CHAPTER 3

A Zhongxiao Celebrity

Huang Daozhou (1585–1646)

Zhou Zhikui’s harsh criticism of the Fushe’s dreadful influence on Donglin icon Huang Daozhou did not diminish Huang’s stardom. On the contrary, his reputation as a moral paragon only soared as he wrestled with the Chongzhen emperor and political rivals. And it would reach new heights with his arrest and imprisonment for alleged factional scheming in Chongzhen 13 (1640).

With Huang’s rising fame, anecdotes about him captivated audiences of contemporary politics. Even news about his physical suffering carried social value and cultural appeal. Huang’s health had deteriorated so much in prison that he was seen to use a walking stick when he briefly stayed in Nanjing after his release. Nanjing epitomized seventeenth-century urbanism.¹ Many literati not only aspired to visit Huang’s temporary residence there; they also loved to describe the image of Huang getting around with a walking stick to those who visited the city. This was how the recently promoted young official Gong Dingzi (1615–1673) learned about it when he passed through Nanjing.² This image of Huang left such a deep impression on Gong that, upon arriving in Beijing, he presented a memorial requesting that the emperor stop the practice of beating officials at court. This memorial annoyed the Chongzhen emperor and contributed to Gong’s own arrest, incarceration, and corporal punishment.³ Gong’s allusion to Huang’s ordeal in his memorial might have been just a ploy for selfpromotion. Still, it points to the role of late-Ming celebrity culture in shaping factionalism and positioning officials’ moral performance at the center of political processes.

Celebrity culture had emerged as a by-product of the printing boom. In order to make profits and survive, late-Ming publishing houses needed prolific and even controversial writers. Through this medium the literati not only earned some part of their livelihood but could also created great publicity, to the point that they might even become a lucrative brand name. Li Zhi (1527–1602), Chen Jiru (1558–1639), and some of the scholars associated with the Fushe attained empirewide fame this way.⁴ The late Ming possessed the economic, social, and cultural conditions from which a culture of celebrity could emerge.⁵

Celebrity culture in seventeenth-century China had unique characteristics. Although writings by figures of celebrity status were highly commoditized and their names were known by the common people, their primary audience remained the educated. That being the case, they could not afford to completely detach themselves from Confucian ethical ideals. In fact, their engagement with Confucian teachings was often a key factor in their celebrity status. For instance, polarized interpretations of Li Zhi’s moral performance greatly contributed to his celebrity appeal and marketability. In Chen Jiru’s case, even though his celebrity might have derived partly from his seeming indifference to controversy or activism, he nonetheless capitalized on opportunities to publicize his Confucian moral commitment as a way of demonstrating his elite status.⁶ Indeed, the gradual emergence of celebrity culture in the late Ming only enhanced the importance of traditional factors—family background, moral reputation, official status, networking, and wealth—on the path to sociopolitical advancement.⁷

Celebrity culture under the particular political conditions of the late Ming contributed to the evolution of image politics. For example, the dramatic expansion of the Fushe’s political influence as an organization resulted from its collective celebrity appeal and the popular reputation of its leading members.⁸ Donglin-identified iconic figures experienced celebrity culture in varied ways. The famed scholar-poet Qian Qianyi (1582–1664) seems to have given up on his career after losing one battle after another to his attackers, but his controversial liaison with the courtesan Liu Rushi (1618–1664) and active involvement with Fushe youths’ social and literary networking enhanced his popularity.⁹ In contrast, Liu Zongzhou was universally admired for his administrative skills, scholarship, and integrity. Literati society treated him as a celebrity even though Liu maintained a low profile and disciplined lifestyle. After he was spotted wearing a simple “purple cotton” robe, that style became a hot commodity in Jiangnan among the literati.¹⁰

In contrast to Qian and Liu, Huang Daozhou’s celebrity appeal derived from his reputation as the epitome of zhongxiao. The aura of this image dazzled many in the Donglin-Fushe camp and led them to assert that Huang deserved the powerful position of grand secretary. The circulation of his highly politicized art made him an idol among nonelites as well. The cultural and social capital deriving from his fame as a moral exemplar made him a particular kind of celebrity.

Huang’s career trajectory and the debates and negotiations in which he participated in the 1630s and early 1640s help us understand late-Ming image politics at the juncture of factionalism, rising ritualism, and contemporary obsession with publicity and sensationalism. His engagements with the zhongxiao ideal—from debates over the duoqing practice and invocation of his own filial acts when confronting political rivals to his display of a perfect unity of loyalty, filial piety, and friendship in poetry, art, scholarship, travel, and ritual activities—defined his fame. Various parties reacted differently to Huang’s emergence as a zhongxiao celebrity. Their political negotiations over Huang’s moral image reveal how celebrity culture complicated the use of Confucian ethics as a language of political communication during this period.

ZHONGXIAO RITUALS

As a historical term used frequently—and often freely—by our seventeenth-century subjects, the word zhongxiao could refer to different ideas, including the unity of loyalty and filial piety, the Confucian virtues or ethical system, or moral accomplishments in general. Zhongxiao can thus serve as an analytical lens through which to examine the verbal, visual, and embodied articulations of officials’ commitment to loyalty and filial piety and as a technique of creative engagement with the rich imperial tradition of “seeking loyal officials in filial sons.” In the late Ming, the productive tensions inherent in the concept of zhongxiao—that loyalty and filial piety are compatible and competing virtues—made it an extremely versatile and prevalent means of political negotiation. It could be invoked as an excuse for privileging one of the two virtues, it could motivate officials to creatively overcome difficulties to achieve both, and it could operate as an effective weapon of attack and counterattack.

The filial rites that played a central role in the construction of Huang Daozhou’s subjectivity and popular appeal had tremendous political significance in the seventeenth-century context. These can be collectively considered as zhongxiao rituals. The first is the observation of a three-year (twenty-seven-month) mourning period for a deceased parent (shouzhi). Officials were supposed to withdraw from office to complete this observance, but exemptions from mourning at home for a full term were not rare in Ming history, especially at those times when the empire faced imminent threats.

However, in the late Ming, protests raised against violations of this norm at the emperor’s request (duoqing) became a common method of framing criticisms of the emperor and fellow officials. Such controversy might instantly evolve into a dramatic political showdown. The Wanli emperor’s decision in the 1570s against letting Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng resign from office to mourn his father—and opposition from officials, which earned them corporal punishments and even exile—is one example.¹¹ The ramifications of this event would continue to shape the political landscape until the fall of the Southern Ming Hongguang regime in 1645.

