Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2020-10-13DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340050
Weitian Yan
{"title":"Collecting the Pei Cen Stele in Qing China","authors":"Weitian Yan","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340050","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article investigates three vignettes in the collecting of the Pei Cen Stele during the eighteenth century. A Han-dynasty monument in Barköl, Xinjiang, the Pei Cen Stele tells of an unrecorded military achievement against the Xiongnu in 137. I begin by discussing how court officials used this artefact to support the Qing imperial expansion into central Asia. The second episode identifies four major types of copies of the Pei Cen Stele—facsimiles, replicas, tracing copies, and forgeries—and examines their varied functions to the epigraphic community at the time. The final section analyses the transitional style of this inscription through calligraphers’ innovative transcriptions. Appropriations of the Pei Cen Stele in these political, social, and artistic contexts, I argue, pinpoint the idea of collecting as a form of invention in the Qing dynasty. Collectors invented the Pei Cen Stele as a symbol of prosperity, a cultural relic, and a calligraphy exemplar.","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46070341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2020-10-13DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340046
Phillip Grimberg
{"title":"Introduction to Special Issue on “Collecting, Collections, and Collectors”, Part 2","authors":"Phillip Grimberg","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340046","url":null,"abstract":"The second part of our special issue of Ming Qing Yanjiu on “Collecting, Collections, and Collectors” in late imperial China brings together a total of five articles, which approach our topic from very different perspectives and with a wide range of methodologies. In her article, “Collecting Chinese Objects in Slovenia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenia as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a centre—periphery approach. She analyses how China was perceived in Slovenia through collected objects and how and to what extend these cultural contacts influenced collecting practices in Slovenia. Katharine P. Burnett, in her contribution on the famous collector, patron, and artist Pang Yuanji 龐元濟 (1864–1949) (“Pang Yuanji, Traditionalist/ Modernist”), sheds new light on the man who not only was a prominent proponent of traditionalist art circles in late imperial and republican China, but also—much less known—a “reformer and modernist” with a wide spectrum of social and cultural interests including, but not limited to, the arts. Exploring the connections between the British collections of Chinese plants and their commissions of China Trade art during the so-called Canton System period, Josepha Richard in her article “Collecting Chinese Flora: Eighteenthto Nineteenth-Century Sino-British Scientific and Cultural Exchanges as seen through British Collections of China Trade Botanical Paintings” elucidates Sino-Western exchanges during the late Qing dynasty, sparked by a newly","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45075273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2020-10-13DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340049
Josepha Richard
{"title":"Collecting Chinese Flora: Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Sino-British Scientific and Cultural Exchanges as Seen through British Collections of China Trade Botanical Paintings","authors":"Josepha Richard","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340049","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In the eighteenth to nineteenth century, British botanists collected thousands of Chinese plants to advance their knowledge of natural history. John Bradby Blake was the first British botanist to systematically collect Chinese plants in the 1770s, a time when foreigners could only access Guangzhou (Canton). This article demonstrates that Blake’s Chinese flora project heavily relied on the work of Chinese ‘go-betweens’, notably painter Mak Sau, who painted Chinese plants in a scientifically accurate manner. The genre of Canton Trade botanical paintings is a hybrid between European botanical tradition and Chinese bird-and-flower paintings that had previously been difficult to analyse owing to the lack of chronological evidence. Thanks to new data uncovered in different Blake collections, this article begins to untangle the chronology of these botanical paintings, and in the process uncovers the untold agency of Chinese ‘go-betweens’ in early Sino-Western scientific and cultural exchanges.","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42367603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2020-10-13DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340051
Ashton Ng
