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forestofgloryWelcome to the second post of our read a long of The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko! For this post we are reading: Chapter 1. The Palace Workshops: The Emperor and His Servants.
Previous posts:
Introduction
You are welcome to join in at any time!
In this chapter we looked at the Qing court and the inkstone makers there. Here are some optional discussion questions:
What where the main arguments in this chapter? Did you find them convincing?
Did any historical figures introduced in the chapter stand out to you? In what way?
Did any of the inkstones in the chapter stand out to you? In what way?
What did this chapter make you want to learn more about?
Previous posts:
Introduction
You are welcome to join in at any time!
In this chapter we looked at the Qing court and the inkstone makers there. Here are some optional discussion questions:
What where the main arguments in this chapter? Did you find them convincing?
Did any historical figures introduced in the chapter stand out to you? In what way?
Did any of the inkstones in the chapter stand out to you? In what way?
What did this chapter make you want to learn more about?
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 12:19 am (UTC)I also continue to be fascinated by the sheer bureaucracy of the Ming and Qing dynasties. They're so organized!
I have not gotten far enough into the chapter to have a lot of thoughts about the historical figures or the inkstones unfortunately. I am hoping tomorrow evening I can catch up and come back for more discussion.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-06 04:50 pm (UTC)I hope real life stuff is calming down for you!
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 04:02 am (UTC)That was another point of confusion for me. When talking about Yongzheng, there's a section that says ' For an object to be “imperial,” it would have to be distinguishable from those made concurrently in workshops outside the court. It is this understanding of style-as-difference that drove the early Qing monarchs to incessant quests for new materials and new techniques.' But then I don't see how that is distinguished from the idea of mass producing gift quality items.
I did appreciate the note that Songhua stone did not become a thing outside of the court. The book gives some reasonable explanations, but I am curious in a we'll never know one way or another way how much it was scholars not wanting to accept this style that was being externally foisted upon them from this new dynasty. Other things that I wondered about while reading were how one would make ink from these elaborate ink cakes versus ink sticks. I imagine it is the same method of grinding it, they just look harder to hold when grinding and since they're an irregular shape I wonder if there's more of an art to grinding them down symmetrically. (Speaking of symmetry, I liked the one cake that the artisan put the actual emperor's words onto. The cycle of words into ink into words. :D) OH I also wondered how the gold leaf ends up effecting the ink that these ink cakes make. Do they flake it off rather than incorporate it irregularly?
Oh I almost forgot, but I liked the discussion of Tang Ying and how he refused to be classified as a scholar only and had his portrait made in stone. Dominion over the intellectual AND material.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-04 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-09 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-06 09:03 pm (UTC)I would really suck to be a master of craft like Liu Yuan and then have your material be outdated!
I appreciate your focus on the physical materials and their properties.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-09 05:06 pm (UTC)It makes me think about if there were some older and private collectors of Liu Yuans other works that maybe encouraged him to keep working with the original Duan stone in relative obscurity.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 04:47 pm (UTC)Did any historical figures introduced in the chapter stand out to you? In what way?
Yes! Where is the historical romance/mystery novel based on bannerman administrator Shen Tingzheng and artisan-scholar Xie Shiji? Because I would like to read it.
Not that I don't think their story supports her thesis that the active bannermen of the Qing were instrumental in shifting public thought away from valorizing pure scholarly pursuits to also admiring the making of things, but, uh, that was not what I was focused on while reading that anecdote.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 08:03 pm (UTC)I found the section on Liu Yuan very interesting, especially how he so freely crossed techniques from one medium to another. Of course, given the talk about how many specialized workshops the imperial artisans were organized into, as soon as I read that, I thought, "I bet that didn't last long," and then the next section was about exactly that. (Interesting and probably entirely coincidental that this was happening at the same time as the Enlightenment in Western Europe, another era of sadly short-lived wild interdisciplinarity. The text does mention the recruiting Jesuits from Europe in addition to outside craftsmen, though, so perhaps not entirely unrelated after all...)
The descriptions of the workshops were also very intriguing. Imagine having such an organized system of essentially artists in residence! And so much intrigue surrounding the issues of knock-off production for sale outside the palace! Even just the brief surface descriptions of the bureaucratic organization of it all indicates to me that all the various historical dramas I've watched that deal with inner palace workings have been underselling it.
Emperor Yongzheng sounds like the micromanaging patron/client from hell, but otoh he was deeply invested. He was overall an interesting figure in the chapter, especially coming at the end after Ko had already introduced the ideas of the Qing starting to transition society away from pure literati veneration, because his focus on inkstones and especially their boxes as art objects and gifts more than scholarly tools essentially condenses that implied Qing spirit. (Also interesting that the final point in the chapter is this had pretty much zero effect on the Han scholars continuing on from the Ming.)
The imperial focus on the harder Songhua stone seems related. Despite its apparent superiority for ink mixing, its real draw seems to have been its more durable hardness making it better for identical production. The most recent art class I took was on wood engraving, which uses the much harder end-grain rather than the softer side-grain of the wood to create a surface that can hold smaller, sharper details and also hold up to a much longer edition of prints being run from it without degradation of quality, better even than etched metal plates. While the purple Duan stone also shown to us clearly allowed for far more sculptural carving with less effort, the green Songhua stone appears to have served Yongzheng's very specific desires much better from both a production and artistic standpoint. It's very interesting to me that what he prized was uniqueness on a production scale, as opposed to the outside literati scholars, who were collecting and prizing individually unique pieces. The imperial and public desires were, as Ko notes, parallel, not overlapping.
