CHAPTER 4

Money and Li Zhi’s Economies of Rhetoric

Anxieties over the blurring of social distinctions caused by increases in the number, variety, and significance of fashions paralleled contemporary financial concerns. Economically developing regions of China and Europe, linked by increasingly complex international maritime trade routes, were home to both a wide array of goods whose prices varied erratically and a great number of currencies, some of questionable legitimacy, whose value and even legal status also rose and fell unpredictably.¹ In China, sales were conducted in an astounding multitude of currencies, including barter, cowrie shells, copper coins, unminted silver, and even counterfeit coins. Thus commercial transactions often required that their participants negotiate among a wide array of monies, old, new, domestic, foreign, legitimate, and false, and that they stay alert to rapid alterations in price. Needless to say, these circumstances posed steep challenges and necessitated that individuals exercise caution and keen judgment.

Li Zhi’s writings demonstrate his awareness of the precarious economic conditions under which he lived. Despite his somewhat insulated position working in the civil bureaucracy, our author, like many officials of the day, drew only a meager salary. According to one account, he experienced long years of severe poverty interrupted by temporary periods of plenty, but never accumulated any savings.² And in midlife he found himself so destitute that he was unable to prevent two of his children from dying of starvation.³ He himself also went hungry on occasion.⁴ Yet his writings seldom explicitly address the economic tribulations of the day. More often they do so obliquely, via analogy.

In this period, “the economic” was not considered a distinct sphere of activity; concepts such as value, predicated on trust and authenticity, permeated both everyday life and literature.⁵ As Sandra K. Fischer has argued with respect to early modern Europe, all forms of social activity were understood to fall “under the aegis of economic exchange,” and even verbal interactions carried an economic valence, as the value of words could be inflated or their meaning falsified.⁶ The interpenetration of the economic, the verbal, and the social evident in Li’s texts both resembles and diverges from the intersection of these domains in the writings of several of his European contemporaries. Like him, these writers struggled to make sense of the economic and numismatic uncertainties confronting them. Consequently, texts by Shakespeare, Donne, Cervantes, Rabelais, and Montaigne, among others, frequently refer to the inflation of language, the counterfeiting of virtue, and the cheapening of reputations.⁷ These overtly economic metaphors highlight the ways in which questions about value came to color early modern perceptions of language and social relations.

The intermingling of these concepts seems appropriate, for money is more than just a medium of exchange; it is, as one scholar aptly puts it, an “emotionally charged object.”⁸ Money makes powerful truth-claims about the value of objects in the world, and for this reason price instability and disturbances to the monetary system such as sudden demonetizations and rampant counterfeiting, which were common occurrences in early modern China and Europe, may provoke unease or stimulate distrust in the very notion of communicating value accurately. Moreover, as a system of signs, money resonates analogically with other semiotic systems. Hence misgivings about the ability of money to convey value reliably may prompt further queries into the possibility that words or actions may adequately express intentions or ideas.⁹ It is in these subtle extensions of the discourse on value that Li’s economic thought is most clearly visible.

Unlike his European contemporaries, whose texts abound in explicitly economic metaphors, Li rarely employed blatantly economic terms. His writings’ engagement with the current economic situation was far more indirect and is evident less in what his texts say than in what they do. By using words in unpredictable and unconventional ways, Li encourages his readers to regard his texts with the same discerning eye with which they might view money of unstable value or merchandise of uncertain worth. Thus even when Li addresses subjects far removed from “the economic” narrowly defined, his rhetoric nonetheless often prompts readers to reflect upon the shifting values and potential falsification not only of salable objects but also of words, identity, reputations, and social relationships. In this way Li’s writings subtly approximate in language the challenges of appraising the values of currencies and commodities in the early modern world.

Mutability of value was a major theme in both Europe and China at the turn of the seventeenth century, but the trajectories along which these regions’ financial systems were progressing differed greatly. Perhaps the most striking disparity lay in the trend to embrace or reject highly symbolic forms of money. The majority of European economies, which had previously relied on precious metals, were gradually beginning to adopt increasingly symbolic forms of currency such as fiat monies, promissory notes, and bills of exchange, whereas China had long since experimented with and rejected purely symbolic currency, paper bills. Paper currency had been introduced as early as the Yuan dynasty but was abandoned in the mid-Ming on account of spiraling inflation. By Li’s lifetime, many Chinese viewed symbolic media of exchange with skepticism. Instead, the market trend, which government policy only partially endorsed, was to reduce dependence on symbolic currencies and, to the greatest extent possible, to determine value via weight. Thus copper coins often changed hands at values unrelated to the inscriptions they bore, and even lumps and ingots of unminted silver circulated freely. As the examples in this chapter attest, Li’s opinions of the metaphorical economies of sincerity and virtue reflect the strong current of cultural mistrust toward symbolic representation evident in the late Ming. Further, they exhibit the author’s nostalgic desire to reestablish reliable, durable standards of value that correspond to his views on the rectification of language.

But paradoxically—if unsurprisingly—Li’s writings abound in acts of bluff, which themselves parallel the phenomena of fluctuations in monetary value and commodity prices, proliferation of media of exchange, and counterfeiting. The economic ideas nestled in Li’s writings subtly manifest the repercussions of these disturbances on late Ming society. Li himself, like many of his contemporaries writing from Europe, was only dimly aware of the development of global networks of international trade and their effects upon the particular economic crises he experienced. Yet his texts evince some ways in which local economic conditions, which were enmeshed in much larger, intercontinental trade relations, affected both social relations and verbal self-expression.

PROLIFERATION OF CURRENCY, FLUCTUATION IN VALUE, AND LI ZHI’S RHETORIC

As early modern societies in China and Europe came to rely increasingly on commercial exchanges, money began to play a more significant role in their economies. And the sheer number and variety of currencies in use in early modern urban centers posed stark challenges for appraising value. By one estimate, Europe in 1600 was home to as many as four hundred different kinds of coins, which circulated so broadly that even an obscure Norman nobleman noted in his diary that he had learned to recognize nearly three dozen sorts of coins.¹⁰ And the narrator of the early sixteenth-century German chapbook Fortunatus carefully reports to readers the value of the many currencies his protagonist handles.¹¹ Reports from contemporary China likewise document individuals using coins from a wide array of dynasties and reign periods alongside contemporary issues and unminted silver. As the editor of the Norman gentleman’s diary remarks, “One can judge by this [variety] what familiarity and what care one had to take in handling so many types of money in order to count exactly and avoid errors detrimental to either the buyer or the seller.”¹²

After 1567, when China lifted its ban on private international maritime trade, vast quantities of New World and Japanese silver started flowing into China, and this precious metal came to be regarded as the preferred store of value as well as the medium in which taxes were collected.¹³ Silver played such an important role in the economy that the succeeding century came to be known as China’s silver century. However, despite its ubiquity, silver was considered too valuable to be used for most everyday purchases. For this reason copper coin remained the medium of choice for small transactions. The weight, inscriptions, color, and metal content of Chinese copper coin varied tremendously. Coins were made from copper of varying quality, extracted from mines in diverse regions of China, and cast by artisans of varying skill levels. As a result, even coins of the same denomination and dating from the same period were not uniform. This was especially the case during the Wanli reign.¹⁴ And due to the vagaries of the market, the value stamped upon these coins often provided only an unreliable indicator of the coin’s exchange value. One Ming author describes having traveled to the capital as early as 1518, where he found that poor quality copper coins, known in local slang as “boards,” were being exchanged at a rate of only half their face value.¹⁵ Reports from Europe also attest to alarmingly high rates of inflation.¹⁶

To make matters still more complicated, a large number of coins circulating in sixteenth-century China were not Ming issues at all. For nearly a century, from 1436 to 1503, the state closed all mines and halted the production of copper coin.¹⁷ This meant that contemporaries came to rely on coins from earlier periods, many of which had aged and thinned by passing through many hands. Gu Yanwu’s (1613–1682) Records of Daily Knowledge (Rizhi lu) reports that as a child, the author frequently encountered coins from the Northern and Southern Song dynasty, and even a few Tang issues.¹⁸ These antique coins differed from one another in size, weight, and purity. And in the intervening centuries since their manufacture many had been clipped or shaved, diminishing their value. Distinguishing among these coins and attributing to each its proper value was surely no simple matter.

International trade further compounded the situation of numismatic complexity. As foreign coins, notably Spanish pieces of eight, entered China in increasingly large numbers, discrepancies arose between the face value of a coin and its exchange value.¹⁹ For instance, the value of a Spanish real in Fujian or Taiwan was determined on the basis of its weight in silver, not its legal tender value in far-off Europe.²⁰

Similarly across Europe, although governments endeavored to cope with an influx of foreign monies by imposing values on them by fiat, these values did not always reflect either the coins’ metallic content or their legal value in their distant country of origin.²¹ As a result, such efforts to impose value often proved ineffectual: royal decrees were disregarded, leaving vendors and licensed money changers free to appraise value according to market trends.²² As the relationship between the face value and exchange value of coins grew increasingly tenuous, the responsibility of assessing value moved further away from the jurisdiction of the law and came to rest more heavily on the shoulders of individuals. Weighing and assaying money became an unremarkable part of everyday life, as attested by European paintings of the period (Figure 4.01).²³ Such scenes were even more widespread in China; for instance, a Jesuit traveling in Macao and in the bustling international port city of Quanzhou, where Li Zhi spent his formative years, exclaimed in wonder that even Chinese children excelled at appraising the quality and purity of silver.²⁴ Unsurprisingly, weighing and assaying silver likewise feature prominently in contemporary Chinese fiction and drama.²⁵

Figure 4.01. Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675). Woman Holding a Balance, ca. 1664. Oil on canvas, 39.7 x 35.5 cm. Widener Collection (1942.9.97), National Gallery of Art. Photo credit: Art Resource.

