Wang Di: Everyone is a historian, and we use records to fight against forgetting Noon interview
Interview丨Huang Peijian
In the world of history, Wang Di is an alternative. When the main theme of the historiography was still the history of the dynasties, emperors and generals, and grand events, Wang Di went to the people, and he did research in the teahouse and collected hand-copied newspapers. The topics of others are getting bigger and bigger, but he seems to be holding a microscope, constantly narrowing his research horizons: from regional studies in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, to the street culture of Chengdu, to daily life and ordinary people such as teahouses and robe brothers.
However, if we look at it from a different perspective, Wang Di has actually been helping Chinese historiography open up new horizons and new territories. He grew up in Chengdu, studied and taught at Sichuan University in the 80s, went to the United States in 1991 for a Ph.D., then taught in the history department of Texas A&M University, and returned to teach at the University of Macau in 2015. Standing at the forefront of the development of global historiography, Wang Di has made many people discover through decades of writing and teaching that there are more topics worthy of research in addition to big people and events, such as the urban public spaces that have emerged in Wuhan and Chengdu, such as the small people in the cracks of history, such as the symbols and rituals in daily life such as clothing, food, housing and transportation. He strongly recommends microhistory classics such as "Cheese and Maggots", "Slaughtering Cats" and "The Return of Martin Gale" to Chinese readers, and consciously uses anthropology, political science, cultural studies, architecture and other methods in his writing to write interdisciplinary works.
In her 2006 book, Street Culture, which explores public space, the interaction between the lower classes and local politics in Chengdu during the late Qing and Republican periods, won the American Society for Urban History Best Book Award. Published in the 2010s, Teahouses in English and Chinese explores how local cultures, represented by teahouses, resist the infiltration of national culture. In 2018, Wang Di published "Brother Pao", which can be called the first work of Chinese microhistory, and the story centered on Brother Pao Lei Mingyuan shows the customs and economic and political ecology of the western Sichuan Plain.
In Beijing before the cold wave fell, I chatted with Wang Di in a café at noon, discussing the possibilities and imagination of historical research in the still warm sunshine. Happily, he is working on a new series, the "Brother Pao" trilogy. After more than 30 years of research, he has amassed a steady stream of ideas and inspiration, and will continue to publish more works in the future.
What is the research value of the teahouse?
Noon: A lot of people do historical research, and they focus on big people and big events. Why do you pay attention to the theme of the teahouse, which has neither typical characters nor a story? Is the teahouse really that valuable for research?
Wang Di: The New Historiography Conference was recently held in Xiangshan, and the theme of my speech was why teahouses are worth studying.
First of all, the teahouse is a microcosm, and everything that happens in the middle of the teahouse actually reflects the big world outside.
Second, as a public space, the teahouse has always been a place where local and national cultures play a game. From the end of the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China to today, many people think that chatting in the teahouse is empty talk and a waste of time. Chiang Kai-shek once said that if we had used the time wasted in the teahouse to make a revolution, the revolution would have succeeded long ago. Therefore, in the past few decades, despite the rolling waves in the tea bowl and the changes on the tea table, the tea guests have made great contributions to the final victory of daily culture. In 1942, there was an article in the "West China Evening News" that wrote: "My generation eats idle tea, although there is no great achievement, but it does not hurt loyalty... No gambling, no drinking, no theater, no prostitution, and eating a bowl of tea is also the last way for the poor. ”
Third, the teahouse is not only a place to drink tea, but also a place for secret society activities. Agents of the Qing government, spies of the Kuomintang, and underground workers of the Communist Party were all active in the teahouse. It's a clearing house where people talk about politics, socialize, meet, and build circles. For example, the "tea wheel" means that everyone takes turns to pay for tea, and a blackboard says that you pay this time, and I will pay next time, so a small circle is formed. In the second volume of "The Teahouse", I mainly talk about how political culture, including socialist culture, was established in the middle of the teahouse. The state decides what kind of performances you watch, whether it's quyi, Sichuan opera, or storytelling.
Noon: After the reform and opening up, what changes have been made in the teahouse?
