History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 18

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Chapter 18: Qing Dynasty Literature II — Popular Culture, Regional Theater, and Women's Writing (ca. 1700–1850)

1. Introduction: The Broadening of the Literary World

If the literary history of the early Qing was dominated by the trauma of conquest, the memory of the Ming, and the achievements of a few towering individual geniuses — Pu Songling, Wu Jingzi, Cao Xueqin — the literary history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a story of expansion, diversification, and the gradual democratization of literary culture. During this period, the social base of literary production broadened significantly: women, who had always written poetry but whose participation in literary culture had been severely constrained by Confucian gender norms, emerged as significant literary voices in unprecedented numbers; popular theatrical forms, long dismissed by the literary elite as vulgar entertainment, challenged and eventually surpassed the refined Kunqu opera as the dominant mode of dramatic performance; and the novel — which had been elevated to the status of high art by Cao Xueqin — continued to evolve in new and sometimes surprising directions, including a vigorous tradition of "sequel" and "imitation" novels and the emergence of the tanci (弹词, "plucking rhyme") as a distinctive narrative form with strong associations with female authorship.

This period also witnessed the first sustained encounters between Chinese and European literary cultures. Chinese novels were translated into European languages for the first time, creating a body of knowledge about Chinese civilization that profoundly influenced Enlightenment thought; European missionaries and traders brought Western books, ideas, and cultural practices to China, initiating a process of cross-cultural exchange that would accelerate dramatically in the nineteenth century; and a small but significant number of Chinese intellectuals began to engage with Western knowledge, laying the foundations for the much larger intellectual transformations of the late Qing and early Republican periods.

The literature of this period has often been overshadowed by the towering achievements of the earlier Qing — the Hongloumeng, the Liaozhai zhiyi, the Rulin waishi — and by the dramatic literary transformations of the late Qing and early twentieth century. But it deserves attention in its own right, both for the intrinsic quality of its best works and for its role in creating the conditions — the expanded readership, the diversified literary culture, the cross-cultural encounters — that made the literary revolution of the late Qing possible.

2. The Tanci Tradition and Female Authorship

The tanci (弹词, literally "plucking rhymes") is a narrative genre that combines prose and verse, typically performed by a single storyteller accompanying herself on a stringed instrument. Originating in the Jiangnan (江南) region — the culturally sophisticated area around the Yangtze River delta that included Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Nanjing — the tanci developed into one of the most distinctive and culturally significant literary forms of the Qing dynasty, notable above all for its strong association with female authorship and female readership.

The tanci form is typically very long — often running to dozens of volumes and hundreds of thousands of characters — and its narratives tend to focus on themes of particular interest to female readers: romantic love, family relationships, the education and moral development of young women, and the tension between personal desire and social obligation. But the best tanci works are much more than mere romances: they are ambitious, intellectually complex narratives that use the conventions of popular storytelling to explore questions of gender, identity, power, and social justice with a depth and a sophistication that rival the achievements of the "mainstream" novel tradition.

The most celebrated tanci is Chen Duansheng's (陈端生, 1751–ca. 1796) Zaisheng yuan (再生缘, Destiny of Rebirth), an unfinished work of extraordinary ambition and literary power. The narrative centers on Meng Lijun (孟丽君), a brilliant young woman who disguises herself as a man, rises through the examination system, and eventually becomes prime minister — a fantasy of female empowerment that was profoundly subversive of the Confucian gender order, even as it was expressed in the unthreatening form of a popular romance. Chen Duansheng — who was herself a woman of the educated gentry class — wrote the Zaisheng yuan over a period of years, producing seventeen volumes before she was forced to stop, apparently by the arrest of her husband on criminal charges. The work was completed by Liang Desheng (梁德绳, 1771–1847), another female writer, but Chen Duansheng's original seventeen volumes are generally considered far superior to the continuation.

The Zaisheng yuan was famously admired by Chen Yinke (陈寅恪, 1890–1969), one of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century, who devoted the last years of his life — when he was old, blind, and persecuted by the political campaigns of the Maoist era — to writing a monumental study of Chen Duansheng and her work. Chen Yinke's identification with Chen Duansheng — a brilliant woman whose talents were crushed by an unjust political system — was itself a deeply personal act of coded dissent, a use of historical scholarship to express political sentiments that could not be stated directly.

