REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

LIFE - The 100 Violent Years..... September 23, 1966

Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square

Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square by Shui-Bo Wang, National Film Board of Canada

Shui-Bo Wang's feature documentary is a visual autobiography of an artist who grew up in China during the historic upheavals of the ‘60s, '70s and '80s. A rich collage of original artwork and family and archival photos presents a personal perspective on the turbulent Cultural Revolution and the years that followed.  For Shui-Bo Wang and others of his generation, Tiananmen Square was the central symbol of the new China – a society to be based on equality and cooperation. This animated documentary artfully traces Shui-Bo's roots and his own life journey as he struggles to sort through ideology and arrive at truth.

Swimming with Mao

By the time I left China, I had either thrown away or lost my childhood collection of memorabilia from the Cultural Revolution

By Xujun Eberlein

Memoir · From the July/August 2006 magazine

By the time I left China, I had either thrown away or lost my childhood collection of memorabilia from the Cultural Revolution— Chairman Mao buttons in various sizes and shapes, embroideries of Mao’s poems in his flying calligraphy, albums full of photographs of Mao at various stages of his revolutionary career. Nonetheless, a newspaper clipping of a black-and-white photograph of Mao found its way into a drawer in my American home.

The photograph was taken on July 16, 1966, and features Mao in a bathrobe waving from a boat. As a child I first saw this photo on the front page of China’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, under the headline “Chairman Mao Enjoys a Swim in Yangtze.” At Wuhan, the seventy-two-year-old Mao had allegedly swum fifteen kilometres in China’s longest river. Like all the other kids in my fourth-grade class, I applauded our Great Leader’s superior health and strength, unaware that this action sent a powerful message to his political enemies and signalled the high tide of the Cultural Revolution. Nor did I have the slightest idea what this event would mean to my family.

In my family photo album was a picture taken almost exactly two years after Mao’s famous swim. Mao is again waving, this time as a life-size statue in the background. In front, a teenage girl wearing a Red Guard arm band and paramilitary uniform is holding a volume of the Great Leader’s writings, her braided pigtails stretching out like paintbrushes. The teenage Red Guard is my big sister, Ruo-Dan. She was sixteen.

Read more at The Walrus

Alice Poon

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

A
Yuan Qu Aria and a Song Poem

Recently I came across two Chinese poems that I became
immediately smitten with. One is a Yuan qu (aria) (元曲)
by Ma Zhiyuan (馬志遠),
called “Sky and Clear Sand: Autumnal Thoughts” (天淨沙:
秋思),
and the other is a Song seven-character quatrain by Southern Song poet Lu You
(陸游),
called “Revisiting Shen Garden, One of Two” (再遊沈園,
二首之一).

Ma Zhiyuan was born in war-torn Southern Song dynasty and
was a Yuan dynasty court official by profession. He was also a well-known Yuan
drama (雜劇)
and aria (散曲)
writer and was honored with being named one of the four great masters of Yuan
aria writers (元曲四大家之一).

天淨沙·秋思•
馬致遠
(“Sky and Clear Sand: Autumnal Thoughts”) by Ma Zhiyuan

枯藤老樹昏鴉，
小橋流水人家(平沙)，
古道西風瘦馬。
夕陽西下，
斷腸人在天涯。

My English Rendition:

Dying vines, old trees, aging crows;
Beneath the
bridge flows a creek, bordering homes.
On the ancient path a gaunt horse braves the west wind.
In the
light of the setting sun,
The homesick man pines away on
Earth's rim.

Read More at Alice Poon

CHINA RECONSTRUCTS - july 1959

 

Contraceptive Use In China

China’s shifting cultural norms regarding sexuality are at odds with existing state healthcare coverage.

by Rachel Will

"Carry out birth planning for the revolution" (IISH / Stefan R. Landsberger Collections)

“Carry out birth planning for the revolution.”

The standard issue propaganda poster, along with its countless similar replications, was a patriotic call for birth control in the name of productivity and health. China was already short on food and resources, and with the country’s population exploding, the future looked positively slim. The government’s earliest efforts to control the burgeoning populace came in the form of these slogans and national dictums, which later expanded to include contraceptive use.

“20 years ago if you went to the rural villages, you could see the slogans on the wall that read, ‘if you have one child, IUD please, if you have two children, sterilization please,’” describes Kaining Zhang, a research physician at the Yunnan Health and Development Research Association. “There is still a very strong influence [from that] policy.”

Today, attitudes towards sexuality and reproductive health have dramatically shifted in China. The once taboo topics have been the subjects of national campaigns to increase sexual health awareness, and a survey by Renmin University shows that more than half of all respondents think premarital sex is acceptable. 

Government policy and more traditional viewpoints remain deeply influential on Chinese attitudes toward contraception and birth control. Yet with rapidly changing world views and sexual habits among China’s younger generations, outdated policies have created a shortage of free state health services for millions.

Methods and trends

China has one of the highest rates of contraceptive use in the world with 84.6% prevalence among women who are currently married or in union. In comparison, the United States has a 78.6% prevalence, and China’s next largest neighbor, Japan, reports 54.3% prevalence. The high figures owe much to China’s vast network of family planning centers and other government initiatives in local communities that followed the implementation of the One-Child policy in 1979.

China’s family planning policies target married women, emphasizing permanent means of birth control, though a multitude of birth control options are available through retails stores. Individuals can visit family planning service stations in both urban and rural areas to access free birth control methods.

Sterilization has a 28.7% usage rate and is typically recommended to women following the birth of a second child. Intrauterine devices (IUDs) have a 40.6% usage rate, and though not permanent, are often promoted by state health services over temporary methods.

“There is a heavy emphasis on IUDs and sterilization, this may be a barrier [to contraceptive use] and people perhaps not wanting to use either of these two methods and finding themselves pregnant,” says Amy Tsui, Director of The Bill & Melinda Gates Institute of Population & Reproductive Health. 

Read more at US-China Today

 

How Do You Say 'Badonkadonk' in Chinese?

Feb 8 2012, 3:09 PM ET The story of OMG! Meiyu, Jessica Beinecke's wildly popular web video series for Chinese who want to learn American slang.

That language shapes culture and vice versa seems intuitive and axiomatic. Language and educational exchanges have always been a defining feature of the U.S.-China relationship. Regular people-to-people exchanges, including the State Department's "100,000 Strong" initiative started under President Obama, have been important to the bilateral relationship because of persistent and often serious mutual distrust. The experience of teaching English in China was perhaps most memorably captured in Peter Hessler's book Rivertown. Like Hessler and many Americans since, I too was once an English teacher in China, attempting to dissect the ingenuity of Jay-Z and explicating Hamlet's neurosis to my students. Though I can't say they fully understood the significance of H.O.V.A and To Be or Not to Be (I'm still not sure I do either), I hope they at least learned something about the diversity of America.

Given that experience, I was delighted to discover that, in the age of YouTube and social media, American English lessons have been taken to another level. Meet Jessica Beinecke, a Voice of America journalist who decided that she could leverage all the web 2.0 tools at her disposal to create a show that taught Chinese youth American slang. It's shot with only a webcam and was exclusively on Chinese Youku until recently migrating to YouTube. A profile in the Washington Post describes the show:

Read more at The Atlantic

JACK LONDON

by Daniel A. Métraux

The Adventurer-Writer who Chronicled Asian Wars, Confronted Racism—and Saw the Future

He stood among the Japanese soldiers wearing a weather-beaten visored cap over his short, dark hair and a rough hewn jacket covering his broad soldiers, a cigarette angling away from his square jaw and a camera dangling from his gloved hand. As they studied documents, the Japanese troops contrasted with Jack London in their box hats and high collared uniforms. A photographer present immortalized London looking like the adventurer and writer that he was, one drawn to the battle like a missionary to his calling, who skillfully recorded the machinations of great powers while sympathizing with the underdogs who struggled to survive.

