Autobiography and Symbolic Capital in Late Imperial China

This essay explores the use of autobiography to enhance symbolic capital in seventeenth-century China as exemplified by the chronological autobiography of the writer and geomancer Peng Shiwang 彭士望 (1610–1683). Peng was one of the Nine Masters of Changes Hall, a group of Ming loyalist scholars based in Ningdu in south-eastern Jiangxi province who gained a reputation among the cultural elite of the early Qing dynasty. Peng was not a major figure in the Ming–Qing transition period, and his own active participation in the Ming resistance to the Qing conquest was slight. Nevertheless, the economic effects of the Qing conquest, and his decision not to seek employment under the new dynasty, left him and his family in a financially and socially precarious position. When, in 1666, Peng published his collected poetry, he prefaced it with a chronological autobiography remarkable for devoting about half its space to the names of people he met during his peripatetic life. These names include a significant number of loyalists, even though Peng cannot have known some of the more famous ones very well. This essay argues that, through his autobiography, Peng sought to leverage his loyalist connections to create a form of symbolic capital which could be used to shore up his status among the educated elite of his time by increasing sales and circulation of his works and by expanding the social network he could draw upon for work as a geomancer or teacher, or for other support on his travels.