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Timely signs, dominance, and vernal celebrations in late imperial Southern China

An exercise in anthropology in the past tense
Signes du temps, domination et célébrations printanières dans la Chine du Sud de la fin de l’époque impériale. Un exercice d’anthropologie au passé
Göran Aijmer
p. 237-250

Résumés

Cet essai contribue à l’exploration anthropologique de la « culture traditionnelle » dans le sud de la Chine. Au départ de la description d’une célébration du printemps dans un canton de la province du Jiangxi, il suggère que de telles cérémonies ne se rapportaient que superficiellement à la société locale. C’était un festin sans message proprement local. Une perspective comparative révèle la grande conformité nationale de tout ce qui concernait l’organisation de ces cérémonies. Un tel degré de conventionnalité suggère une origine commune, à savoir le discours de l’État impérial. La domination suprême était articulée en rendant manifeste localement un empereur omnipotent bénissant son pays. Historiquement étrangère aux sociétés locales du sud, la fête visait à l’incorporation politique tout en maintenant un certain degré d’aliénation sociale vu que les principaux rituels étaient exécutés par les administrateurs locaux de l’Etat seulement. Les réponses démotiques dans les contextes culturels locaux du Sud étaient limitées et différentes.

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Introduction

  • 1 The possibilities offered by a symbological platform have been sketched out and discussed in Aijmer (...)

1In this essay, I wish to draw attention to a limited area of minor importance in southern China in an attempt to explore how, in one particular location, people observed a specific phase in the passage of the year. The prefecture of Jiujiang 九江府 or “Nine Rivers” is situated in the Lake Poyang area in the province of Jiangxi, on the southern side of the middle stretch of the wide Yangzi valley. The capital town was once known as the main port for exporting porcelain goods manufactured further inland. I have chosen this place at random and, as far I know, it has not been researched before by scholars with anthropological leanings. The intention behind this present endeavour is to learn something new about local society in southern China by way of a careful reading of the lapidarian historical ethnography left to us in the “gazetteer” compiled for this location. My examination of this report has been informed by an approach that allows for a symbological interpretation.1

2The prefecture I have chosen as an examination of this sort was dug out of the pages of the enormous so-called “Imperial Encylopaedia” or Gu jin tu shu ji cheng 古今圖書集成 of 1726, which in its geographical section provides ethnographic material compiled from most of the local prefectural and magisterial chronicles then existing. This anthropological perusal of a text that conveys a local ethnography of the past, in particular its account of a festival celebrated in early spring, suggests the involvement of some features of political dominance. My reading of this text will explore the social implications of the ceremonial acts it records. The resulting suggestions will, I hope, be rendered more convincing by further discussion making a few illuminating comparisons later in the essay.

3The ethnographic description in the text refers to pre-modern conditions: the data I discuss were collected and printed some time before 1726. The notes it contains were therefore taken in the period before the almost complete destruction of the area that occurred during the Tai Ping rebellion of the mid-19th-century.

  • 2 Further reading on social life in Jiujiang is found in Chiang 1963.

4Lake Poyang is situated in an area of the country where winters are cool, but not cold, and fairly rainless. A summer season of humid heat and high rainfall is preceded by significant spring rains. Thanks to this well-marked seasonal rhythm, two distinct types of crops became characteristic of this area: some subtropical crops, essentially rice in summer, and complementary temperate cereals, such as wheat, in winter. In the cool and dry season, Lake Poyang became an enormous marsh intersected by shallow canals. Low hills, topped with villages, rose above the swamp lands, in the summer forming islands in the lake. It is reported that the township of Jiujiang was less prone to summer flooding than places closer to the lake (China Proper I, 1944: 99).2

5In the Chinese imperial almanac, the festivities in early spring known as Li Chun 立春 or “Establishment of Spring” took the form of a ritual that was celebrated according to the solar calendar. The first of the twenty-four terms that formed the sequence of the solar year carried the same name, Li Chun, and corresponded to the period February 5 to 19 by the Gregorian reckoning. It is likely that the first day of this stretch of time was the main festive occasion and that the events recorded in the local chronicle took place on or around this very day. The main events may have been preceded by activities staged on the previous days and continued into the days that followed. Being a date in the solar calendar, despite the early season it may have functioned as a sort of landmark for bucolic activities. It was officially associated with the opening of the new agricultural year, which was observed differently from rituals on other specific dates in the parallel lunar calendar. The latter only worked poorly in this respect, as these dates varied considerably in respect of when they occurred in relation to the actual realist cycle of the year.