The open conflict between two incompatible systems of interpretation—face value and metallic content—vying for the authority to determine the exchange value of coins highlighted the state’s failure to guarantee the value of money. And the uncertainty of its value undermined the basic viability of the currency.²⁶ For, as the Han dynasty monetary theorist Guanzi recognized, a currency’s ability to function effectively rests upon the confidence and respect it commands as a legally sanctioned instrument of exchange. Building on this idea, the late Ming monetary thinker Jin Xueyan (fl. 1570) punned cleverly on the words for “coin” and “power” and pronounced that “coin is synonymous with power” (qian zhe quan ye). He concluded that in order to retain control over the country, “rulers should wield power over [the country’s] wealth.”²⁷ This requires inspiring the people’s trust in the value of money. If ever a government loses its ability to command this respect, the symbolic power of money—its capacity to represent value—is compromised, and confusion, ambiguity, and lawlessness ensue as individuals scramble to reassign value on an ad hoc basis. This was precisely the situation in late Ming China.

In response, the Ming state endeavored at many junctures to reassert its authority to regulate the value of coins. But laws restricting or prohibiting the use of certain types of coin were often unenforced and quickly repealed.²⁸ And Chinese monetary policy changed course so unpredictably throughout the sixteenth century that the chief grand secretary Gao Gong (1510–1578) was moved to comment, “The people [live in] fear that the coin they obtain today will be worthless tomorrow.”²⁹ The mere rumor that a new monetary decree would be issued could incite market crises of panic buying or hoarding. One contemporary Chinese observer described the situation in these words:

With each recoinage the financial assets of shops and money changers suddenly were rendered worthless. . . . [Merchants] usually held their tongues and liquidated their inventories. . . . But the petty shopkeepers and peddlers, having lost their stock of capital, expressed fear and doubt to each other. . . . Villainous rogues seized the opportunity to spread rumors; some warned that “baked lacquer” coins would be demonetized; others predicted that “gold reverse” coins would be demonetized; still others confidently asserted that Jiajing, Longqing, and Wanli issues would all circulate simultaneously. The people did not know whom to believe. Households that had stored up coin would sell their stock cheaply, recouping a mere 10 percent of the value of their holdings. A hundred coins containing a full twelve liang of copper would fetch a mere 0.03 tael of silver.³⁰

Needless to say, such monetary instability spawned confusion and anxiety.

Compounding these concerns was the related issue of price instability, which afflicted both contemporary China and Europe. In Europe, massive influxes of New World silver throughout the second half of the sixteenth century led to dramatic price hikes that alarmed contemporaries and later came to be known as the Price Revolution.³¹ In China, several Qing dynasty authors recollected that unsteady prices had contributed to a general sense of unease in the late Ming. One such report from the early Qing states, “Price instability has existed from ancient times, but . . . over the past thirty-several years the price of a single object has sometimes risen by ten or a hundred times. From dear to cheap and cheap to dear, prices have been erratic and unpredictable (zhanzhuan).”³² Another author traced the origins of the prevailing economic concerns back even earlier: “[At] the end of the Zhengde and beginning of the Jiajing reigns . . . prices fluctuated. Only the capable were able to succeed. Those who were a bit slow were ruined. The family on the east might become rich while the family on the west became impoverished. As the equilibrium between those of higher and lower status was lost, everyone struggled over paltry sums.”³³

Li Zhi personally experienced the effects of these tumultuous economic conditions. Comments scattered throughout his writings allude to price hikes and sudden fluctuations in the value of currency. In one missive he wrote, “When the situation gets to the breaking point, the price of a grain of rice, a single unit of silver, and even a respectful glance increases in value tenfold.” “In times like these,” he ruefully noted, “if one can pay one coin and truly receive one coin’s worth of goods one will truly love and the ‘father-and-mother’ official [i.e., the district magistrate, who takes care of the populace as parents care for their children], and things will surely be different from the way they normally are [in such uncertain times].”³⁴ Elsewhere he reported that when his native Quanzhou fell prey to pirate raids in 1560, “no amount of money could purchase rice or corn.”³⁵ In another text he poetically remarked, “The situation these days is like chess; it changes in the blink of an eye.”³⁶

