 Well, ladies and gentlemen, it has just gone 7.30, so we ought to make a start. For those of you who were here on Tuesday, either physically or watching us virtually online, a very warm welcome back. For those of you who weren't able to be here on Tuesday, well, my name is David Pearson. I am the Chairman of the Panitzi Selection Council, and I have to tell you, I'm afraid, that you missed a wonderful lecture on Tuesday. When this year's speaker in the Panitzi Lectures, Professor Cynthia Brockow, from Brown University in Rhode Island in America, gave us the first of her lectures on woodblock publishing in China's First Age of Print. But those of you who couldn't make number one, it's never too late to start. This is only the middle lecture of the series, and we have this one and two more to go, one more to go, and I hope that you'll be able to attend them all. A little bit of housekeeping that I am asked to tell you. We will have some questions and answers at the end of the lecture, and those of you who are watching virtually will have the opportunity to submit any questions through the tab at the bottom of the screen, and you can do that at any point during the lecture or at the end, and I should be able to see them on my iPad, and we will be able to box and cocks between the questions that come in from outside and any questions that come in in the room. And as with Tuesday's lecture, we are hugely grateful to Jonathan Hill, the New York Bookseller, for sponsoring the costs of live streaming the lectures, which we're doing this year for the first time. For those of you who are here physically, the good news that I can give to you is that the bar outside is going to be open at the end of the lecture, and anybody who has time to stay for a little bit of British Library refreshment, as I say, there will be an opportunity to partake of that at the end. I think that is as much as you need to know from me for now. The main event of the evening is definitely not me. It is Professor Cynthia Brockow, and she is going to talk to us tonight about the publishing boom of early modern China and late Ming book culture. And Cynthia, the stage is yours. Thank you. Thank you, David. And again, thank you all for coming out on this very cold night. I hope it wasn't only the lure of the bar being open that attracted you. Okay. The last lecture introduced the major technology of pre-modern Chinese printing xylography, and briefly surveyed the origins and early development of printing during China's first age of print. This lecture and the next focus on the early modern period, the 16th through the 18th centuries, the late Ming and the early Qing dynasties. During this period, there was an explosion in the quantity and an increase in the variety of books printed to meet the demands of a steadily expanding readership, the different tastes, levels of literacy, and purchasing power. Driven largely by commercial publishers, the publishing boom transformed the nature and reach of Chinese book culture. Tonight, I'm going to treat the first part of this publishing boom and the distinctive book culture it created in the first century of the early modern era. From the late 16th century to the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. As I cannot, in the time I have, hope to provide a comprehensive overview of late Ming book culture. I'll discuss works produced at the two opposite ends of the publishing hierarchy. First, the most impressive products of high-end publishing for which the period is famous, and then turning to what is perhaps the most significant development of the day, I'll treat the advances made in popular commercial publishing, that is the production of texts for non-elites, literates of lower social status. But first, to explain briefly the forces that drove the publishing boom of the late Ming. First, demographic growth. The Chinese population more than doubled between the 1390s and the early 17th century, resulting obviously in an increase in demand for texts. Second, by the mid-16th century, China was enjoying a commercial boom, fueled not only by agrarian prosperity, but also by the influx of silver resulting from China's participation in the world luxury trade. Commercialization stimulated social mobility and created a population of newly prosperous men and some women who now, probably for the first time, had the purchasing power to buy books. Commercialization also drove urbanization, particularly in the wealthy and culturally advanced lower yangs delta, or what is called the Jiangnan region, which, let's see if I can get the, is roughly this part of the Ming empire. Here is a map that shows you a little bit more precisely the Jiangnan area, and it's the area encircled by that pink dotted circle. Nanjing, Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Hangzhou were the great cities and some of the most important publishing centers and book markets of the late Ming, and you see all the cities identified on this map. Men ambitious for political power might flock to the capital of Beijing, but anyone who wanted to benefit from the commercial wealth of the day, and I might add, lead the high life, headed for Jiangnan. Publishers shrewdly recognizing that the growth in the number of city dwellers provided them with a large and yet concentrated market began producing stories of urban life and practical guides to city living. Often in the vernacular language, designed to attract merchants, traders, shopkeepers, and artisans. Finally, a new interpretation of Confucianism emerged to challenge the elitism and rigidity of the Confucian orthodoxy of the day. Since the Song dynasty, the 13 Confucian classics, which as works attributed to the great sages of antiquity were believed to be the repositories of moral teaching and the principles of perfect governance, formed the content of the civil service examination system. The idea here was that mastery of these texts would enable the individual to realize the moral principle innate within him and thus become a sage, and then a man qualified to govern others. But mastery of these texts and the very large body of other writings that explained them took years of arduous book learning and memorization, only practically possible for the highly educated elite. In the early 16th century, however, a distinguished scholar official, Wang Yang Ming, challenged this view of the path to sagehood, arguing quite simply that if moral principle existed within one, then the quickest and simplest way of realizing it would be to look inside oneself and realize what he called one's innate knowledge of the good. The years of laborious study demanded an orthodox Confucianism were simply unnecessary. And a corollary, of course, of that conclusion was that anyone could become a sage. One did not even have to be literate. As Wang Yang Ming put it, even ignorant men and women could achieve moral perfection. Now, as you can imagine, this view never won widespread acceptance. Men who had devoted their youth to sweating over their books and who had perhaps achieved some