“How to Do Everything Right”: The Daily Use Encyclopedias of the Ming and Qing as Sources for Social History

The “daily use” encyclopedias (riyong leishu 日用类书) produced by the commercial publishers of Jianyang, Fujian, established ordinary knowledge as a legitimate goal of learning in the late Ming. Very popular in the early 17th century, these works, which claimed to explain to readers “how to do everything right,” proliferated in the Qing, as the growth in the reading public created an ever-greater demand for such texts.  What does the popularity of these works tell us about early modern Chinese society?  How useful are they as evidence of real daily-life practices?  What do they suggest about changing attitudes toward the nature of knowledge and knowledge production—and about the social configuration of knowledge in the late Ming and Qing?  How might their commercial publication and distribution have re-shaped the nature of Chinese book culture and the definition of the Chinese reading “public”?  I hope to show how the study of book history can be a tool of social history.

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Speaker(s) biography:

Professor Cynthia Brokaw

Professor Cynthia Brokaw received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. She is a historian of early modern China, specializing in social history and the history of the book. She has been at Brown University since 2009 and has previously taught at Vanderbilt University, the University of Oregon, and the Ohio State University. Her works include The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China and Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods.

Discussant:

Dr Chan Ying-kit
Assistant Professor
Department of Chinese Studies
National University of Singapore

Advisory: Attendee limit per session: 130