It stands to reason that, buffeted by such uncertainties, Li would have supported policies conducive to economic stability. Although he refrains from addressing this topic directly, remarks culled from the preface to the chapter “Famous Ministers who Enriched the Country” of A Book to Keep (Hidden) support this inference. Here he praises two celebrated finance ministers of the past, Sang Hongyang (d. 80 BCE) and Wang Anshi (1021–1086), both well-known for instituting price regulation along with their ambitious programs of economic reform. Li explicitly commends the former for setting in place policies designed to promote the equitable distribution of grain and for controlling the price of this commodity so effectively that the people’s needs were satisfied and government coffers filled.³⁷ He equally lauds another well-known figure from Chinese economic history, Liu Yan (716–780), who in Li’s words “weighed the ten thousand goods and saw to it that nothing under heaven was excessively expensive or inexpensive, and that commodity [prices] remained stable.”³⁸ By invoking figures like Liu, Wang, and Sang, Li signals his approval of a bygone system of fair pricing and stable monetary value.³⁹

Li’s sober financial outlook is consonant with many of his stated opinions on language. In both cases he opposes fluctuation in value or meaning and favors constancy. As discussed in chapter one, Li’s writings express his consternation over the discovery that the meanings of words shift over time and his desire to restore and maintain their original significance. He was particularly disturbed to observe that by the late Ming, the word “friend,” for instance, no longer connoted a cherished confidant but indicated merely a common acquaintance. To be sure, the process by which the meanings of this and other words became diluted (or polluted or eroded) differed from that which caused the value of money or goods to fluctuate. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of a word seeming to mean less and less over time or carrying vastly different connotations in different contexts may be said to resemble the situation of objects selling for discrepant prices or even, arguably, coins moving in and out of the legal economy or being exchanged for different values. The commonality lies in the strain that all these situations place on acts of interpretation. Under such circumstances, participants in verbal and financial transactions alike must be alert to the variable value or meaning of the tokens being exchanged—coins, objects, or words. Failure to recognize that in late Ming common parlance the word “friend” no longer necessarily connoted an intimate companion could result in as disastrous a misunderstanding as the inability to discern that a coin that had once been legal tender had subsequently lost value or even been demonetized.

The verbal economy of Li Zhi’s texts frequently demands that readers exercise precisely this sort of discrimination, in other words, that they choose among conflicting interpretations of a single word or phrase. Even when he does not employ explicitly economic diction, Li’s revaluation of words resonates with the monetary instabilities of the day. A letter he composed to his close friend Liu Dongxing exemplifies this phenomenon: “The problem with worthies is that they love reputation. If you don’t use reputation to seduce them, they’ll never listen to what you say.”⁴⁰ The meaning of this short passage hinges on the ironic and highly idiosyncratic use of the word “worthies” (xianzhe). As any reader with common sense would concur, true worthies would not need to be “seduced” by means of reputation. Thus the word “worthies” cannot be interpreted literally here. Rather, in this context, Li uses the term to refer to the antithesis of true worthies, people who deceptively present themselves as men of virtue and are widely (though erroneously) heralded as such by those too ignorant to be able to tell the difference. Li’s crafty manipulation of language leads to a discrepancy between readers’ expectations of what the word “worthies” is likely to mean—that is, what they feel it ought to mean—and what it actually means in this particular context. The notion that the meaning of words is flexible and must be reinterpreted in varying contexts mirrors the understanding that even familiar types of coin may have discrepant values in individual transactions or that the price of everyday items may unpredictably change. In this way, the passage illustrates the malleability of the significance of words, which parallels the shifting value of coins and the context-dependent price of commodities. These situations all stimulate readers of various kinds to exercise their powers of discernment.⁴¹

Li’s bluff-laden writings further reflect the unreliable economic conditions by presenting their author in a variety of guises. His use of rhetoric reinforces the notion that the economic uncertainties of the day not only affected practical, financial exchanges but also influenced language use and the construction of identity. By opting to present himself and his views alternately as orthodox and heretical, Li demonstrates the mutability of his own persona and encourages readers to adopt different attitudes toward him in different moments. This vacillation between legitimating and censuring his own views tacitly parallels the movement of coins in and out of the legal economy. For, just as fluctuations in the legality of a coin made users continually reassess the value of money, so too does Li’s protean and paradoxical dramatization of his ideas—as alternately legitimate and unlicensed, important and insignificant—compel readers to assess and reassess them. The internal inconsistencies in his writings invite readers at times to reject the very ideas they had formerly accepted, and conversely to accept ideas they had once rejected.

