The Mountain Songs and Their Context

The Mountain Songs intervened in a complex social and literary environment marked by the explosion of commercial print fed by the unprecedented growth of both population and wealth throughout the Ming empire in the sixteenth century. The Ming witnessed socioeconomic transformations that paralleled those elsewhere in the world, fueled in part by influxes of foreign trade, including silver from South American mines exchanged by Portuguese traders for Chinese silks and porcelain (Brook Reference Brook1998; Fletcher Reference Fletcher, Fletcher and Manz1995). The social and geographical mobility, commodification of print, and rapidity of urbanization that followed in the wake of these drastic changes situate the late Ming as part of a global early modernity, a time when writers and thinkers remained preoccupied with issues of authenticity, status, and wealth (Handler-Spitz Reference Handler-Spitz2019).

These developments were acutely felt in Jiangnan, the region of the lower Yangzi delta, where Suzhou prospered from its location on the Grand Canal. By the mid-1500s, Suzhou was among the largest cities in the world, rivaled only by London and Tokyo in size. Its wealth was built on a burgeoning textile and dyeing industry, and its economy depended crucially on an underclass of craftsmen and laborers (including those involved in sex work), some of whom migrated from rural villages to work in the urban center (Mote Reference Mote1973, 55). It was these laborers whose sung poems constitute the first four sections of the Mountain Songs; they take up ordinary objects such as spindles, shuttles, fishing nets, and dye stones as metaphors to express their singers’ intensity of emotion.Footnote ³ The majority of the 347 songs featured in the collection were sung in Wu 吳, a Sinitic language spoken across parts of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces and in the urban centers of Suzhou and Hangzhou.Footnote ⁴

The first song in the collection, “Laughter,” is perhaps the poem in the collection most analyzed by modern commentators and showcases key features of Mountain Songs (see, e.g., Feng Reference Feng and Ruiming2005, 320–21; Lowry Reference Lowry and Mair2005a, 540; and Ōki and Santangelo Reference Ōki and Santangelo2011, 65–66).

The addressee of the poem is a young woman who has presumably been tempted into a secret love affair (siqing 私情), a romantic pairing outside parentally approved marriage. As do other songs in the collection, “Laughter” is told in the third person but likely acknowledges the personal feelings of the singer herself—boldly positioning a young girl as an agent, rather than an object, of sexual passion (Wu Reference Wu2010, 327). Indeed, Mountain Songs records several examples of the lengths to which young women would go to deceive their parents about their secret assignations—such as in the poem “Clever”:

Other poems give advice from a married woman’s perspective on how to hide evidence of an affair and to conceal one’s passionate emotions in public (1.27a–e). In yet others, women’s sexual desire for men is elaborated using metaphors, such as “coveting flowers” (tanhua 貪花), that are typically only used to describe male passion for women or concubines:

These poems and others like them invert literary tropes that mirror the subordinate sexual and domestic position of women in Chinese society, affirming instead the possibility of erotic passion initiated by females outside marriage.Footnote ⁶

Mountain Songs joined other works in Feng’s corpus in celebrating the capacity of qing 情—“sentiment” or “emotion”—to guide ethical human relationships. As we have seen, often these visions centered the erotic, including homosexual love and concubinage. Yet Feng and some of his contemporaries, most famously Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602) (Reference Li2009b), used the term qing to indicate a much broader range of beneficial human affect whose “authenticity” (zhen 真), in their view, should take precedence over ritual prescription and sclerotic literary forms for guiding human relationships (Feng Reference Feng and Tongxian1993a, Lee Reference Lee2011, 7–8; Li Zhi Reference Li2009b). These views on qing reflect those of the early philosopher Mencius, who argued that human communities and relationships should be guided by precognitive, spontaneous moral intuitions that constituted a shared “human nature” (xing 性), rather than by the contingencies of social convention that too often overrode them (Mencius 6A; Graham Reference Graham1967). Mencius’s views created a tension for the Confucians of Feng’s day, who saw the expression of qing as lending necessary contextual nuance and authenticity to the otherwise generic moral prescriptions of “human nature,” but whose very particularity and instability challenged those same prescriptions (Huang Reference Huang2001, 48–51).

Despite the key role played by Feng’s work in these philosophical debates, he has become known primarily for his transvaluation of romantic and sexual desire in works such as The History of Qing (Qingshi 情史), which collected and reworked vernacular tales of romance, infidelity, and marital relations. Modern commentators tend to view the Mountain Songs, alongside Feng’s larger output, as an expression of elite connoisseurship or entertainment in an age of unprecedented commercial expansion. Kathryn Lowry (Reference Lowry2005b, 7), for example, has argued that the promotion of “passion” and self-gratification in work such as Feng’s was “not the cause for the growing interest in love and self-gratification…but a symptom of a shift in the economy of desire” similar to that emerging in early modern Europe: the luxury of reading and performing such songs was evidence of the extent to which even desire became something to be “bought and sold” (see also Ōki and Santangelo Reference Ōki and Santangelo2011, ix).

