Introduction

Records of the Unseen

Readers often interrogated texts to learn about the world, and many of those texts were designed to teach, but curious readers also mined entertainment literature for information about the natural world. I use the term “entertainment literature” to refer to xiaoshuo in the form of novels and short stories, printed plays, and texts that seem designed or marked to entertain the reader with their stories or literary qualities, but they also beguiled with the kinds of information they transmitted. Xiaoshuo is frequently translated as “fiction,” but that is an invention of modern bibliographers and does not accurately describe the wide range of problematic genres that were dumped into that category because they did not easily fit elsewhere. Or as Ling Hon Lam writes, “The term fiction is yet another strategy (a most recent one) to delimit the unpredictable nature of xiaoshuo.”⁶ Consider this 1880 advertisement in Shenbao for a new printing of the novel Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan): “Although one talks of xiaoshuo as ‘small talk by minor officials,’ this one truly has the ability to enhance one’s spirit and knowledge [zhi].”⁷ Xiaoshuo, among other things, contained knowledge, knowledge that was believed by bibliographers to be unimportant, marginal, trivial, unreliable, or unverified. Not so for readers.

Practical literature, including medical texts, encyclopedias, almanacs, and guidebooks, was designed to educate and inform, and so too were local and court histories, gazetteers, and newspapers that recorded natural disasters, omens, and unexplained phenomena. But entertainment literature—novels, anecdotes (zhiguai, chuanqi), and brush notes created primarily to amuse and beguile, also conveyed information about the natural world. Many texts of the entertainment and epistemic kinds contained or inspired commentaries, appendices, supplements, or sequels that weighed in on the veracity of information contained in the text. These discourses on the literal margins of texts also contained debates on the margins of elite discourse. I hope that Observing the Unseen, by drawing on connections between epistemic and entertainment texts, will advance a more robust understanding of how an increasingly literate population in early modern China perceived and experienced the invisible and therefore perplexing aspects of the natural world.

Parts of the natural world were, of course, fascinating and scary. Observing the Unseen examines the curious in context, revealing fears of both people and practices (magical poison, secret medical practices) along the borders of an expanding empire and foreign curiosities that penetrated its urban centers. It also seeks to understand how things were investigated and envisioned when they lacked visual context, either because they were everywhere (water, wind, life), nowhere (the future), rarely seen (dragons, rainbows), or seen only through their effects (thunder). This book is about reading, visualizing, and envisioning.

This book builds on one of the primary theses in my book Novel Medicine, that while authors wrote in particular genres (some of them, like biji, decidedly lacking distinctive generic markers), many readers disregarded generic distinctions when gathering information about the world. Scholars in recent years have discussed how fiction was conceived differently in China than in the West, and that none of the terms for various narrative entertainments in Chinese, like xiaoshuo, are rendered meaningfully into English by the word “fiction.” Readers found real information in every genre, and authors frequently demonstrated the breadth of their knowledge by quoting or discussing texts of every genre in their novels, compendia, and published jottings.

Visualizing the Unseen

A series of images that encode some of the major themes of this book are preserved in a seventeenth-century illustrated edition of China’s “most popular love comedy.”⁸ Prints of “The Story of the Western Wing” (Xixiang ji banhua) was compiled by Min Qiji (1580–1662?) and published in 1640. Each illustration corresponds to one of the twenty scenes in the Yuan dynasty play by Wang Shifu (ca. 1250–1300). I imagine that anyone living in a big city in the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) would have heard of this play, if not seen it. The plot of the love story between Zhang Sheng and Cui Yingying was common knowledge. But the story was also real in its potentially dangerous effects, as numerous accounts claimed that readers were in danger of pining away under its influence.⁹ That the play was based on a story from a few centuries earlier that claimed to be autobiographical might have contributed to its popularity.¹⁰ The Story of the Western Wing begins with Zhang Sheng, a young scholar on his way to the capital to the imperial civil service examination. While staying at the Monastery of Universal Salvation, he falls in love with Cui Yingying, who is lodging there too, with her mother and maidservant. Zhang Sheng’s machinations save everyone in the monastery when it is besieged by bandits attracted to Yingying’s beauty. After these events, the love story unfolds. Yingying’s mother had publicly pledged that she would marry her to Zhang Sheng in return for saving the monastery, but she later recants, plunging the lovers into despair. A long and secret courtship ensues. With the help of the maidservant, Hongniang, Zhang and Yingying communicate, exchange poems, and eventually consummate their love. Yingying’s mother discovers their liaison and, to hide the disgrace, reluctantly agrees to their marriage. She imposes a final condition that Zhang first succeed in the civil service examinations.¹¹