In a letter to his friend Jiao Hong, Li explicitly thematizes the fluctuation of his own identity. Referring to himself by one of his many monikers, Zhuowu, Li writes, “The person you have seen is merely the former Zhuowu; you do not know that the Zhuowu of today is entirely different. The person you’re fond of is the Zhuowu of days past. You do not realize that the former Zhuowu was very flimsy and weak. If you felt glad for the Zhuowu of the past, then you will definitely pity the Zhuowu of today. For if the Zhuowu of the past was like that, how did it come about that the Zhuowu of today turned out like this?”⁴² In this passage Li evinces genuine wonder at the changes that time has wrought upon his own identity. His inability to fathom the forces motivating these changes echoes contemporaries’ bewilderment at the erratic changes to monetary policy and the concomitant fluctuations in the value of money. And just as demonetizations stirred rumors and engendered disquiet and even panic, so too did Li’s unconventional behavior and variable literary self-presentations give rise, as we have seen, to scandal and unrest among those who knew of him.

Nonetheless, the analogy of Li’s chameleon-like identity to the shifting values of money and goods must not be overstated. While participants in the economy stood to lose their fortune through the frequent demonetizations of coins, surely no reader’s livelihood hinged on the reliability of Li’s authorial self-presentation. Additionally, unlike coins or commodities, which, being mere objects, lack the agency to enhance or reduce their own value, our author exerted creative control over his self-presentation and literary works. As we have seen, he deliberately chose to cast himself alternately as rebellious dissident and staid Confucian scholar. Despite these factors, his multifaceted self-presentations challenged readers’ interpretive abilities in ways that echo the difficulties of assessing more concrete forms of value in the late Ming.

Yet Li insisted at every turn that these multifarious self-presentations all constituted accurate expressions of his ever-changing self. He passionately averred, “Although I shaved my hair and became a monk, I truly am a Confucian.”⁴³ The copulas in each half of the sentence attest to Li’s sincerity. They imply that in the moment of writing he embraced the identity of a Confucian as fully as he had previously espoused that of a monk. Neither identity was feigned or counterfeited. His ideological position had undergone a genuine change.⁴⁴

MONETARY AND METAPHORICAL COUNTERFEITING

This insistence on authenticity was especially important, since as early as the Yongle reign (1402–1424) counterfeiting had become a major, inescapable part of the Ming monetary landscape. Although the severity of the problem waxed and waned in subsequent reign periods, the practice persisted beyond the dynastic collapse. This scourge likewise troubled the economies of western Europe and became so widespread that, according to one scholar, it affected contemporaries on a daily basis.⁴⁵ In France, as early as the reign of François I, complaints were heard that the unsanctioned alloying of coins was degrading the quality of money in circulation. One mid-sixteenth-century source, for instance, condemned the fact that “many people indiscriminately take and alloy coins of gold and silver, both French coins and foreign ones.”⁴⁶ And in England the high number of laws prohibiting counterfeiting in the early seventeenth century testifies to the prevalence of this activity and the government’s inability to curb it.⁴⁷

Counterfeiting likewise flourished in China throughout Li’s lifetime. Not only did individuals mix base metals into the unminted silver taels that circulated as money, but, because the Ming government did not manufacture adequate supplies of copper coin or ensure consistent standards of quality, many even cast their own “private” coins.⁴⁸ According to contemporary reports, “in cities, people indulged in such roguery to their hearts’ content.”⁴⁹ Unsurprisingly, a discourse grew up mocking and condemning the widespread practice of counterfeiting, and this discourse gradually made its way analogically into literature of the period.⁵⁰

The Chinese government attempted sporadically to curb the widespread use of “private monies.” Starting early in the dynasty, dire warnings were published advertising penalties for different types of counterfeiting. Punishments ranged from costly fines and beatings to death by strangulation or beheading.⁵¹ But the government’s message was not systematically enforced. In fact, the Jiajing emperor, acknowledging the ubiquity of counterfeiting and his impotence to rectify the situation, took extraordinary measures: he legalized the use of counterfeit coins and published tables establishing official exchange rates among them.⁵² This policy, however, lasted only several years before it was revoked and the use of counterfeit money was once again outlawed. Throughout the mid- and late Ming, the national copper mines were shut down and reopened several times, sometimes after a lengthy hiatus. Following each closure, the mints would lay off artisans skilled at producing coins, and many of these individuals would ply their trade on the black market. Similarly, when the mints eventually reopened, the state often resorted to employing notorious former counterfeiters since they possessed the requisite skills.⁵³ With legitimate coins and counterfeits made by the same pairs of hands, distinguishing between them posed daunting challenges.

