Market Segmentation and Political Philosophy

The idea that the wealthy can afford not just more things but superior versions of the same kinds of things appears in even very early texts. The Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian, ca. 94 BCE) describes the successful merchant as someone who sells textiles that range in quality “30000 catties of silken fabric, raw silk, or other fine fabrics; a thousand rolls of embroidered or patterned silk; a thousand piculs of fabrics made of vegetable fiber or raw or tanned hides” (Watson Reference Watson1961, 494). By the Song dynasty, there is evidence of far more wide-reaching price and quality differentiation, as well as challenges to the hegemony of a single normative version among items that experienced quality differentiation, or a fraying of the authority of a single version as best, especially when that single version is associated with people of a specific social status. Li Yu takes up this problem among a wide variety of consumer objects.

Status differentiation—which can also manifest as sumptuary law that reserves items for people of specific status—has a venerable history. Tang and pre-Tang ritual guides offered tiered advice for how families of different hereditary status should perform various rituals (Ebrey Reference Ebrey1991), but after the Tang, with the vast majority of families occupying commoner status, these guides could not be consulted for practical advice. The most important of the later ritual guides, Jiali (Family rituals) by Zhu Xi (1130–1200), includes a single set of elaborate descriptions of rituals such as sacrifices, funerals, and weddings. That the Ming state declared these versions orthodox liturgy suggests how necessary detail was to ritual practice's ongoing authority. This liturgy prescribes how to make offerings to the ancestors:

State values focused on practice, but proponents of the teachings of Zhu Xi and the Cheng brothers were concerned with ritual's spiritual importance beyond its external manifestations. Cheng-Zhu thinking is grounded in the fundamental unity of the material and spiritual spheres, perhaps most famously in the connection between li (principle) and qi (vital force). Consequently, these detailed instructions that at once constitute ritual but are performed through items that must be purchased present a problem: if ritual is grounded in purchased items, to what extent does ritual's spiritual dimension exclude those who lack the means to buy those items?

As a result, Jiali leaves open the possibility of expanding the number of ritual participants: “Before performing the rites, the poor should evaluate their resources and the ill their energy. Naturally those with the wealth and strength to conform to the rites should do so” (Ebrey Reference Ebrey1993, 163). To Zhu Xi and his disciples, this addendum might have seemed adequate to the essential task of rendering universal the concrete language that precedes it; if the person seeking ritual orthodoxy cannot afford the vessels, meats, and libations, then by introspecting with sincerity, he can achieve the same end by doing what he can. Nonetheless, the focus of the text remains not on accommodations due to poverty or disability, but instead on the normative version with its full array of prohibitively expensive hardware.

To some in a later age, these lines must have appeared as an afterthought that failed to defuse the advantages of wealth. By the seventeenth century, proposing a single prescriptive set of actions that involved cost to cover all people seemed impossible, even with a proviso at the end. Consider the seventeenth-century Bufeiqian gongde li 不費錢功德例 (Examples of accumulating merit without spending money), one of the so-called Ledgers of Merit and Demerit (gongguoge 功過格), popular morality books that quantified good and bad behavior. Like Jiali, Bufeiqian gongde li regards as problematic that some acts of spiritual consequence depend on personal wealth; the rich could accrue merit by donating to temples, while the poor could not. But, unlike Jiali, that potential disparity is resolved not by amending the single normative path, but by shaping the entire text. The solution must be to find acts of merit that are cost-free, as the introduction explains:

The text that follows counters this universal logic by breaking up good deeds by social rank, listing them first for “local officials” (鄉紳) then “soldiers” (士卒) and “women” (婦女) and then “servants” (僕婢工役): eleven ranks in all, with no overlapping good deeds, until the final category “everyone” (大眾), which lists shared good deeds. Tadao Sakai (Reference Sakai and William1970, 350–51) observes that Bufeiqian gongde li lays out the idea that merit can be achieved cost-free and “the principle that such good works should be adapted to the social and economic status of the performer on a realistic basis.”

The goal of the Jiali's conclusion to the section on ancestral offerings and of Bufeiqian gongde li is the same: to ensure that no one is prevented from exerting their moral inclinations on the basis of poverty. Still, the difference in their logics is revealing. According to Jiali, the single normative form might be adjusted according to the needs of the individual, but the text does not guide people whose resources make strict obedience impossible. Bufeiqian gongde li reflects a more complicated relationship between merit and personal status; rather than attempting a single formula, each segment of the population has a separate set of good deeds accessible to it. Its solution leaves much unsaid, such as whether each list is equal to the others in terms of merit and how to understand the relationship between wealth and these social roles (“woman” covers both rich and poor, and other categories are similarly diverse).

