Inside the Garden, Outside the Law: The Dream of Red Mansions, Brotherhoods, and Sects

Act I: Inside the Garden (Review Question 9)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Social and Cultural Cross Currents," pp. 281–283. Reading-guide sentence (p. 281): "Women with poetic talents figure prominently in an eighteenth-century novel, The Dream of Red Mansions (also called Story of the Stone), considered by many the most successful of all works of Chinese fiction."

From late-Ming openness to Qing caution

Slide B recalls the late Ming, when, as Ebrey puts it, Chinese culture "had been remarkably open and fluid" (p. 281): publishers printed novels and plays for a large urban public, and Wang Yangming's followers urged people to trust their own moral instincts. Slide C gives the reaction. After the conquest many scholars blamed the Ming's fall on that openness, and the textbook says that "because literati argued that drama and fiction were socially subversive, theaters were closed and novels banned" (p. 281). Slide B's source line now cites p. 281, where the late-Ming sentence appears.

The bans were real but should not be overstated. The Qing issued edicts against "obscene" novels and plays repeatedly, from the 1650s onward, and restricted theaters in parts of Beijing, especially the Inner City where the bannermen lived. That the bans had to be repeated shows that they did not work. Theater flourished in the eighteenth century. Lecture 2's salt merchant Jiang Chun kept two opera troupes (slide KK there; Ebrey, p. 275), the emperor's birthday celebrations of 1790 brought the Anhui troupes to Beijing, and their style grew into what became Peking opera. Slide C now uses the safer formulation: moralists attacked fiction and drama and the state banned many works, while both kept their audiences.¹

Room for the unconventional

Ebrey's next sentence is the turn: "both the Manchu rulers and the Chinese intellectual elite provided room for the less conventional to contribute in creative ways" (p. 281; slide D). Her first example is the poet Yuan Mei (1716–1798), who left office young, bought a garden in Nanjing (the Suiyuan, "Garden of Accommodation") and lived as a celebrity writer, gourmet and teacher. He took women as poetry students, published their work and had them painted on a handscroll. His critics, notably the historian Zhang Xuecheng, attacked him for corrupting women. Yuan's students answered back; slide D quotes Luo Qilan's defense. Susan Mann shows that the eighteenth century saw an unprecedented number of published women poets, many from scholar families, and that the debate over Yuan Mei was a debate about what educated women should be.²

Ebrey's second example is the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou (slide HH; p. 281 and the Material Culture feature on Jin Nong, p. 282). Painters such as Jin Nong (1687–1763), Zheng Xie (1693–1765) and Luo Ping (1733–1799) worked in a deliberately odd, personal style, filled their paintings with calligraphy and found patrons among the salt merchants. The point is the one Ebrey makes: they "had no difficulty finding patrons, even among social and cultural conservatives." Ginger Cheng-chi Hsü shows how the painting market of Yangzhou worked.³

The Cao family

Slide E introduces the novelist. Cao Xueqin's family were Chinese bondservants (booi) of the imperial household, enrolled in a banner, who had risen with the Manchus. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father held the lucrative post of textile commissioner at Nanjing; his grandfather Cao Yin was a confidant of Kangxi and hosted him four times on the southern tours (Lecture 2, slide H). In 1728 the Yongzheng emperor had the family's property confiscated for debts and alleged misconduct, and they moved to Beijing in reduced circumstances. Cao Xueqin grew up with memories, or family stories, of great wealth and its loss.⁴

Ebrey gives Cao's dates as 1715–1764 (p. 281); slide E now gives "c. 1715–1763/64." Both dates are uncertain. He was born in 1715 or about 1724, and he died in 1763 or early 1764, depending on how one reads a few lines of the commentary and poems by friends. "c. 1715–1763/64" is the honest form.

The novel

The novel has two titles (slide F). Hongloumeng, translated as The Dream of Red Mansions or Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji), the title used in early manuscripts and in David Hawkes and John Minford's English translation. It frames its story with a myth: a stone left over when the goddess Nüwa repaired the sky is born into the world as a boy with a piece of jade in his mouth, Jia Baoyu.