Li’s writings implicitly address the problem of counterfeiting through their scathing critiques of hypocrisy and social imposture. Li cites numerous examples of mere acquaintances who pose as true friends and ignoramuses who masquerade as scholars and teachers.⁵⁴ In each of these situations, one thing is passed off for another. And what rankles Li most are the cases in which the perpetrators, like counterfeiters of money, deliberately scheme to defraud the unsuspecting and to enrich themselves at the expense of gullible people. In illustration of this point, Li recalls the opportunism of “people who pass for friends today.” They cozy up to powerful and influential people and shamelessly exploit their inferiors. If they see a person in difficulty, they “stretch out their arms to snatch away his food, and rain stones upon him to plug up his mouth.”⁵⁵ Once they have achieved their objective, however, they lose all interest in these relationships: “As soon as a teacher loses his position as an official, his students abandon him, and as soon as he has no wealth, his students scatter.”⁵⁶ With a tacit nod to Mencius, who famously scolded King Hui of Liang for elevating “profit” (li) over “righteousness” (yi), Li chides the false friends of his generation for likewise placing excessive emphasis on gain.⁵⁷

Perhaps the most stunning example of such deceitful, self-serving relationships appears in an anecdote Li tells about a poet, calligrapher, and painter he calls simply Student Huang.⁵⁸ Throughout the narrative, Li characterizes Huang as a devious fellow who epitomizes the hypocrisy of contemporary Confucians. Having met Li on several occasions in the past, Huang appeared unannounced at his doorstep one day, claiming to be accompanying an illustrious gentleman on a pilgrimage to the mountains. Li soon discovered, however, that Student Huang’s visit was no coincidence; it was part of an elaborate ruse designed to extract a sizable gift of money from Prefect Lin Yuncheng of Runing, a town near Macheng. Knowing that Student Huang had already visited Prefect Lin three times and each time wheedled out of him a generous monetary gift, Li deduces that Student Huang intended to call on Lin once again. Huang’s visit to Li was nothing more than a pretext so that, when Huang later arrived at Lin’s home, he could convey to Lin greetings from the famous Li Zhi. Thus by using Li’s name as an entrée, Student Huang hoped to insinuate himself into the prefect’s good graces. This at least is how Li construes the situation. With disgust, he comments, “Prefect Lin and I both nearly fell prey to [Huang’s] tricks without knowing it. How clever! [What passes for] the Study of the Way is no different from this!”

Following the discussion of Student Huang’s sly ruse, the letter proceeds to deride as ethically corrupt both self-proclaimed recluses and worthies. Couching his condemnation in economically tinged language, Li declares:

[Today’s Confucian scholars who] fluctuate back and forth (zhanzhuan) [between calling themselves recluses and worthies] use cheating people to obtain profit. [Student Huang and his ilk] call themselves “recluses,” but their hearts are identical to those of merchants. In their mouths they speak of “virtue,” but their aspiration is stealing. Now to call oneself a “recluse” but to have the heart of a merchant is itself disgraceful. But for him to conceal the fact that he was trying to sponge off of [Prefect Lin], and to say instead that he was going [on a pilgrimage] to Mt. Song and Mt. Shao, to say that people can be taken in and tricked, this is particularly despicable.⁵⁹

In this passage, Li does not condemn Student Huang for seeking an emolument. In hard times, Li himself was not too proud to request financial assistance from friends and patrons.⁶⁰ He did so on numerous occasions, and this practice was not at all uncommon for unemployed or itinerant scholars. Rather, what angered Li was Huang’s deceit—his mendacious attempt to counterfeit his identity and pass himself off as a humble recluse when in fact he wanted money.

At stake are the connotations of the term shanren, translated here as “recluse.” The term literally means “mountain man,” and it connotes an ethical discourse with deep roots in the Confucian tradition. Confucius advised, “When the Way does not prevail, go into reclusion.”⁶¹ Taking this advice seriously, generations of scholars, exasperated with the political intrigues of their day, fled to the hills in an effort to preserve their integrity. Chinese history is replete with examples of such righteous “mountain men” who sought to escape the polluting influences of society by taking refuge in remote mountain sanctuaries. Indeed, Li’s decision to resign his official post and retreat first to the Vimalakīrti Monastery and later to the Cloister of the Flourishing Buddha is reminiscent of such a stance, especially since the image of the righteous recluse or mountain man, an individual of lofty ethics and untainted ideals, gained widespread currency in the late Ming, an era in which eunuchs dominated court politics and corruption flourished unchecked.⁶² Ironically, this period also witnessed the phenomenon of false mountain men, hypocrites who, like Student Huang, pretended to lead the lives of recluses but actually engaged in worldly affairs.⁶³

As Li’s letter reveals, Student Huang embodied this contradiction: his verbal claim to instantiate moral purity resembled the shiny, misleading surface of a counterfeit coin or the deceptive garments of the “pretentious gentleman” mentioned in the previous chapter: it masked a base interior. And this deliberately crafted discrepancy between outer representation and inner substance incited Li’s rage. In the letter he curses Student Huang, calling him “a hungry dog scheming about the day-old shit [he plans to eat].”⁶⁴

