The Shadow of Prosperity: Fake Goods and Anxiety in Song Urban Space

In summer 2018, an exhibition at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, featuring paintings that had been forged in late Ming Suzhou 蘇州, provoked public interest with its playful touch.¹ Although it is certainly not a conventional practice for a museum to endorse the value of forged artworks, the exhibition echoed recent scholarly interest in the topic of forgery in this period of Chinese art history.² It is worth noting that the title of the exhibition, Wei hao wu 僞好物 (Spurious Finery), actually derives from the Song dynasty. Mi Fu 米芾 (1051–1107), the most refined calligrapher and connoisseur of the Northern Song, used this word to assess a few Tang-dynasty tracing copies of the calligraphy of earlier masters, including Zhong You 鍾繇 (151–230) and Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303–361).³ This seemingly oxymoronic combination of wei 僞 and hao 好 best captures the complexity of producing and consuming forged artworks. As scholars across various cultural contexts have observed, setting aside the purpose of disguise, forgeries often reflect the same societal interests as authentic works. In other words, they are candid, yet paradoxical expressions of the materiality and value of the authentic.⁴ To some extent, this is also true of the great magnitude of adulterated and counterfeited goods during the Song, which are pervasively recorded in official histories, government documents, notebooks (biji 筆記), and treatises (pulu 譜錄). Reducing this phenomenon to mere moral corruption would undermine the complexity of this issue. Rather, I consider that the counterfeit, as a simulacrum of the authentic and not necessarily its "evil twin," constituted an undercurrent of Song material culture and provided momentum to the production of knowledge that was in opposition to fakes and fakery.

The Song witnessed an upsurge in discussions and debates about truth and falsehood. Chad Hansen was among the first scholars to identify this development in Chinese intellectual history, although his argument that the notion of "truth" was influenced by the arrival of Buddhism has since been disputed.⁵ Stephen West saw the making and appreciation of mock food as a new aesthetic pursuit in the Song, which was parallel to performance art in its emulation of the "real" and "authentic."⁶ In the same vein, Robert Hymes contended that what was novel during the Song period was not the absolute and abstract "truth," but a prevailing curiosity and urge to find out the factual status of narratives.⁷ Both West and Hymes associated the realization of truth and falsehood with the larger context of the rise of urban and commercial culture. Guillaume Carré and Christian Lamouroux have made a welcome contribution to the study of fake goods in the premodern East Asian context and placed special focus on the role of moral rhetoric as well as government regulations and their constraints.⁸ Built on these scholars' observations, this article focuses on the materiality and the practice of fake goods in particular, rather than on ideas revolving around the false during the Song dynasty.

Some key words appeared often in the reporting of forgery. The word lan 濫 (sometimes hanglan 行濫) was a term that had appeared in legal codes from the Tang onwards and referred to adulterated and unqualified goods.⁹ During the Song period, three other terms were used to refer to forged goods. The word yan 贋 especially referred to forged writing in various formats, including poems, prose, calligraphy, and rubbings.¹⁰ The words jia 假 and wei 偽 were used more interchangeably to refer to falsehood, deception, forgery, and pretense. In the context of forging objects, wei implies an inherent moral judgement, suggesting the intention to counterfeit. Deriving from its original meaning, "to rely on" or "to borrow," jia has the connotation of simulating the authentic or original form, foregrounding the relationship between the original and the copy.¹¹ Being jia could be either artificial or deceptive, as in jiashan 假山 ("artificial hill") made of rocks from Lake Tai 太湖 or jiayu 假玉 ("fake jade") made of fired stones, lead, and other ingredients.¹² In this article, "fake" or "forged" goods will refer to things that not only were produced to defraud or deceive but also were...