Pu Songling (1640–1715) is primarily known as the author of the collection of classical tales that bears his studio name, The Stories of the Strange of the Liaozhai Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi). As one of the most famous authors of the late-imperial age, Pu Songling has been the subject of innumerable studies in English, Japanese, and Chinese, while his collection (or parts thereof) has been studied and translated in over a dozen languages. Zhenzhen Lu’s recent study, The Vernacular World of Pu Songling, may borrow the author’s name prominently, but actually does not centrally concern itself with either the author or the famous text he penned. Rather, the book investigates the remarkably rich and dizzyingly diverse cache of often handwritten manuscripts that were loosely (and often falsely) associated with Pu Songling, locally produced in Zichuan (the hometown of the author), and, due to the author’s fame, subsequently assiduously collected by the author’s descendants, May Fourth scholars, and, rather intriguingly, a Japanese doctor working in Shandong in the 1930s. Without the name of the famous author attached to them, these materials would have most likely been of too little interest to preserve, let alone collect or study. Blessed by the aura of the name Pu Songling, however, they were avidly gathered, and they form the basis of Lu’s fascinating research on the handwriting practices that were crucial to the production, circulation, and consumption of textual materials that in turn mattered for everyday life in late-imperial China.
In six chapters (and five appendices), each of which looks at a genre of materials or an aspect of scriptural practices, the book investigates many of the diverse materials associated with Pu Songling: primers for Chinese characters, popular drum-ballads, personal notebooks, illustrated agricultural educational texts, and personal correspondence. The closest the reader will get to the author of the Liaozhai is Chapter One, “Pu Songling and Beyond.” Here Lu sketches the geographic, economic, and cultural particulars of Pu Songling’s hometown and carefully tracks the man’s scribal activities: from hand-copying Six Dynasties prose to ghostwriting the correspondence of the county magistrate, Sun Hui, who employed him in the 1670s, and from his efforts as a tutor in the household of the wealthy Bi clan of Zichuan to the actual copying and revising of the manuscript of the Liaozhai. Color reproductions of Pu Songling’s handwriting provide the reader with a ghostly connection to the venerated author, but Lu’s interest does not lie in analyzing how Pu Songling drafted the text for which he became famous. Rather, she maps the dimensions of the everyday “scribal” life of a typical late-imperial scholar: how we can differentiate carefully hand-copied texts from hastily drafted manuscripts; how Pu and two copyists each contributed to the oldest surviving manuscript of the Liaozhai; and the ways in which reading and writing, studying and teaching all overlap in the practice of handwriting notes.
The end of the first chapter moves from the production of manuscripts to their collecting. In the early days, it was mostly Pu’s descendants who busied themselves preserving, copying, and promoting his work. With time the circle of collectors broadened, from local Shandong scholars in the nineteenth century to nationally renowned May Fourth scholars such as Hu Shi in the twentieth. Lu carefully maps both the variegated contents of different collections and how the increasing fame of the author gave rise to a cottage industry of producing Pu Songling collectables, manuscripts that prominently display Pu’s name but have little to do with the man. Chapter Two expands on the theme of collecting by turning to the texts that are central to Lu’s study: the collection built by Hirai Masao (1888–ca. 1960), a Japanese doctor stationed in Zichuan in the 1930s, and presently housed at Keio University in Tokyo. Lu nicely summarizes Masao’s activities—the ways in which he networked in Zichuan and collaborated with local Chinese scholars and collectors—and with the utmost precision she records the cataloging practices of the collection. The ideological implications of a Japanese scholar working in colonized Shandong gathering a treasure of Chinese documents only to send them home for further study at a Japanese University remain undiscussed. An opportunity missed; but possibly it will make for a second study focused purely on the curious history of the Keio collection.
Chapter Three is dedicated to the kind of notebook scholars of the late-imperial age kept. The texts gathered therein are, like the “vernacular” collections of Pu Songling overall, variegated: copies of examination essays, word games employing Shandong local dialect (topolect), drum ballads bemoaning the poverty of the over-educated and underemployed tutor, and romantic songs of longing. In any notebook, the textual snippets follow one another in carefully hand-written but nevertheless random order. Chapter Four focuses on the writing, reading, and performing practices of prosimetric texts, works written alternately in prose and poetry (or song); that focus allows Lu to expand her inquiry from writing and reading to oral performance and aural reception. The fifth chapter returns to the topic of the Liaozhai, focusing in particular on the adaptation of two classical tales into local performance text. As Lu nicely shows, the performative nature of these tales transforms the terse classical language into elaborate and spectacular speech acts, moments in which the characters in the tale (often female) as well as the performers of the tale (whom I imagine as mostly male) engage in entertaining but also quite transgressive diatribes. Chapter Six turns back from the literary analysis of the previous two chapters to a more linguistic and historical mode of analysis. It focuses on primers (educational texts geared towards teaching the basics of reading and writing), in particular one most likely written by Pu Songling himself, the Riyong suzi (Popular Characters for Daily Use). The chapter represents the most extensive discussion of a topic that appears repeatedly throughout Lu’s study, that is, the relationship among topolect, standard language, and the Chinese script.
The kinds of texts attributed to Pu Songling are fascinating, but equally interesting are those excluded. Lu remarks on the lack of such utilitarian texts as contracts. Perhaps even more striking is the lack of religious tracts. In recent years, much of the research in late-imperial popular literature has emphasized its relationship with religious practices. Katherine Alexander, Rotislav Berezkin, and Wilt Idema, for instance, have all shed new light on the existence of a rich corpus of handwritten and printed religious writings in popular performance genres such as drumsongs (guci) and precious scrolls (baojuan). The most forceful critique of older approaches to such texts as “literature” has come from scholars such as Meir Shahar and Mark Meulenbeld, both of whom have argued that such texts should be understood not as vernacular “novels,” but rather as vehicles for religious cosmologies. It is therefore worth noting that despite Pu Songling’s reputation as a collector of tales of the strange that tell of encounters with immortals and gods, fox-spirits, and ghosts, none of the popular materials collected under his name has a strong religious nature. Even the Liaozhai rewritten tales downplay their supernatural elements. Instead, as Lu argues, they emphasize the more secular melodrama of family conflict and everyday morality.
Most (though not all) of the documents in the collections associated with Pu Songling are handwritten. With this important reminder of the importance of writing in general, Lu’s study provides a useful counterweight to the field’s predominant interest in cultures of print. The eclectic nature of handwritten notebooks with their juxtaposition of bawdy jokes in topolect and orthodox examination essays reminds us that such jarring contrasts, though clearly exploited for their comic excess in late-Ming collectanea (as argued by Yuming He), need not solely be the result of print. This persistence of hand-written cultures in the age of print, as previously noted by Joseph McDermott, is evinced even in the case of the Liaozhai: after the death of the author in 1715, it circulated for over fifty years in multiple manuscript copies, before first seeing print in 1767. The act of writing, whether as student or teacher, scribe or plagiarist, scholar or commoner, was central to the everyday, vernacular world of late-imperial Shandong or, for that matter, most of late-imperial China. Thanks to its immaculate research (and more than fifty reproductions of manuscript pages), Zhenzhen Lu’s book is an important first step in uncovering this world of handwritten vernacular text.
