Center for Chinese Studie

On May 7, 2019, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia in cooperation with the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library hosted the first session of “Taiwan Lectures on Chinese Studies.” Chiung-yun Liu, associate research fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, was invited to present “Loyalty in Print——Forming and Transforming Moral Paragons in Riji gushi (Stories of the Past to be Remembered Daily).”

        Professor Chiung-yun Liu received her PhD degree from Harvard University, and her primary research focus concerns Ming-Qing literature. More specifically, Liu’s long-term research interests include Chinese literature of the supernatural and the fantastic, historical memory, the mutual influences of literary mediums and cultural production, as well as others. More recently, Liu has inquired into the entwined operations of knowledge formation, cultural imaginings, and cognition within the processes and experiences of cultural clashing during the Song-Yuan-Ming period. This lecture was focused on the so-called concept of loyalty 忠 within Huaren 華人 cultural tradition. Discussing Riji gushi 日記故事 (Stories of the Past to be Remembered Daily) authored by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), a Confucian scholar of the Song dynasty, Liu elucidated how this writing publicized Confucian morality, utilizing loyalty as an important medium. Furthermore, Liu highlighted that the print industry in order to promote sales of Riji gushi during the flourishing development of print culture in the late Ming would attach additional stories concerning intense expressions of loyalty to sate the growing appetite of readership towards heroism. This practice even extended to the insertion of high quality illustrations depicting martyr behavior which further exhibits how the historical models found within Riji gushi were continuously referenced, expounded upon, and remolded, and in turn, formed a network of both cultural and moral symbols allowing people to better understand loyalty itself and the prescribed ways to express one’s loyalty.