Clothing, Food, and Travel

Book excerpt: This book explores the material and cultural history of the Ming Dynasty based on the Chinese magnum opus Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan (literally, The Story of a Marital Fate to Awaken the World), written under the pseudonym of the seventeenth-century writer Xizhou Sheng. The novel weaves into its narrative, through the characters' personalities and the events it illustrates, important details of Ming material life. Through the literary snapshot of the Ming material culture as reflected in Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan, this work investigates the practices and customs of clothing, food, and travel, three of the "four major concerns of the people's livelihoods," known as yishizhuxing in Chinese. While frequenting economic dimensions and probing the impact that Ming politics had on the ethos and social economy of the period, it sheds significant light on folk customs, legal and religious practices, and the status of women, among other issues. This work aims to enrich the current Western scholarship, done primarily by Timothy Brook, Craig Clunas, and Glen Dudbridge, on Ming material culture. The book will be of great value to students and scholars of East Asian Studies, Chinese literature, and those interested in the history of material culture in general.