CHAPTER 3

Sartorial Signs and Li Zhi’s Paradoxical Appearance

Li Zhi’s physical self-presentation was as provocative and difficult to decipher as his writings. Like them, it too may be read as a grand act of bluff. In the summer of 1588, shortly before moving from the Vimalakīrti Monastery in Macheng to the Cloister of the Flourishing Buddha on the bank of Dragon Lake, Li shaved the hair from his head in compliance with Buddhist custom, but incongruously allowed his long beard to remain.¹ Additionally, he seems to have habitually garbed himself in traditional Confucian robes and headgear. Although he may not have maintained this peculiar appearance consistently throughout the rest of his life, the odd figure he cut deeply impressed itself upon contemporaries and elicited numerous comments. Li’s ambiguous appearance and contradictory accounts of his motivations for cultivating it stand out against the dual backdrop of his endorsement of transparent signification and his rejection of self-serving duplicity. The textual record describing Li’s appearance and the reactions it generated, as well as the author’s own diverse and inconsistent justifications for presenting himself in this manner, document paradoxes that, like those found throughout his writings, reveal his multilayered and ambivalent identity. What appear as contradictions—the clash between the author’s long beard and Confucian robe on the one hand, and his shiny shaved head on the other—should be understood not as clumsy attempts to declare unwavering allegiance to any ideological position or to endeavor to improve his social standing but rather as evidence of his painful choice to express his complex identity.

At first, Li’s deviation from norms of dress and hairstyle may seem typical of the era in which he lived, a time when sumptuary laws designed to differentiate clearly among people of different social classes and ethnicities were frequently flouted.² However, the manner in which Li violated these expectations, as well as his motivations for doing so, differed fundamentally from those of the vast majority of his contemporaries. Whereas many in the late Ming dressed “aspirationally,” imitating the attire of the upper classes, very few tampered with their hairstyle as radically as did Li Zhi.³ Indeed, unlike others of his generation, Li violated conventions of self-presentation in ways that rendered his identity either illegible or downright offensive to his peers.⁴ Thus rather than gain him admittance to elite circles, Li’s self-presentation made him the object of ridicule and perhaps even physical attack. He boldly assumed this odd appearance in an effort to make his body and clothing accurately reflect his paradoxical position both within and outside Confucian official culture and to dramatize the struggles that occupying this position caused him.

Li’s writings demonstrate familiarity with the idea, first articulated in ancient texts and still well-known in the Ming, that one’s physical self-presentation—which included both hairstyle and garments—ought ideally to mirror one’s words and actions as a manifestation of one’s moral character and corresponding social status. Accordingly, his writings register chagrin over the fact that many of his contemporaries wore clothes designed to conceal their social status. The pretense inherent in these men’s choice of clothing mirrors the verbal deceptions they perpetrated. The following discussion focuses on the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of the idea that one’s physical appearance may express identity in ways similar to one’s words and actions. It also touches briefly on contemporary European discourses on the meaning and import of clothing, as well as its uses and abuses, for Renaissance Europe, like late Ming China, was home to sumptuary laws that were often honored in the breach.⁵ Both discussions pave the way for my analysis of Li’s unusual self-presentation and my examination of the contradictory justifications he and his biographers provide for why he presented himself in this manner.

CLOTHING AS A MANIFESTATION OF IDENTITY

Since earliest times, ritually correct clothing was associated in China with maintaining social order. Along with a host of interrelated semiotic signs, including standard weights and measures, and appropriate music, garments that revealed their wearer’s personal character, social standing, and identity were viewed as consonant with a harmonious, well-regulated society. According to the Book of Rites (Liji), the rulers of the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) toured the countryside every five years, stopping in each feudal state to examine all aspects of everyday life, including clothing. Wherever practices deviated from the government-sanctioned norm, punishments were meted out accordingly: “Where there [was] neglect of the proper order in the observances of the ancestral temple, [this] was held to show a want of filial piety and the rank of the unfilial ruler was reduced. Where any ceremony had been altered, or any instrument of music changed, it was held to be an instance of disobedience, and the disobedient ruler was banished. Where the statutory measures and the (fashion of) clothes had been changed, it was held to be rebellion, and the rebellious ruler was taken off.” Moreover, the Book of Rites states, any individual caught “using licentious music; strange garments; wonderful contrivances and extraordinary implements” was put to death, since such behaviors were seen to “rais[e] doubts among the multitudes.”⁶ Corroborating this account, the Zuozhuan threatens, “Clothing that does not correspond to one’s inner state will bring disaster upon one’s person.”⁷ And Xunzi (313–238 BCE) warns of the perils that may befall a society when transgressions of sartorial propriety become ubiquitous: “The evidence of a chaotic age is that men wear brightly colored clothing; their demeanor is effeminate; their manners are lascivious; their minds are bent on profit; their conduct lacks consistency. . . . An orderly age is the opposite of this.”⁸ Implicit in these statements is the understanding that in ancient China clothing held both social and political significance.⁹ Texts—whether wrought of words and music or fashioned of fabric—were perceived not simply as symbolic manifestations of personal virtue but also as signs of social and political well-being. As such, semiotic disturbances were seen to figure instabilities in the social world.

