Recorded 1 June 2011

Translated and annotated by Anne Rebull

Lecturer

Hua Wenyi 華文漪 (1941–2022) was among the best-known contemporary dan 旦 performers. Part of the first generation of kunqu students trained after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), she was a member of the Shanghai Troupe [Appendix I], becoming its director in 1985. While she was on tour with the Shanghai Troupe in the United States, the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown led her to settle in California. In the following decades she became instrumental to the growth of kunqu outside the PRC, performing in several experimental productions, including an avant-garde production of The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭) [Appendix F] that premiered in 1998 and was directed by Peter Sellars [Appendix H]. In 1997 she was named a National Heritage Fellow for the US National Endowment for the Arts.

Synopsis

The Peony Pavilion is today the most familiar and iconic kunqu 崑曲 play, and both excerpted scenes and more extended versions represent core repertoire for the main troupes. Written by Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 [Appendix G], its central figure is Du Liniang 杜麗娘, the 16-year-old daughter of the prefect. The scene that is the subject of Hua's lecture here depicts Du Liniang's visit to the abandoned family garden (“The Stroll in the Garden” [“Youyuan” 遊園]) where she dreams of a young scholar (“The Dream Interrupted” [“Jingmeng” 驚夢]). These two linked scenes, based on scene ten of The Peony Pavilion script, can be performed separately (the two halves have their own song suites), but they are most often performed together, and in this lecture Hua does not strongly differentiate them.

These two scenes are the centerpiece of the play as performed today. A preceding comic scene, known as “Chunxiang Disturbs Class” (“Chunxiang naoxue” 春香鬧學) and “The Schoolroom” (“Xuetang” 學堂), showcases the high spirits of Chunxiang 春香, the heroine's maid, and shows Chunxiang encouraging Du Liniang to distract herself from the ennui of her boudoir.

America began four centuries ago with the settlement of what would become thirteen colonies by British settlers at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts and Jamestown in Virginia and the arrival of the first black slaves from Africa. They joined longstanding Native American tribes and settlements in French and Spanish colonies to the north, south, and west of the British colonies.

America at the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1775 had changed little over the last century and a half. Transportation was by horse or other animal on land and by sailing ships on the water. The railroad, the automobile, steam propulsion on the water and the airplane were 75 to 150 years in the future. Electricity would not be harnessed for a century. Rapid exchange of information—telegraph, telephone, radio, television, the internet and social media—was more than a century in the future.

Weapons of war were primitive by modern standards. But they included pistols, rifles and artillery that allowed fighting at distances beyond hand-to-hand combat. And, combat was a concern to most colonials. Native Americans, defending their homelands, could pose a serious threat to white settlers. So could the threat of slave revolts in the southern colonies. The other European colonial powers, France in Canada and Spain in Florida, offered militaries that could match British forces. The equivalent of modern police forces did not exist.

Cities, towns and rural communities responded with the creation of militias. The militias were modeled on Britain’s actions in the 1600s in response to British kings assertion of control over all military actions inside and outside the British Isles.

The British experience gave rise to several precepts that would shape the American approach to raising armed forces. A first concern was to keep direction of the army away from the exclusive control of an executive (the British king). The major challenger to the King was the national parliament. One element of legislative control by parliament was the bitter opposition to standing armies, particularly in times of peace. The counter to the standing army was a more locally based militia. The standing army was seen as a body of men whose primary dedication was to a national military establishment and to a command structure governed by a powerful executive.

Moshe Sharett, as we saw, called the Palestine mandate document “an open covenant” and “an international instrument.” Whatever other implications Sharett intended, he certainly meant that the document would be binding on Britain, and specifically, that Britain would be bound to implement the Balfour Declaration. Yoram Dinstein said, to show that Britain intended to be bound, that the Balfour Declaration was “formally acknowledged and reiterated by successive British governments.” One feature of the Narrative is that the mandate document required Britain to implement a Jewish national home. There could clearly not be any Jewish rights at the international level if the mandate document was not at least binding on Britain.

