Things in Between: Splendour and Excess in Ming China (2024)

Craig Clunas

When in 1491 the teenage Italian aristocrat Beatrice d’Este went out shopping, ‘in order to buy those things which are available in the city’, and ended up brawling in the streets with local market women, it was a rare and startling enough event for the Duke of Milan to record it in a letter to her older sister.1 But his tone (and that of Isabella d’Este's reply) is one of jocularity, recording a form of transgressive fun which was so far from the way an aristocratic woman might be expected to acquire and to consume that it posed no threat at all to the status of Beatrice or of her companions. Just as high-spirited and equally transgressive, but ultimately seen as more troubling and disruptive of a proper order of things, was the behaviour of Zhu Houzhao, born in the very year of Beatrice's escapade, who reigned as emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) from 1505 to 1521, under the reign title Zhengde, ‘Upright Virtue’. The title is more than usually ironic, since in the historical record controlled by the Chinese bureaucratic elite Zhu Houzhao is firmly nailed down as a Bad Emperor, one whose memory is associated more with exotic foreign concubines, louche monks and thuggish drinking companions, cripplingly expensive and rapacious touring of his domains, inappropriate fondness for militaristic posturing, and even rumours of conversion to Islam, than it is with rectitude in government.2 An ‘unofficial history’ of his reign gathers together a number of the more lurid anecdotes about his behaviour, including one which has him turning the world upside down in a most startling way:

Between playing at shopping and playing at shops, pretending to buy and pretending to sell, there seems to lie a world of difference. This world of difference could too easily be spun into another thread in the faded old tapestry of absolute antithesis between East and West, with the latter joyously embracing the rich possibilities of the world of goods, while the former is stuck in a place where only the worst of rulers would embrace the abjection of a shopkeeper's hat and the tools of commerce, or would befoul the sacred precincts of the imperial palace with the clamour of the marketplace. The spatial opposition between young Beatrice roaming out of the castle into the vibrant streets of Milan and the simulacral debauchery involved in having to bring pretend streets into the space of a cloistered young man could also too easily be invoked as a metaphor for the opposition between an outward-looking West, on the verge in 1491 of the Age of Discovery, and a China about to be discovered, immured behind its mental and actual walls. There is a sense in which this dichotomy between a vibrant, consuming West, and a fecund, productive, but unconscious East is one of the classic orientalist tropes, feeding into European discussions of consumption from the early modern period itself and not wholly expunged today. More recent work, which will be discussed towards the end of this essay, suggests a required revisiting of this issue.

However, like many orientalist tropes, there are some indigenous strands in its DNA. If the historian chooses to take this line about China, it would be too easy to point to canonical texts of political economy which were known to all educated people in the Ming period, which retained relevance into the twentieth century, and which structured society into the si min, ‘four categories of the people’, a hierarchy which ran downwards from ‘officials’ at the top through ‘peasants’ and ‘artisans’ to ‘merchants’ at the bottom.4With the former two categories seen as the ben, the ‘roots’ of the social order, the latter two were seen as the mo—the word means ‘branches’, but carries connotations of twigginess and insubstantiality. Or at least such was the theoretical model, which cast the makers of things and even more those who arranged to move them from makers to consumers as disposable or inessential. But despite the horror of the chronicler's censorious gaze, there is plenty of evidence that in Ming China the enjoyment of the fruits of commerce was not so frowned upon as the texts of orthodox morality and political economy might imply. If we read the texts written as funerary eulogies for certain contemporaries by the Ming dynasty calligrapher, writer and painter Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), we get a sense of the complexities through which trade, commodities, and social status were mutually intertwined. Wen was from an elite landowning background, a native of the great commercial city of Suzhou, one of the economic powerhouses of the Ming economy, with a reputation for high-quality textile production which was some centuries old. In 1532 he was commissioned to write a eulogy for one of its textile merchants, Shi Han (1458–1532), whose ‘father raised up the family through hemp and silk, it became even wealthier with him, and the business became more flourishing. Their caps and belts, robes and shoes covered the empire, and they were praised whenever patterned weaves were mentioned’. Seven years later he wrote about a man named Shen Xiang (1479–1539), whom he confesses he has never met, but of whom he writes:

We then hear how Master Shen bought land and how ‘his silk, lacquer and rush matting were carried to the four directions’, how he grew mulberries for silk and fine teas until ‘after several years he was praised for his success at enriching himself’.5 The reason the families of Shi Han and Shen Xiang were willing to pay for Wen Zhengming's eulogies of their deceased members lay in his reputation as a cultural luminary; he came from a family with members of the ‘official’ class (highest of the four types of people), and he had himself held a fairly lowly but locally very prestigious position in the imperial capital, where he had worked on the official chronicle of the reign of the Zhengde emperor. Thus he may have even had a hand in the drafting of the passage quoted above, detailing Zhu Houzhao's social cross-dressing and general failure to behave. Between the chronicle's horror and Wen's celebration of commercial acumen lies a vast range of attitudes to the relationship between things and people in the Ming textual record, one which cannot be reduced to a simple characterization of Ming China as being ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ commercial prosperity and its concomitant consumption practices.

What is highly likely (though ultimately unprovable) is that Ming China had by 1500 more stuff to think about, or even to think with, than the rest of the world. The enormous quantities of surviving Ming material culture, which are continuously being augmented by archaeology (since people were buried with goods for use in the afterlife), range from secular and religious buildings, the paintings and calligraphy produced and consumed by the elite, through printed books, furniture, metalwork, textiles, jewellery, carving in a variety of materials from jade to bamboo, ceramics to weapons and tools. There are of course differential rates of survival; Ming textiles are much less common than Ming ceramics, which fill the museums and private collections of the world, and are found in archaeological contexts from Prague to California, East Africa to Australia. The famous blue and white porcelain of the huge factories of Jingdezhen could be thought of as the very first global ‘brand’.6 However, and despite the survival of so much of the material culture of the Ming period (still only a tiny fraction of what was produced at the time), we have no real means of studying consumption behaviour in any of the ways which would be acceptable today to economic or social historians. What we have instead, to set alongside surviving objects of consumption themselves, are a vast range of representations of consumption, in both texts and images. These representations exist alongside and interact with the similarly large range of representations of social status and of good and bad forms of behaviour, in ways which allow us to perceive how the complex of activities and agencies which we now bundle together under the rubric of ‘early modern Chinese consumption’ appeared to contemporaries.

The representation of the variety and profusion of commodities available in the marketplace is a theme which long predates the Ming period, for example being prominent in the literature of nostalgia written around the fallen Southern Song capital of Hangzhou after the Mongol conquest of 1279.7 It is a cliché of the writing of those early foreign visitors to China who recorded their impressions, from Marco Polo to Ibn Battuta in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Within the Ming period itself it certainly predates the late Ming (generally dated from after c.1550), which has been the focus of most of the recent scholarship to be discussed below. Dialogues in a handbook of the spoken Chinese language which was already circulating in fifteeenth- or even late fourteenth-century Korea assume that the foreigner visiting Beijing will need an extensive vocabulary in order to cope with the range of things available in the market.

The casual trumping of the customer's list of types with the offer of three centres of production (and this is only one of many such litanies of goods in the text) builds up a picture in the reader of China as an almost inexhaustible source of profusion and variety in the material world. ‘See China and buy stuff’ is one of its central messages, or certainly the central task for which it assumes a reader needs to be equipped. Whether it be kinds of bows, kinds of dishes, or the huge list of things to be taken back to Korea for sale there, a list which begins with ‘one hundred pounds of red tassels’ and ends up with copies of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (a popular historical novel), quantity and variety of goods are central to the construction of ‘China’ and to the experience of going there as a consumer.9