6In late imperial China there was a general nationwide and stable conformity in the performance and timing of certain officially recognised celebrations. This conformity was achieved by means of an officially sanctioned public and a widely available almanac. This state control of the flow of time was in turn prepared by the work of a special imperial government department that produced this calendar annually, based on its own astronomical and astrological observations. The government therefore regulated the cosmic sequence of the seasons.

7In practical demotic social life, however, the actual cultural messages and expositions associated with the various seasonal events mapped out in this official scheme were in many respects of regional or local origin, thus reflecting unofficial local understandings. Furthermore, indigenous festive celebrations echoed varying and historically shifting ecologies, local cultural substrata, linguistic and ethnic or cultural variation, and the fluctuating history of state political influence that, taken together, characterised particular indigenous surroundings.

It should be noted that in actuality, agriculture at this early Li Chun time of the year in the Lake Poyang area was pursued in what was and would remain a dull season for weeks to come.

Jiujiang ethnography

8It is now time to turn to the ethnography. This is what the Jiujiang chronicler tells us:

  • 3 This quote appears at (using to the system of Giles 1911): 古今圖書集 VI: 875, 風俗考3a.

The Establishment of Spring (Li Chun 立春) occurs at the time of the twelfth moon, one moon after the Winter Solstice, when the earth (sky?) is under the influence of [the zodiacal constellation of] the Ox, when cold weather comes to a peak (an end?]. For this reason [some] start to prepare a representation (xiang ) [of an ox] to be used to send away the cold [weather, or, the cosmic yin force] and to arouse the yang () [cosmic forces]. In the days before this date [people] hang up ornaments. [Crowds] throng and there are hundreds of games. The principal officials, the public servants and their associates assemble for the Welcoming of Spring (Ying Chun 迎春) [ceremonies]. When the [proper] day arrives, at daybreak [governmental functionaries?] whip the spring ox [made] of clay, breaking it into shreds. People wrestle to pick up [the shreds]. They use them to bring about the spring. This day [people] make use of [such] shreds of the earth ox by placing them into [small?] pavilions (shrines, ting ) made of paper. These are sent as presents, accompanied by drummers and pipers, to the gentry (jian shen ) of all villages.3

9What we learn here is that the Li Chun festivities in Jiujiang were, by and large, carried out in a fashion similar to their public celebrations in very many other places in both northern and southern China. In Jiujiang, demotic discourses reported that the ox was paraded in order to bring the cold season to an end and to introduce the spring, although in fact it was still February, rather early in the season. What the ethnographer considers important is that the ox ceremonies should release the cosmic male yang forces, which were returning after winter’s domination by the opposed femininity of yin . The male-influenced power of growth now gradually began taking over the world from the dominion of winter by female introversion. Also, the shreds of the broken clay ox were seen as objects which themselves, like the whole ox, brought on the warm weather of spring.

  • 4 One account (Chiang 1963: 240) from early Republican days tells us that an urban family in the pref (...)

10The clay ox was broken up using “whips”, the resulting shreds being eagerly sought after by those who attended, who wrestled each other for them. Who actually did the whipping is not clear. It may perhaps have been an activity in which everyone could take part, but more likely it was a set of specially selected people, most probably the governmental officials who were present and their presence was for this very reason. Obviously the clay fragments were thought to bring luck, just as they brought spring. The shreds, if you could obtain them, were arranged in little pavilions made of paper and these were sent around to all villages in the prefecture to be received by their gentry. Who these gentry were we do not know, nor do we know how villages were organised.4

The accompanying social discourse as it is reported in the ethnography tells us that the clay ox was related to, and actually represented, the Ox, the animal stellar sign of the second of the cosmic Twelve Celestial Branches. Probably this celestial connection is best understood here in terms of the imperial official discourse and its symbolism.

11I will leave imperial cosmography aside here, but it may be noted that this very official association of the feast with the second of the Twelve Celestial Branches seems largely irrelevant socially, particularly from a demotic perspective, despite the chronicler’s assertion of its importance. The connection was presumably a purely conventional one, established in the prevailing discursive order without much iconic imagery underpinning it. These explanatory phrases in the chronicler’s text merely show, I suggest, that these Li Chun celebrations basically belonged to the sphere of interest that emanated from the imperial power and its everyday administration. Cosmic calculations were important in ruling over the country. In contrast, and more significantly for a land-based population, the breaking of the clay ox would metaphorically have paralleled the breaking of earth or clay with ploughs or hoes early in the agricultural season. This breaking of the soil was again connected with the theme of spring, the renewal of chthonic productive forces and the start of ploughing the fields.

