Chapter 10 White Silk, Gold Thread, Frosted Temples, and Fat Faces: The Radiating Branches of Zhuzhici, ca. 1700–1900
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Abstract
During the heyday of Qing imperial expansion and also of trade with Nagasaki, the genre of ethnographic poetry known as zhuzhici (“bamboo branch lyrics”) came to function as a kind of lyrical lingua franca employed by itinerant intellectuals for describing and giving voice to the residents of far-flung regions from Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet in the west and from Korea, Ryukyu, and Japan in the east. Their use of indigenous language, while far from ubiquitous, comprises a significant element of their descriptions of the panoply of local peoples and their customs. This use appealed to the growing and increasingly diverse audience of Chinese-literate readers who were receptive to and even hungry for such material. Tracing continuities and parallels in the incorporation of these indigenous languages across the breadth of East and Central Asia, the chapter demonstrates how zhuzhici of the borderlands express a cosmopolitan sensibility through the affective engagement of poets and their readers with the peoples of these lands. It concludes with a discussion of how the late nineteenth-century explosion of zhuzhici set in the foreign concession of Shanghai can be viewed as the logical culmination of this poetic mode.