Much scholarly work on the literary culture of the early Qing dynasty has focused on notions of memory, trauma, and nostalgia. In contrast, this essay investigates the “contemporary operas” (shishi xiqu) of the seventeenth-century Suzhou playwright Li Yu to argue for the importance of the notion of “the present day.” How is this notion of the present day given dramatic form in Li Yu’s operas and what implications does this interest in the contemporary have for the broader cultural scene of the early Qing dynasty? This paper will answer these questions by investigating one dramatic technique favored by Li Yu: the inclusion of snippets of rumor and “news” reports into the play. By including such contemporary media reports, Li Yu not only generates a constantly evolving sense of the present, he also projects this sense of immediacy beyond the fiction of the stage into the “reality” of the audience, creating a form of opera eminently suited for both reflecting and producing local Suzhou activism, as evidenced in Li Yu’s most famous work, Qing zhong pu (Registers of the pure and loyal), a work chronicling the popular Suzhou protests of the mid-1620s and Wanli yuan (Reunion over ten thousand miles), which stages the dissolution and reintegration of family and empire right after the fall of the Ming.
Homoerotic play was central to the recreational culture of theatergoing from the mid-Qing to the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in Beijing. Theatergoing literati in particular played an important role in the production and reproduction of an elite, theater-based, homoerotic sub-culture, heavily investing themselves in the pursuit of social distinction. While it is important not to underestimate the importance of lower-status audiences in the popularisation of Peking opera, the literati doubtlessly considered themselves the aesthetic vanguard in terms of both the judgment of staged drama and the literary promotion of romances between themselves and the boy-actors offstage. Unlike “flower-guides” (Huapu) that circulated between friends, diaries from the period record private thoughts on the scene that would not, and could not, be expressed in public. Drawing on the diary of the influential late-Qing scholar-official Li Ciming (1830–94), I focus on the question of how an understanding of public participation entered Li’s diaries, as well as examining what his self-representations have to say about Qing literati ownership of homoerotic sensibilities and spaces, which is to say, how he saw himself as presenting to others and how that self-presentation is (re-)presented in his writing.
Read as a form of social document, one of the most interesting areas of life illuminated by the huapu (“flower-guides,” that is, theatergoers’ lists, rankings, and descriptions of the Beijing theater’s boy-actors), is what they show us in relation to literati leisure in nineteenth-century Beijing. In this paper I employ the spatial/relational tropes of parergon, ekphrasis, and heterotopia to consider how huapu texts are positioned as supplement in relation to the staging of dramatic works, to boy-actors’ performance and embodiment of erotic fantasy, as well as to performance and play among aspiring paragons of gentlemanly refinement. Doubly turned away from the stage and from public events, huapu celebrate several levels of subjective taste and deploy varying tropes of social exchange, and it was by playing with these things that they also recorded and reproduced a literati need to play with contemporary confusion around the place of private and public discourse.
This article explores the little-known public philanthropic activities of certain elite women during late Qing China. By examining contemporary newspapers, it traces the new development of women’s philanthropic engagement and further analyzes two cases, one on disaster relief and the other on women’s education, to illustrate the issues, controversies and achievements that went along with women’s philanthropy. It demonstrates how philanthropy, a traditionally-sanctioned field for women’s activism, legitimatized women to move out of domestic seclusion and reposition themselves in the public sphere in a crucial transitional era when for “good women” to appear in public was something hotly debated, and how through philanthropic opportunities some were able to engage with political affairs. The broad social impact of their initiatives suggests the continued importance of traditional elite women during China’s transition to the modern era; it challenges some of our previous notions, which often unthinkingly accepted the verdict of “New Women” that those who did not embrace their path to modernity were parasitic, unproductive, and backward. By looking carefully at philanthropy, the article reveals fascinating issues and rich details of women’s public activities that previous historical narratives have often overlooked. It helps to understand how reconfigured traditions became essential components of modernity in the development of modern Chinese gender roles. It also adds a gender perspective to the burgeoning historiography on Chinese philanthropy.
A great deal of research on the Korean War has focused on the military, politics, economy and international affairs, and far less on the religious, particularly the Buddhist, perspective. The Korean War exerted a tremendous impact on institutional Buddhism, and consequently Buddhists were heavily involved. This paper examines the history of Chinese Buddhist participation in the “Resisting America and Assisting Korea Campaign” from Buddhist perspectives such as political propaganda, material donations especially the donation of the “Chinese Buddhist Airplane,” and the enlistment of young monks into the People’s Volunteer Army (the PVA). The paper will then look into social and political factors involved in Buddhist leaders’ reinterpretation of Buddhist doctrines to justify participation in the campaign, as a response to the surge of patriotism in Chinese society. This kind of investigation may shed light on the relationship between institutional Buddhism and politics in the new socialist society of China after 1949.