No sooner had Britain declared mandate rule in 1920, however, than it began to have second thoughts about the feasibility of implementing the Balfour Declaration. Arab opposition in Palestine to the Zionist project forced a reevaluation. Britain faced a population intent on immediate independence. In May 1921, Arabs staged major protests in Jaffa, Palestine's largest city, as they feared that Britain was helping the Zionist Commission, renamed by then as the Palestine Zionist Executive, to take over their country. In a plea to Britain to cancel the Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Arab Congress complained that the British Government “is already carrying out this declaration into effect in spite of our wishes.” A commission of enquiry was appointed, and its recitation of Arab grievances mirrored those of the 1920 military court of inquiry we saw in Chapter 8.

Minutes from 1921 meetings of the British Cabinet reveal concern that the Palestine situation might spin out of control:

Canceling the Balfour Declaration and ceding power to an Arab-led government was considered:

An element of the Narrative, as we have just seen, was that Britain was lawfully in Palestine. Had Britain gained sovereignty by the Treaty of Lausanne, it would have had status in Palestine sufficient to exercise a mandate. The Treaty of Lausanne, however, gave Britain nothing.

As events unfolded in 1923, Britain did not try to tell the League of Nations what it would later say in the 1947 explanation. League Council members knew that the Treaty of Sèvres was dead. They knew that the Treaty of Lausanne was not yet ratified, so they would have seen through an explanation like the one devised for the report to the United Nations in 1947.

Once the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, however, the British Government tried to fashion an argument that, were it to be ratified, it would give Britain legal status in Palestine. This was Curzon's argument to the League Council in his16 August 1923 communication that we saw in Chapter 11. The defunct Treaty of Sèvres had specified sovereignty to the Principal Allied Powers and had recited that the Balfour Declaration was to be applied. The Treaty of Lausanne had nothing of that. All Curzon had was its Article 16, whose text bears repeating. It read:

It was the final clause of Article 16 that Curzon recited to the League Council in August 1923. To repeat, in his communication to the League Council, Curzon interpreted this phrase to mean, “Turkey has agreed to accept the disposal of Palestine effected by the parties concerned.” Article 16, however, did not identify those parties. Nor did it specify what may have already been “settled.” At San Remo, the Principal Allied Powers had “settled” nothing but had only anticipated that Britain would keep Palestine and implement the Balfour Declaration if that would be agreed by Turkey in a peace treaty.

Before describing community strategies for securing safe water, it is important to appreciate the significance of water security as a global challenge for the twenty-first century. Both US News and World Report and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have focused on water as one of the major environmental concerns of the twenty-first century, while others have compared the future demand for fresh water with the energy crisis in its unequal distribution, inefficient pricing and its ability to drastically affect human societies if left unresolved. Whether the issue is security or equity, the increasing demand and declining supply of fresh water is an important topic of contemporary public debate especially in SEA and other areas of the rapidly urbanizing Global South.

The Dire Statistics

Water is, of course, the primary resource supporting life and is fundamental to human existence regardless of nation, demographics or socio-economic status. Increased access to water has far reaching effects and providing the right quality and quantity of water for food and energy promotes economic growth and stability, poverty reduction and food and energy production. Access to water is crucial to the preservation of our ecosystems on which our lives depend, as well as dependent on these very ecosystems to sustain water (UNESCO, 2006). Yet for something so important, there is relatively little of it on the earth; 99 percent of the world's water is either saltwater or locked up in glaciers in its frozen form (PWC, 2012). And while the remaining 1 percent must serve all our human needs, these same freshwater resources simultaneously maintain our natural ecosystem (PWC, 2013).

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 2.8 billion people already live in water-stressed areas and that this could rise to two-thirds of the world's population by 2025. Global demand for water has increased sixfold in the past century, more than double the rate of global population growth and the World Bank estimates demand may grow more than 50 percent by 2030 (PWC, 2012).

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ 2005 report, Addressing Our Global Water Future: “Widespread over-consumption of freshwater resources is causing a collapse in global freshwater systems that will be a primary driver in future water scarcity.”

Costuming is an area of comparative resemblance across xiqu genres. Specific Chineselanguage resources for kunqu exist (Liu Yuemei 2010), though at present English resources are limited to work on jing ju costuming, which however features considerable overlap with kunqu. Xiqu costumes generally do not reflect differences between historical eras (nor do they reflect any given period's historical dress accurately) so audiences can clearly perceive a character's role type but not their historical period. Seasons and Chinese regions are also mostly invisible in costuming, although status, wealth, rank, ethnicity, and the martial/civil binary of repertoire are very clear. Although there are accepted costuming practices for each role type, it is common for mature actors to make alterations for aesthetic or practical purposes.