The prints of the play’s scenes are pictures inside of pictures that point simultaneously to the play’s fantastical dreaminess and its ubiquity and mundanity. Most prints in the collection portray scenes from the play on objects d’art—pots, screens, mirrors. These objects are exquisite but common in real life, and the scenes on them are well known—fantastical and possibly true. Many of these objects allude to double meanings—a lantern that projects shadows, double screens, dressing mirrors, and so on.¹² Real objects commonly depicted scenes from this or other plays, so the prints are realistic in that regard. One print depicts a scene acted out by puppeteers, with unused props and puppets hanging on the side of the stage. This print highlights the story’s layered textual and performance histories and its constructedness. But this picture is also extremely real, capturing a practice of daily life that would have been a familiar street scene in all its detail.

Especially relevant for this study is a print that depicts a dream that Zhang Sheng has while traveling to the capital to take the exams. In the dream, Yingying appears at the inn where Zhang is staying and explains in song that she could not bear being separated from him and has run away from the monastery in the middle of the night. Alone and with bound feet, she made her way to him so they could journey together. Zhang marvels at her intrepidity. He sings about his tender feelings and his determination never to be separated from her again. Suddenly, the same gang of bandits from earlier in the play storms onto the stage and demand that the girl be handed over to them. Zhang Sheng is disconcerted, and Yingying, in a tone of commanding authority, tells him to leave this to her. She then opens the door of the inn and confronts the bandits herself, scolding them with perfect self-control and authority. The bandits snatch her and take her away, leaving the stage. Zhang Sheng wakes up suddenly, exclaiming, “Ya! So it was only in a dream!” From this point until the end of the act, Zhang Sheng’s perception of what exactly is a dream is never clear, and the verses he sings are most ambiguous. When dawn breaks, he continues his journey to the capital with his young servant, amid a sense of irremediable loss.¹³

Of particular interest here is that the print presents the dream as spewed forth by a giant clam in the sea. Such clam motifs were also emblazoned on pottery; everyone knew that clam dragons/demons (discussed in more detail in chapter six), produced cities over the sea with their qi. These cities perhaps were illusions or glimpses of a hidden reality (for now, we will call them “mirage”) but the thing that made them was real, and so was its qi. Images from a play that were motifs on porcelain, or subjects of scrutiny in public theater, were like these cities in that they could be either real or imaginary. Min Qiji adopted for “mirage” the same artistic motifs as many did to portray dream—curly, swirling lines that are usually shown emanating from the dreamer’s head and containing the dream itself. Zhang Sheng’s dream is here an artifact of the natural world, something that has been moved from possible future to alternate reality. The subjects of investigation in this book were not discreet; they gestured at the underpinnings of the world in different, entwined ways.

Observing the Unseen

Observing is a kind of paying attention, of watching carefully or noticing detail. But it is also an act of perception, of becoming aware of something. In the early modern period, nothing was observed, investigated, and debated as much as the information transmitted in texts. Information—data that have been given context and meaning—is found in texts explicitly designed to transmit it, as well as in a range of epistemic forms that in the Ming and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties included information on how to pass the exams, predict the future, build a house, behave in a brothel, sow crops, paint, write poetry, read the stars, raise children, and so on. Some texts were explicitly didactic or explanatory—the encyclopedia, the textbook, the guidebook, and compendia—while others simply described the world, thereby helping readers to locate themselves in it.

