The inkstone containing the essential source (the ink) of a text made in traditional East Asia has remained silent. But Dorothy Ko's The Social Life of Inkstones makes it speak. This finely illustrated and rigorously argued book contains first-hand research with illuminating insights that open a new tunnel of the material and social history of things. Ko breaks boundaries to masterfully evoke the integral material, socioeconomic, and cultural-historical realities of the early Qing (1644–1730s) by carving out the multi-dimensional worlds of the inkstone. The book is likely to intrigue not only scholars but also practitioners and collectors. Readers who seek methodological reflections are likely to be gratified by Ko's dexterous handling of anthropological, art-historical, and social-historical tools—if those divides matter at all.

The book opens with a description of the palace workshops run under the Manchu-Qing emperors’ demands on carving inkstones in the court (chap. 1). The collaboration between the emperors and their court craftsmen, designers, and skilled bondservants aimed to consolidate an imperial style (especially during the reign of the micromanaging Emperor Yongzheng) via quests for new techniques and materials. This seemingly top-down narrative soon turns on its head as Ko goes on to tear down the edifice of the imperial style by grounding the material practices and social fields involved in the making, using, and collecting of inkstones in the empire's remote quarrying sites (Yellow Hill Villages in Guangdong, chap. 2), local workshops and markets (Suzhou, chap. 3 and 4), and marginal collecting circles (Fuzhou, chap. 5). Those are where the “real” stories begin and end. Indeed, the narrative of the book follows the path of the life of an inkstone: from mining the stone and carving the slab to collecting and writing upon the inkstone, as well as the inkstone as objet d'art. But each chapter proffers a self-contained field of knowledge for readers with specific interests.

The Social Life of Inkstones is likely to captivate the reader by conjuring a material world in which the inkstone comes into being and acts within the productive conduits constituted by stoneworkers and carvers as well as in the social networks of collectors. Ko vigorously keeps that world on the embodied ground—as a matter of fact, on the stone—where one sees a neighboring area as only “a stone's throw” away (pp. 72, 81), the size of the inkstone as big as a stretched palm, and the scholar's writing as a métier of making wen (writing, literature, civility).

Finally, echoing the introductory promise of entering the craftsmen's world as a mission of the book, the epilogue further carries out this mission by underpinning the episteme of the craft of wen: the material and textual outputs of the Fuzhou collecting circle evinced an episteme that took classical literature (“theory”) and textual production (“writing”) as material and embodied practices (“making”), an epistemological shift that emerged in the late Ming and became full-fledged by the second half of the eighteenth century (p. 190). Ko insinuates that the artisanal approach to writing and knowledge in the early Qing heralded and became integral to the emergence of evidential scholarship; the elevation of the artisanal approach went in tandem with this philological trend of classical learning in which scholars construed writing as a material fact (epigraphy or not). There, by drawing the fine line of status between “artisan-scholar” and “scholar-artisan,” Ko suggests that it is the latter that conformed to an artisanal epistemology, not the other way round (pp. 199–200). Throughout, her vivid, descriptive evocation of concrete realities and processes makes the text-body of the book enact her critique on scholarly generalization over empirical and material knowledge. In doing so, the book throws into relief Ko's convincing revision of the persistent bias that the work of the brain dominates the work of brawn.

In the form and content of the book, Ko shows that inventive composition or novel design is not merely a mental exercise, but a process of reconfiguring existing sources by measuring the affordances and constraints of those sources—in the case of the inkstone, the mineral patterning and shapes of the slabs, the stoneworker's tools, and the existing tropes. She rehearses this approach in a marvelous formal analysis of the Paired Swallows, where she dissects the distinctive inkstone medium that affords multi-planar depiction and lifelike sculpting (pp. 116–22). Crafts(wo)men's mastery mattered, too. This was especially important in intermedial representation fashioned during the early Qing amid the marketing competition for technical marvel and formal persuasion, both locally and at the court. Thus, by recognizing the field of expertise, or “métier” of a trade, Ko warrants subject position to the undervalued class of artisans in a tradition that connected wen to governance and moral superiority attributed to the male elite.

