The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption
Frank Trentmann (ed.)
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199561216.001.0001
Published: 2012
Online ISBN: 9780191744099
Print ISBN: 9780199561216
3 Things in Between: Splendour and Excess in Ming China 
Craig Clunas
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199561216.013.0003
Published: 18 September 2012
Pages 47–63
Abstract
There is plenty of evidence that, during the Ming dynasty in China, the enjoyment of the fruits of
commerce was not so frowned upon as the texts of orthodox morality and political economy might
imply. The enormous quantities of surviving Ming material culture, which are continuously being
augmented by archaeology (since people were buried with goods for use in the afterlife), range from
secular and religious buildings, the paintings and calligraphy produced and consumed by the elite,
through printed books, furniture, metalwork, textiles, jewellery, carving in a variety of materials from
jade to bamboo, and ceramics to weapons and tools. What we nd in Ming texts are ways of talking
about what we now call ‘consumption’ in ways that are either negative or positive, but which are never
detached from a discourse of morality, of good (or bad) governance, and ultimately of a universal order
that links humanity and its actions to wider cosmic matters of harmony or disjointedness. This article
discusses splendour and excess in Ming China.
Keywords: China, consumption, Ming dynasty, splendour, excess, material culture, morality, political
economy, commerce, universal order
Subject: Asian History, History
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
WHEN
in 1491 the teenage Italian aristocrat Beatrice d’Este went out shopping, ‘in order to buy those things
which are available in the city’, and ended up brawling in the streets with local market women, it was a rare
1
and startling enough event for the Duke of Milan to record it in a letter to her older sister. But his tone (and
that of Isabella d’Este's reply) is one of jocularity, recording a form of transgressive fun which was so far
from the way an aristocratic woman might be expected to acquire and to consume that it posed no threat at
all to the status of Beatrice or of her companions. Just as high-spirited and equally transgressive, but
ultimately seen as more troubling and disruptive of a proper order of things, was the behaviour of Zhu
Houzhao, born in the very year of Beatrice's escapade, who reigned as emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368–
1644) from 1505 to 1521, under the reign title Zhengde, ‘Upright Virtue’. The title is more than usually
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CHAPTER
ironic, since in the historical record controlled by the Chinese bureaucratic elite Zhu Houzhao is rmly
nailed down as a Bad Emperor, one whose memory is associated more with exotic foreign concubines,
louche monks and thuggish drinking companions, cripplingly expensive and rapacious touring of his
domains, inappropriate fondness for militaristic posturing, and even rumours of conversion to Islam, than
2
it is with rectitude in government. An ‘uno
p. 48
more lurid anecdotes about
cial history’ of his reign gathers together a number of the
his behaviour, including one which has him turning the world upside down in
He once wandered over to the Baohe Store [a palace storehouse], and ordered his eunuchs to
display at its door all the goods it contained, while he dressed in a shopkeeper's garb, with a
melon-shaped hat on his head, and in all the Six Stores from the Baohe to the Baoyan he carried
out trading with an account book and abacus in hand, bawling and questioning like who knows
what. And he also ordered them to set up a market place to go along with this, with a crowd of
stallholders, the stallholders being those eunuchs who kept wine shops in the [palace] lanes.
Amidst the racket of every musical instrument, he placed himself right among the tavern women,
who came out and dragged at the sleeves of the customers who entered in swarms … All the market
place sports such as tumbling monkeys, tricks on horseback, cock ghting, and hunting with dogs
were gathered all around, with palace women ‘at the balustrades’ [a euphemism for prostitution],
playing at urging people to drink, and he was so drunk that he slept where he was, carrying on with
3
this for several days.
Between playing at shopping and playing at shops, pretending to buy and pretending to sell, there seems to
lie a world of di erence. This world of di erence could too easily be spun into another thread in the faded
old tapestry of absolute antithesis between East and West, with the latter joyously embracing the rich
possibilities of the world of goods, while the former is stuck in a place where only the worst of rulers would
embrace the abjection of a shopkeeper's hat and the tools of commerce, or would befoul the sacred precincts
of the imperial palace with the clamour of the marketplace. The spatial opposition between young Beatrice
roaming out of the castle into the vibrant streets of Milan and the simulacral debauchery involved in having
to bring pretend streets into the space of a cloistered young man could also too easily be invoked as a
metaphor for the opposition between an outward-looking West, on the verge in 1491 of the Age of
Discovery, and a China about to be discovered, immured behind its mental and actual walls. There is a sense
in which this dichotomy between a vibrant, consuming West, and a fecund, productive, but unconscious
East is one of the classic orientalist tropes, feeding into European discussions of consumption from the
early modern period itself and not wholly expunged today. More recent work, which will be discussed
towards the end of this essay, suggests a required revisiting of this issue.
However, like many orientalist tropes, there are some indigenous strands in its DNA. If the historian
chooses to take this line about China, it would be too easy to point to canonical texts of political economy
which were known to all educated people in the Ming period, which retained relevance into the twentieth
century, and which structured society into the si min, ‘four categories of the people’, a hierarchy which ran
p. 49
downwards from ‘o
4
cials’ at the top through ‘peasants’ and ‘artisans’ to ‘merchants’ at the bottom.