But what constituted appropriate dress? Since before the Han dynasty, sumptuary laws were used to distinguish among individuals of various ranks. For instance, the Han political theorist Jia Yi (201–169 BCE), in his “Discourse on Dress” (Fuyi) states, “Different styles and patterns are applied to classify the upper and lower [strata of society] and to differentiate [between] the noble and the [base]. Therefore, if people’s status [is] different, their titles, their power, their authority, their banner symbols, the certificate of their orders, the greetings and favors they receive, their ranks and salaries, their hats and shoes, their robes and ribbons, their ornaments and decorations, their vehicles and horses, their wives and concubines, their benefits and bestowals, their palaces and houses, their beds and mattresses, their utensils, their drinks and foods, their sacrifices, their funerals, all are different.”¹⁰ These rules are endorsed in the Guanzi, a Han compilation of texts dating back to the Warring States period: “Let clothing be regulated according to gradations in rank. . . . In life, let there be distinctions in regard to carriages and official caps, clothing and positions, stipends and salaries, and fields and dwellings. . . . Let no one, even if worthy and honored, dare wear clothing [that] does not befit his rank.”¹¹ Following in this tradition, sartorial statutes featured prominently in Chinese legal codes and were preserved and reinforced over the centuries.¹² Ming sumptuary regulations were particularly strict, since the dynastic founder, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), held that the previous dynasty (Yuan/Mongol, 1271–1368), had marked a rupture in this transmission of vestimentary norms. According to a member of Zhu’s court, one reason the Yuan dynasty had collapsed was that it had failed to maintain proper sartorial distinctions between commoners and nobility.¹³ In an effort to rectify this problem, reinstate order, and assert its own legitimacy, the new dynasty implemented rigid sumptuary laws. The Ming legal code thus set forth in painstaking detail the various types of costume to be worn by individuals of each social class.¹⁴ Additionally, the Great Ming Commandment (Da Ming ling) stipulated, “There is a hierarchy in the colors of clothes, official ribbons, houses, and vehicles and horses used by officials and commoners; people in the upper rank can use those for the lower rank, but no reverse practices [will be tolerated].”¹⁵

Sojourning in China in the late sixteenth century, Li’s acquaintance, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, was struck by the detailed regulation of official regalia. Although he was familiar with sumptuary laws from his experiences in Italy, Ricci remarked with fascination in his journal:

All mandarins, whether high or low, whether of the military or civil branches, have the same hats of black material and with two flaps on either side. . . . They all also have one type of robe, boots of the correct style . . . , a large belt with various patterns only proper for officials, and two squares embroidered with varying figures, one on the chest and the other on the back. The girdle and these squares have significant differences and enable one to distinguish higher and lower ranks. . . . The girdles differ according to the standing of the wearer.¹⁶

The law’s minute attention to every aspect of an official’s attire from head to toe was designed to enforce distinctions between social classes. Yet these regulations also betray profound anxiety over the potentially destabilizing phenomenon of social mobility.

Unsurprisingly, despite tight legal prescriptions, boundaries between social classes did begin to blur. The Zhengde reign (1506–1521), which ended just shortly before Li Zhi’s birth in 1527, saw a steep rise in violations of sumptuary statutes, and these transgressions grew only more numerous and more flagrant during Li’s lifetime as international and interregional trade networks expanded.¹⁷ By his young adulthood, it was not uncommon to see nobles, wealthy merchants, and even eunuchs dressed illegally in garments reserved for imperial use.¹⁸ We hear reports of commoners impersonating scholars, servants sporting outfits so luxurious they rival those of their masters, and women parading about in facsimiles of gowns designated for imperial concubines.¹⁹ Li himself alludes to “great bandits who wear [Confucian] caps and clothes.”²⁰ Examples of such violations equally permeated the fiction and drama of the period, which portray a population living in open disregard of sumptuary legislation.²¹

Li Zhi was keenly aware of violations of sumptuary statutes, and he shared with many of his contemporaries the desire to reinstate more reliable forms of signification. His essay “Adorned with Every Mark of Dignity” (Wu suo bu pei) traces the process by which garments and ornaments worn on the body gradually became detached from the virtues, skills, and character traits they had once putatively designated. Li’s essay opens with a quotation from the Eastern Han scholar Wang Yi’s (fl. 130–140) commentary on “Encountering Sorrow” (Li sao), a poem in which the poetic speaker-cum-author, Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 BCE), repeatedly describes “adorning” (pei) his body with flowers and herbs representing his many virtues.²² Li quotes Wang Yi: “People whose conduct is pure and clean are adorned with fragrant orchids. Those whose virtue is bright and radiant are adorned with jade. People who can untangle difficulties are adorned with a xi hook made of bone, and those who can resolve doubts are adorned with a jue disc made of jade.”²³ Wang’s statements corroborate the established Chinese narrative that in antiquity each person wore the token that accurately and appropriately corresponded to his character and abilities. Li affirms this view, then contrasts the hypothetically perfect, transparent semiotic system of antiquity with the very real and confusing state of affairs evident in the late Ming:

In ancient times, when a man went out, he did not part from his sword or his ornaments. When he travelled abroad, he did not part from his bow and arrow. Day or night, he did not part from his xi or his jue. . . . [But] people of later generations lost sight of the substance of these talismans; they saw in them nothing more than beautiful adornments to be cherished. . . . From that moment on, the custom of using these talismans began to fall into disuse, and their ornamental and protective functions became disassociated. It’s not merely that civil officials no longer know how to use a weapon; even military men making ordinary social rounds imitate the attire of civil officials, wearing loose garments and wide belts. How refined and proper they appear! But as soon as there is danger, could it be that only civil officials have their hands tied? Even the military men, what use are they?²⁴

Li’s remarks draw attention to the widening gap between signs and the objects they purport to designate. He perceives that by his own era the connection between how a person looked—the objects with which he adorned himself—and what he actually was had all but dissolved: appearances had become as unreliable and potentially misleading as words. Consequently, he believed he was living in an era of decline, a far cry from the mythic past when clothing and ornamentation revealed the identity, character, and corresponding social status of the wearer as transparently as words manifested what was “on [the speaker’s] mind intently.”

The notion that words and clothing ought ideally to signify in concert is rooted in the concept of wen, meaning “patterning,” “ornamentation,” and by extension “literature” or “writing.” The eclectic Han rationalist philosopher Wang Chong (27–91), for instance, explicitly analogizes clothing to words and stresses that both semiotic systems, when operating smoothly, render visible inner qualities of the speaker or wearer. He asserts, “Wen (patterned words) and virtue are the garments of mankind. . . . Expressed sartorially, [words and virtuous deeds] become garments.”²⁵ Strengthening the connection between clothing and words, he further declares, “Garments [should] serve to denote the rank of worthies; worthies may [also] be distinguished by their literary abilities.”²⁶ These statements imply a normative view that words and clothing alike should constitute outward expressions of inner virtue.

Taking this notion one step further, Li’s intellectual forebear, the eccentric philosopher Wang Gen (1483–1540), founder of the radical Taizhou branch of Wang Yangming’s School of the Mind, to which Li adhered, fashioned for himself an outfit that complied exactly with the vestimentary prescriptions recorded in the Book of Rites.²⁷ Seeking to justify his decision to adopt such strange antiquarian robes, which visibly deviated from contemporary fashions, he asked rhetorically, “How can I speak the words of [Sage King] Yao and act as Yao did without also wearing his clothes?!”²⁸ Wang Gen’s peculiar sartorial choices stemmed not merely from his desire to draw attention to himself but also, importantly, from his sincere belief that words, deeds, and clothing should signify in concert. And his behavior may have prefigured Li’s own exotic self-presentation, for each man strove, in his own odd way, to maintain harmony between his inner convictions and his outer appearance.

Li’s support for the view that clothing should manifest one’s inner qualities may be observed in an essay he wrote praising his acquaintance Liu Xie (fl. 1570), a native of Macheng who served as district magistrate in Jiangxi. This humorous essay subtly analogizes the verbal hypocrisy widespread among late Ming Confucians to the practice of dressing aspirationally. Li condemns both forms of social imposture and laments that in his day clothing, like words, was more often used to mask an unsavory interior than to reveal the wearer’s true character. To make this point, Li recounts a (likely fictitious) exchange between the titular character and a pretentious “gentleman from the School of Principle” (daoxue xiansheng), who garbed himself in Confucian raiment and peppered his discourse with allusions to authoritative texts. Li writes, “There once was a gentleman from the School of Principle who wore dignified platform shoes and walked in large strides. He dressed in a generously long-sleeved robe with a wide sash. With the obligations of morality as his cap and the principles of human relations as his garments, he sprinkled his writings with one or two phrases picked up from the classics, and on his lips he always had several passages from orthodox texts. On this basis he claimed that he was a true disciple of Confucius.”²⁹ The passage charts the pretentious gentleman’s unsuccessful attempt to appear respectable by decking himself in Confucian paraphernalia both sartorially and verbally. Yet because he lacks the requisite ethical foundation, his efforts end in failure. The perceptive Liu Xie quickly recognizes that the man possesses only the external trappings of virtue; like the poetic imitators and Ciceronians mentioned in chapter one, his veneer proves fake. Li mocks the superficiality of the pretentious gentleman and praises Liu for his incisiveness.

