The newspaper description of the 1917 funeral procession of Sheng Xuanhuai 盛宣懷 (1844-1916) that opens the introduction to this topical issue highlights the mixture of the old – the Qing (1644-1911) imperial insignia, the Buddhist and Daoist priests, the ancestral tablets – and the new – the boy scouts, the college students, the Western dress of the mourners – that characterized this public event. It ends, however, with a prediction of the victory of the new, interpreting the scene as “the passing of the old and the entering of the new.”
We might imagine that a similar message could be deduced from a much less colorful scene: the Suwei shanfang 素位山房, a printshop-cum-bookstore in the southern coastal city of Zhangzhou in Fujian province. Founded in the late nineteenth century by woodblock publishers, by the 1920s and 1930s the Suwei shanfang presented a picture of mixed old and new not unlike that of Sheng Xuanhuai's funeral procession. On entering the store, a customer might be greeted by one of three sales clerks or – if the customer were important enough – by the shop owner himself. Most customers, particularly the older ones, were interested in the woodblock editions of “traditional” texts, usually dating from nineteenth century or earlier,Footnote 1 still cut and printed at the shop in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century editions: primers like the Three Character Classic (Sanzi jing 三字經) and Expanded Words of the Worthies (Zengguang xianwen 增廣賢文, ca. sixteenth century?); editions of the Four Books, the standard texts of the by then defunct examination system; literary collections like Lan Dingyuan's 藍鼎元 (1680-1733) Luzhou quanji 鹿洲全集; works of local interest (a Zhangzhou dialect dictionary by Xie Xiulan 謝秀嵐, Fifteen Sounds or Shiwu yin 十五音, 1869; a collection of anecdotes about the city, Popular Anecdotes of Zhangzhou or Zhangzhou minjian gushi 漳州民間故事); geomancy handbooks and fortune-telling manuals like Physiognomy of Mayi (Mayi xiangfa 麻衣象法, attributed to the tenth-century master Chen Fu 陳搏); and a host of popular love stories (e.g., The Plum Tree Blossoms Twice or Erdu mei 二度梅, early Qing), martial arts novels (Five Tigers Pacify the South or Wuhu ping nan 五虎平南, preface dated 1807; Three Knight-Errants and Five Righteous Men or Sanxia wuyi 三俠五義, 1879), court-case fiction (e.g., Court Cases of Judge Peng or Peng gongan 彭公案, 1892), and songbooks (e.g., Meng Jiangnü Weeps at the Great Wall or Meng Jiangnü ku changcheng 孟姜女哭長城).Footnote 2
But the shop also catered to a younger and more up-to-date readership. The owner's nephew made regular trips to Xiamen to purchase wholesale lithographic editions of popular novels by Zhang Henshui 張恨水 (1895-1967) and authors of the “mandarin duck and butterfly” genre for retail sale in the shop (Link Reference Link1981). By the 1930s, too, the shop sold the literature of the New Culture to Zhangzhou's progressive intellectual elite. The principals and teachers of the new public schools purchased the works of Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936), Mao Dun 矛盾 (1896-1981), Ba Jin 巴金 (1904-2005), and Zou Taofen 鄒韜奮 (1895-1944), all shipped from Shanghai, from the Suwei shanfang – although these sales were often done in secret: one clerk reported that such dangerous works were usually delivered to their purchasers concealed in sacks of rice.
The traffic with Shanghai was two-way, for by the late 1920s, the Suwei shanfang owner was shipping woodblock texts to Shanghai to be published in yangban 洋版 form (that is, in “foreign blocks,” either as lithographic or letter-press imprints); then in turn he would purchase these new editions for sale in his shop. Although in the early 1940s the Suwei shanfang still employed a block cutter, it nonetheless seems that it was going the way of Sheng's funeral procession: the replacement of the old publishing technology – though not the old texts – with the new.
In fact, the process of replacement was not as straightforward and linear as this description – or the writings of many scholars of modern Chinese publishing, eager to trumpet the major changes in technology, print genres, and reading publics that take place in the late Qing and, most particularly, the May Fourth and New Culture era of the 1920s and 1930s – might suggest. As this brief description of the Suwei shanfang's stock suggests,Footnote 3 even as late as the 1940s (the shop closed in 1942), Chinese book culture was a mixture of old and new in terms of both technology and content; and both publishers and readers were not quick to abandon woodblock texts. To be sure, the new technologies did win out in the end: woodblock printing is used today largely to produce expensive, high-end reproductions of important traditional texts (and some modern texts) that are sold as aesthetic objects to collectors. Or it has been made a tourist attraction – witness the recently established “Nianhua Village” (Nianhua cun 年畫村) in Mianzhu 綿竹, Sichuan, formerly an active site of nianhua and text production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (http://baike.baidu.com/item/绵竹年画村).
But there was a period of several decades, stretching from the late nineteenth century through the mid-1950s, when woodblock printing was still a living technology despite the rapidly increasing use of mechanized print; and moments within that long period when the technology even enjoyed a slight resurgence.Footnote 4 Arguably, the texts of woodblock book culture – at least those considered the classics of the tradition (to name the most obvious: the Four Books and Five Classics, the dynastic histories, collections of Tang poetry, the popular primers known collectively as San 三-Bai 百-Qian 千,Footnote 5 the great vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing, and many other popular novels, particularly love stories, historical romances, and martial arts novels) – are still very much alive today, even outside of the scholar's study, in the form of modern letter-press reproductions widely available in bookstores and electronic versions easily accessible on the Internet.
Since the introduction of the new technologies and the new literature of late Qing and Republican era (1912-1949) China has been thoroughly explored in other scholarship (e.g. Reed Reference Reed2004; Wang Reference Wang1997), I focus here on the role that woodblock print technology and woodblock imprints continued to play throughout that period (see also Brokaw Reference Brokaw, Brokaw and Reed2010). More specifically, I am interested in “the dance of the old and the new” – that is, how woodblock-print technology and the continuing popularity of “traditional” texts interacted with the gradual rise of the new print technologies, the literature of the New Culture, and the modernizing ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The interaction was at times full of tension – as when advocates of the New Culture excoriated the works of the classical tradition; or when the CCP pressed for the end of all woodblock printing in the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC, 1949-). But there are other points of more symbiotic interaction, as woodblock imprints both complemented and supplemented the texts of the modern educational system. Their continued production helped to ease the concerns of parents and teachers who were worried about the staying power of the new learning. Woodblock imprints, collected from a variety of publishing sites, fed the centralized production of an impressive range of both “traditional” and local texts in modern formats, thereby allowing their wider circulation. And woodblock printing satisfied, among certain elite niche publishers, a desire to preserve both the texts and the production aesthetics of the old woodblock book culture.
The larger forces that shaped the Chinese nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century propelled these interactions. At first glance, it might appear that these forces were combining to accelerate the new and supplant the old. Several of the major centers of the indigenous woodblock publishing industry – Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, all in the wealthy and culturally advanced Jiangnan area – suffered terrible devastation during the Taiping rebellion (1850-1864); important publishing operations were destroyed and distribution routes severely disrupted. At the same time, new technologies of print, introduced from the West in the early 1800s, were beginning to take hold; the modern publishing industry of Shanghai took off in the mid-1870s. The intensification of foreign aggression and the forced opening of the Qing interior to foreign settlement in the 1860s and 1870s, in the wake of the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), created the conditions for the spread of these technologies beyond the treaty port of Shanghai, although it was not until the 1880s and 1890s that these technologies reached far into the interior of the Qing empire. In 1883, for example, the first lithographic press was operating in Chengdu, in the distant southwest, and by 1903, there were at least three letterpress publishing houses in that city (Sichuan shengzhi 2001, 210). The introduction of Western learning, a product of imperialism, inspired changes in the educational curriculum that, by the time the civil service examination was abolished in 1905, made the textbooks of the old learning – in theory, at least – obsolete. And in the 1920s and 1930s, progressive cultural leaders in the urban centers of the southeast excoriated the old learning and the texts that relayed it.
Yet there were countervailing forces at work as well. New Culture intellectuals may have repudiated the textbooks of Confucian learning, but they discovered other textual products of the “tradition” to honor and promote. In the vernacular fiction of the early modern period – formerly not taken seriously by many elite readers – they found works that suited, linguistically and ideologically, new notions regarding literature and its audience. As they embraced “modern” Western literary genres, they could find in the Chinese past certain precursors of those genres in the form of the popular vernacular novels and tales of the late Ming and Qing. It was their appreciation for much of this literature (although more importantly its great popularity) that encouraged the preservation and republication of many of these texts. More dramatically, renewed foreign aggression – in this case, Japanese inroads into and, finally, invasion of China in the 1930s – provided an unexpected stimulus to appreciate the “old” technology and texts. By both outraging patriotic sentiment and undermining Nationalist state control of and funding for education, the invasion sparked both a resurgence in woodblock printing (and elite book collecting) and a renewed popularity of the old woodblock educational texts. It is not until the 1950s, when the new party state of the People's Republic began pursuing a modernizing, nation-building program of ideological reform (the eradication of “feudal,” “superstitious,” and “unscientific” ideas and beliefs) and technological advance (the replacement of “backward” woodblock publishing with mechanized letterpress printing) that the older technology and the older texts became the target, now not of progressive intellectuals, but of a concerted state-sponsored campaign.
Rather than see the “dance between old and new” in Chinese print technology and print culture simply and rather vaguely as a consequence of these larger historical forces of internal rebellion, imperialism, invasion, intellectual revolution, nationalism, and nation-building, here I examine in some detail the variety of factors and the range of local conditions that shaped the interaction between old and new technologies and old and new texts in Chinese book culture from the 1860s through the middle of the twentieth century: the economics of publishing, in particular, relative production costs, which differed from place to place; variable demand and the nature of different book markets, urban and rural, elite and non-elite; the functions of different types of publishing, commercial, private, and official; the shifting and often ambivalent attitudes toward Western learning and its value for China; and the significance of aesthetic choices, whether expressive of patriotism, ritual practice, or status consciousness, that favored one technology over another. My goal is to present a granular study of the economic, intellectual, and technological negotiations, accommodations, and resistances that shaped modern (and, for that matter, has shaped contemporary) Chinese book culture, a study that complicates any effort to write it as the product of a smooth linear progression from “tradition” to “modernity.”
These “negotiations, accommodations, and resistances” were by no means just the preoccupation of a small and esoteric corner of the Chinese book trade. They engaged publishers and readers at all levels of the book market, low and high, and touched all the major categories of publishing – commercial, official, private/literati, and religious. As explained in Part 1, commercial publishers, in continuing to produce woodblock editions of old texts, were responding to a widespread “bottom-up” demand for these texts (although of course their technological choice was also driven by financial considerations). This demand was certainly strongest among hinterland populations not necessarily attuned to the shifting political and cultural currents of the day, but readers in the great urban centers of Guangzhou and Shanghai were by no means immune to the lure of these works, particularly those in the popular fiction category. Sadly, little scholarly attention has been paid to popular commercial publishing and this “bottom-up” or non-elite sector of Chinese book culture, yet any discussion of cultural integration and the creation of tradition and its incorporation into the modern must be attentive to the tastes and reading choices of peasants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, and petty traders as well as highly educated scholar-officials, literati, and wealthy merchants.
In Part 2, however, we turn to this latter group of elite book producers and collectors, who were operating at the top levels of Chinese society. More prominently featured in the scholarship on Chinese book culture, these men (they seem to have all been men) were driven more by ideological or intellectual and aesthetic than commercial goals. Continuing long traditions of publishing by the state, private literati, and religious institutions, they were often driven by the “big events” of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese history.