Jack London (1876-1916), easily the most popular American writer a century ago, is still praised for his Yukon novels and short stories such as The Call of the Wild, White Fang and To Build a Fire. However, his visits to Japan, Korea and Manchuria; his factual, hard hitting coverage of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05); his astute short stories about Sino-Japanese competition; his prophetic essays predicting the rise of the Pacific Rim, and his call for respect and constructive interaction between Americans and Asians over "yellow peril" hysteria are undeservedly forgotten. These salient aspects of London's life deserve to be remembered and respected. They evidence his keen intelligence, painfully accurate vision of the future and the progressive and humane values that are still needed to bridge the East and West.

London negotiates passage with a Japanese officer in Korea during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. I explained that I was going to Chemulpo. “In a moment,” said the interpreter. I showed my ticket, my passport, my card, my credentials; and always and invariably came the answer, “In a moment.” Also the interpreter stated that he was very sorry. He stated this many times. He made special trips upstairs to tell me that he was very sorry.

The Yellow Peril Threatens the West?

Today the term “The Yellow Peril” — but not necessarily the fears and fantasies that it engenders — has gone out of fashion. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Westerners' dreams about the "superiority" of their civilization competed with their nightmares of Oriental hordes swarming from the East to engulf the advanced West. This was a popular theme in the day's literature and journalism, which London knew well. The term “Yellow Peril” supposedly derives from German Kaiser Wilhelm II's warning following Japan’s defeat of China in 1895 in the first Sino-Japanese War. The expression initially referred to Tokyo’s sudden rise as a military and industrial power in the late nineteenth century. Soon, however, its more sinister meaning was broadly applied to all of Asia. “The Yellow Peril” highlighted diverse Western fears including the supposed threat of a military invasion from Asia, competition to the white labor force from Asian workers, the alleged moral degeneracy of Asian people and the spectre of the genetic mixing of Anglo-Saxons with Asians.¹

Many writers and journalists in the early 1900s wielded an unflattering pen when writing about Asians, boasting of Anglo-Saxon superiority over the “yellow and brown” Asians. The Hearst newspapers stridently warned of the “yellow peril”. So did noted British novelist M. P. Shiel in his short story serial, The Yellow Danger. One finds similar views in Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” and in some of his stories and novels.

The Russo-Japanese War saw Japan alter the world balance of power that the West once dominated, triggering viceral fears of a yellow peril

Read more at Voices Education Project

 

The quiet path of poets

In a Shanghai stuck between an ancient past and modernity is the lane that once housed Tagore

Nothing seemed French about the French Quarter​, with its shops selling marinated barbecued meats and waiters setting afire the asparagus on my plate, and nothing seemed Chinese about the large mall, which could easily have been in any large Asian city. Nothing seemed authentic when a hawker offered me a Montblanc pen that looked exactly like the Montblanc pen in the shop behind him, where it was sold for a hundred times more. Nothing seemed ancient in a city where each building was a skyscraper taller than the one next to it, and shone like it had been just unwrapped. And nothing seemed modern in a city where on weekends in a public park hundreds of men and women talked animatedly, exchanging photographs of their sons and daughters, arranging their marriages the way their parents had arranged theirs, and their parents theirs, and so on, uninterrupted, generation after generation. Despite the apparent spontaneity of those conversations, the moves were rehearsed, the dialogue planned, a bit like the city itself, where the centrepiece at the museum of planning was a miniaturized model of the metropolis, as though everything, including this sudden growth, was exactly as the Party intended and the city had planned.

Modern times: In the Shanghai of high-rises, the past can be found in museums. By Thinkstock

You could see some of the old Shanghai at that museum—the Shanghai that was among the last to fall to the Communists, the city which provided China with many intellectuals, the city that looked to the East, but was China’s face to the West. And you discovered that old city in large canvases of old houses from the colonial era, with gardens and foliage implying a permanence which empires believe they possess, until one afternoon the revolutionaries arrive, razing everything (on the other side of the same hall, they displayed large photographs of its port, ships and construction activity, looking mechanical and prosaic. There are probably bureaucrats who are prouder of those photographs of modernity, and not of the stillness of the canvases recreating the old).

Read more at liveMint

As Interest From the Next Generation Wanes, A Family's Tofu Legacy Totters

By Stephen Nessen

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  Barrels of tofu at the Fong Inn Too factory in Chinatown. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)

On a recent afternoon, David Eng conducted an orchestra of tofu makers, peering into vats of bean curd in various states of coagulation.

A fog from the steam-spewing, high-pressure pumps fills the air at his family’s Chinatown factory, which is next to a Buddhist temple under the Manhattan Bridge.

Tofu has been Eng’s family business for 78 years, since his grandfather, an immigrant from Guangdong, China, set up shop in on Mott Street in Chinatown in 1933.

“All Asians like to claim ancient ancestry,” said William Shurtleff, author of “The Book of Tofu.” But Fong Inn Too, is, “certainly one of the oldest, if not the oldest, continuously family-run tofu shop in the U.S.”

But after Eng, a 56-year-old banker-turned-farmer who returned to his family business in the 90s, there is no clear fourth generation leader to take over the tofu-making venture. He said he fears he may be the last of his family to run Fong Inn Too.

“Business is slow, terribly slow, especially this past year,” Eng said recently.

Eng starts his day at 5:30 a.m. and is rarely done before 6 p.m. The factory processes about 2,400 pounds of soybeans a day, yielding about 10,000 squares of tofu.

(David Eng at the factory on Division Street. Stephen Nessen/WNYC)

Much of the tofu is destined for local Chinese restaurants. Fong Inn Too, a major wholesaler, has a network of 80 distributors, each of which supplies tofu to an average of 16 restaurants in the city.

“If you come to Chinatown from eight to nine in the morning, it’s bumper to bumper on Mott,” said Jan Lee, the owner of the antiques shop, Sinotique, a few doors down from Fong Inn Too. “Vans from restaurants come religiously every week to pick up supplies. It’s a part of Chinese commerce that the layperson doesn’t see.”

The shop on Mott Street has bags of sugar stacked in one corner, and white take-out boxes for tofu spilling off the shelf.

Read more at WNYC News Blog

Thanks for the tweet:

kattebelletje Alice de Jong | 雍莉

RT @stirfrygrace: My fave tofu RT @rodhuntress: After 78 years family tofu biz in NY Chinatown faces uncertain future: ow.ly/6TOj4

Red Dragon – King of China’s Fish Tanks

'

The Red Dragon fish, also known as Arowana, is considered a good luck charm, in Chinese culture, and sells for unbelievably high prices.

The Arowana is an amazing fish that grows up to a meter in length, and can live up to 25 years. But it’s not these traits that make it so popular among China’s rich and famous, but its resemblance to a dragon. As you may know, Chinese people consider themselves descendants of dragons,  and many of them would pay big money, to own their very own dragon. The older the fish, the more expensive it is, kind of like a good wine.

Red Dragon fish are believed to bring good luck and prosperity to their owners, and some people pay as much as $8,000 to own one. Most Arowana owners prefer to keep them in secret locations, away from prying eyes, where no one else can enjoy the good fortune they bring.

The red-gold coloring and the name “Dragon” have made the Arowana fish a sought after social symbol, and have brought the species to the brink of extinction.

