6.2.1 Background

Letter writing was perceived in historical China as a refined ‘epistolary art’ (chidu wenxue 尺牘文學) with distinctive (ritual) conventions. Although a sense of variation existed between historical Chinese epistolary subgenres because some letters were more practical and less ‘ritual’ in the popular sense of the word than others (see also Reference 233EdwardsEdwards 1948), in general Chinese letter writers tended to follow highly conventionalised themes and tropes and use language in an ostensive way. That is, they often followed a conventionally exaggerated emotive style, used refined vocabulary in markedly artistic ways (see Reference RichterRichter 2013), and indulged in extensive deference and (self-mocking) humour (see Reference Kádár, Culpeper and KádárKádár 2010).

The perception of letter writing as a form of art implied that experts of letter writing often used letters to put their skill on display for the reader. In historical China, the writing of epistles was an ‘elite activity’ (see Reference RichterRichter 2013: 50). However, many letters were not written by members of the elite, but rather clerks from the lower social strata who were paid to write letters for others. Some of these experts – the ones who were fortunate – worked in offices as subordinates of officials, while others earned their bread by servicing members of the largely illiterate public (interestingly, such expert letter writers still existed, e.g., among Chinese immigrants in Singapore in the twentieth century). Thus, many Chinese expert letter writers were often lower ranking literati who, however, were engaged in the writing of an elite genre, and epistolary engagement for them was often more than merely a ‘job’ – it was rather an opportunity to demonstrate their skill. Also, traditionally there was a sense of competition between expert Chinese letter writers because they often collected and published their own letters in collections, and the best of such collections became epistolary models. This competitive engagement, which can be observed in many rituals (see Reference Bax, Culpeper and KádárBax 2010), became a hotbed for ritual self-display in many historical Chinese epistles which were written by clerks rather than members of the elite (see Reference Kádár, Culpeper and KádárKádár 2010). As I previously argued (see Reference Kádár, Culpeper and KádárKádár 2010), historical Chinese epistolary experts had their own communities and they often corresponded with each other partly as a pastime and partly as a friendly competition. While they tended to put their epistolary skill on display even when their recipients were ‘lay’ people such as clients to promote their epistolary services, once they addressed their letters to other experts, they intensified competitive ritual self-display.

6.2.2 Data

As a case study, this chapter examines a source that represents informal letter writing in late imperial China. ‘Late imperial’ denotes here the period between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. The present research is based on sixty letters,¹ selected from the epistolary collection Xuehong-xuan chidu 雪鴻軒尺牘 (Letters from Snow Swan Retreat), which were written between ca. 1758 and 1811² by the office clerk Gong Weizhai 龔未齋 (1738–1811; Weizhai was Gong’s ‘study-name’ and his birth name was E 萼). This edited collection, containing 186 informal letters of varying length written to various addressees by Gong, is considered by many as one of the most representative collections of late imperial Chinese letter writing (see Reference Zhao S.Zhao 1999). Furthermore, it is one of the most ‘popular’ historical Chinese letter collections (see Reference KádárKádár 2009), which was used as an ‘epistolary textbook’ during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and hence is often referred to as an epistolary ‘model work’ (chidu mofan 尺牘模範) by scholars of Chinese.

This source was chosen for the present case study primarily because of its representative feature, and also because artistic engagement and subsequent ritual self-display prevails in it. On this latter point, Letters from Snow Swan Retreat includes both letters written to ordinary recipients and others written to Gong’s friends representing a small circle of intellectuals reputed for their literally skill. Gong Weizhai and most of his correspondents belonged to what was called the Shaoxing Masters’ (Shaoxing shiye 紹興師爺) literary group.³ The members of this circle – natives of the city of Shaoxing 紹興 in South Eastern Zhejiang Province who mostly worked in Beijing as office clerks and officials – became renowned for their skill in letter writing (as well as other literary activities).

