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To: Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
From: Susan Naquin
Subject: Rough Plan for Improving the Infrastructure for Studying
Chinese Material (and Visual) Culture
Date: 2/16/03
NB: For the purposes of this paper, “Chinese material/
visual culture” refers to the culture of the areas now governed
by the People’s Republic and the Republic of China. For most of
this paper I will be writing about the period before 1900. I am
lumping material and visual unsystematically.
The Problem. At present, the study of Chinese material and
visual culture is quite backward. I use two standards of
comparison: 1) what is known about the material/visual culture of
early modern Europe and North America, and 2) what is known about
Chinese books. There are exceptions to this backwardness. Let me
set aside from the outset the field of Chinese archaeology, which
is developed at a rather high level, highest perhaps for the
early periods, and decreasing in its comprehensiveness as one
approaches the present. Archaeology in fact exemplifies a kind of
rule (#1) that can be often invoked below: the closer one comes
to the present, the less well developed the study of material/
visual culture becomes and the more it concentrates on elites.
After 1900, this rule does not hold.
Other fields of material culture that are reasonably well
developed are: 1) Books, well studied for all periods. 2) The
history, technology, and styles of porcelain, including export
ware. But Rule #1 also applies: non-porcelain local ceramics of
later eras are less well studied. 3) Paintings, with less work on
non-literati painting after the Song. 4) The material/visual
culture of the imperial family (strongest for the late Ming and
Qing). For most other topics in material culture – whether
studied by medium or by type of object – scholarship is generally
shallow and certainly uneven.
To bring this still-not-a-field of Chinese material culture
up to a respectable level, we need first a solid foundation and
then some interesting superstructure. I have attempted here to
spell out some of the kinds of tasks that need to be done.
Task 1.A. Inventorying objects. To get control over the
objects themselves: what is left and where is it.
At present, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say
that most of the surviving books from pre-1900 China have been
catalogued somewhere. Although we do not as yet have a union
catalogue for them all, we do for some periods, and it is not
hard to imagine a day when we will be able to search all printed
books (before 1800?) on line and find which library owns a copy.
This kind of comprehensiveness should be our goal for objects as
well. (Such a full inventory has not been achieved for the
material culture of Western cultures, but they are closer to this
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goal than we are.) In the present age, it only makes sense to
imagine this kind of inventory existing in digital form, and
consisting of photographs, basic descriptions, information about
provenance, and location. Ideally, such inventories should be as
full and detailed as possible.
To achieve this goal, the owners of objects should do full
digitized catalogues of their collections. Inside of China and
out. It seems sensible to begin with the largest concentrations,
namely museums. Full inventories of all objects (not just the
most beautiful or famous ones) should be made. And, indeed, many
museums are doing just this. I is important to also include
auction houses and dealers, through whose hands a very large
volume of objects pass. Here, immediate full disclosure (e.g.
provenance, price) will not usually be possible, but at least the
published catalogue information could be digitized. As with books,
there would be problems linking databases and full cataloguing
would take many many years, but that is no reason not to get
going.
1.B. For every task, we need to understand the relevant
intellectual history. We cannot understand the relationship
between surviving objects and all objects if we do not understand
both history (what was destroyed, when) but attitudes toward
saving. To use any collection, one must understand the collector.
It is therefore important to promote the study of collecting – in
every time period up to the present.
Task 2.A. Inventorying pictures of objects.
Most of China’s material culture has been lost. Fortunately,
pictures preserve valuable representations of objects. It may not
be possible to list and count all pictures that show objects (it
becomes more possible as one moves back in time), but we could
begin by getting some control over illustrations in general.
These might be approached medium by medium.
One can make lists of books that contain illustrations,
with some indication as the type of illustration. (I believe that
the Chinese Rare Book Project indicates the presence of maps and
illustrations, but perhaps with no details.) Such lists would be
part of the library work that is a more traditional part of
sinology.
Similarly, we need to keep track of pictures that come in
the form of paintings, woodblock prints, murals, that appear on
textiles, porcelains, etc. This task is another form of basic
inventory.
