Antiquarianism in East Asia

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first pages 04.15.13

anTIQuaRIanIsm In easT asIaa PrEliminarY oVErViEw

lotHar Von FalkEnHausEn

Over many centuries, the complex and mutually intertwined traditions of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam generated a plethora of cultural phenom-ena that, because they involved some form of a systematic preoccupation with the material remains of the past, were motivated by an interest in the past as such, and attempted to bridge a rupture in transmission,1 may be considered instances of antiquarianism. In adopting such an inclusive definition, I wish to eschew the temptation to reduce East Asian antiquarianism simplistically to the scholarly practice known as jinshixue 金石學 (study of metal and stone), which arose in China during the Northern Song period (960–1127) and later spread to other parts of East Asia. While jinshixue inevitably looms large in the five case studies—three from China and two from Japan—included in the present volume,2 my task in this essay is to establish a more long-term, East Asia–wide intellectual and cultural-historical framework that will do better justice to the richness and diversity of the region’s contributions to world antiquarianism.3 Combining synchronic and diachronic approaches, this preliminary attempt will, I hope, prepare the ground for more comprehensive efforts at addressing the topic cross-culturally.

Cultural Practices Related to Antiquarianism

Historiography In a common stereotype, a history-conscious Confucian China is contrasted with a timeless India mired in religion and hence concerned with eternity rather than change over time. But in China as well as India, religious ideas and prac-tices brought about the formation of a historical consciousness and determined both the contents and the forms of early written records. (In China’s case, these religious ideas and practices were connected with the ancestral cult.) Thus, from the beginning, the practice of writing was woven into the religious fabric of traditional Chinese society.4 Oracle-bone inscriptions from the Late Shang period (ca. 1250–1046 BCE)—the earliest preserved instances of full writing in China—may contain an incipient notion (religiously motivated, no doubt) of historical rectitude: the scribes recorded the outcome of a matter that had

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been divined by the king even when that outcome did not agree with what the king had predicted.5 We know too little about the context of Shang divinatory practices to be certain whether this was, at the time, an act of courage, but we are told of historians from later antiquity—held up as moral exemplars by the Confucian tradition—who paid with their lives for insisting on accuracy in defiance of political authority.6

Central to Chinese divination is the belief that change—whether ordained by supernatural powers, caused by the mechanical interplay of cosmic forces, or resulting from pure chance—can be managed by skilled human agents. This attitude is manifested by the prominent role in the Confucian canon of a divi-nation manual, the Yijing 易經 (Classic of changes), parts of which may date back to the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1046–256 BCE).7 During this period, diviners (bu 卜), along with invocator-priests (zhu 祝), served as court officials. Maintaining court records fell under the purview of another official, the grand astrologer (taishi 大史), whose principal task was keeping the royal calendar. Records of court audiences and similar events were some-times adapted and transcribed onto bronze vessels that were used in offer-ing sacrifices to the ancestors; a number of these vessels are preserved and have been a focus of antiquarian scholarship. Parts of several Zhou-period court annals—lists of events composed according to strict ritual protocol—have also survived. One of these, the Chunqiu 春秋 (Springs and Autumns annals), is part of the Confucian canon, and it has given rise to a rich herme-neutical tradition aiming to retrieve the ritual and moral principles guiding its compiler(s).

During the final centuries before the founding of the unified Chinese empire by the First Emperor of Qin (Qin Shihuangdi 秦始皇帝) in 221 BCE, studying history became, gradually, a sanctioned private preoccupation; even then, the endeavor was by no means guided by a disinterested scholarly fascination with the past. China’s two earliest surviving works of historical narrative, the Zuo zhuan 左傳 (Zuo commentary) and the Guo yu 國語 (Narratives of the princi-palities), both compiled during the fourth century BCE, were intended to be guides to correct behavior. They did so by evaluating the actions of historical protagonists according to the standards of the Zhou ritual system. Moral para-gons of the distant past (their alleged antiquity increasing in inverse propor-tion to the age of the texts in which they occur)8 also dominate the discourse on good government found in philosophical writings from the Warring States period (ca. 450–221 BCE) as well as from later periods.

Confucius (Kongzi 孔子, trad. 551–479 BCE) saw himself as a continuator of the ancient traditions initiated by these sages—traditions he and his follow-ers were informed about through a mixture of oral transmission and written

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sources.9 He strove to re-create a lost ideal society that he believed had existed in remote antiquity. Like Clio, Confucianism from the outset had its face turned toward the past, making it a natural breeding ground for antiquarian modes of inquiry. The teachings of the Confucian school, which became polit-ically influential during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), centered on the study of a canon of classical texts that contained a body of knowledge about positive as well as negative historical precedents for the orientation of later generations. Appropriating the age-old ancestral sacrifices, Confucianism increasingly took on religious characteristics,10 becoming a veritable cult of history.11

Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–86 BCE) set the standards for later Chinese his-toriography with the Shi ji 史記 (Records of the historian), his sprawling, multi-partite account of Chinese history from its mythical origins to his own time. It provides annalistic, narrative-evenemential, and biographical accounts; mono-graphic treatments of various topics (such as ceremonies, music, the calendar, and economic matters); and chronological overviews in tabulated form. It thus integrates the chronological and systematic outlooks that, according to Arnaldo Momigliano, mark the distinction between historians and antiquarians in post-Renaissance Europe.12 Material-culture-focused antiquarian scholarship, once it arose in China, could be easily accommodated to the epistemological struc-tures established by Sima Qian and his successors.

Following Sima Qian’s model and continuing into the modern era, the offi-cial histories preserve the record of each of China’s imperial dynasties from the point of view of its successor dynasty, all the way down to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Aside from these, there are a host of other historical works of dif-ferent lengths covering the political, administrative, military, economic, and cultural life during all periods of Chinese history down to the present day. Some of these works are in tune with the political orthodoxy of their times; others (including, it has been argued, Sima Qian’s Shi ji) used history writing as a vehicle for subtle or not-so-subtle criticism of prevailing conditions and policies. In the context of centuries-long debates over the facts, significance, and proper usage of history, antiquarianism was attractive because material culture provided a potential alternative source of knowledge—knowledge that, if handled appropriately, could be more reliable than what had been obtained from transmitted texts.

That Sima Qian was influential beyond China is evident even from the superficial observation that the names of some fundamental early historical works written in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam allude to the title of his work: the Samguk sagi 三國史記 (1145; Historical records of the Three Kingdoms),13 the Nihon shoki 日本書記 (720; Written records of Japan),14 and the Đại Việt sử

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ký toàn thư 大越史記全集 (1400s; Compilation of historical records of Great Viet).15 The historiographical traditions in these countries, albeit distinctive, are beholden to Confucian-inspired patterns of history writing in China. Such influences probably also account for the notable historiographic efforts within the Buddhist tradition after its implantation in East Asia during the first millen-nium CE—for example, to record the biographies of famous teachers and the history of monastic institutions—efforts for which there seems to have been no precedent in the Indo-Iranian homelands of Buddhism.16 Over time, separate co-traditions of antiquarian inquiry developed within each of these offshoots of Chinese-style historiography.

Geography and EthnographyJust as the roots of historiography lie in ritual recordkeeping, the origins of geo-graphical writings can be traced to travelers’ manuals listing the local divinities that should be worshiped along one’s journey. The Shanhaijing 山海經 (Classic of mountains and seas), which, in its present recension, dates to the Han period, derives from works of this nature. Under the influence of Confucian histori-ography, such texts later morphed into geographically arranged listings of places of mythical or historical associations. Li Daoyuan’s 酈道元 (ca. 470–527) Shuijing zhu 水經注 (Notes on the Classic of waterways) is the seminal work in this genre.17 After the Tang period (618–906), local scholars compiled large numbers of gazetteers of individual provinces or counties; their attention to the physical traces of historical events and figures makes them important antiquar-ian sources.

