Lynn Struve

THE BITTER END: NOTES ON THE DEMISE OF THE YONGLI EMPEROR

AbstractDuring three months from the end of January to the end of April in 1662, the last claimant to the Ming throne, the Yongli emperor (Zhu Youlang) was transported from the Burmese capital of Ava back to the provincial seat of Yunnan by his captors, the joint expeditionary forces of the “Prince Who Pacifies the West,” formidable Wu Sangui, and the eminent Manchu prince, general, and high minister of state, Aisingga. Approximately one month later, in an apparent contravention of the magnanimous Qing policy toward members of the Ming imperial clan who surrendered peaceably, the Yongli emperor met death at the hands of his hosts in Yunnanfu. Since then (especially after the fall of the Qing and the advent of the Republic), this matter has aroused curiosity, as well as considerable invective toward Wu Sangui, the Manchus involved, and the Qing court for having perpetrated this outrage. Charges and insinuations have been based on little hard evidence, however, since no official source discovered to date me...

Self-Struggles of a Martyr: Memories, Dreams, and Obsessions in the Extant Diary of Huang Chunyao

Historians have long ascribed the self-martyrdom of Huang Chunyao during the Manchu-Qing seizure of Jiading City in 1645 to his stringent cultivation of Confucian principles. Informed by findings from contemporary psychology, memory studies, and research on dreaming, Lynn A. Struve brings to light dimensions of Huang’s fraught consciousness that traditional biographical sources tend to obscure. Using to advantage the diary that Huang kept in the spring of 1644 (little known until the twentieth century), she delves deeply into Huang’s mental state—including his immersion in Chan Buddhism—during the Ming dynastic collapse. She thereby shows that individual temperament, no less than factors of creed, culture, and social status, illuminates why certain people respond more radically than others to conditions that impinge on all.

Modern China's Liberal Muse: The Late Ming

Abstract This paper illustrates how, since the turn of the Twentieth Century, the late Ming has often served as an encouraging and affirming antecedent for prominent Chinese scholars and public intellectuals who have wished to see indigenous potential for liberal modern development in Chinas not-too-distant past. Despite much ideological flux, hopes have persisted for a viably modern China that is more open, free, creative, progressive, pluralist, and served by institutions and energies based in individuals and grass-roots social groups. This essay posits that such hopes, in search of native historical referents, have accounted for the most significant and fruitful expansions to date in Chinese studies of the late Ming period.

Interviews with Scholars of the Ming

I should begin with my early years because significant influences took place when I was quite young. I come from a really nondescript small town in western Washington state, and my family was not academic. My brother and I were the first in our family to go to college, so over the years I’ve frequently had something like the following question put to me: “How did a nice girl like you end up doing this Chinese stuff?” I’ve thought about my answer to this question quite a bit. My somewhat unusual orientations had their roots very early in life. For me, the earliest realization that I could marginally call “intellectual” had to do with language. It was the discovery, when I was in early grade school, that the process of learning a foreign language was not just memorizing an alternative English word. I realized that languages were patterns, and it dawned on me that different languages reflected different ways of looking at the world. It was an astounding discovery: reality as I knew it was not a given. We slice and dice our sense of reality and organize these slices and dices in different ways. We use verbal languages, as well as nonverbal ones like musical and mathematical languages, for instance, to express different apprehensions of reality. So the relationship between language and reality struck me as very fluid. That kind of interest accompanied me into high school in the early 1960s, when “pop Zen” à la Gary Snyder was in the air and, somehow related to that, I first learned something of semantics and could put a label on what had always interested me. When I went to college at the University of Washington (UW), I discovered to my delight that I could take an introductory course on semantics, using the classic textbook by S. I. Hayakawa. As a result, I became determined to gain fluency in a language, and preferably also a writing system, that was completely different than what I had been formed by within the Indo-European language group. This was part of rebellious me in the rebellious 1960s. I was really bothered by the notion that the way I thought about the world had been pre-formed by the language I had grown up speaking— that my mind had been prearranged! As long as I stayed within the Indo-European languages, I would be stuck in the same patterns. Nobody had asked my preference in this! I’d had no chance to choose either my parents or the language I was born into! I discovered that the UW had one of nine full-range programs in the country in East Asian languages. So, at the beginning of my sophomore Ming Studies, 77, 48–56, May 2018

Song Maocheng’s Matrixes of Mourning and Regret

Through the many poems of loss and commemorative essays in the collected works of  Song Maocheng (1569-1620), we can discern three matrixes of association among the author and his deceased loved ones: (1) a patrilineal matrix in which the salient theme is the rupture or felt-failure of paternal and avuncular care and guidance of male children in the patriline; (2) a female-domestic matrix in which losses engendered feelings of guilt, either for partial responsibility in the deaths or for inability to properly recompense female care and self-sacrifice within the household; and (3) a female-sensual matrix in which the loss of feminine sympathy, comfort, and beauty—whether to death or to parting—dominate the aesthetic. 
 These three matrixes overlap in the wife’s roles as maternal perpetuator of the patriline, preserver of household harmony and resources, and loving, devoted spouse. The centrality of the wife’s role is reflected most strikingly in the long, moving “Elegy, with Preface” that Song wrote for his first wife, nee Yang, who died in Song’s absence shortly after giving birth to his first son in the third year of their marriage. Despite remarriage and the acquisition of multiple concubines, Song also wrote several sets of poems in memory of his first wife, who entered his dreams for many years after her death.

Kwang-Ching Liu (ed.), Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), xi, 375 pp. Cloth

of work and triumph&dquo; (p. 204). He had the support from America, but not much from his own government which under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, as Hayford observes well, was preoccupied with military conquest, having neither patience nor money to spend on social programs. Yen had once determined to &dquo;get the tiger’s cub&dquo; by &dquo;entering the tiger’s den&dquo; (cf. p. 141), but now he found it impossible to &dquo;ask a tiger for its skin&dquo;-request Chiang to act against his wishes of military solution. Yen was convinced