Moreover, in his wrath Li overgeneralizes; extrapolating wildly from Student Huang’s example, he hyperbolically condemns as hypocrites all people who talk of virtue. He writes, “The people these days who discuss virtue and nature-and-life all ‘travel to Mt. Song and Mt. Shao.’”⁶⁵ This blanket accusation illustrates Li’s perception that Student Huang’s ruse is no isolated example; it is indicative of deceptions pervasive throughout late Ming society. In other essays, Li also opines that men “of real talent and intelligence are truly few,” whereas a great number of “today’s scholars . . . frantically scheme about securing profit and avoiding harm. They have departed from reality and cut themselves off from the root.”⁶⁶ His belief that his entire society is riddled with duplicity provokes Li to fits. In another letter he exclaims, “Every time I see people planning to cheat heaven and entrap people I want to grab a blade and chop off their heads!”⁶⁷ These violent fantasies of retribution for social imposture echo government warnings that monetary counterfeiting will be punished by beheading. And in his fantasy, Li endows himself with the authority to arbitrate between falsity and authenticity.

The emotional intensity of Li’s response to Student Huang’s deception and the alacrity with which he generalizes from one instance of duplicity and condemns all “men who talk of virtue” may strike readers as extreme or even paranoid. But these reactions begin to make sense if we regard them as psychological symptoms associated with living in a culture of widespread counterfeiting and hypocrisy. Richard Doty explains that often “when any one [coin] is proven false, every other one will be suspect.”⁶⁸ In other words, the bond of trust on which the monetary system rests, once broken, is not easily restored. A similar logic governs human relations, grounded in trust (xin) and expressed in words. So, just as counterfeit coins attack our deeply ingrained assumptions about monetary value, Student Huang’s social imposture stirs up unsettling questions about the reliability of verbal communication and even, perhaps, identity. It prompts readers to question how much credence we can or should put in an individual’s ability to represent himself in words.

In an essay titled “On Loftiness and Cleanliness” (Gao jie shuo) Li describes his personal experience of having been deceived repeatedly by people who represented themselves in misleading words. “Time and again,” he writes, I exerted myself to the utmost in serving . . . ‘men of intelligence and talent’ with sincere respect, but in the end they did not reciprocate my sincerity.” He tells how, in exasperation, he simply removed himself from circulation: “I had no other choice but to separate myself from them. Since they were not only insincere but also treacherous, I had no choice other than to keep my distance. . . . In the end I was unable to maintain relations with anyone.”⁶⁹ According to this narrative, Li was driven into reclusion because his interactions with other people had become intolerable. Naïvely taking at face value his interlocutors’ claim to be “men of intelligence and talent,” Li responded by lavishing sincerity upon them. But again and again these phonies defrauded him, for they offered in exchange only superficial semblances—counterfeits—of respect.

Thus metaphorically Li’s decision to remove himself from social intercourse corresponds to what economists refer to as Gresham’s law, namely that “bad money drives good money out.” This economic principle states that where alloyed, damaged, or counterfeit coins abound, this low-quality currency will become the preferred medium of exchange and full-bodied coins will go out of circulation; they will be hoarded for their enduring value. By analogy, then, Li’s retreat to the monastery in Macheng can be interpreted as a kind of self-hoarding, an assertion of his ethical superiority and a rejection of anyone who would counterfeit virtue.

However, as the English etymology of the word “currency” indicates—from the Latin currere, “to run”—currency must circulate. And human beings too must engage in social interaction. Li recognized the disadvantages of remaining forever holed up in his monastic retreat. Despite the solace he took in Buddhist reclusion, his writings document his yearning to return to social circulation, a need so strong it seemed at times to prompt him to reconsider the motivations that had driven him into reclusion in the first place. He writes:

Although I keep the door closed all day, I have the unceasing desire to meet someone whose virtue surpasses my own. For a full year I have sat alone, and for a full year I have endured the sorrow of not meeting anyone who could deeply understand me. . . . Hearing footsteps in a deserted valley or even seeing a face that looks as if it might belong to a countryman brings delight.⁷⁰ Yet [people who misunderstand me] say that I do not wish to see anyone. How could this be? I just regret that so far no one resembling a human being has stopped by. Even if a shadow slightly resembling that of a human being paid a call, I would immediately do obeisance, giving no heed to whether the person was of lowly status. I would run toward him, giving no heed to whether the person was of noble status. In every case, I would perceive his strengths and overlook his shortcomings. Not only would I overlook his shortcomings, but I would also, with the utmost respect, serve him as my teacher. How much the more so, given that I am “biased” in favor of such people!⁷¹