degree of political power, wealth and high social status as a result of their labor were not likely to embrace Wang Yang Ming's views. But his ideas did become popular enough to inspire an effort by some sympathetic literati to produce simple explanations of the classics for unskilled readers and vernacular fiction that addressed the moral concerns of merchants, artisans and women, works in short that assumed that ignorant men and women were capable of moral conduct. Some of these men even promoted the radical notion that vernacular fiction might be a more effective teaching tool than the classics. The celebrated poet Yuan Hongdao, who was very clearly a member of the educated elite, famously and scandalously admitted that he fell asleep whenever he tried to read the classics or the dynastic histories, whereas he found reading popular novels like Bandits of the Marsh or the historical romances like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, both entertaining and instructive. When classical compositions cannot get their meaning across, Volger works can, he wrote. And we'll see the influence of some of these ideas later. So several converging interrelated forces propelled the publishing boom of the late Ming. Population growth increased the demand for texts while wealth generated by commercialization meant that more people had the purchasing power to purchase texts. Increased social mobility, the rise in the status of merchants and the growth in the urban population inspired profit seeking publishers to compete with one another to produce works designed to appeal to a growing and more varied readership at the same time that the Wang Yang Ning School promoted writing for an audience that included ordinary men and women as well as sophisticated readers. Now, as I've indicated, it's actually this last development, the expansion in the book market and in readership that actually interests me in my own research most. But it would be remiss of me not to devote some time to what are undoubtedly the most beautiful and the most technologically innovative works produced for elite readers in the late Ming. The tradition of scholarly publication by elite families and high-end commercial publishers established as we saw last time in the Song flourished also in the late Ming. To give you just one example, Mao Jin from a wealthy gentry family, of course in the Jiangnan region, was an avid book collector and publisher. He claimed that he was inspired to publish when in a dream, a dragon, an imperial symbol, presented him with two banners, one of which had classics written on it, the other histories. So employing a staff of 20 block cutters and printers, he devoted his life to publishing the classics, histories and literary texts, sometimes in facsimile editions of earlier Song and Yuan works. At his print shop, very aptly titled, Pavilion of Drawing from the Well of the Ancients. This is the cover page from one of the collections of ancient texts that he published. It includes 140 titles, mostly Song and Yuan works, that he printed from 16,637 wood blocks between 1630 and 1642. But the most famous publications of the late Ming and the ones that I think best expressed the playful, aesthetically refined, and perhaps even slightly precious culture of Jiangnan are illustrated works, particularly fictional works and works that employ new techniques of color printing. If the Song is the golden age of calligraphic print, then the Ming is the golden age of illustration and color. The finest illustrations were often the result of collaborations between noted artists and highly skilled block cutters. Here, for example, are some magnificent illustrations from the 1639 edition of the drama, Romance of the Western Wing, a wildly popular love story, perhaps the most popular drama of the period. Here we have a portrait of the heroine, and then a picture of her hiding behind a folding screen to read a note from her lover, while her maidservant spies on her from around the corner of the screen. And then another very fine illustration from this work, a picture of the hero sleeping and dreaming of a meeting with the hero and his lover. The designs here are by Zhang Hongxiu, a famous figure painter of the day, and they were cut by the master Hongxiu block cutter, Xiangnan Zhou. By far the most famous block cutting artisans of the late Ming were from Huizhou, a cluster of counties in Anhui and Jiangxi provinces on the periphery of the Jiangnan area. As Mikayla Bezoti notes in her study of these cutters, members of the Huang lineage of Huizhou in particular became famous for their cutting skill, so much so that they were often lured to Nanjing, Hangzhou and Suzhou to cut for elite commercial publishers in those cities. And here's an example of what might result from a collaboration between a high-end publisher and a Huizhou block cutter. These very striking illustrations to one of the most popular vernacular novels of the late Ming, Bandits of the Marsh, cut by the Huizhou cutter, Huang Yingguang, working for a Hangzhou publishing house. This is the first picture that opens the novel. It depicts, I think, very strikingly the release of the 108 spirits who become the 108 bandit heroes of the story. And I think you can see right there that is one of the spirits emerging in this cloud of black smoke to take his place in the story. Here is another illustration from this work showing one of the heroes assaulting a neighborhood bully whose victims cower at the left anxiously awaiting the result of the fight. Huizhou was also famous as the home of some of the most prosperous merchants of the late Ming. The commercial wealth of Huizhou supported the publishing efforts of many members of the merchant lineages. Notable here is the rather enigmatic Wang Tingna, skian of a merchant family who, although he funded his very comfortable lifestyle from his family's commercial wealth, rather ostentatiously chose to devote his life, not commerce, but to engagement with the literati culture of Jiangnan. A bibliophile, he also oversaw a publishing house, the Hall of Encircling Jade, which produced some dramas for which he falsely claimed authorship. And a few beautifully illustrated vanity publications designed, it seems, to display both his mastery of his elite aesthetics and his great wealth. Here are two illustrations from one of his works that is presented as a manual on chess, how to play chess, but which in fact seems intended to show off Wang Tingna's large and luxurious garden and his enjoyment of an elite pastime. The designs of this very striking publication were by the artist, Wang Gong. The images were cut by the noted Huizhou block cutter, Huang Yinzhu. It is however in the arena of color printing that late Ming publishers produced their most spectacular effects. The Ming is the age when color printing was used most lavishly and to greatest effect in a variety of different ways. The Min family and Ling family publishers of Huizhou, near the city of Hangzhou, again in the Jiangnan region, specialized in the production of