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Book Review
Asia
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Tobie Meyer-Fong
. Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou. Stanford: Stanford
University Press. 2003. Pp. xv, 281. $49.50.
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| Tobie Meyer-Fong uses the central China city of Yangzhou as the locus for a fresh look at how Chinese elites recovered from the shock and devastation of the conquest of their county by Manchu invaders in 1644. She focuses on the sights of the city and their commemoration in writing, especially poetry; in doing so, she presents an evocative picture of how remembering turned loss into nostalgia, how peace eased pain, and how companionship reconstituted community. |
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Meyer-Fong organizes her book around four places that were the sites of remembrance and objects of tourism (a bridge, two halls, and a temple). It is the literary activities that took place in and about these sights that are her real interest and contribution. Building on the work of Stephen Owen among others, she emphasizes "the restorative power of poetry and friendship" (p. 69), and argues that the composition and anthologizing of poetry were central to reconstituting social life and sense of self. Moreover, she demonstrates how the activities of the men who survived the conquest, preserved in both words and sites, became the social and cultural focus for subsequent generations of Yangzhou elites. This book is a fine example of a cultural historian using literary materials to excellent effect. |
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The processes so well delineated here for Yangzhou were not unusual, and Meyer-Fong adds significantly to a recent literature on the elite culture of the early Qing, complementing particularly the work by the art historians Jonathan Hay (Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China [2001]) and Qianshen Bai (Fu Shan's World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century [2003]). |
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One of Meyer-Fong's goals is to expose the early Qing Yangzhou that became submerged in the richer and more famous city of the eighteenth century. Her focus is on the elite men who lived and served in this city during the second half of the seventeenth century, and she is concerned with the emotional landscape as much as the physical one, with history remembered as much as with history lived. To these ends, she zigzags across her period, following the story of her four sites and their principal patrons. She begins with the generation who lived through the events of 1644, treats extensively the 1660s and 1670s, and has much to say about Wang Shizhen, the young poet and cultured official who served in Yangzhou in 1660–1665 and played a prominent and energizing role in local society. The book also touches on the impact of the Kangxi Emperor's various visits (1684–1707), refers glancingly to the later eighteenth century, and refocuses on the commemorating actions of Ruan Yuan, a local man, in the early 1800s. |
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This book is thus not intended to be a systematic urban history of Yangzhou—interested readers should also consult Antonia Finnane's Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 (2004). Meyer-Fong does, however, have much to say about Yangzhou's physical layout, remembered past, prominent people, and changing hierarchy of tourist attractions. |
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