Evelyn S. Rawski

Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou

This book explores cultural change in a Chinese city following the Manchu conquest of 1644. The city of Yangzhou, at the intersection of the Grand Canal and the Yangzi river, is best known as the site of human and physical devastation during the conquest and as a vibrant commercial center during the eighteenth century. The book focuses on the period between the conquest and the citys commercial florescence-a moment in which Yangzhou was a center of literary culture that was consciously conceived as transregional and transdynastic. The book shows how Yangzhous elite used physical sites as markers in the reconstruction of the city, and as vehicles consolidating power and prestige. Gradually, however, the gestures and sites of the postconquest elite were appropriated by the citys increasingly powerful salt merchants and incorporated into a court-oriented culture centered at Beijing.

Research Themes in Ming-Qing Socioeconomic History--The State of the Field

Chinas political “opening to the West” in 1979–89 directly affected historical scholarship on Ming and Qing socioeconomic history. Some PRC scholars were able to travel abroad, others met foreign specialists at international conferences held in China, and many more were introduced to foreign scholarship through Chinese translations of articles and books published in Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and North America. Foreign scholars, also, profited from new access to archival sources for research; a few anthropologists and historians even were able to reside in the countryside and interview villagers. While increased access and scholarly exchange have enriched research, they have not erased national differences in interpretation and approach.

Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (review)

enhance his business. To begin with, men danced with men and women with women, but that changed quickly. Almost as quickly, the custom set in where the newly betrothed would take off for their engagement “photo-sessions” in the city, the permit given by the village cadre for the purpose being sufficiently effective to allow them into a single hotel room in which young men and women did what young men and women did. Parents approved, and if there is any doubt that pre-marital sex resulted, that was confirmed by the birth records which the author went through. Autonomy for the younger generation posed changes for family property and the treatment of elderly parents, understandably. Family division, including farm land, now comes when sons marry and move out of the family. Newly weds keep the wedding presents and are known even to bargain on their own behalf for customary gifts from the family. Married children living with parents calculate their due respect in terms of perceived parental care given. So far all a very interesting read, but the author also says he is inspired by Philippe Ariès and George Duby. What, then, about the longer range? Not a great deal in the book answers that question. Nevertheless, let us go back to the long dark winter nights around the kang, where hired labourers and lodgers shared the same room and kang with the householders, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and all. When the author did that as a young man in 1971 (probably as a “sent-down” student from the city), he realised, under the restriction of shared accommodation, that “most people are not curious to watch or peep at another individual’s ‘private business.’ ” (116) No-one needs doubt the author’s integrity, but why was he so certain? The mores might have changed, but do we really know, from the reports of the informants, that pre-marital sex was less common and parents less often abused, not only in the 1950s, but also in the 1930s and earlier? The evolution of family life is fascinating, but perhaps along with it, there is another story that needs to be told, of the Manchus and the landlords who used to be in the village before 1949, and the recent migrants into villages of this part of China, the festivities and their settling into homesteads and families, the banditry and war of the bygone age, and the mores of the distant frontier. Let us not jump from a history of the post-1949 family in a village of north China to the rise of the individual under socialism as seems implied in many parts of this book.

Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context.

The nature of Chinese ritual sound / Bell Yung -- Ritual and musical politics in the court of Ming Shizong / Joseph S.C. Lam -- State sacrificial music and Korean identity / Robert C. Provine -- Musical assertion of status among the Nexi of Lijiang County, Yunnan / Helen Rees -- Chinese bridal laments : the claims of a dutiful daughter / Rubie S. Watson -- Processional music in traditional Taiwanese funerals / Ping-Hui Li -- The creation of an emperor in eighteenth-century China / Evelyn S. Rawski -- Singing to the spirits of the dead : a Daoist ritual of salvation / Judith Magee Boltz -- Ritual opera and the bonds of authority : transformation and transcendence / Ellen R. Judd.