Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography

Introduction

1 Introduction If you love ancient inscriptions, then gather them, judge them, contemplate them, and transmit them. Seek ancient calligraphy; seek examples of the concerns of the ancients; seek forms of lost ancient characters. —Chen Jieqi, 1875 letter to Wang Yirong The great eighteenth-century novel A Dream of Red Mansions begins with a curious episode. A monk discovers a stone dropped from heaven and, instead of feeling satisfied with its unadorned beauty, wants to “engrave some characters” on it so “people can see at a glance that you’re something special.”1 This preference animated many forms of Chinese connoisseurship, including the desire to possess ancient objects . Indeed, in the discourse of the eighteenth century, artifacts without texts hardly merited collecting. A century or so later, another fantastic, perhaps apocryphal, discovery seemed to affirm this preference. In 1899, the paleographer Wang Yirong (1845–1900) fell ill with malaria in Beijing. An expert in jinshi (the study of bronze vessels and stone steles; the word rhymes with “insure”), Wang purchased some medication from a nearby pharmacy . The packet contained a variety of natural and exotic ingredients, including, most astonishingly, shards of bone engraved with unusual characters.2 As was later determined, these were pieces of ancient divination implements dating to the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–1100 BC). Now called oracle bones in English, they contain some of the earliest examples of written Chinese, and their chance—yet momentous—discovery exhilarated specialists in history and paleography worldwide.3 2 Introduction Both stories are animated by appreciation for ancient texts and objects, but in fact the tale of the heavenly stone and the discovery of the oracle bones took place in different conceptual worlds. During the eighteenth century, the prevailing hermeneutics of classical texts emphasized kaozheng (the school of textual criticism or philology), which privileged etymology and phonology while reading bronze and stele inscriptions . Late-Qing scholars, in contrast, embraced the concept of artifact studies, an approach suggested by natural science that persuaded them to research a far more diverse set of sources, including materials without inscriptions. Their studies of antiquity also reflected the desire to solve the unique political and social problems of the day. In combination , these factors weakened the importance of kaozheng and encouraged antiquarians to apply their insights to other fields, including history, that were believed to have great practical relevance at the turn of the century. The group of men who led this transformation included several members of Wang Yirong’s social circle, such as Wu Dacheng (1835– 1902), a renowned specialist in ancient calligraphy, and the political reformer and educator Sun Yirang (1848–1908). In turn, their antiquarian activities influenced two of the most famous scholars of the early twentieth century: the philosopher and literary critic Wang Guowei (1877–1927), and his mentor Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940), an art dealer and publisher as well as expert on antiquities. Wang and Luo showed historians how to research oracle bones and bronzes, demonstrating how they could supplement literary sources in describing China’s ancient politics and society.They used the methods of traditional Chinese antiquarianism or jinshi as the starting point for a new form of research that came to dominate the modern historiography of ancient China. Why Antiquarianism? Antiquarianism is a way to understand the past through the systematic investigation of material artifacts and one-of-a-kind inscriptions. For Chinese scholars, this form of research is almost as ancient as the source materials themselves. For millennia, rulers and elites preserved important documents by recording them on durable surfaces like stone steles. Often colossal in size, these plinths were embellished with ornate carvings and affixed to bases in the shape of turtles or other animals that symbolized longevity. Chinese rulers also forged important texts onto the interiors of bronze vessels, like ding (tripods), whose outside Introduction 3 surfaces were decorated with taotie (mythical beast designs) or shaped in the form of fantastic creatures. By the Warring States period (476– 221 BC), these texts were collectively referred to as “bronze and stone” inscriptions, or jinshi. The philosopher Mozi (470–c. 391 BC) possibly made the earliest use of the phrase when he spoke of the words of the philosophers “written on bamboo and silk, and engraved on bronze and stone”; another early reference is found on a Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC) stele that refers to political documents copied onto bronze and stone for preservation.4...