Banner Image Source Original image held by the Harvard-Yenching Library
of the Harvard College Library, Harvard University

December 2017

Volume
77
Number
2
About the cover

The bananas and seahorses that adorn the cover are two of the dozens of colorful illustrations in Chūzan bussankō 中山物産考 (ca. 1769), a description of the geography, flora, and fauna of the Ryukyu Kingdom (modern Okinawa) in the Harvard- Yenching Library’s rare book collection. The author, Tamura Ransui 田村藍水 (1718–1776), was an Edo-born doctor and naturalist who rose to prominence as a key figure in the Tokugawa shogunate’s successful effort to produce ginseng domestically from seeds smuggled from Korea. He wrote extensively on ginseng and other plants with economic value, such as sweet potatoes and cotton.

Zhao Xuemin 趙學敏, the subject of He Bian’s article in this issue, knew and wrote about many of the plants and animals featured in Chūzan bussankō. There is no reason to believe he was familiar with the work. Rather, both he and Ransui were participants in a lively transnational, even global, discourse on natural history that attracted scholars and policymakers interested in materia medica and other useful products.

In his account of Ryukyu, Ransui drew heavily on Zhongshan chuanxin lu 中山傳信錄 (1721), a survey of Ryukyuan geography and institutions by Xu Baoguang 徐葆光 (1671–1723), a Qing official who had traveled to Ryukyu in 1719. Xu’s book was widely read as an authoritative source of information on Ryukyu. A kanbun 漢文 edition printed in Kyoto circulated among Japanese scholars, and a partial translation into French by the Jesuit Antoine Gaubil informed European readers about the kingdom.¹ Much of the text of Chūzan bussankō, including the descriptions of bananas and seahorses, is lifted straight from Xu Baoguang’s work, but the illustrations are all Ransui’s additions. In addition, he composed his own text to accompany images of plants and animals that Xu had overlooked. HJAS thanks the Harvard-Yenching Library for its kind permission to reproduce the images. 

¹Jo Hokō (Xu Baoguang), Chūzan denshinroku (Zhongshan chuanxin lu), punctuated by Hattori Somon 服部蘇門, 6 kan 卷 (Kyoto: Ran’en, n.d.); Antoine Gaubil, “Mémoire sur les isles que les Chinois appellent isles de Lieou-Kieou” (1758), in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangeres: Mémoires de la Chine, &c., vol. 23 (Paris: J. G. Merigot, 1781), pp. 182–245.

Tamura Ransui, Chūzan bussankō, 3 vols. (kan) [ca. 1769], vol. 2 (seq. 29, seq. 44); MS no. TJ 3468/6441, Rare Book Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:32692219. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Editorial Preface & In Memoriam

Editorial Preface

Articles

An Ever-Expanding Pharmacy

Zhao Xuemin and the Conditions for New Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century China

He Bian
Abstract

Bencao gangmu shiyi (Supplement to Systematic Materia Medica) has been recognized as the most outstanding sequel to the sixteenth-century encyclopedia Bencao gangmu, adding over nine hundred drugs to Li Shizhen’s magnum opus. In this article, I investigate the key conditions that rendered it possible for its author, Zhao Xuemin (fl. 1753–1803), to access the textual, empirical, and material resources necessary to accomplish such a feat. I argue that despite Zhao’s efforts to frame his work in a classical light, his humble status as a sojourning private secretary in fact enabled him to derive new knowledge from both elite and lowbrow circles. Zhao and his interlocutors represent an expanding, if oft-neglected community of knowledge, who embraced literary documentation of contemporary experience as a way of transcending the accomplishments of previous authorities. Their existence signifies the beginning of a transition from a literati-dominated culture toward mass society.

摘要 (中文)

本文探讨清代赵学敏著《本草纲目拾遗》成书的历史条件。作为流寓幕客的赵学敏在交游中接触到多样的文献与实物资料,不断修订自己的手稿。这部本草书凭记载当下经验而超越前人经典,亦预示着由士人主导的中国传统文化在十八世纪向近代大众社会的转型。

Monuments and Mandalas in Medieval Kyoto

Reading Buddhist Kingship in the Urban Plan of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu

Matthew Stavros
Abstract

Kyoto’s urban landscape was transformed during the late fourteenth century through the ambitious building projects of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408). By examining these projects, I identify a grand urban vision indicative of monumental aspirations. The creation of palaces and temples helped Yoshimitsu infiltrate and eventually dominate warrior, imperial, and religious spheres of influence in Kyoto. More important, the findings suggest the shogun leveraged the allusive power of architecture and urban planning to forge an anthropocosmic connection between himself and the divine. I suggest that Yoshimitsu—like his counterparts in the premodern Buddhist centers of Angkor, Bagan, and Borobudur—sought to transform Japan’s medieval capital into an expression of sacred geography, thereby legitimizing the Kyoto court at a time of imperial schism and advancing his own aim of attaining a status synonymous with dharma king.