The story is set in the great household of the Jia family. Baoyu's sister Yuanchun becomes an imperial consort, and for her visit home the family builds the Prospect Garden (Daguanyuan) (slide G). Baoyu and his girl cousins and maids are allowed to live in the garden, and there, in a world of poetry clubs and feelings, the novel's adolescent heart beats (slide H). His two great loves are the sickly, sharp-tongued Lin Daiyu and the sensible, cheerful Xue Baochai. Behind them the family's fortunes decline, through extravagance, corruption and finally a government raid.

Ebrey summarizes the ending: Baoyu is tricked into marrying Baochai, thinking he is marrying Daiyu, while Daiyu dies; and the novel "ends with Baoyu passing the jinshi examinations, only to leave his wife and family to pursue religious goals" (p. 283). Two points need correction.

First, the ending is not Cao Xueqin's. Cao left the novel unfinished at about eighty chapters, which circulated in manuscript with a commentary by friends who signed themselves Red Inkstone (Zhiyanzhai) and others. In 1791 Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E published a 120-chapter edition, printed with movable wooden type, whose last forty chapters they said they had assembled from fragments. Scholars still debate how much of the ending Cao planned. The tricked wedding (slide I) and Baoyu's examination and departure (slide FF) both come from those forty chapters. The deck's notes say "another writer added forty chapters," and slides I and FF now say so too.⁵

Second, Baoyu does not pass the jinshi. In chapter 119 he sits for the provincial examination and places seventh, becoming a juren, and then walks out of the examination hall and disappears. In chapter 120 his father glimpses him in the snow, head shaved, in a monk's red cape, bowing farewell. Slide FF's headline now reads "Baoyu Passed the Provincial Exam, Then Walked Away," with the textbook's "jinshi" in the instructor notes. The meaning is the same: he does what his family wanted and then renounces it.

Slide J gives a short scene from chapter 42, in Hawkes's translation, in which Baochai confesses to Daiyu that as children they read plays in secret until the adults found out and "there were beatings and lectures and burnings of books." It is the best primary-source moment in the deck because it shows the conservative turn and its failure in one memory.⁶

Act II: Outside the Law (Review Question 10)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "The Less Advantaged and the Disaffected," pp. 283–286. Reading-guide sentence (p. 285): "To marginalized men, the attraction was security, mutual aid, and empowerment."

Brotherhoods

Slide L recaps Lecture 3: population growth and partible inheritance left millions of men without land or wives. Slide M distinguishes a secret society, a sworn brotherhood with initiation rituals and secret signs, from a sect, a religious congregation with its own scriptures and teachers. The Qing law treated both with suspicion, because any organization outside the lineage and the state could become a rebellion.

The best known brotherhood was the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui), also called the Triads (slide N). Dian Murray and Qin Baoqi trace its founding to about 1761 in Zhangpu county, southern Fujian, among a monk's followers. Lodges spread quickly across Fujian, Taiwan, Guangdong and Guangxi, offering mutual aid with loans, funerals and lawsuits, and protection to migrants and boatmen far from home. Many lodges also ran gambling, prostitution, smuggling and extortion. Their rhetoric of "overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming" (slide O) was real but, Barend ter Haar argues, largely ritual and mythological: an origin legend of loyal monks betrayed by the Qing gave members an identity and a story. The first great Tiandihui rising was led by Lin Shuangwen in Taiwan in 1786–1788, and the Qing needed a large expedition under Fuk'anggan to suppress it.⁷

The White Lotus faith

Slide P recalls an earlier chapter: the Red Turban rebels of the 1350s, who helped bring down the Mongols, drew on White Lotus beliefs about the coming of the Buddha Maitreya. Ebrey's account of the Qing sects (slides Q–R; pp. 285–286) follows the classic model of a single "White Lotus Society." Barend ter Haar has shown that the name is better treated as a label. "White Lotus teachings" (bailian jiao) was a term officials applied to many unrelated sects, usually when they wanted to call them heterodox; few groups called themselves that. What the sects shared was a family of beliefs, set out in printed scriptures called "precious scrolls" (baojuan), centered on the Eternal Venerable Mother (Wusheng laomu), who longed for her lost children and would gather the faithful into the Original Home at the end of the age.⁸ This makes no difference to slide Q's content, which describes the beliefs accurately, but it is worth one sentence in lecture: the government, not the believers, drew the boundaries of the "White Lotus."

