A Love of Labor: The Ethnographic Turn of Zhuzhici

From the mid - Tang through the Qing dynasty, poets employed the short - lyric form known as zhuzhici [bamboo branch lyrics] to write, first and foremost, about ordinary people going about their daily lives in China and elsewhere in the Sinosphere. This article explores how early developments in this genre prepared the ground for what later emerged as an arguably proto - ethnographic mode – that is, both poetry and accompanying prose annotations based on poets’ direct observations of and even immersive “fieldwork” within discrete localities. I focus specifically on poems about “water labor,” by which I mean those that describe and give voice to vocational groups and communities along lakes, levies, and channels of the Yangzi River basin. It was partly thanks to this history of reporting about local lives and conditions, I argue, that zhuzhici eventually came to adopt a more information - intensive and increas ingly empirical orientation during the later stages of their development. Moreover, this mode of what might even be identified tentatively as affective or lyrical ethnography prefigures efforts by contemporary social scientists to recalibrate ethnography in spatially affective modes, and I conclude with some observations on how its example might inform future efforts in these directions.

figures in the emerging professions of anthropology and sociology. Pioneers such as Bronislaw Malinowski , Franz Boas , and E. E. Evans-Pritchard [1902-1973 distinguished this emergent genre from the writings of missionaries, historians, and explorers by stipulating that it be based on authors' sustained observation of and immersive experience in the sociocultural contexts of its subjects and detached from utilitarian or other interests or preconceptions. Although direct observation remains a sine qua non for the form, poststructuralism and other trends have brought the once-vaunted ideal of scientific, disinterested objectivity under increasing scrutiny and debate. The organizational behaviorist Silvia Gherardi, among others, has called attention to the need for "affective attunement" with ethnographic subjects that results in "performative texts" invoking "tacit, implicit, and embodied" forms of knowledge.1 Closely paralleling such embodiment within and through texts is the desideratum that ethnography be firmly rooted in geographic space. "The focus of an affective ethnography becomes," Gherardi writes, "the degree of affective intensity that composes the geography of organizing and the inclusion and exclusion practices materialized in a space…. To experience a place means to learn to be affected by place, and therefore also placeness becomes a resource for conducting an affective ethnography."2 This emplacement emphasizes the body's "resonance" with materiality, both animate and inanimate, in collective spaces. Other writers have likened resonance quite literally to sonority, what some call an in-betweenness that mediates between and among multiple beings and states, a free-floating "music of the world at the local level -a complex polyphonic, polyrhythmic surround."3 It is one thing to call for recognizing and recalibrating the positionality and methodology of the ethnographer but quite another to retool the relatively dispassionate prose styles generally favored in academic writing into vehicles suitable for articulating qualities of affective resonance, sonority, and attunement.4 Some scholars have attempted to achieve this end by incorporating various modes of emotionally evocative literary discourse into more conventional professional discourse, including experimenting with poetic forms. The anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel, who has authored one such effort in the form of an epic poem modeled on the classical Tamil canon, writes that there is a "truth in verse that could not be conveyed in prose…. I believe that most prose in the social sciences in particular does not merely overshadow or repress this affective truth in its secondary status, but may even kill it."5 Whereas verse forms per se have yet to be taken up widely by professional ethnographers, lyricism in the more abstract sense of nonnarrative, emotionally freighted rhetorical registers has been invoked to redraw the contours of social ethnography and even of the presentation or status of propositional knowledge in general. Andrew Abbott, for one, has looked to Heian-era  Japanese lyrical forms, both poetry (tanka, thirty-onesyllable poetry) and prose narrative (monogatari, or tales), as inspiration for a processual sociology that bridges gaps and levels hierarchies between ethnographic researchers and their informants. 6 If Abbott had been better acquainted with East Asian literature, he might have also cited the literary tradition to which many Heian writers looked for inspiration -that of China in the Tang  and Song  dynasties -and especially its lyrical genres. One in particular, zhuzhici 竹枝詞 [bamboo branch lyrics], beginning as early as the late eighth century, functioned as an instrument for recording descriptions of human and natural geography, so much so that imperial officials eventually encouraged submissions in this verse form to the bureaus charged with compiling regional gazetteers.7 The convergence of empirical knowledge with lyrical expression in zhuzhici offers a potentially instructive model for how premodern intellectuals applied poetic forms to the articulation of knowledge derived from close observation of the daily lives of human communities, including their interactions with their physical environment. Eminent scholar-officials such as Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫    are famous for their lyrical evocations of place through the medium of zhuzhici, which typically, though not exclusively, took the form of quatrains consisting of twenty-eight characters. Thanks in part to their efforts, zhuzhici evolved over the course of a millennium into a hybrid amalgamation of affective lyricism and empirically based description. By the late imperial period (after ca. 1550), they were typically written in sequences of dozens or sometimes even hundreds of poems, many accompanied by extensive prose glosses, with the explicit aim of surveying the topography, ecology, archaeology, architecture, and sociocultural conditions, inter alia, of discrete geographic regions and various social, ethnic, or vocational groups within them.8 This article traces the historical rise of ethnographic zhuzhici through one subset of these poems: those that foreground the laborers toiling along the lakes, levies, and channels of the Yangzi River basin. Lyrical invocations of labor, and the affective resonance expressed by poets toward their subjects, I argue, provided a critical element of the foundation, even a keystone, for the rise of descriptively rich zhuzhici, including prose annotations and colophons, which characterized the genre in the late Ming  and Qing  dynasties. What, we might ask, made this particular form attractive to poets and scholars who chose it to document their observations of local conditions under their jurisdiction as officials, along their routes of travel or in places of either temporary or permanent residence? Can the empirical turn of this genre during its final flowering in the Qing be traced to its early history in the Tang and Song? I answer these questions by providing a cursory overview of this poetic lineage from the Tang and Song to the Ming and Qing, and address whether this legacy could inform future efforts by social scientists, as Japanese waka poetry already has, to recalibrate ethnographic scholarship in spatially emplaced, affectively attuned modes that result in "performative texts" invoking "tacit, implicit, and embodied" forms of knowledge.9 8 A considerable proportion of the Chinese classical poetic canon addresses similar or even identical themes, such as the everyday lives of plebeian folk and, more broadly, human and natural geography, and the formal similarity of zhuzhici to other heptasyllabic quatrains meant that the boundaries of this genre were somewhat blurry. Nonetheless, the adoption of such local voices, which can be likened to a sonority that "mediates between and among multiple beings and states" ( The rise of zhuzhici in giving voice to the suffering of humble laborers was anticipated by ballads [yuefu 樂府] in the late Han through the Tang dynasties; in fact, zhuzhici were often subsumed by critics under this rubric. The term "oar songs" can be found in poems and prose as early as the Former Han dynasty, and poems under this title have As noted, zhuzhici were born in the mid-to upper reaches of the Yangzi River; most of the earliest surviving zhuzhici by Gu Kuang 顧況 [725-814], Liu Yuxi, Bai Juyi, and other mid-to late Tang and early Song poets explicitly refer to the Yangzi River and to the people, flora, and fauna of the Three Gorges 三峽 and Jingzhou 荊州 areas in present-day Sichuan and Hubei Provinces. By the late Tang, the geographical center had already begun to shift downstream toward the lower Yangzi, where they soon took hold and flourished across the landscapes of the Jiangnan delta. Many of the Jiangnan poems are named for a particular "lake" [hu] along the river or its tributaries; many of these lake songs also employ an alternative term for them, the "oar song" [zhaoge 棹 歌]. These poems are replete with alluring visions of multiple flora and fauna, the lingering physical traces of historical figures and events, and, most of all, the quotidian joys and sorrows of the residents who toil along their shores, ranging from oarsmen and boat pullers, fishermen, and lotus-gathering maidens, to entertainers at lakeside and floating teahouses and other establishments. References to water abound in the entire surviving corpus of zhuzhici (numbering over 100,000 poems); one could even say that more than "bamboo" or any other physical features, watery environs remained the primary topos of this genre throughout its history. And I argue that the earliest examples of their fascination with the ways in which communities used and depended on water and other natural resources for their survival prefigure the discernibly ethnographic turn of zhuzhici, which reached its full maturity in the mid-to late Qing dynasty.
