Gender and Chinese History

Transformative Encounters

Beverly Jo Bossler, Beverly Jo Bossler

• Verlag: University of Washington Press
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295806013
• Thema: History
• Thema: Chinese History

Until the 1980s, a common narrative about women in China had been one of victimization: women had dutifully endured a patriarchal civilization for thousands of years, living cloistered, uneducated lives separate from the larger social and cultural world, until they were liberated by political upheavals in the twentieth century. Rich scholarship on gender in China has since complicated the picture of women in Chinese society, revealing the roles women have played as active agents in their families, businesses, and artistic communities. The essays in this collection go further by assessing the ways in which the study of gender has changed our understanding of Chinese history and showing how the study of gender in China challenges our assumptions about China, the past, and gender itself.

PART ONE

EARLY MODERN EVOLUTIONS

CHAPTER ONE

LES NOCES CHINOISES

An Eighteenth-Century French Representation of a Chinese Wedding Procession

Ann Waltner

AMONG the first details eighteenth-century Western travelers to distant lands noticed were the local marriage customs. Jesuit missionaries were no exception. Some aspects of Chinese family life made sense to missionaries; others were either incomprehensible or judged to be problematic. Images such as the one of a bridal procession included in a 1735 account of China by the Jesuit missionary Jean Baptiste du Halde (1679–1743; see figure 1.1) can be brought into conversation with multiple sources to illuminate the grounds of contact between China and Europe, placing marriage, family formation, and gender at the center. This excursion may not tell us anything new about Chinese marriage, but it tells us about how Chinese weddings served as a kind of touchstone in European thinking about China and gender, and it tells us in fairly precise ways how the imagination of the observer conditioned what was seen.

One of the most contentious issues in terms of how missionaries regarded Chinese families was what Westerners came to call ancestor worship, especially the honor shown to ancestral tablets. The Jesuits, by and large, had no great difficulty accepting ancestor worship, viewing it as an honor paid to one’s forebears. But other religious orders, such as Dominicans and Franciscans, had differing opinions, and Pope Clement XI condemned Chinese rites (including but not limited to ancestral rites) in 1704. Mutual condemnations between the pope and the emperor of China followed. Du Halde’s Description of China (Description de la Chine) was written in the decades after the Rites Controversy erupted; he acknowledged that the ceremonies attendant upon ancestors might have been excessive, but he stressed that beliefs that the souls of the deceased hovered over ancestral tablets, or that the spirits of the deceased consumed the food given them, were idolatry introduced to China by Buddhists.¹ Thus du Halde posited an original Chinese thought system that was pure and free of idolatry, one compatible with Christianity. Many Jesuits took this point of view, but in the end it proved unconvincing to the Vatican.

Another problematic area of Chinese family life from the standpoint of Western missionaries was concubinage, which, while not widespread among the population in general, was common among the elite, so much so that it affected how members of the elite imagined marriage. Concubinage was a serious issue: a number of would-be converts were denied baptism because they refused to send their concubines away. Other converts (Xu Guangqi and Yang Tingyun) did send their concubines away so that they might be baptized.² Chinese law and practice distinguished clearly between marriage with a principal wife and marriage to a concubine: most laws that dealt with concubinage were interested in keeping the distinctions clear and in particular stressed that a woman married as a concubine could not be made a wife, even if the principal wife were to die.³

But in other ways Chinese marriage (that is to say, marriage between a man and his principal wife) and Chinese weddings seemed to translate fairly well into the Jesuit universe. The image of a bridal procession under study here is a product of this Jesuit encounter with Chinese marriage practices, as well as of the history of such encounters. The illustration shows us ways in which Europeans saw Chinese marriage with a mixture of curiosity, comprehension, and misapprehension.

Du Halde’s text is a fount of information on European views of China. Compiled from reports sent back to Paris by twenty-seven Jesuit missionaries, it followed on the heels of texts published in Amsterdam by Johan Nieuhoff (1618–92) and Olfert Dapper (c. 1635–89). The Nieuhoff text was commissioned by the East India Company and was positioned very differently from du Halde’s in terms of function and ideology. Yet Nieuhoff used missionary texts as a source for his own, and du Halde made liberal use of both Nieuhoff and Dapper.⁴

Du Halde himself never went to China. His experience with China prior to compiling the Description of China was as editor of Edifying and Curious Letters, Written at the Foreign Missions by some Missionaries of the Society of Jesus (Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des Missions étrangères, par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus), an enterprise he took up in 1711. The editorial work gave him access to missionary accounts and provided a foundation for his work. Description of China is richly illustrated, and the visual information contained in the illustrations is worthy of our attention.

