Panel 46: Knowing the Sea: Knowledge and the Marine World in China, Past and Present

Chair and Discussant: Brigid E. Vance, Lawrence University

This panel focuses on the discourses surrounding the marine world in historical and contemporary China. Writings on the marine world and creatures in the field of history and literature remain a relatively understudied topic that deserves more scholarly attention. The topics vary across the papers, but collectively as a panel, they all explore the possibilities and 2 problems of taking up the marine world and human engagement with it as the subject of historical and literary study of early modern and modern China. The formidability of the natural forces unleashed by the sea has long eluded human efforts to control it, and the sheer vastness and the depth of the seas have limited human access. For these reasons, the sea has inspired fear, as well as wonder and curiosity in the human mind. However, since ancient times, the sea has also been a site that has always been open to exploration, observation, and utilization. Thus, it has been a constant and mundane presence in the everyday lives of people, especially along the coastlines. As such, the sea has always been closely entangled with not only the ways in which societies operate but also the life and sustenance of people, as well as the ways in which people imagined and challenged the known boundaries of the world.

Using the Chinese engagement with the marine world as a window, each paper addresses various important intellectual issues of “knowing the sea”: Joo-hyeon Oh’s study investigates the epistemology that pertains to the phenomenal world in early modern China by considering the peculiar case of “sea markets and clam towers” known to appear in the ocean. Kejian Shi’s paper explores the critical connections between natural knowledge and the consumption of marine products in late imperial China, primarily by focusing on pearls. Zihan Feng’s work examines sensorial and encyclopedic natures of contemporary Chinese fictions e about marine creatures and technologies that contest the production and classification of scientific knowledge.

Panelists

Joo-hyeon Oh, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, “Clam Towers: On the Nature of Natural Knowledge in Late Imperial China”

This paper examines the 16-18th century Chinese discourse on the “sea markets and clam towers (海市蜃樓).” Long-accepted knowledge about the sea markets began to be disputed in the late 16th century. This project is not interested in demonstrating the failure or success of early modern Chinese in finding the “correct” scientific answer to the question of the mirage. Rather, I use the case of the mirage to reflect on the fundamental issue of the nature of knowledge about the natural world in late imperial China. When we try to understand how late imperial Chinese elites engaged in the “investigation of things” (格物), the grids of established categories of knowledge, especially so-called “factual” knowledge, seem more restrictive and confusing than clarifying. An examination of late imperial writings on the mirages will reveal that literary, mythical, historical, textual, natural, and empirical knowledge were interlocked together as layers to form an epistemic complex that had deep and enduring cultural significance as a repository of accepted “facts” about what exists in the world and how they work.

Kejian Shi, Washington University in St. Louis, “Pearls on the Move: Knowledge and Consumption of Pearls in Late Imperial China”

Pearls were one of the most popular marine products in late imperial China, coveted by both the imperial court and the populace for their resplendence as luxurious adornments and their therapeutic properties. This paper explores the nuanced relationship between the knowledge of pearls and its consumption in late imperial China, with a particular focus on the dynamic changes of pearl consumption in Qing China. It examines the ascendance of Manchurian pearls (referred to as “northern pearls” in Ming and “eastern pearls” in Qing) and the increasing influx of seawater pearls from foreign shores. The taste preference for pearls was shaped by various factors, including political consideration and elite favor. Furthermore, this study seeks to underscore the critical environmental factor during shifts in pearl consumption: the depletion of 3 pearl resources in South China. The soaring demand coupled with the overexploitation of “southern pearls,” predominantly picked from the Gulf of Tonkin, caused an ecological crisis along the Guangxi coast and Leizhou Peninsula. The shortage of southern pearls was later supplemented by Manchurian freshwater pearls and imported seawater pearls.

Zihan Feng, Washington University in St. Louis, “The Textility of Maritime Encounters: Making Encyclopedic Novels of the Ocean in Contemporary China”

This paper reads contemporary Chinese encyclopedic fictional writings about the ocean as efforts to recuperate an ecology of attention to the “surrounding” through narrations of humans’ attachment to ample things (博物). This recuperated shoreline “surrounding” is neither a local culture represented as part of the national culture nor merely a peripheral positionality asserted against China’s land-based sovereignty that existing scholarships have argued, but a dynamic locale of experiential knowledge-making. Analyzing writers’ extensive delineations of oceanic creatures and marine technologies in two novels on maritime encounters along China’s eastern coastline— Sheng Wenqiang’s Biography of the Fishing Gear (渔具列传, 2015) and Lin Zhao’s A Map of Tide (潮汐图, 2021), this paper argues that these fictional works unsettle evidential scientific knowledge production and classification and complicate encyclopedic information dissemination through the sensory-based approach to felt things. This paper also highlights the making of encyclopedic maritime stories as writers and book publishers’ collaborative effort to reify the “textility” of maritime encounters in print, thus taking seriously cover design and typography as components contributing to the formation of sensory-based oceanic epistemologies that unfold in-between lines.