Beginning with Sima Qian, inspecting the sites of historical events has been an accepted mode of evidence-gathering by traditional Chinese historians.18 This type of travel has been fundamental to antiquarianism. In all East Asian countries, a specialized genre of travel literature arose, which characteristically pays extensive attention to historical monuments and often quotes from their inscriptions.19 Part of the inspiration for this genre may have come from the accounts written by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Buddhist monks about their pilgrimages to sacred sites.20

One aspect of this well-developed sensitivity to place is a proto-ethno-graphic concern with local traditions.21 Those relatively few individuals who had an opportunity to travel into areas outside the Chinese culture sphere often left a perceptive record of the lifeways and material culture of the native inhab-itants;22 early on, it became a topos to expatiate on the similarity between the

“primitive” customs of foreigners and the customs of the early ancestors of the Chinese “We-Group.” In addition to written texts, visual representations of for-eigners shown with all the trappings of their foreignness became a genre in



the visual arts of China and, although it was configured quite differently there, in Japan.23

Another important manifestation of the concern with linking history to place is the custom of engraving inscriptions on stone stelae or on natural fea-tures. The precedents for this practice may be found in West Asia and India, and it is no coincidence that, after some initial attempts under the Qin,24 it began to spread in China during Eastern Han times (25–220), a period of increased contact with areas elsewhere in Asia (a development that is not necessarily linked to the influx of Buddhism, however).25 The resulting monuments were intended either to be displayed publicly or to be placed in tombs as permanent memorials to the deceased buried therein; cumulatively, they created “inscribed landscapes” inviting decipherment by future generations.26

Continuing a learned pastime that first emerged during the Tang period, Song and later antiquarians undertook field trips in search of stone inscrip-tions ( fangbei 訪碑), and they used the distinctive technology of ink-squeeze rubbings—invented around the seventh century CE—to create multiple copies of the inscriptions, which were then circulated.27 It became customary to take model calligraphies and even paintings that had been originally brush-written on paper or silk and engrave them onto stone (or, sometimes, wood) for the sole purpose of making rubbings (figs. 1, 2).28 Affordable even for people of limited means, rubbings came to be widely collected as historical relics, as aes-thetically pleasing objects, and as models for calligraphic practice. Inevitably, a

Fig. 1.Fragment of an inscribed stone stele (h: 180 cm [70 7⁄8 in.]) from the now-defunct rubbing workshop of the Zhao family at Zhangmatun, Jinan (shandong), 19th century (?).jinan, min ziqian memorial Hall.

Fig. 2.stone stelae engraved after bamboo paintings by Zheng Xie 鄭燮 (a.k.a. Zheng banqiao 鄭板橋; chinese, 1693–1765).18th or 19th century, H: ca. 200 cm (78 3⁄4 in.).Pucheng County (shaanxi) 陝西蒲城, former Confucian temple.

Keyline does not print; need to add tone to edges

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connoisseurship of rubbings developed. While inscribed monuments are com-paratively scarce in Korea and Japan, rubbings of Chinese models—as well as any local ones that were available—were avidly collected in these countries as well as in China.

Philology East Asian antiquarianism emanates from the study and veneration of the Confucian classics. A rich exegetical tradition developed and became ever more complex as the language of the texts became increasingly dissimilar from the spoken idioms during the centuries following the Qin unification. By the end of the Han period, extensive commentaries on each of the classics were in exis-tence,29 and a number of pathbreaking works on the semantics and phonetics of the Chinese language had been compiled.30 Significant scholarship has con-tinued to be produced ever since.

Traditional Chinese philology was historically, and remains today, inextri-cably intertwined with the study of the Chinese writing system. Even though the character shapes have changed significantly, it is clear that the modern Chinese script stands in direct continuity with Shang-period writing from three millennia ago. Through mechanisms as yet incompletely understood, the knowledge of archaic script styles was preserved. Xu Shen’s 許慎 (ca. 58–ca. 147) Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Explaining the basic graphs and analyzing the composite graphs), covering more than 9,000 characters grouped under 540 radicals (bushou 部首), gives the archaic small seal script (xiaozhuan 小篆) forms next to the clerical script (lishu 隸書) graphs, which in turn are directly antecedent to the modern standard script (kaishu 楷書). While by no means the earliest Chinese dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi became the basic reference tool for the discipline of Chinese paleography (guwenzixue 古文字學), which, thanks in part to its centuries-long cultivation by antiquarians, flourishes today in East Asian academic institutions.31

One often-remarked-upon difference between Chinese and European civi-lizations is the former’s alleged lack of multilingualism. However, the facts do not support that generalization, for several reasons: First, by the early first mil-lennium, Classical Chinese, the idiom of educated discourse throughout impe-rial times, had become grammatically quite distinct from any of the current spoken versions of Chinese and had to be specially learned; second, the dif-ference between some of these “dialects” (or “local languages”) were, and con-tinue to be today, as large as those between different branches of Indo-European languages, a fact that is obscured by their largely uniform written representa-tion; and, third, Sanskrit and other Indic languages were cultivated within the Buddhist community during certain periods, and the centuries-long project of



translating the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese (which ultimately led to the Chinese versions replacing the originals and to the disappearance of many of the original texts) engendered a sophisticated, East Asia–wide tradition of sci-entific phonology as well as an at least rudimentary sense of grammar.32

A sensitivity to the problems of learning non-native languages was natu-rally more developed in neighboring countries. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam not only adapted the Chinese writing system to their own languages but also devel-oped both distinctive approaches to dealing with Classical Chinese as well as indigenous and often highly independent traditions of philological research on Confucian, Buddhist, historical, and literary texts written in Classical Chinese; these scholarly preoccupations carried over into local antiquarian practices.

“Collectionism”For Chinese rulers throughout the ages, collecting artifacts from the past was a means of asserting political legitimacy.33 The well-known myth of the nine tripods, which describes the way legendary objects were handed down from one dynasty to the next until they were lost at the end of the Zhou period, alludes to the habit of preserving ancient sacrificial vessels as symbols of the Mandate of Heaven.34 Until the Tang dynasty, imperial collections of ancient objects apparently still included some bronzes passed down from pre-impe-rial antiquity,35 but major losses occurred repeatedly (for example, at the fall of Luoyang 洛陽 in 316 CE and during the Five Dynasties period [907–60]). Although such collecting did not rise to the level of scholarly antiquarian-ism, it was characterized by a concern with recovering and preserving certain kinds of relics from the past, with the genuineness of these relics, and with the maintenance of institutions to receive them. The Song palace collections dis-cussed in the present volume by Ya-hwei Hsu were assembled from new finds and were destroyed when the Jurchens conquered the Song capital, Kaifeng 開封, in 1127. Today, the Palace Museums in Beijing and Taipei display the impe-rial collections of the Qing dynasty to the general public; in prerevolutionary times, of course, the public would never have had access to these collections.36 Until the early twentieth century, there were no museums; however, impe-rial collecting was emulated by the socioeconomic elites, whose members over the course of many centuries engaged in various culturally sanctioned ways of sharing and displaying cultural relics.37 Similar developments also occurred in the other East Asian countries. In Japan, for instance, “Chinese things” (karamono 唐物)—not all of which were actually made in China—were collected since at least the eighth century, and their display became incorpo-rated, from late medieval times onward, into the tea ceremony.38 The admin-istration of such collections was one important arena in which standards of

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connoisseurship as well as scholarly practices concerned with material culture developed over time, and it spawned an important literature.

We should take particular note, in this connection, of the collecting prac-tices of religious institutions. Buddhist monasteries, for instance, preserved objects from the past for religious veneration, for study, or for their material value. Lists of such objects were kept; the earliest extant ones in China are ninth-century examples found in the “hidden library” (Cave 17) at the Mogao 莫高 Caves in Dunhuang 敦煌,39 which was sealed in the eleventh century. In Japan, such lists (known in that country as shizaichō 資財帳) are one of the key source texts for art historians. The curation and preservation of old objects was linked to the cult of relics, which was introduced from India with Buddhism; by extension, objects that had been used by famous religious figures or pre-sented to the Buddhist community by virtuous donors possessed an inherent sanctity.40 Regular exhibitions of a temple’s sacred possessions served to arouse piety and to rally patronage; they also provided opportunities to view famous masterpieces of art. In Japan, in particular, the storehouses of temples (the most famous of which is the eighth-century Shōsōin 正倉院, endowed by the impe-rial family at the Tōdaiji 東大寺 temple in Nara 奈良) have traditionally been the repositories of some of the greatest national treasures, prefiguring—and, today, coexisting with—modern museums. The systematic study of their con-tents started well before modern times and certainly constitutes an important driving force of East Asian antiquarianism.

Impersonating the Past For almost two millennia, calligraphy has reigned supreme in the hierarchy of the arts in China, occupying a position comparable to that of architecture in the West.41 Writing never completely lost its early magico-religious associa-tions. A crucial breakthrough occurred during the third and fourth centuries CE—again, perhaps not coincidentally, during a time of cultural permeability vis-à-vis other parts of Asia—when the traditional functional conceptualiza-tions of writing (as an act of ritual efficacy or as a means of conveying informa-tion) became superseded by a new aesthetic that allowed for the possibility of appreciating “art for art’s sake.”42 This change affected both the content of writ-ing and its physical shape, thus elevating poetry and calligraphy to the status of pure art forms.

As in the modern pseudoscience of graphology, handwriting was inter-preted as a reflection of a person’s inner self and taken a basis for judging his or her character; however, in a twist that probably owes as much to Buddhist Yogic impulses and their Taoist adaptations as to the Confucian concern with improvement through education, it was deemed possible to shape one’s



character by imitating, through assiduous practice, the calligraphy of a morally exemplary person.43 This ideal, of partaking in the spiritual essence of another individual represented by that person’s written traces—a goal not altogether dissimilar to that of becoming one with the Buddha by meditating in front of the Buddha’s image—became linked during the late Tang and the Song dynas-ties to the call for wholesale cultural reform by means of a return to antiquity.44 The imitation of ancient styles henceforth not only underlay the practice of calligraphy but also became the guiding ideal of painting by literati and scholars in late imperial China and their contempo-raries elsewhere in East Asia.45 The goal here was not to imitate nature (considered the job of professional arti-san painters) but to bring out the spiritual essence of the ancients.