As Huang Tingjian explains in a comment on Liu Yuxi's poems, these lyrics "channel local customs without being rustic," and whereas poets throughout its history regularly invoked its earliest associations with the mid-Yangzi River, the imperative to record the conditions of specific localities meant that toponyms, customs, flora and fauna, and other topics varied significantly among poems produced across vast swathes of China and its neighbors. Moreover, this "channeling" often involved the motif of travel along the water, even in regions in which water transportation or even bodies of water were less ubiquitous than in the Yangzi basin.12 Those who made travel over the water possibleboatmen -were the subjects of special interest and, indeed, "tapping the boat" [kouxian 扣舷], the rhythmic accompaniment to watermen's singing, served as been preserved from the Liang dynasty and the early and mid- Tang a metonym for composing or reciting zhuzhici. This is most evident in poems that explicitly imitate the singing and chanting of those who rowed, pulled, steered, or otherwise operated watercraft and often assume the voices of these men. Yang Wanli's seven Bamboo Branch Songs [Zhuzhige 竹枝歌] and accompanying colophon, for example, directly acknowledge the poet's debt to the laborers of the Zhenjiang 鎮江 region who ferry him across the water: We left the Danyang [Zhenjiang] government offices in the evening, and at the fifth watch reached Danyang County. The boatman and his pullers kept up their banter the whole evening, singing and joking to spur one another on. I could make out the gist of what they were saying, such as "Brother Zhang, Brother Li, everyone, let's pull hard together" or "One rest-rest, two rest-rest, over how many prefectures does the crescent moon shine?" Their voices were sadly beautiful, as they chanted in unison in response to the leader. I have refashioned and standardized them into these zhuzhige.  休休亭記]." By employing locally inflected speech that simultaneously evokes associations with literary and historical sources, the poem fulfills Huang Tingjian's desideratum, echoed by many later critics, that zhuzhici not be merely "rustic" [li 俚]. These poems "refashioned" (yinkuo 檃括, lit. "straightened," a term used in this period for revising prose or other works so that they could be sung to music), as Yang puts it, the raw material of their humble subjects by selectively distilling elements of the speech of oarsmen into a more elevated medium.14 Another example of oarsmen's songs that inspired both observation and emulation by literati passengers is a series of twelve poems by Wang Yun, who writes that he "matched" poems to songs he heard while being rowed northward from Fujian through Zhejiang: Returning north from Fujian, as our boat passed through Changxiu, I listened, reclining, to the oarsmen's songs. I was very much pleased by them and wrote three rhyming verses to each of their opening lines. Inquiring about their lyrics, I discovered that they were shallow and rustic, not at all like my matching verses' cheery brightness. I thus reworked them into twelve poems that speak of their hardships conveying people and messages back and forth. This was also Liu Yuxi's intention in composing zhuzhici.
In another sequence of ten poems, titled "Weidingci shijie 圩丁詞十解 [Dike Men's Ten Lyrics]," Yang Wanli extolls the achievements of farmers who tamed local waters to irrigate their fields in the Jiangnan region through complex networks of dikes and levees that require their constant care and attention, but allow them to enjoy abundant harvests year after year without fear of flooding. In the last poem, he concludes: "Atop the levees, men pull, while on the water, they navigate / From the front, they inspect the myriad fields of grain and mulberry." Wang Liqi, The poems range widely about the enervating work of rowing as well as the reasons that these rowers struggle to survive: Zhejiang and Jiangsu are packed with people, their lives not easy, Even a slightly bad harvest turns them into refugees. This year, Suzhou and Changzhou have been suffering, Selling their sons to make a living doesn't raise much cash. (third of twelve) [Official] business in Jiangnan is plentiful, Officials passing back and forth resemble gliding shuttles.
