INTRODUCTION
Costuming as Method
Around the year 1694, the aging scholar and playwright You Tong ⯌Ἷ (1618–1704) completed an autobiography with captioned illustrations.1 One illustration represents the premiere of his drama Celestial Court Music (Juntian yue 懆⣑㦪) performed almost four decades prior in 1658 by his private household troupe to entertain his father (figure 0.1).2 In what can be assumed to be the main hall of You Tong’s home, he, his father, and a group of guests watch the performance at the moment a successful cohort of imperial examination candidates makes its public procession, which corresponds to the second scene in the latter half of the play.3 As a rare illustration of an early Qing dramatic performance and audience, this image from You Tong’s autobiography highlights several important tensions surrounding vestimentary and costume codes associated with the change to Manchu rule. Most starkly, it reveals a disparity between ethnically coded dress on- and offstage. The picture includes two types of clothes for the male characters—those in the style of the Ming dynasty (Han style) and those in the style of the Qing dynasty (Manchu style). Among the eight fully depicted members of the audience, seven wear unmistakable Manchu-style clothing marked by a gown with narrow sleeves and a cap with tassels.4 Four members show their thin queues, a clear sign of the enforcement of Manchu hairstyle. By contrast, the costumes of the performers in the procession are in the traditional
Figure 0.1 Woodblock illustration showing premiere of You Tong’s drama Celestial Court Music. Judith Zeitlin, Yuhang Li, and Richard A. Born, eds., Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2014), 141.
Han style because theatrical costumes in the Ming– Qing period were based on everyday clothes of the Ming dynasty.5 The four troupe musicians, especially the one dressed as a scholar, are also wearing Han-style clothing likely because they have just performed or are about to perform onstage in a different scene.6 The picture depicts Manchu clothing as the dress code for the social space and Han clothing for the performance space. The differentiation of dress codes in and around performance spaces constituted a distinguishing feature of theatrical life in early Qing China, a feature that has continued to reverberate in the aesthetics of traditional theater down to the present day. In addition to the performance space, the image indicates another space reserved for Han clothing. Whereas all the other audience members, including You Tong himself—likely to the right in the back row— wear Manchu-style clothes of the Qing dynasty, You’s father, seated in the middle of the back row, wears traditional Han-style clothes of the Ming dynasty. The father’s outfit would have violated regulations regarding hair and dress in early Qing China given the requirement that all of the empire’s Han Chinese males adopt and conform to Manchu hairstyle and clothing practices. The only explanation for the anachronism is that the father had passed away by the time the picture was produced and, as a dead person, was depicted as a Ming subject wearing traditional Chinese clothing. The theatrical performance was about stories set in the historical past, and You Tong’s deceased father also belonged to the past. As demonstrated in the picture, Manchu clothing takes up the space of reality, of the present; Han clothing is assigned for the space of the past, the theatrical, the imagined. Through clothing, the image shows a social world that cannot be represented onstage and a performance space that cannot extend into the social world. In traditional China, clothing was indicative of social status, ethnicity, political regime, and different cultural traditions. In the Ming dynasty, costumes used in theatrical performances corresponded with Ming state attire as well as with the millennia-long sartorial tradition especially solidified by Confucian culture. In Qing China, that sartorial tradition was banished to the stage. Staging Personhood is about theatrical costuming. I use “clothing” and “clothes” in reference to items of apparel in society, “costumes” in reference to pieces of clothes used in drama and theater, and “costuming” in reference to the theatrical appropriation of body and clothing in Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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drama texts, performances, and different types of visual representations. The book asks a two-sided question: how did the Ming–Qing transition influence costuming as theatrical practices and how, in turn, did costuming enable the production of different types of personhood in early Qing China? Focusing on a group of dramas composed in the latter half of the seventeenth century, this book fulfills three tasks: it revisits a selected body of early Qing literature; it introduces an interdisciplinary perspective to understand the relations between literary writing and individual identities; and it develops costuming into a critical method for the study of highly unstable performance texts. Examining the case of early Qing drama, this study shows that theatrical costuming in traditional China was rarely a static affair. Instead, it was in constant interaction with historical changes and personal experiences and was often a means of negotiating disrupted personhood at a time when the world and the stage were simultaneously entangled and detangled. This introduction further explicates theatrical costuming as a hermeneutic entry to early Qing society and discusses the methods and materials of this study. U N S TAG E A B L E W O R L D : C L OT H I N G A N D C O S T U M I N G I N E A R LY Q I N G C H I N A
Together, natural environment, seasonal changes, textile technologies, gender, and social status shaped the material form and social use of clothing in traditional China. Dorothy Ko succinctly summarizes the cultural significance of clothing particularly for the literati class: “Correct attire—headdress, dress, and shoes—was the quintessential expression of civility, culture, and humanity, all being ramifications of wen.” 7 In addition to being a symbol of civilization, clothing also served as a political language embodying lines of authority and power. Records about clothing abound in historical documents, including Confucian ritual classics, dynastic histories, encyclopedias, and literary writings.8 Dynastic transitions almost always involved a change in clothing and dress codes in correlation with cosmological beliefs. Upon the establishment of a dynasty, the new government would choose one of five colors, corresponding to the five basic elements (wuxing) in the culture’s correlative cosmology, to be the basic color for state attire and government paraphernalia. The state would continue to issue protocols regarding attire 4