With the former two categories seen as the ben, the ‘roots’ of the social order, the latter two were seen as the
mo—the word means ‘branches’, but carries connotations of twigginess and insubstantiality. Or at least
such was the theoretical model, which cast the makers of things and even more those who arranged to move
them from makers to consumers as disposable or inessential. But despite the horror of the chronicler's
censorious gaze, there is plenty of evidence that in Ming China the enjoyment of the fruits of commerce was
not so frowned upon as the texts of orthodox morality and political economy might imply. If we read the
texts written as funerary eulogies for certain contemporaries by the Ming dynasty calligrapher, writer and
painter Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), we get a sense of the complexities through which trade,
commodities, and social status were mutually intertwined. Wen was from an elite landowning background,
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a most startling way:
a native of the great commercial city of Suzhou, one of the economic powerhouses of the Ming economy,
with a reputation for high-quality textile production which was some centuries old. In 1532 he was
commissioned to write a eulogy for one of its textile merchants, Shi Han (1458–1532), whose ‘father raised
up the family through hemp and silk, it became even wealthier with him, and the business became more
ourishing. Their caps and belts, robes and shoes covered the empire, and they were praised whenever
patterned weaves were mentioned’. Seven years later he wrote about a man named Shen Xiang (1479–1539),
At the age of eighteen he crossed the Yangtze, travelled into Huai and Si, progressed through Yan
and Ji to Beijing before returning. Wherever he went he inquired into the prices of goods, aimed at
an accordance with the fashion, and was known as an excellent trader between the Yangtze and
Huai rivers.
We then hear how Master Shen bought land and how ‘his silk, lacquer and rush matting were carried to the
four directions’, how he grew mulberries for silk and ne teas until ‘after several years he was praised for
5
his success at enriching himself’. The reason the families of Shi Han and Shen Xiang were willing to pay for
Wen Zhengming's eulogies of their deceased members lay in his reputation as a cultural luminary; he came
from a family with members of the ‘o
cial’ class (highest of the four types of people), and he had himself
held a fairly lowly but locally very prestigious position in the imperial capital, where he had worked on the
o
cial chronicle of the reign of the Zhengde emperor. Thus he may have even had a hand in the drafting of
the passage quoted above, detailing Zhu Houzhao's social cross-dressing and general failure to behave.
Between the chronicle's horror and Wen's celebration of commercial acumen lies a vast range of attitudes to
the relationship between things and people in the Ming textual record, one which cannot be reduced to a
simple characterization of Ming China as being ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ commercial prosperity and its concomitant
consumption practices.
What is highly likely (though ultimately unprovable) is that Ming China had by 1500 more stu
p. 50
about, or even to think with, than the rest of the world.
to think
The enormous quantities of surviving Ming
material culture, which are continuously being augmented by archaeology (since people were buried with
goods for use in the afterlife), range from secular and religious buildings, the paintings and calligraphy
produced and consumed by the elite, through printed books, furniture, metalwork, textiles, jewellery,
carving in a variety of materials from jade to bamboo, ceramics to weapons and tools. There are of course
di erential rates of survival; Ming textiles are much less common than Ming ceramics, which ll the
museums and private collections of the world, and are found in archaeological contexts from Prague to
California, East Africa to Australia. The famous blue and white porcelain of the huge factories of Jingdezhen
6
could be thought of as the very rst global ‘brand’. However, and despite the survival of so much of the
material culture of the Ming period (still only a tiny fraction of what was produced at the time), we have no
real means of studying consumption behaviour in any of the ways which would be acceptable today to
economic or social historians. What we have instead, to set alongside surviving objects of consumption
themselves, are a vast range of representations of consumption, in both texts and images. These
representations exist alongside and interact with the similarly large range of representations of social
status and of good and bad forms of behaviour, in ways which allow us to perceive how the complex of
activities and agencies which we now bundle together under the rubric of ‘early modern Chinese
consumption’ appeared to contemporaries.
The representation of the variety and profusion of commodities available in the marketplace is a theme
which long predates the Ming period, for example being prominent in the literature of nostalgia written
7
around the fallen Southern Song capital of Hangzhou after the Mongol conquest of 1279. It is a cliché of the
writing of those early foreign visitors to China who recorded their impressions, from Marco Polo to Ibn
Battuta in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Within the Ming period itself it certainly predates the
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whom he confesses he has never met, but of whom he writes:
late Ming (generally dated from after c.1550), which has been the focus of most of the recent scholarship to
be discussed below. Dialogues in a handbook of the spoken Chinese language which was already circulating
in fteeenth- or even late fourteenth-century Korea assume that the foreigner visiting Beijing will need an
p. 51
extensive vocabulary in order to cope with the range of things available in the market.
WANG: Elder Brother who sells satin, [do you have]: sky-blue sleeveless jackets, willow-blue
owers inlaid with eight treasures, grass-green-bees ying around plum blossoms, green cypress
with owers of the four seasons, onion-white clouds; peach-red capes; blood-red peony with
entwined branches, glittering yellow Chinese writing brush owers, goose-yellow with four
clouds, willow-yellow threaded with colourful male phoenixes, musk-deer brown knee-wraps,
moxa-brown jade bricks and steps, shimmering honey-browns, eagle-back-brown hippocampus,
and dark tea-brown owers? Do you have all these types of thick silks and thin silks?
8
SHOPKEEPER: Customer, do you want it from Nanjing, from Hangzhou, from Suzhou?