Wang Di: With the rise of private teahouses, it reflects changes in political and economic structures. The reduction of state control led to the so-called revival. This is not only a revival of public life, but also a number of teahouses that have been turned into trade fairs where buyers from all over the world come, as well as specialized teahouses, such as those for cement, brick, and steel, where private companies exchange price information and do business. Later, the teahouse assumed a variety of functions, not to mention blind dates and reading clubs. Famous local writers such as Liushahe also regularly visit the teahouse of Daci Temple to talk to young people about their views on the current society.
With the demolition and construction of the city, the corner tea shops are basically gone, because the small streets and alleys have disappeared. The change of urban structure, the transformation of tea shops to tea houses, and the change of lifestyle, all of which can be displayed in the middle of the tea house. I talked about this change in the first part of "The Tea Shop on That Corner".
As a historian, I am opposed to the idea that we have to study important, important topics. I'm not against studying big topics, but I'm against only big topics. Isn't everyday life important?
Noon: You come from a history background, but your writing spans are too large, involving sociology, anthropology, fiction, cultural studies, philosophy...
Wang Di: My research has indeed attracted the attention of scholars in other fields, such as architecture, information and communication, etc.
In fact, my original research in China was also very simple and narrow-minded. In the 80s, when I was studying for a master's degree in China, I studied the New Deal in the late Qing Dynasty, and my reading, writing, and collection of materials at that time were concentrated in the decade from 1901 to 1911. Later, writing "Out of the Closed World" may have been a turning point, and I extended the period to the entire Qing Dynasty, covering all aspects of society, and began to come into contact with sociological works.
At that time, most people who did history were not interested in sociology or anthropology, but most of the books I read at that time had gone beyond history. For example, Shi Tianya's "Cities in the Late Chinese Empire", which is a work of urban studies and anthropology. The English version I read at the time was very thick, five or six hundred pages. Steiner made extensive use of the tools of geography and anthropology. For me, it's a whole new horizon. At that time, I also began to read world history, such as Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. I feel like I'm in a different way, and my vision has expanded. When I was writing Out of the Closed World, Braudel's concept of long, medium, and short periods had a great influence on me. The first chapter of that book is about ecology, and it is precisely because ecology determines lifestyles, economies, and cultures.
After arriving in the United States, his horizons expanded even more. When I was a Ph.D. student at Hopkins University, the school asked us to study two areas in the Department of Foreign Affairs, anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, and comparative politics in the Department of Political Science. My study experience was written in the preface of "The Whispers of History".
From 2010 to 2014, I worked as a Zijiang Chair Professor at East China Normal University for five consecutive years, and every summer I came back from the United States to teach microhistory and new cultural history, so that students could open their eyes. I am still at the University of Macau, and most of the books I take my students to read are not Chinese history, but mainly some Western classics, including microhistory such as "The Return of Martin Gale" by the recently deceased Davis.
Noon: What kind of discipline is microhistory you are talking about, and who are the representatives?
Wang Di: Karel Ginzburg, a representative of microhistory, believes that in the literature, the lower classes of the people have never had their own voices, and their thoughts and consciousness are all written by the recorders. He wrote "Cheese and Maggots" in search of the voices of the people.
In the early 1960s, in Udine, Italy, Ginzburg read a case from a compilation of 18th-century Inquisition judges. The defendant was a small miller who was charged for having a different view of God. After 14 years of work, Ginzburg wrote Cheese and Maggots: A 16th-Century Miller's Universe.
In addition to Carlo Ginzburg, there is a lot of microhistory in Europe. For example, Emmanuel Lehualaduri's Montayu tells the story of daily life in a mountain village in France in the 14th century. Robert Darnton's The Slaughter of Cats: A Hook on a Cultural History of France discusses the society and culture of early modern France based on folklore, autobiographies of artisans, city guides, police spy reports, Diderot's Encyclopedia, and correspondence between readers and publishers. Natalie Davis, who had just passed away, wrote "The Return of Martin Gale." This book tells the story of a legend that took place in rural France in the mid-16th century. Farmer Martin Gale ran away from home for years without hearing from him before suddenly returning to his hometown. A few years later, his father-in-law took him to court, accusing him of being an impostor, but he almost convinced the judge of his story, and the real Martin Gale appeared. Davis not only tells a vivid story, but also recreates the daily life of farmers at the time.
My research and narration of microhistory, as well as representative figures and works in this field, are embodied in the book "The Whispers of History".
The three-volume edition of "Brother Pao": An anthropological perspective is very helpful
Noon: You also mentioned the concept of new cultural history, which I feel is very similar to cultural studies, and what I do is also text analysis and literary criticism.