The taxonomic imagination broke objects down into component parts and grouped things together that shared the most important of those components. Components were sometimes names—words or parts of words. Origins were essential, especially for categorizing medicinal herbs or distinguishing between genuine items and imitations. The taxonomy of collectanea and other texts interested in the phenomenal world often reinforced the three “branches” (bu) of heaven (astronomy), earth (geography), and humanity (history), each divided into categories (lei) and those subdivided into items (mu). This scheme was broad enough to encompass all manner of things and processes. Other epistemic texts had more specific categories of knowledge, but most were variations on a theme. For popular how-to texts, such as daily-use encyclopedia (riyong leishu) or almanacs, the categories of information contained in them reflected a desire of literate non-elites, especially merchants, for upward mobility and encouraged self-reliance (some had buqiuren “don’t rely on others” in the title).¹⁴ These practical, informational texts suggest profound socioeconomic changes, particularly regarding the increasingly large population of literate or semiliterate readers seeking information about how to understand, protect, or restore their health, their fortunes, and their futures.

Practical, didactic, or epistemic texts often included information on proper ways to address and speak to officials, how to file suits in court, how to interpret dreams. They included chapters on medicine, pregnancy and childbirth, and driving out disease-causing demons. Physiognomy and geomancy, agriculture, and military preparedness were also common categories. Some categories were not really for daily use, being without practical or prescriptive application. These featured discussions about strange things, such as two-headed snakes or reports of feathered people living beyond the borders. Such information had little use value beyond understanding the world. Readers wanted to know about anomalies, omens, and outlying data points. Practical texts collected methods and remedies and stories that proved their efficacy. Sources, treatments, or methods were often described as “strange” (guai), “unusual” (yi), or “extraordinary” (qi). Practical medical texts include miraculous and wonderous cures. Presumably, readers attempted these cures; they were not just barkers’ ruses. After all, what is curiosity if not inquiry after being confronted with a logical or practical conundrum? When anomalies question the dominant paradigm, information categories blur, and curiosity is provoked.

An example of how readers in search of information viewed texts comes from the Systematic Compendium. It is a profoundly influential text that was often reprinted, quoted, and supplemented that purports to be a pharmacopeia dedicated to healing with natural and artificially produced substances. It is also a groundbreaking work of premodern natural history and an remarkably rich archive of information on all facets of Chinese historical culture.¹⁵ Li Shizhen was not necessarily an archetypal reader in the early modern period, but he was a very important one, and some editors and compilers of popular and practical texts in the late Ming and Qing dynasties employed similar reading methods. Recent scholarly work makes it abundantly clear that Li Shizhen and his collaborators drew on every kind of text to gather knowledge about the natural world, including works we might assume were written primarily to entertain.¹⁶ He quoted over fifty texts he identified as xiaoshuo and over a hundred works of brush notes, to say nothing about the classics, poetry, drama, collectanea, and previous materia medica. Moreover, Li was not very consistent about citations, clearly displaying his own disregard for concerns of genre, category, or even title. Books were not easy to obtain or to manage in the early modern era, with long novels and other books published in twenty or more stitch-bound fascicles, at considerable cost. Each fascicle could be shared, loaned, or lost, and none of these works had indices or other apparatus to facilitate searching for specific passages or bits of information. Often, the only available or extant edition of a work was an edited version contained in another text that collected it. This process of collecting, editing, using, and untangling textual information could obscure original generic attributions, nature, or origins. It is also true that many compilers seem not to have cared what lexical or generic category a text belonged to, at least not when finding useful or new information in it.