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for people of different social status. Dressing against those protocols was considered not only an infringement of political order but also a disturbance of heavenly order.9 The sartorial spectacle shown in You Tong’s image was a direct consequence of the Ming–Qing transition around the mid-seventeenth century. During the Manchu invasion into central China, Manchu rulers forced Han Chinese (nonclerical males) to shave their heads and change to Manchu clothing.10 Manchu dress regulations in the early Qing period comprised two parts: shaving the head to leave only enough hair for a thin queue and the substitution of Manchu-style clothing for Han-style clothing. The Manchu conquest thus brought clothing and hairstyle into the center of ethnic contention.11 For Han Chinese people whose traditional culture placed great value on the intactness of the body, shaving the head was one of the greatest insults—a form of punishment, kun 檉—up until the Qing dynasty.12 In response to Manchu rulers’ determination to exercise the policy, Han Chinese revolted in many areas of southern China. Records relating to the enforcement of and resistance to this policy abound in early Qing documents, in particular in Veritable Records of the Shunzhi Emperor (Shizu Zhanghuangdi shilu ᶾ䣾䪈䘯ⷅ⮎抬, basic version issued in 1667), which recounts events in the Shunzhi reign from the perspective of the Manchu court. As Lin Liyueh’s 㜿渿㚰 study shows, remnant subjects of the Ming dynasty invented a variety of ways to preserve their hair (in part at least) and their Han-style clothing (in remote areas, for example).13 As the Manchu regime continuously reformed and regulated the attire of its subjects, the topic of ethnic clothing remained sensitive even after the Qing dynasty had consolidated its rule. A century into the new dynasty, a scholar in Jiangxi province was still subject to capital punishment for openly remarking in his writings on the clothing policy.14 Beginning in the mid-Qing period, discourse and resistance against the Manchu dress regulations gradually waned, until the final decades of the nineteenth century, when the Manchu hairstyle again became a target of anti-Manchu movements.15 Even today, the master narrative in the Han-clothing movement still regards the Manchu dynasty as a time of unprecedented rupture in the history of Chinese clothing and treats Manchu clothing as the “evil other” to the sartorial tradition of the Han Chinese.16 Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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From the perspective of the Manchu rulers, clothing—both Manchuand Han-style—served as a way to consolidate political control and spread state ideology. On the one hand, forcing male Han Chinese to abandon their traditional dress and hairstyle constituted a symbolic way to demand their submission to the Manchus.17 On the other hand, studies in the so-called new Qing history show that clothing was an effective way for the Manchus to formulate, express, and maintain their ethnic identity. In contrast to loose robes and wide sleeves, Manchu clothing features boots, trousers, and jackets essential for their equestrian and archery practices—key elements of the “Manchu Way.”18 To maintain an ethnic distinction in dress, the early Qing government prohibited Chinese men from wearing certain Manchu-specific items such as apparel made from fur and prohibited bannerwomen from modeling themselves after the fashion of Han Chinese women.19 As studies show, Manchustyle clothing, as much as Manchu identity, was not a static existence but a historical entity in the making throughout and beyond the Ming–Qing transition. Early Qing clothing policy, however, cannot be reduced to a replacement of Han clothing by Manchu clothing. Instead, the sartorial order involved a complex structure and was primarily a mechanism of differentiating between dominant and subordinate cultures. Although Manchu clothing prevailed and Han clothing was prohibited in daily life, Hanstyle clothes did not cease to exist in society. Hair and dress regulations applied mainly to adult males, as women and children were largely exempted from those regulations along with Buddhist and Daoist monks, who continued to wear robes developed in the Ming dynasty. Even though adult males had to wear Manchu-style clothes, families were permitted to bury them in ritualistic clothes of the Han style after they passed away.20 The Manchu state designated different dress codes for different spaces within early Qing society, creating a sartorial landscape with Manchu clothing as an arch symbol of state power and Han clothing as a symbol of defeat and submission. In no other historical context of traditional China did clothing play such an important role in mediating interpersonal communication and shaping one’s gender, ethnic, and cultural identities. Traditional Chinese drama lies at the very nexus between Manchu and Han cultures and between literature and history. Perceiving 6
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theatrical performance to be a depraved practice of the Han Chinese tradition, the Manchu rulers prohibited Manchu people from theatergoing as well as the employment of Manchu clothing in popular drama performances. Meanwhile, they allowed theater to continue displaying Hanstyle costumes onstage, despite the ban on Han clothing in society.21 Chapter 1 shows that Manchu clothing was largely absent on the early Qing stage outside the court. This special phenomenon has significant connotations for our understanding of Chinese theater and history. Before the Qing dynasty, clothing in everyday life—for different ethnic groups—found its way into theatrical costumes. The complicated dress regulations in seventeenth-century China produced a unique sartorial landscape: offstage, Manchu clothing prevailed; onstage, costumes in the Han style remained.22 Early Qing society and early Qing theater became two distinct spaces featuring different dress codes. Lu Eting 映古⹕ summarizes three types of violations in drama identified by the Qianlong and Jiaqing emperors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: stories about the Ming– Qing transition, “incorrect” accounts of the Song and Jin confrontation, and the use of Qing state attire and other absurd representations.23 An edict regarding dramas on current affairs issued by the Jiaqing emperor in 1806 reads, “If the story refers to current affairs, however, and authors fabricate stories as they like, thus confusing public opinion, then this contravenes the ban on commoners discussing state affairs. . . . From now on, if anybody dares to compile a drama referring to current affairs, once they are found out, they will be certainly punished severely with no pardon.”24 The emperor’s edict clearly points out the prohibition against dramatizing events in the Ming–Qing transition and in Qing society. The spirit iterated in the decree reflects the Manchu emperors’ animosity toward the representation of contemporary politics in theatrical works, a disfavor that continued up to the nineteenth century. In this book I use the expression “unstageable world” to describe the early Qing society that was segregated from the performance space. It refers to the difficulty of representing Manchu clothing onstage as well as that of representing early Qing society in theatrical practices. Throughout Chinese history, almost all “conquest dynasties” forced Chinese people to conform to their ethnic clothing and hairstyles, but the Manchu Qing dynasty was the only regime to stringently enforce the policy.25 Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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Further, although traditional China witnessed continuous antitheatrical discourses and practices, the Manchu Qing dynasty was the only regime that regulated theatrical costumes along ethnic and gendered terms. The sartorial changes in seventeenth-century China involved a process of disrupting and reassembling the body and different styles of clothes. Body and clothing, accordingly, encapsulated a special realm of experience that reflected the negotiations over ethnic and gender identities during the Ming–Qing transition. As my study shows, the unstageable world of early Qing China promises a unique case for us to understand the relations between clothing, costuming, identity, and history. This book explores the ways in which early Qing individuals grappled with historical and sartorial changes through theatrical costuming. Although the Manchu hair and dress regulations have long been a scholarly focus in studies of Chinese history, literature, and art, the special role of costuming in early Qing drama has thus far received little scholarly attention. Challenges in exploring the question include the scarcity and inaccessibility of evidence about early Qing drama performances because of the natural deterioration of material costumes over time and the political sensitivity of the dynastic transition in early Qing society. As a result, many theater scholars assume that Qing drama simply inherited the costuming practices of Ming drama, and they tend to regard the Ming and Qing dynasties as one continuous period in the development of Chinese drama. If we consider only the material formats of theatrical costumes, that proposition is largely valid since theatrical performances in the Qing dynasty inherited and developed the principal practices of the Ming dynasty. If we consider the dynamic between clothing on- and offstage, however, we notice a significant rupture during the dynastic change. The world-stage relationship has been a perpetual theme in traditional Chinese drama. A number of studies have illuminated the pervasiveness of theatricality in late imperial Chinese society.26 Art historian Jonathan Hay suggests there were “three structural principles of worldmaking” in urban theater beginning in the Song dynasty—namely, the stage space generated outwardly from the performer’s body, the oscillating boundary between the observed world and the observers, and shifting places in chainlike scenes of a drama.27 In contrast to the permeability between the world and the stage in different cultures worldwide, early 8
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Qing China constitutes a unique case in which the world and the stage were clearly separated. By looking at the architecture of the stage in early Qing China, Sophie Volpp notes the increasingly less “soluble” boundary between stage and social space in seventeenth-century China: “The new prominence toward the end of the seventeenth century of commercial theaters with fixed stages in Beijing presumably fostered a sense that the space of performance was more highly demarcated and that the social space of the audience was now less integrated with the space of performance.”28 Following Volpp’s proposition, I suggest that the contrast between clothing on- and offstage in early Qing China conspicuously indicates a separation between the social and the theatrical. Instead of discussing the worldly stage, I focus on a historical moment when a large part of the world, especially the dominant dress code, was rendered unstageable. C O S T U M I N G T H E U N S TAG E A B L E W O R L D
Staging Personhood addresses a puzzle regarding early Qing drama: when the world was rendered unstageable, was it still possible for dramas to represent contemporary society? The answer lies in the careful selection and interpretation of theatrical materials enabled by the lens of costuming. Just as scholars have studied theater both as stage performances and as a mode of representation in late imperial China, in this book I suggest two understandings of theatrical costuming. In the strict understanding of the concept, “costuming” means the production and stage use of costumes. Modern scholars usually use xiqu fushi ㇚㚚㚵梦, a phrase coined in the twentieth century, in reference to costumes of traditional Chinese theater. Neither xiqu nor fushi has a ready equivalent in classical Chinese. Scholars of Chinese theater have identified a cluster of references to the clothes used onstage throughout Chinese history. Those terms include qiemo 䞴㛓 in the Song–Yuan period, chuanguan 䨧斄 in Ming drama, and chuandai 䨧㇜ in court performances and xingtou 埴柕 in commercial performances of the Qing dynasty.29 The absence of a consistent name does not indicate that theatrical costuming was a trivial matter. Rather, the changing references show that theatrical practitioners continuously explored the potential capacities of costuming over time. Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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Current studies of xiqu fushi have focused on two questions: what were the material formats of theatrical costumes in traditional China, and how were those costumes coupled with different role types and characters onstage? Some recent studies represent synchronic and diachronic approaches to traditional Chinese theater costumes. Alexandra B. Bonds has provided a systematic introduction to the costumes used in Beijing opera as a means to visually communicate received aesthetic and cultural traditions.30 Song Junhua’s recent survey of the history of Chinese theatrical costumes focuses on the changing formats of costumes and the shifting ways of using them onstage. With respect to the Ming–Qing transition, Song stresses the continuity in theatrical costumes between the two dynasties.31 Attention to costumes has also engendered important studies of European theatrical traditions. For example, using Shakespeare’s plays as examples, Robert Lublin shows that costuming produced prominent visual codes for sex, social station, religion, and foreignness on the early modern English stage.32 The narrow understanding of costuming serves as a background for this book. With no ambition to address general costume history, Staging Personhood maintains a focus on a single dimension of costuming at a very specific historical juncture: the ethnic connotations of theatrical costumes, primarily for male characters, during the Ming–Qing transition in mid-seventeenth-century China—namely, how the nascent sartorial system of Manchu clothing interacted with theatrical performances. The introduction, chapter 1, and the epilogue include discussions about this narrowly defined costuming. However, since Manchu clothing did not readily appear in stage performances in early Qing China, costume-based studies prove inadequate in dealing with issues about clothing and dressing in early Qing drama. I am more concerned with a broad definition of costuming that corresponds to the ambit of theatrical representation in Ming– Qing China. Different from costume-based approaches, the second understanding of costuming involves dressing, undressing, and crossdressing— different modes of associating bodies and clothing—in all kinds of theatrical practices. Using flower guides (huapu 剙嬄) in nineteenth-century Beijing as an example, Mark Stevenson has coined the term “epitheatre” to describe “forms of social life and literature that
