Kuang Lu's Customs of the south : loyalty on the borders of empire

Abstract

The late Ming dynasty Cantonese scholar and poet Kuang Lu (1604-1650) is almost lost to history. The anecdotes that do tell of him, found scattered in the occasional notes of a number of early Qing writers, situate him on the margins of various discourses: the discourse on the strange and the absurd; that on depravity; and finally that on loyalty, for when Manchu troops occupied Canton Kuang Lu died a martyr to the cause of the Ming dynasty, his favourite qin clutched to his breast. Kuang Lu was also, however, an early ethnographer. Having injured a local magistrate in an accident, he fled to live in Guangxi province amongst the Yao people, serving for some time as the secretary to a woman general there. My paper presents a reading of the account of his stay in the borderlands of the empire that he produced upon his return, his Chiya (Customs of the South), seeking to understand it not so much in terms of what he has to say about the Yao people and their way of life, but as a commentary upon the failings of the social and political order of the Ming dynasty itself.