An extensive bibliographical section in Li’s book categorizes the texts he cites into essentially three groups: works on pharmaceuticals, works on medicine, and everything else. This latter group Li labels as belonging to the taxonomic/generic category of “classics, history and the hundred schools.” Among these are xiaoshuo, biji, chuanqi, generic subcategories of which Li was aware, but unlike modern scholars, he did not assume that any of them were exclusively, or even primarily, “fiction.” This is how just one of hundreds of texts is classified, declassified, and unclassified in the Systematic Compendium:

Tang xiaoshuo: Duke Cui of Wei died suddenly. Imperial physician Liang Xin examined him and said, “This is a case of food poisoning.” A servant said, “He loved to eat bamboo chicken [zhuji].” The doctor said, “Bamboo chicken often eat banxia [pinellia] seedlings.” He then pounded ginger to obtain its juice. That was then force-fed to the patient by breaking his teeth, whereupon he returned to life [su].¹⁷

I discuss the early modern concept of death and revival in chapter six, but here, let us focus on the origins of this account. Li Shizhen cites it as coming from Tang xiaoshuo (Tang period stories) as if that were a title, meaning “some collection of short stories from the Tang dynasty.” Elsewhere in the Systematic Compendium, he refers to its title as Anecdotes from the Area North of Meng (Beimeng suoyan), a Song dynasty collection of anecdotes, words, and deeds of literati and social customs of the Tang and Five Dynasties periods. Li also refers to the text in shorthand, as “anecdotes.” He quotes this text secondhand from Verified and Categorized Materia Medica (Zhenglei bencao), which combined prior materia medica texts with additional material from various sources.¹⁸ Li quotes it extensively, variably referring to it as Verified and Categorized, Song [dynasty] Materia Medica, Old Book, Materia Medica by Tang Shenwei, just Shenwei, or one of four or five other titles. It is unclear if Li knew the origins of this case or if he was just following Zhenglei bencao, which records the story of bamboo chicken as coming from a now lost Biography of the Official Cui Wei (Cui Wei gong zhuan), a title that could easily be that of a xiaoshuo. Either way, he clearly did not view xiaoshuo as something entirely made up but rather as a text full of not only useful but lifesaving (or life-restoring) information. He was interested not in the qualities of this story that make it entertaining, suspenseful, literary, or gruesome but rather in information about the successful use of ginger juice to dispel the poison of banxia seeds, regardless of the text that contains it. Whether pharmacopeia, brush note collection, short story, or official history, the information remained the same.

To readers who sought information about the natural world, virtually every text belonged to an epistemic genre. This blurring of generic lines had less to do with the origins of Chinese xiaoshuo in unofficial histories and news collected by local officials than with the fact that literati not only read everything—they quoted everything. Local gazetteers, the first draft of history, quote brush notes extensively, for instance.¹⁹ Many readers were looking for information, which was both practical and inherently gratifying. Like Guinness World Records, accounts of the marvelous were entertaining, educational, uncanny, and even edifying. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that some genres, like very long high-brow novels were not only encyclopedic in their quotation of virtually every manner of text but were used as encyclopedias.²⁰

The increasing quantity of print materials made the project of collecting and classifying texts essential to manage and navigate so much information.²¹ Editors frequently showed a broadminded inclusiveness. Tao Zongyi (1316–1403), for example, selected and classified for his Purlieus of Exposition (Shuofu) more than a thousand texts, among which were brush notes dating from the Han to Yuan times and material from classics, histories, philosophical works, poetry, and other literature, including many rare or now lost books. Tao was criticized for credulity and superstitious beliefs, but living under the Mongol Yuan dynasty and being generally interested in exotic things seems to have contributed to his conception of a world more broadly encompassing than those of his contemporaries.²² Perhaps Li Shizhen was aware that he shared an editorial curiosity with Tao, since many of the texts cited in the Systematic Compendium are quoted secondhand from Purlieus of Exposition.

Sequels and Supplements

One of the aims of this book is to try to understand readers. On delightful but rare occasions, individual readers annotated books, flagging passages they found interesting or enjoyable. In collectanea, editors express their feelings about what is important or in danger of being forgotten. In many other cases, we have reading notes hiding among the other thoughts, stories, and records in the large texts and huge corpus of brush notes. We also find reading notes in commentary that was printed between lines, in margins, and in prefaces of novels and collections of short stories. We will see that practicing healers made notes, for their own use, of what they had read and heard. Many of these records of reading exhibit a horizon of expectations that align with bibliographic or generic categories—“This novel is reminiscent of that novel” or “This play exceeds that play.” Frequently, though, the comments on texts, prefaces to sequels, and reading notes exhibit an interest in the information contained in a text, disassociated from its primary category.