The political spectacles surrounding duoqing controversies significantly enhanced the literati’s intellectual and spiritual interest in filial rituals as well as the public’s interest in court politics in the late Ming.¹² The duoqing debates might have reflected the late-Ming diversification of mourning rituals. But seen from the perspective of political communication, they demonstrate officials’ strong interest in employing the language of zhongxiao as a tool of negotiation rather than their tendency to “forget” the correct mourning criteria.¹³ Huang Daozhou was the central figure in a spectacle surrounding the duoqing order issued to the Donglin rival Yang Sichang in the late 1630s. Contrary to the observation that these confrontations arose from officials’ misunderstanding of the duoqing precedents, a careful comparison of how Huang and his factional rivals expressly used these precedents will demonstrate something different. Precisely because officials could freely interpret and even deliberately bend those precedents, zhongxiao in effect functioned as a shared language by which to make political points and negotiate.

Another filial ritual that deserves special attention is that of shoumu (voluntarily taking up residence near the family tombs), a sensational way of carrying out mourning. It became so popular among the literati that it has been considered tantamount to a movement in the seventeenth century.¹⁴ Ming-era Confucian scholars increasingly emphasized moral action—a reaction to the “subjective” approach to moral cultivation advocated by the Yangming school.¹⁵ This emphasis manifested itself in literati displays of not only moral accomplishments but also the very process of moral cultivation and the sincerity of moral performance in ritualized actions. Whereas the Fushe celebrity Fang Yizhi performed shoumu for a limited length of time before becoming an official, Huang Daozhou practiced it over many years in the course of his official career, even long after the deaths of his parents, which significantly contributed to his fame as a moral paragon. In addition, Huang’s frequent mention of his shoumu practice in debates with the Chongzhen emperor pointedly illustrates how officials quite self-consciously performed filial rituals as a way of authenticating their moral reputation and enhancing their political standing.

The third zhongxiao ritual that concerns us here is the ritual use of the Classic of Filial Piety. One does not have to completely agree with the observation that Huang Daozhou literally followed the instructions of this Confucian classic in his life and career, but his multidimensional identification with the text is unusually strong.¹⁶ In the seventeenth century, many literati—including Huang Daozhou—used this Confucian classic to create ritualized spaces for self-cultivation. Copying, reciting, and worshipping it turned the book into a ritual prop.¹⁷ Like Huang’s twenty-year shoumu saga, his hand copying of the Classic of Filial Piety in prison physically manifested his process of moral cultivation, affirmed his moral superiority, and pressured the emperor to heed his criticisms. It also made him a cultural icon among the nonelite.¹⁸

As Huang’s highly publicized and ritualized embodiment of zhongxiao blossomed into celebrity appeal, he garnered enthusiastic support and widespread endorsement from the Donglin-Fushe community. For Huang’s fans, it was a natural and convenient position to take, given the influence of the celebrity culture of which Confucian moralism was an organic part.

ZHONGXIAO ON THE ROAD

One of Huang Daozhou’s disciples summarized his life and career this way: “The master’s Way lies only with zhongxiao” (Fuzi zhi dao zhongxiao eryi).¹⁹ After some initial setbacks, Huang came to embody the zhongxiao ideal, to the extent that it would restructure his life, career, emotions, and behavior. Once such a pattern and image was established and articulated, it came to stand for the man.

Before the fall of the Ming court in Beijing in 1644, Huang Daozhou had held only positions in branches of the metropolitan bureaucracy where his literary and scholarly skills were best put to use. Due to leaves and demotions, he constantly moved between the capital and his hometown, Zhangpu (Zhangzhou prefecture, Fujian). Such travels—and the social, cultural, and intellectual activities they allowed—took a substantial amount of time and constituted a crucial part of Huang’s life as an official. They displayed the process of his moral cultivation and exposed it to a wide audience. His travels in particular embodied, and also explained, his zhongxiao pursuits.

In Tianqi 2 (1622), this Fujianese scholar, little known outside his home province, passed the metropolitan examinations and entered the central government. Over the next two decades, as the Ming dynasty struggled through tremendous crises that eventually led to its fall, Huang Daozhou’s fame as a moral exemplar and loyal official steadily rose. This fame came at the cost of a rocky career path. He experienced four major episodes of turmoil in his career, as illustrated in figure 3.1, which delineates his travels between the court and his family tombs.

Chushan (lit., “leave the mountains”) and shoumu were the two terms Huang often employed to describe his trips to and from the capital.²⁰ Framing his travels with these two terms allowed him to simplify the reasons for his departures from court, which actually ranged from illness to political frustration, and kept the focus on the central motif of his life, the unity of loyalty and filial piety. Chusan had long been the standard term referring to the move from a man’s quiet life at home to the tumultuous world of government. In Huang’s case, the metaphorical reference to “the mountains” projects a strong impression because it coincides with the fact that he indeed built and lived for many years in a rustic dwelling next to his parents’ tombs deep in the mountains. When he “resided next to the parents’ tombs” in Zhangpu, Huang did not completely shun public activities: he delivered lectures on Confucian classics. Still, he and his admirers consciously chose the term shoumu to refer to his periodic retreats so as to highlight his embodiment of zhongxiao ethics.

Huang’s travels, as well as the ways in which he and his admirers alluded to them, thus established a conspicuously ritualized life pattern. This pattern of movement between the family tombs in Zhangpu and the court began in Tianqi 5 (1625), precipitated by the dominance of the eunuch faction at court. In his capacity as a Hanlin compiler (bianxiu), Huang also had the responsibility of lecturing to the young Tianqi emperor on the Confucian classics. According to the Ming History (Ming shi), Huang refused to follow the protocol of presenting texts to the emperor on his knees. The Ming History has interpreted this as an expression of heroic defiance toward the eunuch Wei Zhongxian. Although Wei did not move against Huang, he did feel threatened by the gesture.²¹ Whether this account is accurate or not, it captures the noble image that Huang and his admirers attempted to delineate for him.

At the height of Wei Zhongxian’s persecution of Donglin-identified officials, in Tianqi 5 (1625), Huang requested a leave to take care of his mother in Fujian and subsequently extended it to observe the formally mandated mourning period after she died.²² While caring for his mother, Huang built a hut in the mountains and personally carried the dirt needed to construct a tomb for his long-deceased father. In a letter to his brother, he described with much satisfaction how he erected a stele, on which he inscribed his father’s virtuous deeds, at the site. As he carved the inscription, he paused after each character and performed a kowtow. The tomb site was a long-term, carefully designed project. Huang built and arranged everything with his own hands, and it took him many years to complete. He wrote that by residing next to the tomb, he was serving his deceased father.²³ When his mother passed away the next year (Tianqi 6 [1626]), he remained in the mountains and continued to build at the site. From Tianqi 7 (1627) to Chongzhen 1 (1628), he buried or reburied his mother, grandmother, uncles, and deceased first wife in that place, some of whom had passed away long ago. He told others that fulfilling these responsibilities was his only worldly interest.²⁴

Retroactively, Huang and his admirers would identify this period as the beginning of his lifelong mission to embody loyalty and filial piety perfectly and simultaneously in both his career and his personal life. His contemporary Zhang Dian (fl. 1640s–50s) observed that, from Tianqi 5 (1625), Huang “would leave this place only when going to offer criticisms to the emperor, and he would resume attending to the tombs when he returned.”²⁵ Although we cannot exclude the possibility that Huang and his biographers left slightly exaggerated accounts of his hardships during his extended periods of residence at his family tombs, clearly he devoted considerable effort to practicing filial piety as a form of moral cultivation and self-expression.

