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  • A Floating Studio:The Boat Space in Song Literary Culture
  • Yunshuang Zhang

Social and cultural changes during the Tang-Song transition dramatically transformed the identity of the shi 士 elite. Following the work of Peter Bol, we can identify particular continuities and changes from the Tang dynasty to the Northern Song: the shi continued to share three significant qualities: family pedigree, culture, and officeholding. But while the importance of family pedigree declined, culture and education became normative criteria in defining shi identity.1 Accordingly, members of the Song-dynasty shi elite, which could be designated as "literati," were largely defined as sharing a cultural identity. Song literati paid great attention to self-identification by cultivating their own values and tastes, aiming to be perceived as elegant (ya 雅).2 In daily life, they cultivated images of themselves as erudite, versatile, refined, and morally superior gentlemen. By virtue of their scholarly elegance, literati not only differentiated themselves from other social classes in the Song, but also effectively distinguished themselves from the shi, or aristocrats, of the Tang.

In this context of identity formation, the studio (shuzhai 書齋)—a space used exclusively for scholarly activities such as reading, writing, and artistic creation—provided Song literati with the perfect arena in which to fully articulate their refinement and erudition, and thus to label themselves as [End Page 207] distinctively elegant. Although a few studios were recorded in pre-Song texts, it was during the Song dynasty that they became a prominent cultural space for literati. Not only did the physical studio gradually function as an indispensable space in the daily lives of Song literati, but more importantly, they frequently celebrated the studio in literature as a private space for personal pleasure and self-cultivation.3 Primarily enjoyed by the individual self, it excluded the political—and even the domestic—aspects of the lives of shi. This new fascination with the studio space inspired Song literati to creatively develop distinctive physical forms of the studio. One of these was the "floating studio," which integrated elements of a boat into the construction of a studio. Two types of floating studios were constructed: first, the studio boat, which was a real boat that was used as a literatus' studio; and second, the boat-shaped or boat-named studio, which referred to a studio constructed in the shape or after the name of a boat.

The appeal of the floating studio developed out of the pervasive use of river transport in the Song and literati's intense experiences of actual boat travel, but more significantly, it derived from the evocative potential that the boat image suggested.4 In literary treatments of the floating studio by Song literati, a boat not only had a strong sense of mobility but it was also associated with reclusion or Daoist escapism in the medieval literary tradition. Hence, by constructing the floating studio as an interface between the self and the world, Song literati created a tension between two opposing intellectual pursuits: the boat suggested personal freedom beyond society, whereas the studio evoked scholarliness and engagement with the world. Moreover, they took great pains in resolving this tension in their literary writings. They emphasized that, with the boat image, they only retained the connotation of separation from the exterior world in order to accentuate the privacy of the studio, while at the same time, they overlaid new implications upon the image of the boat to establish the positive valence of self-enjoyment and to shift it toward practicality and social engagement. In this sense, the literary reconfiguration of the floating studio can be understood as an embodiment of the process of literati identity construction during the Song. [End Page 208]

A Private Aesthetic Space: The "Studio Boat" Practice

An anecdote in Luo Dajing's 羅大經 (fl. 1224) Song miscellany (biji 筆記) Helin yulu 鶴林玉露 (Jade Dew in the Forest of Cranes) introduces a boat for carrying books:

Xu Yuanzi's poem reads:

徐淵子詩云:

俸餘擬辦買山錢, With my leftover salary, I planned to prepare the money for buying a mountain,
卻買端州古硯磚。 Instead I bought an antique inkstone from Duan Prefecture.5
依舊被渠驅使在, As before I was impelled by this,
買山之事定何年? In which year, after all, will I fulfill the wish of buying a mountain?

Liu...

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