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About this talk

With the compilation of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (1772–1783), the Qianlong reign (1735–1796) bore witness to the largest project for book collection in Chinese history. This state-sponsored project imposed wide-ranging censorship on the assembled titles, and more generally subjected cultural productions under the imperial eyes’ intensified scrutiny. Coinciding with the decease of the Qianlong emperor in 1799, the turn of the nineteenth century was situated at a critical juncture of the lingering aftermath of strengthened censorship in late eighteenth century China and the Jiaqing reign’s (1796–1820) emerging cultural policies. Drawing on recent archival work, this talk will focus on Li Dou’s (1749–1817) Tale of Extraordinary Sourness, a dramatic adaptation composed in the early Jiaqing reign of the late Ming work titled The Plum in the Golden Vase. As a participant in the drama censoring bureau established in 1780, Li Dou’s play stands out for its demonstration of how a former censor navigated the shifting landscape of censorship during the transitional Jiaqing reign. More specifically, the dramatic adaptation features a dual strategy of invoking both the discourse of extraordinariness and the soundscape of the moralistic play titled The Lute to counter potential censorship of the licentious passages incorporated from the sexually explicit Plum in the Golden Vase. Through this case study, the talk will unveil not only a proliferation of literary strategies to negotiate with, but also the historical (dis)continuities of the Qing empire’s changing censoring practice. Zhaokun Xin is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research engages late imperial Chinese literature in interdisciplinary conversation with affect and gender studies, ritual theory, and medical humanities. His ongoing project, tentatively titled Refraction of Emotion: Anger in Late Imperial Chinese Literature, seizes on anger-related feelings as the prism to scrutinize the discursive reconfiguration of emotional norms in Ming-Qing fiction and drama. He is also broadly interested in translation studies and Sino-Japanese literary interactions.

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