by Ying-shih Yü
c h i n e s e
h i s tory
a n d
c u l t u r e
v o l u m e 1
s i x t h c e n t u r y b . c . e . t o
s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y
y i n g - s h i h y Ü
Chinese History and Culture
volu m e 1
masters of chinese studies
Chinese History and Culture
❖
volu m e 1
si x t h ce n t ury b. c . e . to
s e v e n t e e n t h ce n t ury
Ying- shih Yü
With the editorial assistance of
Josephine Chiu- Duke and Michael S. Duke
columbia university press
new york
Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance
given by the Chiang Ching- kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange
and Council for Cultural Aff airs in the publication of this book.
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup . columbia . edu
Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Yü, Ying- shih, author.
Title: Chinese history and culture : sixth century b.c.e. to seventeenth century /
Ying- shih Yü; with the editorial assistance of Josephine Chiu- Duke and Michael S. Duke.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Masters of
Chinese studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2015040772 (print) | LCCN 2015049874 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231178587
(vol. 1 : cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542012 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231178600
(vol. 2 : cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542005 (electronic : vol. 2)
Subjects: LCSH: China— History. | China— Civilization.
Classifi cation: LCC DS736 .Y867 2016 (print) | LCC DS736 (ebook) | DDC 951— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2015040772
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid- free paper.
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
c
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
c ov er de sign: c h a ng ja e l ee
Dedicated to Monica Shu- ping Chen Yü
c on t e n t s
Author’s Preface ix
Editorial Note xi
List of Abbreviations xxi
Chronology of Dynasties xxiii
1. Between the Heavenly and the Human
1
2. Life and Immortality in the Mind of Han China
20
3. “O Soul, Come Back!”: A Study in the Changing Conceptions
of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre- Buddhist China
58
4. New Evidence on the Early Chinese Conception of Afterlife
85
5. Food in Chinese Culture: The Han Period (206 b.c.e.–220 c.e.)
91
viii c on t e n t s
6. The Seating Order at the Hong Men Banquet
122
7. Individualism and the Neo- Daoist Movement in Wei- Jin China
134
8. Intellectual Breakthroughs in the Tang- Song Transition
166
9. Morality and Knowledge in Zhu Xi’s Philosophical System
181
10. Confucian Ethics and Capitalism
208
11. Business Culture and Chinese Traditions: Toward a Study
of the Evolution of Merchant Culture in Chinese History
222
12. Re orientation of Confucian Social Thought in the
Age of Wang Yangming
273
13. The Intellectual World of Jiao Hong Revisited
321
14. Toward an Interpretation of the Intellectual Transition
in Seventeenth- Century China
355
Acknowl edgments
375
Appendix: Address of Professor Ying- shih Yü on the Occasion
of Receiving the John W. Kluge Prize at the Library
of Congress and Ac cep tance Speech on the
Occasion of Receiving the Tang Prize for Sinology 377
Index 383
a u t hor’ s p r e face
Collected in these two volumes are essays published during the past fi ve de-
cades, on vari ous aspects of Chinese cultural and intellectual traditions and
their modern transformations. Written on diff er ent occasions and in diff er ent
times, they are scattered in a great variety of publications, some obscure and
out of print. However, since all of them possess, to a greater or lesser degree, a
unity of theme regarding the Chinese tradition in its historical changes, I con-
sider it desirable to make them accessible to the general reading public by way
of reprinting in a collected form.
It is my extraordinary fortune that two of my highly esteemed colleagues, Pro-
fessors Josephine Chiu- Duke and Michael S. Duke, agreed to serve as editors
of my two volumes. They have edited each and every one of my essays with
meticulous and diligent care, resulting in the elimination of a great deal of im-
perfections in the original versions. I am particularly grateful to both of them
for providing, in the “Editorial Note,” a lucid account of my views discussed in
these essays. It is also remarkable that instead of taking my views in the En-
glish essays as a self- contained category, they have made every eff ort to under-
stand them in the context of my published oeuvre as a whole and specifi cally
emphasized their interrelatedness to my Chinese writings.
In this connection, a word may be said about my bilingual historical writ-
ings. Generally speaking, since the 1970s, it has been an established practice
on my part to write book- length monographical studies in Chinese and pres ent
x a u t hor’ s p r e face
these fi ndings in a more concise format in En glish as articles in journals, peri-
odicals, or symposia. The diff erence is more than between a longer and a shorter
version, however; it also has something to do with two diff er ent ways of histori-
cal repre sen ta tion. Full documentation is often emphasized in Chinese historical
writings— traditional and modern—as a positive feature. As a result, direct quo-
tation of original sources has been established as a common historical method.