It is because of this that we labor from morn to night, Alas, this has turned into a song of lament. (tenth of twelve) Like Yang Wanli's poem cited earlier, Wang also "reworks" materials, but in this case the process is the reverse of Yang's: he reconfigures his original cheerful response poems to better match the somber mood of the laborers' songs, a mood he had failed to appreciate until someone explained the lyrics to him. In a sense, he acts as an investigator, perhaps even an "ethnographer," who overcomes his misunderstanding of local conditions and potential elite blindness (as one of the "hatted officials" [guangai 冠蓋] benefiting from this labor) to fashion a more faithful rendition of the laborers' voices. And he explains his efforts as following the path forged by Liu Yuxi's foundational lyrics, which channeled the thoughts and feelings of the humble residents of Langzhou 朗州, Wushan 巫山, and adjacent regions from which Liu drew his materials into literary forms that made them accessible to audiences beyond these geographic confines.
16 Wang Liqi, Lidai zhuzhici, 1:27-28. Turning toward Elegance, Infusing Knowledge Wang Yun wrote in the early Yuan era, and although references to rowing, pulling, and the oars and ropes employed by laborers retained their centrality in the repertoire of motifs employed by poets, a subtle but significant transformation in the representation of life on and along the water took place over the following century. This is most evident in the collection titled Collection on Bamboo Branch Lyrics of West Lake [Xihu zhuzhiji 西湖竹枝集], assembled by Yang Weizhen 楊維楨 . Most of the over 100 poets represented there, and many who followed in their wake, favored styles and subject matter that departed from the ballad-like modes generally favored by Tang and Song poets and toward a more refined idiom depicting leisurely, materially prosperous, culturally sophisticated settings of pleasure boats and establishments along the lakeshore that were patronized by wealthy, mostly literati elites. As a mid-fifteenth century author of a preface to Yang's collection puts it, these poems are excellent for "poets who, communing with the spirits of departed worthies, sing out these lyrics while floating on the lake, inebriated and tapping on the sides of their watercraft. How pleasing!"17 A later commentator, Chen Can 陳燦 [fl. 1760], notes that although these poets also engage in the requisite task of recording local customs, "they could not shake their habit of writing about luxurious banquets or beautiful courtesans … often employing flowery language and delicate verbiage … [which] strayed from the original intention for composing these songs."18 And even when they did refer to the beating of oars, this familiar motif is cast in a leisurely mode, as illustrated in this poem by Referring to the small craft aboard which the classic beauty Xishi 西施 drifted around the region with her lover, Fan Li 范蠡, female rowers -and virtually all the other female voices in West Lake poems -are typecast as waiting patiently (or not) for an absent, often faithless man, as in this poem by Zhang Shouzhong 張守中 [fl. 1360]: The maiden of West Lake resembles Xishi, Singing of bamboo branches aboard a melon-skin skiff. My man's heart, like the moon, is sometimes black, My body is like the mountain, which never moves.
西湖女兒似西施 瓜皮小船歌竹枝 郎心如月有時黑 妾身如山無動時.21 As in the oarsmen's songs, oarswomen also sing enchantingly, but, instead of lamenting the rigors of carrying literati over long distances for meager sustenance, they glide along the lotus-covered West Lake on light skiffs with few, if any, passengers, to alight on flowery isles dotting the lotus-covered waters. And even when these poems assume the voices of humble working fishermen and women, more often than not they speak of the unrequited desire of their female personae or the latter's anxiety over the safety of men who must fish or travel in distant parts, rather than the labor conditions. Lovelorn lyrics are indeed common throughout the history of zhuzhici, beginning in Liu Yuxi's surviving poems, but this motif assumes even greater prominence from the late Yuan through the Ming and early Qing periods, thanks in part to the influence of Yang Weizhen's collection. As the aforementioned comment by Chen Can notes, although such poems may also treat another form of labor -the work of the courtesans and other entertainers of West Lake and elsewhere -they tend to revisit romanticized images of female labor, such as weaving, spinning, and gathering, which emphasize immobility and thus separation from peripatetic fishermen, rowers, and other male laborers