The implication of these readings is that Feng’s collection of folksongs was primarily encouraged by the new opportunities for elite entertainment afforded by commercial printing, rather than by any ethical attempt to showcase the voices of non-elites or the value of their literary production (Chow Reference Chow2004, 26; Lowry Reference Lowry2005b, 44, 47). However, without denying the importance of the socioeconomic transformations that enabled Feng to circulate his collection in print, we might read him as contributing to the wider reassessment of moral conventions ongoing within contemporary vernacular literature. Novels such as The Plum in the Golden Vase and dramas such as Peony Pavilion presented complex and multilayered accounts of characters at every level of society. Spanning everyday situations to imaginative dreamworlds, these works invited critical examination of ethics, social roles, and identity in late Ming China (Lu Reference Lu2001). Feng’s own stated intentions for his folksong collection likewise support his interventions in a range of contexts beyond ephemeral entertainment.

The Precedents of Transmission: The Odes and the Mountain Songs

The title page of the only surviving Ming-era copy of the Mountain Songs, currently in the Beijing Library, notes it was “transmitted (shu 述) by the Proprietor of the Inked Innocent Studio [Publishing House]” (i.e., Feng Menglong; see the facsimile reproduction in Feng Reference Feng and Tongxian1993b). This small but significant notation was left off subsequent reprintings of his work, but it marks the Mountain Songs as a specific kind of textual production: one that records for transmission, rather than edits or narrates.Footnote ⁷ By Feng’s time, transmission was a well-established practice in East Asian textual traditions, where it typically acted to preserve a culturally privileged textual heritage across time or, less frequently, through space. Editors and redactors often identified transmission as a practice through which they could both demonstrate their moral discernment in selecting texts for transmission and secure for the future the values and lessons of the past (Henderson Reference Henderson1991; Makeham Reference Makeham2003). In this sense, transmission was not intended as an act of translation or alteration, but it did endow the text with new status. In Pure Land Buddhist traditions, transmitting and circulating doctrinal texts were means of gaining karmic merit for the next life (Cherniack Reference Cherniack1994, 21). In orthodox neo-Confucianism (daoxue 道學), transmission often entailed linking readers to an intellectual genealogy identified with a specific lineage of teaching and texts (called daotong 道統 [“transmission of the dao”]; Henderson Reference Henderson1991, 11, 29; Wilson Reference Wilson1995, chap. 2).

Texts were not the only mode of transmission. Poetry, vernacular short stories, and exegetical instruction were often delivered orally and transmitted over centuries. Guan Dedong (Reference Guan1987, 248) has shown that at least one song lyric in the Mountain Songs collection dates to the twelfth century. Modern ethnomusicologists have confirmed that the distinctive features of rhythm, form, theme and performance as recorded by Feng still figured prominently in mountain songs of the Wu region as late as the 1980s (Schimmelpenninck Reference Schimmelpenninck1997, 37–38). These realities suggest that the transmission of the mountain songs was self-sustaining, albeit through precariously fragmented and local oral transmission among urban laborers. Many of Feng’s elite contemporaries documented the existence of such songs among their household staff or in the streets and assumed that their transmission to the future would be secured by their sheer authenticity and pervasiveness (e.g., Fan Reference Fan1928, 2:8a; Li Kaixian Reference Li and Jian2014, 566). Yuan Hongdao (c. Reference Yuan1573, 22a), for example, argued, “If anything [of today’s poetry and prose] happens to be transmitted (chuan 傳), it might well be what commoner women and children nowadays sing,” leaving behind the less worthy elite poetry that clung too heavily to archaic forms.

In his preface to the Mountain Songs, Feng (Reference Feng and Tongxian1993b, 1–2) offers his own view of transmission, including why he transmits these oral songs in textual form:

This rich statement requires much unpacking. From the first lines of the preface, Feng sketches a history of decline from a time when (oral) popular songs and customary “airs” were “placed alongside” literary elite compositions to the present era, “when the sounds of the common people and their temperament were no longer taken note of in poetic circles.” Far from taking the transmission of mountain songs for granted, as many of his contemporaries did, Feng worries that their subordinate position within a hierarchy of worthy literature may lead them to be “buried.”

Placing poetry within a history of its production starting from the Zhou dynasty or—as Feng does here—from “the dawn of writing” is a common claim of premodern Chinese poetic criticism (e.g., Yuan Reference Yuan and Rensheng2008; see also Rusk Reference Rusk2012, 49–50, 53). What is unusual is how Feng positions these “mountain songs” as legitimate components of poetic development, rather than merely a means by which, for example, lower classes expressed their emotions and grievances. Even the history of Chinese poetry offered by Bai Juyi, the legendary Tang poet known for his political and social criticism, reduces the songs of “those below” to a means of emotional revelation, rather than aesthetic expression (Yu Reference Yu1987, 178). In contrast, Feng expresses disappointment at the forced separation of commoner-sung poetry from literary production that was facilitated by their characterization as mere “mountain songs.” Diminishing their value led to the decline in the quality and authenticity of both folksongs and literary writing and gave rise to the phenomenon that Feng (Reference Feng and Tongxian1993b, 1) calls “fake poetry and prose” by writers obsessed with satisfying literary convention at the expense of authentic sentiment (qing).

