1940s on women’s letters and women’s prose also emphasized literary quality.11 It seems to me that whenever literary merit is a criterion used in assembling a letter collection, other criteria (like self-revelation or detailed interactions with coterie members, or output of less well educated women— materials that might interest us as much or more today) are deemphasized. In addition, internally generated or family-driven inhibitions against writing letters in the first place come up in the pages below. Such a taboo helps to explain why women’s poems were published in rather large numbers, whereas women’s letters have proved quite difficult to find. Pattinson’s hypothesis that the chidu or shu 書 in China may be something rather different from what is meant by the term “letter” in America and Britain 8  Quoted in Daybell, “Letters,” 189. 9  E.g., the poet Gu Taiqing’s 顧太清 (1799–1877) correspondence with the critic and poet Shen Shanbao 沈善寶 (1808–1862) refers to letters sent and received. See Zhang Zhang, Gu Taiqing Yihui shici heji, 167. As far as I know, Gu’s letters are not preserved. 10  Yu-Yin Cheng, “Letters by Women of the Ming-Qing Period,” 171. 11  See the prefaces and fanli 凡例 (general principles) for each collection. On these collections see below.

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is another useful point to keep in mind.12 When it comes to women, collections purely of letters were sometimes published, and letters could also come out as one section in omnibus collections of women’s prose. When a letter was included in such a collection, or when it was picked up by twentiethcentury anthologists from individual collections, the reason often had to do with literary merit but also with a kind of intellectual seriousness. At the same time, though, like the criterion of literary merit, the criterion of seriousness may sometimes have worked against the preservation of letters by women. Reactions to the world around her that reveal a woman’s social outreach or inner psychology could have been precisely what would not have passed muster with those who monitored letter collections, most of them men. As for self-revelation, from currently available evidence we can conclude that women were much more likely to convey their innermost thoughts in poems than in letters. Few scholars have attempted to develop interiors for female Chinese subjects, but Grace Fong’s Herself an Author, is an important exception. Letters are one of the tools Fong uses for her path breaking study, but poems are a much more important resource. Occasionally Fong uses the term “epistolary poem.”13 She does not offer a precise definition, but in context her term appears to mean a poem that is rather newsy about family matters, perhaps the way a family letter ( jia shu 家書) would have been. It is also quite clear that women did write family letters, but these tended to concern themselves with very humble details and had few literary pretentions. So what is it, then, that we can hope to learn from the letters by women that survive? In the pages that follow I outline a few possibilities. Part one aims to build a case that there was an increase in women’s letter writing during the Ming and Qing dynasties. As well, we will look into what we can learn from the earliest general collections of letters that contained writings by women. These began to emerge no later than the early Qing. In part two, I offer three examples of specific women and show what their surviving letters can add to our store of knowledge about their own lives and more. I conclude with the thought that the letters of traditional Chinese women may not be as revealing as those fictionalized in Chinese stories or those of Western women, but they still have something new to tell us about the writing woman of this time.

12  The point is argued throughout his thesis, but see pp. 7 and 53 especially. See also his article “The Market for Letter Collections.” 13  Herself an Author, 29, 101, 126. See also Zeb Raft’s essay in this volume for a discussion of poems that serve as letters.

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An Increase in Women’s Letter Writing during the Ming and Qing?

On one level it goes without saying that published letters by women would have increased beginning in the late Ming. As we know from Dorothy Ko’s Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China, publishing of works by women was on an upswing at this time, and there is no reason to think that letters would have been an exception. By consulting the most important twentieth-century sources on women’s letters, Hu Wenkai’s and Wang Xiuqin’s Lidai mingyuan shujian 歷代名媛書簡 (Letters of famous women across the ages) and their Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian 歷代名媛文苑簡編 (Simple compilation of prose by famous women across the ages), we can support this hypothesis fairly readily, especially using the first of these collections. In this collection, dynasty by dynasty, the total of letters is as follows: Han: 22; Sanguo: 6; Jin: 14; Tang: 5; Song: 12; Nan-Bei chao: 4; Yuan: 10; Ming: 48; Qing: 60. Although the designation Ming is not broken down into periods of the Ming, so one has to work a bit to separate the late-Ming letters from those of the earlier Ming, these numbers are consistent with the type of increase just described. There is another way of approaching the same phenomenon. This time my focus is on anthologies of letters and the extent to which women’s letters are included. If we take the three collections that David Pattinson has identified as milestones of the early Qing, we find the following numbers of letters by women:

‧ Li Yu’s 李漁 Chidu chuzheng 尺牘初徵 (First levy of letters) of 1660: 6 out of roughly 600; ‧ Zhou Lianggong’s Chidu xinchao of 1662: 16 out of roughly 300; ‧ Wang Qi’s Chidu xinyu (Modern letters) series of 1663, 1667, and 1668: 53 out of roughly 1,000 total for the three collections.14

14  With Li Yu, I found women only at the beginning of the tenth juan. Zhou’s table of contents is organized by the name of the writer, which makes it rather easy to count the number of letters by Gu Ruopu (3) and Zhou Geng (13). In Zhou’s case, too, the letters by women appear in the tenth juan. In Wang Qi’s case, letters by women are sprinkled throughout his three sets. I am most uncertain of the count with Wang. If anything I have underestimated, not overestimated the number of women in his collections. The edition

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At 53 letters, Wang Qi’s whole series contains the largest number of letters by women. If we consider his three sets of letters one by one, we find 24 letters by women in the 1663 edition, 9 in the 1667 edition, and 20 in the 1668 edition. Each collection is divided into 24 subject headings. In the first two collections, women’s letters are distributed throughout the 24 sections, but in the 1668 edition, almost all appear in section 24, whose subject is women. We know that prior to Li, Zhao, and Wang, a few letter collections had gathered all kinds of women’s writings, an example being Jiang Yuanzuo’s 江元祚 Xu Yutai wenyuan 續玉臺文菀 (Garden of writings from the Jade Terrace, continued) of 1632. What is interesting about Li, Zhou, and Wang, however, is that they chose to include women’s letters in their general letter collections. This in itself can be taken as evidence of some kind of increase in women’s letter writing, or at least of the importance attached to women’s letters in editors’ minds. Pattinson’s work implies that Wang Qi did not aspire to as high a standard of excellence as the other two collectors. The way Wang broke each of his collections into categories suggests, Pattinson argues, that he aimed for a rather popular market, one that may have used his collections, in part, as caches of model letters.15 He further notes that many of the individuals included in Wang Qi’s collection were not very famous.16 While he does not mean to say that lack of fame necessarily leads to poor letter writing, he gives the impression that from a high cultural point of view, Wang’s work may have been less of a milestone than the others. As argued above, though, lack of fame or cultural importance could be an advantage if one is hoping to extract information about daily life from letters. Moreover it cannot be said that Wang and his assistants Xu Shijun 徐士俊 (1602–1681) and Huang Zhouxing 黃周星 (1611–1680) never anthologized the work of famous people. Letters by a number of celebrities are included, among men Lu Yu, Hou Fangyu 侯方域 (1618– 1655), Jin Shengtan 金聖歎 (1608–1661), and Yu Huai 余懷 (1616–1696); among women Wang Duanshu, Wu Shan 吳山 and Huang Yuanjie 黃媛介. It is just that the number of unknowns is relatively great. Wang Qi’s willingness to publish unknown writers may be the reason that the number of women included is greater than with Li and Zhou. In any event, Wang’s work gives us access to letters by women that cannot be accessed by other means. The very fact that he includes as many women’s letters as he does would seem to accord with our general point that more letters by women were being written at this time. I have used for Li Yu is Siku jinhuishu congkan, 153, 499–704; and for Zhou Lianggong is Zhongguo wenxue zhenben congshu. 15  “The Market for Letter Collections,” 142. 16  Ibid., 152.

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We gain a new level of insight if we turn now to identify the sources from which Wang Qi and his associates drew their letters. Here I will consider Wang’s three collections one by one. The first, of 1663, is the only one to record the provenance of materials. Thus we know that he borrowed from both Li Yu and Zhou Lianggong’s collections. When it came to women’s letters, though, he mostly borrowed from Zhou. This is obviously because the number of women’s letters in Li’s collection was so small. His entries on the only two women Zhou considered worthy of inclusion, Gu Ruopu and Zhou Geng, were either drawn from Zhou’s work or from individual collections by these writers. In the case of another woman writer, Wu Bo 吳伯, twenty-two of whose letters he published, most came from her personal collection (bieji 別集), but one is noted to have come from Li Yu’s Chidu chuzheng. From this evidence we can see that Zhou’s and Li’s breakthroughs in including women were influences on Wang. Although Zhou and Li were definitely influences, Wang and company found more of their letters by women in individual collections. It is also quite likely that they included previously unpublished letters. We know from marginal comments in the text that one of the editors (Xu Shijun) was a friend of the woman writer Wu Bo’s brother, who was his neighbor in Hangzhou.17 It is therefore entirely conceivable that the brother gave Xu a set of his sister’s letters. It is through the same means that we can show that one letter by Wu Bo in the first edition came from a previously published collection of letters (Chidu chuzheng), but this is only one among 22 letters by Wu.18 It would appear, then, that preexisting collections of women’s letters were not as influential on Wang as the mixed collections by Zhou and Li, individual bieji, and previously unpublished letters. The second of Wang’s three sets of published letters is less helpful than the first because it does not list its sources. However, it continues to encourage the view that Wang and his team drew on personal relations to build their collections. Two examples help prove the point. One is a Ms. Zhu 朱氏, who turns out to be the wife of Wang Qi.19 How her work made its way into the collection should be obvious. The other, Ye Guan 葉觀, is identified through a note as the wife of Lu Shen 陸深; her letter appears next to her husband’s, who we are told was a friend of one of the editors.20 In both of these instances we know what we know about these writers not from indications of the provenance of each 17  1:5:5a, 1:23:15a, 2:18:7. 18  See 1:4:6a, which comes from Chidu chuzheng, which in turn claims to have found it in a collection of women’s writings from Hangzhou. 19  2:24:8–9. 20  2:24:3.

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letter but from the marginal notes accompanying each letter throughout all three sets. When we get to the third set, we find other changes, most notably the first signs that women wrote to someone other than family members, in this case fellow women poets. This is especially the case in section 24, whose subject is women. One point of interest about the letters between unrelated women is that several are written by present or future editors of collections of women’s poetry. They can be considered a harbinger of developments to come. These are Wang Duanshu of Shaoxing, editor of Mingyuan shiwei 名媛詩緯 (Classics of poetry by famous women) of 1667 (four letters from); Huang Dezhen 黃德 貞 of Jiaxing (seven letters from,21 two letters to), who with Shen Hui 申惠 of Changzhou (four letters from) and Gui Shufen 歸淑芬 of Jiaxing (one letter to) were co-editors of Minggui shixuan 名閨詩選 (Selected poems of famous women), whose publication date is unknown;22 finally Gui Shufen would edit a collection Gujin mingyuan baihua shiyu 古今名媛百花詩餘 (One hundred lyrical flowers by famous women old and new) with Huang’s daughter Sun Huiyuan 孫惠媛 (among others) in 1685.23 The collections by these organizers have suffered various fates and are not all accessible today.24 In the case of Wang Duanshu, a few of the letters to and from her (and others) do mention her collection, and Wang Qi himself expresses satisfaction that he was able to secure letters by this author, who had become quite wellknown.25 As far as Huang Dezhen is concerned, although her edited collection does not survive, it is worth noting that several of the women whose correspondence with her is published by Wang Qi were celebrities who appeared in Mingyuan shiwei and other important anthologies. Examples are Wang Wei 王煒, Wu Shan, and Zhao Zhao 趙昭. Zhou Shuying 周淑英 and Shen Renlan 沈紉蘭 are other correspondents with Huang in this set who appear in Mingyuan shiwei, as does Huang herself.26 It appears to me as if Huang may have been as important an anthologist as Wang in her day but that her collection got lost along the way. Her work does not seem to be derivative from 21  Counting the letters from outside section 24, one each in sections 14 and 17. 22  See Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 784. 23  See Hu Wenkain, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 899. Interestingly, although Shen Hui lived in Changzhou and Gui Shufen lived in Jiaxing, their names are closely associated. See Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 268. 24  Mingyuan shiwei is widely available; Mingyuan shixuan seems to have disappeared completely; Gujin mingyuan baihua shiyu is held in the Nanjing Library. 25  3:24:10b. 26  Another celebrity, Huang Yuanjie has a letter in section 24 of Wang Qi’s third collection, but it is addressed to neither Wang Duanshu nor Huang Dezhen.

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Wang’s, but rather to form a separate, parallel undertaking. Neither Huang nor the next generation of anthologies comes up for comment in Wang Qi’s collections, presumably because their completion lay in the future; but even in these cases, the correspondence between women displays a level of friendship and artistic involvement that could conceivably be a prelude to anthology building. To make the most of the opportunity provided by these letters, one should study them in conjunction with Wang’s Mingyuan shiwei and with other materials turned out by the group connected to Huang and her descendants, including the anthology of 1685. Perhaps the combination could yield new insights into the background from which anthologies emerged. Also of interest is the clear evidence of coterie building among certain sets of women. This is especially the case with Shen Hui of Changzhou, who seems to have been a junior editor under Huang Dezhen. Several of Shen’s letters were added in a supplement after her husband presented them to Wang and company, by which time the third Chidu xinyu collection was essentially finished. A long note by co-editor Xu Shijun sets down Shen’s publications to date and her various associations: her literary society, which included both Huang Dezhen and Gui Shufen; her painting society, which included the famed Li Yin 李因 (1616–1685) of Haining;27 her calligraphic society; her Buddhist society, and so forth. From this list it is clear that society members lived both near to one another and far apart, in a variety of Jiangnan cities and towns. Letters must not only have served the purpose of keeping members in touch with one another. They were also one means through which members could give critical advice, as when Shen Hui advised Gui Shufun on how to hold a brush when doing calligraphy.28 This cluster of functions—keeping people in touch, coterie-building, teaching, and support for editorial projects—continued to be carried out by letters in later eras. Thus, the Ten Women of Wu, the Banana Garden Society, Yuan Mei’s disciples, Chen Wenshu’s 陳文述 (1775–1845) disciples, and other notable configurations all used letter writing as one means of furthering society among women and as one aspect of literary mentoring.29 27  For a recent description of Li Yin’s career, see Fong, Herself an Author, 109–19 and elsewhere. 28  I describe these matters in an article, “The Epistolary World of Female Talent.” 29  Daria Berg’s article “Negotiating Gentility,” Dorothy Ko’s article “A Man Teaching Ten Women,” Gōyama Kiwamu’s article on Yuan Mei’s disciples (“En Bai to jodeshi tachi”), and Mengxi Liu’s book on women associated with both Yuan Mei and Chen Wenshu (Poetry as Power) are valuable assets on these groupings. The letters collected by Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin reveal that all of these groups used letters, to stay in touch over long distances, to plan meetings (or decline to attend them), and to critique one another’s

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The same point could undoubtedly be made of men’s coteries and anthologies,30 but it registers differently with women, whose mobility was so much more limited. At the same time, the inhibition against baring family secrets was much greater on the women’s side, and this inhibition seems to have affected letters more than other genres, on which see below. Section 24 of the third Chidu xinyu collection may perhaps be counted as the first or at least one of the earliest sites of evidence on how coteries hung together, how they generated anthologies, and how letters were used to set up appointments and carry out long-distance teaching. It should be remembered, though, that editors Wang Qi, Xu Shijun and others never intended to supply evidence for future generations doing research on such topics. The chief goal of all three Chidu xunyu collections was to provide a lively reading experience and as a result to reap a profit. The batch of letters by Shen Hui that reached Wang Qi all at once were probably included only as an afterthought, and it is those letters that say the most about the coteries of women of the time. A modified version of this caution could also be made about the anthologies put together by Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin in the 1940s. These are organized around individuals, as is Hu’s masterwork Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歷代婦女著 作考 (Research into the writings of famous women across the ages) of 1958/85. As is well known, each of the women included is assigned a dynasty, and within that dynasty, is listed by the stroke number of her surname before marriage. Given these organizing principles, as well as the number of names any individual could go by, it is often quite a challenge to assemble a coterie from the information he provides. To give an example, it can sometimes turn out that one coterie member is listed as a Ming poet, whereas another is assigned to the Qing.31 When this happens, if one wants to turn these materials to one’s own purposes, one has to work across the grain. Although the two reference works by Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin, together with Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, provide an indispensable first step for the study of letters by traditional women, they are only a beginning. To address the role of letters in the lives of individuals and coteries we must take up specific examples, a task to which we now turn.

writings. Yu-Yin Cheng has translated a few letters from “Banana Garden Society” members in “Letters by Women of the Ming-Qing Period,” 174–75. 30  On coteries, see Tobie Meyer-Fong, “Packaging the Men of Our Times.” 31  For traces of Shang Jinglan’s 商景蘭 (Ming) association with Huang Yuanjie (Qing) during a trip she made to Shaoxing, see Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 156, 400, 663, 936 Huang also associated with Wang Duanshu on this occasion, on which see Wang Duanshu, Mingyuan shiwei 42: 11b, 16b.

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Letters in the Lives of Three Specific Women

For this section I have picked three guixiu almost at random. Starting with the fact that each one did, in fact, write letters (a point gleaned from one or another of Hu Wenkai’s collections), I tried to select people whose lives and other writings were especially interesting and whose letters might therefore have much to say. In the first two of my three cases, the letters lead us to coteries. Liang Mengzhao 梁孟昭, whose published writings link her to the 1630s,32 was apparently associated with other talented women of her era and with supportive men. Her work takes us back to a time before the trauma of the fall of the Ming. Gui Maoyi 歸懋儀 (1762–1835/6) was a woman of many friends and contacts, both male and female, in part because of her business as a “teacher of the inner chambers,” to borrow Dorothy Ko’s term. Through her life we gain insight into women’s culture in Jiangnan, before the Taiping Rebellion brought irreparable disruption of the old ways. The third woman, Wang Zhenyi 王貞 儀 (1768–1797), might be loosely linked with Gui, in that both were disciples of Yuan Mei, which made them fellow members of an extremely informal coalition; but Wang’s writings do not show a firm link to Yuan. Instead, she provides one of two examples I shall give of how letters between women could be used to criticize as well as lend support. The letters picked for Wang by Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin are more like admonishments than praise. Not one of the three women has been much written about in Western scholarship. There is a brief entry on Gui in Chang and Saussy,33 but neither of the other two is mentioned there, and not one of the three is indexed in Dorothy Ko’s pioneering work on women’s culture. However, Clara Ho’s Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women does have a full entry on Wang Zhenyi.34 2.1 Liang Mengzhao Liang was from Hangzhou. She was an accomplished painter. Her writings include several bieji35 and a chuanqi 傳奇 drama “Xiangsi yan” 相思研 (Inkstones of longing). She is one of only six women (two courtesans, one 32  Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 163. 33  Women Writers of Traditional China, 492–95, 781. I myself have an essay on Gui, on which see below. 34  Ho, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, 230–32. 35  Hu Wenkai’s and Wang Xiuqin’s selections of Liang’s work were drawn from a bieji called Moxiuxuan yincao 墨繡軒吟草. I am not sure that this work is still extant. I have not seen it and so cannot do what I do with the other two women brought forward in this study, which is compare the anthologized materials with those in earlier collections.

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nun, and three guixiu) known to have written chuanqi during the Ming.36 Contemporary critics praise her writings as fresh and beautiful and a breakthrough for women. To quote Wang Duanshu, [Liang] is a master of her generation, a standard bearer for women. Her poems and songs are all fresh and unusual; whether great or small her works far surpass those of earlier writers. Her drama Xiangsi yan is steeped in feeling. Its proper meaning is urgent yet poetic. If the likes of Liang Chenyu 梁辰魚 [1520–ca. 1593, 伯龍] or Shen Shi 沈仕 [1488– 1565, 青門] were to come back from the dead, they would have to kowtow to her. 一代作手。為女士中之表表者。其長短詩歌皆清新幽異。大小 墨妙遠過前人。所著相思硯詞劇情深。而正意切而韻。雖梁伯 龍沈青門輩復出,亦當讓一頭地。37 The drama can no longer be seen in the original, but the general outlines of the plot are known (see below). Also one ci 辭 (lyric) and a sanqu 散曲 (song) by Liang are preserved in Mingyuan shiwei, where they are praised.38 The drama revolves around the herd boy and the weaving girl, who tire of the routine of seeing one another only once a year. Secretly, with the help of supernatural beings, they manage to descend to earth, where they are reborn as humans. In the process they acquire two stones left over from Goddess Nüwa’s 女媧 repair of the sky. These had been lost during a chess game played by the herd boy and one of the supernatural beings but later materialize and turn into inkstones, one with the name xiang (of you), the other with the name si (to think of, long for). The couple’s eventual coming together on earth is match by the pairing of the two inkstones. Critic Gōyama Kiwamu 合山究 says of this play that it makes a possible antecedent to Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber), both in the use of the inkstones (called “precious inkstones,” baoyan 寶硯, in the drama, a name that could anticipate the name of the novel’s hero Baoyu 寶玉) and in the heavenly characters’ descent to earth. Like 36  Hua Wei, Mingqing funü zhi xiqu chuangzuo, 31. 37  Wang Duanshu, Mingyuan shiwei, 12:1. See also 37:13 Liang Chenyu is one of the first practitioners of Kunqu drama. Shen Shi is an artist and specialist in sanqu. The translations in this essay are all mine. My thanks to Wai-yee Li for help with this and other translations in this chapter. Of course any mistakes are my own. 38  See sections 35 and 37. See also Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 164. The sanqu and the drama appear to have something in common in that both take up the herd boy and weaving girl theme. On this see Hua Wei, Ming Qing funü xiqu chuangzuo, 45.

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the stone in the novel, these precious inkstones are inscribed. Even though the earthly match is not unhappy (contrast the unhappy relationship between Daiyu 黛玉 and Baoyu), it is conceivable that Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 (ca. 1715– ca. 1763) took ideas from this play.39 Liang’s letters are another genre that is singled out for praise, specifically for their elegance.40 Hu and Wang reprinted nine of them in their Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian.41 These nine were drawn from Liang’s bieji Moxiuxuan ji 墨 繡軒集 (Collection of ink embroidery studio), a work that is difficult to see today. Because Liang was one of the earliest known woman dramatists, it could be interesting to find out more about her personal thoughts as expressed in correspondence, if such can be found. I will discuss only three of her letters here. The first is rather celebrated.42 Its subject is the difficulties women face in becoming writers. It is addressed to her brother, name unspecified. The letter reads in part as follows: . . . The poems of women of my generation are much more difficult to write than those of male poets are. Male poets roam mountains and lakes as much as they like. They have wide ranging experiences and know how to critique their times. They are uninhibited in what they put into words. As a result, their poems have vigor and breadth. But women are not like this. For one thing they do not step outside the women’s quarters, so they do not see beyond their immediate surroundings . . . Even though we may have something to say, it must accord with decorum. If we chant our feelings we cannot say what we really mean but must cloak our thoughts in delicate restraint and refined elegance. . . . 但我輩閨閣詩。較風人墨客為難。詩人肆意山水。閱歷既 多。指斥事情. 誦言無忌。故其發之聲歌。多奇杰浩博之氣。至 閨閣則不然。足不踰閫閾。見不出鄉邦。縱有所得。亦須有體 . . . 即諷詠性情。亦不得恣意真言。必以綿緩藴藉出之。43

39  See his Min Shin jidai no josei to bungaku, 446. See also Hua Wei, Mingqing funü zhi xiqu chuangzuo, 33. 40  Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian, I: bios, 6. 41  Ibid., I:45–49. 42  Hua Wei’s Ming Qing funü xiqu chuangzuo yu piping uses it as an epigraph (see p. 29), and it is quoted in Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 164. 43  Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian, I:45.

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The letter gives two examples of women who have tried to break away from such restrictions. One is the Song poet Zhu Suzhen 朱淑真 (13th c.), who is said to have suffered ridicule for her writings. The other is Liang’s contemporary, the Ming poet Xu Yuan 徐媛 (fl. 1590?), who allegedly styled her work after that of the Tang poet Li He 李賀 (791–817). According to Liang, Xu’s strangeness of language may have been her way of getting around the problem of having to censor what was on her mind. Unless one can find a way out, Liang concludes, one’s poetry will be insipid and dull. One can find other, equally memorable quotations by women about the difficulties for women poets in gaining the kind of experience male poets enjoy. Statements by Wang Duanshu, Luo Qilan 駱綺蘭 (1755–1813?), and Shen Shanbao 沈善寶 (1808–1862) would be examples.44 What is unusual here, though, is Liang’s clear reference to the inhibiting effect of the manners by which proper women must live. Following her logic, it is not only that women poets lack experience, which is the point made by Wang, Luo, and Shen. It is also that even when a woman has a lot to say she cannot say what she really wants to because of family and social controls. From another letter of the time we know that Xu Yuan was roundly criticized by a contemporary, the woman writer Fang Mengshi 方孟式, for hubris and lack of talent. This opinion is rendered in a letter to her sister, Fang Weiyi 方維儀, which was reprinted by Wang Qi.45 In Fang’s words: [Xu] somehow learned to read and write. She composed many pieces carelessly and accumulated a mediocre collection. People in this world have no discrimination and accordingly praised it. Only now do we know that the people of Wu love a good name but have no learning. It is not only men who are like that. 讀徐媛詩與妹維儀偶爾識字。堆積齷齪。信手成篇。天下原無 才人。遂從而稱之。始知吳人好名而無學。不獨男子然也。 Liang does not refer to this matter (which may or may not have occurred before she wrote her letter to her brother). But from it, we of today can know how real the threat of criticism for women poets of that era was, from women as well as men.

44  See Widmer, The Beauty and the Book, 2, 350. 45   Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan shujian, 70. Hu’s and Wang’s source here is Wang Qi’s second letter collection, Chidu xinyu erbian, on which see Wang 2: 24:3–4.

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In this first letter, Liang’s use of the form as a kind of disquisition fits David Pattinson’s hypothesis that the letter form (chidu or shu) sometimes took on weighty topics. Its focused, serious tone is a good example of one kind of letter style. It is not desultory, like some of the letters to be discussed below. Although this letter may not yield much insight into daily life’s fussy details, it provides a convincing picture of the constraints against letting too many of one’s feelings circulate to the world at large. At least as interesting as their substance is the insight Liang’s letters provide into a genteel world of late-Ming literary and artistic culture. Let me begin with the question of who Liang’s younger brother might be. Although I cannot prove it beyond any doubt I regard it as likely that he was the celebrated Ge Zhengqi 葛徵奇 (17th c.). Ge made a name for himself by collecting women’s prose and by writing a preface in 1632 to a collection on this topic, Jiang Yuanzuo’s Yutai wenyuan.46 He is also known for committing suicide as the Ming came to an end and for his marriage to concubine (courtesan?) Li Yin, to whom we have already referred. My evidence for thinking that the brother is Ge lies in the preface he wrote in 1635 to one of Liang’s literary collections, Shanshui yin 山水吟 (Chantings on mountains and water). There he refers to Liang as his wife’s elder sister (nei jie 內姊). This preface takes a supportive tone, among other things explaining that it was not unthinkable for Liang’s to have choosen a studio name based on the idea that one could embroider ink, thus implying some willingness to prioritize writing over embroidery.47 On several counts, then, Ge must be seen as a progressive on questions of this kind. Others of Liang’s letters, are less disquisition-like and more narrative. They provide a different kind of insight into the literary and artistic culture in which Liang lived. As is the case with the letter to her “younger brother,” the problem most of her letters pose is that they do not make the identity of the recipients clear. For example, one to a Ms. Zhao (Zhao Furen 趙夫人) is, in my view, very likely a letter to the late-Ming woman poet Lu Qingzi 陸卿子 (fl. 1600). I say this because Lu was married to a man named Zhao and because the letter is all about Liang’s visit to Suzhou, which was Lu’s hometown.48 It portrays the recipient as a fellow artist and writer. It may also matter that we know from the first letter that Liang was aware of Xu Yuan, who was Lu’s best friend. Here is a short excerpt:

46  Chang and Saussy, Women Writers of Traditional China, 753–55. 47  See Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 163–64. 48  For more on Lu, see Chang and Saussy, Women Writers of Traditional China, 239–57, 686–87.

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. . . We followed the road to Jinchang [Suzhou]. When I climbed high and looked around it was already late spring. The new green was luxuriant, flanking the road and reflecting on us, so that the green seemed to color the clothes of our party. The mountain was not especially high, but it was very beautiful. Qian ren shi (lit. “thousand person rock”) was smaller than expected, not more than fifty steps to the top [?]. It was flat and not especially remarkable. But having come here, we found the sky opening up just at the time that the moon would have been coming out. I regretted that it was the last third of the month and a full moon could not be seen. We lingered and stood watching it for a long time. The water of Sword Lake was as black as ink. In form it was narrow, like a sword. The walls on either side were only about two hundred meters in height, but they were made up of steep crags, quite sheer and slanted. At the top we passed over a small bridge. Looking at it from below, it appeared as a bridge in the clouds. It too was a marvel. . . . 祖道至金閶。因一登眺。時已春杪。新翠蓊翳。夾道映人。衣 袂盡綠。山不甚高。而殊有秀色。千人石亦不過數十武。平坦 無甚奇致。但至此。則天宇豁然。然正當以月夜勝耳。恨值末 旬。月不可得。為躊躇佇望者久之。劍池水沉黑如墨。形之修 狹亦如之。兩壁峭立。雖僅數十仞。而陡削巉巌。若墮若倚。上 通以小橋。從下視之。如在雲際。亦一奇也。49 The letter supplies additional context, as follows: Liang and Ms. Zhao once promised each other that they would see the sites of Suzhou together, but when Liang got there, Ms. Zhao was away in the north (Yan 燕). The letter’s thorough description of Liang’s progress through Suzhou’s top sites was her way of living up to the promise to visit Suzhou with Zhao. Along with the letter Liang sent a painting she made as she traveled, together with some snow-white jasmine. She also mentioned some poems she wrote with her younger brother on this occasion.50 It is possible that some of these poems survive.51 A great feeling of peace came over her at the end of this experience, her only regret being that Zhao was not present to share her pleasure. This use of a letter to stand in for 49  Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian I:48. 50  This seems to be her own younger brother (shedi 舍弟) rather than Ge, a brother-in-law. 51  See Wang Duanshu, Mingyuan shi wei 12:2 a for a set of three jueju 絕句 poems Liang wrote under the rubric “Traveling late to Suzhou” (Wan bo Changmen 晚泊閶門). The poems show the poet to be overcome with the strangeness of Wu, as opposed to her home area of Yue, including the bird-like (unintelligible) language. The letter mentions that she wrote three jueju, in addition to five- and seven-word shi.

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a visit beautifully confirms Kathryn Lowry’s point that “letters fundamentally serve the function of representation, which is conceived as a substitution for the person’s physical presence, ideally expressed in rhetoric so skillful that it seems to transmit the likeness and spirit of the person who is absent.”52 Whether or not the recipient is Lu Qingzi, this letter allows us expand our sense of what the late-Ming letter could do. One would never call this one a disquisition, but it offers a type of verbal experience that a poem alone could not provide. By this I mean that its description of the progress the writer makes through a sequence of vistas is akin to what one might find in a travelogue, except that the letter has a single intended reader and is not particularly long. Let me hasten to add that the fact that Liang traveled now and then does not disprove the contention of the first letter, that women were largely confined to their homes. A third letter by Liang is also of interest, this one being to a Ms. Xu (Xu furen 徐夫人). This time I do not have a guess about who the recipient might be.53 The letter is about a trip Liang took with her brother’s wife to Jiaxing. It is like the letter to Zhao in its description of a natural setting and of Liang’s progress around it. To Liang’s disappointment, the area was flat, not as hilly as Hangzhou. Nevertheless, Liang enjoyed the experience of seeing Lake Yuan and Lake Tai. Here is her description of Lake Yuan: The ripples on Lovebird Lake are no less beautiful than those of lakes in Hangzhou, except that there are no boulders and peaks, only what appears to be a small hill in the middle. If one conjures up a fantasy landscape far away, then one is afraid to lose accuracy, but if one were to depict only what is before one, one could ruin the mood. As long as one can line the long embankment up with the islets, so that distant trees are mixed with the clouds, and lights reflect from right and left, and as long as there is merging and separateness with the lone hill [in the middle of the lake], then the right mood is achieved. 鴛湖波漾淪漣。不減西陵. 獨遠近無一峰一石。徒於水中宛成小 丘。若虛布遠景。則恐失真。祇貌中央。又復傷致。但使長堤 帶渚。遠樹參雲。左右映帶。與孤岒相吞吐。則得之矣。54 An interesting moment in the letter is the arrival on the scene of “Little Ms. Ge” (Ge xiao furen 葛小夫人) possibly Ge Zhengqi’s concubine Li Yin. (Liang 52  “Duplicating the Strength of Feeling,” 246. 53  I have not had time to look deeply into Liang’s associations. 54  Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian, I:46.

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also has a short letter to this person.) Li (if it is she) is already a painter, and her maid hands over a painting she has made. Together, Li and Liang make various attempts to paint the scene in front of them, but they are not very satisfied with their efforts and resolve to touch up their work at a later time. A question we might raise at this juncture is why, given the high quality of Liang’s letters, they do not appear in any of the collections edited by Zhou, Li, or Wang. As the only one of the three collectors who was from Hangzhou, shouldn’t it have occurred to Wang Qi to seek out Liang’s writings? The fact that Wang Duanshu’s Mingyuan shiwei anthologized Liang’s poems and her sanqu must mean that Liang and her family were not opposed to anthologizing per se. Perhaps Wang’s (and Zhou’s and Li’s) network did not extend as far as Liang (who may well have been deceased by the 1660s), or perhaps Liang and her descendants did not wish her to be included in this particular collection, for reasons unknown. 2.2 Gui Maoyi Our second example of a woman who wrote letters comes about one hundred and fifty years after Liang Mengzhao and about one hundred years after Shen Hui, Wang Duanshu, and the letter collections of Wang, Zhou, and Li. Gui was a disciple of Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716–1797). She came from Changshu, but spent much of her life in her husband’s (and mother’s) hometown of Shanghai. In addition, she roamed all around the Jiangnan area as a teacher of the inner chambers. Her life provides an interesting example of a woman who made her way financially, by means of her work as a teacher, for her husband was not very successful at supporting his family. I am inspired to pick her as an example because of my prior research on Gui’s life and work, which gives me a head start in identifying many of the individuals, male and female, with whom she exchanged letters and poems.55 One needs as thorough an acquaintance as possible with these many friends (and the many names each used) if one is to understand the context from which the letters emerged. Seven of Gui’s letters are found in Hu Wenkai’s and Wang Xiuqin’s Lidai ming­yuan shujian,56 but these and fifteen others can also be found in a manuscript collection called Xiuyu xucao 繡餘續草 (Poems after embroidery, continued) that is held in the National Central Library in Taipei.57 One of the interesting things about the Taipei collection is that it often supplies the 55  “Border Crossing and the Woman Writer.” 56  Pp. 160–62. 57  Almost all of Gui’s collections have the same title. Some are printed and some are not, and the content varies widely between editions. Even when editions have the same

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letter to which Gui’s letter is responding. (This collection also contains shi and ci poetry, to which it again often appends the poem or letter in answer to which Gui’s poem was written.) Although this collection appears to have been edited by Gui herself,58 all printed copies of her work from her own time on omit all 22 letters. Below I discuss a pair of letters, one by Gui and one by a man named Li Tingjing 李廷敬 (?–1806), but identified in the collection only as “Weizhuang xiansheng” 味莊先生 (Mr. Always Dignified). Neither is among the letters anthologized by Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin under Gui’s name. Li was a jinshi of 1775. He held the position of prefect (taishou) in the Suzhou and Songjiang areas. His district included Shanghai. He was a bon vivant, patron of drama, and friend of many celebrities, including Gai Qi 改琦 (1774–1829), Hong Liangji 洪亮吉 (1746–1809), Huang Pilie 黃丕烈 (1763–1825), and others, all also friends of Gui’s.59 The Taipei collection contains three letters to Li, as well as several ci; another unpublished collection contains several shi and many ci exchanged with Li;60 finally, one of Gui’s published collections (edited by Ge Zai 戈載 et al.), contains two shi poems addressed to Li as well as another shi poem mourning his death.61 The source on which Hu and Wang drew, Wang Yunzhang’s 王蘊章 Ranzhi yuyun 然脂餘韻 (Leftover rhymes of Ranzhi) of 1918, allows us to see that the decision to eliminate letters from Gui to Li was not made by Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin.62 Hu and Wang reprint all of the letters made available in Ranzhi yuyun. From Wang Yunzhang we learn that he acquired Gui’s letters from a friend who was her descendant. Wang lept at the opportunity to publish documents from an earlier era that had never before circulated outside the family.63 Li was Gui’s teacher. We cannot be sure that the family deliberately failed to prefaces and are dated the same year, usually 1832, the materials contained within are not necessarily the same. 58  Although a manuscript, it has the name of her studio, Langao shishi 蘭杲詩室, on every page as if this were a printed edition. A few others of her mss have this feature. 59  Lu Eting, Qingdai xiqujia congkao, 259–68. 60  This collection has the title Qinchuan nüshi Gui Maoyi Xiuyu xucao 琴川女史歸懋儀繡 餘續草. It is held in the Shanghai Library. 61  In Cai Zhenchu, Zhongguo shihua zhenben congshu, 1–393. For descriptions of most of the many published and unpublished collections of Gui’s work, see Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhizuo kao, 784–85. The one containing the two poems to Li and the one mourning his death came out in 1823. It is held in the National Library of China. 62  Wang Yunzhang, Ranzhi yuyun, 185–89. Hu and Wang reprinted all the letters that Wang Yunzhang did, but not quite in the same order. 63  Ibid., 185.

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keep or to pass on letters between Gui and Li, but this is conceivable. Thus it is possible that Wang Yunzhang’s friend passed on some letters but withheld others. Could Li’s reputation as a bon vivant have posed a problem for family members?64 (Gui’s poems to Yuan Mei are also not reprinted. As far as I know, there are no extant letters from Gui to Yuan.) The following letter by Gui is quite brief, but because it appears next to the letter from Li that prompted it, and because of the event to which the two refer, it is quite interesting. It reads as follows: Coming upon a joyous season [the 15th day of the 1st month], I was filled with longing for you. Receiving your esteemed letter was like seeing [a parent or] someone dear to me. I smile to think of you, my teacher, who has truly understood me. As someone who has raised me, your beneficence is higher than a mountain and deeper than water. No word can sufficiently convey my sense of inadequacy when it comes to repayment. My only hope is that in my next life I will be reborn as your child, so that my humble love for you can find an outlet. 會逢令節。正繫離思。忽奉朵雲。如親色。笑吾師知遇之恩。長 養之德。山高水深。莫名其感。惟願他生轉輪膝下。以慰寸 忱耳.65 Li’s letter, to which hers responds, mentions that he thinks of Shanghai as his home (he was originally from the North). He has been away holding office for the past eight months but is about to be summoned to Beijing. He misses his friends from the poetry society. Yesterday he received letters from two members (Zhou E 周鍔, jinshi 1787 and a multitalented official; and dramatist and official Wan Chengji 萬承紀). If they come to visit, they will stay for a few days, so he has been planning a party in his Southern Garden. The plum flowers have passed by but he believes now is a good time to get together. Modestly, he claims that his circumstances are shabby and he will not be a good host; also he apologizes for the sloppily written letter.66 As we glean from Gui’s letter, Li was her teacher. What is interesting about the pair of letters (his invitation and her response) is the sense they convey of 64  However one of the letters that is reprinted mentions Li, see Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan shujian, 160. 65  Xiuyu xucao, unpaginated, in letter (shu 書) section. Collection held in National Library, Taipei. 66  Here especially it is a shame we do not have the original letter and cannot judge whether or not the calligraphy is sloppy.

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rather intimate friendship between a man and a woman, who were not related through family. It is also interesting to hear directly about the poetry society. Although Li calls it a poetry society, he is very likely referring to a society of artists that met in Wu Park 吾園 in Shanghai, of which Li himself was the organizer and Gui and the painter Gai Qi were members (along with Hong Liangji, Huang Pilie, and many others, including at least one other woman, Yuan Mei’s disciple Liao Yunjin 廖雲錦).67 Gui is also associated with Li through her poem of appreciation for a drama sponsored by Li, Lu Jilu’s 陸繼輅 Dongting yuan 洞庭緣 (Destiny at Lake Dongting, 1803), one of two plays performed at the very party under discussion in the two letters. Her poem of appreciation for this drama is preserved.68 It is one of several documents crucial to understanding what happened at the party and the splash the drama made.69 We know from other evidence that the party took place in 1804, just two years before Li’s death. It was put on by Li Tingjing’s home drama troupe, supplemented by outside professional actors. The event was evidently quite spectacular, the most thrilling moment being when a huge artificial butterfly descended to the stage.70 Despite the modest line Li takes in the letter to Gui, he evidently went way out of his way to put together a memorable send-off for himself as he prepared to say goodbye to his friends. Along with a number of poems (both shi and ci) exchanged between Gui and Li, these letters add to the store of evidence that women of the Ming and Qing did not limit their literary interactions to family members or to other women. They are also interesting because of the contrast they make to Liang Mengzhao’s letters. Whereas Liang’s could be called aesthetic or painterly, Gui’s and Li’s correspondence is noteworthy for its more personal and interactive tone. This impression is furthered by the third of Gui’s letters grouped with these two in the Taipei collection. It is to Xi Peilan 席佩蘭 (1760–1820?), another of Yuan Mei’s disciples, and one of Gui’s best friends.71 In this letter, Gui looks forward to the forthcoming visit of Xi and her husband (Sun Yuanxiang 孫原 湘, jinshi 1805, 1760–1829) to Shanghai, evidently for the same party (the couple

67  For a list of members, see Huang Ke, Shanghai meishushi zhaji, 2–4. 68  See Liaozhai zhiyi xi qu ji, 240–41. 69  E.g., because of Gui’s poem, we know that another play, Wan Chengji’s Huhuapan 護花 幡, was performed on the same occasion. See Lu Eting, Qingdai xiqujia congkao, 263. 70  Ibid., 265. 71  In an article on Xi Peilan, David Hawkes ventures the view that Gui was closer to Xi’s husband than to Xi. See “Hsi P’ei-lan,” 113–21.

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lived in Changshu).72 Yet Gui also takes up other topics: her difficult life as a teacher, her delight that Sun has accepted an appointment to serve in Li’s administration, and her condolences over a death in Xi’s family. Again we see the letter form used quite differently than in Liang’s case. Gui is not writing an essay, nor is she creating a painting in prose. Perhaps one could say that Gui’s use of letters is a little closer to what we might mean by the term letters today, by which I mean the inclusion of many topics. Conceivably, it would be difficult for a poem to be newsy in the same way, but one would have to look at more “epistolary poems” and family letters in order to be sure. The same rather intimate tone and desultory form are also found in Gui’s other two letters to Li, one of which responds to his condolences upon the death of her fourth daughter,73 the other of which simply conveys good wishes to sustain him in his difficult job. The high cultural visibility of this group can be seen in another event, from 1806, which was the year Li died. That year Gui and many friends from Li’s poetry society and others, some sixty people in all, endorsed a painting by the Yongzheng emperor, “Jiangshan wujin tu” 江山無盡圖 (Painting of an endless expanse of rivers and mountains) dated 1730. The painting is currently held by the National Library of China in Beijing. Evidently Gai Qi instigated the plan.74 Whether or not Gui’s family had anything to do with suppressing the correspondence between Gui and Li, when the materials concerning Li are added to the rest of what we know about Gui, she becomes less easy to categorize. She is no longer just a member of a woman-based coterie (or a series thereof), no longer just a teacher of the inner chambers, no longer just a Yuan Mei disciple or a friend of Chen Wenshu. To all appearances, she was also one of a group of mostly male artists who got together frequently in Shanghai; she took part in a banquet planned around a theatrical performance, at which a large butterfly descended to the stage; and she soon thereafter endorsed a painting by the Yongzheng emperor. This behavior may seem unorthodox, even vaguely countercultural, but it is not entirely aberrant. It is part of a story that connects women, drama and the artistic life in early nineteenth-century Shanghai. As another chapter in this same story, the woman poet Wu Zao 吳藻 (1799–1862) 72  For more on Xi and Sun, see Chang and Saussy, Women Writers of Traditional China, 477– 78 and elsewhere. For evidence that Xi was one of the guests at the party, see Lu Eting, Qingdai xiqujia congkao, 266 (she appears under the name Xi Daohua 席道華). 73  For Gui’s own poem on this death, see Chang and Saussy, Women Writers of Traditional China, 494. 74  I have seen this document. It consists of the painting plus a long attachment on which many have signed their names.

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was able to have her play Qiaoying 喬影 (A reflection in disguise) performed in Shanghai no later than 1825.75 If we expand our horizons to understand what Gui was up 1804 we may better able to understand how to account for Wu some twenty years later. At the very least, there is the common denominator of endorsements: Gui affixed poetic comments to the published texts of both Lu Jilu’s Dongting yuan and Wu Zao’s Qiaoying. 2.3 Wang Zhenyi Also categorized as a disciple of Yuan Mei, Wang Zhenyi had ties to Yuan that may have been more superficial than either Gui Maoyi or Xi Peilan’s, and we have less evidence than with those two of rich ties to other disciples.76 Wang was from Nanjing, although she had both family and marital ties to Tongcheng in Anhui Province, which means that both locations count her as one of their own.77 Wang lived a very short life, dying at age 33. I have picked Wang because of her unusual interests and experiences, which might make her letters interesting too. Despite her early death, she has excited considerable attention in contemporary scholarship. This is because of her strong interest in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Wang’s life was also quite unusual in that between the ages of eleven and sixteen she accompanied her grandfather (some sources say her father) to his exile in Jilin. While she was there, a Manchu princess taught her how to shoot a bow and arrow and to ride a horse with ease. At the same time, she made use of the family library and (with or without a tutor) educated herself in a range of fields. This is where she learned astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, as well as more traditional subjects.78 She was heavily influenced by the early-Qing mathematician Mei Wending 梅文鼎 (1633–1721).79 Wang is known to have authored a number of works, including several books on science; What survives today are only the 75  For more on this work, see Hua Wei, Mingqing funü zhi xiqu chuangzuo, 119–27 and Lu Eting, Qingdai xiqujia congkao, 196–210. See also Volpp, “Drinking Wine and Reading ‘Encountering Sorrow’,” 239–50. 76  Whereas Gui Maoyi appears in the Table of Contents of Yuan’s “Nü dizi shi” 女弟子詩 in Suiyuan quanji, even though her poems are not recorded, Wang is not listed there at all. But she does come up for comment in a supplement to Yuan’s “Suiyuan shihua” 隨園詩 話 in the same compilation. Her poems show some awareness of Yuan: at least there is a poem after the work of his disciple Jin Yi 金逸, see Wang Zhenyi, Defeng ting chuji, 847. 77  For the Anhui part of the story, see Fu Ying, Ming Qing Anhui funü wenxue, 382–84. 78  Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian, II:79–81. See also p. 3 of the biography section. Also see the biography by Angela Leung in Ho, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, 230–32. 79  Leung, “Wang Zhenyi,” 231.

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prefaces, now part of her collected poetry and prose; but even the more conventional parts of her work did not come out until the early Republic. As far as is known, not a single one of her works was published in her own day.80 In contrast to my approach to Gui Maoyi, which begins with the letters Hu and Wang did not collect and then looks at how some of those uncollected letters lead to new insights, this time I start with some they did collect then ask whether the impression these letters make is consonant with the rest of what we know about Wang. There are three of Wang’s letters in Hu Wenkai’s collection of women’s prose. Two of the three are addressed to a Ms. Fang (Fang furen 方夫人), about whom virtually nothing else is known, except that she once asked Wang to write a preface to an edition of the Heart Sutra that she hoped to turn out for charitable purposes.81 In direct and purposeful prose, Wang answers Ms. Fang in the following vein: I received your request to write a preface to the Heart Sutra. At first I was happy to do this and was about to set pen to paper, until I thought some more and realized I should not take the principle of “establishing words” lightly. A key principle of writing is that one must not write without a reason. One must take some matter and expound on it, in order to give vent to what lies in one’s heart. There has to be a purpose guiding the writing, such as loyalty or integrity. It should come out of one’s knowledge and learning, which add something to it. Then the reader can sing or cry, show respect or fear. Even though the subject may be ancient, it will not be obliterated and will live on in the words of people after they hear of it. In that way the writing that develops will also be integral to its subject matter and will not perish. This is what is meant by “literature contains the way.” But when it comes to Buddhist sutras, they violate the way and take leave of reason . . . 比承辱命作心經序。始固欣然下筆。既而思之。有不可輕於立 言者。蓋文章一道。斷不可無故而作。必借一事而發之。以稍 見其胸中之所寄託。必有道以寓乎其中。為文也。或忠烈或節 義。出吾生平學問見識以附之。使讀之可歌可泣。起敬起畏。雖 歷久而不可磨滅。昭然在人口耳。於是其所為之文章。亦遂

80  Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 236. 81  Wang Zhenyi’s full collection does give a tiny bit more context. It explains that Fang was married to a man named Chen. It gives his full name and position and notes that he was from Zhejiang. See Defeng ting chuji, 787.

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附事而不朽。此所謂文以載道也。若夫佛經者。叛道離理者 也。. . .82 The letter goes on to talk about all the ways Buddhist doctrine has subverted rulers and corrupted simple people. Because of all the harm it has caused, the author not only does not think it a good idea to write the preface, she also tries to warn Ms. Fang off Buddhism altogether. In the second letter to Ms. Fang, Wang develops the same argument at much greater length and in additional detail. The third letter Hu reproduces is to a Ms. Bai (Bai Furen 白夫人), also unknown. This letter is seemingly a rather abrupt refusal of a request that Wang write a preface to Bai’s collected poems. It reads, in part: Thank you very much for your recent hospitality. While drinking wine, we talked about several matters including the possibility that I might write a preface to your poetry collection. I have learned a lot from you but I must tell you what I think about this. The problem most people have is that they are anxious to make a name for themselves. They are afraid no one will know who they are, so they take their unpublished materials out to show people and request a preface from a well known gentleman as a way of adding luster [to their collection]. The person making the request does not understand the problem with this, but once the writing gets to truly knowledgeable people they will laugh and put [the collection] aside. The reason they will do so is that the writing is not worth high praise. Furthermore, they will not use gentle murmurs and an ingratiating tone to offer flattery just because of someone’s pleading request. In my own case, my knowledge is shallow and my learning is superficial. Although I enjoy dabbling in writing, I would not lightly show my output to others. I don’t dare to claim that I diligently and meticulously cultivate my talents, nor do I consider myself in the right all the time. The reason I embrace obscurity is that I rigidly follow the principle of not letting words of the inner chamber escape the confines of the family so that the proper way for women can be preserved. 昨擾郇廚。謝甚。酒間所談某事。且轉委作詩集序。儀承教多 矣。然不能無説也。大抵今人之弊。最患急於求名。味恐人不 及知。而未定之稿。出以示人。求片言於大老名公以為榮。在 彼固不自知。而一經有識者啞然置之。夫所以啞然置之者。以 物之不足當一贊歎。且幷不遽因其人之乞求。遂柔聲媚態以貢 82  Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian, II:65.

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諛也。儀智淺學疏。雖喜躭翰墨,而從不輕易出以示人。不敢 謂勤慎內修也。亦非自以為是也。其所以甘於隱祕者。味守內 言不出之順。以存女子之道耳。83 Here again we have a strong contrast to the lyrical and artistic letters of Liang Mengzhao, as well as to the intimate, interpersonally sensitive letters of Gui Maoyi. Wang manifests no interest in beauty in these letters, nor are hers the desultory musings of a writer sharing private thoughts with a friend. Wang’s letters to Ms. Fang and Ms. Bai stand out for the clarity of the argumentation. Not a word is wasted and the point is crystal clear. However, the letters leave one wondering whether her relationships with these women could have withstood such frank refusals to go along with what would presumably have been innocent requests for assistance. It sounds as though Ms. Fang protested the first letter and received a longer second letter as a follow-up. It also sounds as if Wang would initially have liked to write the preface for Ms. Fang until she thought better of it. So perhaps there was a cordial personal relationship in the background somewhere. However, the case of Ms. Bai prompts me to wonder whether, if these two women were in close enough contact to have dinner together, why a letter was even necessary to convey Wang’s refusal? Why not just say no at the dinner? If we could answer such a question we might know still more about the way a letter could be used in traditional Chinese women’s culture.84 This letter to Ms. Bai may genuinely have been meant as helpful, but it serves as a useful corrective to the idea that relationships in writing between women were normally cordial. Here a contrast can be made to the dismissive remarks made by Fang Mengshi about Xu Yuan. In this case, however, Wang’s admonishments were made directly to Ms. Fang, not communicated only to a third party, behind the subject’s back and in relatively unpleasant terms. Strangely enough, when we turn to the rest of Wang Zhenyi’s collected writings we discover that Bai and Wang were actually long-time friends. It turns out that Bai’s husband, like Wang’s grandfather, had been exiled to Jilin, where the two women got to know one another, and they kept up a friendship even after Wang moved to Nanjing.85 We also discover that Wang did, upon occasion, endorse collections of women’s poems.86 And we can find letters that 83  Ibid., II:68–69. 84  Antje Richter’s article this volume presents ideas on how admonishments worked among male writers, usually members of the same family. Her idea that writing carries more force than speaking could well apply in this situation. 85  Defeng ting chuji, 763. See also a poem to Bai, 841. 86  Ibid., 761.

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strike quite a different note from the ones Hu and Wang selected: they meander through multiple subjects, they complain about personal illness, they discuss other personal details, and they show signs of affection.87 It is also noteworthy that Wang often refers nostalgically to her days in Jilin. The selections Hu and Wang made from Wang Zhenyi’s extant letters give insight into her formidable intellect, and they are good examples of how the Chinese letter can discourse on important subjects. After seeing her letters we are not surprised to learn that Wang was skilled at many types of prose.88 However, they do not give as full a picture as they might of Wang.



Obviously we cannot offer a full commentary on the place of letters in Ming and Qing women’s culture when our sample is so small. What we can do instead is venture beyond the rather basic points that were developed in the first section of this essay: that women’s coteries made use of letters, at least when members lived far apart, and that letters could be used for generating anthologies, as well as for friendship and other purposes. In the case of Liang Mengzhao, what her letters showcase are the talent and aestheticism of a woman whom many important anthologies seem to have overlooked. Liang may not have been as good a poet as some, or she may not have been as well connected, but her letters leave a strong impression, and her accomplishment in drama was an important milestone, even though her chuanqi does not survive today. In this connection we are reminded that there were some writers, such as Wu Bo, whose entire literary legacies are confined to letters and who are therefore omitted from many important anthologies, including those of today, because such anthologies take up mostly poems. Similarly, Wang Zhenyi was a woman who wrote well in non-poetical genres. Whatever the caliber of her poetry, Liang was skilled at using letters for aesthetic purposes and her work deepens our understanding of Ming women (and supportive men), even though more work is needed to fill in details. Gui Maoyi’s letters present us with another chance to view Ming-Qing women writers with new eyes. Signs that her family may have suppressed some of her own carefully collected records are of interest. We cannot say for certain that the family held all twenty-two of the letters now found in the Taipei collection and only passed on the seven reprinted by Hu and Wang, but this 87  Ibid., 786. 88  For other examples see the prefaces, biographies, colophons, fu 賦, lun 論, ming 銘, and other genres in Defeng ting chuji.

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is entirely conceivable. The fact that none of her letters made their way into print until after the collapse of the Chinese empire is very likely significant too, although whether this would have been a matter of family disapproval or broader societal censorship remains unclear. However we end up assessing it, this picture provides indirect proof of the restrictions under which all women writers labored, restrictions that worked against their writing and publishing letters. Gui can easily be approached through her coteries with other women, but to approach her only in this way is to overlook what her letters bring out: her connection to an artistic scene in Shanghai in the early nineteenth century. It is also of interest to have this evidence that she attended theatrical performances. Finally, Wang Zhenyi’s case helps to demonstrate that to twentiethcentury anthologists, the disquisition-like side of letters was highly valued. The selections from Wang’s work made by Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin suggest this, even when we know that the genre could accommodate a range of moods and styles. To be fair, though, Hu and Wang reproduce samples of Wang’s work in a whole range of genres, several of which show her in a different light.89 Yet when it comes to letters, when they select ones that showcase her intelligence and skill at argumentation, it may say as much about the anthologists themselves as about Wang Zhenyi. In sum, letters are a fruitful avenue of inquiry into Ming Qing women’s literary culture. Many women did not write them, or at least did not seek to publish them, for fear of violating family taboos. Other women, such as Wang Duanshu, probably thought of them as a lesser form of writing and did not bother to include them in their collected works, even when they wrote them perfectly well. Overall, though, the letters that have been preserved can open our eyes to realms beyond poems. The fact that they require a recipient as well as a writer necessarily grounds them in a two-way process that speaks to ongoing relationships, even as the taboo for women against saying too much could restrict what they were able to record. Luckily, some revealing letters have survived the inhibitions of the Ming and Qing and provide insight into women’s culture that poems alone cannot provide. What the work of Liang, Gui, and Wang has shown us may not be what we would have anticipated from the letters of Yingying or Xiaoqing, nor does their work plunge us as completely into quotidian existence as some of the original letters still available in England and elsewhere. Nevertheless, they do add something to our understanding of the lives of Chinese women. This in itself makes them a promising avenue to pursue. 89  Hu and Wang, Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian, II:58, 79, 96, 103.

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Bibliography Berg, Daria. “Negotiating Gentility: The Banana Garden Poetry Club in SeventeenthCentury China.” In The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class, edited by Daria Berg and Chloe Starr, 73–94. New York: Routledge, 2007. Chang, Kang-i Sun and Haun Saussy. Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Cheng, Yu-Yin. “Letters by Women of the Ming-Qing Period.” In Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, edited by Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng, 169–78. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Daybell, James. “Letters.” In The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, 181–93. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2009. Fong, Grace. Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Fu Ying 傅瑛. Ming Qing Anhui funü wenxue zhushu jikao 明清安徽婦女文學著述輯 考. Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 2009. Gōyama Kiwamu 合山究. “En Bai to jodeshi tachi” 袁枚と女弟子たち. Bungaku ronshū 文学論輯 31.8 (1985): 113–45. ———. Min Shin jidai no josei to bungaku 明清時代の女性と文学. Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2006. Guan Dedong 關德棟 and Che Xilun 車錫倫. Liaozhai zhiyi xi qu ji 聊齋志異戲曲集. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983. Gui Maoyi 歸懋儀. Xiuyu xucao 繡餘續草. National Central Library, Taipei, Taiwan. Gui Shufen 歸淑芬. Gujin mingyuan baihua shiyu 古今名媛百花詩餘. Nanjing Library. Hawkes, David. “Hsi P’ei-lan.” AM 7.1–2 (1959): 113–21. Ho, Clara. Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644–1911. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Hu Wenkai 胡文楷. Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歷代婦女著作考. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1985, rev. ed. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 2008. Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin 王秀琴. Lidai mingyuan shujian 歷代名媛書簡. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1945. ———. Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian 歷代名媛文苑簡編. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1947. Hua Wei 華瑋. Mingqing funü zhi xiqu chuangzuo yu piping 明清婦女之戲曲創作與 批評. Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan, 2003. Huang Ke 黃可. Shanghai meishushi zhaji 上海美述史札記. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 2000. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

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———. “A Man Teaching Ten Women.” In Yanagida Setsuko sensei koki kinen ronshū henshū i-inkai 柳田節子先生古稀記念:中國のと傳統家族, 65–93. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1993. Leung, Angela. “Wang Zhenyi.” In Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644–1911, edited by Clara Ho, 230–32. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Li Yu 李漁. Chidu chuzheng 尺牘初徵. In Siku jinhuishu congkan 四庫禁燬書叢刊, 集部, 153, 499–704. Liu, Mengxi. Poetry as Power: Yuan Mei’s Female Disciple Qu Bingyun 1767–1810. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Lowry, Kathryn. “Duplicating the Strength of Feeling: The Circulation of Qingshu in the Late Ming.” In Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, edited by Lydia Liu and Judith Zeitlin, 239–72. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. ———. “Personal Letters in Seventeenth Century Epistolary Guides.” In Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, edited by Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng, 155–67. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Lu Eting 陸萼庭. Qingdai xiqujia congkao 清代戲曲家叢考, Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1995. Meyer-Fong, Tobie. “Packaging the Men of Our Times: Literary Anthologies, Friendship Networks, and Political Accommodation in the Early Qing.” HJAS 64 (2004): 5–56. Pattinson, David. “The Chidu in Late Ming and Early-Qing China.” PhD diss., Australian National University, 1997. ———. “The Market for Letter Collections in Seventeenth-Century China.” CLEAR 28 (2006): 125–57. Volpp, Sophie. “Drinking Wine and Reading ‘Encountering Sorrow: A Reflection in Disguise by Wu Zao, 1799–1862.” In Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, edited by Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng, 239–50. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Wang Duanshu 王端淑. Yinhong ji 吟紅集. In Qingdai shiwenji huibian 清代詩文集 彙編, 82, edited by Guojia Qing shi bianzuan weiyuan hui wenxian congkan 國家 清史編纂委員會文獻叢刊. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2009. Wang Qi 汪淇, ed. Chidu xinyu chubian 尺牘新語初編, 1663. In Nanjing Library. ———. Chidu xinyu erbian 二編, 1667. In Nanjing Library. Reprint: Chidu xinyu: Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1971. ———. Chidu xinyu guangbian 廣編, 1668. In Nanjing Library. Wang Yunzhang 王蘊章. Ranzhi yuyun 然脂餘韻. In Zhongguo shihua zhenben cong­ shu 中國詩話珍本叢書, edited by Cai Zhenchu 蔡鎮楚, 1–393. Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2004. Wang Zhenyi 王貞儀. Defeng ting chuji 德風亭初集. Congshu jicheng xubian 叢書集 成續編, 133. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1994.

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chapter 21

Epistolary Networks and Practice in the Early Qing: The Letters Written to Yan Guangmin David Pattinson Among the numerous collections of letters from the late Ming and early Qing period, Yanshi jiacang chidu 顏氏家藏尺牘, or “Letters Kept at the Yan Family Home,” is particularly valuable for the study of epistolary practices for two main reasons. Firstly, it is a rare example of a collection of letters written to an individual, and one that we can be almost certain was not subject to significant selection or editing. Secondly, because the authors of the letters would not have expected that their letters would one day be published, it provides a rare window into unguarded epistolary practices among the cultural and official elite during the early Qing. The recipient of the letters, Yan Guangmin 顏光敏 (1640–1686), was not only a direct descendant of Confucius’s foremost disciple Yan Hui 顏回 (trad. dates 521–490 BCE), but he was a prominent member of the political and cultural elite of the period as well. Therefore, by analyzing the profile of the correspondents represented in Yanshi jiacang chidu and the functions of the letters they wrote, we can enhance our understanding of the epistolary networks of someone of that social status during that period, and of what those networks were used for. Furthermore, although only a few authors’ letters appear both in Yanshi jiacang chidu and the anthologies of literati letters that were published during the 1660s, the socio-cultural profile of the letter-writers in both types of collection was similar. Therefore, by comparing Yanshi jiacang chidu with some of the published collections, we can try to determine the extent to which the letters published during the early Qing reflected everyday epistolary practice, and if they were different from the Yan letters, in what ways. 1

The Transmission and Publication of the Yanshi jiacang chidu Letters

Yanshi jiacang chidu, which has hardly been the subject of any research at all, is a collection of approximately 750 letters by over 250 correspondents.1 1 The work by Chinese researchers will be referred to in the course of this chapter, but their interest in Yanshi jiacang chidu has been almost entirely as a source for information on Yan’s life and literary output, rather than as letters in themselves. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_023

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Although the letters are mostly difficult to date, they appear to cover all of the period from the late 1660s up to 1686, the year of Yan’s death. We cannot know for certain why Yan kept the letters, but calligraphy was probably the main reason, as Yan himself was an accomplished calligrapher.2 The collection’s first publisher, the wealthy Cantonese salt merchant, publisher and philanthropist Pan Shicheng 潘仕成 (1804–1873), says in his preface that the letters were passed down for their calligraphy, though this does not necessarily mean this is why Yan kept them.3 While many of the letters are by prominent officials, scholars and cultural figures, he also kept many by obscure correspondents, so the fame of the writer was not a motivation. As the discussion below will demonstrate, the letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu generally did not have particular literary value, so literary factors are unlikely to have been important. Yan valued friendships—his diaries record many visits to and from friends—so he might have kept the letters as a way of marking those friendships.4 There is no evidence that he kept the letters with a view to publishing them; most later reprints and library catalog entries say that Yan Guangmin compiled ( ji 輯) the collection, but in fact he seems to have done no more than keep them. It is true that Yan was collecting the letters during a period when there was considerable appetite for letter anthologies amongst the educated public, but there is no evidence that Yan kept the letters for any reason other than his own appreciation. Most of what we know about the process by which the letters came to be published is gleaned from the colophons which appear at the end of the fourth chapter of the published editions. The letters seem to have been kept in the Yan family home until the autumn of 1770, when Yan’s great-grandson Yan Chongju 顏崇榘 (fl. 1770–after 1795) brought some of them to the capital and asked Gui Fu 桂馥 (1736–1805), a fellow Qufu native and an expert in epigraphy, to have them bound. In his colophon to the collection, Gui, who at the time was a Tribute Student at the National University, says that he had the first installment bound into eight or nine fascicles, but over the next four years Yan twice brought more letters to Gui, so that in the end there were three times as many letters as there had been in the first bundle; this is why the letters are in no real order. Gui also says that at first he cut the salutations out of the letters 2 Amy McNair discusses the practice of collecting letters for their calligraphy in her study of a letter by the Tang statesman Yan Zhenqing in this volume. 3 Preface to Yanshi jiacang chidu, 1b. 4  Yan kept three diaries, Deyuan rili 德園日曆,  Jingshi rili 京師日曆, and Nan you rili 南遊 日曆, all of which exist in manuscript form, but I have not had the opportunity to see them. There is some discussion of them in Zhou Hongcai “Zhongguo guji shanben shumu,” 69.

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before binding them, but later came to regret this.5 In another colophon which is undated but certainly written in the mid 1770s, the scholar-official Lubi Chi 陸費墀 (1731–1790), who had the opportunity to read the letters while Gui was editing them, says that there were originally small pieces of paper attached to many of the letters which noted the gift that accompanied the letter, such as “one fish” or “ten tangerines.” However Gui Fu decided to leave these out. Lubi upbraided him for doing this, and Gui admitted he had been wrong to throw them away. In a colophon composed in September 1776, the scholar and eminent official Zhu Yun 朱筠 (1729–1781) says that the collection consisted of thirty-five fascicles.6 Yan Chongju seems to have held on to the collection until his death in the late 1790s. According to the colophon written during the spring of 1838 by the eminent official and scholar Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849), Yan Chongju had a significant collection of calligraphy, paintings and bronze artifacts, but after he died, his descendants could not keep them and sold them off together with the letters. At the time Ruan was writing, the letters were owned by Tao Liang 陶樑 (1772–1857), a prefectural-level official in the northern Zhili area who was a well-known bibliophile and collector of antiques.7 This is confirmed in another colophon by the Hunanese official He Linghan 何淩漢 (1772–1840), who laments how the vicissitudes of time have led to the collection being sold, but is comforted by the fact that it is in the hands of someone who can appreciate them.8 The last colophon to the collection is by the Guangdong painter and calligrapher Luo Tianchi 羅天池 (1805–1856): it is dated 24 May 1841 and was written when Luo saw the letters in Tao Liang’s study. Like some of the other scholars who contributed colophons over the years, Luo suggests that the letters should be inscribed in stone, or at least copied out and printed so that they can be known alongside the letters of Su Shi and Huang Tingjian.9 Six years later in 1847, the collection was finally printed under the auspices of Pan Shicheng as part of his Haishan xianguan 海山仙館 series. We do not know how Pan obtained the letters, but presumably he found out about them during 5  Gui Fu, note appended to colophon, Yanshi jiacang chidu 4.89b. 6  In his 1834 colophon, Kong Zhaoqian 孔昭虔 (1775–1835), who was Yan Chongju’s student, notes that one of the thirty-five fascicles consisted of the colophons. See 4.90b. 7  Ruan Yuan, colophon, Yanshi jiacang chidu 4.91a–b. When Ruan was Provincial Education Commissioner for Shandong between 1792 and 1795, he recommended both Gui Fu and Yan Chongju for posts. Yan took up a post in Xinghua 興化 in Ruan’s home province of Jiangsu, where he performed well, but died soon after. 8  He Linghan, colophon, Yanshi jiacang chidu 4.91b. 9  Luo Tianchi, colophon, Yanshi jiacang chidu 4.92b.