Needless to say the divide between these two sectors was by no means impermeable. The products of popular commercial publishing in particular were accessible to literates (and, in the case of textbooks, aspiring literates) at any level of the population. In contrast, the works at the top-end reached a much more limited readership, and in certain cases were seemingly deliberately designed to enjoy a restricted circulation.
1. Commercial Woodblock Printing and Popular Book Culture, 1870s-1950s
Commercial publishers, workers for profit, are presumably more attuned to the demands of the market than their non-commercial counterparts. Thanks to the publishing boom of the late Ming and Qing and the spread of commercial operations to the interior and the countryside that this boom initiated, the output of these publishers can also provide insights into the nature of popular, “from the bottom up” reading interests and tastes. The simplicity and portability of woodblock print technology facilitated the growth of publishing in county seats, market towns, and even peasant villages – as well as, of course, provincial capitals and other metropolitan areas. By the nineteenth century, a common core of universally popular texts, including primers and the basic textbooks of the examination system, a host of how-to manuals (to household management, medical care, fortune-telling, etc.), and a range of fictional offerings and poetry collections, circulated widely throughout China Proper (Brokaw Reference Brokaw2007, 8–19).
Here I explore the ways in which this popular book culture interacted (or not) with the new technology and new texts of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. The first section presents an example of relatively happy coexistence in a block cutting and minor publishing center in rural Sichuan from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s, when the needs of the new state for conformity to an ideology of modernity and science disrupted the peace. The second section examines the continuing popularity of old-style educational texts – and for a period of about a decade, their increased popularity – even in the face of modernizing school reform in the early twentieth century. Finally, I look briefly at the eager participation of modern Shanghai publishers in the reproduction of certain types of popular old-style texts.
Woodblock Publishing in Yuechi County, Sichuan
My first case is set in Sichuan province, specifically in Yuechi 岳池, an impoverished county about 104 kilometers from Chongqing (although this case touches, too, on Chengdu and Chongqing). Through much of the Qing, Yuechi enjoyed modest note as the home of the workers who supplied the labor for the most capital-intensive step in the publishing process: the cutting of woodblocks. The handicraft of block cutting was introduced to the area by migrants from Fujian and Jiangxi most likely at some time in the mid- or late eighteenth century; and, as the demand for blocks increased with the growth of the commercial publishing industry in the province, block cutting quickly became a common secondary occupation for families who could not support themselves through agriculture alone. Fu Chongju 傅崇矩 (1875-1917), in Comprehensive Overview of Chengdu (Chengdu tonglan 成都通覽, preface dated 1909), his guide to the provincial capital, explained, “In Yuechi county block cutters are the most numerous; most of the book blocks for Chengdu are produced there” (Fu 1987, 503). A later report, written in 1954, is even more emphatic about the dependence of Sichuan's publishers on Yuechi labor: “During the Manchu Qing dynasty, woodblock textbooks of feudal education enjoyed a large market; each county had bookstores that sold the Four Books and Five Classics, and the blocks for printing these books were all cut in Yuechi. Therefore the block-cutting craft was highly developed in this county” (“Yuechixian mukeye qingkuang diaocha baogao,” 44a; also Wang 1991; Liu 2005).
Through most of the county's block-cutting history, its workers labored for Chengdu and Chongqing publishers. Some cutters sojourned in these cities, working for character-cutting shops (kezi dian 刻字店) through which they were hired out to commercial, government, and private family publishers. More commonly, cutters remained in Yuechi county and were hired on a job-by-job basis through the services of brokers in contact with publishers throughout Sichuan and other provinces (Interviews 8: Yuechi, 97/7/13; 10: Baimiao, 97/7/15; 29: Yuechi, 97/7/28; and Yuechixian erqinggongye zhi n.d., 136).Footnote 6 Somewhat surprisingly, given this wealth of block-cutting skill, Yuechi itself did not develop much in the way of a publishing industry until quite late – it is not until the early Republic that we have evidence of any Yuechi commercial publishing industry that took advantage of local block-cutting expertise. This industry nonetheless proved to be, given the upheavals of the day, surprisingly long-lived.
The rise of a modest woodblock publishing industry in Yuechi can most likely be attributed to the decline of woodblock publishing in Chengdu and Chongqing, as Yuechi cutters and kezi dian managers looked for new markets for their skills. Here the shift to a greater reliance on modern print technologies in urban areas served to push woodblock printing out to backwaters that had earlier not really enjoyed much of a book culture. Whereas in the past, the portability and relative simplicity of woodblock printing had eased the spread of publishing into the interior and hinterland, now, in the early twentieth century, it was the modern technology that inadvertently, in this case at least, encouraged the deeper rural, social spread of woodblock texts. At first the new publishers of Yuechi served both markets. Thus Zou Zhongcheng 鄒忠臣 continued to serve as a broker for city publishers even after he founded, in 1915, the Wenyi tang 文藝堂: “Whoever wanted books cut would go to Zou Zhongcheng to commission him to arrange the cutting.” But he also published, under his shop name, poetry, examination textbooks, and some Buddhist and Daoist works (Interview 29: Yuechi, 97/7/28).
Centered largely in the county seat, businesses like the Wenyi tang remained small in scope, printing and distributing inexpensive texts for a largely local readership. In the surrounding villages, their books were often sold in stationery stores (wenju dian 文具店). Most of their works were textbooks for local schools, the family (jiashu 家塾) or “private” (sishu 私塾) schools that taught elementary education in the Qing and often through much of the Republican era as well. According to informants, the largest of these shops was the Wensheng tang 文盛堂 (also called the Xuewen tang 學文堂 and later the Rongsen tang 榮森堂), founded in 1918 by Tang Xuewen 湯學文. This was both a printshop or shufang 書坊 and a bookstore or shudian 書店. Tang employed cutters exclusively from certain villages in Yixing 義興 township, Yuechi. He supplied them with blocks, which they carried back home to cut. After the cutters had transported the completed blocks back to the shop, printers and binders, all male and all regular employees, finished the texts. “There was enough work to keep them busy every day,” reported Tang Rongsen's grandson. Most of the printers and binders lived at the shop and ate with the family, receiving, in consequence, rather low wages of “jikuai yinyuan” 幾塊銀圓 (several silver coins or yuan) per month; if they lived in their own homes, they received a higher wage of “shijikuai yinyuan” 十幾塊銀圓 (ten plus silver coins). Paper was purchased from Daishichang 代市場 in Guang'an; ink soot (songyan 松煙) was purchased at the market as well and mixed with other ingredients to make ink; some colored ink, imported from England, was used for color printing. Woodblocks could be used for several years before they wore out and had to be discarded, so it seems likely that print runs were rather short (Interview 35: Wanshou, 08/7/23).
The Wensheng tang/Rongsen tang published, first and foremost, educational texts. Interestingly, most of these were textbooks of the older examination-oriented curriculum, apparently still in demand over a decade after the abolition of the examination system in 1905: the traditional primers San-Bai-Qian and Expanded Words of the Worthies Footnote 7 and editions of the Four Books and the Five Classics, including a rather fine edition of the Greater Learning (Daxue 大學) with the orthodox Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) commentary, and one of the commonly used guides to the study of the Book of Documents, the Book of Documents, Sentence by Sentence (Shangshu liju 尚書離句).Footnote 8 The shop also produced two of the most widely circulated anthologies of prose and poetry, both standard textbooks of the traditional curriculum.Footnote 9 Yet, signaling the mixed nature of rural education in the early twentieth century, it also published a few modern textbooks like the Literature of the Republic (Gonghe guowen 共和國文) (Interview 14: Yuechi, 97/7/17).
The Wensheng tang's other publications reflect the same reluctance to abandon the old culture, at the same time that their stock suggests the inroads that new print technology had made. A 1930 woodblock edition of the elementary ritual guide Glossaries for Social Interaction (Choushi shiquan zazi 酬世十全雜字) introduced young readers to proper terms of address and social conventions (Interview 14: Yuechi, 97/7/17);Footnote 10 it is very much a product of an earlier time. The shop's Record of the Jade Casket (Yuxia ji 玉匣記, 1937), also a xylographic text, reproduced one of the most popular almanacs of the Ming and Qing (Brokaw Reference Brokaw2007, 452–454); although of course its calendar was updated, it otherwise provided the same guidance about the selection of auspicious and inauspicious days as it had in the past. But all the novels sold in the Wensheng tang shop were lithographic editions purchased from the Guangyi shuju 廣益書局 in Shanghai, not their own productions. The shop's primary customers were first, students (or their parents), who bought works at retail prices – spring and autumn were the busy seasons for these sales; and second, the managers of other local bookstores, who purchased texts wholesale at the shop and carried them on shoulder poles back to their own villages for retail sale. The Wensheng tang/Rongsen tang remained in business, despite the supposedly antiquated nature of both its technology and its products, until 1947 (Yuechixian shudian zhi 1986, 2; Nanchong diqu wenhua yishu zhi n.d., 585).
There were certainly other woodblock printshop-bookstores in Yuechi, although some used a variety of technologies. Informants mentioned the Ding Zhibao shuju 丁至寶書局 as another fairly prosperous shop, established in 1930 and closing only in 1943. Run by one of Yuechi's better known cutters, Ding Zhibao, it produced and sold largely textbooks, in both woodblock and letterpress editions, as well as stationery and sports equipment (Yuechixian erqinggongye zhi n.d., 19, 136; interview 5: Yuechi, 96/7/31; and Yuechixian shudian zhi 1986, 5). At the lower end of the market, shops like the Wenhe shushe 文合書社 produced unadorned and unannotated woodblock editions of moral guides for children like Shi Tianji's 石天基 (1659?-1736?) Song of Instruction for Girls (Xun younü ge 訓幼女歌), an elementary rhyming textbook for girls by a well-known author of didactic texts, and very simple editions of the Four Books for beginning students (Interviews 17: Zhenlong, 97/07/24; 11: Qiaojia, 97/07/18; and 9: Yuechi, 97/07/17). The Wenhe shushe editions of the Four Books, the Four Books with Pronunciation on the Side (Sishu pangyin 四書旁音), are well cut in large, clear characters, with smaller characters added – very sparsely – on the right side as guides to pronunciation (southern pronunciation, not the “standard” guanhua 官話 pronunciation). This shop seems to have specialized in editions of the Classics for beginning students; it also produced, in 1919, a similar version of the Classic of Songs. Only one more sophisticated edition survives from this shop: an undated edition of Children's Treasury of Allusions (Youxue gushi qionglin 幼學故事瓊林 by Cheng Dengji 程登吉 of the Ming and revised by Zou Shengmai 鄒聖脈 in the mid-eighteenth century); a very popular Qing-era encyclopedia of allusions and general knowledge for students, this is a relatively attractive illustrated edition, a cut above the primers and other textbooks produced by the Wenhe shushe (Interviews 4: Yuechi, 96/7/30, and 14: Yuechi, 97/7/17).
We know almost nothing of prices, except that most of these texts were fairly inexpensive; one informant, reporting on prices in 1931–1932, said that the Three Character Classic would cost about 3 tongyuan 銅圓 (copper cash), the Four Books, in 12 ce, about 42 tongyuan – prices were roughly 3 tongyuan per ce, and about 20 percent above the production costs (chengben 成本) (Interviews 15: Qiaojia, 97/7/18; and 19: Dashi, 97/7/23). Books might also be bartered for rice; one informant claimed that most books (by which he meant the primers and glossaries, the Four Books and Five Classics) could be purchased for 2 to 3 tongqian 銅錢 or half a jin 斤 of rice (Interview 32: Yuechi, 08/7/18). Yet the larger booksellers seem to have prospered from the trade; Tang Rongsen's grandson claims that his family was able to manage quite well from the profits from their bookstore, so well indeed that his descendants were able to live luxuriously – until they squandered the bookstore profits on opium (Interview 35: Wanshou, 08/7/23).
