Man Xu - Crossing the Gate: Everyday Lives of Women in Song Fujian (960-1279)

SUNY SERIES IN C HINESE P HILOSOPHY AND C ULTURE

Roger T. Ames, editor

Crossing the Gate

E VERYDAY L IVES OF W OMEN IN S ONG F UJIAN (9601279)

MAN XU

Cover art: Golden silk wide sleeves robe (1235 AD). The garment is a dress for a female, excavated from a tomb sealed in 1235 and found by archaeologists in 1986 in the suburb of Fuzhou. The garment is at the Fujian Museum. Courtesy of The Fujian Museum.

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STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Albany

2016 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Xu, Man, 1979

Title: Crossing the Gate : Everyday Lives of Women in Song Fujian (9601279) / Man Xu.

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2016] | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016007755 (print) | LCCN 2016023269 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438463216 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438463223 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: WomenChinaHistoryTo 1500. | WomenChinaFujian ShengHistoryTo 1500. | Sex roleChinaFujian ShengHistoryTo 1500. | Social classesChinaFujian ShengHistoryTo 1500. | Social changeChinaFujian ShengHistoryTo 1500. | Fujian Sheng (China)Social life and customs. | Fujian Sheng (China)Social conditions. | ChinaHistorySong dynasty, 9601279.

Classification: LCC HQ1147.C6 X8 2016 (print) | LCC HQ1147.C6 (ebook) | DDC 305.4095109/01dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007755

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To my parents

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Eighteen years ago, when I was a junior in the History Department at Beijing University, Professor Deng Xiaonan opened a new course on Women in Tang and Song China. It was the first curriculum on women in pre-modern China available in Chinese universities, and it proved to be a fascinating experiment. The class introduced exciting new perspectives to conduct research on Chinese history and exposed me to the pioneering disciplines of womens history and gender studies. It was in her class that I started to touch on primary sources about women in Chinese history. The narratives are scattered and fragmentary and are generally absent from official histories that I had been reading. They appeared unusual, while at the same time interestingly familiar. I was deeply moved by the biographies of women from more than one millennium ago, which surprisingly resonated with my knowledge of the life experience of my grandmothers and mother. It inspired me to seek womens history that was largely invisible in historical records. Professor Deng offered me hands-on instruction on searching for and analyzing first-hand materials. Meanwhile, she gave me an inclusive reading list of influential books on womens history in pre-modern China that American scholars had published in the 1990s. She generously lent me her collection, considering research books on humanities in English were not easily accessible at that time. Immersed in the scholarship, I was astonished at how thriving and productive this field had been in Western academia. In 2001, as the secretary of the International Symposium on Tang and Song Womens History, I invited dozens of international leading scholars in Chinese womens studies to Beijing University, including Susan Mann, Patricia Ebrey, Dorothy Ko, Beverly Bossler, and Bettine Birge. I was thrilled to meet with these well-known authors and to communicate with them in person, and I was encouraged to further my interest in womens history in the United States.

In the fall of 2002, I joined Columbia University and achieved the good fortune of being assigned to two dedicated advisorsRobert Hymes and Dorothy Ko. At our first meeting, Robert Hymes gifted me his newly published book Way and Byway , which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize two years later. As a prestigious social historian, he appreciated my interest in local history and shared with me his research experience in the field and his insightful knowledge of womens history. Dorothy Ko, in spite of her early devotion to literary history, developed great enthusiasm for cultural studies. By taking her courses and working as her research assistant, I was impressed with the glamour of material culture and was eager to apply it to my research. In addition to the two advisors, my dissertation was greatly indebted to a number of China historians at Columbia. Robert Harrist taught me the methodologies of art history, JaHyun Haboush and Wei Shang trained me in recovering history with literary sources, Feng Li led me to understand the value of archaeological discoveries, and Conrad Schirokauer conveyed to me the wisdom in deciphering intellectual history. Inspired by these experts from a wide range of fields, I adopted a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to conducting my research.

Whether we can contextualize womens studies in local history largely depends upon the scope of available sources. A brief investigation of womens records limited my choice to a few economically and culturally advanced areas in the Song. Fujian stood out to me because of its exceptional wealth of original material that remained largely unexplored. I had started to collect historical sources for my research for the writing of my masters thesis, and I continued to expand my source pool for my dissertation. I explored sources available at Beijing University (China), Columbia University, the Library of Congress, Harvard University, Tokyo University (Japan) and the Oriental Library (Japan) and received great help from their librarians. Also, the CLIR Mellon Fellowship supported my field trips to Fujian libraries and museums. At the Fujian Provincial Museum, I met with some experienced local archaeologists and was offered special permission to visit their archive center. In the bulky old-style cabinets, I saw piles of discolored folders that were sealed in the 1960s and 1970s and had never been opened since. They were like treasure boxes and revealed to me the devotion of a group of local archaeologists in the chaotic period of the Cultural Revolution. I made a wish to present their contributions to a broad audience by getting my work published, and I am glad it is coming true.

The process of revising the manuscript was long and full of challenges. I have been blessed to have Dorothy Ko as my lifetime mentor. In the difficult times of my career after graduation, her encouragement kept me motivated to move forward. She read my revisions chapter by chapter and quickly responded with valuable comments and suggestions. I also owe thanks to a number of historians who expressed interest in my research and generously granted me constructive advice on revisingDagmar Schfer, Harriet Zurndorfer, Peter Bol, Tillman Hoyt, Ankeney Weitz, Jingzhen Liu, Nanxiu Qian, Guotong Li, and Robert Graham. In the summer of 2014, at the Harvard Conference on Middle-Period China, I presented my work to a few experts in Fujians local history, including John Chaffee, Hugh Clark, and Bettine Birge. Their insightful feedback helped me make this book a real product about Fujian. My special gratitude goes to Beverly Bossler as well. She volunteered to read the entire manuscript and gave me advice on how to present the books value to the utmost. In addition, I am very grateful to the two anonymous readers for their thought-provoking reviews. One was so engaged in reading my manuscript and left extensive hand-written comments on the hard copy, and the other recommended to me intelligent strategies on how to improve and strengthen the manuscript.