Li Zhi was not alone in opposing misleading sartorial signs. Similar sentiments were often voiced in both China and Europe. Writing on the phenomenon of social imposture, the scholar Li Le (jinshi 1568) insisted, “Caps and garments are the means by which individuals exhibit their [social] position; they are not mere decorations.”³⁰ And Fan Lian (Ming, n.d.) complained, “When slaves vie to dress splendidly, it is hard to be noble; when ladies copy the fashion of prostitutes it’s hard to be decent.”³¹ Another Ming literatus, Hong Wenke (Ming, n.d.), went so far as to petition the emperor to establish a bureau of “fashion police” to inspect and monitor the level of sartorial rectitude throughout the land.³² For his part, Li Zhi declared, “Ever since the Song royal house fell from its position of dominance, the world has been topsy-turvy, just like a person wearing his hat on his feet and his shoes on his head. Sages occupy inferior positions, unworthy people superior ones.”³³ Echoing these sentiments, the narrator of the early seventeenth-century Chinese novel Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan) comments nostalgically that although in ancient times clothing accentuated distinctions among individuals of different ranks, “today, dark damask and silk gauze, embroidered shoes and cloudy footwear are worn by all people without discerning their social status, fortune, seniority or gender.” “How,” the narrator laments, “could these things not anger Heaven and Earth and exasperate ghosts and spirits?”³⁴

Similar reports, both official and anecdotal, abound from across contemporary Europe, where efforts to enforce sumptuary laws met with little compliance. The Diet of Worms in 1521 advocated “the urgent need for sumptuary legislation in order to maintain the visibility of social status as manifest in attire,” and the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 drafted new sumptuary laws “to ensure that each class should be clearly recognized.” Additionally, the English “Enforcing Statutes of Apparel,” a proclamation dating from 1566, described the “disorder and confusion of the degrees of all estates . . . and . . . the subversion of all good order.”³⁵ These official statements were seconded by personal accounts. Describing his visit to Augsburg in 1580–1581, Montaigne averred, “It’s not easy to distinguish who is noble because everyone wears velvet hats and carries a sword,”³⁶ and the Italian Stefano Guazzo (1530–1593), writing in 1574, opined that based on a person’s attire, “a man can discern no difference in estates.”³⁷ The fiery British Puritan preacher Philip Stubbes (ca. 1555–ca. 1610) passionately voiced similar concerns: “Now there is such a confuse mingle mangle of apparell in England, and such horrible excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it out, in what apparrel he listeth himselfe, or can get by any meanes. So that it is hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a Gentleman, who is not.”³⁸ In words that recall those of Xunzi, quoted earlier, the Spanish Franciscan Juan de Santa María (d. 1622) invoked Sallust’s warning that sartorial confusion signaled social erosion: “When a kingdome . . . [exhibits such] corruption of manners . . . that men do pamper and apparel themselves in curious manner, like women, and make no reckoning of their honestie, but deal therewith as with any other thing that is vendible . . . [then the] Empire [may] be given [up] for lost.”³⁹ These numerous complaints—Chinese and European alike—share the understanding that the practice of concealing one’s true identity under borrowed robes had become shockingly widespread on both ends of the Eurasian landmass. And the deceit inherent in such behavior spawned both noisy denunciations and urgent warnings that, in the words of Rabelais, “the hood does not make the monk.”⁴⁰

But what made these frequent sartorial transgressions so keenly distressing was not merely that they interfered with the legibility of a semiotic system intended to accentuate the boundaries between social classes. More disturbing still, they seemed to signal—or perhaps even to trigger—actual changes in behavior. For, as Li suggests, by cloaking themselves in scholars’ robes, military men ultimately lost or forgot their martial skills.⁴¹ When danger struck, they no longer knew how to react. Implicit in this statement is the assertion that changing one’s clothes corresponds to or perhaps even brings about an unsettling shift in identity.

The suggestion that clothing could effect such a fundamental change may seem implausible. Yet several historians’ investigations into the role and function of clothing in Renaissance Europe help to explain this assertion. Bronwen Wilson, for instance, has traced Renaissance European understandings of clothing to the etymology of this word in Romance languages: “Derived from the Latin habitus, or aspect, the [Italian word habiti and also the French word habit] signified the ways in which apparel invested bodies with meaning through . . . the tradition and conventions attached to dress. The [Italian] word is also defined as contegno, meaning attitude and behavior and thereby conveying those attitudes to which people are inclined habitually or innately.”⁴² In other words, clothing was perceived to possess the ability both to express the status and disposition of the wearer and also to confer status and attitudes upon the wearer. Writing about Renaissance European understandings of the relationship between clothing and identity, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass aptly capture the idea that clothing may mold or shape the wearer. Tracing the English word “fashion” to its Latin root, facere, “to make,” they analyze the extent to which clothing was perceived truly to make the man: “[In Renaissance Europe] clothes [were understood to] permeate the wearer, fashioning him or her from within. This notion undoes the opposition of inside and outside, surface and depth. Clothes . . . inscribe themselves upon a person who comes into being through that inscription.”⁴³ Thus clothing, which once had revealed differences in station, had come to blur not only the representation of these differences but also the fundamental differences themselves. To wit: the military men Li describes ceased to behave as military men when they no longer wore the appropriate raiment.

