Gentry Culture

The survival of a limited number of families within the elite over several centuries required more than carefully managing lineage resources; it depended equally on managing the symbolic capital that accrued to gentry status. I

argue here that culture was one of the means most consistently (even though unconsciously) used to achieve a longevity of power.

In the analysis that follows, culture is regarded as a set of practices whose main effect is to project for all members of a society a sense of sharing common values that are good—in other words, a sense that the existing arrangements of class power and dominance are appropriate. Raymond Williams has characterized culture in this vein as "the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes." Culture is hegemonic because it saturates "the whole process of living—not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships."^[31] The elite can pilot that hegemony by identifying and controlling key social activities that reinforce its status in the eyes of subalterns and make its authority appear inarguable.

We can sense how well this definition applies to the world of late imperial China and the practices of its gentry in the short story "Divorce" that Lu Xun, a native of the neighboring prefecture of Shaoxing, wrote in 1925. Aigu is fighting her husband's attempts to abandon her, and their conflict is brought to Seventh Master for resolution. Seventh Master is introduced as a man from the city who "exchanges cards with the magistrate."^[32] At the beginning of the scene in which he presides over the divorce negotiations, Seventh Master deftly establishes his authority by examining and commenting upon a Han dynasty relic, an anus-stopper from a corpse. This parody of the taste for antiquities among the gentry only underscores the unassailability of the symbolic capital concentrated in the status display. Aigu launches into her complaint against her husband but is swiftly intimidated into silence by a second high-cultural gesture: Seventh Master has his servant fetch a (to Aigu) mysterious flat bottle the size of a tortoise shell and takes snuff from it. Without denying her claim, this lower-level gentryman is able to wield cultural symbols in meaningless display to cancel the conflict. Power in this context means the ability to be seen as powerful, a visibility that cultural affectation could establish with great force.

It should not be surprising to find Lu Xun illustrating the continuing potency of gentry culture as late as the 1920s, for gentry culture of the late imperial period was still alive in the Republic. Indeed, its characteristics proved singularly impervious to alteration. Despite incorporating mercantile elements into the elite through the Qing, gentry culture continued to determine the skills and idioms that elite men were expected to master. Wealth alone could not create status: it had to be mediated by cultural forms that rendered wealth acceptable. In part the gentry were able to dominate the gentry-merchant alliance that emerged in the Qing by supplying and controlling those forms. No member of the late imperial elite, either aspiring or arrived, could overlook the gentry's self-made styles and strategies. Not for lack of other terminology did the opponents of the early twentieth-century

declining rural elites label them "wicked gentry " (lieshen ), for they still clung to the fading aura of gentryhood for their paltry legitimacy.

The particular forms of cultural activity that gentry culture favored covered a wide range. Ritual, literary exercise, artistic appreciation, scholarship, philanthropy, and patronage were all regarded as appropriate activities through which both the crowning Confucian concept of benevolence (ren ) could be realized and the gentry's priority at the top of the Confucian social order could be reaffirmed as unassailable. These cultural practices lent substance to gentry hegemony in several ways in addition to the sort of aggressive symbolic display caricatured by Lu Xun. The two I examine are the reinforcement of associational networks among the gentry and the creation of a recognized public sphere for gentry activism; both became part of the gentry's cultural identity.

Associational Networks in Gentry Culture . The key to the dominance that these old gentry families enjoyed in the county lies in their interaction with each other. They did not exist in isolated eminence; instead, they were consistently forming and reforming ties, building networks that favored men of equal status and disadvantaged lesser gentry and nongentry. Friendship, marriage, political commitment, and cultural pursuits all furnished opportunities for the elite to associate with one another. Through such social interaction, the leading families found a common identity and made entry into their charmed circle difficult. In this context, family continuity was critical, for it provided ready-made ties to other dominant families in the gentry elite's network. These ties could pass from generation to generation almost automatically, especially when members of the elite, like the betrothed newborns of the Wan and Zhou lineages, found themselves playing a part without any voice in the matter.