Other notable tanci works by women include Qiu Xinru's (邱心如, fl. 1840s) Bizhen ji (笔生花, The Brush Blooms), which also features a cross-dressing female protagonist, and Hou Zhi's (侯芝, 1764–1829) revision of the Zaisheng yuan. The tanci tradition as a whole represents one of the most significant bodies of women's writing in premodern Chinese literature — a tradition that has only begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves in recent decades.

3. Peking Opera and Regional Theater Forms

The transformation of Chinese theatrical culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the decline of Kunqu and the rise of regional theater, culminating in the emergence of Peking opera (京剧, jingju) as the dominant theatrical form — was one of the most significant cultural developments of the Qing dynasty, a development that reflected and reinforced broader changes in the social composition of Chinese literary culture.

The roots of this transformation lay in the "flower vs. elegance" (花雅之争, hua ya zhi zheng) competition of the eighteenth century. The "elegant" (雅, ya) tradition was represented by Kunqu, with its literary language, its complex musical structure, and its elite audience; the "flower" or "wild" (花, hua) traditions were represented by the numerous regional theatrical forms — including Qinqiang (秦腔) from Shaanxi, Bangzi (梆子) opera from the north, Erhuang (二黄) from Hubei, and Xipi (西皮) from various southern regions — that performed in local dialects, employed simpler and more emotionally direct musical idioms, and appealed to a much broader audience. By the mid-eighteenth century, the regional theaters had effectively displaced Kunqu as the most popular forms of theatrical entertainment in most parts of China, and Kunqu survived primarily as a refined art form patronized by the educated elite.

The decisive moment in the emergence of Peking opera was the visit of four Anhui opera troupes (四大徽班, si da huiban) to Beijing in 1790, on the occasion of the Qianlong emperor's eightieth birthday celebration. These troupes — performing in a style that combined elements of Anhui, Hubei, and other regional theatrical traditions — were an immediate success with Beijing audiences, and they established a permanent theatrical presence in the capital that gradually evolved, through the absorption of additional musical and performance elements, into the distinctive art form that became known as Peking opera.

Peking opera synthesized elements from multiple theatrical traditions into a coherent and highly formalized performance system. Its music was based on two main melodic modes — Xipi (西皮), which was generally associated with lively, joyful, or martial moods, and Erhuang (二黄), which was associated with more serious, reflective, or sorrowful moods — accompanied by a percussion ensemble that punctuated the action with rhythmic patterns of great complexity and precision. Its performance conventions — the elaborate facial makeup (脸谱, lianpu) that identified character types, the acrobatic combat sequences, the highly stylized gestures and movements, the use of minimal stage properties that were transformed by convention into horses, boats, mountains, and rivers — constituted a theatrical language of extraordinary expressiveness and efficiency.

The repertoire of Peking opera was enormous, encompassing historical dramas, military adventures, domestic comedies, romantic stories, and supernatural tales drawn from the vast storehouse of Chinese historical and literary tradition. The plays were not, for the most part, works of literary distinction: unlike the Kunqu dramas of the Ming and early Qing, which were often written by major literary figures and were valued as literary texts in their own right, Peking opera scripts were typically formulaic in their language and conventional in their plotting. The art of Peking opera resided not in the literary quality of its texts but in the skill and artistry of its performers — the singers, actors, and acrobats whose virtuosity transformed formulaic material into compelling theatrical experience.

The greatest Peking opera performers became celebrities of enormous fame and cultural influence. In the nineteenth century, the art form produced a succession of legendary performers — including Cheng Changgeng (程长庚, 1811–1880), Yu Sansheng (余三胜, 1802–1866), and Zhang Erkui (张二奎, 1814–1864), known collectively as the "Three Great Masters" (三鼎甲, san dingjia) — whose artistry established the performance standards and the role types that would define Peking opera for generations to come.

4. The "Sequel" and "Imitation" Novel Tradition

One of the most distinctive features of the Chinese novel tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the proliferation of "sequel" (续, xu) and "imitation" (仿, fang) novels — works that continued, reinterpreted, or rewrote the narratives of the great novels of the Ming and early Qing periods. This tradition — which has sometimes been dismissed as a mere symptom of creative exhaustion — was in fact a vigorous and culturally significant phenomenon that reveals important aspects of how Chinese readers engaged with the novel tradition and how the novel functioned as a vehicle for cultural debate.

