Volume 25, Number 8 · May 18, 1978
The Lower Depths
By Frederic Wakeman
The Death of Woman Wang
by Jonathan Spence
Viking, 169 pp., $9.95
The Hungarian Sinologist Etienne Balazs once remarked that in imperial China, 'History was written by officials for officials.'[1] The dynastic chronicles were monopolized by emperors and their ministers, by statesmen and literati. The common folk hardly appeared at all in these records, other than as an abstraction: 'the peasants,' 'the hundred surnames,' 'the black-haired masses.' And even if they could have recognized themselves as individuals on the histories' pages, most commoners would not have been able to understand the classical language in which the accounts were written. History was thus expressed and dominated by the imperial presence and its Confucian mandarinate. The perspective was set by the Forbidden City, where the emperor looked down upon his subjects beneath him. Rural China and its inhabitants, the poor and nameless, existed somewhere in the lower depths, under the gentry and bureaucrats who connected the ruler with the ruled.
Review, 3252 words
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