In the face of this neglect, Feng describes his work on the Mountain Songs as analogous to that undertaken by Confucius, who was historically held to have collected folksongs for transmission in what would eventually become the canonical Classic of Odes (Shijing 詩經; also called the Classic of Poetry). The Airs of the States, mentioned by Feng in his preface, was the first section of the Odes. It collected rural folksongs from the regionally disparate states under Zhou dynastic authority and was traditionally held to be part of those editorial efforts to record ancient culture that Confucius famously described as “transmitting but not creating” (Analects 7.1). Feng argues that, despite the humble origins of these oral ballads, Confucius recognized their “authentic emotion” and effectively validated their worth as worthy literature—in this case, as part of the category of shi (詩 poetry)—by recording them for future transmission.Footnote ⁸ By recording these songs in texts that would ensure their circulation beyond their time and place, Feng—like Confucius—exercises the same discernment and appreciation of the “authentic emotion” uniquely conveyed by these songs.

But there is more at stake in Feng’s positioning his transmission of the Mountain Songs as a parallel to work undertaken by Confucius on the Odes. As a canonical text that was necessary reading for the civil examinations in late imperial China, the Odes was never seen as a compartmentalized text with relevance only to literature or poetry. Rather, it was a key basis for how Chinese thinkers considered the relationship between emotional attunement and moral cultivation, including how past texts and practices seen to facilitate such attunement might inform the shape of contemporary human society. The Odes was the linchpin of what Stephen Owen (Reference Owen and Allen1996, xiv) called “the great Confucian project of educating the human heart back to its natural goodness”; its poetry ensured that “if a person heard the songs performed…the emotions of the listener would be shaped to decent, balanced, and at the same time, natural responses to the events of life.” Poetry was seen as the form of human practice that more than any other—whether ritual, literary production, or political institution-building—enjoyed particular efficacy over how human beings could relate to their world and by extension to those around them.

These connections help explain precisely why it is that poetry—in its oral, written, and sung forms—has such political force in late Ming China and how transmission of it constitutes a political act. Significantly, the moral and aesthetic theories that emerged from centuries of engagement with the Odes and its prefaces resulted in poetic ideals distinct from those articulated in other traditions, such as those that draw from Greek (typically Platonic) sources. In contrast to the suspicions Plato raises in the Republic (596a–598b), that poetry misleads with images unrelated to the timeless and permanent truth of the forms (Moss Reference Moss and Ferrari2007), Chinese literary and poetic theory tended to reiterate a morally beneficial continuity between aesthetics, experience, and politics. In the most classic and well-cited formulation of Chinese poetic theory, “poems [specifically in the style of the Shijing] speak the moral disposition” (shi yan zhi 詩言志). That is, poems were manifestations or disclosures of broader patterns of the universe and their appropriate human dispositions (zhi 志; Yu Reference Yu1987, 31–33). To “speak” these dispositions was to express them in the prosodic utterances of poetry.

In early China, the outer process of manifestation of this zhi was called wen 文, “literary patterning,” a term later used to refer to “literature” in general (Owen Reference Owen1992, 25). To transmit this wen across time meant ensuring access to its morally nourishing features for future readers. In this context, poetry was important politically because it was seen as a device of regulation: its consumption and composition were crucially important to human community, because poetic activities regulated (and did not merely register or express) appropriate emotions and responses to the lived world. The production and consumption of poetry were always moral practices, accessible to anyone, that included but often went well beyond any specific message conveyed in the poem itself. The capacity of a poem to be both aesthetically pleasing and emotionally moving turned on the moral insight of the person composing it, whether in text or orally in the case of illiterate persons and more often in the early centuries of poetic tradition. Steven van Zoeren (Reference Van Zoeren1991, 13–14) linked these capacities of poetry, especially the Odes, to its origins in pre-Confucian “word magic”: spells and incantations that invoked a vision of the social world and so hoped to remake it.

These transformative powers were not only directed at others but also at oneself. Neo-Confucian thinkers since the Song dynasty used the careful study of the Odes as a means of cultivating in their readers the sentiments that motivated their utterance (Van Zoeren Reference Van Zoeren1991, 14). The most influential articulation of this view came from the neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (Reference Xi1980, “xu,” 1), who argued that careful study of the Odes can give expression to human emotions and speech, aligning them with the behavior and relationships inscribed by ritual prescription. Zhu’s reading remained authoritative until the nineteenth century. In Feng’s time, it was a key touchstone in debates about the use of vernacular expressions in literary works, in part because Zhu recognized the Odes as being a record of everyday commoner speech. Feng’s own plea for recognizing the value of “the sounds of the common people” relied on this widely acknowledged connection between ancient odes and contemporary folk songs since the Song dynasty. Feng’s contemporary Shen Defu 沈德符 (Reference Shen and Wanli2012, 545–46; 1578–1642), for example, notes that folk songs dating to the Yuan dynasty continued to circulate in northern regions and beyond and were deemed by the literary giants Li Mengyang 李夢陽 (1473–1530) and He Jingming 何景明 (1483–1521) as worthy successors to the Airs of the States.

