The Double Life of Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123-1202): The Hanlin Academician and His Supernatural Tales

Hong Mai’s massive Yijian zhi 夷堅志 has often been mined by scholars for what its thousands of stories reveal about Song dynasty popular religion and social history. But Yijian zhi has less frequently been studied on its own terms as tales of encounters with the “strange” that circulated in Hong Mai’s world and were filtered through his hands as he collected, recorded, and arranged to have them printed. The collection takes on new interest when we think of it this way, as the pastime of an eminent court literatus and historian, as well as a publication project that stretched over forty years in thirty-two installments and apparently catered to an acute thirst for such stories among contemporary readers. This talk will discuss the misgivings Hong Mai’s colleagues had about his activity as recorder and publisher of these tales. It will also consider the nature of the tales as explorations of the interplay between the realms of the mundane and the supernatural, with special attention to stories about women and the human frailties of gods, ghosts, and demons. The apparent contradiction between Hong Mai’s official eminence and his avid collection of marvel tales (Hong’s “double life”) is significant for the way it calls into question our assumptions about high Confucian culture in the imperial period. The discrepancy is also helpful for understanding the nature of the material we find in Yijian zhi and for trying to account for Hong Mai’s self-acknowledged obsession with it.

Ronald Egan is Professor of Sinology in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. His research is on Tang and Song period poetry, aesthetics, and literary culture. He is the author of The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (2006), as well as studies of the literary works of Su Shi and Ouyang Xiu. He is also the translator of selected essays from Qian Zhongshu’sGuanzhui bian, which appeared as Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters by Qian Zhongshu (1998). His newest book, The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China, appeared in 2013.

Co-sponsored with the Mahindra Humanities Center and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University.