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one of his frequent sojourns to the capital, where he is likely to have made the acquaintance of fellow bibliophile Tao Liang. The National Library of China holds a manuscript edition of Yanshi jiacang chidu which appears to contain all of the letters as well as biographies for all the correspondents for whom such information could be found—these are attached to the first page of letters by each correspondent. The notes both written on the pages or appended to them suggest this was a draft made in preparation for final publication. It is not clear who copied the letters out, but there are notes attached to two fascicles that seem to imply that some of the letters were originally intended to be included in Tao Liang’s book of art criticism Hongdou shu guan shuhua ji 紅豆 樹館書畫記, but no letters from Yanshi jiacang chidu appear in the published version of Tao’s book.10 In his preface to the Haishan xianguan edition, Pan simply says that he had held the collection for many years, and decided to print it before giving it as a gift to a friend. He also says that up until that point the letters had been passed down because of their calligraphy, but now they would also be passed down for their prose as well. He redivided the letters into four chapters, and placed the biographies in a fifth chapter.11 There is no consistent pattern to the arrangement of the letters, though clearly an effort has been made to present the letters by each correspondent in chronological order where possible (which was difficult because the letters are rarely dated and the year never given, even when the day and occasionally month have been). Occasionally there is a succession of authors who can be grouped together in some way: many of the early letters are by prominent older officials; letters by most of the “Ten Masters of Jintai” (Jintai shi zi 金臺十子, hereafter “Ten Masters”), a group of poets of whom Yan was one, are arranged together along with those of their patron Wang Shizhen 王士禛 (1634–1711) and his brothers in chapter two; letters by several of the candidates who passed when Yan was Examiner for the Metropolitan Examination of 1670 can be found together in chapter four, but there are others elsewhere in the collection; and members of the Yan and Kong clans, including twelve letters by Yan Guangmin himself, appear towards the end of chapter four, followed only by those letters whose author could not be identified. However, judging from the manuscript edition in the 10  The two notes referring to Hongdou shu guan shuhua ji seem to be draft formatting for chapter headings, but they are for putative chapters 9 and 12, whereas the published version of Hongdou shu guan shuhua ji consists of only eight chapters; it does contain other letters, however. The original letters are held in the collection of the Shanghai Library, but I have not seen them. 11  Preface, Yanshi jiacang chidu 1a–b.

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National Library of China, these groupings already existed in the thirty-four fascicle edition that Gui Fu produced, and it may well have been Yan Chongju, or even Yan Guangmin himself, who grouped some of the letters in this way; the Haishan xianguan editors seem simply to have greatly reduced the number of divisions, opting instead for long chapters of over eighty traditional pages. 2

The Life of Yan Guangmin

As a direct descendant of Confucius’s favorite disciples, Yan would automatically have been regarded with respect, and he was the recipient of certain privileges granted by the court, such as being able to attend the School for the Sons of the Four Eminent Confucian Families (si shi xue 四氏學). This status in itself was no guarantee of success, as the apparent financial difficulties of his descendants in the early nineteenth century demonstrate, but Yan’s achievements in his own right were significant: he became a relatively senior official, and may have risen even further had he not died at the age of 47 sui. As well as being an outstanding calligrapher, he was an authority on ritual and the examination-style essay, and a well-known poet. His generation was also remarkable because two of his brothers, Yan Guangyou 顏光猷 (1638–1710) and Yan Guangxiao 顏光斆 (1639–1698) also passed the Metropolitan Examinations in 1673 and 1688 respectively—as it was said at the time, “one Yan family mother produced three Metropolitan Graduates” 顏氏一母三 進士.12 Another brother, Yan Guangshi 顏光是, although only a Provincial Graduate (1675), nevertheless rose to become a Bureau Director and Prefect of Shaowu 邵武 in Fujian.13 While there is no evidence that the Yan brothers themselves were ever anything other than loyal servants of the new Qing dynasty once Manchu rule over Shandong was established, the family had shown particular commitment to the Ming dynasty before that. Yan Guangmin’s grandfather, Yan Yinshao 顏胤紹 (d. 1642), passed the Metropolitan Examination in 1631, and held a number of county-level posts before being appointed Prefect of famineravaged Hejian 河間 in Beizhili in 1642. At the end of that year, the prefectural seat was attacked by marauding Qing troops. At first the Ming defenders were able to hold the town, but when Qing reinforcements arrived, Yan knew the town would fall, so he herded the members of his family into a room and set it alight. He then returned to the defense of the town, and when it fell, he went to 12  See Li Kejing, Qufu san Yan gong zhuan (Biography of the three Yan’s of Qufu), 1233–34. 13  Yanshi jiacang chidu 5.101b–102a.

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his official residence, set it alight, prostrated himself facing north in his official attire, then leapt into the flames.14 Yan’s father, Yan Bojing 顏伯璟 (d. 1670), was living in Yanzhou 兗州 at the time and did not know his father had died. When Qing troops attacked Yanzhou, Yan Bojing tried to escape by jumping from the city wall, but hurt his left leg badly, and was picked up by Qing patrols. When the troops found out who he was, they told him that his father had died, at which point Yan began crying bitterly and pleading for them to let him go so he could go to find his father’s body. They took pity on him and freed him, so he made his way to Hejian through considerable danger. After the Ming fell, Yan Bojing did not seek to serve the Qing, but rather devoted himself to poetry and calligraphy.15 His wife, Yan Guangmin’s mother, surnamed Zhu 朱, was the daughter of a Ming Defender-commandant of the State, a title of nobility given to fourthgeneration descendants of an emperor. During the Qing raid on Yanzhou, she was cut on the arm by a soldier who was rounding people up, whereupon she began cursing him; he attacked her and left her for dead at the foot of the city wall, but she was found alive four days later. Three-sui-old Yan Guangmin himself was saved by a wet-nurse who smuggled him out of the town.16 From then on, Yan seems to have grown up in more settled circumstances. His biographies report several achievements typical of precocious youth of the period, including his mastery of the cursive and draft calligraphic scripts by the age of nine sui. At the age of fifteen sui he became a Government Student, and in January 1656 he married a woman from the Kong clan (the clan of Confucius’s descendants). In the autumn of that year, the official, scholar and influential poet Shi Runzhang 施閏章 (1619–1683) arrived in Shandong to take up his post as Provincial Education Commissioner, and soon made the acquaintance of the young Yan; there are five letters from Shi in Yanshi jiacang chidu. In 1657 Yan sat the Provincial Examinations and although he did not pass, he was placed on the Supplementary List as a member of one of the four prominent Confucian clans, thereby gaining entry to the National University. He passed the Provincial Examination six years later, and in the spring 1667 passed the Metropolitan Examination; the Chief Examiner was Minister of 14  Ming shi 7470–1. 15   See the tombstone inscription by Ye Fang’ai in Guochao qixian leizheng 379.37a–38a. 16  This account of Yan’s life draws primarily on the chronological biography written by his son Yan Zhaowei, “Yan Xiulai xiansheng nianpu,” included in Zhao Chuanren, Yan Guangmin shiwenji, 301–10. I have also consulted the tombstone inscription by Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊, but Zhu’s account of the later part of Yan’s life is rather sketchy and contains a number of inaccuracies. See Zhu Yizun, Pushutingji 75.2b–4a.

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Rites Liang Qingbiao 梁清標 (1620–1691), nine of whose letters to Yan are preserved in Yanshi jiacang chidu, and Feng Pu 馮溥 (1609–1692), whose two letters open the collection, was another Examiner. In the year before this he had traveled to Shaanxi, where he climbed Mt Hua and made the acquaintance of a number of prominent scholars in the region. Yan’s first appointment was as a Drafter in the Historiography Institute. Two years later, when the Emperor paid a visit to the Directorate of Education, Yan was promoted to Secretary in the Bureau of Ceremonies in the Ministry of Rites on account of his being a descendant of one of the four sages of Confucianism. In 1670, Yan was appointed one of the Assistant Examiners for the Metropolitan Examination of that year, and soon after was posted to supervise the Longjiang Domestic Customs Barrier in Jiangning (Nanjing). Quite a few of the letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu appear to have been written to him during his travels associated with this posting, or refer back to the author’s having met Yan during that time. He worked at Longjiang for about a year, returning north to Beijing via Shandong in June 1671, and in 1673 bought a house in the Xuanwu Ward in the capital. Yan’s chronological biography, written by his son Yan Zhaowei 顏肇維 (b. 1669), catalogues his conscientious nature during these years, whether he was revising dynastic statutes and documents on court ritual, or practicing archery and the seven-stringed zither (qin 琴). In 1675 Wang Shizhen began to work on compiling the Selected Poems of the Ten Masters (Shizi shilüe 十子詩略), the idea for which seems to have originated in a conversation with Yan (see below), which would bring Yan further prominence as a poet.17 In the autumn of the same year he was made Secretary in the Bureau of Records in the Ministry of Personnel, the ministry in which he would spend the rest of his career. At the beginning of 1677, he was granted the prestige title of Grand Master of Governance. At about the same time, the famous Ming loyalist and scholar Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–1682), who had first met Yan on a visit to Qufu in 1661, came to the capital and stayed with Yan, but a month later Yan’s father died, and Yan returned to Qufu to mourn. In 1679, after the three years of mourning had come to an end, Yan went traveling in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region, where he stayed for over a year, including half a year in Hangzhou, from which he visited the many sites in the region including its famous mountains and temples. In 1681 he returned to Jiangning, where he had overseen the Longjiang customs barrier ten years 17  Yan Zhaowei says the Ten Masters collection was published in 1675, but Wang’s chronological biography says 1677. See Wang Shizhen nianpu, 35. However, we know from a letter to be discussed below that Yan’s contribution to it had still not been published in 1679.

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earlier, and traveled to Anhui, before making his way back home to Shandong via Zhenjiang, Yangzhou and Fengyang. After arriving in Qufu in December 1682, he bought some land to the west of his residence and built a garden which he named the Garden of Joy (Lepu 樂圃) after a garden belonging to one Mr Zhu in Suzhou that he particularly admired. From this time on he adopted the sobriquet Master of the Garden of Joy (Lepu zhuren 樂圃主人). In February 1683 Yan resumed his official career, now as Vice Director of the Bureau of Honors, with additional responsibility for the Bureau of Evaluations. Just over a year later he was promoted to Director of the Bureau of Honors, in which role he had an influential role in planning the ritual element of the Kangxi emperor’s first imperial tour, which took place the following year. In May 1686 he was made a Compiler for the Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Great Qing (Da Qing yitongzhi 大清一統志) project. He also published a book of eighty examination-style essays, Examination Style Essays of Weixin Hall (Weixintang zhiyi 未信堂制義).18 However, before his career could reach the greater heights for which it seemed destined, and just four months after celebrating his mother’s seventieth birthday, on 15 November 1686 Yan died of an illness in his residence in the capital. He was forty-seven sui. 3

Yan Guangmin’s Epistolary Network

Yanshi jiacang chidu contains just under 750 letters by 277 correspondents, the names of twenty-two of whom are unknown. 151 of the correspondents are represented by only one letter, including those from the unknown correspondents. Two letters survive from another fifty-four correspondents, and three from nineteen. The most letters from any one individual is thirty-eight by the official and philanthropist Sun Guangsi 孫光祀 (1614–1698), followed by thirty-two by the eminent poet-official Wang Shizhen, twenty-eight by the loyalist philosopher Gu Yanwu and twenty-seven by the poet Tian Wen 田雯 (1635–1704), all of whom except Gu were Yan’s fellow Shandong natives. The geographical distribution of the correspondents’ native places is predictable in the light of Yan’s life. Sixty-three of the correspondents hailed from Yan’s home province of Shandong, while sixty-one came from Jiangsu, with most of the latter coming from the major centers such as Jiangning and Huating. Another forty-seven came from Zhejiang. That over a hundred came 18  See Yan Zhaowei in Zhao Chuanren, Yan Guangmin shiwenji, 309. Later in the biography Yan Zhaowei lists Weixin tang shiyi 未信堂時藝 in a list of his father’s works, which is presumably the same book.

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from Jiangsu and Zhejiang partly reflects the dominance of the Lower Yangtze Delta (Jiangnan) elite during the period, but obviously the main reason is that Yan traveled to those areas on official duties in 1670–71 and spent over two more years there in 1679–82, so he came to know many prominent members of the scholar-gentry from that region. A further eighteen correspondents were natives either of Beijing or of Zhili, so Yan would have met them during the periods in which he served in the capital as an official. The only other provinces to be represented by significant numbers of correspondents were Anhui (14) and Shaanxi (8), both of which Yan had visited. Of the hundred correspondents for whom we have a reliable year of birth, fully eighty-three were older than Yan. The explanation for this might be that Yan entered officialdom at a relatively young age and died in middle age, so by the time Yan made their acquaintance, most of the officials and cultural figures around him would have been older than him and well-established enough to guarantee that more biographical details would survive. Possibly many of the correspondents whom we cannot date precisely were Yan’s age or younger, and never became prominent enough in government or culture to ensure detailed biographical details would survive. Of the 131 correspondents who passed the highest civil service examination, the Metropolitan Examination, twenty-five passed in the same year as Yan himself, 1667, while eleven passed in 1670, the year Yan was one of the Examiners. However, there are seventeen graduates from the 1655 cohort, and most cohorts from 1647 through to 1676 are reasonably well represented, so apart from the predominance of Yan’s 1667 classmates, and that there are more correspondents who graduated before Yan than after, there are no other significant patterns in the dates when Yan’s correspondents passed the Metropolitan Examinations. The explanation for this is almost certainly the same as for why so many of Yan’s correspondents for whom we have birth dates were older than him. One final identifiable group amongst Yan’s correspondents was Ming loyalists. In a study devoted to Yan’s relationship with Ming loyalists, Yao Jindi finds some nineteen loyalists amongst Yan’s recorded acquaintances, most of whom are represented in Yanshi jiacang chidu. Of these Gu Yanwu was the best known and also the most frequent correspondent.19 In addition to the letters from Gu, there are six letters from Zeng Can 曾燦 (1625–1688), one of the Nine 19  Yao Jindi, “Yan Guangmin.” Yao’s apparent definition of who constituted a loyalist is rather broad, as some of those mentioned in his study do not seem to have been very active in seeking to serve the Ming despite being easily old enough to do so. See also Qiao Min “Shilun Qing chu shiren Yan Guangmin,” 110–13.

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Masters of Changes Hall (Yitang jiuzi 易堂九子) in Ningdu, Jiangxi, five from Wang Hongzhuan 王宏撰 of Huayin in Shaanxi, and four from the Huating poet Wu Maoqian 吳懋謙. However in nearly all the other cases only one letter survives. There is other evidence for Yan’s acquaintance with loyalists in his poetry and diary, and given that his grandfather was a Ming martyr, his father did not seek to serve the Qing, and his mother was a member of the Ming imperial clan, it is natural that Yan would have an interest in cultivating the friendship of loyalists. However, Yan’s interaction with most of the loyalists he knew seems to have been limited to infrequent meetings or exchanges, and loyalists do not seem to have held an unusually prominent place in Yan’s social circle compared to other senior officials with similar cultural interests and achievements. Taken as a whole, therefore, the range of Yan’s epistolary network is much as one would expect from a man of his life experience. The most significant concentration of letters, in terms of both the number of correspondents and the number of letters they wrote, is from Yan’s native province of Shandong, and from people who spent significant periods of time in Shandong, such as Gu Yanwu; it is with these men that Yan seems to have worked most closely culturally and sometimes politically. Naturally there is also a large cluster of correspondents whom Yan would have met while working the capital: some Beijing natives, but most of whom, if not from Shandong, hailed from the provinces of the Jiangnan region. There is of course some overlap between the latter group and those people Yan made the acquaintance of during his travels in Jiangnan, the other major cluster of correspondents represented in Yanshi jiacang chidu. 4

What Were the Letters For?

Yanshi jiacang chidu is particularly valuable for us because it reflects the range of correspondence an official and man of culture during the early Qing period might receive, and enables us to gain a better picture of what letters were used for, more or less unfiltered by the norms of compilation of collected works. It will not of course be a perfect guide because Yan almost certainly received many letters which he did not keep or which were otherwise lost, but it is still the best example we have. Zhang Chao’s 張潮 (ca. 1650–1707) collections, discussed by Suyoung Son in this volume, do seem to represent the letters he received, but his correspondents knew that their letters would be published. Of similar value to Yanshi jiacang chidu, but from a slightly earlier period, are the letters to the Huizhou businessman, poet and one-time student at the National University, Fang Yongbin 方用彬 (1542–1608), as well as to other members of

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his family, which date from between approximately 1564 and 1598. These letters are a rich resource for studying epistolary practice during the late Ming, particularly in view of Fang’s social position as both poet and scholar on one hand, and businessman on the other; as well as being a National University Student and member of a poetry society, he sold books, ink and inkstones, paintings and other accouterments of the scholar’s studio, lent money, and ran a pawnbroking business, often in association with other members of his clan. The Fang letters, which are held in the collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library, have been published with extensive scholarly annotations by Chen Zhichao.20 Chen’s scholarship is impressively thorough, but his interest is predominantly that of a historian approaching the letters as historical documents rather than as examples of epistolary practice. The letters have not been discussed in the broader context of epistolary practice during the late imperial period by any other scholar, as far as I am aware. 5

Methodology for Analyzing Yanshi jiacang chidu

The focus of this chapter is on Yanshi jiacang chidu as a window onto early Qing epistolary practice. Although the letters are of course a rich biographical resource, and could be a valuable resource for other kinds of historical, social and cultural studies, these are not the central concern here. For this reason I have generally not explored the relationship between the letters and “what actually happened” unless that is necessary to properly understand the function of the letter in question as epistolary practice. The collection might also usefully be analyzed for the way the letters operated in the economy of social capital, but although here we certainly are concerned with the ends to which the letters were deployed, to study the letters formally for what they can tell us about social capital would require dedicated studies using different methodologies. In any case, because Yanshi jiacang chidu is unlikely to contain all the letters Yan received and does not include his replies, and because it is only sometimes that we can establish how effective attempts to access and deploy social capital were, such a study could only be indicative anyway. For similar reasons, this study has not attempted a full, formal quantitative analysis of the letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu based on any other formal methodological framework either. Nevertheless, having read through the collection, I am convinced that a close reading and analysis of a significant sample from 20  See Chen Zhichao, Mingdai Huizhou Fangshi. This collection also contains over seven hundred letters.

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the collection, supplemented by observations from the rest of the collection, will still elicit a reliable characterization of the roles the letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu played. Therefore, the simplified quantitative methodology I have employed is to read through all the letters in the first chapter creating categories of function or topic in a spreadsheet as I read, assigning each new category to a column. At the same time I assigned a row to each letter, and as I read each letter I placed the number “1” in the appropriate function or topic column each time that function or topic appeared. When I had finished going through the chapter I then added up the number of letters in each column. I do not claim that the results are statistically precise, not least because labeling the functions of individual letters presents a number of difficulties. While some letters clearly only have one function, many if not most letters have more than one. Sometimes these multiple functions are more or less independent, but often one function of a letter, or a topic superficially unconnected to the main purpose of the letter, might in fact be a device meant to support the main function of the same letter. In other words, there can be a hierarchy of functions: one is primary, but it is nested amongst other functions, at least some of which contribute to the primary function, and without which it might not be possible to perform the primary function given, for example because of the requirements of etiquette. One of the most common examples of this in Chinese letterwriting is letters whose ultimate purpose is to ask a favor, but which frequently open with a passage praising the recipient in some way, or with some news about the author, with the request itself only being made some way into the letter. It can be argued that the request that appears near the end of the letter is the “real” purpose, and that other elements which are not clearly about something else should simply be subsumed under this “real” purpose. Nevertheless, even if the author of a letter provides recent news about himself which does eventually lead to a request, in correspondence between friends such news would still be of independent interest, and should therefore be considered a separate function.21 A further problem is deciding when a reference to something that fits one of the category headings is in fact significant enough to warrant counting under that category. We will compare Yanshi jiacang chidu with other published letter collections from the period below, but we might note here that publishers of letter collections in the seventeenth century who attempted to categorize the letters in their collections grappled with similar problems. While some publishers, such as Wang Qi 汪淇 (ca. 1600–after 1668) in his Chidu xinyu 尺牘新語 series, simply categorized the letters in their collections according 21

For a discussion of the structure of request letters in modern Chinese, see Andy Kirkpatrick, “Information Sequencing.”

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to what they perceived was the main topic, when the writer, dramatist and publisher Li Yu 李漁 (1610/11–1680) provided a topical index to his 1660 Chidu chu zheng 尺牘初徵 that attempted to point the readers to topics within letters rather than categorizing the letters by the main theme only, he ended up with a bewildering 140 categories, some 120 of which had fewer than five examples under them, and most of those had only one or two.22 In preparing the present study, I have tried to avoid the proliferation of categories that Li’s eagerness to help his readers engendered, but it is easy to see how it could happen. Of the thirty-eight topic categories that emerged from my own analysis of the letters, eleven returned fewer than five examples, so I have not commented on these below. For reasons of space and to avoid tedium, I have grouped the other categories together into broader subjects, such as the different types of letters about meeting, making requests and so on. There is also the possibility that using a sample of just one chapter, or slightly more than a quarter of the collection, might introduce distortions. For example, the letters by Wang Shizhen and other poets in his circle who were close friends of Yan are not in this chapter, and nor are many letters by Yan’s 1667 fellow Metropolitan Graduates or students he examined in 1670, while older men who reached the rank of Minister are probably slightly overrepresented. However, my impression from surveying the collection as a whole is that these distortions are not likely to be great. As noted above, although the letters by each correspondent were grouped together, and in places correspondents who were connected in some way seem to have been placed together, beyond that Yanshi jiacang chidu does not seem to have been arranged in any particular order, which suggests that one chapter will be as broadly representative as another. 6

Letters Requesting Favors

If we now turn to survey the function and topic categories that emerged from my analysis of the first chapter of Yanshi jiacang chidu as a whole, several broad themes emerge: meetings between the correspondents, apologies, expressions of gratitude, asking and receiving favors, recent activities and travel, scholarly 22  Wang’s Fenlei chidu xinyu, e.g., is divided into twenty-four categories. For a discussion of Wang Qi’s publishing activities, see Ellen Widmer, “The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou.” I have discussed the marketing strategies Wang, Li, Zhou and others used for their letter collections in “The Market for Letter Collections.” Zhou Lianggong did not categorize the letters in his collections at all, regarding categorization as pandering to the needs of literary hacks.

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and cultural interests, life as an official, financial transactions of various sorts, and accounts of the writer’s recent emotions and health. Of these, the most numerous are letters relating to requests: approximately a third of the letters include a request made by the author to Yan, while another dozen make reference to favors the author has done for Yan. The requests made of Yan are most commonly for poems, prefaces and other such texts, for him to transcribe a text in his renowned calligraphy, for favors stemming from his position as an official, or for him to carry certain items or messages to someone else. Letters in which the writers seek Yan’s help to obtain positions in the government administration for their friends and relatives, or to otherwise influence official decisions using informal channels are fairly common and provide a vivid glimpse into the day-to-day lives of officials, beyond the policy debates of their more formal writings. While it is sometimes difficult to identify the precise circumstances in which some of the letters were written, either because the context would have been understood by the correspondents, or because the people being referred to are by now obscure, in other cases the letters refer to well documented events. Liang Qingbiao, who had held the post of Minister of Personnel for several years up until 1684 when he was put in charge of the Ministry of War, wrote to Yan to ask about the honors that were apparently to be granted posthumously to his relative Hao Yu 郝浴 (1623–1683). After Hao died in office in 1683 while Governor of Guangxi, he was posthumously accused of misappropriating funds, as a result of which he was stripped of his official title and concomitant honors, and orders were given for the misappropriated funds to be recovered. However, the Kangxi emperor knew that Hao was an upright man who would not have diverted funds to himself, so he ordered that there was no need to try to recover the money. Three years after his death, his son Hao Lin 郝林, who had passed the Metropolitan Examinations in 1682, successfully appealed to have his father’s case overturned, after which the titles Hao Yu he had held at his death were restored to him and he was given the appropriate funerary sacrifices.23 Liang’s letter, which was probably written in 1685 or 1686, reads: It is sad that it is a long time since we have seen each other. My relative Hao Yu received imperial favor and should receive honorary titles. I have heard the matter is with your office. His son wishes to collect these titles. Although my relative was posthumously punished, in fact there was no misappropriation or corruption involved, and recently a special imperial decree was promulgated praising his incorruptibility, and overruling the 23  Qing shi gao 10,000.

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order to recover the money. Therefore his son should, it seems, be able to collect them. I would be grateful if you would give attention to this matter: whether there is anything that needs to be discussed, and to discuss exactly how it should properly be done. I will tell you the rest of the details when we meet. 久未得相晤為悵。舍親郝雪海。前遇恩。應得封典。聞在 貴署。其公子欲領取。舍親雖經身後處分。原非侵欺及貪墨 之比。近又經特旨褒其廉潔。准免追銀。或仍當領。幸惟 留意。如有應商。亦為酌議。確當如何。餘晤悉。24 More dramatically, amongst the many letters from Gu Yanwu is one written when he was imprisoned in Ji’nan on suspicion of having sponsored the publication of a book inimical to the Qing rulers. Attached to this letter, which we can date to 4 April 1668, is a text that Gu wrote explaining in detail how the book was a forgery, thereby establishing his innocence.25 He asks Yan to pass the letter on to one Tan 譚, who should in turn circulate it among Gu’s supporters in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region. At the time Yan was only a Drafter in the Historiography Institute, but the two men had known each other since 1661. So perhaps Yan was a convenient conduit, and Gu distributed several copies of his defense among sympathetic friends who potentially had access to those who might help him have the charges overturned. In any case, it is clear from these two examples that letters could be used to try to influence at least mildly sensitive political matters in quite specific ways. However, there is little evidence in Yanshi jiacang chidu that more sensitive policy matters or bureaucratic intrigue were discussed in letters, probably for fear that they might fall into the hands of political rivals. Other letters contain more mundane requests for Yan to help certain friends and relatives of the author of the letter. Again Liang Qingbiao, most of whose letters contain requests of some sort, asks Yan to look into the case of one Jin Lei 金罍 who had been county Magistrate of Nanfeng in Jiangxi. After a short opening in which he thanks Yan’s brother for his friendship with his own brother, Liang writes: . . . A graduate of the same Provincial Examinations as myself, named Jin Lei, was Magistrate of Nanfeng. Some time ago one of his parents died, 24  Yanshi jiacang chidu 1.38a. 25  The letter as it appears in Yanshi jiacang chidu is not dated, but a date is given in the version collected in Gu Tinglin shiwenji, 233–34, which in turn draws upon Gu’s chronological biography compiled by Zhang Mu 張穆.

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but because he could not tie up administrative matters in the county, he was delayed and only able to return home recently. At the end of the mourning period he wrote a letter explaining the reasons why he was delayed, and these are explained in detail in that text. I fear some in your Bureau have made excessively stringent demands of him, so I hope you could take charge of the matter. Jin is poor and ill; it was only through the charity of others along the way that he was able make it back to the north. He has not been able to provide an explanation that satisfies the clerks, so he must rely on your kind self to get to the bottom of his difficulties. . . 茲又有鄉試敝同年金罍者。令江右之南豐。丁憂已久。任內 經手未結。羈留至今始歸。服闋起文赴補其遲延之由。文中 已詳。恐貴衙門或有苛求。望門下主持。其人貧窘病困。沿途 持鉢。始能北來。不能飽胥役之欲明矣。所恃仁人能原其苦 情也。26 In the following letter Liang makes a similar request for Yan to intervene in the case of another magistrate surnamed Luo 駱 who has come to the end of his term and lacks the funds to return home, but the new magistrate will not help him out.27 Other requests for Yan to speak or write to another official on someone’s behalf, to hurry up some process under Yan’s jurisdiction, or to perform other such minor favors are scattered throughout Yanshi jiacang chidu; there is not the space to quote more examples here, though one or two more will be referred to in other contexts below. Requests relating to literary and artistic matters are probably the most numerous in the collection, which is not surprising given that this was the major preoccupation of most of Yan’s friends after their official duties. In a letter that is also a vivid example of the reports of ill health that figure frequently in the correspondence,28 the Huating loyalist poet Wu Maoqian explains why he cannot come to visit Yan in person, and asks Yan if he will write a colophon on a painting he has: In recent days I have had much blood in my stool and I cannot bear the pain in my abdomen, so I have not been able to go into town. I have been thinking of you very much. Have you returned from your official duties 26  Yanshi jiacang chidu 1.39a. 27  Ibid., 1.39a–b. 28  References to illness were a staple of letter-writing in China. For an early medieval example, see Antje Richter’s discussion of illness in the letters of Wang Xizhi, “Beyond Calligraphy,” 402–7. See also Paul Kroll’s chapter in this volume.

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yet? Do you have anything else you need to do? I have a portrait for which I would like someone to write a laudatory colophon, and that person should be someone ideally suited to the task. Your writing and reputation for virtue are second to none, so I cannot let this opportunity pass. You can write on either the top or the side; let it be as you decide. . . 日來腸紅甚。腰痛不可忍。不得入城。殊為相念。當事歸否。​ 別有事否。弟有小影求題像贊。俱欲意中人。先生文章品望為 海內第一人。不可錯過也。上與旁皆可題。惟尊意。29 This is a typical example of a relatively simple letter of request: the letter begins with an explanation of why he has not been able to meet Yan and an enquiry into Yan’s recent situation, before turning to the main business of the letter, which is to ask Yan to write a colophon for a portrait. The first entry in Yanshi jiacang chidu under Wu’s name is not in fact a letter, but is a preface to Yan’s Lepu ji 樂圃集 written for Wang Shizhen’s “Ten Masters” collection, in which Wu recalls that he first met Yan on a visit to Qufu when Yan was about twenty years old, so their friendship was not new. The preface is referred to again in the final letter from Wu in which he asks whether the preface has been printed or not, and requests that Yan send him a few copies if it has.30 More examples of letters relating to literary and artistic matters will be discussed below. 7

Letters about Meeting, Travel and Failure to Meet

Wu’s explanation of why he cannot come to meet Yan is an example of what appears to be the second most common theme in Yanshi jiacang chidu, which is letters about meeting, be they letters arranging meetings, expressing pleasure at having spent time together, apologizing for being unable to meet, or expressing regret for failure to meet. In an age when there was no other means of making arrangements over distance, except by messenger, this is hardly surprising, but as one reads through the collection, one is struck by the mobility that was part and parcel of the lives of the scholar-gentry class, especially but not only when they were serving as officials. Admittedly the collection probably exaggerates this impression of mobility a bit, as many visits and 29  Yanshi jiacang chidu 1.23a. 30  A reprint of a handwritten version of Wu’s preface appears along with some other handwritten prefaces at the front of Lepu ji as recently reprinted in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, but there are a number of printed prefaces as well. The handwritten versions seem to have been copied in 1798.

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gatherings, especially those among people living a settled existence in the same town, would have been arranged by word of mouth through friends or servants running messages, and these will now be hidden from our view. There are examples of brief notes written as messages to Yan by people almost certainly living nearby, but while some might have been kept because of the calligraphy of the sender, generally such ephemeral notes are less likely to have been kept than letters, though it is of course not easy to distinguish the two forms. That many letters are about inability or failure to meet reminds us of the obstacles to meeting, especially when traveling. Sometimes the reasons why the correspondent is unable to meet Yan are illness, as we have seen, or bad weather, sudden family emergency—a relative has fallen ill, he has received bad news, or in one case slipped off a boat into a river31—or other business. Some are less grave: the poet Sun Zhiwei 孫枝蔚 (1620–1687) explains in one letter written while Yan was in Jiangning that a friend invited him to go drinking on a boat on the Qinhuai River and he only got back at night; by that time he could not find a messenger, so he could not go to Yan’s residence, even though he has heard that Yan has something he wanted to discuss with him.32 More common are letters which illustrate the sheer difficulty of trying to meet when one has to rely on letters and messengers, or simply luck, to meet, especially when the people involved are on the move. The minor poet and calligrapher Jiang Geng 姜梗 writes that he had gone to Yan’s residence every day for several days to thank Yan in person him for giving him some of his works, but Yan was always out, and now he is about to set off on a journey so cannot visit again.33 Miao Tong 繆彤 (1627–1697), the Principle Graduate in the year Yan passed the Metropolitan Examination, writes one of the few letters giving clear instructions about how he might be found after failing to find Yan when he himself visited: I have a few things I wish to talk over with you, so I especially paid a visit, but sadly did not get to meet you. In three days’ time I will try to visit again. I have moved to my relative Xia’s residence opposite the Zhenjun Temple at the eastern end of Damochang. We are separated by over ten li,

31  The minor official Liu Sijing’s 劉思敬 (fl. 1647–1670) relative, who apparently was coming to see Yan with Liu, had slipped off a boat into a river, getting completely soaked, so Liu was unable to see Yan. Yanshi jiacang chidu 1.3a. 32  Ibid., 1.20b. 33  Ibid., 1.28a.

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making it difficult to see each other. What can we do! I would be pleased if you could write me a note telling me of all your movements. . . 弟有許語奉商。特走候。不得一晤為耿。過三日當再圖過訪 也。弟移寓在東首打磨廠真君廟對門夏舍親。相隔十里。會面 為難。奈何奈何。年兄諸凡行止。有便幸以尺一示弟。34 Other meetings seem almost to have happened by chance as officials moved about on their duties and other members of the educated gentry traveled from place to place for a variety of cultural, business and other reasons. The ever-itinerant Gu Yanwu’s letters frequently refer to his own movements, and include several expressions of regret that he was only able to be with Yan for a short time before having to leave.35 The calligrapher, painter and later official Gao Cengyun 高層雲 (1634–1690) wrote Yan a letter that typifies both letters written after parting and those written when unable to meet despite being in close proximity: At Luhe we were separated by no more than a table, but once you left, it was as though vast mountains and rivers now stood between us. My spirit was stranded in the clouds, and my heart was heavy with thoughts of you. Yesterday I happened to be in Qufu, but was tied down with banal matters and there was not a moment when I could get away and do what I wanted to do; I had hoped to pay you a visit, but in the end could not do as I wished. Soon after that I was summoned home quickly by my master and could not try again to visit you, which has left me very sad. . . 潞河猶几席間耳。馬首一去。遙若山川。神溯雲亭。倍深勞 結。昨偶至闕下。為俗緣所困。片晷不得自由。乘間欲一覿清 揚。乃竟未能適願。旋為敝東促歸。遂不復走晤。殊怏怏也。36 Gao ends by giving Yan two samples of his calligraphy. Although we can only quote a few examples of such letters here, there is no doubt that a crucial role of letters was to stand in place of meetings that did not happen or which were cut short, thereby going some way towards meeting the social obligations that a visit would have fulfilled.

34  Ibid., 1.8a. 35  E.g., ibid., 1.74b. 36  Ibid., 1.37b–38a.

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Letters on Government Administration

Yan spent most of his official career in the Ministry of Personnel, so naturally there are a significant number of letters that touch upon government business; we have already seen examples of requests made in this context above. While requests for various administrative favors were the most common reason why issues relating to government appeared in letters, some letters contain fascinating insights into their author’s experience of life as an official. In a letter written to Yan early in his career, fellow Shandong native Sun Guangsi, who was twenty-six years older than Yan and had begun his official career over ten years earlier, advises Yan on how to handle relations with Manchu officials— the letter begins with an interesting reference to the practice of numbering letters: Yesterday your messenger came south, so I wrote a few lines asking how you were and gave them to him. But for several days after that you did not number your letters. Today your letter was numbered, which was very helpful. However I have not yet seen the previous letter you mention. After you take up your post, you need to make yourself agreeable to the Manchu temperament, treating them with a kind of admiring respect, and when dealing with government runners, it is important that there is a clear difference between how you act towards them and how you act towards the Manchus. You must be upstanding and selfless, and at the same time be meticulous and thorough. Do not try to deceive people. If you do this, important matters will be easier to deal with, and your reputation as an administrator will grow rapidly. . . . 昨貴班役之南。付數行候興居。距此數日。不曾記號。今尊 札有號。甚便也。所云先一字。尚未之見。榮任之後。當與滿 洲意氣相合。而又當使之有一種敬服之意。而御衙役。則更當 使視之與滿不同。於正大中寓精詳。不能欺蔽。則關務易辦。​ 政譽益翔。 . . .37 Writing from Yunnan at the other end of the empire, another Shandong native Dong Ne 董訥 (1639–1701), who came third in the Palace Examination in the same year that Yan passed, writes of his difficulties both traveling to his post and in trying to govern in a difficult region:

37  Ibid., 1.52a–b.

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. . . Although I now live at the ends of the earth, there is never a moment when I am not thinking of you. Braving the heat I made the long journey, traveling day and night. I have passed through towering mountain ranges where the inhabitants were few but the difficulties many. Who would have thought that when I arrived in Yunnan, the people there were very different: all accommodating on the outside yet treacherous in their hearts, and impossible to get to cooperate. The Regional Prince does nothing to look after the area, and the local officials have no compassion at all. I feel completely desolate, and dare not tell you all my feelings about leaving the capital and missing my native town as I fear this will only increase your concerns about me. . . 雖身居天末。無刻不神馳左右也。弟冒暑長征。曉夜馳驅。所 過崇山峻嶺。皆人煙稀少。行路維難。詎意滇人情大變。皆外 柔內險。落落離合。藩王既不照拂。地方毫無情意。蕭條萬 狀。去國懷鄉。不敢為年兄盡陳。恐增年兄之遠念也。38 Yan received another letter from Yunnan in which Kong Xingzhao 孔興詔, a relative of Yan’s by marriage who was serving with the Grain Tax Circuit in Yunnan during the 1680s, explains at some length why he believes that the Provincial Governor of the province, who had been accused of manipulating grain prices in the wake of victory in the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories (1673–81), was not guilty. Towards the end of the letter Kong entreats Yan to contact the Vice Minister of Revenue, Wang Hongxu 王鴻緒 (1645–1723), whom Kong did not know personally but Yan apparently did, and show him his letter in the hope that this will help clear the Provincial Governor.39 The details in this letter are provided in relation to a request rather than just as news, but they still provide an interesting view of events in provincial politics and how people might seek to influence decisions made regarding them in the central government. In an aside in a letter written while Yan was at home mourning his father in the late 1670s, Wang Shizhen relates how he had observed the diligence of the Kangxi emperor in pursuing his Confucian studies, often reading until late at night, and concludes that this is the foundation upon which peace is built.40 While this aside reads almost like propaganda, to the modern 38  Ibid., 1.44a–b. The “Regional Prince” was almost certainly Wu Sangui 吳三桂 (1612–1678) who rebelled in 1673, so this letter must date from before then. 39  Ibid., 4.29a–30a. Wang Hongxu was Vice Minister of Revenue very briefly from September 1684 until March 1685, so the letter must date from that time. 40  Ibid., 2.21b–22a. The Kangxi emperor had for some years made quite a public display of his Confucian education as part of his efforts to win over the Han Chinese literati.

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reader at least, such direct references to the daily life of the emperor in letters by serving officials are rare. Overall, however, although many letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu often touch upon the daily business of administration in a practical context and give us a vivid sense of the more personal side to officials’ jobs, discussions of contemporary politics are not very common, unlike in many letters that appeared in some of the other letter collections published during the early Qing. Most of the references to government affairs are made in the course of making requests, or as part of an explanation as to why the writer has not corresponded with or visited Yan more often, and these references are usually quite cursory. 9

Letters on Financial Matters

We have seen financial difficulties discussed in the letters about officials who had been left without sufficient funds to return home. Although not especially numerous, financial matters figure in other letters too. Whereas the Liang Qingbiao letters about officials lacking the funds to return home were requests for Yan to look into the problems because they fell within his area of administrative responsibility, other letters about financial matters bear more directly upon Yan himself. Of these, the most striking are a series of letters by Sun Guangsi about an attempt to buy 40,000 jin of copper coins. In the early years of the dynasty, the Qing government sought to use coinage to generate revenue to cover the enormous cost of its war of conquest. By the late 1660s, the combined effect of a series of Qing policies to this end caused a relative shortage of copper coins, so the price of copper rose considerably; the letters make several references to the difficulty of obtaining copper coins.41 The precise reason for Sun and Yan buying the coins is not spelt out, partly because this would no doubt have been clear to everyone involved, but also because we do not have Yan Guangmin’s letters, and it is from him that the idea seems to have originated. Yan at the time seems to have been at home in Qufu, and he enlisted the help of Sun Guangsi who was still serving in the capital; quite possibly these date from the late 1660s, which would make these amongst the earliest letters in the collection, or they could date from one of the periods in the 1670s when Yan was at home. Some of the letters are quite long and certain details obscure, See Peterson, Cambridge History of China, 122. Wang was granted an audience with the emperor in February 1678 and was made a Reader-in-Waiting as a result. 41  For a discussion of early Qing currency policy and the high price of copper, see von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, 207–11.

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but they still paint a lively picture of the difficulties such dealings presented. Sun speaks of the need to obtain a license to buy copper as trading in copper was strictly controlled and any suggestion that one was trading in it illegally was likely to land one in serious trouble: he mentions one Zheng 鄭, styled Dan’an 澹庵, who was impeached precisely because he had contravened the strict regulations.42 In another letter Sun stresses that everything must be done under the guidance of the Ministry of Works, which oversaw the production and distribution of copper coins through its Metropolitan Coinage Service, again presumably to avoid falling foul of the authorities. There are discussions of what the copper coins are likely to cost, and of the degrees of purity of both the copper and of the silver used to pay for it. Sun points out further costs that are likely to be incurred, such as canal transport costs and payments to officials and customs clerks who will demand a squeeze. The intention seems to have been to deliver the coins from wherever they were bought to Dezhou on the Grand Canal, where a safe place would need to be found to store them, before they were then delivered to Sun’s home town of Ji’nan; Sun mentions paying for the coins in the capital and receiving them in Ji’nan.43 Several mentions are made of people who Sun has asked or might ask for help, including Gao Xinyun 高辛允 (1613–1685), who was Vice Minister of Works at the time, Shi Tianyi 施天裔 (1641–1690), who was Left Provincial Administration Commissioner for Shandong from some time during the 1650s, Xu Guoxiang 徐國相 (d. 1699) who was Right Provincial Administration Commissioner for Shandong from 1663 until 1667, and Tian Wen, whose home in Dezhou was mentioned as a possible place to keep the coins until they were moved on to Ji’nan. However, although Yanshi jiacang chidu contains letters from all these men, only the letter by Shi Tianyi refers to this attempted transaction. In it Shi also points out at some length the scarcity of copper, but says he has found some if the quoted price is acceptable.44 In the end, however, with Sun still exploring various channels for buying and delivering the coins without incurring too many costs, the letters on this subject come to an end, and we have no indication as to whether they were eventually successful or not. In between Sun’s letters about buying copper coins, there is one vignette in which Sun asks Yan to help him buy some servants and a young actor:

42  Yanshi jiacang chidu 1.55a. In reality the Qing government had great difficulty getting the markets to submit to its will. 43  Ibid., 1.57a. 44  Ibid., 3.51b–52a.

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. . . Can you get the girls I wanted? Just one or two; there is no need for many. Only the husband-and-wife cooks are urgent. Recently Xu Guoxiang bought two servants on my behalf, for which I was very grateful. But one of them is very young and cannot yet be taught to sing. If you can find one older than 12 or 13 years and younger than 16 or 17, good-looking and with a clear voice, then buy one for me. The money for him can be taken from the same fund as that for the chef and female servants. But there is no hurry with this one; it is important that he is good. . . . 女子可得其人否。或一或二。亦不必多。惟廚子夫婦要緊。​ 昨徐公祖代買小廝二名。甚感。但其一甚小。不能學歌。如世 兄覓有十二三以上十六七以下。貌美而喉清者。為購一人。​ 其用價若干自並廚婢銀同扣繳上。然此一宗猶可緩。必佳者乃 妙耳。. . .45 Both the careful deliberations over the purchase of copper coin and this more domestic example demonstrate different ways in which letters might facilitate financial transactions between close friends. Amongst the rest of the relatively small number of letters which touch upon financial matters, most are requests for some sort of financial help. The poet Wu Qi 吳綺 (1619–1694), who had held several posts after being recommended in 1654 but who had later returned to his home town of Yangzhou, writes to Yan asking to borrow some money as he needs to travel to Suzhou urgently to sell two properties he has there, promising to arrange to pay Yan back once he has crossed the Yangtze River.46 In a letter that might have been written in 1673, Miao Tong says that Yan’s wife’s uncle has visited him and delivered Yan’s latest letter, some three years since they last met on the road to Guabu. Miao says that Yan’s uncle was very short of funds, so he gave him over twenty taels of silver for traveling expenses. Taken together with the letters about officials who had difficulties returning home discussed above, one is struck by the number of references to people lacking sufficient funds to travel, and clearly letters played an important role in resolving these problems.

45  Ibid., 1.57a. This matter is mentioned in passing in another Sun letter a few pages earlier, which suggests the letters are not in the right order; see 1.54a. 46  Ibid., 1.26b–27a.

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Letters on Literature and Other Arts

The final theme to feature prominently in the letters to Yan Guangmin is literature and other arts, particularly calligraphy. While predictably there are numerous statements of admiration for Yan’s poetry and calligraphy, the most interesting aspect of the letters is the role they play in facilitating literary and other forms of cultural output, and the way they illustrate the workings of the cultural economy generally. While few of Yan’s prose works survive—the modern edition of his collected works includes just fourteen prose pieces in addition to the twelve letters found in Yanshi jiacang chidu—he was a very erudite scholar of the Confucian classics, and was an authority on the current style, or eight-legged essay, so other scholars often sought his advice on their own scholarly projects. His talent as a poet and calligrapher also attracted considerable attention. It was an age-old practice for literati to exchange gifts of their works with each other. Yan’s correspondents often mention sending some of their works to Yan along with the letter, and thank Yan for sending some of his—these varied from a manuscript poem or two to a published book, or a work of calligraphy. It was also common for the writer to ask the person to whom he was writing to send a copy of their works, or to try to secure copies of works from eminent writers whom they did not themselves know but Yan did. Gu Yanwu, in a letter in which he makes a couple of requests of Yan to help him obtain access to books he wishes to see as part of his scholarly endeavors, also asks Yan to send him a copy of his recent works.47 The poet and fellow official Cao Zhenji 曹貞吉 (1634–1699) wrote to Yan on behalf of his younger brother asking for both Yan’s works and those of the poet Shen Hanguang 申涵光 (1618–1677): I have not seen you for several days. Yesterday I received a letter from my younger brother in which he said that he had read three pages of your works last year and greatly admired their elegance. He was therefore hoping to obtain your complete works to have a look at. I don’t know whether you will be able to help him or not? He also wants to buy a copy of the collected works of Shen Hanguang. However I do not really know Hanlin Scholar Shen [Hanpan], so I must trouble you to do all you can to seek a copy from him. Is this all right? . . .

47  Ibid., 1.74a–b.

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數日來未晤矣。舍弟昨有信來。云去年讀大作三紙。服其秀 絕。更欲求全集一觀。不知可賜教否。又欲購廣平申鳬盟集一 部。但弟與隨叔太史無素。併煩年兄鼎力一求。何如。. . .48 The scholar and art collector Sun Chengze 孫承澤 (1593–1676) probably did not lack connections, but even he could not obtain in the capital certain books on the Confucian Classics that he needed for his scholarly work. Knowing that Yan is about to travel south to oversee the Longjiang Customs Barrier, Sun asks Yan to buy the books he needs on his behalf: . . . I am heading further into my twilight years, but my commitment to reciting the Classics does not fade. All the Classics have explanatory annotations. I am currently annotating the Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial and should be able to finish it in the fifth or sixth month. However, here in the capital there are no books on the Classics which I can draw upon. You have agreed that you will buy them for me when you are in the south. This is the greatest act of love. I have respectfully written a list. Please take care to buy the expensive ones. When you return to the capital, give them all to me. . . . 年華日暮。而咿唔之志不衰。諸經俱有註解。現在在註儀禮。​ 五六月間可卒業。苦長安無經學書。承教代為南中收買。此莫 大之愛。謹開一單。乞留神重價購之。抵都一一奉上。. . .49 There are also quite a few letters in which the correspondents ask Yan to make suggestions or “correct” works that they are preparing for publication. In another example Sun Chengze wrote: . . . The collating of [part of] Zhu Xi’s works you did yesterday was done extremely meticulously, and I have already made the corrections accordingly. I now present the second volume for you to read, and would be pleased if you can return it to me as soon as possible . . .

48  Ibid., 2.41b. Shen Hanpan 申涵盼 (1638–1684) was the son of Ming official Shen Jiayin 申佳胤 (1602–1644) and the younger brother of Shen Hanguang. 49  Ibid., 1.11b–12a. Sun’s biographical account records Yili jingzhuan hejie 儀禮經傳合解 (Gathered explanations of the text of and annotations to the Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial) amongst his works. See Wang Chongjian’s 王崇簡 biography of Sun in Qian Yiji, Beizhuan ji, 223–26.

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. . . 昨校定晦庵先生。極其精細。已一一改正。再以第二冊奉 覽。幸即賜還。. . .50 The indefatigable Gu Yanwu, among other requests also asks Yan to look over his draft for what became Original Pronunciations of the Poetry Classic (Shi ben yin 詩本音) and gives instructions for how this should be done.51 In this section we have identified the main themes and functions of the letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu and illustrated these with what for reasons of space must be a small number of examples. We have seen how most of the letters tended to have quite practical purposes, and played an important role in maintaining relationships, as we would expect. But if the letters played an important role in maintaining relationships—and again remembering that they were not written with the possibility of publication in mind—did that mean that they were also a vehicle through which writers expressed their intimate thoughts, both in terms of their own emotions and their relationship with the recipient of the letter? 11

Intimacy and Personal Revelation

If when reading Yanshi jiacang chidu one is looking for passionate expressions of friendship, detailed outpourings of one’s inmost emotions, salacious gossip, or news of the latest family dispute, then one is likely to be disappointed. But if we put away what are probably rather modern European expectations and look at them in their historical and cultural context, then the answer is more complex. The letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu do of course contain many expressions of friendship. Usually they will be expressed in conventional language, most commonly that of missing Yan after a considerable period of separation, but this is not grounds for dismissing the sincerity of the emotion described. Wang Shizhen’s letter about Yan’s contribution to the “Ten Masters” collection is an example of this.52 A letter by Tian Wen almost certainly written during the winter of 1682–83 spells out his feelings of closeness to Yan as explicitly as perhaps any in the collection: I am very pleased to learn that your mother’s journey north passed safely. As your messenger returned east I received another letter from you: your 50  Yanshi jiacang chidu 1.11a. 51  Ibid., 1.75a. 52  This letter is translated and discussed further below.

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concern for me, as if I were one of your family, is something that I hold deeply in my heart every moment. As Bai Juyi wrote in his poem to Yuan Zhen, “From what I think of this morning, I know what was in your heart last night.” This is true now as well. [Tian then suggests he will seek some advice from Yan on a text he has been working on through his brother.] For the past twenty years, the only person amongst all my close friends with whom I can talk about what is in my heart and mind is you, so why do I need explain anything more? For the last few days I have been ill, caused by melancholy. Blowing on my ink slab to unfreeze the ink I write in haste. The sheet of paper this is written on is but a slip, but the feelings are deep. Chen hour [7–9 a.m.] of the fifteenth day. 老年母北上。知一路平安。喜賀喜賀。盛价東旋。又接手教。​ 骨肉關切。無刻不置諸懷抱間。樂天寄微之云。以我今朝意。​ 知君昨夜心。今日之謂也.  .  .  .  .  .廿年來。知己老友可語以身心性 命者。惟我兄一人。尚庸多贅哉。日來抱病。乃憂鬱所致。呵 凍草草。紙短意長也。十五日辰刻。53 Most of the phrases Tian employs to describe their relationship—such as the one about Yan being the only person in whom he can really confide—are at one level clichés, and Tian uses some of them again in other letters. However, this should not be construed to mean that the feelings expressed in them are insincere or shallow. Seeking advice about a text he has been working on might have been the practical reason for writing the letter, but this takes up less than a third of the letter, with the rest being devoted to expressing the closeness of his relationship with Yan. This went well beyond the requirements of etiquette: most letters of request in Yanshi jiacang chidu contain polite introductions or other devices expressing admiration, sadness at separation and so on, but these are only a small part of the letter and practical issues dominate. At the same time, the letter is quite straightforward: there is none of the literary artifice employed in the letters in the published collections (as we shall see presently), the only embellishment being the quote from Bai Juyi. So if we consider that the letter did not have to be written in that way, that it was largely written using conventional expressions need not suggest that the sentiments expressed in it were merely mechanical. Indeed, as Antje Richter has argued in her book on epistolary culture in early medieval China, “the subtle modifi53  Yanshi jiacang chidu 2.47a–b. Tian slightly misquotes Bai Juyi’s poem, but the meaning is the same. Yan’s mother moved from Qufu to live with Yan in Beijing in the winter of 1682– 83, so we can assume this letter was written on the fifteenth day of either the eleventh or twelfth month of that lunar year.

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cation or situational tweaking of set phrases and topoi that leaves their basic communicative functions intact is not only an effective means of personalizing a letter and achieving emotional authenticity; it may even produce true originality.”54 We can further sense intimacy between the correspondent and Yan Guangmin in Yanshi jiacang chidu by reading across the letters by a particular writer. Unlike in the published collections, in which relatively few letters are written by the same author to the same recipient, and those that are rarely part of a sequence, the letters of Yan’s more frequent correspondents give us access to a significant number of letters to the same person by the same writer, sometimes in sequence, and even where there is no clear sequence, still revealing certain patterns in their correspondence. Therefore it is easier to gain a sense of how the relationship between the correspondents was expressed over a number of letters, and not just in isolated ones presented in edited collections. If we return to Tian Wen’s letters to Yan, we see some of the apparent clichés used in the letter just discussed being redeployed in other contexts in ways that show they are not just empty. Tian repeats the idea that they are like members of the same family several times, perhaps most pointedly in a letter that seems to have been written while both men were traveling in the south: In my life the key thing has been this: that although the two of us have different surnames, it is as though we were fed at the same breast. There is no need for me to labor the point. . . 弟平生要緊關頭。在此一舉。我兩人雖有姓氏之異。不啻胞乳 之同。尚俟諄諄贅語耶。55 In a reply to a letter from Yan that he had received just after returning to his home in Dezhou, Tian writes: . . . Just a few days after I came home, my third son died, and I nearly went blind with grief.56 In the last few days I have had diarrhea because of a disease of the spleen—it is unbearable. My beard and sideburns have turned grey, and I don’t look human at all. Brother, in the concern you show for me as if I was one of your family, tell me what should be done to save me. . . 54  Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 147. 55  Yanshi jiacang chidu 2.43a–b. 56  The original text is an allusion to Confucius’s disciple Bu Shang 卜商, better known by his courtesy name of Zixia 子夏, who went blind with grief at the death of his son.

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弟來家數日。遂有第三子之痛。幾至喪明。近日脾病泄瀉。景 況不堪。鬚鬢全白。竟不似人形。老年兄先生骨肉關切。其何 以救之。 Interestingly, after then repeating the idea that he need not describe at length the closeness of the relationship between them, he continues: . . . But as my brush and ink touch the paper, without meaning to the words flow, all from the depths of my heart. Everything else I want to say your messenger will tell you. My eyes are dim and my wrist hurts. Written hastily by lamplight. . . 然筆墨所至。不覺喋喋皆出衷腸也。別言在盛使口中。眼昏腕 痛。燈下草草。57 Of course we do not know what the other things Tian wanted to tell Yan were, but the fact that he put the expression of close friendship to paper points to how important expressing the relationship was in letter-writing, even if the language was largely conventional—clearly one could not simply ask the courier to pass on these sentiments orally. Another possible source of intimate expression is the letters from members of Yan’s family that appear towards the end of the collection. There are not actually a great many of them; apart from the twelve by Yan Guangmin himself, only his uncle Yan Boxun 顏伯珣 is represented by a substantial number of letters (nine). Taking these family letters as a whole, the main differences between them and the letters by Yan’s other friends are that they contain less of the conventional etiquette, and tend to be more “newsy.” Indeed, it is these qualities that give at least some of the family letters a more intimate feel than letters from friends. There are of course expressions of concern, and of thinking of the recipient, but on the whole the writers of these letters launch straight into the business at hand. Younger members of the family do couch their letters in more formal terms, but generally there is less need to describe feelings of affection where a kinship relation exists. The sense of intimacy emerges from the bits of news of brothers, cousins, uncles and other relatives, accounts of the writer’s own recent doings and things that have happened either at home or in the locality where the writer is at the time, and from the generally unadorned language in which they are related. There are fewer requests, and much less literary, scholarly and artistic exchange. Propriety 57  Yanshi jiacang chidu 2.50b–51a.

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still exerts its restraining hold: while there is a good deal of charming detail about the families of Yan’s relatives, there appears to be little negative gossip or “hanging out of the family’s dirty laundry.” Looking over the collection as a whole, Tian’s professions of close friendship with Yan are perhaps the strongest and most persistent amongst all Yan’s correspondents, but the language Tian uses is entirely conventional—he just uses it more densely than other writers. Indeed, if Tian’s letters mark the extent of the intensity with which letter-writers would express their friendship with the person they were writing to, this suggests that little value was attached to finding novel or elaborate ways to express friendship. Most often when Yan’s correspondents wish to attest to their friendship with Yan, they write in the manner of Wang Shizhen’s letter seeking Yan’s contribution to the Ten Masters anthology, perhaps recalling the last time they were together or how long it is since they have seen each other. These tropes are conventional and many centuries old. What matters is that these sentiments are stated, and the conventional phrases and structures do this perfectly adequately. Indeed, some of the more contrived, formal expressions of admiration suggest that the correspondent does not know the recipient well. On the other hand, the letters from Yan’s relatives, and many of the letters by Yan’s closer friends, particularly the shorter, practical letters, tend to contain little formal etiquette at all. There might be a word of thanks or of friendship, but these letters generally deal very much with the matter at hand. Such letters could really only be sent between people who knew Yan well, and who therefore could dispense with most of the conventional etiquette that would be necessary in longer letters or in letters sent between people who were not on such familiar terms. 12

Yanshi jiacang chidu and Early Qing Published Letter Collections

From the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, letters labeled chidu 尺牘 began to be published more widely than had ever been the case before, both within writers’ collected literary works, and as dedicated collections. The term chidu generally designated a shorter, less formal form of letter than the canonical shu 書 genre, though the distinction between the two forms was not always clear.58 By this time the shu had generally evolved into a form of 58  The earliest influential collection of letters to use the term chidu in its title was Wang Shizhen’s 王世貞 (1526–1590) Chidu qingcai 尺牘清裁, a collection of extracts from letters through the ages published in a 28-chapter edition in 1558, followed by a 60-chapter edition in 1571. Wang’s collection was a response to a lesser-known eight chapter collec-

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treatise in which the writer expounded upon political, scholarly and other such weighty topics at length, sometimes barely acknowledging the named recipient of the letter with whom the writer would normally have been expected to engage. This was the form of letter that would usually be included in a writer’s collected literary works, while the more quotidian chidu, which would have actually been much more numerous, were not considered of sufficient literary value to be preserved for posterity, except perhaps for their calligraphy. Ronald Egan’s chapter in this volume shows how this was at least initially true of Su Shi’s informal letters. However, by the late Ming this situation was beginning to change, and in the early Qing a number of major anthologies of chidu were published. Judging by the number of late Ming and Ming loyalist writers whose letters were included in these anthologies, we can quite confidently say that at least some of them were published mainly or in part to preserve the memory of Ming culture. However, it is equally clear that the collections were popular because of the examples of epistolary writing contained in them. But if such relatively informal letters had been popular since the late Ming, and if certain writers were admired for their dexterity in the form, is it not likely that some writers will have written these “informal” letters with an eye on the possibility that they might be published? Furthermore, it seems reasonable to ask whether, by choosing the “best” letters and anthologizing them, the compilers of the early Qing chidu collections would end up misrepresenting the genre: most of these compilers acknowledged that chidu were a minor genre, but in assembling collections of these letters for their literary quality, the sense that they were everyday letters may well have been significantly weakened. This is why Yanshi jiacang chidu is such an important source for the study of epistolary practice during the early Qing. Part of its significance as a collection of letters that were never intended to be published is that it can give us a clearer idea of what the scholar-gentry class wrote to each other about in ordinary letters—as we have seen in the first part of this chapter. However, Yanshi jiacang chidu can also throw light on the fundamental question of the extent to which the letters published in the major letter anthologies of the period were representative of the types of letters that the educated elite sent to each other in the normal course of their lives, and if they were to some extent not representative, what the major differences were. It can also help us understand more about the editorial strategies adopted by the compilers of the published tion of the same name published in 1530 by Yang Shen 楊慎 (1488–1559), though Yang used the character 赤 instead of 尺. Examples of writers’ published works which contained chidu include Yuan Hongdao’s 袁宏道 (1568–1610) various collections and Wang Siren’s 王思任 (1575–1646) Wenfan xiaopin 文飯小品.

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collections. Answering these questions more fully would require a detailed analysis of several anthologies, a task beyond the scope of this chapter, but we can begin to sketch some answers by comparing the letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu with some representative published letter collections from slightly earlier: Chidu chuzheng 尺牘初徵 published by Li Yu in 1660, and the first of Zhou Lianggong’s 周亮工 (1612–1672) Chidu xinchao 尺牘新鈔 series published in 1662.59 These two anthologies, especially the latter, were popular among the reading public during the period, the authors of the letters included in them were from the same social and cultural background.60 Comparing the published collections with Yanshi jiacang chidu is not without its problems, however. Foremost amongst these is that a considerable proportion of writers whose letters were anthologized in Chidu xinchao and Chidu chuzheng had died before the end of the Ming dynasty, or had survived into the Qing but were dead by the time Zhou and Li began to work on these anthologies: in fact the letters by living writers are a distinct minority. Most if not all of the letters by deceased writers were taken from their published collected works, so these letters had already been subject to a process of selection and editing before Zhou or Li saw them. Of the writers who were still alive in the early 1660s, quite a few are represented by just one or two letters, which is hardly a representative sample upon which comparisons might be based. Furthermore, few of the writers whose letters appear in Yanshi jiacang chidu also appear in either Chidu xinchao or Chidu chuzheng, and where they do, 59  I have also looked at the first of the Chidu xinyu series published by Xu Shijun 徐士俊 and Wang Qi 汪淇 in 1663, but this draws heavily upon Zhou Lianggong’s Chidu xinchao, sometimes citing Chidu xinchao as the source for the letter, but often obscuring it by citing the author’s original collected works as the source when in fact the letter was obviously taken from Zhou’s collection as the excerpt is exactly the same. The clearest example of this is where they include letters by Zhou Qi 周圻 which they say were taken from his Changshitang ji 嘗實堂集, the problem being that Zhou Qi was the pseudonym under which Zhou Lianggong included his own letters in Chidu xinchao—he also used his ancestral hometown of Fuzhou 撫州 in Jiangxi as his native place—and Changshitang ji did not actually exist. See Chidu xinchao, 297–308 and, e.g., Fenlei chidu xinyu 8.1a–2a. Xu and Wang also present the excerpts from Zeng Yizhuan’s letters discussed below in exactly the same way as Zhou did, though not side-by-side. Therefore the first of the Chidu xinyu series has not been included in the discussion here, and unfortunately I have not had access to the two later Chidu xinyu collections. 60  In addition to my work on the marketing of chidu collections cited above, a fuller discussion of Zhou Lianggong’s Chidu xinchao and other late Ming and early Qing letter collections may be found in my unpublished PhD dissertation “The Chidu in Late Ming and Early Qing China.” For a recent Taiwanese PhD dissertation examining Zhou Lianggong’s selection principles, see Sun Shu-fang, “Shibian yu fengya.”

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they do so in unequal proportions, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions with confidence. There are other possible reasons why the overlap between the collections is so small. One is that Zhou Lianggong and Li Yu seem to have made conscious decisions to include a large number of letters from Ming writers and loyalists, the majority of whom were already dead by the early 1660s. Furthermore, Zhou and Li’s collections were published before the earliest of the Yan letters was written, so many of Yan Guangmin’s correspondents will not have come to prominence by that time. But there again, quite a few of Yan’s correspondents were considerably older than him, and were already prominent officials, scholars and writers at the time Zhou and Li were compiling their collections, so this only goes some way towards explaining the difference. Northern scholars make up a greater proportion of the correspondents in the Yan collection, not least because Yan himself was a northerner, while in the other collections southern scholars predominate—both Zhou and Li were based in the south.61 However the significance of this lies not in some essentialized difference between northerners and southerners in the content and style of their letters, but in the different groupings of correspondents this generated. For example, although Yan Guangmin was friends with several loyalists, loyalists make up a very small proportion of his correspondents, whereas Zhou, although an official who collaborated with the Qing, cultivated friendships with many Ming loyalists. Readers’ impressions of epistolary practice during the period will also be skewed because the letters in the published letter collections are mostly extracts, certainly in the case of Chidu xinchao. At the very least the relatively formulaic openings and endings of the letters have been excised, just as Gui Fu had done when he first started editing Yanshi jiacang chidu, but in many cases more than just those parts have been omitted. It seems that none of the original manuscript letters from which the versions in the published letter collections was taken survive, but in the case of some letters published in Zhou Lianggong’s Chidu xinchao, a fuller version is extant in its author’s collected 61  Legally Zhou Lianggong was a northerner, since his grandfather had moved the family to Kaifeng and changed their registration. However, Zhou was born and grew up in Nanjing, but because he was not a registered Nanzhili native he was disqualified from the examinations to enter the Nanjing Confucian School. He therefore spent six years living in Kaifeng until he successfully passed the Metropolitan Examination in 1640. In fact Zhou’s secondary allegiance after Nanjing was to his ancestral native province of Jiangxi. He styled himself Liyuan 櫟園 because his ancestors had until his grandfather’s generation lived at Lixia 櫟下 near Fuzhou 撫州 in Jiangxi, and many Jiangxi scholars’ letters are included in Chidu xinchao. See Zhou’s biographies appended to Laigutang ji, especially fulu 附錄 1a and 3a–4b.

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works. These confirm that significant cuts were made even from letters that are quite long in the version that Zhou published—Zhou does explicitly say in his statement of editorial principles that he cut out parts that he felt undermined the quality of the letter as a whole, though this seems to be something of an understatement.62 Two examples from Zhou’s selection of the letters of just one man, the Fujianese writer and poet Zeng Yizhuan 曾異撰 (1590–1644), can illustrate the extent to which Zhou cut and, one could say, sometimes misrepresented the letters he selected. In the case of the letter to one Zeng styled Changxiu 曾長修, Zhou has left out several opening sentences, then included an isolated sentence that was clearly considered a clever comment, adding the respectful address zuxia 足下 before it though that does not appear in the original letter up to that point; he has then left out several more sentences, then included the long passage that is the rest of the letter in the Chidu xinchao version, and finally omits a long passage at the end. The effect is that the letter as Zhou has presented it appears to be one continuous piece of prose when in fact it was not.63 Immediately following that letter are apparently two letters by Zeng Yizhuan written in reply to one Zeng styled Shuqi 曾叔祈, but when these are compared with what is in Zeng Yizhuan’s collected works, we discover that these are two extracts from the same letter, and that there is at least half as much again that has been left out.64 There are further examples of Zhou doing similar things. It is difficult to know exactly what Zhou considered undermined the quality of letters, but looking at what he has left out of the Zeng Yizhuan letters, he has frequently omitted more prosaic, everyday elements, precisely the sorts of things that abound in Yanshi jiacang chidu. Even without access to the originals, however, it is plain that many letters in Chidu xinchao must have been cut from longer texts. Only a couple of dozen characters long, they can only be extracts from longer letters, not least because they usually lack any context at all and do not make sense as a standalone letter. So we can assume that in many cases Zhou simply chose excerpts because they exemplified how wit, style or wisdom could be employed in letters. Some writers do seem to have enjoyed writing short letters in which they sought to capture the essence of a particular situation, emotion or thought, so one should not assume that because a letter is short that it does not constitute most of the complete letter—many of Yuan Hongdao’s chidu are quite short. Furthermore, in many cases Zhou himself probably only had access to 62  Chidu xinchao, “Xuan li,” 3. 63  For the full letter see, 5.32a–34a, and Chidu xinchao, 6. 64  See Fangshoutang ji 5.35a–37a, and Chidu xinchao, 6–7. Zeng Shuqi might be Zeng Shijue 曾世爵 styled 叔祁, a Putian 莆田 native who also corresponded with Huang Daozhou.

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published versions that had already been edited by the compilers of that writer’s collected works or other anthology. For example, Chidu xinchao includes thirty-three short letters by the late Ming writer and bibliophile Song Maocheng 宋懋澄 (ca. 1559–1620), all of which seem to have been selected from Song’s collected works Jiuyue ji 九籥集 in the form they appeared there, though not in the same order. Although the compilers of Song’s collected works had probably already edited his letters, it would seem likely that Song liked to write such short letters.65 Nevertheless, Zhou’s interest seems to have been in passages within letters rather than in letters as a whole; indeed all the published anthologies followed the practice of placing dots next to each character in a passage that the compilers considered particularly outstanding, further evidence that letters might have been valued more for passages of inventive or otherwise well-written prose within them than for their intrinsic value as letters. So with what the compilers thought were the more mundane parts of the letters having been excised, readers may well conclude that late Ming and early Qing letters mainly comprised elegant and erudite discourse, witty turns of phrase, and evocative descriptions of a range of experiences in their lives, and would have gained only a weakened sense of the workaday concerns that would have occupied these members of the educated gentry most of the time. 13

Formal Discursive Letters (shu)

While bearing these issues in mind, we can move on to ask in what ways were the letters in the published anthologies different from the letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu, and what can this tell us about epistolary practice during the early Qing period? The most obvious difference is that the Chidu xinchao collections contain numerous long, discursive letters consisting of extended discussions of literary, philosophical or political questions, many of which can be found in their author’s collected works (from whence Zhou Lianggong probably took most of them), but these are almost entirely absent from Yanshi jiacang chidu. Often the formal letters in Chidu xinchao are labeled shu, but this is not a reliable guide to the content and style of the letters: those that have the word shu in their titles do usually contain more formal expositions on cultural and academic themes, but some without the genre designation are written in a similar style. At the same time, some of those marked shu can contain some quite everyday or personal elements (although as we have seen Zhou often 65  For Song’s letters (chidu), see Song Maocheng, Jiuyue ji, 235–62. Zhou’s selection from them appears in Chidu xinchao, 42–47.