The concepts of ‘consumption’, ‘consuming’, and ‘the consumer’ are however as anachronistic as they are in the case of Europe at this same period of history, and are alien to the discourse of goods in texts and images of the Ming period, whether those generated inside the empire itself or those imposed on it by outside observers. The modern Chinese word for ‘consumption’, xiaofei, is likely in its present sense to be a neologism of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, and like so much of the vocabulary of the social sciences in modern Chinese it may well be a loan word from Japanese.10 What we do find in Ming texts are ways of talking about what we now call ‘consumption’ in ways which are either negative or positive, but which are never detached from a discourse of morality, of good (or bad) governance, and ultimately of a universal order which links humanity and its actions to wider cosmic matters of harmony or disjointedness. Thus words like sheng, ‘prosperity’, or fan, ‘splendour’, are essentially a good thing, as visible and material manifestations of a world well ruled. These are the words which appear in the titles of two paintings of urban scenes, now rare survivals of a genre which was probably once much more common. One, entitled The Splendour of the Imperial Capital (Huang du ji sheng tu) shows the northern imperial capital of Beijing, while the other, entitled Thriving Southern Capital (Nan du fan hui tu juan) is of the secondary southern capital of Nanjing.11 Neither is dated, though both were probably painted around 1600, when the textual record also registers a heightened interest in goods, in selling, and getting. In the former scroll, numerous tradesman can be seen exposing their wares for sale outside the gates of the imperial city, some in substantial booths, some on mats spread on the ground. We see sellers of stationery, of books, of antiques, of locks and other small metal items, of combs, of Buddhist images, and of socks, as well as strolling vendors of feather fans, of towels, of old clothes. We see numerous buyers, Ming flâneurs, though all of them are male, and the space of shopping is portrayed as an entirely hom*osocial one ( no room for a Chinese Beatrice here). The Nanjing scroll is dominated by a religious festival procession, which is being watched, one might even say consumed, as a spectacle by a large audience, with men and boys at street level, and women and girls watching from the balconies of buildings. Many of these buildings are in fact shops, and several carry prominent banners advertising the goods and services available there: shops for grain, for leather goods, for gold and pearls, and one offering to supply (according to its signage) ‘All the Goods of the Eastern and Western Oceans’. It is worth remarking that the visual evidence of such scrolls is purely on the positive side of the debate, where ‘splendour’ and ‘prosperity’ are unequivocally good.

The negative side of consumption is conveyed in the Ming in words, by a totally different vocabulary, that of chi, ‘wastefulness; excess’, and she, ‘luxury; extravagance’. These negative terms could be applied to exactly the same phenomena as are elsewhere praised as indexes of ‘prosperity’, and sometimes by the same people. It is this moralizing literature of complaint over ‘excess’ and ‘extravagance’ which has formed a mainstay of modern historical writing about the late Ming period in China as one of a rising consumer culture, and which is extensively quoted in what have by now become the key works in the debate. A small sample will be sufficient to give a flavour:

The same author complains in another text, in which we see clearly the linkage of anxiety over inappropriate consumption behaviour and instability of the social order:

One of the longest and most detailed jeremiads against the new tyranny of fashion is found in the work of another late sixteenth-century writer, Fan Lian:

The meticulous detail with which Fan Lian catalogues in this text the detailed changes in men's hats and gowns, in women's hairdos, and in dozens of other forms of luxury from foodstuffs to the special picnic boxes which contained them, suggests a fascination at least as great as the distaste which is his ostensible motivation for writing. Clothing, and the shift from frugality to extravagance is also the focus of complaint in the writing of a man from a third urban centre, Yangzhou:

Quotations of this type could be (and have been) multiplied from a range of Ming authors, and complaints of this type must form a reasonably large percentage, perhaps even the majority, of the archive of Ming discourse concerning the issues we would now bracket as ‘consumption’. Much rarer in the Ming textual record, so much rarer that it was over 50 years ago the subject of a special study by the economic historian Lien-sheng Yang, is the ‘uncommon idea’ that lavishness and luxury are of positive benefit to the body politic. Lu Ji (1515–52) deployed a rather modern-looking argument, hinting at though not explicitly stating Mandeville's ‘private vices and public virtues’ of some 150 years later, to the effect that more economic activity was a good thing, and that one man's lavish spending was another man or men's employment opportunity. He begins:

Unusual as this argument may be in Ming terms, it shares with critique the fact that it is part of a discourse around consumption, rather than material for the study of it. It tells us what contemporaries thought was happening, and what they thought about what they thought was happening. It does not tell us what was happening, or at least it does so only partially. And in fact we may have to accept that the material will never exist for a satisfactory study of ‘consumption in Ming China’, since the kind of historical evidence on which such an argument could be based does not and never did exist. That does not mean that the discourse of ‘prosperity’ (and its dark side, ‘extravagance’) is of no importance, but it is important that we understand the evidence for what it is, and not try to shoehorn it into a set of categories in which it can never be effectively meaningful.

