Mr. Bai and Mr. Qian Earn Their Living: Considering Two Handwritten Notebooks of Matching Couplets from China in the Late Qing and Early Republic

This chapter explores two chaoben that I bought in China in the spring of 2012. They were written between the end of the Qing dynasty, around 1880, and the early years of the Republic, about 1913. They were both written by literate men whose daily life was very close to the common people in terms of their life expectations and their modest incomes. The men, who had received some formal education and had the ability to read and to write, took advantage of those abilities to earn income by preparing couplets of congratulatory poems that were, and still are, a big part of the social and celebratory life of the Chinese. By attempting to draw inferences andmake logical assumptions from the information in these two chaoben and themanner inwhich the information was presented, I suggest the ways in which they can reveal something about the lives, the worldview, and the economic standing of both men. By looking carefully at the contents of what theywrote, we see that these chaoben can also be used to reconstruct something about the communities in which both men lived and worked. The bulk of the content in both chaoben is matching couplets. Many literate men in this period could regularly earn extra income by offering to write matching couplets, celebratory rhyming phrases that were demanded onmany social occasions, such as NewYear festivities and weddings. Many handwritten booklets containing sample phrases are available in the used book markets in China. The volume of chaoben available in markets attests to the popularity of matching couplets and the ubiquity with which literate men turned to this custom as a way to earn income. In addition to introducingmatching couplets, this chapter takes us to the village and city streets where ordinary people lived and worked. Rhyming couplets captured the values and the images of the common people of that era and we can use them to symbolically construct the world as they knew it and as they thought it should be.