multicolored editions of the classics, histories, medical texts, literary collections, et cetera, sometimes using up to five different colors to print these texts. This Min family edition of the Songs of Chu, which is an ancient poetry collection, is printed in three different colors. You see the main text in the large black characters are accompanied by a sort of standard commentary also in black, but in two columns of interlinear characters. But then you see additional characters are printed in the upper margin. Again these would be considered eyebrow comments if you remember that term from the previous lecture. And then of course the punctuation and emphasis markers are also in color. Now we might imagine that the purpose of this kind of color printing was clarity, that it was used as an aid to help the reader distinguish between text and commentary and additional commentaries. But the publisher, Min Xi Ji, reveals that the true motive was aesthetic. The different colors enlivened what might otherwise be a very boring text. In the preface to another multicolored work, an addition of the Confucian classic Spring and Autumn Annals, which traveled with its most popular commentary, the Zoll commentary, he explains. In printing of the past commentary and punctuation were all printed in black and readers attuned to aesthetics found these texts boring to read. Now we add a separate block, print the classic in the Zoll commentary in black, the commentary in vermilion and proof no more than three to five times the extra spent on cutting is worth it. Now opening the book is rewarding to the heart mind. Now, if one embraces Min Xi Ji's aesthetic sensibility, then one will find the color printed pictures of the late Ming, even more rewarding to the heart mind. Color was used to embellish catalogs of ink cakes as in this very famous ink garden of Master Cheng with designs by a contemporary artist, Ding Yun Peng, published in the early 17th century. In this catalog of embroidery designs called a collection of scissored clouds in a sex manual. This is the title of the work printed in five colors and again cut by a Huizhou block cutter and here is an actual illustration from the text. I chose the most chaste illustration so it was not to offend anyone's sensibilities. This is the beginning of the text, as you can probably guess. And then also travel albums or tourist albums. This is a leaf from scenic views of lakes and mountains which contains a series of illustrations of literati tourists traveling around to famous sites in the area of Hangzhou, which was a very famous tourist attraction. Now, the late Ming is also the period when the techniques of color printing were most fully developed. As is the case with printing itself, there were several different methods of color printing in use. Colors might be printed all at once or in sequence from a single block or different blocks might be used to print different colors. By the 1620s, a method called printing by assembled blocks had been developed and it is this technique that produced the great masterpieces of Chinese color printing. A separate block was cut for each of the colors to be printed, as you see depicted here, but each block was cut from small pieces of wood so that they were just a few millimeters larger than the area that they were to be used to print. And they were used to print just one element of the image in a pre-planned sequence and this print gives you some idea of how that worked. The flexibility of the assembled blocks method allowed the printer to print fine gradations of a single color by applying various tonal dilutions of the color to the same block. This method required a high degree of skill. Here is an account of the painstaking very much hands-on methods that were employed to achieve fine gradations of color at the most famous color print shop of the day, the Ten Bamboo Studio. In the Ten Bamboo Studio, there were 10 persons whom Hu Zheng Yan, and he was the master of the shop, the manager of the shop, does not treat as mere craftsmen, that is to say, he did not see them as socially inferior. They investigate and discuss printmaking morning and evening so that 10 years pass as if a single day and their skill thus becomes ever more refined. Each of the 10 fingers of the master craftsman is a tool. Printing by pressing with the flesh of the fingers is distinctive, printing with the fingernail or the fingertip is different from printing with the thumb. In the first impressions, one can see Hu Zheng Yan's fingerprints. Isn't that marvelous? And it is this skill that produced one of the greatest works of color printing, the Ten Bamboo Studio manual of calligraphy in painting printed between 1619 and 1633, a collection of prints of bamboo, flowers, rocks, birds, animals, plums, orchids, et cetera, accompanied by poetic inscriptions in beautiful calligraphy. This work displays the effects that a skillful printer could achieve by using the assembled blocks technique and blind embossing. And I just have a series of slides that from this collection of prints. This gives you an idea of there would be the picture on one leaf and on the back would be the poem or the inscription that went with it. Here's another print in the British Museum. And we actually know that this was designed by a noticed artist of the day, Gu Zheng Xuan. And then finally, this illustration of a banana tree with a scholar's rock from the Cambridge University Library. Now, somewhat less famous, but to my mind, I think even more impressive are the color illustrations that accompany Min Qi Ji's edition of the romance of the Western Wing, this drama we've already talked about. This was published in 1640. For these illustrations are not only beautiful, but also interpretive. Without going into the intricacies of the plot of this love story, I will say that the drama is propelled to a large extent by practices of voyeurism, secrecy, containment, and concealment. There is a hint of this in the earlier illustration that we saw, right here, where you see the heroine covertly reading her lover's message while her maidservant is spying on her. But in Min Qi Ji's version, the sense of concealment and voyeurism is multiplied and a whole other layer of interpretation is presented in compositionally complex images. Here, we see the maidservant on the right lurking behind a rock to spy on her mistress, sort of in the center of the illustration, who is in turn spying on the hero who oblivious to her presence is playing a zither in his study. Here is the heroine reading her lover's note before a mirror, again behind a screen. The mirror, of course, that archetypal symbol of illusion. And the screen allows the maidservant to conceal herself but spy on her mistress to read her reaction to the note. Then we have this illustration. The hero and the heroine are consummating their love closed in this bedroom, watched, of course, by the maidservant, the premier voyeur, with a second aspiring voyeur peeking around the wall. And finally, this image of a puppet theater where we see the major