Pictures of prosperous cityscapes and polemics about silken trousers are far from being the only material we have, but we have very little (especially by comparison with early modern Europe) of the evidence which would allow us to tie specific acts of consumption to specific individuals. In what has been cited above, it is always the faceless and generic consumer who goes overboard for the flashy novelty. Although, as mentioned above, Ming tombs (which necessarily contain named individuals) do to a degree link some specific people with some specific things, the set of practices around burial goods are too distinctive to give much insight into lifetime behaviour. What gives an edge, in terms of specificity, to work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe is the distinctively European practice of the will and the inventory, usually associated with death and the transfer of property. To regret their absence in the Chinese context is most definitely not to subscribe to classic orientalist notions that China lacked a concept of private property, it is simply to acknowledge that private property generated a different range of scribal and individual practices and forms of record-keeping. Thus something like the Diary from the Water-Tasting Studio (Wei shui xuan ri ji) kept from 1609 to 1616 by Li Rihua (1565–1635) is an unusually valuable testimony, given that it appears to have been maintained as a purely personal record (it was not published until centuries later). Li was typical of the urban-based landowning class, living in one of the commercially developed cities of the lower Yangtze region, who entered the imperial bureaucracy through the examination system.17His diary does give us some sense of what a male member of the late Ming elite thought it was appropriate to record about what we would call his own consumption behaviour, and it is particularly interesting to set it alongside a list which Li produced in a more public context, and which he titled, ‘A Ranking of Antique Objects’.18 In this context ‘antique’ does not have to mean chronologically old, but is also itself a type of moral value, embodying a sense that the object so described materializes elite values of engagement with antiquity (gu) as a cultural category. The list begins not surprisingly with the most valued (and commercially valuable) of antiquities in the Ming art market, ‘Calligraphic pieces of the Jin and Tang dynasties’, then proceeds through ‘Paintings of the Five Dynasties’ to various other categories of calligraphy and painting, which between them take up the first ten rankings on the list. Only at number 11 do we get ‘Brilliant examples of bronze vessels and red jades before the Qin and Han’, followed by more jades, inkstones, Qin zithers and swords, early printed books, ‘Strange rocks of a rugged and picturesque type’, other types of plant, then exotic imports such as ‘Imported spice of a subtle kind’, ‘Foreign treasures of a rare and beautiful kind’, foodstuffs such as ‘Excellent tea well prepared’, ‘Rare and delicious food from overseas’, and ending up with ‘Shiny fine white porcelain and mysterious coloured pottery, old and new’. A coda adds (and here we get objects which are certainly not ‘antique’ in the colloquial English sense):

The analogy between ranking things and ranking people is made very explicit here, and is repeated in a number of Ming texts (and not just Ming texts, it both precedes and post-dates the Ming as a practice). Arguably, the ‘master ranking’ of Ming culture was that of the examination system, through the results of which elite males were selected for entry to the imperial bureaucracy; it tested both classical textual knowledge and awareness of policy issues, and provided a template for all sorts of listings.20 But this analogy also cannot be allowed to pass without drawing attention to one very important aspect of Ming thinking about these matters, which is very significant in the light of some of the recent theorizing about material culture studies, and in particular the issue of the boundaries between things and persons.21 For Li Rihua, as indeed for all Ming intellectuals (we are much less well informed about popular understandings of the issue), the category wu, which has the modern dictionary meaning of ‘things’, necessarily includes within it living things, and most definitely encompasses the category of ren, ‘humanity’. As one earlier writer put it:

The explicit point of this passage, as its modern exegetes point out, is the unity of man with other forms of materiality, and the fact that ‘it is precisely because man is a thing that he can know things so well’.22

