Organizer: Paize Keulemans, Columbia University

Chair: Ellen Widmer, Wesleyan University

Discussant: Dorothy Ko, Barnard College

Recently, scholars have increasingly shown interest in the late-imperial, early-modern city, but few have asked what these urban spaces actually felt like. This panel addresses this question by asking what role the different senses played in experiencing the nineteenth-century urban landscape. Not only will we provide an overview of the smells, sounds, sights, and tastes the city offered, we will also ask how different texts, from printed novel to hand-painted scroll, sought to mediate these senses for a diverse audience of consumers. How did written menus in Shanghai capture the variegated tastes of different regions for an urban clientele and why did watercolors of Beijing street-performances recreate urban acoustic spectacle in visual form for rural viewers? Historian of Europe have argued that the development of modern urban life entailed a profound shift in the priorities of the senses; focusing on the nineteenth century, this panel investigates how modernity affected the alignment of the senses in the Chinese cityscape.

  To answer these questions, this panel brings together scholars with historical, art-historical, and literary backgrounds. Alexander des Forges investigates the social connotations of fragrance (xiang) in late-imperial Chengdu through the private and public cultivation of flowers. James Flath analyzes visual spectacle through the representation of Beijing street-performances in early-twentieth century water-paintings. Mark Swislocki investigates how the taste of a local variety of peaches enabled the construction of a Shanghai urban identity. Paize Keulemans argues that Beijing martial-arts tales employed vendor-calls to reproduce the acoustic liveliness of urban street-life for domestic readers.

Visuality and Street Spectacle in Early 20th Century Beijing
James A. Flath, University of Western Ontario, Canada

In the early twentieth century, the streets of Beijing served as the venue for street performances known collectively as zouhui (walking festivals). These zouhui were found all around Beijing and in a variety of contexts—most commonly temple festivals and pilgrimages, but also at official functions and in entertainment quarters like Tianqiao. The performances commonly included martial-arts, acrobatics, animal training, songs and theatricals arranged in specific forms that bore titles such as kailu (opening the road), yangge (rice planting songs), and gangxiang (pole and chest).

  Most of these performance genres have long been extinct, but thanks to a set of popular watercolor portraits dating to 1904, it is possible to reconstruct some of their basic components and open an investigation into how they were appreciated by the residents of Beijing. Using these illustrations as the principal resource, this paper will consider the following questions: how did the spectacle of zouhui define the spaces in which they were performed; how did political, religious and commercial interests use spectacle to control the spaces in which they operated; how did the act of watching the zouhui (i.e. the visuality of spectacle) mediate between Beijing’s authorities, spaces and observers?

Scents and Sensibility: Perceiving Fragrance (xiang) in Nineteenth-Century Chengdu
Alexander des Forges, University of Massachusetts Boston

Accounts of urban smells often single out unpleasant odors, and suggest that one’s negative reaction to these odors is spontaneous, unlearned, difficult to control. This paper takes a different approach to the sense of smell and its experience of the city: first, by focusing on smells that are represented as pleasant and refined; and second, by inquiring into the cultural construction of fragrance itself – its appropriate objects and settings, modes of perception, and associated mental and physical reactions. Chengdu has been known for centuries for its flavorful cuisine, teahouse culture, and preoccupation with growing flowers in public and private spaces; in all these cases, the concept of xiang (fragrant, aromatic) plays a key role in distinguishing the truly refined from the undesirable. Drawing on texts and images ranging from local gazetteers and collections of "bamboo-branch" verses to painting albums to works of tea and flower connoisseurship, this paper investigates the more positive aspects of the sense of smell in nineteenth-century Chengdu – beginning with an urban flower-planting initiative in 1783 and ending with the conversion of the yearly Flower Market to a Fair for the Promotion of Industry in 1906 – with the following questions in mind: What smells serve as markers of urban specificity and public space? How does sense of smell relate to the other senses in the cultural production of the city? Is it possible to take the analytical approach to the visual implied in the study of "visuality" as a model for a new critical approach to smell?

Reading the Acoustic Landscape of Late-Imperial Beijing: Vendor Calls and Storyteller Voices in Nineteenth-century Martial-arts Novels and Drumsongs
Paize Keulemans, Columbia University

In this paper, I argue that the imagined voice of a storyteller allowed nineteenth-century readers to read the silent pages of martial-arts novels as if they were moving through the lively and noisy spaces of late-imperial Beijing. By examining martial-arts novels published in nineteenth-century Beijing and comparing these novels to the hand-written storyteller manuscripts on which they were based, I show how these texts are filled with acoustic signs associated with distinct urban spaces: the rattling of torture instruments recreates the space of the yamen as a site of official authority; the songs of courtesans establish the pleasure quarters as a place of seduction; the explosive sound of the whip define Beijing streets as both exciting and potentially dangerous; and vendor calls showed how sound could travel from the streets across walls into the secluded spaces of boudoir and study. These noises did not only breathe life into the verbal action on the page, they also captured the liveliness (renao) of the storytelling performance itself. As such, they brought the hustle and bustle of the noisy temple-fairs and boisterous street-corners where the storyteller performed into the reader’s home. By focusing on sound as a textually-reproducible sign of urban liveliness, this paper contributes to the field’s comprehension of popular reading practices in late-imperial China and the importance of sound in representing the nineteenth-century urban landscape.

The Taste of Peaches: The "Water Honey" Variety and the Politics and Poetics of Place in Nineteenth-Century Shanghai
Mark S. Swislocki, Brown University

This paper is a case study of the enduring appeal of the taste of local foodstuffs (tuchan) in Shanghai over the course of the nineteenth century. It takes the city’s once-famous Water Honey Peach (shuimitao) as point of entry into the politics and poetics of place as the city evolved from a mid-sized county seat into a trading and cultural entrêpot of national and international significance. Shanghai’s growth over the century brought new people and tastes to the city, as newcomers from other parts of China brought with them the foods and tastes of their native places, while foreign residents imported new foodstuffs and tastes of their own. This paper argues that while the taste of regional cooking kept newcomers connected to their native place, and that of Western food helped define new boundaries between China and the West, it was the taste of Shanghai’s native foodstuffs, and of the honey water peach in particular, that connected city residents to a sense of Shanghai and to the city’s own past. Drawing on gazetteers, travelogues, bamboo-ballad verse and local literatus Zhu Hua’s Treatise on the Honey Water Peach, this paper identifies a pattern of continuity over time in the language used to describe the taste of peaches. Yet while the language remained the same, the meaning evolved, for by century’s end the Shanghai honey water variety was lost, and the taste of peaches had become an act of the urban imagination and of the imagination of the urban.