6.2.3 Methodology

The case study of this chapter follows a contrastive pragmatic take (see an overview in Reference House and KádárHouse & Kádár 2021a): it comparatively examines ritual self-displaying behaviour in letters written to the above-outlined two groups of ‘ordinary’ recipients and fellow epistolary experts. In order to obtain comparable corpora, I chose twenty-eight letters from the Xuehong-xuan corpus, dividing them into two sub-corpora of equal size:

1. 1. Fourteen letters written to recipients who were, to the best of my knowledge, not regarded as leading epistolary experts in the Shaoxing circle, i.e., were ‘lay’ recipients, and

2. 2. Fourteen epistles written to other reputed experts in the same circle of literati, in particular Xu Jiacun 許葭村 (see more below).

In the first sub-corpus I only included letters where the recipient had more power than Gong, while the second sub-corpus included letters whose recipients were peers of Gong. Using the sociolinguistic parameters [+P] and [–P] in the selection of the sub-corpora helped me to investigate the following contrastive pragmatic question: is it possible that in [–P] settings Gong used what one would normally interpret as ‘politeness’ in a more intricate way than in [+P] ones? If yes, we may have a seeming paradox on hand because in the politeness paradigm [+P] is normally associated with a larger degree of politeness (see Reference Brown and LevinsonBrown & Levinson 1987).

In the following analysis I include two representative letters from these sub-corpora. I will approach ritual (self-)displaying behaviour in the two sub-corpora by devoting special attention to deference, humour and emotive discourse.

6.3.1 Letters Written for ‘Ordinary and Lay’ Recipients

Example 6.1 represents a typical letter written to an ordinary recipient:

This is a letter to express gratitude to Zhou Jieyan who had a [+P] relationship with Gong.¹⁵ Epistles representing the first group of fourteen letters studied, like Example 6.1, are heavily loaded with conventional honorific expressions. Perhaps the most important type of such expressions includes words that express self-denigration and the elevation of the recipient (see also Chapter 10). In historical colloquial Chinese (jindai Hanyu 近代漢語) texts such as novels that feature dialogues, such expressions usually consist of polysyllabic nouns (usually forms of address/reference) and verbs (in reference to the actions of the author/recipient). For example, the term xiaoren 小人 (lit. ‘small person’, i.e., ‘this worthless person’) denigrates the speaker and gaojun 高君 (‘high lord’) elevates the speech partner. Xiaonü 小女 (lit. ‘small woman’, i.e., ‘worthless daughter’) denigrates the speaker’s daughter and qianjin 千金 (lit. ‘thousand gold’, i.e., ‘venerable daughter’) elevates the addressee’s daughter. Interestingly, indirect honorific terms of address also exist in reference to objects such as the house of the speaker/writer (e.g., hanshe 寒舍, lit. ‘cold lodging’) and that of the addressee (e.g., guifu 貴府, lit. ‘precious court’). Along with terms of address, another important historical lexical tool for elevation and denigration is the group of honorific verb forms, i.e., forms that deferentially describe the actions of the speaker and the addressee, such as kouxie 叩謝 (lit. ‘thanking with prostration’) and fengshi 奉事 (lit. ‘offering service [respectfully with] both hands’, i.e., ‘respectfully take care’).

The way in which the denigration and elevation forms operate in historical Chinese letters is more complex than what can be observed in dialogic texts. As I argued elsewhere (see Reference Kádár, Culpeper and KádárKádár 2010), in historical Chinese letters self-denigration and other-elevation tend to manifest themselves in what can only be described as innovative ways, due to the fact that the written medium affords significant leeway for the author to use expressions that would be difficult to use and interpret in the spoken medium:¹⁶

