Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage: The Confucian Transformation of Popular Culture in Late Imperial Huizhou - Hardcover

Guo, Qitao

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804750327 ISBN 13: 9780804750325

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

This book analyzes Confucian ideology as culture and culture as history by exploring the interplay between popular ritual performance of the opera Mulian and gentrified mercantile lineages in late imperial Huizhou. Mulian, originally a Buddhist tale featuring the monk Mulian's journey through the underworld to save his mother, underwent a Confucian transformation in the sixteenth century against a backdrop of vast socioeconomic, intellectual, cultural, and religious changes. The author shows how local elites appropriated the performance of Mulian, turning it into a powerful medium for conveying orthodox values and religious precepts and for negotiating local social and gender issues altered by the rising money economy. The sociocultural approach of this historical study lifts Mulian out of the exorcistic-dramatic-ethnographic milieu to which it is usually consigned. This new approach enables the author to develop an alternative interpretation of Chinese popular culture and the Confucian tradition, which in turn sheds significant new light upon the social history of late imperial China.

About this title

About the Author

Qitao Guo is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the author of Exorcism and Money: The Symbolic World of the Five-Fury Spirits in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, 2003).

From the Back Cover

"With copious notes demonstrating extensive use of gazetteers, genealogies, local writings, and scripts, Guo's interdisciplinary excursion into the performing arts makes social history exciting to artists and historians, generalists and specialists alike"--History: Reviews of New Books
"Qitao Guo's most recent book is a fascinating study of the complex interplay between elite and popular and commercial and religious forces shaping the society of the Huizhou region in late imperial China..."--China Review International

From the Inside Flap

This book analyzes Confucian ideology as culture and culture as history by exploring the interplay between popular ritual performance of the opera Mulian and gentrified mercantile lineages in late imperial Huizhou. Mulian, originally a Buddhist tale featuring the monk Mulian's journey through the underworld to save his mother, underwent a Confucian transformation in the sixteenth century against a backdrop of vast socioeconomic, intellectual, cultural, and religious changes. The author shows how local elites appropriated the performance of Mulian, turning it into a powerful medium for conveying orthodox values and religious precepts and for negotiating local social and gender issues altered by the rising money economy. The sociocultural approach of this historical study lifts Mulian out of the exorcistic-dramatic-ethnographic milieu to which it is usually consigned. This new approach enables the author to develop an alternative interpretation of Chinese popular culture and the Confucian tradition, which in turn sheds significant new light upon the social history of late imperial China.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage

THE CONFUCIAN TRANSFORMATION OF POPULAR CULTURE IN LATE IMPERIAL HUIZHOUBy Qitao Guo

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5032-5

Contents

List of Map, Figures, and Tables...............................................................................ixList of Abbreviations..........................................................................................xiList of Reign Periods of the Ming and Qing Dynasties...........................................................xiiAcknowledgments................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction...................................................................................................1Part One. The Setting1. A Gentrified Kinship Society................................................................................92. Huizhou Merchants and Mercantile Lineage Culture............................................................50Part Two. The Script3. The Mulian Legacy...........................................................................................894. The Confucian Transformation of the Mulian Tradition........................................................103Part Three. The Performance5. An Integrated Tradition: Mulian Scripts and Female Chastity.................................................1516. A Shared Culture: Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage.......................................................178Conclusion.....................................................................................................211Appendix A: Extant Mulian Operatic Scripts.....................................................................221Appendix B: Huizhou Ancestral Halls (ca. 1500-1644)............................................................223Appendix C: Homophonic and Graphic Substitutions and Sardonic Characters in Mulian Scripts.....................225Notes..........................................................................................................227Glossary.......................................................................................................299Bibliography...................................................................................................317Index..........................................................................................................351

