Literati Culture

Although the term literati culture (wenren wenhua) entered the Chinese lexicon only in the late 20th century, the aesthetic, moral, and intellectual pursuits it encompasses can be traced back nearly two millennia to the Wei-Jin era (220–420 ce). In its narrowest sense, it denotes the “four arts” (siyi) associated with cultured, literate males (wenren): music (especially the qin or guqin), the game of go (weiqi), calligraphy, and painting, as well as poetry and lyrical essays (especially xiaopin) associated with them. Literati culture is also usually construed to include connoisseurship of various categories of material objects, including tea and its implements, antique paintings and specimens of calligraphy, celebrated or rare manuscripts and book editions, rubbings taken from steles, ancient bronze vessels, and objets d’art associated with writing, such as ink stones or seals. During the mature phase of literati culture in the late Ming and Qing dynasties, this repertoire of practices further widened to include, inter alia, the collecting of any manner of rare or prized objects (both natural and man-made), garden design and architecture, the connoisseurship of the theater and its actors or other entertainers, and the espousal of philosophical ideals associated with leisure or reclusion. Given this expansive scope, scholarship has tended to treat this array of arts and avocations either through disciplinary lenses such as art history and material culture, or in terms of their associations with the principal intellectual vocations—literature (the so-called wenyuan or Garden of Literature) and textual scholarship (rulin or Forest of Scholarship)—that marked literati status. As the relatively elastic conception of literati culture has gained currency, however, cultural historians have increasingly studied these arts within the continuum of socioeconomic practices that marked membership in the elite, and also in light of the position of these arts in relation to more-demotic (tongsu) cultural forms. The growth of literati avocations and the writings about them after c. 1500 was stimulated by the surfeit of first- and second-tier examination holders, along with opportunities for patronage by wealthy merchants in the Yangzi delta region. Also evident in the late Ming and throughout the Qing is the influence of philological scholarship (kaozheng) on the classification or cataloguing of objects of various kinds. Finally, the statecraft-oriented (jingshi) scholarship and letters that flourished during the last century of Qing rule, and critiques of literati social preeminence relative to other vocations and social categories, stimulated the rethinking of the social and cultural institutions that perpetuated their dominance, which extended to the arts associated with the literati as well.