• Various deferential expressions convey their meaning as complex literary references (see also Reference RichterRichter 2013). For instance, in Example 6.1, the author uses guoqing 過情 (lit. ‘beyond its condition’, translated as ‘despite its unworthiness’) to deferentially denigrate his own work by downgrading the recipient’s appraisal. This expression is a reference to the work of Mencius (Lilou xia 離婁下 [Lilou, Part Two] Chapter, Section 46), which contains the following statement: 故聲聞過情, 君子恥之 ‘Thus, a superior man is ashamed of a reputation beyond his merits.’ Note that this is a ‘simple’ polysyllabic expression rather than a structurally and morphologically more complex form (see below); it is not a self-denigrating term that would be normally used in colloquial Chinese sources.¹⁷ In a similar fashion, the author refers to the recipient’s gift by using the expression zhijiu 旨酒 ‘luxurious wine’ – this is a literary reference to the Book of Odes (II. 1. 161), which contains the following line: 我有旨酒 ‘I have good wine’. Similar to the expression guoqing, this is not a colloquial expression. The presence of such expressions does not preclude the use of more regular ones. For instance, in this letter the author also uses the standard elevating verbal form fengjiao 奉教 (lit. ‘to accept with both hands [the recipient’s] teaching’, translated as ‘beg your esteemed opinion’).

• The author also uses literary analogies in a playful fashion, to express elevating and denigrating meanings. For instance, in Example 6.1 he recurrently refers to an anecdote from Mencius in order to denigrate himself. More specifically, he quotes the classic of Mencius (Lilou xia [Lilou, Part Two] Chapter, Section 61), which contains the following anecdote: a man of the ancient Kingdom of Qi boasted in front of his wife and concubine that he had feasted with honourable people while out during the day, but in fact he shamelessly begged for food around the city. The section Dongguo fan jian 東郭墦間 (lit. ‘among the tombs of the eastern city wall’) is cited from the following part of the story: 卒之東郭墦閒, 之祭者, 乞其餘 ‘At last, he came to those who were sacrificing among the tombs beyond the outer wall on the east and begged what they had left over’. The author uses this anecdote to draw similarity between the man who shamelessly begged for food and drink and himself who works as an office assistant to earn his living, despite the fact that he knows this to be a worthless position. In a similar fashion, in the first section of the letter, the author refers to the well-known anecdote of the ugly woman Eastern Shi (Dongshi 東施) from the Taoist classic Zhuangzi as a humorous self-reference, by comparing his own works with the ugliness of Eastern Shi.

The above-outlined forms of deferential behaviour represent ritual self-display in two respects:

1. 1. As Example 6.1 illustrates, elevation and denigration in historical Chinese letters is not simply a polite ‘ritual’: the creative and playful way in which such forms are used in epistles represent a ritual ‘game’ (see Reference GoffmanGoffman 1955). As part of this game, politeness in the conventional sense of the word is implicit rather than explicit. For instance, in Example 6.1 it remains for the recipient to interpret the author’s reference to Mencius for himself. That is, there is a playful challenge involved in the ostensive ‘polite’ practice of historical Chinese letters of this sort – even though, as the analysis of Example 6.2 will demonstrate, the challenge in the case of the present letter is relatively small.

2. 2. Along with this deferential game, practices of elevation and denigration also represent self-display due to its complexity. The sociologist Randall Reference CollinsCollins (2004) described ritual (self-)display as a form of ‘energy investment’, and indeed if one examines the text it is evident that Gong invests a significant portion of the letter to creating complex elevating and denigrating messages, mainly through Informative speech acts Tell and Opine (see Reference Edmondson and HouseEdmondson & House 1981). While Chapters 10 and 11 will discuss speech acts in more detail, it is worth briefly defining these speech acts at this point: both Tell and Opine are Informative speech acts, but while Tell presents information as a matter of fact, Opine presents it in a ‘subjective’ way, i.e., as the speaker’s opinion. If one considers the ubiquity of such complex realisations of elevation and denigration in the letter, one can certainly argue that Gong laboriously displayed his awareness of the conventions of letter writing. However, given the fact that he was a reputed epistolary expert, it is very likely that ‘laboriousness’ here involves ritual self-display rather than the simple display of his awareness of epistolary conventions.