Information about these shops and their sales is sparse, and most of their publications lost. But character-cutting shops remained active through the Republican era; it is estimated that there were still 133 such shops in operation in Yuechi in 1948 (Yuechixian erqinggongye zhi n.d.,137), although these shops served publishers in Chengdu and Chongqing as well as in Yuechi. There is scattered evidence that there were a fair number of small printshop-bookstores active until quite late, into the late 1940s and even through the mid-1950s. They were certainly not the only bookstores in Yuechi; in the 1930s and ‘40s, there were also a few shops that served as outlets for books from the modern publishers of Shanghai and Beijing. But woodblock editions of the old primers, the Four Books and Five Classics, poetry collections, and almanacs (tongshu 通書) continued to enjoy a readership even on the eve of the founding of the People's Republic. In 1948, the Lihong shushe 立鴻書社 produced a woodblock edition of the Expanded Words of the Worthies; and, as mentioned, the Wensheng tang/Rongsen tang stopped operation only in the late 1940s (ibid., 2).Footnote 11
The shops described above, in both Yuechi and the surrounding countryside, although the sophistication and quality of their publications varied, were all established printshop-bookstores producing the conventional works of mainstream Chinese woodblock book culture. But there were other outlets for the production and dissemination of woodblock texts that fall into a somewhat different category: cheaply produced songbooks, geomantic and fortune-telling manuals (including almanacs), primers, and medical guides that fed a local appetite for entertainment, the search for good fortune and good health, and basic literacy education. These works, with a few exceptions, were not sold in “proper” bookstores (which carried only “correct” texts, zhengzong shu 正宗書, according to informants), but by itinerant booksellers or peddlers making the rounds of city and village teahouses, wine shops, periodic markets, and temple fairs (Nanchong diqu wenhua yishu zhi n.d., 586–587). These men carried a large portable bookrack (shupaifang 書牌坊), a bamboo pole crossed with several horizontal bamboo bars, from which their texts were displayed; they announced their arrival at each stop with a distinctive call. Any sales made on such circuits were retail sales, and by all accounts the books were very cheap, selling for only one to two (or two to four) tongyuan; it was the thickness of the book that determined its price (Interviews 9: Yuechi, 97/7/17; 15: Qiaojia, 97/7/18; 29: Yuechi, 97/7/28; 31: Yuechi, 08/7/16; 35: Wanshou, 08/7/23; and 46: Hongmiao, 08/7/30). The peddlers might also sell lots of texts, one hundred ce 冊 to a lot, wholesale, to other itinerant merchants or simply exchange lots of texts to suit the differing tastes of their market circuits (ibid., 585–587).
The stock of the itinerant booksellers/peddlers consisted of stories compiled from recent news events or local scandals; performance texts (including arias from operas, xiqu 戲曲; libretti of Sichuan operas; songbooks, changshu 唱書, and tunes, xiaodiao 小調); primers; short medical manuals and prescription collections; almanacs and fortune-telling handbooks; and prints of guardian gods (particularly the stove god) (Interviews 9: Yuechi, 97/7/17; 11: Qiaojia, 97/7/18; 17: Zhenlong, 97/7/24). Many texts, like the libretti of Sichuan operas, had a distinctive regional flavor, referring to local sites and using local vocabulary; and thus they helped to perpetuate local stories and literary and performance traditions. But others were universal favorites: Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai 梁山伯與祝英台), The Marriage of a Rat and a Girl (Laoshu jia nü 老鼠嫁女), Story of the White Snake (Baishe zhuan 白蛇傳), etc. (Interviews 6: Yuechi, 96/8/1; 13: Yuechi, 97/7/17; 29: Yuechi, 97/7/28; 36: Yuechi, 08/7/26; 38: Yuechi, 08/7/24; and 45: Shiya, 08/7/29).
Some of the latter type of text – the shabby primers, almanacs, and songbooks – were so popular that they were still being produced, along with some popular novels and cheap prescription guides, long after the disappearance of the Four Books and other traditional textbooks. In the early and mid-1950s, the provincial Office of Press and Publishing (Xinwen chubanchu 新聞出版處), responding to orders from Beijing, conducted a series of investigations into the state of woodblock publishing and the sale of “reactionary” (fan 反) texts, which included songbooks deemed pornographic or superstitious, linked text-and-picture stories (lianhuanhua 連環畫), “unscientific” fortune-telling manuals and popular agricultural calendars or almanacs, and “outlandish” novels of the supernatural (including some pseudo-historical fiction) (“Guanyu chuli ziying muke shupu de chubu fang'an” 1954, 53b-54a). The state was disturbed that there was still a rather large audience for such works; both peasants and city-dwellers are mentioned as likely readers (“Yuechi mukeye qingkuang diaocha baogao”; “Guanyu chuli jiu lishu de banfa”; “Baogao chuli Chongqingshi Wenhuaju guanyu shouzhi jiushu de baogao”; and “Guanyu chuli fandong, shenguai, yinluan shuhua de zhishi”).
Although it was acknowledged that these texts were being sold throughout the province, Yuechi was targeted as the major source of the cut blocks. The “Report on the Investigation into the Wood-cutting Craft in Yuechi County” (“Yuechixian mukeye qingkuang diaocha baobao” 岳池縣木刻業情況調查報告), dated April 3, 1954, opened with a brief summary of Yuechi's role in the history of woodblock publishing:
In the past woodblock texts circulated relatively widely in Sichuan, and today there are still not a few counties that still sell woodblock books. Among these, woodblock almanacs are particularly common. According to the responses from each area, the woodblocks [for these texts] are for the most part either produced in the peasant villages of Yuechi or cut by workers from Yuechi. . . . Before Liberation [1949], there were altogether twelve woodblock bookshops in Yuechi, and the books they sold were mostly the Four Books and songbooks and tunes from old Sichuan operas. After Liberation, at first most woodblock bookshops either changed their work or closed; there were only five shops – the Wenting shushe 文廷書社, Yihong shudian 儀宏書店, Tongxing shudian 同興書店, Renhe shudian 仁和書店, and Wenhe shudian 文和書店 – still in business, and even these were selling mostly stationery and paper with [some] woodblock texts. (Ibid., 42a)
Although most cutters in the county seat had turned to seal-cutting, the report continues, in the peasant villages outside the county seat, there were still “not a few cutters.” According to an investigation conducted in November 1953, if one counted up all the Yuechi residents who still knew how to cut blocks, the total would be between four hundred and five hundred persons; it was estimated that about one-third of the population of Yixing township had been trained in the craft (“Yuechixian mukeye qingkuang diaocha baogao” 1954, 42b-43a).
Many of these cutters, unable to support their households from farming alone (or a few who were interested in earning a little extra huoqian 活錢), turned to what was now apparently considered an illicit craft: the cutting of blocks for old-style books, in particular almanacs (tongshu 通書) or calendars (lishu 曆書). As they had no capital to fund what, given the disapproval of a newly intrusive state, would have been a very uncertain enterprise, they relied on investment from outside the county:
Most of the capital comes from outside book merchants or private printshop managers who place orders for block cutting. According to our understanding, these outside book merchants or printshops send a letter or a messenger each year to [order the cutting]. The peasant Zhou Boxun 周伯勳 of Shizu 十組, Sancun 三村, Yixing township, whose family members have been cutting blocks for three generations and who still knows how to calculate the sixty cyclical characters [used in the old method of reckoning time], is hired every year by the Chongqing Wenhua tang 文華堂 to cut blocks for almanacs. According to Zhou's own account, last year [in 1953] he cut almanac blocks for four shops – the Wenhua tang shuju 書局 on Ziyuan jie 字院街; the Qunli yinshuashe 群力印刷社 of Panjiagou 潘家溝; the Yan Yunhui hao 閻雲輝號 on Xinmin jie 新民街 (all in Chongqing); and Chen Xiyun 陳錫雲 [’s shop] on Xinlong jie 新龍街 in Daxian 達縣. Each set (fu 付) cost 300,000 yuan. The Daxian government did not permit Chen Xiyun to sell the almanacs because of their feudal, superstitious, content, but the other two editions circulated rather widely through all parts of the province. (Ibid. 43b)
There thus remained a reasonably profitable market for woodblock editions of calendar/almanacs and songbooks – not just in the eastern Sichuan countryside, but also in a metropolis like Chongqing – well into the 1950s.Footnote 12
The Popular Demand for Woodblock Texts: Textbooks and Fiction
We might argue that the Yuechi area was a special case – after all, as a block-cutting center, it was particularly well suited to the continuing production of woodblock texts. But a similar phenomenon can be found in other areas as well. The songbooks (gece 歌冊) published widely in Chaozhou 潮州, Guangdong, in the early twentieth century were woodblock productions, despite the fact that this region had long since been introduced to modern print technologies. And in Republican-era Chengdu and Chongqing, the “reformed” songbooks produced as part of the 1930s movement to rectify the moral problems raised in certain popular performance works were published by several houses specializing in cheap woodblock printing. To give just one example: Newly Edited and Reformed Bridal Lament (Xinbian gailiang Nü’er ku jia 新編改良 女兒哭嫁), a crudely cut songbook-pamphlet published by the Xiangjia gou 向家溝 in 1931, “reforms” a traditional marriage lament into a song celebrating the joys and benefits of marriage (McLaren Reference McLaren2008; Brokaw Reference Brokaw, Brokaw and Reed2010, 52–53).
Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the continuing popularity of traditional textbooks, especially the “San-Bai-Qian” and editions of the Four Books, the core texts of the late imperial educational curriculum. As late as 1938, thirty-three years after the abolition of the examination system and twenty-six years after the establishment of the modern Republican school system, the leftist writer Lao Xiang 老向 (Wang Huandou 王煥斗, 1898–1968) noted the ubiquity of these texts in the hinterland:
When I was working in the countryside in Hebei's Ding County, I noticed two old bookstores on the northern street. The entrances were so neglected, deserted, and overgrown you could have set up a birdtrap there, and I thought they must have closed long ago. But this was not the case, they just kept on day after day. I only found out after close questioning that they completely relied on the wholesale trade of those outdated old books that still (somehow) survive: the Hundred Family Names, the Thousand Character Classic, and the Three Character Classic. (Lao Xiang 2000, 292–293; Borthwick Reference Borthwick1983, 123)
Peasants, in fact, seemed to prefer these primers to modern works. Lao Xiang explained, “Many uneducated peasants, in town to trade in their spare time, often buy a copy of the Three Character Classic to take home with them. I hardly ever saw them buy a modern, vernacular, book put out by the Commercial Press in Shanghai” (Lao Xiang 2000, 292–293). No wonder that Yuechi shops like the Wensheng tang and the Wenhe shushe focused on the publication of the old primers, the Four Books, and the Five Classics.
The appeal of the old educational texts was by no means a uniquely rural, peasant, phenomenon, however. According once again to Lao Xiang, the market for the old primers included not only peasants ignorant of or resistant to modern education but also teachers in the modern schools: “Not only do private family schools use them but foreign-style, modern schools also use them as supplementary reading material” (ibid., 291–293). And even in the cities private schools using the old-style textbooks persisted through the Republican period.
It is not clear from Lao Xiang's account whether the texts in question were woodblock imprints or not. It would not be unreasonable, however, to assume that they were woodblock texts, for it was around this time that there was a nationwide resurgence in woodblock publishing. The occupation of Shanghai, the great modern publishing center, by the Japanese in 1937 (not to mention their seizure, too, of Wuhan, another important modern publishing center, in 1938) effectively reduced the flow of modern texts to the interior and stimulated a revival – modest to be sure – in woodblock publishing (Interview 68: Wuge, 95/12/05). The war was in fact a boon to Yuechi block-cutters; their numbers swelled locally from over 800 in the first decade of the twentieth century to over 1500 by the late 1930s, and they dominated the block-cutting labor force of Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic (Yuechixian erqinggongye zhi n.d., 136).
