1 Ethnography, Affect, and Lyricism

In the early twentieth century, ethnography took shape as an empirically oriented, avowedly scientific mode of sociocultural analysis championed by key figures in the emerging professions of anthropology and sociology. Pioneers such as Bronislaw Malinowski [1884–1942], Franz Boas [1858–1942], 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 [795–1185] Japanese lyrical forms, both poetry (tanka, thirty-one-syllable 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 [618–907] and Song [960–1279] 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 [772–842], Su Zhe 蘇轍 [1039–1112], Zha Shenxing 查慎行 [1650–1727], Ji Yun 紀昀 [1724–1805], and Zhao Yi 趙翼 [1727–1814] 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 [1368–1644] and Qing [1616–1911] 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

2 Waterborne

Premodern literati as well as contemporary scholars have posited various historical and geographic origins of zhuzhici, but most take the early poets Liu Yuxi, Bai Juyi 白居易 [772–846] and others at their word. Liu and Bai both claim to have been moved to compose their poems as lyrics to songs that they heard while traveling through or being posted within (what were then still) remote regions in the mid- to upper Yangzi River basin.¹⁰ In the late Tang and then the Song and Yuan [1206–1368] dynasties, their successors, such as Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 [1045–1105], Su Shi 蘇軾 [1037–1101],Yang Wanli 楊萬里 [1127–1206], and Wang Yun 王惲 [1227–1304], explicitly emulated Liu Yuxi’s attempts to capture the folk authenticity, especially the local distinctiveness of the subjects and regions about which they wrote. Poets took to crafting scenes and vignettes of the quotidian lives of farmers, fishermen, craftsmen, street vendors, prostitutes, and other humble residents along the river and its tributaries, inscribing what could be called affective cartographies of both rural and urban landscapes. Many poems as well as commentaries on them note the tragic tone said to characterize the folksongs after which they were modeled; although the poems generally encompass a much wider range of emotional registers, poems addressed to or in the voices of humble laborers typically give expression to the toll taken on them by the vicissitudes and unpredictability of their environments, both natural and societal.¹¹

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 possible – boatmen – were the subjects of special interest and, indeed, “tapping the boat” [kouxian 扣舷], the rhythmic accompaniment to watermen’s singing, served as 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.

晚發丹陽館下，五更至丹陽縣。舟人及牽夫終夕有聲，蓋謳吟嘯謔，以相其勞者。其辭亦略可辨，有云: 「張哥哥，李哥哥，大家著力齊一拖。」又云: 「一休休，二休休，月子彎彎照幾州。」其聲凄婉，一唱眾和。因檃括之為《竹枝歌》云。

The colophon indicates that their vernacular singing and spirited patter kept up these pullers’ morale and esprit de corps during the undoubtedly arduous task of pulling Yang’s party toward their destination through the night. He inserts the men’s phrase “letting up” [xiuxiu 休休] seemingly as a local colloquialism, but the educated reader would no doubt recognize its overlap with the lexicon of classical and literary sources, ranging from “Crickets [Xishuai 蟋蟀]” in the Classic of Poetry [Shijing 詩經] to dynastic histories such as the History of the Former Han [Hanshu 漢書], to a famed essay about reclusion by Sikong Tu 司空圖 [837–908], “The Resting Pavilion [Xiuxiuting ji 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.

余自閩中北還，舟行過常秀間臥聽櫂歌，殊有惬余心者。每一句發端以聲和之者三。扣其辭語敷淺而鄙俚，曾不若和聲之驩亮也。因變而作十二闕，且道其傳送艱苦之狀，亦劉連州竹枝之意云。¹⁵

The poems range widely about the enervating work of rowing as well as the reasons that these rowers struggle to survive:

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.

3 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 [1296–1370]. 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 Zhao Yi 趙奕 [fl. ca. 1310], the son of the painter and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 [1254–1322]:

If anything, rowing by young women becomes an exercise in sensual enchantment for the poet cum voyeur, largely divorced from the labor of oars, as in this poem by Yan Gong 嚴恭 [fl. 1360] from Xihu zhuzhiji:

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]:

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 [1891–1962] 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 [1629–1709], 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 [1671–1673]. 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:

Heng Lake and Zhanyun Temple are both to the east of Banluo. Righteous Woman’s Embankment is the grave of Lü Rong, wife of Xu Sheng, who died in the Yellow Turban Rebellion during the Han. Prefect Mi collected money to bury her. Today, this is mistakenly thought to be the grave of Lü Meng.

