Creative Engagement: Encountering Early Modern China through Literary and Performing Arts

In this issue of Late Imperial China, we pause to reflect on the diverse ways scholars engage with their area of study or bring their craft to new audiences. We are by profession, expected to write, typically in genres including the scholarly monograph, the peer-reviewed journal article, the book review, the letter of recommendation, and the bureaucratic report. These genres require us to exercise creativity in our selection and reading of sources and framing of argument. Such writings may be informed by our innate love of language or sense of play. They at times also provide us with a point of imaginative access to early modern China. But these genres are aimed at relatively circumscribed numbers of readers and sometimes feel insufficient as media of self-expression or as vehicles through which to understand the past. Moreover, the documentary record that undergirds our scholarship, abundant as it may be, is also inevitably lumpy and uneven, with holes, often precisely where the scholar instinctively seeks to connect with her subject.

Experiments with genre and form can help fill in the missing pieces and frayed fabric of our sources, as master historians like Susan Mann and Jonathan Spence have demonstrated. Moreover, venturing outside familiar genres and media can bring scholars into contact with broader audiences of readers, viewers, and listeners. This is not a new phenomenon in our field. The Dutch Sinologist and diplomat, Robert Van Gulik (1910–1967) authored several works based on Qing detective fiction. Historian Robert Oxnam developed a role-playing game set in the Qing. Such creativity continues to flourish as scholars of Chinese literature and history seek inspiration from their sources and from the scholarly work of their peers in order to reach new audiences, explore alternative forms, and connect in new ways to the sites and sentiments of early modern China. For this special section, Late Imperial China asked three scholars—two historians and a specialist in comparative literature, to share their experiences of creative engagement—through fiction, music, and the internet—in hopes that this might start a fresh conversation and encourage others pursuing similar endeavors.