12It seems likely that the use of the fragmentary pieces of clay from the official ox idol that had been whipped brought some form of blessings, especially as they were sent around to all rural villages. The wrestling for them seems to imply that their numbers were not enough to cover the demand. The most probable explanation for these local processions with music is that the sherds were presented in a manner that brought imperial blessings to all settlements in the prefecture, in which they were received by what appears to have been the local leadership.

  • 5 E.g. Bredon & Mitrophanow 1982: 129; Bishop 1926: 447–455; Bodde 1975: 204–205.

13In principle it seems also possible, as several authors have already suggested,5 that the shreds of an earth ox were thought of as a parallel to pieces of meat from an actually sacrificed bovine animal, the parallel imagery forming an iconic togetherness. This, if true, would not automatically mean that there was formerly an archaic taurine sacrifice at this time of the year that has disappeared (or has been transformed) in the evolution of Chinese civilisation. What we are dealing with is likely to be only an iconic paraphrase, not necessarily a “survival” of early Chinese civilisation.

This piece of Jiujiang ethnography concerning the fate of the shreds of the whipped clay ox, being distributed out to (nearly?) all settlements in the prefecture to provide blessings, raises the interesting question of whether there actually were any metaphysical links with agriculture. I will return to this below.

14We learn that ornaments were suspended for purposes of decoration, but we are not told where they were put up or what they were. It is likely that the magisterial townships within the Jiujiang prefecture, but perhaps also the surrounding villages, practiced the display of such embellishments. Nor are we told whether these Li Chun adornments were part of spontaneous demotic acting, or whether they were ordained as part of an official practice of public manifestation. The reason for asking this kind of question is that, as we have already seen, the ethnography strongly suggests that this festival was a sort of authorised occasion. The officials and their associates assembled to watch the ceremony of breaking the ox asunder and the accompanying struggle for the resulting shreds. We may thus infer that the attendance of the local prefect and his entourage indicated, and actually made manifest, the ritual presence of the imperial state, and that this occasion bestowed imperial blessings on the public community of the prefecture. This is likely to have included the display of ornaments.

15Li Chun, understood as an agricultural New Year festival occurring as part of the complex New Year ritual cycle, was very much an outdoor affair, mainly celebrated in daylight, and much of it outside built-up areas, in Nature. In contrast, other New Year celebrations were mostly indoor activities and social in their cultural semantic character. This spatial division certainly reflected farming as an open-air activity set apart from habitation, a split between two different cultural modalities. This difference expressed food as contrasted with children —the building of social continuity in terms of kinship being the main theme of the major rituals of the lunar New Year. What remains striking in the whole of this account is the notion that the Li Chun festival propelled a sort of cosmic change, an event discursively related to the imminent agricultural activities, its rituals of blessing ultimately being carried out under imperial supervision.

Discussions and comparisons

16The Li Chun festival brought together several cultural conventional topics, forming a complex of visual imagery. The displays were in a sense iconic in nature, but the pictorial elements in them were of a tableau vivant genre, illustrative in character. What was dominant in the spectacle was that in particular it used a large number of marked elements selected from a discourse of imperial virtuosity. As we can also trace many of the expressive features of the Jiujiang version of the festival in ethnography from other parts of China, to better comprehend the rather piecemeal Jiujiang data, we can take advantage of this and venture some tentative comparisons. It must be understood, however, that all such juxtapositions of pieces of ethnographic evidence from different places, widely separated in space and often in time, implies an approximative approach. Comparison entails an experiment which in this case may provide us with pointers that are hopefully of use in future, more systematic and synthetic attempts to explore the nature of society in southern China.

17In his masterly account of calendar festivals in ancient China, Derk Bodde has traced the origins of the Li Chun celebrations back to the nebulous history of the archaic period and to data in the text called the Yue Ling (月令) or “Monthly Ordinances” written in or before 240 BC. Rituals that were in many ways reminiscent of those staged in late imperial China were already being performed in the two consecutive Han dynasties, but more explicit mention of the beating of the ox does not occur before the early Song dynasty, from around AD 1000 (1975: 189–209).

  • 6 荊楚歲時記, n.d: 5a.
  • 7 The five colours refer to the Five Agents (Wu Xing 五行), which, combined in one sequence generate on (...)