Ko unveils that the inkstone tangibly tangles bureaucratic power and failure, social relationships and tensions, emotional investment and alienation, and gendered labor and discourse. The inkstone was an instrument of writing as well as a token of exchange. With it, a scholar's métier was no more than wielding his tools to craft the wen that makes a bureaucratic career; on it or about it, a collector's encomiums recollect the unstable assemblage of remained and vanished things and social interchanges. Ko elaborates that the notion of assemblage is essential to the understanding of the internal contradiction of the collecting of inkstones—between personal mark and socialized ownership (pp. 184–86). The fourth dimension—time—of inkstones, which comes along with social recognition, embeds in them anticipatory alienation at the very moment when they are carved, as well as imminent dissipation of a collection of a set. Corresponding to this unstable “custodianship” is the imbalance of the ongoing power dynamic in the “fellowship of stone”—be it gift-giving (voluntary or involuntary), market demand, or privy rapaciousness (p. 184). It is precisely the anticipatory alienation and dispersal that fostered literary profusion to retain collectors’ nostalgia and cover elite men's anxiety over lack and impermanence.

Ko's ability to always reveal the other side of the story is likely to enchant the reader with the intense delight of “tunneling” discovery: the rock was icy and hard, but the crafts(wo)man's métier was to make it “fat and opulent” (p. 113); collecting inkstones was a masculine obsession, but the concept of collection masked men's inner fear and sensitivity toward dispersal and loss as a reality. To be sure, Ko's material grounding and physiological penetration of the worlds of the inkstone benefit from her acknowledgement of the complexity of any given issue or existing phenomenon. This is saliently practiced in presenting craftswoman Gu Erniang, a highlighted protagonist in this book. Gu's workshop mark (contrasted by male carvers’ tendency to claim individual authorship) served as a means to endorse a hallmark that contrarily pictured the singularity of her work; hence forgers’ “flattery” by counterfeiting her inkstone, which in turn fostered the spread of Gu's “super-brand” (p. 123). Here, again, Ko's revisionist proposition of a “super-brand” (like a “supersign”) softens collectors’ stubborn obsession with authentic origin, by instead seizes the expansive mapping of a dispersed network of approximation believable and valorized as works associated with Gu's name or workshop. By the same inversional logic, Ko divulges that scholars’ denigration of craftsmen, like elite men's discrimination against women (shown in later myth-making about Gu as an erotic subject by mentioning her feet instead of her hands), conversely exposes a “veiled acknowledgment” of the indispensable presence of those subaltern groups in the essential activities of everyday reality (p. 201).

By pinpointing paradoxes, contradictions, growing social tensions, and human anxieties involved in the lives of inkstones, Ko demystifies the codification of discourse and postures a vigilant warning against the acceptance of writing as a wholesale guide of knowledge and truth—a tendency that had become an entrenched and self-perpetuating mode of production and perception of culture (wen) in a text-ridden tradition discoursed (historically) mostly by male elite and often with a façade of moral philosophy. Ko shows that seeing through the effectiveness and futility of words ought to be the métier of scholars just as the stone miner-prospector-assessor employs his forensic sighting to tell what lies beneath the surface of a quarry or an experienced connoisseur eyes the geological strata of a piece of stone at hand.

Ko's own writing lives fully up to the book's argument: a tour-de-force manifestation of the craft of wen that makes the stoneworkers, carvers, collectors, inscribers, encomium-writers, and the stone itself enact the space-time in which they once existed. She attentively sculpts the text-body by incising the contours of her materials and figures available at hand, just like the inkstone-maker shapes the slab by enhancing its material form and patterning. Ko's exquisite sharpening of her subject yields the present book as a tangible artefactual presentation that affords the hands of readers with a tactile feel resembling that of the inkstone—literally through the powdery touch of the dust cover (by design and by time). Like the inkstone acting upon its various collectors, The Social Life of Inkstones shall meet many hands and make those hands write, or better, create.