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exist as an extension or effect of performances or performance spaces.�33 Costuming can be considered a typical epitheatrical practice because it extends beyond the stage use of costumes to include textual and visual representations of body and clothing in response to and in negotiation with the sartorial changes in society. The broad understanding of costuming enables us to probe the boundaries between page, stage, and the social world in early Qing China.34 This book further suggests that costumes and costuming can be understood as representing two opposite relations between the social world and theatrical practices in early Qing China. Seen from the contrast between clothes and costumes, the world and the stage were separated. Yet theatrical costuming was still able to probe worldly affairs because costuming transcended the boundaries of the stage and penetrated spaces for textual and visual representation. Although Manchu clothing was taboo on the early Qing stage, it was nevertheless represented in some early Qing drama texts, which opens a window for scholars to investigate theatrical responses to the intrusion of Manchu clothing. What is more, theatrical costuming in early Qing China not only dealt with the intrusive Manchu clothing but also responded to the changes in the traditional Han-style clothes of the Ming dynasty. Costuming thus provides an alternative space in which early Qing society can be represented and contested. When historical changes rendered the world unstageable, costuming rendered the unstageable world perceptible. Staging Personhood is concerned less with the material specifications of theatrical costumes than with actual and symbolic processes of integrating bodies, clothes, and personhood in theatrical practices. Rather than explicating the meaning of the visual codes associated with Manchu clothing, chapter 1 discusses the general absence of Manchu clothing on the early Qing stage, which, I argue, led the existing Han-style costumes to be ethnically and politically charged. The four case studies that follow are based on an examination of drama scripts; at the same time they consider visual and performance records that shed light on the possible use of costumes in actual performances. Although usually not taken into account by costume studies, those very phenomena unveil the entanglements between literature and history in early Qing China.
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C O S T U M I N G , P E R S O N H O O D, A N D P R O D U C T I O N A N A LY S I S
When talking about literature and personhood in early Qing China, one might assume that discussion would focus on the authors of literary works. Indeed, scholars in traditional China developed sophisticated theories related to understanding the authorial mind through reading his or her writings.35 It has been widely discussed how the Ming–Qing transition led some Han Chinese scholars to express their traumatic experiences through writings and artistic works. Scholars have explored the same question through reading early Qing dramas. As Wilt Idema notes, “No genre of literature provided a better opportunity to express the conflicting emotions concerning the collapse of the Ming and the subsequent conquest of the Chinese world by the Manchu Qing than drama.”36 Many studies of early Qing drama focus on the yimin group—remnant subjects of the Ming dynasty—and try to explain how that identity is embodied through different literary representations. Those studies tend to treat theatrical works as a form of authorial expression similar to poetry and thus might be referred to as the expression model of drama studies.37 In line with seeking authorial intention, scholars also try to connect the represented characters in a drama with actual persons in society.38 Certainly early Qing literature provides precious materials for us to study personal experiences and expressions in response to the dynastic change. However, treating early Qing drama as playwrights’ voices creates a few problems. Scholars of literary studies are all too familiar with the complicated relations between authors and their works. The genre of drama, in particular, allows and requires the author to hide the authorial voice. Regarding early Qing literature, we frequently face the lack of adequate information about the authorship of a certain drama. Even when a drama’s authorship can be authenticated, there is still a distance between the author’s mind and the written texts. Since the Manchu regime rendered writing politically sensitive, many early Qing writers consciously maintained a distance between themselves and their written works. As discussed by Kang-I Sun Chang, the scholar Wu Weiye ⏛ 㤕 (1609–1672) constructed a “mask” in his poems and dramas as a way to create “an objectivity and a distance from the subject matter.”39 Chang 12
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describes the mask as a dramatic vehicle Wu transposed into the poetic tradition. The inherent distance between a playwright and the characters in his or her works discourages the practice of reading the characters in a drama as projections of the author’s self. Meanwhile, a focus on Ming loyalists highlights political allegiance and ethnic belonging particularly among male scholars who voiced their sentiments through written words. It tends to overshadow the multiplicity of one’s roles in society as a political subject, family member, and expert in different fields. Therefore, the expression model of studying early Qing literature falls short of the sophistication needed to understand theatrical works. To complicate the issue of authorial intention, I propose a method that hinges on costuming, borrowing insights from Michel Foucault and production analysis in theater studies. Discussing what he refers to as the author function, Foucault argues that “such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts.” 40 By questioning the immediate association between texts and the authorial mind, Foucault suggests two different approaches in studying various types of writings. First, one can study the “modes of existence” of discourses—the “modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses.”41 Second, one can study the relationships between discourses and their authors—not as real individuals but as positions that “can be occupied by different classes of individuals.” 