Yet, significant differences of opinion existed in late Ming literary circles as to just how contemporary folksongs might be linked to ancient canonical poems. Li and He tended to endorse the view that both folksongs and ancient odes conformed to cosmic patterns of breath, rhyme, and aesthetic quality that coalesced to inspire uniquely powerful resonance with both the author and the reader (or listener) of poetry (Ong Reference Ong2016, 250–51). But their own engagement with folksongs tended to be more patronizing than ethnographic or descriptive. Li, for example, reworked ballads (yuefu 樂府) sung by commoners, including refugees, not out of concern for their lived experience but rather to develop his own poetic expression (267–70). Even for those poets for whom contemporary styles and vernacular language were critical to the production of authentic poems, such as Yuan Hongdao, folksongs were primarily a source of inspiration—a means of “accumulating a great collection of poetry, expanding the heart for poetry, and broadening poetic vision,” rather than having independent worth (Yuan Reference Yuan and Jialuo1990a, 30; see also Chou Reference Chou1988, 77).

A careful reading of Feng’s preface suggests a contrasting view, which eschews the idea that the mountain songs were valuable because they emulate cosmically universal models of poetic composition. To the contrary, his allusions to the Odes suggest an analogy with the Mountain Songs based on the marginality and heterogeneity of their expressions of qing. The “remnant music of Zheng and Wei” to which Feng likens his folksongs in the preface name the very sections of the Odes that Zhu Xi struggled to incorporate into his moralizing reading of the text. Zheng and Wei were ancient states with little cultural connection to the central Zhou order. The original singers of these ancient lyric poems, who reputedly sung love songs “from amid the mulberry forests and the banks of the Pu river,” reflected their distinctive time, place, gender, and class when they elegized subjects—female sexuality, love affairs outside or prior to marriage, and diverse local customs unrelated to Confucian ideas of ritual—that would later confound orthodox Confucian interpreters. These subjects were made illicit by the very moral system Zhu Xi sought to shore up with his reading of the Odes, yet they had implicitly received sanction from Confucius when he chose to transmit them as part of this collection. Zhu’s solution to this paradox was to declare these poems as useful only for cautionary purposes; their content was too “debauched” (xie) to be read for purposes of emotional or moral regulation (Wong and Lee Reference Wong and Lee1989).

Feng’s allusion to the “poems of Zheng and Wei” in his preface can be seen as embracing this much disavowed but inescapable heterogeneity within the Odes by drawing attention both to the erotic passion of its poems and their cultural divergence from Zhou orthodoxy. His explicit parallel here with similar poems from the Mountain Songs signals their rupture with the cultural mainstream of their time, achieved when the singers disclose both “features of [their] own personality and of [their] moral vision that were not exhausted by social reality” (Van Zoeren Reference Van Zoeren1991, 15). The specific content of the mountain songs—their sustained colloquial language, explicitly erotic themes, and diverse, non-elite performative contexts drawn from the canals, brothels, courtesan quarters, textile factories, and workhouses of urban Suzhou—challenge orthodox expectations for poetic content, even as they draw attention to parallel examples in canonical works (Jenco Reference Jenco2024, 71).

The Particularity of the Mountain Songs

Some modern scholars have assumed that the Mountain Songs compendium offers an elite imitation of commoner folksongs, rather than an accurate record of them. Yet the balance of evidence suggests that Feng was writing the lyrics of the songs down as they were heard.Footnote ⁹ He notes variations on songs to the same tune or theme, and in the rare cases where he changes a line “to make it sound better,” he notes the original in his commentary (1.47). When Feng transmits these songs of the largely unlettered in a textual form, he must sacrifice aspects of their contextual performance and local variation. Yet, he preserves their specific details, including transcribing their regional inflections and grammar with a thoroughness unmatched in any premodern Chinese record (Shi Reference Shi and Simmons2022, 83–84). In his comment on the first poem in the collection, Feng explains, “In general, the characters sheng, sheng and zheng [at the end of the lines] all follow [the pronunciation of] local speech, to rhyme with [the rhyme categories] jiang and yang. There are many other such examples, too numerous to note. Wu people sing in Wu [language], in the way that ‘tile game’ and ‘money game’ are played in just one region. They need not be like imperial decrees, which must circulate everywhere” (1.1).