The most prolific target of sequel and imitation was, inevitably, Hongloumeng. The incomplete state of Cao Xueqin's masterpiece — and the widespread dissatisfaction with Gao E's continuation — provoked a flood of alternative continuations, sequels, and rewritings that began almost immediately after the novel's publication and continued throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Works such as Hou Hongloumeng (后红楼梦, Sequel to Dream of the Red Chamber), Honglou fumeng (红楼复梦, Dream of the Red Chamber Revisited), and Honglou yuanmeng (红楼圆梦, Dream of the Red Chamber Fulfilled) offered alternative endings to the story — typically happier endings in which the lovers are reunited and the family's fortunes are restored — that reflected popular resistance to the tragic and philosophically austere conclusion of the original. These sequels are rarely of high literary quality, but they are valuable documents of reader response, revealing the expectations, desires, and moral assumptions that ordinary readers brought to the text.

The Shuihu zhuan also generated a substantial sequel tradition, of which the most notable is Dangkou zhi (荡寇志, Quelling the Bandits, 1853) by Yu Wanchun (俞万春, ca. 1794–1849), a work that rewrites the Shuihu narrative from a loyalist perspective, presenting the outlaws as criminals who deserve to be suppressed rather than as heroes who defy an unjust government. This ideological reversal reveals the political anxieties of the early nineteenth century, when the memory of the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804) and the growing threat of internal disorder made the celebration of banditry seem less entertaining and more dangerous than it had in earlier centuries.

The tradition of "scholar-beauty" (才子佳人, caizi jiaren) novels — romantic narratives in which a talented scholar wins the love of a beautiful and cultured woman — was one of the most commercially successful genres of Qing fiction. These novels — of which the earliest and most influential examples date from the seventeenth century — follow a formulaic plot: a young scholar of talent and virtue meets a beautiful woman of intelligence and sensitivity; their love is obstructed by various obstacles — jealous rivals, disapproving parents, political intrigues; and the obstacles are eventually overcome, and the lovers are united in a happy ending that combines romantic fulfillment with social respectability. The literary quality of these novels is generally modest, but their enormous popularity reveals the depth of the reading public's appetite for romantic fiction and the importance of the novel as a vehicle for the imaginative exploration of gender relations and romantic love.

5. Courtesan Culture and Literary Reflections

The culture of the courtesan (名妓, mingji, literally "famous courtesan") was one of the most distinctive and culturally significant phenomena of late imperial Chinese society — a phenomenon that left deep traces in Chinese literature from the Tang dynasty to the end of the Qing. In the Qing period, the courtesan culture of the great cities — particularly Nanjing, Suzhou, Yangzhou, and later Shanghai — reached its most elaborate and most extensively documented form, producing a substantial body of literature that includes poetry written by and about courtesans, novels and stories set in the courtesan quarters, and memoirs and guides to the world of commercial entertainment.

The Chinese courtesan of the Qing period was not simply a sex worker — or, rather, the elite courtesan was not merely a sex worker. The most celebrated courtesans were accomplished poets, painters, calligraphers, and musicians who entertained their clients with artistic performances as well as (or sometimes instead of) sexual services. The courtesan quarters of the great cities — particularly the famous Qinhuai (秦淮) district of Nanjing — were spaces of social interaction, artistic production, and literary exchange in which the normal rules of gender segregation were suspended and men and women could mingle, converse, and collaborate with a freedom that was unavailable in respectable society.

The literary representation of courtesans in Qing fiction is rich and complex. The courtesan appears in many roles: as the object of romantic desire and poetic idealization; as a figure of pathos, trapped by economic necessity in a life of sexual servitude; as a symbol of the corruption and decadence of urban society; and as a figure of surprising moral authority, whose loyalty, courage, and integrity put to shame the cowardice and opportunism of the scholars and officials who are her clients. Kong Shangren's Li Xiangjun in The Peach Blossom Fan — the courtesan whose political loyalty surpasses that of the scholars who claim to serve the state — is the most famous example of this last type, but the motif of the virtuous courtesan appears throughout Qing fiction.

The courtesan novel — a genre that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — provided detailed, often encyclopedic accounts of the world of commercial entertainment, including its social rituals, its hierarchies of status and prestige, its codes of behavior, and its economic realities. Novels such as Han Bangqing's (韩邦庆, 1856–1894) Haishang hua liezhuan (海上花列传, Flowers of Shanghai, 1892) — which depicts the courtesan culture of late nineteenth-century Shanghai with a realism and a psychological subtlety that earned it the admiration of Lu Xun and other modern critics — represent the culmination of this tradition and an important bridge between the classical Chinese novel and the modern fiction of the twentieth century.