42 Rather than valorizing or ignoring the author, Foucault proposes studying the intricate connections between texts and their purported authors as well as how those connections influence the existence of those very texts.43 The questions raised in Foucault’s article, when coupled with traditional Chinese philology, prove especially fruitful for the study of early Chinese drama. In her book about the reproduction and reception of early (primarily Yuan-dynasty) song drama in the Ming and early Qing periods, Patricia Sieber delineates two types of relations between authors and their works—what she refers to as attestatory authorship and reproductive authorship.44 Sieber’s study shows how a canonical author such as Guan Hanqing was constructed in late imperial China and how the “author function” was performed by playwrights, editors, commentators, and readers in the process of producing theatrical works.45 Foucault’s Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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propositions about the author function are also helpful for understanding theatrical works in early Qing China. Under the names of certain authors, early Qing dramas circulated as manuscripts, prints, visual representations, and stage performances. The author holds together a group of materials across periods and genres, which allows us to explore costuming in those disparate practices. Instead of the authors or authorial intentions, in this book I am more concerned with the individual and collective identities involved in various theatrical practices. I use the concept of “personhood” to refer to the state, meaning, and requirements of being a person specifically in the context of early Qing China, an era when the issue of personhood became a keen concern for Han Chinese people in general and literati scholars in particular. To explore the relations between costuming and personhood, I borrow and refine the method of production analysis. Judith Milhous and Robert Hume define production analysis as “interpretation of the text specifically aimed at understanding it as a performance vehicle— ‘reading with a directorial eye.’ ” 46 Thus defined, production analysis focuses on drama scripts instead of actual performances. Starting from this definition, Andrew Sofer studies theatrical props as textual devices, performance vehicles, and material entities.47 Sofer further develops production analysis to consider theatrical factors he refers to as dark matter, the invisible aspects of performance texts.48 Sofer’s studies maintain a balance between analysis of drama scripts and that of actual performances. Like Sofer, I consider costuming in a wide range of theatrical practices, especially those found in the fissures between different editions of a drama, between dramas on the page and their executions onstage, and between what can and what cannot be performed. Some of the dramas discussed in this book were closely related with stage performance—they provided possibilities of stage executions or were the result of performance adaptations. Others, however, were produced as texts for reading rather than performance. On some occasions, early Qing drama scripts explicitly employed Manchu clothing, rendering the plays unstageable. On others, stage performances indirectly invoked Manchu hairstyle and clothing, moments that could not be written into drama scripts. Production analysis, therefore, allows for the exploration of
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actual performances as well as of textual details that were impossible to stage in early Qing China. I refine and use the concept of production analysis to also address the production of theatrical scripts, a highly unstable corpus of literature in traditional China. Discussing Renaissance literature and theater, Stephen Orgel succinctly notes the instability of literary texts: “What scientific bibliography has taught us more clearly than anything else is that at the heart of our texts lies a hard core of uncertainty.” 49 The early Qing dramas discussed in this book pose a similar challenge: some of them do not have authenticated authors; others exist as woodblock prints produced decades or centuries after their composition; and still others exist only as manuscripts and diffuse fragments. Oriented toward producing an authoritative text closest to the original author’s edition, traditional Chinese philology often proves inadequate in studying scattered and fragmented performative texts. In response to these challenges, the book regards drama scripts as traces of textual and performance productions. It pays equal attention to the printed texts and marginal writings, textual fragments, performance records, and meaningful absence. The production of theatrical works, in turn, involves a cluster of persons.50 Early Qing dramas first afford nuanced analysis of the represented characters in theatrical works. For instance, the theatrical activities of bestowing, changing, and displaying clothing at a public celebration in You Tong’s Celestial Court Music produce a successful examination candidate in the celestial world. Focusing on Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan 㟫剙㇯), Tina Lu explores how the crumbling of the Ming dynasty endangered the stability of individual identities. Stephen Owen offers similar observations and points out the productive functions of naming and dressing in the same drama.51 Likewise, the four case studies in this book focus on represented characters in drama texts, paying special attention to those characters when they travel between spaces within a text, spaces in different media, and social spaces revolving around a text. Just as costuming spans different modes of theatrical practices, the persons discussed in this book include represented characters as well as actual people who participated in producing, reading, watching, discussing, and even censoring dramas. Whenever possible, the book examines
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the authorial practices in producing certain theatrical works. The perspective of costuming allows us to see the roles of an author beyond the writer of a playscript. For example, in addition to being the composer of the original manuscript, You Tong performed the role of a director and personally instructed his household troupe for the performance in 1658;52 in producing the illustration and poetic caption, You acted as a commissioner of a project of cultural memory. Through playwriting, publishing, staging, and textual-visual representation, You Tong created multilayered relations with different forms of the drama he initially composed. As some of the case studies in the following chapters show, the productions of scripts and performances involved different parties apart from the authors. With regard to Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan, for example, the printed play includes a few dozen commentating and dedicatory poems in the beginning section that were composed by Kong’s acquaintances. In the case of Chaste Lady Hai (Hai Liefu chuanqi 㴟䁰 ⨎⁛⣯), the drama was printed more than a century after its composition by a group of local literati scholars with no personal association with the original author. As different parties collaborating to produce an extant text, those persons together fulfill the author function. Whereas drama scripts involve authors, commentators, and readers, theater performances bring actual performers and their costumes into practices of costuming. In a drama performance, the practices of costuming associate costumes with the bodies of different performers. Again, take You Tong’s picture for example. Although the three successful examination candidates are dressed in official uniforms for male scholars, in the actual performance it could as well be female actors who performed these characters onstage. Some of the dramas discussed in this book, such as Lovebirds Reversal (Dao yuanyang Ὰ泃泎), feature the theme of cross-dressing.53 Other venues of performance involved complicated issues regarding gender and ethnicity: for example, the imperial troupe in the Manchu palace included eunuchs, whose gender identity was ambiguous; the Manchu rulers prohibited Manchu people from performing onstage, leaving the theatrical space primarily for Han Chinese. As far as performers are considered, theatrical costuming on the early Qing stage encompassed the combination of costumes and performers of particular genders and ethnic identities. 16