What then can Li Rihua's diary tell us of the interaction between a specific man and things in the late Ming period? In fact, and unsurprisingly, there is a reasonably good overlap between the categories on his formal ‘public’ list and the types of object with which we see him interacting in the relative privacy of his diary. He makes extensive records of the visits of dealers to his house, and of his own visits to commodity contexts both grand and modest, where, as we might expect, it is the key categories of calligraphy (both actual writing and its preservation through rubbings), paintings, archaic bronzes and jades, and ceramics which make up the bulk of the things described in varying degrees of detail.23 We also see him buy, or consider buying, books, and carvings in wood, rhinoceros horn, agate, and amber. Some categories of purchase are of things not on the list, but very much within the ambit of taste in the ‘antique’. We see him buying an ink-stone, which is measured and described in detail, and which he then tries out for the first time using a cake of ink manufactured by the celebrated and fashionable maker of such commodities, Fang Yulu (fl. 1570–1619).24 He writes about buying gems, and visiting the shop of a gem-dealer who also deals in pictures.25 On a number of occasions Li describes himself buying rocks and other things for his garden:

And once he bought a talking parrot, from the more southerly coastal province of Fujian, a very expensive purchase, but the bird died of the cold after a month.27

Li records interaction with foreign rarities (which presumably fall under the rubric of ‘Foreign treasures of a rare and beautiful kind’); these include, alongside Japanese lacquer and Japanese metalwork, both much admired for their craftsmanship, what must be pieces of imported blue glassware, possibly Islamic or even Venetian, ‘brought by barbarian ships from the south seas, things transformed in fire in a barbarian country’.28 They also include a ‘sea egg’ brought by merchants from Guangdong province, a giant egg which is impressively hard and white but which disappointingly fails to glow in the dark. Although Li speculates that it is the egg of a dragon, an ostrich sounds like a more likely source.29

It is therefore the case that almost the only ‘things’ which are culturally visible to Li Rihua are the things which now come into the categories of ‘artworks’, including ‘decorative arts’ or ‘crafts’. Only very occasionally do we get a glimpse of interaction with what we might call ‘commodities’, or just with things not on the list, such as when ‘a bolt of black and green velvet’ forms part of the payment (along with four antique porcelain cups, a piece of calligraphy, and a painting) which is offered to induce Li Rihua to compose a six-sheet funerary elegy for the mother of one caller.30 On another occasion he enthuses about a lacquered couch inlaid with panels of patterned stone, the innovation of a local entrepreneur, and once he speaks warmly about the pewter teapots of a renowned local craftsmen, but only in the context of being asked for a funeral elegy for the man, not with regard to his own purchase of one.31 Perhaps he most ‘ordinary’ thing he chose to record buying in his diary was a lantern decorated with ‘ various immortals worshipping the Southern Polar Star, for my father's birthday’.32 The importance of the occasion probably rendered the purchase more memorable. Another time he records how his boat tied up at Changmen, a gate of the city of Suzhou, where he bought between forty and fifty large ceramic pots, presumably fairly everyday items, so that he could collect water for brewing tea wherever he wished.33 The connoisseurly consumption of water was of particular importance to Li, and provided him with the name of his studio and the diary he composed there, ‘Water-Tasting Studio’; the diary also records sessions of water connoisseurship.34 Consumption in the sense of ingestion was undoubtedly important to Li Rihua; one diary reads in its entirety: ‘Tasted the oranges from my own garden. Excellent.’35 Li sometimes drank heavily, and did not scruple to record his hangovers in the diary. Presumably he cared about what he drank but we never see him choose alcohol for his cellar, just as we never see him choose his clothes, which almost certainly mattered to him a lot too. It is not that consumption of these items did not matter, but that only some acts of consumption were culturally visible even to the consumer himself. Even less visible in this sense than the consumption of certain goods was the consumption of all services, with the servants, courtesans, chefs, and professional entertainers who were essential to the elite lifestyle all being equally shadowy figures in the diary. We might reasonably suspect that the estates from which Li drew his wealth were very important to him, and we can be absolutely sure that they involved a considerable body of (now lost) textual practices: rent books and leases, account books, deeds, and tax certificates. Nevertheless the diary contains only the rarest of glimpses of this side of life, as when he writes, ‘From the 16th to the 30th, a whole half month, I have been managing estate affairs [literally ‘fields and rents’] every day, and there is nothing to record.’36