In the painting shown in figure 3, for instance, the famous Edo-period (1600–1868) artist and antiquarian Tani Bunchō 谷文晁 (1763–1840) imagines the style of the Song-period Chinese calligrapher and painter Mi Fu 米黻 (1051–1107), whom he mentions in the inscription. In all likelihood, Tani had never seen an actual painting by Mi Fu and was but vaguely aware of Mi’s oeuvre through writ-ten descriptions and through its reflections in the works of other artists. For a learned artist like Tani, imitation did not mean forsaking innovation—once one had mastered the models of the past, it was expected that one’s individ-ual style would naturally emerge, and indeed the painting in figure 3 is readily recognizable as Tani’s work. Moreover, the multiplicity of accumulated models resulted in an infi-nite number of possibilities that were available to an indi-vidual artist.46 The isolation of an artist from his or her cultural group and the resulting autonomy of every artis-tic personality account for the often astonishing moder-nity of literati artistic practice in late imperial China—a modernity that carried over into the often highly original adaptations of Chinese artistic practices in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. For the antiquarian engagement with the physical traces of antiquity, the literati aesthetics estab-lished a crucial personal and performative dimension.

Fig. 3.Tani buncho 谷文晁 (Japanese, 1763–1841).Landscape in the Spirit of Mi Fu, 1804, ink on paper, 30.5 × 132 cm (12 × 52 in.).los angeles, private collection.

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Understanding the Rise of jinshixue

It is during times of political weakness that a country’s inhabitants are most likely to scrutinize their ancient roots. This was certainly the case in China, where the notion of a cultural identity existing independently from politi-cal affiliation served to ensure that traditions would be continued during periods when the country was governed by imperial dynasties of non-Han ethnicity. That notion also created a platform on which participants in Chinese traditions could interact with, and exert a “civilizing” influence upon, interested outsiders.47

To understand the rise of jinshixue during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, it is necessary to consider the tremendously contentious political and intellectual environment in which it occurred. We must realize, first, that the founding of the Song dynasty occurred after the cataclysmic rupture of the Five Dynasties period, a succession of short-lived, mostly non-Han regimes, which had visited tremendous destruction upon the old heartland of Chinese civi-lization. The Northern Song interest in the vestiges of antiquity thus implied a recovery of traditions that had already been lost—a defining component of antiquarianism cross-culturally.48

We must be aware, moreover, that the Song empire (960–1279) was merely one of several powerful political formations in continental East Asia—and it was the only one ruled by an ethnically Han-Chinese dynasty.49 Until the early twelfth century—and thus during the time of the first florescence of jinshixue—its main rival was the Liao empire (916–1125) of the Mongolian-speaking Khitan. Not only were the Liao militarily stronger but their dynasty had been founded earlier than the Song. The Liao promoted themselves as the legitimate successors of the illustrious, ethnically diverse, and culturally eclec-tic empire of the Tang—a fact that is reflected in manifold Tang continuities in Liao material culture and extensive Liao patronage of Buddhism.50 It was as a reaction to this that the scholar-officials of the Northern Song, capital-izing upon the Song control over the heartland of ancient Chinese civiliza-tion, connected themselves to much earlier, pre-Tang epochs. They believed that during these earlier periods, Chinese culture had flourished in its pure state, uncontaminated by foreign elements. As part of this effort, they revived the virulently anti-Buddhist guwen 古文 (antique prose) movement, which Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824) had launched to counteract the decline of the Tang dynasty.51 Like Han Yu, Northern Song literati cultivated a self-consciously archaic style in writing literary prose; in order to enhance the ancient flavor of their texts, some wrote them down in archaizing calligraphy—a practice that became more prevalent during later centuries. Tenth- to twelfth-century



Song intellectuals scrutinized the full sweep of earlier intellectual traditions and reworked them into an overarching neo-Confucian synthesis that became the orthodoxy during subsequent epochs. Scholars in Korea and Japan con-tributed to later re-statements and elaborations. The rise of Northern Song jinshixue was inextricably tied to the initial stage of these efforts.

The semantics of the term jinshixue warrant a brief digression. In the ritual classics from the late first millennium BCE, jinshi 金石 (metal and stone) refers either to bells and lithophones—the “suspended musical instruments” (yuex-uan 樂縣)—that were played during ancestral sacrifices52 or to weapons made of these two materials, which, aside from their functionality, were thought to be endowed with numinous power.53 A completely different meaning occurs in writings from the Eastern Han period, where the expression “like metal and stone” (ru jinshi 如金石) is seen as a metaphor of permanence, comparable to

“cast in bronze” or “written in stone” in English.54 As a designation of antiquar-ian activity, jinshi refers to metal and stone as the main media of inscription studied (oracle-bone inscriptions were not discovered until ca. 1900), a usage that can likewise be traced back to Late Warring States and Han times.55 The fact that jinshi was a classically attested expression, together with the highly positive connotations of its Han-period meanings, imparted the term with a tremendous cachet, which reverberated in its usage to designate a new scholarly discipline during the Song period.

For details on the practice of Song jinshixue, the reader may turn to the essays in this volume by Yun-Chiahn C. Sena on Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–72) and by Ya-hwei Hsu on the catalogs of ritual bronzes compiled during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Even though Song jinshixue is by no means the only East Asian cultural phenomenon that corresponds to antiquarianism elsewhere in the world, it is the one most directly comparable to antiquarian-ism in post-Renaissance Europe in its genesis and intellectual impact. Jinshixue established protoscientific auxilia for historical and philosophical inquiry, and it was linked to practical concerns, such as the reform of court ritual and music; if that reform had succeeded, it would have enabled a performative reenactment of the ways of the sages. The overarching goal of these efforts was the imitatio Confucii in search of a more authentic cultural ideal.

Flashbacks: Some Early Episodes of Antiquarianism

Even though Song jinshixue was radically new in its time,56 it was preceded by episodes of antiquarian behavior that go back to the very beginnings of civiliza-tion in East Asia. Most of the following examples come from recent archaeo-logical discoveries, and therefore the practitioners of jinshixue in late imperial

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China may not have been aware of them in the same way that modern scholars are today. Nevertheless, these examples may be representative of cultural behav-ior in their respective times.

Shang Period (ca. 1550–ca. 1046 BCE) The collecting of ancient artifacts began at least as early as the Bronze Age. Several of the 755 jade objects excavated from Tomb 5 at Yinxu, Anyang (Henan) 河南安陽殷墟, the tomb of Princess Fu Hao (or, more correctly, Fu Zi 婦好, d. ca. 1300 BCE), date to Neolithic times, and they can be assigned stylis-tically to such diverse origins as the fourth-millennium-BCE Hongshan 紅山 culture in the Chinese northeast and the third-millennium-BCE Shijiahe 石家河 culture in Hubei, both far from Anyang. Some had been reworked into Shang-style pieces, others were left intact. Admittedly, we no longer know how aware Shang users were of their antiquity and to what extent such antiquity was val-ued; however, because a concern with ancestral figures both remote and recent is pervasively attested in Shang civilization, the notion that material relics from the past enjoyed a special prestige does not seem far-fetched.

Another indication of a preoccupation with past materials is that Late Shang manufacturers of ritual bronzes frequently emulated Middle Shang (ca. 1400–1250 BCE) or even earlier styles. The visual signature of a remembered past may have been used to commemorate specific prominent ancestors.57 Such archaiz-ing imitation continued to be a prominent feature of all aspects of Chinese art production during subsequent centuries.58

Zhou Period (ca. 1046–221 BCE) The gifts to meritorious retainers listed in Western Zhou (ca. 1046–771 BCE) bronze inscriptions occasionally include instances of individual objects explicitly associated with a famous person from the past.59 Archaeologically discovered hoards of bronzes that had been stored in lineage temples at the time of the abandonment of the Western Zhou capital in 771 BCE attest that heirlooms from the early parts of the Zhou dynasty were kept there, probably for purposes of commemoration rather than for actual ritual use, together with sets of more modern vessels. Zhou tombs also occasionally contain much older jades.

Zhou bronze vessels manifest various archaistic references. For example, from around the middle of the ninth century BCE, bronze decor was radically simplified and new vessel types were adopted that were based on utilitarian pottery or basketry prototypes of lowly, nonritual pedigree; this development may be plausibly interpreted as an attempt to revert to simpler and more pristine traditions of the past—traditions that were perhaps associated with



sage founding ancestors of mythical antiquity.60 In the early fourth century BCE, an especially salient engagement with the material heritage of the past occurred, as evidenced in the bronze-imitating ceramic vessels from Tomb 16 at Yan Xiadu, Yi Xian (Hebei) 河北易縣燕下都, which render the shapes of ritual bronze vessels and bells from all periods of the Bronze Age, including long-obsolete Shang and Western Zhou pieces.61 This is the closest equivalent in pre-imperial China to a proto-archaeological “antiquarian mentality”; it strikingly echoes the discourse on ritual in the Confucian classics and the philosophical writings of the time.