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Theater audiences are also an essential part in the production of theatrical works, especially within the sartorial landscape of early Qing China. The audiences of early Qing dramas included men and women, scholars and the illiterate public, and people in different areas of the Manchu empire. A large part of the performances discussed in this book took place in private households. Audiences would occasionally include women, although in most cases they were excluded.54 Other drama performances took place in public with larger and more heterogeneous audiences, just like in certain European theatrical traditions. Stephen Greenblatt points out two aspects that render Shakespearean theater collective practices: “The theater is manifestly the product of collective intentions” and “the theater manifestly addresses its audience as a collectivity.”55 Similar to the Shakespearean theater, drama performances in Qing China necessarily involved audiences as active participants. Because of the contrast in clothing on- and offstage, the audience became an integral part of costuming at the site of the drama performance. Both audiences’ and performers’ clothing created meaningful sartorial spectacles. Staging Personhood develops a method significantly different from the existing model that treats literature as venues of identity expression. The analysis in this book focuses on the specific practices of costuming in drama scripts while probing possible connections between those practices and the playwrights, their scholar-writer communities, the audiences, and the role of the Manchu state. Whereas questioning the view of early Qing literature as expressions of yimin identity, this book does not simply argue for the instability and multiplicity of identity—what some social scientists call clichéd constructivism.56 Neither is the book a study of self-fashioning through language as exemplified in Stephen Greenblatt’s study of Renaissance literature.57 What I propose in this book is essential to a different order of analysis—it brackets reified identities and examines the meaning-generating capacity of theatrical costuming. The analysis does not start from a preassumed identity of an intentional author; nor does it regard body and clothing as the exterior or the reflection of a certain interior world. Rather, it examines the dissociation and reassociation of different bodies and clothes in theatrical works—for men and women, Manchu and Han, the living and the dead— and places those practices of costuming into the sartorial landscape of Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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early Qing society. This approach calls for equal attention to persons, clothes as objects, and acts of dressing and undressing. As is shown in the following chapters, different modes of costuming separate as well as conflate the social and the theatrical world, creating a matrix in which different persons and different aspects of personhood are located. Put simply, costuming is not a way of expressing a certain identity but one of producing multiple aspects of being a person. M AT E R I A L S : C E N S O R S H I P A N D S H I S H I J U
The topic of Manchu hair and dress regulations remained taboo throughout early Qing China. Most of the existing discussions on the topic by early Qing scholars are in the genres of poetry and prose, especially biographical notes. Except for a handful of titles such as the novel Qiaoshi 㧝⎚ and the short fictional biography “Mister Painting His Hairnet” (Hua wangjin xiansheng zhuan 䔓䵚ⶦ⃰䓇⁛), few pieces of early Qing literature provide detailed descriptions of the Manchu hair and dress regulations. Although the poetry and prose writings allow us to see how early Qing scholars wrote about the poignant experiences of shaving their heads and changing their clothing, they seldom touch on the more nuanced ways in which different clothes were separated from or assimilated with the human body. Among various ways of tackling the changing clothes and hairstyles, theatrical costuming provides a vibrant space to experiment with different ways of connecting the body and different types of clothes. Early Qing dramas on current affairs, or shishi ju 㗪ḳ∯, best serve the purposes of this study because these dramas include the most direct responses to contemporary history through theatrical representation. The two terms “historical drama” (lishi ju 㬟⎚∯) and “drama on current affairs” (shishi ju) indicate contrasting possibilities for understanding the relations between theatrical works and historical events. Whereas lishi indicates a distance between a play and the story it represents, shishi signals proximity between them.58 Playwrights of early Qing China were left with a legacy of dramatizing current affairs. Some recorded theatrical performances of the pre-Qin and Han dynasties were based on stories in society; many of the existing Yuan dramas directly feature social life and political events in the Yuan dynasty.59 In the late Ming 18
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period, playwrights frequently adapted contemporary events, often political, into chuanqi dramas to be read and staged.60 The term shishi was also frequently employed by Ming literati scholars in their drama critiques.61 Representing contemporary history in theatrical works became politically sensitive in early Qing China. The Manchu rulers and government were attentive to the content of dramas written and performed, especially those with direct or implicit references to society. Besides the representation of current events, most of the plays about military conflicts between central China and ethnic people to the north also became politically sensitive in the early Qing period. For example, despite the rich repertoire of Yuan and Ming plays about the Yang family fighting the Khitan invasion, the Qing dynasty did not see large-scale performances of such dramas until the eighteenth century.62 Considering themselves descendants of the Jurchen people, the Manchu rulers were especially attentive to plays about the Song–Jin confrontation.63 Literary scholars and historians have discussed numerous cases of personal calamity caused by writings, or literary inquisition (wenzi yu 㔯⫿䋬). In a recent study, Wang Fan-sen 䌳㯶㢖 uses the word feng 桐 (“wind” or “air,” quoting early Qing scholar Gong Zizhen 漼冒䍵) to describe literary censorship in the Qing dynasty, which, he suggests, had a widespread