Full Description
An innovative account of listening and empire-building in 17th- and 18th-century China.
The Emperor's New Epistemology explores how listening shaped knowledge and empire-building in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China. As the Manchu dynasty expanded deep into Inner Asian territories deemed foreign by the majority-Han population, the Qing Empire's musical culture encompassed the sounds of Mongols, Uyghurs, and Tibetans, as well as Western music brought by Jesuit and other Christian missionaries. Lester Hu reveals that this diversity transformed not only Qing court culture but the very grounds on which knowledge and power could be established.
In one revealing episode from 1692, the Kangxi Emperor (1654-1722) misinterpreted a key term of Classical Chinese music after studying European music with the Jesuits. Hu situates this anecdote within the political, social, and epistemic shifts that transformed late-imperial China. As Hu shows, listening was an instrument of Qing imperial authority: Knowledge about music, language, and even the universe could only be verified through the emperor's ears. Furthermore, listening facilitated new theories of empirical knowledge, which both lent themselves to Qing-imperial ideology and generated new epistemic tensions. By exploring their echoes in similar shifts in early modern Europe, Hu's book brings a global perspective to the study of music in the early modern world and reconsiders the transcendental ground on which such comparative and intercultural knowledge is possible.
Contents
Note on Names and Latinizations
Introduction
Act I. Calendar
Chapter 1. Pitch Pipes and Calendar: An Empirical Promise
Chapter 2. Any Manifest Sign: The Calendar Case Revisited
Chapter 3. From Shadow to Solfège: European Music Against Itself
Act II. Pitch Pipes
Chapter 4. The Emperor's New Theory: A Two-Decade Lesson in Epistemology
Chapter 5. Examining Sounds: Between Absolute Silence and Absolute Sound
Chapter 6. "Modern Music Is Just Like Ancient Music": A Tale of Two Princes
Act III. Sounds
Chapter 7. Excavating the Voice: The Aural Turn of Philology
Chapter 8. Unified in Phonography: Listening as Imperial Ideology
Epilogue: Back to Europe
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Glossary of Latinizations and Chinese-Manchu Translations
Translations of Book Titles
Notes
Bibliography
Index