18In these earlier periods the spring rituals were basically performed at the main courts of the rulers, but apparently they were also progressively staged in some form in less important places in the realm. All these ceremonies were part and parcel of practice in the north and northwest of the country, the classical centres of early Chinese civilisation, around the capitals of Chang’an and Luoyang. What actually went on in the south in these early times is difficult to know. The Li Chun feast was reportedly celebrated in the days of the southern Liang dynasty (AD 502–57), with its capital in modern Jiangling, in Hubei, but the source makes no mention of the northern practices, as they were not seen in the south. The description tells us about hair decorations made of multicoloured cloth and placards wishing for an eternal spring,6 but not much else. “Many” colours were certainly meant to denote the five colours of the Five Agents, which, as we shall see, in later times crucially appeared on the clay ox. The five colours were part of a cosmic quintesectional system and in their togetherness should have signalled a completeness.7

19In this context of Li Chun, the symbolic use of colours is the only known link between the south and the north at that time. It therefore seems reasonably clear that the Li Chun celebrations as we have learnt about them in later times were not yet part of the southern scene. At some point in history (perhaps during the Song dynasty?) they had been imported from the north and imposed on southern local societies in the context of the formation of a new, northern type of rule.

  • 8 See Aijmer 2003: 109–116 for further references regarding the Dongting area.

20We have seen that in Jiujiang the Li Chun festival was clearly an event that included the imperial state by actively engaging local administrators in the ceremonies. At about the same time we find a very similar pattern in the Lake Dongting area, further upstream on the River Yangzi. There we learn that official ceremonial drilling of the militia took place on this day and that a procession of peasants was also held in connection with celebrating officialdom by handing over a bushel of rice to the imperial prefect. The former activity was certainly a pleasing show of benign stately power, the latter a manifestation of the connection between imperial grace and the local cultivation of rice, producing consequential blessings resulting in success. The emperor appears by proxy as the guarantor of the expected harvests of rice. At this time of the year the bushel of rice presented to the prefect must have been a token of last year’s success, returned as a sort of confirmation —a “receipt”— as well as tribute.8 This is an official imperial discourse, and, as mentioned, it constructs a cultural modality very different from local cultural semantics.

  • 9 But see also Doolittle 1876: 18–23.

21In a detailed account, based on his long residence (his notes are dated 1911) in Fuzhou in Fujian Province, Lewis Hodous (1929: 19–25)9 tells us explicitly that in pre-revolutionary China, Li Chun was a grand government ceremony. In Fuzhou, a state procession took place to the eastern suburbs in which the city’s officials were prominent. The display of ornaments, also mentioned in Jiujiang, was in Fuzhou an official characteristic. This circumstance strengthens somewhat our belief that this was also the case in the Lake Poyang area. In Fuzhou the ritual emphasis was on the local prefect, while the higher ranking resident “viceroy” of Fujian did not participate at all. This seems to have stressed that the ritual flow was from the emperor directly to the local administration without any bureaucratic intermediary.

  • 10 Justus Doolittle’s account of Fuzhou from the early 19th century provides some items of information (...)

22The clay ox, which was a centre piece in Jiujiang, was also crucial in Fuzhou. Hodous provides a detailed account10 of the “spring bull” in Fuzhou, how it was manufactured, how it was coloured, and how it was handled. This account is revealing of a rich complex of discursive symbolism that involved the imperial bureau of astronomy and its official cosmic calculations. In other words, the emperor took control of time by stargazing, his cosmic insights being the basis for a translation of observed astral phenomena into an official, printed calendar. Every year Li Chun appeared regularly on a specific date in the official calendar, chosen in accordance with the movement of the sun. Of necessity, the same festival also had an explicit relationship to another, different and changeable date, namely at the direct point of correspondence in the concurrent moon calendar. The annual variation in this correlation between the calendars was expressed in the use of colours and positions in the procession. Different parts of the ox were painted to accord with a cosmological scheme.

23In Fuzhou sacrifices were made to the bull, a bovine idol that was carried into the city centre, then being broken apart at the yamen or central office building. There is a somewhat similar report from Yuezhou Prefecture’s capital of Baling in Hunan, according to which an ox was broken apart at the centre of the town, rice and salt being thrown at its image. All this was supposed to have a purifying effect. In Fuzhou the fragments of the clay ox were collected by people, who gave them to their pigs “to stimulate their growth”.

