Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

Chapter One. Materiality and Terminology

17 c h a p t e r on e Materiality and Terminology Here is a letter, lady; The paper as the body of my friend, And every word in it a gaping wound Issuing life-blood. —w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e , Merchant of Venice The materiality of letters is more pronounced than that of many other genres. Not only do letters depend on a specific, highly conventional, and immediately recognizable tangible form—usually a piece of writing in a sealed envelope; they also need to undergo the often cumbersome procedure of transmission from writer to addressee. All these material facets of epistolary culture shape the composition and reception of a letter’s message and thus need to be taken into consideration in order to understand a letter as fully as possible. The same is true for the complex epistolary terminology, since the materiality of letters often determined what they were called in ancient China. Last but not least, reflections on materiality and terminology are necessary for a preliminary genre definition and delineation of the corpus of personal letters in early medieval China. the spread of paper Not only do we today explore the Chinese epistolary tradition in a day and age of media change, but early medieval China experienced its own media change as well: the gradual replacement of the earlier writing supports of bamboo, wood, and silk by the recent Chinese invention, paper. This means that letters from this period differ considerably in their material form, depending on when they were written and probably also on the region in which they originated and their function. Materials and Concepts of Letter Writing 18 While the oldest archaeological finds of writings on bamboo, wood, and silk date from the fifth century bce, the history of these writing supports is no doubt much longer.1 They were fine and timetested materials, each produced with a particular finishing technology and coming with their own set of advantages and drawbacks. Bamboo and wood were light and inexpensive and, after being processed and finished, easy to write on with brush and ink, the most common writing implements since at least the Shang dynasty (16th– 11th centuries bce).2 Writing done on the hard and smooth surfaces of finished bamboo and wood could easily be scraped off with a so-called writing knife (shudao), allowing for the correction of mistakes or the reuse of the writing support.3 Formats differed, but the long and narrow bamboo slips were usually just wide enough for one vertical line of text, written on one side of a finished bamboo slip from top to bottom.4 Bamboo slips bound together with cords accommodated longer texts; this method, however, seems not to have been employed in the case of personal letters—at least no evidence of such a practice has so far been discovered. A material that seems to have been much more common than bamboo in personal correspondence is wood. Wooden tablets were typically wider than bamboo slips, resembling thin rectangular boards, and offered two writing surfaces, the front and back sides of the board, so that they could carry longer texts and even drawings or diagrams. It would appear that this made them more convenient than bamboo slips for the purposes of personal correspondence, but again, we need to be aware that the vagaries of archaeological discovery do not necessarily yield a representative impression of cultural practices during a time period so far removed. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the two earliest extant personal Chinese letters, dating from around 224 bce and found in a tomb at Shuihudi, Hubei, were written on wooden tablets.5 They are family letters, written by two Qin conscripts , obviously brothers on a military campaign in the south, to a relative, probably another brother who was still at home (fig. 1.1). The letters are no literary masterpieces, but they do convey—apart from urgent requests for money and clothes—the strong affection of the writers for their relatives and possibly also friends and neighbors . Even if the letters do not speak of any imminent danger for the writers, they exude the air of vulnerability that is so characteristic of war letters. After all, messages written in a time of war are especially unreliable signs of life, since there is a higher probability that Figure 1.1...