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Review: Superfluous Things. Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China

Dr Clunas characterizes this learned study as 'not simply a book about things' but rather as one 'about some of the ways of looking at things' in China during the latter part of the Ming dynasty in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. And this may well be an important and pioneering study of material culture in early modern Chinese history. The sources Dr Clunas uses are well known to scholars of Chinese history, but they have been used, more often than not, either in studies of Ming connoisseurship or in studies of Ming social life. There have been few studies of material culture in Chinese history; still fewer are comparative studies of material culture in China and the West. Dr Clunas's study aims, indeed, at both: 'This book, therefore, has two aims. One is to make historians of China consider more seriously the claims of the discourse of material culture upon their attention.... The second is to draw the attention of those who work on the Western tradition to the existence of the Chinese world of goods, with its sometimes striking prefigurations of and parallels with early modern Europe'. The book is composed of six chapters, each of which is worth careful reading. In Chapter 1, Dr Clunas surveys the late Ming literature of connoisseurship, with special attention given to Gao Lian's Eight Discourses of the Art of Living (1591) and Wen Zhenheng's Treatise on Superfluous Things (1616-1620). The latter serves as the main source of Dr Clunas's study. And the survey shows clearly and unmistakably that during the decades from 1590 to 1630, 'the greatly increased quantity of material being put into circulation, either as new work or as reprints of earlier writings, was unprecedented and points to a heightened awareness of the production and consumption of luxury goods'. Chapter 2 of the book deals, initially, with ideas about things or themes in Ming connoisseurship, with a short excerpt from each of the twelve chapters of Wen's Treatise. In fact, this chapter covers much more than ideas and themes of connoisseurship. It reveals a rich picture of late Ming elite material life as well as the networks of commercial activities and information in early modern China, by which a considerable number of craftsmen in a large number of areas began to achieve a national reputation. Chapter 3 is a short but useful study of the language of Ming connoisseurship. Since the terms analyzed in this chapter all have cultural connotations, it may be read as a study of taste of late Ming elite society. So also with Chapter 4. It studies the changing attitudes towards things of antiquity. The last two chapters of the book are clearly the most important. They deal with late Ming luxury objects as commodities and the emergence of a consumer society in early modern China. They are comparative in approach and often insightful in analysis. There is, for instance, an interesting discussion of the sumptuary laws, and the increasing disregard for them, both in China and in the West from 1550