Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

Chapter Five. Normativity and Authenticity

139 c h a p t e r f i v e Normativity and Authenticity I had (and have all my life) observed that conventional phrases are a sort of fireworks, easily let off, and liable to take a great variety of shapes and colours not at all suggested by their original form. —c h a r l e s d i c k e n s , David Copperfield The easily recognizable homogeneity of personal letters written in a certain culture and during a certain period suggests that letter writing has been a highly regulated form of communication since the earliest periods of its history. In Western literature, this assumption is supported by early model letters and letter-writing guides that, in the case of ancient Egypt, appear as early as 1800 bce.1 Since these types of normative texts that set out the rules of epistolary communication are highly revealing about other forms of social intercourse and etiquette , they have been the objects of comprehensive investigation in the West, especially concerning the Middle Ages.2 letter-writing guides Thanks to the bibliographic catalogs in Chinese dynastic histories, we know that in China, epistolary guides (shuyi, lit., “writing etiquette ”) date back to at least early medieval times and existed in considerable variety.3 Some of them targeted a general audience or writers of different social standing and thus communicative needs, such as Tang Jin’s (6th century) Letter-Writing Etiquette for Women (Furen shuyi) and Shi Tanyuan’s Letter-Writing Etiquette for the Sangha (Sengjia shuyi). Others focused on specific occasions, as the two, probably complementary guides Letter-Writing Etiquette for Inauspicious Occasions (Diaoda shuyi), for deaths, and Letter-Writing Etiquette for Auspicious Occasions (Ji shuyi), for all other lifecycle events, by Wang Jian (452–489). None of these early manuals Epistolary Conventions and Literary Individuality 140 has been transmitted, probably because their communicative advice was prone to become obsolete whenever social or literary conventions changed significantly. The loss of these texts is regrettable indeed. Tang Jin’s Letter-Writing Etiquette for Women, in particular, highlights a blank spot on the map of our knowledge of early medieval epistolary culture. More than one hundred letter-writing guides, many of them fragmentary , from the Tang and the Five Dynasties periods (908–60) were found among the Dunhuang manuscripts and have in recent years been studied extensively.4 The first letter-writing manuals that were transmitted in their entirety come from the Song dynasty (960– 1279).5 Late imperial China then saw the publication of an increasing number of epistolary guides and model-letter collections.6 Although some of these books are designed as purely epistolary guides, most manuals of this kind place the rules of letter writing within the framework of other social practices and conventions, an approach that is common in the West as well.7 Epistolary guides were thus typically not only used in the composition of appropriate letters but also consulted as encyclopedias of social life, or, as Roger Chartier put it, “through a process of readings that were often not followed by any attempt at writing, they nourished a social knowhow and a social imaginary.”8 The only extant epistolary guide from early medieval China, Suo Jing’s (239–303) Monthly Etiquette (Yueyi), is a model-letter collection that was transmitted for its calligraphic value (fig. 5.1).9 Although the letters of the fourth to sixth months are missing, the guide probably originally consisted of one letter and its reply per month and may thus have been inspired by the early Chinese “monthly commands” (yueling), which seek to harmonize human behavior with changing seasonal conditions throughout the year.10 That the letters in Monthly Etiquette are not actual letters but rather models or templates, and thus a normative type of text, is indicated by their structural uniformity , peculiar noncommittal blandness, and lack of concrete information . Model-letter collections of this monthly type seem to have been common in medieval China.11 While the transmitted calligraphy of Monthly Etiquette is usually regarded as dating from the Tang dynasty, most scholars today do not share Yao Nai’s doubts about the Jin dynasty origin of the text itself.12 The following translation of two model-letter pairs demonstrates the character of Monthly Etiquette. The letters lack an invented letter Normativity and Authenticity 141 body and consist only of frames—prescript, proem, epilogue, and postscript—that are...