The phenomenon of garments that disguise, conceal, or, most unnervingly, alter the identity of the wearer signaled incipient social decline, and as such mirrored the linguistic erosion evident in Li’s China. The parallel between social and linguistic deterioration finds expression in the words of Li’s British contemporary, Ben Jonson, who, drawing on Thucydides and Horace, wrote, “Wheresoever, manner, and fashions are corrupted, language is. It imitates the public riot. The excesse of Feasts and apparrell, are the notes of a sick State: and the wantonnesse of language, of a sick mind.”⁴⁴ These words, which resonate with the etymology of the word “text”—from the Latin textere, “to weave”—were intended to describe a situation far removed from Ming China. Yet in fact they point to a shared perception in early modern China and Europe that society was unravelling and that this process was finding equal expression in the unruliness of language, the lawlessness of clothing, and the malleability of social identity.⁴⁵ Yet Li Zhi’s deviations from sartorial convention, like his pervasive use of verbal bluff, do not exemplify but rather resist this trend toward debased signification. For unlike his contemporaries, who strove to impress their superiors by speaking in inflated language and donning showy attire that either misrepresented them or distorted their identity, Li opted for an anomalous guise that, like his paradoxical language, accurately manifested his conflicted identity and, in the process, won him not social acceptance but suffering and infamy.

LI ZHI’S UNCONVENTIONAL APPEARANCE

Li’s incongruous appearance posed a riddle to anyone who heard about it or saw him, for it bucked every Chinese sartorial convention. Having served in the Confucian bureaucracy for nearly thirty years as a fourth-tier official, Li was entitled to wear scholars’ robes and the square headdress appropriate for middle-ranking officials. This sartorial choice is mentioned by Li himself and by several of his biographers.⁴⁶ What was striking about Li’s self-presentation, then, was not his clothing alone but rather the juxtaposition of his Confucian attire and his shaved head. Bai Yinzhang (1584–1658) declared that Li “was bald but dressed as a Confucian.”⁴⁷ And He Jiaoyuan (1558–1631) stated, “He shaved his head but kept his beard; and often wore the jinxian cap befitting a worthy and accomplished scholar.”⁴⁸ Wang Keshou (d. 1620) further confirms that “he wore a Confucian cap to cover his monk’s pate.”⁴⁹ These accounts point to the peculiar combination of traditional Confucian attire and a shaved head.

In premodern China, hair, like clothing, served as a semiotic marker registering an individual’s social station and religious or ideological commitment. Confucian filial piety required that, in deference to one’s parents, one maintain one’s entire body intact.⁵⁰ For this reason scholars and officials typically abstained from cutting their hair or altering their body in any way.⁵¹ Despite the many syncretic borrowings from Buddhism that had seeped into Confucian thought since the Song dynasty (960–1279), Ming Confucians continued to observe these practices conscientiously.⁵² As one sixteenth-century European visitor to China remarked of the mandarins he encountered, “They are proud to have a great head of hair. They let it grow long and coil it up in a knot on the crown of their head. They then put it in a hairnet . . . [to] fix the hair in position, wearing on top of it a bonnet. . . . This is their ordinary headgear . . . [and t]hey take a good time each morning in combing and dressing their hair.”⁵³ But if Confucians considered thick, well-groomed hair a sign of respect to parents and elders, Buddhists viewed it as a symbol of attachment to the mundane world. And because removing one’s hair visually deemphasized one’s gender identity, shaving one’s head was taken to represent a monk’s abstention from sexuality, and by extension his renunciation of familial ties.⁵⁴ Thus a tonsured head signaled a monk’s or nun’s rejection of Confucian filial duties. In this way, Confucian and Buddhist attitudes toward hair stood starkly at odds.

Indeed Confucian critics of Buddhism often pointed out in disdainful terms the putatively heretical hair-related practices of Buddhist devotees. Although Li himself showed great sympathy for and knowledge of Buddhism, his writings contain several such anti-Buddhist jibes. In an essay on the Diamond Sūtra, written in 1593, he derides Buddhists for “disfiguring . . . their appearance, . . . changing . . . their robes, abandoning . . . the kindness of rulers and family, and personally rebelling . . . against [Confucian] teachings.” The essay ends ironically with Li urging readers to cultivate “the mind of non-abiding[, since] with this mind, one can carry on conversations with those disloyal, unfilial, head-shaving, strange robe-wearing monks in person!”⁵⁵ Although these critical remarks should not be read as reflective of Li’s personal views on head shaving—they were most likely written while his own head was shaved—they do at least evince his awareness that Confucian doctrine regarded the practice of hair removal as taboo.⁵⁶ A letter dating to 1588, the year in which he first shaved his head, extends this argument one step further. Li states wryly, “To disfigure my appearance by shaving my head is distasteful not only to Confucian scholars but to everyone.”⁵⁷ And yet, cognizant of the negative responses his decision might provoke, one hot summer day Li took a razor to his head.

