Abstract

In mid-to-late Ming Jiangnan, scholar’s studio objects served as crucial symbols of cultural identity among the gentry class. This study examines two distinct patterns of including such objects in tombs, shedding light on the strategies of cultural self-representation across different social strata. The elaborate assemblage of actual scholar’s tools unearthed from the tomb of Zhu Shoucheng may reflect his son’s attempt to emulate elite aesthetic values and construct a scholarly family identity, potentially aiming at upward social mobility. In contrast, several contemporaneous gentry tombs featured miniature burial replicas of scholar’s objects (mingqi 明器), integrating them into orthodox funerary ritual practices. This served both to affirm Confucian ideals and to preserve cultural distinctions between social classes. The contrasting choices in funerary use of scholar’s items reveal divergent understandings and expressions of cultural identity by elites and commoners within the funerary context. This provides a new lens for exploring social mobility and gentry-commoner relations in mid-to-late Ming Jiangnan.

Speaker Bio

CHENG Zhuo is a Ph.D. candidate at the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Fudan University, and a 2024–2025 visiting student at Harvard FAS CAMLab. Her research focuses on funerary art and gentry culture in Jiangnan during the Ming dynasty.

Event Information

• Free and open to the public
• May 23rd (Friday)
• 12:00 – 13:30 PM ET
• This is an in-person event.

Please note

Advanced RSVP required.
The event will be conducted in Mandarin Chinese.