for whom their female admirers long. Thus over the following several centuries, the "original intention" of zhuzhici attributed to Liu Yuxi and his heirs -that of recasting the bittersweet folksongs in Sichuan into a literary medium that preserved its "simplicity" [zhi 質] -was partially supplanted by the elegant, sometimes recondite modes that generally elided the voices of humble laborers. As noted, the poems in Yang Weizhen's collection in particular tended to revolve around the themes of unrequited desire and to assume a feminine voice swearing devotion to a fickle lover, rather than venting complaints about the sorts of issues raised by Wang Yun or Yang Wanli. Such female personae lament their fate not of poverty or lowly status but of dependence on the whims of others -first and foremost of men. At the same time, however, the outpouring of poetry about Hangzhou's West Lake that continued throughout the Ming dynasty had the effect of intensifying scrutiny of its historical and cultural geography, horticulture, and distinctive social customs. Poems about this and other lakes in the region or beyond devote considerable attention to their geographic specificity -in other words, their "placeness."22 The fascination with the minutiae of local conditions grew even stronger in the early Qing, just as zhuzhici experienced an unprecedented wave of popularity and widespread dissemination to regions across all of China and even beyond it to Japan, Ryūkyū, and other foreign lands.23 Such an interest in "placeness" became especially evident in the proliferation of annotations to poems by their authors, a tool conducive to documenting the local conditions alluded to in poems both more systematically and much more comprehensively than had been possible before the advent of this practice. It is no accident that the Kangxi 康熙 reign [1661-1722] also witnessed the rise of what eventually came to be called evidential learning [kaozhengxue 考證學], the scholarly movement first characterized by Hu Shih 胡適  and many others since his time as the definitive birth of empiricism, comparable to that of the European Enlightenment. That the fluorescence of zhuzhici was influenced directly by this intellectual transition is confirmed by the fact that many leading evidential learning scholars, including the aforementioned towering figures Zhao Yi and Ji Yun, left dozens or even hundreds of such poems. Even more tellingly, the single most influential zhuzhici poet in the Qing dynasty, Zhu Yizun 朱彞尊 , was one of the seminal exponents and practitioners of evidential learning during its formative phase.
Renowned nearly equally for both his scholarship and his poetry, Zhu Yizun wrote a series of a hundred poems, Oar Songs of Mandarin Duck Lake [Yuanyanghu zhaoge 鴛鴦湖櫂歌], which was cited by many who wrote in its wake as having set the standard for zhuzhici series about localities identified by bodies of water. Far more than poems in previous eras, Zhu's work inspired generations of successors to emulate his lyrics' combination of stylistic elegance and detailed descriptions of folk customs, historical landmarks, topographical features, and, increasingly, the livelihood of farmers, artisans, and multiple other humble occupations. Zhu's poems are supplemented by laconic but informative annotations that provide additional facts or sources concerning the human geography of the region in which they are set (in Jiaxing 嘉興 Prefecture, Zhejiang Province). At least one later commentator went so far as to claim that the poems not only equaled but, in some cases, exceeded local gazetteers in the breadth and exactitude of their scholarship; the fact that the Jiaxing gazetteer in the Kangxi era failed to include them was "a source of deep regret for those pursuing evidential learning."24 Consistent with his poems' literary polish, Zhu's empiricism typically takes the form of an erudite pursuit of often-obscure textual sources for clues to understanding the human and physical features of the landscape at the time of writing [1671][1672][1673]. Many later series also make considerable use of written materials about local conditions, so-called fengtu 風土 but they also widen the scope of their sources by relying more heavily on firsthand, on-the-ground observations of the everyday lives of their residents. As the colophon to one such series set in Beijing [ca. 1790] puts it, "by expanding the scope of poetry to also include the vulgar and the common, [this genre] has been made far greater."25 However, such sociocultural inclusivity, which, as we have seen, characterized many Tang and Song poems, is conjoined with and mediated