At the same time, a necessary (and temporary) retreat from the modern educational system – and a growing demand, even in the cities of the eastern coast, for the traditional textbooks – supported this revival. In Guangzhou the student population in 1924 was about evenly divided between the old-style private or family schools and the new schools; there were 636 private schools with about 30,000 students, about the same number of students as attended the modern schools. The number had dropped to 74 old-style schools by 1937, but then began to increase again during the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), as the city government lacked funds to support the new school system. It was not until after 1949 that the old schools finally disappeared (Cao Sibin et al. Reference Sibin, Weixiong and Zhi1983, 263–264). A similar pattern emerged in Hanchuan 漢川 county, near the metropolitan area of Wuhan. Hanchuan had 168 private schools in 1935, only 23 of which were “reformed” (that is, they employed teachers trained in modern education and used modern school texts). By 1942, the number had increased to 310, only 70 of which were reformed; a great many new private schools, using the old-style textbooks, were founded during the war. It was not until 1945 that their numbers began to decline (Hanchuan xianzhi 1992, 523).
The persistence of woodblock print technology in the cases cited above can be explained to some extent in economic terms: as long as the demand for titles that had originally been published in woodblock form remained high – and as long as the woodblocks that had been used to print these texts remained usable – a publisher could print new copies at relatively low cost, as he need pay only for paper, ink, thread, and the relatively low wages of the printers and binders. Given the abundance of cheap cutting labor in areas like Yuechi (Fu 1987, 503), even the cutting of new texts (required, for example, when printing the “reformed” song texts in the 1930s or the almanacs that so alarmed the government in the 1950s) might be inexpensive enough that the publisher could still profit even if the final product was sold for very little to peasants and the urban poor.
But clearly there had to be a brisk demand for these works, regardless of the technology with which they were produced. Peasant discomfort with the modern readers – whose contents were rarely relevant to life in the countryside – can explain much of the continuing popularity and use of the traditional primers and glossaries, as the phrases and simple precepts they taught were far more familiar – and useful – to peasant life (Borthwick Reference Borthwick1983, 123). The use of these texts as supplementary reading in modern schools is somewhat more interesting, but it is likely that even modern teachers, particularly in the early stages of the new system, realized the value of the texts as primers of Chinese culture (and/or the classical language) – and perhaps felt more comfortable with them than with the untried new textbooks. As access to modern textbooks was uneven at that time, teachers in areas distant from Shanghai may have quite naturally turned to the old standbys, the very texts that they themselves had probably studied. (Of course when Shanghai and the Jiangnan area were cut off from the rest of the nation during the Sino-Japanese War, many had no choice but to rely on woodblock imprints.) Finally, the relative cost of the woodblock primers may have made them attractive to sites in the interior – produced locally, they could be retailed at a lower price than texts that had to be shipped from distant Shanghai.Footnote 13
Woodblock Publishers and the Shanghai's Modern Publishers: Collaboration
Lao Xiang's description of the shabby shop that sold the old primers in Ding county, Hebei, presents it as divorced from the world of modern publishing, as a site of book production and sale – in parallel and even in opposition to – the great lithographic and letter-press firms of Shanghai. Clearly many of the Yuechi cutters still active in the 1950s also had an existence detached from and, at least in the eyes of the state, threatening to, “modern” publishing and book culture. Interestingly, the two book cultures came together in the modern schools, where woodblock primers were often used alongside modern textbooks.
But commercial woodblock publisher-booksellers also at times chose to work with the modern publishers of Shanghai to perpetuate – and continue to profit from – the book culture they had helped to create. Beginning in the 1870s, several of Shanghai's modern publishers sought out woodblock editions of particularly important or particularly popular texts for reprinting in “modern” form. Lithographic publishing in Shanghai was largely a reprint industry responding to the widespread demand for examination textbooks and the official demand for reproduction of important literary and scholarly works (Reed Reference Reed2004, 90). But typographic publishers were also interested in profiting from the rush to reproduce China's book culture in modern form (Pan Reference Pan2008, 562–565).Footnote 14
And both types of publishers quickly realized that there was a very large popular demand for primers and fiction as well as examination literature (the audience for which had shrunk considerably, but by no means completely disappeared) when the examination system was abolished in 1905. As Pan Jianguo argues, the reprint activities of Shanghai publishers, both lithographic and letterpress, did much to preserve and disseminate many of the works of Ming and Qing fiction. He calculates that 280 reprints of Ming and Qing novels were produced by 62 Shanghai publishers between 1891 and 1898, the years that represent the peak of the reprint boom. The Shanghai shuju 上海書局, Wenyi shuju 文宜書局, Liwen xuan 理文軒, Tushu jicheng ju 圖書集成局, and Zhenyi shuju 珍藝書局 were among the most active shops, producing editions of late Ming and Qing popular military-historical romances, court-case tales, and love stories.Footnote 15 Competition among these publishers led many of them to disguise already reprinted works with different titles or prefaces plucked from old woodblock editions, allowing them to claim that their editions were new and/or improved. So the lithographic edition of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi yanyi 三國志演義) published by the Hongwen shuju 鴻文書局 contained a preface dated 1888 and attributed to “the master of the Feiyun guan” (Feiyun guanzhu 飛雲館主); in fact this was a preface (by “the recluse of Qingxi,” Qingxi jushi 清溪居士) to an 1853 woodblock edition of the novel published by the Xiaoshi shanfang 小石山房 in Changshu, Jiangsu (Pan Reference Pan2008, 570–571).
Pan claims that the demand from Shanghai for woodblock texts to reprint was beginning to dry up in 1898. Yet in the late 1920s and 1930s the Suwei shanfang was still sending works to Shanghai to be converted into yangban; Popular Stories of Zhangzhou, for example, was returned as a “foreign block” text printed on very low quality paper, “like newspaper.” At least one primer, the Suwei shanfang edition of Expanded Words of the Worthies also made its way to Shanghai. But by far the greater number of works were sensationalized military-historical romances like Complete Story of Yue Fei (Shuo Yue quanzhuan 說岳全傳 by Qian Cai 錢彩, with a preface dated 1744), Five Tigers Pacify the South, or Three Knight-Errants and Five Sworn Brothers. And in roughly the same period, the Chengdu Lüye shanzhuang 綠野山莊 sent its woodblock edition of the popular textbook, Children's Treasury of Allusions, for reprinting in Shanghai (Interviews 68: Wuge, Fujian, 95/12/5, and 83: Zhangzhou, 96/4/1). There is convincing evidence that, after an understandable lull during the first two and a half tumultuous decades of the twentieth century, the public's appetite for popular fiction and primers of the late imperial period spurred a revival of reprint operations and drove Shanghai publishers to search farther and farther afield (as far as Chengdu) for woodblock editions to reprint.
Although no contracts explaining the terms of the agreements between Shanghai and woodblock publishers seem to have survived, oral histories suggest that these deals often entailed the shipment of the modern reprints back to the woodblock publishers for sale in their bookstores; this is certainly the arrangement negotiated by the Suwei shanfang in Zhangzhou. Thus the woodblock publisher-bookseller would profit, first, from the initial sale of the text and, second, from the addition to his stock – perhaps at a discount – of bestselling titles guaranteed to attract customers. He was, of course, at the same time undermining his trade in woodblock texts. Presumably a shrewd publisher would limit his sale of texts to Shanghai carefully, choosing titles for which the blocks were already very worn and holding back certain types of texts (fortune-telling manuals and geomancy handbooks do not seem to have been commonly reprinted by Shanghai firms) that might benefit from their material links to traditional practices and technologies.
And what choice did such commercial publisher-booksellers have at the time? Clearly the market for woodblock texts was shrinking. Most did not have the capital to invest in the new machine technologies. Large operations like the Shancheng tang could afford to diversify, but the most that smaller shops could hope for would be the purchase of a lithographic machine that might be used for job printing – that is, the production of ruled exercise books and forms for local schools, governments, and businesses. In this context, collaboration with the rising publishers of Shanghai must have been the most attractive option for many publisher-booksellers: if they could secure a favorable relationship with Shanghai publishers, they could prosper by selling the titles that had proven themselves bestsellers in the past, now produced with the new technologies. Indeed, many of woodblock publisher-booksellers seem to have followed this strategy: they kept up their woodblock trade as long as possible (that is, as long as their blocks held up); forged ties to a prominent Shanghai house through the exchange of texts, as described above; and included stock from Shanghai in their shops, often becoming the special agent for the distribution of “their” house's texts in their localities. And from there it might be an easy transition to managing the local branch store that sold Zhonghua Books (Zhonghua shuju 中華書局), Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan 商務印書館), or World Books (Shijie shuju 世界書局). The Shanghai publishers on their side were spared the necessity of identifying and developing markets on their own; they might even take advantage of the transport routes and channels of distribution used by woodblock publishers to ship their texts (Brokaw Reference Brokaw, Brokaw and Reed2010, 53–56).
*****
The persistence of commercial woodblock printing through the 1940s, long after the rise of modern publishing, can be explained largely as the consequence of the economics of woodblock printing and the continuing popular demand for certain types of texts. More precisely, it was a function of the intersection of the two: the low costs of woodblock printing in certain areas – and the durability of woodblocks – made it possible for commercial publishers, particularly those at the lower levels of the industry, to cheaply produce texts that were widely popular particularly among a peasant and petty urbanite audience.Footnote 16 As noted, the Sino-Japanese War also played a role, stimulating a short upsurge in woodblock printing during the period that customers had only limited access to the modern publishing houses of Shanghai.
And it was once again the dual forces of economics and popular taste that drove the fruitful collaboration between the old-style woodblock publishers and modern Shanghai publishers who brokered the deals that transformed the popular texts of the old woodblock book culture into modern imprints. For the woodblock publishers these deals gave them what was in many cases a last chance to profit from their craft – and the opportunity to form useful connections with the movers of modern publishing; for the Shanghai businessmen, a chance to profit – with no need to invest in the creation of new works – from the enormous popularity of the old-style primers and Ming-Qing fiction and to own, as it were, not only the book culture of the present day, but that of the past (or at least part of it) as well.
But was the book culture of the Three Character Classic and Five Tigers Pacify the South the book culture of the past in the 1930s, ‘40s, and even ‘50s? That through those decades “modern” schoolteachers still taught the classical primers, Chongqing urbanites supported a market in woodblock almanacs, and savvy Shanghai publishers invested in the reprinting of late imperial popular fiction suggests that it was still very much alive as a book culture that satisfied the demands and tastes of a very large and very mixed reading public, a public that for the most part was unselfconsciously attached to this culture. That is, it was composed of readers who were not making a politically or culturally charged choice between the modern and the traditional, but rather sustaining a comfortable engagement with the familiar (not yet the “traditional”) during a period of often puzzling political shifts and cultural starts that may have seemed largely irrelevant to their daily lives.
But this book culture, particularly its fictional component, may have been alive, too, not just in the sense that it provided comfortable forms of entertainment, but also in that its new products expressed, in familiar forms, very contemporary concerns and tensions. David Der-wei Wang has suggested that many of the popular novels of the very late Qing exhibit a modern sensibility later denied by later New Culture critics. Court case novels like the Court Cases of Judge Shi (Shi gong'an 施公案, 1820?), Court Cases of Judge Peng, and Three Knights-Errant and Five Sworn Brothers, for example, conflated the figure of the law-breaking knight-errant and the law-defending judge-investigator, so that “the hero of the courtroom emerges from the yamen to play the hero on the road.” In so doing, they pointed up “the uncertainly of the concepts of law and justice at a turbulent historical moment. By flagrantly playing with the complicit relationship between law and violence, between justice and terror, late Qing chivalric and court-case fiction marks a radical rethinking of legitimacy, whether imperial or ideological” (Wang Reference Wang1997, 9, 119–120). But, by expressing these tensions in the form of the martial arts romance, they familiarized them to a capacious reading public.