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removed these). To cite just one example, before launching into a discussion of the need to improve upon the Song philosopher Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1130–1200) Family Rituals (Jia li 家禮) in a shu to fellow Nanchang native Xu Shipu 徐世溥 (1607–1657), Chen Hongxu 陳弘緒 (1597–1665) relates how the sesame oil his servant had bought to put in a medical concoction to treat Chen’s illness had been mixed with tung oil by the seller, with the result that Chen became violently ill during the night.66 However, this vignette is followed by a philosophical discussion, so the letter still conforms to the expectations of the shu genre. But irrespective of genre designations, there are hardly any letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu that expound upon literary, academic, political or other such topics in a formal, extended manner, and this is the major difference between this and a published collection such as Chidu xinchao, and to a much lesser extent, Chidu chuzheng and Chidu xinyu. We have seen that there are many letters which touch upon these themes in Yanshi jiacang chidu, but the discussions are relatively brief, and they are usually tied to a practical issue that is the point of writing the letter, such as making a request for something, seeking or offering advice, or consulting over a forthcoming commission or publication. In Yanshi jiacang chidu there are two examples of letters that are clearly a formal letter in the shu tradition: the first of two letters under Mao Xianshu’s 毛先舒 (1620–1688) name, and a letter by Zhang Lie 張烈 (1622–1685) who was amongst the scholars Yan passed as Examiner for the Metropolitan Examinations in 1670. The Mao letter is in fact by Mao’s youngest son, Mao Baochen 毛豹臣, with a note from his father added at the end, and is a discussion of questions of pronunciation in reading the Confucian classics, something on which both Mao Xianshu and Yan Guangmin published. The letter begins by launching straight into the discussion, with no acknowledgement of a reader at all, though at the end of the part written by Mao Baochen he says he is sending some works for Yan to comment upon, and is returning two of Yan’s works. However, after that Mao Xianshu adds, “This letter was written by my youngest son, but here I am adding a note in my own hand to prevent its authorship being wrongly attributed in the future.”67 The clue to why the Maos might have written in this way may lie in the second letter under Mao’s name, this time written entirely by Mao Xianshu himself. There Mao explains that his son is going to the capital to seek a minor post, and he has told his son to pay Yan a visit when he gets there (presumably Mao Baochen carried the letter 66  “Yu Juyuan shu,” Chidu xinchao, 74–75. 67  Yanshi jiacang chidu 2.16b. It is probable that the views expressed in the letter were largely those of Mao Xianshu.

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with him). Mao modestly insists that his son lacks the talent to hold even the most minor post under Yan, but then goes on to ask whether Yan might be able to find his son an opportunity and give him some advice. There is no way of knowing for certain whether the two letters were written at about the same time, but together they suggest that Mao Xianshu was hoping to impress Yan sufficiently of his son’s talents that Yan might do something to help Mao Baochen advance his prospects. More speculatively, but quite possibly, the two letters were actually delivered by Mao Baochen at the same time, with the formal shu serving as an example of Mao Baochen’s literary talent, and the other letter as a letter of introduction to accompany it. After all, if Mao Baochen were visiting Yan in person, it would be the ideal opportunity to return Yan’s books and give Yan some of theirs. We have already seen the example of Gu Yanwu’s account of his innocence being included in Yanshi jiacang chidu even though it was appended to a letter rather than being a letter itself, and there are a couple of other examples of such appended texts in the collection, so it would not be anomalous if Mao Baochen’s shu was in fact an appended text and not a letter sent in its own right. But even if the letters were not delivered at the same time, it still seems likely that they were part of an effort to have Yan give Mao Baochen some help in his career. The Zhang Lie letter is part of an exchange he had in 1682 with Yan Guangmin regarding the superiority of Zhu Xi’s interpretations of the classics; it is also the only letter for which we have Yan’s responses, though they are not in Yanshi jiacang chidu.68 Yan’s first letter, which seems to have been prompted by a letter from Zhang that is no longer extant, expounds upon Zhu Xi’s concepts of the “investigation of things” (ge wu 格物) and the “extension of knowledge” (zhi zhi 致知). Zhang’s reply, the letter in Yanshi jiacang chidu, thanks Yan profusely for his guidance on the matter and argues, as many did in the early Qing, that the troubles of the later Ming had their origin in the ascendency, at the expense of the Zhu Xi school, of the Wang Yangming school of Confucian philosophy.69 Yan wrote yet another long reply, to which Zhang wrote a much shorter letter again thanking Yan; this letter too is in Yanshi jiacang chidu.70 Since Zhang Lie’s letters are included in Yanshi jiacang chidu, we can assume they were sent as correspondence in the usual way. Unlike Zhang’s replies, however, apart from 68  This exchange in mentioned in Yan Zhaowei’s chronological biography; see Yan Guangmin shiwenji, 308. 69  See Julia Ching’s The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yang-ming. 70  For Yan’s letters see Yan Guangmin shiwenji, 245–56; Zhang’s replies are included after each of Yan’s letters. Zhao Chuanren’s annotations do not state the source from which Yan’s letters were obtained.

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a rather formal reference to what must have been Zhang’s original letter, Yan’s letters contain practically no reference to anything beyond the philosophical argument made in the letters, and they are completely unlike any other letter in the collection, including the twelve letters by Yan that are in it. That these letters are not in Yanshi jiacang chidu is immaterial as few of Yan’s letters are, but it seems likely that they were not sent as standalone letters in the same way as the other letters in the collection. There is one other letter that contains an extended discussion of the relationship between writing, the current style essay in particular, moral regeneration and peace across the empire. This is a letter by the now obscure Gu Errong 顧二榮 whom we know from the letter visited Yan in 1671 when Yan was working at the Longjiang Domestic Customs Barrier. Gu’s letter begins by reminding Yan of their meeting, and that he had sent another essay to Yan via Yan’s fellow graduate Yuan Shizhong 袁時中. He then makes some exaggerated claims, as required by etiquette, about the positive effect Yan had in his role as one of the Examiners in the 1670 Metropolitan, before launching into his theme of the relationship between writing and social mores. He develops this theme over the next three pages before arriving at the practical purpose of the letter, which is to ask Yan to read and comment upon his work, and also to ask if Yan can obtain a copy of some works by “Mr Xiong of the Palace Academies,” Xiong Cilü 熊賜履 (1635–1709), a prominent Neo-Confucian philosopher who at the time was Chancellor of the Hanlin Academy.71 It is probably also an attempt to attract Yan’s attention in the hope that Yan might be able to help him onto the ladder of officialdom in some way, either by arranging a minor post or offering advice as to how to pass the civil service examinations. So although Gu’s letter does expound upon a philosophical theme at length, it also has practical purposes beyond the discussion of philosophical questions, which at least distinguishes it from the treatise-type letters such as those by Yan to Zhang Lie. At the same time, however, it shows that letters which combined scholarly discussion with practical requests and other personal matters, as some of the shu-type letters in Chidu xinchao do, could be circulated in the same way as more mundane letters, though they comprised but a small proportion of epistolary exchange, at least as represented by Yanshi jiacang chidu. Indeed, it seems likely that quite a few of the letters labeled shu in Chidu xinchao were genuine correspondence—again we see how the term shu is far from a reliable marker. For example, Chen Hongxu’s two letters to Zhou Lianggong in Chidu xinchao are both long and elaborate, but their contents—the main point of which is to tell Zhou of the loss of many of the works of Jiangxi writers during 71  Qing shi gao 9893.

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the Qing conquest, including his own, in the hope that Zhou might help have the surviving works reprinted—contain several references to quite specific incidents in Chen’s life and to some of his friends, which does ground them in Chen’s personal experience. At the same time, Chen cannot have known Zhou Lianggong very well, and he would have been writing from Nanchang in Jiangxi, which would explain the greater length and formality of the letter.72 Nevertheless, even though such examples remind us that the distinction between the formal and informal cannot be clear-cut, Yanshi jiacang chidu as a whole suggests that the long, formal letters of the type often though not necessarily labeled shu were not commonly sent in normal correspondence, and their relative prominence in collections such as Chidu xinchao does not reflect day-to-day epistolary practice. 14

Comparisons of Letters with Similar Functions

If we now turn to compare the rest of the letters in the two published anthologies with those in Yanshi jiacang chidu, given the limitations outlined above, two bases for comparison seem particularly valid: comparing letters by the same writer in different collections, and comparing letters on the same theme or function. There is not the space here to quote many examples at length, but it is hoped that this admittedly highly selective sample will illustrate some of the similarities and differences between the letters in the different types of collections. Of the authors who appear in both Chidu xinchao and Yanshi jiacang chidu, Wang Shizhen’s letters are the most numerous: there are eight in the former and over thirty in the latter. About a third of Wang’s letters to Yan Guangmin are longer and date from the period when Yan was at home in Qufu mourning the death of his father; the rest were probably written after Yan returned to officialdom in 1683 and are quite short. The first letter is representative of Wang’s longer letters, and provides a good point of comparison with letters on similar themes in the published collections, so here it is translated in full: It is two years since you returned home to observe mourning. When your friends look at your mournful expression, they are greatly concerned for you. If those of us who share common interests in the past would enjoy 72  See Chidu xinchao, 79–82. For a translation of the second letter, see Chen Hongxu “A Further Letter to Zhou Lianggong.”

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ourselves together for several days and nights, since you departed we have felt increasingly at a loss. From this you can know the emotions in my heart. With all the traveling by boat and cart, are you not worn out? I know that at present you are busy preparing for the burial, and I will be pleased if doing this assuages your grief a little and provides comfort for your mother. This is what I hope. During the third and fourth months I lay ill in bed for almost forty days, during which time I received your request for me to write the biography. I have just about finished it; it just needs some final pruning then it will be done, and not delayed too long. Mr Ye Fang’ai will send it very soon. His idea is that we must wait until your worthy brother’s letter arrives. I said that you were in mourning and did not dare to send a letter to the capital. Therefore he told me to send it as an oral message. Mr Ye has a rather obstinate character, so soon I should write him a few lines asking after him and thanking him, and asking him to write a few lines for me; this is a good way to flatter him. What do you think? As for publishing the Ten Masters poems, the woodblocks for the poems of Ye Feng, Lin Yaoying and Song Luo are already finished. Only those for your collection have not yet been cut, which is a great pity. It was with you that I first discussed this project, so how could I then turn around and leave yours out, replacing it with someone else’s! While you have been observing mourning, you have naturally stopped your literary work. If friends were to select your poems on your behalf and have the woodblocks cut, that would still conform to the original intention. Please send the draft of your collection as soon as possible to Cao Zhenji and Tian Wen, along with five taels of silver up front to help cover the printing costs; it is fine to send the rest once it is finished. Recently Chen Yuqi, Dong Yu and several others arrived in the capital, expressed their admiration for this project, and wanted to be included in it. Cao He in his letter said that Chen Yuqi was particularly persistent. But I am considering you alone for this, not only because you proposed the idea, but also because I love the quality of your poetry and could not bear to leave it out. I am just mentioning this since I am writing to you. This letter does not express how much I am thinking of you. I don’t know where Shuoyan has put the single folio of pentasyllabic poems; I have asked for it several times but have not yet got it. 兩年兄之奉高堂而徒跣歸也。同人仰覩哀戚之容。不勝懸切。​ 若同志數君子。夙昔樂數晨夕者。分襟以來。益倀倀如有 所失。則弟之懷抱可知也。長涂舟車屢事。得不勞頓否。知目 前正營窀穸。幸稍節哀痛。以慰慈闈。是所顒望。弟三四

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月間。病幾四十日。承委作傳。大略已就。尚須一芟削。然 後脫稿。不至久稽。訒老隨即致之。渠意必待賢昆玉一札到。​ 弟云方讀禮。未感通書都下。是以屬弟口致。訒老性素硜硜。​ 或近申作數行。候謝之。兼索文字。弟好從臾之耳。如何如 何。至十子之刻。葉慕廬林澹亭宋牧菴諸君。皆已刻竣。惟大 集未梓。殊為憾事。且年兄實首商此舉。詎可反遺而登他人。​ 苫塊之中。特自已廢業。若友人代選付刻。義初無傷。祈以集 稿即寄曹實庵田漪停。刻貲先予五金。餘襄事後全寄之亦無不 可。近陳椒峰董蒼水數君入都。慕此舉。皆有此意。而峨嵋書 言。椒峰尤力。然弟獨意在年兄者。不特以首事故。且愛重詩 品。不忍捨去耳。幷此附商。不盡念切。五言一卷。說岩不知 收之何處。屢索不可得也。73 The first part of the letter is properly respectful, but does not become a fulsome tribute to Yan’s father or to Yan’s filial piety, while the rest of the letter is practical: it is clear that he admires Yan’s poetry, and there is no need to elaborate. If we turn to Wang’s letters in Chidu xinchao, we find the younger Wang— he cannot have been more than twenty-nine sui when he wrote the letters that appear in Chidu xinchao—writing on subjects that bear direct comparison. One is a 1662 letter to the poet Cheng Kangzhuang 程康莊 (1616–1679), who at the time was Subprefectural Magistrate in Zhenjiang, in which he asks Cheng to help publish the works of the elderly poet Lin Gudu 林古度 (1580–1666): Mr Lin Gudu is eighty-three sui this year, and amongst the doyens of the literary world, he stands out as the last towering reminder of the achievements of a bygone era. Recently I visited him, and when I asked him where his life’s works were, he said they were at Mt Fu in Lishui, and that none of his poems had been published since 1604. Mr Lin is extremely poor and has not the means to find a publisher himself, and even if he did I fear whatever was published would soon be lost. These days fledgling scholars of talent fill page after page with their cries and shouts, which then get distributed all over the capital, whereas this old man has enjoyed an outstanding reputation for seventy years, but it could well be that not a single word of his is passed down to later generations. This would be a great pity. My suggestion is that we first examine his recent works, then find several people of good will to take responsibility for one chapter each, piling up the stones to make a mountain, and weaving brilliant 73  Yanshi jiacang chidu 2.19b–20a.

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feathers to make a coat. This would be an excellent thing, but I suspect the number of those who will share this aim is likely to be small. 林茂之先生。今年八十有三。文苑尊宿。此為碩果。亦巋然老 靈光矣。頃相見。詢其平生著述。皆藏溧水之乳山中。詩自 萬曆甲辰未付棗梨。茂翁貧且甚。不能自謀板行。行恐盡淪 煙草。今人黃口才學。號嗄連篇累帙。便布通都。此老負盛名 七十年。至不能傳一字於後世。可惜也。弟意先檢點其近作。​ 約好事者人任一卷。積石為山。集翠成裘。大是佳話。顧同志 寥寥耳。74 This is the middle section of a longer letter, the other purpose of which is to introduce Lin’s son Zuzhi 祖直 who carried the letter. In the first couple of lines of the original letter, Wang moves towards his suggestion regarding Lin Gudu by mentioning another publishing project that the Jiangxi poet Chen Yunheng 陳允衡 was working on. He then introduces Lin Zizhi, after which he begins the passage translated above. In the last part of the letter, he explains that Lin Zuzhi was traveling to Zhenjiang and wished to visit Cheng on account of his literary fame, and suggests that it would also be an opportunity to talk about publishing Lin Gudu’s works.75 In neither this letter nor the one to Yan does Wang immediately make the request, but in the letter to Cheng he needs to explain why he is so keen to have Lin’s poetry published. However, because Wang probably did not know the older Cheng particularly well, and because he needs to explain why it is so important to have Lin’s poetry published, he had to do more than just directly suggest Cheng help—indeed the final sentence in the passage above suggests that Wang was pessimistic about the amount of support he would get for this project. That is why he asserts Lin Gudu’s significance in such urgent terms, and dresses his appeal with several rhetorical flourishes. It is also why Zhou Lianggong would have included the letter in Chidu xinchao; in the woodblock edition of Chidu xinchao, Zhou has highlighted the passage comparing the young writers to Lin, and the part about piling up stones.76 Compared to the letters we will discuss below, this is more like some of the letters of request that appear in Yanshi jiacang chidu, but comparable requests in the Yan collection still tend to be less embellished, unless of course the request is being made by someone junior who does not know

74  Chidu xinchao, 28. Wang did not manage to get a selection of Lin’s poems published until he himself was near the end of his life. 75  A full version of the letter can be found in Wang Shizhen, Yuyang chidu, n.p. 76  See Chidu xinchao, woodblock edition, 1.37b–38a.

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Yan well, in which case the request might be made in more elaborate terms, of which the Gu Errong letter is a salient example. This letter is followed in Chidu xinchao by a letter to the poet and painter Zhang Yihu 張一鵠 (fl. 1658–61) who was serving as a Judge in Yunnan. The letter is too long to be included in full here, but it describes in elaborate language laced with allusions both the beauties and dangers of the south-west: . . . It was in the list of official appointments that I first learnt you had been appointed to a post in Yunnan, famous for the picturesque Diancang Mountains and the lakes about Kunming. There one may look for the sites of Zhuang Jiao’s exploits [during the Warring States period], or ponder the great achievements of [the Han general] Ma Yuan. For it is characteristic of men like us to read thousands of books and travel thousands of miles. If we recall what we have read in the histories about when Guizhou and Yunnan were first opened up, we are reminded that the weather there is very changeable, windy one moment and foggy the next, and pestilences are a constant cause of anxiety. Therefore, one must always carry medicine and pay close attention to the condition of one’s boat or carriage. . . . 閱除目始知年兄得滇南。點蒼山色。昆明池水。尋莊蹻之 故蹟。弔伏波之遺烈。讀萬卷書。行萬里路。自是我輩本色。​ 顧六詔初開。五溪乍闢。風煙屢易。瘴癘為憂。藥物當携。​ 舟車可念。. . .77 He then goes on to express confidence in Zhang’s success in both his official duties and his literary pursuits while in Yunnan, before turning to his own recent poetic output, asserting that although one’s official duties might tie one down, they cannot stop one’s name being preserved for posterity through poetry. Finally he says he will send some of his recent works, and hopes to be able to go south of the Yangtze River and relax a bit after the next Chinese New Year. It is a very different letter about separation from the one to Yan, and there are no letters written in this style in Yanshi jiacang chidu. It is also stylistically very different from the one quoted earlier that Dong Ne wrote from Yunnan. Although there is no reason to doubt that it was a genuine letter, it was written during the winter of 1660–61, not long before Wang published a collection of his works entitled Yuyang ji 漁洋集 which Zhou Lianggong says was the source of Wang’s letters. Therefore it is quite possible that this letter was writ77  Chidu xinchao 29. My full translation of this letter can be found in Renditions 41–42. Ma Yuan’s letter to his nephews while he was on campaign in Vietnam is discussed by Richter in her chapter on letters of familial admonition in this volume.

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ten with an eye to publication, which would explain its more consciously literary style.78 In the following letter excerpted in Chidu xinchao, which must have been written at about the same time, Wang writes of the effect of his recent travels to the “three hills of Zhenjiang”: When Tao Hongjing [451–536, a famous Daoist who advised the emperor] became an official, he still dreamt of the breeze blowing through the pines. He and I have the same disposition. I have just come back from visiting the three hills of Zhenjiang. There the mists roll in the wind, and the springs gush over the rocks. I really just wanted to abandon all the cares of the official’s life and seek a perch hidden amongst the bamboo forests, vast expanses of water, and mountains. Several days after returning home, I am still dreaming that I am amongst the great rivers and towering peaks. 陶弘景入官。而松風之夢故在。此自我輩性情。僕游京口三山 歸。雲嵐泱漭。泉石濆薄。真欲脫屣。軒冕卜一枝之隱於竹林 海嶽之間。至今數日。猶夢在江天疊嶂中也。79 Although Wang’s sentiments in this passage arise from the specific circumstance of his recent visit to Zhenjiang, again there is nothing like this in the letters to Yan Guangmin. There are occasional complaints about life as an official—in a couple of places Sun Guangsi mentions his desire to be allowed to return home—but they are not accompanied by the sorts of musings Wang indulges in here. There are four letters by Li Yu in Yanshi jiacang chidu, all written when Li visited the capital to try to sell books, enlisting Yan’s help to circulate them amongst his friends in the hope that they might buy them. The tone of the letters is very practical. In the first letter Li prepares the ground by remarking that when he arrived in the capital and heard that two brothers were serving at court at the same time (Yan’s older brother Yan Guangyou had passed the Metropolitan Examination in 1673), he felt he could not but write something to commemorate this, so he sends Yan a parallel couplet. He then reminds Yan of an earlier contact in which he asked him to help him with the “trivial matter

78  The context of the letters discussed here can be found in Wang Shizhen’s chronological autobiography Wang Shizhen nianpu, 16–20. 79  Chidu xinchao, 30. I have not located the original from which this letter was taken, but it is obviously an excerpt.

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of selling books” 貿書瑣事.80 The remaining three letters contain instructions as to how the books are to be distributed for potential buyers to look at, and when he doesn’t seem to have been able to sell very many, he suggests Yan can either sell them to friends, read them himself, or give them away as he does not want to carry them back to the south. These are interesting vignettes of Li Yu’s efforts as a publisher, but nowhere does he feel the need to employ his considerable literary talents beyond the practically necessary.81 If we compare these to some of his letters in Chidu chuzheng, we see a very different side to Li’s epistolary output. Whereas Li’s requests to Yan were put politely but plainly, his letter to a neighbor asking for some of the neighbor’s chrysanthemums is much more artful: In the past when people asked for flowers, it was a refined act on their part, but not at all for the person to whom the request was made. But for me not to ask you for some of your flowers would not only be unrefined from my point of view, but also from yours. I have heard that this year has been an especially good year for chrysanthemums, and that after looking at them day and night their owners have had their fill, and are fading somewhat themselves. I am not the first to ask for some, so I dare to follow the example of others and seek a few from you to decorate my bare fence. I know that when they are sent to me as I hope, I will most certainly not forget their former master. 向人索花。于己為韻事。于人則不韻甚矣。然不向吾翁索花。​ 于己為不韻。于吾翁亦非韻事也。聞今歲藝菊獨繁。主人旦夕 飽看。頗有倦色。且乞者不自某始。敢循例奉丐數本。点綴荒 籬。知白衣送酒時。必不能忘舊主人也。82 It would have taken a very thick-skinned neighbor to turn down such a delightfully cheeky request. But although there are many amiable requests in Yanshi jiacang chidu, Yan’s correspondents did not seem to feel the need to employ their wit to the same extent. Invitations are another type of letter that provide a useful point of comparison between the published collections and Yanshi jiacang chidu, not least because they appear in considerable numbers. Invitations in Yanshi jiacang chidu tend to be fairly straightforward. The second letter in the collection, from the senior official who was an Examiner for the Metropolitan Examinations 80  Yanshi jiacang chidu 3.62a. 81  Ibid., 3.62a–63a. 82  Chidu chuzheng 10.28a–b.

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in 1667 when Yan passed, Feng Pu, is more formal than most invitations in the collection, though it is more of a general encouragement for Yan to come to the capital than an invitation to visit him directly: From afar I received your letter, which is enough to know that you have not forgotten me. I also received your gift of the large cup. Thank you. I am beset by ageing and illnesses one after the other, but still I cannot extricate myself from the affairs of the world. Every day I hope that an emissary will be dispatched to you [to summon you to a post in the capital], but when does your period of mourning end? Recently the rebel Wu Sangui died, so we can look forward to the end of the war, and all the leading lights of learning and culture in the empire will gather in their glory in capital. It will really be a great moment in history. I pray that you will quickly take to the road to the capital so you too can contribute to this time of peace and prosperity . . . 遠承芳訊。足仞不忘。兼領大杯之惠。謝謝。衰病相仍。未能 脫離塵鞅。日望鋒車至。止從吉在何時耶。近吳逆已亡。休甲 有日。且海內人文雲蒸。霞蔚鱗集京師。真千古盛事。惟祈台 駕速發。馳驅王路。共襄太平耳。83 Two short letters from Sun Chengze are more typical—the translation of the first is slightly tentative because Yan will have known all about the events to which Sun refers, but they are less clear to us: Happily the autumn rains have cleared. Your hometown has not been hit as badly by the [natural] disaster as mine. Has anyone come from my family? I know your whole family is in the middle of a wedding. When you leave your office I hope you will come over for a chat. How is Ning’s matter? Perhaps at the moment you don’t have time to look into it? 秋霽可喜。吾鄉之災。貴縣稍輕。家中有人來否。知闔宅納吉 也。出署後。乞時過一譚。寧兄事若何。此時或無暇及此也。84 I am sorry to have missed meeting you. On the seventh come over to my study for some tea and a chat, and I hope that you will arrange with Tan Jicong for him to come with you. It was a great joy to discuss the prose

83  Yanshi jiacang chidu 1.1a–b. 84  Ibid., 1.11a. “Ning” is clearly an abbreviation of someone’s name; it is not clear to whom it refers, but it might be Gu Yanwu, whose courtesy name was 寧人.

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works of the Song masters earlier, so I would like to continue to talk over this with you. I eagerly await you! 連未得晤為歉。七日齋中瀹茗小譚。乞為約譚舟老同過。前評 宋大家文。極為痛快。欲續為商。確竚確竚。85 These short notes would seem to date from when Yan was serving in the capital before his father died, and although they are standalone letters, the way the invitations are extended is similar in longer letters where they appear alongside discussions of other things. They can be compared with an invitation written to Zhou Lianggong by the loyalist poet Hu Jie 胡介 (1616–1664) in Chidu xinchao; there are no letters by Hu in Yanshi jiacang chidu, but he was one of the few writers still alive when Chidu xinchao was published whose letters were included in significant numbers: The countryside is desolate and cold, so I have never dared to host a drinking party. I have already invited Lin to come tomorrow with a couple of classmates, and to chase you here to stay the night. I would be honored if you would come to my humble abode, bringing your bedding with you. There would be no harm in your experiencing the earthenware crockery and wooden beds of a poor person’s home for yourself. 草野荒寒。從不敢作地主飲。明日已訂林銕翁。與一二同學。​ 追隨先生。作竟夕盤礡。道駕幸早過荒齋。並携臥具來。瓦盆 木榻。貧家風味。亦不妨親歷之耳。86 Hu lived in considerable poverty and at times Zhou helped him out, as he did other loyalist poets and artists who fell on hard times. It is unlikely that he meant to be critical of Zhou here; more likely he wanted to find a witty way of inviting Zhou to his home, and took the opportunity to remind Zhou of his poverty. Although it is not radically different from the letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu, the kind of device Hu uses at the end does not seem to be typical of them. A final example of the more elaborate letters that tend to be found in the published collections is by Mao Xianshu, whose letters in Yanshi jiacang chidu were discussed earlier. In a letter of invitation to a group of unnamed gentlemen (zhu jun 諸君) collected in Chidu chuzheng, he exhorts them to join him after an outing by the West Lake in Hangzhou brings him closer to Buddhist awakening: 85  Ibid., 1.11a. 86  Chidu xinchao, 131.

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Every day I had wanted to bring you out with me to visit Nanping Hill, but first I went out there myself. After I had traveled over clear waters for perhaps half a li, the lake water had covered the bank, so I had to take my socks off and cross on foot. Shrimps and eels glared up at me, not frightened of people at all. If I bent over and caught them in my hands, they would slip out and get to remain where they were. Occasionally I would catch one properly and feel very pleased with myself. The fishermen, however, would fill their boats higgledy-piggledy with them, and yet not even cast the slightest glance towards them. From this I learnt that actions give the most happiness when done for just a short time, and things are most valuable when they are difficult to obtain. Dispelling ignorance and ridding myself of delusions, Enlightenment cannot be far away, and I want to strive freely towards this aim. If one has already seen the monk, one cannot just stop half way down the road. I hope you will all come quickly. 日欲相偕過南屏乃徑獨出。出清波半里許。湖水沒岸。解襪得 渡。蝦鱔睥睨。了不畏人。俯手攬之。輒滑下得留。偶得一 枚。私自矜奇。罟師他他藉藉。滿貯艇子中弗之顧也。故知事 以暫習為欣。物以艱得為貴。解蔽祛惑。悟非在遙。想暢此 旨。如已見和尚。不得中路自輒止耳。望兄疾來。87 This is a very different kind of letter from anything in Yanshi jiacang chidu, and the fact that it is addressed to a group rather than a specific person suggests that it was always intended for circulation. Nevertheless, it reflects a pattern in which letters in published collections tend to contain more conscious literary embellishments than those in Yanshi jiacang chidu.



Writing in 1934, the writer and critic Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) asserted that the familiar letters of the famous Song dynasty literary figures Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101) and Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105) were the best examples of the genre because they were “natural and refined” 自然大雅, whereas the chidu of the slightly later official and writer Sun Di 孫覿 (1081–1169) Zhou considered to be “unavoidably common” 不免有小家子氣, by which he seemed to mean that they were rather pretentious.88 Zhou then continues 87  Chidu chuzheng 3.22–23a. Nanping Hill 南屏山 is the site of Jingci Buddhist Temple 淨慈寺, famous for the sound of its evening bells. 88  See Zhou Zuoren, “Wu lao xiaojian,” 215.

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by mentioning other examples from the Ming through to the late Qing where allegedly more natural letter-writing gave way to more self-consciously showy writing. Both Su and Huang’s letters, usually referred to as shujian 書簡 in earlier times and chidu later on, were originally preserved mainly because of their calligraphy, but were soon admired for their prose as well, and collections of their familiar letters, Su Huang chidu 蘇黃尺牘, were published several times from the early Qing period onward—earlier in this chapter we saw how Luo Tianchi urged the publication of the Yan letters so that they could be known alongside those of Su and Huang. Sun Di’s letters, which were edited and published as Neijian chidu 內簡尺牘 by his student Li Zuyao 李祖堯, seem more self-consciously written; although we cannot be certain that Sun intended that they be published, it seems quite likely on account of his fame as a writer as that he expected that they might be.89 The reason for citing Zhou is not to enter into a debate about which letters were ‘better’, but to demonstrate that this issue of the relative qualities of published and unpublished letters was a live one amongst Chinese literati for many centuries. Because Yanshi jiacang chidu was published so late in the imperial period, and does not seem to have been published outside large series congshu 叢書, it has rarely been mentioned in discussions of the pre-modern epistolary tradition.90 However, as we have seen above, it provides a valuable lens onto epistolary practice during the seventeenth century, both because the letters in it were never intended to be published, and because it contains so many letters to one person. There has not been the space here either to map in detail Yan’s social network and what people used it for, or to describe the functions the letters performed with any more than a broad brush, but its potential for this kind of research is clear. Similarly, our brief survey here highlights the complex relationship between unpublished letters and those that were published, and between the conscious cultivation of epistolary style and the practical motivations for writing letters, but also provides fertile ground for further investigation. Bibliography Chen Zhichao 陳智超. Mingdai Huizhou Fangshi qinyou shouzha qibai tong kaoshi 明代徽州方氏親友手札七百通考釋. Hefei: Anhui daxue chubanshe, 2001. 89  Lik Hang Tsui discusses Sun Di’s chidu in more detail in this volume, in his chapter on bureaucratic influences on letter-writing during the Song period. 90  Yanshi jiacang chidu was published in Congshu jicheng in 1935.

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Ching, Julia. The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yang-ming. Canberra: Australian National University, 1972. Glahn, Richard von. Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000– 1700. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Gu Yanwu 顧炎武. Gu Tinglin shiwenji 顧亭林詩文集. 2nd ed. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983. Kirkpatrick, Andy. “Information Sequencing in Mandarin Letters of Request.” Anthropological Linguistics 33.2 (1991): 183–203. Li Kejing 李克敬. “Qufu san Yan gong zhuan” 曲阜三顏公傳. In Beizhuan ji 碑傳集, edited by Qian Yiji 錢儀吉, 1233–37. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993. Li Yu 李漁, ed. Chidu chuzheng 尺牘初徵. 1660. rpt. Siku jinhuishu congkan 四庫禁燬 書叢刊. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2000. Ming shi 明史. Compiled by Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 et al. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Pattinson, David, trans. “Chen Hongxu: A Further Letter to Zhou Lianggong.” Renditions 41–42 (1994): 98–101. ———. “The Chidu in Late Ming and Early Qing China.” PhD diss., Australian National University, 1997. ———. “The Market for Letter Collections in Seventeenth-Century China” CLEAR 28 (2006): 125–57. Peterson, Willard J., ed. The Cambridge History of China: Volume 9, Part One: The Ch’ing Empire to 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Qian Yiji 錢儀吉, ed. Beizhuan ji 碑傳集. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993. Qiao Min 喬敏. “Shilun Qing chu shiren Yan Guangmin de yimin sixiang” 試論清初詩 人顏光敏的遺民思想. Journal of Shanxi Normal University 38.4 (July 2011): 110–13. Qing shi gao 清史稿. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977. Richter, Antje. “Beyond Calligraphy: Reading Wang Xizhi’s Letters.” TP 96 (2011): 370–407. ———. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: Washington University Press, 2013. Song Maocheng 宋懋澄. Jiuyue ji 九籥集. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1984. Sun Shu-fang 孫淑芳. “Shibian yu fengya: Zhou Lianggong Chidu xinchao bianxuan zhi yanjiu” 世變與風雅:周亮工《尺牘新鈔》編選之研究. PhD diss., National Chung Cheng University, 2008. Wang Qi 汪淇 and Xu Shijun 徐士俊, eds. Fenlei chidu xinyu 分類尺牘新語. 1663. rpt. Siku quanshu cunmu congshu 四庫全書存目叢書. Ji’nan: Qilu shushe, 1995–97. Wang Shizhen 王世貞. Chidu qingcai 尺牘清裁. 1581. rpt. Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan, 1973.

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Wang Shizhen 王士禛. Yuyang chidu 漁洋赤牘. Mid Qing Tingqiushengguan manuscript edition. ———. Wang Shizhen nianpu 王士禛年譜. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1992. Wang Siren 王思任. Wenfan xiaopin 文飯小品. Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1989. Widmer, Ellen. “The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: A Study in SeventeenthCentury Publishing.” HJAS 56 (1996): 77–122. Yan Guangmin 顏光敏, ed. Yanshi jiacang chidu 顏氏家藏尺牘. Congshu jicheng chubian series, vols. 2971–74. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1935. ———. Lepu ji 樂圃集. Shizi shilue 十子詩略 ed., Kangxi period. rpt. Siku quanshu cunmu congshu 四庫全書存目叢書. Ji’nan: Qilu shushe, 1995–97. Yan Guangmin, ed. Yanshi jiacang chidu 顏氏家藏尺牘. Haishan xianguan, 1847. Yao Jindi 姚金笛. “Yan Guangmin yu Ming yimin de jiaowang” 顏光敏與明遺民的 交往. Wenxue qianyan 12 (2007): 114–19. Ye Fang’ai 葉方藹. “Yan Bojing” (mubiao) 顏伯璟(墓表). In Guochao qixian leizheng chubian 國朝耆獻類徵初編, compiled by Li Huan 李桓. Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1966. Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道. Yuan Hongdao ji jianjiao 袁宏道集箋校. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981. Zeng Yizhuan 曾異撰. Fangshoutang ji 紡授堂集. Chongzhen period. rpt. Siku jinhuishu congkan 四庫禁燬書叢刊. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2000. Zhao Chuanren 趙船仁 et al. Yan Guangmin shiwenji qianzhu 顏光敏詩文集淺注. Ji’nan: Qilu shushe, 1997. Zhou Hongcai 周洪才. “Zhongguo guji shanben shumu zhulu Qufu Yanshi zhushu bianwu” 《中國古籍善本書目》著錄曲阜顏氏著述辨誤. Tushuguan zazhi 23.7 (2004): 67–69, 48. Zhou Lianggong 周亮工. Chidu xinchao 尺牘新鈔. 1662 woodblock edition. ———. Chidu xinchao 尺牘新鈔. 1935. rpt. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1988. ———. Laigutang ji 賴古堂集. Kangxi woodblock. rpt. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979. Zhou Zuoren 周作人. “Wu lao xiaojian” 五老小簡. In Zhitang shuhua 知堂書話, 214–18. Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1986. Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊. Pushutingji 曝書亭集 . 1714 woodblock ed.

section 3 Open Letters



CHAPTER 22

Aid and Comfort: Lu Zhaolin’s Letters Paul W. Kroll In early medieval China, the high point of epistolary culture, both in terms of the quantity of works remaining and in terms of their thematic range and literary quality, comes in the first half of the sixth century, during the fifty years of the Liang dynasty. As to the late medieval period, a comparable quantity and quality of letter writing, given our extant texts, is not evident until the ninth century.1 The record from the seventh century, more specifically the first seven or eight decades of the Tang dynasty, is relatively meager. Even the most substantial of collected works from this era—e.g., those of Wang Bo 王勃 (649–676) and Luo Binwang 駱賓王 (ca. 628–ca. 687)—include barely a dozen letters, and the majority of those are of an official nature. This of course has much to do with the general neglect of, and lack of interest in early Tang writing evinced by scholars from the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries, when perhaps ninety percent of the material in early Tang collections (as they were catalogued in the Song dynasty) was lost forever. The dazzle and glare of the “high Tang” period and, to a lesser degree, that of the late Tang cast a pall over the early Tang that has yet to be fully lifted. I wish here to discuss one of the writers from this time, Lu Zhaolin 盧照鄰 (ca. 635–ca. 684), best known as a poet and one of the so-called “Four Elites of Early Tang” (chu-Tang sijie 初唐四傑), a grouping that included Luo Binwang, Wang Bo, and Yang Jiong 陽炯 (650–ca. 694). Lu Zhaolin, like the other three, is now usually read if at all in only one or two anthology selections from his shi 詩 poetry.2 Characterized as precursory of but not fully up to the mature “high Tang” style, their work is typically set aside after a sideways glance, in the rush to reach the glories of the better-known mid-eighth century. The loss is ours. Lu Zhaolin’s eighty extant shi-poems, both in pentametric and heptametric forms, and whether in yuefu 樂府, guti 古體, lüshi 律詩, or pailü 排律 genres, are consistently skillful and display a masterly hand.3 But of even higher genius 1  On certain ninth-century letters, see the chapter by Anna M. Shields in the present volume. 2  Most often, his “Olden Notions: Chang’an” (Chang’an guyi 長安古意), which has also been translated more frequently than any other of Lu’s poems. 3  An early attempt at assessing Lu’s shi-poems is in Stephen Owen’s The Poetry of the Early T’ang, 83–102.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_024

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and originality are his five fu 賦 and, especially, the two multi-part compositions in the sao 騷 style that he wrote near the end of his life.4 We also have some seventeen prose pieces, in different genres. Three of these works are letters. They are of an unordinary sort, pertaining to and deriving from the physical problems and needs that removed Lu from everyday official circles, and they will be the focus of our attention below. Let us begin with a quick survey of Lu Zhaolin’s life. At the outset we must note that although there is only slight dispute about the facts and sequence of those incidents which we know were experienced by him, there is often disagreement about their dating. This has something to do with the uncertainty surrounding his year of birth—given as anytime from 632 to 635—and his year of death—anytime from 683 to 695 or later, according to the editors of the three modern, annotated editions of his works.5 There was a twenty-juan edition of Lu’s works (Lu Zhaolin ji 盧照鄰集) circulating in the Tang6 and a tenjuan version in the Song, along with what seems to have been an abbreviated three-juan edition (called, after his sobriquet, Youyouzi ji 幽憂子集), but by the Ming there was only a two-juan edition containing just his shi-poems, as well as a single-juan edition. A reconstituted seven-juan edition was compiled in 1640 by Zhang Xie 張燮. This is the edition printed in the Sibu congkan 四部 叢刊 collectanea and is the basis of all modern versions of Lu’s works. Lu Zhaolin was born in the 630s, when the good government of Tang Taizong’s 太宗 Zhen’guan 貞觀 era (627–50) had taken hold. He hailed 4  On several of the fu and different aspects of the sao poems, see Kroll, “The Memories of Lu Chao-lin;” “Tamed Kite and Stranded Fish;” and the final section of “The Representation of Mantic Arts.” Another fu is translated in Owen, “Deadwood,” 160–62, 172–73. 5  Ren Guoxu 任國緒 in Lu Zhaolin ji biannian jianzhu says ca. 634–ca. 686; Zhu Shangshu 祝尚書 in Lu Zhaolin ji jianzhu ca. 632–ca. 695; Li Yunyi 李雲逸 in Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu ca. 635–ca. 683. I find Li Yunyi’s chronology the most persuasive and will generally, though not always, follow her suggested dating of individual events here. Of several other attempts to construct Lu’s curriculum vitae, special note should be taken of Fu Xuancong’s 傅璇琮 chronology of both Lu Zhaolin and Yang Jiong (and much about Luo Binwang and Wang Bo as well) in the combined printing of their works, Lu Zhaolin ji, Yang Jiong ji, 195–233, in which Lu’s birth is placed ca. 630; Ge Xiaoyin’s 葛曉音 “Guanyu Lu Zhaolin shengping de ruogan wenti,” which argues for a birth-year of 627; and the chapter on Lu Zhaolin in Luo Xiangfa’s 駱祥發 Chu-Tang sijie yanjiu, 43–77, which follows Fu Xuancong in opting for ca. 630. 6  Thanks to the 2005 excavation of the tomb of Lu Zhaoji 盧照己 (651–723) in Luoyang, with its tomb inscription (muzhi 墓志), we now know that this particular younger brother compiled an edition of Lu Zhaolin’s works in the early years of the Kaiyuan 開元 (713–742) era. See Luoyangshi etc., “Luoyang Tang Lu Zhaoji mu.” Among other information, this inscription also reveals that Zhaolin was one of eight brothers, not just three or four as previously surmised.

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from a minor branch of the prestigious Lu clan of Fanyang 范陽 and as an adolescent studied under Cao Xian 曹憲 (fl. 605–649) and Wang Yifang 王義方 (615–669), two of the most famous, private scholars of the day.7 Though his immediate ancestors may not have distinguished themselves in official service, his family must have been one of means. When barely out of his teens, he was appointed a secretary in the suite of Li Yuanyu 李元裕, a lesser prince and seventeenth son of the Tang founding emperor. He accompanied his patron on provincial assignments, notably to Xiangzhou 襄州 in north-central Hubei, Yanzhou 兗州 in Shandong, and was once sent as a ducal envoy to Yizhou 益州 in Sichuan. After Li Yuanyu died in 665, Lu had to make his own way. He was presently appointed to the low-ranking position of wei 尉 or “consolator” (functionally, commissioner of police and tax collection)8 in Xindu 新都 district, Yizhou, thus back in Shu where he had been before. He seems to have been particularly fond of the region, so much so that, after his term of office expired in 670, he stayed on in Shu for more than a year, not departing till the summer of 671. His strong attachment to the area is evident in the many poems he wrote at different sites in Sichuan, including several throughout 670 while accompanied by Wang Bo who had decamped to Shu after being expelled from the court in Chang’an. Lu Zhaolin’s lingering in the area may also have owed something to a liaison with a young Ms. Guo 郭氏, with whom he fathered a child. He never saw the son she bore him, as he left Shu prior to the child’s birth and did not return.9 Lu’s poetry, like that of the other three “elites,” had often revealed a current of self-regard and personal display that was unusual in conventional verse 7  Cao Xian was the foremost expert at the time on the Wen xuan, one of the chief scholars responsible for the increasingly serious study of the text that later in the century led to the commentary of Li Shan 李善 (d. 689). See Tong Ling, “Sui Tang shidai ‘zhongceng xuewen shijie’ yanjiu xushuo,” 107–8. Cao’s death date is uncertain, but to have been a teacher of the boy Lu Zhaolin he had to have lived till the mid- or late 640s. 8  The wei was the lowest-ranking of the four posts appointed to a district by the central government. Xindu was a district ranked as ciji 次畿 and was hence allotted two wei 尉, ranked 9a2, on the twenty-eighth rung of the thirty-rung bureaucratic ladder. The title of the position points idealistically to the occupant’s role as a sustainer of local security. I avoid Charles O. Hucker’s rendering of official titles, including “defender” in this case, from his Dictionary of Official Titles; for the Tang especially there are in this dictionary many omissions of offices as well as mistaken descriptions of duties. 9  The boy died in infancy. Lu’s delayed return—to put it in the best light—is the subject of a poem that Luo Binwang, who met Ms. Guo when he was in Sichuan two years following, wrote on her behalf. For translation and explication of this poem, see David R. Knechtges, “Luo Binwang’s Defense of a Jilted Lady.”

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before this time.10 From the early 670s, his writings become even more inward and begin to show an increasing turn toward self-revelation. The remaining years of Lu’s life, after leaving Shu, were overshadowed by pain and grief. By 673 he had suffered the first serious onset of the disease—which seems to have been progressive rheumatoid arthritis of the extremities—that would plague him henceforth and ultimately drive him to suicide. At this time he put himself in the care of the famous physician and specialist in occult traditions, Sun Simiao 孫思邈 (?581–682?).11 He had also recently assumed for himself the sobriquet “Master of Intense Distress” (Youyouzi 幽憂子), which evinces the central condition that came to dominate the rest of his days.12 When Sun shortly afterward moved from Chang’an to Mount Taibo 太白山, in the nearby Zhongnan 終南 range, Lu followed him and would remain there for several years. Early in this period, or perhaps slightly before, Lu’s father died—which, as we shall see, had an injurious effect on Lu’s treatment as well as contributing to a decline in the whole family’s financial situation. Soon, both his feet were crippled and one hand palsied. In something he wrote in the early 680s he describes in very pitiable terms the difficulty he has had for nearly a decade in simply moving around his own room, much less going outdoors to enjoy his surroundings.13 Modern medicine is now only partially effective in relieving the chronic pain of the disease that struck Lu Zhaolin and can slow but cannot halt its disfiguring and contorting of hands and feet. In seventh-century China the prognosis for victims was even more bleak, if not completely hopeless. The experiments with medical concoctions to ease his suffering, begun under Sun Simiao’s direction, continued when Lu Zhaolin moved near the end of the 670s to East Dragon-gate Mountain (Dong Longmen shan 東龍門山), about eight miles south of Luoyang. It is from there that he sent the letters we shall examine. Now, one of the most commonly mentioned topics in personal letters of all times and places is the health of the writer, especially if it gives cause for 10  Li Bo 李白 (701–762?) learned much from the sijie in this regard. 11  Lu’s association, and several reputed conversations, with him are recorded in Sun’s official biographies: Jiu Tang shu 191.5094–97 and Xin Tang shu 196.5596–98. For translations of these, and much additional information, see Sivin, Chinese Alchemy. 12  For the classical allusion behind the phrase, see Kroll, “Tamed Kite and Stranded Fish,” 46 n. 18. 13  See the preface to his “Shi ji wen” 釋疾文, one of two extremely long autobiographical poems in the sao style that he wrote at the end of his life. Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu 5.239; Lu Zhaolin ji jianzhu 5.271; Lu Zhaolin ji biannian jianzhu 5.291.

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complaint.14 But medieval Chinese texts rarely refer in third-person fashion to educated individuals with physical disabilities or deformities,15 and they never do so in a tolerant or sympathetic way. In premodern China no positive accommodations or allowances were made for those suffering such afflictions, which might even be taken somehow as evidence of moral deficiency.16 In these circumstances neither Alexander Pope nor Franklin Roosevelt would have fulfilled their destinies. Of all Tang writers the most poignant example of this plight is that of Lu Zhaolin. The first of his three letters that we now turn to has a very specific and practical objective. It is not a letter to or for posterity. Nor does it aim at official promotion or career enhancement, that long-sanctioned intent of the traditional Chinese scholar. Its goal and importance is purely personal, but no less weighty on the human scale than the traditional appeal for patronage. Yet the letter is far from being a downright request. It is composed with the care of someone who values words and honors the scholarly tradition of which he is a learned initiate, and which he expects his recipients to appreciate equally. Indeed, the author is someone for whom words now are the only available resource, a role in officialdom no longer being possible. The title by which the letter is now called, “Letter to Luoyang’s Court Gentlemen and those of Widespread Name, Entreating Items for Medicine” (Yu Luoyang mingliu chaoshi qi yaozhi shu 與洛陽名流朝士乞藥直書), was, like those of the two other letters we shall read, added later by editors on the basis of its contents.17 This letter can be divided into several sections. The first briefly identifies the author, then plunges immediately into the history of his drug therapy:

14  For particularly striking examples, see those cited by Antje Richter, “Beyond Calligraphy,” 402–7. 15  I exclude stuttering from this category, a speech problem that was not incapacitating, as shown in the cases of, for instance, Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (179–117 BCE) and Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–CE 18) both of whose “stuttering,” as David Knechtges has suggested, might actually have been owing to dialect issues. I also exclude the non-specific imperfection of “ugliness,” as in the famous cases of Wang Can 王粲 (177–217) and Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢 (557–641). 16  The European court jester or fool was sometimes an exception, but an institutionally ambiguous one. 17  Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu 7.388–92; Lu Zhaolin ji jianzhu 7.414–17; Lu Zhaolin ji biannian jianzhu 7.435–39; Wenyuan yinghua 684.8a–9a; Quan Tang wen 166.6a–8a. I provide Li Yunyi’s edited text here.

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The Master of Intense Distress pursues the Way in a place of concentration on East Dragon-gate Mountain where, dressed in plain linen, eating bean-leaf broth, he is laid up stubbornly in a corner of a certain cliffside. Of my visitors, there was one who upon stopping by took pity on me. From out of his blue satchel he gave me the elixir recipe of the Master of the Golden Flower,18 which could cure my illness if [compounded and] taken. I saw that the recipe required two catties of cinnabar granules.19 While achenes of the paper-mulberry20 [another necessary ingredient] can be found on this mountain, cinnabar is so rare as to be impossible to come by. In the past there was a certain recluse21 dwelling below Mount Taibo in the area west of the [Han’gu] Pass, who made much of “mysteriously bright chrism”22 which required eight ounces of cinnabar granules. At that time I was living in want and could not afford the best kind of cinnabar, being able only to acquire that of “horse-tooth” quality and hue, of but the slightest luster and purity,23 to fill out [the recipe]. During the

18  Identity unknown, if real at all. 19  Two Tang catties (one catty equaling sixteen Tang “ounces” liang 兩) amount to roughly three English pounds. Cinnabar (mercuric sulfide) is the most important ingredient in medieval elixir recipes, hence the use of its name as synecdoche for the elixir itself. 20  Broussonetia papyrifera. Its achenes are small, single-seeded dry fruit; these would be crushed for use in the concoction. The red color of the paper-mulberry’s achenes would surely add symbolically to their efficacy. 21  Probably not Sun Simiao, for if that were the case, one assumes that Lu would have mentioned him by name, given his renown. But there would have been other experts in pharmaka in the Taibo area. 22  I take this as the name of this recluse’s elixir. The similar “mysteriously bright powder” (xuanming fen 玄明粉) is one term for sodium sulfate, a key ingredient in some elixirs, and might have lent its name to this particular compound, as “cinnabar” does to the elixir class in general. 23  “Horse-tooth” is second-grade cinnabar, according to the early eighth-century Dadong lianzhen baojing xiufu lingsha miaojue 大洞鍊真寶經修伏靈砂妙訣 (HY 889), preface, 2a/b. The context of the letter seems to require the term to refer to cinnabar here. But “horse-tooth” was also used in reference to purified sodium sulfate (maya xiao 馬牙 硝); see Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 5.4:183. Needham says that purified sodium sulfate became prominent in elixir recipes only in the mid-eighth century, when a text describes its properties as “preserving” or “nourishing” cinnabar. However, it could certainly have been used some decades earlier. One might then be tempted to interpret Lu Zhaolin as saying that in the absence of best-quality cinnabar he had to fill out the recipe with sodium sulfate, but this seems unlikely.

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mourning period for my deceased father,24 whenever I wailed and wept the medicine’s qi (or potency) would leak out in my tears and snivel. For three or four years I wasted away, with a debilitating cough that could hardly be relieved. Then again I saw by chance in another recipe an explanation saying that if one ingests cinnabar that is not of the purest essence it will bring on persistent coughing. I have since discovered that there is a certain place that has a very fine quality of this item; but the cost [per ounce] is two thousand coins, so for thirty-two ounces (i.e., the two catties that I need) of it I must find sixty-four thousand cash. 幽憂子學道于東龍門山精舍,布衣藜羹,堅臥於一巖之曲。客 有過而哀之者,青囊中出金花子丹方相遺之,服之病愈。視其 方,丹砂二斤,穀楮子則山中可有,丹砂則渺然難致。昔在關 西太白山下,一隱士多玄明膏,中有丹砂八兩。予時居貧,不 得好上砂,但取馬牙顏色微光淨者充用。自爾丁府君憂,每一 號哭,涕泗中皆藥氣流出。三四年羸臥苦嗽,幾至于不免。復 偶於他方中見一說云,丹砂之不精者,服之令人多嗽。訪知一 處有此物甚佳,而必須錢二千文,則三十二兩當取六十四千 也。 Having described in some detail the background of his condition and his previous attempts at obtaining a cure, and finally stating his needs frankly, Lu Zhaolin next explains why it is that he must seek the assistance of others: On this empty mountain I am laid up with illness, and my family’s assets have hitherto been depleted, my aged mother is advanced in years, my brothers have just the slightest of official salaries—so that if I were to wait for my family to act, I must give up my bones on the peak of a scraggy bluff. 空山臥疾,家業先貧,老母年尊,兄弟祿薄,若待家辦,則委 骨於巉嵓之峰矣。 He then announces exactly what his plan for a cure is and describes his hopedfor benefactors in the most flattering terms: What I have in mind to do is to attempt to compound this medicine in the fifth month of the year to come, when the mulberry’s achenes mature. 24  The death of Lu’s father (“the lord of my patrimony”) occurred probably in 673. There were unfortunate consequences of this for Lu’s family, as will be described in the next letter.

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But were it not for those of widespread name and honored ancestry in the empire, princes and dukes, ministers and gentlemen, by the kindness and beneficence of their hearts reaching out to one of shriveled bones and withered trunk, who else would be able to come to my aid? 意者欲以開歲五月穀子熟時,試合此藥。非天下名流貴族、王 公卿士,以仁惻之心達枯骨朽株者,孰能濟之哉。 A request for a gift, immodest as it is, calls for something of value to be given first by the solicitor. In this case it is what Lu Zhaolin can most readily offer—a poem, but one that is conventionally and humbly belittled by the author: Now I have pushed myself despite illness to compose a poem, to be presented collectively to all of you learned and elegant junzi. Although its artfulness is no more than commonplace,25 perhaps the subject may touch one’s heart. 今力疾賦詩一篇,遍呈當代博雅君子。雖文不動俗,事或傷 心。 Unfortunately, the poem has not come down to us. Having made this proffer, Lu Zhaolin now proceeds to the heart and chief purpose of his letter, the specific plea itself. At this point the letter takes on a different, more formal tone. The language becomes denser. The actual request is ushered in by two suggestive allusions that illustrate favors bestowed in classical times and a selfreference indicating Lu’s earnest posture of anticipation. Note how the recipients of the letter are then given an alternative, if they are unable to provide what Lu desires most: If one happens to encounter a Yan Ying and is redeemed by his surrendering the left horse of his team of three,26 or meets a Master Kong and is allotted a cartload of grain out of his concern,27 then Yue Shi in the one case and Yan Yuan in the other would not suffer harshly in their time. I shall simply sit in meditation here in my “musing cell” to answer such

25  Lit., “would not move even the vulgar.” 26  See Shi ji 62.2135, for the story of Yan Ying’s ransoming the worthy Yue Shi. 27  One bing 秉 consists of sixteen bushels (hu 斛) and is here used in general for a considerable amount. See Lunyu 6.4 and 6.5, where Confucius wants to give Zisi 子思 nine hundred measures of grain when the latter becomes his steward. When Zisi declines, Confucius advises him to disperse it among the poor.

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profound kindness.28 If any of you junzi have in your households cinnabar of the very finest quality and are able to impart it to me, that would by far be the best [that I can ask for]. If you have not, then I would entreat you each for one or two ounces of [other] items for medicine, this being almost as good. 儅遇晏嬰脫左驂而見贖,如逢孔子分秉以相憂,則越石、原憲 不幸苦於當年矣。唯當坐禪念室,以答深仁。若諸君子家有好 妙砂,能以見及,最為第一。無者各乞一二兩藥直,是庶幾 也。 There follow a handful of quotations from Confucius in celebratory exhortation of the virtues of fellow-feeling or kindness (ren 仁): Zhongni has said: “Is there anyone who can for a whole day apply his strength to kindness? There has never been a case where one’s strength is insufficient.”29 He also said: “The junzi does not turn away from kindness even for the time it takes to finish a meal”;30 [and] “when sitting, let these [precepts] be gathered before you; when in your carriage, let them be leaning against the crossbar.”31 The heart of the man of old can be seen here. He also said: “Is kindness far off? If I want [to show] kindness, it has already arrived.”32 If one is only able to put one’s words into action, the Way of kindness is indeed not far off. 仲尼曰:「有能一日用其力於仁者乎。未有力不足者。」又 曰:「君子無終食之間違仁」、「在坐則參於前,在輿則倚於 衡。」古人心可見矣。又曰:「仁遠乎哉。我欲仁,斯仁至 矣。」言能苟行之,仁道不遠也。

28  That is, given my physical condition, my thanks for generosity such as that shown to Yue Shi or Yan Yuan must be shown in devout mindfulness. Nianshi 念室 is an old term for a prison-cell, still current in Tang times. When attached here to “sitting in meditation” it acquires the added sense of “meditation chamber.” Both connotations are active, as Lu sees his enforced residence in the mountains as conducive to spiritual practice as well as being effective confinement. 29  See Lunyu 4.6. 30  Lunyu 4.5. 31  Lunyu 15.6. The received text has “standing” 立 for Lu’s “sitting.” The unstated subject here refers to the advice given immediately before this passage, viz.: “Be whole-hearted and faithful in word, be devoted and respectful in deed” 言忠心,行篤敬. 32  Lunyu 7.29.

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Lu is now ready to bring the letter to a close. He does so both with further compliment and a final imploring. The most interesting feature of the conclusion is his providing an explanation for circulating the letter both to acquaintances and strangers. We, reading the letter out of its immediate topical environment, realize clearly now, what we might only have guessed at before, that this is a broadcast communication in the widest possible sense: If you honored gentlemen, the flower of the court, are given to kindness in your broad-ranging magnanimity, why need we be previously acquainted? So, to those whom I know and those I do not know, I send equally this poem and publish this request. If you do not put hand to sword [to help me], you might as well cover over my skeletal remains— so I say. 朝英貴士,博濟而好仁者,何必相識。故知與不知,咸送詩告 請。無案劍,同掩體骸云爾。 This is a letter like few others in the seventh century (of which there are surprisingly few, to begin with) or, for that matter, medieval times in general.33 While the very personal nature of the communication is evident, it takes the form of a circular or “open letter” sent as a broadcast to a generally defined group of officials. It has thus a public quality, another highly unusual feature among letters extant from medieval China. One may wonder why Lu Zhaolin should assume that writing to an unspecified (or little specified) public would be more effective in procuring donations than writing to certain individuals. Is he hoping, beyond his specific request, for a “group dynamics” effect, by creating his own audience of “you honored gentlemen, the flower of the court”?34 Many other questions remain unanswered and likely unanswerable except as conjecture. For instance, how many manuscripts of the letter were produced? One, to be passed from hand to hand? Or many, to be sent to various groups? If many, how many? Who actually inscribed the letter(s)? If Lu Zhaolin, we might

33  Perhaps the closest comparison is with a thank-you note written by Bao Zhao 飽照 (ca. 414–466) for a gift he received of “divinely efficacious medicine” (lingyao 靈藥) that he hopes will cure an outbreak of pustules; but the similarity is not great. See “Xie ci yao qi” 謝賜藥啟, Bao Canjun ji zhu 2.74. See also Xiaofei Tian’s chapter about thank-you notes in this volume. 34  Since, unfortunately, none of Lu’s letters to individuals remain, it is not possible to compare his rhetoric and style in them with the group letters we are looking at here.

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assume that it was his right hand that was by then his only functioning limb.35 But if not Lu Zhaolin, then who? and did the same person transcribe all the copies (if there was more than one)? Certainly the quality of the calligraphy had to have been high, lest the letter simply be brushed aside, especially by those recipients unacquainted with the author. And why has the text of the letter been preserved but not the attached poem, particularly when Lu Zhaolin’s reputation rested so heavily on his poetic compositions? We can answer none of these questions fully or with confidence. We do have, however, another letter of Lu Zhaolin’s (or perhaps a composite of two or more fragments), which begins by acknowledging by name six individuals who have sent him letters of concern and gifts of silk—then a common medium of monetary exchange—toward his living expenses. It is quite possible, though not indisputable, that the actions of these men were in direct response to the letter we have just examined. If so, we can see that at least some of that letter’s recipients were mid-level (grade six) officials who themselves left some mark on history. We can also surmise that the letters were written sometime between the summer of 679 and the winter of 680, when the imperial court was resident in Luoyang. The officials mentioned, especially the court diarist and those who were attendants of the crown prince, would not otherwise have been there. The court returned to Luoyang in the summer of 682, but the mention in the letter of seven or eight years having passed since the calamitous death of Lu’s father makes such a late date unlikely. If Lu Zhaolin’s second letter follows chronologically upon the letter previously discussed, it might seem curious that it says nothing about his hunt for cinnabar nor his elixir experiments, the ostensible reason for drafting the first letter. But surely his mind was not focused only on this one potential remedy. Whatever the actual place of this letter vis-à-vis the previous one, it is interesting in its own right. Here we have more (auto)biographical information, plus some philosophical ruminations. First, however, this is a letter of thanks, a type of communication of which there are many examples from the preceding centuries and an increasing number in the eighth and ninth centuries. But this occupies only the brief opening paragraph. The letter also seems to represent rather a need for self-disclosure, a compulsion that, as noted above, becomes more evident in Lu’s writings with the passing years and as his physical pain does not abate. In the final third of the letter Lu suddenly turns to remarks on his growing affinity for Buddhist teachings. Yet, the letter seems to jump erratically in tone and topic. In each of the four paragraph divisions I have made, 35  Since in traditional China there was a pronounced right-hand dominance in writing.

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Lu Zhaolin takes up a separate subject, with little or no connection between one section and the next. I am convinced that the letter as we have it today is at best a badly mangled remnant, or perhaps it is a composite made up of fragments from several different writings. Here is the letter. It now goes by the title “Letter Sent to Chamberlain Pei and Other Fine Men who have Given Items for Clothing and Medicine” (Ji Pei sheren zhugong wei yi yaozhi shu 寄裴舍人諸公遺衣藥直書).36 My mountain servant37 has arrived from the capital: Pei Jinzhi, secretary to the crown prince;38 Wei Fangzhi, secretary to the crown prince;39 Fan Libing, the diarist on the left;40 Dugu Sizhuang, auxiliary head of the department of waterways;41 Yan Zhiwei, deputy of the privy workshop, secretary, and deferential aide to the censorate;42 and Qiao Kan, esquire 36  Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu 7.7.393–98; Lu Zhaolin ji jianzhu 7.418–22; Lu Zhaolin ji biannian jianzhu 7.440–43; Wenyuan yinghua 684.9a/b; Quan Tang wen 166.8a–9a. 37  Li Yunyi’s text here follows that of Quan Tang wen which accepts the variant 僕 for 信 listed in Wenyuan yinghua. The Sibu congkan text could be forced to read: “Letters to the mountain have . . .” or “A mountain messenger has . . .,” but the lectio difficilior is preferable. 38  This position was at rank 6a1 on the bureaucratic ladder. There is a mere nominal mention of Pei Jinzhi in Xin Tang shu 71A.2203, indicating that his highest position was head of the department of granaries (cangbu langzhong 倉部郎中), rank 5b. 39  The text reads 韋方賢, but I emend 賢 to 質, as suggested by commentators. The person named here is clearly the Wei Fangzhi who has biographies in Jiu Tang shu 74.2633–34 and Xin Tang shu 103.3995. There were supposed to be four secretaries to the crown prince; Wei and Pei Jinzhi are two of them. Wei later rose to the positions of deputy director of the chancellery (luantai shilang 鸞臺侍郎) and head of the department of finance (diguan shangshu 地官尚書, both ranked 3a. 40  The diarist on the left was one of two recording secretaries of the emperor’s daily deeds and words, and was ranked 6b1. For Fan Libing’s official biographies, see Jiu Tang shu 190B.5011 and Xin Tang shu 201.5744. He later occupied the positions of deputy director of the chancellery (luantai shilang, like Wei Fangzhi) as well as head of the department of personnel (tianguan shangshu 天官尚書) and head of the department of rites (chunguan shangshu 春官尚書), all ranked 3a. Fan ran afoul of Empress Wu and was executed in 699. 41  This position was ranked 6b1. See Jiu Tang shu 89.2889 and Xin Tang shu 75B.3439 for Dugu’s official biographies. He later served as prefect of Weizhou 魏州 and held a court generalship (you jinwu jiangjun 右金吾將軍). 42  He was the grandson of the imperial architect Yan Lide 閻立德. The position of second in command of the imperial manufactory was ranked 6b2. For Yan’s official biographies, see Jiu Tang shu 72.2679–80 and Xin Tang shu 100.3942. He was made a general in 698 and was later executed by order of Empress Wu.

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for tallies and seals43—there are letters from all of you asking after my illness and, sent together with them, gifts of bundles44 of silk as presents to contribute toward the needs and expenses of my clothing and medicine. Alas oh! It is quite some time now that the world45 and the Way have lost each other.46 When Yin Yangzhou and his nephew Han Kangbo were parting, in despair he intoned the lines, “The wealthy and honored, by others are joined;/ The poor and base, by kin are forsaken,” and he could not keep the tears from falling across his chin.47 When I think of his conduct as a man, his words exceeded the reality of his situation. But if for a junzi in olden days it brought great sorrow—which even he could not avoid—that at a time of adversity the unicorn was taken during a hunt in the west, then as to “Kuai and the rest,” what would be the point of reproving them for something similar?48 43  Rank 6b1. Official biographies in Jiu Tang shu 190B.5012 and Xin Tang shu 59.1563. He was one of the many scholars who participated in the compilation of the Sanjiao zhuying 三教珠英 encyclopedia and at the beginning of the Kaiyuan era served as intendant-inchief of Yanzhou 兗州. 44  A bundle (shu 束) was equivalent to five rolls (pi 匹), with each roll equivalent to a measure of four “staves” (zhang 丈), each stave measuring ten “feet” (chi 尺) long and 1.8 feet wide. A Tang foot was about nine and a quarter inches long by English measure. 45  As is usual in Tang writings, 代 is a taboo-substitute standing for 世, to avoid a graph used in Tang Taizong’s personal name (Shimin 世民). 46  See Zhuangzi jishi 16.554: “Looked at from this angle, the world has lost the Way, the Way has lost the world. The world and the Way having lost each other, how can a man of the Way arise from the world? Or how can the world, for its part, arise from the Way? The Way having no means to arise from the world and the world having no means to arise from the Way, even if a sage is not residing amidst a mountain grove, his virtuous power will remain hidden” 由是觀之,世喪道矣,道喪世矣。世與道交相喪也,道之人何 由興乎世,世亦何由興乎道哉。道無以興乎世,世無以興乎道,雖聖人不在 山林之中,其德隱矣。 47  Yin Yangzhou is Yin Hao 殷浩 (306–356). For the incident referred to here, see Shishuo xinyu jiaojian 28/5 (462); trans. Mather, Shih-shuo Hsin-yü, 487. 48  This tightly packed sentence depends on two allusions. The first is to the famous incident of Confucius wailing upon seeing the unicorn that was captured unwittingly in the fields west of Lu 魯 (it is clear that Lu Zhaolin has in mind the telling of this incident in the Kongzi jiayu 孔子家語, with its report of Confucius’s tearful comments). This is joined to the well-known story of the visit of Ji Zha 季札 of Wu 吳 to the state of Lu in 544 BCE, during which he heard the “music of Zhou” and commented in order on the subtle implications of each state’s odes; but when it came to the insignificant states of Kuai and others he declined to say anything. Lu Zhaolin’s intended meaning is that if even Confucius was unavoidably disheartened by an event, why should a lesser man like Yin Hao—and, by extension, Lu himself—be criticized for expressing his grief overmuch?

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During the Xianheng era [670–74] my clan, from finest to humblest, numbered a hundred mouths. But from the time of the trouble that befell my family,49 a younger brother and older sister of my own gates declined and failed, while in seven or eight years our usable goods were completely gone. I, unfortunately, contracted “such an illness,”50 upon which my mother’s elder brother took such pity on me that he laid waste his own estate to pay for my physicians and medicine. Due to the majority of crops not flourishing, the family was frequently in dire straits; older and younger brothers had to find meager employment in nearby districts, but “so great is the wound” that it has not been smoothed away.51 Although each carries a different portion of grief, still none can earn enough to spare. For their part, acquaintances throughout the realm have sometimes sent me draughts and medicines, their beneficence being considerable indeed. Of late I am ever more committed to belief in the Buddha-dharma and, with regard to the establishment built here in the mountain, my expenditures have been far-reaching.52 My deepest wish is to put a stop to craving and to reduce desire; and, resulting from this, to bring it about that when the sprouts of covetous thoughts appear, whatever object they may seize upon—though always pleasing at first—will then be abhorred as unneedful. Oh eheu! Where rests the Way while there is all this rush to compete? Even upon observing the suffering, emptiness, and impermanence of the world, still this karma of mine is already in motion and cannot be left off with midway. I pray to obtain an infusion of blessings, longing to share them with you who are gentlemen’s junzi.53 山僕至自都。太子舍人裴瑾之、太子舍人韋方賢、左史范履 氷、水部員外郎獨孤思莊、少府丞舍人內供奉閻知微、符璽郎 喬偘,並有書問余疾,兼致束帛之禮,以供東山衣藥之費。嗟 乎。代與道交喪,其來尚矣。殷揚州與外甥韓康伯別,慨然而 詠「富貴他人合,貧賤親戚離」,因泣下交頤,不能自已。余 49  That is, his father’s death. This probably occurred in late 673. 50  See Lunyu 6.8. 51  Cf. Xunzi jijie 13 (sect. 19).372, referring to mourning: “the greater the wound, the more numerous the days [in mourning]; the deeper the pain, the slower it heals” 創巨者其日 久,痛甚者其愈遲. 52  A curious sentence. I do not believe that this means, as some commentators aver, that Lu himself founded a Buddhist monastery, but rather that he contributed what he could to one that was being established nearby. 53  Cf. Xunzi jijie 1 (sect. 2).28: “The gentleman’s junzi does not slack off in the Way because of want or indigence” 士君子不為貧窮怠乎道.