On the other hand, I deeply appreciate the Western style of argumentation in
historical studies that, more often than not, refrains from extensive quotation of
sources. Thus, in writing bilingually, I often secretly wished that my two versions
might somehow strengthen and supplement, as well as complement, each other.
I wish to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to Professor Da-
vid Der- wei Wang for his kindness and, indeed, patience in including these two
volumes of mine in a series of books he has specifi cally designed for Columbia
University Press. I also wish to thank all of the vari ous presses for generously
granting their respective permissions to reprint my essays, Mr. Jeff S. Heller
of
Prince ton’s East Asian Studies Department for conveying materials back and
forth to the editors, and Ms. Su Hue Kim for her years of preparing my many
drafts into typed form.
I dedicate these two volumes to my wife, Monica Shu- ping Chen Yü, whose
abiding love and support have sustained me throughout my career.
Ying- shih Yü
September 2, 2015
edi tor i a l not e
Professor Ying- shih Yü is a leading scholar in the fi eld of Chinese studies.
He was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize in 2006 for achievement in the
Study of Humanity, and in September 2014, he also received the fi rst Tang Prize
international award in Sinology. As an eminent historian and a conscientious in-
tellectual, Professor Yü has dedicated more than sixty years of his life to the study
of Chinese history, thought, politics, and culture,1 crossing “many disciplines,
time periods and issues, examining in a profound way major questions and
deeper truths about human nature.”2 Through this comprehensive and integra-
tive lifetime study, Professor Yü has published some thirty books, forty- one mono-
graphs, and more than fi ve hundred articles and essays.3 At the same time, he has
redefi ned the Chinese intellectual and cultural tradition, excavated the meaning
of and instilled new life into that tradition, and, above all, has per sis tently put his
intellectual convictions into practice without worrying about acting “against the
current.” Such actions are evident in his scholarly articles analyzing, for example,
the problematic nature of a “new wave of Chinese nationalism,” and of “the study
of history” based on Chinese offi
cial orthodoxy of “the Marxist- Stalinist fi ve- stage
formulation.” 4 They are also apparent in his “out spoken criticism” of the Chinese
government’s suppression of the peaceful 1989 Tian anmen demonstration, his
support for many scholars, young students, and liberal- minded intellectuals who
left China after 1989, and his ongoing regular commentary on China’s social,
intellectual, and po liti cal phenomena for Radio Free Asia.5
xii edi tor i a l not e
Professor Yü exerted himself to complete a major revision of the article on
Wang Yangming (1472–1529) in late 2014, but his health has prevented him
from writing an introduction to these two volumes, and his deep modesty
would also not permit us to use his address on receiving the Kluge Prize and
his Tang Prize in Sinology ac cep tance speech as a comprehensive introduction.
Thus, at the risk of not doing full justice to the breadth and depth of his creative
contribution to the fi eld of Chinese studies, we feel it necessary to off er a few
initial observations on the primary concerns that have emerged in his research
on China’s cultural and intellectual tradition, while also explaining the struc-
ture of this book of essays.
Since Professor Yü left China in the beginning of 1950 and enrolled in the
fi rst class of the then newly established New Asia College in Hong Kong, two
questions have always dominated his intellectual consciousness: As an ancient
civilization, what was China’s essential value system that had sustained the
life of its culture through ages of tumultuous po liti cal changes? Furthermore,
would this system survive its modern revolutionary overhaul and fi nd its way
to secure itself as a culture that has historically displayed “a great deal of over-
lapping consensus in basic values” with the mainstream of Western culture?6
In a way, these two questions are tied to his overall concern about where China
would go after the radical transformation of its 1949 revolution. The rich body
of his de cades of research that started during his college days in Hong Kong
and continued throughout his academic life at the universities of Michigan,
Harvard, Yale, and Prince ton, and especially the work he carried out during the
time after he retired from Prince ton in 2001, refl ects his examinations of and
responses to these key questions.