In this passage Li expresses several discrepant views; he begins by evincing the desire to meet someone whose virtue exceeds his own. Yet, as he continues, he presents himself as increasingly desperate. By the end, he seems ready to forgive the duplicity he so violently condemned and to settle for the company of “shadows” that only “slightly resemble . . . human beings.” While extreme loneliness may have driven Li to express such sentiments, I would venture that the criteria on which he chose his interlocutors did not in fact waver much. It is telling that the concessions Li considers making with regard to the kind of companions with whom he would interact pertain to “status” and “noble rank,” external factors that have no necessary bearing on an individual’s sincerity of heart. In fact, Li continued to place a premium on genuineness of spirit. This inclination to value authenticity is affirmed in another essay, in which Li repeats that his friends and associates must all “appreciate virtue.”⁷² It seems, then, that his standards remained more or less constant: he sought acquaintances on the basis of their genuine ethical fiber and was willing to overlook their social position, status, or outward appearance.

He did, however, lament the fact that his contemporaries often misunderstood his values and construed his behavior as “biased and unfair.”⁷³ He relates that they accused him of inhospitably turning guests away from his door or “failing to receive them with courtesy.”⁷⁴ He also reports that one friend ignorantly inquired, “You are fond of friends, but these past two years I haven’t noticed that you’ve had associations with anyone. Why is that?”⁷⁵ These anecdotes demonstrate the extent to which Li felt that the majority of his educated peers failed to comprehend his motivations or to acknowledge the gap between his own authentic sentiments and other people’s phoniness.

Indeed Li’s writings often excoriate his contemporaries for what Li identifies as their failures of discernment. On the economic plane, their inability to discriminate between sincerity and superficiality echoes the difficulty many sixteenth-century Chinese and Europeans experienced distinguishing between legitimate coins and counterfeits. The analogy I have been proposing places Li in the position of the valuable, full-bodied coin and explains his reluctance to interact with inferior people as unwillingness to degrade his own value. This analogy finds support in a comparison Li draws between social and economic exchanges. In his essay “On Five Types of Death” (Wu si pian), Li commends men who sacrifice their lives for the sake of a soulmate who fully appreciates their value. This valiant act Li describes as doing “big business” (da maimai). In the same breath, he denigrates men who give up their lives for false friends who fail to recognize their worth. This foolish act he characterizes as making a “petty sale” (xiao maimai).⁷⁶ His point is that only those who die for a true friend “sell” their lives for an appropriate price. Yet too many of his contemporaries, Li implies, lack the perspicacity to tell the difference.

The comparison of friendship to a financial exchange helps to explain the indignant reaction many of Li’s actions provoked among contemporaries. For, just as a person who lacks the discrimination to distinguish between legitimate currency and counterfeit might cry foul when a counterfeit coin is rejected in a transaction, Li’s contemporaries bridled at his refusal to interact with men of feigned or superficial virtue. Unable to differentiate between genuine sagacity and its counterfeit, these ignorant men accused Li of being excessively finicky in his choice of companions and interlocutors.

Li was deeply troubled by what he construed as his contemporaries’ inability to understand him, their failure to distinguish between genuine articles and fakes—real virtue and its mere semblance. Nonetheless, one can easily imagine that Li’s peculiar and erratic behavior may truly have baffled many of his contemporaries. The unpredictability of his behavior and the uncertainty it generated may even be compared to the haphazard monetary policy pursued by the Ming government. By alternating between legitimating and outlawing counterfeit coins, the government created a situation in which discriminating between authentic and false coins was extremely difficult. Similarly, the multiplicity of positions among which Li’s prose frequently shuttles provided opportunities for readers of these texts to practice the skill of discernment.

The widespread practice of counterfeiting in the late Ming affected more than the monetary economy alone; it resonated with and perhaps even amplified wide-ranging cultural reflections on the reliability of representations of all sorts—especially verbal representations. And it provided fertile ground for musings on the difficulty of discerning between genuine articles and fakes. Traces of these discourses may be found in writings on subjects far removed from money per se. Li’s remarks on the debasement of virtue, the perversion of language, and the prevalence of social posturing provide telling examples; his condemnations of phoniness and praise of authenticity, as well as his sophisticated use of rhetoric, obliquely mirror and comment upon the unstable economic conditions of the late Ming. Most interestingly, the literary nature of his text permits Li the freedom to approach this subject from incongruous, even contradictory perspectives. Thus whereas Li speaks out strongly against the counterfeiting of identity, he nonetheless at times perpetuates duplicity through his rhetoric. By simultaneously condemning counterfeiting and perpetrating a sort of deception on his readers, Li’s text exemplifies the magnitude, complexity, and widespread repercussions of this problem.