Chapter One

A Gentrified Kinship Society

In the spring of 1718, a Yangzhou poet named Cheng Ting set off for the first time, at age forty-seven, to fulfill a dream he had nurtured since he was "capped" at age twenty: to visit his ancestral home. His family had lived in Yangzhou, the center of China's salt business, since the time of his grandfather, but now he was sojourning to Censhan village in Shexian, the capital county of Huizhou prefecture, about two hundred miles south of Yangzhou. The main activity of the trip was to offer sacrifice to his ancestors, and thus an auspicious day to begin the journey was first divined. After eleven days traveling by boat, he arrived at Shexian on the fourteenth day of the second month. All members of the Cheng lineage, including all "elders and children," came out to greet him as he walked into Censhan. He was deeply moved by the scene. Nothing could have pleased him more than "holding sleeves and shaking hands" with his kinspeople, he wrote. In Censhan it appeared that he finally breathed some fresh air, which, nevertheless, somehow seemed very familiar to him. On the same day he noted in his travel diary, The Recorded Journey of a Spring Boat, certain "customs of Huizhou," which he certainly would have read about and heard of many times before. The language of the diary passage conveys a profound sense of pride and certainty, as if the social landscape of his ancestral prefecture was as exquisite as Huizhou's Mount Huang, one of the most popular tourist spots in China.

It is the custom in Huizhou that scholar-officials and prominent households settle in the countryside. Each village is occupied by a certain lineage whose members live together, with no men of other surnames dwelling there. In each village a temple is built for the earth god and an ancestral hall for the descent-line. Genealogies are written for lineage branches so that their origins and lineal order are not confused. Lords and servants are clearly differentiated, and everyone is distinctly dressed [according to social status]. This is what distinguishes Huizhou customs from any other prefecture's. Men uphold integrity and righteousness, and women cherish uprightness and chastity. Even in straitened circumstances, they never abandon their [husbands'] villages. There are maidens whose husbands travel far [to do business] immediately after the wedding, and, in some cases, never return. But still they judiciously care for their parents-in-law, uphold high aspirations and behave flawlessly. Throughout their lives they make no complaints. This is another unique custom of Shexian that is better than that of other prefectures.

The following day, the fifteenth day of the second month, Cheng climbed up Cen Hill to the location of the earth-god shrine and ancestral hall. There, after paying tribute to Buddha and offering sacrifices to the Cheng ancestors, he met all members of the Cheng lineage formally.

During the following half month, Cheng Ting's basic schedule was "to sweep the graves" of his great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather and to visit his relatives and friends in nearby villages. The ceremonial procedure of paying a formal visit to their ancestral halls was repeated. Some of those lineage ancestral temples, he noted admiringly, were "ravishingly magnificent." Cheng Ting himself had planned to purchase a grave site in this "pure" environment, and he surveyed some of the surrounding lands. But none was divined "propitious." This saddened him but did not lessen his enjoyment of his ancestral home. The Censhan Cheng lineage treated him frequently to good wine and delicacies, and one evening even called upon a troupe to perform two literary chuanqi operas for him, the romances called Kunlun and Hongxian.

Soon came the Qingming festival, the fifth day of the third month, when people went out to "sweep the tombs of the ancestors." Qingming was "most seriously regarded in Xin'an," Cheng Ting noted, referring to Huizhou by its ancient name. Three days later, on the evening of the eighth day, the Censhan Cheng lineage called upon actors and had Mulian Rescues His Mother staged within the village, obviously as part of the operatic rituals of the Qingming celebration. Cheng Ting did not mention any details regarding the performance other than that its "countrified and folksy" (lisu) manners were laughable. But the Mulian story, he quickly added, was "based on Sanskrit sutras" and was already "popular in Tang times." Clearly, he was not too disturbed by the "folksy" ways of the performance. After all, unlike the two literary operas enacted especially for him, Mulian was simply part of the Qingming ceremony of his kinspeople, which he happened to see and thought worth mentioning.

