So today's topic I'm presenting on Peng Xiaosheng, his relationship with spirit writing, but

particularly how this massive archive of early Qing spirit altar material passes through

his hands and how he can evaluate his role in that transmission.

So unlike Peng Dingchou, Peng Xiaosheng is a figure who I assume a lot of you have a

fair amount of familiarity with and may well know more about certain aspects of his oeuvre

than I do.

In terms of the secondary literature, the main areas of coverage have been in his hagiographies

of Buddhist laymen and Buddhist laywomen, and then also his correspondence with Dai

Jun in the way in which he's held up within kind of very early drafts of Qing history

as basically the last gasp of song learning against the rising tide of evidential studies.

So he's somebody who a lot of people know different aspects of his work, and part of

what's fascinating is arguably for the first time in the Chinese tradition, everything

becomes so splintered that he can't even narrate himself as a unitary being with his interest

in Buddhism, his interest in Confucianism.

So there's a new sort of splintering that happens with him that doesn't happen with

his immediate ancestors who are also equally pervrent in their religious lives and their

religious visions.

So as Aod mentioned, the project I've been finishing at IKGF is the history of 45 years

of Peng Dingqiu as a spirit altar supervisor.

And the connection with Peng Xiaosheng is so much of this material goes through his

hands.

So the issue here with Suzhou as well is when we're speaking about the early Qing for the

spirit altar archives, we're really talking about Suzhou.

So the two most massive collections of spirit altar archives of the early Qing, they're

both from Suzhou, they both feature Peng Dingqiu, and then they both go through the editorial

hands of Peng Xiaosheng.

So to get at this particular time period, we have to understand what's going on in

the mid-Qing just to evaluate the reliability to tell the story of the early Qing.

So that's the area that I want to focus on here.

So essentially, the book that I've been finishing since I got to IKGF in January is reading

a very detailed chronological autobiography against a seance altar transcript and historicizing

material that had largely been regarded as unhistoricizable before that.

So a lot of this lecture is really just going to be on one particular book in the spirit

writing editorial archival and memoir projects of Peng Xiaosheng, and that's the one on the

slide on the right.

So the relatively less problematic narrative is the one on the left, where it is what it

says it is.

There's certainly some early Qing self-fashioning that Peng Dingqiu is involved in, but basically

it's reliable historical documents.

For the one on the right, over 50 years have passed and there's a whole different context

both within the patriline and within the Qing dynasty more broadly.

So the story I want to tell is kind of shifting the lens to these mid-Qing figures in the

Peng patriline as it relates to what we can access of the early Qing.

So this has to do with early Qing sujo, but as I've already said, early Qing sujo, in

the sujo for the early Qing spirit writing is arguably most of what we have for the entire

empire.

So it relates to that, but it also relates to a particular style of branding, how the

Peng patriline itself narrates its justification for its success through the civil service

system and in officialdom.

So part of what's happening here is father and son are working together, they're literally