A Report on the International Conference on Chinese Baojuan (Precious Scrolls), Yangzhou, China, 2014

A REPORT ON THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CHINESE BAOJUAN (PRECIOUS SCROLLS), YANGZHOU, CHINA, 2014 ROSTISLAV BEREZKIN Fudan University The International Conference on Research on Chinese Baojuan [Precious Scrolls] (Zhongguo baojuan guoji yanjiu hui 中國寶卷國際研究會) took place on October 17–18, 2014, at Yangzhou University. The main purpose of this conference was to commemorate the achievements of Che Xilun 車錫倫 (1937–), Professor Emeritus of Yangzhou University, who started to study baojuan literature in the 1980s. Che Xilun is the author of what is currently the most complete catalogue of baojuan texts (latest edition is 2000)1 and a collection of articles about the history and present state of baojuan literature (2009)2 that received prestigious Chinese prizes. To my knowledge, it was the first conference devoted specifically to the study of baojuan either in China or abroad. At the same time it was combined with the annual meeting of the Chinese Association for the Study of Popular Literature (Zhongguo suwenxue xuehui 中國俗 文學學會), which also fitted well the scholarly activities of Che Xilun, who has also studied other genres of Chinese prosimetric literature, drama, and folklore. Because of this added feature, the conference alsoattracted the attention of several Chinese scholars who were not specifically engaged in research on baojuan. There were thirty-two papers presented at the conference by scholars from mainland China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, The Netherlands, and Russia. The papers were printed up and distributed in a bound volume at the conference. In this short note I do not intend to discuss all of them, but would like to introduce the most interesting of them. The papers presented at this conference can be grouped into four parts according to their contents: 1) overview of the history of Chinese and foreign studies of baojuan; 2) baojuan collections outside China; 3) discussion of particular baojuan texts and their place in the history of Chinese literature (including connections with other literary genres), and 4) the results of fieldwork research on modern baojuan performances, known mainly as scroll recitation (xuanjuan 宣卷). In the first of these four categories we should definitely note the article by Wilt L. Idema (Harvard University) on English-language studies of baojuan. It is an expanded version of an article originally printed in this journal (volume 31 1 Zhongguo baojuan zongmu (Comprehensive catalog of the baojuan of China; Beijing: Beijing Yanshan, 2000). 2 Zhongguo baojuan yanjiu (Research on Chinese baojuan; Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue, 2009). CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 34. 2 (December 2015): 169–173© The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2015 DOI 10.1080/01937774.2015.1096560 [2012]), and translated into Chinese by his Ph.D. student Sun Xiaosu 孫曉蘇 (Harvard University). Idema’s article represents a complete annotated list of baojuan studies in the West. Chen Anmei 陳安梅 (Yangzhou University) presented an overview of Japanese collections of baojuan and related research; though she herself is not a specialist in this genre, she completed a quite good survey of Japanese studies of the genre, starting with the 1930s and continuing to the present time. Her catalogue of baojuan texts in Japanese collections, although not complete and mainly based on materials already available in print, still provides quite a good picture of Japanese collections. Guan Jiazheng’s 關家錚 (Shandong University) paper dealt with the earliest period of baojuan studies in China (1930s–1940s), when several scholars of Chinese literature published newspaper articles, many containing lists of baojuan texts in circulation in China at that time. There was also an overview article by Qiu Huiying 丘慧瑩 (Zhanghua Normal University) on the quite numerous Taiwanese studies of baojuan. These works were successful in presenting quite a complete picture of baojuan studies all over the world. As for the second area of research, several articles introduced a number of rare manuscript and printed copies of baojuan texts held only in overseas collections and not recorded in Che’s catalogue, thus contributing to the creation of a more complete inventory of these texts. Cui Yunhua 崔蘊華 (Chinese University of Political Science and Law, Beijing) offered up an article about the collection of printed baojuan texts held by Oxford University, which partially reflects the situation with the collecting of baojuan in the U.K...