capillary effect and incurred self-repression among scholarwriters.64 Although focusing on cases in the Qianlong reign, Wang’s study shows that literary inquisition and the practice of self-censorship were pervasive throughout the early decades of the Qing dynasty. As my case study in chapter 3 demonstrates, drama censorship in Qing China existed as a certain kind of shared knowledge rather than in the form of written codes.65 The explicit and implicit censorship on drama significantly influenced the extant repository of early Qing plays. Scholars have counted about thirty extant dramas based on current affairs in the last century of the Ming dynasty.66 The first century (1640s–1730s) of the Qing dynasty saw the production of about four hundred chuanqi dramas and three hundred zaju dramas.67 The trend of dramatizing current affairs continued into the first decades of the Qing dynasty. However, almost all the dramas directly centering on the Manchu massacres of Han Chinese are lost, and only about a dozen extant plays feature the Ming– Qing transition, most of which are set against the backdrop of peasant Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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rebellions led by Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong.68 Several other dramas from the same period feature events from early Qing society. Produced under conditions of political oppression, early Qing dramas generally avoided direct comment on contemporary history. A convenient strategy to camouflage the relevance between a drama and current society is to change the historical setting to another dynasty or adopt the genre of fantastical literature.69 After the publication and ensuing censorship of Peach Blossom Fan in the early eighteenth century, the number of dramas based on current affairs plummeted. The interest in composing such dramas resumed only in the late Qing period, in a completely different social setting. Despite the sartorial limitations on different theatrical practices, early Qing playwrights still probed possible ways to represent clothing and the personal experiences related to the forced changes in early Qing society. In most cases, the plays discussed in this book are the only existing examples that directly represent Manchu hair and dress regulations (Lovebirds Reversal); confrontation between the Manchu government and Han Chinese (A Ten-Thousand-Li Reunion [Wanli yuan 叔慴⚻]); and the systemic change in the meaning of clothing (Peach Blossom Fan). Some of them employ costuming to probe the potential theatrical meanings of Manchu and Han clothing, while others make efforts to circumvent the issue of costuming. Although these cases do not represent the majority of existing dramas, they illustrate the known body of dramas on Ming–Qing transition that remain missing. As the book reveals, theatrical works in early Qing China were produced in response to social reality and conditioned by the intricate relations between stage and society. Further, in early Qing dramas, the contemporary/present was not a given entity. Theatrical works provided alternative ways to differentiate between the past and the present, not least through costuming. Discussing contemporary operas during the decades of Ming–Qing transition, Paize Keulemans notes, “It is, however, precisely the way these contemporary operas engage with recent political affairs that makes them important, distinguishing them from the opera that either preceded or followed.”70 Staging Personhood explores how early Qing dramas responded to the new sartorial landscape in early Qing China—with the novel category of Manchu clothing and a new hierarchy of clothing based on gender and ethnicity. 20
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In studying dramas based on current affairs, I draw attention to important facets of theatrical costuming in which historical events can be invoked. These facets include drama plots, costume instructions, prop lists, paratextual materials, performance records, and visual representations of theatrical themes. Costume instruction remained a marginal issue for drama composition during the early developments of Chinese drama and theater. When literati playwrights composed dramas in the Yuan and early Ming dynasties, they focused on the arias of the libretto, leaving stage execution—and even dialogue—to individual troupes and actors.71 It was the increasing literati participation in drama performance in the late Ming and early Qing period that brought costuming to a central position in drama composition and performance. By the Ming–Qing period, a large percentage of drama texts, either as manuscripts or woodblock prints, included significant quantities of costume instructions. Since their connections with stage performance vary, the costume instructions in these plays do not necessarily reflect stage use of costumes. Theater scholars have also studied visual materials and actual garments related to theatrical performances. For the Song–Jin–Yuan period, the materials included murals, paintings, and engravings on brick structures such as tombs and temples.72 Woodblock drama prints in the Ming–Qing period include a repository of illustrations inspired by stage performances, including the use of costumes.73 The same period saw the appearance of a group of texts with registers of theatrical costumes, providing more systematic information about costumes used in drama performances.74 In the late Qing period, there appeared a new genre of representation known as xihua, or “play paintings,” which represent popular scenes from the stage. These representations reveal different venues through which clothing was theatrically and artistically appropriated. The prism of costuming allows us to treat drama not as a text with a single master narrative but as an ensemble of textual, visual, and material elements—a space for the conversation between elements on the page, on the stage, and even those absent from both. C H A P T E R O R G A N I Z AT I O N
The chapters of the book discuss costuming as a special sector of the sartorial system and as textual and performance practices. Chapter 1 Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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delineates the changing modes of interaction between clothing on the stage and clothing offstage around the Ming–Qing transition. It also discusses different interpretations of such sartorial spectacles in the eyes of different audiences. It outlines the social context in which the theatrical practices discussed in the case studies took place. The book’s main body comprises four case studies of theatrical works that follow a chronological order based on the time of the dramas’ composition. Chapter 2 studies Lovebirds Reversal, which depicts a scholar who exchanges clothes with a girl to avoid shaving his head during the Manchu invasion. Composed and published immediately after the Manchu conquest, the drama shows how the ethnic conflicts influenced not only male scholars but also gender relations at large. The drama, together with other plays by the author, showcases some of the earliest attempts to represent the Manchu conquest through theatrical costuming. The chapter suggests