Cynthia Brokaw<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The proliferation of \u201cencyclopedias\u201d (leishu<\/em> \u985e\u66f8, literally \n\u201ccategory books\u201d) purporting to provide readers with the basic knowledge\n needed for the conduct of daily life was one of the major trends of the\n early-modern publishing boom of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century \nChina. Dubbed \u201cdaily-use encyclopedias\u201d (riyong leishu<\/em> \u65e5\u7528\u985e\u66f8) by\n modern scholars to distinguish them from the scholarly and imperially \nsponsored encyclopedias that had formed part of the literary tradition \nsince the second century BCE, these works offered \u2014 or claimed to offer \u2014\n practical information essential to everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before the late Ming (1368-1644), most encyclopedias collected and \ncategorized information on the Confucian Classics, the classical \nliterary tradition, institutions of the imperial state, or the natural \nworld; they were published, sometimes at imperial command, for an elite,\n often an official, readership. The first known encyclopedia intended \nfor daily use, the Expansive Record of the Forest of Literati<\/em> (Shilin guangji<\/em> \u4e8b\u6797\u5ee3\u8a18),<\/em>\n was produced in the late thirteenth century. But this work and others \nproduced through the fourteenth century still emphasized classical \nlearning. In both their contents and formats, they were, as Cheng-hua \nWang explains in her essay, designed for the \u201cdaily use\u201d of aspiring \nofficials among the gentry elite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In contrast, the \u201ccomprehensive compendium of myriad treasures\u201d (wanbao quanshu<\/em> \u842c\u5bf6\u5168\u66f8) \u2014 also referred to as works that \u201cfree one from the need to ask the advice of others\u201d (buqiuren<\/em>\n \u4e0d\u6c42\u4eba) \u2014 of the late Ming and Qing (1644-1911) were explicitly produced \nfor \u201call under heaven.\u201d They included (in addition to some basic \ninformation on Confucianism and imperial officialdom) purportedly useful\n and up-to-date instructions on how to write letters and contracts, how \nto cure illnesses in both animals and people, how to conduct oneself in a\n brothel, how to play chess and other games, how to play the zither, how\n to paint and perfect one\u2019s calligraphy, how to cast charms, etc. In \nsum, they claimed to offer the literate everyman both guidance in the \npractices of everyday life and access to elite knowledge (e.g., how to \npaint and play the zither) that would allow them to \u201cact like a shi<\/em>\u201d\n \u58eb \u2014 that is, a cultivated man of high social status \u2014 even though they \nhad not been born into the elite. In valorizing ordinary, mundane \nknowledge and practical technologies they were promoting a kind of \nknowledge marginal \u2014 if not anathema \u2014 to the elite scholarly class \ndedicated to the study and implementation of the constant and universal \nprinciples of Confucian teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In sum, the wanbao quanshu<\/em> and buqiuren<\/em> \u2014 these two\n phrases, which often appear in the titles of the works, came to be used\n to refer to the genre of daily-use encyclopedias \u2014 are emblematic of a \nnew kind of commercial publication that emerged in force in the early \nmodern period and remained popular through the remainder of the imperial\n era and Republican period: works that promote \u2014 in a way that elite \nworks of the past did not \u2014 the importance of everyday knowledge and \nthat are, in their language, formats, and subject matter, clearly \ntargeting non-elite readers. They represent, too, an effort to help \nthese readers manage the flood of print the publishing boom produced — \n\u201cthe multitude of books that are as vast as the ocean,\u201d1<\/sup> as one editor put it \u2014 by collecting and condensing useful information in one text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These works represent just one of several types of texts that \nappeared in the late Ming to meet the social and cultural needs of a \nburgeoning commoner2<\/sup>\n and largely urban readership. The monetization of the economy, the \nresulting commercial growth and greater importance of the merchant \nclass, and the expansion of cities and market towns created the economic\n and social conditions for a growth in the reading public: more people \nbelow the very top scholar-official and wealthy merchant elite had the \nmeans to purchase luxuries like books. And city life stimulated demand \nfor news, information, and entertainment, as well as for guidance on how\n to appear a knowledgeable and sophisticated urbanite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Intellectual and literary trends