characters playing out a crucial scene on the stage while the other character puppets hung on the left side of the stage await their turn in the action. These are just selected illustrations from this work. There are many more. But this is illustration that interprets the text, emphasizing the staged and illusory nature of the passions that unfold in the drama. At the same time, they mark this text as a luxury item intended for a rarefied elite. These prints revealing full mastery of the assembled block color printing technique stand at the aesthetic high end of late Ming printing. I'm a little bit afraid these illustrations do not really do them justice. Now, interestingly, not all members of the elite, that is the scholar official and literati elite that claimed mastery of Confucian ethical moral and aesthetic values, admired these texts. Such men often found illustration itself suspect because it distracted a reader from the serious message contained in a text. Illustration, to their minds, was for those readers who either could not understand the text without it or for those who preferred pretty pictures to the more concentrated effort of reading a text. And of course, no self-respecting Confucian scholar would want to be associated with either group. And color, the character for which Se is actually associated with sex, made illustration considerably more problematic and morally dangerous. Even the multicolored editions of classical texts published by the Min and Ling families were dismissed by some conservative readers as vulgar, as admirable for the technical mastery they revealed. But in the end, nothing more than, quote, fine play things not to be taken too seriously. The Ten Bamboo Studio manual of calligraphy and painting was characterized by somebody who was actually a friend of the publisher as nothing more than a, quote, aesthetic amusement. The distinguished literatist, Sia Jiaozhe, sums up the conventional orthodox stance on such frivolous works. They involve the prolonged concentration of numerous souls, the exhaustion of effort over minute details, the cunning of heaven and the art of man, all vainly to amuse the eyes and ears with marvels. It's difficult to know how to interpret this high-minded disdain as a kind of dog in the manger response to the speaker's awareness that wealthy merchants were much more likely to be able to purchase such marvels than he was, or as a sincere attack on an aesthetic sensibility that diverged sharply from the confusion values of restraint and austerity. Now, the works that we have just seen occupy the highest levels of the book market in the late Ming. Many of them indeed may not ever have been sold on the conventional book market. It's likely that they served instead as networking tools as a kind of cultural currency in the elite market in prestige. But now I'd like to descend to the depths of the publishing hierarchy, and to the lower levels of Ming book culture and the real commercial book network that dealt in actual money, to look at another major trend of late Ming, publishing. The proliferation of books designed for the growing population of non-elite or common readers, men and perhaps some women who were at the very least functionally literate and thanks to the new commercial opportunities of the day, now comfortable enough economically, that they could afford to purchase books. The emergence and importance of this new population of consumers is clearly revealed in the attention that commercial publishers, particularly publishers in Zhenyang, that publishing site outside of Jiangnan in northern Fujian province that we actually talked about last time. It's still very much a thriving publishing site in the late Ming. These were the publishers who eager to increase profits were devoted to developing strategies to attract this new audience of readers. And I want now to look at some of the strategies that they employed. First, there is a change in what we might call the calligraphy of print. Beginning in the 16th century, one particular calligraphic style comes into very common use, the craftsman style. Now this had existed before, it's just in the 16th century, it becomes very, very commonly employed. And this is an illustration of a text printed in the craft or cut and printed in the craftsman style. It happens to be a leaf from a Buddhist sutra that was part of the Jiaxing Tripitaka, a printing of the entire Buddhist canon that began in the late Ming but wasn't completed until the early Qing. The dominance of this so-called hard style for the remainder of woodblock printing history is the reason that bibliophiles see the Ming and Qing as marking a decline in Chinese book aesthetics. Craftsman style is characterized by thick vertical and thin horizontal strokes. And then rather rigidly straight and level strokes. And it produced characters that, although you can see they, if well cut, they're very clear, they lack of the grace and individuality of the soft style characters in the best of Song imprints. And here you see the craftsman style on the right and a leaf from a Song edition with this very graceful flowing and quite distinctive calligraphy on the left and I think the contrast is pretty clear. Now the craftsman style of cutting was embraced by cutters and commercial publishers in the late Ming because it was more efficient to cut and therefore cheaper. A cutter could cut blocks in this style more easily and quickly, first cutting all the horizontal strokes on a block, then turning the block and doing all the vertical ones, et cetera. And this meant of course that the publisher could save on cutting costs and production time, a saving that he might pass at least in part onto his customers. But this style had a benefit for readers as well, as Martin Haider has noted, although the craftsman style characters lack the elegance and grace of the Song dynasty characters as standardized forms evenly spaced in a rigid grid, they were easier not only to cut, but actually also to read so that readers of limited literacy struggled less painfully through these works. Commercial publishers also employed paratextual strategies that made some texts more accessible to not highly literate readers. Punctuation and emphasis marks helped guide the novice reader through texts. This is a leaf from a collection of famous essays and famous excerpts from ancient texts. And you can see that it's marked with several different kinds of punctuation. First of all, you have the sort of comma-like, it's here, which are basically marking off the phrases. You have the vertical lines, which identify proper names, personal names, and place names. And then you have these other interesting markers, these sort of teardrop markers here, and then these circle markers here. Well, this is a collection, it's an anthology of essays, but it's also designed to sort of teach the reader what is wonderful about these essays, what their literary qualities are, that the reader should study and try to learn how to imitate in his own writing. And those, again, the teardrops and the