What Literati Talked About When They Talked About Memory

WHAT LITERATI TALKED ABOUT WHENTHEY TALKED ABOUT MEMORY:

COMMEMORATING RESISTANCE TO THETAIPING IN NANJING’S YU GARDEN,

1900–1911

CHUCK WOOLDRIDGE

Lehman College, CUNY, USA

As used in current scholarship, the term ‘‘memory’’ encompasses much more thanthe recollections of particular people. It considers the totality of practices thatpeople use to record and transmit information about the past. This memoryscholarship rarely considers the ways particular historical actors have used theword ‘‘memory.’’ This article is a case study of one group of degree holders inNanjing who gathered in a garden to commemorate an 1854 plot against theTaiping. Their writings addressed the virtue they thought surrounded them. Whenthey spoke of memory, their main concern was not so much the loss of the war, oreven the loss of the memory of the war, but rather the loss of the cultural valueplaced on people who remember, which for them would mean the end of theliterati class as they knew it. Local commemorative practices thus expressed adeeper anxiety that was articulated in the language of memory.

KEYWORDS: memory, Taiping, Nanjing, Hu Enxie, Phoenix Terrace

By the first decade of the twentieth century, survivors of the Taiping War inNanjing had trouble unearthing the exact details, but they did know fromdocuments and personal accounts the story of Zhang Jigeng’s failure to oust theTaiping from the city. They called it the ‘‘plot’’ (內應 neiying) or the ‘‘righteousrevolt’’ (舉義 juyi), a phrase implying an uprising against a tyrant. The tyrant inthis case was the Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan (洪秀全 1814–1864). Hong hadcreated the Taiping movement, made Nanjing its capital from 1853 to 1864, andunleashed a cataclysmic war that had destroyed the city and decimated itspopulation. In 1854, Zhang Jigeng (張繼庚 d. 1854) had organized an attempt torise against the Taiping and to open Nanjing’s gates to the Qing forces laying siegeto the city. The Taiping had uncovered the plot and executed Zhang and most ofhis co-conspirators, but a few participants survived the war and recounted Zhang’sexploits. By the early twentieth century, however, most of the survivors had died,and the men who gathered to commemorate participants in the plot faced newdifficulties convincing urban residents that Zhang’s plot still mattered and that,

Twentieth-Century China, 40. 1, 3–24, January 2015

# Twentieth-Century China 2015 DOI: 10.1179/1521538514Z.00000000051

had Zhang succeeded, the war could have ended much sooner and resulted in farless devastation.

One group of men who had prepared for civil service examinations in Nanjing’spostwar academies sought to honor Zhang and his co-conspirators, publishingaccounts and poems celebrating the plot. Between 1900 and 1911 they gathered ina garden and presented offerings to the souls of the deceased participants. In thegarden, called Yu (愚 foolishness) Garden, those who had lived through the wartried to remember the plot, and those born after the war sought to remember thesurvivors. As they did so, they also spoke of ‘‘memory’’ to refer as much to thepresent-day challenges to their class as to their attempts to commemorate the past.They used the concept of memory to express their understanding of their ownobligations as literati. They applied their own understanding of ‘‘memory’’ to theircircumstances in the very late Qing, a historically specific use of the term that caninform future scholarship on memory.

From 1850 to 1864, the Taiping War had threatened the existence of thereigning Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), leveled cities across central and southernChina, and killed tens of millions of people. Following the defeat of the Taiping,and for decades afterwards, soldiers, officials, historians, and families of the fallendepicted the events of the period as a cataclysmic tragedy. A recurring sense of losspervaded histories of the war, diaries and memoirs of participants, shrines andgraves for the dead, and innumerable quotidian efforts to recover from the war.The dominant vision of the Taiping was one of unmitigated catastrophe.1

And then it was not. In the early twentieth century, nationalist revolutionariescame to see the Taiping as their historical antecedent. As of 1900 other, morerecent wars held enormous consequences for the future of the Qing: the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 meant that Japan would be the dominant regional poweruntil the end of World War II, and the Boxer War, lasting from 1898 to 1901,would result in crippling debt for the dynasty. In an effort to save themselves, Qingrulers issued a series of reforms in the early twentieth century, including thegradual elimination of the examination system. Revolutionaries at the timeexplicitly took the Taiping as inspiration for overthrowing the Qing, and in 1912Sun Yatsen, who in his youth had been called ‘‘Hong Xiuquan’’ after the leader ofthe Taiping, would come to Nanjing as the provisional president of the newRepublic of China.2 Those seeking to overthrow the Qing downplayed the Taipingmovement’s particular form of Christianity—the daily rituals, the printing ofscripture, and the claim of their leader, Hong Xiuquan, to be the younger brotherof Jesus—and stressed instead the movement’s virulent condemnation of Qing ruleand its proposed programs of land redistribution, a common treasury, and newopportunities for women. To this way of thinking, the Taiping represented anadvance in the evolution of the Chinese state, progress rather than tragedy.3

1 See especially Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War inNineteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

2 Marie-Claire Bergere, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1998), 33–34; Harold Schiffrin, Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1968), 23.

3 Stephen Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story ofthe Taiping Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2012), 355–64.

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Even prior to 1911, those in Nanjing who derived their status from scholarshipand writing, and especially from the examination system, understood the nature ofthe challenge the revolutionaries posed. They knew that their understanding of theseminal event of their times, the Taiping War, was at stake. The men who gatheredat Yu Garden imagined themselves to speak for a larger group of literati, peoplewhose education allowed them to compete in the civil service exams, and whoselearning conferred authority on their political and moral stances. Hu Enxie (胡恩

燮 1824–1892), Nanjing native and survivor of the plot, constructed the gardenwhen he returned to Nanjing following a ten-year period of flight during theTaiping War. He intended it as a site where he could take care of members of hisfamily and tend to the souls of those who had died in the war. After Hu’s death,and continuing into the early twentieth century, it became a gathering spot forsurvivors of the war, who continued to go to the garden to honor Hu himself andothers who had taken part in the Zhang plot. On the occasion of these earlytwentieth-century, very late Qing gatherings, one group of city elites wrote abouttheir concern that not only their commemoration of the Taiping but also their wayof understanding the past was under threat. The language they used was that of‘‘memory’’ and ‘‘forgetting,’’ ‘‘preservation’’ and ‘‘loss.’’ My thesis is that theirdiscussion of memory reflected, as one would expect from the scholarly literatureon memory, a concern about the loss of the past, but more immediately an anxietyabout the cultural value placed on people who took memory and commemorationas their specialty, that is, the literati class itself.

CONCEPTS OF MEMORY

In the China field, as in most branches of historical scholarship, the variedpractices of memory have occupied a great deal of attention. The scholarship onmemory has tended to cluster around three central themes: the ways peoplecapture information about the past, the ways they seek to erase some ofthis information, and the ways such social processes can inform individualrecollections.

One thrust of the literature has been to establish the wide variety of activitiesand objects outside of the practice of historical writing that conveyed informationabout the past. Poetry, gardens, buildings, photographs, memorial halls, museums,pilgrimage sites, and even rocks or stock-market tickets can, in a given context,shape people’s sense of history. In describing what he called ‘‘places of memory,’’French historian Pierre Nora argued that such objects accumulate in sites thatmake available to visitors a direct, emotional response to the past as opposed tothe distance and separation that history creates.4 Much of the literature onmemory in China concerns the creation of such places and the resulting processesof identity formation. Jun Jing’s Temple of Memories: History, Power, andMorality in a Chinese Village has documented how villagers in post-socialistDachuan (Gansu Province) built a Confucian temple, and how they reconstructedritual texts, genealogies, and popular versions of local history alongside the

4 Pierre Nora, ‘‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,’’ Representations 26(Spring 1989): 7–25.

WHAT LITERATI TALKED ABOUT WHEN THEY TALKED ABOUT MEMORY 5

temple. Jing noted that the construction of the temple helped foster certainnarratives about the past, notably the dominance of the local Kong lineage thatclaimed descent from Confucius, but it also allowed the display of challenges tothe authority of both the state and the Kong lineage, so that spirit possession anddevotion emerged alongside the offerings to Confucius. With extraordinary detail,Jing documented how the creation of the site fostered the creation of particularforms of identity.5

Jing’s work, in common with much of the literature on sites of memory,emphasized that the construction of such places involved erasure alongsidereconstruction. The focus on the ways public projects might seek to exclude orignore particular experiences has been a singular achievement of the scholarshipon memory. All too often in twentieth-century China, the attempts to erase thepast have focused on moments of trauma, in particular the hardships of the GreatLeap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Of course, certain traumas might servepolitical purposes of (for example) creating national identity or directing popularsentiment to create support for a particular policy, as occurred with the negationof the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s.6 Some of the most moving accounts ofmemory have demonstrated how those who lived through the events havemanaged to make their own experiences manifest even at times when thegovernment has maintained a policy of silence or construed the past in a mannerthat left little leeway for public discussion of individual suffering. Ching Kwan Leehas written of ‘‘the intensity of rage and despair’’ in the stories told by workers inLiaoning.7 David Davies has shown how an exhibition of photographs of zhiqing(知青 sent down, lit. ‘‘educated’’ youth) during the Cultural Revolution triggereddebates about how injury and loss might be represented.8 In her comparison ofmemory in Chinese and Jewish cultural traditions, Vera Schwarcz found theaccounts of trauma, mostly in poetry, so wrenching that she concluded that‘‘Those who try to hold on to remembrance more often see themselves burdenedrather than uplifted by the effort.’’9

5 Scholars of Republican China have demonstrated similar processes of narrative andcounter-narrative in the formation of national identity around specific locations. In Nanjing, oneof the most significant of these was the Sun Yatsen mausoleum. See Wang Liping, ‘‘Creating aNational Symbol: The Sun Yatsen Memorial in Nanjing,’’ Republican China 21, no. 2 (1996): 26.Charles D. Musgrove, China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 154–63.

6 A recent example is Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memoryin Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). TheRape of Nanjing has produced an enormous literature, the best of which is Takashi Yoshida, TheMaking of the ‘‘Rape of Nanjing’’: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

7 Chin Kwan Lee, ‘‘What Was Socialism to Chinese Workers? Collective Memories andLabor Politics in an Age of Reform,’’ in Chin Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, eds., Re-envisioningthe Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 141.

8 David J. Davies, ‘‘Visible Zhiqing: The Visual Culture of Nostalgia among China’s ZhiqingGeneration,’’ in Lee and Yang, Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution, 189–90.

9 Vera Schwarcz, Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3.

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Another theme of memory studies has concerned the ways social interactionsshape the expression of one’s own private thoughts into a common language andform. Several of the scholars mentioned above, including Jun Jing and Ching KwanLee, have taken up the theme, but none as exhaustively as Gail Hershatter in hermonumental Gender of Memory. Through detailed examination of documentsalongside extensive oral interviews, Hershatter has demonstrated that widelypublicized accounts of model laborers profoundly shaped the oral narratives thatshe collected of women describing their own memories:

Their stories sometimes called [the] past into account, sometimes used [thepast] to call the present and its insufficiencies into account, sometimesnarrated the virtue and value of a world that was currently neglecting them.What they never did was stand apart from that past and reject the subjectpositions that collectivization offered them, even though those positionshave long since ceased to exist.10

Hershatter concluded that she must reject the idea of memory as a distinctlyprivate and individual act, that research cannot uncover an ‘‘interior personadistinct from the public model.’’11 The distinctiveness of women’s collectiveexperiences inflected their recollections, giving memory itself a gender.

Hershatter’s insights draw attention to a common assumption in the literaturethus far. Scholars have acted as if we understand, a priori, what memory is, andthat our task now is to uncover the content of particular memories alongside thelarger forces that might shape that content. If, however, Hershatter is right thatmemory itself can be gendered, then her discovery suggests another direction forscholarship. In addition to asking what and how people remembered, historiansmight also attempt to discern what political and social processes helped define thevery idea of memory in different contexts.12

The breadth of the scholarship may have had the unintended consequence ofobscuring emic categories. If one is using ‘‘memory’’ to mean every rendering ofthe past, it becomes difficult to attend to the more specific, local, and contingentuses of the word and its equivalents in different languages. Indeed, some readersmay justifiably feel that, whatever the strengths of particular studies, the sum totalof works on memory have stretched the concept in so many directions that it canbe difficult to tell what ‘‘memory’’ means, in which case close attention to actors’categories may help clarify things. The Zhang plot and its aftermath in Nanjingafford an opportunity to move in that direction by looking at how a specific groupof people treated the concept of ‘‘memory.’’

The semantic range of the English word ‘‘memory’’ overlaps with a number ofClassical Chinese terms. Yi (憶 to recollect) suggested that one was thinking back

10 Gail Hershatter, Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 234.

11 Hershatter, Gender of Memory, 235.12 I take this to be Matt Matsuda’s meaning when he wrote ‘‘a truly historical project must

be attentive to the ways in which ‘memory’ is not a generic term of analysis, but itself an objectappropriated and politicized.’’ See The Memory of the Modern (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996), 6.


across a span of time. Ji (記) could mean ‘‘to write down, to record,’’ but in thiscontext of memory it meant something closer to English ‘‘to retain,’’ with the sensethat one had an accessible mental record of information recollected from the past.Hence the compound jiyi in Classical Chinese meant the capacity to recall someprevious experience. Jixing (記性) described the mental capacity to access largeamounts of information that one had memorized. This word was used in particularfor the mnemonic skill necessary to memorize the Chinese classics in order to passthe civil service examinations.13

With the reform and elimination of the civil service examinations, degreeholders confronted a situation in which their accumulated mnemonic skills, theirjixing, no longer had the same value. Furthermore, several members of theircohort died between 1900 and 1910, meaning that there were fewer and fewerpeople with whom they could discuss their recollections (yi). The members of thegroup began to wonder whether anybody would continue to be interested in theirrecords of the past (jiyi) or whether their attained scholarly knowledge, moralinsight, and historical experience might be forgotten (忘 wang) or lost (亡 wang, aword with the broader sense of ‘‘to perish’’ or ‘‘to die’’).

Following the destruction of the Taiping, Zeng Guofan (曾國藩 1811–1872) hadtaken the lead in the effort to rebuild Nanjing’s academies, and in these academiesthe issues of memory and forgetting took on a particular nuance. Nanjing’spostwar generation had exerted themselves to renew classical culture and tocelebrate virtue. They described the study of classical texts, and in particularpreparations for civil service examinations, as a means to ‘‘inspire men of talent’’(鼓舞人才 guwu rencai) and thereby lead them to contribute to reconstructionprojects in Nanjing. The end of the examination system led them to fear that theirrebuilding efforts might ultimately fail. Qin Jitang (秦際唐 1837–1908), one of theparticipants in the Yu Garden gatherings, claimed that his contemporaries hadsought to gather texts, honor virtues, and record history. With the elimination ofexaminations, he worried that the literati ‘‘do not look at the thirteen classics orthe twenty-four dynastic histories. County by county and city by city, they forgetthe traditions and texts of their ancestors’’ (十三經廿四史不觀.一鄉一邑往往數典

而忘其 Shisan jing niansi shi buguan. Yixiang yiyi wangwang shudian erwangqi).14 The men of Yu Garden used the language of ‘‘forgetting’’ to suggestthat the labors of postwar reconstruction might have been in vain.

Like the characters in the Raymond Carver short story, ‘‘What We Talk AboutWhen We Talk About Love’’ (characters who spoke of ‘‘love’’ to describe emotionsthat do not, on the surface, seem much like love at all), the Yu Garden elitesemployed the vocabulary of memory and forgetting in particular contexts withsometimes surprising referents. In their terms, much of their ritual concerned itselfnot with recalling events of the past but rather with acknowledging the numinous

13 Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 263.

14 Qin Jitang, ‘‘Preface,’’ in Chen Zuolin, Jinling tongji (Comprehensive annals of Nanjing)(Nanjing: Ruihua guan, 1907). See also the preface to Chen’s Yundu qiao xiaozhi (Small gazetteerof bridges over the transport canal), in Chen Zuolin, Jinling suozhi wuzhong (Five gazetteers ofminor matters in Nanjing) (Nanjing: Yelu Shanfang, 1900). Here and below punctuation ofChinese text added by Wooldridge.

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presence of the souls of the dead.15 When they did speak of memory andforgetting, they often referred to the obligations of what they understood as theliterati class, responsible for performing rituals, writing history, and maintainingconnections to the past. In the Yu Garden, those who had studied in Nanjing’spostwar academies reflected not only on the Zhang plot, but also on the challengesfacing their class as fewer people acknowledged the authority of their writings onmoral issues and as their carefully cultivated skills lost relevance.

THE CREATION OF YU GARDEN

After the war, Hu Enxie, a silk merchant in Nanjing, took the lead in postwarcommemoration of the Zhang plot. Hu was one of the many natives of Nanjingwho in the 1870s took part in the effort to write accounts of the war and to revivescholarly culture in the city.16 He wrote poems about the event and eventuallypublished a lengthy account of his experiences during and after the war. He alsoinvited other survivors to his garden, where they too wrote poems and essaysabout the events of the war.

Early in the Taiping occupation, in late 1853, Zhang Jigeng, a native of Nanjingworking in a clerical position for the Taiping, had realized that some Taipingsoldiers might cling more strongly to their native place allegiances than to theircommitments to Taiping Christianity. In particular, certain recent Taiping recruitsfrom central China, especially those from Hunan, seemed to dislike their morepious and long-serving comrades from Guangxi, the native place of the firstparticipants in the Taiping movement. Zhang had convinced some of thedisgruntled soldiers to rebel. He had wanted these troops to throw open theTaiping Gate in the northwestern part of the city and to link up with Qing regularsbased at the Great Encampment of Jiangnan, enabling them to enter the cityundetected. Zhang claimed to have the allegiance of over 6000 people, and hesought to convince the commander of the Great Encampment, Xiang Rong (向榮

d. 1856) to attack at the same moment that the Hunanese troops rose up.Hu Enxie acted as the intermediary in the negotiations between Zhang Jigeng

and Xiang Rong, sneaking in and out of the city to deliver letters back and forthbetween the two. He did so in part through the good offices of Wu Fucheng (吳復

成 d. 1854), who in the early years of the war had aided those who wished to fleethe city. Wu set up several offices to produce goods, most notably silk, for theTaiping kings, and he later set up a firewood-collecting enterprise that allowed himpassage in and out of the city. He helped Hu Enxie and others in the Zhang plotmake contact with Qing forces.17 Xiang Rong, however, suspected a trap, and he

15 Raymond Carver, ‘‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,’’ in What We TalkAbout When We Talk About Love: Stories (New York, Knopf, 1981), 137–54.

16 On genres of writing about the Taiping War, and special emphasis on ‘‘memory’’ as an eticcategory, see Rania Huntington, ‘‘Chaos, Memory, and Genre: Anecdotal Recollections of theTaiping Rebellion,’’ Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 27 (December 2005):59–91.

17 Jen Yu-wen (Jian Youwen), The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1973), 121–22; see also biographies of Wu Fucheng and Hu Enxie in Qingshigao xiaozhu (Draft history of the Qing, punctuated and annotated) (Taipei: Guoshiguan, 1986),11365.


kept putting off the date of the insurrection. Then in March of 1854 one of theparticipants divulged the plan to the Taiping. Zhang managed to get word out toattack immediately, but the Taiping had since built an additional wooden wallaround the gate. Watchmen heard the sounds of Qing loyalists trying to cutthrough the wall, and the entire plot was foiled. Over 800 people died, includingZhang Jigeng himself. Taiping rule in Nanjing continued, and Hu Enxie escaped toQing-held territory, serving in various clerical positions in tax bureaus until theend of the war in 1864.

Hu Enxie returned to Nanjing in 1865. He then used his professionalconnections and wealth to help revive, and further profit from, the city’s silkindustry. In 1874 he purchased a plot of land in the southern city (an area, hewrote, his mother had especially enjoyed prior to the Taiping) and constructed theYu Garden. He moved in with his mother in 1878.18 In the 1880s, the site becamea gathering spot for Nanjing’s educated elite. This area had been the most denselypopulated section of Nanjing prior to the Taiping War, but at the end of the warfires had destroyed most of the buildings, and people only slowly returned. Thus itcame to pass that Hu was able to obtain ‘‘tens of mu’’ (數十畝 shushi mu) of‘‘overgrown, inaccessible’’ land with a marsh in the middle, the site of the‘‘Western Garden’’ (西園 Xi Yuan) during the Ming. Hu had the marsh cleared tomake a pond, and the buildings in his garden encircled the pond. His mainpurpose, he claimed, had been to provide a suitable retreat for his mother, whohad survived the war with him and who could now appreciate the fruits of peace.Hu therefore justified his lavish spending as an expression of filial piety.19 Thegarden would also become a site where Nanjing’s self-styled literati, returning tothe city following wartime dislocation, would gather and write poetry. In contrastto their writings about other gardens in the city, and differing as well from theiressays about shrines to those who had died in the Taiping, they frequently usedthe words ‘‘recall’’ (yi) and ‘‘forget’’ (wang) to describe Hu Enxie’s particularcontributions to the postwar city.20

In his study of poetry about Nanjing, Stephen Owen wrote that places within thecity gained value through texts, and that those texts also instructed readers in theways they might experience the site. I would add that, by the nineteenth century,

18 Hu Enxie, Huannan yijia yan (Tales of a whole family’s calamity) (1894), xia/9b–11a.19 Descriptions of the garden appear in the front matter to Hu Guanguo, comp., Baixia Yu

yuan ji (Collection from Yu Garden of Nanjing) (1894), and also in Hu Enxie’s memoir Huannanyijia yan and poetry collection about the garden Yu yuan zayong (Miscellaneous songs of the YuGarden), both in Baixia Yu yuan ji; in the writings collected in Hu Guangguo, Yiju hesi huibian(Edited compilation of the collective shrine for righteous actions) (1908) (hereafter YJHSHB);Chen Zuolin, Fenglu xiaozhi (Small gazetteer of Phoenix peak) (1899; repr. Nanjing Chubanshe,2008), 53–56. Chen Yifu, Jinling yuanye zhi (Gazeteer of gardens and rural areas of Nanjing)(1933; repr. Nanjing Chubanshe, 2008), 499–503; Xinjing beisheng (Complete records of thenew capital) (1934), shang 37–38. The quotations in this paragraph are from Deng Jiaji, ‘‘YuYuan ji’’ (Record of the Yu Garden), in Hu, Baixia Yu yuan ji, 1a. On the trope of ‘‘filial piety’’ asjustification for lavish spending on a different kind of garden, see Emily Mokros, ‘‘Reconstructingthe Imperial Retreat: Politics, Communication, and the Yuanming Yuan under the TongzhiEmperor, 1873–74,’’ Late Imperial China 33, no. 2 (December 2012): 80–83.

20 On the rebuilding of Nanjing and the reconstitution of its literati class, see WilliamCharles [Chuck] Wooldridge, ‘‘Building and State Building in Nanjing After the TaipingRebellion,’’ Late Imperial China 30, no. 2 (December 2009): 84–126.

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students in Nanjing’s academies studied the corpus of poetry about sites inNanjing. They were required to compose their own ‘‘Meditations on the Past atNanjing’’ (金陵懷古 Jinling huaigu; the genre Owen took up in his article).21 Hu’schoice of location for the Yu Garden made the most of the literary prestige thatsuch meditations could bring to certain sites in Nanjing. The garden abuttedPhoenix Hill (鳳凰麓 Fenghuang Lu), where the Tang poet Li Bai had written oneof his most famous poems, itself a reference to the sack of the city in 549

On the Terrace of the Phoenixonce the phoenix roamed;the phoenix is gone; the terrace is empty;the river keeps flowing on.In the palace of Wu flowers and grassesbury the unseen paths;caps and gowns of days of Jinhave now become ancient mounds.22

Li Bai’s poem (here in Stephen Owen’s translation) embedded loss and nostalgiainto the landscape. As Owen has demonstrated, subsequent visitors to Nanjingwould frequently use Li Bai’s language, adding to the ‘‘overlay of sites, images, andphrases that shaped the way the city was seen.’’23 When Hu and his circle invokedthe Phoenix Terrace in poems and essays composed in the late nineteenth century,they wrote of something lost, thereby reminding readers of the absence of theTerrace as well as other, more recent losses of their own lifetimes. In this writing,they remembered (in the sense of internal, personal recollection) by allusionto other rememberers, that is, other people telling them that something wasmissing from the site. Owen called the resulting chain of transmitted loss‘‘remembrance.’’24 Remembrance meant that ‘‘the historical past and the literarypast were inextricably woven together.’’25 In creating the Yu Garden on groundhallowed by both war and poetry, Hu himself became one who remembered, onewho sought to resurrect as well as exploit the skein of literary references thatcovered Nanjing.

Hu Enxie and other literati returning to Nanjing after the war viewed thedevastation and recalled the many laments written for the city following itsdestruction at the end of the Six Dynasties period. Li Bai’s words resonated withthem. As they tried to locate their homes and other familiar landmarks, they maywell have thought of Li Bai tracking down the Phoenix Terrace. With the revival of

21 Bi Shiyu and Sun Changming, Xiyin Shuyuan Dong Xi Zhai keyi (Model answers fromthe Eastern and Western Studies of the Xiyin Academy), juan 3.

22 Stephen Owen, ‘‘Place: Meditations on the Past at Chin-ling,’’ Harvard Journal of AsiaticStudies 50, no. 2 (December 1990): 426.

23 Owen, ‘‘Place,’’ 417. See also Catherine Stuer, ‘‘Dimensions of Place: Map, Itinerary, andTrace in Images of Nanjing’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 174–82. See Stuer’sdiscussion of encounters with sites as ‘‘sites of conflict where the articulation and approximationof identity is at stake,’’ 115.

24 Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Chinese Literature(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) , 17.

25 Owen, ‘‘Place,’’ 421.


the economy in the 1870s and 1880s, Nanjing again acquired the buildings andbustle of a city, and Li Bai’s poem stirred a sense of recovery alongside the complexfeelings of loss. As participants in the war grew old and died in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, the loss grew: visitors to the Yu Garden thenhonored those who died in the war and at the same time remembered andcommemorated those who in the wake of the war had themselves remembered andcommemorated the war dead. Then, in the revolution of 1911, the garden wasagain damaged and repaired. At that point, it was the general political chaos ratherthan the physical state of the city that references to Li Bai evoked. Readers recalledhis experience of the An Lushan rebellion of 755–763 and the near collapse of theTang Empire rather than the destruction of Nanjing during the Six Dynasties andthe Taiping War. Emphasis on events of the Taiping War then receded. Visitors tothe garden would, in the words of one writer, contemplate the ‘‘domestic rancor’’(海內匈匈 hainei xiongxiong), and ‘‘pour a cup of wine for Li Bai,’’ identifying atthat point more with the poet than the specific and local context of the poem.26

The changing meaning of the poetry about the city is crucial for understandingYu Garden’s place in Nanjing in the 1870s and 1880s. Several visitors describedthe Yu Garden as a place where they could ‘‘forget the cares of the world’’ (忘機

wangji),27 but they insisted also that the garden allowed one to ‘‘recall the past’’(憶昔 yixi)28 and experience echoes of the elite culture of earlier times in Nanjing’shistory, when earlier poets had also lamented loss. Nanjing flourished in theretelling of its own destruction. To visitors in this period, the garden demonstratedthe post-Taiping reconstitution of the literati class and suggested the importance ofelite activism for maintaining tranquility. It also declared Hu, whose fortunederived from investments in silk and mining rather than scholarship andgovernment service, to be part of that class. As the owner of the garden, and ashost of the gatherings there, Hu could distinguish himself as one of the stewards ofthe poetic city rather than as a mere merchant.

Although large by the standards of post-Taiping Nanjing, the Yu Garden stoodout not for its distinctive landscape, but rather for the ways even its more mundanefeatures could resonate in the wake of the war. Like any garden’s proprietor, Huwished to create a sense of tranquil beauty, but in this case the serenity proclaimedrecovery rather than rehearsing earlier trauma. The family dwellings lay on thenortheastern part of the property, in the ‘‘inner garden’’ (內園 neiyuan), walled offfrom the rest of the landscape. To the southwest the topography was hilly. Visitorscongregated in buildings on the northwest and southeast parts of the property. Asone walked in the gate at the northern side of the property and faced south into thegarden, the private quarters of the garden stood on the left. Turning right (that isto say, west), one saw characters in Hu’s hand carved in a wall: ‘‘Lodge in peace’’(寄安 ji’an). Continuing to the south around the lake, there was a building of threerooms, the Wuying Jingshe (無隱精舍 Studio with No Recluse). The study rested ina bright, sunny spot on the edge of the pond, and its name suggested as well that

26 He Yunshu, ‘‘Huai Bai lou ji’’ (Record of the Tower for Cherishing Li Bai), Jinling yuanyezhi, 502.

27 See, for example, Hu, Baixia Yu Yuan ji, 3/33a, 7/5b, 7/20a.28 Hu, Baixia Yu Yuan ji, 2/46a, 6/3b, 7/8a.

12 CHUCK WOOLDRIDGE

the proprietor was not a recluse, but rather someone who from this calm havennevertheless contemplated the problems of the day. The Chunhui Tang (春暉堂

Hall of Spring Sunshine) contained a similar double-meaning, as ‘‘spring sunshine’’was a metaphor for maternal love, a reference to Hu’s desire to showcase his filialresponsibility.29 The hall also housed a shrine honoring those who had died in theZhang plot. Continuing around the pond, one could climb hills that afforded aview of both the pond and an orchard of peach, plum, almond, and loquat trees.From this artificially pastoral setting in the southwestern portion of the garden,one could continue east to another cluster of buildings, in particular an ancestraltemple, and to the north (close to where we entered the garden in the first place) alibrary that stood at the boundary of inner and outer. In between the library andtemple stood the largest building of the outer garden, the Qingyuan Tang (清遠堂

Hall of the Pure and Far-Reaching), named to describe the surroundings, of whichvisitors had a commanding view. This spot frequently served as the venue for Hu’spoetry gatherings, and his guests contributed calligraphy to hang inside. Outsidethe hall stood perhaps the most remarkable feature of the garden: a rock formationand cave designed to mimic the Shizi Linyuan (獅子林園 Lion Grove Garden) inSuzhou.30 Within the garden, Hu showcased his own moral rectitude as devotedson, gathered with friends to engage in literary pastimes, and provided a venue forthe veneration of local heroes.31

Visitors to the garden reflected on the pain of the war, and in particular on theloyalty that participants in the Zhang plot had displayed. Yet such reflections onthe past took place in the context of identifying themselves with earlier generationsin Nanjing who had also gathered to reflect on the past. Visitors emphasizedrecovery and class identity more than suffering. The Yu Garden contrasted in thisrespect with two contemporary gardens that have been the subject of scholarlyinvestigation. Vera Schwarcz has shown that the Singing Crane Garden in Beijinggave both material and poetic expression to its proprietor’s desire for respite, butalso to the repeated, crushing denial of the possibility of real tranquility. InOctober 1860, the British under Lord Elgin burned the garden in the punitiveexpedition against the Yuanmingyuan Summer Palace. According to Schwarcz, thegarden became emblem of a ‘‘misshapen world.’’32 Late nineteenth-century poemsby Qing aristocrats meditated on the garden’s destruction, and those of Manchuprince Yuhuan, in Schwarcz’s words, ‘‘pulsate with ongoing grief,’’ an emotionalregister that would continue and gain new meaning in the violent twentiethcentury.33 The Yu Garden had not existed prior to the Taiping; it had therefore notbeen destroyed, and it did not inspire similar associations. As Tobie Meyer-Fonghas demonstrated, post-Taiping gardens could indeed express the lingering effects

29 Hu, Baixia Yu yuan ji, 1/1a.30 Deng Jiaji, ‘‘Yu yuan ji’’ (Record of the Yu Garden), in Hu, Baixia Yu yuan ji, 1/1a–3a.31 Visitors to the garden did try to make themselves known through writing, but because the

physical arrangement of the garden mattered to participants, I would not describe it as an‘‘ideational tumulus.’’ See Frederick Mote, ‘‘A Millennium of Chinese Urban History: Form,Time, and Space Concepts in Soochow,’’ Rice University Studies 59, no. 4 (Fall 1973): 35–65.

32 Vera Schwarcz, Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden (Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 111.

33 Schwarcz, Place and Memory, 121.


of wartime injury, pain, sadness, and loss. In Hangzhou, one Zhang Guanglie, whoas an eight-year-old had witnessed the death of his mother at the hands of theTaiping, constructed a garden in her honor. He ate and slept in the garden andinscribed his own poetry into the architecture. As Meyer-Fong put it, in thecouplets Zhang ‘‘highlights his alienation from ordinary society, proclaims hiseternal devotion to the memory of this mother, and announces his life’s purpose isto curate her memory.’’34 In contrast, Hu’s mother had survived the war, and thetone of his garden stressed continuity rather than rupture. Certainly, the Taipingperiod had involved difficulties and suffering for Hu Enxie, and he wrote aboutthem in a work called Record of One Family’s Tribulations.35 The garden itself,however, did not primarily express sadness. Rather, it marked the return ofcontemplative life to a war-torn city.

Through his shrine, Hu Enxie asserted a role in the commemoration of the dead.His desire to honor the participants in the Zhang plot took place alongside muchmore widespread attempts to identify and enshrine the loyal souls of those whohad perished at the hands of the Taiping.36 Several of the men who took the lead inthese efforts, including the gazetteer editors Wang Shiduo (汪士鐸 1802–1889)and Chen Zuolin (陳作霖 1837–1920), attended gatherings in the garden. In 1864,Governor Li Hongzhang (李鴻章 1823–1901) had secured honors and enshrine-ment for participants in the plot, and in 1868 Nanjing officials included in a newshrine complex for the loyal an altar for Zhang Jigeng and his fallen comrades.37

In creating a private shrine in his garden, Hu Enxie attempted to demonstrate thatthe loyalty of participants in the Zhang plot deserved greater veneration than thedynasty could bestow. In Hu’s view, the plotters had not merely died at the handsof the Taiping, but had also nearly undermined the movement and prevented tenadditional years of war.38 They stood out from the thousands of other souls thenentering government shrines as ‘‘loyal and righteous’’ not because of the extent oftheir suffering, but rather because of the imagined alternative history in which theincompetence of Qing general Xiang Rong had not thwarted their efforts. Herewas a story of loyalty that the dynasty did not wish to tell.

This context gave the word ‘‘foolishness’’—the meaning of the ‘‘yu’’ in ‘‘YuGarden’’—a particular register. Yang Changnian (楊長年 1811–1893), one of themen who gathered there, compared the name of the garden to a passage in theAnalects that describes the state ruled by Ning Wu as being ordered when theruler was wise, yet in disorder when he was foolish. Confucius concluded: ‘‘Othersmay equal his wisdom, but they cannot equal his foolishness’’ (其知可及也, 其愚

不可及也Qi zhi ke ji ye, qi yu bu ke ji ye).39 Regarding Hu Enxie, Yang continued:

34 Meyer-Fong, What Remains, 186.35 Hu, Huannan yijia lu, 1904.36 On such practices, see William C. Wooldridge, ‘‘Transformations of Ritual and State in

Nineteenth-Century Nanjing’’ (Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 2007), chap. 7; Wooldridge, ‘‘Building andState Building,’’ 111–17; Meyer-Fong, What Remains, chap. 5, especially 169–71.

37 Liangjiang caifang zhongyi ju, Liangjiang caifang zhongyi zhuanlu (Biographical recordsof the Liangjiang bureau for gathering and interviewing the loyal and righteous) (1887), 20/12a–1b. Wooldridge, ‘‘Building and State Building,’’ includes details of the shrine complex, 115–17.

38 Baixia Yuyuan ji, 2/17a–18a.39 Analects 5, no. 20. Translation adapted from James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 1,

rev. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), 180.

14 CHUCK WOOLDRIDGE

His foolishness is his filiality. His foolishness is his loyalty. Filiality withoutfoolishness is not complete. Loyalty without foolishness is not complete.其愚也, 其孝也. 其愚也, 其忠也. 然而孝非愚不成. 忠非愚不成.40

Yang explained that, as opposed to the sort of foolishness that toppled states, theYu Garden’s foolishness represented the pleasures of peace. It was only throughthe garden that Hu could properly take care of his mother, and it was in the gardenthat he celebrated the effort to protect the dynasty from calamity. This kind offoolishness, Yang argued, could not be matched. In postwar Nanjing, numerousreturning elites constructed gardens and used the occasion to proclaim the returnof serenity, but accounts of the Yu Garden emphasized the virtues of filiality andloyalty.41

Following Hu Enxie’s death in 1888, many who had visited the gardenpublished accounts of their host, and they used the language of remembering (yi)and not forgetting (bu wang) to emphasize several aspects of Hu’s life that theydeemed praiseworthy. Hu had not ‘‘forgotten his mother’’ (忘母 wang mu), butrather acted to protect her in war and take care of her in her old age.42 Heremembered other gardens in Nanjing before the war and sought to recreate thepractices that had flourished then. Mostly, Hu ‘‘recalled the past,’’ providing thespace and occasion for literati to reflect on the Zhang plot.43

In 1895, Hu’s son, Hu Guangguo (胡光國 1845–1924), collected the poems thathis father had written, and in so doing singled out Hu Enxie as a person whorecalled a great deal. The younger Hu explained that his father had written poemsabout travels to the capital and throughout Jiangsu, about the gatherings in the YuGarden, and about the various figures in the city who had died in displays ofloyalty to the dynasty. Hu Guangguo titled the collection ‘‘Draft Poems ofOccasional Memories’’ (偶憶詩草 Ouyi shicao). Hu therefore described thecontent of his father’s memory/yi as extending to a wide variety of matters, but heemhasized the experiences of the war and of events of the Zhang plot.44 HuGuangguo argued that those who had known his father now had the obligation toremember him, to continue to make known the things that he had made known.Yet by the early twentieth century, survivors of the war grew few, and newchallenges to the identity of the educated elites who gathered in the garden made itdifficult to fulfill this injunction. The changed circumstances would create newnuances for the words ‘‘yi’’ and ‘‘wang.’’

40 Yang Changnian, afterword to Yu Yuan ji, back matter of juan 8/4a. The name probablyalso alludes to the Tang writer Liu Zongyuan’s poems about ‘‘Foolishness Stream.’’

41 For example, Chen Zuolin, ‘‘Ke Yuan ji’’ (Record of the garden that can be regarded as agarden), in Keyuan wencun (Extant prose of Chen Zuolin), 8/3b–4b; Sun Yiyan, ‘‘Dai Li YutingFangbo chongjian Jiangning buzhengshi shu ji’’ (Record of rebuilding the yamen of the Jiangningprovincial treasurer, written for Li Yuting [Zongxi]), in Xunxue zhai wenchao (Collected writingsof Sun Yiyan), 2/20a–21a.

42 Yu Yuan ji, shou/2a, dedication (tici) by Sun Wenchuan.43 Yan Duanshu, afterword (ba) to Yuyuan tiyong (Songs composed in Yu Garden), in Yu

Yuan ji.44 Hu Guangguo. afterword to Ouyi shicao (Draft poems of occasional memories), 2/46a–b,

in Yu Yuan ji.


TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHALLENGES

Literary legacies, exemplary moral conduct, and orderly society remained concernsfor Nanjing’s literati following Hu Enxie’s death. Hu Guangguo became thegarden’s keeper. In the early twentieth century it remained a place of reflection andremembrance, and the men who gathered there found ways to use the garden tospeak about contemporary politics.

Hu Guangguo’s circle included people who were children and adolescentsduring the war. They had studied with scholars whom Zeng Guofan had recruitedfor Nanjing’s academies, and (with the exception of Hu Guanguo himself) theyhad passed their provincial examinations in the 1870s. Several members of hiscircle, such as Chen Zuolin, Qin Jitang, and Gu Yun (顧雲 1846–1906) had takenthe lead in restoring Nanjing’s elite culture after the war: seeking out rare volumesfor libraries, collecting names of the dead for enshrinement, and publishinggazetteers of the city to ensure that, whatever the devastation to Nanjing’s physicalcityscape, its historical and literary heritage, which they considered their ownpatrimony, would again become accessible.

In their discussions of the Zhang plot, Hu Guangguo and his guests emphasized itslessons for those seeking to strengthen the Chinese state in the early twentieth century.Whereas a new generation of revolutionaries took the Taiping as a model of radicaltransformation, the men who gathered in Yu Garden imagined that their class couldpromote the moral renewal they thought was necessary to confront new challengesfacing China. Perhaps in answer to the growing calls for citizenship and equalityemerging in the early twentieth century, they used the story of the Zhang plot toemphasize the role local elites had played in coordinating opposition to the Taiping. InblamingXiang Rong aswell as the Taiping for the failure of the plot, themen gatheredat Yu Garden criticized both the Qing and the revolutionary forces seeking to topplethe Qing. They did not outline a clear political program, but they claimed the capacityto recognize the virtuous and mobilize them in times of need. They thought that onlyliterati leadership could allow the state to draw on the energies of ordinary people in away that would prevent chaos of the sort seen during the Taiping War.

By 1900 most of the survivors of the Taiping War, even those who had beenchildren at the time, were themselves aging, and the main protagonists, like HuEnxie, had died. In state shrines, the established mechanisms of enshrinementhonored those who had died during the war, but did not include those who died afterthe war, however weighty their acts. Hu Enxie and thirty other participants in theZhang plot who lived through the war were not eligible to receive state honors fortheir loyalty. (Hu was, however, commemorated for his filiality in taking care of hismother.) Hu Guangguo set up a new shrine in Chunhui Hall on the grounds of theYu Garden and named it the Minzhong Ci (愍忠祠 Shrine of Sorrow for the Loyal).Because they understood ‘‘loyalty’’ to apply to acts of literati leadership in which theprotagonists did not die, they could treat the Zhang plot as a model of how men oflearning might act to save the dynastic order against revolutionaries or foreigners.45

In the garden, Hu Guangguo and his fellow educated elites could enact this vision.

45 For a parallel example from 1890, see Tobie Meyer-Fong’s account of an essay by ZhangBinglin, who also calls for an expanded definition of ‘‘loyalty’’ to include survivors. Meyer-Fong,What Remains, 162–63.

16 CHUCK WOOLDRIDGE

The shrine included three rooms. The middle room featured a painting of ZhangJigeng. It held a shrine to him and ten others who had orchestrated the plot anddied at the time. To the left was a room honoring Wu Fucheng, Hu Enxie, andeighteen other people who had plotted from outside the city walls to link up withZhang Jigeng’s forces. In the room to the right was a shrine to thirty people whohad taken part in the plot within the city and still survived. Participants describedthemselves as ‘‘supplementing’’ (補 bu) the court’s efforts to ‘‘give recompense tothe loyal’’ (報忠 bao zhong).46 The ceremonies were to take place in spring andautumn, and they involved a common meal as well as prayers, music, and theburning of incense in front of three paintings, which took the place of woodenspirit tablets normally found in similar shrines.47

The first of these offerings took place in 1900. It is uncertain how many peopleattended, but Hu Guangguo, his younger brother Hu Guangyu (胡光煜 datesunknown), Chen Zuolin, Deng Jiaji, Gu Yun, and Qin Jitang were all present.They compiled a description of the shrine, including an account of the Zhang plot,the names of those enshrined, prayer texts, and poems honoring the participants.Around 1904 they circulated these writings among fellow literati, many of whomadded further encomia. Altogether 38 people contributed to the final compilation,the Yiju hesi huibian (義舉合祀彙編 Compilation of writings from the combinedshrine of the righteous revolt). It appeared in 1908, just three years before theshrine, along with most of the Yu Garden, was damaged in fighting in the 1911Republican Revolution.

The writers who contributed to Hu Guangguo’s compilation lavished praiseupon the participants in the Zhang plot, but they also used the occasion tocomment on society in the early twentieth century. They had a lot to say, none of itcomplimentary. These men agreed that the revitalization of those virtues that hadinspired participants in the Zhang plot, and particularly Hu Enxie’s willingness tosneak in and out of the occupied city, remained the only hope for addressing theaffairs of the day:

Now the transformation of human affairs is even more urgent. The qi of theliterati is more and more diminished, and biased and deceitful wordsendlessly pour out, injuring loyalty and righteousness, and cardinalrelationships are tearfully rejected.今者世變益棘. 士氣愈靡, 卮言詭詖, 荼毒忠義,彛倫淚斁.48

On the one hand, the rhetoric is cliched, and it could describe nearly any of thefrequent occasions in imperial China when writers called for a return to the virtuesand relationships described in classical texts as prevailing at the time of the ancientsage kings. On the other hand, the words had a specific context, one in whichmany were coming to question the efficacy of classical learning. Written todescribe rituals honoring people who fought against the Taiping, the wordsnaturally called to mind a comparison between the early twentieth-century attacks

46 YJHSHB, 1b.47 YJHSHB, 27a–28b.48 YJHSHB, 29b.


on classical culture and the Taiping iconoclasm of the mid-nineteenth century.Another contributor, Sun Yiwei (孫毅威 dates unknown) of Nanjing, made thiscomparison more explicit. He recalled the Taiping claim that demons, includingManchus, had enslaved the world and compared it to the racial rhetoric of therevolutionaries. Sun thought these ideas eroded natural human relationships andcaused people of talent to be cast aside. In Sun’s words:

Today exhortations to support [contending movements] spread in alldirections; the three bonds decline and are rejected. In raising revolt, rebelssay ‘‘The Han race is rising again’’ and cast aside the meritorious. In the past[rebels] said: ‘‘The qualities of enslavement have become human nature.’’They gradually accumulated errors, yet prevailed. This was really a case ofmisleading the world by tricking the people.今日百說粉披; 三綱淪斁. 奉叛, 逆曰: ‘‘漢種復興,’’ 斥勳. 舊曰: ‘‘奴質成性.’’寖積非而勝. 是迺惑世以誣民.49

In contrast to those who sawmodernity and revolution as the unfolding of the new, themen gathered in Yu Garden considered themselves to be encountering familiarchallenges. They thought that the weakness of the state resulted from a broad inabilityto recognize truth, and in particular the failure to appreciate the strength that could arisefrom true virtue. Virtues, particularly filiality and loyalty, cemented the relationshipsthat inspired people to selfless acts. They were manifest in the Yu Garden, in ritual, andin written accounts of virtuous acts, particularly the story of the Zhang plot itself.

