Conceptualizing Court Literature with New Methodologies

Jack W. Chen (University of Virginia)

In this paper, I return to an argument that I ventured at the end of a chapter in my first book, a study of the Tang emperor Taizong. There, I wrote: “That is, despite the very real function of the court in the governance of the empire, it is an institution whose origins may be located in the social imaginary, in the collective imagination of the officials who quite literally may be said to compose the court” (The Poetics of Sovereignty, 266). At the time, this statement seemed controversial to me, an intuition that would surely be criticized by historians who knew better, and I hedged my bets, thinking that surely the court was a real historical space, the site of audiences and ceremonies, and that this was what medieval scholars meant when they wrote about court culture. However, following the publication of monographs by Pablo Blitstein and Luke Habberstad, it seems to me that the question of what a court remains unsettled, and that the imagination of the court is perhaps the more interesting and vital issue. This essay will consider the court as an imaginary space, one composed by the discursive practices of those who attended upon the emperor. I will focus on a set of matching poems about chess to illustrate how social and political space is produced and encoded through the exchange and circulation of literary texts.

Tian Yuan Tan (University of Oxford)

By focusing on the textual production of late imperial Chinese court theatre, this paper has two basic aims: first, to examine the rich textual forms of what are collectively referred to as ‘court drama’, and second, to consider these performance texts in the context of Chinese literary traditions. In modern scholarship a wide swathe of texts associated with court theatrical performance in late imperial China are classified under the umbrella term ‘court drama’. This corpus comprises a broad spectrum of dramatic texts of different shapes, forms, functions, and sizes, ranging from single-act short plays of only one to two pages in hand-copied manuscripts to grand theatre of 240 acts in lavishly produced five-coloured printed editions. What characteristics, styles, or occasions marked these texts as ‘court’ drama, and more broadly, as a part of Chinese court literature? Which earlier works or literary traditions came to the minds of the writers and the readers in framing the production and reception of these court drama texts? In this paper I trace these literary worlds and connections through the clues provided in the paratexts (prefaces, colophons, etc.) accompanying the production of court drama, as well as intratexts and intertexts within and beyond the immediate corpus, focusing on one Qing dynasty court play.

Huijun Mai (UCLA)

This paper re-examines the construction of Genyue (Northeast Marchmount, an imperial park centered around a manmade mountain) at Emperor Huizong’s court between 1117 and 1122, during the twilight years of the Northern Song Dynasty. The largest architectural and engineering initiative of its times, Genyue was often viewed as an imperial pleasure park, a materialization of Huizong’s artistic predilections and a symbol of the court’s splendor (which historians held accountable for its subsequent demise). Such prevailing assertions failed to account for Genyue’s central place in the entanglement of space, religions, and domestic and inter-state politics at Huizong’s court. In this paper, I study a set of literary texts produced at Huizong’s court at the time of Genyue’s completion; I further illuminate these literary compositions by examining another set of historical sources that documented a series of events leading up to the construction of Genyue and by attending to the gaps and contradictions between these sources. I argue for Genyue’s place as an ideological landscape and a religious-political theatre. As Huizong’s religious-political enterprise, Genyue materialized the emperor’s ambition to insert himself into Daoist pantheon and, with the garnered religious efficacy, to reassert his court’s dominance over its powerful neighbors on the northern and northeastern frontiers. In reassessing how spatial configurations participated in advancing religious and political ambitions, this paper calls attention to the agency of literary texts in aiding such enterprises and, methodologically, the usefulness of literary texts in uncovering hidden facets that were often concealed in the moralized historical assessments.

顏子楠（北京師範大學）

本文討論清代乾隆時期編修的兩部最具代表性的地方志《西湖志纂》與《欽定盤山志》中收錄乾隆皇帝御制詩和臣子恭和詩的狀況。官修《欽定盤山志》創立了乾隆朝官修地方志的標准，即以數卷御制詩作為地方志的“卷首”，以此來標榜乾隆的御制詩。私修《西湖志纂》作為進呈御覽的逢迎之作，在標榜皇帝的同時，也展現了沈德潛借皇帝自重的私心。這兩部地方志的編撰體例不同，但其性質相同，均以乾隆皇帝作為首要讀者，進一步揭示了乾隆時期宮廷文學的特點。

Liana Chen (George Washington University)

