Pride and Injustice: Literati-Official Prisoners in Early-Modern China

This paper explores the experiences of imprisonment of early-modern Chinese literati-officials, esp. those in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. During this period, in the intensive factional struggles and confrontations between the emperors and officials, imprisonment for political reasons occurred so frequently that some even claimed there were more officials in the imperial prison than real criminals. A large number of literati-officials, including both senior and low-ranking young bureaucrats, entered and left the prison as if it were an expected experience. Their records of activities in imprisonment appeared in their collections of works as evidence of moral cultivation and political integrity, nothing to be shamed of. Thrown into this symbolically sensitive environment, they claimed even higher fame and wider support, self-organized to study Confucian classics and Buddhist scriptures together, composed poetry, practiced art, and built friendships through sharing wine and daily necessities. They were not completely exempted from physical tortures, but they were also not the subjects of “moral education and discipline.” On the contrary, these men embodied Confucian moral teachings precisely because of their status as victims of corrupted politics and their continuous manifestations of literati social, cultural and political ideals in prison. Prison constituted a stage for performing moral superiority. As a site of moral self-cultivation, it was not separated from other moral-political spaces in literati-official lives.