During the mid-seventeenth century, the Qing court undertook one of the largest and fastest translation projects in the world: the translation of the massive corpus of Ming Veritable Records from Chinese into Manchu; based on the Manchu translation of this source, the court immediately compiled an official history of the Ming, that is the Manchu-language Ming State’s History (Ming gurun i suduri). Drawing on a wide range of previously inaccessible materials housed at the Palace Museum (Beijing) and the National Library (Beijing), Shoufu Yin, in his “Navigating Translation and Censorship Rules: The Making of the Ming Veritable Records in Manchu,” examines how anonymous translators navigated the rules of translation and censorship. Specifically, Yin argues that while the Qing court sought to establish institutionalized guidelines for rendering key terms—ranging from official titles to politically sensitive content—the actual implementation of these rules often required individual translators to interpret them independently. Their interpretations, at times confused and at times creative, were then either confirmed or overturned by their superiors, as evidenced by layers of corrective brushwork on the manuscript. Uncovering these layers of interpretation and translation not only enables us to trace the everyday workings of a translation/censorship regime but also reveals the ingenious ideas of bottom-level agents.
Fast-forwarding to the late Qianlong reign (1735-1796), the Qing court bore witness to the culminating compilation of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (1772-1783), the largest project for book collection in Chinese history. This state-sponsored project imposed wide-ranging censorship on the assembled titles, and subjected cultural productions under the imperial eyes’ intensified scrutiny. Coinciding with the decease of the Qianlong emperor in 1799, the turn of the nineteenth century was situated at a critical juncture of the aftermath of strengthened censorship in late eighteenth century China and a new reign’s emerging cultural policies. Drawing on recent archival work, Zhaokun Xin, in his “Staging the Jin Ping Mei: Censoring Practice in China at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” will focus on a series of dramatic and theatrical adaptations of the late Ming work Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), which were produced at the start of the nineteenth century, to explore continuities and discontinuities of institutional censoring practice during this transitional period. Furthermore, Xin’s paper will demonstrate the proliferation of literary strategies that navigated the state’s shifting landscape of censorship.
Despite repeated calls during the Qing (1644-1911) for bans on popular novels and plays for their perceived power of encouraging the ignorant and gullible to pursue banditry and illicit sexual relationships, moralists still complained that such works were impossible to dislodge from the popular consciousness. Indeed, the frequency of proclamations by both government officials and social reformers should be taken as signs that no book ban or burning ever worked beyond a limited scope. But if people could not halt their spread, could the gods and their brutal acts of heavenly retribution be counted on to take care of the problem instead? Katherine Alexander, in her “Literary Censorship by Heavenly Bureaucrats: Immoral Literature in Late Qing Morality Tales,” explores tales of cosmic punishment recorded in late Qing biji miscellanies as they relate to the publication and performance of banned works. Punishments range from the personal – individuals struck down by illness – to the collective – whole villages burned after the performance of a salacious play. Alexander engages with such anecdotes in order to investigate literary censorship on a cosmic level, asking how the intellectual elites who compiled collections that included these accounts framed human efforts to ban literature as a partnership with their gods’ desires for moral purity.
Each presentation will last for no more than twelve minutes, collectively followed by the respondent’s feedback within the same duration. It will take at most twelve minutes for the respondent to facilitate the introductions and transitions, leaving at least fifteen minutes for the Q&A session.