The many and contradictory motivations attributed to Li Zhi, by both himself and others, will be examined below. For now, I will focus on the reactions his extraordinary appearance precipitated in those who saw him or heard about his behavior. Had Li thoroughly abandoned one identity for another—had he cast off his Confucian robes and donned in their stead the simple frock of a Buddhist monk to match his shiny pate—his identity might have discomfited his contemporaries slightly less. What rendered Li’s appearance so profoundly disturbing and so challenging to interpret was the mixture of two seemingly irreconcilable ideological positions. A tomb inscription for Li Zhi, composed by the promising young scholar Wang Keshou, attests to the incomprehensibility of Li’s appearance. The document records an encounter that took place between the two men the year after Li first shaved his head: “In the year 1589 I [Wang Keshou] first encountered Li Zhi at Dragon Lake. At the time, two or three friends were also present. The old man [Li Zhi] emerged with a shaved head and a beard. I said ‘You have shaved your head, yet your beard remains. It seems, sir, as if you’ve not finished the job.’”⁵⁸ Wang’s bemused reaction is telling. He seems at a loss for how to interpret Li’s appearance and can only surmise that he has caught Li in medias res, in the fleeting moment between our author’s rejecting one identity and fully espousing another. Wang scarcely imagines that this paradoxical appearance could be anything other than transitory.

A similar opinion is expressed by Geng Dingxiang, whose alleged hypocrisy Li unrelentingly attacked throughout A Book to Burn. Upon learning that Li had recently shaved his head, Geng assumed that Li had also adopted Buddhist attire and leaped to the conclusion that our author had wholeheartedly embraced the Buddhist religion.⁵⁹ Geng’s deduction makes a certain amount of sense, for it was not uncommon in this period for men—especially those who had fulfilled their Confucian familial obligations—to join monasteries late in life.⁶⁰ Hearing the news about Li’s bald head, Geng immediately dashed off a letter to the two men’s mutual friend Zhou Sijiu (jinshi 1553), stating, “Those who are bound by Confucian thought will be shocked and consider his behavior strange, but those who put their faith in Buddhism will be delighted by Li’s action.”⁶¹ Li’s friend Deng Yingqi (jinshi 1586) was so appalled by Li’s conduct that he related the story to his mother. And the mother, regarding Li’s decision to shave his head as proof of his apostasy from Confucian values, registered such concern that she was unable to eat for days and piteously implored Deng to persuade Li to grow his hair back.⁶² These remarks show that Wang, Geng, Deng, and even Deng’s mother viewed Li’s hairstyle as a rejection of his allegiance to Confucian values. Despite the ethos of religious syncretism prevalent in the late Ming, they could not conceive that Li would deliberately cultivate a composite identity inclusive of incompatible Confucian and Buddhist elements.

Wang’s narration of an encounter that took place between himself and Li in Tongzhou in 1601, shortly before Li’s death, further bolsters this point. Here Wang displays continued shock that Li persisted in presenting himself in such an unconventional guise:

[Li] wore a Confucian cap to cover his monk’s pate and greeted us with proper decorum. In surprise, I asked him “Why so reverent?” He replied “I used to read Confucius’ books, but I was unpersuaded. Recently I’ve been perusing the Book of Changes and I’ve realized that Confucius’ teachings are worthwhile after all. How dare I fail to follow their ritual prescriptions?” I paused then replied, “It seems that in the past you were still caught in the snares of [attempting to distinguish] right from wrong.” The old man answered, “These matters do not concern me alone; they affect everyone. As long as we have hands, how could we refrain from striking when there are people who deserve to be struck; and as long as we have mouths, how could we refrain from rebuking those who deserve to be rebuked?” I laughed and said “You’ve not changed a bit, Li Zhuowu!” [Emphasis mine].⁶³

Wang’s hesitation and laughter are characteristic responses to bluff. They highlight his surprise and register his uncertainty how to respond to a ritually correct Confucian greeting issuing from a bald man residing in a monastery. Surely such a peculiar, even monstrous appearance would have provided ample reason for contemporaries to have difficulty classifying Li neatly as either a Confucian or a Buddhist.

Yet by choosing to present himself in this manner, Li was arguably dramatizing his conflicted inner convictions.⁶⁴ He was manifesting his complex identity. Having studied Buddhist texts seriously for close to a decade, Li was well versed in Chan and Pure Land teachings and held both in high esteem. On many occasions both he himself and his contemporaries referred to him as a monk (heshang).⁶⁵ He wrote commentaries on several major Buddhist texts and spent years at the Cloister of the Flourishing Buddha. However, he took no religious vows, resisted submitting to monastic discipline, and by some accounts abstained from taking part in prayer services.⁶⁶ To the end of his days he adhered to a vegetarian diet only sporadically and was ultimately accused of entertaining women on the premises of the Cloister of the Flourishing Buddha, in flagrant violation of Buddhist law.⁶⁷ At the same time, he viewed core tenets of Confucian doctrine with abiding respect and raged against their perversion by phonies styling themselves Confucians. His incongruous appearance dramatized these ambivalences, and in doing so raised disturbing questions. What manner of man was he? The identity of this idiosyncratic “Confucian monk” seemed to defy classification.⁶⁸