Ebrey notes that women were welcomed "on the same terms as men" and that wives often took over when their husbands were arrested (p. 285; slide R). Her quotation of an official's description of a woman leader, from Kwang-ching Liu's study of the 1796 rising in Hubei, is the deck's primary-source evidence. Most congregations were not rebels. They were pious groups who chanted, fasted, healed and practiced breathing exercises and martial arts. Rebellion came when a teacher announced that the end of the age had arrived, or when persecution forced them to fight. Susan Naquin's studies of the Wang Lun rising in Shandong (1774) and the Eight Trigrams rising (1813) show both patterns.⁹

The White Lotus rebellion, 1796–1804

The great rising followed persecution (slide S). In 1793 the government launched an investigation of sects in the hills where Hubei, Sichuan and Shaanxi meet, a frontier recently filled by migrants. Local clerks and runners used the hunt for extortion, and in 1796 congregations rose in Hubei, then in Sichuan and Shaanxi. They fought from fortified hill villages, joined by bandits and martial-arts bands. Ebrey says it took "more than eight years" to destroy them (p. 286). The campaign exposed the weakness of the banners and the Green Standard army. The court finally won by organizing local militia and building fortified villages to cut the rebels off from the population, tactics the Qing would use again against the Taiping. Its cost, commonly estimated at well over 100 million taels, consumed much of the surplus built up under Qianlong, and Heshen's mismanagement of the war funds became one of the charges against him in 1799.¹⁰

China in 1800

Slide U ends the lecture with the textbook's question: "How different was China in 1800 than in 1600?" (p. 287). The empire was twice as large and twice as populous, ruled by a Manchu dynasty that most Chinese had come to accept. Its high culture was more conservative and more scholarly. Its frontiers were quiet, but its interior was restless. The slide's image is the Jiaqing emperor, who took the throne in 1796; Chapter 18 picks up the story with the Opium War.

Pierian Spring: The Conservative Turn (Review Question 8)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Social and Cultural Cross Currents," p. 281. Reading-guide sentence (p. 281): "With the collapse of the social order in the early seventeenth century and the conquest by the Manchus, many Confucian scholars concluded that the Ming fell as a result of moral laxity."

Blaming Wang Yangming

Slide W gives the diagnosis. Wang Yangming and his followers, "by validating emotion and spontaneity, had undermined commitment to duty and respect for authority" (Ebrey, p. 281). The cure was a return to Zhu Xi's orthodox Neo-Confucianism (slide X), which the Qing court promoted through the examinations and through Kangxi's personal patronage. Kai-wing Chow adds that the turn was also a ritual movement: scholars tried to restore correct family rituals, lineage organization and the purity of the classics.¹¹ Slide W's source line now cites p. 281, where the passage appears.

Chastity

The clearest sign of the turn is in women's lives (slide Y). "The cult of widow chastity reached new heights," Ebrey writes (p. 281). The state rewarded widows who did not remarry with honorific inscriptions and permission to build memorial arches; local gazetteers recorded thousands. Susan Mann shows that the cult was also shaped by economics and kinship. Remarriage would take a widow's dowry and children out of her husband's lineage, and poor families sometimes pushed widows to remarry for the bride-price. Janet Theiss shows how eighteenth-century courts and families argued over women's chastity in everyday cases.¹²

Slide Z gives the extreme case: girls whose fiancés died before the wedding and who lived as their celibate "widows." These "faithful maidens" were controversial even among Confucian scholars, some of whom argued that a betrothal was not a marriage and that the practice violated ritual. Weijing Lu's study is the standard account. One famous faithful maiden appears in Lecture 1: Gu Yanwu's adoptive mother, Madame Wang, who had been betrothed to his uncle, raised Gu, and starved herself in 1645 rather than live under the Qing (Lecture 1, slide T). Linking the two slides shows students that the conservative turn's ideals were lived by real people.¹³