Qin Period (221–206 BCE) Among the regional variations of the Zhou script that were in use preceding the Qin unification, Qin graphs most closely resembled those of the prestigious bronze inscriptions of old. The imposition of this relatively conservative “font” under the First Emperor of Qin as the standard script for the newly unified realm may be interpreted as an early instance of an archaizing calligraphic aes-thetic; the visual allusion to royal Zhou precedent may have been a deliberate means of Qin political legitimization.62

Han Period (206 BCE–220 CE) In the Han-period cult of omens, any discovery of Shang and Zhou ritual bronzes was regarded as an auspicious signal from the spirit realm;63 the discov-eries were recorded in the official histories, and the vessels might be presented to the imperial court, though some have turned up in Han-period tombs of relatively low-ranking individuals. So far, however, there is no indication that such items were being collected systematically by commoners.

A heyday of pre-jinshixue antiquarianism in China occurred during the reign of Wang Mang 王莽 (ca. 45 BCE–23 CE), who temporarily unseated the Han imperial house and founded his own short-lived Xin dynasty (9–23 CE). Wang Mang had been a leading Confucian scholar of the “reformist” faction, which sought to reshape the Han empire in the image of an ideal Zhou-type polity as conceived in systematizing texts such as the Zhou li 周禮 (Rites of Zhou, comp. ca. fourth century BCE).64 This was not the last such episode in Chinese history: an attempt to create a strictly Zhou li–based administration took place in northwest China during the Northern Zhou dynasty (557–81), and yet another one occurred under the Northern Song–period reformer Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–86).

One material manifestation of the archaizing tendencies during Wang Mang’s reign indicating that there was some current knowledge of the visual signature of the Zhou are coins that approximate the spade shape of the earliest

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Chinese coins from the mid-first millennium BCE. This attempt to replace the round coins of the Qin and Han turned out to be economically disastrous. Another example is the assemblage of nine ding 鼎 (tripods)—five of bronze, four of pottery, and all of identical shape and with the same archaizing decor mimicking mid-ninth-century-BCE precedents—excavated from a Wang Mang–period tomb at Zhangjiapu in the outskirts of Xi’an (Shaanxi) 陝西西

安張家堡.65 Although it is unclear whether the bronze and ceramic specimens should be regarded as two sets or as one and whether the number nine relates to transmitted notions of hierarchically ranked assemblages, where nine was (at least according to one understanding of the contradictory textual records preserved) the prerogative of a king, these vessels represent an obvious attempt to invest current ritual practices with a Zhou aura.

Visual references to antiquity continued to be made after the restoration of the Han dynasty in 25 CE. Of particular art-historical import is what Martin Powers has called the “classicism” of some Eastern Han–period stone-carved monuments in Shandong, chief among them the Wu family shrines in Jiaxiang County 山東嘉祥武氏祠, which later were to become a crucial focal point for Qing antiquarianism.66 In the Wu Liang shrine 武梁祠, the most famous of the group, key individuals and episodes from mythical antiquity to relatively recent times are arranged according to a complex iconographic scheme reflect-ing Confucian moral values. The protagonists are depicted in a simple, semi-abstract style, one that strikingly departs from the far more naturalistic modes of representation the same artisans deployed elsewhere in the same time and region when they depicted scenes from luxurious life in the present.67 There are textual grounds for believing that the deliberate simplicity of this “classicist” style was meant to connote antiquity—to create a look that would immedi-ately identify the subjects depicted as historical. Throughout the later history of Chinese painting, simplicity in shape continued to be equated with the elegantly antique.

Northern and Southern Dynasties Period (317–589 CE) During the period of disunion following the fall of the Han, an archaizing sim-plicity was characteristic—for instance, in the brick reliefs showing conven-tionalized portraits of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove seen in several tombs in the Nanjing 南京 area. Such a manner of rendering was motivated by a desire not to depict the subject naturalistically but to find a convincing visual formula for contemplating paragons of wisdom from the (in this case relatively recent) past.68

In northern China during the same epoch, attempts were made to estab-lish visual linkages with Han-period precedents; whether these are continuities



or consciously archaizing revivals is not always clear. In some cases, they may be related to attempts on the part of the ethnically non-Han regimes then in control of northern China to reoccupy and revive the seats of famous earlier dynasties.69

This was, of course, the period when Buddhist art was first introduced to China, resulting in the widespread manufacture of cult images; in order to be effective, those Chinese-made objects had to duplicate the iconographic fea-tures of their Indian prototypes faithfully.70 The novelty of this challenge to Chinese artists can hardly be overemphasized. In the process of meeting that challenge, there arose new, specifically Buddhist, ways of engaging in visual archaism as well as new canons of iconographic connoisseurship. These had a lasting impact and should be considered among the wellsprings of Song jin-shixue. It was also at this time that mainstream Chinese visual culture, which had started to reach Korea and parts of southeast and central Asia during the Han period, first had a major impact in Japan.

Tang Period (618–906 CE) Despite ample literary evidence attesting to the widespread practice of collect-ing painting and calligraphy and to the existence of a taste for the antique under the Tang, and despite a multitude of archaeological discoveries, Tang antiquari-anism remains incompletely researched.71 One pertinent event was the discov-ery, in western Shaanxi sometime during the seventh century, of the so-called Stone Drums of Qin, ten granite boulders inscribed with hunting poems in an archaic script.72 In spite of numerous scholarly efforts, their exact date (and even their authenticity as a Zhou-period monument) remains controversial to this day. Han Yu celebrated them in a rhapsody.73

The earliest surviving Chinese instance of what appears to have been a sys-tematic collection guided by a historical interest is a coin collection from a hoard of precious metal objects found at Hejiacun in Xi’an (Shaanxi) 陝西西安

何家村, which had probably been buried about 755 CE.74 It contains one speci-men for each historical period, starting with Eastern Zhou spade-shaped and knife-shaped coins and proceeding to the round coins of each of the imperial dynasties, including both the southern and the northern regimes during the Period of Disunion. It also contains some foreign coins—Chinese-influenced copper cash from Turfan and Japan as well as Byzantine gold coins, which must have seemed highly exotic to a Tang viewer. Unfortunately, we do not know who the owner was, how he (or she?) became a connoisseur of coins, and what the motivations were for assembling the collection.

As mentioned, the earliest evidence from Japan of collecting precious arti-facts from the continent dates to the time contemporaneous with the Tang. The

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Shōsōin treasury in Nara is a unique surviving instance of such a collection. Many of the objects were already old at the time they were deposited there. That they were assembled with a taste for the antique in mind is, however, doubt-ful—it was the artifacts’ imperial pedigree, above all, that ensured their preser-vation. Only later did they become the subject of antiquarian scholarship and connoisseurship.

Song Period (960–1279 CE) We may close our overview of “flashbacks” with Nie Chongyi’s 聶崇義 (tenth century CE) Sanli tu 三禮圖 (Pictures for the three compendia on ritual), com-piled at the beginning of the Song dynasty.75 Nie attempts to provide illus-trations of all the ritual equipment, ranging from vestments to vessels and implements, that were needed for performing the rituals described in the three Confucian ritual classics—the previously mentioned Zhou li, the Yi li 儀禮 (Ceremonial protocols; comp. ca. third century BCE), and the Li ji 禮記 (Records on ritual; comp. first century BCE). Some of the objects depicted can be recognized, based on current knowledge, as genuinely ancient, but most are fanciful. Even during Song times, the book was criticized for its lack of exacti-tude, and the desire to improve on it may have been one trigger for the rise of jinshixue. Piecemeal corrections were made in later compilations that appeared over the course of the centuries,76 but the Sanli tu, intended as it was as a pre-scriptive work (and thus contrasting with the descriptive bronze catalogs com-piled by practitioners of jinshixue), continues to serve as the basic reference, not only in China but also in Korea and wherever Confucian rituals are performed. It has engendered its own idiosyncratic material culture. Archaeological finds have begun to document that some of the archaizing fantasies in the Sanli tu actually go back to Han- through Tang-period precedents,77 thus showing that the Sanli tu is merely the most recent in a long line of technical manuals for ritualists, similar to those that existed since the Eastern Zhou period for various other professional groups.78

What crucially sets the Song jinshixue scholars apart from such forerunners is that their findings, though contributing to a culture of text-based learning, rely on the observation of actual material objects and not on the (sometimes controversial) interpretation of texts. Objects from the past were no longer merely curiosities, religiously charged relics, or treasures; they had become evi-dence. This was an innovative but ultimately highly orthodox response to the Confucian imperative to “investigate things” ( gewu 格物) as a way of augment-ing one’s virtue;79 doing so was believed, quite literally, to turn the practitioner into a morally better person.