Along with deference, the letter also includes ritual forms of gently self-mocking humour, as Gong Weizhai humorously assumes that the recipient made an error by positively evaluating his work. This humorous narrative is recurrent and is part of the practice of ritual epistolary self-display. Various sinologists like Reference MairMair (1978, Reference Mair1984) also noted this humorous and playful characteristic of Chinese letter writing practices, i.e., this pragmatic characteristic of the Xuehongxuan corpus fits into a broader pragmatic pattern.

Along with deference and humour, the emotive features of Example 6.1 are also worth noting. Upon examining letters in the corpus, it transpires that the recipient is bombarded with emotions. Such emotive discourse is not ad hoc: the study of the corpus shows that it follows conventionalised tropes, i.e., emotive discourse in the letters studied is also clearly part of ritual ostensive behaviour. In Example 6.1 one can witness the following elements of emotive discourse:

• In the first section of the letter, Gong discusses his friendship with the recipient, by describing their relationship as bi qing jiao er geng jia 比情交而更洽, which can be literally translated as ‘being on better terms than friends’. In the corpus studied, there are as many as 124 such references to friendship, that is, it is clearly a conventionalised and ritual trope.

• In the second section, the author engages in an ostensive self-denigrating description of his feelings of being humble.

• In the third section, the author realises complaining through a speech act chain of Tells and Opines: he complains about the decline of his career, which is a theme that recurs in some form in ninety-seven out of the 186 letters in the corpus. As Sinologists like Reference ShieldsShields (2015) demonstrated, such lamentations were frequented by Chinese literati, and so once again this is a typical manifestation of ostensive ritual behaviour.

6.3.2 Letters Written for ‘Expert’ Recipients

The following letter was written to Xu Jiacun who was a close friend of Gong Weizhai, and who was the other most renowned ‘star letter writer’ in the Shaoxing circle:

Deference, humour and emotive discourse are all present in this letter, just as in Example 6.1. However, if one compares these two letters, it becomes clear that Example 6.2 – and other letters in the second sub-corpus – includes increasingly complex ways in which deference is expressed to the recipient, compared to letters written to non-epistolary experts, such as the recipient of the letter featured in Example 6.1. If one considers that the recipients of letters like Example 6.2 had a [–P] relationship with the author, it becomes clear that the use of such saliently complex realisations of deference was less related to politeness in the conventional sense of the word than ritual self-display and related competition. Such ritual challenges in the present letter include the following:

1. 1. References to history. For example, in this letter Gong refers to his own work by using the form yanshi 燕石 (lit. ‘stone of Yan’, i.e., ‘a stone which looks like Jade’, translated as ‘worthless collection, like shiny jades enlightening worthless stones’). This is a rarely used honorific self-denigrating form of address, which describes the author’s own work in contrast with meiyu 美玉 (‘refined jades’) – the latter serves as an honorific reference to the recipient’s works. By using these terms, the author makes a reference to the anecdote Song zhi yuren 宋之愚人 (The Crazy Man of Song State). According to the fifty-first chapter (Kanzi 闞子, Master Kan) of the source Taiping Yulan 太平御覽 (Readings of the Taiping Era), once an insane man found a worthless stone that looked like jade (this jade-like stone is called Yanshi 燕石 in the source) and so he valued it very much. When he was warned by a guest that in fact the stone was not worth more than ordinary tiles and bricks, he became furious and assiduously guarded the stone ever after.

2. 2. Pieces of popular literature. The section yu caomu tong fu 與草木同腐 (lit. ‘rotting together with [cut] grass and trees’, translated as ‘die slowly in the manner of plants scythed down’), in which the author ritually narrates his lament, is a literary reference to the forty-ninth chapter of the popular historical novel Sanguo yanyi 三國演義 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms). In this novel the hero Kan Ze 闞澤 (170–243), based on a real historical figure, utters the following words: 大丈夫處世, 不能立功建業, 不幾與草木同腐乎! ‘A man of fortitude and courage cannot make progress in his social conduct if he grubs for money, and he should certainly not [idly] rot with [cut] grass and trees!’.