  • 11 Doolittle (1876: 22) also points out that the military was completely absent in the ritual procedur (...)

24Hodous’ rich account of Fuzhou thus confirms that the Li Chun ox rituals were very much official business conducted to make manifest the transcendental force of imperial power. The same point is emphasised by Doolittle (1876: 22).11 From a broader perspective, there is little to suggest that this celebration of Li Chun was related to local social conditions in a more significant sense. The clay ox seems to have been highly instrumental in manifesting the existence of officialdom. Its discursive symbolism consisting of the ox’s colour combinations was unique to each occasion it was displayed.

25It appears that the full celebration of the festival would have been dependent on the presence of a resident imperial magistrate or prefect, and consequently that the defining central rituals could not have been staged everywhere, but only in magisterial and prefectural capitals.

There seems to have been no apparent connection between the Li Chun ox imagery and an observation from Hubei Province (e.g. in Suiyang xian, in Wuchang fu) on the fifth day of the first moon. This was one of the days at New Year when cattle were specially fed and spoken to in courteous words. This considerate approach to bovine creatures was, it appears, a sort of recognition of the special bond between humans and animals among the rice peasants in this area. The Li Chun ox was different, an astral phenomenon linked to vernal renewal in a very general way and only abstractly. It is true that cattle and buffaloes were used for ploughing, and indeed, in Anlu fu in Hubei there was a ritual ploughing at Li Chun, accompanied by drumming. That is, here there may have been some more direct local symbolic links between the clay ox and the imagery surrounding local rice production. Otherwise, the festival’s symbolism seems to have been indirect, largely discursive in nature, and very much “official”. Furthermore, as ploughing was also part of the imperial ritual in the capital (e.g. Cormack 1927: 150), positing a local origin for this Anlu ploughing is doubtful, as it was rather an echo of what went on in the capital.

26Official ceremonial engagements apart, Hodous mentions that in Fuzhou this Li Chun feast was a very popular occasion full of merriment, generally a joyful celebration. The impression is that in Jiujiang too people found pleasure in this festivity, which was accompanied by “one hundred games”.

27There are several accounts from the north of China from about the time of the final days of the Qing empire, those from the capital, Beijing, being particularly lively. The emperor himself was involved, and there was a ploughing ritual at the Temple of Earth, a whipping of a clay ox and many other things. Performers were dressed in special beautiful clothes, this all being staged, it is said, to promote the spring and the coming year’s agriculture, as well as to drive away pestilence. In the early days of the republic, the President of China continued the imperial ritual in a somewhat changed and subdued way, but by then it had “lost much of its fascination as a spectacle” (Cormack 1927: 149–152; Tun 1987: 4–6). A description referring to eastern Shandong is very similar in outline (Johnson 1910: 180–182). It has been said more generally that the Li Chun festival, involving the country’s local administrations, did occur everywhere in a rather uniform shape during the Qing dynasty (Ch’ü 1962: 166). More general accounts of the celebrations also stress this uniformity (e.g. Bredon & Mitrophanow 1982: 129–133).

28Hypothetically this ritual event to celebrate the opening of the new agricultural season, implying blessings graciously bestowed by the imperial state, may have first appeared in Jiangxi Province as part of the Sinicization of the area, perhaps starting in the period of the first Han dynasty (BC 206–AD 23) and in step with the realm’s southerly expansion. We may suppose that the main features of this official public festival were introduced as tokens of a new imperial dominant order introduced by the “Han Chinese” from the northern plains into the ethnically and linguistically varied south, to be spread among indigenous southerners. In the south the festival became an integral part of the introduction of new and foreign Chinese political institutions.

29The politically motivated introduction of a standardising calendar was without doubt a device to control newly incorporated regions in an expanding state. Despite the imperial imposition of conformity, what emerged in the south was variation. The local chronicles of magistracies and prefectures very often have a special section containing records of calendrical celebrations, including local practices, some of which were unorthodox.

30Although rather flimsy, this survey helps us to understand the Jiujiang ethnography somewhat better. In Jiujiang the uniformly expressive imperial imagery of a basically discursive nature had been accepted by an essentially rice-producing area in which, from the dominant northern perspective, irrigation agriculture was a key part of a world of different preconditions and presuppositions. In the true historical Chinese heartland the imperial New Year agricultural rituals would have been concerned with the dry cultivation of sorghum and, somewhat later, wheat.