To be sure, the introduction and growing influence of new forms of writing and publishing in the late Qing and early Republic re-contextualized this culture, giving it a new and quite complicated standing in the Chinese textual world. The classical primers (with their Confucian “messages”) became objects of contempt in the eyes of the progressive intellectuals of the May Fourth era, at the same time that they clearly continued to meet the educational, ethical, and linguistic needs of much of the population, rural and urban alike. The popular fiction of the Ming and Qing retained its broad appeal as entertainment (and, as Wang has argued, as a vehicle for the expression of contemporary anxieties), but, as it also became an object of academic study – specifically a means of newly celebrating the vernacular tradition in Chinese literature – it took on heightened cultural and political meanings. For better or worse, by mid-century, all these texts had become players in forging a new Chinese national identity: the popular fiction as precious traces of a vital “folk” sensibility that foreshadowed China's revolutionary present; the primers and almanacs (and the outmoded technology that reproduced them) as remnants of a “feudal” past to be replaced by a modern and “scientific” future. Both categories were now consigned to “tradition”: the former to that part of the tradition that provided a kind of indigenous origin story for socialist sentiments at the same time that it highlighted the greater theoretical sophistication and political efficacy of the new, “modern,” “scientific” socialism of Marx, Lenin, and the Chinese Communist Party; the latter to that part of the tradition that was to be resisted and overturned for modernity.
But, as I suggest in the Epilogue, these mid-century assessments by no means represent the end of the story.
2. Not for Profit Alone: The Preservation of the Classical Textual Culture in Woodblock Imprints and the Creation of Tradition in the Qing and Republic
Commercial publishing offers a useful index to measure market demand and thus popular tastes. But commercial publishers were not the only players in the dance between old and new; officials, literati/scholars, and religious institutions continued to publish works for their different reading constituencies – as they had done since the rise of woodblock printing several centuries earlier. Governments in China had, as early as the tenth century, played an important role in woodblock (and movable type) publishing; the Qing in particular had earned both praise – for its sponsorship of large scholarly publishing projects like the encyclopedic Illustrated Collection of Books, Old and New (Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成, 1725) – and blame – for harsh literary inquisitions of the Kangxi 康熙 (r. 1661–1722), Yongzheng 雍正 (r. 1723–1735), and Qianlong 乾隆 (r. 1736–1795) reigns, which had resulted in the destruction of thousands of titles.
In the last decade of the dynasty, Qing (and later Republican) officials, uneasily weighing the need for intellectual and cultural reform – which entailed acceptance of foreign, Western, learning – against their allegiance to the indigenous classical textual tradition (mastery of which had been the basis of their careers), moved to promote the woodblock reproduction of the great works of China's scholarly book culture. At the same time, wealthy elite book collectors, motivated variously by aesthetics, scholarly interests, desire for sociocultural prestige, and/or patriotism, made a point of publishing block-printed texts, usually editions of rare books or works of scholarship; they, too, were working within a long-standing tradition, that of private literati book publication, that dates back to the Song dynasty (960-1279) at the latest. Finally, certain monasteries, temples, and religious charitable institutions also self-consciously embraced woodblock publishing as a means of preserving sacred texts, as they had since the very beginnings of woodblock printing in the eighth century. Although, as in the past, the state, book collector-publishers, and the religious institutions did sell their works, they were not motivated primarily by a desire for financial profit.
However much the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century elite practices of textual publication may have been grounded in long-standing practices of state, literati, and institutional publication, the changed political and cultural circumstances and technologies of the time gave them meanings outside those practices. When, despite the easy accessibility of more convenient and less expensive technologies, elites, whether official or private, made a conscious decision to reprint ancient texts in high-quality (and high-cost) woodblock editions, they were asserting an aesthetic link between the ideas, scholarship, and literary achievements of the Chinese past and the material form of the woodblock text that was necessarily new – and, we might argue, implicitly revealed the contemporary challenges facing the very knowledge they were trying to preserve. Commercial publishers continued to reproduce the works that were treated in part 1 in order to meet an ongoing popular demand for them, a demand that did not cease even when the woodblocks used to print them wore out; the not-for-profit publishers discussed here published works of arguably greater intellectual sophistication and aesthetic value, but of increasingly restricted relevance even to the class of elite readers for which they were designed.
The State's Investment in Woodblock Book Culture
To some degree the late Qing state and later the early Republican state, at the same time that they were establishing a modern educational system and requiring the use of new state-sponsored textbooks, also encouraged the continuing study and publication of texts of the indigenous elite culture. In 1902, in the wake of the Boxer Protocol of the previous year, the imperial government urged the closing of the old academies or shuyuan 書院 that had served as the major institutions of examination study in the Qing, and their replacement with new schools, colleges or xuetang 學堂, that would teach both Chinese and “modern” learning, but through a curriculum heavily influenced by Western educational models. The abolition of the examination system a few years later, in 1905, suddenly made the enormous body of textual knowledge required for examination study more or less irrelevant. It confirmed that the Qing was serious about modern educational reform and set the stage for even more vigorous reforms during the Republican era.
Yet, in 1907, Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837-1909, jinshi 1863), ironically one of the most ardent advocates of the modern school system and the study of Western learning, argued that reform may have gone too far in abandoning Chinese classical scholarship. Fearful that knowledge of China's ancient classical culture might be lost entirely in the rush to educational modernization, he established a Cungu xuetang 存古學堂 (College of the enduring ancients) in Wuchang, Hubei. Two years later, in 1909, the Qing government ordered each province in the empire to follow suit – that is, to build, in addition to the modern schools, Cungu Colleges as academies for the study of traditional learning (they were renamed Guoxue guan 國學館 or National Studies Schools after the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912). The Cungu Colleges, conforming to a pattern that Zhang had set early in his career as an education official, were to combine the functions of teaching and publishing; each Cungu College was encouraged to establish a publishing unit, a Cungu shuju 存古書局 or Cungu Publishing Office, to print lectures and textbooks for the academies’ students and to ensure the continued reproduction of the texts of classical learning (Brokaw Reference Brokaw, Bussotti and Drège2015, 628–629).
In Sichuan, the Cungu College was duly founded in Chengdu in 1910 under the leadership of the provincial educational commissioner Zhao Qilin 趙啟霖 (1859-1935), who announced the goal of the college to be “emphasis on national learning for the support of culture” (zhuzhong guoxue, yi wei wenhua 注重國學, 以維文化). A proponent of Cheng-Zhu 程−朱 teachings, the Confucian orthodoxy at the heart of the old imperial examination system, Zhao was horrified by contemporary currents in education. He hoped to promote the “learning of principle” or lixue 理學 and to that end had shrines to the major Confucian scholars of Song-dynasty Sichuan erected at the school; lixue was also one of the courses of study offered in the curriculum. The earliest directors of the school were distinguished scholars who were not natives of Sichuan: the scholar and calligrapher Xie Wuliang 謝無量 (1884-1964), who taught there from 1910 to 1912, and the historian and ardent defender of the China's national essence (guocui 國粹), Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1884-1919), who was at the school for only one year, in 1912. Thereafter, the directors and teachers were all appointed from within the province (Guo and Zhang 2000, 34–35).
The Cungu College, in both its teaching and publishing operations, represents an effort to preserve and perpetuate the work of the province's by then defunct higher-level academies, the Zunjing 尊經 Academy (founded by Zhang Zhidong in 1874, when he was education commissioner in Sichuan, to introduce Han learning to a region that had not up to that point been touched by the major intellectual and scholarly debates of the dynasty) and the Jinjiang 錦江 Academy. Four of the teachers at the new school were graduates of the Zunjing Academy: Liao Ping 廖平 (1852-1932, jinshi 1889), Xu Jiong 徐炯 (1852-1936), Song Yuren 宋育仁 (1857-1931, jinshi 1886), and Wu Zhiying 吳之英 (1857-1918). The most famous of the four, Liao Ping – whose notion that Confucius was a reformer had inspired Kang Youwei's 康有為 (1858-1927) reform program of 1898 – he became the director of National Studies School in 1912 and held that position until 1918. The College's publishing house, at first lacking blocks, used woodblocks from the former publishing units of the Zunjing and Jinjiang Academies to reprint old texts (Guo 2008, 91–95); the old blocks were taken out of storage, their condition assessed and arrangements made for their repair and the cutting of new blocks where necessary (“Pi Cungu xuetang” 1911).Footnote 17 A bookstore on Xuedao jie 學道街, near the old examination compound, sold the reprints of the old texts.
Through this new publishing house many of the more notable publications of the old academies, in particular the Zunjing Academy, were reprinted and sold. The Cungu Publishing Office's works fall into roughly three reprint categories: editions of the Classics used in instruction; editions of works that represent the distinctive teaching of the Zunjing Academy, particularly under Wang Kaiyun 王闓運 (1833-1916), the most influential director of the academy and a New Text scholar; and works of particular local and regional interest.
Thus, in 1912, a facsimile of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋) hand-copied by Wang Kaiyun was one of the first products of the Cungu Publishing Office. The next year, at least three more works were produced: a reprint of the Zunjing Publishing Office reprint of the Wuyingdian 武英殿 edition of Xiangtai Edition of the Five Classics (Xiangtai wujing 相臺五經), an edition of the Five Classics collated by Yue Ke 岳珂 (1183-1240) of the Song, with “Kaozheng” 考證 sections listing variant characters added in the Qing; the Explanations of the Classical Canon (Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文), a guide to the pronunciation and variant and simplified forms of characters in ancient texts by the Tang (618-907) scholar Lu Deming's 陸德明; and an edition of the Changes of Zhou (Zhouyi 周易, 10 juan) identified as a textbook of the Zunjing Academy (Chengdu Zunjing shuyuan keben 成都尊經書院課本). These works were presumably reprinted for the use of Cungu College students.
Second, the Cungu Publishing Office attempted to keep alive Sichuan's claim to a school of learning based on the teachings of the Zunjing Academy and somewhat loosely on Wang Kaiyun's Gongyang New Text scholarship. (Wang viewed the Spring and Autumn Annals, with the Gongyang Commentary or Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳, as the Classic that, if properly decoded, would provide the blueprint for sage political action in the face of the myriad political, social, and economic problems facing the Qing.)Footnote 18 The publishing unit reprinted the major collections of late Qing “Sichuan learning,” which consisted primarily of essays from the students of the Zunjing AcademyFootnote 19 and articles from the Academy's short-lived journal, the Journal of Sichuan Learning (Shuxue bao 蜀學報, 1898). During the time that Liao Ping (who had inherited the mantle of the leading light of “Sichuan learning”) directed the National Studies School, the Cungu Publishing Office served as an outlet for reprinting of texts from his medical collection and the publication of his voluminous writings on the Classics, which were designed largely to reconcile the Old Text and New Text traditions of classical scholarship – Liao wavered between the two throughout his life (Liao 1985, 182–187). Indeed, in its later years, the Cungu Publishing Office seems to have become almost a vanity press for Liao; his works were, in fact, almost the only new woodblock publications the office produced after 1916.