Some of Observing the Unseen’s major sources are sequels, supplements, and appendices. Many books, whether designed to teach or to entertain, were appended, amended, supplemented, or rewritten in forms that announced themselves as conscious responses to their parent text. These often had the same impulses as current fan fiction does; readers admired the original work and wanted it to go on or wanted to undo some aspect of it or to fix it in some way. We see this happening with epistemic texts too, in which readers wanted to contribute new knowledge to texts they admired.

Epistemic texts often append information that the author or editor found anomalous or hard to categorize. In some cases, the author appended (fulu) entries to a section that seemed a bit more fantastic or unverified. Li Shizhen explains this practice in his introductory notes: “Items that seem to belong to the same group but lack known potential or application, or that have potential and application that are in danger of being forgotten are added as appendices. If there is nothing they could be appended to, they are added as an appendix at the end of a section.… What is obscure should not be neglected.”²³ In addition to these reasons, Li appended things that were simply strange to him, as evidenced by his use of such phrases as “It is not known if this is so” (Weizhi ran fou). Preserving data for later analysis outweighed the personal risk of appearing too credulous.

Sequels sometimes expand on the fantastic or anomalous in the original, and supplements similarly add information that was overlooked or cast aside by the original text. Authors and publishers wanted to benefit from the popularity of the parent text to sell copies, but in making connections for marketing purposes, they occasionally blurred generic lines. An example of this are the anomalous accounts of Wang Tao (1828–97), published toward the end of a long period of popularity of those stories and claims, beginning with Pu Songling’s (1640–1715) Strange Stories from Liaozhai (Liaozhai zhi) in 1766.²⁴ Originally released in installments in the lithography-printed Dianshizhai Pictorial (Dianshizhai huabao) between 1884 and 1888, they were presented as news and printed by Shenbao, one of the earliest modern newspapers in China. Wang Tao’s accounts were printed as a collection in 1887 under the title Casual Notes from the Seclusion of the Song River (Songyin manlu), which sounds like a brush note collection. Likely because a very popular edition, Strange Stories from Liaozhai, Illustrated (Liaozhai zhiyi tuyong) was published in 1886, Wang Tao’s collection was soon reprinted in at least five authorized and unauthorized editions between 1887 and 1903 under variants of the title Sequel to Strange Stories from Liaozhai (Hou Liaozhai zhiyi). Whether news, reading notes, or fantastic tales, these same accounts were repackaged numerous times and may have contributed to readers’ sense that generic distinctions were not useful classifiers of the information contained in a text.

Authors of sequels and supplements to epistemic texts explained and justified their impulse by first praising the parent text and then citing the ever-expanding field of knowledge. Zhao Xuemin, writing in 1765, defended his Supplement to the Systematic Compendium (Bencao gangmu shiyi) by saying that people love to collect curiosities, and therefore more and more of these exotic treasures become known over time. Zhao argued for the inclusion of new information, exotics, curiosities, and anomalies. The pharmaceutical archive was ever-expanding, reflecting the growth of intellectual and material horizons of the Qing world, as well as the excitement and confusion that surrounded it.²⁵

Sequeling, like appending, said much about the veracity, utility, morality, or reality of the information in the original. Implicit in many of these texts is the sense that sequels to entertainment literature are written by readers dissatisfied with the relation of the parent work to reality—that it was somehow unbelievable—or with the parent work’s exclusion of obscure or fantastic possibilities.