The most hated woman in China becomes a manicurist in a Brooklyn salon... and she's still on the hunt for Mr Right

Still searching: Feng Luoyu, pictured in Brooklyn after her relocation, became a web sensation in China after her infamous hunt for a husband

Pin up girl: Feng Luoyu made billboards and TV ads to get the word out in China

New York is a Mecca for American stars of stage and screen, but rather than seeking attention at the city's hot spots, one Chinese internet sensation has been hiding out in a nail salon in Brooklyn because of the backlash she received in her own country.

Feng Luoyu, 27, who became a national laughingstock in China, now lives and works in Brooklyn as a manicurist.

She shot to fame two years ago when she handed out flyers in Shanghai with specific demands for potential suitors.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2042028/Chinese-internet-laughingstock-moves-hunt-perfect-man-Brooklyn.html#ixzz1ZDv71TaX

Full River Red

 

怒发冲冠，凭阑处、潇潇雨歇。
抬望眼，仰天长啸，壮怀激烈。
三十功名尘与土，八千里路云和月。
莫等闲白了少年头，空悲切...

Leaning against the railing,
Watching the rushing rain easing,
My heart is raging.

Tossing my head towards the heaven,
Letting out an anguished wailing,
My blood is boiling.

Thirty years of exploit,
To me, just a pile of dust;
Eight thousand miles of expedition,
I lived rough under clouds and moonlight

With all these, I have no regrets,
For I didn't waste my youth
By doing something meaningless...

Read more at Multiple Texts

Returning to Songshan Mountain - Wang Wei

Read more at Chinese Poems

Clear river belt long thin Cart horse go idle idle Flow water like have desire Dusk birds another with return Desolate town face old ferry Set sun whole autumn hills Far successively Song high down Return come for now close shut

The limpid river runs between the bushes, The horse and cart are moving idly on. The water flows as if with a mind of its own, At dusk, the birds return to perch together. The desolate town is faced by an ancient ferry, The setting sun now fills the autumn hills. And far below high Songshan's tumbling ridges, Returning home, I close the door for now.

Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

In 1971, as Mao's Cultural Revolution swept over China, shutting down universities and banishing "reactionary intellectuals" to the countryside, two teenage boys are sent to live on the remote and unforgiving mountain known as Phoenix in the Sky. Even though the knowledge the narrator and his best friend Luo had acquired in middle school was "precisely nil," they are nevertheless considered dangerous intellectuals and forced to spend their days carrying buckets of excrement up and down the mountain to fertilize the fields. But when they bargain their way into obtaining a forbidden Balzac novel from their friend Four Eyes, a new and dizzyingly vast world opens up to them. Through Balzac, the narrator discovers "awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden" [p. 57]. And when Luo falls in love with the beautiful Little Seamstress, life and literature come together in a passionate romance. Luo and the narrator plot to steal Four Eyes' suitcase full of books both for their own pleasure and to transform the seamstress from a simple peasant into a sophisticated woman. Their success in doing so, and the unexpected consequences that follow, drive the novel to its stunning, heart-wrenching conclusion.

Part historical novel, part fable, part love story, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a moving testament to the transformative power of literature.

Reading Groups Guide

 

Chinese Porn: The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou Putuan)

What first attracted me to Li Yu was his love of comic invention. "Broadly speaking," he once wrote to a friend, "everything I have ever written was intended to make people laugh." He was never content, as other writers were, to make minor variations upon the standard literary themes. Instead he submitted those themes to a drastic overhaul and created a new comedy of his own, claiming all the while that his version of reality was the true one and that everybody else was deluded. He thus belongs to that rare breed of comic writer-rare in any culture-who discovers or invents the terms of his own reality. ^[1]

Let me give two obvious examples, both of them discoveries rather than inventions. In its most general outline a Chinese romantic comedy consisted of a handsome youth with brilliant literary gifts falling in love with a beautiful and talented girl and, after overcoming a number of vicissitudes, marrying her. By the seventeenth century countless stories and plays, some of them masterpieces, had been written to this formula. But Li Yu would have none of it. In his first play (or opera, both terms apply), Lianxiang ban, a title freely translatable as Women in Love, he adapted the formula and applied it-for the first, and perhaps only, time in the history of Chinese literature-to a love affair between two women. Eventually the lovers are united as wives to the same man-the only solution open to them. Similarly, in Li Yu's Silent Operas (Wusheng xi) collection, there is a story about a love affair between two men that derives its comic power from the way it parallels a perfect heterosexual marriage, all the way from courtship to widowhood. Examples of comic discovery and invention abound also in his novel, The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan).

Invention and discovery, together with the implied virtue of originality, were stressed more by Li Yu than by any writer before him. "Newness is a term of approbation for everything in the world," he wrote, "but above all for literature." Copying is taboo, of course, even from the ancients, but so is echoing other writers, and not merely other writers but ourselves; we are not permitted even to echo ourselves-an impossible ideal, and one that Li Yu himself did not come close to realizing.

His passion for invention carried over from literature to life. He was a designer and practical inventor as well as a writer, and his essays ring with the (slightly self-mocking) refrain: "Is it not strange that the world had to wait for Li Yu to invent this?" A version of the refrain occurs in Chapter Ten of the novel, too, after Vesperus has shown his savoir-faire with pillows: "The general principle is known to all, but… that particular formula has never been understood before." So strong was Li Yu's passion for novelty that he was also quite capable of shocking his readers for sensational effect.

A second unique quality is his voice or persona. Strictly speaking, he had not one voice but a range of them, mostly humorous, that he employed in his fiction and essays. The narrator in the traditional Chinese novel had always been a strong vocal presence anyway, in vague simulation of an oral storyteller, and Li Yu exploits that convention-openly manipulating the narrative, commenting on the action, addressing his readers as if they were an audience, and even answering questions posed by a fictitious member of that audience. A passage in Chapter One of his novel exemplifies this last convention:

"Storyteller, since you want people to suppress their lecherous desires, why not write a tract promoting morality?"

"Gentle readers [or audience], there is something of which you are evidently unaware…"

The difference is that Li Yu is substituting a voice of his own for the voice of the traditional narrator. Every Chinese novelist had to make some accommodation with the figure of the traditional narrator-a history of the genre could be written in terms of their accommodations-but Li Yu's solution was the most personal, and perhaps the most satisfying. He was a noted wit and pundit in life, and I suggest that he managed to create in the voice of his fictional narrator a perfect literary correlative for his oral wit and punditry.

Few people realize that a lively tradition of erotic fiction existed in China, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a superior tradition, in my opinion, to its somewhat later counterparts in England and France. Granted, Fanny Hill is a small miracle, but it seems a miracle precisely because it is isolated; and Sade's novels, as fiction, are second-rate at best-full of philosophizing as well as ludicrous cruelties and blasphemies. In China, by contrast, several novels of undeniable power were written. The Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus) is only a partial member of the genre, being much else besides. If there is a classic example of the Chinese erotic novel, it is surely Li Yu's Carnal Prayer Mat.

It is in the nature of erotic fiction to seek out forbidden territory to explore. In China that was likely to mean adultery, not defloration as in the corresponding European genre. (In Europe adultery was left to the bourgeois novel.) The reason is clear enough: adultery violated the husband-wife ethic, one of the key Confucian social obligations. In a family-centered morality, it was a natural choice as the crucial sin, but for precisely the same reason, it also posed an intolerable threat to society. The libertine's adulterous adventures may enthrall the reader with their glimpse of forbidden pleasure, but ultimately they must fail. Sexuality for the Chinese writer, unlike Western apostles of eroticism from Sade to Lawrence, was a drive that had to lose when it collided with social values. That is why Chinese libertines are generally the objects of satire-as they certainly are in Prayer Mat. And it also explains why the Chinese novels can end only with the libertine's punishment and repentance.