Within the first five years of its existence, the Cungu Publishing Office also made a point of reprinting older works about Sichuan or works by noted Sichuan authors: Zhang Shu's 張澍 (1781-1847) Records of Sichuan (Shudian 蜀典), an anecdotal gazetteer compiled when the author was serving in the province; Fan Zuyu's 范祖禹 (1041-1098) history, Mirror of the Tang (Tangjian 唐鑑); the statesman Wei Liaoweng's 魏了翁 (1178-1237) literary collection, Heshan wenchao 鶴山文鈔; and the anthology Selected Works by Sichuan Worthies (Shuzhong xianzheng wenxuan 蜀中先正文選). The publishing house also reprinted Sichuan Learning (Shuxue bian 蜀學編), a collection of biographies of famous Sichuan scholars of the Cheng-Zhu school originally compiled by a student of the Zunjing Academy in 1888. Of course such publications, as they worked in tandem with those claiming to represent a contemporary Sichuan school of learning, bolstered pride in the province's distinguished past and enlarged the claims for the significance of Sichuan as a vital participant in the intellectual life of the nation.
Thus this government-sponsored woodblock publishing house (re)printed old textbooks for students devoted to mastering what was rapidly becoming, as it competed with “modern” Western learning, “traditional” Chinese knowledge. It also helped perpetuate, at least through most of the Republican period, the form of classical study that Sichuan scholars, led by Liao Ping, claimed as their own, as the “learning of Sichuan” (Shuxue 蜀學); and fueled Sichuanese pride by reprinting regional histories and native authors. How are we to evaluate the work of this operation (and, presumably, the work of other provincial Cungu Colleges – National Studies Schools) in the context of the cultural (and publishing) concerns of the very late Qing and Republican eras? Zhang Zhidong's intention in establishing the first Cungu College was not, at least as stated, an effort to undermine the new, “modern” educational model he had done so much to promote, but rather to advocate a balance between classical Chinese study and Western learning. Nevertheless, the Cungu College quickly came to be associated with a conservative cultural stance, a passionate defense of the value of the Classics as a source of answers for the problems of the day. The original 1874 guidelines for the Zunjing Academy stated that its goals were to master the Classics to produce “scholars of broad learning and men talented in the practical management of government” (Brokaw Reference Brokaw, Bussotti and Drège2015, 607).Footnote 20 But, in the changed intellectual and political context of the early twentieth century, there was no way that the College could truly carry on the teaching of the Zunjing Academy. While the teachers of the Sichuan Cungu College made some effort to introduce new questions clearly inspired by Western ideas,Footnote 21 the insistence on the Classics (and to some extent the histories) as the repositories of all wisdom about contemporary concerns betrayed a desperate need to keep what was rapidly becoming “traditional” learning alive and relevant.
The publishing record of the Cungu Publishing Office confirms this impression of growing irrelevance. There was an audience for the texts produced by the Cungu Publishing Office,Footnote 22 but it became an increasingly limited one. This is suggested by the fact that the publishing house tapered off its reprint operations within a few years of the founding of the Republic. It seems that, after around 1916, it simply did not need to produce more textbooks. Liao Ping's writings formed the major publications of the school in its later history, but his increasingly confused efforts to reconcile New Text and Old Text classical studies by this time held little or no interest to scholars. These facts demonstrate the very reduced role that the heir to the Zunjing Academy, in both its teaching and publishing activities, played in Sichuan educational and intellectual life and book culture in the May Fourth era.
Private Collectors and Woodblock Publishing
The efforts of the state to sustain an increasingly challenged educational curriculum – and its woodblock textbooks – ultimately had little impact on early twentieth-century society, if we can take the example of the Sichuan Cungu College/Publishing Office as representative. In addition to training at least one scholar of note,Footnote 23 perhaps the most that can be said for the institution is that it preserved the often quite fine publications of one of China's last old-style schools, the Zunjing Academy.
But the work of preservation, through the reprinting of rare and important texts of the classical tradition, was more often the work of wealthy private book collectors. Quite aside from the service such publishers performed for scholarship, this kind of publishing often garnered its practitioners’ considerable cultural capital. It was an attractive activity for wealthy merchants aspiring to establish themselves in elite society or to signify their mastery of elite culture. Take, for example, the case of the Yan father-and-son bibliophiles of Chengdu, who arguably did more than the Cungu Publishing Office to ensure the preservation of the national essence through their publication of a series of carefully edited and finely produced editions of literary collections, texts of Qing evidential research (kaozheng 考證), and medical works. Yan Yanfeng 嚴雁峰 (1855-1918), a Zunjing Academy graduate and son of a wealthy Zigong salt merchant (on the status of these merchants, see Zelin Reference Zelin2006), established the finest private book collection in Sichuan, the Biyuan shuku 賁園書庫, and, at the urging of his teacher Zhang Zhidong, started publishing some of the rarer works in his collection. He then trained his adopted son, Yan Gusun 嚴谷孫 (also Gusheng 谷聲, 1889–1976), to continue his work.Footnote 24 It was, indeed, Gusun who oversaw the publication of the best known production of the “Yan Family School of Filial Piety and Righteousness” (Yanshi xiaoyi jiashu 雁氏孝義家塾), a collectanea of works on phonology, Yinyun congshu 音韻叢書 of 1933 (Yan Yunmo n.d.; Sichuan shengzhi 2001, vol. 1, 25–26).
Of course by the 1930s, lithographic and, especially, letterpress printing had become quite common. Lithography was introduced to Chengdu in 1897; and in 1900, the publishing pioneer Fu Chongju founded the letterpress company, the Chengdu tushuju 圖書局, which printed Popular News for Enlightenment (Qimeng tongsu bao 啟蒙通俗報), “a paper directed at the multitudes of semi-literate city residents” in 1901 and, in 1909, a pictorial newspaper, Illustrated Popular Press (Tongsu huabao 通俗畫報) (Stapleton Reference Stapleton2000, 115–116). Although it was still possible, in the 1930s, to hire Yuechi cutters to produce woodblock texts,Footnote 25 certainly by that time the dominant print technology in Chengdu was letterpress. Thus Yan Gusun was making a conscious decision to publish xylographically, to preserve China's traditional book culture in its traditional form.
We might dismiss the case of Yan father-and-son as a sign of the conservative cultural orientation of wealthy elites living in the interior and out of touch with modern trends. But a much better known example of an elite woodblock publisher comes from the heart of the culturally advanced Jiangnan region: Liu Chenggan 劉承幹 (1882-1963) of Nanxun 南潯, Wuxing 吳興 county (Zhejiang), founder of the Jiaye tang 嘉業堂 publishing house. Liu drew on his fabulous collection of rare books, numbering over 600,000 juan and including many Song and Yuan editions, to print a series of collectanea and stand-alone titles between 1913 and the late 1940s. The collection was funded by family wealth accumulated by Chenggan's grandfather, Liu Yong 劉鏞 (1826-1899). Born into poverty, he rose to become a prominent merchant dealing in salt, silk, cotton, and real estate. Then, following a pattern common among wealthy merchants, he saw to the education of his son, Liu Jinzao 劉錦藻 (1862-1934, jinshi 1894), who achieved some note as an official sympathetic to the Western Affairs (Yangwu 洋務) movement; he was also the founder in 1907 of the Zhejiang Xingye yinhang 浙江興業銀行, one of the first merchant-managed banks in China. Jinzao's son Chenggan built up the bulk of the family collection in the early decades of the twentieth century, largely, it is said, at the urging of Zhang Yuanji 張元濟 (1867-1959, jinshi 1892), founder of the Commercial Press (and fellow Zhejiang native), who feared that Japanese dealers were making off with the nation's major rare book collections by buying them up from their once wealthy but now impoverished gentry owners (Wu Reference Quansun, Changshou and Kang1997, 1–7; Ying and Li 2008, 46–55).Footnote 26
Following the tradition of earlier Jiangnan literati collector-publishers like Mao Jin 毛晉 (1599-1659), Lu Xinyuan 陸心源 (1834-1894), and Xu Shulan 徐樹蘭 (1838-1902), Liu Chenggan devoted much of his attention to the reproduction of early – that is to say, Song, Yuan, and Ming – editions of rare works in his collection; he occasionally persuaded book-collector friends to lend one of their own rare works for reprinting. The Four Histories in Song Editions (Jing Song sishi 景宋四史, 1918), perhaps the Jiaye tang's finest work, was a facsimile reproduction of Song editions of the most important of the dynastic histories: Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記), History of the Former Han (Hanshu 漢書), History of the Latter Han (Hou Hanshu 後漢書), and Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi 三國志). Liu Chenggan was also interested in preserving local literary culture: one of the Jiaye tang's major productions was the Wuxing Collectanea (Wuxing congshu 吳興叢書, 1914), a collection of writings by authors from Wuxing, his home county.
Most of the publications of the Jiaye tang were collectanea; 91 percent of the 187 titles in 3001 juan published by the Jiaye tang were in congshu (Ying and Li 2008, 140, 154–163). For the most part these collections reflected an interest in the preservation of texts that transmitted the writings of early schools of thought and the orthodox teachings of the Confucian tradition: the Jiaye Hall Collectanea (Jiaye tang congshu 嘉業堂叢書, 57 titles, 750 juan; 1918) reprinted the works of the “masters” or early philosophers; Qiushu Studio Collectanea (Qiushu zhai congshu 求恕齋叢書, 33 titles, 210 juan; 1913–1922) reproduced relatively recent Confucian writings; Collectanea of the Liuyu Thatched Hut (Liuyu caotang congshu 留余草堂叢書; 10 titles, 62 juan; 1920–1925) collected Cheng-Zhu school writings on human nature and moral principle.
Somewhat more adventurously, Liu also printed texts that had been proscribed by the Qing court during the literary inquisitions of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A collection of poems penned by members of the Tongcen poetry society, the Tongcen ji 同岑集 (edited in part by Li Lingxi 李令皙, whose work was banned as a result of his connection to the Zhuang Tinglong 莊廷鑨 case of 1661),Footnote 27 presumed destroyed under the orders of the Kangxi emperor but preserved in a private collection, was reprinted by the Jiaye tang in 1922. So, too, were at least three other works proscribed because of their insistence on treating the Southern Ming, the short-lived government formed to resist the Manchu conquest, as a legitimate state (Ying and Li 2008, 145–146).Footnote 28 Liu Chenggan was also somewhat receptive to contemporary scholarly concerns: the Jiaye tang produced a collection of Zhang Xuecheng's 章學誠 (1738-1801) writings (Zhang Xuecheng yishu 章學成遺書, 1922); Zhang had recently been “discovered” as a philosopher of history by Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) – and Liu sent Hu a copy of his edition of Zhang's works (ibid., 148).Footnote 29
Liu Chenggan was able to draw on a pool of expert scribes, cutters, collators, editors, and proofreaders in his publishing efforts. He employed the bibliographer (and former employee of Zhang Zhidong in Sichuan) Miao Quansun 繆荃孫 (1844-1919, jinshi 1876) to oversee the collation and editing of his publications and the composition of a catalogue of his collection.Footnote 30 Other scholars might be hired for specific projects: the book expert Ye Juchang 葉鞠裳 (1847?-1917; jinshi 1889) was given the task of collating The Four Histories in Song Editions in 1916, for example. These men also produced scholarly prefaces and postscripts, explaining the edition history and transmission of each text (Ying and Li 2008, 147).
Even in the heart of Jiangnan, the undisputed center of modern print technologies, it was not difficult to hire skilled scribes and cutters – although Liu did on occasion look to cities outside the region for labor. Relying on Miao Quansun for advice, he hired workers through reputable character-cutting shops. Rao Xingfang 饒星舫, a scribe skilled in all calligraphic styles, was hired from the Wuchang cutting shop of Tao Zilin 陶子麟 (1857-1928) to write the transcript (diben 底本) for The Four Histories in Song Editions. Tao Zilin himself cut blocks for Liu. But their relationship was not exclusive; Liu also hired Jiang Wenqing 姜文卿, a local cutting shop manager; Zhu Wenhai 朱文海 of the Shanghai Meihuali kezi she 上海美華里刻字社; and Liu Chunsheng 劉春生, manager of the Beiping Wenkai zhai 北平文楷齋 (a cutting-and-printing shop that employed over thirty scribes and between 300 and 400 cutters and printers and specialized in the publication of classical and vernacular fiction “in the Ming style” – that is, the fang Songti zi 仿宋體字 style). These cutters (some of whom were also scribes) worked in the tradition of the noted artisan cutters of the late Ming and early Qing, “signing” their work on the title page. The sparse records that survive of the terms of their employment reveal that they might be paid 2 yuan 2 jiao per thousand characters (Ying and Li, 150–153).
