The Human Tradition in Premodern China (review)

This is the second volume dealing with East Asia in a series "devoted to providing minibiographies of 'real people' who, with their idiosyncratic behavior, personalize the collective experience of grand themes, national myths, ethnic stereotypes, and gender relationships" (publisher's information on flyleaf). (Its predecessor was The Human Tradition in Modern Japan [2001], edited by Anne Walthall.) Anyone familiar with the sources for the study of premodern China will approach a volume done in this spirit with fascination and bewilderment, eager to see how the contributors have dealt with the staggering challenges facing anyone who tries to do people's history from the bottom up in a premodern Chinese context.

In any event, one is not surprised to find the book composed of sketches of the privileged existences that one would expect of a prime minister, a grand counselor, a top general, a chief eunuch, a chief examiner in the civil service, and a slew of aristocrats. A modern historiographical agenda pressing on recalcitrant material manages to move outside the charmed circle of the superelite enough to include a celebrity courtier/hanger-on whose family had not been producing civil servants for long, a wealthy writer more famous for his work done in retirement than for his government service, and an extremely rich mercantile heir, known thanks to the discovery of his tomb, who spent his life collecting paintings and calligraphy. The sole female is a royal consort.

I beat the thoroughly dead horse of the volume's ineluctable focus on Dead Yellow (superelite) Males only to recognize its uneasy fit with the stated purpose of the series in which this book appears. The editor's claim to be finding representative lives and "going beneath the surface of great figures like emperors and of philosophers such as Confucius to touch on more 'ordinary' persons" (p. xx) can only be understood as a compulsory nod in that direction. The subjects of the essays are not "ordinary" or "real" people, with their idiosyncracies intact, but rather highly stylized exemplars, whose utterly unrepresentative lives we can perceive only through complex layers of literary topoi and historiographical convention. Students of premodern China cannot realistically expect anything else.

The chronological coverage of the book is declared to be "from the earliest historical times to the dawn of the modern age" (p. xv). This span is divided into three periods: Early (Shang through Qin), Imperial (Han through Tang) and Later Imperial (Song to mid-Ming)—roughly 1200 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E. Approximately one seventh of the book's pages (two essays) is devoted to Early, with the rest of the pages evenly divided between Imperial (represented by three essays) and Later Imperial (five shorter essays). The early medieval era (the Han-Tang interregnum) is represented only by the Three Kingdoms state of Wei, and the tenth century (Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms) is passed over in silence. Little use is made of this tripartite periodization except to distinguish the Later Imperial period as one in which non-Chinese people and conquest states play an important role (pp. xvi-xviii). While no doubt reflecting the Ming-period interests of the editor, this distinction will come as a surprise to students of the earlier periods, and is not reflected in the selection of biographical subjects.

The editor has left the individual authors to deal with their materials as they see fit, resulting in a collection written in ten very distinct voices. No other choice was reasonable, given the tremendous range of chronology, source material, and disciplinary focus represented, but one cannot expect to come away from reading the book with a key theme around which the essays cohere. An alert reader will appreciate certain recurring tensions: family-state, center-periphery, learning-wealth, learning-power. The volume will probably work best as a supplementary reading in a Chinese civilization course...