The casual trumping of the customer's list of types with the o er of three centres of production (and this is
only one of many such litanies of goods in the text) builds up a picture in the reader of China as an almost
inexhaustible source of profusion and variety in the material world. ‘See China and buy stu ’ is one of its
central messages, or certainly the central task for which it assumes a reader needs to be equipped. Whether
it be kinds of bows, kinds of dishes, or the huge list of things to be taken back to Korea for sale there, a list
which begins with ‘one hundred pounds of red tassels’ and ends up with copies of The Romance of the Three
Kingdoms (a popular historical novel), quantity and variety of goods are central to the construction of
9
‘China’ and to the experience of going there as a consumer.
The concepts of ‘consumption’, ‘consuming’, and ‘the consumer’ are however as anachronistic as they are
in the case of Europe at this same period of history, and are alien to the discourse of goods in texts and
images of the Ming period, whether those generated inside the empire itself or those imposed on it by
outside observers. The modern Chinese word for ‘consumption’, xiaofei, is likely in its present sense to be a
neologism of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, and like so much of the vocabulary of the social
10
sciences in modern Chinese it may well be a loan word from Japanese.
What we do nd in Ming texts are
ways of talking about what we now call ‘consumption’ in ways which are either negative or positive, but
which are never detached from a discourse of morality, of good (or bad) governance, and ultimately of a
universal order which links humanity and its actions to wider cosmic matters of harmony or disjointedness.
Thus words like sheng, ‘prosperity’, or fan, ‘splendour’, are essentially a good thing, as visible and material
manifestations of a world well ruled. These are the words which appear in the titles of two paintings of
p. 52
urban scenes, now rare survivals of a genre which was
probably once much more common. One, entitled
The Splendour of the Imperial Capital (Huang du ji sheng tu) shows the northern imperial capital of Beijing,
while the other, entitled Thriving Southern Capital (Nan du fan hui tu juan) is of the secondary southern
11
capital of Nanjing.
Neither is dated, though both were probably painted around 1600, when the textual
record also registers a heightened interest in goods, in selling, and getting. In the former scroll, numerous
tradesman can be seen exposing their wares for sale outside the gates of the imperial city, some in
substantial booths, some on mats spread on the ground. We see sellers of stationery, of books, of antiques,
of locks and other small metal items, of combs, of Buddhist images, and of socks, as well as strolling
vendors of feather fans, of towels, of old clothes. We see numerous buyers, Ming âneurs, though all of them
are male, and the space of shopping is portrayed as an entirely homosocial one ( no room for a Chinese
Beatrice here). The Nanjing scroll is dominated by a religious festival procession, which is being watched,
one might even say consumed, as a spectacle by a large audience, with men and boys at street level, and
women and girls watching from the balconies of buildings. Many of these buildings are in fact shops, and
several carry prominent banners advertising the goods and services available there: shops for grain, for
leather goods, for gold and pearls, and one o ering to supply (according to its signage) ‘All the Goods of the
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knee-wraps, duck green edging with clouds, parrot-green oral designs; dark-green heavenly
Eastern and Western Oceans’. It is worth remarking that the visual evidence of such scrolls is purely on the
positive side of the debate, where ‘splendour’ and ‘prosperity’ are unequivocally good.
The negative side of consumption is conveyed in the Ming in words, by a totally di erent vocabulary, that of
chi, ‘wastefulness; excess’, and she, ‘luxury; extravagance’. These negative terms could be applied to exactly
the same phenomena as are elsewhere praised as indexes of ‘prosperity’, and sometimes by the same
people. It is this moralizing literature of complaint over ‘excess’ and ‘extravagance’ which has formed a
culture, and which is extensively quoted in what have by now become the key works in the debate. A small
sample will be su
cient to give a avour:
The customs of the present age have reached an extreme of extravagance, they are ‘di erent every
month and dissimilar every season’ … Nowadays the wealth and goods of the empire are
concentrated in the capital, yet half of them are produced in the south-east. (Zhang Han [1511–93],
12
Treatise on Merchants)
The same author complains in another text, in which we see clearly the linkage of anxiety over
inappropriate consumption behaviour and instability of the social order:
The dynasty has clear regulations for the dress and ornaments of women of o
p. 53
times changed and customs became more lavish, people all set their
cial families … As
resolve on venerating
riches and excess and, as if they no longer knew there were clear prohibitions, rather set about
trampling on them … Nowadays men dress in brocaded and embroidered silks, and women
ornament themselves with gold and pearls, in a case of boundless extravagance which outs the
13
regulations of the state. (Zhang Han [1511–93], ‘Account of the Hundred Crafts’)
One of the longest and most detailed jeremiads against the new tyranny of fashion is found in the work of
another late sixteenth-century writer, Fan Lian:
Customs go quickly from sound to imsy, like the irreversible falling downwards of the rivers. It
has been regretted since ancient times. Our Songjiang was always called extravagant, dissolute,
crafty and overbearing in custom and already had no chance of a reversal to soundness and
simplicity. Together with that, from the Jiajing and Longqing reigns [1522–72] on, powerful and
high-ranking houses have led the way in extravagance and excess. Those who wear ceremonial
sashes and scholars’ caps excel in craftiness and arrogance. Every day they give rise to strange
stories, every year they start a hundred new enterprises. (Fan Lian [b. 1540], ‘Eyewitness Record of
14
Songjiang’)
The meticulous detail with which Fan Lian catalogues in this text the detailed changes in men's hats and
gowns, in women's hairdos, and in dozens of other forms of luxury from foodstu s to the special picnic
boxes which contained them, suggests a fascination at least as great as the distaste which is his ostensible
motivation for writing. Clothing, and the shift from frugality to extravagance is also the focus of complaint
in the writing of a man from a third urban centre, Yangzhou:
In the Hongzhi and Zhengde eras [1488–1521] it was still the style to esteem agriculture and devote
oneself to practical matters. Most gentry living at home wore clothes of simple weave and hats of
plain black fabric. Students prided themselves in the study of texts; they also wore plain robes and
unadorned footwear … Now the young dandies in the villages say that even silk gauze is not good
enough and lust for Suzhou embroideries, Song-style brocades, cloudlike gauzes, and camel serge,
15
clothes high in price and quite beautiful. (Chen Yao [jinshi degree in 1535])
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mainstay of modern historical writing about the late Ming period in China as one of a rising consumer
Quotations of this type could be (and have been) multiplied from a range of Ming authors, and complaints of
this type must form a reasonably large percentage, perhaps even the majority, of the archive of Ming
discourse concerning the issues we would now bracket as ‘consumption’. Much rarer in the Ming textual
record, so much rarer that it was over 50 years ago the subject of a special study by the economic historian
Lien-sheng Yang, is the ‘uncommon idea’ that lavishness and luxury are of positive bene t to the body
p. 54
politic. Lu Ji (1515–52) deployed a rather modern-looking argument, hinting
at though not explicitly
economic activity was a good thing, and that one man's lavish spending was another man or men's
employment opportunity. He begins:
Those who discourse on government as a rule wish to prohibit extravagance, assuming that
restricting spending will enrich the people. However, as an early worthy has observed, as to the
wealth produced by Heaven and earth there is a xed amount. One person's loss becomes the gain
16
of another. I do not see how extravagance is capable of impoverishing the whole world.