that dressing across Manchu and Han ethnic styles problematizes the topos of cross-dressing in Chinese drama, a threat to gender stability during the dynastic transition. Examining A Ten-Thousand-Li Reunion, chapter 3 focuses on the bodies and clothes of the male members in a Chinese family. It begins by noting a surprising absence of costume instructions in Reunion and continues to show that different scenes of the drama use different methods to dress characters as members of a family and subjects of changing states. Moving away from the male body and clothing, chapter 4 focuses on the semiological meaning of women’s bodies and clothing. It discusses two early Qing dramas about a chaste lady who stitched her entire outfit together to prevent a sexual assault before committing suicide. In a close reading of the descriptions of the chaste lady’s stitched clothes, body, coffin, statue, and shrine, I argue that theatrical costuming turned the woman’s socially constructed body into a vehicle for mediating ethnic conflicts experienced during the dynastic change. After three case studies of individual persons during the dynastic change, chapter 5 examines the changing nature of Ming state attire as represented in Peach Blossom Fan. Completed half a century after the fall of Ming, the drama provides a historical reflection with a panoramic view of the dynastic change. The chapter reveals the process through which Ming state attire is theatricalized—its banishment to the theatrical realm and the historical past and its separation from the bodies of 22
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Ming subjects. Peach Blossom Fan, as theater scholars have argued, marked the peak and the end of a period in the history of Qing drama. Likewise, the practices of costuming centering around that drama symbolized the end of a historical period when costuming and personhood were specifically intertwined. The epilogue explores the changing relations between costuming, personhood, and the state by tracing the emergence of Manchu clothing in drama throughout the Qing dynasty. As it reveals, both drama and Manchu clothing were associated with certain perceptions of groupness. The tension and interaction between them indicate shifting relations between Manchus, Han Chinese, and China transitioning from an empire to a nation-state. The chronological order of the chapters helps us understand changing modes of interaction between Han Chinese and the intruding Manchu culture—from initial encounter to confrontation, reconciliation, and, finally, integration. Critiquing different types of diachronics in the studies of Chinese art history, Jonathan Hay suggests a disjunctive diachronics that would “contribute to a kaleidoscopic representation of the Chinese past—the only kind of historiographic representation that can do justice to our currently evolving state of knowledge.”75 Although the case studies in this book are in chronological order, I do not attempt to suggest a version of theater history that accords with the history of the Qing dynasty. Instead, different chapters use different combinations of materials to address specific aspects of costuming. The selected cases, in turn, address the interweaving between gender and ethnicity, individual males, individual females, and collective memory. The epilogue and some chapters use materials ranging from the early to late Qing era. They demonstrate the lasting impact of the dynastic and sartorial transitions that transpired in mid-seventeenth-century China. The choice of method and materials determines that the book is not dealing with a body of anti-Manchu writings with a coherent theme or voice. Rather, I endeavor to show the subtleties of costuming and inconsistencies in personhood that do not necessarily reflect the progress of Qing history. Scholars of traditional Chinese theater such as Beijing or kun opera (also known as kunqu ⲹ㚚, originating in Jiangsu province and boasting a history of more than five hundred years) tend to stress the ahistorical Intro duction : C o stuming a s Metho d
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nature of theatrical performances, especially in the use of costumes; yet scholars of early Qing literature tend to read dramas as direct responses to and representations of the Ming– Qing transition. This book challenges and complicates both views. Placed into the context of the Ming– Qing transition, theatrical costuming turns out to be a volatile site reflecting and resisting historical changes. The Manchu conquest severed the existing connections between clothing in society and costumes onstage, consequently producing opportunities for theatrical costuming to negotiate these fissures. Early Qing history has more to do with costuming than current studies of theatrical costumes tend to indicate. Thus, I suggest that theatrical costuming is a uniquely productive means for the study of state and individuals in early Qing history, and that this interpretive framework allows us to better understand the Ming–Qing transition as a reconfiguration of the sartorial system, a policing of theatricality, and a transformation of individual identities.
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Praise for
STAGING PERSONHOOD
“A marvelous piece of scholarship, Staging Personhood presents an exhaustive study of the function of clothing on stage and off. While speaking to issues of sexuality, gender, masculinity, and status in real society, the book goes beyond the existing literature to introduce the body as a symbolic marker and site of detailed and sustained discourse.” —Stephen H. West, coeditor of The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays: The Earliest Known Versions “In this thoughtful and richly informative study of theatrical costume in the early Qing, Guojun Wang explores the dramatic transformation in the clothing and hairstyles of Han Chinese men through actual drama. Plunged into the imagined worlds created for audiences of long ago, the reader emerges from Staging Personhood with a sense of the play between costume and clothing, the theatrical and the everyday, that produced the sartorial landscape of early Qing China.” —Antonia Finnane, author of Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation “A refreshing book that will encourage readers and researchers to pay closer attention to the modes and codes of theatrical costuming in association with issues of ethnicity, gender, and individual identities, embedded in the specific context of early Qing China.” —Tian Yuan Tan, author of Passion, Romance, and Qing: The World of Emotions and States of Mind in “Peony Pavilion” “Solidly felted, seamlessly knitted, and shrewdly illuminative, Guojun Wang’s scholarship is a brocade of erudition—or should I say, a magician’s cloak, waving for overdue attention to the disappearing act of Qing stage costumes and their ghostly presence. Sharply revealed in Wang’s needle eye, class, gender, ethnicity, and, above all, time-space are no longer set fault lines of history but are warped and woven to the effect of costumed personhood.” —Ling Hon Lam, author of The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NE W YOR K
cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.