Sociocultural Study on Singing in the early modern China

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370395
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Chinese literature
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: OKI Yasushi 東京大学, 東洋文化研究所, 教授 (70185213)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 中国 / 近世 / 明清 / 音楽 / 歌唱 / 演劇

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Songs were sung at various scenes in the late Ming and early Qing periods. I collected many materials which told us situations of singing songs at that time through this project. Seeing the images of singers in the late Ming and early Qing, almost all the pictures were those of female singers. We can find the gender unbalance.
Mao Xiang’s Tongren ji includes poems by Cao Rong, Mao Xiang, and Xu Zhijian which described female entertainers of Yu Jinquan in Taizhou in the early Qing period. Many of the literati who visited Yu Jinquan’s house and appreciated the music of his female entertainers were Ming royalists. Female entertainers were prohibited after the Manchu conquest. It was a quite rare case that Yu Jinquan preserved female entertainers in the Qing. Ming royalists felt nostalgia for the lost Ming dynasty, when they listened to the music by female entertainers. Female entertainers were the symbol of the Ming dynasty.

Free Research Field

中国文学