An Ear Witness to History: Feng Menglong’s Record of Rumor about the Year 1644

• In Event: Literary Migrations: Transformation in and out of Text in Qing and Early Republican China

Abstract

The seventeenth-century Suzhou literatus Feng Menglong is known in Chinese late-imperial literature primarily for his pivotal role in championing the spoken voice in the realm of literature, specifically his unprecedented embrace of the vernacular short-story and local folk-song. In this paper, I will discuss a lesser known aspect of Feng Menglong’s experiments in vernacular culture through a discussion of his Record of Rumor about the Year 1644 (Jiashen ji wen), a “historical” text that sought to come to grips with the demise of the Ming dynasty by exhaustively documenting the rumors that sprang up after the fall of Beijing in 1644. Specifically, I will focus on the crucial role the titular concept of listening (wen) played in allowing Feng to challenge the writing of orthodox historiography by calling for what I term “aural history,” that is the recording of a multiplicity of voices and a host of discordant rumors. By investigating the role of “listening” in the writing of Feng Menglong’s alternative history, I aim to shed light not only on a previously unexamined aspect of Feng’s writing and his vernacular project of transforming voice into text, but also on the importance of sensory experience in our understanding of history, and the potential of an imagined space of multi-vocal discourse at a crucial juncture in early-modern Chinese history.

Author

• Paize Keulemans, Princeton University