A Poetics of Book Burning in the Ming-Qing Transition

Description

Historians typically regard the deliberate destruction of books as a means of censorship and ideological control. The First Qin Emperor’s (259–210 BCE) infamous campaign of “burning the books and burying the scholars” (fenshu kengru) in 212 BCE, for instance, became a byword in later periods for the tyrannical repression of knowledge. In the seventeenth century, however, a significant number of Chinese writers—including some of the leading poets and critics of the period—began to reevaluate book burning as a positive and potentially productive activity. 

My talk reexamines this phenomenon by looking at the most notorious case of self-inflicted book burning in the Qing—Zhou Lianggong’s (1612–1672) decision to set fire to the wooden printing blocks for his collected writings in 1671. Zhou’s bibliocaust synthesizes three broader trends: 1) a hardline Neo-Confucian view that print corrupts learning; 2) the valorization of erasure in the transmission of women’s poetry; and 3) the idea that book burning had become a means of self-preservation among Ming loyalists and twice-serving ministers. By reconsidering the complex interplay between these trends, I show how the reevaluation of book burning in seventeenth century scholarly circles illuminates a neglected yet distinctive aspect of late imperial textual culture: namely, that intellectuals responded to a proliferation of books from the sixteenth century onward by prioritizing subtraction over addition. For these thinkers, editing was not simply a matter of preservation and dissemination, but also of curation through destruction.    

Speaker

Thomas Kelly is an assistant professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard. His first book, The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China (Columbia 2023) develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the Ming and Qing dynasties. He is currently working on two book projects. The first, entitled The Unfinished Book, circa 1645, investigates the interplay between a poetics of incompletion and manuscript culture in the Ming-Qing transition. Research for this book has been supported by fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. The second, is a study of performance theory in early modern China based on the life and essays of the drama critic Pan Zhiheng (1566–1622). He is currently serving as the President of the Society for Ming Studies.