2.B. One cannot take the representation for the object. It
is therefore necessary first to study and understand the genre in
question for the appropriate period. How did painters paint
buildings? How was furniture pictured on porcelain? What were the
conventions for showing clothing in a woodblock print? Without
such knowledge, one will misjudge the image. Fortunately, a
certain amount of this work, especially for painting, has been
done.
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Task 3.A. Writing about objects.
There is much to be learned about material culture from our
traditional sources, texts, and many historians have already used
such sources. Bibliographies focusing on the most useful genres
(e.g. encyclopedias) would be useful.
3.B. Here too, however, one cannot merely lift references.
Only by understanding the literary genres can one know how to use
the material contained in them – the symbolism of jade, the
poetic conventions of wine-drinking, the history of allusions to
fishing pole, and so forth.
Task 4.A. Stylistic analysis.
It is crucial to be able to locate an undated object in
time and space. In certain fields (literati painting, book
publishing, porcelains), concentrated scholarly work has made it
possible to identify an object with reasonably certainty, and
determine when it was made, perhaps even who made or owned it,
and sometimes where it was made/owned. At our present state of
knowledge, for most Chinese objects, we can do little more than
specify the century or dynasty, and perhaps a region. Contrast
this with most chairs produced in North American in the last 400
years, for example, which can usually be dated within decades and
located to a town or city or even workshop. It is perhaps most
striking, by comparison with Europe, that our knowledge of
regional styles is so thin. The existence of quasi-national elite
class did create some general styles (and, more importantly, the
idea of a “Chinese” style), but it is my guess that regional
distinctions were always present. To find them, one needs to look.
4.B. One also needs to know enough of the social or
cultural value of an object to be able to guess where within
society it might be found. Such information can be deduced from
the context in which it is placed, from references to prices and
value. The depth and breadth of knowledge that would make
possible detailed stylistic analysis depend in turn on the kinds
of inventories spelled out in Task 1.
5.A. Bibliographies of relevant secondary work.
These are certainly useful, and probably easiest to do.
They exist for archaeological finds, but are otherwise unevenly
systematized. Object or material or era-specific bibliographies
of books and articles could usefully be encouraged, especially if
they were produced in an open-ended format (e.g. on a website not
in book form). But bibliographies are not enough.
The above tasks (goals, really) could form a foundation on
which it would then possible to do interesting scholarly work.
Short of that happy day, we can only proceed by small increments.
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What can CCK do?
None of the tasks listed above can readily be accomplished
by means of a conference. They are, instead, more usefully
tackled by other means. For example?
For 1A. Support the production and dissemination of useful
data-base software for inventorying objects, software that could
be used (accessed) by different kinds of institutions. CCK could
undertake such a project within the limited venue of Taiwan, for
starters.
For 2A. Encourage the cataloguing of all illustrations in
books in libraries.
Conferences?
Conferences might be beneficial to this field if they were
undertaken on topics that fit the following (seemingly
contradictory) criteria: 1) topics that have not been greatly
worked on (e.g. not books, paintings, and other Usual Suspects),
and 2) topics on which there are just enough people working to
sustain a conference, and 3) where the work being done promises
to be interesting. You could encourage subjects on which a
certain amount is known from textual sources but for which little
attention has been paid to the material culture dimension. For
example: -- all for Ming/Qing :
Beds, sex, and conjugal relations.
Male and female dress/ornament and gender distinctions.
The circulation of Western objects in China (telescopes,
eyeglasses, clocks)
Western objects in daily lives in 19th century Canton or
Shanghai
etc.
20th century
The closer one comes to the present, the more material
survives. Preservation is, of course, still an urgent task,
perhaps even more so than for earlier periods because it is still
possible to save the ephemeral and seemingly trivial items that
are nearly all gone from pre-1900 China. Concentrating
exclusively on the near past is thus certainly justified and in
need of these same kind of inventorying and foundational analysis
spelled out above.