As a standard genre for classical essays in the civil examination, the contemporary prose (also known as the eight-legged essay during the Ming and Qing dynasties) combined classical exegesis and literary creation. Due to the “representative speech style” of the genre, scholars could represent the classics without rigidly adhering to the classics, and thus could accommodate the classics to their own literary theory. The style of contemporary prose was determined by multiple factors, such as ideology, academic trends, and a scholar’s background. During the Ming-Qing transition, the style of contemporary prose changed rapidly. By rediscovering ancient texts beyond Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, scholars competed to find knowledge sources to renew the paradigm. As a result, the knowledge world of the scholars expanded, and the orthodox interpretations were also counter-influenced. The style of contemporary prose was not merely changing with the academic trends step by step but rather had its own agenda, showing an alternative narrative to the elite intellectual world, which had taken Confucian-Classicism and Neo-Confucianism as the main line.
Ji Yun’s Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observations 阅微草堂笔记 and Yuan Mei’s What the Master Would not Discuss 子不语 are two highly influential works of tales of the strange from the Qianlong-Jiaqing period, most of whose stories originated from scholar-officials’ casual talks. By situating these works within a cross-class social network and reproducing the contexts and pathways through which such narratives were transmitted, this paper demonstrates how distinct modes of communication shaped judgments about the content of the stories. Furthermore, the act of storytelling itself serves as a process of knowledge exploration.
During the mid-to-late Ming period, within the context of the Little Ice Age, progressively cooling climates posed substantial threats to agricultural productivity. Booksellers from Jianyang, the center for commercial publishing in Fujian, promptly incorporated agricultural divination into their compiled daily-use encyclopedias, aiming to meet the pressing needs of the populace for weather forecasting. The main content of agricultural divination within these encyclopedias involves forecasting future weather patterns and agricultural yields based on indicators such as the Heavenly Stems, Earthly Branches, five elements, and meteorological factors of specific dates. Enhancements and original contributions within these works were built on the foundation of earlier literature. Both farmers involved in agriculture and merchants trading in grain constituted the primary readers for the agricultural divination works in these encyclopedias. Agricultural divination may be viewed as an example of the “interaction between Heaven and humanity” during the mid-to-late Ming period, offering insights into the effects of climatic changes and resultant agricultural challenges on societal mindsets.
Examining local readings of miscellaneous characters in the Ming and Qing dynasties reveals a distinct knowledge landscape regarding “transmitting rites to the ordinary people,” one that differs from perspectives focused solely on dynastic ritual institutions or commentaries on the Confucian classics. When rural Confucian scholars compiled these works of miscellaneous characters, they mingled dynastic and Confucian rituals with rituals related to gods and ghosts, Buddhism and Daoism, and fengshui (Chinese geomancy), thereby blending rites with customs. To make the ritual texts straightforward and easily accessible to the ordinary people, the miscellaneous characters were compiled by category, ritual templates from daily-use encyclopedias were simplified, and the original ritual passages and chapters were converted into characters, words, and phrases for everyday literacy texts. From a longterm knowledge history perspective, ritual institutions since the Song and Yuan dynasties provided the institutional foundation for “transmitting rituals to the countryside”; various ritual texts compiled by scholar-officials promoted the popularization of rituals, while MingQing social changes facilitated the penetration of rituals into daily literacy practices. Ritualfocused miscellaneous characters thus represented both a new product of literacy development in the Ming-Qing period and a new genre fostering ritual order in rural communities. The spread of writing to the countryside and the downward penetration of rituals mutually reinforced each other, collectively shaping the Chinese society and ritual culture during the Ming and Qing dynasties.