Frog in a Well

Hi, everyone. This is Vincent Leung, a PhD student in Chinese history at Harvard. I just finished my third year in the program, and hopefully after my general examination this September, I can at last proceed to writing my dissertation. My research interest is on the political and intellectual history of early China, particularly the late Warring States and the Han empire (ca. 300 BC-AD 200). More specifically, I want to study the “imperial formation” during this period, which led up to the first bureaucratic empire in the Central Plains, looking at things like the territorial expansion, monetary policy, allocation of natural resources, and not the least, its ideological state apparatuses.

Before doing my PhD, I did a masters in East Asian Studies at Harvard. And before that, I was a math/econ major at UMass Amherst. In my more quixotic days back in college, I did want to do grad work in math, but alas, soon enough I found that I was not really cut out for it. I am glad, though, that I did bump into History, esp. early Chinese history. The received materials from early China, texts or otherwise, are exciting enough, despite their relative paucity, but all the excavated texts from the past few decades are simply incredible. Tens of thousands of them are just now sitting in museums waiting for people to work on them. And I sure hope I can dig my hands into them when I go aborad sometime in the next couple of years in China.

Let’s see — what else should I put in this intro? Perhaps I should mention the fact that I am originally from Hong Kong, where I grew up. I do a little bit of Chinese calligraphy on the side, though hardly anymore these days, and also (try to) study a bit of the early (political) history of Chinese Buddhism.

Thanks Konrad for inviting me to this blog! This is actually the first blog that I’ve joined, so it should be exciting. Very much look forward to our exchanges in the coming months!

This picture should of course be familiar to a many of our readers. It’s from 点石斋画报, probably the most famous of the late-19th century illustrated magazines. This is a source which has been used a lot by scholars, and there is a monograph by Ye Xiaoqing. Although the journal did lots of other images, as did its most famous artist Wu Youru, what it is mostly known for are little scenes of ordinary life, sometimes having to do with the western intrusion, sometime just with Chinese life (yes, a false distinction.) There is a certain tendency to show scenes of anomalies and strange events, but lots of good social history as well. They make a great teaching tool for all sorts of things.
Link to Picture

This particular image is about training “little hoodlums” (小流氓) as soldiers. These are little people (小矮人 in the modern paraphrase) who had been treated like hoodlums (liu mang means the floating population, and is usually a term of abuse), but if treated properly can they not become defenders of the nation? This of course lends itself to all sorts of teachable moments.

What interests me is the way these pictures have been reproduced over and over in the last decades. I first saw them in the mid 80’s in a huge string-bound edition published out of Guangzhou. Since then I have seen a number of nicely done modern editions, Don Cohen did some images with translations (Cohn, Don, ed. Vignettes From The Chinese: Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth Century. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987.) Fake images from the 点石斋 turn up on Ebay . A lot of the images seem to be somewhat faded, giving the impression that nobody has a really good original copy.

This image is from 上海旧闻 苏州：古吴轩出版社，2004。It is a fairly cheap paperback of about 200 pages. They also have books for 北京，南京，苏州，扬州，and 杭州. This one includes baihua paraphrases of the stories, which is why I found it so interesting. The original vignettes are often hard to make out, and even harder to understand, since they are in rather obscure Classical Chinese for my tastes, and, presumably, for a lot of buyers of this series. There seems to be a market for these pictures and stories of ordinary Chinese life.

One of my great disappointments in Art History class was Dr. Munakata telling me that in the Tang there were a lot of paintings of vignettes of ordinary life, and that we have the titles of many of them, but as they were not valued by later collectors, very few of them still exist. These 点石斋 images seem to be valued a great deal by the market, as there is presumably a great desire for valid and authentic (and illustrated) stories about social history. As the introduction to this volume puts it we can understand the changes in today’s society by looking at the past. Not probably a goal of most historians, but a good way to move product.

Of course lots we read different things back into this past. I note that the modern collections usually don’t include the bird and flower paintings I remember from the old Guangzhou edition. They also seem more likely to skip images of foreigners at home, and they have a lot fewer pictures of opium smoking. That people pick and choose what they want from history is of course not surprising, but I find it interesting that everyone, scholars, ordinary Chinese readers, publishers looking to make money, all keep coming back to this relatively small amount of stuff. A lot of what we would call “content” was generated in the Qing, and this one bit of it seems to be the wildly over-represented in the places we look for meaning.

