How can we imagine, let alone interpret, what eleventh- and twelfth-century Chinese scholars might have been tasting, smelling, and hearing? Ephemeral sensory experiences are elusive by nature and definition, and are tantalizing yet perilous subjects for cultural historians to reconstruct, especially from rare fragments of textual and visual representations from the Northern Song, whose survival pattern is highly contingent. In Tea, Fragrance, and Music, Kin Sum (Sammy) Li attempts to demonstrate that “Northern Song scholar-artists strengthened their community bonds by sharing sensory experiences and emotions” around the collective appreciation of the brewing and drinking of tea, the burning and appreciation of incense, playing and listening to the zither, and sometimes all three simultaneously (2). In this short monograph, Li seeks to explicate how a small sample of writers and painters commemorated these transitory moments of aesthetic production and social interaction. He acknowledges that “these three practices were cultural, economic, and artistic constructs”—first-order artifices that produced second-order poetic or painted representations—and warns against “taking the records left by the scholar-artists at face value” (2).

Li’s introduction reveals a thoughtful engagement with key theorists’ insights about historical structure and agency, including Anthony Giddens’s structuration process and Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory. This would suggest a reading of literati networks as unstable and dynamic, and an acknowledgment of the agency of objects themselves—tea, incense, zithers— to instantiate social connectivity. Yet, despite the promising introduction, the core chapters of the monograph do not apply these theoretical insights to the primary sources in any systematic or substantive manner. Further, the book’s tacit methodological assumptions collapse the ontological and epistemological distinctions between historical actors and present-day historians by conflating textual representations, painted images, archaeological objects, and contemporary re-enactments, so that it is unclear where the sinological scholarship ends and imaginative reconstructions or speculative projections begin.

In the book’s three main chapters, titled “Cultural Construct,” “Economic Construct,” and “Artistic Construct,” Li organizes his examinations of tea, incense, and zither music into three categories: as cultural practices, material commodities, and literary and artistic subjects. His objective is to aggregate poems and paintings commemorating these three ephemeral artistic practices that were produced by two tightly circumscribed communities of what he inaptly terms “scholar-artists”: first, the literary patron-disciple lineage of Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 (1007–1072), Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), and Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105); and second, the clientelistic court network comprised of Emperor Huizong 宋徽宗 (r. 1100–1126) and his grand councilor Cai Jing 蔡京 (1047–1126). In so doing, Li is conflating a horizontal social network of scholarly patrons and protégés with an asymmetric vertical alignment of a monarchical patron and his favorite courtier, even though he acknowledges that the emperor “should perhaps not be identified as an official” (8).

Further, it is unclear whether Li has assembled this archive because these works were the only surviving texts and paintings that document these ephemeral arts in Northern Song cultural history, or because these were the sole surviving sources that had been produced within two discrete and identifiable socio-political networks. While Li cautions that the two “communities were constantly in the process of being formed, shaped, and changed” (7), he presents these limited groupings (comprised of five individuals or fewer, and often only two) in a highly static fashion rather than as dynamic, even though both Giddens’s structuration and Latour’s actor-network theory would require consideration of contingency, change, and agency. Further, Li’s interpretation usually takes as given that these cultural practices constituted communities, but only sporadically supports that claim with tangible evidence. In opposition to Western-derived conceptions of individual artistic creativity, Li seeks to reinterpret these two cultural networks as being engaged in shared processes of “collaborative creativity” that was the sum total of their acts of literary and pictorial production, but his reading of the sources replicates the conventional model of singular authorship (174).

Starting from Chapter 1, Li’s theoretical framework is disconnected from his analysis of poems and paintings from the Northern Song, which he interprets as transparent reflections of actual social practices. For example, he examines a total of two paintings of uncertain authorship attributed to Huizong’s atelier—Literati Gathering (Wenhui tu 文會圖) and Listening to the Qin (Tingqin tu 聽琴圖), which he assumes “depict ordinary activities at actual literati gatherings” (128)—along with three poems from these two paintings’ colophons by Huizong and Cai Jing. Admirably, his careful technical study of the poems’ prosody and melody gives expression to their potential for musicality and performance. But his cursory readings of pictures and poems present both as transparent windows into cultural practices of tea-drinking, incense-burning, and zither-playing, missing a deeper analysis of whether these might have been idealized, aspirational, or allegorical representations, and missing also an examination of the unspoken artistic conventions and shared cultural contexts that might have shaped their production. In great tension with his readings of poetry and paintings, Li employs material evidence from archeology—in this case, five pieces of Song-era ceramic tea ware, a porcelain incense burner, and an eighth-century zither—which require an imaginative leap into of how Song literati might have deployed them practically or appreciated them aesthetically. More problematically, Li also reports the results of staged simulation experiments that were intended to historically re-enact Song-era preparation processes for green tea, reading the 1107 manual Daguan chalun 大觀茶論 (The Daguan Era Treatise of Tea), attributed to Emperor Huizong, as a prescriptive rather than descriptive text. Along the way, I began to wonder whether these discrete interpretations were cultural constructs produced by Song literati, or anachronistic reconstructions produced by Li himself, perhaps unwittingly.

