Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China by Francesca Bray

Author:Francesca Bray [Bray, Francesca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, General, China, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Regional Studies, Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9781136184291
Google: QueFIfn1sd0C
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-06-19T15:56:13+00:00

The textuality, and the easy legibility, of the geomantic architecture is notable: first there is the existence of the Carpenter’s canon itself, whose widely-known maxims were built into the fabric of the house, and the spread of geomantic manuals and of almanacs with sections of geomantic advice.53 Second, the house itself served as a complicated textual talisman to bring good fortune: matching calligraphic scrolls, duilian, inscribed with famous poetry, moral precepts or mantras of good fortune, were pasted up even by illiterate families, along with textual charms. Moreover, the use of punning allowed the translation of lucky characters into visual symbols, which pervaded house space as decorative motifs whose significance even the unlettered, women and children could understand.54

Geomancy allowed a materialist and selfish tinge to Confucian desires. It embodied a yearning for wealth and success, a readiness on the part of a family to compete against the outside world rather than working for the harmony of the community. Compared to the more Protestant and individualist trends ascribed to modernizing Europe, however, in China the importance of family solidarity was inscribed, the merits of independence, privacy or individuality were not.

Time and space in this representation were inseparable: in geomantic terms a site, xue, is also a moment. The house was tied to the family graves, and to a competitive local landscape in which one family’s energetic benefit was often another’s loss — what one might call familial rather than individual selfishness.55 The most important form of time was familial, reproductive time, the growth and prosperity of the household within which individual bodies were born, grew and died. The rituals that accompanied these events involved eating, not the somehow insubstantial offerings of wine and tea prescribed by Zhu Xi, but meat, rice and liquor that were divided up and consumed by family and relatives according to their degree of kinship. In this story the altar depends on the stove, and indeed the Kitchen God was known to hold the destiny of the family in his keeping, as he reported on their behaviour each New Year to the celestial gods.

The most prominent desire manifested through the geomantic architecture was for good fortune embodied in wealth, health, social advancement and successful reproduction. The manipulations of environment were something one owed to the family line, yet at the same time they operated in the here-and-now. Materially, however, a house was a structure of long duration: geomantic modifications were long-term both in production and effect. Although a tree might be felled or a screen wall built to deal with immediate problems such as sickness, failure to conceive or loss of fortune, by and large geomancy was not a response to risk in the sense of the immediate uncertainties and dangers of a competitive and unstable society, such as Kendall proposes in her analysis of contemporary Korean shamanism.56 Nevertheless, we may suppose that the elaborations and popularizations of this representation that occurred in the Qing, with the growth of geomantic literature and the spread of geomantic knowledge, were connected to the concomitant growth of markets, competition and entrepreneurial activity.

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