Katherine L. Alexander’s new book, Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing, is a rigorous and engaging contribution to knowledge of nineteenth-century Chinese history. It uses the written and editorial output of a single individual to retell the history of an entire generation: a delicate and difficult task, and one well-accomplished. Yu Zhi 余治 (1809–1874) was the chief protagonist of an ultimately unrealized Confucian cultural revolution during the mid-nineteenth century. Yu witnessed first-hand the cataclysmic rise of a fellow failed examination candidate and local teacher, the Taiping rebel leader Hong Xiuquan. He lived through the unspeakable horror that followed, and he emerged furious, energetic, and fully dedicated to pouring his life’s energy into the project of moral instruction: to rescue the Chinese people, and to save the empire.

Yu Zhi thought that the “Confucian civilizing mission of jiaohua 教化” (p. 3) had utterly failed to transform the masses into an obedient, productive, and filial population. The Taiping war exposed the longstanding and deep disconnect between real life in China’s cities and villages and the orthodox Confucian notions of proper human relations that the educated elite cherished and perpetuated. As a schoolteacher already discontented with the state of education, Yu Zhi emerged during the war as a fundraiser and publisher, a partisan of the conservative mission to fugu 復古, or “return to the old ways” (p. 239). His methods, however, were nothing short of revolutionary. Yu believed that his class of people—the literate local elite—needed to do more to reach commoners, to speak in a way that the semi-literate and illiterate masses might actually understand. They needed to rewrite their own moral instructions through the kinds of stories that ordinary people consumed. They needed to translate the civilizing mission of jiaohua into the vernacular. This is the grassroots history of the Tongzhi Restoration (1862–1875), a window into the social history of an energetic burst of conservative activism after the Taiping.

The book is divided into five thematic chapters. The first introduces the “Record of Achieving Goodness” or Deyi lü 得一綠, as a vehicle for exploring the intellectual history behind Yu’s advocacy of using vernacular literature to achieve the goals of moral instruction. This was a project that needed salesmanship, requiring members of the local elite to overcome “millennia of conservative prejudice against popular culture” (p. 39). Yu sympathized with other Confucians who attacked vernacular fiction for its ambiguous morality or outright immorality; he too proposed banning books like Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 and Honglou meng 紅樓夢. But unlike others, Yu Zhi recognized that the ubiquity and frighteningly religious authority of popular fiction among the masses signaled an opportunity. If officials and local elites were going to be required to hold regularly scheduled lectures for the edification of the people (the so-called “community compact,” or xiangyue 鄉約), they would do well to learn from the authors of popular fiction how to tell a good and accessible story.

Chapter 2 then contextualizes Yu’s mission within the broader landscape of education in the late Qing. Here, Alexander gives us the pre-Taiping roots of Yu’s ideas and a full explanation of his underlying teaching philosophy. Building on the work of Evelyn Rawski and others in the field of Qing education, the author portrays Yu as someone who recognized that even rudimentary texts like the “Three Character Classic” (Sanzi jing 三字經) were simply beyond the reach of most of the boys lucky enough to attend charity schools. He did not believe that rote memorization was effective. He wanted to reach students on what he imagined to be their own terms, and to lift the spirits of teachers who had grown cynical about forcing boys to try to memorize texts they would never comprehend. To do this, to reenvision Confucian morality for the new age, he proposed “reimagining charity schools as jiaohua training centers,” places where students would actually develop and learn to embody Confucian morals.

To capitalize on the context built within the first two chapters, Chapter 3 gives a thorough and wide-ranging exploration of a “precious scroll” (baojuan 寶卷) known as “The precious scroll of Lord Pan which will avert calamities and save from disasters,” or simply, Pan Gong mianzai jiunan baojuan (潘公免災救難寶卷). It gives the hagiography of a Suzhou elite man named Pan Zengyi, who died just before the Taiping arrived in Nanjing and who was worshipped posthumously by Suzhou residents as a protective spirit during the crisis. The interventions in this chapter are too many to enumerate in this space—including revelations that Yu Zhi was likely the author of parts two and three, but not part one—but I was particularly intrigued by the history of the book’s reproduction, as it was published (with new forwards, donor lists, and other embellishments) at least 40 times by between 1844 and 1934 (p. 108).

Chapter 4 then turns to another precious scroll: the Xigu mianzai baojuan (惜榖免災寶卷), or “The precious scroll to cherish grains and avert calamities.” Here, Yu Zhi turns his attention to women’s education, believing that traditional materials in this realm had likewise proved insufficient and inaccessible to most prospective students. The Xigu, as Alexander explains, was an earnest if clunky attempt to offer women moral instruction on what he imagined to be their own level. It was, as she writes, “intended to speak to women, rather than simply about them to male audiences” (p. 170). The stories in the Xigu include unforgettable moments involving reclaiming (“cherishing”) undigested grain from latrines. Alexander demonstrates the revolutionary nature of the collection, explaining that the Xigu was perhaps the first text in which a late Qing author wrote mothers (and particularly those with a history of infanticide) as characters capable of moral redemption. This development was, she argues, an earnest attempt on Yu’s part to create buy-in and develop supporters among the women who he hoped would read the stories.

The book’s final chapter examines the “literary mash-up” known as the “Middle Volume of Liu Xiang” or Liu Xiang zhong juan 劉香中卷: a series of morality tales written in the baojuan format and starring a pious Buddhist heroine. Here, Alexander shows the collection to have been edited heavily over time by Yu Zhi in his effort to offer moral instruction to women without insulting their intelligence. The book’s conclusion has two analytical sections, which are both very intriguing. The first explains the afterlife of Yu Zhi’s Deyi lü in the 1860s–1880s, and here the story of merchant contributions to the re-publication of the book is a fascinating example of identity creation and late-Qing Confucian nationalism. The second section builds on Chapters 4 and 5 to dig into women’s participation in the textile industry during the early phase of industrialization, offering thoughtful considerations on how to place that phenomenon within Yu Zhi’s moral outlook and late-Qing Confucianism more broadly.

The author’s sympathetic approach to Yu Zhi as a social activist is a real strength of this study. Alexander argues that we need not share Yu’s conservative Confucian beliefs to appreciate how his prodigious literary output and seemingly unceasing charitable activity were very clearly rooted in an earnest desire to improve the well-being of his community. She takes him seriously and on his own terms. The result is a rich and informative account of a highly influential representative of the substantial cadre of Confucian true-believers in the final decades of the imperial era. More difficult but just as valuable, she is also able to use Yu Zhi’s one-sided conversations with the Chinese people as a mirror—however small and cloudy—in which we can catch a glimpse of those whose lives are not well preserved in written sources.