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以其為人也,名過其實。然窮達之際,則西狩獲麟,所不能 免,斯亦古君子之大悲也。自鄶而下,曷足譏焉。余家咸亨中 良賤百口。自丁家難,私門弟妹凋喪,七八年間貨用都盡。余 不幸遇斯疾,母兄哀憐,破產以供醫藥。屬多穀不登,家道屢 困,兄弟薄遊近縣。創巨未平,雖每分多見憂,然亦莫能取 給。海內相識,亦時致湯藥,恩亦多矣。晚更篤信佛法,於山 間營建,所費尤廣。本欲息貪寡欲,緣此更使貪心萌生,每得 一物,輒歡喜,更恨不足。嗚呼。道惡在而奔競之若茲。雖觀 苦空無常,而此業已就,不可中廢。祈獲福澤,思與士君子共 之。 The second paragraph here, beginning with its lament over the world’s loss of the Way, hardly follows from the first, especially if addressed to half a dozen successful courtiers of middle rank, with the emperor near at hand. Perhaps we should not put too much emphasis on Lu’s words themselves but understand the whole paragraph as an elaborate apology for his seemingly excessive groaning. We could then read the third paragraph as an extended clarification of why he is now in such financial need. The final paragraph’s abrupt swerve to professing belief in the dharma and the wish to cut off desire is surprising— though we may recall the passing mention in the preceding letter of “sitting in meditation.” There is nothing inherently contradictory between preparing an elixir for medical purposes and practicing Buddhist quietude; Lu Zhaolin is aiming to be neither a monk nor a Daoist priest. But, as mentioned earlier, this letter does not quite seem a coherent composition. We have one more letter of Lu Zhaolin’s, also written to Luoyang, also evidently from about the same time, “Letter to Various Worthies at Court” (Yu zai chao zhu xian shu 與在朝諸賢書).54 The title that the letter currently bears is obviously not original, for, as we shall see, it was sent to other officials in the surrounding area, not only those serving at court. In this missive, Lu is asking not for drugs nor for funding but rather simply for poems, so that he might begin an exchange of verse writings. The opening section of this letter is missing. The fragment that remains begins with Lu citing examples of men of stature who condescended previously to associate with those of lesser standing. The analogy between these ancient worthies and those now at court and between the inferiors of the past and Lu himself is clear enough. It is then made explicit when Lu refers to himself as a “lowly official” who is secluded in sickness on his mountain. Two more historical analogies follow, capped with a final plea 54  Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu 7.385–88; Lu Zhaolin ji jianzhu 7.411–14; Lu Zhaolin ji biannian jianzhu 7.432–35; Wenyuan yinghua 691.9b; Quan Tang wen 266.9a/b.

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for the Luoyang courtiers to distribute their “gold and jade” to his mountain valley. There is no way to tell whether this letter was sent before or after the letters we have already examined. But the sequence hardly matters. Here we have Lu Zhaolin, physically disabled and confined as he is, requesting what is most essential intellectually for a man of letters—active communication with those who also love the craft of writing. This also gives us some insight into the social function and importance of poetry exchanges in the early Tang, not only on shared occasions but by messenger and from a distance. In times past, though Zhang Zifang held the honor of grand tutor, he himself spread [lacuna]55 toward the recluses of South Mountain;56 though Gongsun Hong occupied the position of chief minister, he even louted low to Scholar Dongfang.57 Though Bojie was deceased, Kong Wenju invited an old soldier to sit knee-to-knee with him;58 though Fanghui was still alive, Wang Xizhi deigned to converse with a churlish slave.59 Goodly historians have recorded this, and worthies of high character do not consider such behavior an embarrassment.

55  The lacuna indicated by Wenyuan yinghua is obviously correct, as a word is needed here for the sake of balance with the parallel passage regarding Gongsun Hong. 56  Zifang was the byname of Zhang Liang 張良 (d. 187 BCE), one of the key figures supporting Liu Bang 劉邦 in the establishment of the Han dynasty. The reference here is to the four hermits of the Zhongnan 終南 mountains (the second character here used by Lu as short-hand, for the sake of parallelism) whom Zhang Liang coaxed to court in 195 BCE. See Shi ji 55.2045–47. Zhang’s position at the time was actually that of junior tutor to the crown prince (taizi shaofu 太子少傅), but the title is abbreviated here, again for the sake of parallelism. 57  Gongsun Hong was considered a paragon of Confucian virtues and was particularly influential during the reign of Han Wudi 漢武帝 (r. 141–87 BCE), being made chief minister in 124 BC when he was in his mid-seventies. The incident referred to here, of his humbling himself to the eccentric scholar Dongfang Shuo 東方朔 (ca. 161–ca. 89 BCE) does not appear in any of the extant records pertaining to either of the men. 58  Bojie was the byname of the famous scholar Cai Yong 蔡邕 (133–192?), as Wenju was the byname of the equally respected Kong Rong 孔融 (153–208). The two had a long and close friendship. After Cai Yong died, Kong sometimes invited an old warrior who resembled Cai to drink with him, explaining that “Though I am without my dear old friend, here at least is his copy” 雖無老成人,且有典形. See Hou Han shu 70.2277. 59  Fanghui was the byname of Chi Yin 郗愔 (313–384) who was a relative by marriage and friend of the scholar and famous calligrapher Wang Xizhi (309–ca. 365). The latter once praised one of Chi Yin’s servants with whom he had a discussion about literature. See Shishuo xinyu jiaojian 9/29 (282–83); Mather, 275.

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In olden days, whether in court or countryside, did one ever abandon words because of the [status of the] man?60 Still less should it be so, when pertaining to a lowly official embracing his affliction on East Mountain, uninvolved with affairs of the present day.61 What harm could it do the members of any cohort for him to be provided with works to sing and respond in kind?62 Yanzhou and Ziqi kept time on their own upon hearing the tune: one, yearning still for him whose corpse was laid in a red-leaved dale, slipped off his priceless sword by the side of a gravemound;63 the other, with bones covered by the yellow dust, brought an end to his friend’s precious zither here in the human world.64 Given these examples, is it not a fine act of a time of highest peace to relinquish gold and cast aside jade in a mountain valley?65 The Master of Intense Distress here makes this plain.66 60  Lunyu 15.22: “The junzi does not promote a man because of his words; and does not, because of the man, abandon words” 君子不以言舉人,不以人廢言. 61  East Mountain is, as we have seen, before East Dragon-gate Mountain. Coupled with the following reference to being uninvolved with affairs of the time, it cannot help but recall the famous reclusion of Xie An 謝安 (320–385) in the “eastern mountains” of Guiji 會稽, before he came out to have a memorable official career. 62  Lit., “to sing and harmonize with,” i.e., poems exchanged using the same rhyme categories. However, this probably overspecifies, for the sake of rhetoric; Lu is just seeking reciprocity. 63  This first description refers to “Yanzhou,” another name for Ji Zha, of n. 47 above. On a diplomatic mission to the north, he stopped en route at the territory of the Lord of Xu 徐君. The latter admired Ji Zha’s sword but did not venture to speak of it. Ji Zha recognized this but had to take it with him on his mission. When later he returned through Xu, he found that the Lord of Xu had died. Ji Zha then hung his sword on a tree by the lord’s tomb, explaining that he had already promised it to him in his heart and could not withhold it even after death. 64  This second description is of Zhong Ziqi 鍾子期, friend of the famous zither-player Boya 伯牙. Only Zhong Ziqi could immediately understand upon hearing the full meaning of Boya’s music, and Boya knew and appreciated this. When Zhong Ziqi died, Boya broke his zither and cut its strings, for now there was none who truly “understood the tune” (zhi yin 知音). See Lüshi chunqiu jishi 14.6a. The first phrase of Lu’s sentence characterizes both Zhong Ziqi and Ji Zha as individuals who can accord internally with the emotions of their friends. 65  Cf. Baopuzi waipian jiaojian 2: 38.213: “Those of higher wisdom do not prize goods that are hard to come by, therefore Tang (Yao) and Yu (Shun) relinquished gold and cast aside jade discs” 上智不貴難得之財,鼓唐[堯]虞[舜]損金而抵璧. 66  Bai 白 in pre- or postscripts can usually best be translated simply as “[N] lets you know,” as noted by Antje Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 77–78, in her explanation of numer-

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昔張子房處太傅之尊,自疏□於南山隱。公孫弘居丞相之位,亦 伏地於東方生。伯喈已亡,孔文舉將老兵而造膝。方回尚在,王 羲之就傖奴而共談。良史書之,高賢不以為累。自古朝野,曷 常以人廢言。況下官抱疹東山,不干時事,借人唱和,何損于 朋黨。延州、子期聞音竊抃,猶冀身膏丹壑,脫寶劍於山阿;骨 掩黃塵,罷瑤琴於天下。則損金抵玉於山谷者,非太平之美事 乎。幽憂子白。 In the context of the letter, the gold and jade requested here are not literal but metaphorical: the terms refer, as notably in Liu Xie’s 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 522) Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍, to beautiful and resonant writings.67 Of course this letter is, as much as anything, a self-advertisement. It is Lu’s goal to impress the recipients with his skill and scholarship, to show his potential correspondents that he is the kind of person with whom it would be worthwhile to exchange poems. Now Lu Zhaolin is not seeking playmates with whom to pass the time. We need to remember that during the early Tang, as for several centuries previously, the sharing of poems at banquets and on outings was a central activity of the literati. Without opportunity for this, a man of letters would soon feel bereft. In this light this is the most heart-wrenching of Lu’s three letters, seeking fundamentally just for companionship, of the only kind he can now hope for that will allow him to exercise the best of his remaining abilities—the mutual creation and appreciation of composing verse. As it happens, there is preserved in Lu’s extant works a poem that has all the signs of having been composed in response to one sent him from a penpal, precisely as requested in this letter. With this we may see exactly how the creative reality of this verse exchange worked. The poem to which Lu’s was replying came from the magistrate of nearby Wen district 溫縣 (present-day Mengxian 孟縣, about twenty miles northwest of Luoyang). We do not have the poem sent to Lu by this unnamed magistrate, but we know from Lu himself that it was on the topic of the wildgoose (yan 雁). Lu Zhaolin’s poem answers by taking up the same topic but changes it slightly, to “A Wildgoose Lost from Its Flock” (Shi qun yan 失群雁), the unflocked bird of course standing for Lu

ous common epistolary structures and phrases. But here I cannot help thinking that the literal image of “making plain” is active for Lu, and have so rendered it. 67  See, for instance, Wenxin diaolong yizheng 5.168 referring to Qu Yuan 屈原, or (paired) to Zhang Heng 張衡 (78–139) and Cai Yong.

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himself.68 The use of a particular bird to represent metaphorically a poet’s situation was a familiar maneuver long before the seventh century, and Lu himself employs it in several other poems. Given the literary values traditionally attached to the wildgoose, we can be sure that the magistrate’s poem used the figure of the bird to convey his dissatisfaction at not being placed at court, in a more desirable and congenial position. In a brief preface Lu Zhaolin explains the immediate circumstances of his own poem: The magistrate69 of Wen district has condescended to favor me with his poem on “The Wildgoose.” I regard both the court gentleman of former times who went out to govern an area of a hundred li70 and he who today has the ink-black ribbon71 and enters the court in consonance with its thousand officials to have duties placing them in the “ranks of wildgeese,”72 with nothing worth complaining about. But when it comes to being laid up impotently in the barren cliffs, this can be taken as the sad plight of one who is indeed “lost from the flock.” Now as I have some time to spare when couched on a pillow, I answer him with this composition.73 溫縣明府以雁詩垂示。余以為古之郎官出宰百里,今之墨綬入 應千官, 事止雁行,未宜傷歎。至如羸臥空巖者,乃可為失群 慟耳。聊因伏枕多暇,以斯文應之。 The poem itself, in twenty-four heptametric lines comprising six stanzas of varying length, is replete with historical allusions to birds used metaphorically in different contexts. Those relating to the magistrate have a positive implication, meant to show that there is ample precedent proving he will be advanced to court and need not lament his current situation as a district magistrate. This 68  “Shi qun yan, bing xu,” Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu 2.69–73; Lu Zhaolin ji jianzhu 2.76–80; Lu Zhaolin ji biannian jianzhu 2.102–6; Wenyuan yinghua 328.9b–10a. 69  Lit., “splendid repositor” 明府 (mingfu), a common, informal designation for a district magistrate (縣令 xianling) during the Tang. 70  An “area of a hundred li” typically refers to a district (xian). 71  Tang district magistrates were given a seal of bronze and an ink-black ribbon of office to hang it from. 72  From early times court officials have commonly been imaged as birds drawn up in hierarchical formation. 73  Perhaps it is worth noting that despite the recently popular vogue of translating the term siwen 斯文 as “this culture of ours,” it most often in medieval times meant simply “this [specific] composition,” or “writings of this sort,” as here; also in Wang Xizhi’s famous preface to the poems composed at Lanting, and in many other instances.

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situation is placed in contrast to Lu’s, also described by means of several apt allusions, which is portrayed as that of a now flightless bird who is all on its own. The poem ends with this plaintive couplet: 願君弄影鳳凰池 時憶籠中摧折羽

I pray that you milord, when playing with your shadow by the Phoenix Pond, May sometime remember the one with broken wings still in a cage.

The Phoenix Pond is a medieval kenning for the Imperial Secretariat (zhongshusheng 中書省), one of the three highest bureaus of government. In other words, Lu Zhaolin expects his correspondent to be raised in future to a high official post and is asking not to be forgotten by him when this comes to pass. Now, one understands how misery, especially physical pain, often curls into itself with relentless constriction. And while a reader can admire in this poem the breadth of Lu’s scholarly command of literature and history (a hallmark of all his poetry), we can imagine that it might also be difficult to keep up an exchange of verses if his focus always spirals back to his own situation this way. This, however, is itself a reminder that we are dealing here not with literature as just an intellectual pastime but with literature that is deeply embedded in, or—to reverse the image—ineluctably growing out of life itself. The exchange of poems with the Wenxian magistrate also suggests an answer to one of the questions raised earlier, namely whether Lu’s letters of request were single copies passed from hand to hand or were sent out in multiple copies. At least in this case the latter seems more probable, for it is hard to imagine that a lone manuscript seeking verse correspondence would have been circulated to surrounding counties on the initiative of its original recipients in Luoyang. Rather, it seems likely that Lu would have produced at least a few copies and sent them himself to different destinations.



The three letters we have examined give us enough of a view into Lu Zhaolin’s personal circumstances and desires to want keenly to read more. Unfortunately, this is all there is. We know that the elixir, if he was able to gather the ingredients to make it, was not successful. We also know that he moved, probably in 682, even farther from society, to Mount Juci 具茨山 in the valley of the Ying River 穎水, some thirty miles southeast of Luoyang. The final flowering, or one might say, fatal culmination, of his poetry is represented in the two sao-style

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writings, “Five Grievings” (Wu bei 五悲)74 and “Text for Release from Illness” (Shi ji wen 釋疾文)75 that he composed near the very end of his life. These exhaustingly long, multi-part compositions express his yearning backward looks and his present pleas and torments in a manner unlike anything else in medieval literature. Ultimately, the pain and the irreversible loss of the life he once knew were too much to bear, and he drowned himself in the Ying River. Conditioned as we now are in a postmodern age to disbelieve sincerity and see performance in its stead, we may wish to question how authentic are the statements and emotions expressed in these letters. It is true that to some degree every writer constructs a persona in everything he or she writes, indeed in every choice made among synonyms or among various syntactic arrangements. But this is mere tautology: we always want to express ourselves as the particular person we wish our reader to see. In Lu Zhaolin’s case, there is no question that during the last decade of his life when illness held him increasingly in its grip, he came to identify himself with pain and misery and created a persona to represent it. Even his adoption of the sobriquet “Master of Intense Distress” says as much. Rather than casting doubt on the authenticity of the person behind his letters, this instead fortifies a sense of the author’s individual consistency. While the letters obviously were written with great care and concern to effect a desired appreciation and response, they are just as obviously not just literary pastimes. The circumstances and emotions that prompt them are far from hidden, hardly feigned. Lu Zhaolin’s letters may also suggest to us something about the fluidity of epistolary culture in the Tang. Note that these letters follow none of the formulas recommended in medieval shuyi 書儀, the manuals of “epistolary etiquette” that have attracted a certain amount of scholarly attention in recent years. The particular letters we have examined may be an extreme case, as were Lu Zhaolin’s personal circumstances. But judging from my reading of Tang letters written throughout the dynasty’s three hundred years, they are far from 74  It may be of interest to remark, since we have noted the references to Buddhism in the second of our letters, that the “griefs” told of in this poem, which have much to do with memories both good and bad, are finally resolved in the understanding of bei 悲 in its Buddhist sense, as “compassion.” 75  This work reads very much like a valedictory composition, complete with dark omens and death wishes. Some scholars regard it as Lu’s “suicide note” (a prodigiously long one, if so), similar to the traditional view of “Huai sha” 懷沙 as being Qu Yuan’s farewell composition. This cannot be proved, but it has some likelihood. Note that Lu refers to the “Huai sha” poem in the preface to this composition.

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unique in their structural and stylistic variance from the forms promoted in the manuals.76 Good writers do not need, and will not follow, prescriptions laid down by others or meant for writers in general. It is primarily those who have less confidence in their own abilities and little of original interest to say, who make up the audience of such works. To say this another way, the manuals are chiefly compiled either for novice or mediocre writers. We should therefore be careful not to over-interpret these works, nor to make too much of them outside their limits as beginners’ guidebooks. They serve a certain purpose for particular ritualized or common occasions and for hesitant writers. But they are hardly guides to the actual practice of letter writing among the educated elite. Lu Zhaolin, for one, speaks to us now, as he did to his contemporaries, in his own quite inimitable tone and style. And is not the experience of such an intense encounter with a lived individual reality one of the chief reasons, after all, that we still look into and value texts from former times? Bibliography Bao Canjun ji zhu 飽參軍集注. Edited by Qian Zhonglian 錢仲聯. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980. Baopuzi waipian jiaojian 抱朴子外篇校箋. Edited by Yang Mingzhao 楊明照. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991. Dadong lianzhen baojing xiufu lingsha miaojue 大洞鍊真寶經修伏靈砂妙訣. HY 889. Ge Xiaoyin 葛曉音. “Guanyu Lu Zhaolin shengping de ruogan wenti” 關於盧照鄰生 平的若干問題. Wenxue yichan 1989.6; rpt. in idem, Shiguo gaochao yu sheng-Tang wenhua 詩國高潮與盛唐文化, 15–25. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1998. Hou Han shu 後漢書. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965. Hucker, Charles O. Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985. Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Knechtges, David R. “Luo Binwang’s Defense of a Jilted Lady: ‘Amorous Feelings: On Behalf of Miss Guo Sent to Lu Zhaolin.’” In Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music: Essays in Honor of Wilt Idema, ed. Maghiel van Creevel et al., 45–57. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Kroll, Paul W. “The Memories of Lu Chao-lin.” JAOS 109 (1989): 581–92.

76  The “circular” or “open letter” quality of these communications may also have something to do with their exceptionality.

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———. “Tamed Kite and Stranded Fish: Interference and Apology in Lu Chao-lin’s fu.” T’ang Studies 15–16 (1997–98): 41–78. ———. “The Representation of Mantic Arts in the High Culture of Medieval China.” In Fate and Prognostication in Chinese and European Traditions, ed. Michael Lackner. Leiden: Brill, 2015 (forthcoming). Lu Zhaolin ji biannian jianzhu 盧照鄰集編年箋注. Edited by Ren Guoxu 任國緒. Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1989. Lu Zhaolin ji jiaozhu 盧照鄰集校注. Edited by Li Yunyi 李雲逸. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998. Lu Zhaolin ji jianzhu 盧照鄰集箋注. Edited by Zhu Shangshu 祝尚書. 1994; rev. edn. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2011. Lu Zhaolin ji, Yang Jiong ji. Edited by Xu Mingxia 徐明霞. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980. Lüshi chunqiu jishi 呂氏春秋稽釋. Edited by Xu Weiyu 徐維遹. 1935; rpt. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985. Luo Xiangfa 駱祥發. Chu-Tang sijie yanjiu 初唐四杰研究. Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1993. Luoyangshi di’er wenwu gongzuodui 洛陽第二文物工作隊. “Luoyang Tang Lu Zhaoji mu fajue jianbao” 洛陽唐盧照己墓發掘簡報. Wenwu 2007.6: 4–8. Mather, Richard B., trans. Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World, 2nd edn. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002. Needham, Joseph, et al. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, part 4: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Apparatus, Theories and Gifts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Owen, Stephen. The Poetry of the Early T’ang. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. ———. “Deadwood: The Barren Tree from from Yü Hsin to Han Yü.” CLEAR 1.2 (1979): 157–79. Quan Tang wen 全唐文. 1814 edn.; rpt. Taipei: Datong shuju, 1979. Richter, Antje. “Beyond Calligraphy: Reading Wang Xizhi’s Letters.” TP 96 (2010): 370–407. ———. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Shi ji 史記. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972. Shishuo xinyu jiaojian 世說新語校箋. Edited by Xu Zhen’e 徐震堮. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984. Sivin, Nathan. Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. Tong Ling 童岭. “Sui Tang shidai ‘zhongceng xuewen shijie’ yanjiu xushuo: Yi Jingdu daxue (Kyōto daigaku) yingyin jiuchaoben ‘Wen xuan jizhu’ wei zhongxin” 隋唐時

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代「中層學問世界」研究序說:以京都大學影印舊鈔本《文選集注》為 中心. Gudian wenxian yanjiu 古典文獻研究 14 (June 2011): 88–144. Wenxin diaolong yizheng 文心雕龍義證. Edited by Zhan Ying 詹锳. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989. Wenyuan yinghua 文苑英華. 1567 edn.; rpt. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1966. Xin Tang shu 新唐書. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Xunzi jijie 荀子集解. Edited by Wang Xianqian 王先謙 (1842–1918). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988. Zhuangzi jishi 莊子集釋. Edited by Guo Qingfan 郭慶藩 (1844–1896). 1961; rpt. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989.

chapter 23

She Association Circulars from Dunhuang* Imre Galambos The discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts in a sealed off cave at the beginning of the twentieth century provided scholars with an unprecedented amount of first-hand material for the study of China’s past. Although the overall majority of the manuscripts were copies of Buddhist scriptures, the library cave also yielded a significant number of other types of texts, including a sizeable body of administrative and economic documents, which have become a major source for the study of social and financial conditions during the TangSong period. Among these documents are numerous texts related to local she 社 associations commonly referred to by modern researchers today as sheyi wenshu 社邑文書, or she association documents. Among these texts is a subgroup of documents called shesi zhuantie 社司轉帖, or she association circulars. The term shesi zhuantie generally appears at the beginning of the circulars and thus seems to represent their contemporary designation. The circulars represent a utilitarian genre of letters which were written to and circulated among members of she associations, informing them about the place and time of an upcoming meeting, the agenda, the contributions they were supposed to bring with them, and the penalties for late arrival or nonattendance. The text of these circulars was relatively stable and most examples follow the same formulaic wording; divergences are minor and in many cases only the names, times and locations vary. The circulars date from the ninth to tenth centuries and mostly appear on coarse paper, often on the verso of other texts. Their other interesting feature is that many of them are written in an untrained hand, with clumsy calligraphy and copious mistakes. In several cases the vertical lines are read in reversed direction, going from left to right. Taken by themselves, cases of such reversed writing may be considered insignificant, but the presence of an entire group of such examples from the mid* The first version of this paper was written while I was a Petra Kappert fellow at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg in the summer of 2012; I am very grateful for the Centre’s financial support and the untiring help of its staff. I am also grateful for the participants of the “Letters and Epistolary Culture in China” workshop in August 2012 at the University of Colorado, Boulder for their valuable input, as well as for the comments provided by the subsequent anonymous reviewers.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_025

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ninth to the end of the tenth centuries in the Dunhuang corpus implies that we are dealing with a pattern that may be traced back to specific circumstances. There is evidence that some of the surviving circulars represent the actual letters used to inform members of the she, and as such they are contemporary witnesses to this highly restricted domain of epistolary culture. They were worded by the management of the she and then passed around among the members, presumably through personal contact. In this sense they were never “mailed” but may have been delivered through messengers. The circular that made a full round was eventually returned to the management and the fact that some of them came down to us suggests that even though they had served their purpose of calling the members together for a meeting, they were preserved or filed. Many of the extant examples of these circulars are, however, fragmentary or appear in conjunction with texts commonly used by students to learn to write, which indicates that these were not original exemplars of actual circulars but copies used to practice writing. The inclusion of these circulars in the range of texts used for the acquisition of literacy illustrates how epistolary texts could be used in a completely different setting long after they had served their primary purpose of delivering a message to its recipients. In fact, their ultimate survival was most likely the result of this secondary function, and many similar documents and letters that were not “recycled” in such a way perished. 1

She Associations in Dunhuang

Although she associations were known in other parts of China in different times in history, the related documents that appear among the Dunhuang manuscripts date to a specific period, i.e. 850–1000, and are quite uniform and formulaic across different associations, which sets them apart from other associations in China’s past.1 Even documents and circulars written decades apart essentially maintain the same wording, pointing to a common origin and a shared tradition. Accordingly, based on the dozens of she-related documents that survived in Dunhuang, we can reconstruct the main characteristics of these associations. The manuscripts tell us that she associations in Dunhuang were governed by the Three Officers (sanguan 三官), who comprised the President

1  For a careful study of the she as village associations in South China during the pre-modern period, see McDermott, The Making of a New Rural Order in South China.

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(shezhang 社長), the Manager (sheguan 社官) and the Secretary (lushi 錄事). In some cases an officer bearing the title Elder (shelao 社老) is also identified. As far as we know, the she in Dunhuang did not have names. Even if they had a charter that laid down the rules and principles of association, and thus made the she function as a legal entity, they seemed to have no names to distinguish them from other she. The circulars dispatched by the management were only sent to members of that particular she and thus there was no need to specify which association was meant—perhaps it was the list of recipients that identified the she. Instead, the circulars from Dunhuang often indicate the type of people who joined into a she (e.g. irrigation channel managers) and thus distinguish the different types of associations. When a she needed to be identified unambiguously, it could be referred to by naming one of its officers. For example, manuscript Dx.2149 contains the list of people owing firewood, and the list includes “Eighty-two people of the she of Gao Zhu’er” 高住兒社八十 二人, where Gao Zhu’er is presumably the President (shezhang) or one of the other officers. In principle, circulars had a list of names at the end and members appended a mark below their name to indicate that they had received and read the notice. In reality, however, most of the surviving circulars do not have name lists, most likely because they are not originals but copies made for the sake of practicing writing. Still, many of these copies also include a list of members and thus can help us understand the demographics behind the associations. They show, for example, that she associations in Dunhuang consisted of ordinary people, rather than high-ranking officials. We can also see that in Dunhuang the she consisted of urban residents who lived within the city limits, rather than in the villages around it. It is possible that the she were formed by people living in proximity of one another, and thus in some cases the she may have functioned as a sort of neighborhood union. While a large number of circulars and other she-related documents survive, these are minimal when compared to the total population of Dunhuang at the time, especially if we consider that the documents stretch over a period of at least five generations. Obviously, the fact that the majority of local population does not appear in these documents does not prove that they were not involved in she associations. It is probable that the majority of the documents were simply lost, and that only a fraction of them came to be preserved for reasons that are most likely external to the documents themselves, such as the practice of copying them as a writing exercise or that they could be used as scrap paper for conserving manuscript scrolls. But it is hard to say what portion of the population participated in she associations and how common they were. What is clear, however, is that in most cases the

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associations comprised male members from among the general population, that is, ordinary people.2 Occasionally we find monastic names among the members but in general the associations consisted of secular residents. In rare cases all members of a she are clergy. For example, the list of names at the end of an association circular in manuscript Or.8210/S.5139 includes names of Buddhist monks with titles such as sengzheng 僧政, falü 法律, dusi falü 都司法律, laosu 老宿, shangzuo 上座, duli 闍梨, sizhu 寺主 and chanshi 禪師.3 Because the list enumerates the top clergy in Dunhuang, these individuals obviously belonged to different monasteries and were not the type of ordinary residents we see in most circulars. In addition, a small number of documents relate to female associations and—beside the list of members—this is usually also specified in the title. For example, the bylaws of an association in manuscript Or.8210/S.527 begin with the following words: On the 3rd day of the 1st month of the 6th ( jiwei) year of the Xiande reign (959), our women’s association, on the occasion of the coming of the new year, in an expression of each member’s good will, hereby re-establish the [association’s] bylaws. 顯德六年己未歲正月三日,女人社因茲新歲初來,各發好意, 再立條件。 According to the list of founding members at the end of the document, the Manager (sheguan) was a nun, whereas the rest were secular members, including the President and the Secretary. Interestingly, an Elder is also listed and her name is simply Nüzi 女子, that is, Woman. We assume that the she were voluntary organizations yet when a member wanted to join or leave a she, he had to submit an application and other members would pass a decision on the matter. For example, manuscript Or.8210/S.5698 contains a memorandum recording someone’s request to withdraw from a she: On the 19th day of the 3rd month of the guiyou year, three members of the she, namely, Luo Shennu and his sons Wenying and Yizi are experiencing difficulties due to poverty in their family. Shennu and his sons, having been unable to make the contributions on several occasions, ear2  It is also possible that the male names, at least in some cases, were listed as heads of households and that they thus represent entire households. 3  Hao Chunwen, “Cong chongtu dao jianrong,” 13.

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nestly requested the Three Officers and the other members to let their names be removed from the charter and relieve them from continuing to be members. The Three Officers brought the matter before the members who decided to relieve Shennu on account of his dreadful poverty. If, following his release, someone dies or is born in the family of Shennu and his sons, this will concern the she’s members no more.4 癸酉年三月十九日,社戶羅神奴及男文英、義子三人,為緣家 貧闕乏,種種不員。神奴等三人,數件追逐不得。伏訖(乞)​ 三官眾社賜以條內除名,放免寬閑。其三官知眾社商量,緣是 貧窮不濟,放卻神奴。寬免後,若神奴及男三人家內所有死 生,不關眾社。 This document is a record of a decision reached by the assembly, relieving Luo Shennu 羅神奴 and his sons from the membership of the association. Apparently, being part of a she could mean a significant burden for poorer members and they could fall behind on their membership contributions. It is not impossible that the application for withdrawal documented here was only nominally voluntary and Luo Shennu was forced to request this because of his falling behind with payments, thereby relieving the she from further obligations towards him and his family. As an alternative explanation, it is also possible that poverty was merely an excuse and Luo Shennu and his sons simply wanted to leave the she because they did not find paying the contributions worth the benefits anymore. Following the discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts, scholars early on noticed documents related to she as a promising group of material. The first person to study such documents in the French and British collections was the Japanese scholar Naba Toshisada 那波利貞 who published a long article in three installments in 1938.5 Later on, in his catalogue of the Chinese manuscripts of the Stein collection, Lionel Giles listed these texts together as “Club rules and circulars” under numbers 7572–624.6 Since he arranged his catalogue by manuscripts rather than texts, quite a few she association texts were listed under other categories, on the basis of another text on the manuscript. In Russia, Leonid I. Chuguevsky published a number of studies on these documents from the 1970s, primarily based on the Russian collection of Dunhuang

4  I am using my own translation from Rong Xinjiang, Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang, 298. 5  Naba Toshisada, “Tōdai no shayū ni tsukite,” Parts 1–3 and “Bukkyō shinkō ni motozukite,” Parts 1–2. 6  Giles, Descriptive Catalogue, 259–61.

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manuscripts.7 A major step in organizing and studying these documents was the publication of the Tōyō bunko series titled Tun-huang and Turfan Documents Concerning Social and Economic History, Volume IV of which was specifically devoted to “She Associations and Related Documents” (hereafter cited as She associations).8 Each text was presented with a complete transcription, notes, bibliography of secondary literature and—in a separate volume— facsimile reproduction from microfilm. In China, a collection of she-related texts was compiled by Ning Ke 寧可 and Hao Chunwen 郝春文 in 1997 with the title Dunhuang sheyi wenshu jijiao 敦煌社邑文書輯校 (hereafter cited as Sheyi wenshu).9 This collection, together with the Japanese She associations, represent the two main sources for studying documents related to lay associations in Dunhuang. Recently, Hao Chunwen published another related monograph with the title Zhonggu shiqi sheyi yanjiu 中古時期社邑研究, while Meng Xianshi 孟憲實 came out with a book called Dunhuang minjian jieshe yanjiu 敦煌民間結社研究.10 The group of documents related to she associations comprises a variety of different types of documents. In She associations, Tatsuro Yamamoto and Yoshikazu Dohi organize the surviving material into the following main categories: I. She association Bylaws II. Applications and Notices III. Circulars IV. Funeral and Festivity Ledgers V. Accounting Ledgers VI. Miscellaneous She-Related Documents VII. Prayer Books VIII. Documents from Turfan and Kucha Of these, VIII is in reality not a real document type but a category delineated on the basis of the geographical provenance of documents, which are grouped together because they are not from Dunhuang but other regions in Western 7  Chuguevsky, “Obshchinnye ob’edineniia”; “Nekotorye dannye”; “Mirskie ob’edineniia”; “Tsirkuliarnye predpisaniia.” 8  Yamamoto, She Associations. 9  Ning and Hao, Dunhuang sheyi wenshu jiaoji. Subsequently, Hao Chunwen published several articles in which he supplemented this collection with additional material. See Hao Chunwen, “Dunhuang sheyi wenshu jijiao buyi” (in three parts). 10  Hao Chunwen, Zhonggu shiqi sheyi yanjiu; Meng Xianshi, Dunhuang minjian jieshe yanjiu.

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China. But the other seven categories show how diverse the surviving collection of she-related documents is. In this essay I am interested in III “Circulars,” the most numerous of all the documents in the corpus, which is probably due to the fact that, unlike she association bylaws and other documents, they were issued relatively often, every time a meeting was held.11 Circulars are further divided by the editors of She associations into the following subcategories: a. She association circulars b. Circulars of kinship and brotherhood associations c. Circulars of irrigation channel managers d. Circulars of watchmen and soldiers e. Circulars of Buddhist temples and clergy f. Fragments Once again, the last item in the list is not an actual document type, thus in reality there are only five types of circulars (a–e). In this essay I will only look at the first group of she association circulars, which comprises the majority of all surviving circulars. This allows me to work with a clearly defined corpus that consists of a large group of documents with relatively stable formulaic content. 2

Structure of the Circulars

She association circulars are surprisingly consistent in their format and wording during the period they were in use in Dunhuang. While the earliest unambiguously dated example of such a document is from the 10th year of the Xiantong 咸通 reign (869), there are ones with ganzhi 干支 cyclical dates that may go back to the 850s, even though there is unavoidably a certain degree of ambiguity in relying on such dates. In addition, there also seem to be some undated circulars that go back to the Tibetan period, i.e. before 848. The later dates are given almost entirely according to the Earthly Branches (dizhi 地支) and thus their dating is also quite problematic.12 Yet none of the documents 11  In Sheyi wenshu, of the 396 she-related documents 218 are circulars, including 25 duplicates. Thus there are more circulars than all other she-related documents together. 12  Although it is generally assumed that the dates using only the Earthly Branches were specific to the period of Tibetan control over Dunhuang, this is more of an assumption than a firmly established fact. For convincing examples of how these dates may in fact come from after the Tibetan withdrawal, see Zhang Xiuqing, “Tubo dizhi jinian.”

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is dated after 992. Therefore, the corpus of shesi zhuantie can be dated to the mid-ninth through the late tenth century, which in Dunhuang chronology means the Guiyijun 歸義軍 (Return to Allegiance Army) period when the region functioned as a de facto independent Chinese kingdom ruled by military commissioners ( jiedushi 節度使) who claimed allegiance to the Tang or later dynasties in Central China. In order to observe the basic structure of these texts, let us look at the example of manuscript Or.8210/S.1453 held in the British Library. The manuscript is a 5 m long scroll with a complete copy of Kumārajīva’s translation of the Diamond sūtra (Jingang boreboluomi jing 金剛般若波羅蜜經, T08.235).13 The circular is on the verso of the scroll, towards its middle part, on the fifth sheet of paper.14 Apart from the circular, the verso of this relatively long scroll is largely empty, with only a few one or two-line fragments of texts written in the same hand as the circular. Interestingly, one of the fragments is the first six characters of a circular, possibly copied from the complete one on the same side of this manuscript. The circular is written in a semi-cursive hand, with rather faint ink; it is dated to 886, which is already a generation or so after the end of the Tibetan rule over the region. The text reads as follows:15 The office of the association: A circular. The aforementioned [office], on account of the annual meeting and feast of the she, requests all members to attend in response to this circular on the 10th day of the present moon and assemble at the gates of the Jiejia Hermitage. Those who do not arrive punctually will be fined one beaker ( jiao) of wine, and those who do not come at all will be fined half a jar (weng). The circular is to be transmitted rapidly from hand to hand to members, and must not be held up or delayed. From any member who delays the circular a fine will be exacted according to the fixed rules of the she. When it has completed its round, it should be returned to the office to be used [as evidence for declaring] the fines imposed.

13  Although the beginning of this scroll is torn, the text begins with the first line of the sūtra, which shows that only the title and perhaps the name of the translator is missing. 14  Medieval Chinese scrolls were glued together from rectangular sheets of paper into a long writing surface, which was then rolled up. Typically, in a standard Buddhist sūtra one sheet would hold 27–28 lines of text, with 17 characters per line. 15  The translation is a modified version of that seen in Giles, “Dated Chinese manuscripts in the Stein collection,” 1038. The transcription of the Chinese text is based on Yamamoto, She Associations, 26.

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Dated the 10th day of the 2nd (bingwu) year of the Guangqi reign (886). Secretary Zhang Qi. Manager of the association: President of the association: Liang Zaisheng Zhang Bianbian Zhang Quan’er Liang Gougou Deng Zan[. . .] Wang Zaisheng Wang Henu Wang Xiangnu An Fuzhong Chen Xingsheng 社司  轉帖 右緣年支座社局席,幸請諸公等,帖至,並限今月十日,於節 加蘭若門前取(聚)。如右(有)於時不到者,罰酒壹角。全不到 者,罰半瓮。其帖速遞相分付,不得停帶(滯)。如帶(滯)帖者, 准條科罰。帖周,卻付本司,用告。  光啟二年丙午歲十日,錄(事)張欺。 社官梁再晟 社長張弁々 張犬兒 梁狗々 鄧贊□ 王再晟 王和奴 王像奴 安伯(福﹖)忠 陳興晟 On account of their formulaic nature, this sample circular is fairly representative of the corpus. Using this example as our point of departure, we can outline the structure of such documents the following way: 2.1

Title Line 社司   轉帖

The words shesi 社司 and zhuantie 轉帖 are in most cases written quite a bit apart. This implies that even though modern scholars refer to this type of document as shesi zhuantie, and in this they appear to follow contemporary terminology, in reality the two words were not read together but functioned as separate entities. As shesi is the association’s management or office, the whole title should probably be understood as “From the office of the association: A circular.” While the title line often occupies a line by itself, there are many cases when the main text begins on the same line, rather than on a new one, as it is also the case in this particular manuscript. 2.2

Announcement of the Meeting 右緣年支座社局席,幸請諸公等。帖至,並限今月十日,於節 加蘭若門前取。

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Written in a formulaic form, this part can be broken down further as follows: i. Announcement of the meeting and its agenda ii. Invitation to attend iii. Date and time iv. Place Although the announcement of the meeting and the agenda invariably come first, the invitation and the time and place of the meeting does not always follow one another in the same sequence. In most cases the body of the circular begin with the phrase you yuan 右緣, in which the word you (aforementioned < right, above) refers to office of the she mentioned just before, whereas yuan (reason) introduces the reason why the meeting was called together. As to the reason why the meetings were called together, the most common agenda in the circulars are the organization of the spring and autumn banquets, the celebration of Buddhist festivals or the arrangement of funerary donations. There are also cases when the proposed agenda is the “discussion of a trivial matter” 少事商量,16 which of course does not tell us what the meeting was about, although it is likely that members knew why they were being called together.17 Members were also commonly expected to bring contributions to the meeting, although our sample circular does not request this. In many cases the hour of the meeting is also specified. When this is not stated, as in this particular manuscript (Or.8210/S.1453), we have to assume that the meeting was held each time at a pre-determined time. The circular always announced a meeting held in the same month. In some cases the meeting was to be held on the same day as the date of the circular (e.g. Or.8210/S.1453, Pelliot chinois 5003). But there are also cases when the meeting is held a day or two, or even a week, after the date of the circular. Thus a circular on manuscript Or.8210/S.5631, written on the 14th day of the 1st month, calls the meeting for the 20th of the same month, and the six days between the two represent an entirely reasonable period of notice. Nevertheless, we may assume that the circular made its round among the she members relatively quickly, perhaps 16  Meng Xianshi counts fifteen circulars with this particular agenda. See “Lun Dunhuang minjian jieshe,” 74. 17  There is no evidence of the degree of extra-textual communication between members but since they lived in the vicinity of each other, and at times even belonged to the same family, it is probable that most of the communication happened verbally and through more ephemeral forms of writing. The surviving circulars and memoranda are merely administrative records the association had to preserve.

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within a single day, which was probably also facilitated by the fact that people of the same association either lived or worked in proximity to one another. Members were usually asked to convene in front of a temple’s entrance, outside of a city gate (e.g. Dongmen wai 東門外), by a bridge, or at the home of a host (zhuren 主人). In cases when they did not meet at someone’s home, we have to assume that they only gathered at the specified location and then went together to the place where the meeting was actually held. Late arrivals would have doubtless also known where to go, even if this was not stated in the text of the circular. 2.3

Stipulations for Late Arrival or Non-Attendance 如右於時不到者,罰酒壹角。全不到者,罰半瓮。

Late arrival and non-attendance were always separated and the fines were also different. Thus those who came late ( yu shi budao zhe 於時不到者) had to pay significantly less than those who did not come at all (quan budao zhe 全不到者). Another common variation of the first part of this formula is “to seize the last two persons who arrive late” 捉二人後到 and fine them for a jiao of wine.18 These stipulations appear to be necessary if we consider that most of the meetings were held at 5–7 am, and in at least one case, at 3–5 am (Or.8210/S.1159). The fines seem to be relatively minor in comparison with those at times imposed in circulars of irrigation channel managers, where late attendance could result in several strokes of the cane, and non-attendance in even heavier punishment. For example, in a circular dated to 984 (Pelliot chinois 5032), we read: Those who come late will be fined with seven strokes of the cane, those who are absent through the entire meeting, will be punished even heavier. 如有後到,決杖七下﹔ 全段不來,重有責罰。 According to a model association bylaws (Or.8210/S.5629), caning was also instituted for disobeying the Three Officers of the she: From now on, if a member of the association does not obey the stipulations of the Three Officers, he will be fined seventeen painful strokes with the cane. 18  This variation was also extremely common. See, e.g., manuscripts Pelliot chinois 2680 and 5032.

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自後若社人不聽三官條式者,痛杖十七。 The severity of fines do not seem to have a correlation with the agenda of the meeting but are based on the type of association. Presumably it was a matter of violating the association’s rules rather than how much damage or inconvenience late arrival or inattendance would cause. 2.4

Request to Distribute and Return the Circular 其帖速遞相分付,不得停滯。如滯帖者,准條科罰。帖周,卻 付本司。用告。

As far as we can determine, circulars were issued as single copies, which were requested to be transmitted speedily among the members. Thus there appears to have been no channel of transmission other than personal contact between members. Once again, a penalty was stipulated if someone failed to pass on the circular and held on to it (tingzhi 停滯). Such persons, if there were any, were to be fined in accordance with the regulations of the she. One circular (Or.8210/S.705) uses the phrase ni tie 匿帖 (to conceal the circular) instead of zhi tie 滯帖 (to detain the circular), which shows that such cases were also known to have happened.19 Once the circular has been read by all members on the list and thus completed its round (tie zhou 帖周), it was requested to be returned to the association’s office (si 司) that issued it. The phrase yong gao 用告 at the end of our sample is an abbreviation of the more common phrase yong ping gao fa 用憑 告罰, which means that the office will use the returned circular—in the translation of Giles—“as evidence for declaring the fines imposed.” 2.5

Date and Signature 光啟二年丙午歲十日,錄事張欺。

The circular was drafted by the Secretary of the association—in this case a person called Zhang Qi 張欺—and it is his name that appears at the end of the circular. He was one of the Three Officers along with the President and the Manager. In rare cases, the circular was signed by the Manager or the President instead of the Secretary. Sometimes after the name of the Secretary we also find the verb tie 帖, which in this place signifies that the circular was drafted 19  Meng Xianshi, “Lun Dunhuang minjian jieshe,” 79.

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and circulated by the Secretary. In terms of its format, the date and signature are similar to ordinary colophons seen on manuscripts from Dunhuang, as they appear on a separate line, indented. Moreover, as colophons habitually do, this distinct part of the circular contains the date and signature of the person responsible for creating the main text. Occasionally, if there is enough space in the last line, the date and signature may be written on the same line. Although in this case the date uses a reign mark and can thus be dated reliably, the majority of the dates in she association circulars employ the ganzhi system, which makes exact dating impossible because each combination can designate a range of years, sixty years apart from one another. For example, the recto of manuscript Or.8210/S.6461 contains fragments of circulars and the date 18th day of the jiaxu year 甲戌年十八日. Beside the fact that no month is indicated, the year jiaxu, within the general time period in question, can be 854, 914, or 974. Without further evidence there is no way of knowing which of these options was the actual year when this particular circular was written. In some cases, however, a dated document can help to date another document that shares the same handwriting or names of members. One such example is manuscript Pelliot chinois 3372 written in the year of renshen 壬申, which could signify 852, 912, or 972. Elsewhere on the same manuscript there is also a reference to a guiyou 癸酉 year, which is the following year (i.e. 853, 913, or 973). But some of the names from the list at the end of the circular, such as Fan Zaichang 氾再昌, Song Youchang 宋友長, Liang Yanhui 梁延會, An Chouzi 安醜子, appear in a circular on manuscript Or.8210/S.2894, which is also dated to a renshen year.20 While this does not help with narrowing down the time when the actual meeting took place, an additional colophon on the side, apparently written in the same hand, contains the date “28th day of the 1st month of the 5th (guiyou) year of the Kaibao reign” 開寶悟年癸酉正月 廿日, which corresponds to 972.21 Although the 5th year of Kaibao was not a guiyou but a renshen year, as the guiyou year came a year later, the use of the reign period helps us to ascertain the date for the renshen year in Pelliot chinois 3372 as 972 by linking the two manuscripts on the basis of names that appear in both.

20  In Or.8210/S.2894 the name An Chouzi 安醜子 is written as 安丑子 but considering that there are other people that appear in both manuscripts, we can be fairly certain that this is the same person. 21  Obviously, the phrase wu nian 悟年 is a mistake for wu nian 五年 (5th year). Similar trivial mistakes in writing dates were not uncommon in documents of this period.

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2.6 List of Members The main text of the circular is usually followed by a list of members who were supposed to read it and come to the meeting. The list typically begins with the sheguan, the Manager of the association in charge of daily administration. In some circulars the character zhi 知 is written next to most of the names, indicating that the person acknowledged reading the notice before passing it on. Those names in the same list that are not acknowledged in this manner apparently mean members who have not received the circular. In a circular in manuscript Pelliot chinois 5003, twelve names are marked with zhi 知, and three with bu zhi 不知, which suggests that both zhi and bu zhi were not added by the members themselves, who obviously could not have signed off the circular as “not notified” if they have not seen it. Instead, the acknowledgments of receipt or non-receipt was probably added by someone involved in the delivery of the circular, which is further supported by the fact that the ones on manuscript Pelliot chinois 5003 all appear in the same type of ink which is consistently fainter than the main text of the circular, and were possibly also written by one hand. On some membership lists we also see other marks besides the words zhi or bu zhi. A circular dated to 967 (Or.8210/S.5632), for example, has a long list of names and the majority of the names are marked with a circle, a black dot, a right-angled hook at the top right corner of the name, or a combination of these. Ning Ke and Hao Chunwen speculate that the black dot was placed by the members as acknowledgment of notification, whereas the circles were drawn by the management to mark whether the person came to the meeting and made a contribution.22 Yet most of the black dots seem to have been erased and then replaced with a circle, which is an indication that the status of some members was updated at some point, and thus they do not mark acknowledgment of notification but something that happened at the meeting (e.g. timely arrival or contribution). Most extant examples of she association circulars from Dunhuang, however, are not marked as having been received, which suggests that they may be copies rather than original documents. We should also point out that the list of members is often missing from the end of circulars, even in cases when there is clearly no physical damage to the manuscript. Once again, this points to them being copies of originals that did not survive. The above items represent the basic structure which she association circulars follow. There are occasional differences in the sequence of sections or subsections but other than that, the wording and format are remarkably stable. In fact, the formulaic text of the circulars was so obvious to all members that 22  Sheyi wenshu, 104.

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the message did not seem to suffer even when characters were omitted and some sentences were thereby rendered largely ungrammatical. This, in turn, is not a trivial point because she-related documents abound in omissions and orthographic mistakes. 3

Material Aspects of the Manuscripts and Their Implications

A number of scholars have used Dunhuang she association circulars for the study of particular aspects of medieval Chinese life, including the formation of lay associations, clan history, popular festivals, local geography, or even food. Nevertheless, in almost all cases they looked at them purely as texts, largely ignoring their physical appearance and codicological characteristics. In a way this is the negative side effect of having convenient punctuated transcriptions at one’s disposal; while such pre-digested anthologies may provide an easy access for a much wider readership, they often also obscure some peculiarities that would be immediately apparent when consulting the original manuscripts or high quality photographs.23 An examination of the codicological features of the circulars indeed reveals a number of interesting patterns which taken together cannot be considered random. One of the interesting patterns is that there is a large number of fragmentary circulars, many of which consist of only one or two lines, or even a few characters, often written one after another on the same manuscript. It seems as if someone began writing them and stopped after a few characters, only to begin writing again a bit further down. Because such mini-fragments cannot be considered actual examples of circulars, they are generally not included in the transcribed editions.24 Yet their relatively high frequency among the Dunhuang material certainly warrants a closer look. They are obviously too short to have been sent out to notify members. In most cases they appear on the verso of short Buddhist texts or copies of the Xiaojing 孝經, which is yet another indication that they never functioned as separate documents. Early on, scholars have realized that these, and some of the complete ones written in a markedly incompetent calligraphy, were merely writing exercises. In other words, these were never meant to be circulars that could be dispatched 23  Even though She Associations provides black and white photographs of the manuscripts in addition to the transcriptions, these are collected in a separate volume and are not always consulted by readers. 24  Pelliot chinois 3319V, e.g., has three fragments but only one of them, the longest, is recorded in Yamamoto, She Associations (p. 57).

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to members of a she but were simply copies created for the sake of practice. This understanding is corroborated by the fact that many such examples, fragmentary or not, appear on the verso of Xiaojing manuscripts. Once again, these circulars are often written in a very crude hand, which is in sharp contrast with the beautiful calligraphy seen, for example, on Tang dynasty official communications. Needless to say, if we assume that these unfinished scribbles represent writing exercises, we should also allow that some of the larger fragments or even complete copies were also written for the sake of exercise, rather than being original documents that were circulated among members of a she. So who were these students who learned to write by copying the circulars? Were they children or adults? Where did they study? Fortunately, there are a number of colophons that survive at the end of texts copied for the sake of practice. Although these colophons never appear to accompany copies of circulars, in many cases the handwriting of the colophon and the text it follows matches that used to write the circular on the same manuscript. The colophons tell us that the students were referring to themselves as xuelang 學郎 or xueshilang 學士郎 (with the middle shi written with a variety of homophonous characters), which reveals that they were all male students. Often they include the name of a monastery, indicating that their education was within the confines of that monastery.25 Yet their names are always secular. Accordingly, they were male secular students studying in a monastery in Dunhuang. Unfortunately, we learn nothing about the age and thus the question of whether they were children or adolescents remains open. Similarly, we do not know why they would use circulars as practice material; perhaps the answer to this question will become clear once we learn more about the social background of education. An even more striking pattern among the available circulars is that quite a few of them are written in a reversed direction, that is, in vertical columns going from left to right. While there are some cases in Chinese history when an inscription on bronze or stone is also written in this direction, these cases are extremely rare and are hundreds of years apart. As a general principle, the Chinese script, when used for writing running text rather than being part of a decorative design, always reads from left to right. In contrast with this rule, there are several dozens of texts from Dunhuang and Turfan where we see a right-to-left reading. For example, the verso of manuscript Or.8210/S.865

25  For the colophons written by the xuelang, see Li Zhengyu, “Dunhuang xuelang tiji jizhu”; Itō Mieko, “Tonkō no tsūzokushi ‘gakurōshi’ ni tsuite” and Tonkō monjo ni miru gakkō kyōiku.

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Figure 23.1

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Manuscript Or.8210/S.865V with four unfinished fragments of circulars written from left to right. Copyright The British Library.

(fig. 23.1) contains four unfinished fragments of she association circulars, all running from left to right. Interestingly, the first word of the body of these texts is you 右 (right) which is equivalent to the word “above” in English, referring to something stated before, in this case to the title, i.e. that the management has issued a notice. And while this makes perfect sense when the lines are read in the normal way from right to left, it completely loses its locative function as the referent is no longer on the right. Thus we have a mismatch between what the text says and how it is presented visually. Apart from the shorter fragments, there are also a number of larger ones or even complete circulars written in this anomalous direction. Of the 118 so-called “she association circulars” listed in She associations, at least 9 are written from left to right.26 It is difficult to give an exact count because some of the texts are extremely fragmentary or nearly invisible in the reproductions. The punctuated transcriptions in She associations do not say anything about the direction of the text, as all of the examples are typeset in the standard right-to-left direction. Thus one has to rely on the images, which, having been 26  These are the following manuscripts: Or.8210/S.329V (2 examples), Or.8210/S.6104, Or.8210/S.274, Or.8210/S.6614V, Or.8210/S.6461V, Or.8210/S.1386V, Pelliot chinois 3698V and 2439V.

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made from microfilms, are not always clear. Yet even these 9 examples make up nearly 8% of the total number in the anthology, which is a surprisingly high proportion, especially if we consider that left-to-right writing was almost non-existent in the Chinese tradition. There are only a few dozen examples of left-to-right writings among the tens of thousands of Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang, which would be an insignificant proportion in such a large corpus; yet all of these examples are dated to the period of 850–1000 and the fact that 8% of the circulars are written in this way cannot be a random coincidence. Moreover, many of the manuscripts contain writings in mixed directions, showing that even if a person wrote a circular from left to right on one or two occasions, he did not always write that way. For example, the verso of manuscript Or.8210/S.329 (fig. 23.2) contains three texts titled shesi zhuantie, one of them following the conventional form, whereas the other two run in the reverse direction. We should also mention that not only she association circulars could be written from left to right. There are also quite a few other texts, including colophons, contracts, or in one case even a fragment of the Qianziwen 千字文.27 Some of these manuscripts are dated and the dates run from the middle of the ninth to the end of the tenth century. These one and a half centuries in Dunhuang represented the Guiyijun period that began with the end of the Tibetan rule in 848. That dozens of examples of left to right writings emerge during this period but none before is a pattern that could clearly not be considered random. Instead, it had to be a manifestation of a changed social reality that began with the end of the Tibetan period.28 The rarity of such reversed direction in the Chinese tradition points to a foreign influence.29 During the Tang and Five Dynasties period, Dunhuang was a cosmopolitan city connecting China with Central Asia. Not only large numbers of foreign merchants, pilgrims and envoys passed through here as part of their journey along the Silk Road but many non-Chinese ethnicities lived in town on a permanent basis. This multilingual local culture is amply reflected 27  This fragment consists of one and a half lines on the verso of manuscript Or.8210/S.4747. 28  An interesting example of a Tibetan influence in a she association circular is manuscript Pelliot tibétain 1102, which is written in Chinese but has a list of goods contributed by the members on the verso, written in Tibetan. Takata Tokio has shown that the Tibetan text must have been written after the meeting took place and that it details the contributions of people, most of whom are also named in the Chinese circular. He dates this circular to the Tibetan period, i.e. prior to 848. See Gaotian Shixiong, “Zangwen sheyi wenshu.” 29  On such foreign influences, see Galambos, “Non-Chinese Influences in Medieval Chinese Manuscript Culture.”

she association circulars from dunhuang

Figure 23.2

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Manuscript Or.8210/S.329V with a circular running from left to right. Copyright The British Library.

in the Dunhuang manuscripts which comprised material written in a dozen and a half languages and scripts. In many cases manuscripts contain multilingual texts, attesting to the close interaction of various cultures and languages.30 Chinese and Tibetan manuscripts were the most numerous but there was also a significant body of texts and documents in Khotanese, Uighur, Sogdian, Sanskrit and other scripts. Of these, Uighur was written in vertical lines from left to right. Another possibility was the Sogdian script from which the Uighur script evolved—this could also be written in vertical columns from left to right, in addition to right to left horizontal lines. In fact, as Prof. Yutaka Yoshida demonstrated recently, this was done more commonly than hitherto assumed.31 Fortunately, the she association circulars commonly have a list of members at the end and an examination of the names gives us a clue as to the potential

30  On the multilingual nature of Dunhuang society, see Takata, “Multilingualism in Tun-huang.” 31  Yutaka Yoshida, “When Did Sogdians Begin to Write Vertically?”

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source of influence here. For example, Pelliot chinois 3319V has the following list of names at the end of a circular: 石定信 右全 石丑子 石定奴 福延 福全 保昌 張丑子 李千子 李定信 Of these, Shi 石 is one of the common Sogdian surnames used in China. Of the so-called Nine Zhaowu Clans 昭武九姓 of Sogdian origin, Kang 康, Shi 史, An 安, Cao 曹, Shi 石, Mi 米 and He 何 are well attested among the Dunhuang manuscripts, including she association circulars. In the above example, of the ten people listed, the three with the surname Shi 石 are certainly Sogdian, plus probably the second person in whose surname the character 右 is most likely a crudely written 石. Thus of the ten names in this list at least four appear to be Sogdian, which is a relatively high percentage of non-Chinese members in contrast with the general population of Dunhuang.32 Although modern scholars generally rely on surnames to establish the Sogdian identity of people mentioned in the manuscripts, there are also individuals with authentic Chinese surnames whose personal names match those that appear together with Sogdian surnames.33 In the above example (Pelliot chinois 3319V), the given names Dingxin 定信 and Chouzi 丑子 appear both after the Sogdian surname Shi and the Chinese surnames Zhang 張 and Li 李, which cannot be explained in such a small group of people as a coincidence. Perhaps these members all belonged to the same extended family with both Chinese and Sogdian ties. In many cases we see Sogdians among the officers of she associations. Thus one of the several circulars in manuscript Or.8210/S.2894, the Manager (sheguan) has the surname Cao 曹 and the President (shezhang), the surname An 安, both of Sogdian descent.34 The list of members contains several more persons with Sogdian surnames: An Chouzi 安丑子, Cao Xingding 曹興定, Cao Yuanying 曹願盈, and An Yanzi 安延子. In addition, the meeting con-

32  On the question of Sogdians in Dunhuang during the 9th and 10th centuries, see de La Vaissière, Sogdian Traders; Rong Xinjiang, “Dunhuang Guiyijun Cao shi tongzhizhe”; Zheng Binglin, “Wan Tang Wudai Dunhuang diqu”; Lu Qingfu and Zheng Binglin, “Tang mo Wudai Dunhuang de she yu Suteren juluo.” 33  For a fascinating discussion of foreign names in Chinese, including those of Iranian origin, see Sanping Chen, Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages, 112–18. 34  Yet another example on the same manuscript is a circular actually written from left to right, where one of the officers is identified as Manager An 安社官.

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vened in this document was to be held in the “tavern of the Cao family” 曹家 酒店, a reference to a Sogdian-run establishment.35 Thus Sogdians often appear among the members of she associations in Dunhuang, along with Chinese members. In view of this, the left to right direction of writing that we see in the circulars from about 850 onward may be attributed to the influence of the Sogdian script which was also known to have been written in this manner. In fact, this codicological feature is yet another independent proof to the presence and influence of Sogdians in Dunhuang during the Guiyijun period.36 At the same time, most researchers in this context have emphasized the sinicization of the original Sogdians and preferred to talk about their “descendants” (Sute houyi 粟特後裔), claiming that in many aspects by the late Tang these people had become largely indistinguishable from the Chinese population.37 The circulars described in this essay, however, show that this sinicization may not have been as thorough as we normally assume and that some of these individuals may have also been literate in both Sogdian and Chinese. Their literacy in Chinese also meant that they could participate in Chinese manuscript culture and, among other things, employ traditional epistolary genres, including the association circulars.



The Dunhuang manuscripts, especially the documents related to economic and social history of the region, provide first-hand evidence of life and society in medieval China, much of which is not found in traditional sources. At the same time, the entire material comes from the northwestern periphery of the Chinese political and cultural sphere, where interaction with other peoples created a unique cosmopolitan environment both culturally and linguistically. Thus the material is unavoidably skewed and cannot be fully representative of Central China. Yet in many areas the lack of information in transmitted sources forces us to rely on these manuscripts when we attempt to reconstruct contemporary society. Within this body of first-hand material, the association circulars form a unique group of documents that shed light on the

35  For a discussion of other Sogdian localities in Dunhuang, see Zheng Binglin, “Wan Tang Wudai Dunhuang diqu de huxing jumin yu juluo.” 36  Back in 1965, when Ikeda On described the Sogdian settlements in the Dunhuang region, he believed that the descendants of the original settlers disappeared by the 8th c. See his “Hasseiki chūyō no okeru.” 37  See, e.g., Rong Xinjiang, “Dunhuang Guiyijun Cao shi tongzhizhe.”

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details of she associations in Dunhuang during the mid-ninth through the late tenth centuries. The circulars are very stable in terms of their form and content, and only the key data (e.g. names, the date, place and agenda of the meeting) varies. Consequently, they can be identified as a specific epistolary genre which had the pragmatic purpose of notifying members of an upcoming meeting. Whether they were sent by a designated messenger or passed along from one member to the other by the members themselves, they clearly had both a sender (i.e. the office) and recipients (i.e. the members). Although there was more than one recipient, the circulars were delivered to each recipient along with the message. In fact, the list of names at the end of a Dunhuang circular might be considered as one of the earliest surviving examples of an actual address, even if it only includes the recipients’ names. Whether the circular was delivered by a messenger or the members, everyone involved obviously knew the next recipient’s location and the name in itself would have functioned as the address. This brings up the question of how the circular was delivered. The clause warning against the detainment of the circular (zhi tie) suggests a scenario according to which members would have kept the circular for a limited amount of time before passing it on to others, perhaps by walking to the home of the next person on the list and handing the document over to him. But the zhi and bu zhi notes on Pelliot chinois 5003, written by someone other than the notified members may very well point to the involvement of a messenger who carried the circular from one recipient to another. Whether he would leave the circular with each member for some time and come back in a couple of hours to carry it to the next person on the list, or just showed it to members and pushed on immediately, is impossible to know. But if the circular was circulated by the association’s messenger, we may wonder whether it was seen at all by the recipients, since the messenger could have just as easily told them the limited amount of information contained therein orally. The fact that the acknowledgment of receipt is marked as zhi (notified) and bu zhi (not notified), rather than using a verb associated with reading or receiving a physical document—e.g. du 讀 (read), shou 受 (received)—may be an indication that the recipients did not always read the actual text of the circular but were notified by the messenger verbally. This, in turn, brings up the question whether we can assume that all she members were fully literate simply on the grounds that they are identified as recipients of a document. An argument against treating the circulars as letters could be made in view of the existence of the multitude of copies used as writing exercises, since these were obviously neither written with the aim of delivering a message

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to a recipient, nor ever sent out. In this sense, they simply functioned as yet another text used by school children to improve their literacy skills. Yet it is clear that even these copies were made from actual circulars that had been used in real life. Rather than being letter models (shuyi 書儀), which were also commonly copied in Dunhuang, the copies of circulars always contain actual data, such as the date, place and agenda of the meeting, and at times even the names of members and officials. Thus they are not model circulars but copies of actual documents that had once been written at a particular occasion and had presumably been delivered. It is highly unlikely that the students would have made up the elaborate list of names and other particulars of the circular for the sake of practicing how to write. Quite to the contrary, even the most crudely written circulars that survive among the Dunhuang manuscript appear to be copies of original letters sent out to members of a local she. Naturally, this is in line with how epistolary materials were used in the past and accounts at least partially for their survival. Bibliography Chen Peihong 陳培紅. “Dunhuang Cao shi zushu yu Cao shi Guiyijun zhengquan” 敦 煌曹氏族屬與曹氏歸義軍政權. Lishi yanjiu 1 (2001): 73–86. Chen, Sanping. Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Chuguevsky, Leonid I. “Obshchinnye ob’edineniia mirian pri buddhiiskikh monastyriakh v Dun’khuane” [Social associations of laymen in Buddhist monasteries in Dunhuang]. In Shestaia nauchnaia konferentsiia “Obshchestvo i gosudarstvo v Kitae”: Tezisy i doklady [Sixth Academic Conference “Society and the State in China”: Proceedings], 61–69. Moscow: RAN, 1976. ———. “Nekotorye dannye ob otnosheniiakh ob’edinenii mirian s mestnoi administratsiei v Dun’khuane” [Some facts concerning the relations of lay associations with local administration in Dunhuang]. Vos’maia nauchnaia konferentsiia “Obshchestvo i gosudarstvo v Kitae”: Tezisy i doklady [Eighth Academic Conference “Society and the State in China”: Proceedings], 98–102. Moscow: RAN, 1977. ———. “Mirskie ob’edineniia she pri buddhiiskikh monastyriakh v Dun’khuane” [The she lay associations in Buddhist monasteries in Dunhuang]. In Buddizm, gosudarstvo i obshchestvo v stranakh Tsentral’noi i Vostochnoi Azii v srednie veka: Sbornik stat’ei [Buddhism, the State and Society in Central and East Asia during the Medieval Period: A Collection of Studies], 63–97. Moscow: Nauka, 1982. ———. “Tsirkuliarnye predpisaniia v Dun’khuanskom fonde Rukopisnovo sobraniia Peterburgskovo filiala Instituta vostokovedeniia Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk”

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[Circulars in the Dunhuang collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences]. Peterburgskoie Vostokovedenie (St. Petersburg Journal of Oriental Studies) 8 (1996): 198–214. Galambos, Imre. “Non-Chinese Influences in Medieval Chinese Manuscript Culture.” In Frontiers and Boundaries: Encounters on China’s Margins, edited by Zsombor Rajkai and Ildikó Bellér-Hann, 71–86. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012. Gaotian Shixiong 高田時雄 [Takata Tokio]. “Zangwen sheyi wenshu ersan zhong” 藏 文社邑文書二三種. Dunhuang Tulufan yanjiu 敦煌吐鲁番研究 3 (1998): 183–90. Giles, Lionel. “Dated Chinese Manuscripts in the Stein Collection.” BSOAS 9 (1939): 1023–46. ———. Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese Manuscripts from Tunhuang in the British Museum. London: British Museum, 1957. Hao Chunwen 郝春文. “Dunhuang sheyi wenshu jijiao buyi (yi)” 《敦煌社邑文書輯 校》補遺(一). Shoudu shifan daxue xuebao (Shehui kexue ban) 129.4 (1999): 23–28. ———. “Dunhuang sheyi wenshu jijiao buyi (er) 《敦煌社邑文書輯校》 補遺(二). Shoudu shifan daxue xuebao (Shehui kexue ban) 133.2 (2000): 6–11. ———. “Dunhuang sheyi wenshu jijiao buyi (san) 《敦煌社邑文書輯校》補遺(三). Shoudu shifan daxue xuebao (Shehui kexue ban) 141.4 (2001): 27–33. ———. “Cong chongtu dao jianrong: Zhonggushiqi chuantong sheyi yu Fojiao de guanxi” 從衝突到兼容一中古時期傳統社邑與佛教的關係. Pumen xuebao 24.11 (2004): 1–64. ———. Zhonggu shiqi sheyi yanjiu 中古時期社邑研究. Taipei: Xinwenfeng, 2006. Ikeda On 池田温. “Hasseiki chūyō no okeru Tonkō no Sogudojin jūraku” 8 世紀中葉 における敦煌のソグド人聚落. Yūrashia bunka kenkyū ユ-ラシア文化研究 1 (1965): 49–92. Itō Mieko 伊藤美重子. “Tonkō no tsūzokushi ‘gakurōshi’ ni tsuite” 敦煌の通俗詩 「学郎詩」について. Ochanomizu joshi daigaku Chūgoku bungaku kaihō 4 (2007): 1–21. ———. Tonkō monjo ni miru gakkō kyōiku 敦煌文書にみる学校教育. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2008. Li Zhengyu 李正宇. “Dunhuang xuelang tiji jizhu” 敦煌學郎題記輯注. Dunhuangxue jikan 1 (1987): 26–40. Lu Qingfu 陸慶夫 and Zheng Binglin 鄭炳林, “Tang mo Wudai Dunhuang de she yu Suteren juluo” 唐末五代敦煌的社與粟特人聚落. In Dunhuang Guiyijun shi zhuanti yanjiu 敦煌歸義軍史專題研究, edited by Zheng Binglin 鄭炳林, 391–99. Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 2005. McDermott, Joseph P. The Making of a New Rural Order in South China: I. Village, Land and Lineage in Huizhou, 1000–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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Meng Xianshi 孟憲實. “Lun Dunhuang minjian jieshe neibu de zhuantie” 論敦煌民 間結社內部的轉帖. Guoxue xuekan 1 (2009): 71–83. ———. Dunhuang minjian jieshe yanjiu 敦煌民間結社研究. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2009. Naba Toshisada 那波利貞. “Tōdai no shayū ni tsukite” 唐代の社邑に就きて, Parts 1–3. Shirin 23 (1938) 2:15–71, 3:71–110, 4:93–157. ———. “Bukkyō shinkō no motozukite soshiki seraretaru chūban Tō-Godai jidai no shayū ni tsukite” 佛教信仰に基づきて組織せられたる中晩唐五代時代の社 邑に就きて, Part I. Shirin 24.3 (1939): 491–562. ———. “Bukkyō shinkō no motozukite soshiki seraretaru chūban Tō-Godai jidai no shayū ni tsukite,” Part II. Shirin 24.4 (1939): 743–84. Ning Ke 寧可 and Hao Chunwen. Dunhuang sheyi wenshu jijiao 敦煌社邑文書輯校. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1997. Rong Xinjiang 榮新江. “Dunhuang Guiyijun Cao shi tongzhizhe wei Sute houyi shuo” 敦煌歸義軍曹氏統治者為粟特後裔說. Lishi yanjiu 1 (2001): 65–72. ———. Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Tatsuro Yamamoto, Yoshikazu Dohi, and Yusaku Ishida. Tun-huang and Turfan Documents Concerning Social and Economic History; IV: She Associations and Related Documents. Tokyo: Tōyō bunko, 1989. de la Vaissière, Étienne. Sogdian Traders: A History. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Yoshida, Yutaka. “When Did the Sogdians Begin to Write Vertically?” Tokyo University Linguistic Papers (TULIP) 33 (2013): 375–94. Zhang Xiuqing 張秀清. “Tubo dizhi jinian yu Dunhuang sibu shu de duandai” 吐蕃地 支紀年與敦煌四部書的斷代. Zhonghua wenhua luntan 3 (2008): 12–15. Zheng Binglin. “Wan Tang Wudai Dunhuang diqu de huxing jumin yu juluo” 晚唐五 代敦煌地區的胡姓居民與聚落. In Suteren zai Zhongguo: Lishi, kaogu, yuyan dexin tansuo 粟特人在中國-歷史、考古、語言的新探索, edited by Rong Xinjiang et al., 178–90. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005.

chapter 24

Between Writing and Publishing Letters: Publishing a Letter about Book Proprietorship Suyoung Son This essay examines a 1706 letter from the renowned early Qing publisher Zhang Chao 張潮 (ca. 1650–1707) to a fellow publisher, Zhang Yongde 張庸德 (fl. 1706), in order to explore the nature of the letter medium during the letter-publishing boom in the seventeenth century. The letter in question was included in Zhang Chao’s voluminous letter collection Chidu oucun 尺牘 偶存 (Random preservations of letters), which was published as a companion volume to Chidu yousheng 尺牘友聲 (Friends’ voices in letters). While Chidu yousheng gathered letters that Zhang Chao’s contemporaries had sent to him, Chidu oucun collected Zhang Chao’s replies to them. The two letter collections were published in several installments over a span of more than thirty years, from 1677 until 1706, and gained wide popularity.1 The sheer quantity and wide geographical distribution of the letters reveal the extensive epistolary network that Zhang Chao established, exchanging letters with more than 300 of his contemporaries, mainly literati from the major cities in the Jiangnan area, such as Yangzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. Among the 1,463 letters gathered in chronological order in both letter collections, the letter of Zhang Chao to Zhang Yongde stands out in terms of its length, tone, and subject matter. As indicated in the titles of the two collections, the term chidu 尺牘, which usually designated short, casual, intimate letters, as distinct from formal and longer shu 書,2 most letters included in both collections are indeed informal and short, usually not exceeding one leaf. 1  Gu and Liu, “‘Chidu oucun,’ ‘Yousheng’,” 263–74. The original editions of Chidu yousheng and Chidu oucun are not extant, but reprint editions of 1780 survive. Chidu yousheng consists of three collections, each of which has 5 juan, collecting 1,009 letters sent to Zhang Chao. Chidu oucun is made up of 11 juan, collecting 454 replies of Zhang Chao. This essay is based on the editions held in the Beijing University Library. 2  Although the boundary between chidu and shu was often blurry, the distinction was conventionally acknowledged in late imperial China. When Zhou Lianggong, e.g., published his letter collection Chidu xinchao, he discarded long letters and mostly gathered short ones, to capture the true nature of chidu. Zhou Lianggong, “Fanli,” in Chidu xinchao sanji, 3; Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 35, fn. 84. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_026

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However, Zhang Chao’s letter to Zhang Yongde is relatively formal and lengthy, covering twelve leaves3—and is, in fact, the longest letter in either collection. Furthermore, it is one of the letters exchanged during Zhang Chao’s dispute with Zhang Yongde over the proprietorship of the book that they had published together nine years before. Although the popularity of publishing letters in the late Ming and early Qing periods greatly expanded both the scope of letters that found their way into print and the sort of topics published letters could address,4 such a conflictive letter would not usually be published because most private letter collections, particularly those of contemporaries, were meant to display the letter writers’ friendships, social status, and literary accomplishments. The tone of friction and refutation in Zhang Chao’s letter clearly distinguishes it from the friendly and amiable correspondence that makes up the majority of Zhang Chao’s two letter collections.5 The unusual character of this letter to Zhang Yongde therefore makes one wonder what Zhang Chao’s intention was in publishing it. The letter ostensibly justifies Zhang Chao’s property rights to the book against Zhang Yongde’s claim. However, the letter is undoubtedly partial, in the sense that it explicates only Zhang Chao’s claim to ownership of the book in question. When the scholar-official Zhou Lianggong 周亮工 (1612–1672) published his letter collection Chidu xinchao 尺牘新鈔 (Newly copied letters) from 1662 to 1670, he intentionally excluded letters about lawsuits and disputes because he wanted to avoid prejudice in favor of one side over the other.6 Since Zhang Yongde’s 3 Chidu oucun, 11.9a–14b. 4  Pattinson, “The Market for Letter Collections,” 132. Letter collections published in the 17th c. included not merely the correspondence of historically eminent literary men such as Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072), Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1011), and Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045– 1105), but also letters of their contemporaries, from respected celebrities of the time to figures who might otherwise have slipped into obscurity. The topics of the published letter became more diverse, encompassing model letters of literary quality, notes penned in fulfillment of social etiquette, and correspondences on a variety of quotidian affairs of the literati, such as sharing poetry, inviting friends for drinks, borrowing and lending books, introducing friends, discussing literature and scholarship, etc. 5  Since no authorial preface or editorial principles are attached, the selection criteria of the letters in Zhang Chao’s letter collections are not clear. But most of the letters they include are written in a relatively informal and casual style, covering a variety of mundane details of the life of a man of letters. And since Zhang Chao was engaged in publishing ventures, a large number of the letters in the collections concern details of his endeavors, such as soliciting manuscripts, asking for and giving financial support, discussing editorial decisions, hiring carvers, proofreading, collating, distributing, and selling books. 6  Zhou Lianggong, “Xuanli,” in Chidu xinchao, 3–4.

