Cutting Carving, Poisoning: The Social Drama of Lacquer Craft in the Great Ming

This project explores the social drama of lacquer artisans’ daily work in the Ming period. What technical mistakes could they make during their daily routines? How did work damage their health? What did they consider the biggest threats to their profession, and which strategies did they devise to effectively deal with them? How did lacquer artisans regulate labor and technique when dealing with customers, especially concerning issues of counterfeit, archaism, reputation, and commission? How did they envision and situate their work within the cosmological epistemology popular during the Ming period? To address these questions, the project draws on Everett Hughes’s sociology of occupations and Sarah Schneewind’s manual on the social history of work in order to excavate traces of the lacquer craft. Specifically, it examines mistakes at work, code and policy, technique and the body, guilty knowledge and dirty work, cross-generational transfer of artisanship, and artisans’ ecological awareness. Primary materials include the eighteenth-century handwritten copy of a rare manuscript Records of Lacquering (Xiushilu 髹飾錄, dated 1567–1572, edited and annotated 1625), lacquered objects and structures, local gazetteers, household encyclopedias, and paintings and prints of Ming social spaces. Additionally, environmental statistics, as reconstructed in recent geophysical research, provide crucial insight into the ecologies of lacquer trees and lacquering processes. Connecting the histories of art, technology, and environment, the project seeks to shed light on the neglected agency of lacquer artisans, seeing the labor of lacquering as social dynamics beyond the production of art and commodities. By doing so, the project will contribute to destabilizing historical research’s analytical hierarchies on work and knowledge, foregrounding the agency of ordinary people who actually sustained the “Great Ming.”