If Li’s enigmatic appearance provoked laughter from Wang Keshou, clearly not all of his contemporaries responded to it with such good humor. According to one account, when Li shaved off his hair “everyone was shocked and considered [such behavior] strange; rumors arose from every direction. The prefect [of Huangzhou] and a military officer in that region declared that because Li Zhi was behaving eccentrically and confusing the multitudes, he must be arrested immediately.”⁶⁹ Another contemporary account leveled similar charges: it asserted that Li was “behaving eccentrically, deceiving the multitudes, and wreaking havoc upon the world.”⁷⁰ As if harkening back to the passage from the Book of Rites, which proclaims that those who wear “strange garments . . . raise doubts among the multitudes” and therefore deserve to be put to death, Li anticipates in the preface to A Book to Burn that his opponents will wish to kill him.⁷¹

Li’s unconventional appearance did not result in his immediate assassination. However, it did arguably provoke at least one act of violence. In 1591, during a trip to Wuchang to view the Yellow Crane Pavilion with his friend Yuan Hongdao, Li was accosted by an angry mob that accused him of “behaving eccentrically and muddling the multitude” and drove him out.⁷² A letter Li wrote to his friend Zhou Sijing (d. 1597) outlines this disturbing experience. Immediately following the description of the event, Li pledges, “That very same day, I put on my [Confucian] cap [and resolved to] grow out my hair and resume my original appearance.” The tone of the letter in which this assertion appears is highly ironic, so one may well doubt whether Li actually acted on this intention.⁷³ Yet the very assertion itself demonstrates that on some level Li connected the violence perpetrated against him not only to the provocative rhetoric in A Book to Burn, likely published just one year earlier, but also to his physical appearance. Whether serious or ironic, his oath to grow back his hair so as to avoid such violent episodes in the future implies that Li, for one, perceived a link between his appearance and the aggressive actions of the mob.⁷⁴

If Li’s incongruous appearance truly stimulated such a violent response, what prompted him to cultivate and sustain this look? Perhaps unsurprisingly, writings by and about Li Zhi provide contradictory accounts of his motivations for shaving his head. And the confusion generated by the plurality of conflicting explanations mirrors the original difficulty of interpreting Li’s appearance. The result is a double bluff, a situation in which interpretation is hampered simultaneously on two levels: making sense of the motivations that stimulated Li to remove his hair proves as challenging as attempting to decipher the meaning or meanings of the resultant look itself. Nonetheless, in what follows I examine several rationales and endeavor to extract meaning from them.

A biographical sketch of our author written by Yuan Zhongdao, the tomb inscription by Wang Keshou, and several other sources portray Li as simply reacting impulsively to physical discomfort. Yuan’s “Biography of Li Wenling” (Li Wenling zhuan) states, “One day, exasperated with having an itchy head and tired of combing his hair, [Li] shaved it off, but allowed his beard to remain.”⁷⁵ An entry in a Qianlong-era (1735–1796) local gazetteer from Li’s home town of Quanzhou, Fujian, reiterates this rationale. It explains, “One day his head was itchy and he was tired of combing his hair, so he shaved it off and covered his bald head with a [Confucian] cap.”⁷⁶ Wang’s tomb inscription, the wording of which is repeated almost verbatim in Liu Tong (Ming, n.d.) and Yu Yizheng’s (Ming, n.d.) Survey of Scenery and Mountains in the Imperial Capital (Dijing jingwulue), broadly restates this rationale but provides additional detail:⁷⁷ “The old man [Li Zhi said]: ‘How could I have meant anything by shaving off my hair!? Last summer my head felt hot, and I was always scratching my white hair. It emitted a smell like rotting flesh, so foul I couldn’t stand it! Then I happened to come across a monk who had just shaved his head, so I thought I’d give it a try. Having shaved my hair, I felt happy, so I made a habit of it.’ He then stroked his beard and remarked ‘as for this, I couldn’t part with it’” (emphasis mine).⁷⁸ These passages all describe Li’s shaving as an unpremeditated response to scorchingly hot weather. Omitting any mention of the ideological significance of his action, they focus on the putatively spontaneous nature of the deed. In this way they correspond to Li’s descriptions of his own writing: just as Li analogizes his process of literary composition to “vomiting forth” his feelings in a torrent of emotion that “cannot not be stopped,” these narratives characterize him as responding to an almost insuppressible somatic urge. His decision not to shave his beard, outlined in the tomb inscription, seems almost equally arbitrary—the result, perhaps, of some ineffable sentimental attachment to his whiskers. Moreover, the remarks this document attributes to Li seem flippant and unpersuasive, for they deny the gravity of the action he took and provide no compelling rationale for it.