through the refined styles that, as noted, were the enduring legacy of the West Lake poetry in the Yuan and Ming inherited by Zhu Yizun. Zhu's contribution was to dexterously fuse these seemingly contradictory impulses, inspiring subsequent generations of what we might tentatively call "poet-ethnographers" precisely because, more than almost any previous figure, he had managed to combine information-rich, empirically based descriptions of human and physical geography with a polished, elegant literary medium.26 His successors both affirmed and further developed Zhu's model of artfully weaving verbal tapestries of lyrically inflected facts on -and of -the (watery) ground.27 Stylistically, Zhu Yizun's series largely resembles the elegant register of his Yuan and Ming predecessors' poems; thematically, too, he develops the inquisitiveness about local culture, language, and conditions that had been evident in some of the later Yuan and Ming poems set on the West Lake and elsewhere, excavating and foregrounding information about the linguistic, historical, and other features of the people and places that he describes in and around the lakes in Jiaxing. Through the sweep of its hundred poems (which, according to Zhu's preface, have no particular order [yu wu quanci 語無詮次]), the physical and human contours of this landscape emerge into comprehensive view. We can glimpse these multifaceted features in a single example, Poem #69: My home is by the head of the Qin Creek, When days are long, I love to wash the boats of Heng Lake. In each of its four lines, the poem brings up a single physical landmark, either natural or manmade, through the voice of a young woman reveling in the neighborhood's vernal delights. The relatively brief gloss tells the tale that has given the last reference, the embankment (or weir), its name, and ends by noting its "mistaken" identification with Lü Meng 呂蒙. The word "mistaken" occurs with some regularity in the annotations, often registering the author's objection to local lore that strays from the historical record. This fidelity to fact and the culling of inaccuracies was, according to a preface by Ye Feng 葉封 , one of Zhu's principal motivations for writing the series.29 Many other poems and their glosses recount legends and beliefs that have become associated with particular sites, but similarly note their "errors" or simply consign them to apocryphal status. We would expect precisely such exacting standards from the author of the monumental Study of the Meanings of the Classics [ Jingyikao 經義考] (in 300 juan), one of the most significant bibliographical compilations in the Qing and a formative influence on subsequent textual scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was his rigorous commitment to sorting fact from fiction that, together with the literary polish of the series, earned Zhu's work the respect of generations of later poets.

Returning to the Plain and Ordinary
In the more than two centuries of the Qing dynasty that followed Zhu Yizun's series, numerous zhuzhici poets, especially those who wrote in the subgenre of lake/oar poems, acknowledged his methods as the model and inspiration for their own work. While adhering to the general principle of identifying "errors" and meticulously tracing historical genealogies of places, people, and practices, many incorporate increasingly vernacular language and content. and understood with ease. The oarsmen drum tap on the sides of their boats and drum with their oars, singing these songs amid the waves and mist, thus making "oar song" an appropriate name for them.

今詩因地紀事，凡古老所流傳，習俗所聞見，黃郎漁婢，習而易知。 相與鼓栧，發唱於煙波杳靄之際，則名之以櫂歌為宜。 31
According to Sun, Yang's descriptions of temple festivals, games, village customs, proverbs, and other localisms are more fully expressive of the genre's plainspokenness [zhipu 質樸] than are Zhu Yizun's recondite poems tracing forgotten events in the past [yishi 逸事]. Its poems are arranged sequentially over the four seasons, beginning with the New Year and Lantern Festivals, and ending with preparations for starting the cycle all over again. "Plain and ordinary" is indeed an apt qualifier for the Lotus Lake poems: their register is folksy, bragging about local products (e.g., multiple varieties of chestnuts) and talented citizens (e.g., an exceptionally dexterous barber), but also lamenting the endemic poverty of the residents: Temple drummers noisily announce preparations for harvest festivities, But how many families can celebrate with a full bin of grain? They only lament the sight of grain merchants' sails and masts, As of old, families have no rice to last beyond the next meal.