circle markings are marking off parts of the text that the compiler that the editor wants to call to the attention of the reader. And then, of course, you noticed at the top, well, first of all, this text does have interlinear commentary, the double columns of smaller characters, which explain the larger characters, but then also it does have printed eyebrow commentary. Again, another, a further aid to understanding of the text. Commentary also in these texts becomes more copious. The classics in the past usually had been published with commentary, but now they're published with even more commentary, often added in additional registers of text to clarify the meaning of these works, which by this time were very, very difficult to read. Perhaps in an effort to reach ignorant men and women, the ignorant men and women that Wang Yang Ming celebrated, some works carried commentary in the vernacular language. And for both punctuation and commentary, the title of the book would often announce that the book was punctuated or contained extra commentary. So clearly this was a selling point in this period. Another strategy, different editions of basically the same text might be produced to appeal to different sectors of the reading public. And McLaren has noted at least two parallel textual traditions in the circulation of vernacular novels in this period, one pictorial and simple, and the other literary and complex. The Zhenyang publishers were noted for their production of fiction in the first, the pictorial and simple tradition. For example, this edition of a collection of what we might call detective stories, various court cases from the Ming dynasty, marvelously and correctly judged, published by Yu Xiangdo, one of the most prolific of the Zhenyang publishers, at his Twin Peek Hall in 1605. And you see every page of this work is illustrated in the picture above, text below format, beloved by Zhenyang publishers. Again, we saw some examples of this last time. Each picture is linked to the action recounted in the text below so that it can serve as an aid to readers. Works in this pictorial and simple tradition also differed in linguistic register. They were written in a simpler style with fewer citations of historical documents or poetry in classical Chinese. Here is one of the most famous vernacular novels of the day, a historical romance set in the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, also published in Zhenyang. And you can see that it too follows this picture above, text below format. Now, the literary complex texts in contrast employed an elevated style and were often not illustrated at all or had scattered illustrations or had only full page illustrations collected at the beginning of the work, as in this 1663 edition of another very popular vernacular novel, Journey to the West, a highly fictionalized account of a Chinese monk's travels to India to collect Buddhist sutras in the Tang Dynasty. Now, how does this particular work mark itself as a literary complex text? Well, it opens with a preface in running script in good calligraphy. So already we're dealing with some level of sophistication. Its full page illustrations are clustered all at the beginning of the text and are all finally executed. Again, I'm showing you just a few of them. There are quite a few in the real text. And then the text is in the more elevated literary style. You can contrast this work to this pictorial simple edition of the same novel, Journey to the West, but published in Jiangnan in, again, this picture above, text below format with crude illustrations and a rather cramped, not particularly pleasant to read text. Now, I'd like to spend, for the remaining time, here looking at one particular type of popular text, a kind of case study of a text that was more or less new in the late Ming period. And I would argue very much a product of commercial publishers' efforts to both serve and expand the new reading public of the day. This is the genre of the daily use encyclopedia. These are works produced, again, most prolifically in Zhenyang, that purport to reveal all the information that one needs in the conduct of daily life. Consisting of citations cobbled together from previous texts, they came to be known generically as Wanbao Quan Xu, Compendia of Myriad Treasures, or as Buqiu Yuan, works that rescued one from the embarrassment of having to consult others. My favorite title, but anyway. This genre had antecedents in the late Song and Yuan periods, but it is really only in the late Ming that these works were crafted in both their contents and paratex to appeal to a popular audience. Here, I'm going to draw on two different editions of what was essentially the same work to create a kind of composite picture of what these works offered their readers and to suggest why they were so popular. In irresponsibly mixing and matching two texts in this way, I am operating very much in the spirit of these works. Their compilers, who were very often also their publishers, were promiscuous mixers and matchers, that is to say pirates, never hesitating to lift pictures or texts, sometimes whole chapters, from other Wanbao Quan Xu in order to put together what they could claim, obviously very dubiously, was a hot off the blocks, up to date new edition, informing readers of the latest trends. The base text that I'm using here is Santai's infinitely useful guide to how to do everything right for the convenient consultation of all the four classes under heaven, newly cut. Compiled by, once again, the Jianyang publisher, Yu Xiang Dou, who's, he had many names and one of them was Santai, so when it says Santai is infinitely useful, it's Yu Xiang Dou's infinitely useful work. The second work, which traveled under the title of Orthodox guide to a myriad categories of useful information for all, compiled at the pavilion of a revered culture so that you need not seek the advice of others, just newly cut. Also published by Yu Xiang Dou, but eight years later in 1607, has really exactly the same title page as the other texts, although it purports in its formal title to be a different text. In fact, it's not all that different. But anyway, let's begin with the cover page of Santai's How to Do Everything Right. I'll give you the abbreviated title. And indeed, the cover page contains the abbreviated title in large characters, which I would render as Santai's How to Do Everything Right, organized in categories. Again, this was published in 1599. And this abbreviated title highlights the real selling points of the text. You know, it's telling you how to do everything right. And then it also, of course, mentions the publishers on the compiler's name, Santai. The cartouche at the top of the page presents scenes of elite men. They're wearing official caps, engaged in high status leisure activities. Here, this gentleman is playing the zither. Here, they're playing what seems to be chess. Here, they're viewing a hanging scroll. They're art connoisseurs. The implication here is clearly that the text will make the reader into a master of the