The imagery of going back and forth between the mountains and the court thus condensed several kinds of filial rituals that characterized a particular configuration of zhongxiao for Huang. He not only practiced the rituals that had been prescribed in the Confucian classics, mandated by the state, and explored by Confucian scholars of his time but also ritualized his politics and life by frequently displaying the very process of cultivating zhongxiao in the public eye. Consequently, Huang’s trips between the capital and his hometown conferred special meanings on the many spaces that he visited and where he resided during those years. In turn, these places came to delineate the contours of his zhongxiao commitment—the harmonious merging of his images as a filial son, loyal official, and true friend.

These images did not truly merge until Tianqi 5 (1625). Huang’s first trip, which took place in Tianqi 2 (1622) immediately after he entered government service, was one whereby he had hoped to fulfill filial duties only. He traveled thousands of kilometers back to Fujian to bring his mother to the capital. But by doing so, he missed his first opportunity to prove himself a loyal official and true friend.

That was the year when Wen Zhenmeng and Zheng Man, two new officials from Huang’s jinshi cohort, challenged the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian. Although Huang had promised that he would join his friends in their efforts, he hesitated because he had become more concerned about his mother. He was torn between loyalty and filial piety.²⁶ “I composed three memorials but burned them all because I had to bring my mother to the capital,” he later recalled.²⁷ Not only was he unable to reconcile filial piety and loyalty, but by withdrawing from this joint effort, he also fell short of fulfilling his responsibility as a friend. Although the competing relationship between loyalty and filial piety had been a familiar one over the course of imperial history, this experience must have been a difficult first lesson to swallow for this junior official.²⁸

The unified image of a filial son, trustworthy friend, and loyal official began to coalesce over the next several trips Huang took up and down the Grand Canal. A calligraphic presentation of poems produced in Chongzhen 3 (1630) illustrates his strengthened efforts to unify loyalty, filial piety, and friendship. On his trip northward to Beijing that year, Huang and his family visited Zheng Man, who was observing the three-year mourning for his father. Huang was eager to express his admiration for Zheng’s political integrity and their friendship.²⁹ This time, he produced a calligraphy scroll for Zheng. This calligraphic work is arranged very artistically and shows a degree of formality.³⁰ Beginning with those poems dedicated to Zheng in Tianqi 2 (1622) and ending with new poems written during this latest reunion, it records their meetings over a nine-year period (1622–30). Huang had extended the scroll twice as his travel plans changed, adding more poems to it each time, until it came to include fifteen old and new poems.

Thus, the completed scroll consists of three sections. The first, which is the longest, highlights the moral exemplariness of the Zheng father and son. The poems are arranged in chronological order, providing a complete record of their friendship over the nine years. The first poem in this section begins by expressing admiration for Zheng Man—and their other friend Wen Zhenmeng—for having courageously stood up to abusers of power at court, a heroic action in which Huang had failed to participate.³¹ It painstakingly portrays Zheng as a loyal official, suggesting that he deserved as much recognition as that given to Wen, who became a political superstar when he placed first among their cohort in the metropolitan examinations. The poem goes on to remind the audience that Zheng Man in fact came from a family of the most loyal officials—his maternal grandfather, Wu Zhongxing, won empirewide admiration for having challenged Zhang Juzheng’s duoqing in the early Wanli reign, and his father, Zheng Zhenxian, driven by sincere loyalty, offered critical, substantial advice to the Wanli emperor but was demoted through the efforts of factionalists.³²

Following the poem that lauds the zhongxiao tradition of the Zheng family, Huang presents a second poem, this one to illuminate friendship. He emotionally recalls that in Tianqi 2 (1622), upon his departure for Fujian to see his mother, Zheng Man, himself being forced out of the capital as a result of factional purge, still remembered to offer money to help Huang rent a horse.³³ It was Zheng’s friendship that then helped Huang fulfill his filial duties.

After these two poems, Huang presented three more poems written three years later, in Tianqi 5 (1625), on his return to Fujian after he had offended Wei Zhongxian. During this trip, he paid a visit to the Zhengs. These poems reiterate the bond of friendship between Huang and Zheng Man as well as his admiration for the elder Zheng. Further, the poems stress the fact that the two friends shared a strong commitment to both loyalty and filial piety.³⁴ The poems chosen for the first section of this calligraphy scroll as a whole thus neatly erase Huang’s failure to perform loyalty and friendship at the beginning of his career. Instead, they create a narrative of strong friendship built on shared zhongxiao beliefs.

The poems in the other two sections of the scroll were written years later, on two separate occasions in Chongzhen 3 (1630). During Huang Daozhou’s trip back to the capital after years of living next to his parents’ tombs, he and his family made a stop at the Zhengs in Wujin County. The Manchus had recently launched military assaults and seriously threatened northern Ming. Given the difficult situation on the road northward, Huang decided to leave his mother and wife behind with the Zhengs and headed for the capital alone. Later, after the situation had quieted, he returned to fetch them. The second section of the calligraphy scroll contains one long poem that Huang composed before departing for the capital without his family. The third section concludes with Huang’s return to retrieve his mother and wife.³⁵ These two sections testify vividly to Huang’s deepening appreciation of Zheng Man’s friendship. Once again, Zheng’s hospitality toward Huang’s mother had allowed Huang to accomplish his own filial duties.

The scroll as a whole thus aptly demonstrates that Huang’s friendship with Zheng was a central component of his zhongxiao image in the early stages of its formation during his travels. The message of these poems would become well known among Huang’s allies as well as his opponents. Their contentions on the relationship between friendship and zhongxiao in Huang’s case revealed the complex ways in which Confucian ethics operated as a language of political communication.

After these trips, a series of clashes erupted at court between Huang and the Chongzhen emperor. Huang began to publicly assert that his movement between the court and family tombs was an embodiment of his zhongxiao. When the new emperor succeeded to the throne, he called back many Donglin-identified officials, including Huang. In Chongzhen 4 (1631), Huang memorialized in defense of Grand Secretary Qian Longxi (1579–1645), who had been implicated in the Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630) treason case and imprisoned. Huang went after Qian’s enemies within the former eunuch faction, whom he believed sought revenge for Qian’s involvement in the Chongzhen emperor’s purge of that faction.³⁶ This memorial was met with strong questioning from the emperor, who pressed Huang to memorialize two more times to clarify his position and language.³⁷