Unusual as this argument may be in Ming terms, it shares with critique the fact that it is part of a discourse
around consumption, rather than material for the study of it. It tells us what contemporaries thought was
happening, and what they thought about what they thought was happening. It does not tell us what was
happening, or at least it does so only partially. And in fact we may have to accept that the material will never
exist for a satisfactory study of ‘consumption in Ming China’, since the kind of historical evidence on which
such an argument could be based does not and never did exist. That does not mean that the discourse of
‘prosperity’ (and its dark side, ‘extravagance’) is of no importance, but it is important that we understand
the evidence for what it is, and not try to shoehorn it into a set of categories in which it can never be
e ectively meaningful.
Pictures of prosperous cityscapes and polemics about silken trousers are far from being the only material we
have, but we have very little (especially by comparison with early modern Europe) of the evidence which
would allow us to tie speci c acts of consumption to speci c individuals. In what has been cited above, it is
always the faceless and generic consumer who goes overboard for the ashy novelty. Although, as
mentioned above, Ming tombs (which necessarily contain named individuals) do to a degree link some
speci c people with some speci c things, the set of practices around burial goods are too distinctive to give
much insight into lifetime behaviour. What gives an edge, in terms of speci city, to work on sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Europe is the distinctively European practice of the will and the inventory, usually
associated with death and the transfer of property. To regret their absence in the Chinese context is most
de nitely not to subscribe to classic orientalist notions that China lacked a concept of private property, it is
simply to acknowledge that private property generated a di erent range of scribal and individual practices
and forms of record-keeping. Thus something like the Diary from the Water-Tasting Studio (Wei shui xuan ri
ji) kept from 1609 to 1616 by Li Rihua (1565–1635) is an unusually valuable testimony, given that it appears
to have been maintained as a purely personal record (it was not published until centuries later). Li was
typical of the urban-based landowning class, living in one of the commercially developed cities of the lower
p. 55
17
Yangtze region, who entered the imperial bureaucracy through the examination system.
His diary does
give us some sense of what a male member of the late Ming elite thought it was appropriate to record about
what we would call his own consumption behaviour, and it is particularly interesting to set it alongside a list
18
which Li produced in a more public context, and which he titled, ‘A Ranking of Antique Objects’.
In this
context ‘antique’ does not have to mean chronologically old, but is also itself a type of moral value,
embodying a sense that the object so described materializes elite values of engagement with antiquity (gu)
as a cultural category. The list begins not surprisingly with the most valued (and commercially valuable) of
antiquities in the Ming art market, ‘Calligraphic pieces of the Jin and Tang dynasties’, then proceeds
through ‘Paintings of the Five Dynasties’ to various other categories of calligraphy and painting, which
between them take up the rst ten rankings on the list. Only at number 11 do we get ‘Brilliant examples of
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stating Mandeville's ‘private vices and public virtues’ of some 150 years later, to the e ect that more
bronze vessels and red jades before the Qin and Han’, followed by more jades, inkstones, Qin zithers and
swords, early printed books, ‘Strange rocks of a rugged and picturesque type’, other types of plant, then
exotic imports such as ‘Imported spice of a subtle kind’, ‘Foreign treasures of a rare and beautiful kind’,
foodstu s such as ‘Excellent tea well prepared’, ‘Rare and delicious food from overseas’, and ending up
with ‘Shiny ne white porcelain and mysterious coloured pottery, old and new’. A coda adds (and here we
get objects which are certainly not ‘antique’ in the colloquial English sense):
objects for the literati to use. They should be aware of the ranking of these objects, like the ranking
of scholars in the Lingyan Hall of the Han Dynasty, which was arranged by the wisdom of a just
19
ruler.
The analogy between ranking things and ranking people is made very explicit here, and is repeated in a
number of Ming texts (and not just Ming texts, it both precedes and post-dates the Ming as a practice).