Although he records his own consumption behaviour (and very occasionally the prices which he paid for things, or which he had heard others had paid for things) in a manner which eschews moralizing comment, Li Rihua was perfectly prepared to draw on that discourse when it suited him. He spurns an offer of an antique Qin zither (the musical instrument which was a key marker of elite status) on the grounds that there is something not quite right about such an instrument being made of metal: ‘In the end not an elegant item, and I returned it.’37 The opposite of ‘elegant’ for Li and his contemporaries was ‘vulgar’, as in the laconic diary entry for one bad night out: ‘A banquet with vulgar guests’.38 And Li is as willing to tut-tut about the vast and licentious excess of a popular religious festival as is he is to remark on the extravagant nature of the sweetmeats taken with tea in the (significantly merchant-dominated) culture of Xiuning in Anhui province.39

However the criteria of ‘elegance’ and ‘vulgarity’ which were so meaningful to Li and his contemporaries increasingly must have seemed to be not the stuff of ‘proper’ history, and by the time the Diary from the Water-Tasting Studio was published for the first time in 1923 the understanding of historical processes in both China and outside it had turned its gaze in other directions. Over a century of imperialist assault and dynastic decline, and the tumult surrounding the birth of the Chinese Republic in 1911, made the etiolated discriminations of the Ming elite seem irrelevant if not offensive to contemporary sensibilities. Some scholars of the Republican period chose to draw on a tradition, which went at least as far back as the eighteenth century, if not to the fall of the Ming in 1644, of seeing too fastidious a concern with the exact cut of hats or with which type of rocks which would make a garden truly ‘elegant’ as being in some sense a cause of dynastic collapse, and hence an extremely bad historical role model in China's painful transition to modernity.40 However others saw the self-reflexive sensibility of late Ming writers as being in some sense a harbinger of that modernity, in the literary and cultural, if not in the political or economic, sense, thus ensuring that the late Ming was through the twentieth century a vibrant field of enquiry.41

At first, that enquiry was fairly firmly directed towards production, rather than consumption, most notably through the historiographical controversy over the so-called ‘sprouts of capitalism’ (zibenzhuyi mengya). Although strongly associated, indeed almost uniquely associated after 1949, with Marxist historiography, this linked set of arguments about the existence or otherwise of an indigenous motor of economic development in China, seen as burgeoning particularly strongly in the late Ming, was by no means in its origins the product of Marxist historians only. Prominent conservatives such as Tao Xisheng (1899–1988) weighed in to argue that the development of commercial capital in China was not necessarily corrosive of the ‘feudal’ economy and its social structures.42 Historians of the mid-twentieth century argued over late Ming commercial developments, such as the growth of cities and of handicraft production, and the increasing involvement of China in global networks of trade which brought silver in unprecedented quantities from the Americas, and whether these did or did not prove that China was tending (via the iron laws of history) autonomously towards a capitalist state. However they tended to do so on the basis of the same bodies of evidence, reading the glass as half-full or half-empty, and praying in aid the kinds of statements Ming writers have left us about ‘extravagance’ and ‘fashion’, even as they carried out valuable work on excavating such other evidence as exists in sources like local gazetteers, a genre of chorographic writing which deals with the specificities of place. So Fu Yiling (1911–88) noticed as early as 1957 (coincidentally the very same year in which it was translated by Lien-sheng Yang) the essay of Lu Ji on the economic value of extravagant spending which is cited above, including it on one of only a couple of pages dealing with consumption (a ‘Bad Thing’ in Chinese Marxist historiography of the period).43