Bufeiqian gongde li specifically concerns the cost-free, but the structural logic of these separate lists of meritorious acts resembles that of a segmented market of consumer goods, with different items appropriate for certain people. The congruence stands out partly because seventeenth-century literature is rife with descriptions of price and quality differentiation. The first story in Ling Mengchu's collection of vernacular stories Paian jingqi 拍案驚奇 (Slapping the table in amazement, 1627) contains the following passage describing three kinds of fans prepared for sale:

These three tiers correspond only distantly with the social roles in Bufeiqian gongde li (something like scholars, craftsmen, and merchants), but the relationship is so attenuated that the fans are really differentiated by price point. With three tiers of fans that are functionally the same, the passage hints at answers to some of the questions that Bufeiqian gongde li might be said to bring up, with at least one set of buyers having been snookered.

By becoming the object of scrutiny in the seventeenth century, the incipient forms of market segmentation that had been around for centuries formed a prism through which to inspect the differences between classes. The price- and quality-differentiated market could only be articulated from a specific position, with texts themselves—and sometimes their entire genre—voicing the dynamic not globally but from the perspective of one of the tiers. Another short story collection, Doupeng xianhua 豆棚閒話 (Idle talk under the bean arbor, 1668), begins by explaining a Jiangnan summer, during which everyone suffers heat except

Forced to plan ahead, these middling people plant the eponymous bean arbor whose shade can be shared. In those stifling evenings, they rest under the cool arbor and share stories, so that the conceit for the entire volume is the perspective of “middling rank” accommodation, a frame of experience centered not around abundance, but by constrained resources.

Even when price and quality differentiation are mentioned only obliquely, they can still be governing principles for a text. The classical essay collection Tao'an mengyi 陶庵夢憶 (Dream reminiscences of Tao'an, 1640s) by Zhang Dai (1597–1684) has generally been understood as an exploration of nostalgia for the author's wealthy youth (Kafalas Reference Kafalas2007). One of the collection's primary rhetorical moves is to juxtapose the humble and refined without mentioning their divergent prices—that is, price differentiation with the prices deliberately obscured: crabs and tea rest cheek by jowl with priceless antiques and lavish parties in which the entire mountain landscape is lit up by lanterns. In repeatedly transforming what the “middling rank” depicts as social hierarchy and class into pure aesthetic experience, Zhang Dai's position is literary but also political, in opposition to the logic of a text like Doupeng xianhua.

Tao'an mengyi's “The West Lake Incense Market” (西湖香市) depicts bygone social harmony by describing a price-differentiated market, but whose goods are jumbled together and unmarked. The reader is not told which option is more expensive, or who is imagined to be an appropriate consumer: “The elegance of the refined ladies does not exceed the simple facepaint of the country girls. The sweet perfume of fragrant orchid does not exceed the aroma of gum storax and coriander. The strings and winds do not exceed the all-night clamor of shaking drums or blowing pipes” (Zhang Reference Dai2008, 127). In the overwhelming smorgasbord that was the incense market, female beauty, scents, sounds—whatever their price points—have the same effect on the senses. It is hard to avoid the sense that imagining all tiers mixed together and reconfigured by smell or personal affinity is itself a privilege of rank and wealth, the perspective of a person who can afford fragrant orchid and gum storax and coriander.

Another of the collection's essays, “The Full Moon on West Lake” (西湖七月半), makes a similar point, but with people instead of consumer goods. Zhang Dai's (Reference Dai2008, 130) description of the five kinds of moon gazers mirrors the five kinds of consumers: partygoers, social climbers, those enjoying the crowds, “those looking at the moon and looking at those looking at the moon and looking at those not looking at the moon, and not really looking at anything,” and then, finally, the aesthetes like himself. The usual assortment by social rank or profession—as seen in a text like Bufeiqian gongde li—has been replaced by distinction according to tastes, making it impossible to determine which gazers are of highest social status. Nevertheless, the defense of rank is inescapable: all five groups share a status-differentiated experience, but aesthetes like himself have it best.

Xianqing ouji participates in this discourse on price and quality differentiation, with essays on topics as varied as hairpins, garments, housewares all centered around this theme. But the volume also elevates the discussion, explicitly taking up the questions that the texts I have cited intimate: whether one segment of the market is best, and how to understand status in an age of consumer choice. Li Yu is largely uninterested in Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism's promises of self-cultivation and inner transformation. Ruist ritual practice, despite its natural engagement with the idea of market segmentation, is nowhere to be found in Xianqing ouji. Instead, Li Yu invests with absolute value a well-lived life whose highest goal is epicurean and consumerist, to have done the best a person could have with the resources they were given. Li Yu uses consumer choice in a price-segmented market as a means to interrogate and understand social inequality and hierarchy.