{"title":"Bibliophilia: the Passion of Ming Dynasty Private Book Collectors","authors":"Ashton Ng","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340051","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), book collecting evolved from an elite pastime into a widespread obsession. ‘Bibliophilia’—the passionate love for books—drove many book collectors to exhaust their fortunes or even trade their concubines for books. As books became indispensable towards gaining respectability in Chinese society, scholars, merchants, and landowners ensured that their residences were thoroughly infused with the prestigious “fragrance of books”. Some literati even regarded book collecting as a man’s most important undertaking in life. Ming private book collectors broke away from tradition and made their private collections available for others to view, exchange, or copy, greatly promoting the circulation of books. Through their incredible attention to the collection, classification, storage, and proofreading of books, Ming bibliophiles contributed enormously to the preservation and transmission of Chinese culture.","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64437090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2020-10-13DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340047
Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik
{"title":"Collecting Chinese Objects in Slovenia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century","authors":"Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340047","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects that were brought to the territory of present-day Slovenia by sailors, missionaries, travellers, and others who travelled to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, this territory was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; we will, therefore, begin with the brief historical context of the Empire and its contact with China, followed by a discussion on the nature of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenian territories at that time. We will further examine the status of the individuals who travelled to China and the nature and extent of the objects they brought back. The article will also highlight the specific position of the Slovenian territory within the history of Euro-Asian cultural connections, and address the relevant issues—locally and globally—of the relationship between the centres and peripheries with regard to collecting practices.","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47699570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2020-05-15DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340041
S. Gandolfo
{"title":"To Collect and to Order: the Siku quanshu 四庫全書 and its Organization","authors":"S. Gandolfo","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340041","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Collecting and hoarding are distinguished by order. An agglomeration of objects is defined by chaos while a collection comes into being through its organization. The largest collection of texts undertaken in Chinese dynastic history, the Complete Writings of the Four Repositories (Siku quanshu 四庫全書), is the high point of late imperial compilation projects (congshu 叢書). While much scholarship has been devoted to explaining the criteria of inclusion, the question of order remains largely unexplored. In this article, I investigate the link between the collection of knowledge and its organization in the high Qing. Specifically, I explore the poetic understanding of knowledge, the intellectual, non-political purposes behind the collection and its fundamental principle of order. I end this essay offering some remarks on the nature of the Complete Writings, high Qing scholarship, and contemporary attitudes towards classification.","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24684791-12340041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48753053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2020-05-15DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340040
Phillip Grimberg
{"title":"Introduction to Special Issue on “Collecting, Collections, and Collectors”","authors":"Phillip Grimberg","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340040","url":null,"abstract":"The contributors to this special issue of Ming Qing Yanjiu have brought together diverse and original scholarship on various aspects of our topic that reflects upon the complexity of collecting as a concerted social act. Broadly defined as the selective acquisition and maintenance of an interrelated set of objects, collecting has long played a prominent role in different strata of society across time and cultures.1 In the introduction to their edited volume on Cultures of Collecting John Elsner and Roger Cardinal identify “[the] urge to erect a permanent complete system against the destructiveness of time” as one of the most compelling incentives for collecting.2 Thus, in keeping, maintaining, and safeguarding objects that carry multiple meanings—personal, historical, social, political, cultural, or other—while simultaneously ascribing a certain value and a biographical dimension to these objects based on historic and/or social contingency,3 the collector functions as a transmitter of material evidence of human creative and mimetic acts.4 The fruit of these acts might eventually feature in a catalogue or an inventory of a given collection that provides information about the objects collected. However inchoate and vestigial, the practice of recording a collection’s contents evidently points to an intent not only to itemize, but","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24684791-12340040","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48385071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2019-12-10DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340038
O. Milburn