The intensity of the ties among the county gentry is reflected in another sixteenth-century jingle recorded by Li Yesi of the Qijie Lis:

The Fu family of Huijiang and the Jiatang Wus:
Their huge gates face each other, their buildings touching roofs;
The Zhangs and Lus support each other like a pair of willows entwined;
The Zhus and Chens, living together in one place, are likewise so inclined.^[33]

The families in the first line are the Wuxiangqi Fus and the Lianghu Wus. Together with the Qijie Lis they were known as the "three great families of eastern Yin." In the third line appear the superelite Chahu Zhangs and the Xihu Lus. In the fourth are the Jiangshan Chens and possibly the Maodong Zhus, a family that had won two jinshi degrees in the latter part of the fifteenth century but by the late Ming was of little consequence.^[34] All but the Zhus are found in Table 1.1.

The verse is silent on the types of ties we tend to look for in elite networks,

particularly marriage ties, which are poorly reported in the available records for Yin. But it is revealing of one aspect of elite association—physical proximity. The Fus and Wus are pictured as living within sight of each other, the Zhus and Chens as neighbors. At first glance, the solidarity between the Zhangs and Lus would appear more symbolic than physical because the Lus lived in the city's exclusive Moon Lake area, whereas the Zhangs' native village was some six kilometers southwest of the city wall. "A pair of willows entwined," however, is probably not pure metaphor, for the Zhangs probably maintained a residence in town near the Lus. We have already seen that a family could maintain both a rural residence and a second house in town in the case of the Fushi Zhous, who acquired a property on Moon Lake in the sixteenth century.

Of the forty-eight lineages in Table 1.1, I have been able to determine addresses for forty-two. Twenty-four of these forty-two lineages were based either within the city of Ningbo or in its immediate suburban area. Another eleven, among them the Chahu Zhangs and the Fushi Zhous, identified themselves with villages west and southwest of the city within ten kilometers of the city wall. This area was the part of Ningbo's hinterland plain first drained and farmed during the Song dynasty. Of the other seven lineages, five were located on the eastern plain, and two were in major towns in the peripheral upland. If we restrict our sample to the nineteen lineages placed highest in Table 1.1, eleven lived in or adjacent to the city, and the rest lived on the hinterland plain. However the sample is determined, the distribution of elite lineages is skewed more heavily to the urban core of Yin county than is true for the population as a whole. As the Zhou family's possession of a second residence inside the city indicates, this survey underestimates the urban concentration of elite families. At the very least, it suggests a tendency for elite lineages to gravitate toward the political and commercial core of the county, adjacent not only to the center of power but also, and as important, to each other.

The concentration of elite residence in or near the city of Ningbo reflects the associational pattern of gentry life. This relationship is underscored by Wan Yan's reminiscence about the betrothed newborns that furnished this article's opening story.

When I lived in Guangji ward in the prefectural capital, I was neighbors with many noted families. The Shens, the Huangs, the Zhangs, and the Gaos all lived there. My great-great-grandmother Wang was related to both the Huangs and the Zhangs, so I had cousins in both families.^[35]

Wan further comments that in the winter of 1656-57 he and these cousins, thrown together during a period of civil unrest, formed a literary society, and that half the members were young men from the neighboring families.

Wan Yan's story brings us to the central issue of culture and its critical

function in gentry hegemony. The connections between Wan and his associates, facilitated by residential proximity, were lent greater substance through a cultural practice unique to the gentry, the writing of poetry. The gentry came, in a sense, culturally equipped to exercise their hegemony over local society by the cultural expertise nourished by elite life-styles: a confident competence in the arts of reading and writing, an ability to interpret and manipulate the symbols of the Confucian order, an appreciation of complex artistic media through which elite values found expression, an understanding of courtesy and deference and their effective use in social encounters, a knowledge of acceptable models and precedents for decision making. These skills were automatically gained through neither classical study for the examinations nor acquisition of the wealth needed for leisure and cultural display, but they were polished through exposure to the practices and society of highly cultivated elites. Several generations might be required for the upwardly mobile to master these social and cultural marks of good breeding, without which they could not hope to be admitted to the upper levels of societies like that of Ningbo, where a mature gentry was firmly established.