The most recent survey of the literature on the history of consumption in China, with special reference to the Ming period, is contained in a volume entitled Pinwei shehua: Wan Ming de xiaofei shehui yu shidafu, (‘Taste and Extravagance: Late Ming Consumer Society and the Gentry’) by the Taiwan-based historian Wu Renshu, who entitles the first chapter ‘From the Study of Production to the Study of Consumption’.44 There he credits scholars working in English with a prominent role in this turnabout, drawing on the revival of consumption as a topic particularly within British historiography of the 1970s and 1980s, but also bringing a range of new perspectives from sociology and anthropology to bear on the evidence. One book he cites, the present author's Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (1991) was certainly written consciously in the light of the scholarship on eighteenth-century Britain, and sought to draw attention to ways in which the early modern European experience might not be unique.45 It did so by attending to a specific type of late Ming text, and most centrally to the Treatise on Superfluous Things by Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645), which provided guidance on correct consumption, structured along the parameters of ‘elegance’ and ‘vulgarity’. Wu Renshu's second landmark in the English-language scholarship is Timothy Brook's 1998 volume The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, which has a wider compass, and arguably goes some way to addressing the problem raised by Frank Trentmann in a review of the field, where he sees a ‘widening gulf between material culture, focused on identities and representations, and material politics and political economy’.46 The same might be true of Wu Renshu's other examples, with the work of S. A. M. Adshead and Kenneth Pomeranz, which—particularly the latter—puts a new spin on the ‘roots of capitalism’ question by using the work of Clunas and others to link (in one chapter title), ‘Luxury Consumption and the Rise of Capitalism’, and to argue, ‘But this [European] “rise of consumer society” was not unique … China also became increasingly crammed with paintings, sculptures, fine furniture and so on’.47 It might be claimed that the ‘gulf’ has been less of a problem in the literature focusing on China, where there has perhaps not been the same imbalance within material culture studies between the study of culture and the study of material; this is identified by Trentmann as particularly acute in the case of British scholarship on the issue, when he claims, ‘In short, historical material culture studies have been more about culture than about material’.48 Recent work such as that of Dorothy Ko, for example, on the material culture of footbinding and gender identities in China is rigorous in its address to both.49

The continuously developing literature on consumption, material culture, and status in China has faced in two directions. It is often united in its opposition to any perceived European exceptionalism (perhaps typified by the continued citation of Fernand Braudel's Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, despite the fact that this is generally marked by lamentable and willed ignorance of the material on China).50 This is often explicitly comparative work, exemplified most clearly by something like Pomeranz's The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (which was published, it should be noted, in a series entitled ‘The Princeton Economic History of the Western World’). But it is also internally engaged in lively debate about some of the central premises of the work cited by Wu Renshu, which is now decades old. There have been effective challenges to what might be called ‘late Ming exceptionalism’, citing developments both before and after the period which tend to erode claims made for the distinctive nature of the century 1540–1640. For example, Kathlyn Liscomb's work on the archaeological evidence from the tomb of a prosperous merchant who died in 1494 tends to challenge the claims, implicit in Clunas's Superfluous Things, that it is only after about 1550 that elite forms of luxury consumption spread to a newly assertive merchant class.51 Jonathan Hay has argued that it would be wrong to see the late Ming moment as some sort of failed or stalled modernity, pointing out instead that the kinds of consumption behaviour over which late Ming moralists fretted may have become so embedded and so common by 1700 that they were no longer worthy of notice. And more recently Hay has engaged with the tradition of phenomenology to look at the material world of the luxury object in China.52 Kathlyn Liscomb and Jonathan Hay are by disciplinary affiliation art historians, and it could perhaps be argued that it is the ongoing involvement in the debate of art historians and museum curators, who necessarily engage personally with surviving material objects from China's past, which has kept the argument grounded in concerns around the artefact itself.53 For many art historians now, the ‘agency’ of things, an idea which a number of social scientists would ascribe to Bruno Latour and to actor-network theory, requires no scare quotes, given that they are likely to be much more familiar with Alfred Gell's The Agency of Art (1998), and to the subsequent debates around it. Gell polemically rejects the idea that anything other than language has ‘meaning’, insisting instead that, ‘In place of symbolic communication I place all the emphasis on agency, intention, causation, result and transformation.’54 Even those art historians who do not subscribe fully to Gell's ‘methodological philistinism’ (and it would be professionally hard for them to do so) have found his insistence on doing, rather than meaning, useful in opening up a dialogue with anthropologists and social scientists of other kinds.