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letters to Zhang Chao written immediately before and after Zhang Chao’s were not included in Zhang Chao’s two collections, contemporary readers would have learned of the dispute only from the viewpoint of Zhang Chao. Why, then, would Zhang Chao have thought that the publication of his biased letter would help him win the dispute? In other words, why did he choose to publish this conflictive letter in order to secure the proprietorship of his book? In an attempt to answer these questions, this essay analyzes the meaning of Zhang Chao’s letter in terms of the context of publishing. The letter had been established as a distinct literary genre in China as early as the Han dynasty, but the unprecedented boom of publishing letters in the seventeenth century indicates the growing stature of the letter in literary and social interactions. Much of the discussion has tended to center on the semantic decoding of the published letter because the letter, by being published in a letter collection, was detached from the context of its original circulation and became a selfcontained text.7 At the same time, however, it is often overlooked that publication of letters contributed to amplifying the practical utility of the letter as a medium of communication by readdressing its message beyond the confines of two correspondents to the wider view of an audience of considerable social and geographical distribution.8 In other words, it was not only the written message of the letter, but also the publicity of the letter, enacted by publishing, that was essential to the meaning that the published letter conveyed. In a close observation of the gap between the intentions that prompted the writing of Zhang Chao’s letter and the publication of that letter, this essay demonstrates the ways in which publicity of Zhang Chao’s long, conflictive letter to Zhang Yongde enabled the letter to cut across the boundaries between (1) private and public purview, (2) personal and social contracts, and (3) social propriety and legal property—and it thereby played a significant role in insisting on Zhang Chao’s claim of his property rights to the book that he had copublished with Zhang Yongde. I will argue that publishing made Zhang Chao’s letter not only a carrier of the textual message of his book proprietorship but 7  A majority of scholars, including Zhao Shugong and Wu Chengxue, have examined the 17th c. letter-publishing boom in terms of the reevaluation of interiority and intimate expression that the letter genre championed. But there is also an increased awareness to tie this boom to the historical conditions, such as the growing need for epistolary models and social manners in the expanding commercial book market and the building of an epistolary community in which elite men and women shared recent news or collective memories. Zhao Shugong, Zhongguo chidu wenxue shi, 310–11; Wu Chengxue, Wan Ming xiaopin yanjiu, 304; Lowry, “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter in Late Ming,” 48–77; Widmer, “The Epistolary World of Female Talent,” 1–43; Pattinson, “The Market for Letter Collections,” 154–55. 8  Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print, 86.

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also a social performance to exert a certain effect on the protection of that proprietorship in the absence of legal and institutional measures to prescribe book proprietorship in the seventeenth century. 1

Between Private and Public Purview

Zhang Chao’s letter to Zhang Yongde is one of seven letters between them published in the two letter collections.9 While the first four letters were exchanged around 1697, when they collaborated on the publication of Sishu zunzhu huiyi jie 四書尊注會意解 (Explication of the annotations of the Four Books), this letter was written in 1706, in response to Zhang Yongde’s claiming property rights during their dispute over the book. The letter is cogently organized and divided into several sections. It begins with the two men’s initial contact and the process of their publishing collaboration, continues with the rise of the dispute and a rebuttal of Zhang Yongde’s claim, and ends with a reaffirmation of Zhang Chao’s book proprietorship. The 1706 letter begins as follows: Zhang Chao from Xin’an respectfully addresses Mr. Zhang Yongde. I had not known you and your father before. But a while ago, the carver Zhou Changnian came and told me something like this: “Mr. Zhang Yongde does not have any capacity to publish his late father Zhang Jiuda’s Explication of the Annotations of the Four Books. If you publish the book for him, not only would the father and son feel grateful for it until death, but we [carvers] would also owe you a debt of gratitude for making a living from it”; and so I got to know you. At that time I tried my best to respond to what was asked and bring the bequeathed book to light. It was done out of a lofty friendship of fellows, not originally [undertaken] to seek profit. 新安張 潮謹白紫裳先生足下。 潮與賢橋梓素非相識。止因昔年 有梓人周長年來云:張紫裳相公,其乃尊九達相公所著四書會 意解無力梓行。若尊府肯為授梓,不但伊父子歿存感德,即我 輩攬此一宗生意,亦沾台惠等語。 潮 時尚有綿力,狥其所請,​ 以為表章遺書。亦屬吾儕高誼,原非藉以牟利也。10 According to the letter, Zhang Yongde in Yangzhou was seeking a sponsor to publish his late father Zhang Jiuda’s 張九達 annotations of the Four Books 9  Chidu yousheng, 5.26b–27a, 6.4b–5a, 6.6a, 6.7b–8a; Chidu oucun, 3.13b, 3.28b–29b, 11.9a–14b. 10  Chidu oucun, 11.9a.

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around 1693, because he did not have the means to do so himself. Upon hearing of his trouble, the carver Zhou Changnian 周長年 introduced Zhang Yongde to Zhang Chao, who was publishing a variety of books at that time in Yangzhou.11 Zhang Yongde then asked Zhang Chao to support the publication of the book. It was common for publishers to collaborate with each other and Zhang Chao generously agreed to collaborate with Zhang Yongde—on the condition that while Zhang Yongde supplemented and collated his father’s manuscript, Zhang Chao would take charge of the carving blocks, the most costly stage of publishing a book. It turned out that Zhang Chao spent a large sum of money, about 700 taels of silver, to have the book published, including 40 taels for Zhang Yongde’s collation fee. The book was finally completed in 1697, and the woodblocks were entrusted to Wang Yuanchen 王元臣, the owner of the bookshop called Daibao lou 貸寶樓 in Yangzhou, for distribution and sale. The book enjoyed broad circulation, being transmitted beyond Yangzhou to Nanjing, Jiangxi, Fujian, and even as far as Japan.12 The successful collaboration experience encouraged Zhang Yongde to seek more help from Zhang Chao for his ensuing publication projects. Unlike Zhang Chao who had already established himself as a renowned publisher with several popular imprints such as Yu Chu xinzhi 虞初新志 (The magician’s new records) and Tanji congshu 檀几叢書 (Collectanea of a sandalwood desk), Zhang Yongde had eked out a living as a resident tutor and made publishing his alternative career. He was interested in publishing best-selling items in the book market. Although the publication of Sishu zunzhu huiyi jie seems to have been initiated by filial piety, it was actually an examination guidebook in demand for the civil service examination. He further prepared another guidebook of examination essays entitled Bagu bidu wen 八股必讀文 or Zhiyi bidu wen 制義必讀文 (Must-read eight-legged essays) and a prose collection of eminent Tang and Song writers, such as Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819), Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072), and Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037– 11  Zhang Chao was one of the most active and successful literatus-publishers in Yangzhou in the early Qing. Although only 14 titles of books published by Zhang Chao survive, he is believed to have published more than 40 titles, including collections of letters, poetry, and prose, books of drinking games and riddles, game manuals, drama and popular songs, annotations of the Classics, studies of phonology, elegies for his dead wife, and textbooks for women. But what finally earned him fame as a publisher were his massive collections of short prose by contemporary literati, such as Tanji congshu, Zhaodai congshu 昭代叢 書 (Collectanea of a glorious age), and Yu Chu xinzhi. For details of his practice, see Son, “Publishing as a Coterie Enterprise,” 98–135. 12  Chidu oucun, 11.12b; Ōba Osamu, Hakusai shomoku, vol. 1, juan 7, 13–14.

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1101). He asked Zhang Chao to write prefaces for the two books because a preface by such a famous publisher as Zhang Chao would enhance the value of the books on the competitive book market. Moreover, he unabashedly asked Zhang Chao to cover the paper costs for the books.13 From several years of publishing experience, Zhang Chao sympathized with the novice publisher’s financial pressure and responded to Zhang Yongde’s request favorably.14 Their relationship was so intimate that they even traded jokes about borrowing and lending money. See a letter Zhang Yongde wrote around 1697 to ask Zhang Chao for money: The [carving of the] collection is completed, but I am in distress with no paper to print on, so I cannot send it far off. If you have not spent all the money that you deposited in a big bamboo box at your bedside, it would do no harm to spend some to buy paper for me—wouldn’t it be a pleasant thing to do! Or, if you want to be stingy, that is also very understandable. 集成,苦無紙印,不能致遠。如牀頭大竹筒中有用不盡錢,不 妨盡數倒來買紙,亦是快事!倘慳甚當。15 And Zhang Chao jovially rejoined by sending this reply: In your letter, you suspect me of being stingy, but I am not a stingy person. Since you admit that you are greedy, I consider myself “stingy,” if only to match the word “greedy.” In a couple of days, I will make sure to break out of stinginess and hope to satisfy your greed. Please wait a little more. 手教疑我為慳,僕本不慳。因足下自認為貪,故僕亦自處於 慳,以與貪字作一篇對股文字耳。稍遲數日,亦必些須破慳,​ 庶幾有以成足下之貪也。幸姑待之。16 The cordial terms between Zhang Chao and Zhang Yongde, however, broke down when the issue of property rights to Sishu zunzhu huiyi jie arose, beginning in 1705, eight years after the book was published. On February 7 of that year, a mutual friend accused Zhang Chao of not having made a promised payment to Zhang Yongde. Zhang Chao denied such an arrangement, but on February 22, several friends of Zhang Yongde visited Zhang Chao to ask for the money, arguing that Zhang Chao had initially promised to give Zhang Yongde 13  Chidu yousheng, 6.5a. 14  Chidu yousheng, 6.6a. 15  Chidu yousheng, 6.5a. 16  Chidu oucun, 3.13b.

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80 taels of silver, yet had paid him only half that amount. Zhang Chao repudiated this claim as well, but when he learned that these men were trying to help their friend Zhang Yongde who had just gone blind, he agreed to give him 10 taels, stressing that this amount was not to satisfy an initial agreement but out of sympathy as a former friend. This seemingly minor commotion that Zhang Yongde’s friends made on his behalf was, however, followed by a more serious accusation a year later. This time it was Zhang Yongde himself who requested profits from the sale of the book. Zhang Yongde’s claim was plausible in the sense that he did share the property rights to the book with Zhang Chao. His requests were twofold: First, he asked for the 80 taels of silver that Zhang Chao had guaranteed him each time Daibao lou reprinted the book. Second, he accused Zhang Chao of monopolizing the profits from circulating the woodblocks to commercial publishers outside Yangzhou to Jiangxi and Fujian provinces without his consent. In sum, Zhang Yongde squarely demanded the division of the profits from the book based on the fact that although Zhang Chao was the financial sponsor of the publication, it was Zhang Yongde’s father who had written the manuscript and Zhang Yongde who had collated it. He requested that his and his father’s intellectual contributions be counted in dividing the financial rewards—a notion similar to that of modern intellectual property, which acknowledges authors’ originality and labor of mind by granting them the foremost property rights in the form of financial assets. Zhang Chao’s 1706 letter is thus his elaborated rebuttal of Zhang Yongde’s claim of authorial property. Although the letter is ostensibly private in that it is addressed to a particular individual, involving a dispute concerning only two correspondents, it was certainly intended not merely for Zhang Yongde’s eyes but purported to reach a wider audience. This is evident in several aspects. First, the letter is drastically different in tone and expression from the two men’s earlier correspondence. Whereas Zhang Chao’s previous letters to Zhang Yongde are short and casual, this letter is long, plain, and factual, fully equipped with the conventional epistolary rhetoric.17 For example, it begins with the typical epistolary salutation “Zhang Chao from Xin’an respectfully addresses Mr. Zhang Yongde” 新安張潮謹白紫裳先生足下 and ends with “[Zhang] Chao sincerely addresses [you]” 潮謹白, expressions that are absent from all his earlier letters. Zhang Chao also addressed Zhang Yongde with his penname Zichang 紫裳 and marked his own name, Chao 潮, several times, instead of using pronouns, such as zuxia 足下, the conventional polite second person pronoun, or the humble self-designation pu 僕, both of which were 17  See Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture, 110–12, for details of epistolary rhetoric.

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used in the earlier letters. It is as though he felt a need to identify who was addressing whom exactly. The letter moreover proceeds sequentially in a wellorganized narrative, from the background of the publishing collaboration to the rise of the dispute and then to the rejection of Zhang Yongde’s claim. In the refutation, in particular, the letter renders the original wording of Zhang Yongde’s claim, or gives the impression of quoting it directly, by using the words “you said” (yun 云), “you also mentioned” (youyun 又云), “if you want to argue” (ruoyun 若云), and “according to what you said” (juyun 據云), which are then followed by Zhang Chao’s rebuttal line by line. Such a step-by-step reiteration that reminds one of testimonies in legal document might not have been needed in a letter to Zhang Yongde, who would already have been well aware of his own arguments, although it is useful for readers who have no prior knowledge of the dispute to discern the details of the disagreement. It is difficult to gauge whether the letter was written to be published or whether it was published after it had been delivered to Zhang Yongde. Whatever the case, the publication of the letter immediately placed the private nature of its contents into public circulation, thus redirecting its message to the anonymous readers for whom the letter collections were printed. In effect, its publication made the two publishers’ private dispute into a public issue, protecting less the confidences exchanged between the two correspondents at the individual level and instead demanding that readers share and take part in the dispute at the level of the reading community. 2

Between Personal and Social Contracts

The publicity of the letter that Zhang Chao attained by the publication of his 1706 letter was deemed necessary because book proprietorship was not just a matter of individual dispute but a pronounced public concern in the rapidly expanding commercial book market of the time. The frequent collaborations undertaken in the publishing enterprise often blurred the boundaries of book proprietorship, distributing rights to profits among a number of individuals and groups who participated in the publishing process.18 Accordingly, disputes erupted constantly over the profits from publishing and selling books. Zhang Chao and Zhang Yongde’s dispute thus touched on a thorny issue about book proprietorship at that time—that is, who owned the property rights to the published book. Was it the author and the editor who had put their labor of mind into creating the “text” (in this case, Zhang Yongde and his father)? Or 18  Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power, 90–148.

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was it the publisher who had invested the money to make the actual woodblocks from which the physical copies of the “book” were made (Zhang Chao)? Zhang Chao first reminded Zhang Yongde of their personal agreement by indicating his misunderstandings. First, Zhang Chao flatly denied Zhang Yongde’s contention that Zhang Yongde should receive the profits whenever the bookshop reprinted the book, and firmly posited not only that no such verbal agreement had been made but also that there should have been a written contract signed by both parties to verify his claim. “In general, what is called ‘agreement made’ is verified only after it is written down” 夫所謂定議者, 必見之紙筆,方可為憑, Zhang Chao wrote, and then exclaimed, “I have no idea what signed contract your claim is based on!” 不知足下所言有何 着押議約為據否也!19 Second, Zhang Chao insisted that, contrary to Zhang Yongde’s assertion, there had been no reprinting of the book at all. Zhang Yongde suspected that Wang Yuanchen, a longtime business partner of Zhang Chao, had secretly recarved the blocks and sold them to the booksellers in Jiangxi and Fujian. Rejecting this allegation, Zhang Chao explained that the copies circulating in other provinces must have been pirated ones, because there had been no recarving and reprinting of the book of which he had not informed Zhang Yongde, and hence no hidden profit on his side alone. It is impossible to determine what the initial contract between the two publishers was, because what both parties insisted was as opposite as black and white. Without any written records, there was no evidence readers could use to judge whose claim was correct. After clearing himself of Zhang Yongde’s accusation that he had monopolized the profits from the book, therefore, Zhang Chao shifted the emphasis in his argument from personal agreement to social convention: no matter whose claim was correct, the property rights to the book customarily belonged to the publisher, not the author. Making frequent use of expressions such as “what is called” (suowei 所謂) and “in general” ( fan 凡, fu 夫), Zhang Chao asserted that his claim was reasonable from the widely accepted social conception about property rights to a book. In his 1706 letter, Zhang Chao maintained that the property rights of the publisher derived from long-standing conventions that judged property rights in terms of the possession of woodblocks.20 As a visible and tangible form, woodblocks were considered the physical embodiment of the publisher’s 19  Chidu oucun, 11.11a. 20  Brokaw argues that “possession of the original blocks” (cangban 藏板)—a phrase that frequently appears on the cover page—is a customary expression to indicate that a publisher has a proprietary claim to the blocks in his possession. See Brokaw, Commerce in Culture, 178–79.

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financial investment—namely, his buying of the raw blocks and hiring of carvers to inscribe characters on them. As the publisher’s rights were not merely limited to the rights to possess the blocks but also included the rights to the copies produced from them, woodblocks were the publisher’s capital asset and the source of his revenue.21 Zhang Chao verified this by revealing the commonly held practice in which publishers traded both rights with woodblocks:22 I am about to sell the woodblocks of Explication of the Annotations [of the Four Books] to make a living. I do not expect to recoup the initial investment and just hope to sell them for 600 taels of silver, by reducing the price by 100 taels. If someone buys them, the day the full cost is paid the book can be circulated at the buyer’s will, after my name is scraped off [from all the blocks] and replaced with the name of the buyer. 正欲將會意解板片賣去為糊口之計。亦不敢望當年原價,願減 價百金,止望六百金。倘有人買去,俟兌價完足之日,即將 潮 家姓名盡行鏟去,另換買人姓字,任彼流通。23 Zhang Chao’s claim to book proprietorship may sound absurd in terms of the modern conception of intellectual property, because the direct transaction between woodblocks and money involved no consideration of immaterial authorial endeavor. In fact, however, Zhang Chao’s claim was corroborated by the popular practice of book proprietorship in traditional China, in which the rights of the publisher tended to outweigh those of the writer, the editor, and the collator. For instance, Ai Weiguang 艾為珖 (b. 1632), the grandson of the popular writer Ai Nanying 艾南英 (1583–1646), had tried to reclaim his grandfather’s collection of writings, Tianyongzi ji 天傭子集 (Collection of heaven’s hired hand), from the local scholar Hu 胡 of the same hometown, who had collected Ai Nanying’s scattered writings and made the woodblocks of the collection. Yet Ai Weiguang was not only unable to buy back the blocks but was also refused permission to print copies from Hu’s woodblocks. Although Ai Weiguang criticized the Hu family, noting that they “do not pay the [proper] courtesy [owed to] someone of the same town, but only covet commercial profits” 無桑梓之誼,復貪貿易之利, there was no way he could force them to hand over the property rights of the book to him. Because it was the Hu 21  Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power, 142. 22  See similar examples of Zhang Zhupo 張竹坡 (1670–1698) and Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716– 1697) selling woodblocks to recoup financial capital. Rolston, How to Read the Chinese Novel, 198, and Waley, Yuan Mei, 108–9, 200. 23  Chidu oucun, 11.14a–b.

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family who had invested in the woodblocks, both the woodblocks and the copies printed from them belonged to the Hu, rather than to the descendants of the original author. In order to own the collection, Ai Weiguang had to collect his grandfather’s writings elsewhere and make the woodblocks by himself.24 Because a published book had customarily been regarded as the property of the publisher, Zhang Chao was able to convincingly repudiate Zhang Yongde’s claim of authorial property as going against commonly shared social code. Zhang Chao aptly makes this point, citing the example of Confucius and Mencius: I have no idea how many blocks of the Four Books have ever been made. But how can one pay the descendants of Confucius and Mencius every time the Four Books are published? 天下四書板片,不知几幾。豈每刻一回,皆當有所酬于孔孟子 孫耶?25 This rhetorical question sarcastically insinuates that, following Zhang Yongde’s own logic, Zhang Yongde himself had infringed upon the property rights of Confucius and Mencius, the authors of the Four Books, since his manuscript quoted the entire text of the Four Books. Zhang Chao’s seemingly flawless defense of a publisher’s exclusive property rights was, however, undercut by his implicit agreement with Zhang Yongde’s authorial credit. Instead of completely disregarding Zhang Yongde’s authorial endeavor in making the book, Zhang Chao in fact admitted that Zhang Yongde’s authorial credit was something for which he deserved to be compensated—albeit not necessarily in financial capital, as Zhang Yongde insisted, but in the form of invisible capital, such as recognition, reputation, and cultural status. Zhang Chao argued that publishers expected to receive monetary rewards by investing financial capital while authors were compensated with invisible symbolic gain, since they contributed intangible labor of mind— which bespeaks their fundamentally different aim of publishing. In his 1706 letter, thus he explained: In general, what is called “[piracy cases] must be prosecuted even if they are committed as far as one thousand li away” is for the sake of the publishers who eke out a living by selling books. If their books are pirated, 24  Ai Weiguang, “Yuanke fanli,” in Tianyongzi ji, 1.a. 25  Chidu oucun, 11.13b.

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they not only find it difficult to earn profits but have also futilely spent printing costs. For this reason, the pirates ought to be prosecuted. . . . If we are to speak about the authors, they are too busy being delighted with the fact that their books are reprinted. How would they want to prevent and prosecute the pirates? 夫所謂千里必究者,乃是刻書家以賣書糊口,若被他人翻刻,​ 則難以覓利,空費刻貲,是以必究之爾。. . . 若就著書者論之,​ 方喜人刻之不暇,豈肯禁而究之耶?26 According to Zhang Chao, the divergence between author and publisher is clearly revealed in their different reactions to piracy: whereas most authors consider piracy of their book an indication of its popularity, publishers are indignant about it because it threatens their livelihood, which depends entirely on profits from the sale of books. It is true that the rampant piracy that occurred with the increasingly competitive commercial book market since the sixteenth century caused particular frustration and vexation among publishers.27 For example, the early Qing publisher, Li Yu 李漁 (1610–1680), greatly suffered from pirates due to the popularity of his books. He even moved his residence from Hangzhou to Nanjing because he could not suppress the Nanjing publishers’ piracy of his books from Hangzhou. After moving to Nanjing, however, he found that his most recent book had been reprinted in Suzhou. Immediately filing a lawsuit against the culprit and pursuing traces of the pirated copies, he was again dismayed by news of piracy of the book in Hangzhou, the very locale that he had left in order to protect his books from piracy.28 Yu Xiangdou 余象斗 (ca. 1560–1637), one of the most successful late Ming commercial publishers from Jianyang 建陽, was also affected by piracy and publicly scolded pirates as shameless villains on the first page of the book that he published.29

26  Chidu oucun, 11.12b. 27  The modern scholar Yuan Yi identifies five major patterns of piracy in this period: (1) false attribution of famous names, (2) putting new titles on old books, (3) haphazard re-editing by omitting or mending sentences, (4) repackaging old woodblocks into a new book, and (5) reprinting without permission. Yuan Yi, “Mingmo siren chubanye,” 153. 28  Li Yu, “Yu Zhao Shengbo wenxue,” in Liweng yijia yan, 167–68. 29  Yu Xiangdou, “Xu,” in Baxuan chuchu dongyou ji, 1.a–b. Ironically, Yu Xiangdou himself was often accused of arrogating other people’s works without their permission. Yuan Yi, “Mingmo siren chubanye,” 153.

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Compared to such publishers who had vehement responses to piracy, authors seemed not to have minded piracy of their works as much, partly because it testified to the stature of their works. As Zhang Chao sneered that the authors “are too busy being delighted with the fact that their books are reprinted,” some authors even welcomed piracy as an opportunity to have their books and their reputation circulate widely. Since authors were usually more concerned with their rights to exercise authorial control over their work and with establishing authorial fame than they were with earning any direct financial compensation,30 what authors found the most troubling about piracy was the alteration of their work. Pirates often produced flawed versions of the original and could thus damage the reputation of the original author. As a writer in the Ming dynasty Lang Ying 朗瑛 (1487–1566) observed, although spurious reprints had the exact same table of contents and number of volumes, the pirates had taken out a great deal of the text proper in order to cut down on printing costs. These pirated editions gained ascendancy in the book market because they were sold at half the original price.31 Therefore, when a leading writer and critic in the late Ming, Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568–1610), discovered the piracy of his writing collection, he was furious not necessarily because the pirates had reprinted it without his permission, but because their hasty reprints contained a number of errors with the omission of important sentences.32 He was afraid that readers would mistake the spurious reprints for his original works and that this would mar his reputation. Zhou Lianggong even admitted that his letter collection would end up being pirated, and pleaded with the pirates to disseminate the prints in their original form so as to maintain integrity of the work.33 In this vein, Zhang Chao contends that Zhang Yongde had already received his reward as an author by making his work known and thereby obtaining fame.34 And although these rewards were seemingly intangible, they might be 30  Nugent, Manifest in Words, 270. 31  Lang Ying, “Shuce,” in Qixiu leigao, 664–65. 32  Yuan Hongdao, “Jinfan yuyue” 禁翻豫約, cited in Wang Zhongmin, Zhongguo shanben shu, 657. For other examples, see Ye Dehui, Shulin qinghua, 356, and Volkmar, “The Physician and the Plagiarists,” 18. 33  Zhou Lianggong, “Fanli,” in Chidu xinchao sanji, 3. 34  Zhang Chao posited that his collaboration with Zhang Yongde was not a case of maiduan 賣斷, i.e. purchasing an author’s name as well as his manuscript, which allowed a publisher to erase the author’s name and put his own name on the text, because he had purchased every right related to the manuscript. Zhang Chao emphasized several times that he did not erase the name of Zhang Yongde and his father, and put their names above his own in recognition of their authorial accomplishment. Chidu oucun, 11.11b.

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even more beneficial than financial compensation for a novice publisher like him, because his reputation would be a symbolic asset for his career. Alluding to the importance of reputation in the book market, Zhang Chao pointed out that his own reputation as a publisher contributed to the success of the book rather than the quality of the book itself. At the end of the letter, he remarked: I have enjoyed meager fame, and as everybody knows [my name], the booksellers in the capital and provinces seek after this book. But if the three characters of [my penname] Zhang Shanlai were changed into someone else’s, the situation would certainly be radically different. 蓋潮素有薄名,世所共知是,以京省坊客肯要。若換去張山來 三字,勢必與前大不相同也。 Underneath Zhang Chao’s proud assertion of the contribution of his reputation to the success of the book lies his acknowledgment of the widespread transaction between money and reputation in the world of publishing: a publisher’s financial investment buys him a reputation, and by the same token, his reputation as a publisher is converted into financial assets in the book market. The circular interchange between the two made Zhang Yongde’s authorial endeavor translate not only into the incorporeal capital of reputation, publicity, and cultural status, as Zhang Chao repeatedly argued, but also very likely into monetary gain. Zhang Chao’s emphasis on the clear-cut dichotomy between author and publisher, and between financial and symbolic capital, thus paradoxically reveals that authorial credit was no longer to be neglected but had emerged as something to be compensated for by any means necessary. 3

Between Social Propriety and Legal Property

Zhang Chao’s publication of his 1706 letter to Zhang Yongde brought their private dispute to the attention of the public eye and sustained Zhang Chao’s claim in terms of the social conventions of book proprietorship. But it intended to do more than simply impose public pressure on Zhang Yongde to give up his property rights to the book. The increasingly contentious notion of book proprietorship in the seventeenth century, a notion that varied widely from publisher’s exclusive rights to authorial property, might have inevitably led Zhang Chao to publish his letter to ask for approval of his own property rights by appealing to public acknowledgment and social propriety because book proprietorship was not fully articulated through the stipulation of laws and official institutions in this period.

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Disputes over book proprietorship had not been entirely absent in earlier times,35 but as piracy, counterfeits, and unauthorized prints had flooded the book market since the sixteenth century, infringements and consequently protection of book ownership became pressing concerns for publishers. Despite a surge of disputes, however, little protection of book proprietorship was established by legal codes or imperial authorities. Some scholars argue that the Song dynasty built a system of official pre-registration of books to be published, something similar to a “license,” a statement of approval issued by a state or ecclesiastical officer that was required before any book could be published in most countries in early modern Europe.36 This assumption was made, as some books published during the Song dynasty contain such warning phrases as “This book is already registered with the authorities, so reprinting is forbidden” 已申上司, 不許翻板.37 But how strictly the law was observed in the Song dynasty is in serious doubt, and in the Ming and Qing dynasties it existed only in name.38 Because there were no preemptive legal codes or regulatory institutions specifically addressing piracy nationwide,39 official intervention was very limited because it had to be initiated by individual litigation. Once piracy was spotted, the individual publisher asked local authorities to issue protection orders that would take substantial action against the pirates. The local authorities would then trace and crack down on the pirates by levying fines, confiscating the pirated copies, or destroying the counterfeit woodblocks.40 Nevertheless, individual litigation was usually a very tedious, time-consuming, and expensive task to undertake. Moreover, piracy was principally a local matter and complaints were filed only with the regional office where piracy took place, making it difficult for an individual publisher to pursue cases of piracy, particularly across regions. Zhang Chao complained about the inefficiency of legal enforcement in 1703:

35  Cherniack, “Book Culture and Textual Transmission,” 53–55, 65. 36  Twitchett, Printing and Publishing, 62–63. 37  The colophon of Dongdu shilüe 東都事略 in the Song Meishan 宋眉山 edition, cited in Lin Shenqing, Song Yuan shuke, 5. 38  Twitchett, Printing and Publishing, 62–63. The late Qing bibliophile Ye Dehui 葉德 輝 (1864–1927) even insisted that the phrase just indicated an atypical case—namely, that one or two publishers influential in a certain locale asked their local authorities to prevent the reprinting. Ye Dehui, Shulin qinghua, 35. 39  Wang Sanqing, “Mingdai shusi,” 47–49. 40  E.g., see Li Yu, “Yu Zhao Shengbo wenxue,” in Liweng yijiayan, 167–68.

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In the past, reprinting was strictly prohibited. But most contemporary officials dealing with [the reprinting] are so lenient and loose [that they do not put an end to reprints] and yet editors and publishers possess no capacity to go to the Min region [Fujian, where the reprinting frequently occurred] and pursue litigation to the end. For this reason, these gangs [of pirates] have nothing further to fear. I cannot help sighing over this state of affairs. The Explication of the Annotations of the Four Books that I published, has been heavily harmed by numerous reprinting. I plead with the current officials in the Min region that if they encounter these gangs, they make an effort to destroy the false woodblocks and prosecute the culprits according to the law. 翻刻之禁,昔人所嚴。邇來當事諸公類,多寬厚長者,而選刻 之家,其力又不能赴閩終訟。是以此輩益無忌憚,惟有付之浩 歎而已。 僕所梓四書尊註會意解,大受翻板之累。伏願今八閩 當道諸先生,凡遇此等流,力為追劈偽板,究擬如法。41 While sighing over the untrammeled piracy and impotent legal system, however, publishers had also developed some tacit rules of conduct with which to maintain the order of the book business and uphold their reputations. Despite the fact that there were no official “registers”—books in which printers and booksellers of a particular city in medieval Europe entered the titles of forthcoming works to protect themselves from severe competition and piracy42— the publishers of late imperial China developed various ways to exercise their property rights to a book. For example, publishers often included warnings on the cover page of the book such as “Reprinting is prohibited” 不許重刻, “Piracy will be prosecuted” 翻刻必究, or “Piracy will be prosecuted even if it is committed a thousand li away” 翻刻千里必究, thus indicating that cases of unauthorized piracy would be followed by official intervention. In addition, some bookshops designed a specific stamp to indicate their ownership of a book. For example, Yeshi shufang 葉氏書坊 in Beijing put the stamp of the qilin 麒麟, a mythical creature believed to have appeared in the time of rule by the sages of ancient China, on every book that it printed, and Zhongde tang 種

41  Zhang Chao, “Fanli,” in the Third Collection of Zhaodai congshu, 344. 42  Aside from registers and licenses, there was one more institution to protect books from piracy in Europe: privileges or patents, open letters from a ruler to protect titles from unauthorized reprinting. Registers appealed to the autonomy of a craft, whereas licenses, privileges, and patents appealed for their authority to the prerogatives of a state. Johns, Piracy, 10–28.

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德堂 in Jianyang made eight hexagrams its trademark.43 Publishers in Nanjing pasted the covers of new books onto their bookshop walls, or hung announcements of the publication of new book titles in a busy street or on a city gate that crowds passed by.44 Such publicizing efforts were not only an effective marketing strategy for a new publication but also a means of making their ownership publicly recognized.45 In particular, it was not uncommon for publishers to adopt a strategy of advance publicity to regulate competition and preemptively prevent piracy. At the end of every year in the Qing and Republican periods, for example, publishing houses in Sibao in Fujian province customarily printed a sample cover page of each new work that they planned to print in the coming year and posted these on the gate to assert the authority to use the blocks for the posted titles.46 Another example of the use of preemptive publicity was recorded by the popular Ming writer of short vernacular stories Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–1645), who was also deeply involved in the book business: a crafty publisher falsely reported the robbery of his own imprint to the authorities.47 By doing so, he not only ensured that his book title was registered in the official record but also warned off potential pirates by making his ownership publicly known. By creating protection for book proprietorship that the legal and official institutions of the day did not fully guarantee, the public appeal to social propriety may have taken precedent over imperial law, since violations of social propriety would have led to a loss of both credibility and reputation in the book business. In particular, losing credit for their works was considered fatal for a number of literati-publishers who did not merely pursue money but also sought reputation and cultural authority that they could not obtain by the success in the civil service examinations. Li Yu revealed a publisher’s most severe anxiety in these words: I am afraid that people may see the thing before they read my book, and not knowing by whom it was created, instead assume that I had plagiarized someone’s achievement and arrogated it to my own. How could this be not a case of being wrongly accused! 43  Yuan Yi, “Mingmo siren chubanye,” 157. 44  Ye Dehui, Shulin qinghua, 31–32; Chidu oucun, 6.12b–13a. The frequently seen expression “Hang [the book] on a city gate” 懸之國門 was a both literal and figurative set phrase referring to making a new publication widely known. 45  Widmer, “The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou,” 94. 46  Brokaw, Commerce in Culture, 177–78. 47  Feng Menglong, Zhinang quanji, 569.

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竊恐世人先睹其物而後見其書,不知創自何人,反謂剿襲成功 以為己有。詎非不白之冤哉!48 Considering the high possibility of being mistaken as a pirate due to excessive competition in the book market, advance publicity might have been the surest way to garner fair recognition and thereby protect property rights. Li Yu, therefore, chose to circulate a letter to appeal to social propriety, seeking the literati community’s public acknowledgment in advance of his property rights to a letter paper design.49 He wrote: Several new designs in this collection are allowed to be imitated and circulated. But I have my servants manufacture the letter paper designs and sell them. It is an alternative to making a living by my brush, so I do not allow other people to reprint them. I have already circulated letters to make an announcement and give a warning at the outset. 是集中所載諸新式, 聽人效而行之, 惟箋帖之體裁,則令奚奴 自制自售,以代筆耕,不許他人翻梓。已經傳札布告,誡之於 于初矣。50 He continued that if the appeal to social propriety did not work, he would pursue legal measures: By arrogating other people’s achievements, grabbing others’ profits and annihilating their names, these people [pirates] are the followers of the Wolf of Zhongshan [who acted ungratefully]. I shall accuse them in the courts where they are and plead that justice be done. 即以他人之功冒為己有,食其利而抹煞其名者,此即中山狼之 流亞也。當隨所在之官司而控告焉,伏望主持公道。51

48  Li Yu, “Xiang long qie si” in Xianqing ouji, 215. For another example, see Gu Cai’s 顧彩 letter in Chidu yousheng, 3.14a. When Gu Cai heard about the piracy of his poetry, he was apprehensive that people might mistake his poetry for the work written by someone else and that he might thereby lose credit for his own works. 49  See Suzanne E. Wright’s essay in this volume for the popularity of decorated letter papers in the 17th c. 50  Li Yu, “Jianjian,” in Xianqing ouji, 229. 51  Ibid. I have modified Hanan’s translation, The Invention of Li Yu, 14–15.

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Li Yu further published this warning in his popular collection of notes, Xianqing ouji 閒情偶記 (Casual notes in a leisurely mood), to intensify its effect of enforcement. In this respect, Zhang Chao’s publication of his 1706 letter was not merely an act of public display of his possession of property rights to the book that he had published in collaboration with Zhang Yongde. Rather, it was an attempt to be recognized and protected by obtaining the acknowledgment of the reading public formed by a wide epistolary network from the serial publication of the installments of his letter collections. Since his 1706 letter was published in the last juan of his Chidu oucun, which had circulated to a wide, cross-regional community of contemporary literati beyond his intimate groups that consisted of his family, relatives, and close friends over about thirty years, Zhang Chao presumed the effect of its circulation on publicity of the letter. So the letter, via publication, functioned as a mode of social communication that intended to exert an effect to protect his property rights. The publication of the letter created not only a discursive space in which Zhang Chao claimed his book proprietorship but also a socially performative space in which he sought acknowledgment of that property right from the community and strove to secure it.



This essay has analyzed the meaning of Zhang Chao’s letter generated not only from the textual message but also from publicity accomplished by its publication. Zhang Chao’s letter, although it was addressed to a specific addressee, Zhang Yongde, was never private. With a high degree of formality that sets itself apart from earlier intimate correspondences, the letter’s command of language attenuated the private nature of the communication and intended to bring the issue of book proprietorship to the attention of the reading public. In the controversial debate over the author’s and publisher’s property rights to a published book, the published letter publicly defended a publisher’s exclusive rights to the book that he paid to have carved on woodblocks. By drawing on longstanding social practice, the letter tried to settle the issue of book ownership in the name of social propriety. At the same time, however, the letter also uncovers the anxiety toward the emerging change of the notion of book proprietorship because the interchange between financial and symbolic capital enabled authorial credit to be transformed into financial profits, thus challenging the allegedly exclusive rights of the publisher to the ownership of the book. Instead of remaining a discursive form, therefore, the published letter also became a performative text, seeking social recognition of Zhang Chao’s prop-

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erty rights. Supplementing the absence of legal and institutional measures to protect book proprietorship, the published letter appealed to public recognition, which played a role as social arbiter to affirm book ownership. Between writing and publishing, epistolary practice, a practice that is central to sociability as it builds on the reciprocal exchange between two correspondents, was expanded into a circuit of social enforcement that presupposed, or attempted to create, a broad reading community whose ideas of social propriety would serve to protect book proprietorship. Bibliography Ai Nanying 艾南英. Tianyongzi ji 天傭子集. 1879 Tiyun shuwu 梯雲書屋 edition. Harvard-Yenching Library. Brokaw, Cynthia. Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republic Periods. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Cherniack, Susan. “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China.” HJAS 54 (1994): 5–125. Chow, Kai-Wing. Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Feng Menglong 馮夢龍. Zhinang quanji 智囊全集. Annotated by Miao Yonghe 缪詠 禾. Nanjing: Jiangsu chubanshe, 1986. Gu Guorui 顧國瑞 and Liu Hui 劉煇. “Chidu oucun, Yousheng ji qizhong de xiqu shiliao” 尺牘偶存,友聲及其中的戲曲史料. Wenshi 文史 15 (1982): 263–74. Hanan, Patrick. The Invention of Li Yu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Jagodzinski, Cecile M. Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Lang Ying 郎瑛. “Shuce” 書冊. In Qixiu leigao 七修類稿. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1961. Li Yu 李漁. “Yu Zhao Shengbo wenxue” 與趙聲伯文學, in Liweng yijia yan 笠翁一家 言. In Li Yu quanji 李漁全集, vol. 1. Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1991. ———. “Jianjian” 箋簡, in Xianqing ouji 閑情偶寄. In Li Yu quanji 李漁全集, vol. 11. Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1991. ———. “Xiang Long Qie Si” 箱籠篋笥, in Xianqing ouji 閑情偶寄. In Li Yu quanji 李 漁全集, vol. 11. Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1991. Lin Shenqing 林申清, ed. Song Yuan shuke paiji tulu 宋元書刻牌記圖錄. Beijing: Beijing tushu guan chubanshe, 1999.

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Lowry, Kathryn. “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter in Late Ming.” Ming Studies 44 (2001): 48–77. Nugent, Christopher M. B. Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Ōba Osamu 大庭脩, ed. Hakusai shomoku 舶載書目. Fukita: Kansai Daigaku Tōzai Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo, 1972. Pattinson, David. “The Market for Letter Collections in Seventeenth-Century China.” CLEAR 28 (2006): 125–57. Richter, Antje. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Rolston, David, ed. How to Read the Chinese Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Son Suyoung. “Publishing as a Coterie Enterprise: Zhang Chao and the Making of Printed Texts in Early Qing China.” LIC 31.1 (2010): 98–135. Twitchett, Denis. Printing and Publishing in Medieval China. New York: Frederic C. Beil, 1983. Volkmar, Barbara. “The Physician and the Plagiarists: The Fate of the Legacy of Wan Quan.” The East Asian Library Journal 9.1 (2000): 1–77. Waley, Arthur. Yuan Mei: Eighteenth-Century Chinese Poet. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Wang Sanqing 王三慶. “Mingdai shusi zai xiaoshuo shichang shang de jingying shoufa he xingxiao celüe” 明代書肆在小説市場上的經營手法和行銷策略. In Niwatazumi: Higashi Ajia shuppan bunka kenkyū にわたずみ:東アジア出版文化 研究, edited by Isobe Akira 磯部彰. Tokyo: Chisen Shokan, 2004. Wang Zhongmin 王重民, ed. Zhongguo shanben shu tiyao 中國善本書提要. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983. Widmer, Ellen. “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China.” LIC 10.2 (1989): 1–43. Wu Chengxue 吴承学. Wan Ming xiaopin yanjiu 晚明小品研究. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1998. Ye Dehui 葉德煇. Shulin qinghua; Shulin yuhua 書林清話書林餘話. Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1999. Yu Xiangdou 余象斗. “Xu” 序, in Baxian chuchu dongyou ji 八仙出處東游記. In Guben xiaoshuo jicheng 古本小說集成, vol. 120. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990. Yuan Yi 袁逸. “Mingmo siren chubanye de weidao zhi feng” 明末私人出版業的偽盜 之風. In Chubanshi yanjiu 出版史研究, vol. 1. Beijing: Zhongguo shuji, 1993. Zhang Chao 張潮, comp. Chidu yousheng 尺牘友聲. 1780 reprint, Beijing University Library.

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———. Chidu oucun 尺牘偶存. 1780 reprint, Beijing University Library. Zhang Chao et al., eds. Zhaodai congshu 昭代叢書. Reprint of Daoguang 道光 Shikai tang 石楷堂 edition. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990. Zhang Jiuda 張九達. Sishu zunzhu huiyi jie 四書尊注會意解. Reprint of 1697 edition. In Siku jinhuishu congkan bubian 四庫禁燬書叢刊補編, vol. 2. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2005. Zhao Shugong 趙樹功. Zhongguo chidu wenxue shi 中國尺牘文學史. Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1999. Zhou Lianggong 周亮工. Chidu xinchao sanji 尺牘新鈔三集. In Zhongguo wenxue zhenben congshu 中國文學珍本叢書, vol. 42. Shanghai: Shanghai zazhi gongsi, 1935–48. ———. Chidu xinchao 尺牘新鈔. In Chongshu jicheng chubian 叢書集成初編, vol. 2975. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985.

chapter 25

Opinions Going Public: Letters to the Editors in China’s Earliest Modern Newspapers Natascha Gentz Letters to the Editor were a crucial part of nineteenth-century mass print media in both European newspapers and new modern native language papers emerging in the colonies and other parts of the world. They served both as sources of information and as means of articulating individual opinions. This is perhaps not surprising in view of the fact that modern private European newspapers themselves emerged originally from communication by letter, when merchants started distributing “news” letters written by hand with information on the weather, wars, trade and so on in the fifteenth century. These letters evolved into public newsletters and later into newspapers, fulfilling the same function as later reports from professional correspondents.1 Hence, in nineteenth-century newspapers there is a broad variety of Letters to the Editor informing readers about news, entertaining them with social interest stories or giving personal opinions on on-going debates. In a formal sense, only a few of those letters in nineteenth-century newspapers conform to what is widely understood as a Letter to the Editor today: comments about articles, editorials and other material in the newspaper itself. This paper is therefore only concerned with those letters that express opinions and provide comments on issues, rather than information.2 However, as Letters to the Editor are typically thought of as being comments on the reports and editorials of the newspaper itself, many of those under investigation here still do not conform to the general understanding of the function of Letters to the Editor. Looking at Letters to the Editor that express opinions and comments will allow us to identify how this novel form of public communication was accepted and formed and came to transform a culture of Letter to the Editor writing in Late Qing China. Letters to the Editor form part of a peculiar genre within epistolary studies, as they are obviously not one-to-one or A to B communications and are not 1  Frasca, “Newspapers in Europe before 1500,” 89–87. 2  Letters containing information rather than opinions cover a wide spectrum such as social interest stories in the community, weather reports from other cities or theatre news. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004292123_027

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private, but purposely addressed to a large audience and published.3 While “private” letters had been published in edited book collections and circulated to wider groups before, the participation in wider public debate with thousands of readers on a daily basis was certainly an absolute novelty—and a phenomenon which led Benedict Anderson to put forward the idea of an “imagined community” of readers nationwide. Despite their prominence in the papers, Letters to the Editor have been largely ignored by social scientists as a subject of analysis in modern newspaper studies. In an early seminal study Emmett H. Buell states: “Of all the actors in American politics, probably none receives less attention than the individual who writes about politics in letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines.”4 Scholars dismissed the genre as a “hazy reflection of public opinion”5 or “an unreliable public opinion thermometer,”6 on account of its bias in representing public opinion and because of the difficulties in identifying the authors of the letters and in claiming authenticity. While it is now contested whether there has ever been a public sphere which allowed citizens unrestricted and equal access to public debate in the European or Western tradition, Schudson has argued that its existence at least has formed a part of the political imaginaire, as part of the democratic ideal.7 Subsequently, more recently, within a larger discussion about the nature(s) of public sphere(s), Letters to the Editor have gained more attention as an individual, voluntary form of political participation in this imagined public sphere.8 The emerging scholarship concerned with the press in Late Qing China was originally triggered by questions of whether this new form of communication contributed to the formation or transformation of a public sphere in China.9 In nineteenth-century Shanghai and Hong Kong, there were not many places for Chinese subjects to articulate or discuss their individual views on subjects of common concern face-to-face. Members of the Chinese community could meet in private literary societies or in local guilds or associations (huiguan 會館) in Shanghai or in the Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong, but these debates remained segmented and rarely reached a general public. Hence, the introduction 3  On publishing letters as a strategy to make them part of a public discourse see also Suyoung Son’s article in this volume. 4  “Eccentrics or Gladiators?,” 440. 5  Grey and Brown, “Letters to the Editor.” 6  Sigelman and Walkosz, “Letters to the Editor,” 939. 7  Schudson, “Was There Ever a Public Sphere?” 8  Cooper, Knotts, and Haspel, “The Content of Political Participation,” 132. 9  For a summary discussion see Wagner, “Joining the Global Imaginaire,” 105–47.

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of new print technologies and the establishment of modern newspapers fundamentally changed the nature of conventional forms of individual communication on public affairs. However, no systematic study of Letters to the Editor in early Chinese newspapers has been undertaken so far, and little is known about the practice of letter writing, the selection of letters, or their authors and impact.10 This article will therefore map out the field of Letters to the Editor in the first modern Chinese language newspapers, such as Shenbao 申報 (Shanghai, 1872–1949) and Xunhuan ribao 循環日報 (Hong Kong, 1874–1947). Rather than engaging in the debate about how far these letters contributed to the creation of one or several public spheres in Shanghai or Hong Kong, or even on a national level, this analysis will focus on how this novelty of public articulation was perceived and responded to, and how it formed a new type and culture of letter writing in term of style, narrative and content. This question also relates directly to the issue of the audience of the newspapers, which I will not be able to address adequately in this paper. Suffice it to say that while Shenbao explicitly reiterates that the targeted audience is the wider public including the uneducated (and women), the style and language register suggests an elite readership. Another reason for the neglect of Letters to the Editor as a subject of analysis is the fact that their systematic study bears a large number of methodological problems, as in most cases their authors are unknown, editorial screening procedures are often unclear and the suspicion remains that large proportions of them may have been fabricated by the editors themselves. In addition, Letters to the Editor contain a broad variety of content and are written for a variety of purposes, hence not only authenticity but also the authority of the public voice is questioned. This is even more the case for late nineteenth-century Chinese newspapers, about which we have comparatively scarce information on daily journalistic practice. The issue is further complicated by the fact that Chinese newspapers operated in a transnational context, with a strong orientation towards their foreign local counterparts, but are likewise rooted in conventional forms of communication. This applies to writing Letters to the Editor as well, as editors and letter writers were in the process of establishing and shaping this new form of public interaction. 10   The only studies specifically devoted to readers’ letters in the 19th c. I am aware of are Li, “Letters to the Editor” and Dong, “Communities and Communication.” There are more studies using Letters to the Editor for the Republican period, for which Goodman’s “Words of Blood and Tears” is a good example. However, in all those studies letters are not examined as a particular genre but analyzed in terms of their content only.

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In order to shed some light onto this process we have to rely on contemporary sources, mainly from the newspapers themselves. These, of course, do not provide hard evidence for actual practice, but announcements by the newspaper editorial boards, self-referential statements by letter authors and other occasional or apparently unintentional remarks made in passing do give some clues about the individual backgrounds and intentions of Letter to the Editor writers and reveal at the very least how editors and letter writers wanted to present themselves. A quantitative analysis of snapshot samples also allows for a preliminary typology of the letters and the letter writers. The first part of this study will therefore establish the context of Letter to the Editor writing in the early phase of Chinese journalism. It will address issues of authenticity, selection processes by the editorial board, and self-presentations of the authors. The second part will focus on the letters themselves. A typology of Letter to the Editor writing is established through quantitative analysis, and then, through close reading of representative letters, questions of epistolary forms and styles of letters will be discussed. For the purpose of this study all Letters to the Editor from two months (May and June) of the first three years of Shenbao were identified, i.e. 1872–74, numbering 108 in total. With regard to the early years of Xunhuan ribao, only a few months of its first year 1874 (February–August) are available, some incomplete, containing only fourteen Letters to the Editor.11 While this is not a representative sample, the letters of Xunhuan ribao are still included in the analysis in order to examine variations or congruities between the major newspaper centers of nineteenth-century China. The total number of Letters to the Editor sampled for quantitative analysis is 122, with examples from other newspapers also occasionally included. The focus of this study is on the early period of the formation of Chinese journalism practice, because in these first years it can be best observed how letter writing in newspapers was adopted as a new practice of public communication, as both editors and letter writers reflected on this formation 11  Unfortunately most of the early Xunhuan ribao is lost. Microfilm editions exist for February to August, 1874, February to June, 1880, and an almost complete set of 1883– 85. As for Shenbao, research has been greatly facilitated by the emergence of full text databases. For this study, the Shenbao database provided by Cross Asia has been used. However, as a note of caution, it has to be mentioned that those texts still have to be checked against their originals in the published Shenbao, as there are numerous errors and omissions in the database version. For this analysis, all quoted texts are from reprints. I would like to thank Joern Grundmann for his assistance in matching the different texts against each other.

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process. In this period we therefore find most information about how this new participation in public debate was formed and transformed before writing Letters to the Editor became a general and more standardized practice with the explosion of the press market after 1905. Within these years we also have the first large reader debates in Shanghai, which drew the attention of even the Imperial court in Beijing.12 1

The Context

In the nineteenth century access to news and information mattered to almost anyone in the colonies and settlements. British communities in the concessions were longing for news from home or letters from relatives and friends. Newspapers built a bridge to the home society, but were of course also of important commercial value for merchants, relating news about prices, the weather, and revolutions. All this became relevant knowledge for the Chinese communities in the colony and treaty ports, who quickly outnumbered foreigners in the settlements. Access to such information was stratified. While political information was typically restricted to the Imperial Gazettes and internal elite communication, circulation of social news and announcements to the general public through posted placards or pamphlets was restricted in its dissemination. Before the establishment of a public postal service, access to commercial news in the settlements was monopolized by big foreign companies and firms who were keen to keep this important knowledge to themselves.13 Starting from the 1850s, newspapers attempted to fill in this information gap for the public, but editorial boards were small and news reporting not yet an established professional practice, not to mention the sparseness of the 12  These two debates were related to the famous court cases involving the actor Yang Yuelou and the affair of Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai in 1874. Yang Yuelou was a famous actor in Shanghai who had married the daughter of a merchant during her father’s absence. Yang was arrested and heavily tortured, which caused a major debate about social morals and justice. Yang Naiwu was accused of having incited his lover to murder her husband. Both became famous court cases of the late Qing and inspired writers and dramatists. They are treated in individual studies: Vittinghoff, “Readers, Publishers and Officials” and Dong, “Communities and Communication.” 13   Studies in late Qing journalism have proliferated during the last two decades. For general background information on the press market in this period and particularly Shenbao and Xunhuan ribao, see Wagner, Joining the Global Public; Mittler, A Newspaper for China?; Gentz, “Useful Knowledge.”

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correspondence system. Hence their coverage of “news” relied heavily on contributions from readers; editors frequently encouraged their readers to send in material for publication, but also set the bar high in terms of the quality of contributions: If renowned and erudite scholars from near and afar would generously share with our publishing house some exquisite poems, brilliant treatises, valued opinions or farsighted views, which could serve to remove ignorance and enlarge knowledge, we would certainly print those without delay. 設使遐邇名流四方雅士苟有鴻詞偉論、高見遠識,足以豁愚蒙 而增智慧者,賜知本居,自當亟為登錄。14 Contributions by readers were not always classified as “Letters to the Editor.” Xunhuan ribao published “incoming letters” (laizha 來扎 or laizha fudeng 附 登) under headings next to and in the same font size as “international news,” “Guangzhou news” etc., which indicates that they were seen as equally important and “news-worthy,” while incoming letters reporting certain conditions elsewhere where placed under the respective news section. Shenbao, however, did not carry such headings and sections. In this newspaper the incoming letters were instead classified into a variety of conventional genres, such as “discussion” (lun 論), “proposal” (yi 議), or “records of an incident” ( jishi 記 事) alongside all other texts, sometimes even replacing the editorial. Therefore the Letters to the Editor of Xunhuan ribao were mainly opinion pieces, while the Shenbao’s readers’ contributions were far more numerous and varied in nature.15 1.1 Authenticity of Letters to the Editor Editors were also concerned about the authenticity of the letters and requested senders to identify themselves by their name and address. The use of pseudonyms was general practice among journalists and reporters as well. Thus the true identity of the editors was not always known to the public. Signing articles by name was not introduced as standard practice until the early twentieth century and pseudonyms were also widespread among Letter to the Editor writers in the British colonial papers. At the same time, it was common practice 14  “Changshe Ribao xiaoyin,” Xunhuan ribao 5.2.1874. 15   During the first months of publication between April and August 1874, Xunhuan ribao published 14 letters under the section “incoming letters,” while Shenbao has an average of 25 to 30 letters per month during the first years.

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that letter writers had to give their real names. Shenbao, too, from very early on, requested that contributors give their names and addresses in case they used pseudonyms. It also reassured the letter writers that they would only publish the pseudonym and not reveal the slightest information about their true identities.16 Hence, while the majority of senders remain anonymous to us, as almost all letters are signed with pseudonyms,17 the true identity was known to the newspaper, at least in theory. The Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報 (Shanghai, 1874–1907) carried a similar announcement with a warning that anonymous letters would not be published.18 However, this principle was not always rigorously followed, as is evidenced by a number of anonymous contributions. There is also evidence that readers tried to identify the real persons behind the letters. In one case, when the reader was successful, he accused Shenbao of not having disclosed the true identity in the paper. Occasionally the readers themselves questioned the authenticity of Letters to the Editor. In one of the above-mentioned readers’ debates in 1874, which due to its vehemence nearly forced Shenbao to close, some contributors suspected that all letters of the opposing party were either compiled by the leading spokesman of this party, or even entirely fabricated by the Shenbao editorial board. Others suspected that the letter writers were being paid for their contributions.19 Yet, since Shenbao published these letters as reader contributions and was moreover taking great risks in publishing the debate at all, it is rather unlikely they were all fabricated. Further supporting evidence for the authenticity of the letters exists in crossreferential Letter to the Editor debates between Chinese and foreign newspapers, e.g. Shenbao and North China Daily News (1864–1951) and Xunhuan ribao. Some of the letters in the English papers were then being signed by name and occasionally even Ernest Major (1841–1908), the editor of Shenbao, himself took part by writing letters to English papers in Shanghai.20 Furthermore, Shenbao published some Letters to the Editor in the advertisement section, 16   “Benguan gaobai,” Shenbao 14.8.1872. 17   Both in Shenbao and Xunhuan ribao there are exceptional cases where readers sign letters with what appear to be their own names, such as “Scholar Yang Yutian from Shunde” 順 德揚玉田茂才 (Xunhuan ribao 7., 11., and 14.4.1874), or “Li Jieshi from Shunyi” 順邑黎介 史 (Xunhuan ribao 8.4.1874). 18  “Benguan jinqi,” Wanguo gongbao 20.7.1878. 19   “Muxiao guoke shu,” Shenbao 23.1.1874. 20   See, e.g., the debate about proper titles and names for the foreigner per se or foreign leaders as discussed in Vittinghoff, “ ‘British Barbarians’ and ‘Chinese Pigtails’?”

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implying that those senders had to pay for their publication, which would not seem reasonable were those letters fabricated. 1.2 Letters Going Public: Editors as Gatekeepers Much of the literature on Letters to the Editor is concerned with the bias created through the selections of letters by the editorial board. This refers not only to personal preferences or the political partialities of the editors, but also to the number of letters a newspaper receives which determines how much selectivity is required. In assessing this gate-keeping function of the editors, scholars come to very different conclusions, finding either almost no bias and a general reflection of public opinion or a significant impact through selection.21 Different studies also identify different criteria of editorial boards for selection. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen regarded the news value of the letter as the most important criterion to be taken into consideration, as well as factors of textual quality, speed or temporal proximity, individualized representation, fairness and, most of all, disagreement. According to Nielsen, disagreement with the newspaper or another contribution is the most significant consideration of editors, as it enables debate.22 Karin Wahl-Jorgensen emphasized the rules of relevance, brevity, entertainment, and authority. Under “relevance,” she places elements of news values, i.e. timeliness, general interest, importance and topicality. The entertainment function is also an element, and one rather neglected in other studies on selections of Letters to the Editor, where the educational and political aspects of the public debate have stronger priority. However, as Wahl-Jorgensen points out: While deliberative democrats may condemn a form of debate that primarily entertains and provokes rather than bringing about rational discussion, the editors show the flipside of this argument: they suggest that entertainment can be one powerful way to create and fuel a public debate.23 Thus, entertaining the readers can also be an effective means to engage them in deliberations about public issues. Nevertheless, the quality and level of entertainment has to be kept to a high standard to avoid debates degenerating into trivial gossip. Hence, the rule of authority, defined as cultural capital and entrance requirement involving professional knowledge, skillful use of 21  Perrin and Vaisey, “Parallel Public Spheres,” 787. 22   Nielsen, “Participation through Letters to the Editor,” 26–30. 23   Wahl-Jorgensen, “Understanding the Conditions,” 75.

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language, persuasiveness, and cultural competences is another important component for considering the acceptance of letters.24 Regarding early Letters to the Editor in the newspapers of Hong Kong and Shanghai, similar factors dictated the inclusion of letters. However, there were not only different views on what material should be selected for publication, but also a widespread view that the editorial board should be biased in exerting its gate-keeping function. As the general assumption is that early Chinese journalism was immature and not subject to any rules and standards, it could easily be concluded that editors were making arbitrary selections of letters serving their own interests. Also, Madeleine Yue Dong concluded from her analysis of the famous debate about the murder case of Yang Naiwu 楊乃武 and Xiao Baicai 小白菜 in 1874, that Like most newspapers in the early eras of mass media, Shenbao served the interests of some elite groups, helping them to form and transform their community, rather than representing “the people’s voice,” or even an unbiased forum of elite debate, as it claimed.25 In contrast to this conclusion I would argue that early newspapers were keen on establishing standards of “good” journalistic practice, i.e. not favoring certain views of certain elite groups. We have ample evidence that they made great efforts in following the model of their foreign counterparts and frequently explained their publication strategies. As a foreigner edited Shenbao, it seems rather natural that their understanding of “good practice” followed contemporary Western standards. Also Xunhuan ribao was explicitly keen to emulate the Times.26 The Chinese language edition of China Mail in Hong Kong, Huazi ribao 華字日報 (1872–1941) was the first to publish their principles of selection, and, according to Zhuo Nansheng, had directly translated this text from its English language mother publication, the China Mail, which again testifies to their close proximity in journalistic practice to their Western colleagues: Our columns are open to all who wish to address the public on legitimate grounds, but we do not hold ourselves responsible for the opinion of our correspondents. All communications addressed to this paper must be

24   Ibid. 25   Dong, “Communities and Communication,” 101. 26   “Prospectus,” China Mail 2.2.1874; “Prospectus,” Hongkong Times 2.2.1874.

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accompanied by the name of the sender, not necessarily for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith.27 The commemorative edition of Shenbao’s 20.000th issue, published in 1928, explained in a retrospective article on the history of the paper that the relationship between readers and editors was very close in the early years of Shenbao, and that the editors would print all major points of every incoming letter: As to news correspondence and letters to the editors: regardless of whether they were reporting news, discussing politics, or whether they were painful but useful critical comments aimed at reforming common customs or at correcting wrong views, they were all published. By doing this they hoped to facilitate the broadest public discussion possible. 次則於外間來函:無論報告新聞、商略政治,鍼砭世俗、更正 說誤,一律擇要刊載,冀臻言論公開。28 However, as this commemorative issue was published more than half a century later than the letters analyzed here, it must be read with caution; this statement might rather reflect aspirational objectives projected onto the past than journalistic practice of the time. Moreover, as is clear from contemporary newspaper comments, not all submissions were printed. The reservation that critical comments are allowed as long as they are useful, is further and more explicitly expounded in a flyer by Xunhuan ribao: In case one of the distinguished gentlemen would have compiled a new book about current affairs, which brings benefit to our colleagues and conforms to all like-minded persons, please bring it to our house at your leisure and we will publish it, not requesting a single penny no matter what it is about, as long as it brings something new to our ears and eyes, and is not of libelous or licentious content. 諸君子有新撰著述,係論及時務,授益于同人,有合於同好 者,無論何事,但能新吾人之耳目,非作譭謗肆譖之詞,則隨 時可付來。本居代為刊印,分文不取,特此佈聞。29

27   Quoted (in English) in Zhuo, “You guan ‘Xianggang Huazi ribao’,” 215. 28  Shenbaoguan erwanhao jiniance, 23. 29   “Ci zhi qi tie,” Xunhuan ribao 1874.