The literary culture of the courtesan quarters also played an important role in the broader history of women's writing. The courtesan quarters were among the few spaces in traditional Chinese society where women could participate in literary culture on something approaching equal terms with men — where a woman's poetic talent could earn her fame, respect, and a degree of social autonomy. Several of the most celebrated women poets of the Qing — including Liu Rushi (柳如是, 1618–1664) and Ma Xianglan (马湘兰, 1548–1604), both of the late Ming–early Qing transition — were courtesans whose literary achievements were recognized and admired by the male literary establishment.

6. Women Writers in the Qing: Poetry Clubs and Anthologies

The Qing dynasty witnessed an unprecedented flourishing of women's writing — a phenomenon of enormous cultural significance that has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. While Chinese women had written poetry since antiquity — the Shijing contains poems attributed to women, and individual women poets had achieved fame in every subsequent dynasty — the Qing period was the first era in which women's literary production reached a scale and a level of institutional organization that constituted a genuine women's literary culture, with its own networks of patronage, its own channels of publication and circulation, and its own critical discourse.

The scale of women's literary production in the Qing was remarkable. Recent scholarship has identified more than three thousand women who published poetry during the Qing period — a number that dwarfs the combined total of all previous dynasties. These women came from diverse social backgrounds — gentry families, merchant households, official families, and even (as noted above) the courtesan quarters — and they wrote in a wide range of genres, including shi poetry, ci lyrics, fu prose-poems, essays, letters, and the tanci narratives discussed earlier.

The most distinctive institutional form of Qing women's literary culture was the poetry club (诗社, shi she) — a gathering of women poets who met regularly to compose, exchange, and critique poetry. These clubs — which were modeled on the long-established tradition of male literary societies — provided women with a social space for literary activity, a network of intellectual companionship, and a mechanism for the circulation and evaluation of their work. The most famous women's poetry clubs were centered in the Jiangnan region, particularly in Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing, where the concentration of educated gentry families and the relatively liberal cultural attitudes of the region created favorable conditions for women's literary activity.

Among the most celebrated women poets of the Qing were Wang Duan (汪端, 1793–1839), a poet and literary critic who compiled an anthology of Tang poetry and was recognized by her contemporaries as one of the finest poets of her generation; Gu Taiqing (顾太清, 1799–ca. 1877), a Manchu noblewoman who was acclaimed as the finest female ci poet since Li Qingzhao and who also wrote a novel, Honglou meng ying (红楼梦影, Shadows of Dream of the Red Chamber); and Xi Peilan (席佩兰, 1760–after 1829), whose poetry was praised by Yuan Mei — the most famous male poet of the mid-Qing — as the finest by any living woman.

The male poet and literary theorist Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1797) played a controversial but significant role in the promotion of women's writing. Yuan Mei — who was himself one of the most celebrated poets of the eighteenth century, known for his witty, personal, and often provocative verse — actively encouraged women to write and publish poetry, accepted female disciples, and included women's poetry in his anthologies. His support for women's literary activity was attacked by conservative critics as improper and even immoral — the mixing of male and female literary spheres was seen as a violation of the gender norms that were fundamental to the Confucian social order — but Yuan Mei's prestige and influence helped to create a cultural space in which women's writing could be taken seriously as literary art.

The publication of women's poetry anthologies — collections that brought together the work of multiple women poets, often organized by region, family, or social network — was another important feature of Qing women's literary culture. The most comprehensive of these anthologies, Wanyan Yun Zhu's (完颜恽珠, 1771–1833) Guochao guixiu zhengshi ji (国朝闺秀正始集, Correct Beginnings: Women's Poetry of Our August Dynasty, 1831), collected the work of more than a thousand women poets, providing a panoramic survey of women's literary production that demonstrated, beyond any possible doubt, the breadth and the depth of women's contribution to the Chinese literary tradition.