I'm anticipating future chapters getting more into the flow of artisans, craftsmen, and scholars into and out of various circles, touched on a bit in this chapter by the mention of Tang Ying and also the fluid records of employment in the imperial workshops. I feel like that theme of movement on several levels is going to repeat.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-06 09:08 pm (UTC)I hadn't thought of comparing this to contemporary Europe but that's a really interesting point about the Enlightenment.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-07 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-07 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-09 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-12 02:09 pm (UTC)Really interesting points about wood engraving, I'd never heard of that before!
Same!! 🤣
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 05:42 pm (UTC)The main arguments in this chapter seem to be about how the Qing rulers use of inkstones represented both a technical and social change from the Ming. I found the technical part of the argument more convincing than the social parts. I think because the social parts assumed I know more about the Ming-Qing transition than I do.
I liked Tang Ying -- I identified a bit with his betwixt and between role.
The Luminous Dragon inkstone was stand out for me. So gorgeous! Though I did wonder if the ink filling up all the crevices would actually make for a nice writing experience. This is where having used inkstones would really be helpful.
The last picture of the woman looking at the inkstone definitely made me curious as to women's use of inkstones, since the chapter focused so much on men.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 08:50 pm (UTC)I'm kind of enjoying learning about the Ming-Qing transition from inference, but it would be particularly interesting to read something about the Ming after this and see how much I interpreted correctly. (I do keep googling various historical figures/time periods I know about to see how they fit in relation to this. The way Luoyang in particular presented the Baili family as engineers on the cusp of being respected scholars seemed topical, but Wu Zetian's rule was 690-705, *way* before the Qing. So the possibilities are: Qing sensibilities persist for people wanting to write historical fiction, Luoyang was not super period-specific, or the Qing differences Ko notes were actually more subtle than she implies. See also: some glimpses of an earlier Ming palace workshop system being referenced in Sleuth, though that one mostly focused on munitions rather than art. We do get a bit of an outside-the-palace art forgeries case, though, with the whole chicken cup plotline.)
no subject
Date: 2022-03-06 09:17 pm (UTC)On the other hand some of the other books I've read have mentioned engineering as prestigious. The Rise of West Lake talked a lot about the power of various minsters who where in charge of various improvements to the lake -- but it's not clear how much engineering they did themselves.
I've also read a bit about the role of monks in bridge building -- I think they both helped collect money to fund bridges and engineered the bridges themselves at least some of the time.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-07 02:53 am (UTC)The main thing they're building in Luoyang is the giant Buddha/temple I assume the empress really did commission, because it seems to feature in all the fiction set in her reign, the Detective Dee movies being the main other ones I've seen.
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Date: 2022-03-07 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-07 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-09 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-12 01:23 pm (UTC)Extraordinarily late but I had been reading this (super slowly.. it's denser than I expected) and thought I'd still share my responses as I go along!
My major takeaway from the chapter overall was that the imperial/literati tastes regarding inkstones are a reflection of the political context. Court inkstones appeared the way they did because of the way that imperial craftsman were trained and recruited at the time (a mix of people trained in-house, and master craftsman recruited from the outside) and because of the drive of the Emperor to have marketable branding and good PR (basically). Meanwhile, most literati were apparently totally unaffected, in terms of personal taste and opinion of inkstones, by imperial output. This seems to imply that despite the Emperors' efforts to be viewed as fellow scholars by the literati, they weren't viewed as real authorities on scholarly matters (like what stones make good inkstones and how inkstones should be stored). Although Manchus ruled the country, they failed to dictate its culture.
Liu Yuan was definitely The character of the chapter for me; he seems like an extreme guy and was entertaining to read about. I also thought the commentary about him being womanly was interesting (insight about gender roles at the time). The bit where the Emperor gifts him calligraphy, and Liu Yuan reacts by building a pavilion to house said calligraphy and then crafted an intricate, symbolically-rich ink cake depicting said calligraphy and said pavilion, killed me. His art also was awesome-- loved that ink cake, and his Luminous Dragons inkstone easily stands out the most to me so far. I love that kind of grandiose ornate object so it definitely appealed to me more than the more "chic" design of later ones.
Yongzheng, besides being probably the most objectively important character of the chapter and representing a lot of the dynamics between the court and society, stood out a lot to me because of how much of a familiar figure he was, like in terms of his personality and attitude. He really reminded me of Steve Jobs, which I was not expecting. The uncompromising vision... the fact that he couldn't actually blueprint everything himself and had to work by reacting to the difficult labor of his helpless subjects... the obsession with presentation and elegance..... the need to make his mark and stand out from his competitors with an identifiable brand... the demand that all of this be scalable such that it could be produced with a codified workflow... it's all there!
Tangential sparks of interest I had from this chapter: women's interaction with scholarship (I know men are the scholars, but my understanding is women of high standing women should also be able to write and paint; is this correct and if so, are there any differences in what inkstones would be appropriate to gift them?); non-inkstone reaction by literati to courtly tastes in matter of scholarship (Songhua stones didn't take hold, but what about painting styles, poetry, other elements of design?).