When sung in the Wu language local to the Suzhou region, he explains, the rhymes of the song blend harmoniously. In fact, Mountain Songs are one of the only pre-twentieth-century Chinese sources written primarily in a regional language and not in the more widely used “official language,” guanhua; that is, Mandarin (Shi Reference Shi and Simmons2022, 59, 81–82). The collection was distinctive even within the burgeoning sphere of vernacular literature, in which authors generally “took some pains to avoid words and idioms with too narrow a currency” (Hanan Reference Hanan1981, 1). The mountain songs’ irreducibly local origin leads Feng to worry that they may not necessarily be suitable for “circulating everywhere,” in the fashion of imperial decrees.

At the same time, emphasizing the local features of poetry does not deny its possibilities for a broader moral or political critique. Interest in vernacular literature was justified by its Ming advocates in part by the undeniable emotive force of colloquial language and experience that reflected the distinctiveness of “the times” (shi 時; Yuan Reference Yuan and Rensheng2008; Jiang Reference Jiang and Rensheng2008). But the mountain songs introduce more than just new colloquialisms. Feng’s transmission of their voices suggests how the very particularity of experience, including of class and gender, can interrogate the values upheld by established literary hierarchies.

This interrogation is enacted by the poems themselves, whose singers frequently reflect on the very conventions they are in the process of disrupting, as in these two poems, both called “Enticement” (tou 偷):

Ōki Yasushi (Reference Ōki, Widmer and Chang1997, 133–34), in his analysis of these two poems, admires the vigor and bravery of these girls and suggests that Feng platforms their voices out of sympathy for their bold expressions of emotion (qing; see also Wu Reference Wu2010, 332–33). But in their observation of how deeply their actions disrupt the conventions of their time and place, we see also the exercise of critical reflection on everyday experience that Roxanne Euben (Reference Euben2006, 11) argued constitutes “theory.” In a context where elites were obsessed with knowing the most up-to-date language to truly reflect “the times,” these singers offer their own comment on the nature of contemporaneity in “this new age” and the kinds of actions appropriate to it—ones in which women have agency to pursue their erotic feelings, even in public spaces such as magistrate courts and urban crowds.

Feng’s own commentary invites such a “theoretical” reading, noting that the culture and language “transmitted around the Wu region” 吳中相傳 advance analysis of their own songs (1.16). In a lengthy comment on song 1.2, “Sideways Glances” (suo 睃), Feng applies this locally transmitted heritage of critical reflection to the hallowed poetic exemplars of Tang dynasty poetry. The singer invokes a series of carefully articulated metaphors for the expression and achievement of her sexual desire, based on tools used by laborers in Suzhou’s booming textile and fishing industries:

Feng’s commentary reads: “‘Caught up in its eyes,’ ‘produced by the shuttle,’ such reflective language is most ingenious. It is what the locals call ‘double entendre.’ This is the same type of thing seen in Tang poetry, such as the lines ‘only in spring when the silkworms die will they stop spinning / only when the candle turns to ash will the tears dry.’”

Textiles were an industry that relied heavily on female labor for spinning and weaving within the household. The shuttle would have been an ordinary object encountered everyday by the weavers, most of whom were female. Here the object is invoked by the singer of this poem as a metaphor for male anatomy, which induces a desire so strong that she is willing to forgo established social conventions to satisfy it and at great cost. Feng’s comment notes that locals have developed a “reflective language” (yingyu 影語) of analysis that names this category of wordplay and self-consciously deploy it in discussing, performing, and appreciating their own poetry. In an interesting reversal of perspective, he goes on to use this reflective language to classify both high and low cultural products—most prominently well-known lines of poetry from the Tang dynasty, widely held in Feng’s time to be a source of paradigmatic examples of poesis.

There are other examples of these kinds of reversals in the Mountain Songs, particularly when the poems invoke urban sites, whose meaning and creation previously lay wholly within the domain of elite male experience. In early modern China, it was primarily poems and essays, not ruins of the built environment, that served the imaginations of later generations in their experience of landscape. Ruins and other features of the built environment “were not identified by external signs but [are] given a subjective reality: it is the visitor’s recognition of a place as a xu [ruin] that stimulates emotion and thought” (Hung Reference Hung2019, 26–27). These formed what Frederick Mote (Reference Mote1973, 53) called “ideological tumuli,” reproduced in provincial and urban gazetteers to serve as historical records of local geography. By the late Ming, Suzhou was not only a dominant commercial and cultural urban center throughout East Asia but was also arguably one of the most-elegized cities in the Chinese literary imagination. The reality of its built environment was conveyed in historical records not through a list of facts about its material existence but through extracts from literary works that elegized or invoked it (53).

