Guides for Vexed Travelers: A Second Supplement

96 GUIDES FOR VEXED TRAVELERS« - A SECOND SUPPLEMENT Timothy Brook Harvard University I am grateful to Wolfgang Franke for taking the trouble to correct a footnote in the first supplement of "Guides for Vexed Travelers," and I acknowledge his correction with thanks and some embarrassment. My only comfort in having miscredited Chouhai tubian to Hu Zongxian is the knowledge that the com­ pilers of the Qing Imperial Catalogue committed the same error by relying, as I did, on a later edition published by Hu's grandsons. The imperial cataloguers, however, did not have the Dictionary of Ming Biography or Professor Franke's Intro­ duction to the Sources of Ming History at hand. Professor Franke is also correct in pointing out that the Hu edition of Chouhai tubian is not particularly rare. Since publishing that footnote, I have come across a copy in the Toyo Bunko, another in the Harvard-Yenching Library, one listed in the 1936 cata­ logue of the Zhejiang Provincial Library, and four in the Library of Congress. I must beg the reader's indulgence for extending the duly limited subject of route books to a third installment, but I 97 take the opportunity of acknowledging Professor Franke's in­ terest to share further information and bibliographic materials that I have accumulated since publishing "Guides for Vexed Travelers" and "A Supplement" in numbers five and six of the current volume of Ch'ing-shih Wen-t‘i. In this supplement, I wish to (1) offer some observations on the historical deve­ lopment of travel in the Ming and Qing, (2) introduce the Toyo Bunka Kenkyu^o's holdings of military postal route books, as well as a fragment of a rare route encyclopedia at the Library of Congress, and (3) review the Harvard-Yenching Library's holdings or route books for the convenience of historians in North America. * In the preceding installments of "Guides for Vexed Travelers," I noted that the route book appeared as a dis­ tinct genre in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The rate of publication increased noticeably at the beginning of the seventeenth, when many publishers also began to incor­ porate simplified route books in popular almanacs. As early as the last two decades of the Ming dynasty, the route book was already developing in the direction of the more compre­ hensive merchant manual.'*' Both route books and merchant manuals flourished through to the nineteenth century. These books were produced for travelers rather than for sedentary 98 readers or bibliophiles, and could have appeared only when the volume of travel generated a demand great enough to convince publishers that the cost of preparing a route book would be more than offset by the income from sales. Route books reflect travel in its more developed state. Other kinds of writings, meanwhile, hint at earlier historical stages in the develop­ ment of travel in the Ming and Qing. In the early Ming, when commoners were forbidden to tra­ vel, under normal circumstances, and when those who did tra­ vel were monitored by having to register at each place they stopped, a trip was a cumbersome undertaking. Even the sup­ posedly well-marked post roads were at this time sufficiently undertraveled to vex someone who did not follow them regularly, if we may extrapolate from the following poem by the early Ming official Yao Guangxiao % - (1335-1418) :2 I gaze out over the Yangzi River Into the vast murk where it meets the sky: Evening fog chokes £he trees on the bank, Wintering geese settle on the sandbar plots, Smells .from the forest penetrate the monastery, Voices on the bank reach the merchant's boat. The post road is bafflingly hard to follow; At least another year before I pass this way again. A Suzhou gazetteer later in the fifteenth century confirms the impression that travel at this time was uncommon:3 The people of Wujiang county do not travel great distances. Merchants grimace when they have to go more than a hundred If from home, leaving their parents, wives, and children who stick to their .home village and carry on the farming. Only those 99 sent out on official business travel great distances. Those...