摘要 (日本語)

中世京都における足利義満の大規模な建造プロジェクトを検討し、建築と王権、および新たな都市構想を分析する。更に、東南アジアの仏教王国との比較を通じ、義満が法皇を目指し、仏教的コスモロジーに基づいて京都の都市計画を行った可能性を提案する。

Mandarin over Manchu

Court-Sponsored Qing Lexicography and Its Subversion in Korea and Japan

Mårten Söderblom Saarela
Abstract

The Manchu language studies of the Qing empire emerged in Beijing during the late seventeenth century and spread to Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan during the eighteenth century. The Qing court sponsored the compilation of multilingual thesauri and thereby created an imperial linguistic order with Manchu at the center and vernacular Chinese, or Mandarin, in a subordinate position. Chosŏn and Tokugawa scholars, by contrast, usually placed Mandarin—not Manchu, Korean, or Japanese—as the leading language in the new multilingual thesauri they compiled on the basis of Qing works. I show how the balance between Manchu and Mandarin changed as Korean and Japanese scholars reworked lexicographic books from Beijing. The lexicographic evidence demonstrates that the international languages of pre-twentieth-century East Asia included Manchu and vernacular Mandarin as well as literary Chinese.

摘要 (中文)

本文以乾隆『御製增訂清文鑑』為例,探討清朝構造的以滿文為中心的多語言制度及其在朝鮮和日本的傳播和轉變。日本和朝鮮學者利用滿語辭書所載的漢語白話譯文與官話注音來學習漢語。漢語對學習滿文必不可少,於是日朝學者往往把辭書中的漢語白話部分作為研究的對象。

Arendt in Asia

Responsibility and Judgment in Nanjing and Hiroshima

John Whittier Treat
Abstract

Political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) wrote little on Asia, but her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil suggests how she might have evaluated responsibility for and judgment of war crimes in East Asia. I speculate first about how she might have regarded the 1946–1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and I argue that she would have approved of the executions of those ruled culpable for the Rape of Nanjing while contesting much of the moral and legal thinking that led to them. Second, Arendt’s endorsement of the literary imagination as a tool for judgment allows us to read Hotta Yoshie’s 1963 A-bomb novel Judgment to explore how justice might have been served in the wake of the wartime use of nuclear weapons.

摘要 (日本語)

ナチス·ドイツによるユダヤ人虐殺の犯罪責任を再考察した「イエルサレムのアイヒマン」著者のハンナ·アーレント氏ならば、南京虐殺及び原爆投下をいかに裁いたであろう?東京裁判の記録や堀田善衛の小説「審判」にアーレント思想を適用し、その法律的、倫理的な諸問題を解いてみる。

Review essays

The Return of Seduction

Morgan Pitelka

Gender and the Public Sphere in Modernizing East Asia

Ellen Widmer

“Authentic”: Rehabilitating Two Chan Buddhist Masters Neglected in Zen Studies

T. Griffith Foulk

Book reviews

The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964, by Jessamyn R. Abel.

Tom Havens

Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History, by James A. Benn; The Rise of Tea Culture in China: The Invention of the Individual, by Bret Hinsch.

John W. Chaffee

Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan, by Heather Blair.

Fabio Rambelli

Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE–50 CE, by Erica Fox Brindley.

Nam C. Kim

The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive, by Miranda Brown.

Christopher Cullen

Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema, by Youngmin Choe; New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media, by Dal Yong Jin.

Kyu Hyun Kim

The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan, by Adam Clulow; Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan, by Noell Wilson.

Mark Ravina

Radical Inequalities: China’s Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective, by Nara Dillon.

Morris L. Bian

Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images, by Chelsea Foxwell.

Rosina Buckland

A Great Undertaking: Mechanization and Social Change in a Late Imperial Chinese Coalmining Community, by Jeff Hornibrook; Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920, by Shellen Xiao Wu.

Elisabeth Köll

Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film, by Bert Mittchell Scruggs.

Ping-hui Liao

Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions, by Mathew H. Sommer.

Rubie Watson

City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions, by Chuck Wooldridge.

Peter J. Carroll

The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre, by Catherine Vance Yeh.

Keith McMahon