7. Hao Qiu Zhuan and Early Chinese Novels Translated into European Languages

The Hao Qiu Zhuan (好逑传, The Fortunate Union or The Happy Couple, also known as Haoqiu zhuan), a novel probably dating from the early Qing period, occupies a unique position in the history of world literature as one of the first Chinese novels to be translated into a European language. Its translation into English by James Wilkinson in 1761 (published as The Pleasing History) and into German by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr in 1766 — the latter based not on the Chinese original but on a manuscript English translation — made it one of the earliest Chinese literary works to reach a European readership and contributed to the eighteenth-century European fascination with Chinese civilization that was a significant strand of Enlightenment thought.

The novel itself is a "scholar-beauty" romance of modest literary ambition: it tells the story of the virtuous scholar Tie Zhongyu (铁中玉) and the talented beauty Shui Bingxin (水冰心), whose love is obstructed by various villains and eventually vindicated by the intervention of a just emperor. Its plot is conventional, its characters are types rather than individuals, and its moral vision is straightforwardly didactic — qualities that explain both its appeal to eighteenth-century European readers, who valued it as an illustration of Chinese moral values, and its relative neglect by later Chinese literary critics, who found it inferior to the great novels of the Ming and Qing periods.

But the significance of the Hao Qiu Zhuan lies less in its literary quality than in its cultural impact as a medium of cross-cultural communication. For European readers of the eighteenth century — who had very limited access to Chinese literary texts and who depended on missionaries, merchants, and occasional translations for their knowledge of Chinese civilization — the Hao Qiu Zhuan provided a window into Chinese social life, moral values, and literary conventions that, however narrow and distorted, was genuinely revelatory. Goethe, who read the novel in 1827, famously discussed it in a conversation with Eckermann that led to his formulation of the concept of Weltliteratur (world literature) — one of the most influential ideas in the history of literary criticism. Goethe found the novel surprisingly similar in its moral vision and narrative structure to European fiction, and this discovery of unexpected kinship across the vast cultural distance between China and Europe prompted his reflection on the possibility of a universal literary culture that transcended national and civilizational boundaries.

Other Chinese works that reached European readers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries include the Yujiao li (玉娇梨, The Two Fair Cousins), translated into French by Abel-Remusat in 1826, and selections from the Shijing and other classical texts translated by Jesuit missionaries. These translations — however imperfect and however limited in their selection — initiated a process of literary exchange between China and Europe that would accelerate dramatically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that would eventually transform both literary traditions.

8. Beginnings of the Sino-Western Literary Encounter

The literary encounter between China and the West — which would become one of the most consequential cultural phenomena of the modern era — had its origins in the activities of European missionaries, particularly the Jesuits, who established a sustained presence in China from the late sixteenth century onward. The Jesuits — led by the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci (利玛窦, 1552–1610), who arrived in China in 1583 and spent the last three decades of his life in the country — pursued a strategy of cultural accommodation, learning the Chinese language, adopting Chinese dress, and engaging with the Chinese intellectual tradition on its own terms. This strategy produced a body of cross-cultural writing — including translations of European scientific and philosophical works into Chinese, translations of Chinese classical texts into European languages, and original works that attempted to synthesize Chinese and European knowledge — that constituted the first sustained literary and intellectual exchange between the two civilizations.

The Jesuit contribution to the European knowledge of Chinese literature was substantial. Jesuit translations of the Sishu (四书, "Four Books") — the Lunyu, the Mengzi, the Daxue, and the Zhongyong — made the foundational texts of the Confucian tradition available to European readers for the first time and contributed to the Enlightenment image of China as a civilization governed by rational moral philosophy rather than by religious superstition. The Jesuit description of the Chinese examination system — which selected government officials on the basis of merit rather than birth — was widely admired by European philosophers, including Voltaire and Leibniz, who saw in it a model of rational governance that could serve as a corrective to the aristocratic privileges of European society.

However, the Jesuit focus on the classical and philosophical traditions of China meant that popular literary forms — novels, drama, folk tales — received relatively little attention in the early phases of the Sino-Western literary encounter. It was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the publication of translations like the Hao Qiu Zhuan and the increasing availability of Chinese vernacular texts in European libraries, that European readers began to gain access to the full range of Chinese literary production.

The impact of Western literary and intellectual culture on China during this period was more limited. The Jesuit mission introduced European scientific knowledge — astronomy, mathematics, cartography, medicine — to the Chinese court, and some of this knowledge was taken up by Chinese scholars. But the literary and philosophical impact of Western thought on Chinese intellectual life remained minimal until the mid-nineteenth century, when the shock of military defeat at the hands of the Western powers forced Chinese intellectuals to engage with Western knowledge on an entirely different scale and with an entirely different urgency.