If nothing else these pictures are an argument for stronger copyright laws in China. Various authors, artists and journalists came up with these pictures and texts and they are getting reproduced over and over, and presumably would be generating a fair amount of money if China had copyright going back to the Qing.

As summer is here soon we may be getting reports of the dreaded Chinese Snakehead fish.

Invasive species are of course nothing new, but Zebra Mussels and Eurasian Water Millfoil don’t get near the panic reaction that Snakeheads do. In fact, other species are a concern mainly to the nature nut contingent. Snakeheads add the national purity set. And, of course, they come from China, and Chinese markets right here in the U.S. They can walk on land, so they may well flop into your house, devour the kids and replace them with orphaned Chinese girls, and re-program your TIVO to record only Cantonese game shows. Plus, when you ask Chinese how to deal with them they may suggest you eat them, which is disgusting and un-American.

Member introduction.

I would like to thank Konrad for his invitation to join up, and say that I look forward to being a part of this blog.
I suppose I should start off with a bit of biography. I sort of drifted into this field as an undergraduate. I started out my career (at Northern Illinois University) as a business major. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I did assume that after college I would get a job, and business seemed to be connected to jobs. After determining that I did not want to be a business major, I switched to History, mostly because I liked the stories (many of them not true, sadly) that Mr Yohe used to tell in High School history class. Really, I was trying to find something that would interest me enough that I would eventually graduate from college, even if I ended up starving afterwards. I spent a couple of very enjoyable years majoring in History that meet after noon. I realized that teaching was the only option if I wanted to eat as a historian, and I had no interest in education classes, so that meant grad school, not that I really knew what that meant. I knew I did not want to do U.S. history, and I knew I did not want to do China. I’m not sure if it was Pearl Buck or James Clavell who gave me this impression, but I had this hazy idea of China as a despotism
that was inhabited by pathetic peasants.
France was coolMexico was cool. China was not. I took one Chinese history class on the assumption that I should know something about the place. I’m still not entirely sure why I was so interested in that class. This was long enough ago that the lecturer actually read from yellowed notes he had written out in longhand. I’m not quite sure why I liked Chinese history so much. The fact that there was a lot of it helped. All the other places I studied were bits of something larger. China was a host in itself. Also, I thought learning Chinese would be a challenge.

I mention all this in part because it seems completely inadequate. Now I’m an academic and a China person, and it is hard to imagine being anything else, but when I look back the reasons I had at the time seem silly and almost random. Apparently there is a lot of path dependence in what we do. Most of the rest of my life has been shaped by the casual decisions (and stubbornness) of a kid who was uniformed not only about China but also about academia and most other things. My professors probably had some point to a lot of what they were doing, but I had no idea what it was. They tossed out lots of interesting things, and I picked some of them at random and held on to them.

I also mention it because studying China seems to call for a lot of explanation, at least around here. I’ve given versions of the
above a zillion times. There are parts of the world and the U.S. where the coming Chinese century is obvious and dealing with it or profiting from it seem to be things that are well worth doing. The chief question in Western PA is why holes in the ground that used to contain coal no longer contain coal and what can be done about it. Explaining to people why they should care about China is part of what I do, and like most academics I am wound up enough in study in general and in China in particular that it is hard for me to get outside it and explain why anyone else should care.

This ties directly into why anyone should read this blog. Some blogs are worth reading because the people who post to them are interesting Clearly not a reason to read what I write. Some are funny.Some blogs are written by experts who will tell you things any informed citizen needs to know. I suppose my current tendency is to post on things that interest me and assume that occasionally they will intersect with a larger conversation, but mostly it will just be talking to a small group of people, and as often as not only to myself. This is sort of typical for China academics, I think, since we are always part of the narratives that society and academia want to tell. China is too big to be left out (unlike, say, Korea) and we can always get into a
conversation if we want to. On the other hand we can also go off in our own weird little
sinological world. I like both approaches, but I suppose that place I like best is somewhere between
I will try to post something about my current work soon, but this is enough of a trial to your patience for the moment. I will also try to figure out Word Press’s formatting a little better