Viewed from this perspective, family continuity was more than an empty symbol of established authority. By passing on the appropriate cultural orientation from generation to generation, a family steeped in gentry traditions was better positioned to train its young men to acquire and hone skills essential for succeeding in both serving the state and maintaining status at home. Culture should thus be thought of as providing a repertoire of activities by which the gentry could create and maintain networks of personal ties with each other and set themselves apart from those who had not mastered the nuanced language of elite life.

A good example of the mastery of this repertoire is Zhang Shiche (jinshi 1523). The Chahu Zhangs entered the sixteenth century with a reputation for living communally in accordance with the Confucian ideal of kinship harmony.^[36] After three decades in bureaucratic office, in his years of retirement from the 1550s through the 1570s Zhang Shiche embodied the Confucian model of gentry responsibility by actively participating in a wide range of sociocultural activities. His name appears in numerous inscriptions, dedications, and publications connected with important projects in the region: Chongde Shrine, raised in posthumous honor of a Taoyuan Chen for lightening the tax burden of local peasants; the Donggang Sluice, built in neighboring Dinghai as part of a large gentry-sponsored hydraulic project to improve irrigation on Yin's eastern plain; the Dinghai county school; a private academy; four bridges, one of which was known as Minister Zhang's Bridge; and the prefectural gazetteer of 1560, for which he served as editor-in-chief.^[37] Zhang Shiche was the mentor of the younger elite cohort of the 1570s, of whom Tu Long was the principal figure. We see him, for example, at a select reception for the Suzhou painter Wu Zhoushi when the latter visited Ningbo

in the 1570s. In addition to his eldest son Bangren, this coterie included Tianyige library owner Fan Qin, the poet Shen Mingchen, two Jiangbei Tus, and two other eminent gentry.^[38] Zhang Shiche's presence among these younger men in turn placed his own family in a central position within that generation, so that when Zhang Bangren published his collected poetry several decades later Tu Long wrote the preface recommending the work.^[39]

Cultural pursuits thus were organized through the networks of elite society, and mastering cultural skills was necessary for those who sought access to those networks. Entry into the elite world of the gentry was difficult, even more so if one lacked formal gentry titles. Occasionally an interloper could break in by other means. A contemporary of Zhang Shiche, Lu Chuanmei, was a merchant whose father had come to Yin to escape pirate troubles elsewhere along the coast. Lu was annoyed at being unable to deal with the "powerful lineages" of his neighborhood. His lineage biographer says that he overcame their exclusion and came to their notice by cultivating "virtuous conduct."^[40] Its exact meaning is not indicated, although Lu's mercantile wealth hints that he was buying his way into the elite. Entry into the gentry's world could thus be facilitated by strategically adopting gentry "virtues" (which could be measured by donations) as well as discouraged by ignorance of them.

Literary accomplishment was a key basis for signaling status and forming groups among the elite. Yin sources are particularly rich in information concerning poetry clubs, especially in the mid-seventeenth century when they provided Ming loyalists a refuge from the calamity of the Manchu occupation in 1645. The collapse of the Ming dynasty provoked a major crisis for the Ming gentry. Their legitimacy as the local elite rested on an agreement to serve imperial power in return for the highest tokens of status. Loyalty to a fallen dynasty, which such a contract demanded, essentially marginalized the existing gentry elite. They were not supposed to acquire further degrees or hold office under the new rulers, though some of course did. Bereft of public careers and further access to legitimizing state titles, the gentry in the immediate postconquest period turned to literary groups as the safest way to honor the fallen dynasty and display their own status. Indeed, the Yin elite achieved something of a reputation in this regard, for Quan Zuwang notes that "the gentry of Ningbo, whose distress had driven them into retirement, became nationally prominent after the fall of the Ming." The postconquest poetry clubs that Quan declares most noteworthy—like the "eight gentlemen of West Lake" and the "nine gentlemen of South Lake"—were highly exclusive. But he says there were many other "societies and gatherings" (she hui ) besides these.^[41] He describes in some detail the Discarded Silk Society (Qixu She), formed by his ancestor, Quan Meixian, who chose for its name the appropriately gloomy emblem of discarded silk to express how the late-Ming gentry perceived their prospects under the Qing dynasty. In addition

