When Literati Beg: Informal, Voluntary, and Collective Support in Song and Yuan Presentation Prefaces

I consider that literati poverty reaches its ultimate in this gentleman. He has no official salary with which to serve his parents, no farmland to provide food, no servants to work for him, no members of the younger generation to help him with errands, and no interested person to find him a solution to emergencies and to help him even the least bit.¹

予以為士之貧至於君極矣。無祿以為養，無田以為食，無僮僕為之負 販，無子弟為之奔走，無好事者為之謀緩急而功〔助〕薄少。

Describing the desperate situation of the poet Zhang Cheng 張澄 (b. 1196), Yuan Haowen 元好問 (1190–1257) listed Zhang's needs, which included assistance from an "interested person" together with more ordinary resources like salary and land. The implication is that informal, voluntary material aid was a normal part of literati life. But who would play the role of "interested person" and how would one get him interested in providing help when it was needed? On a small scale, informal assistance in the form of individual mutual aid regularly existed within circles of relatives and associates. Giving was based on personal relationships, with the backing of the cultural concepts or moral principles that were associated with those relationships. However, in contrast to this common but rather limited help from direct personal networks, the Song and Yuan dynasties saw the development of a new mechanism for seeking informal, voluntary, but collective support from a much broader swath of literati: assistance that was solicited through a special literary genre, the "presentation preface" (zengxu 贈序).

Analyzing the kinds of aid these prefaces were used to obtain as well as the types of people who provided and received help, this essay uses the creation of new uses and applications of the presentation preface to investigate two related but different kinds of literati connections: networks and communities. Informal support constituted an important part of socio-economic life: the material aid it provided amounted to a circulation of wealth and served as a way of maintaining social order, in addition to what "formal" systems such as official charitable institutions provided. But material help did not only have economic consequences; as a kind of "gift," it was also deeply embedded in ideas of social relations. The existence of support itself indicates a bond between the benefactor and the beneficiary; thus, it provides a window onto the networks, identities, and notions of social groups.

I will first show that the new uses of the presentation preface provided a means for going beyond one's own circle of contact to solicit aid by connecting the multiple networks of preface authors and preface readers. It was through these networks that collective support became a possible solution to the material needs of literati. But if help from one's personal circle was determined by the strength of the specific ties amongst the involved parties, what motives lay behind the giving of collective help by people whom the recipient might not even have known? I argue here that this kind of assistance involved not just social networks but also conceptions of group identity. While new institutional developments in this period, like charitable estates and the community compact, embodied group identity based on lineage ties or local identity, the development of a new application of presentation prefaces designed to solicit informal collective help indicates a sense of literati community. Thus, these texts provide an indicator of the formation and the strength of literati community during the Song and Yuan periods. It shows that the literati community that took shape during this period understood itself not only in terms of shared culture, but in terms of a certain standard of living. I will evaluate the practice of composing presentation prefaces designed to solicit economic aid in the context of new developments in "charitable institutions" in the Song to show that networks provided a peer-to-peer alternative to charitable institutions for collective help, and that the different natures of these networks and institutions also represented different conceptions of group identity.

Using Presentation Prefaces to Seek Help

The genre of xu 序 originally consisted of introductions, either prefaces or postfaces, to a book. By the Tang dynasty, a derivative type of xu known...