LADDER TO THE CLOUDS: Intrigue and Tradition in Chinese Rank
By BEVERLY JACKSON AND DAVID HUGUS
Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1999. 310 pages, $75
John R. Finlay
Beverley Jackson and David Hugus are the coauthors of Ladder to the Clouds: Intrigue and Tradition in Chinese Rank, which examines the history and art of so-called Mandarin squares, the woven and embroidered badges of rank worn on officials' robes in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. The two writers have very different approaches to their subject, and each is responsible for almost completely independent sections of the book.
Jackson sets out to provide the intrigue of the title and attempts to present the striving for official rank and status in traditional China through the fictional tale of the wealthy Bao Gui and the impoverished but noble peasant Yong Shang as they seek to climb the ladder to the clouds. Unfortunately, little effort is made to carry through this promising strategy. The "tale" appears only intermittently, and most of it is a string of clich¨¦s frequently interrupted by digressions on all sorts of Chinese folk beliefs and practices, most of which have little or nothing to do with civil service rank.
Set pieces that seem to derive from prejudiced-and now discredited-images of China mar Jackson's tale. In one egregious example, Bao Gui's concubine mother displays a caricature Fu Manchu-style cruelty when she has a hapless servant girl viciously beaten for revealing that the spoiled Bao Gui broke a precious amber and green Tang-dynasty camel. The anachronism, too, is typical of other lapses that undermine Jackson's narrative. Collecting Tang-dynasty tomb figures is a Western preoccupation, and Chinese museums and collectors only relatively recently have followed the West in placing any value on them. No upper-class Qing-dynasty home would have had objects associated with the dead on prominent display.
Having read this far, the purchaser of Ladder to the Clouds must wonder if it is indeed worth the seventy-five-dollar price tag. It is Hugus's far more substantial section answers that question in the affirmative, with a focused and workmanlike account of the Mandarin squares themselves. The heart of his contribution is a detailed description of the emblems of the nine civil or military ranks and a fascinating discussion of stylistic evolution of badges through the Qing dynasty. Hugus frankly addresses collectors and dealers, trying to make sense of the multitude of mostly Qing dynasty badges that one finds on the market today. It is period fashion that is at the heart of his attempt to assign a reliable chronology to the development of rank badges. Although Hugus admits that it is not possible to assign specific dates to individual badges, his arguments are based on close observation of numerous examples drawn from public and private collections (including his own and his co-author's), as well as the stock of well-known dealers in the field.
If one feels that there are points to dispute here, this only reflects the time and care Hugus has taken to consider the ongoing questions that dog this particular aspect of collecting. Issues of dating individual squares sometimes remain-as they too frequently do in many areas of Chinese art history-circular arguments based on traditions and certain unquestioned attributions. A badge is called, for example, "after 1850" according to what appears to be the dating supplied by the owner, and that information is then used to substantiate the date of another, similar badge. Hugus's innovative use of paired portraits to distinguish badges worn by men from those worn by women points one way out of this maze.
Neither author claims that this is an academic publication, although each provides relatively extensive and intriguing bibliographies. Jackson's includes a large body of writing on China from early in this century. With almost no footnotes, it is impossible to tell what she has garnered from these fascinating but notoriously unreliable texts outside of photos and illustrations, which are almost always credited to their original source. Hugus's bibliography includes relatively more recent scholarly sources, including articles by Schuyler V.R. Cammann, the most informed writer on the subject.
Nagging questions of reliability are raised by the many minor mistakes that mar both sections of the text. No editorial decision was made to consistently use either Wade-Giles or the pinyin transliteration of Chinese names and terms. Thus the Ch'ien-lung (Wade-Giles) emperor can be mentioned in the same breath with his father, the Yongzheng (pinyin) emperor. The issue would be less troublesome if there were fewer misspellings. The most frustrating example is k'o-suu [sic] for k'o-ssu (pinyin: kesi), or Chinese tapestry weaving, which appears throughout the text, captions, and index. (The slip must come in part from the popular pronunciation of this tongue twister to rhyme with the common name "Sue.") Such complaints are now standard in reviews: though generously recognized by individual authors, editors rarely seem to have the chance to properly practice their craft. Still, Ladder to the Clouds is in the main a solid and gorgeously illustrated introduction to a fascinating area of Chinese art.
John R. Finlay is curator of Chinese art at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.