Xianqing ouji and Lifestyle Guides

Xianqing ouji is usually understood to be a lifestyle manual, others of which, all authored by elite men, include Zunsheng bajian 遵生八箋 (Eight discourses on the art of living, 1591) by Gao Lian 高濂 (fl. sixteenth century), Zhangwu zhi 長物志 (Superfluous things, 1620s) by Wen Zhenheng 文震亨 (1585–1645), and Qing bi cang 清秘藏 (Pure and arcane collecting, 1695) by Zhang Yingwen 張應文 (fl. sixteenth century). Deeply indebted to Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (Reference Bourdieu and Nice1987), Craig Clunas (Reference Clunas1991) understands the authors of these texts as anxious literati attempting to leverage cultural capital, with the social world lingering in the backdrop as repressed subtext. Clunas's interpretation is persuasive precisely because these earlier lifestyle guides largely omit mention of the market, as well as market participants’ decision-making processes. If there is market segmentation—other items that could have been chosen, whose function is the same but whose price is not—it is not mentioned.

Compare Wen Zhenheng and Li Yu on the narcissus. Wen Zhenheng himself is nowhere to be found: “Of the two kinds of narcissus, the kind with the tall flowers, short leaves, and single petals is better. They ought to be planted in the winter months but are not cold-resistant. Take the best and plant them in pots among indoor furniture. As for the next, they may be planted amidst pine and bamboo, or even among ancient plums and weird-looking stones, which will be still more elegant” (Wen Reference Zhenheng1850, juan 2.13). In contrast, Li Yu places himself and his own finances front and center:

Wen Zhenheng's list of the flower's absolute traits is replaced by a disagreement between family members about the relative worth of narcissus. Value is relative and subjective, with a presumption of potential disagreement, and always implicates an individual's perspective as to how great a sacrifice the purchase would be.

Xianqing ouji covers topics as different as “Socks,” “Bedding,” and “Noodles,” but what these objects have in common is their accessibility, which is precisely what many of the essays explore, in the guise of affordability and the evaluation of versions at different price points. Shared but also differentiated by status and class, the categories that constitute “leisure” (xianqing) look to us like a snapshot of material culture, but they are actually constructed out of political parameters. Some scholars have cited Gao Lian's Zunsheng bajian as an important antecedent for Xianqing ouji. Gao Lian's list of thirty items for Yiyang dongyong shiju 怡養動用事具 (The happy care and employment of tools) covers some of the same categories as Xianqing ouji, with housewares described in detail, but there is no mention at all of relative cost, just relative aesthetic merit. Moreover, Gao Lian never mentions the broader categories into which items such as stone pillows, bamboo couches, rush mats fit. As a result, the text is silent on the fact that consumers are not alike—that for reasons of budget, status, or sex, people might choose different kinds of pillows, couches, or mats.

Xianqing ouji's categories are constituted out of a recognition of how diverse the consumers might be; objects that are included either are cheap (like flowers) or, better yet, come in cheap and expensive versions, whose movements and purchase Li Yu notices and sorts. As a result, expensive items like painting and calligraphy that resist market segmentation cannot be included. Note the profound contrast with Zunsheng bajian's and Zhangwu zhi's inclusion of picture scrolls and bronze vessels. Li Yu does write about objects that can substitute for a wealthy person's status purchase, like a window frame that makes the scene outside look like a painting. The essay “Antiques” (Gudong) is an exception to the rule, but only because the essay tackles the problem head-on. Li Yu begins, “There is a reason this volume lacks an entry on antiques—without which it could not be complete” (215). He then explains that rich people compete to buy antiques at high prices, sometimes justifying their behavior as a desire to commune with the ancients. But reading their books brings us closer to the ancients, and antiques only make sense as an efficient means to store and transport vast quantities of wealth. Without wealth, the very notion of antique is irrelevant—hence the silence on antiques as a whole in Xianqing ouji: “I am a poor man, and what I buy ranges from one hundred wen to a thousand wen and that's it. I worry I can't afford the new, never mind antiques” (216). Except by pointing out that the essay cannot exist, Xianqing ouji cannot include an essay on the “antique.”

In treating the price and quality differentiation among “Wine Sets” (酒具), Li Yu evaluates various materials: precious metals, then ivory, rhinoceros horn, and jade, and, finally, porcelain, the best and most suitable. Only the rich can afford antique porcelain: “everyone knows that antique porcelain is admirable, but with its high prices—which mount by the day!—it is entirely the purview of people with means” (223). The essay aims to suggest a functionally equivalent experience that costs less. Modern knockoffs are not only cheap but actually even better: “Craftsmen of modern times are so skillful that new porcelain is no worse than that from the Chenghua or Xuande eras, and as far as the fineness of their forms even better. The only reason that they do not vie with antiques in price is that they are so numerous” (223). The positionality of the essay writer is clear; he knows what he knows precisely because he lacks means, but his advice is useful for both rich and poor. Even the rich who own an antique set lock theirs away for fear of breaking a cup. The essay allows the poor and the rich to have the same experience, replacing the power of the market to determine what is “best” with Li Yu's own evaluation.

The market in other objects demands more complicated decision-making. Threaded through many of the essays is Li Yu's concern that someone will make the wrong choice for their status by buying the wrong thing (whether it is poor people violating their status or rich people violating good taste). Strikingly, although the objects of Xianqing ouji demonstrate the potential to be hypermobile, the people in Xianqing ouji are not socially mobile. The volume contains not a single example of someone moving upward or downward in status. Modern readers might understand the exclusive focus on market segmentation as cathexis, a repression of what cannot be spoken, in this case radical social mobility. But I prefer to see the segmented market as the means by which Xianqing ouji theorizes the interrelationship of the worlds of people and objects.

Equal but Unequal

Like “Wine Sets,” “Head Ornaments” (首飾) begins by categorizing the materials from which hairpins are made. All brides need hairpins, but though equal in that form of practice, the rich and the poor still maintain difference:

Although the rich have one version (gold and jade) and the poor have another (bone or horn), the low-end version is not categorically worse than the high-end one. But equality is maintained with “Head Ornaments” only when the poor know their own place. The poor should guard against bronze (a fake gold), not the mean material of bone. In overreaching—by choosing a facsimile of the rich person's hairpins (i.e., bronze or tin)—a poor person will commit an aesthetic fault and “also damage their hair.”

Li Yu implies a parallel between social rank and material, with material—bone as opposed to jade or gold—transformed into a metaphor for class distinction that essentializes the distinction between the upper and lower classes as fundamental, but also, perhaps, as superficially invisible as the distinction between gold and bronze. The rhetoric polices the gulf between rich and poor while insisting on some space of equality: he stresses the universality of need (all brides need hairpins), but also a plane on which fairness actually exists: “when they are finely crafted, no different from rhino horn or shell.” Integral to this logic of equality is a sense that the poor are responsible for their condition but not their status: by being invested with choice, the poor are now responsible for the quality of their own possessions. Because they can choose a “finely crafted” version “no different” from the expensive, if their hairpins are worse than those of the rich—even hurting their hair—that is the fault of their own decision-making.

The idea that the poor are responsible for their condition recurs in the introduction to the section on “Housewares” (制度), in which Li Yu ascribes equality to poor and rich not in possessions, but in their ability to decorate their home environments. He cannot fathom why the poor do not beautify their doors made of twigs or their window frames made of broken pots. He recommends, “if they took broken shards and arranged them carefully according to size, [the window frame] would look like the crackle pattern in Song-era celadon ware” (201–2). The comparison between a window frame made of pottery shards and a Song-era antique seems ridiculous and insensitive, but these writings on price-differentiated sectors necessarily involve defusing the market. The market valuation of a bronze hairpin might be the same as that of a bone hairpin, but Li Yu's intent is to replace the market's hierarchy with his own. The expensive item is worth nothing on resale if it is ugly, but the valueless twigs could manifest high social status if one arranged the twigs well: “that same door would reveal the difference between a farmhouse and a scholar's household” (202). A Bourdieusian would argue that this message is directed toward the impoverished scholar who can still distinguish himself from a peasant through taste. Truer to the essay is a fundamentally universalist position, that rich and poor can both exhibit terrible taste, and on this plane of potential failure, they are paradoxically equal. “Housewares” concludes with a grounds of equality that might be the motto for the entire volume: “If you have ears and eyes, you have the power of discernment; if you take care, the power of cleverness. Only worry that your planning is unintelligent, and that you have not done your best to exert your imagination” (202).

Li Yu returns to the relationship between social hierarchy and innate gifts in the essay “Charm” (態度), which treats the distinction between women who possess innate charm and women who lack it. He praises a peasant woman he observes during a downpour, the only one of a crowd of women seeking shelter in a pagoda who hovers near the eaves rather than pushing her way into the center and then is mindful enough not to hurry away because she knows the rain will start again. He finds her compelling: “That a countrywoman of thirty-something years—because of something special in her charm—should exceed a 16-year-old beauty or a noblewoman dripping in jewels, that is the power of charm, and it is far from meager” (117). Just as in “Housewares,” Li Yu implies the less fortunate bear some responsibility for their lack of success. If you happen to be a middle-aged peasant who does not outshine a rich beauty, that is partly your own fault for lacking charm.

Female beauty forms a sui generis category in that the beautiful woman is both consumer and consumer object; in both cases, Li Yu is careful to maintain one axis of ranking and hierarchy (charm, resourcefulness) while insisting on its independence from the other axis of ranking, namely social status and wealth. On one hand, even rich men cannot count on acquiring beautiful women: “Some of the noblest and richest of men have been thwarted by a niggardly fortune or else an empress’ jealousy and have lived out their whole lives without ever making love to a beautiful woman” (130). But, on the other hand, those beautiful women are themselves consumers, also subject to inequality. Elsewhere, he offers advice to beauties of low status who still want to choose flattering clothes. Their poverty is not their fault: “a beauty has never chosen the family into which she will be born, nor can a beauty choose her husband” (133). If there is fairness in that even the rich cannot be guaranteed to have sex with beauties (i.e., axes of equality that have nothing to do with wealth or poverty), then there will be unfairness in that some beautiful women are poor, or even that some women are just more beautiful than others. Every attempt to locate grounds for the egalitarian results in a downstream act of ranking and hierarchy. (This contradiction also appears in Bufeiqian gongde li, with its efforts to separate ethical accumulation from wealth; equal categories to pursue merit only lead to later inequalities in merit.)