Insofar as it was texts, not physical remains, that stood as guideposts for remembrance of the past (Wang Reference Wang, Zeitlin and Liu2003, 488), the Mountain Songs do nothing less than reconstruct the urban geography of Suzhou from a non-elite—and often female—point of view. The poems contain few mentions of the “towers, terraces, kiosks and pavilions” that most often prompted orthodox Confucian literary production on themes of nostalgia or emotional transcendence (494–95), and they very rarely focus on the past understood as a collective civilizational enterprise. Instead, they ponder quotidian objects and unexpected features of the built environment, many of them specific to Suzhou and its textile industries, to express a range of feelings—including but going well beyond sexual desire—that would be denied them in conventional society.Footnote ¹⁰

For example, the famous Suzhou landmark Tiger Hill, whose short slopes are covered in centuries of literati calligraphy and poetry that “literally inscribe” it as a meaningful landscape (Milburn Reference Milburn2009; for examples, see Wang Reference Wang1990, 493), is reclaimed instead as a metaphor for a woman’s skills at seduction:

Here Tiger Hill is commemorated for its ability to gain fame despite its size—comparing favorably to the skills of a woman imposing her sexual will. In another poem, a daughter compares herself to a thief escaping from a police station, using lies to achieve her freedom despite the watchful eyes of the “guards”; that is, her mother (1.20). Another describes two unmarried people as being “just like a school and a cooperage facing each other / Students read books on one side, and coopers bind barrels on another” (3.69A). This poem has been interpreted as a lament about the shared loneliness of an unmarried pair of young people (Ōki Reference Ōki2011, 16). Yet it might also be read as an observation about geographical space and its class features: the working classes of Suzhou labor in spaces directly adjacent to those occupied by the elite but remain permanently separated from them.

The poems also contain some reflection of the constraints on young lovers who live in conditions of poverty, as in “My Mother’s Cough”:

Living in a shack so small (or with walls so thin) that a cough could startle a lover climbing in the window, the singer of this poem laments the impoverishments of a built environment that, like her romance, will never achieve the solidity or transcendence of a Buddhist temple. In this poem and in others, gates, windows and doorways are figured not as sites of public commemoration but as liminal spaces where unorthodox feelings can be expressed. In “Resuming Relations,” a couple closes the door on their bedchamber as a means of assuaging their anger, allowing the “traffic” of their feelings to resume like “a newly retiled road” (3.79). In “No Lover,” a girl stands beside a window gazing at a lone wild goose outside, expressing bitterness at her solitude “like a pig’s head stuffed with bitter herbs, like an abandoned Buddhist temple door without a corridor [behind it]” (1.8). In these poems, spaces both liturgical and utilitarian are presented instead as tools for expressing qing—not only feelings of romantic love but also sentiments that challenge social hierarchies and conventions. The Mountain Songs evoke anger, bitterness, solitude, and reconciliation using metaphors that are striking in their simplicity and directness.

I submit that Feng’s act of transmitting these poems is politically significant, beyond the obvious contribution of introducing non-elite perspectives into conversations that largely operated to exclude them. Textual transmission positions these poems within the central stream of influence meant to contribute to the emotional and, by extension, ethical regulation of a much wider audience—the promise of their unvarnished qing. But these sentiments and experiences do not simply mimic elite mainstream views of the world as it is supposed to be. Feng (Reference Feng and Tongxian1993b, 3–4) notes this contribution in the last few lines of his preface:

Feng once again alludes to time-honored practices of transmission: the records of high antiquity against which most elites seek to orient their moral self-cultivation are here positioned alongside “what circulates among the common people.” But arguably these records are supplanted by the divergent experiences, landscapes, and emotional expressions offered by the commoners, who are here portrayed as providing compelling material for “discussing the world” and having knowledge of it. This material is constituted by their qing, whose “instability” many late Ming elites recognized as an inextricable part of moral well-being but tried to contain within the terms of an existing Confucian discourse—particularly the “nature” (xing 性) that Zhu Xi and other neo-Confucians identified with tranquility and moral order (Huang Reference Huang2001, 50). In contrast, Feng suggests that far from being containable by existing Confucian moral prescriptions, qing in fact “exposes” this “orthodoxy” (mingjiao 名教) as “false medicine.”

Significantly, in this preface, as well as his interlinear commentary, Feng attributes this accomplishment to the songs themselves, not to his work recording them. Transmitting this material situates it alongside elite modes of writing and further provincializes its content; yet transmission itself is a mode that amplifies, rather than displaces, what the songs were already doing. It is not an act that intends to translate or revise, but simply to forestall the likely oblivion of these self-sustaining, powerful moral statements. True to form, Feng goes on to show how the mountain songs offer a further interrogation even of the nature and site of transmission itself.

The Precarity and Power of Transmission

Transmission and concerns about its failure were key topics of conversation among Feng’s contemporaries, most prominently among Feng’s fellow devotees of vernacular literature. The very particularity of such vernacular speech led to worries about the extent to which quality—and not only timeliness—should play a role in the assessment of literature and its potential for transmission. Li Zhi (Reference Li, Jianye and Dai2009a, 324), for example, resolves these tensions by claiming that only good literature will endure through time:

Here Li argues that the assessment of such quality “rises and falls with the times” but insists that assessments of quality will “flow down to later eras.” The quality of literature, although it requires “weighing up” in each era, would nevertheless be self-evident and enduring. On this view, transmission was not so much an act of passing forward or documentation but an automatic process of discovery. The innate brilliance of a worthy literary work will ensure its transmission through time.