Read more of Introduction at e-reading

CHAPTER ONE

Make use of lechery in putting a stop to lechery; start off with sex in treating the subject of sex.

Lyric:

 Raven hair so quickly gray,

Ruddy cheeks soon past.

Man's unlike the ageless pine-

His fame and fortune, e'er in flux,

Gone in the flower-destroying blast.

How sad if youth is deprived of joy!

(From the courts of love the old are cast.)

So once you hear the siren song,

Young masters,

Rush to enjoy the flowers' throng.

 

True paradise on earth,

All things considered well,

Is found in bedroom bliss.

Unlike the realm of fame and glory,

Here joy begins and troubles cease.

Each day is spent in slippered ease, each night

In drunken slumber till the morning bell.

So open your eyes, take this to heart:

All the world's

A vast erotic work of art.

This lyric, to the tune of "Fragrance Filling the Courtyard," points out that our lives would be so filled with toil and worry as to leave no room for pleasure-had not the Sage who separated Heaven from Earth created in us the desire for sexual intercourse to alleviate our toil and worry and save us from despair.

In the parlance of our Confucian sticklers for morality, a woman's loins are the entrance through which we come into the world and also the exit by which we leave it. But the way wise men see these things is that, without those loins, our hair might go white a few years sooner than otherwise, and our deaths occur a few years sooner too. If you doubt their word, consider how few priests there are whose hair has not turned white by the age of forty or fifty, and whose bodies have not succumbed entirely by seventy or eighty. Of course the objection might be raised that, although priests have joined the order, they still have a way open to them, either through adultery or by having relations with their disciples, and that they may be no more apt to preserve their vital energies than the laity, all of which would explain their failure to live to a ripe old age.

But if that is true, consider the case of the eunuchs in the capital, who, far from committing adultery, have lost even the basic equipment for it and who, far from having relations with their disciples, lack even a handle on such things. In theory they ought to retain their delicate, youthful looks over a lifetime of several centuries. Why, then, do they have even more wrinkles than anybody else? And why does their hair go white even sooner? Granddad may be our name for them, but the truth is they look far more like grannies. ^[2] Plaques are put up in the capital to honor ordinary folk who have lived to a great age, but no centenary arch has ever been erected to commemorate a eunuch.

It would thus appear that the activity we call sex is not harmful to mankind. However, because the Materia Medica failed to include it, we lack a definitive explanation. ^[3] One view holds that it is good for us, another that it does us harm. But if we compare both views in the light of the above argument, we must conclude that sex is beneficial. In fact its medicinal effects closely resemble those of ginseng and aconite, two substances with which it can be used interchangeably. But there is a point to be noted here. Potent tonics as they are, ginseng and aconite should be taken only in small doses and over long periods of time. In other words they should be treated as medicine, not as food. When swallowed indiscriminately, without regard to dosage or frequency, they can prove fatal.

Now, sex has precisely the same advantages and disadvantages. Long-term use results in the mutual reinforcement of yin and yang, whereas excessive use brings the water and fire elements into conflict. ^[4] When treated as medicine, sex relieves us from pent-up emotion, but when treated as food it gravely depletes our semen and blood.

If people knew how to treat it as a medicine, they would behave toward it with a degree of detachment, liking it, but well short of addiction. Before first engaging in it, they would reflect, "This is a medicine, not a poison. Why be afraid of it?" And after engaging in it, they would reflect, "That was a medicine, not a food. Why become addicted to it?" If they did this, their yang would not be too exuberant nor their yin too depressed. No one would die an early death, and what is more, no girls would be left without husbands nor men without wives, a development that would contribute substantially to the institution of Royal Government. ^[5]

But there is one further point to consider. The properties of sex as a medicine are the same as those of ginseng and aconite in every respect save the location in which it occurs and the criteria by which it is selected; in both of those respects there are contrasting features of which users should be apprised. In the case of ginseng and aconite, the genuine variety is the superior one, while the local product brings no benefit; ^[6] whereas with sexual activity, it is the local variety that is superior and the genuine one that not only brings no benefit but can even do harm.

What do I mean by local product and genuine variety? The term local product refers to the women you already possess, your own wives and concubines; you have no need to look further afield or to spend your money; you simply take what is at hand. There is no one to stop you, no matter how you choose to sleep, nor any need for alarm, no matter who knocks on your door. Sex under such circumstances does no damage to your vital energies; it even benefits your ancestral shrine. If a single encounter results in such physical harmony, surely we can agree that sex does us good!

Genuine variety refers to the dazzling looks and glamour that are found only in the boudoirs of rich men's houses. Just as the bland domestic fowl lacks the refreshing tang of the game bird, so our wives' faded looks can hardly compare with the youth and glamour of these fledglings of the boudoir. When you set eyes on a girl of this kind, you dream about her; you strive to win her at all costs; you make advances, then follow them up with presents; and you scale walls to get to secret assignations or clamber through tunnels to declare your passion. But no matter how emboldened you are by lust, you'll still be as terrified as a mouse; even if no one has seen you, you'll always think someone is coming; you'll sweat more from fear than from love, and semen will seep from every pore. The desire for love exceeds the heroic spirit; when you're taken in adultery, you'll lose your beard and eyebrows. A plunge into the abyss will result in a frightful disaster. In the other world you'll have destroyed your moral credit; in this world you'll have broken the law and will be put to death. Since there is no one left to pay for your crime, your wife will have to live on and develop her own desires, engaging in unchaste behavior and doing all kinds of harm-an unbearable tragedy. In the case of sex it is obvious that people must on no account sacrifice the near in favor of the far, the coarse in favor of the fine, or spurn the commonplace in order to seek what is rare.

The author of this novel has been motivated solely by compassion in his desire to expound the doctrine. His hope is to persuade people to suppress their desires, not indulge them; his aim is to keep lechery hidden rather than to publicize it. Gentle readers, you must on no account misconstrue these intentions of his.

Storyteller, since you want people to suppress their lecherous desires, why not write a tract to promote morality? Why write a romantic novel instead?^[7]

Gentle readers, there is something of which you are evidently unaware. Any successful method of changing the current mores must resemble the way in which Yu the Great controlled the floods: channeling current trends into a safe direction is the only way to get a hearing. People these days are reluctant to read the canonical texts, but they love fiction. Not all fiction, mind you, for they are sick of exemplary themes and far prefer the obscene and the fantastic. How low contemporary morals have sunk! Anyone concerned about public morality will want to retrieve the situation. But if you write a moral tract exhorting people to virtue, not only will you get no one to buy it; even if you were to print it and bind it and distribute it free along with a complimentary card, the way philanthropists bestow Buddhist scriptures on the public, people would just tear the book apart for use in covering their winepots or in lighting their pipes and refuse to bestow a single glance upon its contents.

A far better solution is to captivate your readers with erotic material and then wait for some moment of absorbing interest before suddenly dropping in an admonitory remark or two to make them grow fearful and sigh, "Since sexual pleasure can be so delightful, surely we ought to reserve our pleasure-loving bodies for long-term enjoyment instead of turning into ghosts beneath the peony blossoms, ^[8] sacrificing the reality of pleasure for its mere name?" You then wait for the point at which retribution is manifested and gently slip in a hortatory word or two designed to provoke the revelation "Since adultery is always repaid like this, surely we ought to reserve our wives and concubines for our own enjoyment instead of trying to shoot a sparrow with the priceless pearl, ^[9] repaying worthless loans with real money?" Having reached this conclusion, readers will not stray, and if they don't stray, they will naturally cherish their wives, who will in turn respect them. The moral education offered by the Zhounan and Shaonan songs ^[10] is really nothing more than this: the method of "fitting the action to the case and the treatment to the man." It is a practice incumbent not only upon fiction writers; indeed, some of the sages were the first to employ it, in their classical texts.