Like many literati publishers before him, Liu Chenggan distributed his publications with an eye to their value as cultural capital. Certain titles were sent as gifts to family members, friends, and noted scholars, fellow-collectors, and “important people.” Between 1915 and 1921, Liu sent at least 260 texts to several noted collectors and public figures – 57 texts to the collector Fu Zengxiang 傅增湘 (1872-1950), 66 to the scribe Rao Xingfang, 11 to the writer, publisher, and educational reformer Ye Shengtao 葉聖陶 (1894-1988), and so forth. Liu, at the urging of Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877-1927), also sent some titles to Japanese collectors. But Jiaye tang texts were also sold through the Jiaye tang sales office, the Nanxun Jiaye cangshu lou yinxing bu 南潯嘉業藏書樓印行部; a catalogue served to advertise the texts. Not surprisingly, prices were high; The Four Histories in Song Editions sold for 300 yuan (Ying and Li, 148–149).
Jiaye tang publications served the primary function of preserving, in scholarly (and often facsimile) editions, many rare works of the Song, Yuan, and Ming and transmitting works believed lost or largely ignored during the Qing. Following a pattern common to literati publishers of the imperial period (McDermott Reference McDermott2006, 84–94), these texts circulated as gifts within a rather small group of elite readers and collectors, men either fortunate enough to be included in Liu Chenggan's circle of acquaintances (or to be ones Liu desired to draw into this circle) or wealthy enough to afford to purchase these finely produced imprints. Liu was certainly not engaged in any effort to disseminate important texts to a broad readership; his technological choices alone suggest that the deliberate goal was, rather, to limit access to a valued elite.
Although the audience for Liu's publications was small, it was important. Among the men who collected and consulted Jiaye tang editions were some of the most prominent writers and scholars of the Republican era: Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873-1929), Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868-1940), Zhang Yuanji, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866-1940), Fu Zengxiang, and Wang Guowei (Ying and Li, 164–172). Some of these works remain useful today; since 1963, 16 titles (including four collectanea) have been reprinted by presses such as the Shanghai Ancient Texts Bookstores (Shanghai guji shudian 上海古籍书店), Cultural Artifacts Publishers (Wenwu chubanshe 文物出版社), and Zhonghua Books.
Liu Chenggan could be seen as one of the last in a long line of literati-publishers (or merchant-literati publishers) who embraced the reprinting of the great writings and imprints of the past as a means of both preserving the textual tradition and solidifying their position as men of learning (and wealth) within elite circles. Presumably he chose to rely on xylography rather than lithography (which was widely available at this time and actually allowed for a finer reproduction of calligraphy than woodblocks) out of allegiance to the tradition, as a means of reproducing as closely as possible the look of the editions he reprinted. (It is not clear how conscious he was of continuing a local tradition of woodblock publication; Wuxing county and, more widely, Huzhou 湖州 prefecture, had been in the late Ming the site of several famous elite publishing operations.) Here, as in the case of Yan Gusun, content and form are inextricably linked; Liu and other bibliophile-publishers of the Republican period like him rejected the convenient and less expensive option of lithographic or letterpress reproduction, tying “traditional” content to “traditional” print aesthetics.
This choice emphasizes the nature of the book as a collectible artifact or museum piece as much as (or perhaps more than) a text to be read. Arguably Song and Yuan imprints had become such as soon as, in the Ming, they began to be published in facsimile; did collectors actually read them or just glory in their possession and the cultural capital they accrued by printing them? But the collectible or museum-artifact quality of the wealthy bibliophile's reprints is thrown into even sharper relief when they are seen as emblematic of a culture that is perceived to be under threat, whether from the New Culture, the semi-literate public that Fu Chongju hoped to serve, the flood of new, Western-influenced genres of writing coming out of Shanghai, or wealthy Japanese collectors.
If indeed one of Liu's motives was to rescue Chinese treasures from Japanese buyers, then his book collecting and publishing gains another meaning: it becomes a “modern” patriotic or even nationalist act. Here the book conservatism of the old-style literatus-publisher is complicated by the need to defend (and ensure the continuation of) Chinese culture against the non-Han intruder. In any event, Liu and the Jiaye tang, however much they may have served a new nationalist cause, seem to stand at the end of the literati-publishing tradition, cut off first by the Japanese invasion and then by the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the central regulation of publishing operations that followed on that victory.
Religious Associations and Woodblock Publishing
There is one final case relevant to the dance between old and new in late Qing and Republican-era publishing: religious institutions and associations that continued publishing sacred texts in woodblock form through the Republican period. Two examples, one Daoist and the other Buddhist, will serve to give a sense of the range of this kind of woodblock publishing activity.
The first concerns the efforts of Yan Yonghe 閻永和 (d. 1908), the abbot of the Daoist monastery Erxian an 二仙庵 in Chengdu, to produce a reprint edition of the Essentials of the Daoist Canon (Daozang jiyao 道臧輯要), the most important anthology of Daoist writings produced in the Qing (Esposito, 100). Although it purports, as its title suggests, to present the essence of the Orthodox Daoist Canon (Zhengtong Daozang 正統道臧) of 1445, it in fact includes works that reveal later developments in Daoist thought and practice, from the mid-fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. Compiled by Jiang Yuanting 蔣元庭 (1755-1819) during the Jiaqing era (1796-1820), it includes “cosmological, philosophical, liturgical, and alchemical scriptures; commentaries on Daoist and Confucian Classics; epigraphic, topographic and hagiographic materials; and much else.” Unlike previous Daoist canons, it was not an imperial production, but a private publication (albeit by a man who also held an official post) reportedly inspired, via spirit writing, by no lesser a figure than the immortal Lü Dongbin 呂洞賓 (Esposito Reference Esposito2009, 96–97; Mori Reference kenkyūjo2007, 340–346).
The blocks for the original publication of this voluminous work had been ruined, and Yan Yonghe, on becoming abbot of Erxian an in 1892, felt he had the authority to organize a reprinting. As he explains in his preface, he and the collators of the work, He Longxiang 賀龍驤 and two other scholars, used the edition of the Daozang jiyao in the collection of Yan Yanfeng (the Chengdu bibliophile discussed earlier) as the basis for the reprint; missing portions of that text were supplemented from hand-copied versions made of the work by two other collectors, He Qichong 何起重 of Chongqing and Qin Pengsheng 秦竼生 of Zhongzhou (in Chongqing prefecture). The project was funded largely by contributions of “several hundred pieces of silver” (shubai jin 數百金) collected by Peng Hanran 彭瀚然, a frequent visitor to the monastery, from his native county, Xinjin, next to Chengdu. Working though Zhou Dasan 周達三 (1856-1922), the manager of Chengdu's most distinguished commercial bookstore, the Zhigu tang 志古堂, long noted for its production of high-quality works of scholarship (Brokaw Reference Brokaw, Bussotti and Drège2015, 631), Yan contracted with Yuechi block cutters to complete the blocks, a task that took, by one account, seven years.Footnote 31 Essentials of the Daoist Canon, Reprinted (Chongkan Daozang jiyao 重刊道臧輯要) was finally published in 1906 (Yan Yonghe 1971, 15a; Peng 1971, 16a; He [1906] 1971, 17b; Mori Reference kenkyūjo2007, 346–349).
In identifying this work as a reprint of the Daozang jiyao, however, Yan and his collaborators were concealing their rather considerable alterations to the original text. Essentials of the Daoist Canon, Reprinted is not in fact a straightforward reprint of the Daozang jiyao, but rather a collection that reflects the distinctively Sichuanese Daoist orientation of the network of Chengdu-based priests and laymen who produced it. It alters somewhat the arrangement of the work, and, more importantly, adds new texts that express the ritual concerns of the Longmen branch (Longmen pai 龍門派) of the Quanzhen sect (Quanzhen jiao 全真教).Footnote 32 The collection was thereby transformed into one more sympathetic to the Daoism favored by Yan and his followers; by borrowing its title, they were presumably hoping to borrow the authority of the Essentials of the Daoist Canon (Mori Reference kenkyūjo2007, 354–388).
In 245 ce 冊, the work continued to be printed until the Sino-Japanese War necessitated the removal of the blocks, for safe-keeping, to Mount Qingcheng, about 85 kilometers northwest of Chengdu. Moved back to the Erxian an when the war ended, the blocks were thoroughly cleaned and used to reprint the canon. In 1961, they were shifted to the Qingyang gong 青羊宮 Daoist complex in Chengdu, where they remain to this day, still used (after a lull during the Cultural Revolution) to print portions of the Essentials of the Daoist Canon, Reprinted, although now worn or broken woodblocks are replaced by machine-cut blocks.
While the original decision to use xylography to print the Essentials was probably in large part prompted by the easy availability of cheap block-cutting labor in Yuechi, it was motivated also by a desire to “borrow” the authority of woodblocks as well.Footnote 33 Cutting a text onto blocks had long represented (whether accurately or not) the fixing or finalization of a text; the text became, as it were, “set in wood.” Indeed, block cutting, ke 刻 had come to mean “to publish”; so, too, the character for catalpa, zi 梓, a wood commonly used to make woodblocks, was often used in colophons to identify the publisher of a work. Book blocks, if properly stored, might last decades, giving a text a life far longer than it would enjoy set in type or pressed on the lithographer's stone. The publishers of the Essentials of the Daoist Canon, Reprinted, were following a long tradition in choosing block publishing as the technology that would lend greater authority to their effort to redirect the message of the original Essentials of the Daoist Canon.
The second case – the Jinling Sutra Cutting House (Jinling kejing chu 金陵刻經處) established in 1866 by the lay Buddhist Yang Wenhui 楊文會 (1837-1911) in Nanjing (whose ancient name is Jinling) – suggests a more complicated relationship between publishing goals and technological choice. Yang Wenhui, an ardent convert to Pure Land Buddhism, established the Jinling Sutra Cutting House in reaction to a “karmic catastrophe” – the destruction of Buddhist temples, monasteries, libraries, texts, and printing operations in the wake of the Taiping rebellion (Kiely Reference Kiely, Brokaw and Reed2010, 187). While serving as an official in Zeng Guofan's 曾國藩 (1811-1872) post-Taiping administration in Nanjing, he was horrified in particular by the loss of Buddhist texts; he reported, “In areas that soldiers had burned, one saw only small volumes of the Amitabha Sutra (Amituo jing 啊彌陀經) and even now one cannot find large volumes of the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra (Wuliangshou jing 無量壽經) or the Sixteen Guanyins Sutra (Shiliu Guanyin jing 十六觀音經)” (ibid., 187). His mission, embodied in the Sutra Cutting House, became the location, preservation, and dissemination of Buddhist texts: “The scriptural heritage had to be reconstituted in order to spread the Dharma and ensure karmic merit for all” (ibid.). By the time the house ceased publication in 1966,Footnote 34 it had produced close to 500 Buddhist texts (253 titles in the late Qing, 159 during the Republic, and 36 under the People's Republic), the majority of them from the Pure Land school (Luo 2010, 158, 158–230).