Reality and Belief

It was not uncommon to prize information contained in the textual tradition above that which could be gathered with the naked eye, but the period that this book focuses on witnesses an evolution in that regard. It also exhibits new uses of old texts, a desire to locate the patterns that undergird technology (a.k.a. scientific thought) in ancient tradition, and the instinct to supplement and perfect those texts. Long entertainment or epistemic texts were archives of other texts, and they cite many of the same texts—classics, but also poems, plays, medical texts, biji, xiaoshuo, and others. The more a text is quoted by other texts, the truer it becomes.

As an example of this, we can consider A Miscellany from Youyang (You-yang zazu), a Tang dynasty collection of brush notes. It contains chapters of essays and accounts, anomalous reports, omens, unnatural calamities, local habits and customs, depictions of curious objects (magical swords and mirrors), anecdotes of transformation (leaves turning into fish, stones into birds), remarkable feats (the armless beggar who did beautiful calligraphy with his foot), oddities from border regions, delicious kinds of food and alcohol, dreams, thunder, tattooing, medicine, and more. One of the earliest bibliographies to mention it classifies the work in the general category of xiaoshuo, a generic repository for texts that did not readily fit into other, more well-defined, bibliographic categories.²⁶ This probably would have pleased Duan Chengshi (ca. 860), the author, since he titled his book after a legendary cache of mystical texts supposedly hidden in a cave on Youyang Mountain.²⁷ Six centuries later, the bibliographical work Catalogue of the Hall of Literary Profundity (Wenyuange shumu) of 1441 classed Youyang alongside the broadly inquisitive texts “philosophies and miscellanies” such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, family instructions, and descriptions of local customs. Both the Systematic Compendium and Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei) quote and cite Miscellanies from Youyang, as do other medical texts, xiaoshuo, and miscellany, but also books on agriculture, dictionaries, and encyclopedia. It has been anthologized in tens or hundreds of compendia. Many Qing dynasty texts that cite Youyang are explicit about teaching the reader a variety of useful knowledge and contribute to the sense that You-yang was a source of reliable information. Two examples of these are Record of Daily [Gains in] Knowledge (Rizhi lu, 1695) and Record of Minor Knowledge (Xiaozhi lu, 1804). Thus, Miscellanies from Youyang transmitted its tried-and-true knowledge to readers through collections and highly intertextual works for a thousand years.

Many texts, including xiaoshuo, insist on the veracity of their information, and readers might believe commentary that states, “It happened exactly this way,” regardless of genre.²⁸ Readers of Strange Stories from Liaozhai might be reminded that certain stories were made up when the author, writing as the Historian of the Strange (Yishi), appends his own commentary to point out their morals, metaphors, and other created qualities. Alternately, the lack of commentary to brief entries may have signaled their authenticity. Readers may have been captivated by authors’ own credulity, as when Li Shizhen writes of accounts in his own text, “Wow!” (Yi!). More often, though, Li uses phrases such as “This makes sense” or “This is reasonable” when evaluating evidence and adjudicating truth. Li’s occasional skepticism adds to the force of his positive evaluations: “I have my doubts,” “It is not known,” “Most likely untrue.” His inquiries seem so earnest because he is not always able to disentangle truth and speculation. He asks rhetorical questions in these moments: “How could all this be meaningless?” Whether or not readers agree with him, they cannot doubt that Li believes that what he writes is true and real.

Readers of Plum in the Golden Vase might have been surprised to learn, as was the story’s maidservant who stole a golden bracelet, that a “wolf sinew” (langjin) could be used to detect the culprit in cases of theft, a “fact” corroborated by epistemic texts like Youyang Miscellany and the Systematic Compendium that discuss and debate the nature and application of the object.²⁹ Li Shizhen believes that those who employ wolf sinew to uncover crimes are skilled in “arts” (shu), though it is unclear if these are arts of magic or of trickery—or both.³⁰ Plum’s detailed descriptions of everyday life and its resonance with epistemic texts obfuscated its “fictionality,” at least for some readers. The novel states repeatedly that a pageboy has been sent “out on the street to purchase a wolf’s sinew,” which reifies the thing’s material reality and its mundanity. Perhaps readers had seen such a thing for sale themselves. Marketplace evidence materialized unseen things—dragon bones, water from far-off places, the hammer that thunder left in the ground after a strike—and realistic literature propagated information from big-city marketplaces. Elites and marginally literate alike found phenomenological traces of unseen things in the marketplace, and entertainment literature helped circulate knowledge of things found there.

