Publishing as a Coterie Enterprise: Zhang Chao and the Making of Printed Texts in Early Qing China

This paper explores the meanings of the print medium and making a printed text in the early Qing literati community by reconstructing the production and circulation of printed texts of a literatus-publisher, Zhang Chao (1650-ca.1707). Zhang Chao’s publishing pr¹actice demonstrates that early Qing literati publishers appropriated print not simply as a technological tool of rapid duplication of texts for wide dissemination. Instead they constituted print as a social means to evoke the conventions and privileges of the manuscript tradition, in which production and circulation of texts promoted the exclusive status and privilege of the elite community.