Abstract


During the late Ming, the development of the city of Suzhou, the largest metropolis in the Jiangnan region, surpassed the capital in terms of cultural creativity and economic importance, and fostered an urban culture which encompassed both the literati class and the commoner class, and also a structure of urban ethics that was to ease the tension between the rich and the poor. This process of transformation is demonstrated in four chapters. The first chapter introduces the famous members of Suzhou literati, whose observations as seen in their works are the main source of this research. The commercialization of urban society in the late Ming inevitably diversified the literati class. Based on their distinct character, the literati class in Suzhou were divided into three generational groups, with progressive involvement in urban market. The second chapter deals with the formation of urban ethics of late imperial China. An explanatory model of "mutual dependency" is proposed, which not only stresses the existence of the economic ties between the rich and the poor but also the moral bond. In order to illuminate the evolution of this model, important turning points from the late Ming to the end of the Qing are examined to show how the rich finally recognized their moral obligation to their poor neighbors, and also how the consciousness of the working poor became articulated in this period. In chapter three the focus moves from social issues to the cultural arena. Through market exchange, features of literati culture became popularized. As aesthetic taste ceased to be a useful criterion in distinguishing between classes, the literati looked for different means to redefine the blurry boundaries between classes. Literati culture was not the only one that underwent transformation; the fourth chapter turns to issues related to popular culture and cultural transmission. Discussions are focused on the writings of three literati, particularly on their perceptions of the common people, which demonstrated a growing understanding of the lower class as the common people and their culture asserted a stronger presence in urban life.

INTRODUCTION


The great medieval cities of China--Chang'an, Luoyang, Kaifeng and Hangzhou --which succeeded and superseded one another in their ebullience of urbanism, were the only single great metropolises in the historical landscape of their time.(1) As the residence of emperors, the center of politics and culture, and as the place where the best talents of the nation converged, medieval capitals were in essence the heart of China. It is thus understandable that officials often expressed the mood of "longing for Chang'an" (wang Chang'an) while in exile, because "Chang'an" was indeed the only place under heaven that provided meanings for their existence.

But when Wen Zhengming went to Beijing to serve in the imperial court between 1523 and 1526, he desperately longed for the return to Suzhou --his native place. In the capital, Wen was mocked as a painter possessing a talent no better than an artisan's.(2) Whereas in Suzhou, he was always highly respected by all members of Suzhou society, from officials to commoners; and the very same talent was hailed by all as refined artistic taste, his works being eagerly sought after. Wen Zhengming's example was not an isolated case but a general phenomenon in the Ming dynasty, which showed that the capital had ceased to be the sole place for literati to gain recognition, status and long-standing historical fame. The once quiet regional cities had risen during the sixteenth century to emulate the cultural influence of the capital. And Suzhou, with its abundant talents, prosperous industry and commerce, firmly established itself as one of the leading cities in China during the Ming dynasty.

The ascent of Suzhou in the Ming was not accomplished overnight. Warfare and political turmoil during the Yuan-Ming transition destroyed the city and staggered its reconstruction for nearly one hundred years. Around the end of the fifteenth century, the development of Suzhou finally took off and surpassed its state of prosperity in the Yuan; and by the following century, Suzhou had further transformed into a society that nurtured the "sprouts of capitalism" of China. The concept of the "sprouts of capitalism" was first raised and heatedly debated by mainland Chinese scholars during the 1950s. Even though the debate is in danger of falling into petty arguments over whether capitalism did sprout, sprouted a bit, or in fact had not yet sprouted at all, it has shed new light on our understanding of Ming history, and replaced the traditional images of evil eunuches and humiliated literati with issues of the burgeoning handicraft industry, the urbanization of the Jiangnan region, the emergence of a new laborer and employer relationship, and the new urban tensions. Scholars of Chinese culture are ready to utilize this new information to explain the waves of publications of vernacular literature, or the eccentric behavior of the literary men. However, the correlation between "base structure" and "superstructure" made by culture historians tends to stay only at the surface level. The enormously complex social transition is often reduced to overly general terms, such as urbanization and commercialization, which hardly provide sufficient explanations for the appearance of any cultural phenomena.

