What do we know of the Chinese concept of luxury, a commentator at an Association for Asian Studies panel asked a few years ago. Not as much as we should: we are frequently treated in the primary sources to descriptions of frugality, both on the state and personal levels, but for both ideological and practical reasons, we don't hear much of indulgence. If we didn't know much of luxury a few years ago, we certainly do now, largely through the work of authors represented in the two rich volumes under review here. Yulian Wu's book is a monographic study of the salt merchants of Huizhou in the eighteenth century; the Akçetin's and Faroqhi's is an edited collection, the product of a conference on material culture and “the good life” that was held in Istanbul in 2013.
Luxurious Networks is a study of how the salt merchants of Huizhou got their money, but more significantly, how they spent it. Wu shows how salt merchants, when they became head merchants (a new position created in the Qing), became involved in a social and economic network that included the Qianlong court. Merchants “courted the court” by providing it with luxury goods produced or procured in the southeast; the court, in turn, rewarded them with status and position. The larger part of the book, however, describes in some detail how the merchants spent their money, accumulating books and valuable objects, building memorial arches for chaste women, and celebrating their lineages. The book offers a steady and thoughtful argument that takes seriously the notion that material objects have their own lives that tell us much about the surrounding society.
Living the Good Life is divided into four parts, but they can be best described as representing two interpretive techniques. In the first, inventories of possessions of those who have died, or in the Chinese case, officials whose possessions have been seized, are mined for what they tell us about their owners’ lives. In this section, Yun Yan presents the first discussion in English of an inventory of possessions seized from Chen Huizu in the huge Gansu corruption case of the 1770s. The archives of this case are full of such inventories, which await fuller treatment. Chen Huizu, a provincial governor and son of a very distinguished early Qianlong official was a wise choice to start with, as his family had long experience of imperial favor and had time to accumulate significant resources. The second analytical approach in Living the Good Life is to study categories of luxury consumption, textiles, pictures, food, diamonds (among the Ottomans), furs, and buildings to see what they tell is about tastes and capacities.
The examples in these two volumes are fascinating and far too rich to be summarized in this (or any) review. But the various arguments coalesce around two propositions that can be relatively simply stated. First, China and the Ottoman Empire participated in the growth of consumer society that historians have seen as characterizing the European eighteenth century. Second, that Chinese and Ottoman consumption, no less avid than European, was guided by different sets of cultural and social preferences which can be reconstructed through careful study of material objects. The first proposition is most clearly stated by Joanna Waley-Cohen in her chapter “Food and China's World of Goods in the Long Eighteenth Century” (Akçetin and Faroqhi, 283–306). It is usefully reprised in the introduction to the volume, where the point is made that only with China's emergence as a consumer society in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has it occurred to scholars to investigate seriously Chinese consumption from earlier eras. In the Chinese case, we need to imagine two commercial revolutions, one in the later Song, and a second beginning in the later Ming. Waley-Cohen would have us further divide the second commercial revolution into two parts, one in the late Ming and the other in the mid-Qing, which were separated by the Qing conquest and the great Kangxi depression. The reason for this second sub-division was the change in tastes between the late Ming and the Manchu Qing.
The commercial revolutions in the Chinese and Ottoman Empires were founded primarily on the consumption of domestically produced luxuries. The eighteenth century was a great age of exploration, which saw the development of a global commerce, and many of the luxury goods Europeans purchased were of exotic or foreign origin. But this was not the case, or so it seems in these volumes, in the empires studied here. There were, of course, foreign goods in the Chinese markets of the eighteenth century: clocks, telescopes and other scientific instruments; there were also in China goods that came from Southeast Asia, like shark's fins, bird's nests, and furniture made from exotic woods. These goods, however, were not the everyday luxuries of the Chinese market. While it is possible to imagine the wealth of the eighteenth century as a product of global commerce, such commerce was not the midwife of consumer society in eighteenth century Beijing, or for that matter, Istanbul.
China and the Ottoman Empire both experienced expanded commercialization, as did Europe; where these societies differed was in the perceptions and tastes that guided the consumption, and both the volumes here evoke these tastes with careful studies of various categories of goods purchased. Wu Yulian shows how a new category of collector (shoucangjia) emerged in Huizhou, and how other salt merchant families developed conspicuous means of honoring their lineages. In the Akçetin and Faroqhi volume, we read about social differentiation in the consumption of food at Kangxi era imperial banquets (Michael Chang), fine distinctions made by pawnbrokers in their evaluation of fur (Elif Akçetin), and the development of Chinese taste for brass (Lai Hui-min and Su Te-cheng). In each of these cases, the logic of consumer preferences is readily recognizable, even if the choices are ones we might not have made.
In one respect, however, the two works are in some conflict, a conflict that might well be productive of future scholarship in this fascinating field. Akçetin and Faroqhi argue strongly for the influence of the court on taste and fashion in the middle Qing period. In fact, the salience of the court in setting fashion is one of the distinctions they see between the Qing and the Ottoman Empires: “the Qing emperors attempted to become leaders of elite fashion, while such an ambition is not particularly obvious in the Ottoman case” (427). The habits of wearing furs, displaying bronzes, or dining in a Beijing court banquet style began in the capital, and spread to the other parts of the realm. Yulian Wu, however, questions what she calls the “paradigm of status negotiation” (12), the idea that merchants emulated the tastes of the court in order to demonstrate their own growing wealth and sophistication. Rather, she suggests that wealthy merchants of Huizhou could shape court tastes in their selection of tribute gifts, and the production and procurement of items for the emperor. In the late Ming, gardens of Suzhou mimicked the Forbidden City; in the Qing the imitation, and the sincere flattery it implied seemed to go the other way. There are, of course, ways to reconcile these positions. The Huizhou merchants were by no means typical consumers, and if anyone had the wealth and discrimination to form a model for the court, they did. Lesser lights may have imitated the court, even as their social betters led it. Perhaps broad categories of taste were shaped at court, while finer distinctions fell to individuals. Either way, these matters of taste, fashion-making, and imitation are worthy of further consideration, as we try to refine the contours of social class and differentiation in the late imperial period.