31In the Jiujiang ethnography presented above, we are fortunate to have a glimpse of the manner in which this imported set of rituals was locally understood and received by southerners. These ceremonies must have been comprehended as a rather remote, official and foreign manifestation. As such the festival obviously brought good fortune, and so the physical remains of the rituals —the ox fragments— were much sought after, even fought over, as they brought blessings in a more direct, contagious way. However, there were also some interesting differences in this regard. We remember how in Jiujiang shreds of the clay ox were brought inside paper pagodas in processions to the villages of the prefecture after the struggle to obtain them and there presented to the “gentry” with great ceremony. This was an impressive display including drummers and pipers, all, we may assume, reflecting the imperial pomp of the official celebration. Imperial blessings were brought to the countryside for its population to appropriate.

How this distribution of blessings would have benefited the cultivation of rice is not clear. We might suggest that within the New Year duration any such beneficial influences would bring about social continuity, though whether in terms of the production of rice (the official agricultural connection) or through the birth of children is hard to say. The former suggestion seems somewhat ungrammatical culturally. In southern China’s world of symbolic expression rice agriculture was generally the business of the ancestors in their graves, and did not directly concern any exterior forces (e.g. Aijmer 1968, 1979).

  • 12 Doolittle’s Fuzhou account tells us that in his days the main ox (or buffalo) was made of paper and (...)

Also in Fuzhou, people recognised that the clay ox shreds were bringers of good luck and were beneficial to those who possessed them, but, by contrast to the case of Jiujiang, there was here no real deeper reverence for these fragments. To make good use of these tokens of imperial benignity here in Fuzhou, they were thrown to the pigs, to make them thrive (Hodous 1929: 21).12

  • 13 古今圖書集成 1888: VI, 1193, 風俗考 3b.

32The lack of uniformity in such secondary rituals, which were “tagged on” to the basic liturgy of the main calendar event, tells us that they were not themselves part of the ceremony imposed from above, but reactions to them. This suggests that the native response would be dissimilar in different locations according to local pragmatic circumstances. Sometimes in some places additions were made to Li Chun that do not seem to belong at all, like the great tug-of-war carried out in the Jiangling magistracy (Jingzhou Prefecture, Hubei).13 Such “odd” conventions were perhaps cases of calendrical drift.

33As an agricultural New Year festival, Li Chun was apparently not accompanied by any major verbal narrations revealing an origin for these rituals: they were neither historically nor mythically founded. Nor was there any mention or other indication of a divine connection in Jiujiang. In most places, however, the clay ox was accompanied by a clay and straw figure depicting a herdsman called “Mang Shen” (芒神). The circumstance that he is not mentioned does not necessarily mean that he was not present in Jiujiang’s celebrations, but rather that, in a self-evident way, he was included in the notion of the “clay ox”. This in Jiujiang seemingly absent figure is often characterised as a “tutelary god” of the spring and of crops, being a member of the general Chinese inventory of gods and godlings. He was associated with the east, the direction of the spring and also with the colour azure (green/blue qing ). His appearance, like that of the ox, was generally associated with weather forecasts for the coming season. There seems to have been no particular myth connected with this figure either.

34In the times of Li Chun, an important aspect of the “general picture” of the celebrations was such weather forecasting. Again, this possibility is not explicitly mentioned in the Jiujiang chronicle, but it was a fairly regular characteristic, for instance, further upriver, in the Lake Dongting area (Aijmer 2003: 109–116). When mentioned, the forecasts were said to depend on the colours of the ox. What colours would be appropriate in a particular year had been predetermined by the office of astronomy in the imperial capital. When the year’s colours were displayed, their implied imperial predictions must have been of great interest in the peasants’ world (cf. Hodous 1929: 22–25; Doolittle 1876: 21). More generally we find that the calendars of southern China in many ways formed conventional systems of divination about the progress of the world. Another general calendrical theme of this sort was that the course of the annual celebrations provided pre-set points in time for the renewal of protective measures against various kinds of demonic evils. In many areas Li Chun was said to offer just such a defence against attacks from the nebulous forces of misfortune.

Final words

  • 14 Previous, more general studies of Chinese calendars and their annual festivities have been made by (...)