The Wider Impact of Song Antiquarianism

The period encompassing the Southern Song (1127–1279), Yuan 元 (1279–1368), and Ming 明 (1368–1644) dynasties is conventionally regarded as a hiatus in the history of jinshixue. However, the study of stele inscriptions and their rub-bings actually continued to flourish, with major works of scholarship produced during the Southern Song period;80 only the study of bronzes went into a tem-porary decline, perhaps because of the loss of the Song imperial collections during the Jurchen conquest and the unavailability of such objects in the terri-tory controlled by the Southern Song. Meanwhile, the Northern Song bronze catalogs and other Song works of scholarship on bronze inscriptions continued to be reprinted;81 in fact, we would not know them today were it not for these reprints, as no copies of the original editions survive. Throughout the centu-ries—continuing all the way to the present—they have served as blueprints for manufacturers of bronzes in archaic styles. Some of these bronzes were outright fakes, made with an intention to deceive. Most, however, were replicas evoking the spirit of antiquity rather than closely copying all details of their models; they may be appreciated as original works of artisanship displaying considerable creativity and technical skill. The first wave of such antiquarian art production occurred after the reestablishment of the Song dynasty in Hangzhou 杭州 as part of an attempt to revive the Northern Song state rituals.82

Under the Southern Song, the focus of mainstream intellectual activ-ity turned away from a preoccupation with actual things to a concern with more-abstract philosophical matters. This resulted in the temporary demotion in the cultural prestige of ancient objects. Formerly regarded as testimonies of hallowed antiquity and as being endowed with an inherent moral author-ity, they came to be seen as collectors’ items to be appreciated mainly on aes-thetic grounds. The late-Ming connoisseur Wen Zhenheng 文震亨(1585–1645) famously categorized them as “superfluous things” (zhangwu 長物).83 Scholarly

“inquiry into antiquity” (kaogu 考古)—an expression in the title of one of the Song bronze catalogs that was chosen in the nineteenth century as a calque translation of “archaeology” into Japanese and that was subsequently reim-ported into Chinese in that meaning84—morphed into “treating antiquity as a plaything” (wangu 玩古).85 Rather than furthering scholarship, the reprinted works of Song jinshixue mainly served literati collecting interests,86 and in this way they were similar to connoisseurial manuals of taste, which were published in great numbers during the Ming dynasty. But one should be aware that a con-siderable amount of wangu probably inhered in the literati engagement with the past even during the heyday of jinshixue; enthusiastic amateurs no doubt always outnumbered scholarly antiquarians. Arguably, moreover, the emotional depth

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of wangu-inspired appreciation of one’s material heritage was no less than that experienced by practitioners of proto-archaeological kaogu, especially when the ownership of antiques was involved.87

Throughout the final millennium of imperial China, the visual signatures of the past as defined in the works of Song jinshixue and subsequently promul-gated by the Ming collectors’ manuals were consistently upheld as the standard of aesthetic refinement, and they are manifested pervasively in the material culture of the period. They are especially apparent in what conventional art historians have misleadingly called the “minor arts”—the various exceedingly well developed craft traditions, ranging from textile making to wood carving to porcelain manufacture, that mass produced high-quality objects for house-hold consumption. Through them, antiquarian-inspired art forms and motifs gradually trickled down from the elite sphere into the lower strata of society. Determining the precise extent of the antiquarian impact on the material cul-ture of late imperial China and its neighbors remains a task for future scholar-ship. What is clear is that the antiquarian aesthetic became a defining element in what Jonathan Hay has called the “designscape:”88 it was naturalized as an indispensable component of the familiar environment in which participants in the Confucian-influenced cultures of East Asia passed their lives. This includes the adaptation to various new media of ornamental regimes based on the decor of Shang and Zhou bronzes; the ubiquitous use of still-life compositions of antiques (known as the bogu 博古 motif) in decorating folding screens, wall decoration, carpets, and objects of daily use (fig. 4 and see pls. 1, 2); the ubiquity of inscriptions in archaic script; and the display of genuine antiques, their rep-licas, or both. These objects and their modes of display exerted an inexorable impact on the thought processes of the people exposed to them.89

This situation invites a comparison with the constant visual evocation of Classical civilization in the material culture of the European Renaissance. An obvious difference between the two is that, in China, the objects that refer-enced the antique were for the most part portable items, such as vessels and personal ornaments—objects that had been the primary focus of artistic skill since pre-imperial times90—whereas in Europe, architecture took the lead. But the cognitive-psychological impact produced by the relentless visual refer-ence to antiquity was likely similar in both cases. Even if the connections were in part subconscious, I suspect that an encompassing antiquarian ambiance eventually led to the seventeenth-century genesis of a new form of scholarly antiquarianism.

Taking possession of the Chinese cultural past became a pan–East Asian preoccupation. Not only were Mongol and later Manchu conquerors involved91 but so were the members of the educated elite in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.92



Throughout East Asia, a new turn toward a more scholarly preoccupation with the past occurred in the seventeenth century as part of what Benjamin Elman has characterized, for China, as a paradigm shift from philosophy to philol-ogy.93 The turn away from metaphysical speculation toward a new apprecia-tion of the concrete and the practical was felt to be tremendously liberating, innovative, and exciting—a scenario that calls to mind the intellectual trends in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In China’s neighbor-ing countries, it had the effect of opening up “national studies” that included the earliest attempts of engaging with local antiquities (as opposed to Chinese antiquities known through collections or books). This was particularly true in Japan, where the investigation of ancient sites and the collection and classifica-tion of prehistoric artifacts were crucial in shaping new and often boldly revi-sionistic accounts of that country’s cultural origins.94 In China, too, the shift to the philological paradigm brought about a renewed prominence of active field investigations by antiquarians; these could involve rudimentary excavations (as was the case, for example, when the Wu family shrines were rediscovered in the late eighteenth century).95 Of course, such “fieldwork” falls short of the requirements of scientific archaeology, but it undeniably set the stage for the acceptance of modern archaeological methods in the twentieth century.

Fig. 4.lidded vessel in the form of an ancient bronze bird-shaped wine jar (xiaozun 鴞尊).middle qing dynasty (ca. 1700–1800), cast copper with gilding, overall: 16.5 × 6.4 × 9.2 cm (6 1⁄2 × 2 1⁄2 × 3 5⁄8 in.).los angeles, los angeles County museum of art, gift of the Estate of anita m. Baldwin, 51.29.8a-b.

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Some of the perceived moral complexities of Chinese antiquarianism during this stage of its development are analyzed in the present volume in Qianshen Bai’s essay on the great late-Qing antiquarian and collector Wu Dacheng 吳大澂 (1835–1902), who, as a high-ranking government official, was valiantly (though unsuccessfully) involved in ongoing efforts to transform the Qing empire into a modern state. As a contrast, François Lachaud’s essay on the Osaka merchant–antiquarian Kimura Kenkadō 木村蒹葭堂 (1736–1802) illustrates how antiquarian practices in Edo-period Japan could contribute to the formation of an entirely private realm deliberately removed from the public sphere. Notably, the frame of reference for Kimura Kenkadō and his cohort is still the ancient relics of China, a place Japanese were forbidden to visit. Similar China-focused antiquarian practices also arose in Korea under the Chosŏn 朝鮮 dynasty (1392–1910), but for reasons of modern nationalism, they remain virtually unstudied.

It has been suggested that the difference between Song-period and Qing-period jinshixue lay in a change in attitude vis-à-vis ancient objects and inscrip-tions: formerly considered within a philosophically focused inquiry, objects and inscriptions came to be seen as historical evidence in a more modern sense—that is, in the sense of enabling the reconstruction of a cultural system.96 Still, the “evidential learning” (kaozhengxue 考證學) that Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–82) and his followers engaged in during the Qing dynasty was primarily focused on the textual record and its verification by way of authentic inscribed mate-rial;97 a sensitivity to the evidentiary potential of material objects as such was slow in developing. In an analogy with what has been said above about Song jinshixue, it is perhaps not accidental that the renewed attempts to define the Chinese intellectual tradition during the Qing dynasty coincided with (1) the advent of an alien regime and (2) the arrival of Western science—two external challenges that sharpened traditional scholars’ sense of urgency in clarifying what made Chinese culture unique (and, in the minds of its participants, supe-rior).98 The resulting wholesale critical reevaluation of China’s cultural heritage culminated in the early twentieth century with Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980) and the “school of the doubters of antiquity” (yigupai 疑古派),99 which built in many essential ways on the results of antiquarian scholarship during the past two-and-a-half centuries and also helped to lay the intellectual groundwork for modern archaeology in China.

Even though we cannot ignore the increasingly inescapable confrontation with the West in the background of these events, it should be stressed that the systematic and critical approach to the classical heritage developed by Qing scholars was by no means directly influenced by parallel developments in Western scholarship; instead, it constitutes a—highly admirable—intellectual



achievement that is entirely indigenous to the Confucian intellectual tradi-tion. Indeed, the domination of the Qing intellectual discourse by the philo-logical-antiquarian impulse may have prevented or at least slowed down the absorption of Western modernity in China—even in those fields of modern science in which Chinese intellectuals had a strong interest.100 The deeply ingrained habit of literati scholars of reacting to any new item of informa-tion by searching for precedents in classical texts, though ensuring the per-petuation of traditional antiquarian knowledge and skills, may have impeded China’s modernization.