The fundamental goal of this thesis is to look for the junctures where base structure and superstructure actually met. If the "sprouts of capitalism" signified an extraordinary social and economic transformation into the early modern era in Chinese history, then what were the corresponding changes in people's mentality and in social relationships that ushered China into a new phase of cultural history? My hypothesis is that regional cities in late Ming Jiangnan, which had surpassed the capital in cultural creativity and economic importance, fostered an urban culture which encompassed both the literati class and the commoner class, and also an urban ethics that was to ease the tension between the rich and the poor. These urban experiences did not disappear along with the demise of the Ming, but were preserved in the collective memory of the people, and guided the evolution of urban society in the Qing. In other words, late Ming urbanism was the inception of the modern urban experience in China.

In order to locate distant causes for these late Ming developments, we will begin our study in the mid-fifteenth century, and cover up to the end of the Qing to follow along the residual effects of late Ming urbanism. We will also look for the contemporary parlance in which sixteenth-century people talked about their changing society--of course they would not consider their prosperity as the beginning of capitalism, but as a resurgence of extravagant living that had always followed periods of material improvement in previous ages. Only by analyzing the key words in their language, such as "extravagance," and key phenomena, such as new ways in which the literati achieved a sense of fulfillment, can we probe into the cultural changes that made urban societies in the late Ming part of the future and not of the end of a medieval past.

In this thesis, we are going to ask how Suzhou ascended to the role of cultural leader. What kind of urban society did the Suzhou literati live in? Who supported the literati, and why? What did the literati have to offer to their supporters? How did alternatives to officialdom influence literati culture? What was the effect of sixteenth-century economic development on Suzhou society? What was the social position of the tens of thousands of artisans in Suzhou? Did they have a culture of their own? To what degree did the thriving market economy contribute to the mutual influence of popular culture and literati culture? How did the urban populace bridge the increasing gap between the rich and the poor?

These questions will be answered in four chapters. In the first chapter, we will acquaint ourselves with the famous members of Suzhou literati, whose observations are the main source of this research. Here I suggest that the transforming urban environment, which moved from mid-fifteenth-century quietness to the robust commercialization of the seventeenth century, inevitably changed the outlook of the literati class in Suzhou. And based on our observation of the distinct character manifested in these literati, we can divide them into three generational groups, with progressive involvement in the urban market. The second chapter deals with the formation of what I style the urban ethics of late imperial China. I propose an explanatory model of "mutual dependency," which not only stresses the existence of economic ties between the rich and the poor but also the moral bond linking them. To illuminate the evolution of this model, I will point to important turning points in the course of Suzhou urban history from the late Ming to the end of the Qing and try to show how the rich finally recognized their moral obligation to their poor neighbors, and also how the consciousness of the working poor became articulated in this period of time. In chapter three we will move from social issues to the cultural arena. There we will analyze how features of literati culture became popularized through market exchange. And as aesthetic taste ceased to be a useful criterion in distinguishing classes, we will also examine the literati's different reaction toward redefining the blurry boundaries between classes. Literati culture was not the only one that underwent transformation; in the fourth chapter we turn to issues related to popular culture and cultural transmission. We will focus our discussion on the writings of three literati, particularly on their perceptions of the common people, and see how these views changed as both the common people as well as their culture asserted a stronger presence in urban life.

