The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko (review)

Of the "four treasures of the study" (wen fang si bao 文房四寶), it is the inkstone that historically enabled the transformative interaction of brush, inksticks, water, and paper into the words and images that constitute the core of Chinese culture during the imperial period. Yet despite this consistent presence, the place of inkstones in scholarship has typically been subordinate to those brush-traces, and their consideration merely that of a tool, or at best, a prized bibelot in a Northern Song or Ming collection. With The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China, Dorothy Ko investigates the often-overlooked inkstone as a material example that reveals new insights into the range of sociocultural and epistemological transformations occurring among scholars and artisans in the early Qing dynasty, specifically during the reigns of the emperors Kangxi (r. 1664–1722) and Yongzheng (1723–1735). Contending with gender, technology, craft, social status, and geography through an attentively material approach to social history,¹ Ko uses inkstones to suggest a new paradigm for understanding the spectrum of roles that educated, neat-handed men and women could occupy with dignity and respect in the new cultural milieu of the early Qing. Specifically seeking to overturn the artificial but entrenched traditional valorization of intellectual ability over craft skills, Ko also upends the gender division in late imperial Chinese artisanship and brings a famed woman inkstone carver, Gu Erniang (fl. 1700–1722), into the foreground.

The Introduction and the Epilogue concentrate on Ko's methodological approach and its implications for scholars across multiple fields. In the Introduction, Ko articulates her interest in inkstones, their quarriers, and their carvers as a means of upending the "hierarchy of head over hands" that resulted in "the denigration of craftsmen . . . so pervasive and taken for granted that even when an occasional scholar set upon the idea of investigating craft skills, he had to subsume the latter into his theoretical framework when he committed his findings to writing before it became legible" (p. 5). Recent scholarship across various fields, but particularly in the history of Chinese science, has firmly demonstrated that during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the literate elite engaged with technical knowledge in a far more open-minded way than previously believed.² But by using inkstones and inkstone carvers as the crux of her approach, Ko levers upon the traditions of "scholarly knowledge and its standard of judgment" to "introduce alternative standards" (p. 6), namely those of the craftsman and craftswoman, to the changing modes of knowledge.

"If this book has a thesis," Ko writes, "it would be that artisan and scholar cease to be predetermined and distinct entities; in the overlap of their skill sets and knowledge cultures in unlikely corners of the empire, we may discern the transformations wrought by the social forces of the commercial revolution initiated in the late Ming and the political forces of the Manchu conquest in the early Qing" (p. 10). Emphasizing that neither "the scholar" nor "the craftsman" existed as discrete identities in the early Qing, Ko offers more fluid identities of the "scholar-artisan" and the "artisan-scholar" (p. 9), which she deems "one of the most salient social phenomena of the eighteenth century" (p. 9). As Ko acknowledges in the Epilogue, "The Craft of Wen," the distinction between them is "subjective and subtle:" the "scholar-artisan" who "succeed[s] in being known as more scholar than craftsman [is one] who can summon enough economic and cultural capital to substantiate the claim" (p. 200). Arguing for an "episteme" that arose in the late Ming, Ko "construes classical scholarship ('theory') and textual production ('writing') as material and embodied practices ('making')," for which she coins the phrase "the craft of wen (word, writing, male literati culture)" (p. 190). The episteme of the "craft of wen" helps to create the cultural capital that...