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Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 2 |
< Back Antiquarian Politics and the Politics of Antiquarianism in Ming Regional Courts Craig Clunas SOAS, University of London Those members of collateral branches of the Ming imperial house who bore the title of wang, ‘king’, the sixty-two sons of ruling emperors other the crown prince, carried in that title explicit reference to the political structures of the ancient Zhou dynasty ‘golden age’. Not only that, but their states similarly carried names that were enormously resonant and redolent of that period – Chu, Jin, Qin, Liang, Lu, even Zhou itself. Much as in European political rhetoric from Machiavelli to the framers of the US Constitution, the antiquarian appropriation and construction of a revered past was used here to make a polity very different from its predecessors. As fan wang, literally ‘kings acting as a defensive barrier’, they were ranged in an arc around the first Ming capital on Nanjing. Established across the face of the Ming empire in great state, they are now strangely absent from accounts of Ming culture and society, and standard historical overviews either minimise their importance, or else draw on Republican nationalist and Marxist historiography to denigrate them as pointless and expensive drones, drains on the resources of the state. They thus represent an intriguing sort of ‘counter-culture’ to the view of Ming as ‘early modernity’. There is considerable evidence for the role of Ming regional kingly courts in antiquarian cultural projects designed to realise an ideal polity which instanced in the present the perfect patterns of the past. These projects often have a specifically ‘local’ flavour, aimed at sustaining (or inventing) a tradition associated with the regional (and archaically-named) state itself. They include publishing projects, for example the reprinting of rare early histories of Sichuan under the auspices of Zhu Chu (1371-1423), King Xian of Shu, at his capital of Chengdu. They also include the patronage of important regional cults, as Richard Wang has demonstrated in the case of the Kings of Su at Lanzhou in Gansu province, and Tracy Miller has shown with regard to the Kings of Jin, with their seat at Taiyuan in Shanxi province. This family, descendants of Ming Taizu’s third son Zhu Gang, supported throughout the sixteenth century a number of rebuilding projects at the very important but highly localised Jinci, ‘Shrine of Jin’ just outside Taiyuan. The Kings of Jin, as with all the houses which descended from sons of Taizu, received at their installation significant dispersals of calligraphy and painting from the imperial collections inherited from the Yuan emperors and ultimately from the Northern Song imperial court. These in turn enabled a range of kingly projects of cultural replication and transmission around the central cultural practice of calligraphy. The earliest of these projects is probably the Dong shu tang ji gu fa tie, ‘Assembled Ancient Calligraphic Specimens from the Eastern Studio’, compiled in 1416 by Zhu Youdun (1379-1439), King Xian of Zhou. The last is the so-called ‘Su Palace edition’ of the Song dynasty collection Chunhua ge tie, ‘Calligraphic Specimens from the Chancellery of the Chunhua Era’, produced in Lanzhou in 1615-21. There are several in between. The paper will look in more detail at one of these calligraphic projects, the Bao xian tang ji gu fa tie, ‘Assembled Ancient Calligraphic Specimens from the Hall of Treasuring the Worthies’, compiled by Zhu Qiyuan, crown prince of Jin, on the orders of his father Zhu Zhongxuan, King Zhuang of Jin, in twelve juan in 1489. A study of the complex genealogy of this rubbing collection reveals that it depends heavily on a specifically local Shanxi tradition of transmission, and in particular on the Jiang tie, or ‘Jiangzhou rubbings’, the earliest copy of the Chunhua ge tie, compiled in Jiangzhou (hence the name) by the official Pan Shidan in the Qingli and Jiayou reigns of Song Renzong (1041-1063 CE). The Kings of Jin were the owners of the surviving stones from this Song dynasty project, which they incorporated into their own version of calligraphic history. This history, made explicit in the long preface by Zhu Qiyuan, aims to link calligraphy to governance through the homology of fa, ‘pattern’ or ‘model’. This was also a version of history which sutured the Ming dynasty Kings of Jin, instigators of this collection of ‘assembled antiquity’, to their ancient predecessors, the emperors of the Jin dynasty, beginning with Sima Yan (r. 265-290 CE), under whose reigns the canonical standards for calligraphy were first set. Much existing discussion of Ming antiquarianism has seen it as a commercialisation of elite forms of cultural capital, now sought by rising fractions of the ruling class such as merchants. This paper will attempt to explore another dimension of the phenomenon, by taking seriously Ming kingly antiquarianism, as a political project with a focus on making the ‘now’ as well as reinventing the past. |