If you doubt me, look at how Mencius in Warring States times addressed King Xuan of Qi on the subject of Royal Government. ^[11] The king was immersed in sensual pleasures and the pursuit of wealth, and Royal Government did not figure among his interests, and so to Mencius's speech he returned only a perfunctory word of praise: "Well said." To which Mencius replied, "If Your Majesty approves of my advice, why not follow it?" "I have an affliction," said the king. "I love wealth." To whet his interest, Mencius told him the story of Liu the Duke's love of wealth, which is on the theme of frugal management. But the king then said, "I have another affliction. I love sex." By this remark he meant that he was interested in becoming another King Jie or Zhou. ^[12] It was tantamount to sending Mencius a formal note rejecting the whole idea of Royal Government.

Now, if a puritan had been there in Mencius's place, he would have remonstrated sternly with the king along these lines: "Rulers from time immemorial have admonished us against sexual license. If the ordinary folk love sex, they will lose their lives; if the great officers love sex, they will lose their positions; if the feudal lords love sex, they will lose their states; and if the Son of Heaven loves sex, he will lose the empire." To which King Xuan, even though he might not actually have voiced the sentiment, would certainly have replied mentally along these lines: "In that case, my affliction has penetrated so deep that it is incurable, and I have no further use for you."

Mencius, however, did not reply like that. Instead he used the romantic tale of King Tai's love of sex to gain the king's interest and get him so excited that he could hardly wait to start. From the fact that King Tai, although fleeing on horseback, still took his beautiful consort along with him, he deduced that the king's lifelong love of sex made him loath to be parted from his women for a moment. Such a dissolute ruler ought surely to have lost both his life and his kingdom, but this king practiced a love of sex that allowed all the men in his country to bring their women with them in their flight, and while he was making merry with his consort, his men were able to make merry with their women. It was a case of moral influence exerted by a king who "brought springtime with him wherever he went and was unselfish in all things." Everyone was moved to praise him and none dared criticize.

Naturally from this point on, King Xuan was perfectly willing to practice Royal Government and made no further I have an affliction excuses. Otherwise he might well have demurred again with trite excuses such as I love wine or I have a bad temper. Mencius's ploy may truly be said to have made a "lotus emerge from the flames" ^[13]-a technique from which the author of this novel drew his inspiration. If only the entire reading public would buy this book and treat it as a classic or as a history rather than as fiction! Its addresses to the reader are all either admonitory or hortatory, and close attention should be paid to their underlying purpose. Its descriptions of copulation, of the pleasures of the bedchamber, do indeed come close to indecency, but they are all designed to lure people into reading on until they reach the denouement, at which point they will understand the meaning of retribution and take heed. Without these passages the book would be nothing but an olive that, for all its aftertaste, would be too sour for anyone to chew and hence useless. ^[14] My passages of sexual description should be looked upon as the date wrapped around the olive that induces people to keep on eating until they reach the aftertaste. But please pardon the tedium of this opening; the story proper will begin in the next chapter.

CRITIQUE

How enticing this novel sounds! I am sure that when it is finished, the entire reading public will buy it and read it. The only people who may not are the puritans. The genuine puritans will; only that species of false puritan, those who try to deceive people with their righteousness, will not dare. On the other hand, it has been suggested that, although the false puritans will not dare buy it themselves, they just may get someone else to buy it for them, and although they won't dare read it openly, they just may do so on the sly.

Read more at http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/97634/Yu_-_The_Carnal_Prayer_Mat_%28Rou_Putuan%29.html

A Chinese Honeymoon

More at The Guide To Musical Theatre

A musical play in 2 acts by George Dance                          
Music by Howard Talbot
Royal Strand Theatre, London October 5, 1901
Casino Theatre, Broadway - June 2, 1902 (376 perfs)

 EMPEROR: What is the law on the subject of Admirals disappointing their Emperors?

CHIPPEE CHOP : There isn't one.

EMPEROR: Then go in the corner and think one out. 

"I Want to be a Lidy"

I want to have an evening dress that opens down to there,
And wear a great big diamond ta-ra-ra in my hair;
And when I to the playhouse go, I want to do the grand
With a wreath of flowers on my breast, and a bucket in my hand.

I want to be a lidy, and have a private box,

I want to wag a great big fan, and shake my golden locks,

I want to hiss the villain, and cheer the maid forlorn,

So that folks will know, when I say "Bravo!"

I'm a lidy bred and born

I want to learn to patter French, just like a parlez-vous,
And call my servants "garçons" and my letters "billy-doos,"
And when I go a-visiting, and on my friends I drop,
I want to say "Pardon, Mamselle, I hope I'm not de trop."

 

EMPEROR: Let us rather talk about our wedding.

FI FI: Our wedding! Well, I must say, your highness, you didn't waste much time over pre-limin-aries.

The Emperor does not find his bride as bashful as he had expected.

The Custom of Crying Marriage

The custom of crying marriage existed a long time ago in many areas of Southwest China's Sichuan Province, and remained in vogue until the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Though not so popular as before, the custom is still observed by people in many places, especially Tujia people, who view it as a necessary marriage procedure.

Crying Marriage in General

It is very much the same in different places of the province. According to elderly people, every bride had to cry at the wedding . Otherwise, the bride's neighbors would look down upon her as a poorly cultivated girl and she would become the laughingstock of the village. In fact, there were cases in which the bride was beaten by her mother for not crying at the wedding ceremony.

During the Warring States Period (475-221BC), as historical records reveal, the princess of the Zhao State was married to the Yan State to be a queen. Her mother, on the point of her daughter's departure, cried at her feet and asked her to return home as soon as possible. Later, the story was alluded to as the origin of the "crying marriage" custom.

In west Sichuan Province, the custom is called "Zuo Tang (Sitting in the Hall)". Usually, the bride begins to cry a month before the wedding day. As the night falls, the bride walks inside the hall and weeps for about an hour. Ten days later, her mother joins her, crying together with her.; Another ten days later, the grandmother joins the daughter and mother, to cry together with them. The sisters and aunts of the bride, if she has any, also have to join the crying.

Read more at ChinaDaily

Chinese Composer Guo Wenjing

 

Guo Wenjing is a composer who lives in China. His work has been taken abroad many times to amaze international audiences. The New York Times once claimed that he is the only world-renowned Chinese musician who never settled down in a foreign country. Today, our reporter Zhao Yang will tell us the story of Guo Wenjing and his music.

Reporter:
You are listening to "Shu Dao Nan", or literally the "Sichuan Road", composed by Guo Wenjing in 1990s. He was inspired by a poem with the same name written 1,000 years ago by the famous poet Li Bai. The poem describes the precipitous and steep roads in the mountainous Sichuan area.

Born in Chongqing city in Sichuan area in 1950s, Guo Wenjing has a deep feeling for his hometown. Besides "Shu Dao Nan", most of his early works are also related to Sichuan, like the concerto "Desolated Mountain" and "Symphony Suspended Coffins on the Cliffs in Sichuan". Though these music works are all named after typical Sichuan sceneries, Guo Wenjing explains what he wanted to express.

"Actually, my music is about Sichuan people rather than Sichuan landscapes. They depict the stubborn spirit of the residents there and my love for my hometown."