also both supported the increase in \nliteracy that would have given newly prosperous potential book \npurchasers the skills necessary to read and, at the same time, aroused \nelite interest in popular knowledge. The movement inspired by Wang \nYangming\u2019s \u738b\u967d\u660e (1472-1529) teachings that \u201canyone could become a sage\u201d, \neven \u201cignorant men and women\u201d, produced reading primers, vernacular \ncommentaries on the Confucian Classics, morality books, and other works \nof popular literacy and moral education. While followers of Wang \nYangming urged the education of commoners through what we might call a \ntop-down approach to the dissemination of knowledge, other literati, \nwith a somewhat different take on the processes of moral improvement, \nwere engaging happily in the \u201cpopular\u201d culture of urban commoners, \nparticularly in the pleasures of vernacular fiction\u2014and recommending, \nimplicitly if not explicitly, a bottom-up integration of popular and \nelite culture. Both trends \u2014 the sense that commoners could and should \nbe educated in orthodox Confucian values and<\/em> the sense that commoner culture had something to offer the elite \u2014 doubtless spurred the production of daily-use encyclopedias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These dual impulses are reflected not only in the daily-use \nencyclopedias but also in many other commercial publications of the late\n Ming. In addition to educational texts and encyclopedic guides to daily\n life, the period witnessed the production of a flood of other works \napparently aimed at a growing literate public of merchants, petty \nshopkeepers, lower gentry, clerks and other sub-officials, students, \ntransport workers, and perhaps even some better-off peasants and some \nwomen. News sheets (dibao<\/em> \u90b8\u5831) transmitted news of the court and\n gossip about contemporary scandals. Merchant handbooks advised \nsojourning traders on the best routes to travel and warned against the \ndangers of the road. Medical manuals and prescription collections \nprovided people \u2014 aspiring and even practicing medical technicians and \nphysicians among them \u2014 with the means of diagnosing disease and \ndispensing medicine. Guides to good taste advised nouveaux riches<\/em>\n and other social climbers how to appear artistically and culturally \nknowledgeable. All sorts of manuals educated readers about sex, weiqi<\/em>\n \u570d\u68cb (chess), calligraphy, painting, etc. Geomantic and fortune-telling \nhandbooks gave families and individuals the skills necessary to invite \ngood fortune and ward off evil. But perhaps most impressive was the \noutpouring of xiaoshuo<\/em> \u5c0f\u8aaa,<\/em> the \u201cpetty\u201d fictions that, \nbecause of their distance from \u201cthe truth,\u201d were viewed with at least \npretended disdain by the highly educated elite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, one of the prerequisites for the production of these texts\n was the existence of commercial publisher-booksellers who recognized \nthe profits that could be made in this book market. The late Ming was in\n fact the first time in Chinese publishing history that commercial<\/em>\n publishers dominated the world of books. Although commercial publishing\n had begun as early as the late Tang dynasty (618-907), it was not until\n the seventeenth century that commercial production outstripped \ngovernment and private or literati publishing. The growth of commercial \npublishing was very much part of the overall commercialization of the \neconomy that began in the late sixteenth century. It was at this time \nthat the wages for woodblock-cutting, the part of the publication \nprocess that required the heaviest capital investment, declined; as \npaper industries flourished, particularly in south China, the costs of \npaper, too, fell. And the growing demand for books also made it easier \nto earn profits from publishing. In sum, it might be an attractive \nbusiness for entrepreneurs, particularly those in the highly urbanized \nand culturally advanced Jiangnan area (the lower Yangzi River delta), \nwhere the large population of unemployed or under-employed literati \nprovided both a ready supply of authors and editors, and an eager \naudience for new publications. The great cities of Jiangnan \u2014 Nanjing, \nHangzhou, and Suzhou \u2014 became the greatest publishing centers and book \nmarkets of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was not Jiangnan, however, but Jianyang (in northern Fujian \nprovince), one of the most prolific publishing sites of the Ming, that \ntook the lead in the production of wanbao quanshu.