Wang Di: My research is still based on history, but there are methods of anthropology, sociology, and political science. Western culture studies generally include literature, urban studies, gender studies, and so on, which are covered in my books. When thinking about problems, we don't just think from the perspective of history.
I am currently working on a three-volume edition of "Brother Pao", which will be published by the People's Literature Publishing House. Each of the three volumes has its own emphasis, with its own focus on history and specific research. The first volume studies the origin of Brother Pao, and the title of the book has also been determined, called "The Order of Opening the Mountain", which feels very literary; the second volume mainly analyzes the rituals of Brother Pao, which is a typical anthropological research theme, such as how Brother Pao holds meetings, how to arrange the venue, how to communicate in secret language, and various gestures, tea bowls... These are all research topics in anthropology. Without the influence of anthropology, it can be said that there would not be a second volume. I don't study the rituals and symbols of the robe. Many of their symbols are now unknown how to decipher. For example, how to arrange a venue and what flags to plant, it has standard words. I will decipher some of the various mysterious symbols, but I may not be able to decipher most of them. Because it was secret, or only existed for a certain period of time, it is likely to be lost. At that time, it was a hidden language, and it was quite difficult to interpret. The third volume is more devoted to political science, dealing with power struggles, political movements, political struggles, and relations with the organization.
In short, a multidisciplinary perspective has broadened my research direction and enabled me to go beyond history to ask questions and solve problems.
Noon: Historical research must rely on documents, where does the material about Brother Pao come from?
Wang Di: In 2018, I published Brother Pao: Violence and Order in the Countryside of Western Sichuan in the 1940s, which is a microhistory, and the three-volume book I am writing now is another big project. I started researching Brother Pao in the 1980s, and it took me more than 30 years to publish a book in 2018. The reason for this long time is that it is difficult to collect information.
We still rely on documents to do historical research, and fieldwork is generally an anthropological method. So far, all the books I have published are mainly documents, including archives, newspapers and periodicals, etc. For my research, I used various documents, official archives, and their own manuscripts (under the sea). I have thirty or forty materials in my hands. I will analyze these texts, which is the method of historiography.
The published "Brother Pao" is a microhistory based on Shen Baoyuan's thesis, which is one of the many materials I have. But I have a bigger plan - to put the organization on display in its entirety, including its origins. We still don't know where they came from, and the first of the three volumes of "Brother Pao" is to solve this problem.
In Sichuan, Brother Pao is the Elders' Association. How did the Brotherhood come into being in Sichuan? Up to now, there are different views in academic circles. To solve these problems, it is necessary to have all the literature that can be found at hand. Now I have that confidence.
The early origins of Pao Ge are associated with many myths and legends. The Elders' Association itself can be traced back to Zheng Chenggong at the earliest, but there is no way to prove it. How to understand these stories and legends, and is there any other reason behind them? This involves the use of other disciplines. Some of the theories of the West have been very inspiring to me, such as Hobsbawm's most influential research on banditry. He studied the marginalized populations of early modern Europe and developed the concept of "traditional inventions"—things that appear to be traditional now, but were actually invented later.
For example, why the Brotherhood can be traced back to Zheng Chenggong is actually to oppose the Qing Dynasty and restore the Ming Dynasty during the Xinhai Revolution, because of such a purpose. But we can't prove whether or not it was created. Another theory that is helpful is Benedict Anderson's Imagined Community, i.e., how nationalism is formed. In fact, the establishment of the Brotherhood is an imaginary community built in the context of nationalism to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. These all involve an anthropological perspective.
Reading a lot is very good for opening my mind. For example, Wang Mingke's "Heroic Ancestors and Brotherly Nations" studies the brothers and ancestors of the Qiang people in Sichuan, and the robe brother is actually a brotherhood, which can also be traced back to the legend of Zheng Chenggong's brothers and ancestors who founded a church in Taiwan.
When we have no way to answer the question directly, we can only make a kind of historical decomposition of this historical phenomenon. This is a different approach from historical research in the past. In the past, teachers told us that the materials we used must be credible, so we would reject literature, poetry, and other materials. But now it is different, and all kinds of resources nowadays, including archives and literature, are actually some kind of text. I even make the point that archives are not closer to history than literature. Natalie Zemon Davis once said that there was a lot of fiction in the archives, and she wrote a book about it.
Noon: The archives of the Inquisition have played a great role in these well-known microhistorical studies, providing a lot of basic historical information.
Wang Di: There are many archives of the Inquisition, but since many of the complaints have to be exonerated for themselves, they are not necessarily true. It has a purpose, and it may also make up a story. The same is true of the file I look at now. For example, members of the Brotherhood were caught in prison and had many confessions. Because I have been tortured, I will say whatever you tell me to do. Therefore, these confessions are not necessarily his real experience. It can only be said to be a statement, and it needs to be corroborated and analyzed using other more information. Which aspects are real, which aspects are fictional, and which aspects are very far away from history need to be discerned one by one.
The origin of Brother Pao is very complex, and there are various sources. All I can say is that this is my family's words. There is no standard answer to history, because each of us has a different understanding of history. The understanding of history is different, and in turn, our understanding of reality is also different.
Noon: There are inquisitions in the West, and do China have similar materials that can be used as a basis for historical research, such as pleadings?
Wang Di: There's no analogy. The reason why the earliest important works of microhistory came from Italy and France is because they drew on a large number of materials from the Inquisition. The Inquisition is an archive left by the Church, dating back to the fifteenth century, and The Cheese and Maggots was written mainly on this material.
The records of the Inquisition are incrediblely detailed. The Roman Inquisition had strict requirements for the trial, and everything that happened in the court was completely recorded, including the questions of the trial, all the replies of the accused, and all the statements. Even his words and deeds during the torture, including his sighs, weeping, remorse, tears, and so on. It is the duty of a clerk to keep a verbatim record of everything that happens. The reason for the requirement for such detailed records is to try to prevent irregularities during the trial, such as inducing or suggestive questions asked by some judges. Moreover, the Inquisition was not in a hurry to reach a conclusion, and a case was tried over and over again, even if it lasted for years.
In the past, we used to say "the dark Middle Ages", but when we get into the details of history, we find that it is completely different from what we imagined. The brutality and cruelty of modern treatment of human beings and the disregard for human life are often beyond the reach of the so-called "dark Middle Ages". Thousands of people have died, not even because of their deviant ideas, but because of the whims of the great men who ruled their destinies. Of course, I'm not saying that the Middle Ages were bright, I'm just saying that it wasn't necessarily dark compared to the twentieth century. The twentieth century was the era of civilization that we thought we thought we were, but it was marked by two world wars, horrific genocides, cannibalism, and the reckless disregard for human life by powerful men large and small.
Noon: Shi Jingqian's "Yongzheng Dynasty's Great Righteousness Jue Fan" is also based on the complaint?
Wang Di: In China, interrogation records are never that detailed. Shi Jingqian's book is mainly based on the book "The Mystery of the Great Righteous Jue" engraved and printed by Yongzheng, which combines Zeng Jing's confession and Yongzheng's criticism, but these are all peripheral materials. Shi Jingqian used historical materials very cleverly, but there was no way to write them in such detail as "Montayu" and "Cheese and Maggots".
Shi Jingqian's "The Death of Wang" is also very good, but Wang's story is only the last chapter, and the front is full of background. Luo Xin's "The Long Rest of My Life" published last year is actually the basic material of an epitaph of a palace maid. He is more capable, and an epitaph of a few hundred words can write a book, which is more cleverly written. He wanted to write about the long rest of the palace maid's life, but in the end he had to come to see the situation of the court through the palace maid.
My "Brother Robe", some people criticized that it injected a lot of water. There's no way around it. I mainly used Shen Baoyuan to study a paper by Brother Pao, which is a case study, and I can only write a microhistory, and many materials do not exist. The Lei family written in "Brother Pao" may be the most detailed record we can see at present, that is, 20,000 or 30,000 words. Fortunately, more than 20,000 words record a family, which is very precious. No other similar information can be found. If there can be a record of five or six hundred thousand words, it will be amazing.
At present, we have collected dozens of manuscripts, such as "Under the Sea", which are also decades of work. Others know that I am doing research on Brother Pao, and once they have a clue, they will contact me. Only now do I dare to claim that no one can compare with me in the current information of Brother Pao.