After the harvest, much of the rice leaves the district. The price cannot be stabilized. More so than either of the two series discussed above, the contents of this series introduce an earthy, sometimes lusty poetic mode along with a generous infusion of geographic and historical knowledge. We observe this in the poem that corresponds (using the same two rhyme words, zhou 舟 and you 游) to number 69 in Zhu's sequence quoted above: Your heart is as hard as Rock Man's Head, When you leave town, you're as aimless as Untethered Boat. This poem brings up toponyms in each of its four lines, just as Zhu's verse does, but cleverly uses their literal meanings in a breezier, more colloquial style. Here, instead of a putatively chaste maiden gazing demurely over flowery hillsides, the poetic voice rails theatrically against the "depravity" of her lover, echoing the refrain in hundreds of Yuan and Ming zhuzhici that men had a habit of straying toward "wild mandarin ducks" [ye yuanyang 野鴛鴦 aka prostitutes]. Although this particular poem lacks the historical or other learned references that are so prominent in Zhu's notations, the series as a whole retains some of the erudite style typical of Zhu's poems and includes extensive annotations for a significant number of its entries.

Fragrant Flowers, Bitter Roots, and Weighty Bricks
Peng Shu 彭淑 , the author of yet another hundred-poem series (Changyang zhuzhici 長陽竹枝詞), offers an especially effusive encomium to Zhu, praising the "surfeit of loveliness" in his descriptions of people and places and self-deprecatingly referring to his own poems as clumsy imitations that have "assumed a rustic tone to speak of everyday affairs."37 True to this selfportrait, he lards his sequence about a district along the south bank of the a famine, bargain for fish at the market, convey New Year's greetings tardily, or sing love songs convincingly, and quotes from ditties that poke fun at selfimportant officials. His annotations are confined mainly to descriptions of live performances of song or opera, some of which he attended. In a note to a poem commemorating a banquet where an ensemble of singers identified as ten "sisters" performed tragic love songs, he says that such sincere, moving expressions of feeling are "the true meaning" [zhenyi 真意] of zhuzhici. And in the poem, he explicitly identifies the progenitors of their singing style as the young women of Ba whose bamboo branch songs had inspired Liu Yuxi to write his poems a thousand years before: The ten sisters' singing is all too tragic, The girl who is leaving stamps her feet and wets her clothes with her tears. Invoking the tragic intensity of these forerunners, Peng draws a genealogical line directly from his own work to that of Liu Yuxi. Even though overall the tone of his sequence is far from bleak, he locates the essence of the genre in examples that were drenched in the heartrending tears of a jilted woman, which, as we have seen, remained a predominant thread in such poetry for several hundred years. Aside from the ubiquity of tears of longing and loneliness, another word frequently intoned in zhuzhici, whether for romantic or other reasons, is "bitterness" [ku 苦]. In another contemporary sequence that not only invokes but is actually set partially in the Ba region, Flowing Bamboo Branches [Yan zhuzhi 演竹枝], its author Tan Cui 檀萃 [fl. 1761] is said to be overwhelmed by the bitterness of his fate, so much so that it has made him "mute." Tan was assigned the arduous task of supervising a shipment of Yunnan copper down the Yangzi River from Chongqing to Yangzhou and, from there, along the Grand Canal to Beijing. His hundred poems describe a cornucopia of local Sichuan legends in the voice of a seductively beautiful maiden of Wushan, who, after marrying Roddy Journal of chinese humanities 7 (2021) 258-285 him as a concubine, comforts the poet, now rendered mute by his bitterness about this physically and psychologically ruinous assignment (forced on him by a vindictive superior): I pity you for having tasted bitterness for over a year, And now you've set anchor in [the bitter] Canker Root [Huanglian] Harbor. Reports say the flowers in the river garden are coming into bloom, I will go ahead and pick some fragrant sprigs for you.
Alongside these sentimental outbursts, the annotations (written in the poet's own voice) provide meticulously detailed accounts of shipping routes, different types of watercraft, prices and overall business conditions, and the historical, geographic, and climatic conditions in the regions through which the poet and his companions travel. Although this marriage between (feminine-voiced) lyrical expression and (masculine-inflected) empirical commentary is awkward in places, especially compared to the spare elegance of Zhu Yizun's work (which is not credited as an influence in the notes or prefatory remarks), the gendered juxtaposition of emotionally fraught lyrics with matter-of-fact observations about local conditions is singularly ingenious. That the author was a native of Anhui (in Wangjiang 望江, Anqing 安慶), the home of many of the most influential evidential scholars in his lifetime during the movement's heyday in the High Qing [1723-1820], may be far from incidental to these features in his sequence.