Guo Wenjing's fondness for music was cultivated in childhood. At that time, China was suffering social unrest caused by the Cultural Revolution. To ensure little Guo Wenjing's safety, his parents bought him a violin at age 12 to keep him at home. Guo Wenjing gradually understood the charm of music and a few years later, became a professional musician in a local art troupe in Chongqing. There he was attracted by the Russian composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich's 11th symphony.

"In his 11th symphony, there is a song about the revolution in Warsaw. It is amazing. When you listen to it, you can immediately picture a scene of the soldiers marching in your mind. The song is very easy to understand. So I decided to be a composer and express my thoughts through music."

Read more at CRIENGLISH

Li Po

Li Bai's birthplace is Chu, Kazakhstan. Another candidate is Suiye in Central Asia (near modern-day Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan). However his family had originally dwelt in what is now southeastern Gansu , and later moved to Jiangyou, near modern Chengdu in Sichuan province, when he was five years old. At the age of ten, his formal education started. Among various schools of classical Chinese philosophies, Taoism was the deepest influence, as demonstrated by his compositions. In 720, he was interviewed by Governor Su Ting, who considered him a genius. Though he expressed the wish to become an official, he could not be bothered to sit for the Chinese civil service examination. Perhaps he considered taking the examination below his dignity. Instead, beginning at age twenty-five, he travelled around China, enjoying liquor and leading a carefree life: very much contrary to the prevailing ideas of a proper Confucian gentleman. His personality fascinated the aristocrats and common people alike, and he was introduced to the Emperor Xuanzong around 742.

In 725, when he was twenty-five years old, Li Bai sailed down the Yangtze River all the way to Weiyang (Yangzhou) and Jinling (Nanjing). During the first year of his trip, he met celebrities and gave away much of his wealth to needy friends. He then turned back to central southern China, met Xu Yushi, the retired prime minister, married his daughter, and settled down in Anlu, Hubei.

In 730, Li Bai stayed in the Zhongnan Mountain near the capital Chang'an (Xi'an), and tried but failed to secure a position. He sailed down the Yellow River, stopped by Luoyang, and visited Taiyuan before going home.

Read more at The biography of Li Po

The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove

 

During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, there were seven famous scholars who would get together in the bamboo grove for drinking wine, playing musical instruments, chanting poems and chatting. They were Ji Kang, Ruan Ji, Ruan Xian, Shan Tao, Xiang Xiu, Wang Rong and Liu Ling, whom people called “the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove“. These seven noted scholars were all advocates of Taoist theories and fond of music, wine and chatting. They were representative figures of Chinese metaphysics at that time. Many of their literary works were aimed at exposing and satirizing the imperial court. However, due to the different characters, thoughts and aspirations of the seven, they ended up in different situations.

Among them, Ji Kang, Ruan Ji and Xiang Xiu were noted writers and thinkers, all of whom were opposed to the Sima clan that was in power at the time. Ji Kang was multi-talented. He was not only excellent in poetry and literature, but also an accomplished musician. He was subsequently killed by Sima Zhao, who asked him to play Guangling San (a Guqin piece) before his death. The tune was since ranked as a masterpiece throughout the ages.

Due to political reasons, the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove went their separate ways in the end. Although they shared a relatively short time together in the bamboo grove, their literary works and advocating of the nihility thoughts of Laozi and Zhuangzi made them the symbol of honest scholars at the end of the Wei Dynasty. The seven scholars had a far-reaching impact on ancient Chinese writers and the development of ideological history.

The brick relief featuring the Seven Sages plus Rong Qiqi unearthed from the tombs of the Southern Dynasties at Xishan Bridge of Nanjing, Jiangsu Province in 1960 is an invaluable historical and cultural heritage. The relief is composed of over 300 ancient tomb bricks. In the relief, there are eight people sitting on the floor. Some of them are playing musical instruments, some are singing songs and some just listening and nodding. The featured characters are all distinctive and the depiction is simple and lifelike.

During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, there were seven famous scholars who would get together in the bamboo grove for drinking wine, playing musical instruments, chanting poems and chatting. They were Ji Kang, Ruan Ji, Ruan Xian, Shan Tao, Xiang Xiu, Wang Rong and Liu Ling, whom people called “the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove“. These seven noted scholars were all advocates of Taoist theories and fond of music, wine and chatting. They were representative figures of Chinese metaphysics at that time. Many of their literary works were aimed at exposing and satirizing the imperial court. However, due to the different characters, thoughts and aspirations of the seven, they ended up in different situations.

 

Among them, Ji Kang, Ruan Ji and Xiang Xiu were noted writers and thinkers, all of whom were opposed to the Sima clan that was in power at the time. Ji Kang was multi-talented. He was not only excellent in poetry and literature, but also an accomplished musician. He was subsequently killed by Sima Zhao, who asked him to play Guangling San (a Guqin piece) before his death. The tune was since ranked as a masterpiece throughout the ages.

Due to political reasons, the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove went their separate ways in the end. Although they shared a relatively short time together in the bamboo grove, their literary works and advocating of the nihility thoughts of Laozi and Zhuangzi made them the symbol of honest scholars at the end of the Wei Dynasty. The seven scholars had a far-reaching impact on ancient Chinese writers and the development of ideological history.

The brick relief featuring the Seven Sages plus Rong Qiqi unearthed from the tombs of the Southern Dynasties at Xishan Bridge of Nanjing, Jiangsu Province in 1960 is an invaluable historical and cultural heritage. The relief is composed of over 300 ancient tomb bricks. In the relief, there are eight people sitting on the floor. Some of them are playing musical instruments, some are singing songs and some just listening and nodding. The featured characters are all distinctive and the depiction is simple and lifelike.

Read and see more at Cultural China

菜根譚 / Tending the Roots of Wisdom

 

               Uploaded by tomorallen on Dec 7, 2006

Tending the Roots of Wisdom was written by Hong Yingming during the Wanli reign period (1573-1620) of the Ming Dynasty. Hong Yingming adopted the Confucian virtue of "self-cultivation" with the Taoist and Buddhist doctrine of "returning to simplicity and the unadorned truth". These two appellations thread together and fuse the three major trends of traditional Chinese thought - Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. Tending the Roots of Wisdom is filled with precepts stressing self-cultivation.

              

Marco Polo and His Travels

"When a man is riding through this desert by night and for some reason -falling asleep or anything else -he gets separated from his companions and wants to rejoin them, he hears spirit voices talking to him as if they were his companions, sometimes even calling him by name. Often these voices lure him away from the path and he never finds it again, and many travelers have got lost and died because of this. Sometimes in the night travelers hear a noise like the clatter of a great company of riders away from the road; if they believe that these are some of their own company and head for the noise, they find themselves in deep trouble when daylight comes and they realize their mistake. There were some who, in crossing the desert, have been a host of men coming towards them and, suspecting that they were robbers, returning, they have gone hopelessly astray....Even by daylight men hear these spirit voices, and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms. For this reason bands of travelers make a point of keeping very close together. Before they go to sleep they set up a sign pointing in the direction in which they have to travel, and round the necks of all their beasts they fasten little bells, so that by listening to the sound they may prevent them from straying off the path." ---- Marco Polo, Travels

Marco Polo (1254-1324), is probably the most famous Westerner traveled on the Silk Road. He excelled all the other travelers in his determination, his writing, and his influence. His journey through Asia lasted 24 years. He reached further than any of his predecessors, beyond Mongolia to China. He became a confidant of Kublai Khan (1214-1294). He traveled the whole of China and returned to tell the tale, which became the greatest travelogue.

