Purposes For The Scholar-Official To Travel In China

There are two purposes for the scholar-official to travel. On one hand, to fulfill their civil service obligations, they had to travel to different places for government services, even crossed China for several times in their lives. On the other hand, Wu also observed that, since the Ming time, more and more scholar-officials took the advantage of traveling for the reason of government service and initiated their own casual style of traveling during their leisure time. Nevertheless, in the late-Ming period, their leisure traveling sometimes could be quite extravagant. Besides indispensable transport, such as palanquins and boats, and other necessities, the elite class sometimes carried as many consumer goods as they wanted to use on the road, which was all delivered by their servants. Zhang Dai

(1597-1679), who was raised in a wealthy scholar-official family in Shaoxing, had recorded the objects that would be brought during the journey, such as food including dessert, appetizers and rice, dishes, incense burner, wine, and tea.

Besides servants who delivered these materials, some courtesans would also accompany the scholar-officials on the trip. Therefore, this style of traveling had prevented the elite class from a long-term adventurous style of traveling, and limited them in the short-term ones that usually not too far from the urban areas. As a result, the tourist sites within the Jiangnan region, particularly the places around the cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou such as the Mount Hui, the Tiger Hill (Huqiu) and the West Lake, became extremely popular during the Ming time. Furthermore, since most of the productive writers also residents in this region, and their influence expanded through their publications with the help of the exploding woodblock printing business around China, and reached readers outside of the elite class. Consequently, the places where scholar-officials highly praised, a flock of tourists would also come to visit. Taking the Tiger Hill of Suzhou as an example, while the scholar-officials visited this site to practice their elite-style traveling and tried to find peaceful places to enjoy their own pleasure, local travelers came to throw a party and broke the

silence. However, the scholar-officials were still able to “apart from the laboring merchants and the common sightseer” based on their different preferences during the traveling. On the other hand, even though when the scholar-officials had to share the same the tourist site and landscape with other people, they would still keep some specific perspectives and understandings. As mentioned before, the scholar-officials had developed a series of vocabulary to differentiate the “elegance” and the “vulgar”. Timothy Brook further argues that the scholar-officials labeled “the pleasure of travel as a ‘craving’ or ‘obsession (pi).’ This term had a precise meaning in elite circles where it communicated an obsessive enthusiasm for a culturally approved activity.” As culturally approved activities, the obsession of tea drinking and the fascination of famous spring water, not only play a significant role in tea connoisseurs daily practice of tea drinking, but also contributed to the glossary of the esthetic principle, such as the idea of “zhen” (true). Furthermore, since the famous spring sites, such as the Huishan spring and the Hupao spring, were usually located in the Buddhist monasteries and managed by the monks, traveling to these places also provided opportunities for the scholar-official tea drinkers to interact with the monks, not only who were considered as excellent tea makers and drinkers, but also the visiting itself helped “publicizing gentry identity,” Brook has pointed out.