3. 3. Sources that need significant literary expertise. For instance, in this letter Gong uses the rare honorific expression fubu 覆瓿 (lit. ‘covering vessel’, translated as ‘worthless’) in reference to his own work. This expression is a reference to the eighty-seventh chapter (Yang Xiong zhuan 楊雄傳, The Biography of Yang Xiong) of the History of the Han Dynasty (Hanshu 漢書). According to this source, Liu Xin 劉歆 (53 BC–23 AD) when reading Yang Xiong’s works expressed his concern that Yang’s books were too well-written to be understood by ordinary people; he used the following words: 吾恐後人用覆醬瓿也 ‘I am afraid that the men of later ages will only use [these works] to cover the jars in which they store sauces.’

While not all such deferential elevating and denigrating references are necessarily more ‘difficult’ to interpret than their counterparts in the previous example, in general they must have been complex forms to interpret, and a key is their diversity here. That is, by referring to sources of diverse origin and by using less standard forms, the author here clearly engages in a more playful ritual game than in Example 6.1.

In letters written to epistolary experts like Example 6.2, the use of such increasingly complex textual features as a form of ritual self-display also manifests itself in other forms, such as humorous self-references and complex wordplays. For instance, in the closing section of the letter featured here the author refers to the recipient by using the form 知許子之不憚煩也 lit. ‘knowing that Xuzi spares no effort’, translated as ‘I will know that you, sir, like Master Xu of old, do not try to spare yourself effort’. Here Gong Weizhai makes a literary reference to Mencius (Teng Wen-gong shang 滕文公上 [Duke Wen of Teng, First Part] Chapter, Section 4). This source contains the following section: 何為紛紛然與百工交易?何許子之不憚煩? ‘[Mencius said:] “Why does he [Xuzi 許子, i.e., Master Xu] have a confusing exchange with the craftsmen? Why does he not spare himself so much trouble?”’. This reference implicitly draws a parallel between Master Xu of old and the recipient Xu Jiacun, both having the family name Xu 許. As such, it also has a playful other-elevating meaning, since it compares the recipient to an ancient Confucian Master.

6.3.3 Contrastive Analysis

The case study has shown that while deference, humour and emotive discourse are used in a self-displaying way in both sub-corpora studied, the second sub-corpus includes increasingly complex ways in which deference is expressed to the recipient. Thus, referring again to Reference LeechLeech’s (1983) scalar view, there is a comparatively higher degree of self-displaying behaviour in the second sub-corpus than in the first one.

As was noted, in the first sub-corpus I only included letters where the recipient of the letter had more power than Gong, while the second sub-corpus includes letters whose recipients were peers of Gong. Using the sociolinguistic parameters [+P] and [–P] in the selection of the sub-corpora helped me to investigate the following contrastive pragmatic question: is it possible that in [–P] settings Gong used what one would normally interpret as ‘politeness’ in a more intricate way than in [+P] ones? If yes, we may have a seeming paradox on hand because in the politeness paradigm [+P] is normally associated with a larger degree of politeness. The analysis of the two representative examples above has shown that this seeming paradox indeed exists. However, it gets resolved once we consider that it was the expertise of the recipients in the [–P] settings which triggered more competitive self-display, i.e., manifestations of ‘politeness’ are increasingly ostensive in such settings.

Figure 6.1 summarises the paradox which has been resolved in the case study analysis:

Figure 6.1 The paradox resolved in the case study.

The circle in Figure 6.1 shows that the ritual situation studied here represents a specific competitive context. Many interaction rituals, including the ones studied in Chapters 3 and 4, include such contexts, but one should bear in mind that (self-)displaying behaviour can also occur in non-clearly competitive contexts, such as ritual etiquette (see Reference Paternoster and PaternosterPaternoster’s 2022 authoritative study). While historical etiquette also triggered (self-displaying) behaviour, the participants were normally required to follow conventions rather than ‘compete’ in the strict sense of the word.³²