According to Yue Fei＇s biography, when the legendary general was slandered and interrogated for treason, he tore the shirt off his body, exposing four characters tattooed on his back： ＂Exhaust one＇s loyalty in ser...According to Yue Fei＇s biography, when the legendary general was slandered and interrogated for treason, he tore the shirt off his body, exposing four characters tattooed on his back： ＂Exhaust one＇s loyalty in service of the state.＂ This study looks at two components of the Yue Fei story--patriotic tattoos, and tattooed generals--and examines their meaning in the broader stretch of Song dynasty history. Yue Eei was not the Song dynasty＇s only tattooed general who came to a tragic end. The Northern Song＇s Di Qing was a tattooed soldier whose military merit allowed him to rise to the highest levels of power in the empire. Di Qing＇s story makes it clear that tattooed generals were objects of suspicion and ridicule at court due to their military tattoos, a trait that linked them to the criminals and lower class men that manned the Song armies. Though military tattoos sometimes had a loyalist ring to them, they were carried out on a mass scale, and were a characteristic of coercion rather than fervent loyalism. This study shows that underneath the nationalist historical narrative of the Song dynasty, of which Yue Eel is a famous example, there lies a different story of social conflict within the Song state. Rather than a story of Chinese fighting non-Chinese and of traitorous and cowardly officials struggling with loyal patriots, this study offers a narrative of a social conflict between high-born clear-skinned officials and low-born tattooed military men.展开更多
Two sets of assumptions surrounding the Manchus and footbinding have crept into the historiography of the Qing period. A first set of assumptions claims that the Manchus attempted to ban footbinding among civilian Han...Two sets of assumptions surrounding the Manchus and footbinding have crept into the historiography of the Qing period. A first set of assumptions claims that the Manchus attempted to ban footbinding among civilian Han on repeated occasions after the conquest but failed due to women＇s resistance. Moreover, Qing attempts to ban footbinding made binding into a politically charged ethnic marker that embodied for Han anti-Manchu and anti-Qing sentiments and caused the bans to backfire and footbinding to spread further. A second set of assumptions claims that the overwhelming cultural allure and popularity of footbinding proved irresistible to banner women, who, thwarted by banner regulations forbidding the practice, covertly imitated footbinding by wearing platform shoes that hid natural feet and created an illusion of smallness. This paper scrutinizes the evidence put forward by Qing historians for the first of these two sets of assumptions. The claims are found to be unsubstantiated and evidence is offered that contradicts them. I argue that the weight of evidence shows that there was no prohibition on footbinding imposed in 1645 or at any time during the Manchu conquest, and that a 1664 proposal to ban footbinding was withdrawn before it could be implemented, for reasons misunderstood by historians offootbinding. Therefore there could have been no ＂resistance＂ by Han women or men to a ban on footbinding, and claims that footbinding became a politically charged ethnic marker of anti-Qing sentiment in the seventeenth century are groundless. With regard to the second set of assumptions, I provide evidence in a separate paper to be published elsewhere that banner women had distinctive roles and fashions uninfluenced by the culture of footbinding, and that in Beijing and the Northeast Manchu styles were emulated by Han, not vice versa.展开更多
文摘According to Yue Fei＇s biography, when the legendary general was slandered and interrogated for treason, he tore the shirt off his body, exposing four characters tattooed on his back： ＂Exhaust one＇s loyalty in service of the state.＂ This study looks at two components of the Yue Fei story--patriotic tattoos, and tattooed generals--and examines their meaning in the broader stretch of Song dynasty history. Yue Eei was not the Song dynasty＇s only tattooed general who came to a tragic end. The Northern Song＇s Di Qing was a tattooed soldier whose military merit allowed him to rise to the highest levels of power in the empire. Di Qing＇s story makes it clear that tattooed generals were objects of suspicion and ridicule at court due to their military tattoos, a trait that linked them to the criminals and lower class men that manned the Song armies. Though military tattoos sometimes had a loyalist ring to them, they were carried out on a mass scale, and were a characteristic of coercion rather than fervent loyalism. This study shows that underneath the nationalist historical narrative of the Song dynasty, of which Yue Eel is a famous example, there lies a different story of social conflict within the Song state. Rather than a story of Chinese fighting non-Chinese and of traitorous and cowardly officials struggling with loyal patriots, this study offers a narrative of a social conflict between high-born clear-skinned officials and low-born tattooed military men.
文摘Two sets of assumptions surrounding the Manchus and footbinding have crept into the historiography of the Qing period. A first set of assumptions claims that the Manchus attempted to ban footbinding among civilian Han on repeated occasions after the conquest but failed due to women＇s resistance. Moreover, Qing attempts to ban footbinding made binding into a politically charged ethnic marker that embodied for Han anti-Manchu and anti-Qing sentiments and caused the bans to backfire and footbinding to spread further. A second set of assumptions claims that the overwhelming cultural allure and popularity of footbinding proved irresistible to banner women, who, thwarted by banner regulations forbidding the practice, covertly imitated footbinding by wearing platform shoes that hid natural feet and created an illusion of smallness. This paper scrutinizes the evidence put forward by Qing historians for the first of these two sets of assumptions. The claims are found to be unsubstantiated and evidence is offered that contradicts them. I argue that the weight of evidence shows that there was no prohibition on footbinding imposed in 1645 or at any time during the Manchu conquest, and that a 1664 proposal to ban footbinding was withdrawn before it could be implemented, for reasons misunderstood by historians offootbinding. Therefore there could have been no ＂resistance＂ by Han women or men to a ban on footbinding, and claims that footbinding became a politically charged ethnic marker of anti-Qing sentiment in the seventeenth century are groundless. With regard to the second set of assumptions, I provide evidence in a separate paper to be published elsewhere that banner women had distinctive roles and fashions uninfluenced by the culture of footbinding, and that in Beijing and the Northeast Manchu styles were emulated by Han, not vice versa.