Li’s optimism fails to consider how much the transmission of a literary work depends on the resources and prestige of an author, rather than merely on its self-evident aesthetic qualities. Feng’s preface and commentaries to the Mountain Songs present transmission differently, as enmeshed in a precarious act of co-dependence and resonance that relies crucially on the particularities of its time and place, rather than the self-evidence of its literary quality. As Feng notes, the Mountain Songs mirror the Odes in just how narrowly they avoided historical oblivion—and Feng mirrors Confucius in just how judiciously his act of transmission averted that loss. His comparison suggests further that their oral circulation, in heterogeneous and always changing forms at the margins of society that reflect the everyday concerns of their singers, is evidence of their precarity but not their ephemerality. That the mountain songs nearly escape notice is a result of a historic, systematic classification of non-elite poetic composition as being unworthy of the category of literature.

Feng’s approach expands on views like that of his contemporary Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568–1610), who argued that talent alone was insufficient to ensure that the sublimity of a literary work would be recognized (Yuan Reference Yuan and Jialuo1990b, 11). Like Feng, Yuan (Reference Yuan1935, 32–33; Reference Yuan and Jialuo1990b) was concerned to show that “the times”—the historical circumstances and contingencies of any given era, including its colloquial language—played an important role in securing the emotional response of any given audience to a work of literature. But Feng goes further to specify that it is social hierarchies, not only a vague historical context, which prevent the transmission of work by non-elites and foreclose the possibility of its moral service. Feng’s preface indicates that these mountain songs, excluded as they are from elite consideration, are thus also excluded from the resources and prestige—in other words, from the hierarchies of power—that secure the perpetuity of other forms of (in his view, less worthy) literary expression. When Feng’s preface narrates the history of separation between elite literati literature and the songs of laborers and commoners, he identifies these vast inequalities of power.

The mountain songs, like many of those included in the Shijing, were endangered because they emerged from an unlettered vernacular culture, prevented not only by its inherent orality but also its “vulgarity” (su 俗) from entering the transmitted textual record. Late Ming aesthetic tastes associated vulgarity with a certain unwholesomeness of content, which the sexual themes of the Mountain Songs certainly exemplified. But as James Cahill (Reference Cahill1978, 191) pointed out, vulgarity was also associated by elites with a portrayal of lower-class life, “which could suggest uncomfortably that the poor were not really so contented and picturesque as they preferred to believe.” The stigma of vulgarity directly influenced transmission, because elites did not consider paintings or literary works that considered such subjects to be worthy of inclusion in personal art collections or libraries.Footnote ¹¹ In painting, only one example thematizing lower-class subjects from the late imperial period remains extant: the “virtually unprecedented” depiction of beggars and street people (liu min 流民) by Feng’s fellow Suzhou native, Zhou Chen 周臣 (c. 1455–1536; see Bianchi Reference Bianchi, Asie(S) and Laureillard2017, 248).

Poems were more likely than paintings to deviate from standard sentimentalized tropes in depicting the privation and hardship of non-elites, but rarely do these tribulations appear in commoners’ own words. When oral poetry does present these voices, they strike much closer to the centers of literary orthodoxy than could other forms of vernacular literature, such as dramas, novels, or jokebooks. In terms of genre, prominence, and depth of genealogy, poetry’s continuity with an existing Chinese literary heritage made the mountain songs’ focus on unwelcome, vulgar subjects—not only sexual desire but also the disappointments, sorrow, and anxieties of underclass life—both particularly prominent and especially uncomfortable. Feng acknowledges this reality when he reads transmission as a process that demands the mobilization of specific economic and social resources, rather than an inevitable outcome accruing to works that bear universal markers of inherent quality. It is thus always tied to its time and place because it cannot be automatically linked to a chain of inheritance or be sustained spontaneously by virtue of some self-evident quality.

These themes find expression in the mountain songs themselves, particularly in those poems that elegize female body experience, including the sensations of orgasm, menstruation, and pregnancy. A series of seven poems on “pregnancy” that conclude Section 1 introduces the anxieties of women grappling with the possibility of pregnancy resulting from an extramarital affair, as well as the unwanted physiological changes brought about by a growing baby. This series of poems are remarkable for their female point of view, exploring the physiological experience of pregnancy and the diversity of emotions that may accompany it: fear, anxiety, hope, and sorrow. But the poems also present women’s experiences as allegories of the precarity and risk of transmission: things are left behind under circumstances that do not bode well for their fate.

In one poem in this series, a mother-to-be meditates on the ugliness of the written character for pregnancy, yun 孕:

The poem uses an observation about two components of the character for pregnancy, yun 孕—comprising the characters for “child” (zi 子) below and “breast” (nai 奶) above—to suggest that writing something down fails to match the lived experience it is meant to convey. Alternatively, the poem indicates the physical burden of pregnancy in bearing the overlarge child beneath a swelling chest. Both readings warn of different sacrifices made in the act of transmission: in one, committing experience to writing formally records its reality but can only gesture toward its felt experience; in the other, bearing the weight of posterity exerts a physical cost. Another poem in the series grapples with the sorrow of having to give up a child, that which “flows forth (fengliu 風流), transmitted (chuan 傳) by a secret lover” (1.32e). Here the baby is described in terms often used to explain the transmission of literary influences, which flow like water from one generation to another. But unfortunately, the mother has “no husband to rely on” and so must drown her baby in a lotus pond. This poem speaks of the precarity of transmission when its sentiments—however authentic—do not find adequate sustenance in the social or economic conditions of their time.