In Chapter 2, Li attempts to reconstruct the economic contexts around the production and consumption of tea and tea vessels, and to a much lesser extent, of the rare aromatic substances that were processed into incense, and finally, the construction process for the wooden and lacquered components of a zither. Again hazarding anachronism, he projects backward from the current conditions in Fujian’s tea gardens to speculatively reconstruct Northern Song cultivation techniques, and transposes methods from herbal medicine methods from materia medica “due to the lack of textual records” that would substantiate these hypotheses (82). And, unaware of the incommensurability of contemporary categories with the statecraft discourse within which officials advocated or denounced the tea monopoly policies of the Northern Song court, Li refers to eleventh-century “liberal economists” and “planned economists” but does not identify these individuals by name, and he invokes Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to describe Northern Song mercantile policies (90, 92). Nor does he seem to realize that the Song History’s (Songshi 宋史) “Treatise on Food and Commodities” (“Shihuo zhi” 食貨志) was a secondary, not a primary source: composed under Neo-Confucian influence, the treatise is highly critical of the New Policies fiscal reforms, including the scaling-up of the state tea monopoly as a blunt instrument of revenue extraction. Based on this tendentious interpretation of a patchy collection of primary sources that confirm his prior assumptions, Li further assumes that Emperor Huizong’s court, by promulgating the Daguan chalun, imputed “high political and cultural status” to their own aesthetic standards of tea cultivation and appreciation, and “expected tea practitioners to follow their prescriptions” (108). Similarly, in the absence of textual sources produced by Song scholar-artists, Li performs a second act of speculative reconstruction, this time of the complex fabrication process of a zither, and (even less supported by evidence) of the physical bodies and working conditions of porters who labored to carry these luxury goods across the empire. Li seems particularly unaware of the disconnection between his own reimaginings of Song-dynasty material culture and the threadbare documentation that is stretched too thin to support them.

In Chapter 3, Li offers more incautious over-readings of a narrow selection of three paintings and eight poems produced by major Song literati. He begins by revisiting Huizong’s Listening to the Qin painting (discussed in Chapter 1). While acknowledging that the “gathering depicted was a political symbol,” Li reconstructs the pictorial subjects’ actions into a prescribed sequence of activities based upon Cai Jing’s highly allegorical colophon, speculating about their sensory experiences. His readings of two well-known horizontal scroll-paintings, Li Gonglin’s 李公麟 (1049–1106) Mountain Villa (Shanzhuang tu 山莊圖) and Zhang Zeduan’s 張擇端 (1085–1145) Qingming Scroll (Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖) are overly literal. He assumes a priori that the former was a transparent reflection of scholars’ tea-drinking practices and the prevalence of urban shops selling tea and incense, rather than recognizing Li Gonglin’s painting as an assertion of scholarly self-representation in a highly aestheticized depiction of reclusion, or Zhang Zeduan’s as an allegory of virtuous political rule in a well-governed city. Further straining credulity, Li deploys a late eleventh-century Khitan tomb-mural depicting tea vessels (among many other high-end objects of conspicuous consumption) as evidence of Song Chinese tea culture, without corroboration.

The monograph’s greatest strength is in Li’s sensitive interpretations of a corpus of nine poems by Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989–1052), Su Shi, and Huang Tingjian about the drinking of tea, the burning of incense, and the playing of the zither. Here, he demonstrates much greater sensitivity to texts as works of literature, whose poets spun networks of allusions and engaged in performances of subjectivity as they commemorated ephemeral cultural practices and substantiated friendships around them. This section could have served as the core of a substantive journal article, but is an insufficient foundation for a monograph-length study.

If Li had paid equally close attention to the creative processes by which paintings and other poems were produced, and how these textual practices might have diverged from the production processes of ceramic artisans or zither-makers, this book would have succeeded in its stated mission. In the conclusion to Tea, Fragrance, and Music, he attempts to justify his choice to integrate literary, pictorial, and archeological evidence, but in historiographic practice he collapses the distinctions between textuality and visuality on one hand, and material reality and cultural representations on the other. While Li warns that “[i]f we are unaware of the differences in other people’s worlds, we will easily allow our implicit, long-held assumptions to dictate our judgments of others” (177), this work of scholarship does not rigorously distinguish between his own under-examined epistemological assumptions as a twenty-first century sinologist and the mentalities of Northern Song poets and painters. One imagines what a scholar who had developed a more sophisticated and appropriate set of methodological tools, and who was sufficiently aware of the distinctiveness of the cultural milieu of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, might have made of the juxtaposition of the various kinds of intriguing literary and visual material presented in the book.