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The Shenbao editors seem to follow this understanding that the papers and their letters would publish commonly shared views for the public good rather than individual and perhaps eccentric opinions when stating: Our publishing house received multiple letters from different locations, which all protested in similar fashion against the injustice. Only when we saw that the public opinion was uniform did we start publishing [these views] in the paper. We certainly did not publish anything instantly in the papers as soon as we heard something about it. 本館屢接各處來信亦皆無不為之訴枉。因見眾口一詞,始為錄 列于報。並非一有所聞即為列報也。30 Obviously the editors saw their gate-keeping function as one of creating common sense and avoiding controversies rather than stimulating controversial debates. In the above-mentioned contested debate about the actor Yang Yuelou 楊月樓, which brought a first crisis to Shenbao in 1874, three years prior to the statement above, the editors forced the readers to stop the debate, first by appeal to the readers not to send in further comments, and, when this did not seem to bear fruit, by authoritative decision: Our house already announced previously that we will not publish anything further related to this . . . case and we wish to put an end to the quarrel between both parties. The former letters have brought about sufficient damage. Hence we are bound and determined to end the discussion. 本館前言凡関涉 . . . 概不肯再刊本。欲息兩下之爭,且本館代刊 前件業已代人受過。故決計停止也。31 Still, it has to be mentioned that this authoritarian decision by Shenbao was an exceptional case, in that foreign and Chinese authorities also exerted strong pressure on Ernest Major to close the debate, to the extent that they threatened to ban the paper.32 That the newspapers were supporting certain views and suppressing others in their selection of letters was, however, a general suspicion shared by early letter writers. At the same time, other letter writers firmly requested that the editors be biased and publish only those letters and views they deemed “cor30   “Shu dichao Wang shiyu,” Shenbao 7.4.1877. 31   “Benguan fukan Xiangshanren,” Shenbao 24.1.1874. 32   The debate in the Shenbao in fact escalated into a fierce community conflict between different local groups in Shanghai, and partly led to violent actions.

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rect”; these writers could be rather explicit about their views on the editors. Commenting on the fact that Shenbao allowed some people to use the paper to vent their anger, one letter writer attacked the editors directly: Editors of your respected house do not seem to be very brilliant, hence they cannot distinguish between good and evil, fragrance and stench. . . . As the chief editor cannot know the real situation, [but] he does not carefully ask for advice, hence it comes to these absurdities! 貴館主筆者不見高明,固良莠不分,香臭莫辨。. . . 貴館主筆人 既不能知事情,又不細心請教,亦至如此荒謬。33 However, such instances of accusations against the editors were exceptions to the norm and occurred mainly when readers or community members felt that their case was inadequately represented in the paper. In many of these cases, Shenbao would explain to the letter writers why they published the other contributions or reports, and apologize. One peculiar feature in the Shenbao’s understanding of the gatekeeper function is the fact that they felt apparently compelled to publish any letter that was paid for. However, probably because they were aware that a newspaper being pushed to publish readers’ contributions by payment could expose itself to potential charges of corruption, they carefully distinguished those and inserted them into the advertisement section. That advertisements occasionally contain [such allegations] is indeed the case. But as we receive money from the senders we have to print them. We do take care not to publish the names of the persons concerned. 偶于告白之中或有指及者,然此亦皆受人之錢,不得不為代 列。亦究未實指其姓名也。34 Letters published in the advertisement section, however, raised suspicions among the readers. When, during the discussion of the murder case of Yang Naiwu, a letter paid for by the sender appeared accusing Yang, and hence taking a stand in opposition to most other letters, a respondent wrote: I don’t believe this piece was written by a Hangzhou scholar, but by somebody who is really afraid that the case will be reopened. Scholars do not have much money. . . . Why does someone want to write this letter of 33  “Juwairen zhi benguan shu,” Shenbao 8.1.1874. 34   “Shu huibang an lüe hou,” Shenbao 17.2.1875.

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thousands of characters and pay to get it published in the newspaper to get Yang Naiwu executed?35 These discussions reveal stark discrepancies in the expectations about the role of the newspaper as a public forum between the editors and some of their readers. Shenbao itself explained that readers still had to become familiar with the new medium, but by 1877 it felt that readers were now used to critical and diverse opinions and comments. In my personal view, the fact that Shenbao frequently published [contested] comments both about official circles as well as the community got it into some trouble during its first two years. However, since it has now been running for three or four years, readers [have become used to it and] regard this as normal. 自《申報》創設一、二年中,猶往往有登諸報之事,無論 官場、民間,為本人所見,將與《申報》為難者。自行三、​ 四年,閱報者亦皆以為。36 The editorial statements therefore make all efforts to establish an open discussion, with both editors and letter writers having to commit to fairness and truthfulness. The selection criteria are similar to those articulated in more recent Letter to the Editor studies, although formulated in more vague terms: timeliness and relevance of the topics, general interest and entertainment. However, the responses from letter writers and discussions with the editorial boards also clearly reveal that a consensus about the form and extent of the discussion in the papers had yet to be reached. While in principle the editors were committed to publishing everything that they received, in actual practice, when transgressions of good conduct occurred, they had to revise this position and occasionally intervened by fully exerting their editorial authority. 1.3 The Letter Writers “Eccentrics or Gladiators?” is the title of an early study on Letters to the Editor, debunking “the traditional view that letter writers are cranks or eccentrics and are unrepresentative of either public opinion or of the articulate public in their community,” which apparently had long been a shared assumption.37 35   Quoted from Dong, “Communities and Communication,” 101. 36  “Xuan xinwenzhi chengshu shuo,” Shenbao 28.3.1877. 37   Volgy, “Some of My Best Friends are Letter Writers,” 321; in response to Buell, “Eccentrics or Gladiators?”

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In the case of early Chinese newspapers, there are occasional statements—by letter writers themselves—about the mean character, evil intentions or low education of Letters to the Editor writers. However, these are always made ad personam and represent therefore an attempt to undermine this person’s authority, rather than being an objective statement about their true origin. Also the sheer number of contributions indicates that engaging publicly in newspapers through letter writing was a culturally accepted practice. As noted above, the newspapers requested the highest standards of incoming contributions in their advertisements, and, unless letter writers involved themselves in debates with each other, which could result in personal attacks, contributions are commonly of high literary quality, conforming to that of the other articles in the papers. While we lack biographical information about the senders, we can at least reconstruct from their pseudonyms how they would like to present themselves. The following analysis is based on 136 letters, with 108 signatures from the sample of Shenbao letters (122), and nine from Xunhuan ribao letters (14).38 It is not possible to establish firmly that all the appearing names referred to different people, as writers might have chosen different pennames for different contributions. However, there are examples of letter writers who frequently contribute under the same names, as e.g. a “Master Sparkling Snow from Yuan Lake” (Yuanhu yingxue sheng 鴛湖映 雪生), who had four letters published within three weeks (on May 13, 24, 28 and June 3, 1873). The signatures comprise elements or combinations of elements containing the following information: studio names (zhai 齋, shi 室, tang 堂, etc.), education or profession, place of residence, and statements about the personality of the writers. Thirty per cent of the letters indicate the geographical origin of the writer, often in combination with other self-descriptions, and are sometimes very precise, as that of the “Fair Old Man from Huating County in Jiangsu” (Jiangsu Huating xianren chiping sou 江蘇華亭縣人持平叟). Ten per cent of those indicating a locality are from Shanghai, while other letters are from writers from Zhejiang and Jiangsu, and also Shandong, Jiangxi, Guangzhou among others. Broadly speaking, the signatures can be divided into two groups, those that give factual information about the identity of the writer (20) and those that describe the personality of the letter writers, which make up the majority (70). Information about the writers includes full names and/or place of origin (4),

38  Five of the letters are not signed.

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such as Mr. Wu Naihe 呉乃和氏39 or Kuaijihu Xiangshan 會稽湖象山, their status as residents or visitors (e.g. ke 客, laike 來客 or guolairen 過來人) in Shanghai (10) as “home comer to Shanghai” (Shanghai guilai ke 海上歸來客), or information about their profession (6), such as Import Tradesman (Yanghuo jingshou ke 洋貨經手客), Tradesman from Ningbo (Ningbo jingshou ke 寗波 經手客), Shanghai Doctor (Shenjiang yeyi ren 申江業醫人) or Chief Leader of the Public Administration Bureau (Gongsuo shoushi renzhang 公所首事 人長). In these cases, the content of the letters is related to their profession, hence they establish themselves as experts or insiders.40 The studio names (18) sit between these categories, as some of them refer to real studios, which would imply that the authors are identifiable. Such names usually refer to the workplaces of the writers, most likely literati, artists, or poets.41 Ernest Major, for example, used “Master of Respect for the News Pavilion” (Zunwenge zhuren 尊聞閣主人) as his signature, and this studio name was identifiable as the Shenbao house.42 Yet the majority are metaphorical pseudonyms and cannot be identified as real venues. As mentioned, many of the pennames are metaphorical self-descriptions (70), and could be or were seen as indicators of social status. The majority are literary metaphors, referring to the character or mood of the writer. They can be grouped as follows:



Describing the intention of the letter writer in programmatic or normative statements, such as “Enlightener of the Weak from Jingkou” (Jingkou zhenmizi 京口振靡子), “Cleaner of the Ears from Wusong, Jiangshang” (Wusong Jiangshang xi’er ren 吳淞江上洗耳人), or “Fair Old Man” (Chiping sou 持平叟). Describing their attitude towards a discussion or event: most of these contain words related to the semantic fields of “eyes,” “seeing,” “observing,” etc., such as “Cold-eyed Old Man (Lengyan sou 冷眼叟), “Unconcerned



39   Wu Naihe is a common Chinese name, but, as Antje Richter thankfully pointed out, in this case the name could also be read as a pun for a “Mr. Nothing to Do About It” (wunaihe 無奈何). 40  Ningbo jingshou ke, “Fulai youren shu,” Shenbao 14.6.1872; “Suzhou yanghuo jingshou ke lai shu,” Shenbao 17.6.1872; Zhongshang Hechao shi, “Wen baoguan bi yong xi zi laishu,” Shenbao 27. 6.1873. 41   Bauer, Der chinesische Personenname, 14. 42   Between 1872 and 1889, when Major returned to England, over 70 articles appeared under this name, most of which are advertisements or announcements.

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Observer” (Xiushou pangguangzhe 袖手旁觀者), or “Cold Eyes after the Disaster” (Jiehou lengyanren 劫後冷眼人). Describing their status in society. Among these, the majority refer to the semantic fields of eremitism or Buddhism, either using suffixes such as “scholar emeritus/lay Buddhist” ( jushi 居士), or similar terms, e.g. “Hermit Official from Jiangnan” (Jiangnan liyin 江南吏隱) or “Master at Sea on the Ferry of Salvation” (Haishang cihang sheng 海上慈航生). Another related and frequently evoked semantic field is that of “instability” or “floating/idle life,” using suffixes such as “idle man” (sanren 散人), “vagabond” (youmin 游民) or bird names. Examples would be “One Who is Not Yet Retired and Has Nothing to Do” (Wushi wei xianjuzhe 無事未閑居者), “Shanghai Stroller” (Shenjiang juanyouzhe 申江捲游者), or “Idle Seagull from Shanghai” (Hushang xian ou 滬上閑鷗). Indicating their high moral stance or literary merit through general literary metaphors, such as the above mentioned “Master Sparkling Snow from Yuan Lake” or “Master Drinking at Peace and Eating with Dignity” (Yinhe shide sheng 飲和食德生).





Although we do not know the true identity of the letter writers, from their representations through pennames we can conclude that they identify themselves as literati, merchants or other professionals, many of whom, as is apparent from the content of the letters, are in contact with foreigners. As most of the letters are from people based in Shanghai, they represent the elite community of Chinese living in the concessions, who have come in large number as refugees to the city during the Taiping rebellion (1848–64).43 Studies on the biographical backgrounds of the first generation of editors and journalists have shown that most of them were also well educated and well connected to transnational institutions of Western learning in Shanghai.44 It seems hence plausible that there are overlapping features between the first journalists and these letter writers. The writers present themselves as observers and bystanders, rather than active instigators of debates. This is also reflected in the choice of pennames related to seclusion and hermitage. According to traditional conventions, to withdraw from a vita activa to lead a life in seclusion can be read as a sign of protest, when an official deliberately and voluntarily renounces titles and 43   While in the 1850s the Chinese population in the foreign concessions was very low and consisted mainly of household servants, in the 1870s, the Shanghai concessions had 2767 foreign and 58,981 Chinese residents. Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai, 39–40. 44  Vittinghoff, Die Anfänge des Journalismus, chapter 3.

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merits and refuses to fulfill his duty as rightful official.45 However, in the context where a large proportion of the Chinese population in the concessions consisted of refugees and immigrants, these pennames could also hint at their current status as “hermits” away from their original homes. As Rudolf G. Wagner has pointed out, Shanghai provided a “place of withdrawal [for the retired gentlemen] from the control of the government, but with the modern option to turn the silent remonstrance into a very public and articulate affair.”46 While this is a convincing but optimistic interpretation, the frequently referred to semantic field of a “floating” or even “meaningless” life points toward an interpretation of some feeling of unsettledness among the writers in the new settlements. Using normative or programmatic terms as pennames might have been a new practice borrowed from English language newspapers. The use of pseudonyms was widespread in nineteenth-century European and American newspapers, often for critical writing or when writing public letters was not considered a suitable occupation. In the North China Herald, readers frequently signed their contributions with normative terms such as “Progress,” “Justice,” or “Fairness.” For the nascent Chinese press, this seemed to be a novelty and was not always accepted. For example, in regard to the pennames “Indignant Old Gentleman” (Buping fu 不平父) and “Old Forefather of Fairness” (Gongping laolao zu 公 平老老祖), another reader comments: With regard to the letter by the “Indignant Old Gentleman” or the “Old Forefather of Fairness,” we don’t even have to discuss the correctness of their articles. One only has to look at the modesty or arrogance [revealed] in their pennames, and one can clearly see their intensions without ever having met them in person. Their conduct is truly not worth commenting on. 至若不平父、公平老老祖二書,不必辨其論說之是與否。僅須 視其稱呼之驕與謙,雖未謀半面之緣,已足見其底蘊。其人之 品行早亦卑不足。47 As mentioned, Chinese residents also wrote Letters to the Editor to English language newspapers and usually signed those by name. In some cases it is explicitly stated that these letters were originally written in Chinese and translated by foreigners. 45   Kwok, Protest in the Chinese Tradition, 1–8. 46   Wagner, “The Role of the Foreign Community,” 431. 47   Fu Yue huanke, “Lun Yuedong Xiangshanxian minshi hou,” Shenbao 19.1.1874.

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The Letters

2.1 Typology of Letters to the Editor In considering these letters, we find a broad range of different types of communication: individuals sent in the majority of letters, but we also occasionally find joint letters sent in by groups.48 Again, while the majority of Letters to the Editor writers in Chinese papers are of Chinese nationality, and likewise of English nationality in English papers, Chinese readers would also contribute letters to English papers49 and foreigners would send letters to Shenbao.50 Also, some of the Chinese letters respond to articles in newspapers in another language: for example, the North China Herald responded to letters in Shenbao. Chinese letter writers contributing to English language papers also made clear that they saw themselves in a higher and more authoritative position to comment on or discuss with foreigners matters of common or national concern. In a debate about the position and legal protection of Catholic missionaries, the Chinese letter writer Ch’ih Tao Ten explicitly write in his letter “We Chinese (of course I speak not of the large mass altogether ignorant of foreigners).”51 The culture of Letter to the Editor writing emerging in this early phase is therefore from the outset transnational and cross-referential, but also very much an elite affair. The following statistical analysis is based on a sample set of 108 Letters to the Editor in Shenbao in 1872–74. There are two basic types of Letters to the Editor: responsive letters, which refer to reports or other letters in the newspaper, or initiating letters, which bring up new topics. While in general editors prefer “letters that are directly relevant to the newspaper, in practice readers and editors alike understand the column as a forum for a more expansive commentary on the public.”52 The analysis of Shenbao letters shows a clear majority: out of 108 letters, 77 were initiating individual contributions, while only one third (31) were responsive letters. Among the responsive letters, the majority (21) responded to Shenbao itself,53 while only a few (10) responded to other readers’ contributions. 48   “Without Title,” Shenbao 7.2.1873. This letter is a joint letter against lijin 厘 金 taxes written in the format of a petition and submitted by Shanghai merchants. 49   See discussion below. 50   E.g. “Faguo xunbu nüedai Huaren shi bian wu,” Shenbao 28.10.1872. The French Police Office sent this letter. 51   “The Missionary Question,” North China Herald 2.5.1874, 398–399. 52   Perrin and Vaisey, “Parallel Public Spheres,” 786–87. 53   Three of these letters did not mention Shenbao, but still referred to topics discussed in previous issues.

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The ratio of initiating and responsive letters remains stable, even if the number of contributions varies greatly in different periods: while the months May to June in 1872 carried 32 Letters to the Editor, and in 1874 only 17, during the same period in 1873, 62 letters can be identified. This shows that the frequency of reader contributions can be very irregular. However, throughout these periods the ratio of responsive and initiating letters remained precisely 1 : 2. It also seems that large debates among readers with more than five contributions, such as the above mentioned Yang Yuelou or Yang Naiwu cases, remained exceptions rather than the rule, as most responsive letters were single responses, and were only rarely followed by further contributions. This shows that Letter to the Editor writers are on the one hand refraining from engaging in interactive discussion in the papers, but, on the other are keen to bring their own views to a wider public. Another distinction that can be made is whether letters address issues of local, regional or national concern. Again, as Wahl Joergensen concluded from her analysis, “Editors often explained their preference for locally generated content by arguing that it fosters a higher quality of debate. Local letters, they argue, create more of a “back and forth.”54 The Shenbao Letters to the Editor do in fact have a clear preference for local issues. While for 28 out of 108 letters a clear regional coverage could not be identified as they address very general issues of common concern, 54 of the remaining 80 clearly discuss local events or issues in Shanghai, while another 17 refer to events mainly in the Jiangnan region, and occasionally also Guangxi or Beijing. However, if we combine this data showing a clear preference for local issues with the ratio of responsive and initiating letters, the conclusion presented above that local issues would provoke more responsive letters and back and forth debate cannot be demonstrated in the context of the early Chinese press, where we clearly find mostly initiating letters referring to local issues. In a discussion of the genre types of Letters to the Editor, Nielsen distinguishes three genres of letters: story telling, criticism, and appeal.55 In general, similar types can be identified for the Shenbao letters. However, some modification is needed. The Shenbao letters under discussion can be grouped into the following main categories: general social concern (49), social interest stories (26), literary pieces and literary criticism (13), issues in business and trade (12) and national politics (9).56 54   Wahl-Jorgensen, “Understanding the Conditions,” 74. 55   Nielsen, “Participation through Letters to the Editor,” 30. 56   One letter discussing the globe escapes any of these categories: Donghai sanren, “Diqiu lüeshuo,” Shenbao 2.6.1874.

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Storytelling letters in Nielsen’s understanding are a supplement to existing news coverage in the paper and hence would be mainly responsive letters. In Shenbao, however, most of the storytelling letters are initiating letters. There are two types of letters under this category: social interest stories and literary pieces, which sometimes overlap as it remains unclear in some instances whether the story told is a real or fictional event. Social interest stories mainly concern local events or people, such as the Leader of the Doufu gang.57 With a total of 39 letters, story-telling letters make up about one third of the contributions under discussion. In a sense, we can see here the forerunners of installment fiction, which set off in the 1890s to become a distinct characteristic of China’s subsequent tabloid newspaper journalism.58 The clear majority of letters is touching on issues of social concern. While Nielsen distinguishes between letters of criticism, which again respond to something that had been published, and appeal letters, including those that advocate a course of action,59 it was difficult to separate these types clearly in the Letters to the Editor of Shenbao. As most letters are initiating contributions, criticism voiced in them referred mainly to social reality, i.e. instances of social injustice, the welfare of the people, the unfair treatment of the working class, or general moral issues, sometimes in combination with a proposal for a course of action.60 At the same time, many of the responsive letters were not criticizing but supporting the previous letter’s viewpoint, and therefore not instigating controversial debates but seeming to be keen on creating a sense of shared values and beliefs. This is in line with the above-mentioned statements by the editors of the papers that they seek to form or address a community of like-minded readers. A larger part of those letters articulating social concern (49) addressed three recurring areas: opium (8), women (9) and general public social morals (8, i.e. those not related to women, which likewise also often related to social morals). Letters about women were mainly concerned with prostitutes, brothels, licentious plays in Shanghai, and questions whether women should be allowed to visit the theatres. General moral concerns included family morals, filial sons, and also religious issues, concerning either Buddhist or heretic (often meaning “Christian”) sects.61 57   Wu Naihe shi, “Fulu laishu shu doufudang gunfei,” Shenbao 29.6.1872. 58   E.g. Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai, Introduction. 59   Nielsen, “Participation through Letters to the Editor,” 30–31. 60   Most obvious is the demand for a course of action in letters starting with “a proposal to” (ni 擬 . . . yi 議), as in Mingxian jushi, “Niqing jin nü tangguan yi,” Shenbao 25.5.1872. 61   Hou lengyan ren, “Lun xiejiao huo ren shi,” Shenbao 5.5.1873.

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Although business people, and especially those engaging in international business, formed a major part of Shenbao’s readership, only a comparatively small number of letters dealt with business and trade issues. Perhaps as businessmen, they did not regard themselves really as men-of-letters capable of contributing erudite writings. Letters grouped as concerning politics are those which discuss political decisions by major officials or are comments on contributions in the official gazettes.62 The latter phenomenon is peculiar as the official gazettes were certainly not a forum for discussion, but contained carefully edited and censored official documents, which had to be reprinted in different editions exactly according to the template issued by the court. As has been discussed elsewhere, the reprint of the official gazette in Shenbao had already led to quite controversial discussion.63 With Letters to the Editor commenting on the content of the official gazettes, the imperial publications are implicitly also being included in the forum of public discussion. 2.2 Epistolary Formulae In contrast to Letters to the Editor in English language newspapers of the nineteenth century in either Britain or China, which start with “Letter to the Editor, DEAR SIR,“ and end with a greeting such as “SINCERELY,” the letters in the early Chinese papers have not developed a coherent formula. As mentioned at the outset, most Letters to the Editor were not classified as such, but printed like regular articles with headings and signed by name. Most letters carried the name of the sender under the heading of the letter, while a small number are signed at the end as part of the general text. Also, in one instance only, the letter writer addresses the editors in the beginning, as “XYZ sends this letter to the editor of the Shenbao House with a kowtow” 頓首致書 于申報舘主人 and closes expressing his “hopes that [his] humble scribble will be selected for publication” 望拙作錄. This letter, which was not signed by name, was sent in by a colleague from another newspaper and is therefore an exception.64 Most articles end with some reflection on the purpose or intention of the letter: alluding to the function of the newspapers as a collector of people’s voices, one, for instance, concludes that this is “to give some support to those 62   Qinggang jushi “Bian wan mache zhong bishang ren da wei minxin lun,” Shenbao 16.5.1873; Shenpu diaotu, “Lun Huyi dangqing jian Liu Gong chuanci,” Shenbao 6.5.1873. 63   Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, chapter 3; Vittinghoff, Die Anfänge des Journalismus, chapter 7. 64   “Yingyou laishu,” Shenbao 13.6.1874.

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who are collecting folk songs [i.e. the voices of the people]” 頗足為采風者 之一助焉. Some also include a request to publish the letter, such as “I would be truly happy if your honorable house would please ascertain [whether it can] be published in the newspaper in order to dispel any doubts” 貴館請查明登報以釋 疑懷幸甚, or “I told this story and present it to your honorable house, hoping that it will very soon be published in Shenbao to prevent impeding disasters” 述此事錄呈貴舘望亟登申報以警世云. Such phrasing indicates that they were not only very aware of the selection process, but also quite confident that the publication of their contribution would have a definite impact. This is even more the case for letters addressing issues of national importance, which accordingly end in a grander gesture, such as: “I truly wish that those in superior positions concerned with the morals of our times will select and spread this, which indeed would be of great fortune for our nation in the world” 願有心世道之在上位者採擇而言之實天下國家之大幸也. In all these formulae the writers are paying respect to the publishing house, and there are very few attacks or criticisms of Shenbao editors to be found in the letters. Indeed, the tone of the letters is in most cases respectful and objective, but also personal. Many stories, particularly in letters of social concern, start with an event that the letter writer has personally witnessed, which caused the deliberations that follow in the letter. While few letters end with concrete proposals as to how to remedy the situation, the conclusion is frequently a long sigh, or “alas.” The following piece, “On Beggars in the Foreign Concession” by “A Most Happy Old Man from Ancient Wu” [i.e. from around Suzhou], is representative of a letter of general social concern, and is quoted in full, as a typical example for further analysis of its narrative: Seeing beggars always makes me sigh. The universal will to cherish life does not reach to the foreign concessions. Beggars are poor people. They bear no filthy marks of corporal punishment for crimes. They are not as dirty and mean as prostitutes or servants. They do not do any harm to the national constitution as thieves and robbers do. If they were able to support themselves, they would still be pure and good citizens. Those who cannot help but beg, honestly do this only as a last resort for a chance of survival they can turn to. If all begging were prohibited, would this not also mean an end to their lives? Now if you watch the police in the foreign concessions, they treat beggars very violently. In order to drive them out, they hit them spitefully and maltreat them, and nothing can stop them. Those emaciated, maltreated bodies, slowly trudging, lacking the

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strength to walk, how are they supposed to withdraw in a swift manner? They just get beaten! Nearly all of them have to suffer this ferocity. Therefore we can count numerous cases when beggars are fatally injured. Last summer I watched a bitterly poor little broker in the Rue Gaston. Completely emaciated, he hastily came over, not asking for money at all. A policeman from Ningbo seeing him in such poor shape, actually secretly followed this poor man behind his back with light speedy steps, as if in fear the man could escape from him and he would miss the opportunity to use his truncheon on him, hitting him hard when he finally reached him. The poor man immediately cried out loud, and covered with blood he passed out and then died on the spot. All who observed the scene felt nothing but grief in their hearts. As everybody fears the police, all kept their mouths shut and did not dare to speak. And yet the policeman started to swear endlessly using a foreign language. Does (this man) have a heart like a tiger or panther, a jackal or a wolf? How could he have a human heart? I could not bear to watch this without asking him why he was so hateful. And the policemen said with a stern voice: it’s this lot of beggars who steal other people’s belongings. Therefore they are not permitted to beg in the foreign concession. How can you not know about this? He then glared at me fiercely for some time, as if he wished to embarrass me. When I observed how his face had become even more forceful, I knew he was simply demonstrating the power of his position, and that it would be pointless to appeal to reason. Hence I didn’t dare to engage in more discussion either and just sighed at him. Alas! How could all beggars be capable of being thieves? They lack the skills for it. Thieves would never become beggars, because they are likely to gain something every day to rely on. If he was really a thief, the patrolling policemen on the beat as well as the inspectors would all know this man, they would often accept his bribes, relying on this as a money-tree, and would cover up his actions by [pretending] to be too busy. Why should they be willing to expel him and beat him savagely? Hence the true reason is that they wish to protect the thieves by slandering the beggars. Therefore they only confer the label of thieves on the lot of beggars. The common foreigner turns his hatred only against the beggars, without further investigation about who the real thieves are, while the thieves in contrast all remain free of trouble. Scattered around the foreign concessions, they can exert their skills to rob from people every day without being investigated. The policemen and others can enjoy their increasing profits beyond limits. Even if they would catch one in the band of thieves and hand him over, he would be

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released within the twinkling of an eye. So we only see policemen beating beggars, never beating thieves. Every shop owner can also rely on the power of the police, and bully the beggars without spending a single copper. Unfortunately, these beggars thus already have long experience that in the foreign concessions they can only get small monies of few coppers. Unfortunately, the consuls of the foreign countries do not know about this evil situation yet, and also suspect the beggars of being thieves, not knowing that the actual thieves are other people. Hence the foreign concessions are no longer a last resort for the livelihood of the beggars. I can only hope there are people with great benevolence, who share the universal will to cherish life and investigate the case with the police station, to get rid of the poison and to establish a good method by which to enable a way of survival for the beggars, which might also be a method of accumulating merit. Moreover, the shop owners would not have to spend more than a few coppers every day. Why should there be a need to expel the beggars, only so that the shop owners can save this little amount! And the shopkeepers do not even necessarily feel thankful to the foreigners for saving them this little amount. As I saw a policeman violating a beggar again today, I am giving this brief account in very general terms. Those sharing the same mind will forgive me and not regard these as farfetched ruminations. 吾常觀於乞人而嘆:天地好生之心至洋場而絕矣。夫乞人者,​ 貧人也。非有刑傷過犯之穢迹也。非如娼優隸卒之汗賤也。​ 非若為盜為賊之有干國憲也。苟能自立,仍然清白良民。其不 得已而求食也者,誠此生之末路,僅一線之生機也。若並乞之 不許不亦絕其命耶?乃觀於洋場巡捕汹洶乞人,是讎驅打凌虐 無所不至。逃避稍遲,棍棒交下。此種饑寒交迫之軀,緩步徐 行猶行力絀,安能疾逃避?打哉!罹其凶者,殆十有八。故乞 人之受傷而至斃者詎可以數計。余於去年夏在寶善街見有貧而 苦,小經紀人也。鳩形鵠面貿貿然來並不討錢。有巡捕寧波人 望見其潦倒狀潛,從該貧人背後輕步疾馳,若惟恐其逃脫而不 得試其棍者。至則突然猛擊,該貧人大 噴血暈絕於地。見者 莫不心惻皆畏巡捕而箝口不敢言而該巡捕猶作外國語怒罵不 已。噫!虎豹耶?豺狼耶?是豈尚有人心者耶?余旁觀不勝其 忿,問其何讎。而該巡捕厲聲云:「剪竊人財物,皆此等乞 人。故不許其在洋場求乞。汝豈未之知耶?虎視耽耽幾欲與余 為難。余觀巡捕面甚凶,頑知其恃勢作威,非可以理喻者。故 亦不敢多與言,第付之一歎而已。噫,乞人者,豈皆能為剪竊 以未習其技也。剪竊者每不層為乞人,蓋日有取進也。若真剪 竊者,流為巡捕者及包打聽等皆識其人,時時收取陋規,方將

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倚為錢樹子而庇護之不暇。毒打哉!推原其故,惟欲庇護夫剪 竊,特衊汗夫乞人,蓋以剪竊之名盡於乞人。洋人之怒第加於 乞人而不復究夫真剪竊者矣。而剪竊之徒反得安然無,雜處洋 場日肆其攫人之技而莫與追究。巡捕等可長享其利於無窮。即 有獲得剪竊之徒交與巡捕,不轉瞬即安然釋放矣。故獨見巡捕 之驅打乞,不見其驅打剪竊也。各店家亦有藉巡捕之勢欺嚇乞 人而一文不捨者。可憐彼乞人即歷盡洋場能得幾文小錢耶。惜 各國領事館未悉其弊,亦疑乞人之即為剪竊而不知剪竊之另有 人也。故乞人至洋場生路絕矣。惟望忠厚仁人體天地好生之 心,將此事妥商巡捕房,弛此毒禁,設夫善法俾乞人得有一線 之生機,未始非積德之一段也。況洋場各店家每日不過費數文 錢耳,何必驅打乞人為店家省此區區哉!而各店家亦未必因省 是區區而遂感德洋人也。今因又見巡捕肆虐,故畧陳梗概。想 同具人心者,諒不河漢芻蕘。65 The letter starts with the articulation of a personal feeling evoked by a certain situation. This is followed by a general statement about the state of affairs, in this case the true nature of beggars. These opening parts often also contain general moral statements or references to the men of antiquity. The letter then poses the problem, i.e. the police maltreating beggars for no obvious reason. The following section of an eyewitness account of a scene of heartbreaking social injustice is a typical strategy for invoking compassion and sympathy from the reader. Once the reader is on his side, the letter writer turns to his actual point, i.e. criticism of the local police for their corruption. The writer further explains the mechanisms of why no one understands the true situation (apart from himself, hence the need to expose this truth) and why even the foreigners are blinded. The letter continues with the expression of hope for a redress of this problem and why this would be of benefit to all good people (but not to the police, of course). The letter ends by explaining the motivation for sending it at this point of time—because he again witnessed a similar incident, and finishes off with a formulaic apology for sending it. The overall tone of the letter is engaging and emotional. It appeals to the reader’s compassion for beggars and their condemnation of the cruel, corrupt and selfish police. Even if it addresses the ignorance of the consuls and people, at which point the letter writer puts himself into a superior position, it remains modest, deploring but not accusatory. As such it is a representative example of the majority of Letters to the Editor in this phase of early Chinese journalism 65  Gu Wu zuile laoren, “Yangchang qiushi lun,” Shenbao 4.9.1872.

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in terms of both style and content. However, conversations among readers can occasionally become cynical or even aggressive. According to Andrew J. Perrin and Stephen Vaisey the tone of Letters to the Editor is not dictated by their content or topic.66 It can, in the case of Shenbao, also change quite drastically, when readers engage in personal debates, and include angry or posing, even sarcastic remarks. In these cases, ad hominem attacks are frequently employed to undermine the other letter writer’s authority, such as in the following example: It is a shame that Mr. Fairness Jr., seemingly such a big talent, is neither a member of the Hanlin Academy nor controlling the frontier areas. Instead he always roams around the markets and mingles with the most common and low people. . . . I wish I had advised him to shave his hair and become a monk a long time ago, since that would suit him best! If he cannot succeed in becoming either a famous official or well-known Ru-scholar, he could have the opportunity to become a famous monk! Wouldn’t that be great! 惜乎持平子似此高才,不登翰苑而掌封疆,尚在市廛之間與至 微至賤之優伶為黨羽耳。. . . 予欲勸持平子早日劊髮為僧,極 合其宜。今世不為名宦名儒,亦可為名僧矣。豈不美哉!豈不 美哉!67 The debates around Yang Yuelou and Yang Naiwu also challenge a conventional view held in accordance with the law of the “spiral of silence,” a term coined by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who explained that individuals will speak less openly about issues with which they would expect others to disagree, thus triggering a spiral of silence about contested issues. Regarding this concept it has been assumed that individuals would be less inclined to articulate controversial views the closer they are in relation to others in the group, as they would risk their local reputation. Accordingly, Perrin and Vaisey theorize that the less local an issue is, the more individuals are incited to become vehement.68 In this case, however, the debate about a very specific local issue became more personal and controversial than any other in the early years of the Shanghai and Hong Kong newspapers. However, the majority of letters, even in controversial debates, remain polite and impersonal. Even when the 66   For an identification of criteria to analyze tones and strategies in Letters to the Editor see Perrin and Vaisey, “Parallel Public Spheres,” 789–90. 67   “Quan Chipingzi xi lun shi,” Shenbao 13.1.1874. 68  Perrin and Vaisey, “Parallel Public Spheres,” 798.

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above-mentioned Mr Ch’ih Tao Ten, discussing the missionary question in the North China Herald, is attacked in a response by a foreign letter writer (signing as “One of Them”): Now, it means to me that the Chinese writer must either come down from the moon, that he knows so little of what is going on in his own country, or prove to be a rather barefaced humbug.69 He continues to respond in the most polite way, asking his opponents to “to give a fair and unbiased consideration to the following points” he is making. He also makes a plea to the whole community of foreigners and thanks the newspaper to give him the opportunity to address their readers and advocate his views.70 Nevertheless in terms of content, the letter writer insists on all his points (8 in total), and quite frankly attacks the missionaries: 7. Groundless suspicion against you Missionaries I am willing to combat, but remember that many real grounds of suspicion and dislike remain. You come from afar to preach us your religion—you evidently think ours insufficient and inferior; you work to make us abandon what we most love and revere! . . . To realize our feelings in this, think of our going to your country to disseminate our teaching!71 In conclusion, however, the letter writer again establishes the commonly shared objective of friendly relations for the benefit of both nations, something he had stressed in previous letters as well: In conclusion: I write for the sake of my country and, more specifically, the preservations of its friendly relations with foreign countries, looking at these as a means of maintaining China’s greatness.72



The above is a snapshot of Letter to the Editor writing culture in the earliest phase of China’s nascent modern journalism. Due to the scarcity of stud69  “To the Editor of the North China Herald,” North China Herald 2.5.1874, 390. 70  “The Missionary Question,” North China Herald 30.5.1874, 482. 71  Ibid. 72  Ibid.

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ies in the field and the limited knowledge about many details and aspects of this new letter writing practice, it is far too early to conclude with far reaching statements, e.g. in how far these are representative examples of public opinion or could serve as a barometer for measuring public participation. However, by looking at the earliest months of publication of the two most important Chinese national papers in the late nineteenth century, it can be observed that writing Letters to the Editor was quickly accepted as a reputable cultural practice and formed an important part of newspapers from their beginnings. Editorial boards not only depended on contributions from readers to fill their pages and receive information about distant locations when a correspondent system was yet to be established. As in British newspapers of the time, readers’ views and voices were also sought after in order to foster public debate. Editorial policies in dealing with Letters to the Editor were very similar to those of their European counterparts. Editors requested information about the real identities of contributors, i.e. names and addresses, and openly discussed their selection policies. However, in contrast to their European counterparts, where letters articulating oppositional views were preferred for publication, statements of the Chinese editors reveal a slight inclination towards creating consensus rather than controversial debate and dissents. That this approach was seemingly accepted and shared among readers also is reflected in the content of the letters, the majority of whom are not responsive to previous articles of the papers themselves, but bring up new topics with their own agendas. At the same time, comments by readers on ongoing debates reveal an expectation that selection and censorship was necessary and even demanded. While suspicion existed among readers that the editors themselves might in special cases have fabricated Letters to the Editor, this analysis shows that in most cases it can be safely assumed that this was not the case and that most letters were authentic contributions. In most cases of the letters it has not been possible yet to identify the real persons behind them. The analysis here therefore concentrated on investigating how the letter senders presented themselves by choice of their pennames. Pennames would either give factual information about the person, i.e. locality, profession and, rarely, even the name, or indicate aspects of the person’s character, describing personal views and attitudes to certain issues, their motivations for sending the letter, their social status and moral stance. Many of these reflect their current “floating” situations as sojourners in an increasingly cosmopolitan environment, reflecting the uncertainties and transitory elements of their life. Moreover, a common pattern is to present oneself as observer, rather than judge; as someone who would prefer to withdraw from political affairs out of frustration rather than

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to take the offensive in frank dissent. Similar caution could be observed in the often conciliatory and rather defensive style and gestures within the letters. This is not too surprising, as Letters to the Editors were still a novelty and letter contributors had yet to establish authority and justification to speak in public about public matters and give judgments on government affairs, authority which so far had been the exclusive privilege of official examination degree holders through memorials etc. At the same time, there is a strong readiness to engage with communal affairs and participate in deliberations on issues affecting the community. As the analysis has shown, the majority of letters were concerned with social issues, questions of moral and public order, and charitable actions to support disadvantaged groups. Also here we can observe that readers are addressing the editorial boards (or local governments) as authorities, pleading for address of social wrongs rather than presenting demands. In very few cases were the editors themselves attacked or criticized for mistakes; if any, attacks were mostly directed against other contributors. The one letter quoted in full served as an example to illustrate the widespread approach by letter writers: starting from a personal observation and story moving towards a political motion for change by requesting authorities and the paper to take action. Again, this points toward a general trend of sharing a uniform discourse on enhancing public norms and political reforms. All these conclusions have to be treated with caution, however, as the uniformity presented could of course also be rather an indication of the selection process than the attitude of the contributors. However, there is still little evidence to be found that specific views were directly suppressed and censored. Over the following decades, such Letters to the Editor evolved into journalistic genres. As has been mentioned, letters were addressing new topics rather than responding to opinions articulated by the newspapers and rarely addressed the editors directly, but rather had author and title as in essay writings. As such they can be seen as forerunners of the political commentary and later op-eds. Literary contributions and fictional stories evolved into the practice of publishing fiction in installments, which so dominated the press of the Republican period. Also, since contributors presented themselves as “floating” literati in the new concessions, the main pool from which editors and later professional journalists were recruited for the first newspapers, it is likely that some of the more regular contributors would move fully into the profession in later years.

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Gu Wu zuile laoren 古呉最樂老人. “Yangchang qiushi lun” 洋塲求食諭. Shenbao 4.9.1872. Hou lengyan ren 後冷眼人. “Lun xiejiao huo ren shi” 論邪教惑人事. Shenbao 5.5.1873. “Juwairen zhi benguan shu” 局外人致本館書. Shenbao 8.1.1874. Kwok, D. W. Protest in the Chinese Tradition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989. Li, San-pao. “Letters to the Editor in John Fryer’s Chinese Scientific Magazine 1876– 1892: An Analysis.” Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan 4 (1974): 729–77. Mingxian jushi 茗香居士. “Niqing jin nü tangguan yi” 擬請禁女堂倌議. Shenbao 25.5.1872. “The Missionary Question from a Chinese Point of View.” North China Herald 30.5.1874, 482. “The Missionary Question from a Chinese Point of View.” North China Herald 2.5.1874, 389–90. Mittler, Barbara. A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in Shanghai’s News Media (1872–1912). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. “Muxiao Guoke shu” 目笑過客書. Shenbao 23.1.1874. Nielsen, R. K. “Participation through Letters to the Editor: Circulation, Considerations, and Genres in the Letters Institution.” Journalism 11.1 (2010): 21–36. Ningbo jingshou ke 寗波經手客. “Fulai youren shu” 附友人來書. Shenbao 14.6.1872. Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Perrin, Andrew J., and Stephen Vaisey. “Parallel Public Spheres: Distance and Discourse in Letters to the Editor.” American Journal of Sociology 114.3 (2008): 781–810. “Prospectus.” China Mail 2.2.1874. “Prospectus.” Hongkong Times 2.2.1874. Qinggang jushi 琴岡居士. “Bian wan mache zhong bishang ren da wei minxin lun” 辨 萬馬軍中壁上人大慰民心論. Shenbao 16.5.1873. “Quan Chipingzi xi lun shi” 勸持平子息論事. Shenbao 13.1.1874. Schudson, Michael. “Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case.” In The Political Economy of the Media. Volume 2, edited by Peter Golding and Graham Murdock, 192–212: Cheltenham: Elgar 1997. Rpt. 1992. Shenbaoguan erwanhao jiniance 申報館二萬號紀念冊. 1928. Shenpu diaotu 申浦釣徒. “Lun Huyi dang qing jian Liu Gong chuanci” 論滬邑當請 建劉公專祠. Shenbao 6.5.1873. “Shu Dichao Wang shiyu zou Zhejiang sheng dali chengshen yaoan shu hou” 書邸抄 王侍御奏浙省大吏承審要案疏後. Shenbao 7.4.1877. “Shu huibang an lüe hou” 书毁谤案略后. Shenbao 17.2.1875.

opinions going public

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Sigelman, Lee, and Barbara J. Walkosz. “Letters to the Editor as a Public Opinion Thermometer: The Martin Luther King Holiday Vote in Arizona.” Social Science Quarterly 73.4 (1992): 938–46. “Suzhou Yanghuo jingshou ke lai shu” 蘇州洋貨經手客來書. Shenbao 17.6.1872. “To the Editor of the North China Herald.” North China Herald 2.5.1874: 390. Vittinghoff, Natascha. “ ‘British Barbarians’ and ‘Chinese Pigtails’? Translingual Practice in a Transnational Environment in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong and Shanghai.” China Review 4.1 (2004): 27–54. ———. Die Anfänge Des Journalismus in China (1860–1911) [The Rise of Journalism in China, 1860–1911]. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002. ———. “Readers, Publishers and Officials in the Contest for a Public Voice and the Rise of a Modern Press in Late Qing China (1860–1880).” TP (2001): 393–455. Volgy, Thomas J. et al. “Some of My Best Friends Are Letter Writers: Eccentrics and Gladiators Revisited.” Social Science Quarterly 58.2 (1977): 321–27. Wagner, Rudolf G. “Joining the Global Imaginaire: The Shanghai Illustrated Newspaper Dianshizhai Huabao.” In Joining the Global Public: Word, Image and City in Early Chinese Newspapers 1870–1910, edited by Rudolf G. Wagner, 105–47. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2007. ———. “The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere.” The China Quarterly 142 (1995): 423–43. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin. “Understanding the Conditions for Public Discourse: Four Rules for Selecting Letters to the Editor.” Journalism Studies 3.1 (2002): 69–81. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. Global Shanghai, 1850–2010: A History in Fragments. London: Routledge, 2009. “Without Title.” Shenbao 7.2.1873, 4. Wu Naihe shi 吳乃和氏. “Fulu laishu shu Doufudang gunfei” 附錄來書述豆腐黨棍 匪. Shenbao 29.6.1872. “Xuan xinwenzhi chengshu shuo” 選新聞紙成書說. Shenbao 18.3.1877. “Yingyou laishu” 營友來書. Shenbao 13.6.1874. Zhongshang Hechao shi 中商鶴巢氏. “Wen baoguan bi yong xi zi laishu” 問報關必 用西字來書. Shenbao 27.6.1873. Zhuo Nansheng 卓南生. “You guan ‘Xianggang Huazi ribao’ qianshen ‘Zhongwai xinwen qirilu’ (1871–72) de tantao yu yanjiu” 有关“香港华字日报”前身“中外新闻七 日录”的探讨与研究. Huazhong ligong daxue xuebao, shehui kexueban (1995): 213–21.

Scholarship on Chinese Epistolary Literature and Culture: A Select Bibliography*

Theoretical Approaches, General

Bai, Qianshen. “Chinese Letters: Private Words Made Public.” In The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection, edited by Robert E. Harrist, Jr. and Wen C. Fong, 381–99. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University Press, 1999. Liu Guangsheng 劉廣生; Zhao Meizhuang 趙梅莊. Zhongguo gudai youyi shi: Xiuding ban 中國古代郵驛史:修訂版. Beijing: Renmin youdian chubanshe, 1999. Liu Heng 劉恒. Lidai chidu shufa 歷代尺牘書法. Beijing: Zhishi chubanshe, 1992. Qiu Runxi 仇潤喜 and Liu Guangsheng 劉廣生. Zhongguo youyi shiliao 中國郵驛史 料. Beijing: Beijing hangkong hangtian daxue chubanshe, 1999. Renditions 41–42 (1994). Shanghai tushuguan 上海圖書館, ed. Zhongguo chidu wenxian 中國尺牘文獻. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2013. Yan Xing 晏星. Zhonghua youzheng fazhan shi 中華郵政發展史. Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1994. Zhao Shugong 趙樹功. Zhongguo chidu wenxue shi 中國尺牘文學史. Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1999. Zhao Xianzhang 趙憲章. “Lun minjian shuxin ji qi duihua yishu” 論民間書信及其對 話藝術. Qinghua daxue xuebao 96.4 (2008): 475–509. Zheng Yimei 鄭逸梅. Chidu conghua 尺牘叢話. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004. Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛. “Tan shu du” 談書牘. Wenxue zazhi 3.1 (1948.5). Zhu Weiqing 朱維青. Zhongguo tongxin xiaoshi 中國通信小史. Beijing: Xuexi chubanshe, 2011.



Early Imperial China (ca. 200 BCE–ca. 200 CE)

Chen Lanlan 陳蘭蘭. “Han dai jiandu zhong de siwenshu fazhan tezheng yanjiu” 漢代 簡牘中的私文書發展特徵研究. Sichuan wenwu 4 (2005): 57–63. Chen Pan 陳槃. Han Jin yijian shi xiao qi zhong 漢晉遺簡識小七種. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 2009. Chung, Eva Yuen-wah. “A Study of the Shu (Letters) of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220).” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1982. * Special thanks go to Lik Hang Tsui for his help in assembling this bibliography.

934

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Durrant, Stephen, Wai-Yee Li, Michael Nylan, and Hans Van Ess. Sima Qian and the Letter to Ren An. University of Washington Press (forthcoming). Fuehrer, Bernhard. “The Court Scribe’s Eikon Psyches: A Note on Sima Qian and His Letter to Ren An.” Asian and African Studies 6.2 (1997): 170–83. Giele, Enno. “ ‘Yu’ seiko: Shin Kan jidai wo chūshin ni” 「郵」制攷—秦漢時代を中 心に. Translated by Tomiya Itaru 冨谷至. Tōyōshi kenkyū 東洋史研究 63.2 (2004): 1–37. ———. Imperial Decision-Making and Communication in Early China: A Study of Cai Yong’s Duduan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006. Hu Pingsheng 胡平生 and Zhang Defang 張德芳, eds. Dunhuang Xuanquan Hanjian shicui 敦煌懸泉漢簡釋粹. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001. Knechtges, David R. “The Liu Hsin/Yang Hsiung Correspondence on the Fang Yen.” MS 33 (1977/78): 309–25. ———. “ ‘Key Words,’ Authorial Intent, and Interpretation: Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An.” CLEAR 30 (2008): 75–84. Metelmann, Carsten. “Schriftverkehr der Han-Zeit.” PhD diss., Hamburg University, 2001. Pattinson, David John. “Privacy and Letter Writing in Han and Six Dynasties.” In Chinese Concepts of Privacy, edited by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hanson, 97–118. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Yang Fen 楊芬. “Chutu Qin Han shuxin huijiao jizhu” 出土秦漢書信滙校集注. PhD diss., Wuhan University, 2010.



Medieval China (ca. 200–ca. 800)

Chen Zhichao 陳智超 et al., eds. Lü Ri gaoseng Yinyuan zhongtu laiwang shuxinji 旅日 高僧隱元中土來往書信集. Beijing: Zhonghua quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 1995. Debon, Günther. “Der Jadering des Chung Yu (Wen-hsüan 42,4).” In Studia SinoMongolica: Festschrift für Herbert Franke, edited by Wolfgang Bauer, 307–14. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979. Egan, Ronald C. “The Prose Style of Fan Yeh.” HJAS 39 (1979): 339–401. Harrist, Robert E., Jr. “A Letter from Wang Hsi-chih and the Culture of Chinese Calligraphy.” In The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection, edited by Robert E. Harrist, Jr. and Wen C. Fong, 241–59. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University Press, 1999. Hung, William. “A T’ang Historiographer’s Letter of Resignation.” HJAS 29 (1969): 5–52. Jansen, Thomas. “The Art of Severing Relationships ( juejiao) in Early Medieval China.” JAOS 126 (2006): 347–65.

a select bibliography

935

Knechtges, David R. “Liu Kun, Lu Chen, and Their Writings in the Transition to the Eastern Jin.” CLEAR 28 (2006): 1–66. Ledderose, Lothar. “Schrift als Kunst, Schrift als Kommentar: Die Überlieferung von drei chinesischen Briefen aus dem 4. Jahrhundert.” In Text und Kommentar, edited by Jan Assmann and Burkhard Gladigow, 463–81. Munich: Fink, 1995. Lin, Pauline. “Rediscovering Ying Qu and his Poetic Relationship to Tao Qian.” HJAS 69 (2009): 37–74. Mair, Victor H. “Li Po’s Letters in Pursuit of Political Patronage.” HJAS 44 (1984): 123–53. Qi Xiaochun 祁小春. Mai shi zhi feng: You guan Wang Xizhi ziliao yu renwu de zonghe yanjiu 邁世之風:有關王羲之資料與人物的綜合硏究. Taipei: Shitou chuban, 2007. Richter, Antje. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. ———. “Beyond Calligraphy: Reading Wang Xizhi’s Letters.” TP 96 (2010): 370–407. Wagner, Rudolf G. “The Original Structure of the Correspondence Between Shih Huiyüan and Kumārajīva.” HJAS 31 (1971): 28–48. Wang Zhenping. “Speaking with a Forked Tongue: Diplomatic Correspondence between China and Japan, 238–608 A.D.” JAOS 114 (1994): 23–32. Wu Liyu 吳麗娛. Tang li zhiyi: Zhonggu shuyi yanjiu 唐禮摭遺:中古書儀研究. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2002. Zach, Erwin von. “Ein Briefwechsel in Versen: Zwei Gedichte von Po Chü-i und Yuan Chen.” Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 14.3 (1913): 197–227. Zhao Heping 趙和平. Dunhuang xieben shuyi yanjiu 敦煌寫本書儀研究. Taipei: Xin wenfeng chuban, 1993. ———. Dunhuang shuyi yanjiu 敦煌書儀研究. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2011. Zhao Heping and Zhou Yiliang 周一良. Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu 唐五代書儀研究. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995.



Middle Period China (ca. 800–ca. 1400)

Ebrey, Patricia. “T’ang Guides to Verbal Etiquette.” HJAS 45 (1985): 581–613. Egan, Ronald C. “Su Shih’s ‘Notes’ as a Historical and Literary Source.” HJAS 50 (1990): 561–88. Golas, Peter J. “The Courier-Transport System of the Northern Sung.” Papers on China 20 (1966): 1–22.

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Heller, Natasha. “Between Zhongfeng Mingben and Zhao Mengfu: Chan Letters in their Manuscript Context.” In Buddhist Manuscript Cultures, edited by Juliane Schober, Claudia Brown, and Stephen Berkwitz, 109–23. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Higashi Hidetoshi 東英壽 and Hong Benjian 洪本健, eds. Xinjian Ouyang Xiu jiu shi liu pian shujian jianzhu 新見歐陽修九十六篇書簡箋注. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2014. Hu Ke 胡珂. “Dishui canghai: Fan Zhongyan ‘Shilu tie’ suojian Bei-Song shidafu tongxin xingwei” 滴水藏海:范仲淹《師魯帖》所見北宋士大夫通信行為. Zhongguo shehui lishi pinglun 中國社會歷史評論 13 (2012): 81–94. Ichiki Tsuyuhiko. “The Value of Zhu Xi’s letters as Historical Material: A Viewpoint from Research into the History of Thought.” In The Study of Song History from the Perspective of Historical Materials, edited by the Research Group of Historical Materials in Song China, 129–53. Tokyo: Ando Satsu Kogyosha, 2000. Jin Chuandao 金傳道. “Bei-Song shuxin yanjiu” 北宋書信研究. PhD diss., Fudan University, 2008. McNair, Amy. “The Engraved Model-letters Compendia of the Song Dynasty.” JAOS 114 (1994): 209–25. Pee, Christian de. The Writing of Weddings in Middle-Period China: Text and Ritual Practice in the Eighth through Fourteenth Centuries. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2007. Xia Yuchen 夏玉琛. “Shi xi Nan-Song de ji zhong shuxin chengshi ji qita” 試析南宋的 幾種書信程式及其它. Shanghai bowuguan jikan 上海博物館集刊 5 (1990): 25–28. Xu Bangda 徐邦達. “Chidu xiaokao” 尺牘小考. Gugong bowuyuan yuankan 故宮博 物院院刊 3 (2005): 32–34. Zhu Huiliang 朱惠良. “Songdai ceye zhong de chidu shufa” 宋代册頁中的尺牘書法. In Songdai shuhua ceye mingpin tezhan 宋代書畫册頁名品特展, edited by Guoli Gugong bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院, 10–20. Taipei: Guoli gugong bowuyuan, 1995.



Late Imperial China (ca. 1400–ca. 1900)

Belpaire, Bruno, trans. L’Épistolier Yuen Mei (1715–1797). Brussels: Bibliothèque de l’Institute Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1976/77. Brook, Timothy. “Communications and Commerce.” In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8: The Ming Dynasty, pt. 2, edited by Frederick Mote and Denis Twitchett, 579– 707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Campbell, Duncan. “The Epistolary World of a Reluctant 17th Century Magistrate: Yuan Hongdao in Suzhou.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4.1 (2002): 159–93.

a select bibliography

937

Chen Zhichao 陳智超, ed. Meiguo Hafo daxue Hafo Yanjing tushuguan cang Mingdai Huizhou Fang shi qinyou shouzha qi bai tong kaoshi 美國哈佛大學哈佛燕京圖書 館藏明代徽州方氏親友手札七百通考釋. Hefei: Anhui daxue chubanshe, 2001 Cheng, Yu-Yin. “Letters by Women of the Ming-Qing Period.” In Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, edited by Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng, 169–77. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Ching, Julia. The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yang-ming. Canberra: Australian National University, 1972. Diény, Jean-Pierre. “Les lettres familiales de Tcheng Pan-k’iao.” In Mélanges publiés par l’Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2:15–67. Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1960. Eichman, Jennifer. A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship: Spiritual Ambitions, Intellectual Debates, and Epistolary Connections. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Ivanhoe, Philip J. On Ethics and History: Essays and Letters of Zhang Xuecheng. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Kádár, Dániel Z. Model Letters in Late Imperial China: 60 Selected Epistles from “Letters from Snow Swan Retreat”. Munich: Lincom, 2009. ———. Historical Chinese Letter Writing. London: Continuum, 2010. King, Gail. “The Family Letters of Xu Guangqi.” Ming Studies 31 (1991): 1–41. Ko, Dorothy. “ ‘Letter to My Sons’ by Gu Ruopu (1592–ca. 1681).” In Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, edited by Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng, 148–53. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Leonard, Jane Kate. “A Study of the Court Letter and the Canal Administration during the Ch’ing Period.” The American Asian Review 4.3 (1986): 1–28. Lowry, Kathryn. “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter in Late Ming.” Ming Studies 44 (2001): 48–77. ———. “Personal Letters in Seventeenth-Century Epistolary Guides.” In Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, edited by Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng, 155–67. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ———. “Editing, Annotating and Evaluating Letters at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century: Instituting Literary Forms for the Self.” In Zhongguo wenxue pingdian yanjiu lunji 中國文學評點研究論集, edited by Zhang Peiheng 章培恆 and Wang Jingyu 王靖宇, 101–28. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002. ———. “Duplicating the Strength of Feeling: The Circulation of Qingshu in the late Ming.” In Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, edited by Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu, 239–72. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. ———. “The Space of Reading: Describing Melancholy and the Innermost Thoughts in 17th-Century Qingshu.” In Concealing to Reveal: An International Scholarly

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Conference on “the Private” and “Sentiment” in Chinese History and Culture, edited by Ping-chen Hsiung, 1:33–78. Taipei: Center for Chinese Studies, 2003. Pattinson, David. “The Chidu in Late Ming and Early-Qing China.” PhD diss., Australian National University, 1997. ———. “Zhou Lianggong and Chidu xinchao: Genre and Political Marginalisation in the Ming-Qing Transition.” East Asian History 20 (2000): 61–82. ———. “The Market for Letter Collections in Seventeenth-Century China.” CLEAR 28 (2006): 125–57. Tsai, Weipin. “Breaking the Ice: The Establishment of Overland Winter Postal Routes in the late Qing China.” Modern Asian Studies 47 (2013): 1749–81. Widmer, Ellen. “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China.” LIC 10.2 (1989): 1–43. Wright, Suzanne E. “Visual Communication and Social Identity in Woodblock-Printed Letter Papers of the Late Ming Dynasty.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 1999. ———. “Luoxuan biangu jianpu and Shizhuzhai jianpu: Two Late-Ming Catalogues of Letter Paper Designs.” Artibus Asiae 63.1 (2003): 69–112. Zach, Erwin von. “Auszüge aus einem chinesischen Briefsteller.” Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 14.1 (1911): 27–72. Zhang Ruilong 張瑞龍. “Shuxin wanglai yu Qingdai xueshu: Yi Qing zhongye xuezhe shuxin wanglai wei zhongxin de kaocha” 書信往來與清代學術:以清中葉學者 書信往來為中心的考察. Jiuzhou xuelin 7.2 (2009): 140–205. Zou Zhenhuan 鄒振環. “Qingdai shuzha wenxian de fenlei yu shiliao jiazhi” 清代書 札文獻的分類與史料價值. Shilin 5 (2006): 175–84.



Modern China (ca. 1900–)

Findeisen, Raoul David. “From Literature to Love: Glory and Decline of the Love-Letter Genre.” In The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, edited by Michel Hockx, 79–112. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999. Goodman, Bryna. “ ‘Words of Blood and Tears’: Petty Urbanites Write Emotion.” Nan Nü 9 (2009): 270–301. Han Rui 韓蕊. Geren de siyu: Zhongguo xiandai shuxinti xiaoshuo yanjiu 個人的私 語:中國現代書信體小說研究. Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 2009. Kirkpatrick, Andy. “Information Sequencing in Mandarin Letters of Request.” Anthropological Linguistics 33.2 (1991): 183–203. McDougall, Bonnie S. Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. “Revealing to Conceal: Love-Letters and Privacy in Republican China.” In Concealing to Reveal: An International Scholarly Conference on “the Private” and

a select bibliography

939

“Sentiment” in Chinese History and Culture, edited by Ping-chen Hsiung, 2:279–344. Taipei: Center for Chinese Studies, 2003. ———. “Enduring Fascination, Untutored Understanding: Love-Letters in China and Europe.” MS 54 (2006): 195–206. Ng, Daisy Sheung-yuen. “Li Ang’s Experiments with the Epistolary Form.” MCL 3.1–2 (1987): 91–106. Qiao Qi. “The Adoption and Use of SMS among Chinese Teenagers.” MA thesis, Université de Montréal, 2009. Xu Xiao 徐曉. Minjian shuxin 1966–1977 民間書信 1966–1977. Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 2000. Yip, Terry Siu-han. “The Reception of Werther and the Rise of the Epistolary Novel in China.” Tamkang Review 22.1–4 (1991–92): 287–304.



Important Studies of Epistolary Literature and Culture Beyond China

Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982. Barton, David and Nigel Hall, eds. Letter Writing as Social Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000. Beebee, Thomas O. Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Camargo, Martin. Ars dictaminis, ars dictandi. Turnhout: Brepols, 1991. Chartier, Roger et al., eds. Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Christopher Woodall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Clough, Cecil H. “The Cult of Antiquity: Letters and Letter Collections.” In Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, edited by Cecil H. Clough, 33–67. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976. Constable, Giles. Letters and Letter Collections. Turnhout: Brepols, 1976. ———. “Dictators and Diplomats in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Medieval Epistolography and the Birth of Modern Bureaucracy.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 46 (1992): 37–46. Crystal, David. Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. London: Oxford University Press, 2008. Day, Robert Adams. Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. Dierks, Konstantin. In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Fraser, Antonia, ed. Love Letters: An Anthology. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.

940

a select bibliography

Garrison, Mary. “ ‘Send More Socks’: On Mentality and the Preservation Context of Medieval Letters.” In New Approaches to Medieval Communication, edited by Marco Mostert, 69–99. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999. Gay, Peter. The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Grundy, Isobel. “The Techniques of Spontaneity: Johnson’s Developing Epistolary Style.” In Johnson After Two Hundred Years, edited by Paul J. Korshin, 211–24. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Guillén, Claudio. “Notes Towards the Study of the Renaissance Letter.” In Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, edited by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, 70–101. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. ———. “On the Edge of Literariness: The Writing of Letters.” Comparative Literature Studies 31.1 (1994): 1–24. Haboush, JaHyun Kim. Epistolary Korea: Letters from the Communicative Space of the Chosŏn, 1392–1910. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Kauffman, Linda S. Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Klauck, Hans J. Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006. Koskenniemi, Heikki. Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie des griechischen Briefes bis 400 n.Chr. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1956. Malherbe, A. J. Ancient Epistolary Theorists. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. London: Routledge, 2011. Müller, Wolfgang G. “Brief.” In: Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, 2:60–76. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994. Nickisch, Reinhard M. G. Brief. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. Poster, Carol; Linda C. Mitchell, eds. Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Rooksby, Emma. E-mail and Ethics: Style and Ethical Relations in Computer-mediated Communication. London: Routledge, 2002. Rosenmeyer, Patricia A. Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. Ancient Greek Literary Letters: Selections in Translation. London: Routledge, 2006. Rüttermann, Markus. “‘So That We Can Study Letter-Writing’: The Concept of Epistolary Etiquette in Premodern Japan.” Japan Review 18 (2006): 57–128.

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Schöne, Albrecht. “Über Goethes Brief an Behrisch vom 10. November 1767.” In Festschrift für Richard Alewyn, edited by Herbert Singer and Benno von Wiese, 193– 229. Cologne: Böhlau, 1967. Stanley, Liz. “The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences.” Auto/ Biography 12 (2004): 201–35. Trapp, Michael, ed. Greek and Latin Letters: An Anthology, With Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Violi, Patrizia. “Letters.” In Discourse and Literature, edited by Teun A. van Dijk, 149–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985. White, Peter. Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Revelations of the Late Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Ysebaert, Walter. “Medieval Letters and Letter Collections as Historical Sources: Methodological Questions and Reflections and Research Perspectives (6th–14th Centuries)” Studi medievali 50.1 (2009): 41–73. Zott, Regine. “Die unzeitgemäßen Hundsposttage . . .: Fragen nach einer Brieftheorie.” In Wissenschaftliche Briefeditionen und ihre Probleme: Editionswissenschaftliches Symposion, edited by Hans-Gert Roloff, 43–72. Berlin: Weidler, 1998.

