Overt and Covert Treasures: Essays on the Sources for Chinese Women’s History

9. Gazetteers and the Talented Woman

Gazetteers and the Talented Woman Ellen Widmer My aim is to elucidate the value of gazetteers as tools for researching the lives and works of talented women in traditional China. Because of the vast number of gazetteers in existence, I have limited the project to the following three focused areas of interest. First, I begin by asking what local histories can contribute to the study of six individuals that have interested me in other research. The six are Wang Duanshu 王端淑, Gui Maoyi 歸懋儀, Wang Duan 汪端, Gu Taiqing 顧太清, Wang Qingdi 王慶棣 and Shan Shili 單士釐 (here presented in order of their year of birth). These investigations led to successes and failures that I detail in the paper. Second, I consider the process by which gazetteers first began to take up the lives and writings of women. Women of talent were not included in local histories from the beginning but made an appearance only gradually, in most cases during the Qing. In demonstrating this point I rely primarily on a single example, Ruan Yuan’s 阮元 (1764– 1849) Guangdong tongzhi 廣東通志 (published 1822, republished 1864). I look at the materials it drew on and its stimulating effect on later histories. After that I propose a set of guidelines, far from perfect, on how to use gazetteers. Finally, I take note of a few gazetteers that are especially valuable for our area of interest. With only five titles, my list makes no claim whatsoever to be exhaustive. Throughout I have relied on Hu Wenkai’s 胡文楷 Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歷代婦女著作考 of 1958 and 1985 and Xian Yuqing’s 洗玉 清 Guangdong nüzi yiwen kao 廣東女子藝文考 of 1941 for guidance. Both rely heavily on gazetteers, although other types of materials were employed. I began most of my inquiries about individuals by consulting sources referred to in these reference works. Eventually I was able to depart from these models as I learned more. INTRODUCTION To mine traditional gazetteers for information on talented women is, for the most part, to ask them to do something they were not set 262 | Overt and Covert Treasures up to do. This is because such works are significantly immersed in traditional values, which means that women are generally situated in the lienü 列女 (exemplary woman) section (normally a part of a larger grouping traditionally entitled renzhuan 人傳 [biography] or something similar), where it is their devotion to family, not their talent, that is celebrated. The problem is much less acute, if not nonexistent, with gazetteers published after 1949, of which there is a growing number. Republican gazetteers, too, are somewhat less uncomfortable with female talent. Nevertheless there are, indeed, late imperial gazetteers that yield information on our subject, though it may take some time to find out where that information lies. Another problem is the notorious inaccuracy of gazetteers.1 Even when they yield information, that information may not be reliable. What data we can find there are best used with caution. By this I mean that one should look for confirmatory evidence from other sources or at least assess the reliability of particular authors. A third point to mention is the sui generis quality of individual gazetteers. As I will explain in more detail below, each one is different, and it can take time to eliminate a source as useless, or, if useful, to understand where the relevant information lies. Yet when treated respectfully and carefully, these sources can increase our knowledge about talented individuals and provide insight into the environment in which they lived. I should add one final note by way of introduction. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the gazetteers I consulted are held in the HarvardYenching Library. In addition, Harvard-Yenching holds a number of reprinted gazetteers. These meant that I could look far beyond HarvardYenching ’s own holdings of original materials. I often found it useful to refer to the originals after consulting the reprints when both were available because the quality of the print in the reprint editions was not uniformly high. Despite the richness of Harvard’s holdings, however, there were still some gazetteers that I could not find. SPECIFIC WOMEN IN GAZETTEERS Six Examples Wang Duanshu (1621–c. 1680) There are several large gaps in our knowledge of Wang Duanshu’s life. The most important is her date of death. I have hypothesized elsewhere Gazetteers and the Talented Woman | 263 that it is probably earlier than traditionally supposed.2 We also know too little about the way she arranged her...