<\/em> The \ncommercial houses of Jianyang, although notorious for the production of \noften shoddily edited and pirated popular texts, were among the most \ninnovative publishers of the day. Their wanbao quanshu<\/em> reflect \nboth these characteristics of Jianyang publishing. They are in effect \npastiches of other texts, composed of scraps of information lifted from \neither specialized handbooks or other wanbao quanshu<\/em> and presented as new and original.<\/em>\n Yet they are also imaginatively designed and advertised; the Jianyang \nshops employed a rich array of paratextual devices to organize (and \nrepeatedly re-organize) \u201cdaily-use\u201d information and to promote their \ntexts as not only new but also easy to use. They were brilliantly \nsuccessful. The wanbao quanshu<\/em> became very popular, so much so \nthat other commercial publishers, most notably in the Jiangnan area, \nbegan to turn them out as well. They remained a staple of commercial \npublishing through the Qing and even into the Republican period; the \nphrases wanbao quanshu<\/em> and buqiuren<\/em> are still used today in the titles of contemporary daily-life manuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Modern Japanese scholars were the first to take the wanbao quanshu<\/em>\n seriously. The great legal historian of China, Niida Noboru \u4ec1\u4e95\u7530\u965e \n(1904-1966), drew on these works in his study of legal knowledge in the \nMing and Qing, using the model contracts in the daily-use encyclopedias \nto make arguments about land and commercial transactions. Sakai Tadao \n\u9152\u4e95\u5fe0\u592b (1912-2010) produced the first serious study of the works as a \ngenre, calling attention to their usefulness for an understanding of \ndaily life in early modern China. These scholars are the first to refer \nto the texts as a group as \u201criyong leishu.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first essay here, however, Cheng-hua Wang \u738b\u6b63\u83efchallenges their notion that wanbao quanshu<\/em> provide valuable evidence of the real practices of daily life.3<\/sup>\n On the basis of close readings of the \u201cCalligraphy\u201d and \u201cPainting \nManual\u201d sections, she suggests instead that the most popular of these \nworks are best seen as efforts by Jianyang commercial publishers to take\n advantage of the new group of consumers eager for information that \nwould give them some window on \u2014 if not genuine access to \u2014 the cultural\n and social lives of the elite. In the process, she argues, the works \nopened up new social spaces and new discourses on calligraphy and \npainting that, although they might have overlapped with mainstream elite\n spaces and discourses, nonetheless remained distinct from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hsu Hui-lin \u8a31\u6689\u6797 similarly challenges the notion that the wanbao quanshu<\/em>\n offered practical information for everyday use, focusing on their role \nin creating imaginative rather than social spaces. In particular he \nargues that, although the \u201cBarbarians\u201d sections of the encyclopedias did\n not offer practical information, they nonetheless served a practical \nfunction by helping readers negotiate a new understanding of geography.4<\/sup>\n The ways in which information about foreign peoples was organized in \nthe texts \u2014 in particular the ways in which accounts of fantastic \ncreatures taken from ancient Chinese texts were mingled with solid \ninformation from \u201creal\u201d travel records \u2014 encouraged readers to preserve a\n vision of the tributary system (in which all outlying lands offered \ntribute to China) just at the time when the system was in decay. This \neffort to reimagine tributary relationships was also, Hsu argues, a way \nof resisting the western geographical information introduced to China by\n the Jesuit missionary Mateo Ricci in the late sixteenth and early \nseventeenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the last two essays reveal, the wanbao quanshu<\/em> circulated\n beyond the borders of imperial China, in both Korea and Japan, within \ndecades of their production in Jianyang and Jiangnan. Both Chos\u014fn Korea \n(1392-1897) and Tokugawa Japan (1601-1868) looked to China as a source \nof learning. The literary traditions of both countries were heavily \ninfluenced by Chinese literature; and the written language of the elites\n in each country was classical Chinese. Chinese texts, particularly \ntexts of Confucianism and Buddhism, were highly valued, and, as these \nessays make clear, official Korean visitors to Beijing, the Chinese \ncapital, eagerly sought out a wide range of works to bring back home, \nwhile Japanese scholars relied on shipments of texts from China through \nthe port of Nagasaki. While the circulation of elite knowledge from \nChina to Korea and Japan has been relatively well studied, the two \nessays published here are among the first to examine the ways in which wanbao quanshu<\/em> in particular made their way to and were understood