Huang’s three memorials defending Qian are the earliest examples of his employment of the metaphor of shuttling between the court and his parents’ tomb site as a way of articulating his self-identity and political criticism before the emperor. In response to the emperor’s demand that he submit a second memorial explaining himself, Huang proudly wrote: “Having attended to the tombs (shoumu) for three years and served in the government (chushan) for only six years, I am just a rude man unfamiliar with the taboos.”³⁸ Then, in the third memorial, he defended his loyalty by contrasting the silence and irresponsibility of many officials with his perfectly proper display of loyalty and filial piety: while piously residing by his parents’ tombs in the mountains, he had not stopped reading government briefs; though far away from the capital, he had foreseen the danger arising from Qian’s arrest.³⁹ Finally, immediately following this unpleasant exchange with the emperor, Huang submitted a request for leave so that he could “be close to the tombs [of his parents].”⁴⁰

The shoumu-chushan metaphor that Huang Daozhou so effectively leveraged defined his image as an exemplary Confucian official and enhanced the rhetorical power of his memorials. His recourse to zhongxiao rhetoric helped him lay claim to an archetypal loyalty defined by honest remonstration with the throne, illuminating the mutual cultivation of filial piety and loyalty and drawing on the literati-official tradition of using one’s filial duties as a legitimate excuse for withdrawing from politics as a form of passive protest.⁴¹ Huang received permission to go home and resumed residence next to his parents’ tombs until he was summoned to serve again. At this point, his pattern of practicing zhongxiao by alternating between the family tombs and the court had become established and known. His travels and calligraphy would continue to display and document his self-cultivation throughout his career, significantly contributing to his popularity as a moral paragon among the literati.

ZHONGXIAO IN DEBATES

At court, Huang Daozhou’s zhongxiao pattern of travel was both reinforced and contested in his debates with the Chongzhen emperor and political rivals. Three debates about zhongxiao enhanced, but were also complicated by, his popular appeal. Although these debates took place in the space of the imperial court, their details would reach various corners of the empire because the literati and print media moved quickly and frequently between the capital and local communities.

As a language of communication shared by opponents, the effective deployment of zhongxiao was more complex than one side claiming moral rectitude in order to exert political pressure on others. Attacks and self-defense at court were delivered and negotiated through officials’ competing arguments about how to sincerely and properly pursue filial piety. These competing arguments drew upon and appropriated a variety of officially sanctioned sources, such as the Confucian classics, established Confucian scholarship, and official histories. Huang’s factional rivals displayed their own moral exemplariness and also effectively challenged Huang’s understanding of zhongxiao ethics. In response, Huang’s supporters had ever more incentive to draw a stark contrast between his moral perfection and his rivals’ moral deficiency.

The first of these three debates took place in Chongzhen 9 (1636), just a few months after Zheng Man was arrested and imprisoned. The emperor had made their mutual friend Wen Zhenmeng a grand secretary. Huang Daozhou was on his way back to the court. Anticipating powerful challenges from these three friends, the senior grand secretary Wen Tiren took immediate action. He not only forced Wen Zhenmeng to retire; he also put forth the moral charges against Zheng Man that led to Zheng’s arrest.⁴²

When Huang arrived in the capital, several officials had failed in their efforts to impeach Wen Tiren for incriminating Zheng on unverifiable charges. One of them was Liu Zongzhou. Liu criticized the emperor’s blind confidence in Wen Tiren, who had been relentlessly eliminating political opponents. This memorial so angered the emperor that he stripped Liu of official status.⁴³ Meanwhile, another political storm was rapidly forming. In early Chongzhen 9 (1636), somewhat desperate in his search for officials who could devise more effective strategies against the rebels and the Manchus, the emperor appointed Yang Sichang president of the Board of War. Yang answered the call, thereby cutting short the mourning term for his father.⁴⁴

After some contemplation, Huang Daozhou decided to tackle Yang’s appointment first. His memorial against Yang’s promotion during the mourning term consisted of two parts. The first part questioned the appointment on the principle that it violated basic Confucian ideals. The second part protested Yang’s proposal for new taxes to raise funds for military operations.⁴⁵ In the face of challenges from rebels and the Manchus, the Ming government needed to mobilize more resources. Whether Yang’s tax proposals were practical or not, Huang’s alternatives barely suggested anything new. Emphasizing that recent droughts were Heaven’s negative reaction to the emperor’s promotion of an unfilial son, Huang suggested that in order to ensure suppression of the rebels, the emperor needed to promote more suitable officials.⁴⁶ Huang’s insistence on the zhongxiao principle was both a display of his strong belief in it and a tactic. This tactic had a precedent and a source of inspiration: during the Wanli reign, Zhang Juzheng’s critics had succeeded in making a connection between his duoqing and natural disasters.⁴⁷ However, this time, the Chongzhen emperor remained unconvinced. He dismissed Huang’s preaching as part of a factionalist agenda and went along with Yang Sichang’s proposals.

Huang Daozhou did not pursue the protest further. Instead, he moved on to Zheng Man’s case. In doing so, he was forced to contend with the various meanings of loyalty. When attacking Yang, he portrayed Yang as an unfilial man, while his defense of Zheng rested on criticizing their factional enemies’ incorrect understanding of loyalty.

In two memorials, Huang carefully carved out his position. The first one, “On My Three Faults, Four Shameful Actions, and Seven Defects” (San zui si chi qi buru shu; hereafter “My Seven Defects”), lists Zheng as a worthy official deserving of important positions.⁴⁸ Unsurprisingly, the emperor reacted with fury to this memorial for its praise of Zheng. Huang then submitted a response that explicitly defended Zheng’s record of loyalty and filial piety. He expressed concern that the emperor might give credence to the sensational charges that had been presented to the court as evidence of Zheng’s ethical violations. He reminded everyone that true loyalty was demonstrated by officials’ proper behavior in political debate:

Han Qi, an official of the Song dynasty, held office in the Grand Council. Every time he came across memorials that exposed other officials’ personal mistakes, he would cover those words with his hands. The emperor Renzong called him “a loyal official.” Yan Zhenqing in the Tang dynasty once attacked Li Heji for lacking filial piety. But he later admitted that he blurted out those improper words as a result of drunkenness. Hence, discussion of others’ personal problems should not happen in a good political environment. Nowadays, locals enjoy getting together and gossiping to entertain themselves. Everywhere, dishonest men fabricate smears to benefit personally.⁴⁹

The historical reference to Han Qi (1008–1075) stresses the impropriety of bringing rumors about domestic affairs into court, suggesting that the emperor should dismiss the groundless charges against Zheng. The reference to Yan Zhenqing (709–784) implies that officials often recklessly and irresponsibly make grave but unverifiable accusations. On the basis of these examples, Huang suggests that Zheng’s attackers should be condemned for disloyalty.

Huang was probably aware that his arguments in these two cases could easily be interpreted as inconsistent and factionalist. According to his logic, though, his criticism of Yang Sichang and defense of Zheng Man ultimately served the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the Confucian ethical system and the true spirit of “governing with filial piety.” His actions and his scholarship on the Classic of Filial Piety suggest that, like many other contemporary Confucian scholars, he understood the paradigm of “governing with filial piety” as encompassing not only the important virtues of loyalty, filial piety, and self-discipline but also mutual respect between the emperor and officials and between officials of different political positions.⁵⁰ These two actions showed his consistent belief in zhongxiao and determination to exalt it. It was imperative for him not only to put into practice his understanding of zhongxiao but also to correct others’ “misunderstanding” of it.