to several Quans, the society's members included seven members of the most successful lineages listed in Table 1.1 and five men from other well-known families.^[42]

Somewhat later, as their emotional response to dynastic collapse faded, some greater gentry of Yin sought to come to terms with the political crisis of transition by turning, as Wan Yan did, from the romance of the poetry of remorse to the labor of scholarship by attempting to reconstruct the causes of the Ming's decline. The intellectual tradition spawned by this reaction—from Wan Yan to his student Quan Zuwang and thence to his student Jiang Xueyong (juren 1771)—has been called the Eastern Zhejiang School of historiography.^[43] The focal figure for this interest and its original inspiration was Huang Zongxi, living in retirement in the next county and presiding over a scholarly circle called the Society for the Discussion of the Classics (Jiangjing Hui).^[44] This coterie arond Huang Zongxi, which Wan Yan and Li Yesi referred to as "our party," was based on existing networks among the leading families of Ningbo: a Dingyuan Wan, a Qijie Li, a Quan, a Shaoyaozhi Qian, a Longgu Chen, and a Qingjiezhen Rong, among others, were counted in this group. History neither excluded nor replaced poetry, however. Although Wan Yan says that the poetry group he formed with his neighbors in 1656-57 made a point of not talking about "historical records and the suppression of disorder," his presence in the Huang group indicates that the poets and the intellectuals did not move in separate worlds. Indeed, essentially the same elite families in Huang Zongxi's coterie can also be found gathering around Li Yesi in the Mirror Lake Poetry Society. By the next generation, poetry and history were fully combined in the Candid Society (Zhenshuai She), formed by Quan Zuwang and others in 1742. The network that existed among these men passed on through their families, for Li Yesi's son, Wan Yan's younger cousin, and the sons of several others in Huang Zongxi's circle met together at exclusive semiannual drinking parties later in the century.^[45]

Nongentry elites appear to have had little place in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social networks that operated through these cultural associations; at least, local sources do not indicate their presence. Formal gentry status continued to define access to this cultural realm, and associational activity within this realm was the mantle of exclusiveness in which the elite wrapped itself.

Gently Culture and the Public Sphere . The gentry's typical cultural practices served as mechanisms for not only bringing them together but also enlarging their presence in the public sphere of local society. This public sphere may be defined as the arena of nonstate activity at the local level that contributed to the supply of services and resources in the public good. It existed throughout the late-imperial period, but the types of activities pursued in this arena prior

to the latter half of the nineteenth century were restricted because of the state's anxiety about local autonomy. Given the limited state resources available for local development, it was essential that the gentry adopt this role. As the state was forced more and more to rely on local decision making to maintain local stability, the public sphere grew gradually until, under the impact of the Taiping Rebellion and subsequent reconstruction, it expanded quickly to create a substantially new and greatly enlarged local political arena.^[46] Prior to this enlargement, and to some extent even after it, the greater gentry occupied almost entirely the center of this public sphere in Yin county.