Writing in Chinese in 2008, the historian Wu Renshu explicitly seeks to build on the tradition of Braudel and Neil McKendrick to produce an account of late Ming consumption which is both more nuanced and more detailed. This is attempted through a series of case studies, in chapters entitled: ‘Consumption and the Symbolics of Power—the Example of Sedan Chair Culture’; ‘The Formation of Fashion—the Example of Clothing Culture’; ‘Consumer Taste and Status Discrimination—the Example of Travel Culture’; The Commodification and Singularisation of Objects—the Example of Furniture Culture’; ‘The Development and Extension of Scholar Taste—the Example of Food Culture’. Wu's extensive reading of the broadest possible range of Ming sources is meticulous in its care about the terminology used at the time. He unpacks, for example, the term fu yao, which means literally something like ‘weirdness in clothing’, and which had been in use for millennia as a technical term in prognostication, where weirdness in clothing was a sign of impending personal or national disaster. By the Ming, the term was used alongside others to mean also ‘fashion victim’, ‘fashionista’, but without ever losing its sense that the material and the cosmic were aligned for good or for evil.55

But this Ming terminology is not the only technical language which is explained by Wu Renshu. As is the case with academic writing in Chinese since at least the early twentieth century, neologisms or translations of English technical terms have the original English printed within the Chinese text, a reading knowledge of English being correctly assumed to be widespread among intellectuals. The words which are so treated in the introduction to his book (excluding proper names and titles) are: ‘modernity’; ‘consumer culture’; ‘early modernity’; ‘consumerism’; ‘fields’; ‘wage-rate’; ‘the bottom up’; ‘consumer society’. Not one of those terms would have been familiar to the writers of the late Ming whose works form the underpinning of the argument. However the ‘discrimination’ (pinwei) and ‘extravagance’ (shehua) of the book's main title have longer pedigrees, indeed would have meant something to a Ming reader, while the status term shidafu certainly would, and is correspondingly almost impossible to translate satisfactorily into modern English. Matthew's’ Chinese English Dictionary gives ‘gentry; officials; upper classes’, but all are contestable. This title of a modern Chinese scholarly work (and one unlikely to enter the wider conversation through translation) might therefore stand as a metaphor for a field of enquiry which is delicately, even precariously, balanced between a set of emic concerns which were intensely meaningful to social actors in China centuries ago, and those etic concerns with development and global historical processes which any ‘history of consumption’ must address, in the full range of their variety and specificity.

There now seems little point in continuing the argument as to whether China ‘also’ was developing a consumer society in the Ming period. The quantity of empirical evidence is certainly there to make such a case, and enough of it now exists in English to make further claims of European exceptionalism look increasingly defensive and ultimately slightly perverse. However although strategically there was a considerable point to writing Ming China into the history of a global ‘early modern’ (it is after all the move which gains the present essay a place in this book), the problems and inconsistencies of such an inscription are by now well understood, and elegantly laid out in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, among many others.56 To carry on insisting that Ming China is ‘just like’ early modern Europe seems as unproductive as arguing for its total difference—as if that too had not been tried, in fact for some centuries now, and with results which are tediously familiar, not to mention being also supportive of a contemporary Chinese nationalism always at risk of tipping into chauvinistic claims of exceptionalism of their own kind. How then to move forward from either/or, same/different? Although this is acknowledged right at the outset as special pleading, perhaps there is something to be found in art history's own history, and in its long process of extrication from the ahistorical construct of Beauty (which as Bruno Latour observes is ‘more easily seen as a construction than is Truth’). Latour has further argued that art history is by its nature, and by its attention to the pleasure derived from the multiplication of mediations, particularly well-suited to ‘be constructivist and realist at the same time’.57 If this claim is true, then perhaps an attention to the full range of mediations materialized in surviving things is equally a way of enjoying the benefits of both those standpoints.

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