Modes of Knowing: Compendia for Everyday Life and the Rise of the Common Reader in Early-Twentieth-Century China

• In Event: Knowledge Configuration and Common Readerships in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

This paper proposes a new tack in studying Chinese knowledge culture and reading practices in the seminal period from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. While most scholarship to date has focused on the big Shanghai publishers and the “new-style” materials they produced, my focus is on small lithograph publishers who continued to publish updated and expanded editions of materials that were in circulation from at least the late Ming dynasty.
Prominent among these materials are wanbao quanshu (complete compendia of countless treasures), the centerpiece of this paper. These compendia were created to provide all of the information necessary for the conduct of everyday life. A close examination of the sections their market-savvy compilers omitted, reprinted, and added in several early twentieth century editions offers some insight into what these compilers deemed to be essential quotidian information and how they assumed it could be most effectively acquired. They continued to retain certain sections on, for example, the ten months of gestation, while introducing new material on recognizing foreign coins, dressing as a Republican citizen, and arranging an “enlightened” wedding party.
As important as the content of this updated everyday knowledge is its presentation through illustrations, mnemonic verses, rich metaphors, practical prescriptions, and symbols standing in for Western languages. Evidence of alternate modes of knowing—consultative versus contemplative, contiguous versus cumulative, visual and poetic versus discursive—these texts offers insight not only into what China’s new common readers knew in the early decades of its revolutionary twentieth century, but how they knew.

Author

• Joan Judge, York University