This dialectic between equality and hierarchy makes for a proliferation of different grounds of the egalitarian—sometimes taste, sometimes intelligence, sometimes resourcefulness, sometimes charm, each of which generates a new elite who possess that trait. Part of the effect is to destabilize the normal framings of identity and turn talent (or charm or perspicuity) into the defining trait. But the dialectic also has implications for the shape of the text itself. Li Yu concludes “Charm”: “It cannot be taught. I say, ‘You can learn it, but you cannot teach it’” (117). The woman who lacks charm can certainly be faulted for not having learned it, but the putatively instructive book that the reader is holding also cannot teach “Charm,” because to do so would undermine the natural hierarchy of those with it and those without it. Elsewhere, the book possesses equalizing properties, but in the conflict between that promise and the need to retain inequalities, the latter triumphs.

“Charm” contains two anecdotes that, to a modern reader, seem on the surface mutually exclusive: the peasant woman in the rain is a version of Li Yu as clever problem solver, standing out from the crowd in perspicuity and not social status, but the same essay also includes a passage in which Li Yu helps a nobleman buy a girl from a trafficker in Yangzhou, the sheer quantity of girls making it difficult to choose well. Both anecdotes revolve around the potential meritocracy of consumer choice within the context of social hierarchy's inequities. That precise combination—consumer choice and social hierarchy—comes together in the collection's considerations of price differentiation, which in Xianqing ouji are also constitutive of society as a whole. It has been a scholarly truism that early modern market economies led to new ways of envisioning selfhood. Li Yu's specific logic involves the market's providing an independent quantifying scale separate from social standing. He stands outside and inside both these available standards: as much separating himself from the market's evaluation of worth as price as from examination-studying culture (except to joke about its curriculum). The complicated ways in which new possibilities of equality introduced more inequity and not less are central to his politics and aesthetics.

The Poor and the Rich

Xianqing ouji does not divide people up by profession; instead, the social division to which it alludes is “rich” as opposed to “poor,” usually denoted by fugui and pinjian, where he associates himself with the “poor.” (Other seventeenth-century texts that concern themselves with market segmentation, like those cited in the first part of this article, similarly focus on disparities of wealth as that which divide society.) Fugui, the term that Li Yu usually uses, is technically “the rich and noble,” conflating two forms of status (except in the two essays, “How Rich People Can Be Happy” and “How Noble People Can be Happy,” that distinguish between people who are merely rich, as opposed to people who also have political power). Who are the poor (“poor and common”), among whom he includes himself? Given the relatively low cost of labor and the relatively high cost of commodities, historians have long struggled with the impossibility of correlating premodern wealth with modern equivalents. Perhaps no historical imagination can grasp a world in which an enslaved girl (4 taels) was worth approximately twenty times what a fat goose cost (0.2 taels) and about eight times the price of a mid-level edition of the Four Books (0.5 taels) (Chow Reference Chow2004). Nonetheless, a careful reader can glean hints as to what Li Yu means when he describes himself as poor. He was neither official nor landowner; he needed to budget; he could not spend as much on groceries as he would have liked; and he could splurge on narcissus flowers when they were in season but might have regretted it.

Ultimately, though, poverty does not match up with external metrics; instead, its rhetoric thrust positions it as the opposite of “wealth.” Like the seventeenth-century discourse of market segmentation, assertions of wealth or poverty are shaped by the speaker's own positionality. In the conclusion of “Soup” (湯), Li Yu attributes to soup—a means for his family to gulp down more rice—his successful household management: “As an utterly destitute gentleman (赤貧子) supporting an establishment of half a hundred mouths, we have not gone hungry even in times of famine by following this method” (244). This joke about the powers of soup can be situated first in the wake of the terrible famines of the 1640s, which millions did not survive, while also recognizing that most of those fifty mouths were servants to Li Yu, his wife, his three concubines, and their four sons. Moments like this powerfully suggest why we must distance ourselves from Li Yu's definitions of poverty, lest we collude with Xianqing ouji in its erasure of most people—not just the subsistence farmers who made up the vast majority of the seventeenth-century population, but also, closer to hand, the servants of his own household, whose status approached that of enslavement in that they could be trafficked and who certainly were not the audience he imagined for his book.

Instead of referring to an objective state, “poor” is specifically meant to be understood as the rhetorical position that Li Yu stakes out to speak for everyone and whose proper response is, at least in part, resistance. If you have been reading this essay carefully, perhaps each assertion of universalism has struck you as limited by Li Yu's own class blindness. All brides were married off with hairpins, he says, but we know that a large percentage of girls were trafficked into the sex trade or sold off to serve as concubines. How many people who could not afford proper window frames would have had the wherewithal to put together pottery shards to resemble Song crackleware? Perhaps most fundamentally, Li Yu understands his readership as universal, when best estimates for seventeenth-century adult literacy hover around 10 percent.