Index Abbott, Andrew 354n74 Abelard 550–51, 555, 565 addressees: of administrative letters 346; of autobiographical letters 639; of collegial letters 679; of cover letters 647, 648, 649–50, 657, 658, 660, 663, 671; of familial admonitions 242, 243; in manuscript letters 450, 452; of personal letters 405; and postal delivery 424; and ritualized language 337–38, 346. See also audience addresses: of authors of letters to the editor 905; labels for 415–18, 466; and postal system 17, 424; on she circulars 874 administration: government 19, 20, 31, 794–96; of postal system 3, 30, 34, 47; Yan Guangmin on 794–96 administrative documents 12, 331–62; of Chan monks 733–35, 740; as genre 195, 339n30, 682; literary style of 346–51; manuals for 343, 345; and personal relations 351–58; ritualized language of 337–46; and status 333–37; writing conventions of 6, 363–65 admonitions ( jie 戒, zhen 箴, chi 敕) 226, 248n38, 357; imperial ( jiechi 戒敕) 243, 355–56; for women 243 admonitions, familial 5–6, 239–75; history of 240; interventional vs. testamentary 247–62, 266; post-Han  262–69; from prison 266–67; pronouns in 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 267; rhetoric of 240, 248, 262; as testaments 245, 248–50, 254, 261, 263, 266–67, 269. See also family instructions adscription 256. See also prescripts adultery 9, 508–45, 567; and morality 525–32 advertisements 119, 644, 664, 667n64, 846; and letters to the editor 906–7, 911, 913 affect 496, 678–79. See also emotion Ai Nanying 艾南英: Tianyongzi ji 天傭子集 887–88 Ai Weiguang 艾為珖 887–88

Algren, Nelson 560 allusions: in autobiography 626, 639; in biographies 623; in collegial letters 683, 704; in cover letters 658; in familial admonitions 247, 269; in Lu Zhaolin’s letters 836, 841n48, 847–48; and presentation-response poetry 303; in Su Shi’s letters 499–502 Alter, Robert 307 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63) 54, 56, 58 An Lushan 安禄山 54, 57–58, 86 An 安 (emperor, Jin dynasty) 100 Analects (Lunyu 論語) 259, 261n71, 285n38, 287n54, 290n70, 298n89, 324, 347n54, 349 Anderson, Benedict 901 Anderson, Judith 554 anger. See emotion anthologies, epistolary: and autobiography  628; and calligraphy 806, 824; of Chan monks 721–26, 727, 734–35, 740–41; of collegial letters 676, 688, 704, 717; and decorated paper 106, 113; editing of 807–10; emotion in 685; familial admonitions in 241, 270; and genres 190–92, 193, 244, 307–8, 366; of informal letters 475, 805–6; literary letters in 810; of love letters 547, 551–52, 557, 564; personal (bieji 別集)  192–93, 750, 754–55; private 879; publication of 806–7, 880; sources of 750–52; vs. unpublished letters  814–23, 824; of women’s letters 553, 744–54, 761, 762–63; and Yanshi jiacang chidu 775, 776, 786, 805–10, 814–23 anthologies, literary 190–92, 193, 307–8, 475, 495, 770. See also particular authors Anti-Rightist Movement 602 archaeology 3, 8; of postal systsem 17, 18, 25, 46; and Shen Congwen 583. See also Dunhuang; manuscript letters; Xuanquan zhi Asquith, H. H. 553 Asquith, Mary 553

Index associations: Chinese Writers’ 582; huiguan 會館 901; local (she 社) 2, 13, 853–77 audience: for autobiographical letters  628–29, 630, 633–39; for Chan monks’ letters 725; for collegial letters 679, 686, 703, 717; for cover letters 648, 649, 656n45, 663; for familial admonitions  245, 248, 269; intended vs. unintended  5, 7–8, 10, 12, 14, 331, 479, 494, 547, 550, 554–55, 557, 634–35, 638, 823–24, 884, 896; in legal cases 508, 513, 520, 544; for letters to the editor 902; and publishing boom 880; of Shen Congwen 585, 605, 614–16; women as 563, 882n11, 902. See also addressees Augustine of Hippo 625n10 authenticity 9, 10, 11, 12, 678; authorial 2, 247; of letters to the editor 901, 902, 903, 905–7, 920, 927; of love letters 546–47; in Lu Zhaolin’s letters 849 authority: of etiquette manuals 343; in familial admonitions 245, 257; and gift-giving 149, 153, 164; in letters to the editor 902, 907, 913, 925, 928; and public-private dichotomy 332, 351–58 authors: of cover letters 644–46, 649, 671, 681, 691–92, 705–9; of letters to the editor 901, 902, 903, 905–7, 909, 912–16, 920; self-identification of 447; self-presentation of 626, 716–17; self-revelation of 727, 747, 831–32. See also particular individuals autobiography 11, 621–42; authorial postfaces (zixu 自序) in 625, 626, 627–28; and biography 621–26, 630, 631; and Chan monks’ letters 726; circulation of 628, 633, 634; and crisis 630–33, 639; definitions of 625; letters as 621–22, 625, 626–30; non-narrative 625; and subjectivity 630; transcultural 622; zhi 志 (intent, will, vision) in 624, 629 Ba Jin 巴金 600 Bai Juyi 白居易 11; collected works of 676; collegial letters of 676, 681, 688, 706, 707, 710, 711, 713–14, 716–17; and cover letters 662n57, 665; “Yu Chen jishi

943 shu” 與陳給事書 649n25, 656n45; “Yu Yang Yuqing shu” 與楊虞卿書 707; “Yu Yuan Jiu shu” 與元九書 706; “Yu Yuan Weizhi shu” 與元微之書 707; “Yu zhu tongnian . . . tong yan Xiao shangshu ting zi” 與諸同年 . . . 同宴蕭尚 書亭子 666; “Zhou zhong du Yuan Jiu shi” 322; “Zhou zhong du Yuan Jiu shi” 舟中讀元九詩 322 Bai Qianshen 61, 89, 120n48 Bai Ting 白珽 60, 69, 76 Ban Gu 班固 32n49, 628, 635. See also Han shu Ban Zhao 班昭 244; “Nüjie” 女誡 (Admonitions for women) 243 Bao Shuya 鮑叔牙 263, 264 Bao Tingbo 鮑廷博 107 Bao Zhao 鮑照 838n33; “Deng Dalei an yu mei shu” 登大雷岸與妹書 197; “Xie ci yao qi” 謝賜藥啟 194 Baosi 褒姒 24 Barbieri-Low, Anthony 456n117 Barton, Richard E. 693n43 beacon towers (sui 隧) 17–19, 23–26, 28–30, 34, 36, 44, 47, 439, 453 Beauvoir, Simone de 560 Beethoven, Ludwig van 555 beipai 碑派 (beixue 碑學; stele tradition)  88 Beitang shuchao 北堂書鈔 137n8 Ben Qie (Fei Ju) 賁且 467 Benjamin, Walter 601n60 Bian Bin 卞彬 199, 221 Bian He 卞和, jade of 149n24, 151, 156, 158, 313n26 Bian Kun 卞壼 199, 221 Bian Zhongzhen 卞忠貞 221 Bian 卞, Lady (Cao Cao’s wife) 137, 144–48; “Yu Yang Biao furen Yuan shi shu” 興陽彪 夫人袁氏書 144 biao 表. See memorials bieji 別集 (personal collection) 192–93, 750, 754–55 Bing Chongguo 丙充國 467 Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women (Clara Ho) 754 biography (zhuan 傳): and autobiography  621–26, 630, 631; and Chan monks 721,

944 biography (zhuan 傳) (cont.) 722, 726; collective 623; and cover letters 645; official (liezhuan 列傳)  621, 627, 634; survival of 783; unofficial (biezhuan 別傳) 623; of women 623, 754; in Yanshi jiacang chidu 778 birth sequence marker 452n104 Bligh, Elizabeth 567 Bligh, William 567 Board of Punishments 509, 512; xingke tiben 刑科題本 (routine memorial) of 9, 508, 510n2, 513 Board of Rites 509, 512 Bole 伯樂 314n31 book market: and piracy 886, 888–90, 892, 893–95, 896; and Zhang Chao’s letter  880n7, 882, 883, 885, 889–92, 895 book proprietorship. See property rights, intellectual bookshops 82–83, 882, 886, 893–94 Border Town (Biancheng 邊城; Shen Congwen) 586 Borgia, Lucrezia 556n39 Boya 伯牙 845n64 Boying (Zhang Zhi 張芝) 63 Branner, David 310, 696n52 “Brigade, The: Miscellaneous Sketches from Land Reform in Southern Sichuan” (Zhongduibu: Chuannan tugai zaji 中隊部:川南土改雜記; Shen Congwen) 595 brushes. See tools Buddhism 12, 168n76; and anger 689; Chan 禪 721–43; and Dunhuang manuscripts 853; in formal letters  822–23; in letters to the editor 915, 919; and literary entanglements 738–39, 741; and Lu Zhaolin 839–43, 842, 849n74; and presentation-response poetry  285n38; Pure Land 725, 737; and she circulars 856, 862, 867; of Su Shi  492–93; Tiantai 724, 725; and women’s letters 767–68; yulu 語錄 (records of speech) in 721, 722, 725, 726–727. See also Chan 禪 monks, letters of Buell, Emmett H. 901 bureaucracy 363–97; corruption in 509; and finances 481–82, 486; and literary

Index genres 307; and personal relations 351–58; and writing conventions 6, 363–65. See also administration; civil examinations bureaucratic documents. See administrative documents Burnett, Katharine 87, 88 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 556n39 Cai Changmin 蔡長民 371n37 Cai Lun 蔡倫 97, 99 Cai Mu 蔡睦 287n55, 289n63 Cai Yanbin 蔡雁彬 241n9 Cai Yong 蔡邕 278, 282n26, 293, 844n58 Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 86 calligraphy 3–4; anthologies of 806, 824; in banquet poems 279; and Chan monks’ letters 736, 741; collectors of 65–87; in colophons 84, 85; columns of 75, 90; in cursive script (caoshu 草書) 53, 62, 63, 65, 75; on decorated paper 127; economics of  485; and elites 53, 61–62; faulty characters in 427, 447; and gift-giving  4, 136; and innovative transcriptions (lin 臨) 53, 87–92; in legal case 514–18, 540; of Lu Zhaolin 839; in manuscript letters 368, 407, 409–10, 411; models of 53, 61–62, 80; and personality 3, 53, 58–61, 85, 627; power of 321, 322; and presentation-response poetry 304; and public-private dichotomy 629n30; in regular script (kaishu 楷書) 61, 68, 75, 76, 80, 84, 85, 90; rubbings of 53, 64–66, 73, 74, 79–81, 80, 81, 83, 88, 90; in running script (xingshu 行書) 54, 61, 62, 68, 75, 84, 90, 92; in she circulars 853, 867, 868; of Su Shi 480; Wang style of 62–63, 74, 75, 88; and women’s letters 744, 752; of Yan Guangmin 776, 778–80, 788, 792, 793, 799; of Yan Zhenqing 54, 61–65, 68, 90, 92; of Zhao Mengfu 724, 728n19, 729; zhuo 拙 (awkwardness) in 75, 480, 657. See also tools Callimachus 549, 555 Canliao 參寥 485 Cao Biao 288n60

Index Cao Cao 曹操 149, 154, 201–3, 208; and Cao Pi 162, 204; and Cao Zhi 323, 324; and gifts 167, 182, 183; “Yu taiwei Yang Biao shu” 與太尉楊彪書 137–47 Cao Changsi 曹長思 209 Cao Daoheng 曹道衡 310 Cao He 815 Cao Hong 曹洪 202 Cao Pi 曹丕 (Emperor Wen, Wei dynasty 魏文帝) 137–38, 180n122, 196; and Cao Cao 162, 204; and Cao Zhi 323; cultural legitimacy of 162–71; Dianlun 典論  163n60; edicts of 167–68; and gift-giving  148–62; “Jiu ri yu Zhong You shu” 九日與鍾繇書 159–60; letters by  176nn106–7, 182, 203, 204, 205, 218, 309, 684; letters to 193, 202, 217; and Liang rulers 175, 177, 179; “Lun wen” 論文  162–63, 624n8, 629n31; poems by 174; “Shanzai xing” 善哉行 163–64; “Yu chao chen shu” 與朝臣書 169; “Yu Liu Ye shu” 與劉曄書 170; “Yu Wu Zhi shu” 與吳 質書 84n24; “Yu Zhaoge ling Wu Zhi shu” 與朝歌令吳質書 311, 326; “Yu Zhong dali shu” 與鍾大理書 149n23; “Zhao qun chen” 詔群臣 77n168, 169n80, 170nn81–85; “Zhu wu shu fu cheng yu Zhong You shu” 鑄五熟釜成與鍾 繇書 160–62, 171 Cao Rong 曹溶 81 Cao Rui 曹叡 (Emperor Ming 明, Wei dynasty 魏明帝) 323, 324–25 Cao Shen 曹參 312n20 Cao Shu 曹攄 279, 280n18 Cao Shuang 曹爽 636 Cao Song 曹嵩 162n57 Cao Xian 曹憲 831 Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 755–56 Cao Zhang 324 Cao Zhenji 曹貞吉 799, 815 Cao Zhi 曹植 6, 137–38, 156, 159, 196, 307–30; “Chen shen ju biao” 陳審舉表  322–23, 325–26; “Gui fu” 龜賦 218; “Ju fu” 橘賦 167, 178, 180n121, 181; letters by  205, 206, 217, 684; letters to 207–8, 218; and Liang rulers 175; memorials of  322–26; poems by 288n60, 323–24; “Qiu tong qin qin biao” 求通親親表 322, 324;

945 “Qiu zi shi biao” 求自試表 322, 324; “Shang ‘Ze gong’ ‘Ying zhao’ shi biao” 上責躬應詔詩表 322; and Wu Zhi  309, 311–22, 324, 326; “Yu Wu Jizhong shu” 與吳季重書 311–15; “Yu Yang Dezu shu” 與楊德祖書 324 captatio benevolentiae 240, 268 Catalogue of Calligraphy in the Xuanhe Era (Xuanhe shupu 宣和書譜) 65, 67 celibacy 522. See also chastity Cen Wenyu 岑文瑜 210 censorship: in letters to the editor 927, 928; and love letters 568; of official gazettes 920; self- 10, 584–85, 596, 603–5, 756–57; and Shen Congwen  584–85, 596, 598, 603–5, 615; of women’s letters 744, 746, 753, 756–57, 770–71 Chan 禪 monks, letters of 721–43; administrative 733–35, 740; collections of 721–26, 727; functions of 726; reflective 726–29; ritual 736–40; teaching 730–33, 738, 740–41 Chang, Kang-I Sun 754 Chang Kuang-pin 張光賓 68, 75–76 Chang Ruilin 572n5 Chao Gu 巢谷 505 Chaoye leiyao 朝野類要 (Important affairs at court and in the country) 367 Chaplin, Joyce 567 characterology 3, 58–61, 627 Charles, Prince (United Kingdom) 559 chastity 526–27, 534, 535, 536 Chavannes, Édouard 419n31, 439 Chen Balang 陳八郎: Wuchen Wen xuan  190 Chen Bozhi 陳伯之 214 Chen Chuandao 陳傳道 479–80 Chen Hongmou 陳宏謀 509 Chen Hongxu 陳弘緒 811, 813–14 Chen Jingyun 陳景雲 189–90 Chen Jo-shui 701n59 Chen Lin 陳琳 196, 204, 205, 217; “Da Dong’e wang jian” 答東阿王牋 218; “Gui fu” 龜賦 218; “Wei Cao Hong yu Wei Wendi shu” 為曹洪與魏文帝書 (“Yu Wendi jian” 與文帝牋) 193; “Wei Cao Hong yu Wei Wendi shu” 為曹洪與魏文 帝書 202

946 Chen Maoren 陳懋仁 342n41 Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 19, 20, 24, 25, 31, 38n71 Chen Ping 陳平 209 Chen Sihe 陳思和 615 Chen Wenshu 陳文述 752, 765 Chen Yunheng 陳允衡 817 Chen Yuqi 815 Chen Zhichao 陳智超 785 Chen Zun 陳遵 59, 209 Cheng Dayue 程大約: Chengshi moyuan 程氏墨苑 98 Cheng Kangzhuang 程康莊 816–17 Cheng Yi 程義: Mo shi 墨史 98 Cheng Yingquan 程應銓 599n50 Cheng 成 (king, Zhou dynasty) 150, 243, 356 Chesterfield, Lord 552 Chi Yin 郗愔 844n59 chi 敕. See admonitions Chiang Kai-shek 86, 600 chidu 尺牘. See informal letters children: biographies of 623; and love letters 552–54, 561, 567; and Shen Congwen 589–90, 591, 598, 601, 602–3, 609, 611 China Mail (newspaper) 908 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 589–90, 600, 602 Chinese Writers’ Association 582 Christianity 919 Chu ci 楚辭 (Lyrics of Chu) 313n25; “Huai sha” 懷沙 849n75; “Jiu zhang” 九章  180; “Ju song” 橘頌 180, 181; “Li sao” 離騷 160, 353n72 Chu Hsiao-hai 朱曉海 213 Chu Yuan 褚淵 165, 166 Chuang Yen 莊嚴 83n79 Chuguevsky, Leonid I. 857 Chung, Eva Yuen-wah 194 Ch’ung-sŏn, King 忠宣 (King Shim 瀋王)  730 Chunhua ge tie 淳化閣帖 (Model-letters in the Imperial Archives in the Chunhua Era) 74, 88, 89 Chunqiu yundoushu 春秋運斗樞 179n118 Chunqiu 春秋 (Spring and autumn annals)  318

Index Churchill, Clementine 565 Churchill, Winston 556, 565 Chuxue ji 初學記 100n14, 137n8 Cicero 549 cinnabar 834–35, 837, 839 Cinnabar pills extend spring (illustration; Sui Yangdi yanshi) 127, 128 circular. See open letters circulars, local association (shesi zhuantie 社司轉帖) 2, 13, 853–77; columns in  868, 871; dating of 853, 854, 859–60, 864–65; delivery of 864, 874; physical characteristics of 867–71; reverse-direction writing in 868–73; structure of 859–67; types of 859; as writing exercises 854, 855, 867–68, 874–75 circulating scrolls (xingjuan 行卷) 644–45, 646, 651, 669n67, 671 circulation: of autobiographical letters 628, 633, 634; of collegial letters 676, 690, 695n49, 703, 716; of formal letters 823; of Lu Zhaolin’s letters 838–39, 848; of personal letters 634; of private letters 680. See also audience civil examinations 11, 513, 537; and collegial letters 715; and cover letters 643–74; criticism of culture of 668–71; and finances 482; and social relations  643–44, 645, 662; and Su Shi 477, 498, 500, 505; and Yan Guangmin 779, 780, 781, 783, 813; and Zhang Yongde 882 Cixi 慈禧 (empress dowager, Qing dynasty)  84 class struggle 589, 591, 592, 595 Classic of Changes. See Yijing Classic of Documents. See Shang shu Classic of Filial Piety. See Xiaojing Classic of Odes. See Mao shi collectors 262, 800; of calligraphy 53–54, 60, 62, 65–87; of Su Shi’s works 479–80; of women’s letters 748–49, 761. See also Li Yu; Wang Qi; Zhou Lianggong collegial letters 675–720; affection in 692, 695, 696, 702–17; anger in 689–702, 709, 717; counterfactuals in 697; definition of 677, 687; literary debate in 676;

Index methodology for 687–89; particles in 696–97; repeated 691; rhetorical devices in 694, 696–97, 699–700, 703, 717 colophons 53, 74; on Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter 60–61, 66–68, 70–71, 76–77, 83–85, 87, 92n104; on she circulars 865, 868; in Yanshi jiacang chidu 776–77, 790–91 Complete Works of Shen Congwen (Shen Congwen quanji 沈從文全集) 583, 603–4 condolence, letters of 7, 189, 239, 339n31, 344, 646, 735, 765 Confucianism 1, 269, 493, 689, 698, 795; vs. Mohism 318; on morality 527, 536, 543 Confucius (Master Kong; Kongzi 孔子) 22, 24, 207, 347n54, 624n7; in collegial letters 699n56; and cover letters 666, 667n64, 672; in familial admonitions 250, 257, 259, 266; in Lu Zhaolin’s letters 836n27, 837, 841n48; and patronage 663–65, 666; and property rights 888 contracts: in legal files 513; personal vs. social 885–91 conventions, writing 2; in autobiographical letters 626, 627, 639; in biographies  623; bureaucratic influence on 6, 363–97; changes in 675; in collegial letters 680, 683, 686, 687, 697, 703–4; in cover letters 646; and encyclopedias  363, 376, 381–91; for expressing emotion  677, 685, 687, 690, 694, 696–97, 699–700, 703–4; and gift-giving 136; in personal letters 240, 371. See also formulaic language corruption: government 684, 768, 788; legal case on 9, 509, 511, 518; and letters to the editor 911, 924 court, imperial: and calligraphy 89–90; and Cao Cao 137, 319, 321, 323; and cover letters 660, 663–64; etiquette of 336, 344, 345–46; and familial admonitions  356, 357; and letters to the editor 904, 920; and literary culture 175, 177, 179, 181–82, 277, 279, 304; and Lu Zhaolin 839, 843–44, 847; and postal system 47; and Sima Qian 631–32, 634; and Su Shi 477,

947 479, 486, 489, 500–501; and Yan Guangmin  779, 781, 819; and Yan Zhenqing 55, 56, 57, 58. See also administrative documents; edicts, imperial; memorials cover letters 643–74; authors of 644–46, 649, 671, 681, 691–92, 705–9; criticism of 658–62, 668–71; as genre 645–50; plagiarism in 670n69; to Quan Deyu 650–67, 671 creativity 246, 478, 490, 548, 678 Cui Lizhi 崔立之 707, 715, 716 Cui Qun 崔群 695n49, 708, 712, 717 Cui Yan 崔郾 644n4 Cui Yuan 崔瑗 63 Cultural Revolution (1966–1969) 10, 584, 596–606, 608, 609 Da Qing yitongzhi (Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Great Qing) 782 Da xue 大學 (Great Learning) 111–12 Da 大 (emperor, Wu dynasty). See Sun Quan Dadong lianzhen baojing xiufu lingsha miaojue 大洞鍊真寶經修伏靈砂 妙訣 834n23 Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 721–22, 723 Dai Mingyang 戴明揚 213 Daizong 代宗 (emperor, Tang dynasty) 54 Dao Gai 到溉: “Xiang Ren Xin’an banzhuzhang yin zeng shi” 餉任新安班 竹杖因贈詩 172 Daoism 157, 207, 637, 689 Dayrell-Browning, Vivien 556–57 Deng Daoshi 鄧道士 (Daoist Deng) 493 Deng Xiaonan 鄧小南 368 Depei 德沛 511, 512, 518, 544 Derrida, Jacques 135–36 Dezong 德宗 (emperor, Tang dynasty)  650n28 dialogicity 4, 5, 8, 12, 242; in familial admonitions 248, 250, 253, 270; of love letters 547 Diamond Sutra (Jingang boreboluomi jing 金剛般若波羅蜜經) 502, 729, 737, 860 Diana, Princess of Wales 566 Diao Cun 刁存 183 Dien, Albert E. 243 Ding Hongwu 683n21

948 Ding Ling 丁玲 593; Taiyang zhao zai Sanganghe shang 太陽照在桑乾河上 (The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River)  593n31 diplomas (ce 策; patents of enfeoffment)  243, 355 divorce 542, 549 Diwan 地灣 (Ulandurbeljin) 453 Dong, Madeleine Yue 908 Dong Hongqi 213 Dong Ne 董訥 794–95, 818 Dong Qichang 董其昌 78, 79–80, 82, 85, 89; Xing cao shu 行草書 88 Dong Yu 815 Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 209, 255, 256 Dong Zhuo 董卓 256n57 Dongfang Shuo 東方朔 243–44, 355–56, 844n57 Dongpailou 東牌樓 manuscripts 406, 417n25 Douglas, Lord Alfred 552 drama 7, 549; chuanqi 傳奇 754–55, 770; and women 754–55, 764, 765–66, 770, 771 dreams 250, 487, 522–23, 525 drugs. See health issues Du An 杜安 254n54 Du Bodu 杜伯度 63 Du Fu 杜甫 64 Du Jiliang 杜季良 252 Du Mu 杜牧: “Ebang gong fu” 阿房宫賦  644n4 Du Wenfu 杜溫夫 691n37 Du Yu 杜輿 497–98 Du Yu 杜預 318n48, 339n30 Duan Pidi 段匹磾 216 Duan Yucai 段玉裁 21–22 Duanqiao Miaolun 斷橋妙倫 724 Dubrow, Heather 242n11 Dugu Ji 獨孤及 651n32, 652 Dugu Lang 獨孤朗 650 Dugu Sizhang 獨孤思莊 840 Dugu Yu 獨孤郁 11, 643–74; Quan’s reply to 645, 667–72; “Shang libu Quan shilang shu” 上禮部權侍郎書 645, 650–67, 671 Dunhuang sheyi wenshu jijiao (Ning Ke, Hao Chunwen) 858–59, 866 Dunhuang 敦煌 3; administration of 19; Guiyijun 歸義軍 period in 860, 870, 873;

Index postal routes in 39–42; she associations in 854–57; Tibetan period in 859, 870. See also Xuanquan zhi Dunhuang 敦煌 manuscripts 3, 31; collegial letters in 677n7; columns in 13; emotion in 685; labels in 415, 419; mail records in 34–35; multilingual 870–71; poetry in 688; private letters in 404, 405, 412, 421–22, 427, 429–44, 447, 464; research on 857–58; she association circulars in 853–77; she documents (sheyi wenshu 社邑文書) in 853, 857–59, 866; on silk 407n11, 409, 421, 427, 429–44; Sogdian script in 871–73; textbooks in 341 Ebrey, Patricia 339n32, 342, 345, 375, 677n7 economics: and adultery 535–36; of art market 484–85; and Dunhuang manuscripts 853; of exile 482, 483–86; of gift-giving 136, 137, 159, 166; and letters to the editor 904, 920; of love letters 568; and morality 542; of she associations 856–57; and Su Shi 478, 481–86; Yan Guangmin on 796–98 edicts, imperial (zhao 詔) 189, 226, 325, 355, 367; as public letters 167–68, 170 editing: of anthologies 807–10; and autobiography 628; of Chan monks’ letters 721, 723, 727, 740; of collegial letters 688–89, 704; of letters to the editor 907–12, 927; of love letters 557, 558, 559, 562, 563–64, 571n3, 572nn4–5, 574n2; of Lu Zhaolin’s letters 833; of Shen Congwen’s letters 583; of women’s letters 745; and Yanshi jiacang chidu 775, 784, 805–10 education 72, 241n9, 246, 602, 868; socialist 611; of women 553. See also civil examinations; literacy Egan, Ronald 737, 806 Egerton, George (Chavelita Dunne): Rosa Amorosa 551 elites: and anger 689–90; and anthologies 806; and autobiography 621, 625; and biography 623; and calligraphy 53, 61–62; and Chan monks 723, 724, 725, 730–31; and collegial letters 677, 679,

Index 686; finances of 481–82; and letters to the editor 902, 908, 915–16, 917; and letters vs. memorials 335–36; and literary writing 307, 682; marriages of 537; and morality 527–28; networks of 775–826; and paper designs 116; ritualized language of 337–46; and scandal 508–45; and the state 296, 297–98, 300, 301, 302. See also bureaucracy; civil examinations; court, imperial emotion (qing 情; feeling, passion, emotional authenticity): anger 522; in autobiography 627, 629; and biography  624; in collegial letters 675–720; conventions for expressing 677, 685, 687, 690, 694, 696–97, 699–700, 703–4; in cover letters 648; and epistolary genres 334–35; and lawsuits 542; and literary creativity 678; longing 519, 520; in love letters 508, 518–25, 557, 563; in Lu Zhaolin’s letters 849; in model letters 681–87, 685; vs. morality  530–32; nostalgia 1, 684; and particles  696–97; in presentation-response poetry  283n26, 287n53; in public vs. private letters 543–44; and publishing boom  880n7; and Shen Congwen 614; “six” or “seven” (六情 or 七情) 679; and Su Shi 496, 502–7; and Yanshi jiacang chidu 801–5 encyclopedias (leishu 類書) 7, 8, 137n8, 182n33, 241, 244n21, 841n43; and familial admonitions 267, 270; and writing conventions 363, 376, 381–91 envelopes 242, 369n28, 415–16, 417, 418, 556 epitaph inscriptions (muzhiming 墓誌 銘) 277–78, 650n28 eremitism: and autobiographical letters  635, 637, 638, 639; and Chan monks 723, 724, 733, 738–39, 740; and foreign concessions 915–16; and letters to the editor 915; and Lu Zhaolin 844n56, 845n61; in presentation-response poetry  283n26, 285n38, 289n63, 290–91, 294, 303; and the state 296, 297–98, 300, 301, 302 Ernian lüling 二年律令 (Statutes and ordinances of the second year) 44, 46 Erya 爾雅 18, 29n40, 150

949 etiquette, epistolary 646, 685, 786, 879n4; in formal letters 813; of imperial court 336, 344, 345–46; of Japanese love letters 550. See also conventions, writing etiquette, verbal 345, 347 etiquette manuals (shuyi 書儀) 390n80; adherence to 849–50; for auspicious and inauspicious occasions ( jixiong shuyi 吉凶書儀) 646, 679, 682; authority of 343; and collegial letters 675–76, 677, 679, 681–87, 688–89, 702, 703, 704, 713; and decorated paper 118; for official communication 341–43, 345; and she circulars 875. See also manuals, letter-writing; model letters eulogy (song 頌; zan 贊) 189, 191, 318, 738; by Fan Ye 633n44; and poetry 277–78, 303, 304; by Yan Zhenqing 56–57, 68, 70, 78, 83, 92 Europe. See West, the exercises, writing: copying as 445; in manuscripts 412, 414, 445; she circulars as 854, 855, 867–68, 874–75. See also manuals, letter-writing; model letters exile: and collegial letters 675, 676, 683, 703; and finances 482, 483–84; letters from  646n12; and poetry 486; of Su Shi  477–78, 496, 497; and women’s letters 769 face-to-face communication: vs. cover letters 647–48; vs. letters 281, 536–43, 626–27; and letters to the editor 901; vs. love letters 518; and verbal etiquette codes 345 fame. See reputation family: and love letters 552–53; and morality 538; patrilineal vs. conjugal  542; and the state 351–58; and women’s letters 744, 746, 753, 757, 770–71 family instructions (jiajie 家誡, jiaxun 家訓) 243, 536, 687. See also admonitions, familial; Yanshi jiaxun Family Instructions for the Yan Clan (Yanshi jiaxun 顏氏家訓; Yan Zhitui) 243, 267, 339n32, 340, 341 family letters (jiashu 家書) 9, 582–617, 687, 747

950 Family Letters of Fu Lei (Fu Lei jiashu 傅雷家書) 603 Family Letters of Shen Congwen (Shen Congwen jiashu 沈從文家書) 583–84 Fan Libing 范履 氷 840 Fan Rongqi 213 Fan Sui 范睢 (3rd c. BCE) 151–52, 154, 156, 159 Fan Ye 范曄 266, 632–33, 634; “Yu zhong yu zhu shengzhi shu” 獄中與諸甥姪書, 197. See also Hou Han shu Fan Yu 氾毓 (Zhichun 稚春) 264 Fan Yun 范雲 214 Fan Zeng 范增 497, 498 Fan Zhen 范縝 168n76 Fan Zuyu 范祖禹 505 Fang Mengshi 方孟式 757, 769 Fang Weiyi 方維儀 757 Fang Yizhi 方以智 101 Fang Yongbin 方用彬 784–85 Fang Yulu 方于魯: Fangshi mopu 方氏墨譜 98 Fangmatan 放馬灘 tombs 99n11 fatie 法帖. See model letters Fayun 法雲 168n76 Fei Li Shi 費李氏 (wife of Fei Yuyou)  508–9, 513, 514, 518, 544; and husband 537, 539; lawsuit of 510–12, 524, 535, 540–41, 542; literacy of 515–16, 517, 526n21; lovesickness of 519–25, 534; mental state of 532–35; and morality 525–32 Fei Lüxiang 費履祥 511, 512, 544 Fei Qianliu 費謙流 511–16, 518, 524, 535, 544; and Fei Yuyou 537–38, 540, 542 Fei Shunan 費樹楠 510, 544 Fei Shupian 費樹楩 510–17, 526, 534n36, 544; father’s letters to 536–43 Fei Yuyou 費豫游 508–9, 510, 513, 516, 534n36, 544; absence of 536–43 Fei Zifu 費滋復 511, 512, 537, 544 female infanticide 492 Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 118n44, 894 Feng Naichao 575n13 Feng Pu 馮溥 781, 821 Feng Su 馮宿 709 Feng Xiaoqing 馮小青 771; Xiaoqing zhuan 小青傳 744

Index Feng Xuan 馮諼 207, 316n36 Feng Zizhen 馮子振 730 Fenghuangshan 鳳凰山 411n16 fiction: epistolary 246–47, 562, 563, 564; installment 919, 928; love letters in 520, 527, 547, 549, 550, 551, 557, 562, 564, 567; qing in 531; and Shen Congwen 586–87, 606; and women’s letters 744, 747 filial piety 355, 526, 536, 867, 868, 882; in familial admonitions 269; Shen Congwen on 602; and state power 352–53 First Emperor 始皇 (Qin dynasty) 22–23, 32, 156, 222 fish (carp): in letter paper decorations 102, 104, 116, 123; as metaphor 124, 129, 289n63 Fitzpatrick, Sheila: Everday Stalinism 600 five elements (wu xing 五行) 157n45, 164, 285n38, 302 Five-Tastes Cauldron 159, 160–62, 182 Fong, Grace 747 forgeries 9, 368, 683, 789; in legal case 508, 511, 513, 514, 518, 520, 532, 539 formal letters (shu 書) 189, 195, 308, 333n8, 334, 475, 687; etiquette of 813; vs. informal 680–81, 805–6, 814–23, 824, 878; and intellectual property rights 878, 896; of Yan Guangmin 811–14 formats, letter: character size 64, 71, 82, 407, 905; closings in 688, 723, 727, 736, 741, 808; columns in 13, 407, 409, 411, 427, 868, 871; frame in 241, 250, 253, 256, 270, 431; line breaks in 122; main text in 431, 861; of manuscript letters 412; of official communications 253; of she circulars 859–67; spacing (pingque 平闕) in 371–72; superscription in  256. See also salutations formulaic language: in letters to the editor  920–26; in manuscript letters 407, 413, 414, 424–27, 431, 466, 467–68; in official communication 404; in personal letters 337–46, 405; in she circulars  853, 859–67. See also conventions, writing Four Books (Sishu 四書) 881–85, 888 “Four Clean-ups” campaign 596

Index “Four Elites of Early Tang” (chu-Tang sijie 初唐四傑) 829 fragmentation 5, 409, 412, 435 Freud, Ernst 563 Freud, Esther 563 Freud, Lucian 563 Freud, Sigmund 563 friendship 209, 219, 326; and decorated paper 113, 118, 125; and familial admonitions 254, 259, 264, 270; and gift-giving 138, 165, 172; and Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter 67, 72–73, 75; in manuscript letters 377–79; and pengyou shuyi 朋友書儀 682, 685–86, 704; and poetry 282, 284, 286–90, 294, 295, 296; severing 211–12, 636, 648n23, 684; and Su Shi 479–81, 488, 496, 502–6. See also collegial letters; social relations frugality 106, 252, 483, 484, 536, 541, 542 Fu Cong 傅聰 603 Fu Gang 傅剛 190, 195 Fu Lei 傅雷 240n4; Fu Lei jiashu 傅雷家書, 603 Fu Liang 傅亮 290n69, 293n81 Fu Min 傅敏 603 Fu Qian 服虔: Tongsu wen 通俗文 174n100 Fu Shan 傅山 85 Furth, Charlotte 522, 524 Gai Qi 改琦 762, 764, 765 Gai Xun 蓋勳 256n57 Gan Bao 干寶 213; Jin ji 晉紀, 212 Gan Jiang 干將 654n40 ganzhi 干支 cyclical dates 859, 865 Gao Buying 203 Gao Cengyun 高層雲 793 Gao Shixian 高時顯 110, 111 Gao Wentao 高文濤 109n33 Gao Xinyun 高辛允 797 Gao Ying 高郢 665 Gao Zhu’er 高住兒 855 Gao 高 (emperor, Qi dynasty). See Xiao Daocheng Gaofeng Yuanmiao 高峰原妙 723–24, 726–28, 730–31; “Chanyao” 724 Gaozong 高宗 (emperor, Song dynasty) 368, 375–76 Gaozu 高祖 (emperor, Han dynasty). See Liu Bang

951 Garland of Chinese Calligraphy, A 92 Gawain and the Green Knight 136n4 gazetteers 42, 509 Ge Hong 葛洪: Baopuzi 抱朴子 845n65 Ge Zai 戈載 762 Ge Zhengqi 葛徵奇 758, 760 genres, epistolary: in anthologies 190–92, 193, 244, 307–8, 366; and autobiography  621, 625, 627; bai zhazi 白劄子 (expository dispatch) 367; ci 刺 ( ye 謁; greeting cards/tablets) 406, 422–23, 428, 449, 467–69; and cover letters 645–50; definitions of 4–5, 242; and emotion  334–35; and familial admonitions  241–47; jian 箋/牋 (memorandum) 194, 195, 196; jianji 牋記 (letter to a superior)  336–37, 342n41; of letters from readers  905, 918; and letters to the editor  900–901; ling 令 (command) 189, 226; Liu Xie on 334–35; and manuscripts  404; of official communications 239; pengyou shuyi 朋友書儀 682, 685–86, 704; and personal relations 351–58; and public vs. private 357; and publishing boom 880; qi 啟 (administrative) 195, 339n30, 682; and ritual 332; she circulars as 874; and subgenres 3–7, 363–65; thank-you notes 171–82, 322; tie 帖 (note) 197; and women 745–46, 771; xiaojian 小簡 (short note) 384; and Yanshi jiacang chidu 810–11 genres, literary 240–41, 331–62; anthologies of 190–92; biji 筆記 (notebook) 363, 376; biography 623; Buddhist 721; ci 辭 (rhapsody, song) 189; and collegial letters 676; of familial admonitions  270; historical determination of 364; in Jian’an period 307–8; lei 誄 (dirges)  189, 191, 321; letters as 551, 562; and Shen Congwen 587; and Su Shi 476, 490, 495; in Wen xuan 189–90; yi 移 (dispatches) 194, 195, 215 Giele, Enno 17, 338n28 gift exchange 135–86; and authority 149, 153, 164; and calligraphy 4, 136; and Cao Pi 148–62; and Chan monks’ letters  729, 737, 738, 741; collegial letters as 703, 717; and economic value 136, 137, 159, 166; of flowers 159–60, 182; of jade 

952 gift exchange (cont.) 148–59, 171, 182; and letters 136–37, 139–40, 141, 144, 148, 150, 158–59, 171, 182, 280; and love letters 560–61; and Lu Zhaolin’s letters 836; of oranges  175–81, 182; and power 137–48, 149, 162–71; reciprocity in 135–36, 137, 141, 182; requests for 148–61, 205; and social relations 72, 135–37, 138, 149, 165, 172; and status 135, 149; symbolism of 135–37, 143, 148–59, 160, 175, 182–83; and thank-you notes 171–82, 322; and Yanshi jiacang chidu 777, 799; and zhazi 375 Giles, Lionel 857, 864 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 246; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 562, 563 Goffman, Erving 345, 566 gong’an 公案 (Chan text) 724 Gongsun Gui 公孫詭 223 Gongsun Guisheng 公孫歸生 (Shengzi 聲子) 263, 264 Gongsun Hong 844 gossip 509, 514, 516, 517, 560, 566, 709, 801, 805, 907 Gōyama Kiwamu 合山究 755 graphology 53, 58–61, 85 Gray, Euphemia Chalmers 564 Great Walls (Changcheng 長城) 25 Greene, Graham 556, 558n44 greeting cards (ci 刺, ye 謁) 406, 422–23, 428, 449, 467–69 greetings. See salutations Gu Cai 顧彩 895n48 Gu Errong 顧二榮 813, 818 Gu Ruopu 顧若璞 245n27, 746, 748n14, 750 Gu Taiqing 顧太清 746n9 Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 781, 782, 783, 784, 789, 793, 799, 812, 821n84; Shi ben yin 801 Guan Hua 官花 510, 511, 514, 516, 518, 529, 544 Guan Zhen 管鎮 371n37 Guan Zhong 管仲 (Guan Yiwu 管夷吾)  263, 264 Guangming ribao 光明日報 (Guangming Daily) 589 Guangwu 光武 (emperor, Han dynasty). See Liu Xiu Gui Fu 桂馥 776–77, 779, 808

Index Gui Maoyi 歸懋儀 12, 754, 761–66, 767, 769, 770, 771 Gui Shufen 歸淑芬 752; Gujin mingyuan baihua shiyu 751 Guillén, Claudio 5, 242, 246 Guo Dengfeng 郭登峰: Lidai zixu zhuan wenchao 歷代自敘傳文鈔 627, 628 Guo Jue 郭珏 468n162 Guo Moruo 郭沫若 563 Guo Pu 郭璞 174n99 Guo Yanwen 郭彥文 225 Guodian 郭店 manuscripts 22 Gurevich, Aaron 159, 165 Guwen guanzhi 古文觀止 248n37 guwen 古文 (ancient-style prose) 677n7, 704 Haiyan 海巖 734 Hamilton, Gary 332n4 Hammer, Leon 523 Han guanyi 漢官儀 (Han official ceremonial)  46 Han Jing 韓經 122–23 Han Jingqing 韓菁清 554 Han Kangbo 841 Han lin 193 Han Rong 韓融 (Yuanchang 元長) 264 Han Shiheng 573, 575n11 Han Shineng 韓世能 80 Han shu yin yi 漢書音義 26n35 Han shu 漢書 (Han history; Ban Gu) 31, 32, 59, 123, 199, 501; terms in 20, 26, 26n35, 46 Han Yanzhi 韓彥直: Ju lu 橘錄 178n115 Han Yu 韓愈 499, 500, 882; “Chong da Yi shu” 重答翊書 692; “Chong da Zhang Ji shu” 重答張籍書 692; collected works of 676; collegial letters of 681, 685, 687–717; “Da Cui Lizhi shu” 答崔立之書  707; “Da Feng Su shu” 答馮宿書 709; “Ji Liu Zihou wen” 祭柳子厚文 500n54; “Shang Jia Huazhou shu” 上賈滑州書  649; “Tang gu xiang Quan gong mubei” 唐故相權公墓碑 650; “Yu Cui Qun shu” 與崔群書 708; “Yu Li Ao shu” 與李 翱書 692, 708; “Yu Meng Dongye shu” 與孟東野書 708 Han Yuanji 韓元吉 375n44

Index Han Zhoujun 韓冑君 80 Handan Chun 邯鄲淳 159 handwriting. See calligraphy Hanlin zhi (Record of the Hanlin Academy) 100 Hanshi waizhuan 354n75 Hao Chunwen 郝春文 858, 866 Hao Lin 郝林 788 Hao Yu 郝浴 788 Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge  555 Hartley, L. P.: The Go-Between 564 Harwood, Britton J. 136n4 Hawkes, David 180 He Linghan 何淩漢 777 He Qufei 何去非 500 He Yan 何晏 636 He Zeng 何曾 209 He Zhizhang 賀知章 63 He Zong 賀踪 214 health issues: and autobiographical letters 631n38; and doctors 284n38, 485, 523–24, 914; and eremitism 301; in love letters 508, 558–59; lovesickness (xinbing 心病) 518–25; of Lu Zhaolin 829–50; in presentationresponse poetry 284, 285n41, 290, 296–97, 299, 300, 301; and sexuality 536; and Shen Congwen 609–10, 612–13; sleep 521–22, 523, 559, 569–70, 587; and status 833; stuttering 833n15; and Su Shi’s initiatives 492; tuberculosis 523; and women 766; in Yanshi jiacang chidu 790; Yin deficiency 522 Heart Sutra 767 Hegel, Robert 126, 128 Heloise 550–51, 555, 565 Heroides (Ovid) 549 Herself an Author (Fong) 747 Heshen 和珅 89 Hewitt, James 566 historiography 623–24, 630 History of the Southern Dynasties 165 History of the Three Kingdoms. See Sanguo zhi Ho, Clara 754 homosexuality 552 Hong Kong 92, 901–2, 908, 925 Hong Liangji 洪亮吉 762, 764

953 Hong Mai 洪邁: “Han Wengong jian shi” 韓文公薦士 670n70; Rongzhai suibi 容齋隨筆, 670n70 Hongguang 弘光 (emperor, Southern Ming dynasty) 120 Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber; Cao Xueqin) 520, 523, 531, 536, 755–56 Hongming ji 弘明集 168n76 Hou Fangyu 侯方域 749 Hou Gao 侯高 691, 693, 696, 697n53, 698 Hou Han shu 後漢書 (Later Han history; Fan Ye) 20, 31, 48, 61, 266, 633 Hou Yili 侯怡利 54, 56, 68 Hou Ying 侯贏 207, 316n37 Houzhu 後主 (emperor, Shu Han dynasty)  249n39 Hu Chong 胡沖: Wu li 吳歷 164n64, 167 Hu Daoshi 胡道師 (Daoist Hu) 485 Hu Jie 胡介 822 Hu Kejia 胡克家 189n1; Wen xuan kaoyi 文選考異 190 Hu Shi 胡適 561, 562 Hu Wenkai 胡文楷 746, 748, 752n29, 756, 757, 761–63, 768, 770, 771; Lidai funü zhuzhuo kao 歷代婦女著 作考 751, 753, 754, 755n38, 756n42, 758, 762, 767 Hu Zhengyan 胡正言 124, 125; Lai’s garment (letter-paper design) 118–19; Shizhuzhai jianpu 十竹齋箋譜 113, 115–20, 131; Thinking of carp (letter paper design) 116, 117 Hua Qin 華欽 73 Hua Tan 華坦 73 Hua Xia 華夏 71–72, 73, 75, 76, 77 Huainanzi 淮南子 32, 314n29, 319n49 Huaisu 懷素 63–64, 69n43, 82; “Cangzhen tie” 藏真帖 64 huajiao 花椒 (fagara) 170n85 Huan Tan 桓譚: Xin lun 新論 312n22 Huan Xuan 桓玄 100, 291, 298–99, 302 Huan 桓 (duke of Qi) 263n77 Huan 桓 (emperor, Han dynasty) 183 Huang Daozhou 809n64 Huang Dezhen 黃德貞: Minggui shixuan 名閨詩選 751–52 Huang Kan 皇侃 349–50 Huang Kan 黃侃 190

954 Huang Luyin 黃盧隱 (Lu Yin) 563 Huang Pilie 黃丕烈 762, 764 Huang Shengzhang 黃盛璋 460n130 Huang Shi 黃始 507; Su Huang chidu xuan 蘇黃尺牘選 475, 824 Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 71, 475, 777, 823–24, 879n4 Huang Yuanjie 黃媛介 749, 751n26, 753n31 Huang Zhouxing 黃周星 749 Huangfu, Jenny 590 Huangfu Shi 皇甫湜 687n31; “Shang Jiangxi Li daifu shu” 上江西李大夫書 665 Huazi ribao 華字日報 (newspaper; Hong Kong) 908 Hui 惠 (emperor, Han dynasty) 249, 293 Hui 惠 (king of Qin) 223 Huiyuan 慧遠 721, 722 Huizong 徽宗 (emperor, Song dynasty)  104, 375 humor 12, 483, 502–4 Humphreys, Arthur 552 Hung, Eva 371 Huo Qubing 霍去病 312n20 Huxley, Aldous 555n36 hypotaxis 689, 694, 697, 711, 712 identity: in autobiographical letters 11, 621–22, 628, 629, 630, 638, 639; and cover letters 645, 648, 649; and crisis 630–33; in love letters 565; and preservation of letters 681 illness. See health issues Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter (Liu Zhongshi tie 劉中使帖; Yan Zhenqing)  3, 53–96; background of 54–57; calligraphy of 61–65; collection history of 65–87; innovative transcriptions of  87–92 Imperial Gazettes 904 informal letters (chidu 尺牘; shujian 書簡)  8, 9, 403–617; and collegial letters 689, 713; vs. formal 680–81, 805–6, 814–23, 824, 878; formal tone in 496, 506; manuscripts of 403–74; of Su Shi  475–507; topics of 758; and women’s letters 745, 746; of Zhang Chao 878 ink. See tools intimacy: in presentation-response poetry  277, 281, 290, 294; and the state 295–301

Index jade 148–59, 171, 182, 205; of Bian He 149n24, 151, 156, 158, 313n26; Chuiji 149, 151 James, Henry 563 Jansen, Thomas 684 Japan 115, 277, 550, 567, 586, 882 Jauss, Hans Robert 364 Ji Fan 嵇蕃 682–83 Ji Han 嵇含: Nanfang caomu zhuang 南方草 木狀 176n103 Ji Kang. See Xi Kang Ji Pingzi 季平子 150–51 Ji Zha 季札 841n48, 845n63 Jia Mi 賈謐 303n98 Jia Shou 賈收 (Jia Yunlao 賈耘老) 482, 485, 486 Jia Sixie 賈思勰: Qimin yaoshu 齊民要術  97–98 Jia Yi 賈誼 654n40 Jia Yunlao. See Jia Shou jian 箋/牋 (memorandum) 194–96 Jian’an 建安 era 135, 307–8, 319 Jiang Biao: Letter to Shen Xuanhuai 113, 114 Jiang Biao 江標 113, 114 Jiang Geng 姜梗 792 Jiang Jizhou 蔣繼周 372n40 Jiang Qing 江青 605, 606 Jiang Xu 蔣詡 283n26 Jiang Yan 江淹 196, 226, 290n69; “Ai qianli fu” 哀千里賦 181; “Yi Jianping wang shang shu” 詣建平王上書 225 Jiang Yuanzuo 江元祚: Yutai wenyuan 玉臺文菀 749, 758 Jiangling 江陵 (Hubei) 44 Jiangzhai 姜寨 (Lintong, Shaanxi)  99n9 Jianwen 簡文 (emperor, Liang dynasty). See Xiao Gang jiashu 家書. See family letters jie 戒. See admonitions Jijie 集解 commentary (Shi ji) 26n35 Jin ji 213 Jin Lei 金罍 789–90 Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 518, 520 Jin Shengtan 金聖歎 749 Jin Yi 金逸 766n76 Jing (emperor, Jin dynasty) 293 Jing Ke 荊軻 156

Index Jing 景 (emperor, Han dynasty) 223, 224, 225 Jingang boreboluomi jing 金剛般若波羅 蜜經. See Diamond Sūtra Jintai shi zi 金台十子 (“Ten Masters of Jintai”) 778, 815 Jiong, Prince of Qi 齊冏 117 Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書 56n5, 57n9, 60n15, 63n24, 670, 685n27, 832n11, 840nn39–42, 841n43 jixiong shuyi 吉凶書儀. See etiquette manuals Jizhuang 紀莊 Village (Tianchang, Anhui)  406 John, Augustus 552 Joyce, James 625n10 Junzi lin 君子林 (Forest of gentlemen; scroll)  102n27, 104 junzi 君子 (noble man) 151, 162, 689 Juyan 居延: administration of 19; postal routes in 39; silk manuscripts from  409; tower T9 in 25, 34 Juyan 居延 slips 17–21, 24, 26, 29–33, 37, 47, 48, 405; labels in 415, 417, 418, 420; mail records in 34–35; manuscript letters in 404, 427–28, 447–56; on postal service grades 43 Kang Sheng 康生 605 Kangxi 康熙 (emperor, Qing dynasty) 89, 782, 788, 795 Kharoshti script 416, 417 Khotanese 871 Knechtges, David 833n15 Ko, Dorothy 245n27, 748, 754 Kong Anguo 孔安國 257, 258 Kong Huan 孔逭: Wen yuan 文苑 192 Kong Rong 孔融 162, 196, 202, 844; “Lun Sheng Xiaozhang shu” 論盛孝章書 201 Kong Xingzhao 孔興詔 795 Kong Zang 孔臧 257–58, 259, 260; “Yu zi Lin shu” 與子琳書 258 Kong Zhaoqian 孔昭虔 777n6 Kong Zhigui 孔稚珪 190, 196; “Beishan yiwen” 北山移文 189, 198 Korea 503–4, 629n30 Korolkov, Maxim 468n162 Kuang Heng 匡衡 449n88

955 Kūkai 空海 309–10; Bunkyō Hifuron 文鏡祕 府論 309–10 Kumārajīva 鳩摩羅什 721, 722, 860 Kuomintang 86 labels: address 415–18, 466; sealing (fengjian 封檢) 415–16, 417, 419, 420, 421 Laclos, Choderlos de: Les Liaisons dangereuses 562 land reform 10, 584, 585–96 “Landlord Song Renrui and His Son” (Caizhu Song Renrui he ta de erzi 財主宋人瑞和 他的兒子; Shen Congwen) 595 Lang Mountain site (Inner Mongolia) 25–26 Lang Ying 朗瑛 890 Langye Wang family 343n46, 344 Lao Laizi 老萊子 118–19 Lao She 老舍 600 Laozi 207, 637. See also Daoism law: and book piracy 886, 888–90, 892, 893–95, 896; and intellectual property rights 889, 892, 897; and postal system 17, 18, 38–39; vs. public opinion 891–96; and Zhang Chao’s letter 880–81, 885 layout, letter. See formats, letter legal cases 9, 508–45; letters as evidence in  513–18; patrilineal vs. conjugal family in  542 Legge, James 22 legitimacy: cultural and political 171, 181–82; and eremitism 300, 301; and public letter poems 302; and ritual and music 299 letter poems. See poetry, epistolary letters: copying of 73–74, 80–81, 93, 445, 479; definitions of 168n75, 404, 549, 628; delivery of 36, 421–24, 452, 468, 864, 874; dictation of 315, 516, 550; diversity of 7–14; drafts of 61, 63, 255, 367, 403, 407, 430, 439, 445, 480, 603, 613, 695, 778, 780, 801, 815; drawings in 556, 568, 571, 577; envelopes/containers for 242, 369n28, 415–16, 417, 418, 556; folding of 430–31; forwarding of 21, 24, 44, 455; innovative transcription (lin 臨) of 53, 87–92; literary 10, 621–826, 682, 810; memorization of 88, 92, 269, 313, 318; physicality of 2–4, 136, 558–59, 760;

956 letters: copying of (cont.) proliferation of 308; recitation of 269, 696; of response 645, 667–72; terms for 8–9, 189, 403; tradition of (tiepai 帖派, tiexue 帖學) 87–88; transmission of 4, 8–9, 688–89, 704, 717, 775–79 letters, terms used in: an 案 (to put on the table) 404; bai 白 (to let know, to explain) 138, 141, 149, 157, 425, 845n66, 884; Chan monks’ letters 730, 733; collegial letters 709, 711; dun shou 頓首 (kowtow, salutation) 71, 122, 123, 144, 145, 337, 382, 384, 405n3, 484, 500, 669, 736, 920; duoqing 多請 (well-wishes) 415, 439; duowen 多問 (well-wishes) 414, 415, 450, 462, 464, 466; hanzao 翰藻 (literary elegance) 227; huatou 話頭 (critical phrase) 731; kanhua 看話 (contemplation of the key phrase)  730–31, 738; koutou 叩頭 (kowtow)  405n3, 414, 423n36, 425, 450n94, 450n99; lin ming, lin si, lin zhong 臨命/死/終 (on the verge of death) 245; love letters 555, 558, 567; normative  914, 916; rang 讓 (deference) 301; she circulars 861; sizui 死罪 (capital offense, unforgivable) 337, 339n31, 404, 405, 425, 426; wu 吾 (term of self-designation)  339, 711n78; wuyang 毋恙 405, 414, 415, 426; xin 信 (trust)  678; xingshen 幸甚 (very fortunate) 405, 414, 426, 450n93; by Zhang Chao 886; zhi ji 知己, zhi wo zhe 知我者 (the one who knows me) 647, 652; zhi yin 知音 (knower of the tone) 584, 605, 615, 703, 845n64. See also terms of address letters to the editor 14, 900–931; in advertisement section 906–7, 911, 913; anonymous 906; authenticity of  905–7; context of 904–16; editing of 907–12, 927; and entertainment 907, 912; formulaic language in 920–26; literary quality of 913, 915; on local issues 918, 925; typology of 903, 917–20 Li Ao 李翱: collegial letters of 687–88, 690–93, 695–701, 706–15, 717; and cover letters 650n28, 662, 663, 665n60, 666, 672n72; “Da Hou Gao di er shu” 答侯高 第二書 691; “Ji Yang pushe wen” 祭楊

Index 僕射文 666n63; “Tang gu Fujian deng zhou . . . Dugu gong muzhiming” 唐故福 建等州 . . . 獨孤公墓志銘 650n28; “Tang gu jinzi guanglü dafu . . . Yang gong muzhiming” 唐故金紫光綠大夫 . . . 楊 公墓誌銘 666n63; “Xie Yang langzhong shu” 謝楊郎中書 648n21, 663n58 Li Baochen 李寶臣 56 Li Bingcheng 李并成 39 Li Bo 李白 832n10 Li Chang 李常 484, 486–87 Li Chong 李充 193; Han lin 漢林, 191, 192 Li Deng 李登 116n42 Li Guan 李觀: and collegial letters 676n4, 687; and cover letters 648n19, 655n44, 658n48, 659; “Tie jing ri shang shilang shu” 帖經日上侍郎書 659; “Yu libu Xi yuanwai shu” 與吏部奚員外書 648n19; “Yu shan bu Chen yuanwai shu” 與膳部 陳員外書 647n15; “Yu yousi Zhao yuanwai shu” 與右司趙員外書 655n44 Li Han 李漢 681 Li He 李賀 500, 501, 757 Li Heng 李衡 176n104 Li Hongzao 李鴻藻 86 Li ji 禮記 (Record of Rites) 150, 198, 215, 250, 258n62, 664, 679n11; and familial state 353, 355 Li Jian 李建 695n49, 702, 704, 705, 712, 716 Li Jian 李簡 371n37 Li Jianzhong 李建中: Tongnian tie 同年帖  101 Li Junming 李均明 19, 406 Li Kan 李衎 102, 104, 105, 123 Li Kegong 李克恭 116 Li Laitai 李來泰 82–83 Li Ling 李陵 195, 631, 632, 634, 682–83; “Da Su Wu shu” 答蘇武書 200, 675, 683nn21–22 Li Lou 離婁 656 Li Qingyun 517 Li Qingzhao 613 Li Shan 李善 150, 311, 831n7; on Cao Zhi’s letters 314n31, 318n48, 319, 320; and Wen xuan 193, 197, 203, 209, 212, 213 Li Shangyin 李商隱 677n7; Zazuan 雜纂, 670n69 Li Shi 李實 670

Index Li Shizeng 李石曾 84, 85, 86–87, 92 Li Si 李斯 195, 223; “Shang shu jian zhu ke” 上書諫逐客 222; “Shang shu Qin Shihuang” 上書秦始皇, 222 Li Tai 李泰: Kuodi zhi 209n40 Li Tingjing 李廷敬 762–65 Li Xilie 李希烈 58 Li Yi 李翊 692, 693, 694, 700 Li Yin 李因 752, 758, 760–61 Li Yingzhen 李應禎 72, 75, 76 Li You 李尢: “Qi kuan” 七款 178n113 Li Yu 李漁 819–20; Chidu chuzheng 尺牘 初徵 748, 749, 750, 761, 787, 807–8, 811, 820; Jiezi yuan 芥子園 (Mustard Seed Garden) 124, 126; and piracy 889, 894–96; Xianqing ouji 閒情偶記 124, 125, 896 Li Yuanyu 李元裕 831 Li Zhao 李肇: Hanlin zhi 翰林志 100–101 Li Zhi 李廌 505 Li Zhiyi 李之儀 503 Li Zhouhan 李周翰 212 Li Zilan 李滋蘭 539 Li Zuyao 李祖堯 824 Liang Chenyu 梁辰魚 755 Liang di shu 兩地書 (Letters between two; Lu Xun and Xu Guangping) 548, 554n32, 559; editing of 571n3, 572nn4–5, 574n2 Liang Mengzhao 梁孟昭 12, 14, 754–61, 764, 765, 769, 770, 771; Moxiuxuan ji 墨繡軒集  756; Shanshui yin 山水吟 758; “Wan bo changmen” 晚泊閶門 759n51; “Xiangsi yan” 相思研 754–55 Liang Qingbiao 梁清標 781, 788, 789–90, 796 Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋 554 Liang Ying 梁颖 102n25 Liao Yunjin 廖雲錦 764 Lidai mingyuan shujian 歷代名媛書簡 (Letters of famous women across the ages; Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin) 748, 757, 761, 763 Lidai mingyuan wenyuan jianbian 歷代名媛 文苑簡編 (Simple compilation of prose by famous women across the ages; Hu Wenkai and Wang Xiuqin) 748, 756, 759, 760, 766, 768, 771 liezhuan 列傳. See biography

957 Liezi 列子 285n38 life writing 622, 625. See also autobiography; biography Lin Gudu 林古度 816–17 Lin Tianhe 林天和 483, 493 Lin Xi 林希 504 Lin Xiangru 蔺相如 150, 156 Lin Yaoying 815 Lin Zizhi 林祖直 817 lin 臨 (copy, innovative transcription) 53, 87–92 Ling Shuhua 凌叔華: “Shuo you zheme yi hui shi” 563 Linghu Chu 677n7 Linzi, marquis of 臨淄侯 311 literacy: and decorated paper 109, 120; of Fei Li Shi 526n21; and Four Treasures 99; and legal case 514–18; and love letters 546, 551, 567; and manuscript letters 427; and she circulars 874–75; and women’s letters 553 literary activities 582, 752, 763–64, 765, 785, 901. See also calligraphy; gift exchange; networks, epistolary literati (wenren 文人) 111–12, 365; and poverty 484, 485, 486–87. See also elites Little, Stephen 122 Liu Bang 劉邦 (Emperor Gaozu 高祖, Han dynasty) 224, 312n20, 844n56; familial admonitions by 243, 244, 247, 249–50, 251, 355–56; “Shou chi taizi” 手敕太子  250 Liu Bei 劉備 (Emperor Zhaolie 昭烈, Shu Han dynasty) 164n64, 202, 207, 317n42; “Yizhao chi Houzhu” 遺詔敕後主  249n39 Liu Chan 劉禪 (Emperor Houzhu 後主, Shu Han dynasty) 249n39 Liu Chen 196 Liu Gongquan 柳公權 59–60 Liu Hunkang 劉混康 375–76 Liu Jiao 劉交 497, 498 Liu Jingsu 劉景素 225 Liu Jun 劉峻 (Liu Xiaobiao 劉孝標)  178n115, 196, 214–15; “Bian ming lun” 辯命論 215; “Chong da Liu Moling Zhao shu” 重答劉秣陵沼書 190 Liu Kan 劉侃 375n44

958 Liu Kun 劉琨 193–94, 196, 279, 280; “Da Lu Chen shu” 答盧諶書 216 Liu Lingxian 劉令嫻 172–73, 175; “Da Tang niang qixi suo chuan zhen shi” 答唐娘七 夕所穿鍼詩 172n92; “Zhao tongxin zhizi zeng Xie niang yin fu ci shi” 摘同心 栀子贈謝娘因附此詩 172n91 Liu Mian 柳冕: “Yu Huzhou Lu dafu lun wen shu” 與滑州盧大夫論文書 679n10 Liu Mu 劉睦 61 Liu Pi 劉濞 223, 224, 225 Liu Qian 劉潛. See Liu Xiaoyi Liu Qingtan 劉清潭 56 Liu Rushi 柳如是 744 Liu Ruyi 劉如意 249 Liu Shao 劉邵: Renwuzhi 人物志 59n11 Liu Sijing 劉思敬 792n31 Liu Tao 310 Liu Wei 劉偉 254 Liu Wu 劉武 223 Liu Xi 劉熙: Shi ming 釋名 30 Liu Xia 劉遐 338n24 Liu Xiang 劉向 247, 255–56, 497, 498; “Jie zi Xin shu” 誡子歆書 256n56; Lienü zhuan 列女傳 654n42; Shuo yuan 說苑  179n117 Liu Xiaobiao 劉孝標. See Liu Jun Liu Xiaowei 劉孝威 172, 175 Liu Xiaoyi 劉孝儀 (Liu Qian 劉潛) 177, 179, 181; “Xie Donggong ci cheng pang ju qi” 謝東宮賜城傍橘啟 175; “Xie Jin’an wang ci gan qi” 謝晉安王賜甘啟 178 Liu Xie 劉勰 6, 174–75, 308, 331–62, 364n2, 627, 629, 846. See also Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 Liu Xin 劉歆 189, 190, 195, 199, 215, 255; “Yi shu rang taichang boshi” 移書讓太常 博士 198 Liu Xiu 劉秀 (Emperor Guangwu 光武, Han dynasty) 19, 204 Liu Xu 劉緒 650 Liu Ye 劉曄 170–71 Liu Yi 劉廙 255; “Jie di Wei” 戒弟偉 254 Liu Yi 劉毅 291, 303 Liu Yikang 劉義康 632 Liu Yilong 劉義隆 (Emperor Wen, Liu Song dynasty) 225, 292, 293, 300, 342 Liu Ying 劉盈 (Emperor Hui 惠, Han dynasty) 249, 293

Index Liu Yiqing 劉義慶: Ji lin 集林 192; Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 292n77, 298n90, 502, 841n47, 844n59 Liu Yu 劉彧 (Emperor Ming 明, Liu Song dynasty; 439–472) 225 Liu Yu 劉裕 (Emperor Wu 武, Liu Song dynasty; 363–422) 283n26, 287n51, 291–95, 298, 299, 300, 302–3 Liu Yuangang 66 Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫: and collegial letters  675–76, 681, 691n37, 695n49, 702, 704, 706; and cover letters 650, 651, 653n35; “Da Liu Zihou shu” 答柳子厚書 706; “Da Su Wu shu” 答蘇武書 675; “Zou ji cheng xiang fu lun xue shi” 奏記丞相府論學事  653n35 Liu Zhao 流沼 215 Liu Zhen 劉楨 178n115, 204, 205, 217, 218; “Gua fu” 瓜賦 173n94, 178n115 Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 683 Liu Zhongshi tie. See Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter Liu Zizhen 劉子真 225 Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 500, 882; collegial letters of 676, 681, 688, 691, 693, 695, 696, 697n53, 699–709, 712, 715–17; and cover letters 647n19, 651, 659, 672n72; “Fu Du Wenfu shu” 復杜溫夫書 691n37; “Shang Jiangling Zhao xianggong ji suo zhu wen qi” 上江陵趙相公寄所著文啟 657n47; “Shang Quan Deyu buque wen juan jue jin tui qi” 上權徳輿補闕温卷決 進退啓 657n47; “Yu Han Yu lun shi guan shu” 與韓愈論史官書 691; “Yu Li Hanlin Jian shu” 與李翰林建書 705; “Yu Lü Daozhou lun Fei Guoyu shu” 與呂 道州溫論非國語書 705; “Yu Xiao Hanlin Mian shu” 與蕭翰林俛書 705; “Yu Yang Huizhi shu” 與楊誨之書  705 Liye 里耶 (Hunan) manuscripts 17, 406, 428, 457, 464–67 Llewelyn Davies, Margaret: Life as We Have Known It 551 Long Bogao 龍伯高 252 Long River (Changhe 長河; Shen Congwen) 586 Lorge, Peter 368 Lotus Sūtra 732, 738

Index love letters (qingshu 情書) 10, 508–45; authentic, unedited 546–47; on bathing 559; content of 518–25; drawings in 556, 568, 571, 571n1, 577; editing of 548, 557, 558, 559, 562, 563–64, 571n3, 572nn4–5, 574n2; in Europe vs. China 546–81; as evidence 513–18; frequency of 564–65; functions of  565–67; history of 549–51; longing in  519, 520; media for 552, 555–57, 567, 568; modern (xin qingshu 新情書) 563; and morality 525–32; social imaginary in  527–28; as talismans 566; themes of  557–60; and transcultural borrowing  567; translations of 548; value of  560–64, 566; and women’s letters 745; writers and recipients of 551–55, 561 lovesickness (xinbing 心病) 518–25 Lowry, Kathryn 518, 527, 537, 551n16, 745, 760 loyalty 3, 57–58, 60, 61, 76, 85, 254, 354, 767 Lü An 呂安 212, 213 Lü Buwei 呂不韋 222; Lüshi chunqiu 176n105 Lu Chen 盧諶 193–94, 279, 280, 281; “Zeng Liu Kun shu” 贈劉琨書 216 Lu Cheng 354n76 Lu Chu 盧儲 672n72 Lu Guangqi 盧光啟 382–83 Lu Ji 陸機 196, 197, 289n67, 303n98, 335n14; “Gua fu” 瓜賦 173n94 Lu Jianzhi 陸柬之 62, 63; Lanting shi 蘭停詩 67 Lu Jilu 陸繼輅: Dongting yuan 洞庭緣 764, 766 Lu Jingqing 陸晶清 563 Lu Kanru 陸侃如 208 Lü Qi 呂杞 58 Lu Qingzi 陸卿子 758, 760 Lu Qinli 逯欽立 288n60 Lu Rubi 盧汝弼 (Lu Bi) 127 Lu Shanjing 陸善經 213 Lu Shen 陸深 750 Lü Wen 呂溫 705, 712n78 Lü Xiang 呂向 311n18 Lu Xiaoman 561 Lu Xie 陸拹: Lin chi jue 臨池訣 63 Lü Xun 呂 巽 213 Lu Xun 魯迅 10, 113, 346n53; “Kong Lingjing bian Dangdai wenren chidu chao xu”

959 孔另境編當代文人尺牘鈔序 247; Liang di shu 兩地書 548, 554n32, 559, 571n3, 572nn4–5, 574n2; love letters of 548, 552, 554, 556, 558–61, 563–66, 568–75; A Q zhengzhuan 阿Q正傳 595 Lu Yanyuan 陸彥遠 62 Lu Yaodong 逯耀東 634n51, 635n53 Lu You 陸游 372–76 Lu Yu 陸羽 69n43, 749 Lu Yun 陸雲 196, 197, 279, 280n18 Lu Zhaoji 盧照己 830n6 Lu Zhaolin 盧照鄰 13, 558n46, 829–52; “Chang’an guyi” 長安古意 892n2; illness of 832–33, 834–36, 841, 842, 849; “Ji Pei sheren zhugong wei yi yaozhi shu” 寄裴舍人諸公遺衣藥直書 839–43; letters of 833–50; life of 830–33; “Shi ji wen” 釋疾文 849; “Shi qun yan” 失群雁 653n36, 846–48; “Wu bei” 五悲 849; “Yu Luoyang mingliu chaoshi qi yaozhi shu” 與洛陽名流朝士乞藥 直書 33–39; “Yu zai chao zhu xian shu” 與在朝諸賢書 843–46 Lu Zhi 陸治 106, 108 Lu Zhi 陸贄 659, 676n4 Lu Zhuo 盧焯 509–14, 518, 535, 544 Lu Ziqi 盧子期 54, 55, 56 Lü Zuqian 呂祖謙 376, 380 Lubi Chi 陸費墀 777 Lunyu 論語. See Analects Luo Binwang 駱賓王 829, 830n5, 831n9 Luo Hongkai 駱鴻凱 189, 190 Luo Qilan 駱綺蘭 757 Luo Qingkang 羅慶康 26 Luo Shennu 羅神奴 856–57 Luo Tianchi 羅天池 777, 824 Luo Zongqiang 346n53 Luoxuan biangu jianpu 蘿軒變古箋譜 (Trumpetvine Pavilion guide to variations on letter paper designs) 113, 116 Ma Meng-ching 126n59, 127n60 Ma Yi 馬怡 437n56, 438n59, 449, 455nn111–13 Ma Yuan 馬援 257, 269, 818; familial admonitions by 243, 244, 247, 252–54; “Jie xiong zi Yan Dun shu” 誡兄子嚴 敦書 253 Mair, Victor 644n3

960 Major, Ernest 906, 910, 914 Man Bing 滿炳 208 Man Chong 滿寵 208 manuals, letter-writing 130; for administrative documents 343, 345; and Chan monks’ letters 738; and decorated paper 105; for love letters 520, 563. See also etiquette manuals manuscript letters 3; columns in 13, 407, 409, 411, 427; contents of 412–24; creases in 409, 418, 431; delivery of 421–22, 424, 452, 468; epilogues in 413n23, 414–15; folding of 430–31; formats of 412; formulaic expressions in 407, 413, 414, 424–27, 431, 466, 467–68; vs. literary transmission 8–9; materials used for 407–12; postscripts in 413n23, 414, 415; private 403–74; Qin vs. Han  413–14; sources of 404–6; translations of  424–69; on wooden rod 411–12, 427, 445–47. See also zhazi 劄子; particular sites Mao Baochen 毛豹臣 811–12 Mao Jin 毛晉 190 Mao Qiang 毛嬙 654, 667–68 Mao shi 毛詩 (Shijing 詩經; Classic of odes) 318n46, 664; and familial admonitions 251n47, 257, 258, 264, 268; on family and state 353n72; and gift-giving 150, 153; Great Preface to 678n10; and presentation-response poetry 282n24, 283n26, 284nn35–36, 285n38, 287nn49–51, 288nn56–60, 289nn61–63, 305; and Su Shi 484; and Wen xuan 198, 207, 215 Mao Sui 毛遂 207, 316n35, 324 Mao Xianshu 毛先舒 811–12, 822 Mao Zedong 589, 597, 608 Masterpieces in the National Museum 92 masturbation 558 Mauss, Marcel 135, 137, 182 May Seventh Cadre School (wuqi ganxiao 五七幹校) 584, 607 Mayor of Casterbridge, The (Hardy) 555 McMahon, Keith 536 media, electronic 1, 7, 552, 555, 556, 567, 568 medicine. See health issues Mei Sheng (Cheng) 枚乘 195, 226; “Shang shu chong jian Wu wang” 上書重諫吳王,

Index 225; “Shang shu jian Wu wang” 上書諫 吳王 224 Mei Wending 梅文鼎 766 Meiyu 眉語 (Eyebrow talk; magazine) 563 memorandum ( jian 箋/牋) 194–96 memorials (biao 表, zou 奏) 189, 191, 199, 308–9; of Cao Zhi 322–26; vs. letters 6, 326, 333–37; and ornamented style 347; shang shu 上書 194, 195, 226, 322, 644; in Wen xuan 337n24; xingke tiben 刑科 題本 (Board of Punishments routine memorial) 9, 508, 510n2, 513 Mencius (Master Meng; Mengzi 孟子) 22, 325, 700, 888 Meng Da 孟達 170n85, 176n107, 183n129 Meng Jiao 孟郊 708, 710–11, 712, 713, 717 Meng Kang 孟康 26n35 Meng Tian 蒙恬 97 Meng Xianshi 孟憲實 858, 862n16 Mengchang, Lord of 孟嘗君 316n36, 318n45 Menzies, Robert G. 553 Metelmann, Carsten 241n7 Mi Fu 米芾 64–65, 69, 76, 85, 92; Han ma tie 韓馬帖 102; Yan shi 硯史 99 Miao Tong 繆彤 792–93, 798 Min Qiji 閔齊伋 129, 130 Min Ziqian 210 Ming loyalists 779, 783–84, 806, 808 Ming 明 (emperor, Han dynasty) 61 Ming 明 (emperor, Wei dynasty). See Cao Rui Ming 明 (Liu Yu 劉彧; emperor, Liu Song dynasty) 62, 225 Ministry of Rites 105 missionaries 917, 926 Mo Di 墨翟. See Mozi model letters (fatie 法帖) 53, 73–74, 92; vs. actual letters 677; for administrative documents 343; and Chan monks’ letters 735, 738; for collegial letters  688, 717; and decorated paper 118; and elite marriage 537; emotion in 681–87, 685; and genre collections 192; and Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter 87; and letters tradition 88; for love letters  520, 567; and manuscript letters 412; and ornamented style 346–47; and