The historical origins of this public sphere are to be found largely in what Susan Mann has called the "liturgical" services that the state expected of the gentry. Max Weber derived the notion of "liturgy" from the Athenian practice of having the elite discharge various public responsibilities at private expense; similarly, in China local elites were expected to render services for the benefit of the local community, usually to ensure public order. Chief among gentry responsibilities were operating welfare services, supervising public works, and maintaining local institutions. In some areas, the gentry might also involve themselves in regulating local trade because, as Susan Mann has pointed out, "orderly markets and contented merchants were as important as schools and granaries to community well-being."^[47] The Yin county gazetteer of 1788 contains an intriguing reference to "high-handed gentry" extracting payments from small-time merchants who traded in Ningbo's main commercial area on the river fiats east of the city wall about 1640. The assistant maritime commissioner for the region stopped this practice by punishing the bond servants who were acting as the gentry's agents and forbidding them to enter the area.^[48] The gazetteer presents this practice as extortion, although possibly the gentry's agents were simply collecting customary fees that both they and the merchants accepted as the price of liturgical supervision. Although problems inevitably arose, the state not only accepted but also encouraged gentry involvement in the public sphere, for it met needs for which state funding was inadequate or unavailable. For their part the gentry embraced the opportunity because this public service both heightened their social standing and more immediately augmented their incomes.

In some instances the gentry undertook activities in the public good at the behest of the state, whose practice of understaffing local administration made policy implementation impossible without help from some quarter. Famine relief particularly needed cooperation from local elites. The wealthy were called on to contribute grain, and the gentry were mobilized to manage its distribution, reinforcing the notion that the gentry should work in the public good. This division of labor is documented for a famine that struck Yin county in 1751:

During the Eastern Zhejiang famine of 1751, the magistrate deputed gentry to go to the wealthy people and encourage them to make donations. Li Changyu (jinshi 1754) and his friend Tu Ketang (juren 1751) rushed about encouraging people to forward grain and were successful in amassing the required amount. The magistrate suggested setting up a central soup kitchen, but Li Changyu pointed out the dangers of doing so..... [He argued that] the better method would be to draw up ward registers and distribute grain directly to the people [in their home areas] The magistrate agreed to his plan and thousands of lives were saved.^[49]

Li Changyu's plan called for excluding yamen runners and involving the area's "wealthy households" as well as the local tax captains in overseeing the distribution of the relief grain, but it also held them doubly responsible for making sure that irregularities did not arise. The men of nongentry wealth whose grain made the relief effort possible were thus kept subordinate, subject to the gentry's managerial power. Mary Rankin has noted the role of welfare activities among the local elite in stimulating the growth of the public sphere during the post-Taiping reconstruction period.^[50] Local-elite activism of this type was already found among the eighteenth-century gentry, however, though its influence in generating a public sphere was limited by the state's stronger supervisory presence.

According to this account, Tu and Li were able managers, but the motivation and justification for their activities rested on more complex cultural meanings. Active involvement in relief demonstrated commitment to general values, like benevolence toward social inferiors, with which the gentry were imbued. Men at the upper reaches of the Yin gentry could claim the moral credentials to take the lead in projects benefiting local society, and by doing so they would further enhance the image of moral responsibility with which the gentry associated themselves. By the same token, they could maintain their claims to superiority over elites with lesser cultural credentials.

Tu Ketang's ability to exploit cultural norms in this way is demonstrated in another context. When his father was, for reasons unstated, imprisoned and sentenced to a beating, Tu chose to embody the kind of filial behavior integral to gentry Confucian norms by begging the presiding official to allow him to be punished in his father's place. Such a grand gesture, with many historical precedents, was part of the lore of Yin gentry dedication during the difficult dynastic transition between the Ming and Qing.^[51] A conventional Confucian official might be expected to accept the substitution, or, more magnanimously, to waive the punishment altogether, and Tu was probably hoping to alter the course of justice by this act. As it happened, his offer backfired; the annoyed official increased his father's sentence by forty strokes.^[52] Despite the unsatisfactory outcome, Tu Ketang's attempt illustrates some cultural dimensions of the elite's public actions: moral motiva-

tion rooted in the Confucian tradition, dramatic public display, strategic appeal to basic norms, tension between the values of official duty and kinship solidarity, and the preservation of such gestures in gentry-controlled sources. Tu's part in the relief work of 1751 is integral to these strategies.

