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12 Qian Qianyi’s Reflections on Yellow Mountain Of Trivial Things Writing the Self in Late-Ming Literary Culture 1 The world in which the Jiangnan man-of-letters found himself during the course of the final century of Ming rule was a fast-paced and in many ways a rather troubling place. While the population had more than doubled, and the number of degree holders had increased fivefold since the beginning of the dynasty nearly three centuries earlier, the size of the public service, the traditional destination for an educated male, had remained relatively static.1 Success in the imperial examinations could no longer guarantee a candidate a government position, while the expanding salt and textile industries in particular produced a new generation of wealthy mercantile families, further challenging the boundaries of élite society. Factionalism, corruption and an expansion of eunuch power characterized a court unable to quell the increasing incidence of banditry and violence reported throughout the empire, as state infrastructure continued to decline, with the Chongzhen 崇 禎 Emperor (Sizong 思宗; r. 1628–44) giving approval for the closure of up to one-third of the stations in the already weakened imperial courier system beginning in 1629.2 Now famine and plague not only threatened further destabilization of the social and economic order, but in symbolic terms, also represented the final stages in the erosion of the Ming ruling house’s moral claims to imperial authority. The immense social impact of such changes on the late-Ming world has proven to be a fruitful source of some particularly fascinating scholarship in recent years.3 The virtually hereditary claim to leadership and élite status that the literati had enjoyed for centuries was being challenged, perhaps for the first time in history, as educated scholars increasingly found themselves Of Trivial Things 13 marginalized by the political system. At the same time, the perception that surplus capital was shifting the balance of economic power out of élite hands and into those of the merchant class was for many deeply unsettling. As Craig Clunas has shown, the quest of the educated literatus to find new avenues of self-definition saw the enjoyment of fashionable items such as antiques shift “from being a personal predilection, one of a number of potential types of privileged activity, to being an essential form of consumption which was central to the maintenance of élite status.”4 For those living through the early decades of the seventeenth century this shift had happened at an almost frightening pace. The historian Shen Defu 沈德符 (zi Huchen 虎臣, hao Jingbo 景伯; 1578–1642) found remarkable the changes that had taken place in the Hangzhou antique markets over his lifetime: When I was a child I did not think of [cups] as valuable treasures. A pair of Chenghua 成化 [1465–87] wine cups now fetches 100 ounces, and a Xuande 宣德 [1426–35] incense burner almost as much. It is all due to the leaders of fashion from Suzhou making these things the subject of their ‘elegant discussions’, which the imperial relatives and big merchants blindly and frivolously imitate, that the flood of rising prices has reached this point.5 As status competition increasingly played itself out around the complicated arenas of fashion and taste, ever more commodities became subject to the whims of the unpredictable marketplace, while consumptive practices that had previously been the preserve of the élite were coming within the reach of a wider range of the population than in any previous period in the empire’s history. A decade after government sumptuary restrictions began to be relaxed around the 1560s, Chen Yao 陳堯 (zi Jingfu 敬甫, hao Wugang 梧岡; js. 1536?) lamented, “Take simple clothes to a country fair, and not even country people will buy them.”6 The claim made in the gazetteer of Tongcheng 桐城 county, Anhui, that “by the Chongzhen period, extravagance became excessive and distinctions were confused,”7 echoed Zhang Tao’s 張濤 (zi Zhenhai 振海, hao Shanshi 山是; b. 1560?) now famous lament of 1609, that “[t]he lord of silver rules heaven and the god of copper cash reigns over the earth.”8 Such, at least, is how society is portrayed in the myriad complaints about the excesses of rampant commercial expansion we find in the works of lateMing literati. Did these complaints reflect a genuine unease about the reality of the evolving world? Jonathan Hay is one critic who, addressing Clunas’ study, cautions against taking “too much at face value” the rhetoric of the literati, and underestimating “the degree to which the educated gentry élite...

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