Zhaoshi bei 3 and the Boundary Problem in Late Imperial Narrative

This paper concerns the third of the four stories in Zhaoshi bei (The Cup that Reflects the World), "Zou Annan yüma huan xingrong" (whose title Patrick Hanan has rendered "On a Journey to Vietnam a Jade Horse Miniature is Exchanged for Crimson Velvet"). Written by an author who identifies himself only as Zhuoyuan ting zhu, or The Master of the Zhuoyuan Pavilion, and dating most likely from the 1660s, the story begins with a poem which suggests the subject of the story. The final couplet reads:

As dusk approaches, the cry of the cuckoo grows ever more plaintive, And in my leisure, I edit an unofficial history (yeshi), adding to my incomplete incollection. ¹

The story that follows concerns precisely the contents of this yeshi: what can be included within it and what cannot? Is completion even a possibility when the subject lies outside of the borders of the empire?

Annan is a special case, neither wholly outside of, nor entirely a part of the empire. As the Qing critic and scholar Wang Shizhen notes in Chibei outan, "As far as the reputation of our dynasty reaches, with those who come to us over land and sea reaching many tens of countries, of those who have received titles and send regular emissaries there number only two: Annan and Okinawa." ²

Liminal locations like Annan have in recent years begun to attract the notice of many scholars, as part of work on the greater empire. Laura Hostetler's recent work on Qing efforts cartographically to enclose the minority Miao comes to mind. ³ These border regions were perhaps of singular importance during the 1660s, the decade when this story was written, as Ming loyalists retreated southward. In her treatment of Chen Chen's Shuihu houzhuan, Ellen Widmer discusses the implications of the outlaws' choice of far-off Siam as the location for their utopian society. ⁴ Like Widmer's work, this paper addresses Annan, not as a real-life location, but as an idea—in the case of this story, a way of addressing certain problems of political philosophy.

In its discussions of various circulations—specifically what happens to a jade horse and some bolts of fabric, and what happens to a woman who makes her presence public—the story uses Annan's liminal position to pose questions about whether the empire is a closed system or an open one, and the extent to which the outside plays a part in these imperial circulations. This story challenges the very form of late imperial narrative, posing the question of whether the imperial framework can essentially erase borders. And can what is "other" be written, and absorbed wholly into the totalizing imperium (whether into a map, or a history, or tax records)?

These questions can take a number of forms and are not limited to imaginings on the provenance of exotic goods, although journeying in the literature of this period does seem inextricably linked to trading. By the late Ming, this set of issues is recurrent; by the middle of the Qing, it is nearly ubiquitous. (The problem also seems to have been the special concern of this particular author. In the final story in this collection, "The Miser Makes a Fortune from New Pits," a dealer in night-soil actually lives in a valley that is so closed a system that no fertilizer can be imported, making excrement an invaluable commodity.) Keith McMahon has written of self-containment as an internal, subjective state of equilibrium mirrored by certain external manifestations, among them the boundaries between country and city and the world of men and the world of women. ⁵ My concern in this paper is with the way these external manifestations are maintained once the greater border of the empire has been crossed.

"Zou Annan yüma huan xingrong" posits various ways in which what lies outside of the empire is to be related to...