The Polo Brothers
In 1260 two Venetian merchants arrived at Sudak, the Crimean port. The brothers Maffeo and Niccilo Polo went on to Surai, on the Volga river, where they traded for a year. Shortly after a civil war broke out between Barka and his cousin Hulagu, which made it impossible for the Polos to return with the same route as they came. They therefore decide to make a wide detour to the east to avoid the war and found themselves stranded for 3 years at Bukhara.

The marooned Polo brothers were abruptly rescued in Bukhara by the arrival of a VIP emissary from Hulagu Khan in the West. The Mongol ambassador persuaded the brothers that Great Khan would be delighted to meet them for he had never seen any Latin and very much wanted to meet one. So they journeyed eastward. They left Bukhara, Samarkand, Kashgar, then came the murderous obstacle of the Gobi desert. Through the northern route they reached Turfan and Hami, then headed south-east to Dunhuang. Along the Hexi Corridor, they finally reached the new capital of the Great Khan, Bejing in 1266.

The Great Khan, Mangu's brother, Kublai, was indeed hospitable. He had set up his court at Beijing, which was not a Mongol encampment but an impressive city built by Kublai as his new capital after the Mongols took over China in 1264 and established Yuan dynasty (1264-1368). Kublai asked them all about their part of the world, the Pope and the Roman church. Niccolo and Matteo, who spoke Turkic dialects perfectly, answered truthfully and clearly. The Polo brothers were well received in the Great Khan's capital. One year later, the Great Khan sent them on their way with a letter in Turki addressed to Pope Clement IV asking the Pope to send him 100 learned men to teach his people about Christianity and Western science. He also asked Pope to procure oil from the lamp at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

To make sure the brothers would be given every assistance on their travels, Kublai Khan presented them with a golden tablet (or paiza in Chinese, gerege in Mongolian) a foot long and three inches wide and inscribed with the words (Left Fig.): "By the strength of the eternal Heaven, holy be the Khan's name. Let him that pays him not reverence be killed." The golden tablet was the special VIP passport, authorizing the travelers to receive throughout the Great Khan's dominions such horses, lodging, food and guides as they required. It took the Polos three full years to return home, in April 1269.

Although the Polo brothers blazed a trail of their own on their first journey to the East, they were not the first Europeans to visit the Mongols on their home ground. Before them Giovanni di Piano Carpini in 1245 and Guillaume de Rubrouck in 1253 had made the dangerously journey to Karakorum and returned safely; however the Polos traveled farther than Carpini and Rubrouck and reached China.

Marco Polo's Birth and Growing Up
According to one authority, the Polo family were great nobles originating on the coast of Dalmatia. Niccolo and Maffeo had established a trading outpost on the island of Curzola, off the coast of Dalmatia; it is not certain whether Marco Polo was born there or in Venice in 1254. The place Marco Polo grew up, Venice, was the center for commerce in the Mediterranean. Marco had the usual education of a young gentleman of his time. He had learned much of the classical authors, understood the texts of the Bible, and knew the basic theology of the Latin Church. He had a sound knowledge of commercial French as well as Italian. From his later history we can be sure of his interest in natural resources, in the ways of people, as well as strange and interesting plants and animals.

Marco Polo was only 6 years old when his father and uncle set out eastward on their first trip to Cathay (China). He was by then 15 years old when his father and his uncle returned to Venice and his mother had already passed away. He remained in Venice with his father and uncle for two more years and then three of them embarked the most couragous journey to Cathay the second time.

Read more at Silk-Road

An abandoned history of Chinese influence

Painters in Edo Period Osaka modeled themselves on the Chinese literati artists, finding fellowship in their shared interests

Edo Period (1603-1868) paintings from Osaka have been relatively neglected in comparison with paintings from Tokyo and Kyoto. A canonical list of works and a historical framework were written up in Tokyo in the 1890s in a series of influential lectures by scholar Okakura Tenshin, setting the directions of subsequent scholarship. Osaka received scarce consideration, and it was not until the 1981 exhibition "Osaka Painting Schools in the Edo Period" at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art that interest returned. Now, a new show, "The World of Bunjinga in Early Modern Osaka" at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History till Feb. 22, takes another look, focusing on bunjinga — Japanese paintings done in the style of Chinese literati from the Song dynasty.

 

Eastern inflections: Imamiya Taishitsu's "Floating Wine Cups"(1832) and Zen priest Kakutei's "Yellow Birds in a Willow"(undated; below) ASHIYA CITY MUSEUM OF ART

Kansai University art historian Nobuo Nakatani offers reasons for the inattention. When Osaka's economy collapsed during World War II, collectors stopped buying Osaka paintings and haven't returned to them since then (Nakatani has pointed out that these pieces can now be acquired at prices equivalent to "a salaryman's pocket money"). Another, earlier reason was the distinctly Chinese orientation of artists in the city — a backward-looking position — when Japan was about to modernize and its Meiji (1868-1912) government was creating slogans such as "Out of Asia, Into Europe."

China figures prominently in the coterie of artists and intellectuals who orbited the influential painter and naturalist Kimura Kenkado (1736-1802), whose work is on show in the exhibition. Born Kimura Sonsai, he became known as Kenkado, from the Japanese name of the school he later founded: Hall of the Concurrent Reed. Due to his fragile health as a youth, Kenkado was encouraged to pursue a scholarly life by his father. At age 5 or 6, he took an interest in art, and later studied with the Kano School painter Ooka Shunboku (1680- 1763), before learning flower and bird painting with the Obaku Zen priest Kakutei (whose "Yellow Birds in a Willow" is in the exhibition). This was the colorful and decorative Ming dynasty (1368-1644) style of Shen Nanpin, who visited Nagasaki from 1731-33 and established a following among locals.

Other literati, such as Kyoto-based Nakabayashi Chikuto, took a dim view of mixing the craftsmanlike skill of Nanpin's botanical accuracy with the cherished, expressive possibilities of true literati painting; still, such a style percolated unreservedly in Osaka works.

At age 15, Kenkado visited Ikeno Taiga, considered Japan's premier literati painter, and became his pupil and then patron. To become part of the bunjinga world, however, it was not enough to study painting and scholarship alone, or join a school. As a Chinese import that took root in 18th century Japan, literati painting escaped art's boundaries and came to represent a whole lifestyle that was imbued with poetic sentiments and gentlemanly ideals.

Kenkado's membership in the Konton (Elegant Confusion Society) is instructive. There, members would gather, sometimes in Chinese dress, to enjoy steeped tea and savor Chinese verse, art treasures and the Confucian classics — in short, to become erudite and cultivated, and to share a common interest in the culture of China, though one very much internalized, lacking as they did the actual desire to travel there.

Their fellowship is obvious in their joint contributions to a single work, such as "Views from High Atop a Mountain" by Kenkado, Totoki Baigai, and Okada Beisanjin and his son Hanko. As well, the often modest size of paintings suggests that they were to be exchanged and enjoyed among friends.

Such a sense of fellowship can also be discerned in the benefaction of Maruyama Sessai, Daimyo of Nagashima from 1776-1801, who came to the aid of Kenkado when he was forced to forfeit the fortune he had amassed as a sake merchant due to a breach of the production code. Inviting Kenkado to Nagashima for two years, Maruyama helped him revive his former wealth, a kindness extended due to the Chinese ideals they held in common — ones that dissolved the class barriers that could conventionally have kept the two remote.

The more pure Sinicization in Osaka paintings was in contrast to early literati painters such as Ikeno Taiga and Yosa Buson, who blended Chinese and Japanese painting idioms. This refinement of Chinese styles was brought about by the increasing availability of Ming and Qing period paintings in late 18th-century Japan.