As Jan Kiely and other scholars have shown, Yang Wenhui and his Jinling Sutra Cutting House were only one part of a broader revival of interest in Buddhism in the late Qing and Republic. The Jinling Sutra Cutting House was not the only operation that reproduced Buddhist texts in woodblock form; Yanghzou, Suzhou, Changzhou, Hangzhou, Changsha, Beijing, and Tianjin all had their own kejing chu. In Jiangsu province, the Piling Sutra Cutting house (Piling kejing chu 毗陵刻經處), founded in 1901 by Chan master Yekai 冶開 (1852-1922), produced a staggering 960 different Buddhist titles under the Republic (Kiely Reference Kiely, Brokaw and Reed2010, 188–189; Luo 2010, 231–270).
But most of the Buddhist revival was publicized in lithographic or letterpress publications. Modern Shanghai publishing houses like Youzheng Books (Youzheng shuju 有正書局), Yixue Books (Yixue shuju 醫學書局), and the Commercial Press could produce many more copies of Buddhist texts (and more cheaply) than could the woodblock enterprises of Nanjing, Beijing, Yangzhou, and so on. It is easy to understand why Yang Wenhui relied on woodblock printing during the last decades of the Qing; in 1866, in the ravaged Jiangnan area, that was probably the only technology available, and it remained a viable option even in Jiangnan until his death in 1911. But why did his successors continue to rely on woodblock publishing through the Republic, when, given the location of the Jinling Sutra Cutting House, it would have been quite easy to shift to a technology that would both reduce costs and produce a greater volume of texts for dissemination of Buddhist teachings – supposedly one of the goals of the house?
Doubtless, as was the case with the Essentials of the Daoist Canon, Reprinted, woodblock production was considered more authoritative. But the continued commitment to woodblock publication of the highest quality was also a way of expressing the sacred nature of the texts and their centrality in what was a Buddhist ritual act: subscription to the printing of texts. The value of this ritual performance of textual distribution was enhanced in direct proportion to the quality of the text and the limits on its circulation. And of course the fact that xylography was chosen at a time when modern mechanized technologies allowed for the mass production of cheap texts heightened the material importance of the text; its form was as important as its content. Kiely explains:
As with religious images or statues, the artistry of such ritual reproductions mattered. The sense of value preserved in these volumes was generated by their “graceful ancient style” (guse guxiang 古色古香) – the look, feel, and smell of a fine book, qualities that became even more important as the market gradually filled with cheap, industrially produced books. In rejecting technological advances and pursuing a preservationist agenda of publication – one that produced sacred texts in a self-consciously traditionalist, aestheticized style – Yang Wenhui created a new kind of Buddhist text whose cultural meaning was conveyed through its material form and its reference to the past. (Kiely Reference Kiely, Brokaw and Reed2010, 188)
Here, as with Liu Chenggan and Yan Yonghe, the woodblock book became as much a sacred object (although clearly sacred in a different way) as a text to be read, studied, and passed on. Unlike other Republican-era Buddhist associations that eagerly took advantage of modern print technologies to ensure as wide as possible a circulation of their publications, the primary goal of the Jinling Sutra Cutting House, as revealed in its continued use of an antiquated technology through the first half of the twentieth century, was preservation of the sutra as a ritual object, not the widespread dissemination of Buddhist writings.
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For all their conservative choices, Liu Chenggan, Yan Yanfeng and his son, Yan Yonghe, and Yang Wenhui were – unwittingly no doubt – helping to make China “modern” by creating “tradition” or, perhaps more accurately, carving out a tradition that could stand either in opposition to or as a contrastive resource for the modern.Footnote 35 The choice to reproduce classical literary texts and Buddhist and Daoist scriptures in woodblock form, in numbers and for prices that strictly limited their accessibility – in a world where other more up-to-date technologies, capable of producing texts for mass readership, were readily available – marks these works as the products of an effort to preserve them as artifacts of the past, but of a past that could help define the present (and future). It's a step toward the glass case in the museum, where they might be honored and admired to be sure – but not read and used as Zhang Zhidong had hoped, as living guides to contemporary governance. And of course Zhang Zhidong's Cungu Colleges were also complicit in this “modern” creation of tradition; that a need was perceived for classical learning to be taught defensively, in tandem with Western learning, signaled the beginning of the long process by which that learning became “traditional.”
But they were also importantly aiding in the creation of modernity by supplying the nation with an indigenous book culture that could inform, shape – or provide a counterpoint or point of opposition to – the new. This process might take many different routes: Zhang Zhidong seemed to hope that these elite works might slow down or at least temper the advance of the new (at that point, more or less equivalent to “the West” or Western ideas as filtered through Japan). The New Culture progressives and, more recently, the activists of the Cultural Revolution made them points of resistance and opposition, objects of attack in the battle for modern nationhood. But they are in all cases a resource for the creation of a distinctive modern national identity, for the modern requires tradition; it is built on a notion of tradition. The official and private preservers of “woodblock” knowledge described here thus served the modernization of China by providing the country with a book-culture tradition necessary to the process of defining the modern – of course a highly contested process involving frequent and often violent shifts in meaning – in China.
Epilogue
The CCP was able to effectively close down woodblock publishers like Zhou Boxun, the Yuechi block cutter still printing almanacs and songbooks in the 1950s, by destroying their stock of texts and blocks and pressuring them to shift from block-cutting to seal-cutting or assigning them to work in modern machine-printing factories.Footnote 36 Today woodblock printing survives primarily as displays in state-sponsored museums and tourist attractions; in Yangzhou's Guangling Ancient Text Printing House (Yangzhou Guangling guji keyin she 揚州廣陵古籍刻印社), a showcase woodblock printshop that produces facsimile editions of old texts (and some editions of modern works like the poetry of Mao Zedong); in the private craft manufacture of exquisite limited editions of classical and modern texts; and in the production of Buddhist and Daoist scriptures, crude single-sheet religious images, and the “hell money” burned at funerals to fund the afterlife of the deceased. Now, as China is in the throes of a movement to preserve the skills of traditional handicrafts, there is some interest in training young cutters in the block cutting craft.Footnote 37 But it seems unlikely that in the future xylography will ever be more than a (barely) “living national treasure,” either the technology of choice for a small group of artisanal printers,Footnote 38 for publishers (state directed or not) interested in advertising the cultural value and sanctity of their products,Footnote 39 or perhaps for the occasional artist hoping to make a cultural statement through this medium (as, for example, in Xu Bing's 徐冰 1987–1991 “Tianshu” 天書or “Book from the Sky”).
But the popular “traditional” texts of the woodblock book culture are still very much alive, albeit in new contexts and thus with new meanings. Book rental shops in peasant villages offer old historical romances and fortune-telling manuals to their customers. On market days in rural western Fujian, itinerant booksellers display – just as in the old days, on a bamboo mat spread on the ground – modern letterpress reprints of old divination texts, popular novels, and sensational accounts of the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Bill Gates in the traditional “exemplary biography” (liezhuan 列傳) style. Villagers carefully preserved woodblock geomancy manuals dating from the nineteenth century as essential guides to the siting of family graves in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Brokaw Reference Brokaw2007, 456). As Liu Yonghua has shown, ritual manuals, often in manuscript, still serve to guide weddings, funerals, and other village ceremonies (Liu Yonghua 2013).
But one need not go to the countryside to find the old texts. The popular vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing and the primers of late imperial education – the San Bai Qian – are easily available in most bookstores, perhaps even more prominently in metropolitan shops; so, too, are the Four Books and the Five Classics. The popular commercial book culture treated in the first part of this essay has on the whole proven to be remarkably resilient; and it continues to play an active role in contemporary book culture in a way that the rarefied texts of the elite publishing (part 2), now fixed in tradition, do not. It has, to be sure, been a bumpy ride for the more overtly Confucian of the popular texts; works like the Four Books were burned during the Cultural Revolution and have only recently been restored to favor. But the familiarity and accessibility of these texts – the very qualities that drove their continuing popularity in the late Qing and Republic – have apparently helped to ensure their ongoing relevance.
Their resilience depends to some extent on the degree to which these works can be repurposed and made relevant in rapidly shifting political contexts. Take for example the impressive series of transformations that the Three Character Classic has enjoyed over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Footnote 40 At the same time that this classical primer was being excoriated as a vehicle for the indoctrination of “feudal” ideas, its easy-to-read form – a series of three-character couplets – and popular title were repeatedly repurposed to teach either Nationalist or Communist ideology (in the Three Character Classic for Peasants, Workers, and Soldiers or Gongnongbing sanzi jing 工農兵三字經, published in the 1930s and reprinted during the Cultural Revolution), to whip up anti-Japanese sentiment (in the Anti-Japanese Three Character Classic or Kang Ri sanzi jing 抗日三字經, published in the 1940s),Footnote 41 or to celebrate Mao and the Communist revolution (in the 1947 Three Character Classic of the People's Army or Renmin jundui sanzi jing 人民軍隊三字經) for a mass readership. The 1990s then witnessed a retrieval of the old text, which has since then been frequently reprinted in a form that retains much of the original primer's emphasis on the Confucian virtues of filial piety and study (Mittler Reference Mittler2012, 152–156).
The so-called revival of Confucianism in the PRC today has served to make this work and other old primers relevant again. The State Council, in its guidelines for education issued in January 2017, recommended that Rules for Students (Dizi gui 弟子規), a popular Confucian primer first published at least four centuries ago, be taught again in elementary schools (Zhao). This work inserts phrases from the Analects of Confucius (another “traditional” text now reincorporated into some school curricula) into simple sentences that teach filial piety and obedience to authority (Brokaw Reference Brokaw2007, 332–333). Its promotion by the state is seen as one of many measures taken by President Xi Jinping 习近平 (1953-) to limit Western influence, make China more Chinese by affirming what are seen as distinctively Chinese values (e.g., filial piety) – and ultimately to fortify his own power.
But of course there can be no genuine or complete revival or restoration, for this and other old texts can never have the meanings they had before the disruptions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the imperialist intrusions of the West, the rise of the New Culture, the 1911 and 1949 revolutions, the construction of modern Chinese (Putonghua 普通話), the attacks on Confucianism in the Cultural Revolution, the “opening” of China and the economic reforms of the 1980s, etc. As they are attacked, neglected, or celebrated, their meanings continue to change; indeed, the very notion that they are being “revived” today marks the effort as one with very particular political and cultural meanings in the era of Xi Jinping. The old print technology, reserved now for prestige editions, ritual publication, artistic statements, or tourism, has been supplanted by modern print and electronic technologies as an effective means of text reproduction and dissemination, but the texts that this technology made available throughout the empire (and the Republic) are still alive; and they must be taken seriously as ever-changing political, social, cultural, and even economic contexts give new meanings to the roles they play in defining Chinese cultural and political identities.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ori Sela, the two anonymous readers of the essay, and the editors of Science in Context for their comments and suggestions for this essay. My fieldwork research in Yuechi would not have been possible without the cooperation and assistance of many Yuechi residents. I am grateful to Ms. Cheng Wanhui, head of the county Foreign Affairs Office, who supported my initial field trips to Yuechi in 1996 and 1997; and to Mr. Gong Zhiming, who offered equally generous support during my two recent visits in 2008 and 2009. I would also like to thank Mr. Li Renzhong for the information he supplied on Yuechi history. I am particularly thankful for the help of Mr. Yang Lin, dedicated local historian and collector, who allowed me, on all my visits to Yuechi, to study texts from his own collection. Ms. Ming Yue, head of the Yuechi County Library, and Mr. Si Jiaji (the former head), Ms. Liu Ying, and Ms. Lei Juanhui graciously extended library – and their own working – hours in order to accommodate my research; I am very grateful for their assistance. Finally, I am very grateful for the assistance of Liu Yonghua (1996), Yang Lan (1997), Yin Chuan (2008), Gong Yu (Reference Pan2008), and Wang Yan (2008) in these interviews.