Xianqing ouji's framing as “equality within difference” demands that it treat only topics of concern to both the rich and poor. Moreover, to claim universal knowledge, the author must approach the topics from a specific status position: poor with some exposure to wealth. The volume's best-known innovations emerge from a status perspective that is also a political assertion about equality: whether it is the clever inventions that allow him to enjoy something beautiful at no cost, such as a window frame that repurposes a fallen tree branch 梅窗 (180), or an invention that solves a problem that plagues rich and poor, like the warming chair 暖椅式 (206). “Bed Curtains” (床帳) recommends bedding that will keep one cool in the summer and warm in the winter, but it concludes, “These are things I know as a poor man. Mutton and fine wine can also ward off the cold; heavy layers of ice that surround a wide hall can also keep one cool. That's obvious, but I've never gotten to experience them personally” (211). Anyone with infinite resources can figure out how to keep cool or stay warm. Only in the absence of wealth are advice and cleverness necessary interventions.

But it is not just that money buys a person's way out of problems. Wealth, Li Yu tells us, narrows the perspective, so that poverty allows him to see more, not less. If Li Yu's claims to universality are tethered to his claims of financial constraint, social alterity is turned into a means by which Li Yu can speak to poor and rich. “Travel” (行) explains the psychological basis for this kind of thinking. The rich ride, while the poor walk, Li Yu tells us, but the poor tell themselves they have the better end of the deal: “If at leisure, you can go slowly, but if in a hurry, you can break into a run. If you have a companion you can go out, but you can also go out without a companion” (326). Even in cases in which wealth indubitably opens up vistas—for example, experience with beautiful women, who would have been understood to have been celebrity sex workers—Li Yu works out a way in which the perspective of the poor is still more expansive than that of the rich. Sexuality's real realm is the egalitarian sphere of fantasy: “Even though my destiny hasn't been favorable, my imagination has been quite good. Though I haven't experienced these things, the principles themselves are easy to understand. Imagining the pleasures of what must be is many times more moving than being personally intoxicated by voluptuous pleasures” (108–9).

In “Houses” (房舍), this particular argument—that wealth narrows a person's vistas—is extended further, so that wealth and creativity are mutually exclusive. Li Yu's class position and his panegryrics to creativity are causally connected. He begins by comparing the houses of the rich with those of the poor, showing the limitations of both. The best houses, he says, are like the best writing, novel and imaginative. In contrast, trapped by their own wealth, the rich ask their builders to replicate other structures they have seen to prove their wealth: “It isn't that they like the fancy and lavish, but that they can't innovate. If they got rid of the fancy parts, they'd have no way to reveal their own high rank, so they use ‘fanciness’ to go through the motions” (157). Creativity itself is tied to poverty: “I am a poor man and what I understand are matters having to do with poverty” (157).

Finally, Li Yu suggests that without his advice, the rich would not only experience life with limitations as real as the poor but would be blind to them. For all that they might possess more, what the rich do not know means that they don't really own it—making them no better off than the poor. The rich (who cannot enjoy their possessions) and the poor (who need help getting the best they can) are alike in needing Li Yu's advice. In “Wine Sets,” Li Yu describes how owners of antique porcelain sets put them away, lest they accidentally break one cup: “To have a set that you don't use is the same as not owning one” (223). You only really own a cheap modern set that you can risk breaking. He says the same in “Travel,” about the rich on horseback, sedan chairs, or carriages: “This is like having feet but living as if you don't, and it doesn't actualize the creator's endowed shape for us” (326).

What Everyone Really Shares

The point that what the rich and poor truly share is Xianqing ouji itself is made most explicitly in “Top Layers” (衣衫), perhaps precisely because of how difficult any argument having to do with equality in clothing must have been to construct. For premoderns, garments meant to be seen by others were one of the great sites for insurmountable heterogeneity, partly because of the long history of sumptuary law that in theory reserved colors or fabrics to certain statuses, but also because of the particularities of the Ming-Qing transition that made people keenly sensitive to the idea that not everyone wore the same clothes. Other texts tell us that the rich wore lavish clothing and the poor could barely keep themselves clothed. “Top Layers” cannot dwell on disparities that are so extreme as to destabilize the premise of the entire volume: that one perspective can adequately cover the spectrum of rich and poor to make categorical statements about all clothes. The essay must open with what are presented as universally accessible qualities that anyone can achieve, “clean” and “elegant”: “In women's clothes, what is important is not finery but cleanliness, not magnificence but elegance” (132). Elegance, he implies, can be achieved through resourcefulness, and, characteristically, Xianqing ouji simply does not see the domestic labor that produces cleanliness.