橫湖、霑雲寺俱在半邏東。義婦堰，漢許昇妻呂榮冢，死黃巾之亂。糜府君斂錢葬之。今譌為呂蒙冢。²⁸

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 [1623–1687], 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.

4 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. As one author, Chen Qi 陳祁 [fl. 1780], put it, “For matters of the past, I occasionally look to Zhu [Yizun’s] ten lines; For rustic speech, I randomly imitate Xie [Yong’s ‘Twelve Rustic Word’] poems.”³⁰ It is unclear whether Xie Yong’s 謝鏞 [1719–1795] poems under that title still survive and thus how truly “rustic” they were, but these two references hint at how Zhu’s successors applied the textually based empirical methods pioneered by Zhu to the more demotic domains of folk customs, language, and beliefs.

According to a preface by his nephew (Sun Erzhun 孫爾準), Yang Lun 楊掄 [fl. 1778] wrote his hundred-poem series, Oar Songs of Lotus/Hibiscus Lake [Furonghu zhaoge 芙蓉湖櫂歌] (in Jiangyin 江陰, Jiangsu) in explicit imitation of Zhu Yizun’s work. He identified them as oar songs in homage to Zhu as well as in acknowledgment of the genre’s plebeian roots and character:

Today’s poems record the circumstances of the locality, including what has been passed down from old, customs that can be seen and heard, ordinary men and fisherwomen – in other words, what can be learned 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:

After the harvest, much of the rice leaves the district. The price cannot be stabilized.

秋收後，米多出境，價不能平。³²

In a slightly later hundred-poem series about a district in Jiaxing, Danghu zhuzhici 當湖竹枝詞, by Lu Gongdou 陸拱斗 [fl. 1790], local colloquialisms and humorous descriptions of harvest festivals figure prominently, too:

A preface to Lu’s work by his friend Li Zongchuan 李棕川 [fl. ca. 1800] lauds the pivotal role of Zhu Yizun’s series in stimulating the subsequent outpouring of zhuzhici, but notes that many of his later imitators strayed into “sensuality and flowery verbiage, which had nothing to do with the essential purpose of describing local customs and the ways of the humble folk.” Only Lu’s work has “deeply absorbed [Zhu’s] original intention in writing oar songs.”³⁴ In a still later sequence, Weitang zhuzhici 魏塘竹枝詞 (Weitang is also in Jiaxing), the preface (by Ying Hu 應鹄, dated 1837) praises the author, Cao Xinxian 曹信賢 [fl. ca. 1800], for his fidelity to Zhu Yizun’s work and lists several other poets who also followed closely in Zhu’s footsteps. Their poems, including Cao’s, are all in the format of identically rhymed [heyun 和韻] series, which, in the words of another preface (by Huang Antao 黃安韜 [fl. ca. 1830]), can supplement Zhu’s poems by “recasting new materials” in the mold of the original work.³⁵ 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:

Rock Man’s Head is in Ba’nan District; Untethered Boat is the inscription on a plaque over a room in the Qian family’s Guest Garden; Flourishing Fortune Bridge is in Qianshan Township; Depths of Depravity is in Baoxi District.

石人頭在八南區，不繫舟係錢氏客園中室上顎。興隆橋在遷善鄉。敗落蕩在保西區。³⁶

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.

5 Fragrant Flowers, Bitter Roots, and Weighty Bricks

Peng Shu 彭淑 [1748–1808], 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 self-portrait, he lards his sequence about a district along the south bank of the Yangzi River in western Hubei with local folk wisdom about how to survive 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 self-important 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:

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 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):

