Ming Qing Women’s Writings: A Digital Archive and Database of Women’s Literature and History in Late Imperial China

History and Context

Ming Qing Women’s Writings (MQWW) is an open-access, long-term, sustainable database launched in 2005 by McGill University Library.¹ It is the only online digital archive of writings by women of imperial China, particularly for the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties (1644-1911) when women’s literary culture flourished. Until recently, this significant corpus of writing, consisting principally of poetry, has been overlooked in standard histories of Chinese literature and cultural production. With their poetry disparaged as frivolous and trivial in radical critiques of tradition in the early twentieth century, their presence and agency as writing women were for a long time obscured and neglected by the modernizing narratives of China.

Works by individual women have been difficult to access for research, as those that survived the vicissitudes of history mostly ended up in rare book archives in libraries in China.² In recent decades, through assiduous exploration in these archives, scholars have rediscovered the remarkable phenomenon of a critical mass of women writers emerging from literati families in late imperial China, with a concentration in the affluent economic and cultural center of the Jiangnan region, the Yangzi River Delta in southeast China. Facilitated by the concurrent boom in the printing industry from the late sixteenth century on, these women created a vibrant literary culture supported by their kinship relations and social networks. The recent research on Chinese women’s literature, culture, and history has brought exciting developments in scholarship both in China and the West.³ The innovations and vibrancy of this new research owe much, directly and indirectly, to the influence of developments in feminisms and gender studies in the West, where, for example, feminist literary scholarship took the critique and deconstruction of stereotyped representations of women in the earlier wave to the recovery and rediscovery of textual and material productions by historical women. Women’s own voices—as they speak through texts or inscribe their subjectivities in texts, even as these texts are recognized to be mediated by language, literary convention, and ideology—became key nodes in theoretical and textual analysis.

In the China field, the post-Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) publication in 1985 of a revised edition of Lidai funü zhuzuo kao (1957; Catalog of women’s writings through the ages) compiled by the scholar Hu Wenkai (1901-1988) marked a defining moment.⁴ With this indispensable reference work, scholars became fully aware of the rich tradition of writing by women in China, particularly during the late imperial period. With over four thousand records of collected writings by women from antiquity to the early twentieth century, this work is the most comprehensive catalog of historical Chinese women’s writings to date and has become the “bible” that scholars consult when conducting research on women writers from China’s imperial past. Hu’s catalog made scholars realize that, as leading authority on Ming Qing women’s literature Kang-i Sun Chang aptly states, “No nation has produced more anthologies or collections of women’s poetry than late imperial China.”⁵ Yet within the Confucian gender regime, women were a subordinated group, ideally located within the domestic sphere. Their writings had not been deemed worthy of systematic preservation. Less than a quarter of the writings identified by Hu have survived the ravages of history. Nevertheless, the excitement that the rediscovery of Chinese women’s literary culture has generated is palpable. Contrary to twentieth-century stereotypes of the passive and illiterate traditional Chinese woman, a chorus of women’s voices in printed collections of poetry and prose beckons from distant archives in China. These collections with their rich autobiographical, literary, and social contents hold promise to open up gendered perspectives on, and complicate many aspects of, research on Chinese culture and society.⁶

Recognizing the problems arising from the inaccessibility of women-authored texts in Europe and America, feminist scholars have pioneered efforts to preserve and make available collections of early modern women’s writings for research since the 1980s and 1990s. It is not...