Li Yu then proceeds to outline two separate axes of hierarchy that are orthogonal to one another: social station and appearance. He writes, “What is not important [in choosing clothing] is to match the station of the family. What is important is to suit the appearance” (132). What follows is a complicated dance involving multiple iterations of distinction, equality, distinction, equality. He begins by arguing that the status differential should replicate itself in the segmented market for clothes: “A nobleman's wife should wear patterned clothes. A poor woman should wear muted clothes” (132). But clothing should also reflect inborn differences that have nothing to do with their class: “just as people are born with their faces, those faces have clothes that suit them, while clothes themselves have colors that suit their cut, and none of these can be changed” (132).

He constructs something like a verbal Punnett Square with two independent characteristics: beauty and rank. A beautiful noblewoman finds it easy to choose clothes, as does a plain poor woman; in those cases, station and beauty are not in conflict, but a plain noblewoman or a poor beauty will have more difficulty navigating consumer choices that are flattering without violating the imperatives of rank. Li Yu proposes a kind of meta-fairness, dependent on a market that is first differentiated by quality, but within each tier also offers different modes: “Cotton and hemp have distinctions of fineness and coarseness and lightness and darkness; brocade and patterned fabric also have distinctions of fineness and coarseness and lightness and darkness” (133). That plain noblewoman ought to wear a matte satin brocade, and the poor beauty, a tightly woven, well-dyed cotton—neither choice violating their rank, but also picking up on the differences in their innate appearance.

With no pretense that the quality of the tightly woven cotton matches that of the matte satin, the grounds for fairness are more complicated than that of the bone hairpin. There are two axes for fabric, just as there are two axes for women: for fabric, fineness and material; for women, beauty and rank. A woman who navigates these two axes will have achieved her personal pinnacle of appeal, which in itself is a kind of equality. But another way to look at it is that Li Yu's advice is its own truly universal equality, pertinent and useful for all: “Everything I say suits both rich and poor. I am not providing lots of detail for those from rich families and neglecting those of poor families, but also not being biased toward the poor and slighting the rich” (133).

Next, Li Yu praises clothes in qing (青), a color whose salient quality is its universality. Everyone likes it: the changing color preferences of the previous dynasty have now settled on this particular color, and “No matter whether people were old or young or women or men, they all wore it” (134). (Qing crosses even the gender divide.) It suits everyone, but in a highly specialized way by making the fair-skinned look fairer and the dark less dark; the young appear younger and the old less old. And here is what it does to people of different social ranks: “When poor people wear it, it seems like it is for their original station; when the noble wear it, it looks as if they are divesting themselves of their flowery habits, and only keeping their elegant airs, but not losing their noble origins—this is how it is well suited to people's status” (134). It is at once a ground for equality—everyone is improved by qing—but at the same time, it does not equalize people, instead enforcing the distinctions between different statuses.

And what is this color? Qing is part of a binome, qingyi (青衣), dark clothes for commoners. But the precise color that qing denotes is ambiguous, especially when Li Yu contrasts it with specific colors like pale rose 銀紅, peach pink 桃紅, bright red 大紅, and baby blue 月白. Li Yu's own interlineal commentary instructs us in how to understand qing, as a substitute for the character yuan (元). But yuan, in turn, is meant to stand in for xuan (玄 black), a character in the personal name of the Kangxi Emperor (Xuanye) that was taboo and could not be used. I have retained qing rather than translating it as “black” because the stand-in word (which stands in for yet another word) renders the color itself not just ambiguous—is it black as xuan would be? Or blue as qing would most often be?—but even secondary. Qing announces itself as pure sign. Anything could stand in here, something that is magically able to be good for all even as it keeps everyone neatly in their own tranches, preventing those who are disadvantaged by birth or nature from jumping the line.

Qing is the promise of justice that is non-egalitarian since the only space for the egalitarian is Li Yu's voice, as he tells us in the passage immediately before. His advice is directed to all classes, the poor beauties who should be wearing the finest cotton and the rich uglies to whom he is recommending matte satin: “My endeavor has been that whoever picks up this essay should have some benefit, so with the intent to care for the tender sex, I cover everyone just like dew and rain” (133). That “dew and rain”—first used to describe Emperor Wu of Han's land division policy—has always been imbricated with the imperial state, suggesting that even if Li Yu's purview is that of consumerism, his promises have some tinge of the political, replacing the empire itself as a means by which to establish universal benefits that are in themselves equitable, even if neither the outcomes nor the starting points are.

The Place of Style

Many premodern Chinese texts engage with questions that we moderns categorize as having to do with the social sciences. In studying them, the practice in some disciplines has been to construct a sphere of ideas, pulling out excerpts from many different passages, each embedded in its own rhetorical context, to construct what to a modern reader looks more cohesive but really rewrites in another genre. This essay, you might be thinking, is guilty of the same. But Xianqing ouji is a quintessentially literary text, often calling attention to itself as artifice and rhetoric. “Antiques” is primarily about its own unwriteability (what Patrick Hanan [Reference Hanan1988, 189] calls “a ploy”), and other essays, too, foreground their own status as acts of writing.

