The Social Life of Inkstones Read Along: Chapter 1

[forestofglory]

Welcome 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?

Comments

[rhysiana]

(I'm going to come back and comment with more substantive thoughts later but:)

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.

[rhysiana]

More substantive thoughts:

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.

[forestofglory]

I said this on Twitter, but I love that you read this with a fanish/shiping lens!

I hadn't thought of comparing this to contemporary Europe but that's a really interesting point about the Enlightenment.

[rhysiana]

I think I was primed to make that European connection because I previously went down a research spiral on the influence of Dutch traders on medical research and mapmaking in Japan: Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793–1841 (amongst other books and articles).

[forestofglory]

That sounds like a fun rabbit hole! I love thinking about connections between times and places.

[cortue]

Oh I appreciate the perspective of why using the harder stone was easier from the artistic standpoint as well! And I would definitely read more about bannerman administrator Shen Tingzheng and artisan-scholar Xie Shiji if I ever got the chance.

[blueshiftofdeath]

Really interesting points about wood engraving, I'd never heard of that before!

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.

Same!! 🤣