Robes and trousers

• • Court robe (mang 蟒) is the most formal and high-status garment.

• • Official robe (guanyi 官衣) is used by male characters of middling rank.

• • Pi robe (pi or pei 帔) is used by imperial characters and high officials. While the court robe is fastened at the side, the pi robe is fastened at the center front. An informal robe is often worn underneath the pi robe.

• • Informal robe (xuezi 褶子) is side-fastened and principally used by young scholars. For lower-status characters, it may be a somber, unpatterned robe called a dark robe (qingshan 青衫). Serving characters may wear a shorter, even more informal robe called a tea robe (chayi 茶衣), so called because it may be worn by a serving lad in a teahouse.

• • Armor (kao 靠) is used by martial figures. Hard armor ( yingkao 硬靠) has four pennants on the back while soft armor (ruankao 軟靠) does not and is therefore is more convenient for dynamic choreography.

• • Archer's robe ( jianyi 箭衣), apparently of Manchu origin, is a less formal military garment than armor, used for a variety of characters (Bonds 2019, 142–43).

• • Colored trousers (caiku 彩裤) are unembroidered cotton trousers. They are usually worn underneath robes or armor but are sometimes visible.

• • Water sleeves (shuixiu 水袖) are extended white sleeves attached to robes, though lower-class or martial characters typically do not use them.

Robert K. Merton is known to have been a brilliant lecturer; and there exist many accounts of how he literally spellbound his audience at Columbia University (e.g., Marsh 2010; Swedberg 2019). In this chapter, in contrast, the focus will be on his role in the seminar, where he was “a very different person” to cite a former student (Cole 2020a). In what follows, an attempt will be made to explore how Merton conducted seminars, and what he tried to accomplish with this form of teaching. One of Merton's seminars has been selected for special scrutiny: “Selected Problems in the Theory of Organization (Soc 321–322).” It was conducted twice, in 1955–1956 and in 1956–1957. The main reason for choosing this particular seminar is that Merton here presented an interesting innovation that cannot be found in his written work.

The material used for teaching this seminar was a text by Georg Simmel, which was read line by line by Merton, commented on by him, and then generally discussed. The focus was on Simmel's ideas, but besides teaching the students the value of these, Merton was also doing something else, which was perhaps more important. This was to provide the students with a general technique for how to use the theoretical texts of earlier sociologists in their own research. With its help, the students would be able to make use of older insights into the profession and also add to these.

Merton's term for this technique was restatement; and it can be described as taking a passage in a theoretical work (or a theoretical statement in an empirical study), and then tentatively restate it and discuss the new version, in order to come up with new and useful ideas. The “re” in restatement stands not only for the recasting of a theoretical statement, but also for the central role of tradition and cumulation in Merton's view of sociology. In his view, you do not create a new theoretical idea out of nothing. You draw on the existing tradition of insights, which you should also try to add to.

The idea of teaching the students at Columbia a technique for how to theorize in sociology was not new to Merton.

Recorded 12 April 2010

Translated and annotated by Kim Hunter Gordon

Lecturer

Yue Meiti 岳美緹 (b. 1941) is a female sheng 生 of the Shanghai Troupe. A 1987 winner of the Plum Blossom Prize (Meihua jiang 梅花獎), she specializes in jinsheng 巾生 roles. Her autobiography, A Jinsheng in Today's World: Fifty Years of Yue Meiti's Life in Kunqu (Jinsheng jinshi: Yue Meiti kunqu wushinian 巾生今世: 岳美緹崑曲五十年), was published in 2008 (see also Yue Meiti 1994).