Far commoner among the gentry's liturgical duties than famine relief, and more central to their elite identity, was the funding of local institutions and local construction projects. Some of these, particularly larger hydraulic systems, involved at least the supervision if not the active involvement of local officials, but the gentry were the major source of support. All such projects had two aspects in common: they were accessible to the public (not restricted to an exclusive group, as in the case of a lineage shrine), and they were viewed as necessary to maintain the social fabric or economic infrastructure of the county. The number of institutions and projects that belonged to the public realm was great. They included schools, academies, city walls, granaries, bridges, ferry docks, hydraulic systems, orphanages, temples to state-sanctioned gods, shrines to local figures, even Buddhist monasteries.^[53] Gentry involvement in these institutions was varied. Financial support was most common. From the seventeenth century onward the use of private wealth for public purposes became increasingly respectable, although private donors are infrequently named in Yin gazetteers. Choosing instead to reflect the gentry's persona as literati, these gazetteers far more consistently report essays, steles, and poetry written to commemorate the public projects with which the gentry were involved and to which they lent the prestige of their names.

Schools automatically attracted gentry support, given their direct link to the examination system by which gentry status was ratified. The local magistrate was responsible for supervising schools, but the gentry were conscious that it was largely their responsibility to keep the schools in operation so as to prepare local sons for the exams. The prefectural gazetteer of 1733 reports accordingly that rebuilding the county school in 1664 was accomplished by "the gentry of the county" under the direction of the county magistrate and further that its restoration in 1727 was financed by gentry contributions.^[54]

In projects that served a larger constituency, the gentry were often assisted by "wealthy commoners," probably a polite reference to merchants. For example, "gentry and wealthy commoners" supported rebuilding the city wall in 1658.^[55] Irrigation systems attracted the involvement of both "gentry and elders" (i.e., esteemed commoners), according to Zhang Shiche's text commemorating the building of the Donggang Sluice. As we noted in the case of the 1751 famine, the gentry considered the public sphere their particular domain and believed that their involvement should predominate over that of other powerful groups in society. A contemporary of Zhang's stresses that the management of hydraulic systems should be in the hands of "members of the families of gentry," who would be expected to monopolize appointments to

the position of embankment captain (tangzhang ). Respecting this claim, local officials in 1820 "called together the gentry to manage and complete" the reconstruction of the Fengpeng Sluice.^[56]

Philanthropic activity was thus part of gentry life: It enhanced their reputations, justified their dominant position, and notified all that the public sphere depended on them. By mobilizing not only their wealth but also the accompanying educational and artistic skills, the gentry appeared essential to maintaining local society. The late imperial public sphere remained in their hands.

The gentry's domination of the public sphere does not imply total exclusion of lesser folk; rather it appears that the latter's contributions tended to go to more modest local institutions. The only full account I have found of charitable work by men outside the ranks of the greater gentry in eighteenth-century Yin is a full-page account in the 1733 prefectural gazetteer of the creation in 1730 of a charitable cemetery in the western hills. The account names nineteen men and one Daoist priest under the ambiguous epithet shimin ("gentry and commoners"). The greater gentry is not totally unrepresented: the list includes two Chengxi Fans, neither of whom earned a higher degree, though they had cousins who did. There is also someone named Chen Zhaoshen, whose brother Zhaojia won a gongsheng degree in 1731.^[57] But the other sixteen are complete unknowns. This could signify that a public cemetery was not an institution the greater gentry considered worthy of their attention. But the more intriguing hypothesis is that being named in the gazetteer indicates that the Yin elite in the eighteenth century was obliged to acknowledge men who did not bear full gentry credentials but who, on the grounds of wealth, were asserting elite status in certain contexts and receiving public recognition for it.