THE PRESENCE OF VIRTUE

The garden, texts, and rituals commemorating the Zhang plot all invoked the pastto foster literati identity in the postwar period. In that respect the sources accordwith existing scholarship on memory. The titles of many of the essays about theZhang plot employ the language of ji (記 to write down or retain, as in memory), ji(紀 to record for posterity), and lu (錄 an enduring record), each of which evokesthe idea of information and emotions about the past resonating across time. Yetthose who took part in rituals at Yu Garden understood there to be anotherpresence: qi, and in particular the form of efficacious (靈 ling) qi that could haveeffects in the world of the living. They insisted that the Zhang plot, like othervirtuous acts, left material traces in the city. This point of view fits poorly to thenotion of remembrance. They did not see themselves as trying to recall orreconstruct an absent past. Rather, they regarded their ritual practice as in part anacknowledgment of the virtuous qi in their immediate surroundings.

Virtue endures. That was the refrain of essays about the Yu Garden ritualshonoring participants in the Zhang plot. It remains and leaves physical traces inthe world, including the garden itself, which ‘‘in the beginning was completed outof filial piety, and in the end was made known from loyalty’’ (愚園之始以孝成, 終以忠顯 Yu Yuan zhi shi yi xiao cheng, zhong yi zhong xian).50 Hu Enxie’s love of

49 YJHSB, 32b–33a.50 YJHSHB, 14b.

18 CHUCK WOOLDRIDGE

his mother had created the garden, which had given survivors a place tocontemplate the heroic loyalty displayed by participants in the Zhang plot.

For Yu Garden elites, the souls of the participants of the Zhang plot lingered inNanjing. The stated purpose of ritual was to ‘‘console’’ (慰 wei), ‘‘secure’’ (妥 tuo),or ‘‘honor’’ (褒 bao) the souls of the dead.51 The qi of these souls, in the view ofliterati, remained coherent and had demonstrable effects in the world. Bypresenting offerings to souls, literati helped maintain the coherence of this qi.Literati had the obligation to reveal (顯 xian), make manifest (昭 zhao), and createa record (表 biao) of both the original acts of the Zhang plot and the continuingunfolding of those acts in the world.52 They addressed their poetry to the‘‘expansive qi’’ (浩氣 hao qi) surrounding them, which, following Mencius, theyunderstood to be the product of human will.53 The claim here was not that oneshould remember the lessons of the past. Rather, these men said they were simplyinteracting with their surroundings. Hu Guangguo and his circle felt that by‘‘expounding and propagating’’ to both the seen and unseen worlds (闡發幽光

chanfa youguang), they were demonstrating that magnificent virtue (盛德

shengde) does not decay (不朽 bu xiu).54 In that sense, their project was not oneof ‘‘remembrance,’’ for the things they claimed to be most crucial remained near tohand. They were making known the present rather than the past.

The solution to chaos, be it in the form of the Taiping or the imperialistexploitation of the empire through trade and foreign concessions, was to rely onunchanging truths, themselves perceivable, yet intangible. In the words of DengJiaji:

Duty is what commonplace and cowardly people avoid, but what men ofwill strive for. In the same fashion [the same thing, still duty] is what thedesperate and depraved neglect and what men of humanity reflect upon. Toexperience hardships together, and then contentedly forget about them—that does not accord with our forebears’ magnificent integrity. To havesomething made [by one’s father] bequeathed to you, and then to inherit andreject it—that does not accord with a filial son’s generous transmission [ofthe works of his father]. Are not acts like those of Hu Enxie and his son themeans by which the virtue of his generation is passed on and cultivated, andthe means by which the minds of men do not die?義者, 庸懦之所避, 而志人之所爭也. 氣類者, 澆薄之所忽, 而仁人之所念也.患難同之, 而安樂忘之, 非先民之盛節也. 創造貽之, 而繼嗣違之, 非孝子之

善述也. 若先生父子之舉斯世德所以聿修，人心所以不死者乎55

In this passage, the people imagining the past are also identifying with it. In thisvision, there are a select group of people—literati—who understand virtuousaction. They know their responsibilities and have the will to act, even when such

51 For example, YJHSHB, 16a, 28a, 35b.52 For example, YJHSHB, 14b, 32b.53 Mencius 2A:9–15. References to hao qi appear in YJHSHB, 39, 59a, 60a. Other poems

addressed qi: 47a, 49a, 51a, 53a, 54a.54 YJHSHB, 3a.55 YJHSHB, 21a.


action is perilous. By performing rituals to participants in the Zhang plot, the mengathered at Yu Garden sought to make clear that they possessed particular insightinto virtue, and just as this virtue had ultimately won out over the Taiping, itwould guide them as they sought to come to terms with the myriad forces ofmodernity. They styled themselves the leaders in this project. Several writersemphasized that literati and commoners would ‘‘band together’’ (糾合 jiuhe).56 Anessay by He Yunshu (何允恕 dates unknown) particularly emphasized the capacityof ‘‘the talented among the literati’’ (士林之彥 shilin zhi yan) to direct ‘‘the heroesof the marketplace’’ (闤闠之傑 huanhui zhi jie).57 To this group of Nanjing’s elites,the vision of strength through literati leadership served as a riposte to emergingrevolutionary movements based on equality and citizenship.

THE LANGUAGE OF MEMORY

Although virtues, from the point of view of the Yu Garden literati, might continueto exist, the particular story of the acts of the Zhang plot could be lost. HuGuangguo wrote that the offerings to the participants helped him ‘‘think back andremember’’ (追憶 zhui yi) the virtuous deeds of Zhang Jiegeng and his co-conspirators, and another writer suggested that the accumulation of qi in Nanjinghelped him to remember.58 In Deng Jiaji’s lengthy passage on duty (quoted above),he remarked that to forget about the events would sully ‘‘our forebears’magnificent integrity’’ (先民之盛節 xianmin zhi shengjie). Remembering was akind of duty, one that enhanced the virtue of those gathered at the Yu Garden, notof the participants in the Zhang plot.

The lone survivor of the Zhang plot still alive in the early twentieth century wasWeng Peng (翁鵬 dates unknown). He also took up the issue of memory. Heacknowledged that he had forgotten a great deal:

I am taking up a brush to go back to what I have more than half forgotten.What I have written down now is but no more than a tenth [of the story].But the comrades [who took part] are again very few and scattered in thefour directions. There are none with whom to discuss the matter of thetroubles of those days. And so, regarding the names and families of thosewho took part in the conspiracy, I have not quite remembered all of them;[my memory], for its part, has been enough to prevent [the names] fromdisappearing, and now I am recording and preserving those that I have notyet forgotten.握管迴溯強半遺忘. 今所記者不過什一而已，而同志諸人,又復落落晨星, 四方散處.無從與談當日患難中事. 乃至同謀之姓氏都不甚記憶; 亦足以險其衰

矣.今就其未忘者錄存之.59

In this passage, memory is what allows preservation of names and of at least aportion of the story. To remember and record is itself a virtuous act, for, although

56 YJHSHB, 15a, 21a.57 YJHSHB, 23b.58 YJHSHB, 61a, 49a.59 YJHSHB, 9b.

20 CHUCK WOOLDRIDGE

the souls and the qi of Weng Peng’s co-conspirators might remain in some physicalform, in order for those souls to inspire appropriate response in the living,somebody must ‘‘record and preserve’’ what is ‘‘not yet forgotten.’’ In Weng’s case,the worries about forgetting perhaps parallel his own anxieties about beingforgotten.

The tension between preservation and loss animates all of the essays of the Juyihesi huibian. On the one hand, the contributors insist that the qi of theparticipants in the Zhang plot is everywhere. On the other hand, they worry thatthe events of the plot will go unrecognized. Because memory is a kind ofpreservation, and because the men who gathered in the Yu Garden in the earlytwentieth century sought to identify themselves so closely with the plotters, thistension reflected as well deeper anxieties about their own status. The men of YuGarden had derived their status from their knowledge of ancient texts alongsidetheir acts of postwar commemoration. They insisted that the virtues celebrated intexts and rituals were timeless. Souls, qi, and the truths of ancient sage kings mightbe enduring, but their effects in the world depended on people who memorizedclassical texts, who remembered and recorded the acts of exemplars, and whocombatted falsehood. Yet the men in the garden felt their class was now facingextraordinary challenges. The Yu Garden then must have felt like a tranquilbastion for asserting timeless truth in the face of a surrounding world thatquestioned their convictions. They must have been aware that their acts of memorymight no longer be valued. And they worried that they themselves were alreadyforgetting, that their gestures of connection to the past would be inadequate in theface of political and social transformations around them.