Arguably, the ‘master ranking’ of Ming culture was that of the examination system, through the results of
which elite males were selected for entry to the imperial bureaucracy; it tested both classical textual
20
knowledge and awareness of policy issues, and provided a template for all sorts of listings.
But this
analogy also cannot be allowed to pass without drawing attention to one very important aspect of Ming
thinking about these matters, which is very signi cant in the light of some of the recent theorizing about
21
material culture studies, and in particular the issue of the boundaries between things and persons.
For Li
Rihua, as indeed for all Ming intellectuals (we are much less well informed about popular understandings of
p. 56
the issue), the category wu, which has the modern dictionary meaning of ‘things’, necessarily includes
within it living things, and most de nitely encompasses the category of ren, ‘humanity’. As one earlier
writer put it:
There is a thing (wu) of one thing. There is a thing of ten things. There is a thing of a hundred
things. There is a thing of a thousand things. There is a thing of ten-thousand things. There is a
thing of a million things. There is a thing of a billion things. Isn’t man the thing of a billion things?
The explicit point of this passage, as its modern exegetes point out, is the unity of man with other forms of
22
materiality, and the fact that ‘it is precisely because man is a thing that he can know things so well’.
What then can Li Rihua's diary tell us of the interaction between a speci c man and things in the late Ming
period? In fact, and unsurprisingly, there is a reasonably good overlap between the categories on his formal
‘public’ list and the types of object with which we see him interacting in the relative privacy of his diary. He
makes extensive records of the visits of dealers to his house, and of his own visits to commodity contexts
both grand and modest, where, as we might expect, it is the key categories of calligraphy (both actual
writing and its preservation through rubbings), paintings, archaic bronzes and jades, and ceramics which
23
make up the bulk of the things described in varying degrees of detail.
We also see him buy, or consider
buying, books, and carvings in wood, rhinoceros horn, agate, and amber. Some categories of purchase are of
things not on the list, but very much within the ambit of taste in the ‘antique’. We see him buying an inkstone, which is measured and described in detail, and which he then tries out for the rst time using a cake
of ink manufactured by the celebrated and fashionable maker of such commodities, Fang Yulu ( . 1570–
24
1619).
25
He writes about buying gems, and visiting the shop of a gem-dealer who also deals in pictures.
a number of occasions Li describes himself buying rocks and other things for his garden:
Someone from Wukang brought forty rocks, the big ones like crouching lions, the small ones like
creeping foxes; he exchanged them for rice and went away. I put them in the courtyard of the
Meiyinxuan, and strolled among them from morning to night—something of the atmosphere of a
26
mountain gully.
On
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In addition to these, white rice and green dishes, and cotton robes and rattan canes are exquisite
p. 57
And once he bought a talking parrot, from the more southerly coastal province of Fujian, a very expensive
27
purchase, but the bird died of the cold after a month.
Li records interaction with foreign rarities (which presumably fall under the rubric of ‘Foreign treasures of a
rare and beautiful kind’); these include, alongside Japanese lacquer and Japanese metalwork, both much
admired for their craftsmanship, what must be pieces of imported blue glassware, possibly Islamic or even
Venetian, ‘brought by barbarian ships from the south seas, things transformed in re in a barbarian
They also include a ‘sea egg’ brought by merchants from Guangdong province, a giant egg which
is impressively hard and white but which disappointingly fails to glow in the dark. Although Li speculates
29
that it is the egg of a dragon, an ostrich sounds like a more likely source.
It is therefore the case that almost the only ‘things’ which are culturally visible to Li Rihua are the things
which now come into the categories of ‘artworks’, including ‘decorative arts’ or ‘crafts’. Only very
occasionally do we get a glimpse of interaction with what we might call ‘commodities’, or just with things
not on the list, such as when ‘a bolt of black and green velvet’ forms part of the payment (along with four
antique porcelain cups, a piece of calligraphy, and a painting) which is o ered to induce Li Rihua to
30
compose a six-sheet funerary elegy for the mother of one caller.
On another occasion he enthuses about a
lacquered couch inlaid with panels of patterned stone, the innovation of a local entrepreneur, and once he
speaks warmly about the pewter teapots of a renowned local craftsmen, but only in the context of being
31
asked for a funeral elegy for the man, not with regard to his own purchase of one.
Perhaps he most
‘ordinary’ thing he chose to record buying in his diary was a lantern decorated with ‘ various immortals
32
worshipping the Southern Polar Star, for my father's birthday’.
The importance of the occasion probably
rendered the purchase more memorable. Another time he records how his boat tied up at Changmen, a gate
of the city of Suzhou, where he bought between forty and fty large ceramic pots, presumably fairly
33
everyday items, so that he could collect water for brewing tea wherever he wished.
The connoisseurly
consumption of water was of particular importance to Li, and provided him with the name of his studio and
the diary he composed there, ‘Water-Tasting Studio’; the diary also records sessions of water
34
connoisseurship.
Consumption in the sense of ingestion was undoubtedly important to Li Rihua; one diary
35
reads in its entirety: ‘Tasted the oranges from my own garden. Excellent.’