and appropriated for different ends in the two countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lin Kuei-ju \u6797\u6842\u5982 surveys the uses they were put to in \nseventeenth-century Japan, during the early Tokugawa or Edo period \n(1603-1868).5<\/sup> Here their reception was rather different from that in China, in that the wanbao quanshu<\/em>\n seem to have been taken as quite respectable digests of information on \nChinese culture; at least one was included in the Chinese library of a \ndistinguished scholar and member of the Tokugawa ruling elite. The \nencyclopedias were seen as particularly useful in the compilation of \neducational works for students. Famous stories from Chinese history and \nliterature, excerpted from the encyclopedias (which had excerpted them \nfrom other sources) taught children of the Japanese elite the Chinese \nlanguage \u2014 but also allusions to Chinese stories that had been \nincorporated into Japanese literature in classical Chinese. Many of the \nstories were also didactic, teaching Confucian ethical principles \u2014 and \neven standards of official conduct for future shogunate officials \u2014 in \nan entertaining fashion. Eventually the wanbao quanshu<\/em> spawned a new genre of Japanese \u201cdaily-use\u201d texts, whose titles mimicked the \u201cmyriad treasures\u201d (C. wanbao,<\/em> J. banp\u014d<\/em>) phrase of the Chinese titles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Chos\u014fn-dynasty (1392-1897) Korea, as Ch\u2019oe Yongch\u2019\u014fl \u5d14\u6eb6\u6f88explains, the wanbao quanshu<\/em> seem to have been accorded a similar degree of respect.6<\/sup> Korean readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were attentive to the sections of the wanbao quanshu<\/em>\n on calculation as a guide to fiscal management (particularly useful for\n officials) and on medicine and gestation as guides to reproductive \nhealth. They also accepted the works at least in part as practical \nguides to elite culture, for portions of the wanbao quanshu<\/em> \nwere copied into manuals for playing the zither and following the Way of\n tea \u2014 very much preoccupations of the elite \u2014 and used as guides to the\n writing of proper ritual documents. Yet no self-respecting member of \nthe Chinese literati class would have accepted instruction in these \nmatters from works aimed at \u201call classes of the people.\u201d When a wanbao quanshu<\/em>\n was partially translated into vernacular Korean, the sections selected \nfor the fullest treatment were the summaries of Chinese history; and in \nthese sections, the copyist chose to indicate, in his method of \nreferring to the (Chinese) Ming dynasty and the (foreign, Manchu) Qing \ndynasty, his loyalty to the Ming \u2014 suggesting the powerful hold that \nChina had on the Korean worldview. But he also felt the need to clean up\n the section on jokes by deleting the lewd quips that dominated that \nsection in the Chinese original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Together the four essays in this issue illuminate the multiple ways \nreaders in not only China but also Japan and Korea could use the perhaps\n shoddy and hastily produced but also richly heterogenous wanbao quanshu<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NB: All essays have been abridged and revised in the process of translation and editing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cite: Cynthia Brokaw, \u201cIntroduction: Publishing for Daily Life in Early Modern East Asia,\u201d Lingua Franca<\/em>, Issue 6 (2020), https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/linguafranca\/2020-Brokaw.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cynthia Brokaw The proliferation of \u201cencyclopedias\u201d (leishu \u985e\u66f8, literally \u201ccategory books\u201d) purporting to provide readers with the basic knowledge needed for the conduct of daily life was one of the major trends of the early-modern publishing boom of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. Dubbed \u201cdaily-use encyclopedias\u201d (riyong leishu \u65e5\u7528\u985e\u66f8) by modern…<\/p>\nChronologies<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
China<\/em><\/th> Japan<\/em><\/th> Korea<\/em><\/th><\/tr><\/thead> Tang dynasty\n(618-907)<\/td> <\/td> <\/td><\/tr> Song dynasty\n(960-1279)<\/td> <\/td> <\/td><\/tr> – Northern Song (960-1126)<\/td> <\/td> <\/td><\/tr> – Southern Song (1127-1279)<\/td> <\/td> <\/td><\/tr> Yuan dynasty (Mongol rule; 1279-1368)<\/td> <\/td> <\/td><\/tr>
<\/td><\/td> Chos\u014fn dynasty (1392-1897)<\/td><\/tr> Ming dynasty\n(1368-1644)<\/td> <\/td> <\/td><\/tr>
<\/td>Tokugawa shogunate\/Edo period (1603-1868)<\/td> <\/td><\/tr> Qing dynasty (Manchu rule; 1644-1911)<\/td> <\/td> <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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