35The calendars of Southern China14 seem, generally speaking, to have systematised and appropriated latent, but potentially available blessings. They were also instrumental in the distribution of such blessings and thereby contributed to the cultural building of social continuity. The sources of these sought-for blessings differed, being variously social, natural, transcendental or political in nature. This process of socially distributing good luck over time provided a flow of expressive conventional forms seeking a close correspondence, or even true integration, between a cycle of iconic narrations and the perceived stream of time, known objectively as a sequence of seasonal changes. Within this process, I suggest, the prospects of social continuity were sought in two separate symbolic spheres, each dominating one half of the year. Each of these spheres was based on a set of presuppositions that formed them into separate cultural modalities. While one ruled in summer and was concerned with continuity in terms of constant access to food (rice), the other governed in the winter period when the notion of continuity was focussed on the birth and incorporation of new individuals to replace those who, of necessity, had passed away (Aijmer 2003: 155–163).

36From a south China perspective, Li Chun was an event that did not seem to fit easily into the prevailing cultural system, being a foreign extravaganza of a basically political nature. Its dominant message seems to have been that it was the charismatic emperor who provided the coming crops. According to this discourse the supreme ruler spread his extraordinary blessings, implicitly including his cosmic control of the weather, through the channels of his state apparatus. It therefore seems significant that, at the dawn of modern times, once the imperial administration had collapsed, the nationwide celebrations of Li Chun soon appear to have disappeared from the New Year period to which they had so clearly belonged. In Jiujiang, we learn, a few centuries after the taking of the ethnographic notes I have discussed in this essay, in a period during which the empire vanished, the Li Chun celebration did not take place. Although there were a series of “spring dinner parties”, these were family occasions with indoor assemblies. By then nothing seems to have remained of the grand official celebration described in the chronicle (Chiang 1963: 111–113).

  • 15 But see, for instance, Aijmer 1968, 2003: 149–163.

37The ethnography indicates that there was a certain contradiction between the Li Chun ritual message saying that crops were the gift of the emperor and the widespread southern notion that the gift of rice was not primarily an imperial affair, but rather a concern of the local ancestral dead, one that found ritual expressions in other spring and summer feasts in the calendar. I leave this latter aspect of vernal celebrations aside here.15

38An ancient set of seasonal rituals stemming from the north and northwest of the country, with its vast dry plains, Li Chun originated primarily in an area characterised by deeply rooted “Han Chinese” civilisation. The festival’s archaic messages concerned an agriculture that favoured the cultivation of sorghum and later wheat. It contributed to the articulation of charismatic rule with ancient northern references. Its ceremonies were introduced, together with Chinese domination, into the wet rice-cultivating societies in the marshy lands of the south as part of the process of their subjugation to northern rule. The introduction of the standardising Chinese calendar was certainly a device to control newly incorporated regions into an expanding empire. The imperial reckoning of time was enforced here in the south, as it was on other frontiers of the expanding empire (e.g. Pelliot 1929: 208).

In the late imperial period, there were still significant cultural differences in symbolic articulation between north and south in the Chinese empire. There were variations in timing, with local calendars often offering dates different from those found in the official schedule. As was pointed out already in the introduction, indigenous celebrations frequently incorporated aspects that reflected ecological features (both of the present and of days gone by), local cultural presuppositions and substrata, and also the degree of the state’s political influence present in the local environs.

39It is still widely claimed that down the ages Chinese society has displayed a remarkable unity based on centralised power in a world characterised by a common peasant mentality and Confucian philosophy. Indeed, this view is held by many sinologists, historians and even some social anthropologists. To counter such views, which assume an almost monolithic sameness, differently minded anthropologists should encourage more systematic comparisons that make use of detailed local ethnographic studies. It is my suggestion that we should treat the China of both past and present as an ocean of family resemblances, in which we also find endless variation. It is only by understanding this unceasing variation that, in due course, we will be able to discern what is common ground and what is not. Superficial similarities often have their roots in dominant discourses and the drift of idioms of imagery. Anthropologists concerned with the Chinese south and its various social morphologies could with some advantage base their curiosity, and thus their analyses, on symbology and generative cultural semantics. This is a field of promises.

The approach advocated here needs an eye for detail, because it is in the “odd” ethnography that we may hope to find reflections of significant variation, indicating differences between local cultural grammars. We may find such ethnographically helpful clues should we venture to explore the generative processes that result in meaningful conventions. Local cultural grammars may well share many basic cultural templates, but even so we may expect to find a spread of very dissimilar semantic inputs. Modifying conditions of many sorts will explain the richness in apparent social morphology from a wider perspective.