Li’s own writings offer a number of different motivations for his action, and in characteristically paradoxical fashion, few of his accounts corroborate one another. In an essay titled “Reflections on My Life” (Gankai pingsheng), written in 1596, Li refutes the claim that he shaved his head impulsively. Instead he avers, “The matter of shaving my head . . . was something I had contemplated for a long time before I actually went ahead with it.”⁷⁹ Here he characterizes his action as a conscious, premeditated, and reasoned, although painful, decision and one against which the county magistrate of Macheng, Deng Yingqi, had cautioned him. “Alas!” Li sighs. “Writing about this [action] I am in tears.”⁸⁰ The letter continues, “It was by no means easy for me to shave my head! I did it only for the reason that I could not bear submitting to the control of others. Shaving my head was by no means easy!”⁸¹ These statements testify to the fact that Li acted deliberately, not impulsively.

Throughout this essay, Li emphatically repeats the assertion that he consciously chose to shave his head. The reason, he states, was to liberate himself from the authority of other people. He lists in detail the purportedly onerous responsibilities scholars must shoulder, from displaying proper obedience to teachers to deferentially carrying out supervising officials’ orders. Additionally, he outlines how many times during his official career of more than two decades he became involved in conflicts with his superiors. His statements betray a tone of weariness and evince a deep desire to be rid of these petty entanglements once and for all.⁸² Indeed, more than a decade earlier, in 1580, the very year he would have been due for a promotion, Li so ardently desired to quit his post as prefect of Yao’an that he implored his superiors for permission to resign. His comments in “Reflections on My Life” exhibit his exasperation with the culture of hierarchy and blind conformity he associated with the Confucian bureaucracy.

However, in a letter written in 1588 to his follower Zeng Jiquan, Li provides a rather different rationale for shaving his head. Never mentioning the burden of official obligations, he attributes his action to his aspiration to avoid familial responsibilities. He writes, “The reason I shaved my head was that various people of no importance from home were always expecting me to return home [to Fujian]; moreover, they were constantly visiting me from afar and urging me to attend to my lay responsibilities. So I shaved my head to demonstrate that I would not return and that I certainly would pay no more heed to secular matters. Additionally, many people think of me as a heretic, so I decided to become a heretic in order that they not give me an empty name.”⁸³ Because of the ironic tone with which this excerpt concludes, one wonders whether the statements made here can be taken seriously. Yet Li insists that it was to avoid fulfilling his familial duties—not to escape from professional obligations or to find a refuge from social hypocrisy—that he shaved his head. These practical considerations were not insignificant, for, as the most distinguished and accomplished member of his clan, Li would have been beset by requests and demands from relatives near and far.⁸⁴

The concatenation of discordant motives and methods these writings display results in a double bluff. Not only did Li’s physical self-presentation perplex and disorient those who saw him, but his verbal explanations of his behavior also confounded those who read about them. On one level, the nature of these paradoxical self-presentations, the one visual, the other verbal, may seem to differ. The visual contrast between Li’s shiny bald head and his venerable beard and Confucian robes produced an immediate reaction of shock, whereas the discrepancies among his verbal justifications for presenting himself in this manner unfold gradually over time as readers encounter each successive explanation. Nonetheless, the incongruous aspects of his physical self-presentation parallel his contradictory verbal accounts. In each case the “truth” being manifested turns out to be greater than the sum of its parts. For it would be just as inaccurate to classify Li as a Buddhist practitioner on account of his shaved head, or as a Confucian scholar on account of his long beard and attire, as it would be to attribute primacy to any one of the reasons he mentions.

Just as his eccentric appearance manifested his simultaneous adherence to and rejection of elements of both Confucian and Buddhist thought, so too, it seems likely, did all of the various reasons he cites play some part in catalyzing his action. One could well imagine that Li wished to escape both from his familial responsibilities and from his professional obligations and that although he had been considering this decision for some time, he impulsively took action one swelteringly hot summer day in 1588. Thus simultaneously on varying levels, Li’s texts exhibit the complex constellation of factors that motivated him to take action and the paradoxical appearance that resulted. As if to cap these various nested paradoxes, Li writes in a poem, “I shaved off my hair and became a monk,” but elsewhere he counters, “Although I shaved my hair and became a monk, I am, in fact, a Confucian.”⁸⁵ Together these statements encapsulate the complexity of Li’s identity.

In a society in which sumptuary laws were growing increasingly difficult to enforce and social imposture was on the rise, the expectation that garments could or would reveal the identity of their wearers became ever more unrealistic. Yet the idealistic hope of restoring the intimate bond between inner identity and outer manifestation persisted. Li’s stubborn insistence on cultivating an appearance that he deemed expressive of his conflicted allegiances exemplifies his conviction that garments must expose the identity of the wearer just as words must exhibit the speaker’s genuine feelings.

The difficulty of differentiating among individuals based upon their often misleading external appearances resembled both the kinds of challenges that readers experience as they endeavor to make sense of Li Zhi’s bluff-laden works and the sorts of challenges typical of life in the early modern world. These included identifying and negotiating among counterfeit and legitimate currencies, and discerning false from authentic book editions. In each of these cases, a system of representation is thrown into disarray. And just as the indistinctness of social categories raised concern and placed social actors on guard against deception, so too did the verbal, material, and ideological slipperiness of Li’s texts provoke in certain readers a wary attitude toward what they read and a corresponding need to take on the weighty task of making judgments for themselves.