In Japan, Western-style positivistic historiography and archaeology were firmly implanted in the course of that country’s thorough modernization dur-ing the Meiji period (1868–1912);101 however, traditional modes of knowledge management continued to exist side by side with more modern approaches, as exemplified in Hiroyuki Suzuki’s study, in the present volume, of Ninagawa Noritane’s 蜷川式胤 (1835–82) “research on accomplished objects” (meibutsug-aku 名物學). During the Meiji period, museums—both government-run and private—were founded for the public display of the national past. Objects from the continent featured prominently in their collections, documenting Japan’s cultural debts to classical China and, eventually, Japan’s imperialistic claim to domination over all of East Asia.102

Lingering Effects

The terms of discourse changed decisively with the introduction of modern nationalism. In each East Asian country, well-established antiquarian modes of thinking were appropriated in the construction of exclusivist national identi-ties;103 this is not astonishing when one considers the agonistic roots of anti-quarianism, discussed above.

In China after the 1911 revolution, sophisticated scholarly debates on how to replace obsolete traditional viewpoints with modern and scientifically defen-sible ones extended the semi-independent republic of letters of the Qing-period practitioners of “evidential learning” into the public sphere.104 Eventually, how-ever, political and economic developments led to a marginalization of intellec-tuals that continues to this day. Even though some older scholars still cling to the traditional ethos of the intellectual as being responsible for the fate of the nation, most modern-day academics in mainland China and in Taiwan, like their colleagues elsewhere in East Asia, tend to regard themselves as profession-als—as wage-earners in a capitalist society.

When modern archaeology was introduced to China during the 1920s, the scholarly community appreciated it principally as a modernized form of

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antiquarianism—a tool for verifying and expanding text-based constructions of history into which archaeological evidence could be pigeonholed.105 The country’s first generation of trained modern archaeologists to a large extent willingly accepted such an auxiliary role for the new discipline. This situation continued after the Communist takeover in 1949, when the nationalist attitudes of the Republican period (1911–49) were further sharpened under the impact of Stalinism. As a result, it has been difficult to establish archaeology as a modern social science and as a purveyor not only of new evidence but also of new ideas and new methodological paradigms.

Thirty years ago, it nevertheless seemed safe to predict that in China modern archaeology would replace antiquarianism within a generation. But changing historical circumstances have produced a new climate in which antiquarian-ism has crept back into fashion. Scientific archaeology now has to contend in the public and academic realms with a connoisseurial interest in the material heritage of the past uninformed by the concern with context that is at the center of a properly archaeological approach to the traces of history. This retrogres-sion to protoscientific wangu answers to the desires of the collecting public in the wake of China’s ongoing economic boom. In the vernacular realm, a simi-larly superficial appropriation of the forms of the past manifests itself through the pervasive use of ancient styles and decoration patterns in contemporary Chinese architecture and design, where they uneasily coexist side by side with the hallmarks of uncompromising modernity. Figure 5, for instance, shows the new Municipal Museum in Xi’an (Shaanxi), designed by Zhang Jinqiu 張錦秋

Fig. 5.The Xi’an municipal museum 西安市博物館 and its urban context as seen from the top of the little Goose Pagoda 小雁塔 in Xi’an (shaanxi) 陝西西安, 2009.



(b. 1936) and opened in 2007. Constructed of reinforced concrete and faced with ceramic tiles, the building replicates the shape of the Hall of Light (ming-tang 明堂), a ritual building constructed by Wang Mang in the early first century CE, extrapolating from its excavated remnants. Its conceptualization, urban placement, execution, and functionality as a museum all invite critical discus-sion at many levels. Fundamentally, constructions of this nature, increasingly common in China, exemplify a new antiquarianism, parasitory on the achieve-ments of modern archaeology while lacking archaeology’s intellectual rigor. As a phenomenon of twenty-first-century Chinese history, this new antiquarian-ism is a force to be reckoned with for those committed to advancing the cause of modern archaeology today.

Notes The author is grateful to Peter N. Miller, Tim Murray, and especially Alain

Schnapp for constructive discussion leading to the conceptualization of this essay, and to Yun-Chiahn C. Sena, Christoph Harbsmeier, Ya-hwei Hsu, Minku Kim, Guolong Lai, Michael Puett, Jonathan Silk, and Takeshi Watanabe for helpful comments.

1. Even though this definition of antiquarianism—which I proposed in Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Antiquarianism in Eastern Zhou Bronzes and Its Significance,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 77–102—invites quibbling, I consider it a useful starting point. For an even broader definition, see Alain Schnapp’s introduction to the present volume. The annotation provided below merely skims the surface of an immense and disparate literature; the principal intention is to provide the Western reader with some orientation for further reading.

2. See the essays in the present volume by Yun-Chiahn C. Sena, Ya-hwei Hsu, François Lachaud, Qianshen Bai, and Hiroyuki Suzuki.

3. For two very different attempts at a synthesis of the topic, see Wu Hung, “Patterns of Returning to the Ancients in Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” in idem, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 9–46; and Peter N. Miller, “Comparing Antiquarianisms,” in Peter N. Miller and François Louis, eds., Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 103–45. K. C. Chang, “Archaeology and Chinese Historiography,” World Archaeology 13, no. 1 (1981): 156–69 (also in K. C. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed. [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986], 4–21), remains fundamental.

4. On this nexus, see K. C. Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 81–94; and Mark E. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999), 13–51.

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5. David N. Keightley, “Theology and the Writing of History: Truth and the Ancestors in the Wu Ding Divination Records,” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 1 (1999): 207–30.

6. Zuo zhuan 左傳 Xiang 襄 25; Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed., Shisanjing zhushu 十三經註疏 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1981), 36.282, 1984; and James Legge, trans., The Chun tsew with the Tso chuen (Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, London: Trübner, 1865), 514–15.

7. For references to editions and translations of all classical texts mentioned herein, see Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Institute of Asian Studies, University of California, 1993).

8. See Bernhard Karlgren, “Legends and Cults in Ancient China,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 18 (1946): 199–365.

9. Lunyu 論語 “Shu’er 述而”; Shisanjing zhushu, 7.25, 2481; and James Legge, trans., Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean (Oxford: Clarendon, 1893), 195.

10. On this topic, see, for example, Rodney Taylor, The Religious Dimensions of Confucianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); and John Berthrong, “Confucian Piety and the Religious Dimension of Japanese Confucianism,” Philosophy East and West 48, no. 1 (1998): 46–79.

11. See Mu-chou Poo, “The Formation of the Concept of Antiquity in China,” in Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl, eds., Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization (Heidelberg: Edition Forum, 2008), 85–101; Pierre Ryckmans, The Chinese Attitude toward the Past (Canberra: Australian National University, 1986); and Wang Gungwu, “Loving the Ancient in China,” in Isabel McBryde, ed., Who Owns the Past? (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 175–95.

12. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13, no. 3–4 (1950): 285–315.

13. A partial translation of this text is given in Jonathan Best, A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006).

14. William G. Ashton, trans., Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to a.d. 697 (London: Kegan Paul, 1896).

15. This text remains untranslated into a Western language. 16. For sidelights on this topic, see John Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk: Buddhist

Ideals in Medieval Chinese Historiography (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997).

17. This book remains untranslated into a Western language. On its antiquar-ian aspects, see Michael Nylan, “Wandering in the Ruins: The Shuijing zhu Reconsidered,” in Alan K. L. Chan and Yuet-Keung Lo, eds., Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 63–102.

18. Siep Stuurman, “Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China,” Journal of World History 19, no. 1 (2008): 1–40. See also Wu Hung, “Ji: Traces in Chinese Landscape and Landscape Painting,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 17 (2010): 167–192.

19. Some of this literature is anthologized in Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed



Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

20. Hiuen Tsiang [Xuanzang], Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, Samuel Beal, trans., 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1884); Edwin O. Reischauer, trans., Ennin’s Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law (New York: Ronald, 1955); and Yang Han-Sung et al., trans., The Hye-ch’o Diary: A Memoir of the Pilgrimage to the Five Places of India (Berkeley: Asian Humanities, 1984).

21. One classical work of this genre is the Southern Song–period Yijian zhi 夷堅志 (Record of the listener); not coincidentally, its author, Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123–1202), was the brother of the famous jinshixue scholar Hong Gua 洪括 (1117–84).

22. Leo K. Shin, “Thinking about ‘Non-Chinese’ in Ming China,” in Peter N. Miller and François Louis, eds., Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 289–309.

23. On the southwestern borderlands of China, see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); on Taiwan, see Junjichu Zouzhelu fu Taiwan yuanzhumin shiliao huibian 軍機處奏摺錄副臺灣原住民史料彙編, 3 vols. (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 2009–10). On the representation of foreigners in sixteenth-century Japan, see, for example, Yoshitomo Okamoto, The Namban Art of Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1972); on Japan’s scholarly representation of other Asian cultures in the age of imperialism, see Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

24. Gilbert L. Mattos, The Stone Drums of Ch’in (Nettetal: Steyler, 1988); and Martin Kern, The Stone Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-Huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 2000).

