Personal Politics and the Politics of the Personal: Innuendo, Gossip, and Networking in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Beijing

Multiple literary genres from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China exhibit a concern with divulging news about contemporary persons.  Many of these texts are urban in focus: “flower registers”—an early fanzine literature—recorded the charms of the boy actresses of the metropolitan playhouses; novels such as Chen Sen’s A Precious Mirror for Ranking Boy Actresses (Pinhua baojian) were set in the capital—elucidating the affairs of performers and patrons; a subgenre of narrative fiction known as “scions’ tales” was devoted to sketches of Qing dynasty Beijing.  Although novels predated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, flower registers and scions’ tales were new genres that emerged in tandem with the splendors and vices of eighteenth-century Beijing.  And novels in the mid to late Qing reveal a new sensitivity to happenings in the capital.  Focusing primarily on Chen’s Precious Mirror, this paper explores the ways in which this literature can be read as embedded within a larger corpus of social commentary and innuendo.  These genres often overlapped.  Some of the earliest literary criticism on Precious Mirror is found in flower registers; and reader responses to the novel insisted upon reading it as a roman-à-clef.  These writings, in other words, expose a world of metropolitan gossip and patronage.  Borrowing methodologies from both literary studies and anthropology, this paper will show that gossip about men of power (and their amorous pursuits) in Qing Beijing was a way to comment upon the abuse of power as well as to navigate career success within a treacherous political system.