The existence of the unseen things discussed in this book was mostly not up for debate. Divination, varieties of water, dragons, thunder, and animating forces beyond “souls” were all widely accepted features of the natural world. It was the characteristics of these things and their uses that required investigation. Although modern readers may ask, “But what was it, really?” our sources mostly accept the existence of these things. We need to overcome the hegemony of the scientific method and other modern ways of thinking to understand the thoughts and methods of Ming and Qing readers. This is a book about curiosity and curiosities, and as such, I hope it will beguile and enthrall readers, but just as much, it is about trying to inhabit the minds of others—readers living in early modern China. Many readers in China, before the proliferation of biomedicine and the scientific method, read in ways that seem surprising to readers of the modern era. Literary scholars might assume that people read texts for their literary content, for instance. Many certainly did. Others did not. Early modern readers had their own agendas, and they used texts according to their interests. When it came to investigating dragons, for example, most readers who left records did not wonder if something was really a dragon. They wondered whether dragons produced wind or merely inhabited it. They wondered whether dragons could reproduce or die. They wondered why dragons were so lazy and so lusty. Some had their doubts, of course, but even the nature of that doubt was different from ours.

Transformation

A few brilliant studies that have inspired this one mention the very end of the last chapter of the Systematic Compendium.³¹ I think it is important to begin this investigation into curiosity, fantasy, and common knowledge with this passage. In it, Li describes all the various forms that people can take. In the section “Human Abnormalities” (Rengui), Li quotes from tens of texts that discuss instances of birth after abnormally long pregnancies, feathered people, people who turn to stone due to chastity, objects that transform into human beings, and so on. As Li stretches his own taxonomic imagination, he keeps coming back to the principle underlying all these anomalies: “Creation and transformation between heaven and earth are limitless. The changes and transformations of human beings and objects are limitless, too.”³² He argues against simplistic interpretations of the mechanisms of the natural world: “How can scholars of superficial learning rely on one perspective to categorize the old and new, the six directions, and the unending transformations and changes of affairs and things, and call them irrational and strange?”³³ When the fundamental paradigm for understanding the world is one of transformation, rather than creation, then what, as Li asks, is strange? Among the myriad transformations, though, some were unique. As Pu Songling, Historian of the Strange, would say describing an earthquake, “This was a truly incredible anomaly of transformation.”³⁴ That there are marvels in the world—curiosities and new information—is a reasonable outcome of a ceaseless process of transformation. However, even in a world based on endless change and transformation, there were limits. Li Shizhen discusses how horses, dragons, and silkworms have identical qi, which is why there are silkworms that have the head of a dragon and those that have the head of a horse. But there are inevitably busybodies (haoshizhe) who exaggerate these facts, saying that if one were to wrap a girl in a horse hide and place her in a grove of mulberry trees, she would transform into a silkworm. This, Li says, is nonsense.³⁵

There were limits to what transformation could do, and to what it could explain. Some of those limits were bound by common sense. It is these limits, patterns in the principles of nature, that give the world meaning. Things might share a certain kind of qi, but things could also be connected through shared characteristics, resonances, feelings, or a common sense, tonggan. When flowers or cloth transformed into butterflies, it was natural that the butterflies would be the color of the thing from which they transformed.³⁶ It was when behavior or transformations diverged from expectations of transformational relationships that they were deemed to be strange.

Transformation followed certain principles, without which it would be impossible to discern differences between things. These principles were at the heart of many debates about how the world worked and were the ultimate object of inquiry into natural phenomena. As Li writes, “How can scholars not investigate things and their underlying principles to discern their benefits and harms?”³⁷ When something reached an extreme, the next step in a cycle of transformation was to begin again as its opposite.³⁸ Things were deemed strange only when they exceeded the expansive boundaries of a foundational paradigm of transformation.