The folk performance of Mulian attended by Cheng Ting in Censhan was in fact a fundamental feature of traditional Chinese popular culture. Similar scenes took place throughout late imperial times, as part of Qingming festival celebrations and on other ritual occasions, not only in Huizhou but also in the countryside and market towns of other prefectures of southern Anhui, as well as throughout south-central China. The significance of Cheng Ting's account lies not in his mention of Mulian but in the way he documents the social setting of Censhan and the larger Huizhou region.

Censhan was a gentry community of mercantile lineage throughout late imperial times. In the Ming dynasty, the Censhan Chengs produced six metropolitan jinshi and six provincial juren degree holders; and from the late Ming through High Qing, they, along with ten or so other Shexian lineages, dominated the salt business in Yangzhou, one of the most lucrative trades in the realm. By the eighteenth century, the Censhan Chengs had grown into one of the most prosperous descent groups in the prefecture. This gentrified lineage, as implied in Cheng Ting's observation, showcased entire Huizhou, a prefecture that was thoroughly saturated with Confucian norms and customs. Indeed, the strict Confucianism of Huizhou had caught the attention of numerous other visiting literati as well, not to mention self-congratulatory native sons. For example, Yao Qiyuan, when appointed magistrate of Qimen in 1683, offered his first impressions of this Huizhou county in terms similar to Cheng Ting's. In "this land of propriety and righteousness," Yao noted, gentlemen were modest and had a sense of honor, whereas commoners were obedient and had a sense of sincerity-they all showed the "cultural heritage of the ancient sage-kings."

This Confucian land was nevertheless also home to the "countrified and folksy" Mulian performance. In fact, Huizhou was the very birthplace of what I will call here the new tradition of Mulian ritual opera performance. The Huizhou man of letters Zheng Zhizhen first scripted the performance into a three-volume text, Mulian Rescues His Mother: An Opera for Goodness. This script, though written by a well-educated literatus and professionally printed in 1582, was still quite "folksy" in its style, especially as enacted during its three-night performance. Qi Biaojia (1602-45), a metropolitan degree holder from Shaoxing, Zhejiang, despised both the script and its performance in Jiangnan: "An Opera for Goodness (Quanshan): It shows no awareness whatsoever of operatic melodies. Just like blind beggars, [the performers] do nothing but yell and sing from house to house. However, foolish people worship Buddha. Totaling 109 scenes, the performance lasts three days and three nights, stirring up the whole rural community." Qi Biaojia was one of leading dramatic critics in the art world of late-Ming China. His criticism of Mulian may be sound, if considered from a literary or artistic perspective, but his personal experience might have also fueled the rebuke. In Qi's diary on the thirtieth of the fifth month, 1639, he noted: "It has been extremely hot for a couple of days. Tonight the village of Ke again staged the Mulian opera, [it was so noisy that I] couldn't fall asleep the entire night."

Here we have a puzzle that is critically important for a proper understanding of traditional Chinese popular culture and its relation to gentry society: Why was the "noisy" performance of "folk" Mulian so popular in "a land of propriety and righteousness"? The key to answering this question lies not only in the Mulian tradition per se but in Huizhou local society as well.

Part 1 of this study focuses on the social history of late imperial Huizhou, setting the stage for analyzing the Mulian ritual opera. Although I treat the late imperial period from the 1500s to 1912 (or up to the 1930s) as a coherent whole, the two chapters of Part 1 concentrate on the sixteenth century to show how a series of socioeconomic changes transformed Huizhou local society. In Huizhou at least, virtually all major social forces and cultural patterns that remained powerful or relevant up through the early decades of the twentieth century took full shape over the course of the sixteenth century. Part 1 is a discrete essay on Huizhou social history for its own sake, though often reconstructed in light of illustrating the social dimensions of Mulian performance. First, Chapter 1 describes how, especially in the eyes of local elite, the prefecture was a model of Confucian gentry society. The thrust of the chapter lies in examining the lineage organization, the institutional foundation for gentry rule that partly explains the prevalence of Confucian values in local life. Chapter 2 explores other aspects of Huizhou society, highlighting the rise and gentrification of Huizhou merchants and two of their cultural products, namely, the new mercantile code and the cult of female chastity, while briefly considering operatic and religious traditions to prepare for subsequent investigations of Mulian ritual opera in Parts 2 and 3. It demonstrates how seemingly non-Confucian sociocultural developments could serve local gentry lineages and enhance Confucian moral teachings. In particular, the gentrification of merchants was the surest manifestation of the prevalence of Confucian ideology in kinship communities and is the key to understanding Huizhou mercantile lineage culture. But what is particularly relevant to the Mulian performance is how merchant gentrification contributed to the Confucian remolding of local popular culture. Mulian is used in this study to shed new light on Huizhou mercantile lineage culture, just as the social fabric of the local kinship community is used to make full sense of the ritual opera tradition.