Okada Hanko developed a rich and conservative aesthetic based on his study of Qing dynasty (1644-1912) painting. Though Hanko in his own lifetime was the more celebrated than his father, in the 20th century Beisanjin has garnered more acclaim for bold and gestural landscapes such as "Literati Studio"(undated). But, as is often the case, the present values the past for different things, and even imposes on it meanings it may not actually have possessed. Up to now, Osaka painting circles have not only been overlooked in the formation of a Japanese canon of art, they have suffered a decline in patronage as Japan moved its aesthetic orientation away from China. Perhaps it is time for a new look at the genre.

The Japan Times

Hanfu

            Chinese Clothing - Five Thousand Years' History

The History of Chinese Clothing

Each dynasty in China had its own memorable culture. The many facets of colour and design that emerged during a dynasty’s reign were marvellous and made every aspect of Chinese culture, including their wearing apparel, - highly acclaimed works of art.

The costumes of ancient China were emblems of Chinese tradition, as well as an essential element in the history and culture of each dynasty. Costume maintained an important place in Chinese culture for more than three thousand years. The culture of China is ancient and well established, brilliant and resplendent. The costumes are likewise magnificent and colourful. There were many dynasties throughout China’s history, each having its own unique style of dress. And each style would change or disappear as its dynasty changed, declined, or was replaced. With the advent of each new dynasty and the progression of time, costumes were revolutionised. The style was classical and conservative in the Qin and Han dynasties, luxurious and glamorous in the Tang dynasty, delicate and exquisite in the Song dynasty, graceful and magnificent in the Ming dynasty, and very intricate in the Qing dynasty. Stylised costumes first appeared in the Yellow Emperor, Yao and Shun periods. Chinese characters were invented during the ancient Yin Shang period. Although eighty percent of the characters were pictographic drawings, they were quite sufficient for writing and had special pronunciations. The inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells in the Shang dynasty, from about the 16th to 11th century B.C., show characters representing the social classes at the time, including wang (monarchs), chen (officials under a feudal ruler), mu (shepherds), nu (slaves), and yi (tribesmen). There were also words that related to dress and personal adornments, such as as yi (clothing), lu (shoes), huang shang (skirts), and mei (sleeves). Ornaments of varying value, like jade pendants, jade rings, earrings, necklaces, combs, silk fabrics, burlaps, and copper decorations, have been found on excavated statues. Valuable, exquisite items belonged to the aristocrats exclusively, not slaves or tribesmen. With the developments and advances made regarding textiles, articles of clothing for different functions began to appear, such as dresses, skirts, crowns, footwear, hats, and stockings. Costume styles evolved from simple and practical to ornamental. This is reflected in the invention of “twelve designs of symbols.” Looking at the patterns and styles of clothes in history books such as The Rites of the Zhou, Book of Rites and Rites, you can see that Chinese clothing evolved from nothing to very simple and functional styles, and then to styles that were quite complex. During the Ying Shang period, the etiquette, music, rituals, and clothing showed no evidence of any distinction among different social classes. Starting in the Western Zhou dynasty, however, class distinction became apparent, as evident in the differences in clothing and personal adornment. More and more variety in clothing also appeared, depending on the occasion. For example, paying respects to the gods and making obeisance to heaven and earth at the palace temples required special clothing. Special clothes were worn for grand ceremonies. There were army uniforms, wedding ceremony outfits, bereavement clothes, and so on. Clothing at the time was still made in accordance with old systems and thus had dark tops and yellow bottoms, but official garb included four-inch-wide sashes made from silk or leather that were worn over the lapels. Other costumes included jade adornments on the waist belt linked together with silk ribbons. In addition, clothing of different colours indicated different social classes. During the Warring States, the costume of the seven dukedoms of Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, Wei and Qin, each developed changes accordingly. The so-called “skirt around the front of the body" style actually referred to loose-cut cloth with wide rims that was wrapped around the lower body. The ancient designers wrapped the cloth ingeniously from the front of the upper body to the back, making full use of horizontal and diagonal lines to complement space and achieve both quietude in motion and motion in quietude. Materials were light and thin, and stiffer brocade was used to embroider the borders with wavy patterns that reflected the wisdom and intellect of the designers.

Qin and Han Dynasties

During the Qin and Han dynasties, changes in the style of dress were dramatic. The Emperor Qin, who was influenced by the concept of Yin and Yang as well as the theory of the Five Elements, believed that the Qin dynasty would subdue the Zhou dynasty like water extinguishes fire. Therefore, because the Zhou dynasty was "fire superior to gold, its colour being red," the favourite colour of the Qin dynasty was black, since the colour black was associated with water. Thus, in the Qin dynasty, black was the superior colour to symbolise the power of water, so clothing and adornments were all of the colour black. During the two hundred years of the Western Han dynasty, the “dark style” continued for clothing and personal adornment. Its characteristics were: cicada-like hats, red clothing, square sleeves, sloping necklines, jade hanging decorations, and red shoes. The general term for this style of clothing was “Buddhist clothing” and is basically a one-layer coat. Court dress was black in colour. As for the formal dress used in performing sacrificial rites, it was edged with red. The only way to tell a person’s rank or position in society was by the colour and quality of his clothing — there was no difference in the style of the clothing worn by government officials and ordinary people. There were two types of robes, classified according to the style of the front of the robe. One style had a front with a diagonal opening, where the material was wrapped on a diagonal from the collar to under one arm, and the other had a straight opening down the front. Because this style of clothing was long and loose, it was a popular style for men.

The Eastern Han dynasty started from 25 A.D. and ended in 200 A.D. During the period of the Guangwu emperor, red was regarded as the most respectful colour, as it displayed the Han dynasty’s “fire virtue.” Until the second year of Yongping period, red was still the popular colour, but a white inside layer had to be worn when performing sacrificial rites. This white layer was edged with red, which matched the red socks and shoes. Government officials dressed in colours that were appropriate for the seasons, according to the theory of Five Elements. They held ceremonies to pray according to the four seasons. At the beginning of spring, they would hold a ceremony in the eastern suburbs, and carriages and clothing would be a gray-green colour. At the beginning of summer, the ceremony would be held in southern suburbs, and both carriages and costumes would be red. At the beginning of autumn, carriages and dress would be yellow, and at the beginning of winter, everything would be black. According to History of the Song Dynasty, “The Han dynasty inherited the style of the Qin dynasty. There were thirteen different types of hats. Since the Wei-Jin dynasty people still used these hats, such as, law hats, high hats, hats for skilled craftsmen, mountain-like hats, square hats, Jian-Hua hats, Que-Di hats, swordsman’s hats, Que-Fei hats, Jin-Xian hats, and many others.” In the Han dynasty, a man’s rank and status was indicated by the style of his crown. In the Han dynasty, a woman wore a short jacket and a long skirt, and a decorative belt hung down to the knee. A man always dressed in a short jacket, trousers in the style of calf’s nose, with a short cloth skirt outside. This style was the same for everyone — workers, farmers, businessmen, and scholars. During the Wei-Jin period, court dress was red, and casual clothing was purple. In the ancient book History of the Wu Empire -- The Story of Lu Meng, it says, “ask the people who wear white clothing to be businessman’s servant.” From this description, we can tell that white was the colour for ordinary people. During this period, the emphasis was on the jacket and skirt. A coat was considered informal dress. Women’s adornments were particular delicate, including golden earrings, silver rings, and bracelets. There was a big difference in quality for women’s accessories worn inside and outside the imperial palace.

 

Left: A lady with a flowery hairpin; Tang dynasty
Center: Women colouring fabrics; Tang dynasty
Right: A gentlewoman in a court-style costume; Tang dynasty

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