Index public-private dichotomy 331; and publishing boom 879n4; and women  749 Model-letters from the True Appreciation Studio (Zhenshangzhai tie 真賞齋帖; Hua Xia) 73–74, 79 Model-letters of the Hall of the Frolicking Goose (Xihongtang tie 戲鴻堂帖; Dong Qichang) 78, 79–80, 81, 83, 92 Mogao Grottoes 莫高窟 17 Momiyama Akira 籾山明 415, 417, 419 Mongols 60 morality: and adultery 525–32; and autobiographical letters 623, 624, 626, 638, 639, 640; and family harmony 538; and finances 542; in love letters 560, 566–67; normative 304; vs. qing  530–32; Shen Congwen on 602–3 Moye 鏌鋣 (sword) 654, 655n44, 667 Mozi 墨子 (Mo Di 墨翟) 206, 280, 281, 314, 320; and postal system 17, 18, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 46 Mu 穆, Duke of Qin 223 music 206, 312, 314, 320, 664, 845n64; ci 詞 (song lyrics) 476, 755; and legitimacy  163–64, 299; as metaphor 143, 160; and politics 595; and ritual 298, 299; sanqu 散曲 (songs) 755; of Zhou 841n48 Musset, Alfred de 563 Mustard Seed Garden ( Jiezi yuan 芥子園)  124, 126 muzhi 墓志, muzhiming 墓誌銘 (tomb inscriptions) 277–78, 650n28, 830n6 Muzong 穆宗 (emperor, Tang dynasty) 59 Naba Toshisada 那波利貞 857 names: concealing (hu ming 糊名) 644n3; family names (xing 姓) 437n54, 449, 452, 687n31, 872; foreign 872, 906n20; of monks 856; nicknames 558, 566, 571n22, 574n2, 586, 589; personal names (ming 名) 90, 250, 256, 405, 414, 452, 687n31; pseudonyms 551n18, 590n23, 884, 905–6, 913–16, 927; purchase of  890n34; studio names 758, 762n58, 782; style/courtesy names (zi 字) 180n122, 258n61, 260n67, 388, 405, 423n35, 449, 452, 453n104, 636, 699, 711n78; tabooed 252,

961 499, 500, 647, 841n45; of women 442n67, 753 Nan Qi shu 南齊書 (Book of Southern Qi)  338n26, 343n43, 352n70 Nanhua Bianlao 南華辯老 492 National Palace Museum (Taipei) 92 Needham, Joseph 28, 29 networks, epistolary 775–826; and Chan monks 723, 725, 738, 740; and intellectual property rights 896–97; and publishing boom 880n7; of women 751, 752–53, 754, 765, 770, 771; of Zhang Chao 878 New Century (journal) 86 New Policies (Wang Anshi) 477, 486 New York Times 908 newspapers: English-language 916, 917, 920, 926; foreign vs. Chinese 900, 905, 906, 908, 927; incoming letters (laizha 來扎) to 905, 908–9; letters to the editor in  900–931; vs. official gazettes 920; and Shen Congwen 600, 601–2 Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis 907, 918, 919 Nienhauser, William H. 126n59, 127n60 Nietzsche, Friedrich 625n10 Ning Ke 寧可 858, 866 Noelle-Neuman, Elisabeth 925 North China Daily News 906 North China Herald 916, 917, 926 Nugent, Christopher M. B. 368n27 occasionality 5, 8, 11, 12; and Chan monks’ letters 735, 738; of collegial letters 680; in familial admonitions 248, 270; in letter models 685 official communications: etiquette manuals for 342–43, 345; formulaic expressions in 404; manuscripts of 404; and ornamented style 346–51; Peking Gazette  509, 517, 541; vs. personal 6, 226, 322, 326, 331–32, 337, 363, 365, 403, 467; and personal relations 351–58; and sealing labels 417; spacing in 371, 372; speed of 36; structure of 253; subgenres of  239; zhazi 劄子 as 365–68, 369, 370–71. See also administrative documents; memorials; petitions “Old Comrade” (Lao tongzhi 老同志; Shen Congwen) 589n58

962

Index

Pei Du 裴度 704, 709, 710; “Ji Li Ao shu” 寄李翱書 706 Pei Jinzhi 裴瑾之 840 Pei Songzhi 裴松之 136n4, 203, 255, 311n15, 636n59 Peking Gazette (official newsletter) 509, 517, 541 Peng Chong 彭寵 201–2 Peng Ruli 彭汝礪 386 Pengzu 彭祖 160 performativity 727, 896, 897 Perrin, Andrew J. 925 personal letters: autobiographical letters as 639; of Chan monks 725–26, 727; in China 550; circulation of 634; and collegial letters 689; conventions of  240; as creative expression 568; formulaic expressions in 337–46, 405; as painting 131, 485, 754. See also scrolls genre 239; and letters to the editor  Palace Museum (Beijing) 86, 87 921–24; of Lu Zhaolin 833–50; vs. official  Pan Jixing 潘吉星 102 6, 226, 322, 326, 363, 365, 403, 467; vs. Pan Ni 潘尼 289n67 private 403; vs. published 583; and Pan Shicheng 潘仕成 776, 777–78 Shen Congwen 584; by women 764. Pan Yue 潘岳 303n98; “Dao wang shi,” See also private communications 321–22; “Yang Zhongwu lei” 321 personality: and calligraphy 3, 53, 58–61, 85, Pang Anchang 龐安常 485 627; and Imperial Commissioner Liu paper: coating (tubu 涂布) of 100; columns Letter 53, 57–61, 68, 76, 78; and legal drawn on 106, 125, 129; dyeing of  case 523–24, 539; in letters to the 100–101; hemp 100; and literary genres  editor 913; of Su Shi 486, 502 307; and Lu Xun’s love letters 572, 575n8; petitions (biao 表) 189, 191, 194, 199, 338n28 and sealing labels 421; watermarked Pillow-Book (Makura no sōshi 枕草子; Sei (shuiwen zhi 水紋紙) 4, 102 Shōnagon) 550 paper, decorated 3–4, 97–134; catalogs of  Pingyuan, Lord of 平原君 316n35 130; categories of 125; designs on  Plato 625n10 113–29; flowers on 100, 106, 116, 123, 128; Po Qin 繁欽 196; “Yu Wei Wendi jian” with metallic materials 104–5; and 與魏文帝牋 217 piracy 895; techniques for 99–113 poetry (shi 詩): and autobiography 625; parataxis 711, 713 banquet 6, 278–80; and civil Parker-Bowles, Camilla 559 examinations 644n7; vs. collegial Parsons, Marjorie Ritchie 554, 558 letters 688; on decorated paper  patents of enfeoffment (ce 策). See diplomas 127–28; definition of 304n99; and patronage: and Cao Zhi-Wu Zhi letters 326; emotion 335n14, 678; exchanges of 321, and civil examinations 644, 645; and 690, 843–46; and exile 486, 487; collegial letters 676, 687; and Confucius  four-syllable 276, 277–78, 303, 304; 663–65, 666; and cover letters 646, 648, fu 賦 174, 189, 205, 207–8, 217, 321, 324, 649–67, 671–72; criticism of 658–62, 830; genres of 189, 829–30; jueju 絕句  668–71; imperial 62; terms for 293 759n51; of Lu Zhaolin 829, 830, 831–32, Pattinson, David 331, 346, 357, 358, 680, 745, 836, 839; meter in 276; parting 684; 746, 748, 749, 758

open letters 8, 13, 301, 628, 635, 838–39; autobiographical letters as 636–39; of Chan monks 725–26; love letters as  508; of Su Shi 479. See also public-private dichotomy opium 919 Opium Wars 86 Oppong, Christine 553 oracle bones 98 oral communication 315, 516, 550, 696, 874 Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 85, 879n4, 882; Yan pu 硯譜, 99 Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢 833n15; Bushang tie 卜商帖, 67; Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚, 267 Ovid 549, 566 Owen, Stephen 613, 683n21

Index private life in 677; repetitive reading of 290; sao 騷 830, 848; on scrolls 90; of Shen Congwen 583, 611; of Su Shi 476, 478, 479, 481, 486, 487; in thank-you notes 171–72; tones in 310; by women 172–73, 751, 754–57, 759n51, 761–62, 764, 767, 769, 770; of Yan Guangmin 779, 816; and Yanshi jiacang chidu 788, 799; yongwu fu 詠物賦 (poetic expositions on things) 174; yongwu shi 詠物詩 (poems on things)  174. See also presentation-response poetry poetry, epistolary 6, 194, 646; vs. banquet poems 278–80; and love letters 514, 520, 547, 549, 550, 566n69; and women 746, 747, 765 poetry societies 763–64, 765, 785 politics: anger in 690, 697; and autobiographical letters 621, 638; and collegial letters 676, 679–80, 717; culture of 181–82; and elite scandal 509; in letters to the editor 907, 920, 927–28; and literary letters 682; and literature  595–96; in love letters 560; and newspapers 904; and persecution  477, 478–81, 494; and poetry 486, 487; and severing friendship letters 684–85; and Shen Congwen 582–83, 585, 587–88, 595–98, 606–13; and Su Shi 477–78, 486, 490, 494, 505; in Yanshi jiacang chidu  796. See also censorship; exile Pollard, David E. 371 Pope, Alexander 833 postal stations 17, 18, 19–20, 31, 42, 43; functions of 33, 34, 41, 45, 47–48 postal system 3, 4; administration of 30, 34, 47; on borders 21, 25, 27, 29–30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 45, 46, 47, 48; couriers in 22, 29, 30, 36–37, 45, 47–48; grades of service in  18, 43–44; Han 17–52; horses in 18, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 44, 47, 48; and love letters  564, 568; mail records in 34–39; and military 19–21, 23, 25, 33, 36–37, 47; and newspapers 904; penalties in 38–39, 45; and personal letters 413, 423; routes in 18, 39–43; speed of 38, 44, 47; Tang  42–43; terminology for 18, 20, 21–33 postcards 7

963 poverty 165, 260, 265n83, 285n41, 615, 822, 856–57; and exile 484, 485, 486–87 power 250; and personal relations 350, 351–58. See also politics prefaces/postfaces, authorial (zixu 自序)  883; in autobiography 625, 626, 627–28; parting 677, 690; by women 767, 768; in Yanshi jiacang chidu 788, 791 prescripts 256, 257, 259, 413n23, 414 presentation-response poetry (zengda shi 贈答詩) 6, 171–72, 276–306; and Cao Zhi 288n60, 323–24; examples of  282–90; as letters 279–80; separation in 277–81, 300–305; and the state 277, 295–300 preservation 8, 13, 74, 79, 172, 628, 783; of collegial letters 681; of decorated paper 102, 105; of love letters 549–50, 554, 561; of she circulars 854, 875; of Shen Congwen’s letters 585–86, 606, 613; of Su Shi’s letter 476, 494; and Wen xuan 190, 191; of women’s letters  744–46, 770–71 printing technology 308n4, 479, 902 prison, letters from 197, 223, 225, 266, 314n29, 515, 632, 634, 789 privacy 331, 354, 357–58; in autobiographical letters 639; and collegial letters 677; concepts of 403; and letters 629; and love letters 508–9, 547, 554, 562; and manuscript letters  424; and Su Shi 494–95. See also secrecy private communications: circulation of 680; manuscripts of 403–74; vs. official 403, 467; vs. personal letters 403 proems 257, 259, 262, 413n23, 414 property rights, intellectual 14, 879–97; and author vs. publisher 888–91, 896 prose: in Chan monks’ letters 733; and civil examinations 644n7; in collegial letters 676; guwen 古文 (ancient-style) 677n7, 704; letter inserts in 4, 7; sanwen 散文 (free) 309–10; and Su Shi 476 prose, parallel (pianwen 駢文) 197; in collegial letters 677n7, 678, 682, 683, 685, 686, 704, 713–14; in familial admonitions  247, 268; vs. sanwen 散文 309–10; in thank-you notes 171, 175, 177

964

Index

prosody, tonal 309–10 Pu Yongsheng 蒲永昇 102n22 public opinion 512, 891–96, 900–931 public space: letters to the editor as 900, 901–2, 904, 906, 907, 908, 910, 913, 915, 917; and presentation-response poetry 277, 300–304 public-private dichotomy (gong 公/si 私)  10, 628–29; and autobiographical letters  622, 634–36; in Chan monks’ letters  731–32; and collegial letters 678, 680; and elite scandal 509; and epistolary subgenres 364; and familial state  357–58; and love letters 552, 554, 562, 563; and official vs. personal documents  6, 226, 322, 326, 331–32, 337, 363, 365, 403, 467; and ornamented style 346, 350–51; and severing friendship letters 684; and Shen Congwen 584, 595–96, 604–5; and women’s letters 744; and writing styles  338n25; and Zhang Chao’s letter 880, 881–85 publishing 14, 878–99; 17th century boom in 878, 880; of letter collections 806–7; of love letters 551–52, 558, 559, 560, 561–64, 566, 568; and property rights  885–91; of Shen Congwen’s letters 583; and women 553; and Zhang Chao  879–80 punctuation: dots 415, 431, 810, 866; duplication mark 428, 450n93, 464n153; hook marks 457n120, 866; in modern editions 683n22 Puyi 溥儀 (emperor, Qing dynasty) 86

Qidong yeren 齊東野人: Sui Yangdi yanshi 隋煬帝艶史 126, 127, 128 Qin Guan 秦觀 480n11, 482–83, 484, 503–4, 505 Qin Gui 秦檜 370 qing 情. See emotion qingshu 情書. See love letters Qin Shihuang. See First Emperor Qiu Chi 丘遲 196; “Yu Chen Bozhi shu” 與陳伯之書 214 Qiu Chong 丘崈 375n44 Qiu Huan 丘洹 291, 292 Qiu Jizu 丘繼祖 291 Qiu Lingju 丘靈鞠 291n73, 344n48 Qiu Wang 丘尫 291 Qiu Xian 丘顯 291n72 Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭 22 Qiu Yuanzhi 丘淵之 6, 291–92, 293, 294–95, 300–304; Xinji lu 新集錄 292n77; “Zeng jishi Yang Hui qi shu ji zai wai, yi shou” 贈記室羊徽其屬疾在外一首 282–86, 290, 295–300, 301 Qiu Zhong 求仲 283n26, 303 Qu Wanli 屈萬里 258n63 Qu Yuan 屈原 160, 180, 181, 353n72, 624n7; “Huai sha” 懷沙 849n75. See also Chu ci 楚辭 Qu Yuan 蘧瑗 (Boyu 伯玉) 259–60 Quan Deyu 權德輿 11, 643–74; cover letter to 650–67, 671; “Da Dugu xiucai shu” 答獨孤秀才書 645, 667–72; “Ji Dugu Changzhou wen” 祭獨孤常州文  652n34 Quan Tang wen 687

Qi Baishi 齊白石 131 qi 啟. See thank-you notes qi 氣 629, 696, 835 Qian Chenqun 錢陳群 536 Qian Feng 錢灃 89–92 Qian Shuoren 錢碩人 73 Qian Xie 錢勰 498 Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 197–98, 320 Qianlong 乾隆 (emperor, Qing dynasty) 83, 509, 512, 513 Qianziwen 千字文 (Thousand character essay) 104–5, 870 Qiao Kan 喬偘 840 Qiao Kuicheng 喬簣成 67, 87

Random Sketches on a Trip to Hunan (Xiangxing sanji 湘行散記; Shen Congwen) 586, 587 Rebellion of the Three Feudatories (1673–81) 795 reciprocity 280, 560–61 recluses. See eremitism recognition 668, 671, 888, 895, 897; belated 215, 583, 653. See also reputation Ren An 任安 200, 239, 634–35, 638; Sima Qian’s letter to 5, 308, 550, 555, 631–32, 684 Ren Fang 任昉 199, 214; “Baibi quan jin jinshang jian” 百辟勸進金上牋 220;

Index “Da Dao Jian’an xiang zhang shi” 答到建 安餉杖詩 172; “Dao sima jishi jian” 到 司馬記室牋 220; “Feng da chi shi qixi shi qi” 奉答勑示七夕詩啟 221; “Qi Xiao taifu guci duoli” 啟蕭太傅固辭奪禮  222; “Wei Bian Bin xie xiu Bian Zhongzhen mu qi” 為卞彬謝脩卞忠貞墓啟 221; Wenzhang yuanqi 文章緣起 342n41; “Zou tan Liu Zheng” 奏彈劉整 196–97 Rentou geda 人頭疙瘩 412, 421–23 reputation 3, 211, 217, 562, 676, 739, 925; and autobiography 623, 624, 637; and cover letters 646, 658, 661, 665, 667–68; in familial admonitions 241, 251, 258, 265, 268; in Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter 54, 57, 58, 60, 63, 85; and intellectual property rights 888, 890–91, 893, 894; and legal case 509, 511, 527, 529, 531–32, 534, 536, 540, 542; and love letters 554; and networks 776, 817, 824; and poetry 281, 290n69, 293, 294, 302; of Su Shi 477, 479, 480, 486; and women 744, 749. See also status requests. See cover letters; gift exchange; Yanshi jiacang chidu Research on Ancient Chinese Costume (Zhongguo gudai fushi yanjiu; Shen Congwen) 613 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa 562 Richter, Antje 136, 321, 326, 634, 769n84, 914n39; on manuscript letters 413, 415, 434n47, 445n81, 452n102 ritual (rites; li 禮, yi 儀): and Chan monks’ letters 725, 726, 736–40, 741; and genre distinctions 332; language of 337–46; and letters vs. memorials 336–38; and ornamented style 347; and status 357. See also Li ji Romania 558 Rong Qiqi 285n38 Roosevelt, Franklin 833 Rosenmeyer, Patricia 549 Ru mian tan 如面談 (Like speaking face to face; letter-writing guide) 118 Ruan Ji 阮籍 196, 216, 219; “Wei Zheng Chong quan Jin wang jian” 為鄭沖勸晉 王牋, 199 Ruan Xiaoxu 阮孝緒: Qilu 七錄 344n50

965 Ruan Yu 阮瑀 204; “Wei Cao gong zuo shu yu Sun Quan” 為曹公作書與孫權 202 Ruan Yuan 阮元 777; “Beibei nantie lun” 北碑南帖論 88n91; “Nanbei shupai lun” 南北書派論 88n91 Ruskin, John 564 Salmond, Anne: Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas 567 salutations: in anthologies 808; in Chan monks’ letters 723, 727, 736, 741; in collegial letters 688; in Yanshi jiacang chidu 776–77; zaibai 再拜 (to salute repeatedly) 405, 410, 414, 419n29, 426, 431, 736 Sand, George: Elle et lui 563 Sanft, Charles 430n39 Sanguo zhi 三國志 (History of the Three Kingdoms) 255, 323, 325 Sanskrit 165, 736, 871 Saussy, Haun 754 Schonebaum, Andrew 523, 525 Schudson, Michael 901 scribes 410, 432, 447–49, 551 scrolls 102n27, 104; duilian 對聯 (matched pair of hanging scrolls) 90, 91; poetry on 90; signature on 67, 82, 83, 87, 90n103; xingjuan 行卷 (circulating)  644–45, 646, 651, 669n67, 671 sealing labels (fengjian 封檢) 415–16, 417, 420, 421 seals 65, 68, 76, 77–78, 81–82, 83, 85 secrecy 467, 551; in public vs. private letters  543–44; and Su Shi 478–79, 481, 494 Sei Shōnagon 清少納言: Makura no Sōshi 枕草子 550 self-censorship 10; by Shen Congwen  584–85, 596, 603–5; by women 756–57 self-cultivation: of Chan monks 724; in familial admonitions 254, 265, 270; in presentation-response poetry 285n38, 290n69; as public 302; and sexuality  524–25 self-expression 9, 543–44 self-referentiality 5, 11, 12, 242; in familial admonitions 248; in letters to the editor 903; in Lu Zhaolin’s letters 836, 839–43

966 Self-Strengthening Movement 85 sentiment. See emotion separation: and autobiography 627, 628; in definition of letter 4–5, 242–43; emotion of 684, 686, 690; and familial admonitions 245–46, 248, 256, 260, 261–62; and love letters 565; in presentation-response poetry 277–81, 300–305; and Shen Congwen 585, 614; and the state 295–300 sexuality: and familial lettters 553; in love letters 557–58, 563, 565, 567; and lovesickness 522–25; and medicine 536; and money 535–36; and morality 525–32 Shan Tao 山濤 211–12, 636, 637, 684 Shang Jinglan 商景蘭 753n31 shang shu 上書. See memorials Shang shu 尚書 (Shujing 書經; Classic of documents) 198, 215, 335n14, 356, 628, 664; and familial admonitions 243, 245, 249, 258, 268; and poetry 284n37, 304n99 Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 596 she 社 (local associations) 2, 13, 853–77; sheyi wenshu 社邑文書 (documents) of 853, 857–59, 866. See also circulars, local association Shen Congwen 沈從文 10, 14, 240n4, 582–617; in Cadre School 606–13; end of literary career of 582–83, 587; and land reform 585–96; love letters of 561; research of 606–7, 613; self-criticisms by 583, 588, 589–90, 604; suicide attempt of 582, 587, 601, 608; and thought reform 587–88, 597–98, 610; travel writing of 586–87; works by 586, 587, 589n58, 595, 603–4 Shen Defu 沈德符 79–80 Shen Fu 沈復: Fu sheng liu ji 浮生六記  547n2 Shen Hanguang 申涵光 799–800 Shen Hanpan 申涵盼 800n48 Shen Hong 沈紅 597–98, 599 Shen Huchu 沈虎雏 583, 589, 592, 597–607 Shen Hui 申惠 752, 753, 761; Minggui shixuan 名閨詩選 751 Shen Jiayin 申佳胤 800n48

Index Shen Liao 沈遼: Dong zhi tie 動止帖 101, 103 Shen Longzhu 沈龍朱 589, 592, 594, 599, 601–2, 607 Shen Quan 沈荃 82, 83, 85 Shen Renlan 沈紉蘭 751 Shen Shanbao 沈善寶 746n9, 757 Shen Shi 沈仕 755 Shen Yazhi 沈亞之: “Yu Tongzhou shiguan shu” 與同州試官書 649 Shen Yi 申儀 184n129 Shen Ying 沈瑩: Linhai yiwu zhi 臨海異物志 173n96 Shen Yue 沈約 214, 279, 309; on administrative writing etiquette 342; and Liu Xie 334n11; postfaces by 628; Song shu 宋書 285n41, 290n69, 292, 292n77, 298, 299, 342, 343 Shen Yunlu 沈云麓 597, 612 Shen Zhaohui 606n75 Shen Zhou 沈周 72, 75 Shenbao 申報 (newspaper; Shanghai) 14, 902–14, 917, 919–20, 925; editing of  908–12; letter in 921–24 Sheng Xian 盛憲 201 Shenzong 神宗 (emperor, Song dynasty)  480, 504 Shi Bao 石苞 212 Shi Chuhou 史處厚 69 Shi Hao 史浩 386 Shi ji 史記 (Records of the historian; Sima Qian) 31, 32, 200, 314n31, 623; and autobiographical letters 634; and gifts  156; jijie 集解 commentary on 26n35; and Shen Congwen 614–15; writing of  632. See also Sima Qian Shi Jian 史鑑 75 Shi Pingmei 石評梅 563 Shi Runzhang 施閏章 780 Shi Siming 史思明 54 Shi Tianyi 施天裔 797 shi 詩. See poetry Shi’er yue xiangbian wen 十二月相辯文 (Texts exchanged through the twelve months) 685–86 Shih, Vincent 333 Shijing. See Mao shi Shisun Meng 士孫萌 280

Index Shizhuzhai jianpu 十竹齋箋譜 (Ten Bamboo Studio guide to letter paper designs) 113, 115, 116, 118–19, 120, 131 Shizhuzhai shuhuapu 十竹齋書畫譜 (Ten Bamboo Studio guide to calligraphy and painting; Hu Zhengyan) 131 Shizhuzhai 十竹齋(Ten Bamboo Studio)  120, 121–22 shu 書. See formal letters Shuihudi 睡虎地 (Yunmeng, Hubei): manuscript letters from 17, 22, 406, 428, 456–64, 466; tombs at 98–99 shujian 書簡. See informal letters Shujing 書經. See Shang shu Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Xu Shen 許慎) 21, 30, 32 shuyi 書儀. See etiquette manuals signature: on manuscript letters 410, 447, 449; on scrolls 67, 82, 83, 87, 90n103 silk: manuscripts on 407–9, 410n15, 421, 427, 429–44; pouch of 419, 421; as stationery  407–10, 419, 421 Silk Routes 42, 430, 870 Sima Biao 司馬彪: Xu Han shu 續漢書  146n20; Zhan lüe 戰略 183n129 Sima Guang 司馬光 504 Sima Hui 司馬徽: “Jie zi shu” 誡子書  265n83 Sima Qian 司馬遷 195, 200, 201, 239, 623, 633; autobiographical letters of 634–35, 636, 637, 638; “Bao Ren An shu” 報任安書 (“Bao Ren Shaoqing shu” 報任少卿書)  5, 308, 550, 555, 631–32, 684; and biography  624n7; and Chan monks’ letters 726; on characterology 59; and Shen Congwen  614–15. See also Shi ji 史記 Sima Shi 司馬師 293 Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 194, 195, 224, 833n15; “Shang shu jian lie” 上書諫獵 224 Sima Yi 司馬懿 136, 183, 636 Sima Zhao 司馬昭 199, 212, 213, 219, 636, 638 Simmel, Georg 159 sincerity (cheng 誠) 678 slander 213, 223, 479, 635, 638; familial admonitions on 260, 268, 269; in legal case 508, 512, 514, 515, 535, 537–38, 539, 542

967 social class: and collegial letters 679; and love letters 551, 552; and Shen Congwen  594, 596; and women’s letters 744, 745 social relations 4, 6, 12; and affection  702–17; and anger 689–702; and Chan monks’ letters 726, 730, 732, 736–40, 741; and civil examinations 643–44, 645, 662; and collegial letters 675–76, 678, 679–80, 717; and cover letters 646, 647, 650, 651, 652, 657, 671–72; and epistolary subgenres  364; and formulaic expressions 425; and gift exchange 72, 135–37, 138, 149, 165, 172; and intellectual property rights 897; and letters vs. memorials 335–36; and manuscript letters 376, 424, 437, 442; and public-private dichotomy 331–32; and publishing boom 880; and ritualized language 337–46; secrecy and intimacy in 357–58; and the state 296; of women 766; and women’s letters  750, 752–53, 769, 771; and Yanshi jiacang chidu 776, 785, 793, 801; and Zhang Chao’s letter 880–81 Sogdian script 871–73 Son Suyoung 784 Song Luo 815 Song Maocheng 宋懋澄: Jiuyue ji 九籥集  810 Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe) 246 stamp-collecting 7 Stanley, Liz 4, 5n7, 12 state, the: and eremitism 296, 297–98, 300, 301, 302; familial 351–58; modern 353, 358; and presentation-response poetry  277, 295–300; and public-private dichotomy 331 stationery: bamboo 17, 18–21, 100, 410, 411n16, 634n51; materials used for  407–12; silk 407–10, 419, 421; wooden 17, 18–21, 29, 100, 410–12, 417, 427–28, 445–67, 550. See also paper status: in autobiography 626; and Chan monks’ letters 735; and collegial letters  677; and cover letters 648; and disability  833; and formulaic expressions 404; and gift exchange 135, 149; in letter writing 226, 405; and letters to the editor 914, 915, 927; and letters vs.

968 status: in autobiography (cont.) memorials 333–37; and manuscript letters 437; and ornamented style  346–51; and patronage 650, 670; and personal relations 356; and presentation-response poetry 294–95; and property rights 888–90; and publishing 890–91, 894; and ritualized language 337–46; and thank-you notes  171; and ugliness 833n15; of Yan Guangmin 779 Stein, Aurel 31 Sterne, Laurence 552 storytelling 919 style, literary: of administrative documents  346–51; in Chan monks’ letters 738–39; in collegial letters 704, 711, 717; high-status 10, 226–27, 326, 346–51, 902; in informal letters 8, 475; in letter models 682; in letters to the editor  902, 924–25, 928; low-register 196–97; ornamented 346–51; and public-private dichotomy 338n25, 346, 350–51; in published vs. unpublished letters 824; stream of consciousness in 534; of Su Shi 495–502 Su Jun 蘇峻 221 Su Shi 蘇軾 9, 13, 14, 475–507, 777, 823–24, 882; “Bie Hainan Limin biao” 別海南黎 民表 487n24; biography of 477–78; and Chan monks’ letters 737; “Da Fan Chufu shiyi shou” 答范純夫十一首  479n6; “Da Li Fangshu shiqi shou” 答李方 叔十七首 480n10, 505n66; “Da Qin Taixu qishou” 答秦太虛七首 482n16, 503n59; on decorated paper 102n22; exile of 477–78, 482, 483–84, 486–90; finances of 478, 481–86; formal tone of 496, 506; “Huangzhou yu ren wu shou” 黃州與人五首 481n13; and Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter 69, 71; in letter collections 806, 879n4; literary style of 495–502; persecution of 477, 478–81, 494; personality of  502–7; and social welfare projects 478, 490–95; “Yu Canliaozi ershiyi shou” 與參寥子二 十一首 479n5; “Yu Chen Chuandao wu shou” 與陳傳道五首  480n9; “Yu

Index Cheng Huaili liushou” 與程懷立六 首 505n65; “Yu Cheng Quanfu shier shou” 與程全父十二首 492n38; “Yu Cheng xiucai san shou” 與程秀才 三首 488n25; “Yu Cheng Zhengfu qishiyi shou” 與程正輔七十一首  491nn29–34, 492n39, 493n42; “Yu Du Zishi sishou” 與杜子師四首 497n47; “Yu He Zhengtong sanshou” 與何正通三首  499n52; “Yu Hu daoshi si shou” 與胡道師 四首 485n20; “Yu Huang Dong xiucai er shou” 與黃洞秀才二首 480n10; “Yu Jia Yunlao si shou” 與賈耘老四首 485n21, 500n55; “Yu Li Fangshu shiqi shou” 與李 方叔十七首 480n10, 505n66; “Yu Li Gongze shiqi shou” 與李公擇十七首  479n4, 484n19, 487n22; “Yu Lin Tianhe ershisi shou” 與林天和二十四首  483n18, 493n43; “Yu Lin Zizhong wushou” 與林子中五首 503n60; “Yu Nanhua Bianlao shisan shou” 與南華辯老十 三首 492n40; “Yu Qian Mufu ershiba shou” 與錢穆父二十八首 497n50, 498n51; “Yu Quanlao yishou” 與泉老一首  505n64; “Yu Wang Dingguo shishiyi shou” 與王定國四十一首 480nn9–10, 483n17, 493n44; “Yu Wang Minzhong shiba shou” 與王敏中十八首 491nn35–36, 492n39, 506n67; “Yu Wang Xiang wu shou” 與王庠五首 490n27; “Yu Yang Yuansu shiqi shou” 與楊元素十七首 497n49; “Yu Zhang Junyu wu shou” 與張君予 五首 493n41; “Yu Zheng Jinglao sishou” 與鄭靖老四首 500n53; “Yu Ziyou di shi shou” 與子由弟十首 488n26 Su Wu 蘇武 123–24, 200, 682–83 Su Yijian 蘇易簡: Wenfang sipu 文房四譜  97, 99 Su Ziyou 蘇子由 488 Sui shu 隋書 344; “Jingji zhi” 經籍志 190, 193 Sui Yangdi yanshi 隋煬帝艶史 (The romantic history of Emperor Yang of the Sui) 126, 127, 128 suicide: and adultery 541; of Lu Zhaolin  832; Shen Congwen’s attempted 582, 587, 601, 608; and Sima Qian 631–32 Sun Ce 孫策 201

Index Sun Chengze 孫承澤 120n47, 800, 821–22 Sun Chu 孫楚 196; “Wei Shi Zhongrong yu Sun Hao shu” 為石仲容與孫皓書 212 Sun Chuo 孫綽 278, 279, 289n67, 303 Sun Di 孫覿 823; Neijian chidu 內簡尺牘  824 Sun En 孫恩 291 Sun Guangsi 孫光祀 782, 794, 796–97, 819 Sun Hao 孫皓 212 Sun Hong 孫宏 212 Sun Huiyuan 孫惠媛 751 Sun Huizong 孫會宗 201, 635 Sun Mou 孫謀 105–6, 113 Sun Quan 孫權 (Emperor Da 大, Wu dynasty) 164, 166, 167, 201, 207, 317n42 Sun Sheng 孫盛: Weishi Chunqiu 魏氏春秋  136n4 Sun Simiao 孫思邈 832, 834n21 Sun Yatsen 575n12 Sun Yuanxiang 孫原湘 764, 765 Sun Zhiwei 孫枝蔚 792 Sun Zi 孫資 212 Sunshu Ao 孫叔敖 314n31 tablets. See greeting cards taboos 252, 499, 500, 647, 841n45 Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) 746, 754, 915 Taiping yulan 168 Taiwan 582, 608, 612 Taizong 太宗 (emperor, Tang dynasty) 62, 830, 841n45 talent 812, 816, 820; recognition of 162, 649, 650, 652, 653, 657, 658–60, 661, 662, 664, 665, 668, 670, 671, 676, 681, 704; of women 745, 754, 770 talisman 279, 566 Tan Jicong 821 Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖: Mudanting 牡丹亭  520 Tang Yuhui 湯餘惠 460n130 Tang zhiyan 唐摭言 644n4 Tang 湯 (Yin ruler) 210, 638 “Tangchao xushu lu” 唐朝敘書錄 (Narrative record of calligraphy in the Tang court)  74n56 Tao Hongjing 陶弘景 819 Tao Kan 陶侃 338n24

969 Tao Liang 陶樑 777; Hongdou shu guan shuhua ji 紅豆樹館書畫記 778 Tao Qian 陶潛 251n47, 265, 266; “Yu zi Yan deng shu” 與子儼等書 265n82, 631n38; “Ze zi shi” 責子詩 263 Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 279n13, 280n18, 283n26, 301; “Gui chu lai xi” 歸出來兮  502; “Tao hua yuan ji” 桃花源記 324 Teachers of the Inner Chambers (Dorothy Ko)  748 Ten Bamboo Studio (Shizhuzhai 十竹齋)  120, 121–22 “Ten Masters of Jintai” (Jintai shi zi 金台 十子) 778, 815 Terentia 549 terms of address: in collegial letters 675, 679, 711; er 爾 250; in familial admonitions 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 267; gong 公 425, 437n54; honorifics 417, 419n29, 434n45, 687n31; jian 牋/ jianji 牋記 342n41; jun 君 151, 162, 689; and ornamented style 350–51; qing 卿 255; and ritual 337–46; ru 汝 250, 339n32; ruo 若 257; for women 454n107; wu zi 吾子 312n21, 672, 693; in Zhang Chao’s letter 884–85; zuxia 足下 339n32. See also salutations testaments (yiling 遺令, yiyan 遺言) 245, 248–50, 254, 261, 263, 266–67, 269 thank-you notes (qi 啟, qishi 啟事) 171–82, 322; imperial (zhang 章) 338–39, 347–48; of Lu Zhaolin 839–43 Tian Chengsi 田承嗣 54, 55 Tian Guo 田過 354n75 Tian Wen 田雯 782, 797, 815 Tian, Xiaofei 307 Tian Yan 田衍 69, 76 Tianchang 天長 (Anhui) manuscripts 406, 428, 467–69 Tianru Weize 天如惟則 723, 724–25, 729, 730–33; administrative letters of 733–35; social letters of 736–40 tombs 46, 97, 98–99, 422, 449n88; greeting tablets in 467; inscriptions (muzhi 墓志, muzhiming 墓誌銘) in 277–78, 650n28, 830n6 tonal prosody 309–10

970 Tongzhi 同治 (emperor, Qing dynasty) 86 tools: brushes 75, 97, 98, 99, 130, 433, 481, 752; eraser knives 377, 411; ink 97–98; inkstones 98–99 transculturalism 567, 622, 902, 917 treaty ports/foreign concessions: and letters to the editor 904, 921–24; literati in 915–16, 927, 928 Truman, Harry 553 Truman, Margaret 553 Trumpetvine Pavilion 120; Luoxuan biangu jianpu 蘿軒變古箋譜 113, 116 Tsao Hsingyuan 120n48 Tulu 禿魯 731–32 Turfan manuscripts 868 Uighur 871 Vaisey, Stephen 925 visiting cards. See greeting cards Wagner, Rudolf G. 721n1, 916 Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin 907, 918 Wan Chengji 萬承紀 763; Huhuapan 護花幡 764n69 Wang Anshi 王安石 371, 477 Wang Bo 王勃 829, 830n5, 831 Wang Can 王粲 204, 205, 217, 278, 280, 833n15; and presentation-response poetry 287n55, 289n63 Wang Chong 王充 59 Wang Dao 王導 502 Wang Dehou 572n3 Wang Duanshu 王端淑 749, 753n31, 757, 771; Mingyuan shiwei 名媛詩緯 751, 752, 755, 761; Yinhongji 吟紅集, 745–46 Wang Dun 王敦 293 Wang Duo 王鐸 88, 89 Wang Faliang 王法良 77, 84, 85, 86 Wang Fangqing 王方慶 74 Wang Gong 王鞏 480, 483, 493 Wang Gu 王古 506 Wang Hongxu 王鴻緒 795 Wang Hongzhuan 王宏撰 784 Wang Huzhi 王胡之 279, 282n23 Wang Jian 王儉 343–44, 352; Diao da yi  341; Qizhi 七志 344n50 Wang Jintai 王金臺 84, 85, 86

Index Wang Junru 572n3 Wang Kentang 王肯堂 79 Wang Lengran 王泠然: “Lun jian shu” 論薦書 643 Wang Liang 汪亮 534 Wang Liang 王良 314n31 Wang Liqun 王立群 193 Wang Lü 王履: Shu ji 書集 193 Wang Qi 汪淇 757, 761, 807n59; Chidu xinyu guangbian 尺牘新語廣編 745; Chidu xinyu 尺牘新語 748–53, 786–87, 811 Wang Rong 王融 348n59 Wang Sengqian 王僧虔 62, 265; “Jie zi shu” 誡子書 266n85 Wang Shaozhi 王韶之 295n85 Wang Shifu 王實甫: Xixiang ji 西廂記 129–30 Wang Shizhen 王世貞 109, 122; Chidu qingcai 尺牘清裁 805n58 Wang Shizhen 王士禎 778, 782, 787, 791, 795, 814–19; Shizi shilüe 十子詩略 781; Yuyang ji 漁洋集, 818 Wang Shu 王澍 79 Wang Siren 王思任: Wenfan xiaopin 文飯小品 806n58 Wang Su 王肅 209 Wang Sun Shi 汪孫氏 511, 512, 544 Wang Wancheng 汪萬程 510–15, 517–18, 520, 524, 528–29, 532, 536, 538–39, 544 Wang Wei 王煒 751 Wang Wenbo 汪文伯 537 Wang Wujun 王武俊 56 Wang Xiang 王廂 489 Wang Xiang 王祥 245n26 Wang Xianzhi 王獻之 62, 63, 88–89, 136, 629n30 Wang Xiaojue 601n60 Wang Xiu 王脩 261–62, 265; “Jie zi shu” 誡子書 262n72 Wang Xiuqin 王秀琴 746, 748, 752n29, 753, 754, 756, 761, 762, 767. See also Hu Wenkai Wang Xizhi 王羲之 62, 63, 256, 340, 844, 844n59, 847n73; innovative transcriptions of 88–89; “Lanting Preface” 197; Yuan Sheng tie 袁生帖 74

Index Wang Yangming 王陽明 105, 812 Wang Yi 王逸: Zhengbu lun 正部論 152n33 Wang Yifang 王義方 831 Wang Yingsun 王英孫 76, 77 Wang Yingxia 王映霞 559, 560, 561 Wang Yuanchen 王元臣 882, 886 Wang Yun 王筠: “Da Yuan jinzi xiang zhuli shi” 答元金紫餉朱李詩 172; “Yu zhu er shu lun jiashiji” 與諸兒書論家世集  257n60; “Zhai anshiliu zeng Liu Xiaowei shi” 摘安石榴贈劉孝威詩 172; “Zhai yuanju zeng Xie puye Ju shi” 摘園菊贈謝 仆射舉詩 172 Wang Yunzhang 王蘊章: Ranzhi yuyun 然脂 餘韻 762–63 Wang Yuquan 王毓銓 31–32, 46 Wang Zhenyi 王貞儀 12, 754, 766–70, 771; Defeng ting chuji 德風亭初集 766n76, 767n81, 769n85, 770n88 Wang Zhi 王芝 60, 67, 68, 77 Wang Zhuanghong 王壯弘 54n1 Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報 (newspaper; Shanghai) 906 Wanli 萬曆 (emperor, Ming dynasty)  128n62 Wansuitongtian Era Album (Wansuitongtian jin tie 萬歲通天進帖) 74 Wanyuzhai 宛羽齋 (bookshop) 82–83 Washington, George 240n5 Wei Congwu 573, 575n11 Wei Dan 韋誕 97 Wei Fangzhi 韋方質 840 Wei Feng 魏諷 254 Wei Guanzhi 韋貫之 662n56 Wei lüe 魏略 148, 154 Wei Qing 衛青 312n20 Wei Shu 韋述 63 Wei Shuyuan 573, 575n11 Wei Zhuang: “Qi cai jian ge” 乞彩箋歌 101 Wei Zhuang 韋莊 101 Weitz, Ankeney 61 welfare initiatives 478, 490–94 well-wishes (duowen 多問, duoqing 多請, wuyang 毋恙) 413, 415, 445, 454n109, 457n122 Wen Peng 文彭 78 Wen Qiao 溫嶠 279 Wen xuan chao 文選鈔 212

971 Wen xuan jizhu 文選集注 212–13 Wen xuan 文選 (Selections of refined literature) 5, 124, 150, 175, 189–238; admonitions in 248; authors included in 163n60, 195–99; and Cao Zhi 311, 319, 320, 323; and collegial letters 702, 704; experts on 831n7; jian 箋/牋 section of 194, 195, 196, 217–20; letters in  193–227; literary genres in 189–90; memorials in 337n24; model letters in 681–87; periods covered by 195–96; preface to 190, 226–27; qi 啟 section of 194, 195, 196, 199, 221–22; shang shu 上書 section of 194, 195, 222–26; shi 詩 section of 216–17, 276; shu 書 section of 194, 195, 196, 200–215, 226; sources of  192–93; types of writing in 226; yi 移 section of 194, 195, 215; zengda shi 贈答詩 in 276; and zhazi 366 Wen Ying 文穎 26n35 Wen Zhengming 文徵明 76, 85; Zhi Hua Zhongfu chidu 致華中甫尺牘, 71–73, 75 Wen 文 (emperor, Han dynasty) 154 Wen 文 (emperor, Liu Song dynasty). See Liu Yilong Wen 文 (emperor, Wei dynasty). See Cao Pi Wenfang sibao 文房四寶 (Four treasures of the scholar’s study) 97–99, 130 Wenfang sipu 文房四譜 (Four guides to the scholar’s study) 97, 99 Wenguan cilin 文館詞林 277n5 Wenmeizhai baihua shijian pu 文美齋白花 詩箋譜 (Guide to one hundred flowers poetry paper of culture and beauty studio) 111, 115–16 Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 (The literary mind and the carving of dragons; Liu Xie) 6, 174–75, 263, 269, 367; on familial admonitions 242–45, 263; on literary genres 332–62 Wenzhang liu bie ji 193 West, the: autobiography in 625, 626; collegial letters in 693n43, 701n60; disabilities in 833n16; informal letters in 746–47; intellectual property rights in 892; letters to the editor in 900, 915; love letters in 10, 549–51; and piracy  893; women’s letters in 744, 747, 771

972 West, the: autobiography in (cont.) West Hunan (Xiangxi 湘西; Shen Congwen)  586 Widmer, Ellen 609 Wilde, Constance 552 Wilde, Oscar 552 wildgoose/geese (yan 雁, hong 鴻): in letter paper decorations 102, 104, 123–24, 129; as a metaphor 653, 846–47 Williams, Edith Clifford 561 women: as audience 563, 882n11, 902; biographies of 623, 754; and class struggle 592; collections (bieji 別集) by 750, 754–55; and drama 754–55, 764, 765–66, 770, 771; educated 553; and female infanticide 492; and letters to the editor 919; literary culture of 744–74; and love letters 551, 553, 563; and menstruation 559; and ministers  353n72, 357; names of 442n67, 753; networks of 751, 752–53, 754, 765, 770, 771; in personal letters 405; poetry by 172–73, 751, 754–57, 759n51, 761–62, 764, 767, 769, 770; and she 856; societies of 752; talented (cainü 才女, guixiu 閨秀) 745, 754, 755; as writers 563 women’s letters 10, 12, 744–74; anthologies of 553, 744–54, 761, 762–63; and Buddhism 767–68; and calligraphy  744, 752; censorship of 744, 746, 753, 756–57, 770–71; collectors of 748–49, 761; by courtesans 744–45, 754, 758; and emotion 679; familial admonitions by 243; and family 744, 746, 753, 757, 770–71; functions of 752–53; increase of 747, 748–53; manuscripts of 452; preservation of 744–46, 770–71; and social relations 750, 752–53, 769, 771. See also Gui Maoyi; Liang Mengzhao; Wang Zhenyi woodblock printing: in catalogs 130; for illustrations 129; of letter paper 4, 114, 115, 117, 121, 125, 126; on paper 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 woodblocks 886–87, 892, 896 Woolf, Leonard 554, 558 Woolf, Virginia 551, 558, 559, 746 Wordsworth, Mary 565n67, 566n70

Index Wordsworth, William 565n67, 566n70 Wu Bo 吳伯 750, 770 Wu Chengxue 880n7 Wu Faxiang 吳發祥 115, 119, 124, 125; Luoxuan biangu jianpu 蘿軒變古箋譜, 113, 115n40, 116 Wu Ju 伍舉 263, 264 Wu Kuan 吳寬 72 Wu li 167 Wu Liyu 吳麗娛 677n7 Wu Maoqian 吳懋謙 784, 790–91 Wu Na 吳訥 244 Wu Pei-yu 726–27 Wu Qi 吳綺 798 Wu Qizhen 吳其貞 81 Wu Sangui 吳三桂 795n38, 821 Wu Shan 吳山 749, 751 Wu Wuling 呉武陵 644n4 Wu Xiguang 吳希光 54, 56 Wu Yiming 吳翼明 81 Wu Zao 吳藻: Qiaoying 喬影 765–66 Wu Zetian 武則天 (empress, Tang dynasty)  42, 74, 840n40–42 Wu Zhi 吳質 176n106, 180n122, 181, 196, 203, 204, 206; and Cao Zhi 309, 311–22, 324, 326; “Chong da Wei taizi jian” 重答魏太 子牋 218; “Da Dong’e wang shu” 答東阿 王書 207–8, 311, 315–19; letters to 684; “Yuancheng yu Wei taizi jian” 元城與魏 太子牋 218–19 Wu Zongguo 吳宗國 644n7 Wu 武 (emperor, Han dynasty) 194, 224, 844n57 Wu 武 (emperor, Liu Song dynasty). See Liu Yu 劉裕 Wu 武 (emperor, Liang dynasty). See Xiao Yan Wu 武 (king, Zhou dynasty) 638 Wuji, Noble Scion of Wei 魏公子無忌  316n37 Wuyi guangchang 五一廣場 (May 1st Plaza, Changsha) 406 Xi Fan 嵇蕃 212, 213 Xi Kang 嵇康 196, 211–12, 213, 290n69, 684; Yu Lü Changti juejiao 636; Yu Shan Juyuan jue jiao shu 636–38 Xi Maoqi 嵇茂齊 212

Index Xi Peilan 席佩蘭 764, 766 Xi Qiang 西羌 20 Xi Shao ji 嵇紹集 213 Xi Shao 嵇紹 211, 213 Xi Xi 嵇喜 212, 213 Xia Chisong 夏赤松 193 Xian 獻 (emperor, Han dynasty) 264n79 Xiang Dechun 項德純 78 Xiang Dehong 項德弘 78, 79 Xiang Deming 項德明 78 Xiang Dexin 項德新 78 Xiang Dushou 項篤壽 78 Xiang Yu 498 Xiang Yuanbian 項元汴 77–78 Xianyu Shu 鮮于樞 60, 67, 68, 76, 78 Xiao Baicai 小白菜 904n12, 908 Xiao Daocheng 蕭道成 (Emperor Gao 高, Qi dynasty) 222, 338n26, 352 Xiao Daxin 蕭大心 267n92 Xiao Gang 蕭綱 (Emperor Jianwen 簡文, Liang dynasty) 173, 174, 175, 178, 266; “Feng da Nanping wang Kang lai zhuying shi” 奉答南平王康賚朱櫻詩, 173; “Jie Dangyang gong Daxin shu” 誡當陽公大 心書 267 Xiao He 蕭何 312n20 Xiao Hong 蕭宏 214 Xiao Hong 蕭红 561 Xiao Luan 蕭鸞 199, 222 Xiao Mian 蕭俛 705, 712, 716 Xiao Qian 612 Xiao Tong 蕭統 319; and Wen xuan 175, 189 Xiao Yan 蕭衍 (Emperor Wu, Liang dynasty)  168n76, 175, 199, 214–15, 220, 221 Xiao Yi 蕭繹 (Emperor Yuan, Liang dynasty)  175, 308 Xiao Ze 蕭賾 (Emperor Wu, Southern Qi dynasty) 219 Xiao Zilong 蕭子隆 198, 219, 338n24 Xiao 孝, Duke of Qin 223 Xiaojing 孝經 (Classic of filial piety)  352–53, 355, 867, 868 Xiaowu 孝武 (emperor, Liu Song dynasty)  225 Xie An 謝安 136, 279, 294n83, 629n30, 845n61 Xie Hongyuan 285n38

973 Xie Hun 謝混: Ji yuan 集苑 192 Xie Ju 謝舉 172 Xie Lang 謝朗 257 Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 279, 280, 285n38, 287n51, 287n54, 288n60, 291n71, 301 Xie Meng 謝孟 467 Xie Tiao 謝朓 196, 198, 219–20, 338n24; “Bai Zhongjun jishi ci Sui wang jian” 拜中軍記室辭隨王牋 219 Xie Wan 謝萬 257; “Yu zi Lang deng shu” 與子朗等疏, 257 Xie Zhan 285n38 Xiguo Bao 西郭寶, tomb of 449n88 Xin bian shi wen lei yao qi zha qing qian 新編 事文類要啓箚靑錢 735 Xin Tang shu 新唐書 (New Tang history) 56 xinbing 心病 (lovesickness) 518–25 Xingshu lü 行書律 (Statutes on the forwarding of writings) 44–45 Xiong Cilü 熊賜履 813 Xiongnu 匈奴 19–20 Xiuyu xucao 繡餘續草 (Poems after embroidery) 761–62 “Xiyue Huashan miao bei” 西嶽華山廟碑, 113 Xiyue Huashan Temple Stele (Xiyue Huashan miao bei 西嶽華山廟碑) 112, 113 Xu Bangda 徐邦達 75, 369, 370 Xu Fei 徐悱 173 Xu Feng 徐奉 166 Xu Gan 徐幹 204, 205, 217, 218 Xu Gongchi 徐公持 211 Xu Guangping 許廣平 10, 552, 556, 558–61, 563–66; Liang di shu 兩地書 548, 554n32, 559, 571n3, 572nn4–5, 574n2; love letters of 548, 568–75 Xu Guoxiang 徐國相 797, 798 Xu Ling 徐陵: Yutai xinyong 玉臺新詠 100 Xu Lun 517 Xu Mian 徐勉: “Wei shu jie zi Song” 為書誡 子崧 265n83 Xu Qian 許謙 47 Xu Shen 許慎 21, 30, 32 Xu Shijun 徐士俊 749, 750, 752, 753, 807n59 Xu Shipu 徐世溥 811 Xu Xun 許詢 279, 289n67

974 Xu Yantan 徐延菼 508, 510–18, 536, 544; calligraphy of 540; lovesickness of 519–25; and morality 525–32 Xu Yuan 徐媛 757, 758, 769 Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 561, 566 Xu Zhong 徐中 504 Xu Zuzheng 徐祖正 563 Xuan 宣 (emperor, Han dynasty) 635 Xuan 宣 (king of Qi 齊宣王) 354n75 Xuanhe shupu 宣和書譜 65, 70n45 Xuanquan zhi 懸泉置 (Xuanquan Postal Station) 17, 18–21, 33–36; silk manuscripts from 407, 408, 410n15, 429, 430–35, 436; slips from 29–30, 31, 41, 43, 47, 48 xuanxue 玄學 philosophy 216 Xuanzong 玄宗 (emperor, Tang dynasty)  57 Xue Song 薛嵩 55 Xue Tao 薛濤 101, 127 Xueyan Zuqin 雪嚴祖欽 724, 726–27 Xun Hong 荀宏 205 Xun Zhongmao 155, 156 Xunhuan ribao 循環日報 (newspaper; Hong Kong) 14, 902, 903, 905, 906, 908, 909, 913 Xunzi 荀子 249n40, 314n28, 679n11, 689 Yamamoto Tatsuro 858 Yan Bojing 顏伯璟 780 Yan Chongju 顏崇榘 776–77, 779 Yan Guangmin 顏光敏 13, 722n3, 775–826; Lepu ji 樂圃集 791; letters by 778, 812–13; life of 779–82; network of  782–84; Weixintang zhiyi 未信堂制義, 782. See also Yanshi jiacang chidu Yan Guangshi 顏光是 779 Yan Guangxiao 顏光斆 779 Yan Guangyou 顏光猷 779, 819 Yan Hui 顏回 775 Yan Jiming 顏季明 56 Yan Jizu 顔繼祖 116 Yan Kejun 嚴可均 164n64, 178n115, 244n21 Yan Lide 閻立德 840n42 Yan Shigu 顏師古 57 Yan Weizhen 顏維貞 57 Yan Yannian 顏延年 348n56

Index Yan Yanzhi 285n38 Yan Ying 836 Yan Yinshao 顏胤紹 779 Yan Yuan 837n28 Yan Yuansun 顏元孫 57 Yan Zhaowei 顏肇維 780n16, 781 Yan Zhending 顏真定 57, 70n44 Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿: Cai Mingyuan tie 蔡明遠帖 67; calligraphy of 54, 61–65, 68, 90, 92; death of 57; Duobao ta bei 多寶塔碑 89–90; Hanshi tie 寒食帖  67; Ji zhi Jiming wen gao 祭姪季明 文稿 56–57, 68, 70, 78, 83, 92; loyalty of 57–58, 61, 85; Ma bing tie 馬病帖  68, 70; personality of 60; Song Liu Taichong xu 送劉太沖敘 88; Song Xin Huang xu 送辛晃序 70; Wenshu tie 文殊帖 64–65, 66; Zheng zuo tie 爭座帖 88. See also Liu Zhongshi tie Yan Zhitui 顏之推 57, 243, 245n26, 339n32, 340, 341, 647n16, 648n23. See also Family Instructions for the Yan Clan Yan Zhiwei 閻知微 840 Yang Biao 楊彪 149, 162, 182; and Cao Cao 137–47; “Da Cao gong shu” 答曹 公書 141 Yang Buyi 羊不疑 294 Yang Fen 楊芬 406 Yang Fu 楊孚: Yiwu zhi 異物志 176n103 Yang Fu 羊孚 298 Yang Guangchao 楊光朝 55 Yang Guozhong 楊國忠 57 Yang Hangong 楊漢公 662n56 Yang Hu 羊祜 267–69, 293, 298n90; “Jie (xiong) zi shu” 誡(兄)子書 260, 267 Yang Hu 陽虎 150–51 Yang Hui 楊繪 498 Yang Hui 羊徽 6, 282–86, 292–95, 299–304; “Da Qiu Quanzhi, yi shou” 答丘泉之 一首 286–91, 295–300 Yang Huizhi 楊誨之 705, 709, 715 Yang Jiong 陽炯 829, 830n5 Yang Naiwu 楊乃武 904n12, 908, 911–12, 918, 925 Yang Pingzhi 楊凴之 672n72 Yang Shen 楊慎: Chidu qingcai 赤牘清裁  805n58; Sheng’an jing shuo 升庵經說 47

Index Yang Sheng 羊勝 223 Yang Tan 羊曇 294n83 Yang Xi 楊羲: Huangting neijing 黃庭內景  80 Yang Xin 羊欣 294, 298–300 Yang Xiong 揚雄 58, 205, 209, 833n15; Fayan 法言 59; “Jie chao,” 316n34; Shu du fu 蜀都賦 179n119 Yang Xiu 楊修 137–47, 196, 205; “Da Linzi hou jian” 答臨淄侯牋 217 Yang Xuanbao 羊玄保 298 Yang Yuelou 楊月樓 904n12, 910, 918, 925 Yang Yuling 楊於陵 662, 663, 665n60, 666 Yang Yun 楊惲 195, 201, 638; “Bao Sun Huizong shu” 報孫會宗書 190, 635, 636 Yang Yuqing 楊虞卿 707, 710, 716 Yang Zhong 羊仲 283n26, 303 Yang Zhu 280 Yang 煬 (emperor, Sui dynasty) 126, 127, 128 Yanshi jiacang chidu 顏氏家藏尺牘 (Letters kept at the Yan family home; Yan Guangmin 顏光敏) 13, 775–826; on administration 794–96; categorization of 785–87; emotions in 801–5; on financial matters 796–98; formal letters in 811–14; functions of letters in  784–85, 786, 787–88, 814; invitations in 820–23; on literature and arts  799–801; on meetings 791–93; vs. published collections 814–23; requests in 787–91, 794–96, 798, 813, 817–18, 820–21; transmission of 775–79 Yanzi 晏子 179n117 Yao Shuiweng 姚水翁 81 Ye Dehui 葉德輝 892n38 Ye Feng 815 Ye Guan 葉觀 750 Yeats, W. B. 625n10 Yi Yin shu 伊尹書 180n120 Yi 乙(Marquis of Zeng) 97 yi 移 dispatches 194, 195, 215 Yijing 易經 (Zhouyi 周易; Book of changes)  249n40, 279n8, 334n14, 621; and cover letters 658; on family and state  353n72; and Fei Li Shi 534–35; and presentation-response poetry 282n22, 283n26, 285n38

975 yiling 遺令. See testaments Yim Chi-hung 523 Yin Hao 殷浩 (Yin Yangzhou) 841 Yin Jun 殷鈞 214 Yin shi jianpu 殷氏笺譜 (Master Yin’s guide to letter papers) 115 Yin Yaofan 殷堯藩 662n56 Ying Dezhan 應德詹 100n14 Ying Junmiao 應君苗 210–11 Ying Junzhou 應君冑 210–11 Ying Qu 應璩 196, 208–11; Ying Qu shulin 應璩書林 193; “Yu congdi Junmiao Junzhou shu” 與從弟君苗君冑書 210; “Yu Guangchuan zhang Cen Wenyu shu” 與廣川長岑文瑜書 210; “Yu Man Gongyan shu” 與滿公琰書 208; “Yu shilang Cao Changsi shu” 與侍郎曹長 思書 209 Ying Shao 應劭 180n120, 183; Fengsu tong 風俗通 48 Ying Yang 應瑒 204, 205, 217, 218; “Shi wuguan zhonglang jiang Jianzhang tai ji” 侍五官中郎將建章臺集 154 Ying Zhen 應貞: “Anshiliu fu” 安石榴賦  177n109 Yinwancun 尹灣村 (Jiangsu): manuscripts from 422, 449n88; tombs in 46, 422 Yitang jiuzi 易堂九子 783–84 Yongming Yanshou 725 Yongzheng 雍正 (emperor, Qing dynasty): “Jiangshan wujin tu” 江山無盡圖 765 Yoshida Yutaka 871 Yoshikazu Dohi 858 You Mao 尤袤 189n1 You 幽 (king, Zhou dynasty) 24 Yu Bing 庾冰 278, 279 Yu Dafu 郁達夫 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 567 Yu Huai 余懷 749 Yu Huan 魚豢 148n23; Dian lüe 典略 203, 311; Wei lüe 魏略 203 Yu Jianwu 庾肩吾: “Xie lai ju qi” 謝賚橘啟  179–81 Yu Jiaxi 余嘉錫 213 Yu li hun 玉梨魂 (Jade pear spirit) 563 Yu Shaosong 余紹宋 111–12 Yu Shinan 虞世南 62, 63 Yu Xiangdou 余象斗 889

976 Yu Yi 庾翼 338n24 Yu Yu 虞預: Guiji dianlu 會稽典錄 201 Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 806n58, 809; “Jinfan yuyue” 禁翻豫約, 890 Yuan Kejia 袁可嘉 596n40 Yuan Mei 袁枚 509, 752, 754, 761, 763–66, 887n22 Yuan Shizhong 袁時中 813 Yuan Yi 袁逸 889n27 Yuan Zai 元載 56, 58 Yuan Zhen 元稹 11, 101; “Chou Letian zhou bo ye du Weizhi shi,” 322; collegial letters of 676, 681, 688, 706, 707, 710, 711, 713, 714, 717; “Yingying zhuan” 鶯鶯傳 550, 555, 563, 564, 744, 771 Yuan Zhun 袁準 219 Yuan 元 (emperor, Jin dynasty) 293 Yuan 元 (emperor, Liang dynasty). See Xiao Yi Yuan 袁, Lady (Yang Biao’s wife) 137, 144–48; “Da Cao gong furen Bian shi shu” 答曹公夫人卞氏書 145 Yuanyou Party 477 Yue Shi 836, 837n28 yulu 語錄 (records of speech) 721, 722, 725, 726–27 Zeng Can 曾燦 783 Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 552, 602 Zeng hou Yi mu 曾侯乙墓 (Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng) 97 Zeng Shuqi 曾叔祈 (Zeng Shijue 曾世爵)  809 Zeng Yizhuan 曾異撰 807n59, 809 zengda shi 贈答詩. See presentation-response poetry Zengzi 曾子 254n52 Zhan Ying 339n29 Zhang Chao 張潮 14, 784, 878–99; Chidu oucun 尺牘偶存 878, 896; Chidu yousheng 尺牘友聲 878; Tanji congshu 檀几叢書 882; Yu Chu xinzhi 虞初 新志 882 Zhang Chou 張丑 77 Zhang Han 張翰 116–17 Zhang Heng 張衡: Nan du fu 南都賦  176n105 Zhang Hong 張紘 154 Zhang Hua 張華: Bowu zhi 博物志 173n96

Index Zhang Huaiguan 張懷瓘: Shu duan 書斷  136n7 Zhang Huan 張奐 259–60, 265n83; “Jie xiong zi shu” 誡兄子書 260n68 Zhang Ji 張籍 692, 693, 696, 713 Zhang Jie 張傑 371n37 Zhang Jiuda 張九達: Sishu zunzhu huiyi jie 四書尊注會意解 881–85 Zhang Jun 張濬 370, 371 Zhang Junmin 張俊民 31 Zhang Liang 張良 (Zhang Zifang) 844 Zhang Lie 張烈 811, 812–13 Zhang Lu 張魯 202 Zhang Mu 張穆 789n25 Zhang Pu 張溥 244n21 Zhang Qia 張洽 82 Zhang Shengtu 499 Zhang Shinan 張世南 386 Zhang Sili 張斯立 67 Zhang Siqi 張思齊 333 Zhang Xie 張燮 830 Zhang Xu 張旭 62–65, 69; Du tong tie 肚痛帖 64–65; and Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, 87, 92 Zhang Yan 張晏 68, 70–71, 76 Zhang Yi 張禕 368 Zhang Yihu 張一鵠 818 Zhang Yingjia 張應甲 81, 82 Zhang Yingwen 張應文 77 Zhang Yongde 張庸德 14, 878–99; Bagu bidu wen 八股必讀文 (Zhiyi bidu wen 制 義必讀文) 882 Zhang Yunhe 張允和 608 Zhang Zaogong 章藻功: Siqitang wenji 思綺 堂文集 514 Zhang Zhaohe 張兆和 561, 582–99, 606–15; “Houji” 後記 582, 585 Zhang Zhaoxiang 張兆祥: Wenmeizhai baihua shijian pu 文美齋白花詩箋譜  111, 115 Zhang Zhipei 張之佩 597–98, 602 Zhang Zhupo 張竹坡 887n22 zhang 章 (imperial thank-you letter). See thank-you notes Zhangjiajie Gurendi 張家界古人堤 (Hunan) 406n9 Zhangjiashan 張家山 manuscripts 17 Zhanguo ce 戰國策 32, 316n36

Index Zhao Ding 趙鼎 369–70, 371, 372 Zhao Heping 趙和平 675n3, 685, 687n31 Zhao Jingzhen 趙景真 212 Zhao Meng 趙孟 207 Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 75, 89, 724, 728–29, 736–37, 738 Zhao Qi 趙岐 656n46 Zhao Shugong 趙樹功 880n7 Zhao Shuli 趙樹理 593 Zhao Yanwei 趙彥衛 381–82, 383, 386, 388 Zhao Zhao 趙昭 751 Zhao Zhi 趙至 196, 682–83; “Yu Xi Maoqi shu” 與嵇茂齊書 212–13, 684 Zhao Zi 趙咨 164n64 Zhao 昭 (king of Qin) 151–52, 156, 159, 223 zhao 詔. See edicts, imperial Zhaolie 昭烈 (emperor, Shu Han dynasty). See Liu Bei zhazi 劄子 6–7, 363–76; as letters 365–66, 368–76; as official documents 365–68, 369, 370–71; and zha 劄/札 (wooden tablet) 366–67 zhen 箴. See admonitions Zheng Banqiao 鄭板橋 602 Zheng Chong 鄭沖 219 Zheng Jinglao 501, 502 Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 28–29, 150, 154, 259, 265n83, 631n38; “Jie zi Yi’en shu” 戒子益 恩書 247, 249, 250–51, 253, 254 Zheng Yi’en 益恩 250–51 Zheng Yuqing 鄭餘慶: Da Tang xinding jixiong shuyi 大唐新定吉凶書儀 685 Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸 113 Zhezong 哲宗 (emperor, Song dynasty) 504 zhi ji 知己, zhi wo zhe 知我者 (the one who knows me) 647, 652 zhi yin 知音 (knower of the tone) 584, 605, 615, 703, 845n64 Zhi Yu 摯虞 193, 279–80; Liu bie lun 流 別論 191, 192; Wenzhang liubie ji 文章流 別集 191, 192 zhi 志 (intent, will, vision) 624, 629 Zhiyong 智永 62 Zhong Xing 鍾惺: Ru mian tan 如面談 118 Zhong You 鍾繇 148–61, 171, 180n123, 181, 182; and jade circlet 205; Jian Ji Zhi biao 薦季直表 74 Zhong Ziqi 鍾子期 845n64

977 Zhongfeng Mingben 中峰明本 12, 724, 725, 728–29, 730, 732, 736–37, 738, 740; “Expansive Record” (guanglu 廣錄)  722–23, 734–35 Zhongliang Huai 仲梁懷 151 Zhongyitang fatie 忠義堂法帖 (Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium) 66 Zhou (last king of Yin) 206 Zhou, Duke of 周公 243 Zhou Changnian 周長年 881, 882 Zhou E 周鍔 763 Zhou Enlai 605, 606 Zhou Geng 周庚 746, 748n14, 750 Zhou Jianren 571n3, 575n7 Zhou li 周禮 28, 29, 32 Zhou Lianggong 周亮工 102n22, 750, 787n22; Chidu xinchao 尺牘新鈔 746, 748, 749, 761, 807–10, 811, 813–14, 816–19, 822, 878n2, 879; Du hua lu 讀畫錄 122; and piracy 890 Zhou Libo 周立波 593; Baofeng zhouyu 暴風驟雨 593n31 Zhou Mi 周密 67 Zhou Qi 周圻 807n59 Zhou Shuying 周淑英 751 Zhou yi 周易. See Yijing Zhou Yong 周顒 198, 309 Zhou Zhenfu 周振甫 213 Zhou Zuoren 周作人 823–24 Zhu An 朱安 552 Zhu Changwen 朱長文: Xu Shu duan 續書斷 69n40 Zhu Fu 朱浮 195, 201–2; “Wei Youzhou mu yu Peng Chong shu” 與彭寵書, 201 Zhu Meifu 朱梅馥 603 Zhu Mu 684n25 Zhu Suzhen 朱淑真 757 Zhu Xi 朱熹 800, 812; Jia li 家禮 811 Zhu Yi 朱邑 499, 501 Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊 780n16 Zhu Yun 朱筠 777 Zhu Zhenheng 朱震亨 524–25 Zhu Zongbin 祝總斌 343 Zhuang Zhou 莊周. See Zhuangzi Zhuangxiang 莊襄 222 Zhuangzi 莊子 157, 216, 282n23, 286n46, 637, 702–3

978 Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 136, 183, 241n8 Zhuo Nansheng 908 zhuo 拙 (awkwardness) 75, 480, 657 Zichan 子產 29, 314n31 Zigong 349 Zilu 699n56 Zisi 子思 836n27 Zixia 子夏 (Bu Shang 卜商) 263, 347n54 Zong Huishu 宗惠叔 154

Index Zou Yang 鄒陽 195, 223–24, 226, 266n88, 314n29; “Shang shu Wu Wang” 上書吳王 223; “Yuzhong shang shu ziming” 225 Zou Zhilin 鄒之麟 120, 121–22 zou 奏. See memorials Zuo Si 左思 302n96 Zuo zhuan 左傳 150, 198, 215, 284n38, 623–24 Zürcher, Erik 721n1