Li sometimes drank heavily, and
did not scruple to record his hangovers in the diary. Presumably he cared about what he drank but we never
p. 58
see him choose
alcohol for his cellar, just as we never see him choose his clothes, which almost certainly
mattered to him a lot too. It is not that consumption of these items did not matter, but that only some acts
of consumption were culturally visible even to the consumer himself. Even less visible in this sense than the
consumption of certain goods was the consumption of all services, with the servants, courtesans, chefs, and
professional entertainers who were essential to the elite lifestyle all being equally shadowy gures in the
diary. We might reasonably suspect that the estates from which Li drew his wealth were very important to
him, and we can be absolutely sure that they involved a considerable body of (now lost) textual practices:
rent books and leases, account books, deeds, and tax certi cates. Nevertheless the diary contains only the
rarest of glimpses of this side of life, as when he writes, ‘From the 16th to the 30th, a whole half month, I
36
have been managing estate a airs [literally ‘ elds and rents’] every day, and there is nothing to record.’
Although he records his own consumption behaviour (and very occasionally the prices which he paid for
things, or which he had heard others had paid for things) in a manner which eschews moralizing comment,
Li Rihua was perfectly prepared to draw on that discourse when it suited him. He spurns an o er of an
antique Qin zither (the musical instrument which was a key marker of elite status) on the grounds that there
is something not quite right about such an instrument being made of metal: ‘In the end not an elegant item,
37
and I returned it.’
The opposite of ‘elegant’ for Li and his contemporaries was ‘vulgar’, as in the laconic
38
diary entry for one bad night out: ‘A banquet with vulgar guests’.
And Li is as willing to tut-tut about the
vast and licentious excess of a popular religious festival as is he is to remark on the extravagant nature of
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28
country’.
the sweetmeats taken with tea in the (signi cantly merchant-dominated) culture of Xiuning in Anhui
39
province.
However the criteria of ‘elegance’ and ‘vulgarity’ which were so meaningful to Li and his contemporaries
increasingly must have seemed to be not the stu
of ‘proper’ history, and by the time the Diary from the
Water-Tasting Studio was published for the rst time in 1923 the understanding of historical processes in
both China and outside it had turned its gaze in other directions. Over a century of imperialist assault and
discriminations of the Ming elite seem irrelevant if not o ensive to contemporary sensibilities. Some
scholars of the Republican period chose to draw on a tradition, which went at least as far back as the
eighteenth century, if not to the fall of the Ming in 1644, of seeing too fastidious a concern with the exact
cut of hats or with which type of rocks which would make a garden truly ‘elegant’ as being in some sense a
cause of dynastic collapse, and hence an extremely bad historical role model in China's painful transition to
p. 59
40
modernity.
However others saw the self-re exive sensibility of late Ming
writers as being in some
sense a harbinger of that modernity, in the literary and cultural, if not in the political or economic, sense,
41
thus ensuring that the late Ming was through the twentieth century a vibrant eld of enquiry.
At rst, that enquiry was fairly rmly directed towards production, rather than consumption, most notably
through the historiographical controversy over the so-called ‘sprouts of capitalism’ (zibenzhuyi mengya).
Although strongly associated, indeed almost uniquely associated after 1949, with Marxist historiography,
this linked set of arguments about the existence or otherwise of an indigenous motor of economic
development in China, seen as burgeoning particularly strongly in the late Ming, was by no means in its
origins the product of Marxist historians only. Prominent conservatives such as Tao Xisheng (1899–1988)
weighed in to argue that the development of commercial capital in China was not necessarily corrosive of
42
the ‘feudal’ economy and its social structures.
Historians of the mid-twentieth century argued over late
Ming commercial developments, such as the growth of cities and of handicraft production, and the
increasing involvement of China in global networks of trade which brought silver in unprecedented
quantities from the Americas, and whether these did or did not prove that China was tending (via the iron
laws of history) autonomously towards a capitalist state. However they tended to do so on the basis of the
same bodies of evidence, reading the glass as half-full or half-empty, and praying in aid the kinds of
statements Ming writers have left us about ‘extravagance’ and ‘fashion’, even as they carried out valuable
work on excavating such other evidence as exists in sources like local gazetteers, a genre of chorographic
writing which deals with the speci cities of place. So Fu Yiling (1911–88) noticed as early as 1957
(coincidentally the very same year in which it was translated by Lien-sheng Yang) the essay of Lu Ji on the
economic value of extravagant spending which is cited above, including it on one of only a couple of pages
43
dealing with consumption (a ‘Bad Thing’ in Chinese Marxist historiography of the period).
The most recent survey of the literature on the history of consumption in China, with special reference to
the Ming period, is contained in a volume entitled Pinwei shehua: Wan Ming de xiaofei shehui yu shidafu,
(‘Taste and Extravagance: Late Ming Consumer Society and the Gentry’) by the Taiwan-based historian Wu
Renshu, who entitles the rst chapter ‘From the Study of Production to the Study of Consumption’.
44
There
he credits scholars working in English with a prominent role in this turnabout, drawing on the revival of
consumption as a topic particularly within British historiography of the 1970s and 1980s, but also bringing a
range of new perspectives from sociology and anthropology to bear on the evidence. One book he cites, the
p. 60
present author's
Super uous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (1991) was
certainly written consciously in the light of the scholarship on eighteenth-century Britain, and sought to
45
draw attention to ways in which the early modern European experience might not be unique.
It did so by
attending to a speci c type of late Ming text, and most centrally to the Treatise on Super uous Things by Wen
Zhenheng (1585–1645), which provided guidance on correct consumption, structured along the parameters
of ‘elegance’ and ‘vulgarity’. Wu Renshu's second landmark in the English-language scholarship is Timothy
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dynastic decline, and the tumult surrounding the birth of the Chinese Republic in 1911, made the etiolated
Brook's 1998 volume The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, which has a wider
compass, and arguably goes some way to addressing the problem raised by Frank Trentmann in a review of
the eld, where he sees a ‘widening gulf between material culture, focused on identities and
46
representations, and material politics and political economy’.
