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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.2 (2006) 336-337


Reviewed by
Yamin Xu
Le Moyne College
Street Criers: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars. By Hanchao Lu (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005) 269 pp. $45.00

Lu devotes this study to Chinese beggars to move away from "the powerful, the well-known, or the privileged" and bring "the obscure and disadvantaged to record" (xi). This is not an easy task. Due to the murky conditions of beggars and vague written records about them, Lu has to abandon the regional approach that has become familiar to many China scholars since Skinner published his landmark studies on China's macroregions in the late 1970s. 1 Instead, Lu can only follow the footsteps of those mendicant groups in written records and enter whatever historical periods these records indicate. He encounters beggars not only in big urban centers like Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin but also in cities and towns in peripheral Inner Mongolia, Manchurian frontier, Tibetan Plateau, and northwest and southwest regions. Not enough archival materials are available to warrant a book-length study based on a micro- or anthropological investigation of particular groups of floating beggars living in one region during a specific historical period.

To resolve this dilemma, Lu skillfully turns to the "cultural homogeneity" of Chinese beggars across the country, focusing his study on their "shared characteristics" (2). This cultural approach enables him to exploit a rich variety of materials from different historical periods. In this regard, Lu shows the influence of Chinese scholars who are particularly good at writing "a total history," such as Cen Dali and Qu Yanbin, each of whom wrote A History of Chinese Beggars. 2 Indeed, while treating and reconstructing Chinese beggars as ahistorical social groups, or as an "ideal type" of social and cultural existence to be handled by the public [End Page 336] and the state in almost every recorded historical period (except in the Mao years when beggars' records were suppressed), Lu wisely utilizes such source materials as the political-economics writings of Guan Zong, Sima Qian's Shiji, and other official histories; ancient legends, Ming fictions, the biji (anecdotes) of Qing scholars; and modern popular stories revealing the "secrecies of jianghu (the unofficial and unorthodox world); and accounts of foreign travelers and observers, local gazetteers, social surveys, and contemporary wenshi ziliao (personally experienced cultural and historical accounts). Lu thus creates a cultural encyclopedia about Chinese beggars.

Lu engages in extensive discussions on the relationship between beggars and disasters, famines, and poverty (Chapter 1), public sympathy and antipathy toward beggars (Chapter 2), the state's management and control of beggars and other vagabonds (Chapter 4), operations and internal rules of beggars' own "guilds" (chapters 4–5), and wisdom and various strategies of mendicancy (chapters 6–7). Another important contribution that he makes (Chapter 3 and Chapter 8) is to show Western readers the strong cultural and romantic connections established in Chinese history between the "subaltern" and mainstream worlds. In terms of social mobility, mendicancy in China was (and is) not necessarily a permanent status mark for any particular individual. In fact, both Chinese popular and elite cultures place great value on stories about those who overcame their earlier misfortunes to become heroic figures. For example, Zhu Yuanzhang, a beggar who later founded the Ming dynasty, was revered by many mendicant guilds as their "forefather." Lu also reminds his readers that both Confucius and Chairman Mao had endured embarrassed moments as wanderers.

Footnotes

1. G. William Skinner, "Introduction: Urban Development in Imperial China," in idem (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977), 3–31; idem, "Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China," in ibid., 211–249; idem, "Cities and the Hierarchy of Local System," in ibid., 275–351.

2. Cen Dali, Zhongguo qigai shi (A History of Chinese Beggars) (Taibei, 1992); Qu Yanbin, Zhongguo qigai shi (A History of Chinese Beggars) (Shanghai, 1990).

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