social and artistic skills of the elite. The colophon blatantly asserts the superiority of this production over other commercial Juan Bautrencu, emphasizing that it conforms to the highest scholarly standards and once again drops the name of the publishing house. Commercial shops publish all sorts of books, often producing old works over and over, which is, of course, exactly what Yu Xiangdo does, but anyway, taking one part and discarding 10, rejecting the fine and selecting the course. Scholars everywhere distrust these works. This shop recently published this work, titled How to Do Everything Right. It is topically arranged with all the information you need provided. On opening the book and beginning to read, you will see that it is so comprehensive that you will need not to seek out other texts. Buyers, please acknowledge the Santai House as the registered seller. The preface on the following page emphasizes the practical usefulness of the work. Yu Xiangdo opens with a complaint about what we might call information overload, asking rhetorically. The number of books is now boundless as the ocean. How can we read them all? If the multitudinous techniques of the 100 schools are not abridged and edited, then who will record them? Who will transmit them? He announces that he has nobly stepped up to the task. I have availed myself of my spare time to collect all the techniques. And here he means the techniques of some medicine, divination, physiognomy, fate calculation, et cetera, et cetera. Divide them into categories, bringing together the essential and selecting the best. He assures the reader that all matters of practical worth have been gathered together. Nothing in the world and nothing of daily use has not been searched out and included. And the title, How to Do Everything Right, means that it provides a model for everyday life. Now, this might seem like actually a rather unexceptional opening to the text, but you here is making what is in fact a rather subversive claim about what constituted useful, valuable knowledge. The kind of mundane, practically useful knowledge that you is promoting here was not seen as of particular value in the world of the classically educated elite, for whom the eternal truths of the classics were the only useful and worthwhile forms of knowledge. Knowledge of the 100 schools and the multitudinous techniques that Yuxiang Dou is celebrating was actually just the kind of knowledge that had been dismissed, relegated to the preserve of men and women who, as the early Confucian thinker Menchus noted, worked with their hands, not with their minds. Yet here it is made the object of learning, the knowledge that anyone who wants to do everything in the proper fashion must master. It is, as another Wanbao Trenshu more explicitly states, the miraculous knowledge not found in the Confucian classics. From a strictly orthodox standpoint, there is something close to blasphemous in this notion that miraculous knowledge might exist outside of the Confucian classical canon. And for this reason, Wanbao Trenshu have been seen as harbingers of a sea change in the conception of knowledge in the early modern era. But perhaps it's not too startling that works validating mundane knowledge would emerge at a time when a movement for the re-evaluation of Confucian thinking was promoting recognition of the moral potential of ordinary commoners of ignorant men and women and when there was, in the literary world, an efflorescence of vernacular fiction, which at least in many of its forms is grounded in the mundane. The Table of Contents leads with the full title of the work on the far right. And then, this title, like all of these works, have extremely long, almost comically long titles that pretty much emphasize the same thing, the usefulness, correctness, convenience, universal applicability, and up-to-datedness of the Wanbao Trenshu. The Table of Contents dazzles the reader with a list of 43 different chapters. You see the chapters, titles, and the larger characters at the top. I'm only showing you two pages of the Table of Contents here. Under each chapter heading, the contents of both the upper and lower registers of each chapter are also listed. Now, this work, when we get into its actual contents, it actually opens with a kind of conventional information that any encyclopedia might contain. A chapter on the heavens, on geography, on famous historical figures, on foreign lands. But it then also provides chapters on writing letters and contracts, playing games, learning calligraphy and painting, studying the zither, telling jokes, conducting oneself properly in brothels, curing childhood diseases, casting charms and spells, practicing martial arts, tending to livestock, farming, et cetera, et cetera. Again, 43 different topics. Now, what would normally follow at this point on the Table of Contents would be the first page of the main text. But Yu Xiangdu never want to miss an opportunity for self-promotion as a portrait of himself as a literate is surrounded by symbols, perhaps just a few too many of them to be entirely persuasive of wealth and learning. He's seated at a desk with an open, whoops, whoops, whoops, I pressed the long button, sorry. Seated at a desk with an open book before him, surrounded by a variety of attendance. He's in a garden with this rather awkwardly depicted scholars rock here, a pool of what appear to be carp. Again, all these symbols of elite status and learning sort of crammed together rather awkwardly in this frame. In addition to its function as a self-advertisement, this portrait reinforces the notion already set forth on the cover page that the use of this work will make the reader a cultivated gentleman, a literatus. Compiled by a literatus, how to do everything right can teach you too to become a literatus. And then we finally get to the text itself. This is heavily interlarded with illustrations and different character formats that seem, at least at first glance, to serve as aids to the reader to guide him or her through the text to learn how to do everything right. Here, for example, from the correspondence chapter are charts that inform the writer what forms of address to use in correspondence, in particular how to observe hierarchical relationships between respected elders and lowly youths. This chapter instructs how to form the land with illustrations of peasants working their fields. Here is a chapter on the martial arts. Note the picture on the right, showing one man subduing two aggressive females. Animal husbandry shows how to treat diseases and horses and oxen. Construction explains how to build houses and pavilions. Self-cultivation describes techniques of meditation and physical cultivation. Games illustrates moves in board games. Foreign peoples introduces the reader to both real and fantastic creatures. In the lower register here, there is an illustration of a man from Siam on the right and a member of the Siung Nu nomadic tribe on the left. And these are real peoples and real foreign places. But of course, the top register consists