Such efforts to fashion a synthesis between lyrical expression and empirical observation continued well into the nineteenth century, such as in two sequences written sometime in the last century or so of the Qing. and extending to other areas of the empire and even beyond in the Qing. In fact, the genealogy invoked by commentors such as the abovementioned Mao Guiming, who, along with many, argued for a non-Han origin of the genre (which Liu Yuxi's description of zhuzhici songs as cangning bukefen 傖儜不可分 [crude and unintelligible], words he elsewhere used for the "barbarians" of Sichuan, seems to support), places this function -of rendering a cultural or geographic "other" more comprehensible -at the core of its historical trajectory after the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, in the poems of the Tang, Song, and Yuan, we can discern early signs of these trends, first and foremost the genre's affective attunement with the rhythms of everyday life in surrounding landscapes, whether musical, biological, or geographical. Such resonance is evident in Liu Yuxi's foundational 45 For examples of zhuzhici that were included in practical collectanea for their perceived value in illustrating agricultural and sericultural customs and practices, see Zhou Anbang poems, whose arresting images of singing, flowing waters, howling gibbons, or broken hearts, inter alia, reverberated throughout the poetry of the subsequent millennium: The waters churn noisily through the twelve shoals of Qutang Gorge, This route has been difficult since ancient times. I have long lamented that men's hearts are inferior to water, They stir up waves on flat land, for no reason at all.
瞿塘嘈嘈十二灘 此中道路古来難 長恨人心不如水 等閒平地起波瀾.46 Indeed, the continuity of the motifs, themes, and even language of zhuzhici over time and space is quite striking, especially to readers who are unfamiliar with the profound sensitivity to literary and historical precedents that have shaped Chinese cultural expression throughout the imperial era and even today. As we have seen with Zhu Yizun's poems, the desire to testify to and to "perform" their writers' affective engagement with their surroundings often went hand in hand with an almost archaeological excavation of an observed environment in order to discover not only the traces of the past but of the resonance of that past with the present as well. It is perhaps this antiquarian bent that might inhibit zhuzhici from being plumbed for models to apply to ethnographic writing and research in the present.47 Regardless of these caveats, however, social scientists might still discover that zhuzhici have something valuable to offer to ethnographers in this time of aesthetic, sociopolitical, and epistemological ferment. As Kent Maynard and Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor write about the poetry of ethnography and vice Journal of chinese humanities 7 (2021) 258-285 versa, the fusion of these two modes of writing requires multiple competencies and modes of knowing, through which to articulate an "artful reality": A poet may write more to what one does not yet know; an ethnographer (at least in the classic and positivist sense) writes more to what one already knows. The ethnographic poet and the poetic ethnographer must do both. That is, like the author of historical fiction, the ethnographic poet must try to be faithful to external historical experience, while reaching beyond or through it to an equally true, artful reality.48 Needless to say, artistry is central to the practice of poetry of any kind, including ethnographically informative, "reality-based" zhuzhici. Moreover, poetry "shares a cultural function with myth, performance, and ritual, promoting ways of being that are not instructional but, instead, are performative, relying on the enactment and re-enactment of the verse itself, rather than on argumentation" to impart insights to its readers.49 It is this possibility for re-enactment, a "refrain" that, in Félix Guattari's analysis, makes this and other aesthetically centered discourse potentially "creative alternatives to scientific rationality."50 From multiple disciplinary perspectives, be they organizational behavior, anthro pology, sociology, or psychology, the research for and construction of ethnographies is increasingly being reconfigured in ways that make room for the poet or, more generally, the lyrical ethnographer attuned to "polyphonic, polyrhythmic surround" in "the world at the local level."51 Their exquisitely refined sensitivity to geographic particularities, to both love and labor experienced locally, makes zhuzhici surprisingly relevant to present-day efforts to revamp ethnography in these directions.