Themes of Weather and Time, Bugs and the Written Word

In early modern entertainment and epistemic literature, many debates concerned the objects in and functioning of the natural world. The current study investigates only a few of them, chosen for their kinds and degrees of invisibility and tied together by time (or timing) and weather (or seasons). The precise moment that a person was born, when transformation brought them forth, influenced their fate. Plants blooming out of season were omens. The date and time of day when medicines were harvested, prepared, or administered to a patient played an important role in effecting a cure. Much of what made waters different from each other was when they were gathered, how old they were, and how far they had traveled. Predicting the future implicated memory and the past. Thunder and dragons had their seasons.

Time touches all things, and it is a thread running through this book, but the chapters do not unfold chronologically. With evidence drawn mostly from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, discussions range back and forth in time because our Ming and Qing era authors and readers engaged older texts as well. In fact, because so much of what was read in the Ming and Qing was found in collectanea that gathered texts from disparate time periods, disparate topics, and disparate genres, readers must have had a difficult time discerning old information from new or tracking the chronological development of thought.

The written word, perhaps predictably, emerged as a theme in Observing the Unseen. Societies for the care and respectful disposal of paper with written words, charlatans writing on water or with water, dragon bones identified because they had writing on them, and writing burned into the charred remains of willful animals all factor into this study. Graphophagy included grinding and swallowing dragon bones (identified by their curious markings) with wine and the ingestion of written talismans. Healing practices included writing on the body and receiving written answers from inquiries directed at spirits. Heaven also sent messages via writing burned on buildings or bodies scorched by thunder.

The emergence of bugs in each chapter surprised me but probably would not surprise my colleagues who study the history of health care in China, who are aware that the real damage, fear, and illness caused by bugs, worms, poisonous things, and all manner of pest (chong) was omnipresent in the early modern period.³⁹ Bugs were a mundane nuisance but also capable of miraculous transformations. They also snitched to heaven about the sins of their hosts. They were, at times, admired (“Among small creatures, none are more lovable than ants”) but mostly, bugs infested homes and bodies.⁴⁰ Some scholars estimate that between one quarter and one half of all humans were hosts to roundworms, helminths, or the like through the eighteen century.⁴¹ The realities of gastrointestinal issues, bowel movements, digestion, chamber pots, hygiene sticks (early toilet paper), and the like were indelicate, and thus they rarely found themselves represented in printed texts written by and for the elite. Bugs were ignored by mainstream medical traditions but discussed in certain kinds of texts such as materia medica, brush notes, miscellanies, and stories. Pests wiggle their way through this book, transforming into dragons and rainbows, evolving from water, responding to thunder, and generally helping to demonstrate that entertainment literature was epistemic literature too.

These themes, emerging in a book about scrutinizing the unseen, are somewhat obvious in retrospect. They are all concerns that affected everyone in their daily lives, and this book is about common knowledge that a wide variety of readers gathered from a broad range of texts. Authors and publishers intend their books to be read by specific audiences, but who their readers actually are and what readers actually get out of their books is another matter. Publishers were aware of the expanding readership of their texts and the variety that such expansion entailed. Publishers of entertainment literature and epistemic literature alike were aiming their wares at a broad readership. “Even those committed to the most rigorous scholarship,” the publisher’s note to a collection of short stories begins, “have always included unofficial histories [yeshi] in their studies. It is no wonder, then, that the lower classes find popular historical romances [yanyi sometimes a synonym for xiaoshuo] most appealing.”⁴² An edition of a daily-use encyclopedia was published a century later with a marketing note specifying that “this book is designed to be appreciated by all four classes of people [i.e., everyone].”⁴³ We cannot know how many people read these books or who they were, but it is clear that publishers expected their books to be used by a variety of readers for a variety of purposes. Many of these readers sought to be informed as they were entertained. I hope readers of this book will be similarly broad and that they will also find it entertaining and informative.