of portraits of imagined creatures. I'm not sure how to describe the one on the left, a kind of headless winged creature. A multi-headed serpent on the right, et cetera, et cetera. These Wanbao Chenshu were exuberantly paratext. Information is crammed into two supposedly complementary registers. Illustrations, as I hope I've demonstrated, abound and varying character sizes and formats are used to differentiate subtopics. So here are two leaves from the geography section. And you see the major subject, sorry. The major subject on the lower register, this is Beijing. So this is about the city of Beijing. You will notice here they mark off the different subtopics here. This is on the population, the registered population of the city. This printed in intaglio tells you that this section is going to discuss the local products from the area. So there is this effort to format the text in a way that at least makes it seem as if it's guiding the reader. The paratext in these works then all loudly assert the comprehensiveness, usefulness, convenience, and universal applicability across all four classes of the people, of the knowledge they purport to purvey. But even a brief reflection on these components of the text and a glance at their contents reveal how misleading these paratextual claims are. The titles identifying the likely audience for the Wandao Trenshu as all four classes of the people would certainly put off members of the upper of the four classes. A member of the elite would presumably not be attracted to a work, build is for everyone. And he would certainly be offended by the notion that he needed a text to explain how to do everything right. And careful study of the information presented in the different chapters yields a very mixed impression of the real usefulness of these works. To be sure, information on how to write letters and contracts and other simple legal documents could likely be of some real use. But the chapters claiming to provide information on the elite arts, calligraphy, painting and music, et cetera. And those purporting to teach complex skills, medicine, veterinary and human, agriculture, and so on are misleading, often comically so. For example, the chapter on calligraphy, that highest of the elite arts, does contain some useful information on its opening pages. These are real characters and the text gives you some idea about how they're supposed to be written. But as Wang Zhenghua has pointed out, it quickly descends into absurdity with illustrations like this that purport to show different examples of seal script characters. These were characters in an ancient script that was no longer in common use in the lightning, but would be the kinds of characters that educated elites would be expected to be able to read and even perhaps write. This is an example of real seal script. But here in the Wandao Chenshu, this script is depicted in all sorts of very strange ways, as consisting of schools of fish, tadpoles, flocks of birds here in this column. And then just in forms that are totally made up, they're totally fantastic. The designer of this text is playing a joke on the reader, or perhaps he's playing a joke on antiquity. These are not authentic ancient character forms, but products of the playful, hucksterish imagination of the compiler. So too, it's hard to see how one could really learn how to irrigate rice fields or cure a diseased water buffalo from the incomplete and jumbled information contained in the chapters on agriculture or veterinary medicine. The popularity of the compendium of myriam treasures lay not in their usefulness and convenience, but in the entertainment value of their many lively pictures and fantastic claims, in the illusion that they offered the aspiring gentleman in the chapters on the literati arts a glimpse at the social and cultural lies of the elite and what they offered the aspiring man of the world in the chapters on agriculture, astronomy, and medicine, just enough information about these subjects to appear in casual conversation in the know. The Wanbao Chengxu may in their contents betray the claims of their paratex to real usefulness and convenience for all, but they remain nonetheless very useful to the book historian. First, for what they reveal about the ways in which the publishing pioneers of the late Ming, chief among them the commercial publishers of Zhenyang, worked to expand the market for texts by shrewdly discerning the new interests of the growing reading public in the late Ming and creating products or adapting old ones to these new interests. Second, they reveal the aspirations of the new class of readers who profiting from the commercial boom of the 16th century now had the purchasing power to buy works that if they did not teach them how to do everything right, at least offered them a lively and entertaining, albeit not particularly accurate, glimpse into the culture and social world of the elite. Now, here I've given you a very partial picture of woodblock publishing during the beginning of the early modern period. During the publishing boom of the late Ming, publishers continued to reproduce the genres of texts, the classics, histories, Buddhist sutras, and Taoist scriptures, medical texts, and literary collections that we found in the Song and Yuan periods, but they also expanded or opened up new fields of print in popular fiction and drama, music, the industrial arts, travel, shipbuilding, science, including, by the way, some scientific treatises from the West, and so on and so on. As I have not had time to provide a comprehensive overview of Ming printing here, I've chosen to highlight two of the developments that especially distinguish it, the perfection of woodblock illustration and color printing at the high end of the publishing industry, and at its opposite end, the recognition, and to some extent the creation by commercial publishers of a market in text design for the lower levels of the literate population. As we have seen, it's not just that publishers were printing more texts and a greater variety of texts, they were also interested in producing titles in different formats for different readerships, novels in a literary and complex edition for the highly lyric and a pictorial and simple edition for the less well educated, and some texts, like the daily use encyclopedias, were designed to provide not very discriminating and perhaps rather gullible readers with scraps of knowledge that publishers like you, Xiong Dou, promised would explain to them how to do everything right. Now, do these two ends of the publishing industry, there were the publishing hierarchy, I should say, have anything in common? Well, following the lead of He Yu Ming, I think that we can detect a playful, perhaps even somewhat irreverent quality that links these two extremes. Min Xi Ji claims that the classics were so boring that they needed to be livened up with color print. Yu Xiong Dou passes schools of fish calligraphy off as archaic Chinese script and includes chapters on joke telling and brothel etiquette in his daily use