Law and letters

Slide AA collects the other signs. "Laws against homosexuality were made harsher" (Ebrey, p. 281): a substatute of 1734 made consensual sodomy between men a crime for the first time, as part of a wider effort to police sexuality and protect the household order.¹⁴ And the scholar Qian Daxin (1728–1804) "went so far as to argue that the vernacular novel was the main threat to Confucian orthodoxy" (p. 281). Ebrey's text misprints his name as "Qian Daxian"; the deck corrects it on slides C and AA. On slide AA the corrected name now stands outside the quotation marks, so the words quoted are Ebrey's own.

Evidential scholarship

The other side of the conservative turn was a scholarly revolution (slide BB). Following Gu Yanwu, eighteenth-century scholars practiced kaozheng, "evidential research": they tested the classics by philology, phonology, epigraphy and textual comparison rather than by philosophical intuition. Benjamin Elman shows that the movement was centered in the Yangzi delta, supported by patrons such as salt merchants and officials, and that it was, in his phrase, a shift "from philosophy to philology."¹⁵

The deck's example is Yan Ruoju (1636–1704) (slide CC), who proved that the "old text" chapters of the Book of Documents, accepted as classics for more than a thousand years, were a forgery of the third or fourth century AD. The discovery was explosive because one of those chapters contained the "sixteen-character" passage on the human mind and the mind of the Way, on which Zhu Xi's school relied. Evidential scholarship thus had a paradox at its heart. It served orthodoxy by purifying the classics, and it undermined orthodoxy by showing that parts of the canon were not what they claimed to be.

More to explore: the boatmen's hostels

Slide EE tells Ebrey's story of the hostels that a sect set up in Hangzhou and Suzhou for the boatmen of the Grand Canal grain fleets, who had no work or pay in winter (p. 285). Old boatmen could live and be buried there. In 1768 the government, alarmed by the sect and by the boatmen's organization, had the hostels destroyed. Ebrey calls the sect "an offshoot of the White Lotus called the Luo sect." The Luo teaching, founded by Luo Qing (1442–1527), had its own scriptures and history and was not a branch of any White Lotus organization; it was later classed by officials under the same heterodox label. Slide EE now calls it "a related sect, the Luo teaching." David Kelley's article tells the story of the boatmen and their temples.¹⁶

Corrections and Cautions

Corrections and Sources Behind the Slide Notes

The deck's speaker notes are written for students. The instructor-level detail behind them, where a slide departs from Ebrey and the scholarship it relies on, is collected here, slide by slide.