{"title":"Introduction to Research on Late Imperial China: a Perspective from the UK","authors":"O. Milburn","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340038","url":null,"abstract":"Aiming to highlight thriving research on Ming and Qing China carried out by scholars trained and/or working in the United Kingdom, this special issue of MQYJ includes contributions by Professor Olivia Milburn (Seoul National University), Dr Ewan Macdonald (University of Cambridge), and Dr Gregory Adam Scott (University of Manchester), together with a review by Dr Chen Jiani (previously at SOAS University of London, now at Zhongshan University, Zhuhai) of Yang Haihong’s volume on Women’s Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China: A Dialogic Engagement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Olivia Milburn is Associate Professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Seoul National University. She received her PhD in the history of ancient China and Chinese literature at SOAS University of London (2003), after completing her BA and MPhil in Chinese language and literature at Cambridge and Oxford. She has published extensively, authoring volumes and articles on a variety of topics related to ancient China (amongst them: “The Blind Instructing the Sighted: Representations of Music Master Kuang in Early Chinese Texts”, Monumenta Serica, 2018; Cherishing Antiquity: The Cultural Construction of an Ancient Chinese Kingdom, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 2013; “Marked out for Greatness? Perceptions of Deformity and Physical Disability in Ancient China”, Monumenta Serica, 2007; “Kingship and Inheritance in the State of Wu: Fraternal Succession in Spring and Autumn Period China”, T’oung Pao, 2004). She is also the author of important annotated translations, such as The Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Yan (Brill, 2016), Urbanization in Early and Medieval China: Gazetteers for the City of Suzhou (University of Washington Press, 2015), and The Glory of Yue: An Annotated Translation of the Yuejue shu (Brill, 2010). In her contribution to this issue of MQYJ, entitled “Zhao Luanluan and Her Tale”, Milburn examines the fictional character of Zhao Luanluan 趙鸞鸞, the Yuan dynasty gentlewoman in the early Ming tragic story Luanluan zhuan 鸞鸞傳 (The Tale of Luanluan) by Li Changqi 李昌祺 (1376–1452). Milburn exposes the late Ming practice of misrepresentation of the poems attributed to Zhao within the story, casting light on their actual author, presumably Li himself. She also cautions readers about the consequences of misattribution, an","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24684791-12340038","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44729862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340031
Elke Papelitzky
{"title":"Editing, Circulating, and Reading Huang Zhong’s Hai yu 海語","authors":"Elke Papelitzky","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340031","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Huang Zhong’s 1536 Hai yu is a short text about foreign countries and products connected to the sea. To compile his book, the author mainly used information based on what seafarers told him in his native place Nanhai, Guangdong, making the text a unique source for Chinese maritime history during the early sixteenth century. In the Ming dynasty, at least three different versions were circulating, all of which are now lost. Luckily, all three editions were preserved in congshu of the late Ming and Qing dynasties. The Hai yu was read and quoted by later scholars, especially those from the Jiangnan area, who valued the book for its expertise on products and animals.\u0000Through the analysis of two full text databases of Chinese texts and gazetteers, this article examines the history of reading of Huang Zhong’s book, as well as the circulation of knowledge and the changes and adaptions Huang Zhong’s knowledge went through.","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24684791-12340031","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45903187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ming Qing YanjiuPub Date : 2019-06-17DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340033
C. Bocci
{"title":"An Odd Couple of Ancient China: ‘Fierce-Fire Oil’ and ‘Rose-Dew’ in Huang Zhong’s Hai yu 海語 (1536)","authors":"C. Bocci","doi":"10.1163/24684791-12340033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24684791-12340033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This study examines two entries in Huang Zhong’s Words of the Sea: ‘fierce-fire oil’ and ‘tumi-dew’ (rose-water), whose connection goes back at least to the tenth century, when they were offered as tributes by the king of Champa. They continued to appear together down through the centuries, thus reinforcing the idea of a particular relation; a curious circumstance, given their utterly different nature: an incendiary medium to destroy enemies, and an intoxicating fragrance. Going back in time, one realizes that they shared a Middle Eastern origin: Byzantium, Persia and the Arabian Peninsula. As the sea-routes took on a more prominent role and new powers like Srivijaya emerged (see Kulke, 2016), they got to be appreciated along the shores of the Indian Ocean, where they generated such great profits that the locals learned to manufacture their own alternatives. Huang Zhong seems to be the first to name ‘tumi-flower dew’ this alternative rose-water.","PeriodicalId":29854,"journal":{"name":"Ming Qing Yanjiu","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24684791-12340033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48959103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}