encyclopedias. Min Xi Ji's illustrations to the romance of the Western Wing turn the drama into an adventure in double and even triple voyeurism and illusion. The exuberant promiscuous and often deceitful paratex of how to do everything right, not to mention the presumption of its title, make comically exaggerated claims to contain comprehensive culturally sophisticated knowledge. All of these choices reflect, I think, a playful, even humorous sensibility that comes close to characterizing what is distinctive about Lei Ming book culture. And it is indeed this character that earned that book culture heavy censure in the more straight-laced Qing dynasty, the setting for the next and final lecture. Thank you. And do we have any questions, James? I do have one question already on the iPad, but I think the floor has precedence. James. Thank you. There was just an astonishing lecture and I was struck by the parallels between this earlier commercialization that you were talking about and what was happening in Europe later, you know, from the late 17th century and then I suppose through maturing, if that's the right word, in the 18th century, but this is all happening earlier. And there were so many fascinating parallels here in terms of market segregation, in terms of puffing the book. It just goes on and on, really. But I wondered about two aspects particularly, whether there were further parallels in an even greater sort of segmentation of the market, whether you get highly specific readerships, for example, for children or for women or for particular professions. And a second aspect of that, which was whether the wonderful encyclopedias and extracts of other works, which have these parallels, too, were in Europe also paralleled by or were developed into part issues. And so that the hot off the press or the hot off the block also became a part issue issue. Is there other parallels there, too? Oh, okay. The first question. I think it's mostly in texts for specific professions that you find this kind of, what I would call niche textual production in the late Ming. And for children's literature, I don't know that you really have that developing until much later. And you have primers, but things like children's stories and so on. That is, although actually there are some encyclopedias that are collections of stories intended for, I think young students, not necessarily children's, not like fairy tales, but collections that are intended for that. And that is a phenomenon of this particular period. So, yes, you are getting the development of kind of niche markets in this period as well. Again, had I had more time, I probably would have gone into that a little bit more thoroughly. And then your second, I couldn't quite understand you. The idea of serial publication. You might do in party shoes and serials. Does that happen? Not to my knowledge. That is, again, a much later development. You mean like the way Dickens published novels? Or something like that, because you were talking about the idea of it being advertised as newsworthy, as hot off the block as you put it. And so I wonder whether that developed into saying, even to an extent, look out for the next, the second part, even to a third part, perhaps, or even like a saga, over time. Yeah, not really. I mean, you do have sequels to a lot of the vernacular novels, but they're not necessarily, they're just continuations of the story that come after the original version has been published. So I don't think there's anything like that. I mean, that's a strategy that's used within these vernacular novels. You very often have the end of the chapter will say, and if you wanna find out what happens next, read the next chapter. And that's believed to be a kind of carryover from an oral storytelling tradition, but that's not really what you're talking about. No, and frankly, the advertisements of the daily use encyclopedias for reflecting the latest trends, that's usually not true. I mean, it's just an advertising strategy. So I don't think you really have serial publications, again, that I'm aware of in this period now. Okay, we do have a couple of questions that have come in online. Marco Khalil is asking, could you comment on the blankness of the page in Chinese book culture? Have the Chinese attributed mystical, religious, and negative, aesthetic values to the emptiness in pages as the Japanese have in their Buddhist interpretations of ma or gaps? Dear, I don't know. I have no idea. I'm sorry. I don't know the answer to that question. Thank you, right. I'm already looking into it, yes. Sorry, Marco, a brief, but straight up answer to that one. And then Ingrid Dismet is asking, after saying thank you very much for a wonderful lecture, the quality of the prints and their refinement is amazing. Could you say a little bit more about the coloured prints? Perhaps I missed this, but were prints also coloured in afterwards, e.g., on demand of the customer, in the way the prints of the same period in Europe, like maps or city views, atlases, zoological prints, might be embellished with watercolours, kind of post-printing, and were women involved in this kind of printing and colouring? Okay, the examples I know of, actually, they're single sheet images, usually, that would the basically outlines of the image would be printed, but then the colour would be added by hand after the, and this was done particularly for single sheet prints of auspicious symbols that were usually sold and pasted up at the New Year as a sort of symbol of the New Year. That's the one case I know of that. There are some, in the next dynasty, the Qing, the imperial government does produce some texts that are hand-painted. The text has been printed, but the illustrations have been hand-painted, but those are the only two sort of instances of that kind of work that I am aware of. And then did women engage in this kind of work? That's very hard to say. We don't have very little evidence about women's participation in these crafts. Again, we have a few comments. I think I mentioned one last time where people say even women could cut blocks. And there are, I did do field work in an area in Guangdong province, where there was a community of female block cutters active in the late 19th and early 20th century. But in terms of the painting, I'm not aware of women having been very active. Again, for much of this, we just have very little information. Okay, I fear the time has come to let Cynthia, and indeed all you good folks, go home. But please don't forget, the third and last lecture in the series is next Tuesday. And I hope that you will all be able to be here again, either physically or online. Then if you can be here physically next Tuesday, there will be a free bar outside at the end of the lecture because there will be the traditional British Library reception at the end of the third lecture. But I'm sure you don't need that incentive to come and hear what will clearly be another wonderful lecture. So Cynthia, thank you very much again, and we look forward to seeing you again next week. Thank you.