9. The First Wave of Translation of Chinese Literature into European Languages

The translation of Chinese literature into European languages — a process that began in the seventeenth century with Jesuit translations of the Confucian classics and gradually expanded to include poetry, fiction, and drama — constitutes one of the most important chapters in the history of world literature. The early translations were inevitably shaped by the linguistic limitations, cultural assumptions, and ideological purposes of their translators, and they often presented Chinese literature in a form that was significantly different from the original. Nevertheless, they played a crucial role in expanding the horizons of European literary culture and in establishing the conditions for the more systematic and more accurate translations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The first wave of translation was dominated by the Confucian classics. The Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta and his collaborators published a Latin translation of the Lunyu, the Daxue, and the Zhongyong under the title Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687) — a work that introduced Confucius to the European intellectual world and contributed to the Enlightenment image of Chinese civilization as a model of rational, secular governance. This translation was followed by numerous others — in Latin, French, English, and German — that gradually made the major works of the Chinese classical tradition available to European readers.

The translation of Chinese poetry presented formidable challenges. The conciseness of classical Chinese — in which a single character can carry multiple meanings and grammatical relationships are often left implicit — makes it one of the most difficult literary languages to translate into any European language. The earliest European translations of Chinese poetry — such as the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys's Poesies de l'Epoque des T'hang (1862) — were pioneering efforts that introduced European readers to the beauty and the strangeness of Chinese lyric poetry, but they inevitably lost much of the original's musicality, ambiguity, and allusiveness in the process of translation.

The translation of Chinese fiction — which began, as noted above, with the Hao Qiu Zhuan in 1761 — expanded significantly in the early nineteenth century. Translations of Chinese novels into French, English, and German appeared with increasing frequency, and by the mid-nineteenth century, European readers had access to versions — however imperfect — of several major Chinese novels. These translations were typically produced not by professional sinologists but by missionaries, diplomats, and merchants who had acquired some knowledge of Chinese during their residence in China, and the quality of the translations varied enormously. Nevertheless, they served the essential function of making Chinese fiction visible to the European reading public and establishing the Chinese novel as a recognized, if imperfectly understood, literary form.

The cultural significance of this first wave of translation extended well beyond the immediate literary sphere. The translations of Chinese literature contributed to the broader European understanding of Chinese civilization — its social structures, its moral values, its aesthetic sensibilities, its philosophical traditions — and they played a role in shaping the European intellectual debates about the nature of civilization, the universality of human values, and the possibility of cross-cultural understanding that were central to the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur, Voltaire's idealization of Chinese governance, Leibniz's fascination with the Chinese language — all of these were informed, directly or indirectly, by the translations that made Chinese thought and literature accessible to European readers.

10. Conclusion: The Expanding Literary World of the Mid-Qing

The literary culture of the mid-Qing period — roughly the century and a half between 1700 and 1850 — was characterized above all by expansion: the expansion of the social base of literary production to include, in unprecedented numbers, women writers who created a distinctive women's literary culture with its own institutions, genres, and critical discourse; the expansion of the theatrical world from the refined exclusivity of Kunqu to the popular vitality of regional opera, culminating in the emergence of Peking opera as a truly national theatrical form; the expansion of the novel tradition through the vigorous, if often artistically modest, traditions of sequel, imitation, and "scholar-beauty" fiction; and the expansion of the horizons of Chinese literary culture through the first sustained encounters with European literary traditions.

This expansion was accompanied by a diversification of literary taste and literary authority. The Qing literary world was no longer dominated — as it had been in the Ming — by the values and the judgments of a relatively homogeneous male literati class. Women writers, popular theater performers, commercial publishers, and a growing body of readers outside the traditional elite all contributed to a literary culture that was more diverse, more commercially oriented, and more socially inclusive than anything that had existed in earlier periods.

The changes of this period also prepared the ground for the much more dramatic transformations that would follow in the late Qing and early twentieth century. The expansion of the reading public, the diversification of literary genres, the growing commercial orientation of literary production, the first encounters with Western literary culture — all of these developments created the conditions in which a genuine literary revolution would become possible. When the shock of Western military power and Western ideas arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, it would find a literary culture that was already in flux, already diversifying, already opening itself to new influences and new possibilities — a culture that was, in some respects, already preparing for the transformation that the modern era would demand.

References

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