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  • The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou
  • William T. Rowe
The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou. By Steven B. Miles (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) 450 pp. $49.95

In 1817, a Cantonese scholar named Liang Xuyong, in Beijing to sit for the imperial civil service examination, was chagrined to overhear other students from the ultrarefined Yangzi delta ridiculing the intellectual life of his native place. A century later, however, another Cantonese named Liang (Liang Qichao) could dismiss other provinces as having produced "no scholars of note," in sharp contrast to the glorious scholarly tradition of his own. The Sea of Learning is the story of how Canton determinedly transformed itself during the nineteenth century from an intellectual backwater into one of the Qing empire's most important centers of classical learning.

This book is deeply sinological, and not especially interdisciplinary. Long sections are devoted to detailed histories of fairly obscure texts, and of the lineages and careers of relatively minor scholars. It is a history of an institution, the Sea of Learning Academy (Xuehaitang), that every practicing historian of late imperial China has known to be important but that until now has lacked full-length study in English. The book is marvelously researched, drawing upon not only the full gamut of published sources but also, fruitfully, a manuscript diary of one key actor in the story. It is also impressively organized, and sophisticatedly and convincingly argued.

Miles sees the history of the Xuehaitang, above all, as a contest for control of local cultural production. Established in the 1820s by the eminent scholar-official Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), the academy became a renowned center for the sophisticated textual philology (kaozheng) of the ascendant "Han learning" school, for which Ruan and his hyperelite native place, the Lower Yangzi city of Yangzhou, were already nationally [End Page 495] famous. Like its imported scholarly curriculum, the new academy's constituency comprised mostly new arrivals, highly urbanized sojourners whose financial base lay in commerce, official service, and urban landlordism. The area's more long-established rural elite, whose wealth came from exploitation of the rich rice and fish-farming of the Canton delta, and whose scholarly tastes adhered to "Song learning" neo-Confucianism—emphasizing moral indoctrination, ritual correctness, and the pursuit of personal sagehood—had little use for the novel evidential research of the Xuehaitang. Ironically, however, because "Han learning" took as one of its central tasks the conscientious study of local history through archival investigation and fieldwork, the arrivistes of the urban academy, rather than the pedigreed local elite, eventually defined for contemporaries and posterity what being a "Cantonese scholar" meant. In effect, Ruan's followers expropriated Cantonese identity from those who had exemplified it for centuries.

Despite all of this detailed analysis, however, a remarkable amount seems to be missing from this book. Miles shows, for example, that Canton's "maritime" merchants were major patrons of the Xuehaitang and participants in its debates, but he has little to say about the specific trade in which they were engaged—with Southeast Asia? With the West? and how this experience shaped their intellectual outlook.

More importantly, the era of the 1820s and 1830s, that of the Xuehaitang's rise to prominence, was one of intense crisis for the Qing Empire, administratively, diplomatically, and economically. Most of the leading literati of this generation, including Ruan Yuan, were intensely conscious of the problems, offering compelling ideas about how to address them. Nonetheless, Miles offers virtually no hint of what those at Xuehaitang thought about the empire's increasingly desperate plight. Even in his chapter on "Crisis and Reconstruction, 1830–1870," covering the era in which the Canton delta lay at the epicenter of two foreign wars and a major domestic rebellion, Miles concentrates narrowly on how the academy staff reconstituted its local cultural leadership and rebuilt its premises. The book, in fact, reveals little of the intellectual content of the Xuehaitang's debates. Can it really be that the academy stood simply for "learning" without "thought"?

William T. Rowe
Johns Hopkins University

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