The same might be true of Wu Renshu's
other examples, with the work of S. A. M. Adshead and Kenneth Pomeranz, which—particularly the latter—
puts a new spin on the ‘roots of capitalism’ question by using the work of Clunas and others to link (in one
consumer society” was not unique … China also became increasingly crammed with paintings, sculptures,
47
ne furniture and so on’.
It might be claimed that the ‘gulf’ has been less of a problem in the literature
focusing on China, where there has perhaps not been the same imbalance within material culture studies
between the study of culture and the study of material; this is identi ed by Trentmann as particularly acute
in the case of British scholarship on the issue, when he claims, ‘In short, historical material culture studies
48
have been more about culture than about material’.
Recent work such as that of Dorothy Ko, for example,
49
on the material culture of footbinding and gender identities in China is rigorous in its address to both.
The continuously developing literature on consumption, material culture, and status in China has faced in
two directions. It is often united in its opposition to any perceived European exceptionalism (perhaps
typi ed by the continued citation of Fernand Braudel's Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, despite the
50
fact that this is generally marked by lamentable and willed ignorance of the material on China).
p. 61
often
This is
explicitly comparative work, exempli ed most clearly by something like Pomeranz's The Great
Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (which was published, it should be
noted, in a series entitled ‘The Princeton Economic History of the Western World’). But it is also internally
engaged in lively debate about some of the central premises of the work cited by Wu Renshu, which is now
decades old. There have been e ective challenges to what might be called ‘late Ming exceptionalism’, citing
developments both before and after the period which tend to erode claims made for the distinctive nature of
the century 1540–1640. For example, Kathlyn Liscomb's work on the archaeological evidence from the tomb
of a prosperous merchant who died in 1494 tends to challenge the claims, implicit in Clunas's Super uous
Things, that it is only after about 1550 that elite forms of luxury consumption spread to a newly assertive
51
merchant class.
Jonathan Hay has argued that it would be wrong to see the late Ming moment as some sort
of failed or stalled modernity, pointing out instead that the kinds of consumption behaviour over which late
Ming moralists fretted may have become so embedded and so common by 1700 that they were no longer
worthy of notice. And more recently Hay has engaged with the tradition of phenomenology to look at the
52
material world of the luxury object in China.
a
Kathlyn Liscomb and Jonathan Hay are by disciplinary
liation art historians, and it could perhaps be argued that it is the ongoing involvement in the debate of
art historians and museum curators, who necessarily engage personally with surviving material objects
53
from China's past, which has kept the argument grounded in concerns around the artefact itself.
For many
art historians now, the ‘agency’ of things, an idea which a number of social scientists would ascribe to
Bruno Latour and to actor-network theory, requires no scare quotes, given that they are likely to be much
more familiar with Alfred Gell's The Agency of Art (1998), and to the subsequent debates around it. Gell
polemically rejects the idea that anything other than language has ‘meaning’, insisting instead that, ‘In
place of symbolic communication I place all the emphasis on agency, intention, causation, result and
54
transformation.’
Even those art historians who do not subscribe fully to Gell's ‘methodological
philistinism’ (and it would be professionally hard for them to do so) have found his insistence on doing,
rather than meaning, useful in opening up a dialogue with anthropologists and social scientists of other
kinds.
Writing in Chinese in 2008, the historian Wu Renshu explicitly seeks to build on the tradition of Braudel and
p. 62
Neil McKendrick to produce an account of late Ming
consumption which is both more nuanced and more
detailed. This is attempted through a series of case studies, in chapters entitled: ‘Consumption and the
Symbolics of Power—the Example of Sedan Chair Culture’; ‘The Formation of Fashion—the Example of
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chapter title), ‘Luxury Consumption and the Rise of Capitalism’, and to argue, ‘But this [European] “rise of
Clothing Culture’; ‘Consumer Taste and Status Discrimination—the Example of Travel Culture’; The
Commodi cation and Singularisation of Objects—the Example of Furniture Culture’; ‘The Development and
Extension of Scholar Taste—the Example of Food Culture’. Wu's extensive reading of the broadest possible
range of Ming sources is meticulous in its care about the terminology used at the time. He unpacks, for
example, the term fu yao, which means literally something like ‘weirdness in clothing’, and which had been
in use for millennia as a technical term in prognostication, where weirdness in clothing was a sign of
‘fashion victim’, ‘fashionista’, but without ever losing its sense that the material and the cosmic were
55
aligned for good or for evil.
But this Ming terminology is not the only technical language which is explained by Wu Renshu. As is the
case with academic writing in Chinese since at least the early twentieth century, neologisms or translations
of English technical terms have the original English printed within the Chinese text, a reading knowledge of
English being correctly assumed to be widespread among intellectuals. The words which are so treated in
the introduction to his book (excluding proper names and titles) are: ‘modernity’; ‘consumer culture’;
‘early modernity’; ‘consumerism’; ‘ elds’; ‘wage-rate’; ‘the bottom up’; ‘consumer society’. Not one of
those terms would have been familiar to the writers of the late Ming whose works form the underpinning of
the argument. However the ‘discrimination’ (pinwei) and ‘extravagance’ (shehua) of the book's main title
have longer pedigrees, indeed would have meant something to a Ming reader, while the status term shidafu
certainly would, and is correspondingly almost impossible to translate satisfactorily into modern English.