Surprisingly, the Chongzhen emperor did not admonish Huang. After this debate, Huang’s fame within the Donglin camp grew quickly. As the next debate in Chongzhen 11 (1638) shows, he had accumulated so much star power that the younger generation of officials in the Donglin-Fushe community began to lobby for his promotion.

The second debate about zhongxiao involved a violent factional clash and tested Huang’s popular appeal. After Grand Secretary Wen Tiren was made to retire in Chongzhen 10 (1637), Donglin-identified officials felt ready to put Huang into this newly vacant position. The emperor did not feel Huang could assume the responsibility as a leader in a time of crisis. Instead, he promoted Xue Guoguan (d. 1641). Xue and Zhang Zhifa (jinshi 1601), another grand secretary, were seen as associates of Wen’s anti-Donglin camp and a continuation of his corruption and incompetence. Huang’s supporters were disappointed by the emperor’s decision.

Soon afterward, in Chongzhen 11 (1638), the emperor appointed several officials as tutors for the Heir Apparent. This honor represented imperial recognition of the appointees’ virtue, talent, and political potential. With the release of the name list, one of them, the Donglin-identified official Yang Tinglin (d. 1646), submitted a memorial arguing that Huang Daozhou was the most qualified for this position and expressing his willingness to concede the position to Huang Daozhou.⁵¹ The Fushe activist and official Xiang Yu (jinshi 1625) wrote a similar memorial.⁵²

As the Donglin-Fushe camp enthusiastically announced its intention to replace its factional rivals with its own hopeful, Huang Daozhou, officials on the other side voiced strong disagreement. They cited Huang’s old memorial “My Seven Defects” to challenge his understanding of zhongxiao ethics. Grand Secretary Zhang Zhifa argued before the emperor: “Regarding [Zheng Man’s] immoral behavior and mother beating, His Majesty’s edict had made a clear judgment. Zheng does not deserve to be called a human being, but [Huang Daozhou] claims that Zheng has surpassed him. Could we let someone like Huang advise the Heir Apparent?”⁵³

Zhang further questioned whether Huang had properly understood and performed loyalty, filial piety, and friendship: “[Huang]’s return to court after mourning (chushan) was compelled by filial devotion to his mother, who had [been helped by Zheng before, and thus he] hoped to offer a favorable testimony on Zheng’s behalf. We cannot say that Huang is unfilial. But he shouldn’t sacrifice the public interest just because he owed a debt of thanks to Zheng.”⁵⁴

Clearly, Zhang was familiar not only with Huang’s frequent deployment of the imagery of shuttling between the court and his parents’ tombs but also with how the Huang-Zheng friendship had significantly contributed to establishing this image. However, in Zhang’s interpretation, although Huang’s filial performance was admirable, it did not transfer to loyalty, and so Huang’s return to court did not really amount to an act of zhongxiao. On the contrary, by defending a morally corrupt man simply because he had taken care of Huang’s mother, Huang actually abused and betrayed the zhongxiao principle. This interpretation by Zhang called into question the authenticity of Huang’s image as a paragon of zhongxiao and instead depicted him as a factionalist.

Huang’s supporters were outraged. How dared their factional rivals challenge Huang’s zhongxiao image and block their personnel preference! They immediately reminded the emperor that this questioning of Huang’s moral accomplishments was nothing more than factionalist machinations; Huang’s reputation as a filial son was an indisputable, widely acknowledged fact. One of them plainly told the emperor, “Huang Daozhou served his parents with utmost filiality. Everyone in the empire knows!”⁵⁵

Flummoxed by this conflict between officials drawn to Huang’s appeal as a zhongxiao exemplar and those who questioned that appeal, the emperor simply observed. He saw no need to arbitrate, since both sides were using the same language to advocate for their candidate preferences. He maintained a neutral stance, ignoring the Donglin-Fushe advocacy for Huang’s promotion as well as their rivals’ critiques of him. However, he began to realize that Huang had become something of a political leader thanks to his zhongxiao fame, as shown in the emperor’s attitude in the third debate.

The third debate about zhongxiao almost followed on the heels of the previous one. Huang led a group of officials protesting another promotion for Yang Sichang, this time to the position of grand secretary. Upon his nomination, Yang also suggested promoting Chen Xinjia (d. 1642), an official accused by the Donglin of having been an associate of the former eunuch faction. Yang recommended that Chen be appointed to supervise the war effort in key strategic regions in the north. This proposed promotion would shorten Chen’s mourning period for his deceased mother by several months.⁵⁶

Prompted by the actions of Fushe scholars in Beijing and Nanjing, the zhongxiao celebrity Huang Daozhou felt he must submit protests both against Yang’s appointment to the Grand Secretariat in violation of mourning norms and against Chen’s return to office before completing the prescribed mourning term.⁵⁷ To buttress his stance, Huang adopted a few tactics that would create a clear moral contrast between him and his rivals.

First, Huang redefined certain duoqing precedents in the history of the Ming. In one memorial, he cites a group of mid-Ming officials who had to suspend mourning so that they could lead crucial military campaigns. These duoqing cases were considered legitimate, if undesirable, given the urgent military situation then and could be supported with reference to still older historical precedents. However, even if the question of legitimacy were put aside, Huang argued, these cases still could not be used to justify Yang’s and Chen’s duoqing, because they simply were not analogous. According to Huang, the mid-Ming official Yang Bo (d. 1574) was very close to the end of his mourning period when he was summoned back to service, and therefore this case should not be considered a legitimizing precedent for Chen Xinjia.⁵⁸ This position was merely rhetorical manipulation on Huang’s part. Like Yang Bo, Chen had nearly completed his mourning duty.⁵⁹ Huang misrepresented Chen’s promotion as establishing a new, dangerous precedent.

Next, Huang identified another group of duoqing cases in Ming history as inauspicious events. His first example was Weng Wanda (1498–1552), who was called back to court as he was mourning at his father’s tomb. After the Jiajing emperor rejected Weng’s petition for permission to complete his mourning, Weng rushed back to the capital from thousands of kilometers away. The impatient emperor, counseled by Weng’s factional enemies, withdrew his trust and favor. Here, Huang cites Weng’s political demise as a punishment from Heaven to warn the emperor that depriving officials of time to complete their filial mourning was inauspicious.⁶⁰ To reinforce this point, he invokes three additional examples of late-Ming mourning violations by high-ranking officials. “Zhang Juzheng ruined his own legacy by duoqing. [After that,] for the next seventy years, the literati abided by the [zhongxiao] principle and the frontiers remained secure. However, in the late Tianqi years, Yuan Chonghuan’s [rise] and Cui Chengxiu’s shameful promotion to high government positions both came with violations of mourning rules. They ended up being executed and despised!”⁶¹ Here, Huang distorts Zhang Juzheng’s case and turns it, again, into an inauspicious incident. In Huang’s account, because the Wanli emperor later changed his mind and decided to punish Zhang posthumously, Heaven responded by bringing relative peace to the frontiers.

