The Elite and Popular Culture of Old China

July 31, 2010 – January 14, 2011

The Elite and Popular Culture of Old China exhibit featured a collection of carved seals, calligraphy, jade, and Chinese opera artifacts from the Qing Dynasty 清朝 (1638-1911 CE) and early 20th century.

For thousands of years, the Chinese people have been divided into a majority of common farmers (including a few craftsmen and merchants) and an elite minority of scholars serving as government officials. Starting in the Han Dynasty 漢朝 (206 BCE-220 CE), examinations allowed exceptional commoners to elevate their families into the ranks of the elite, but farmers’ sons rarely had the time to memorize the Confucian canon, learn literary style, and perfect the highest art of calligraphy that was thought to reveal a person’s character. The painstaking art of carving hard jade was an allegory for this process of perfecting the human mind, and both resulted in the most culturally valued product. In a similar vein, scholars and farmers each used stone chops carved with a specialized script as a signature, but only the former could read them. Thus, agricultural and scholarly classes coexisted in a symbiotic relationship, occupying opposite ends of the same cultural continuum. While scholars studied classic literature, they also enjoyed common folk stories brought to life by common Chinese opera actors with elaborate makeup, colorful costumes, and symbolic gestures. Both classes used utensils handmade from similar materials; scholars’ tools cultivated the mind, while farmers’ cultivated the soil, but each activity was an integral part of shaping and maintaining the Chinese culture that has endured into the present.