These concerns were encapsulated in Chen Zuolin’s prayer text to the souls ofWu Fucheng, Hu Enxie and others who had survived the war but who had sincedied. After a long tribute to the bravery of all the participants, Chen praised Hu forconstructing the shrine in the first place and for initiating the rituals that Chen wasnow continuing. In Chen’s understanding, the rituals of the 1880s had meantrevisiting the memory of the 1850s, and calling back the souls of Hu’s comrades:

Your virtuous actions seek out the nightmare from which you have alreadyawakened and call back souls to the long cold ruins of destruction.惟先德尋已醒之噩夢撥久冷之劫灰招魂.

Chen was now seeking to follow Hu’s precedent, but he expressed uncertainty:‘‘Eating together in the same hall is for its part the ritual of those who have lost theritual’’ (合食同堂亦亡者之禮 Heshi tongtang yi wanglizhe zhi li).60 In thisaccount, Hu had access to his own past. He could revisit his nightmares andbeckon his fallen comrades to his present (that is to say, Nanjing of the 1880s). Hismemory could guide his ritual practice.

Chen Zuolin and the other participants in the ceremonies in the early twentiethcentury could not rely on their memories. Their claims of impoverished memorymay seem like mere rhetoric. It was indeed typical of the genre of prayer texts tocontrast one’s own inadequacies to the capacities of the person or god receiving the

60 YJHSHB, 19b.


prayer. Yet the particular contrast in this case was significant. By describing thegathering as ‘‘the ritual of those who have lost the ritual,’’ Chen Zuolin engaged inmore than a stylistic flourish. It was an acknowledgment, akin to Weng Peng’sconcern that he recalled no more than a tenth of the story, that, despite their effortsto preserve information about the past, literati were in fact losing a great deal.

The men who collected and performed rituals in the Yu Garden in the waningyears of the Qing articulated several kinds of tension in their descriptions of thepassage of time. They promoted a view of return to an idealized path thatconflicted with emerging views of historical progress. They claimed the virtues ofthe past remained present, yet they also felt that acting in a virtuous manner wasgrowing more difficult as those who had truly embodied righteous action weredying out. The social roles they imagined for themselves also became more difficultto enact: civil service examinations no longer determined status, and proponents ofcitizenship tended to reject their sense of appropriate social hierarchies. As a result,the ideal of the Zhang plot—that literati would coordinate the action of morallyinspired ‘‘heroes of the marketplace’’—became less and less likely. This socialproblem was also a problem of history: the version of history embraced at YuGarden required the identification and celebration of models from the past, but thecapacity of self-styled literati to live up to those models diminished in the earlytwentieth century. They described this failure as a form of loss (亡 wang) that theyfelt paralleled the loss of memory (忘 wang; that is, forgetting).

In 1911, the fight between revolutionaries and Qing loyalists damaged most ofthe buildings of the Yu Garden. In 1915, Hu Guangguo rebuilt the garden. At thatpoint, the Taiping receded as its central historical reference point. Three accountssurvive, two by Chen Zuolin’s son, Chen Yifu (陳詒紱 1873–1937) and one by HuEnxie’s grandson He Yunshu (何允恕 dates unknown). This generation, whichknew of the Taiping war only second-hand, focused instead on the garden’sconnections to China’s more distant past, and particularly to Li Bai’s poem aboutclimbing Phoenix Terrace.61 Hu Guangguo built a tower for viewing Phoenix Hill,naming it Huai Bai lou (懷白樓 Tower for Cherishing Li Bai). In their writings onthe garden, Chen and He ‘‘sense the expanse of Heaven and Earth’’ (感天地之茫茫

gan tiandi zhi mangmang), identifying with Li Bai rather than Hu Enxie.62 Thegarden allowed a sense of connection to China’s cultural heritage, and thereforeprovided an alternative to the restless political division and civil war of thecontemporary warlord period. One could contemplate as well the destruction andrevival of many things: gardens for example, or dynasties, or the city of Nanjingitself.63

This shift in descriptions of the Yu Garden changed it from a site forremembering and commemorating the Taiping War to a place for commemoratingLi Bai. Caveats are in order: I am speaking of relative, not absolute emphasis. HuEnxie mentioned Li Bai in his early descriptions of his purpose for choosing the

61 The essays are collected in Chen Yifu, ed., Jinling yuanye zhi (Gazetteer of Nanjing’sgardens and landscapes) (1933; repr. in Jinling suozhi jiuzhong (Nine significant gazetteers ofNanjing) (Nanjing: Nanjing chubanshe, 2008)), 501–3.

62 Jiling yuanye zhi, 503.63 This theme of rising and falling (興廢 xingfei) repeats in the introduction and poems at the

beginning of the Jinling yuanye zhi, 408–10.

22 CHUCK WOOLDRIDGE

site, and Nanjing’s gazetteers continued to mention that the garden had beenconstructed in response to the war. Nevertheless, the notion of continuity with thepast (the idea that souls and virtue and qi remained a part of the landscape)receded through the remainder of the twentieth century. In Li Bai, the garden’sadvocates and enemies found a way to identify the garden as part of a broadercultural heritage that, depending on one’s point of view, either burdened orstrengthened the nation. As a way of preserving the garden itself, this move hadmixed results. As one might expect, the garden was leveled in the CulturalRevolution. In recent years, however, the city government of Nanjing has recreatedit as a tourist attraction, even as that same government has bulldozed most of thebuildings in the city that actually dated to the late nineteenth century.

In that longer history of the garden, the years 1900–1911 remain distinctive, forit was in that period that the problem of remembering was most explicitly raised asa challenge to class identity. Hu Guangguo, Chen Zuolin, and their cohortthemselves remembered the war. In identifying so strongly with the participants ofthe Zhang plot, they must also have known what took place in its aftermath: tenyears of continuous warfare, the destruction of Nanjing, the death of millions.Furthermore, in the years 1900–1911, several of their own cohort died, includingGu Yun and Qin Jitang. When they saw the changes happening in Nanjing, and inparticular the revolutionaries’ celebration of Taiping iconoclasm, they must haveseen not progress, but the resurgence of chaos.

Certainly, the literati gathered at Yu Garden recognized suffering on the part ofthose who died, and it is possible they privately recalled their own experiences ofwar and its aftermath. They focused more attention on virtue, yet as we have seen,they understood virtue as material and present, not as loss, and therefore not asmemory at all. Those who gathered spoke not only of the war, but also of thecommemorative projects of war’s aftermath. They were, in Stephen Owen’s words,remembering the rememberers.64 They used various forms of ‘‘ji’’ and ‘‘yi’’ tohighlight the obligations of the literati class to memorize classics, to point out thevirtue that surrounds them, to try to establish the correct version of events. Theirmain concern in the early twentieth century was not so much the loss of the war, oreven the loss of the memory of the war, but rather the loss of the cultural valueplaced on people who remember, which for them would mean the end of theliterati class as they knew it. This future loss, rather than the trauma of the war orthe need to form a coherent narrative of the past, is what they talked about whenthey talked about memory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Susan Naquin, Tobie Meyer-Fong, Jay Carter,Kristin Stapleton, Anjali Singh, Henrietta Harrison, and an anonymous reviewerfor Twentieth-Century China for their helpful comments and suggestions onearlier drafts of this article.

64 Owen, Remembrances, 25.


NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Chuck Wooldridge, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Lehman College,CUNY, is the author of City of Virtues, Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions, forthcomingfrom University of Washington Press.Correspondence to: Chuck Wooldridge. Email: [email protected]

24 CHUCK WOOLDRIDGE

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What Literati Talked About When They Talked About Memory