The other two duoqing cases Huang invokes, those of Cui Chengxiu (1584–1627) and Yuan Chonghuan, occurred when the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian controlled the court.⁶² By invoking them, Huang raises the alarm and warns the emperor that duoqing orders themselves signify chaos and decline. Officials who followed duoqing orders were all doomed men. The religious tone of such discussion about the ethics of zhongxiao, resounding in Huang’s frequent references to the Confucian classics—in particular the Classic of Filial Piety and the Book of Change (Zhou Yi)—in his memorials,⁶³ reflected the cosmological significance attached to zhongxiao by late-Ming Confucian scholars. It was meant to enhance the impact of his rhetoric.

Huang Daozhou’s employment of zhongxiao language in this personnel debate was quite powerful. But he and the Donglin-Fushe camp faced a strong rival. His opponent, Yang Sichang, had proved himself to be a paragon of filiality and a loyal official. Did the competition between Huang and Yang represent two traditions of interpreting zhongxiao? It has been suggested that, whereas Huang’s privileging of filial piety followed the thought of Confucius, Mencius, and the “Sagely Governing” (Sheng zhi) chapter of the Classic of Filial Piety,⁶⁴ Yang’s emphasis on loyalty over filial piety drew on Xunzi, Han Feizi, and other chapters in the Classic of Filial Piety.⁶⁵ This interpretation is helpful to an extent but risks reducing the debate between Huang and Yang to a philosophical one. In fact, Yang had demonstrated that fulfilling his filial duty had been the very motivation behind his suspension of mourning and compliance with the emperor’s order.

Yang’s father, Yang He (d. 1635), had once been the emperor’s most trusted official. The senior Yang’s missteps in dealing with rebels had serious military consequences, and he was arrested, imprisoned, and then exiled to a remote garrison, where he eventually died of an illness.⁶⁶ He was saved from the death penalty only because his filial son Sichang begged to be allowed to die in his father’s place.⁶⁷ Yang Sichang thus framed his loyalty in relation to a particular form of filial devotion, a desire to redeem the Yang family honor and repay the emperor’s trust. Importantly, in addition to highlighting his own acts of zhongxiao, in his memorials, Yang also discussed the duoqing precedents in Ming history that Huang had depicted as either unsuitable for comparison or inauspicious. Although Yang acknowledged the legitimacy of these duoqing precedents, he repeatedly expressed his reluctance to follow them.⁶⁸

Whose views and practices of zhongxiao were sincere, authentic, and proper? The Chongzhen emperor had in front of him these two self-proclaimed loyal and filial men who accused each other of “misunderstanding” and “misrepresenting” zhongxiao ethics. Both had demonstrated a strong sense of loyalty and filial devotion, yet each accused the other of not following these principles. They even invoked the same historical references of duoqing in posturing as loyal officials and filial sons, albeit with different interpretations. Their stances were nothing out of the ordinary in the long history of zhongxiao polemics. In the next phase of the confrontation, which took place in front of the emperor and soon circulated among the literati reading public, they engaged in a lively performance of their respective zhongxiao commitments.

At the public debate ordered by the emperor, Yang Sichang opened by accusing Huang of failing to understand zhongxiao. He cited Huang’s old memorial “My Seven Defects” and suggested that Huang steer clear of talking about filial piety, since in his memorial he had claimed he was “not as good as Zheng Man” (buru Zheng Man), which clearly indicated poor judgment and a problematic application of the zhongxiao principle.⁶⁹ Huang retorted that he had attacked Yang in order to defend Confucian ethics; he had always followed the taboo against speaking of others’ moral defects. Huang portrayed himself as the more authentic moral paragon: He reminded the emperor that he had fulfilled his filial duty by building his parents’ tombs with his own two hands. He claimed that, as a filial son, he simply could not tolerate any failure to fulfill the mandated rituals of mourning.⁷⁰

Building on his claim to filial exemplariness, Huang then presented a long argument about why relieving Yang of the responsibility to mourn his parents at home was dangerous. According to his logic, Yang’s return to office, a new promotion, and the proposed appointment of his subordinate Chen Xinjia would set in motion a chain reaction of moral failures culminating in a potential total collapse of the moral-cosmological order of the Ming. Huang’s line of argument went as follows: When the duoqing precedents established for dealing with urgent military situations were applied so that Yang could serve at the frontier, it was acceptable, though undesirable. But as the chief official of the Board of War, he should not have violated mourning norms. After the court struck a compromise between principle and reality in order to accommodate the need for Yang’s leadership as head of the Board of War, Yang should have turned down the next promotion to the Grand Secretariat. Even if a further exception could be made for Yang’s entry into the Grand Secretariat, it was absolutely unacceptable for Yang to bring in Chen Xinjia, whose promotion also violated mourning rules. All these ethical violations would amount to a horrific scenario, a “world of duoqing” (duoqing shijie).⁷¹

This reasoning and rhetoric lacked political, intellectual, and rhetorical consistency. It sounded crooked to the emperor and only confirmed his suspicion that the Donglin-Fushe community conspired in opposition to his personnel choices in an attempt to install their own men in key government positions. Two years earlier, when the emperor had promoted Yang via the duoqing, Huang did not persist in his opposition, nor did he and the Fushe publicly echo each other within and outside the capital. What had emboldened Huang so much this time? The emperor mockingly replied that factionalist officials resorted to moral preaching when they in fact lacked a deep understanding of Confucian ethics.⁷²

Although the emperor did not question the extraordinary displays of filial commitment by Huang and other Donglin-Fushe figures, he still challenged Huang’s self-contradiction by invoking the damaging evidence against Zheng Man. Referring to the sensational literary accounts of Zheng’s ethical violations, he excoriated Zheng as “having abandoned all the Five Cardinal Relations” (Wulun jin jue).⁷³ He claimed furthermore: “Lower-level staffers understand public opinion. Officials don’t know what public opinion is!”⁷⁴ By saying this, the emperor dismissed the “public opinion” raised by Huang and the Fushe-Donglin community as pure factionalist slander.