Existing Qing-dynasty written and visual accounts—records of theatre-going experiences by court officials and foreign guests, and court-commissioned birthday scrolls and battle prints, to name a few—collectively paint a picture of the grandeur and magnificence of the Qing court theatre as perceived by its sponsors and participants. Thanks to the publications of the Shengping shu archives in the past few decades, current scholarship has established theatrical performances as an organic component of the court ritual and life-cycle events, and Qing emperors as informed and astute patrons of performing arts, making theatre work for their personal and political agendas. However, the same set of archival materials, when examined closely, also tells a story of how failures on and offstage were anticipated, accommodated, mitigated, or quite unexpectedly, turned into a source of inspiration for the managers and actors of the court theatre.
This paper proposes to examine the operation of the Qing court theatre and its theatrical productions through the lens of failure. It postulates that such an angle could be a productive one, as it provides us with a framework to read and interpret court-commissioned ceremonial plays within the context of the palace troupe’s operation. The first part of my analysis will focus on the court’s changing policies in terms of actor recruitment, staffing and training, and the second part of the paper examines failure as a plot device in court-commissioned theatrical productions for ceremonial occasions. Through this, we will also consider to what extent the late-Qing court’s active patronage played in the development and consumption of xiqu may have been resulted from the need to accommodate its own exigencies.

Nicholas Morrow Williams (Arizona State University)

The regulated fu (lü fu 律賦) of the Tang at first glance appears remote from its antecedent, the grand fu poetry of the Han. In particular, Tang poets generally seem to have lost interest in imitating the elaborate depictions of imperial capitals and palaces. But even as the scale of fu poetry narrowed, its new guise still retained symbolic and structural connections to the origins of the form. To begin with, the regulated fu continues to employ certain extrametrical phrases to arrange the structure of the piece, dividing a text into distinct paragraphs that focus on distinct topics. In regard to content, it is worth noting the enduring popularity of historical rulers as the subjects of these later fu poems, not least Emperor Wu of Han in mourning for his Lady Li. And beyond these more tangible echoes of the Han fu, the regulated fu also delights in symbolically-abbreviated representations of more grandiose scenes, whether mythological, celestial, or imperial. The paper concludes by illustrating the argument with late Tang poet Xue Feng’s 薛逢, “Tianshang zhong baiyu fu” 天上種白榆賦, which finds in the white elm tree a tantalizing recollection of celestial landscapes above.

Ming Tak Ted Hui (University of Oxford)

The establishment of the Kuizhang Academy 奎章閣 by Emperor Wenzong of Yuan 元文宗 (1304-1332) in 1329 was often considered as a high point of court culture in the early 14th century. As renowned literati like Yu Ji 虞集 (1272-1348), Jie Xisi 揭傒斯 (1274-1344) and Ma Zuchang 馬祖常 (1279-1338) were appointed to serve as the academicians, the court provides a venue for scholars from a diverse background to exchange and comment on the poetry of one another. Using the literary productions associated with the Academy as a case to assess the meaning and mechanism of court literature, this paper will first investigate the aesthetic pursuits of these academicians through looking at their poetic exchanges. It will then examine how these poets quickly gained prominence through the commentaries made by their contemporaries, and how these commentaries were circulated in a broader literati network. This paper argues that the diverse styles of each individual academician were greatly simplified in the literary criticisms of the time to create an illusion of the existence of a unified style in court, and this, in turn, facilitated the emergence of court poetry in the Yuan dynasty.

Yuanyuan Su (University of Oxford)

As one of the ethnic minorities in China, the Manchus’ voices have been disempowered and neglected since the collapse of the Qing empire in 1912. The impact of political change leads to a narrow view on Manchu literature among Chinese scholarship. Specifically, on the pre-modern literary firmament, contemporary scholars pay more attention to Chinese literati and their works, rather than Manchu literati—the ruling class of the Qing empire. Among the limited research on Manchu literati, the voices of imperial clansmen are rare and small.
To fill the significant lacuna, this paper is a case study of an imperial clansman Aisin Gioro Yigeng 愛新覺羅奕賡, demonstrating the different roles Yigeng played across multiple genres and his individual voices between the lines. He switches multiple roles—imperial clansman, literati, commentator, imperial bodyguard, and zidishu writer—within both the multiple literary genres and the declining mid-Qing bannermen group. Taking all his existing works, namely eleven under his real name and twenty zidishu (youth tales) under a pseudonym, a storytelling genre prevalent among Manchu bannermen from around 1735 to 1912, it is a first thorough attempt to explore these hitherto understudied texts and listen attentively to his own voices. His pride and guilt hidden behind the multiple roles are specifically reflected in his zidishu, which differentiate his individual voices from other zidishu writers, but may also provide us with some new possibilities and reconsiderations on the definition of “court literature.”