China played an increasingly important role in the eighteenth-century European imagination. By the time du Halde published his book, numerous texts in European languages on China had been published. Nonetheless, the du Halde text made something of a splash. Voltaire wrote of du Halde: “Even though he never left Paris and knew no Chinese at all, based on the memoirs of his confreres, he has given us the broadest and best description of China that the world has ever known.”⁵ As with many books in its genre, du Halde’s was a great success; it was published in the original French in Paris in 1735 and in La Haye in 1736 in what some scholars have called a “pirate edition.” The first English edition followed in 1736, and a second English edition, by a different publisher, followed in 1741. (The formats of the two English editions differ, and the translations are not identical.) German editions were published in 1747 and 1749 and a Russian edition in 1772.⁶ While the phenomenon of the popularity of European books on China has been widely commented on, surprisingly little has been written on du Halde himself.⁷

In the preface to his book, du Halde takes pains to assure us of the accuracy of the text: he tells us that the text was corrected by the Jesuit Cyr Contantin, who had spent thirty-two years in China followed by a year in Paris, where he had, in the words of the 1736 English edition, “sufficient leisure to alter, add, or retrench whatever he thought necessary for the Perfection of the design” of the text.⁸ Du Halde writes in the preface: “I am convinced of the accuracy of everything I have presented here.”⁹

The original French text was beautifully illustrated, and the accuracy that du Halde is at such pains to claim for the text extends to the illustrations. He tells us in the preface that all the illustrations were drawn (invenit) by one A. Humblot (ca. 1700–1758),¹⁰ who, he tells us, had completely entered into the style of paintings done by the Chinese themselves, which du Halde had provided him.¹¹ (Du Halde may have been responding to comments like those made by the German author and naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer about a book on Japan by Arnoldus Montanus: “Most of the plates, which are the chief ornamentation and are as it were the soul of transactions of this kind, depart a long way from the truth, and do not show things as they were but as the draughtsman imagined them to be.”)¹²

FIGURE 1.1. Les Noces chinoises, a wedding procession from Jean Baptiste du Halde’s Description geographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinois. Paris: P. G Le Mercier, 1735. Reprinted with permission of the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota.

Du Halde’s preface offers further detail as evidence of the accuracy of the illustrations. He tells us that Humblot had access to Chinese illustrations brought to Paris from China by M. de Velaër, who had lived for many years in Canton as a director of the East India Company. The de Velaër family had long been involved with the East India Company. It is tempting to think that the man who sent the pictures was Joseph Julien de Velaër (1709–85), but it may in fact have been his father, Joseph (1667–1747). We know that Joseph Julien spent much time in Canton, and that he married a Chinese woman, whose portrait still hangs in the family chateau in France at the Château de Lude.¹³

We know little about these source illustrations, but we can take seriously the assertion that there were source illustrations. We can, moreover, make some inferences. It is clear that Humblot had seen the Assembled Illustrations of the Three Realms (Sancai tuhui), an early-seventeenth-century illustrated encyclopedia. As Isabelle Landry-Deron has pointed out, two of his sericulture engravings are clearly related to texts in the Assembled Illustrations of the Three Realms, perhaps via Xu Guangqi’s (1562–1633) Comprehensive Treatise on Agricultural Administration (Nongzheng quanshu), an illustrated agricultural handbook that was in the collection of the Bibliothèque National in Paris as early as 1716.¹⁴ Landry-Deron has also identified a number of the illustrations in the 1735 text as being closely derived from previously published illustrated texts such as those by Athanasius Kircher and Nieuhoff.¹⁵ But we have little information on the source illustrations that du Halde talks about in the preface, the pictures sent by M. de Velaër.

The actual engraving of the illustrations was done by a number of different engravers. That of the wedding procession was done by J. Haussard, who is probably Jean Baptiste Haussart (1679–1749, also spelled Haussard), the father of the well-known engravers Elisabeth and Catherine Haussard.

Whi...