In response, Huang Daozhou quoted The Analects as proof that he was not driven by a factional agenda. He stated that the memorial “My Seven Defects” did not say that he was “not as good as Zheng Man.” Rather, he pointed out, the original language in the memorial read that his “literary skill was not as good as Zheng Man’s” (Chen wei wenzhang buru Zheng Man).⁷⁵ He then likened his admiration for Zheng to Confucius’s praise for Zaiyu: “Confucius himself said, ‘My communication skills are not as good as Zaiyu’s’” (Kongzi zi yun ciling wu buru Zaiyu).⁷⁶

Huang’s reference to Confucius and Zaiyu turned out to be a terrible choice. Zaiyu was one of Confucius’s disciples. The master may have recognized him for his communication skills,⁷⁷ but The Analects also contains another rather unpleasant conversation in which Confucius is annoyed by Zaiyu’s rejection of the three-year mourning observance for deceased parents.⁷⁸ By this reference, Huang sounded as if he was admitting that Zheng Man, like Zaiyu, was indeed unfilial, but that he—like Confucius—still recognized the unfilial man’s other talents. Further, the parallel drawn by Huang between his attitude toward Zheng and Confucius’s toward Zaiyu was seen as hubristic. How could Huang liken himself to Confucius? The emperor parried Huang’s reference to Confucius’s recognition of Zaiyu with a reference to Confucius’s decision to execute the evil official Shaozheng Mao, suggesting that he himself, as sagacious as Confucius, had made a correct moral judgment in punishing the unfilial Zheng Man.⁷⁹

Huang failed to outshine his political rivals in either the debates or the moral contest. He also proved inadequate when negotiating with the emperor through classical references. This famous audience about zhongxiao ended with a new demotion for him. But, by declaring he was “returning to his parents’ tombs,” Huang immediately turned the demotion into another demonstration of his filial piety. During this trip home, he remained in Jiangnan for some time and lectured at a local academy, where he enjoyed the enthusiastic companionship of Fushe scholars. His posturing as a filial son appeared so triumphant that neither his humiliation in the court debates nor his demotion could shake his image as a moral paragon or his popularity.

These three court debates that took place between Chongzhen 9 and 11 (1636–38) over officials’ loyalty, filial piety, and friendship demonstrate that Huang’s image as a champion of zhongxiao had become consolidated through his persistent presentation of sincere filial pursuits, his copious references to Confucian classics, and his creative interpretation of historical precedents. More important to our purpose here, however, these debates shed light on the weakness of a Donglin-Fushe leadership based on an ineffective mix of moral claims and celebrity appeal.

As the foregoing discussion has revealed, Huang was a poor spokesman and political negotiator for the Donglin. His communication skills were inadequate and even inept. He focused too much on his own reputation as a filial paragon, a pedestal on which he continued to be placed by the Donglin-Fushe community. Still, Huang’s supporters and fans in and outside the court rallied to the rhetoric of zhongxiao and stood behind Huang’s moral stature. By suppressing defectors who challenged Huang and creating distance between Huang and the allegedly corrupt Zheng Man, they played an important part in sustaining Huang’s celebrity appeal as a zhongxiao exemplar. Advocating for Huang’s promotion to high government position was an expedient but irresponsible move on the part of the Donglin-Fushe community. It only deepened the emperor’s suspicion of their factionalism.

Meanwhile, the more Huang’s political opponents challenged his understanding and practice of zhongxiao, the harder he strove to prove that his zhongxiao pursuit was sincere, profound beyond any doubt. In his next trip between the court and the family tombs, he further authenticated his image as a moral paragon, this time through his use of the Classic of Filial Piety as a ritual trope. By using body and brush to physically display the very process of self-cultivation and authenticate his moral accomplishment, Huang once again delivered an impeccable zhongxiao image, one that became well known even among the common people.

ZHONGXIAO IN INK AND BLOOD

By the time Huang Daozhou learned about Zheng Man’s execution in Chongzhen 12 (1639), he had already returned home to “attend to the tombs.” Before his departure from the capital, he had begun to compile the Collection of Works on the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing da zhuan) in the fall of Chongzhen 11 (1638), right around the time of his last court debate.⁸⁰ This project permitted him to express his hope that the emperor would realize the true meaning of “governing with filial piety.” In retirement, Huang continued working on the compilation and also lectured to his students on this classic.

In Chongzhen 13 (1640), the provincial official Xie Xuelong (1585–1645) memorialized that Huang was an outstanding official and should be called back to serve. The emperor immediately interpreted this move as factional. In response, he had Xie, Huang, and several others brought to Beijing and thrown into prison. There, Huang suffered eighty lashes.⁸¹ That punishment nearly killed him and left him partly paralyzed. During imprisonment, Huang began to hand copy the Classic of Filial Piety. Since he was already famous as a calligrapher, the prison staff took copies out and sold them for good prices. It was said that he copied the classic 120 times.⁸² In the physical reproduction of this Confucian classic, his embodiment of zhongxiao was further reinforced.

Art historians have pointed out that Huang was able to mount a highly publicized political protest with this calligraphic performance, one that showed his resolve and rallied public moral support.⁸³ From this act of devotion, Huang also came to realize the efficacy of calligraphy as a means of spreading Confucian teachings.⁸⁴ His choice of format and style manifested that consciousness. Whereas his calligraphic presentations on social occasions were often produced on large scrolls, a format that prioritized self-expression,⁸⁵ he produced the Classic of Filial Piety mainly in small pamphlets using regular script (kaishu), a calligraphic style that would render the text more accessible.⁸⁶

Huang Daozhou was a renowned calligrapher and Confucian scholar, and his repeated inscriptions of this text in prison embodied the ethics of zhongxiao in multiple dimensions and produced the strongest possible public impression. Above all, his actions reflected contemporary ritualistic approaches to moral cultivation, which met the literati needs to promote Confucianism in their lives more effectively and creatively. Rituals had symbolic and performative advantages as a mode of communication in political and social spaces.⁸⁷ Further, reciting and copying the Classic of Filial Piety, as well as meditating on it, had become important forms of literati self-cultivation.⁸⁸

Efforts to promote the ideology and practice of “governing with filial piety” reached new heights in the late sixteenth century. The revival of the Classic of Filial Piety in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the literati re-elevated it from the status of a moral textbook for women and children to a sophisticated work of political philosophy and a ritual trope, involved more than promotion of a virtue or mere rhetoric. The literati treated this work and the notion of “governing with filial piety” as the ultimate Confucian wisdom, a means of self-cultivation and self-expression, and “a way of communicating with a higher authority.”⁸⁹ In sum, as the Classic of Filial Piety assumed unprecedented significance and became a focus of Confucian intellectual, didactic, and ritual practices among literati, Huang’s calligraphic reproduction of this text was a wise choice.

Significantly, Huang carefully numbered many of the copies he made in prison (fig. 3.2). This numbering, or serialization, of the copies combined documentary, didactic, and ritual purposes creatively. First, a community of participants and observers of a spectacle formed and gradually expanded as these numbered copies trickled out of his prison cell into the public domain. Second, serialization allowed the public to witness this exemplar’s persistent and strenuous efforts at self-cultivation as an ongoing process that engaged his mind, brushwork, and body. This process, which culminated in Huang’s use of his own blood as ink to make the last of the 120 copies, was a live performance for pursuing zhongxiao.⁹⁰ The use of blood for the final copy signaled the successful completion of a multidimensional ritual event and a personal journey. Huang’s rich display of moral action and the very process of moral cultivation through the repeated hand copying of the classic illustrate the late-Ming cultural fascination with the novel and the extreme.⁹¹ In fact, the power of blood writing as a ritualized program derived partly from its extreme nature.⁹²

Given Huang’s fame as both an erudite Confucian scholar and a calligrapher known for his immense interest in experimenting with archaic and unusual characters in order to express intellectual concerns, his audience could and would look for deep connections between his calligraphy, the meaning of the text, and his physical and mental condition during his imprisonment.⁹³ For instance, in one of the unnumbered copies he made in prison, Huang compared the various known editions of the classic and explains his decision to include or exclude certain words.⁹⁴ This copy itself would have been treated as a piece of scholarship on zhongxiao.

