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The Rhythm of the City: Everyday Chengdu in Nineteenth-Century Bamboo-Branch Poetry

“Bamboo-branch poetry” (zhuzhici), lyrical descriptions of everyday life written by members of the elite class and containing four lines of seven characters each, was a traditional form of Chinese folk literature. Unlike most other forms of poetry, bamboo-branch poetry was not meant to express the poet’s imagination, emotions, or abstract thinking. Rather, it was a literary form that directly and concretely described people, events, and things—although it also often included the author’s opinions. Bamboo-branch poetry largely dealt with people’s real life, also described in some traditional Chinese narratives as distinguished from lyric poetry. Although Qing poets “did not invent new genres” as did the poets of Tang, Song, and Yuan times, they did compose verse more closely related to people’s lives. The emergence of bamboo-branch poetry was most likely attributable, as some scholars point out, to “the rise of realism in Qing poetry.” Because of this feature, bamboobranch poetry contains rich information regarding everyday life in the Qing dynasty, that is usually absent in conventional historical data. Bamboo-branch poetry also provides insights into how local elites viewed ordinary people and popular culture. Historians of Chinese popular culture increasingly use literature as a primary source of data, including scripts of local operas, popular novels, and