Like the “ballads of farmers” Feng mentions in his preface, both poems suggest that transmission—of life, of texts, or of experience—is less about the quality of what is transmitted or even human desire for it, and more about the circumstances under which that content might be sustained. These poems sung from a female point of view, moreover, lead us to consider the additional difficulty of conveying female perspectives and experiences. They elegize experiences of women whose own stories of transmission—of quite literally birthing posterity—are jagged, uncertain, and beset by sometimes insurmountable burdens. Their children, like their literary creations, exist outside the socially supported institutions of patrilineage and have little hope of survival.

Feng seems to offer some hope, however, in his comments on the poem immediately following the “pregnancy” series. Titled “Not Pregnant,” this poem records the lament of parents in a secret love affair who cannot conceive (whether with each other or with their respective spouses is not clear). The couple declare that their “secret love can exceed the breadth of the skies” but worry that they “have no son or daughter to burn incense for us after our death… , We have hugely wasted [these] two or three years” (1.33). In his comment on the poem, however, Feng restates their dilemma: “‘We have hugely wasted these two or three years’—but then you have no scars to turn into someone else’s gossip [lit., scars that would goad transmission (chuan 傳) of the news by others]. In this world, you must not fear truncating the flow of the ‘seeds of love.’ Do you really need sons or daughters to burn incense for you?” (1.33). Feng here picks up on the analogy between the transmission of bodily fluids in human conception and the transmission of literary production, using the same imagery that in the preceding poems described pregnancies as “flowing forth” (fengliu 風流) from love affairs.

Feng’s comment can be read in multiple ways. He contemplates the idea that transmission is not always something undertaken by one’s literal progeny, and we must beware of those who would transmit gossip about our socially subversive actions. But he also may be asking who it is that “burns incense for us”: Is it the traditional lineages of scholarship—the conventional “sons and daughters”—who take forward our works into the future? Or is it those who, like Feng, stand outside conventional lines of transmission? What endures is the emotive thrust of these experiences, their qing, whose authenticity encourages Feng to write down these songs and their perspectives.

This view is directly articulated in Feng’s well-known short story collection History of Qing (Qingshi), where his introductory remarks present transmission (here understood as the recording of experiences with qing) as a transformative act (Reference Feng and Tongxian1993a, 4–5):

Feng argues that the transmission of stories of qing will do nothing less than change the world. Once “recorded” (chuan, lit., “transmitted”), they will stand as monuments to the enduring capacities of qing, which would go unnoticed were it not for the leverage that the act of transmission creates. In such acts, orthodox lineages of blood or text are supplanted by connections based on qing.

Feng’s comments, although they make bold claims for the capacity of qing, both rely on and subtly redirect typical expectations for textual transmission, which involve what and whose literary productions should be transmitted. These questions gained added poignancy during periods of perceived cultural crisis, the most salient of which were displacements of Han Chinese dynastic rule by so-called barbarian outsiders, such as the Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty or the Manchu rulers of the Qing. During such times, Han Chinese literati worked to preserve a literary record that in their view represented nothing less than Chinese civilization itself (Franke Reference Franke, Chan and De Bary1982, 180; Langlois Reference Langlois1980). Perhaps not surprisingly, what they preserved typically represented a very narrow Confucian vision of Chinese civilization, often defined in terms of cultural and racial purity and excluding even long-standing Chinese Buddhist and Daoist influences on literary production. These repeated efforts at literary retrenchment often targeted the Odes themselves, smoothing out their heterogeneity by removing the “contamination” of “barbarian” and “licentious” influences on their production (Mittag Reference Mittag1993, 209).

Like these more typical practices of transmission, Feng’s mode of transmission shores up the voices and literature made precarious by historical and political circumstances of unknown duration. Yet, it profoundly disrupts the chauvinistic practices that marked these other parts of the mainstream textual tradition. The ideals of transmission that emerge in Feng’s poems suggest an orientation not toward the past but toward the future—which is inherently full of risk. The pregnant singers of the mountain songs and the largely female voices who sing other songs in the collection assume neither a fluency with an established past nor a secure means of having their voices heard. They speak directly to their lived experiences and emotions in the present, using as metaphors objects and situations not prevalent in much literati poetry. When Feng enters these songs into the permanent textual record, he hoped to record their qing for posterity. But his act of transmission bequeathed material whose content was both multivocal and indeterminate—to orient, inspire, or transform the worlds of distant strangers, even in times of catastrophic loss and subjugation.