The "Southeastern Zou-Lu"

In late imperial China, Huizhou prefecture comprised the six counties of Shexian, Xiuning, Jixi, Yixian, Qimen, and Wuyuan. The prefecture, deep in southern Anhui, lay toward the southwestern end of Jiangnan, the great economic and cultural heartland of the realm. Unlike other regions in Jiangnan that were largely flat, the ecology of Huizhou and its surrounding areas, including Ningguo and Guangde in the north, Chizhou in the northwest, and Raozhou in northeastern Jiangxi in the south, was dominated by a series of high, densely forested mountains. At least half of Huizhou's six counties were named after local peaks, and the very name of the prefecture, it is believed, had been taken from Peak Hui in Jixi. Rising highest was Mount Huang (1,841 meters), animating literati empirewide to compose poems and travel accounts about its stunning beauty. Mythmakers even link the mountain to the ancient sage-king, the Yellow Emperor. Other mountains were invested with particular religious significance, including Mount Jiuhua (lying just outside Huizhou) and Mount Qiyun. Home to great Buddhist monasteries or Daoist temples, they conveyed an aura of mystery, inspiring legends about Heaven and Hell, gods and ghosts. The mountainous scenery of course enlightened local literati as well. A scene in Zheng Zhizhen's Mulian Rescues His Mother titled "Black Pine Forest," for instance, was set in High Crimson Peak in western Qimen, the home county of the playwright. Encircling the mountains were meandering watercourses, including the Xin'an and Chang rivers. The waterways and mountain ranges produced moving seas of clouds, creating an atmosphere of natural charm and mystery (Figure 1.1). With such a scenic setting, Huizhou came to be known as a veritable Peach Blossom Spring (taoyuan), the legendary paradise where "gentlemen love to live and settle."

The mountains also shielded Huizhou during times of war, but it was not isolated. A few transportation arteries moved local residents to the outside world and outside people to the hilly region. It could be reached by a combination of water and land routes from the regions of Hangzhou, Yanzhou, Raozhou, Chizhou, Ningguo, and Jiangning, noted the geographer Gu Zuyu (1624-80). So did Huizhou merchant Huang Bian, in an illustrated route book he published in 1570. Reachable but secure, scenic Huizhou steadily attracted immigrants from the Jin dynasty (265-420) onward. The Huang Chao rebellion (875-84) is often highlighted in local genealogies as the period when a substantial number of aristocratic clans migrated to Xin'an from a devastated northern and central China. They settled there and, partly out of the pride in their family pedigree and partly due to the need to band together to fight natural disaster or beasts in the mountainous region, they kept their kinship settlement intact throughout the following centuries. In Ming-Qing times Huizhou also became the destination of landless peasants crowded out of coastal areas in eastern Jiangnan, even though the hilly prefecture itself had limited arable land. In 1600, Huizhou had a population of about 1.2 million; and by 1820, the population had surpassed 2 million. The security, combined with Huizhou's natural beauty and the social eminence of its great families, bred in its residents a profound love for their homeland.

