Southern Capital: Staging Commerce in Seventeenth-Century Suzhou

Abstract

This dissertation explores the intersection of literary and economic imaginaries through an examination of the market as both theme and structure in late imperial drama. Theater played a crucial role in helping late imperial subjects make sense of the sweeping transformations that defined China’s so-called silver century (1550–1650), a period of tremendous social volatility in which the intensification of the commercial economy that began in the Song was increasingly and acutely felt throughout the lower Yangzi region. The rapid expansion of mercantile capital, the integration of local economies into global trade networks, and the frequent fluctuations in the availability of currency had far-reaching implications for all aspects of late imperial society. While historians have exhaustively documented the flows of silver and coin, the fiscal mismanagement of the court, and the tax riots that convulsed the lower Yangzi region, less attention has been paid to the multifarious ways in which the commercialization of everyday life was experienced and understood.

At the core of my study are a group of playwrights active in mid-seventeenth century Suzhou whose plays map the moral and affective terrains of an increasingly commercialized society. Although these plays were widely read and performed throughout the Qing, they have been largely neglected in modern scholarship, due in part to their unconventional subject matter. In examining the work of the Suzhou playwrights, I am particularly concerned with how the imaginary world of the play self-consciously engages with the material conditions of its own performance. Looking at these plays not just as texts but also as performances that happened within private halls, in temples, and on pleasure boats reveals the ways in which the stage was a site for the performance of commerce itself—both in the dramatization of buying and selling and in the buying and selling of this dramatization of buying and selling. It was precisely through these nested performances in which virtually every strata of society was implicated as producers and consumers that the abstractions of commerce were made legible and the imagination of new loci of power outside the state was made possible. This dissertation asks not only how money, merchants, and commerce were represented on stage, but also how drama itself—its material history, its performance contexts, its conventions and language—informed understandings of money, merchants, and commerce.