Slide C (crackdown). Corrections: Ebrey prints the scholar's name as "Qian Daxian" (p. 281); he is Qian Daxin (1728–1804). Ebrey also says "theaters were closed and novels banned"; the bans were periodic and partial, and in 1790 the Anhui troupes came to Beijing for Qianlong's eightieth birthday. Source: Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City (2012).
Slide D (eccentrics). Moved from the notes: the 1792 scroll of Yuan Mei's women students and his inscription come from outside the textbook.
Slide HH (yangzhou-eccentrics). Moved from the notes: Zheng Xie (Zheng Banqiao), Luo Ping, and the point that lists of the Eccentrics name more than eight painters come from outside the textbook.
Slide E (cao-xueqin). Correction: Ebrey gives Cao Xueqin's dates as 1715–1764 (p. 281). His birth year is uncertain, and he died in 1763 or early 1764; the notes say so. The Nanjing silk works, Cao Yin, and the confiscation of 1728 come from outside the textbook. Source: Jonathan D. Spence, Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor (1966).
Slide F (names-dream). Moved from the notes: the Chinese title Hongloumeng and the opening story of the stone come from outside the textbook.
Slide G (jia-garden). Moved from the notes: the names Yuanchun and Grand View Garden come from the novel, not from Ebrey.
Slide H (three-cousins). Moved from the notes: the character details beyond Ebrey's description and the Gai Qi prints (printed 1879) come from outside the textbook.
Slide I (tricked-wedding). Moved from the notes: the point that this part of the story comes from the last forty chapters follows Dore J. Levy, Ideal and Actual in The Story of the Stone (1999).
Slide FF (dream-ending). Correction: Ebrey says Baoyu passes "the jinshi examinations" (p. 283). In the 120-chapter novel he passes the provincial examination in chapter 119, placing seventh; the notes give this version (Levy, 1999). Gao E and the debate over the ending come from outside the textbook.
Slide J (books-burned). Moved from the notes: the painter Fei Danxu comes from the image record, not from Ebrey.
Slide N (heaven-earth). Moved from the notes: the night initiation with a blood oath comes from outside the textbook.
Slide P (rc-white-lotus). Moved from the notes: Ebrey treats the White Lotus as one society (p. 285). Specialists see "White Lotus" mostly as a label officials put on many separate sects. Source: B. J. ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (1992).
Slide R (women-leaders). Moved from the notes: the name Wang Lun (1774 rising) comes from outside the textbook.
Slide S (revolt-1796). Moved from the notes: the extortion by clerks and runners and the end of the revolt in 1804 come from outside the textbook.
Slide U (closing). Textbook misprint: Ebrey prints the 1800 population as "at least 300,000" (p. 287); it means 300 million, as on p. 273.
Slide Y (ps-chastity). Moved from the notes: the honors, the Tangyue arches, and the comparison of the chaste widow to the loyal minister come from outside the textbook.
Slide Z (ps-fiancees). Moved from the notes: on faithful maidens and Gu Yanwu's adoptive mother, see Weijing Lu, True to Her Word (2008).
Slide AA (ps-harsher-laws). Correction: Ebrey prints the name as "Qian Daxian (chyen dah-shyen)" (p. 281); the scholar is Qian Daxin (1728–1804).
Slide BB (ps-evidential). Moved from the notes: the term "evidential scholarship" (kaozheng) comes from outside the textbook; see Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology (1984).
Slide CC (ps-forgery). Moved from the notes: the history of the "old text" chapters and Yan Ruoju's methods come from outside the textbook (Elman, 1984).
Slide EE (ps-luo-hostels). Correction: Ebrey calls the Luo sect "an offshoot of the White Lotus" (p. 285). It was a separate tradition founded by Luo Qing, which officials lumped with the White Lotus; the notes say so. Sources: David E. Kelley, "Temples and Tribute Fleets: The Luo Sect and Boatmen's Associations in the Eighteenth Century," Modern China 8 (1982); ter Haar (1992). The date of the crackdown (1768) comes from outside the textbook.

Notes

Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), on Qing theater regulation and the Beijing stage. ↩
Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956). ↩
Ginger Cheng-chi Hsü, A Bushel of Pearls: Painting for Sale in Eighteenth-Century Yangchow (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). ↩
Spence, Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor, is the history of the family's rise. ↩
On the novel's composition and the continuation, see Dore J. Levy, Ideal and Actual in The Story of the Stone (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), and Anthony C. Yu, Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). ↩
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes (vols. 1–3) and John Minford (vols. 4–5), 5 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973–1986). ↩
Dian H. Murray, in collaboration with Qin Baoqi, The Origins of the Tiandihui: The Chinese Triads in Legend and History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Barend J. ter Haar, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads: Creating an Identity (Leiden: Brill, 1998). ↩
Barend J. ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Daniel L. Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). ↩
Susan Naquin, Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), and Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). ↩
Yingcong Dai, The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), is the most recent full study, with special attention to the war's cost and to official corruption. ↩
Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). ↩
Susan Mann, "Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China," Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1987): 37–56; Janet M. Theiss, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). ↩
Lu, True to Her Word. ↩
Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. ↩
Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984). ↩
David E. Kelley, "Temples and Tribute Fleets: The Luo Sect and Boatmen's Associations in the Eighteenth Century," Modern China 8, no. 3 (1982): 361–391. ↩