Out of Place: Education and Identity among Three Generations of Urban Panyu Gentry, 1850-1931

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 33 OUT OF PLACE: EDUCATION AND IDENTITY AMONG THREE GENERATIONS OF URBAN PANYU GENTRY, 1850-1931 STEVEN B. MILES, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN SAINT LOUIS In 1920 a group of Cantonese scholars gathered to revive Xuehaitang (學海堂 Sea of learning hall) quarterly examinations in Confucian texts and classical literature. Lauded as Guangzhou’s preeminent Confucian academy since its founding in the 1820s, the Xuehaitang had been closed in 1903 with the imperially mandated transformation of academies (書院 shuyuan) into new-style schools (學堂 xuetang). The 1920 revival got off to an unpromising start, as the former academy grounds were occupied by troops associated with the Guangxi clique of militarists then controlling Guangzhou and, ironically, sponsoring the Xuehaitang examinations. Consequently, academy organizers were forced to use a new library across town. The revived Xuehaitang seemed to be operating on borrowed time as well as space. As in the nineteenth century, eight co-directors were selected to administer the examinations.1 But the group chosen in 1920 ranged in age from those in their midfifties to at least one in his upper seventies. All eight had won juren degrees in provincial examinations under the old Qing regime; two had gone on to earn jinshi degrees in the national examinations. Nor were the examinees particularly young: several for whom we have information were in their mid-forties and the youngest in his mid-thirties. The revival of the Xuehaitang lasted only through the winter examination of 1921, before academy operations were discontinued, surely seen as an unnecessary financial burden by the revolutionary regime that had since displaced the Guangxi warlords.2 This quixotic revival of the Xuehaitang seems to confirm Wen-hsin Yeh’s observation that “[c]ultural traditionalism … made allies of provincial militarists and cultural conservatives who sought to perpetuate their claim to legitimacy through the manipulation of traditional symbols. The alliance, paradoxically, contributed to the demise of that tradition through its petrification.”3 As far as traditional symbols go, This article has benefited greatly from suggestions and comments from Joseph Dennis and the anonymous reviewers for Twentieth-Century China. Robert Culp and Christopher A. Reed devoted a great deal of time to improving this paper. 1 The eight co-directors were He Zaoxiang, Lin Henian, Pan Yingqi, Shen Zetang, Wang Zhaoquan , Wang Zhaoyong, Yao Yun, and Zhou Chaohuai. Wang Zhaoyong, Weishang laoren ziding nianpu (Chronological autobiography of Wang Zhaoyong) (n.p.: Wang Jingdetang, 1949), 41. 2 Huang Rongkang, Qiuqianzhai wenji (Collected prose from the Seeking-Contentment Studio) (n.p.:n.p., n.d.), 4:6a-7a; Wang, Weishang laoren ziding nianpu, 42, 44. 3 Wen-hsin Yeh, Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 29-30. April 2007 STEVEN B. MILES 34 however, the Xuehaitang did possess a certain amount of cachet in early Republican Guangzhou, at least among the older generation of the urban Cantonese elite. The early Republic was a time of intense activity among this older group of scholars who had emerged from the premier academies of Qing Guangzhou. Finding themselves out of power and loosing prestige, these scholars busied themselves creating spaces and publishing books that celebrated the scholarship and literature associated particularly with the Xuehaitang, but also more broadly with the Cantonese urban elite culture that had lost its institutional basis with the closure of Confucian academies and the subsequent demise of the Qing and creation of the Chinese Republic in 1912. Through such activities, the elite culture represented by the Xuehaitang took on more relevance for these scholars than it had in the Qing, becoming for some of these displaced scholars an integral part of their identity in a new age. Five of the eight co-directors selected in 1920 were registered residents of Panyu (番禺) County, which, during the Qing, shared jurisdiction of Guangzhou with Nanhai (南海) County.4 These five were members of the “Panyu gentry” described by Edward Rhoads in his study of Guangzhou in the decade leading up to the 1911 Revolution.5 But this group can be characterized in even more specific terms as a sojourning urban administrative and cultural elite. Most members of the Panyu gentry involved in academy education belonged to in...