Synopsis

To Win a Peerless Beauty (Zhan huakui 占花魁), also translated as Winning the Prize Courtesan, is the work of the Suzhou playwright Li Yu (I) 李玉 [Appendix G]. The story concerns a penniless oil peddler, Qin Zhong 秦鍾—actually the son of a general captured during the fall of the Northern Song—and the high-class courtesan he admires from afar. The convoluted plot, adapted from a vernacular short story in the 1627 collection Stories to Awaken the World (Xingshi heng yan 醒世恒言) by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 [Appendix G], ends happily with the marriage of Qin Zhong (who has been returned to his original status after his father is liberated) and the courtesan (who as it emerges is the niece of a palace eunuch). For an English synopsis and a discussion of the divergences between Feng's story and Li's drama, see Ariel Fox (2015, 73–76).

The fourteenth scene, “The Inn on the Lake” (“Hu lou” 湖樓), is one of the few scenes from Li Yu plays that remains in the traditional performance repertoire. It is in this scene that Qin Zhong first learns of the identity of a courtesan whose beauty has twice struck him as he noticed her on the shores of the West Lake. Having stopped work in order to search for her, Qin enters a tavern by the lakeshore, hoping that he can find out more.

Role Types

As Yue discusses, Qin Zhong is poor but of high birth, and is therefore played as something between a qiongsheng 窮生 and a jinsheng. Shi A-da 時阿大 is a comical chou 丑 of a gossiping but good-hearted variety.

Recall a point from the opening chapter: The land we call China was not always Chinese. In fact, in a very real sense for many eons, when the world of Sinitic culture was defined by the Central Plain, no one was Chinese, a term I shall argue that only gains real meaning in the last millennium. Through most of the first millennium BCE, the people of the Central Plain, the Yellow River flood plain where classical Sinitic culture emerged, called their land “the courts (or kingdoms, i.e., guo) in the center,” or Zhongguo. As explained in Chapter 1, this was both a political and cultural term, referencing a large and diverse realm across the Plain that shared several defining attributes, most notably a parallel, if not entirely identical, orthography through which the literate elite shared a common body of classical texts. What it did not mean then, as it has come to mean only in recent times, is China. A range of terms were used instead by the people of the Sinitic world to refer to their homeland; as the Sinitic world gained definition, Zhongguo instead defined the geophysical realm of Sinitic culture, and Sinitic culture defined civilization.

These several “courts in the center” shared an academic culture that fostered a degree of commonality even as they remained politically and linguistically disunited. This was much like the diverse courts and cultures of late medieval Europe, where a common cultural discourse built on Latin, the shared language of the literate elite, and the broadly shared premises of Christianity provided a common identity even as they simultaneously maintained regionalized and localized political and colloquial identity. Like medi-eval Europe, the Central Plain through the first millennium BCE remained a fractious and restricted realm. The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the cultural transformation from Sinitic toward one that was to become China, from a world that was both geographically and culturally constrained to one that was geographically vast and culturally diverse. That is, how did Sinitic China become holistic China?

As a coherent and shared Sinitic culture emerged out of the ancient regional cultures of the Central Plain, beyond the “courts in the center” was a complex world of many divergent and often very local peoples and cultures.

Like many countries in the Global South, Viet Nam is currently undergoing a major social and economic transition that has three primary components: market reforms, urbanization and increasing demands for public service amenities. These three components have combined to create a development paradox that has many state institutions scrambling to create and reorient traditional structures of governance to meet these demands in areas that are urbanizing quickly. The literature on institutions and urban service provision, however, provides scant evidence to suggest how such urbanization may play out in a context of rapid population growth where infrastructure currently does not exist—a defining characteristic of peri-urban areas. Many studies focus on the privatization of public services and the outcomes this institutional change has on the poor, assuming that these services are natural monopolies. These studies, however, overlook that in rapidly transitioning urban areas, multiple water sources may facilitate competition within the market—as opposed to for the market—and keep open viable economizing choices for the poor.

This case of the city of Can Tho's efforts to provide clean water to its new residents by partnering with local community-level entrepreneurs illustrates some of the ways that the state can participate in the kinds of service provision networks described in Gresik in Chapter 3. In a socio-political sense, the state becomes an organized collective hoping to help solve residents’ problems, but without any particular monopoly on trust. As one of several providers in this market, the state—as a relatively new player in this market—must justify itself as the provider of first choice.

