The Life and Work of Ruan Dacheng

Woodblock print illustration from Ruan’s own publication of his drama Spring Lantern Riddles or Ten Cases of Mistaken Identity. The illustrations were designed by Ruan’s friend Zhang Xiu, undoubtedly with input from Ruan himself. This one, captioned 'The mountain hen leads her chickens to burrow under the fence', contrasts this idyllic rural scene with the sadness of the hero's parents, who believe their son has drowned.

Dr Alison Hardie became interested in Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646) when she was researching Chinese garden history. Ruan Dacheng was a patron of a famous 17th century garden designer, Ji Cheng, whose book Dr Hardie translated (Yuanye, or The Craft of Gardens). Through trying to find out about Ruan Dacheng's gardens, she became interested in other aspects of his life. As well as being a poet and dramatist, he was also a government official, at least until he got the sack in about 1630. He became politically notorious, so Chinese scholars have been reluctant to study him in depth.

Dr Hardie believes that, although he has been regarded as a transgressive figure, he is actually rather typical of the scholar-official class in the late Ming dynasty, so that an understanding of his sense of his own identity can tell us something about his society as a whole. Dr Hardie has been studying his four surviving plays, and some of his approximately 2,000 surviving poems.

The approach to the Patriarch's Hall Temple (Zutangsi), south of Nanjing. Ruan Dacheng left the city to live here (actually slightly further up the hill than the existing temple) in the late 1630s, at a time when he was under severe political pressure for his past association with a corrupt court eunuch in the 1620s.

She has also been reading as much as possible of what was written about him by his contemporaries, much of which is very critical, not to say abusive. His plays and poems are full of ideas about personal identity, which Dr Hardie is trying to place in the context of concepts of identity and the individual which were current at the time, deriving from the thought of the 15th-16th century philosopher Wang Yangming.

The Tianyige (Celestial Unity Pavilion) library in Ningbo, founded as a private book collection in the 16^th century, holds a unique copy of Ruan Dacheng’s early poetry collection Harmonising with the Flute (Hexiao ji).

Most of Ruan's work is readily available in print, but a volume of early poems survives only in a unique copy in a historic Chinese library in Ningbo and has never been published, so Dr Hardie had to visit the library to see it. Unfortunately, these poems are not very exciting as literature, unlike his later work, but they tell us a lot that we would not otherwise know about this period of Ruan's early life. She has also visited a temple just outside Nanjing where Ruan stayed in 1638, when he was in even more political trouble than usual; its distance from Nanjing made it clear that he really was trying to keep his head down at this time, whereas his usual tactic was to brazen things out.