Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography

Chapter 3 A Passion for Antiquity, in Two Dimensions and in Three

51 3 A Passion for Antiquity, in Two Dimensions and in Three Zigong said, “If you had a piece of beautiful jade here, would you put it away safely in a box or would you try to sell it for a good price?” The Master said, “Of course I would sell it. Of course I would sell it. All I am waiting for is the right offer.” —Analects IX.13, trans. D.C.Lau What was it like to be a jinshi expert in the late Qing? On a daily basis, the pastime entailed three activities—shopping for artifacts and rubbings, appraising them, and publishing catalogs of their inscriptions and images—all of which gave moments of extreme, if elusive, pleasure. The greatest luxury for any specialist was time. As Liu E recounted, At most, our lifetimes only last seventy or eighty years. In our youth, we strive for official rank; in old age, our ears, eyes, hands and limbs are useless. In between are thirty or forty years when we are worn out from household cares, providing clothing and food, racing around every day on long journeys, forced to exert ourselves in quests for trifles. It is so rare that I can spend my resources on ancient texts, calligraphy, and beautiful bronzes and steles! Even when I do have resources, these things are almost as expensive as gold, pure jade, fine brocade and damask. Once I collect them, I can only fondle and appreciate them when there are no annoying personal matters, household chaos, endless official business, or idle friends about. So in an entire lifetime, there might be only a few days like today.1 52 Pastimes Some scholars wrestled with the consequences of private enjoyment, particularly as museums and preservation laws became more common in other antiquity-obsessed societies. But many joined Liu E, a significant collector of coins, Buddhist sculpture, and oracle bone fragments in regarding a day spent pursuing jinshi as “paradise.”2 The contours of this paradise changed significantly over the course of the nineteenth century. As ambitious young men sought expertise in the field, the antiquities market expanded to meet their demand , making available a more diverse variety of objects. On a 1905 trip to the capital, for example, Duanfang purchased “an iron ink stone from the founding of the dynasty, previously collected by Ruan Yuan, who made a rubbing of the piece; a Han Dynasty oil lamp; an inscription from a Tang Dynasty pagoda; two pieces of Song Dynasty stone sculpture; two other small stone sculptures; and more than two hundred fragments of oracle bone inscriptions.”3 Only the ink stone and the Tang inscription would have been collected a century or so earlier, and the rest would have been considered unorthodox or trivial (sculpture , almost certainly Buddhist) or taboo (the oil lamp, likely looted from a tomb); some, of course, had not yet been discovered (the oracle bone fragments).To study these materials and judge their authenticity, scholars still relied primarily on rubbings of inscriptions, using philological methodologies developed over the previous several centuries. But they also conceived of new styles of making those rubbings as well as catalog images, tending towards more three-dimensional representation . This shift encouraged the emergence of artifact studies at the turn of the century. In other words, the paradisiacal practices of jinshi were of significant methodological importance, determining what objects were collected by antiquarians and how they were treated in collections. Obsession and Orthodoxy The great jinshi collectors of the age amassed scores of artifacts. Chen Jieqi owned hundreds of clay seals, the specialty for which his collection was noted, as well as more than two hundred bronze vessels, including the famous Maogong tripod. Pan Zuyin possessed around five hundred artifacts, and Wang Yirong owned several hundred bronzes. By 1886, Wu Dacheng had gathered together more than a hundred bronze artifacts , as well as even more jades and seals.4 While many scholars had far more modest collections, the size and scope of these assemblages— A Passion for Antiquity, in Two Dimensions and in Three 53 not to mention the costs involved—suggest the extraordinary interest, verging on obsession, that consumed the minds of the most famous practitioners of the pastime. Late-Qing antiquarians were fixated with the material remnants of the past. Liu Xihai’s “long-time obsession for antiquity,” for example , led him “stealthily to collect four to five thousand artifacts...