As a historian by training, my archival digging is also invaluable. The first is the archives, the second is the historical archives, the Sichuan Provincial Archives, the Chengdu Municipal Archives, the Chongqing Municipal Archives, and the county-level archives. I will collect everything I can collect, and it can be said that I am poor and fall into the Yellow Spring.
Everyone is a historian
Noon: Did the novels of the Republic of China help your research?
Wang Di: I've read a lot of them, and I'm looking for any relevant clues. For example, Li Jieren's Great River Trilogy, "Dead Water Breeze", "Before the Storm" and "Big Wave", and Sha Ting's "In Its Xiangju Teahouse" and "The Story of the Trapped Beast" and so on. Yang Hansheng wrote a drama with Brother Pao as the background called "Reckless Hero".
I particularly like Li Jieren's novels because they can be used as historical materials. To what extent does he use naturalistic writing? For example, the name of the teahouse mentioned in the book, and the street in which it is located, can be confirmed by historical investigation. Moreover, historical figures of the time are also presented in dialect in the daily life of the teahouse.
Similar materials include "Bamboo Branch Words" that I used in my research. The bamboo branch ci was originally a mountain song, and later evolved into a folk creation, and the literati also liked to write it. It's generally seven words, four sentences, and it's all in the vernacular. Chengdu, Wuhan, Guangzhou, everywhere. For example, the monthly market in Chengdu, one city per month, the lamp market is for appreciating lanterns, and the fan market is for selling fans. One song a month, twelve songs. These twelve bamboo branch poems have become the most precious information for us to understand the moon market. I may have thousands of bamboo branch poems in my hand, all of which are about Chengdu. Through the bamboo branch words, we can see the daily life of Chengdu in that era: what solar terms and what things to buy. How electric lights are used in the city, and how women dress on the streets, are completely natural expressions.
When writing "The Tea Shop on the Corner", I made full use of literary materials such as novels of the Republic of China and bamboo branch ci.
High Noon: Any other materials?
Wang Di: I've been tracking down a material for the past two days. During the Republic of China, there was an archaeologist named Wei Juxian, also known as Master Wei. He studied under Wang Guowei and Liang Qichao, and studied at the Tsinghua Research Institute. He wrote four books about Brother Pao, which I call "The Four Books of Brother Pao". He himself joined Brother Pao and was the spokesperson of Brother Pao's history during the Anti-Japanese War. I recently published a paper about him. He provided a clue in his own research, saying that there was a record of the appearance of Brother Pao during the Daoguang period, citing the "New Theory of Salvation", which I later found out was actually called "The New Chronicle of Salvation". When this book was reprinted in the Guangxu period, it was changed to "Papier-mâché Lantern". The book was found in the National Library only for the table of contents, but not for the contents. Later, on the Confucius website, I spent 200 yuan to buy a scanned copy of this book.
Anyway, as long as a clue is found, every piece of information cannot be let go. The difficulty of collecting data is the disadvantage of studying marginalized groups. Writing Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, you sit in the study, the door is not stepping, through the online library, you can solve it. But to study ordinary people, you have to go to the field, look for dictation, and once you find a clue, you have to follow it. And what you get your hands on may be something that doesn't have much use. Therefore, from the 1980s to the present, Brother Pao's materials have not yet been completed, and they still have to be pursued.
Noon: The lives and stories of ordinary people are now also popular topics for the media. Do you have any suggestions in this regard?
Wang Di: Recently, an author named Hu Anyan wrote a book called "I Deliver Couriers in Beijing", which is very good. No one had paid attention to the courier's state of existence before, and he wrote about his experiences and feelings from the first perspective.
Actually, it is very convenient to record now, you can take pictures, you can record voices. In an article, I wrote about StoryCorps, a non-profit oral history project in the United States that has been doing for 20 years and has 640,000 people who have left their recordings. They built a small recording studio at the train station and the airport, where anyone could go in and record their own story, and everyone would tell it for ten minutes. The records are all in the Library of Congress, and NPR (National Public Radio) selects stories to tell every Friday. Ordinary people can talk about their love, family affection, or friends and their own experiences, and finally turn it into a huge database.
It would be nice to have such a website where you can upload your own voice. China may have similar initiatives, such as the Cui Yongyuan Oral History Center at Communication University, which is now the most collected, preserved, and effective institution in the country for collecting and preserving oral records.
"Everyone is a historian" requires a constant call to fight oblivion with records.
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Title photo by Huang Peijian