In the summer of 1971, when he revisited his alma mater and took his fi rst
trip to the major research institutes in Japan and Taipei, Professor Yü discov-
ered that almost all of the China specialists there had never read his book or
articles published in En glish. At the time, he began to think that if he wanted to
play a role in bringing about meaningful communication between the Western
and East Asian intellectual communities, he prob ably should try to make his re-
search available in the Chinese- language world. Later, between 1973 and 1975,
he took a leave from Harvard and returned to Hong Kong to serve as president
of the New Asia College, and concurrently as the pro- vice- chancellor of the
Chinese University of Hong Kong. Due to the demands of his daily work, Chi-
nese became the most natu ral and reasonable medium for his writing. It was
then that he deci ded he would resume writing large and detailed research ar-
ticles and books in Chinese, and would pres ent similar topics on a smaller scale
and in a more concise format in En glish.7
As a result of that decision, his works in En glish constitute only a small part
of his vast publication rec ord, but the thirty- three scholarly articles collected in
these two volumes nevertheless represent the essence of his fundamental con-
cerns about and systematic interpretations of Chinese culture and history rang-
edi tor i a l not e xiii
ing over a time span of more than two thousand years. They demonstrate how
his extraordinary knowledge about a wide variety of primary sources enabled
him to investigate the crucial changes in Chinese cultural and intellectual tra-
ditions during the major transitions of China’s history. They also show how he
has always explored and approached a series of questions and issues centering
on his concerns from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives while never
failing to compare impor tant aspects of Chinese culture with relevant histori-
cal phenomena in Western or other Asian cultures. More impor tant, they reveal
the complex changes crisscrossing with the unbroken line of the foundational
values that have connected China’s past and pres ent, and prob ably its future
as well. We should also note that several of Professor Yü’s Chinese books, es-
pecially his magnum opus on the historical world of Zhu Xi (1130–1200)
:
( Zhu Xi de lishi shijie: Songdai shidafu
zhengzhi wenhua de yanjiu [The Historical World of Zhu Xi: A Study of the Po-
liti cal Culture of Song Intellectuals]) (Taipei: Yunchen, 2003; Beijing: Sanlian,
2011), and his most recent breakthrough study,
:
( Lun tianren zhiji: Zhongguo gudai sixiang qiyuan shi tan [Between Heaven
and Man: An Exploration of the Origin of Ancient Chinese Thought]) (Taipei:
Linking Publishing, 2014), have developed from some of the articles presented
here.8
The earliest article in these two volumes was published in 1965 and the most
recent one was completed near the end of 2014. For the pres ent volumes, these
articles are not arranged by their publication dates, but rather in chronological
s
equence by Chinese dynasties and with re spect to their interconnected nature. In
this manner, the central theme of continuity and transformation that links these
articles together in relation to Professor Yü’s overall investigation and interpreta-
tion of Chinese civilization may unfold in accordance with its own inner logic.
In his 2006 John W. Kluge Prize ac cep tance speech, Professor Yü asserts,
“the Dao, or the Way, and history constitute the inside and outside of Chinese
civilization.”9 Indeed, unraveling the unique dynamics between Chinese intel-
lectuals’ discourse on the Dao
and their criticism of con temporary real ity in
diff er ent periods of time throughout China’s historical trajectory has always
been ingrained in Professor Yü’s intellectual eff orts. This endeavor is explic itly
manifest in his earlier studies of the tension- fraught ruler- minister relationship
embedded in Chinese po liti cal tradition. These studies had a strong, “wide and
enduring” infl uence, and like many of his later works, have since become clas-
sic essays for students of Chinese history and culture in Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and even in China after Mao.10 Professor Yü’s endeavor is equally discernible in
his nonpareil study of the post-1949 inner landscape of the late historian Chen
Yinque (1890–1969).11 Its impact has been and continues to be far- reaching. It
caused quite a bit of consternation to the Chinese offi
cial academic leadership,
and gave rise to an extensive trend of studying Chen Yinque’s works among
diff er ent generations of Chinese scholars during the past three de cades.12
xiv edi tor i a l not e
Likewise, one can also detect Professor Yü’s eff orts in the above- mentioned
trailblazing masterpieces on Zhu Xi and Between Heaven and Man centering
on the formation and development of China’s refl exive system of knowledge
and thought on the Dao, or if one may, the transcendentally rooted set of moral
princi ples for a symbolized ideal world order, throughout what Karl Jaspers
called the “Axial Age.”
We believe that the articles made available here on the intellectual and cul-
tural changes from ancient times down to the late nineteenth century can help
illustrate just exactly how and why the Dao, according to Professor Yü, became
the defi ning characteristic of Chinese culture during the “Axial Age,” and how