25. Wu Hung, Monumentality in Chinese Art and Architecture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 121–42; Minku Kim, “The Genesis of Image Worship: Epigraphic Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011).

26. Robert E. Harrist Jr., The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).

27. Kenneth Starr, Black Tigers: A Grammar of Chinese Rubbings (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Thomas Lawton, “Rubbings of Chinese Bronzes,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 67 (1995): 7–48; and Wu Hung,

“On Rubbings,” in Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 29–72.

28. Figure 1 shows a nineteenth-century(?) stone stele from the now-defunct rub-bing workshop of the Zhao 趙 family at Zhangmatun, Jinan (Shandong) 山東濟

南張馬屯, now displayed at the Min Ziqian Memorial Hall 閔子騫, Licheng 曆城 District, Jinan. It belonged to one of a large group of stelae inscribed with cop-ies of famous pieces of ancient calligraphy for the sole purpose of making rub-bings. Even though the stele is now fragmentary, rubbings continue to be made from it occasionally even today. The text inscribed is Wei Zheng’s 魏徵 (580–643)

“Jiuchenggong Liquan ming” 九成宮醴泉銘 (“Inscription on the Beneficient Spring

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at the Temple of the Nine Perfections,” 632) in the calligraphy of Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢 (557–641); it was copied from a rubbing taken from a stele now preserved in the museum of Linyou (Shaanxi) 陝西麟游.

29. For an example of the exegetical procedures employed, see Steven Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality: A Study of the Hermeneutics of the Classic of Odes (Shijing) (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991).

30. See Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic in Traditional China, vol. 7, pt. 1 of Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

31. For an excellent introduction to this subject, see Qiu Xigui, Chinese Writing, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 2000); see also Edward L. Shaughnessy, ed., New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1997).

32. On early Buddhist translation efforts, see Jan Nattier, A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han 東漢 and Three Kingdoms 三國 Periods (Tokyo: Center for Advanced Buddhology, Sōka University, 2008); and Daniel Boucher, “Gandhari and the Early Chinese Buddhist Translations Reconsidered: The Case of the Saddharmapundarikasutra,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 118, no. 4 (1998): 471–506.

33. Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens, “Du collectionnisme et de la science des antiquités à l’archéologie scientifique en Chine,” Journal asiatique 298, no. 1 (2010): 115–31; and Patricia B. Ebrey, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).

34. Wu, Monumentality, 4–11. 35. See François Louis, “Cauldrons and Mirrors of Yore: Tang Perceptions of Archaic

Bronzes,” Georges-Bloch-Jahrbuch der Universität Zürich 13–14 (2006–7): 207–39. 36. On the history of Palace Museum collections, see Jeannette S. Elliott with David

Shambaugh, The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); and Cheng-hua Wang, “The Qing Imperial Collection, Circa 1905–25: National Humiliation, Heritage Preservation, and Exhibition Culture,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 320–41.

37. For one example of private antiques collecting in the Song period, see Robert E. Harrist Jr., “The Artist as Antiquarian: Li Gonglin and His Study of Early Chinese Art,” Artibus Asiae 55 (1995): 237–80.

38. Christine M. E. Guth, Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993); and Andrew M. Watsky,

“Locating ‘China’ in the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan,” Art History 29, no. 4 (2006): 600–624.

39. Hou Ching-lang, “Trésors du monastère Long-hing à Touen-houang: Une étude sur le manuscrit P. 3432,” in Jean-Pierre Drège, ed., Nouvelles contributions aux études de Touen-houang (Geneva: Droz, 1981), 149–68.

40. John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

41. Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese



Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 187–213. 42. Wu, Monumentality, 251–80; and Victor H. Mair, “Xie He’s ‘Six Laws’ of Painting

and Their Indian Parallels,” in Zong-qi Cai, ed., Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 81–122.

43. Lothar Ledderose, “Chinese Calligraphy: Its Aesthetic Dimension and Social Function,” Orientations (1986): 35–50; Lothar Ledderose, “Some Taoist Elements in the Calligraphy of the Six Dynasties,” T’oung Pao 70 (1984): 246–78; and Amy McNair, The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998).

44. Peter K. Bol, This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992); and Peter K. Bol,

“When Antiquity Matters: Thinking about and with Antiquity in the Tang-Song Transition,” in Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl, eds., Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization (Heidelberg: Edition Forum, 2008), 209–35.

45. The literature on this topic is inexhaustible; see, for example, the contribu-tions to Christian Murck, ed., Artists and Traditions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); and Roderick Whitfield et al., In Pursuit of Antiquity: Chinese Paintings of the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Earl Morse (Princeton, N.J.: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1969).

46. Martin J. Powers, “Imitation and Reference in China’s Pictorial Tradition,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 103–26.

47. See Rolf Trauzettel, “Sung Patriotism as a First Step toward Chinese Nationalism,” in John Winthrop Haeger, ed., Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), 199–213; and Wolfgang Bauer, ed., China und die Fremden: 3000 Jahre Auseinandersetzung in Krieg und Frieden (München: Beck, 1980).

48. On this point, see Li Ling 李零, Shuogu zhujin: Kaogu faxian he fugu yishu 鑠古鑄

金：考古發現和復古藝術 (Hong Kong: Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Yishuxi, 2005), 9–11.

49. See Morris Rossabi, ed., China among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th–14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

50. For recent scholarship on the Liao, see Naomi Standen, Unbounded Loyalty: Frontier Crossings in Liao China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); and Hsüeh-Man Shen, ed., Gilded Splendor: Treasures of China’s Liao Empire (New York: Asia Society, 2006).

51. For details, see Bol, This Culture of Ours. 52. Li ji 禮記 “Yueji” 樂記 (Shisanjing zhushu 37.302, 1530; 38.308, 1536). 53. Zhou li “Qiuguan: Zhijin” 秋官。職金 (Shisanjing zhushu 36.244, 882). 54. This metaphor, preferentially applied as a contrast with the impermanence of the

natural human lifespan, appears with some frequency on Eastern Han mirror inscriptions, as well as on stone stelae and in contemporaneous texts; relevant citations are assembled and discussed in Kenneth E. Brashier, “Longevity like Metal and Stone: The Role of the Mirror in Han Burials,” T’oung Pao 81, no. 4–5 (1995): 201–29, especially 217–21.

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55. This usage can be traced back to Lüshi chunqiu: 呂氏春秋 “Qiuren” 求人; Chen Qiyou, ed., Lüshi chunqiu jishi 呂氏春秋集釋 (Shanghai: Xuelin Chubanshe, 1981), 22.1515; and Shi ji “Qinshihuang benji” 秦始皇本紀 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1959), 247, 276, which recount how the achievements of famous people were

“carved onto metal and stone.” 56. See Ronald C. Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in

Northern Song Dynasty China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 7–59.

57. Jessica Rawson, “Reviving Ancient Ornament and the Presence of the Past: Examples from Shang and Zhou Bronze Vessels,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 47–76. This realization should help overturn questionable notions of unilinear stylistic sequences that have heretofore dominated the art-historical literature on Chinese bronzes. See also Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Neolithic Reminiscences in Shang Art,” Orientations 44.1 (2013): 22–28.

58. Falkenhausen, “Antiquarianism in Eastern Zhou Bronzes,” 78–92; see also Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Archaeological Perspectives on the Philosophicization of Royal Zhou Ritual,” in Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl, eds., Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization (Heidelberg: Edition Forum, 2008), 135–75.

59. See also Shangshu 尚書 “Guming” 顧命 (Shisanjing zhushu 18.124–29, 237–41); James Legge, trans., The Shoo King (Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 3 [London: Trübner, 1865], 544–61) for the record of a custom of displaying such treasures at a ritual occasion.

60. Jessica Rawson, Western Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pt. A: 108–9; and Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Western Zhou Taste,” Études chinoises 18, no. 1–2 (1998): 143–78.

61. Falkenhausen, “Antiquarianism in Eastern Zhou Bronzes,” 92–96. 62. On the conservative elements in the Qin unification, see Lothar von

Falkenhausen, “Introduction: Archaeological Perspectives on the Qin Unification,” in Yuri Pines et al., eds., Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited (Berkeley: Institute of Asian Studies, University of California, forthcoming).

63. See Martin J. Powers, Art and Political Expression in Early China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 224–78.

64. Michael Loewe, Crisis and Conflict in Han China, 104 BC–AD 9 (London: Allen Unwin, 1974); on Wang Mang, see Hans Bielenstein, “Wang Mang, the Restoration of the Han Dynasty, and Later Han,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 223–90.

65. Zhang Xiaoli 張小麗, “Xi’an Zhangjiapu Xin Mang mu chutu jiuding ji qi xiang-guan wenti” 西安張家堡新莽墓出土九鼎及其相關問題 , Wenwu (2009).5: 53–55.

66. Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrines (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989); and Cary Y. Liu, Michael Nylan, and Anthony Barbieri-Low, eds., Recarving China’s Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the “Wu Family Shrines” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).