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. Lin Zhongqi’s 林中麒 [fl. ca. 1790] Zhapu zhuzhici 乍浦竹枝詞 is set in Zhapu, the booming port just south of Jiaxing, which, by the late eighteenth century, had surpassed Ningbo 寧波 as the hub of trade with Japan and Southeast Asia.⁴⁰ In his erudite preface written in parallel prose, Lin pays brief homage to Zhu as the model for his work, noting that he had striven to remain faithful to the sequence by writing the full hundred poems. The significance to Lin of Zhu’s work is further emphasized in the first poem, in which he begins his description of Zhapu by noting that the “city today is a dense hive of 10,000 households, far more than during the time of the Scribe of Golden Pavilion [Zhu Yizun’s sobriquet].” The attached gloss then quotes a regulated verse poem by Zhu, Inscription for the Ruixiang Monastery [Ruixiang sengshe tici 瑞祥僧舍題詞], which describes Zhapu as a lonely hamlet clinging to the coastline, with a mere “eight or nine households.”⁴¹ This gesture seems to indicate not only how far the town has come since Zhu’s time but also, by implication, that this poetry, too, had adapted to the current prosperity of the region. And, indeed, Lin’s poems and glosses provide a thorough yet judiciously concise balance between historical geography and lyrical expression. As if needling Zhu Yizun because of his condescension, Lin lavishes attention on Zhapu’s thriving maritime commerce, such as in this poem, which traces the town’s commercial importance all the way back to the coastal trade in jasmine during the Northern Song [960–1127]:

[Zhou Mi’s] “Record of the Qianchun Reign”: When jasmine first blooms, women stuff their waists with up to seven sprigs, which cost them tens of rolls [of coins]. The merchants from Fujian and Guangdong who come to sell flowers at Zhapu bring orchids and jasmine in the greatest amounts. Their prices are not particularly high.

《乾淳歲時記》: 茉莉初出，婦人簇帶多至七插，所值數十卷。閩廣商人販花至乍，蘭與茉莉最夥，價不甚穹。⁴²

Oar Songs of Pingchuan [Pingchuan zhaoge 平川櫂歌], about another township just northeast of Jiaxing, was composed between the late Qianlong and the Jiaqing period but not published until the early 1920s. Its author, Xu Han 徐涵 [1730–1813], wrote some of the annotations for his fifty-eight surviving poems, but the majority were added by at least three later writers (or possibly the same writer using three different pen names). These notes are especially useful, because Xu’s poems cover an astoundingly wide range of topics: local tax rates, beekeeping techniques, boat construction, women’s headgear, poultry and other animal husbandry, cormorant fishing, local crab varieties, Suzhou- bound ferry schedules, local school financing, cotton prices, physical geography, historical lore, and more. For example, he writes of the brickmaking sideline that farmers take up during their slack days in spring:

Note by Wan:⁴³ Many locals produce mud bricks to sell for cash on spring days when they take a break from planting. These mud bricks are unfired.

萬注: 按鄉人於春耕休息日，多製泥坯以貨錢。泥坯乃磚瓦之未經火煉者。⁴⁴

Of all the sequences that I have covered, Xu’s lyrics are without doubt the most comprehensive in surveying the everyday lives of their unassuming subjects. As such, Pingchuan zhaoge might be regarded as having most fully realized the potential of this genre for marrying lyrical expression with empirical observation: applying well-honed powers of description to the here-and-now of quotidian life, supplemented where appropriate by learned textual sources, in an aesthetically pleasing form. In this respect, it is representative of the late Qing dissemination of zhuzhici in nearly every corner of the empire and the larger Sinographic world, where they both lyricize and convey detailed information about multiple societal, vocational, geographical, and cultural contexts to their readers across this cultural sphere who increasingly sought out such knowledge.

6 Writing Poetry, Writing Ethnography

If the germ of this proto-ethnographic poetic mode can be traced back to the formative stages of zhuzhici in the Tang and Song dynasties, one might nonetheless ask whether its full flowering was preordained or to any degree inevitable.⁴⁵ Given the pivotal role of Zhu Yizun in setting the course for the final phase of zhuzhici, one could argue that such a development was far from clear in the surviving examples from the Tang and Song. Moreover, Zhu’s model of rigorous empiricism, heavily weighted toward historical and textual sources, led some poets to look elsewhere for demotic modes, as attested to by the remarks by Lu Gongdou and others cited above. In addition, we can also point to ethnographically descriptive poems and annotations about non-Han ethnicities, beginning in Yunnan in the mid- to late Ming (Diannan zhuzhici 滇南竹枝詞, Dianzhong zhuzhici 滇中竹枝詞, and especially the Translated Bamboo Branch Lyrics of Different Nations in the South of Yunnan [Diannan zhuyi yiyu zhuzhici 滇南諸夷譯語竹枝詞]) and extending to other areas of the empire and even beyond in the Qing. In fact, the genealogy invoked by commentors such as the above-mentioned 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 poems, whose arresting images of singing, flowing waters, howling gibbons, or broken hearts, inter alia, reverberated throughout the poetry of the subsequent millennium:

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 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, anthropology, 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.