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Abstract
Leisure is not doing nothing: it involves complex signifying practices that communicate social status and have to be performed to be legible to others. The practice of leisure fills the pages of the eight-year diary of Li Rihua (1565–1635), an artist and art collector of the late Ming who devoted an extended mourning sabbatical to building a major art collection and socializing with like-minded colleagues. For someone outside government service, leisure was an organized project absorbing time and money. Its apparent goal was pleasure, but it was also about accumulating objects and the value and status they conferred. As a man of leisure, Li achieved a prominent place within the regional gentry elite without ever having to return to office, but also without challenging the state's foundation of status.
Notes
1 Li Rihua has not been heavily studied. See Chaoying Fang's biography in The Dictionary of Ming Biography, in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press), vol. 1, 826–30. Li's social context is explored in Chu-tsing Li, “Li Rihua and his Literati Circle in the Late Ming Dynasty,” Orientations (August 1987), 28–47; also his “The Literati Life,” in Chu-tsing Li and James C. Y. Watt, eds., The Chinese Scholars Studio: Artistic Life in the Late Ming Period (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 37–51. On aspects of his collecting practice, see Craig Clunas, “The Art Market in 17th Century China: The Evidence of the Li Rihua Diary,” History of Art and History of Ideas 1 (2003), 201–24. See also my “The Artful Life of the Late-Ming Recluse: Li Rihua and his Generation,” in Peter Sturman and Susan Tai, eds., The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2012), 50–61.
2 On Xiang Yuanbian (1525–90), see Ellen Johnston Laing, “Sixteenth Century Patterns of Art Patronage: Qiu Ying and the Xiang Family,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 111, no. 1 (1991): 1–7; also Kwan S. Wong, “Hsiang Yüan-pien and Suchou Artists,” in Chu-tsing Li, ed., Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Painting (Kansas City: American Council of Learned Societies, 1990).
3 Other extant late-Ming diaries are Pan Yunduan, Yuhua tang riji (1586–1601); Xiao Shiwei, Xiaozhai riji; Feng Mengzhen, Kuaixue tang riji; Qi Chenghan, Dansheng tang ji; Qi Biaojia, Qi Zhongmin gong riji; Xiang Dingxuan, Huyuan riji; Wen Zhenmeng, Wen Wensu gong riji; and Bi Ziyan, Situ Enyu riji. I am grateful to Dai Lianbin for bringing some of these texts to my attention.
4 Li Rihua, Weishui xuan riji (Shanghai: Yuandong chubanshe, 1996), 243–51. Note that the 2011 edition from the same publisher alters the pagination; the seventh month is found there on 261–71.
5 Ibid., 55, 80, 117.
6 Ibid., 242.
7 Ibid., 243.
8 Ibid., 270.
9 Ibid., 92.
10 Ibid., 245–46.
11 Ibid., 246. On Ma Chi's identity as a dealer, see 269.
12 Ibid., 246.
13 Ibid., 247. Li goes on to praise Jiang as second only to Shen Du (1357–1434) and Shen Can (1379–1473) as a practitioner of the standard calligraphic style favored by the early Ming court. On the two Shens, see Craig Clunas, Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China (London: Reaktion, 2014), 69–70.
14 See Li Rihua, Weishui xuan riji, 29, for their earlier meeting at Stone Buddha. For their visit to his grotto, see 263.
15 Ibid., 249.
16 Ibid., 222.
17 On the basis of his comments in the diary, Li's favorite Yuan-dynasty painters were Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), Ke Jiusi (1290–1343), Ni Zan (ca.1301–1374), Wang Meng (1308–85), Wu Zhen (1280–1354), and Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322); his favorite Yuan-dynasty calligraphers, Kui Kui, Ni Zan, Wu Zhen, and Zhao Mengfu. Of Ming-dynasty painters, Li liked Chen Chun (1483–1544), Dong Qichang (1555–1636), Shen Zhou (1427–1509), Tang Yin (1470–1524), Wen Boren (1502–75), and Wen Zhengming (1470–1559); his favorite Ming-dynasty calligraphers were Dong Qichang, Wen Jia, Wen Zhengming, Wu Kuan (1436–1504), and Zhu Yunming (1461–1527).
18 Li Rihua, Weishui xuan riji, 552.
19 Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming (London: Reaktion, 2004).
20 Charles Laughlin, The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), 2.
21 Miriam Nandi, “Writing Selves: Early Modern Diaries and the Writing of the Novel,” in Gerd Bayer and Ebbe Klitgård, eds., Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 60–76.
22 R. C. Rudolph, “Kuo Pi, a Yuan Artist: And his Diary,” Ars Orientalis 3 (1959): 175–88.
23 Li Rihua, “Yunshui yue” (Contract for transporting water), reprinted in Zheng Peikai and Zhu Zizhen, eds., Zhongguo lidai chashu huibian (Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2007), vol. 1, 491–92.
24 Two months later Wu Zhengru appears again in Li's diary bearing twenty scrolls and a fan inscribed with a short poem by Li's friend Chen Jiru, which Li calls “very elegant”; Weishui xuan riji, 231.
25 Ibid., 217, 238, 287.
26 Ibid., 236–37.
27 On Wen Zhengming's withdrawal from political life, see Clunas, Elegant Debts, 85–90. On Dong Qichang's different management of the same challenge, see Nelson Wu, “Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636): Apathy in Government and Fervor in Art,” in Arthur Wright and Denis Twitchett, eds., Confucian Personalities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 260–93.
28 Li Rihua, Weishui xuan riji, 296.
29 Ibid., 317–18.
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Timothy Brook
Timothy Brook holds the Republic of China Chair in Chinese history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His recent publications include The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties and Mr Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer.