Inkstones have long been considered one of the four treasures of the Chinese scholar's studio, and yet they have often been overlooked as art objects within existing scholarly literature. These carved stone basins, in which ink is prepared for use in writing or painting, are intimately tied to the very nature of imperial-bureaucratic rule and to the construction of Chinese Han literati culture. And yet, despite this, as Dorothy Ko tells us in her impressive new book, The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China, Chinese culture's tendency to privilege mental over manual labour has meant that both the materiality of the inkstone and the creativity of the craftsmen and women who made them has been overlooked. Ko's effort to redress this by focusing her book on the artisans who made the inkstones rather than just the scholars who used them results in a fascinating confluence of material culture and intellectual history, and reminds us that no matter how far removed elites may see themselves from the world of objects, cultural capital is always, in part, material.

The first chapter fits somewhat awkwardly with the rest of the book, but is, in itself, convincing. Our understanding of Qing history has changed drastically over the past few decades: where we previously saw a “sinicized” Qing court, we now see a flexible multi-ethnic empire that tailored its performance of leadership to each of the subject peoples. The Qing interest in inkstones is a fascinating new example of this. It is well known that many Qing emperors were deeply versed in Han literati culture, but Ko describes how the newly enthroned Manchu rulers – especially the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors – created a new aesthetic of inkstones that attempted simultaneously to conform to the expectations of the Han elites and yet also remain distinctly Manchu. This was done through the promotion of a new stone – Songhua – from the traditional Manchu homelands of north-east China, as well as through the creation of a distinctive aesthetic. What is striking, however, is how little these Songhua stones featured in the rest of the book: the Manchu rulers did create a distinctive style, but not one, it seems, that the Han literati particularly cared about.

The rest of the book follows the life of the inkstone through its process of production and consumption. We start by travelling to the Duan quarries of Guangdong to hear the story of China's most famous inkstones. Here, dedicated to restoring a dignity to those who quarry and craft the inkstones, Ko digs deep into the technical process of mining and carving. In the third chapter, we meet the star of Ko's book, the female artisan Gu Erniang, who grew to national prominence in the early eighteenth century. Ko untangles the complex ways in which Gu's gender both helped create her “super-brand” at the time, but perhaps also worked against her: we currently do not have a single inkstone that can be securely attributed to Gu. While Ko's effort to bring Gu Erniang to life is ambitious and impressive, and backed up by impeccable research, it also falls ever so slightly flat. Gu Erniang as a woman, as an individual, remains just beyond comprehension. It is primarily through Gu's patrons that we know her work, and it is the stories of these figures, who, because they were literate and empowered enough to write and publish their own stories, make the final chapters of Ko's book its strongest part.

The arrival of the Qing dynasty changed the career trajectory of many budding scholars: with Mongols and Manchus taking a more substantial role in the bureaucracy, a newly-enlarged group of Han would-be scholar-officials who would never make it into office emerged. They were, however, both literate and deeply inculcated in literati culture, and so were able to use this cultural capital to create new opportunities. Ho particularly focuses on a circle of inkstone aficionados in Fuzhou, who both built and capiltalized upon their cultural capital through inkstone carving and collecting. The group's heightened attention to the material objects themselves also changed the fields of both creating and collecting. Ko argues that seemingly clear-cut identities such as artisan and scholar became increasingly unstable and overlapping in the early Qing period. Because of the transformed political environment, these Fuzhou collectors developed a level of not just aesthetic expertise, but also technical command that earlier connoisseurs lacked. They are, then, “scholar-artisans”. And it is through these collectors that the social life of these inkstones really emerges: they become objects with which scholars could write, but they are also collectibles and conduits to social networking, financial opportunities and community building at a time of rapid change for the scholarly elites.

Ko's book positions inkstones, their makers, and collectors, in the socio-political context of the early Qing without ever losing sight of her aim: to dwell with the often-illiterate miners and artisans who drew on deeply embedded rituals, experience and local knowledge in their production of exquisite objects. Ko's engagement with the objects themselves is indeed masterful; while the book has dozens of high-quality images, her textual explanations bring them to life in a way the flat surface of a page can never do. You start to appreciate the complex interplay of natural rock and crafted design, to comprehend the number of stages and hands the rock goes through before it ends up with its owner, and the complex social, political, and economic contexts in which inkstones – somewhere between art and craft – lie. You feel Ko's empathy for the forgotten figures and her desire to make material the lives of not just the inkstones, but the inkstone makers. For those interested in material culture histories, Chinese art history or Chinese culture more broadly, this is a must-read.