Before beginning our discussions, we first turn to some basic information about Suzhou. Suzhou prefecture in the Ming included the the city of Suzhou and seven surrounding counties, which were Wu, Changzhou, Wujiang, Kunshan, Changshou, Jiading and Chongming. The city of Suzhou was divided by the central street of Wolong into two administrative units: the western half belonged to Wu county, and the eastern half to Changzhou county. The prefectural seat was also located in Suzhou city. It is difficult to determine precisely the size of the urban population in sixteenth-century Suzhou, but I would suggest a tentative figure of one quarter million, based on existing records.(3) This population was mostly concentrated in the northwestern and northeastern parts of the city; with the former more commercially oriented and the latter more related to handicraft industries. The differences between the eastern and western parts of the city will be brought up in appropriate sections in this thesis. In general, there were no strictly residential areas or commercial areas in Suzhou; shops, private households, rich people, poor people, officials, merchants and yamen clerks might all be neighbors to one another.

The definition of some recurrent terms in this study requires clarification here. Suzhou is often called alternatively "Wu," or "Wumen," or "Wuzhong." The term Wu came from the Kingdom of Wu, which was established in the eleventh century B.C., when the two elder brothers of King Wen of Zhou--Taibo and Zhongyong gave up their kingdom to their younger brother and came to the region of present-day Jiangnan. The city itself was built by the King of Wu, Helü, in 514 B.C.. Generally, all terms with the character "Wu" refer to the area that was once under the Wu Kingdom, that is, broadly speaking, south of the Yangzi River, around Lake Tai, with the city of Suzhou as the center.

There was no late Ming equivalent to the term "urbanite," which is closer to the modern Chinese term of shi min (residents of the city). In late Ming writings, when it came to describing a large number of urban population, the writers undistinguishably used the term zhong (the masses), or sometimes with some class distinction, shi min (literati and commoners). However, for the sake of convenience, I still use the term "urbanite" to designate those who lived in Suzhou city, regardless of their class backgrounds. By "literati" I refer to the Chinese equivalent of shi, who were separated from the commoners by their classical education and their potential roles as the cultural, social and political leaders in society. In other words, the term "literati" is used here in the most general manner.

Finally, I regard this thesis primarily as a cultural study of the social transformation of a city; I have been much inspired conceptually by works on European popular culture in the early modern period, such as those by Natalie Z. Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Carlo Ginzburg. In this study I will not tackle the usual questions asked about the role of Chinese cities in the modernization of China, and in the civil strife against the imperial autocracy.(4) The friction between the central government and local society was an important issue in late Ming Suzhou, but it was the internal friction between Suzhou's upper class and lower class that dominated the daily life in that the urban society, and so it will dominate our attention in the present study.

1. According to G. William Skinner, the development of the regional cities in the Tang-Song period was still immature; consequently the urban population converged in the largest cities. It was in the late imperial era the hierarchical system became more mature, and the urban population spread out more evenly throughout the hierarchy. G. William Skinner, "Urban Develoment in Imperial China," in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner, p. 28.

2. He Liangjun, Siyouzhai congshuo, vol.15:125.

3. A 1617 record of the population of Suzhou prefecture shows that the population of Changzhou county was about 140,899, and 100,969 in Wu county. This is the tax-paying population, which consisted only of rural and male population in the two counties. According other figures from a Jiajing account, Wu county had a overall population of 339,042, and Changzhou 294,116 in 1570. If we combine the two figures and deduct the 1617 population (we have to double the number in order to include the female population), we might be able to get a very tentative figure of the urban population, which was about a quarter million, which means about 37 percent of the entire population of Wu and Changzhou counties lived in Suzhou city. Hong Huanchun, Ming Qing Suzhou nongcun jingji ziliao, 1988:35. The entire population of Suzhou prefecture had generally been two million. F.W. Mote impressionistically estimated that the city population in the sixteenth century was about half a million, and by the eve of the Taiping rebellion, the number reached one million. I tend to believe the sixteenth century population was larger than one quarter million; but probably as much as half a million. F.W. Mote, "A Millennium of Chinese Urban History: Form, Time and Space Concepts in Soochow," p. 39.

4. This issue of the emergence of civil society in China has become a dominate theme in recent studies of Chinese urban history by Western historians. See, for example, the two books by William Rowe on Hankou: William Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1984); Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); and David Strand's Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1989).