In this context where no clear monopoly exists, and where residents have many options for service of a wide range of qualities and prices, the state is more of an innovator and educator trying to get people to pay for a new product than a monopolistic provider. This characteristic of multiple local “demand curves” (Spencer, 2008b) points out the central issue of building infrastructure that is embedded within an understanding of the water supply choices and alternatives available to locals. Because there are several local water supply alternatives in a peri-urban environment, the context differs greatly from both an urban one or a rural one.

The previous chapter lays out a wide-ranging background through a narrative that broadly illustrates the distinct history of the South, but the event through which our narrative is framed is defined narrowly and by a specific place. To understand the implications of that narrative, we need the story. Late in what we now call the eighth century CE, during the first year of the Restoration of Balance reign period of the Tang dynasty (the Restoration of Balance reign period was 780–84; the Tang dynasty was 618–906), Wu Xing, whose identity we will consider below, organized a project centered on the Distributed Blessings Retention Dam to drain a coastal marsh. Located on the Plain of Emerging Transformation in Putian District on China's central coast in the area that in the years ahead came to be known as Fujian province (see Map 2.1), this was a complex project involving the damming of the Distributed Blessings Creek, the drainage of coastal salt marshes and distribution of fresh water through a network of canals into the now dry marshland (see Map 2.2). Wu's project was essential to the transformation of the Plain from a lightly settled wetland primarily utilized by non-Sinitic indigenous peoples into one of the most densely settled and economically productive areas of the empire. It is that transformation, a microcosm of transformation that was occurring across southern China through the first millennium CE, on which we are going to focus.

In his New History of the Tang Dynasty, compiled in the mid-eleventh century and regarded as one of the most authoritative accounts of the Tang, Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) provided the earliest surviving reference to the project, although without reference to Wu Xing. Ouyang recorded that the dam provided irrigation to “over 400 qing” (1 qing = 100 mu = ca. 150 acres; i.e., a total of ca. 6,000 acres), a sizable area itself, but later sources record that “over 2000 qing,” or roughly 30,000 acres, were irrigated, the result of later additions to the network of canals.

There is very little we can say definitively about Wu Xing. There is no evidence that he held any official position, although at some point, perhaps posthumously and probably by local custom only, he was granted the honorary title Commander (chang guan).

Recorded 11 March 2010

Translated and annotated by Josh Stenberg

Lecturer

Zhang Jiqing 張繼青 (1939–2022), like her husband Yao Jikun 姚繼焜 [Appendix H], was a member of the post-war “ji” 繼 generation of students of the Jiangsu Company. Zhang had a successful early career before the Cultural Revolution, but reached her greatest fame in the post-Mao reform and opening years, winning an inaugural national Plum Blossom Prize (Meihua jiang 梅花獎) in 1984. Her performances in Europe and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s played a major role in building kunqu's 崑曲 international profile. This lecture concerns one of kunqu's great dream scenes and by far the most bitter. Along with “The Dream Interrupted” (“Jingmeng” 驚夢) and “Seeking the Dream” (“Xunmeng” 尋夢) (both from The Peony Pavilion [Mudan ting 牡丹亭] [Appendix F]), this is one of the performances that earned Zhang Jiqing the nickname “Three Dreams Zhang” (Zhang Sanmeng 張三夢). The role she is describing in this lecture belongs to the zhengdan 正旦 type but her performance as Du Liniang 杜麗娘 in The Peony Pavilion, captured in a 1986 film, has become an equally enduring standard for the younger and more innocent guimendan 閨門旦.

Synopsis

The story of Lanke Mountain, also known as Zhu Maichen Divorces His Wife (Zhu Maichen xiuqi 朱買臣休妻), has its origins in the biography of the actual Han dynasty official Zhu Maichen. The narrative has a long pedigree on the Chinese stage and continues to be popular in various genres. However, no full chuanqi 傳奇 script is extant, nor is an author known, though key scenes feature in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collections. The story concerns Zhu's wife Cui-shi 崔氏, who, frustrated by unfulfilled promises of an end to their poverty, demands and receives a divorce from Zhu (“Divorce under Duress” [“Bixiu” 逼休]). However, her remarriage to Carpenter Zhang 張木匠 is a bitter disappointment (“Regretting Remarriage” [“Huijia” 悔嫁]).

In “The Mad Dream” (“Chimeng” 痴夢), Cui-shi learns that Zhu's learning has been recognized and he has been appointed to an official post.