40In historical anthropology, the task is to examine data from the past in the perspectives generated by an anthropological platform. The definition of this platform is today certainly only nebulous: “anthropology” has become a very general, all-inclusive and evasive concern. However, it may still be argued that, should an anthropologist take a research interest in ethnography in the past tense, she or he should strive to contribute to the formation of new knowledge by producing novel insights which scholars from other academic disciplines cannot reach because they see the data differently. There is, of course, no universal order of legitimacy saying who is an anthropologist and who is not. It follows that the same applies to historical anthropology. And yet I believe that most researchers with an anthropological training who find historical data interesting in their work would agree that such explorations into the past entail not only involvement with a corpus of ethnography, but also, in anthropological terms, a distinct way to think about and explain this ethnography. The main anthropological question would be: What sort of society could have produced the scatter of data left for us to contemplate? We have to find the right questions to match the answers that are already given, but are hidden in the ethnography.

41This brief study of a particular ritual phenomenon that once occurred in early spring in a prefecture in the Yangzi valley, in Jiangxi Province, provides a glimpse of the manifestations of wider discursive processes in the Sinitic world. It also offers some indication of the creation of local cultural imagery. Although the work represents just a small contribution to the study of the formation and re-formation of the socio-cultural landscape of southern China through time, a trickle of minor studies such as this will ultimately provide us with a flood of significant information on the many facets of the development of southern Chinese culture.

I wish to thank Virgil Ho, Robert Parkin, Ingrid Tang and the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for valuable help with this text.

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 The possibilities offered by a symbological platform have been sketched out and discussed in Aijmer 2001.

2 Further reading on social life in Jiujiang is found in Chiang 1963.

3 This quote appears at (using to the system of Giles 1911): 古今圖書集 VI: 875, 風俗考3a.

4 One account (Chiang 1963: 240) from early Republican days tells us that an urban family in the prefectural capital owned both rice producing land and upland areas in the countryside, all being farmed by tenants. Probably there was a rather mixed picture of ownership and tenancy in these tracts.

5 E.g. Bredon & Mitrophanow 1982: 129; Bishop 1926: 447–455; Bodde 1975: 204–205.

6 荊楚歲時記, n.d: 5a.

7 The five colours refer to the Five Agents (Wu Xing 五行), which, combined in one sequence generate one another, while in another sequence they destroy one another. The togetherness of these colours thus has an ambiguous meaning as both generative and productive, and protective and destructive (See e.g. Aijmer 1964: 50–51).

8 See Aijmer 2003: 109–116 for further references regarding the Dongting area.

9 But see also Doolittle 1876: 18–23.

10 Justus Doolittle’s account of Fuzhou from the early 19th century provides some items of information that are somewhat different, among them that a live buffalo was part of the official procession (Doolittle 1876: 21–22). I will not address these differences in this essay.

11 Doolittle (1876: 22) also points out that the military was completely absent in the ritual procedure in Fuzhou.

12 Doolittle’s Fuzhou account tells us that in his days the main ox (or buffalo) was made of paper and burnt. Miniature oxen made of clay were also carried in the procession. These small replicas were those that were broken. A living buffalo was slaughtered and the meat divided among the officials (Doolittle 1876: 22).

13 古今圖書集成 1888: VI, 1193, 風俗考 3b.

14 Previous, more general studies of Chinese calendars and their annual festivities have been made by J.J.M. De Groot (1886), Juliet Bredon & Igor Mitrophanow (1927), Volfram Eberhard (1957), Derk Bodde (1975) and Tun Li-ch’en (1987). Less specific accounts of Chinese festivals are plentiful.

15 But see, for instance, Aijmer 1968, 2003: 149–163.

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Göran Aijmer, « Timely signs, dominance, and vernal celebrations in late imperial Southern China »Civilisations, 69 | 2020, 237-250.

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Göran Aijmer, « Timely signs, dominance, and vernal celebrations in late imperial Southern China »Civilisations [En ligne], 69 | 2020, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2024, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/civilisations/6070 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/civilisations.6070

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Auteur

Göran Aijmer

Göran Aijmer is professor emeritus and former chair of social anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and currently associated with the Gothenburg Research Institute of the University. His research focuses on symbolic expression and articulation in fields like politics, economy and religion. His regional projects have concerned Southern China, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia. One of his books, New Year celebrations in central China in late Imperial times (2003), is a symbolic anthropological study that made a new contribution to the study of the Chinese annual religious cycle. In more recent years, he has published a series of articles concerned with ancestor worship in Southern Asia. [goran.aijmer[at]gmail.com]

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