The 2024/25 Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture
with guest speaker Professor Sophie Volpp (UC Berkeley)
Lecture: Journey into Exile: The Rare Books of the National Peiping Library, 1933–1941
In fall of 1941, the National Library of Peiping, now the National Library of China, sent 100 crates of rare books to the Library of Congress and the University of California for safe keeping. These books were the rarest of the rare, many from the Ming dynasty imperial library. They had been hidden in Shanghai since 1933, when the Ministry of Education ordered them to be safeguarded from Japanese troops. The shipment of these books to the United States in 1941 took place just weeks before Pearl Harbor and was the result of a year of increasingly fraught negotiation between the National Library, the Ministry of Education, and the Department of State.
In this research, I pair the published letters between the principal figures in this negotiation—Hu Shih, Chinese Ambassador to the U.S.; Wang Zhongmin, bibliographer of the National Library; and Yuan Tung Li, Director of the National Library—with unpublished files from the archives of the Department of State as well as the University of California. I piece together the story of why the shipment of these rare books encountered such perilous delay, how they finally made it to the United States, and ask what it might mean for rare books to be in exile.
Date & Time:
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Reception: 5:00pm-6:00pm (PDT)
Lecture: 6:00pm-8:00pm (PDT)
Location:
Asian Centre Auditorium, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver
(view map)
Presented in English
Free & open to the public
Events in Conjunction
Research Seminar: Why Should We Care About Literary Objects?
It seems self-evident that we should care about historical objects that bear the marks of use. But why should we care about literary objects? In this seminar, I take as a case study the relation between Cao Xueqin’s mid-eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone and the scenic illusion paintings (tongjing hua) of the Forbidden City. Scholars of Chinese art history have understood these paintings to be mimetic and described them as employing a monofocal perspectivalism that creates a three-dimensional verisimilitude.
In this seminar, we will consider the way in which The Story of the Stone itself thinks of perspectivalism, and use that information to reread both chapter 41 of The Story of the Stone and the scenic illusion paintings. Ultimately, this work will help us to rethink the conceptions of verisimilitude as well as mimetic illusion. How can the metamorphosis of space—and in particular the dynamic appearance and disappearance of recessionary spaces—help us reconceptualize the problem of reference? How can it help us reconsider the relation of vernacular fiction to the world beyond its pages?
Date & Time:
Friday, April 11, 2025
2:00pm – 4:00pm (PDT)
Location:
Asian Centre Auditorium, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver
(view map)
Presented in English
Free & open to the public
A reading to prepare in advance will be circulated to participants who RSVP.
Speaker
Sophie Volpp is professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature, and Faculty Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley. She works primarily on Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries. She is the author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard, 2011) and of The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022), and has translated the work of pre-modern women poets and dramatists.
About the Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture
The Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lectures are made possible by the generous support of Messrs. Alex and Chi Shum Watt in honour of their mother, the late Mrs. Wat, and her passion for Chinese literature and culture.