The same ecological features, however, could also spark a strong desire among local residents to leave home and eke out a living in other places. Philip Kuhn, in his celebrated Soulstealers, sketches an abject picture of hilly Huizhou, which ironically became the home base of the most vigorous mercantile group of late imperial China. Only a few small plains and river deltas dotted the rugged region, leaving about one-tenth of its land arable. To make things worse, the land-man ratio decreased steadily with continual increases in population. The average amount of land, in mu (about 0.0667 hectare), that each taxable man (ding) owned in 1391 was 4.15; in 1600 it had decreased to 2.2; in 1850, to a mere 1.5. This tight land-man ratio contrasted sharply with the empirewide average, which ranged from 6.5 to 20.6 mu in the Ming dynasty. Huizhou's land scarcity in part explains why, to quote a local proverb, "every boy upon the age of sixteen needs to go out to do business." For Xin'an men, indeed, leaving home to enter a trade was a typical economic behavior, which earned them the title Huishang ("Huizhou merchants"). From about 1500 to 1850, the merchants of Huizhou dominated the highly developed commercial scene in southern and central China. As a popular saying put it: "No market town can emerge without [the presence of merchants from] Huizhou," especially in Jiangnan and the Middle Yangzi Valley.

For those who stayed home, the mountains became the source of their livelihoods, in some cases even fortunes. Tea, lacquer, lumber, and bamboo products, all mountain-related in one way or another, became major commodities for Huizhou merchants. Some locals were masters of handicraft, especially good at manufacturing the "four treasures of the study" (wenfang sibao), essential for Confucian literati life. Chengxintang paper, Wang Boxuan brushes, Li Tinggui ink, and Jiukeng inkstones of Huizhou were famed throughout the realm in pre-Qing times.

Also famous was Huizhou-style woodblock printing. Of special interest is its organization, as certain consanguineous groups dominated the printing industry. Most notable among these was the Huang lineage of Qiu village in Shexian. From 1436 to 1832 the Qiu Huangs produced about four hundred block cutters. Their prints covered a variety of subjects, often with well-cut illustrations. On the top of their list were the four major categories of traditional Chinese writing: classics, history, philosophical works, and belles lettres (for example, Rites of the Zhou and Zhu Xi's Family Rituals, Sima Qian's Records of a Historian, the philosophical master Xun Kuang's Xunzi, and Songs of Chu [Chuci]). Other texts printed by the Qiu Huangs, and by other lineage-based printers as well, included county gazetteers, Buddhist and Daoist scriptures, manuals of trade routes, and family genealogies. They also printed moral handbooks that simplified or popularized Confucian ethical teachings, such as Female Exemplars (Guifan), Records of Model Women (Nfan bian), and Records of Male Duty and Female Fidelity (Yilie ji). Another major category of publication was vernacular literature, including Zheng Zhizhen's Mulian opera script and the semierotic Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei), one of four masterworks of the late-Ming novel. This list of publications, far from exhaustive, reflects the richness and complexity of local cultural life. It might also indicate the savvy business strategy and cultural tastes of Huizhou merchants, because these books were printed primarily for export to other places.

The single most notable heritage of Huizhou culture was its unique connection to Song-dynasty neo-Confucianism, which became the state orthodoxy during the Ming and Qing. Xin'an was the ancestral place of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), the great synthesizer of neo-Confucian philosophy and morality. Members of the Cheng lineage of Huangdun in Shexian even claimed themselves to be descended from Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, important forerunners of Zhu Xi. In Shexian and Xiuning counties, large numbers of ancestral halls were constructed in memory of the two Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi. Known as "the native place of Cheng-Zhu" (ChengZhu quili), Huizhou came to be called "Southeastern Zou-Lu," with ZouLu referring to the native places of Mencius (Zou) and Confucius (Lu). These labels, legitimate or apocryphal, conveyed enormous symbolic meaning, for the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi were widely viewed as the legitimate transmitters of the Way established by Confucius and Mencius.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0804750327
• ISBN 13: 9780804750325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384