67. Powers, Art and Political Expression, 156–85. 68. Audrey G. Spiro, Contemplating the Ancients: Aesthetic and Social Issues in Early

Chinese Portraiture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 69. Katherine R. Tsiang, “Antiquarianism and Re-Envisioning Empire in the Late

Northern Wei,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 127–54.

70. Marilyn M. Rhie, Early Buddhist Art of China and Central Asia, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); and Kim, “The Genesis of Image Worship.”

71. For aspects of the topic, see Louis, “Cauldrons and Mirrors of Yore”; and Tonia Eckfeld, “Reinventing the Past, Inventing a Dynasty: Inspiration of Monuments of the Past and Tang Dynastic Topography,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 155–78.

72. See Mattos, The Stone Drums. 73. Han Yu, “Shigu ge” 石鼓歌, in Quan Tang shi 全唐詩 (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1980),

340.3810–12 TK. 74. See Ma Zhenzhi 馬振智 et al., Da Tang yibao: Hejiacun jiaocang chutu wenwuzhan

大唐遺寶：何家村窖藏出土文物展 (Xi’an: Shaanxi Renmin Chubanshe, 2010), 74–89. 75. On this text, see Jeffrey Moser, “Recasting Antiquity in the Song Dynasty” (Ph. D.

diss., Harvard University, 2010). 76. For example, Yunlu 允祿 et al., Huangchao liqi tushi 皇朝禮器圖式 (1759; reprint,

Yangzhou: Guangling Shushe, 2004). 77. See Xie Mingliang 謝明良, “Beifang bufen diqu Yuan mu chutu taoqi de quyuxing

guancha: Cong Zhang Xian Wang Shixian jiazu mu chutu taoqi tanqi” 北方部分地

區元墓出土陶器的區域性觀察：從漳縣汪世顯家族墓出土陶器談起 , in idem, Zhongguo taocishi lunji 中國陶瓷史論集 (Taipei: Yunchen Wenhua, 2007), 149–89.

78. Li Ling 李零, Zhongguo fangshu kao 中國方術考 (Beijing: Renmin Zhongguo Chubanshe, 1993; revised edition, Beijing: Dongfang Chubanshe, 2000); and idem, Zhongguo fangshu xukao 中國術續考方 (Beijing: Dongfang Chubanshe, 2000).

79. The locus classicus for gewu may be found in Li ji “Daxue” (Shisanjing zhushu 60.445, 1673; Legge, The Analects, 357–59).

80. The most famous of these is Hong Gua, Lishi 隸釋 (Taipei: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1983).

81. One important discovery concerning the edition history of these texts is reported in Xu Yahui 許雅惠 (= Ya-hwei Hsu), “’Zhida chongxiu Xuanhe Bogutulu’ de ban-yin tedian yu liuchuan: Cong Zhongyanyuan Shiyusuo cangpin tanqi” 《至大重修

宣和博古圖錄》的板印特點與流傳：從中研院史語所藏品談起 , Gujin lunheng 18 (2008): 76–96.

82. Chen Fangmei 陳芳妹 , “Song guqiwuxue de xingqi yu Song fanggu tongqi” 宋古器物學的興起與宋仿古銅器, Meishushi jikan 10 (2001): 37–160; Susan Erickson,

“Investing in the Antique: Bronze Vessels of the Song Dynasty,” in Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl, eds., Die Gegenwart des Altertums: Formen und Funktionen des Altertumsbezugs in den Hochkulturen der Alten Welt (Heidelberg: Edition Forum, 2001), 423–35; Rose Kerr, Later Chinese Bronzes (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1990); Robert D. Mowry, China’s Renaissance in Bronze: The Robert H.

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Clague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1993); Philip K. Hu, Later Chinese Bronzes: The Saint Louis Art Museum and Robert E. Kresko Collections (St. Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 2008); Jessica Rawson, “Novelties in Antiquarian Revivals: The Case of Chinese Bronzes,” Gugong xueshu jikan 22, no. 1 (2004): 1–34; Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan 國立故宮博

物院, Wenyi shaoxing: Nan Song yishu yu wenhua tezhan, qiwu juan 文藝紹興:南宋

藝術與文化特展。器物卷 (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 2010). 83. See Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early

Modern China (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); and Sir Percival David, Chinese Connoisseurship, the Ko ku yao lun: The Essential Criteria of Antiquites, a Translation (New York: Praeger, 1971).

84. The context and mechanics of this linguistic transfer are explained in Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).

85. Chen Fangmei 陳芳妹 , “Zhui sandai yu dingyi zhi jian: Song dai cong ‘kaogu’ dao ‘wangu’ de zhuanbian” 追三代與鼎彝之間：宋代從「考古」到「玩古」的轉變, Gugong xueshu jikan 23 (2005): 267–332.

86. Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens, “Du collectionnisme,” 119–20. 87. Craig Clunas, “Antiquarian Politics and the Politics of Antiquarianism in Ming

Regional Courts,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 229–54.

88. Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorated Object in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010).

89. Hay, Sensuous Surfaces, 61–89. 90. This point is well made in Wu, Monumentality, 17–27. 91. On the Yuan, see James C. Y. Watt, ed., The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art

in the Yuan Dynasty (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010); and Shen C. Fu, “Princess Sengge Ragi: Collector of Painting and Calligraphy,” in Marsha Weidner, ed., Flowering in the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 55–80. On the Qing imperial collections, see, for example, Zhang Hongxing, ed., The Qianlong Emperor: Treasures from the Forbidden City (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 2002).

92. Burglind Jungmann, “Sin Sukchu’s Records on the Painting Collection of Prince Anpyeong and Early Joseon Antiquarianism,” Archives of Asian Art 61 (2011): 107–26; and Guth, Art, Tea, and Industry.

93. Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984).

94. For Japan, see, for example, Peter Nosco, Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990); Susan Burns, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). For Korea, see, for example, Mark Setton, Chŏng Yagyŏng: Korea’s Challenge to Orthodox Neo-Confucianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).



95. Eileen H. Hsu, “Huang Yi’s Fangbei Painting: A Legacy of Qing Antiquarianism,” Oriental Art 50, no. 1 (2007): 56–63; Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, “Retrieving the Past, Inventing the Memorable: Huang Yi’s Visit to the Song-Luo Monuments,” in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, eds., Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 37–58.

96. Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens, “Du collectionnisme,” 120–125. 97. On antiquarian arts during this period, see, for example, Lothar Ledderhose

[sic], Die Siegelschrift (Chuan-shu) in der Ch’ing-Zeig: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der chinesischen Schriftkunst (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970); Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Li Yumin 李玉

珉 , ed., Guse: Shiliu zhi shibashiji yishu de fanggufeng 古色：十六至十八世紀藝術的仿

古風 (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 2003). 98. On the Chinese situation under the Qing, see, for example, Joseph Levenson,

Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1968). For related reflections in a Japanese context, see Derek Massarella, “Some Reflections on Identity Formation in East Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Donald Denoon et al., eds., Multicultural Japan: From Palaeolithic to Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135–52.

99. See Lawrence Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

100. Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); see also Kenneth J. Hammond,

“Wang Shizhen and Li Shizhen: Archaism and Scientific Thought in Sixteenth-Century China,” in Peter N. Miller and François Louis, eds., Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 234–49; and Nathan Sivin, “Therapy and Antiquity in Late Imperial China,” ibid., 222–33.

101. See Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (London: Macmillan, 1998); and William Wayne Farris, Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures: Issues in the Historical Archaeology of Ancient Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 1–5.

102. Aspects of this problématique are discussed in Hyung-il Pai, Re-Inventing Antiquity and Patrimony: The Politics of Heritage Management in Korea and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming); on the history of Japanese museums, see Shiina Noritaka 椎名仙卓 , Nihon hakubutsukan seiritsushi: Hakurankai kara hakubutsukan e 日本博物館成立史: 博覧会から博物館へ (Tokyo: Yuzankaku, 2005); and Kanayama Yoshiaki 金山喜昭, Nihon no hakubutsukanshi 日本の博物館史 (Tokyo: Keiyusha, 2001). On Korea, see Ch’oe Sŏg-yŏng, Hanguk pangmulgwan ŭi ‘kŭndaejŏk’ yusan (Seoul: Sŏgŏng Munhwasa, 2004).

103. This point is well made by Paola Demattè, “Emperors and Scholars: Collecting Culture and Late Imperial Antiquarianism,” in Vimalin Rujivacharakul, ed.,

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Collecting China: The World, China, and a History of Collecting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 165–75.

104. On trends during this period, see Shana J. Brown, Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011); and Sarah E. Fraser, “Antiquarianism or Primitivism? The Edge of History in the Modern Chinese Imagination,” in Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 342–67.

105. Chang, “Archaeology and Chinese Historiography”; Xia Nai, “What is Archaeology?” in Gregory E. Guldin, ed., Anthropology in China (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 59–97 (Chinese original published in Kaogu 1984.19: 931–35, 948); and Lothar von Falkenhausen, “On the Historiographical Orientation of Chinese Archaeology,” Antiquity 67, no. 257 (1993): 839–49.

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