Huang Daozhou’s efforts were replicated and thus reinforced by his wife, Cai Yuqing, an educated woman who had a demonstrated interest in politics.⁹⁵ She imitated Huang’s handwriting and made and sold many copies of the Classic of Filial Piety in his name while he was in prison. It was said that Cai always signed her works with her husband’s name, because she believed that it would not be proper to disseminate a woman’s name.⁹⁶ By closely imitating Huang’s calligraphy, Cai attempted not only to demonstrate her wifely virtue but also to augment Huang’s political undertaking.⁹⁷ It should be stressed that by displaying a perfect combination of female talent and virtue, a main concern in seventeenth-century gender discourse,⁹⁸ Cai completed her husband’s image as an impeccable Confucian exemplar. The fact that she not only imitated her husband’s calligraphic style but also had the same interest in artistic experimentation with unusual Chinese characters testifies to their shared determination to take extreme measures to perfect Huang’s public image.⁹⁹

Huang Daozhou’s celebrity appeal did deliver some political results, but again this case was not a straightforward instance of moral persuasion. In Chongzhen 15 (1642), the emperor not only pardoned Huang but also ordered his official status restored. It was said that several officials mentioned Huang’s copying of the Classic of Filial Piety to the emperor and helped secure Huang’s release.¹⁰⁰ This incident should not be interpreted too literally, however. At the time, the factional configuration had changed once again. In Chongzhen 14 (1641), Yang Sichang killed himself in despair over his unsuccessful campaigns against the rebels. The Donglin-Fushe community struck a deal with the former grand secretary Zhou Yanru (1593–1644) and engineered the reinstatement of this corrupt official, with whom they believed they could build a powerful alliance. Therefore, it is more accurate to view Huang’s release as a compromise between the emperor and the Donglin-Fushe community, even though it was readily publicized by his fans and seen by later historians as imperial recognition of his sincere zhongxiao pursuits. The emperor also benefitted from endorsing this perception, of course. Huang’s moral image hence served as a vehicle of negotiation for the various parties.

Fushe scholars outside the government put their own spin on Huang’s release. Nanjing literati society, dominated by the Fushe, hailed Huang as a true celebrity. When news arrived that the emperor had ordered Huang’s reappointment, they gathered and wrote poems in celebration. Some of these explicitly voiced the expectation that Huang would be promoted to the position of grand secretary, even though Huang had not demonstrated any talent in administrative or military spheres.¹⁰¹ Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the local literati enjoyed talking about the image of Huang getting around Nanjing with a walking stick, sharing it with visitors, and disseminating it to other parts of the empire.

Few in late-Ming politics appear to have mastered zhongxiao ethics more thoroughly than Huang Daozhou. He earned his celebrity status through multidimensional moral image-making at the intersection of everyday life and politics, in scholarship, policy debates, travel, art, and writing, all of which transformed his life into a zhongxiao spectacle and impressed his audiences in and outside the capital. Huang’s significance does not lie in whether he was more filial and loyal than most of his colleagues or whether he represented moral heroism, victimization by evil men and imperial autocracy, or the seventeenth-century turn to conservatism. Rather, his story illustrates the complicated political, cultural, religious, and social factors that contributed to making officials’ moral images central to political processes.

In the second half of the Chongzhen reign, Donglin-Fushe officials’ need for a popular leader met literati society’s fascination with the sensational. They found their candidate in Huang Daozhou. Huang’s emergence as a zhongxiao celebrity reflects the three factors that were shaping late-Ming image politics: political volatility, print culture, and diverse approaches to Confucian moral-cultivation. However, these same conditions empowered his rivals as well. While Huang’s fame as a moral exemplar soared, his rivals successfully challenged his understanding and practice of zhongxiao. Although he garnered enthusiastic support, that support was based less on his administrative and political acumen than on his celebrity appeal. The Donglin-Fushe community’s attempt to impose its version of “public consensus” on the court and install Huang in the Grand Secretariat ultimately proved detrimental to their factional interests.

Does Huang Daozhou then prove the generalization that Confucian moralizing only encouraged hypocrisy and prevented officials from taking care of the real issues? We cannot reach a simple conclusion. In fact, Huang’s deployment of zhongxiao rhetoric produced few political victories precisely because this rhetoric, first and foremost, was a means of negotiation. Further, our seventeenth-century subjects did not pretend that moral issues were not political issues; the separation of the two is a modern illusion. To the contrary, these debates forced them to reflect on their behavior as officials and deepen their search for better ways of fulfilling both public and familial roles. Huang could not win high position or a policy debate just by displaying his moral perfection, nor do we have evidence that had these men not spent time negotiating politics through the language of Confucian ethics, they would have found “real” solutions to the myriad problems faced by the Ming empire in the 1630s and 1640s.

What we can argue is that print culture, urbanization, expanded social networks, and celebrity culture, phenomena that historians often associate with the emergence of modernity, further tangled politics and morality in the early modern Chinese context. The language of Confucian ethics helped officials adapt and negotiate. Therefore, rather than deriving from a unitary, eternal Confucian moralism, Huang’s failures—and those of the Donglin-Fushe—were the result of this community’s poor strategic choices.

During the Ming-Qing transition, scholars made persistent reference to Huang Daozhao’s keen interest in zhongxiao ethics and loyalist martyrdom, thereby further cementing his image as a Confucian exemplar. This image has indeed lingered. Since 1646, the year of his death, eulogies celebrating his rectitude have appeared in the writings of generations of historians. Huang earned the most glowing praise, posthumously, from the Qing state, the dynasty against which he fought to his death. After the Manchus had consolidated their rule, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) named Huang “a perfect man of his era” (yidai wanren).¹⁰²

At the same time, some of Huang’s former Ming colleagues and even some supporters, who had performed filial piety dutifully and served both the Ming and Qing courts diligently, were entered into the notorious Biographies of Twice-Serving Officials (Erchen zhuan), which was also compiled under the Qianlong emperor’s patronage. Due to their failure to remain loyal to the Ming, their life experiences have been simplified or distorted, and they have been reimagined as examples of a lack of moral rectitude. Although Huang was already widely recognized as an extraordinary symbol of zhongxiao in the late Ming, it was the turncoat figure, the historical Other, who helped elevate him to become “a perfect man of his era.”