Let me attempt to replicate the experience of a first-time reader of “Housewares,” which begins, “Whatever one's status or wealth, when it comes to the utensils needed for eating and drinking, everyone needs them” (201). Before the reader works out the grammar, the Chinese reads, “Among people there is no noble or base, and among families there is no wealthy nor poor” (人無貴賤，家無貧富). But this cannot be what Li Yu means, because in 1671 this argument would have been unthinkable. A quotation follows in which Mencius refutes the ideas of Xu Xing: “the products of the various artisans are available to each person.”Footnote ³ Xu Xing argued against specialization and hierarchy to the point of urging rulers to join their subjects in the fields; Mencius argued in favor of kings, social hierarchy, and specialization. Li Yu deploys this quotation playfully, so that instead of endorsing specialization and rank, it bolsters the universal nature of the need for housewares. These opening lines whiplash the reader back and forth between equality and hierarchy.

Li Yu goes on to pronounce on difference, not sameness. Even if all families need utensils, poor households should avoid tchotchkes, Li Yu says, which leads him to this observation: “An object meant for everyday use, if its make is fine, once it's in a princely household, it is the same as a bauble. But an object made of jewels and jade, if its make is poor, once passed down to the descendants, it won't be worth even a single cash” (201). He sums up: “If you understand the guiding principle of fine versus crude, then you also understand that wealthy versus poor is exactly in parallel” (201). The economy of the writing and the internal parallel of “fine versus crude” and “wealthy versus poor” are a kind of legerdemain, tricking us into reading logical coherence when none is to be found. “Fine and crude” refer not just to the material, but also to the make; he means both that it is more important that something be well-made than that it be made of fine material, and that it be a well-made item for everyday coarse use rather than a crudely made decorative item. Without knowing whether “fine” refers to the material or its make, it is impossible to map “fine versus crude” onto the human realm and turn it into “wealthy versus poor.” Does he mean that poor people (of fine make) can live as well as or even better than the rich? Or is it the opposite, that the poor will always be of crude material and the line between rich and poor can never be erased? Parallelism maintains but also obscures the distinction between wealthy and poor even as it seeks some grounds of equality.

“Clothing” (治服) begins with the observation that it takes generations of wealth to inhabit it truly, whether by eating well or wearing clothes well. Whatever the rich wear looks rich, while whatever the poor wear looks shabby: “Say there is a rich gentleman here, wearing clothes of rags, shod in split-open shoes, but still with an air of abundance, able to transcend his clothes and shoes, so that one knows without asking that he is a man of noble rank” (128). A reader could try to square this assertion with that in “Head Ornaments”; perhaps the bone hairpin is just as good because it conforms to the status of its wearer. (Amalgated, the argument would go like this: forget the qualities of the bone hairpin qua hairpin or compared to horn. If you are a bone hairpin wearer by status, you might as well wear a bone hairpin.). But “Clothing” resists being read as a treatise to the extent that it is even unclear whether the initial observations are literary criticism or engagement with the real world.

Much of the essay consists of parodic exegesis of a line from Daxue 大學 (The great learning, fifth century BCE) that compares a person's moral qualities with a house: “Riches adorn a house, and virtue adorns the person” (Legge [1966] Reference Legge1992, 325). Li Yu insists on his alternative (decidedly heterodox) interpretation of those lines: “It is riches that make the house splendid; it is virtue that makes the person splendid.” Because the owner's wealth shines through, the exact nature of the house does not matter, only that of its owner. Otherwise, Li Yu says, the wealthy person who worried that his house had lost that flourishing air would simply go and buy a new house (and the person who worried about maintaining virtue would modify their physical body instead, gaining some weight). But even this tongue-in-cheek reading of one of the Four Books does not prepare us for the passage's conclusion, which shifts us definitively into the terrain of metalanguage. Referring to his own joking exegesis of Daxue, he embeds the title of the collection we are reading:

If allusion's purpose is partly to mark the demarcation between an in-group and an out-group, Li Yu's joke points to the very text that you happen to be holding at this moment, that you bought, your understanding of the joke a marker that you belong to this club constructed by commercial participation. As Li Yu says matter-of-factly in another essay, “What I call a wenren [文人 “a man of culture,” sometimes translated as “literatus”] does not necessarily refer to a gentleman of talent—but includes all people who can read and who can regard books as their true medicine” (351). Ultimately the efforts to bridge all consumers in a differentiated market boil down to this, an assertion that his readers are all people, and all people are his readers.

Classical Chinese prose is frequently so dense with difficult and obscure allusions as to seem largely composed of them. Xianqing ouji deploys very few, and then always to twist a text known by all in some quirky way, so there are more allusions to the Analects, for example, than to any other text. This last allusion is the most inclusive of all, but of a piece with the volume's style, a witty, straightforward Chinese that to a seventeenth-century person must have felt like what Li Yu promises of a bone hairpin, but that maybe no actual bone hairpin could ever live up to: well crafted but intentionally made of humble material, something made for everyone.