Matthew's’ Chinese English Dictionary gives ‘gentry; o
cials; upper classes’, but all are contestable. This title
of a modern Chinese scholarly work (and one unlikely to enter the wider conversation through translation)
might therefore stand as a metaphor for a eld of enquiry which is delicately, even precariously, balanced
between a set of emic concerns which were intensely meaningful to social actors in China centuries ago, and
those etic concerns with development and global historical processes which any ‘history of consumption’
must address, in the full range of their variety and speci city.
There now seems little point in continuing the argument as to whether China ‘also’ was developing a
consumer society in the Ming period. The quantity of empirical evidence is certainly there to make such a
case, and enough of it now exists in English to make further claims of European exceptionalism look
increasingly defensive and ultimately slightly perverse. However although strategically there was a
considerable point to writing Ming China into the history of a global ‘early modern’ (it is after all the move
p. 63
which gains the present essay a place in this book), the problems and inconsistencies of
such an
inscription are by now well understood, and elegantly laid out in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, among
56
many others.
To carry on insisting that Ming China is ‘just like’ early modern Europe seems as
unproductive as arguing for its total di erence—as if that too had not been tried, in fact for some centuries
now, and with results which are tediously familiar, not to mention being also supportive of a contemporary
Chinese nationalism always at risk of tipping into chauvinistic claims of exceptionalism of their own kind.
How then to move forward from either/or, same/di erent? Although this is acknowledged right at the
outset as special pleading, perhaps there is something to be found in art history's own history, and in its
long process of extrication from the ahistorical construct of Beauty (which as Bruno Latour observes is
‘more easily seen as a construction than is Truth’). Latour has further argued that art history is by its
nature, and by its attention to the pleasure derived from the multiplication of mediations, particularly well57
suited to ‘be constructivist and realist at the same time’.
If this claim is true, then perhaps an attention to
the full range of mediations materialized in surviving things is equally a way of enjoying the bene ts of both
those standpoints.
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impending personal or national disaster. By the Ming, the term was used alongside others to mean also
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Lien-sheng Yang, ʻEconomic Justification for Spending—An Uncommon idea in Traditional Chinaʼ, Harvard Journal of
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Li Rihua, 511, [Wanli 44/1/13].
Li Rihua, 101, [Wanli 38/4/14].
Li Rihua, 534, [Wanli 44/6/2].
Li Rihua, 414, [Wanli 42/9/30].
Li Rihua, 552, [Wanli 44/10/16].
Li Rihua, 69, [Wanli 37/12/28].
38
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Bruno Latour, ʻHow to be Iconophilic in Art, Science and Religion?ʼ, in Caroline A. Jones and Peter Gallison (eds.), Picturing
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43
Li Rihua, 536, [Wanli 44/6/15].
Li Rihua, 98, [Wanli 38/4/2] and 385, [Wanli 42/4/20].
Clunas, Superfluous Things, 168–71.
Wai-yee Li, ʻThe Collector, the Connoisseur, and Late-Ming Sensibilityʼ, Tʼoung Pao, 81 (1995), 269–302.
Timothy Brook, ʻCapitalism and the writing of modern history in Chinaʼ, in Timothy Brook and Gregory Blue (eds.), China
and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 110–57, at
150–2.
Wu Renshu, Pinwei shehua: Wan Ming de xiaofei shehui yu shidafu (ʻTaste and Extravagance: Late Ming Consumer Society
and the Gentryʼ) (Taipei, 2008), 3.
Wu Renshu, Pinwei shehua, 1–22.
Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in early Modern China, 2nd edition (Honolulu:
University of Hawaiʼi Press, 2004), xi–xvi explains some of the genesis of the book. Wu Renshu perhaps chooses to
overlook a quantity of scholarship from the People's Republic of China which draws on the classical tradition for positive
a irmations of consumption, and which was produced in the context of the post-Maoist economic transformation.
Trentmann, ʻMateriality in the Future of Historyʼ, 285.
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 130; S. A. M. Adshead, Material Culture in Europe and China, 1400–1800: The Rise
of Consumerism (Houndsmills and London, Macmillan, 1997).
Trentmann, ʻMateriality in the Future of Historyʼ, 288.
Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's sisters: a revisionist history of footbinding (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California
Press, 2005).
Craig Clunas, ʻReview Essay—Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the Westʼ, American Historical
Review, 104/5 (1999): 1497–1511.
Kathlyn Liscomb, ʻSocial Status and Art Collecting: The Collections of Shen Zhou and Wang Zhenʼ, Art Bulletin, 78.1 (1996),
111–35.
Jonathan Hay, Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 339;
Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 2010).
Not that there is no involvement of art historians in the study of Western material culture, see Michelle OʼMalley and
Evelyn Welch (eds.), The Material Renaissance (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007).
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 6. On Gell see Mathew
Rampley, ʻArt history and cultural di erence: Alfred Gell's anthropology of artʼ, Art History, 28/4 (2005), 524–51, also Robin
Osborne and Jeremy Tanner (eds.), Art's Agency and Art History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).
Wu Renshu, Pinwei shehua, 160–5. On the role of fashion in China see Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion,
History, Nation (London: Hurst, 2007).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical di erence (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000). On the specific problems of applying the term ʻearly modernʼ to China see Søren Clausen, ʻEarly Modern
China: A Preliminary Postmortemʼ, electronically published 4 April 2000,