Thank you Professor Zhang for the kind introduction. Good evening everybody. Thank you for having

me here at the ICA-GF, but also for having me tonight here to talk a bit about my ongoing

research and as you already mentioned, the title of my paper tonight will be on Liu Ji's

Shaobingge and Lei Qing's anti-Manshu sentiment. I will talk you through real quick, just through

my bullet points that I put together for today, so I will give you a bit of an overview about the

source material about the Shaobingge itself, about what I'm dealing with and about the research

questions that I first posed when I first thought about the project. And then I will give you a

really short biography of Liu Ji. I will tell you why later. Then I will talk about the process of

myth-making, of fictionalization and popularization of both the law of the Shaobingge as well as the

historical persona of Liu Ji. Then I will give you a bit of a historical overview, really quick

historical context about the connection between Liu Ji and Chinese secret societies and anti-Manshu

movements in the 19th century. Then I will come to the core of my talk, really, to the text itself,

to the Shaobingge, and I will give you a couple of examples so that you know what I'm dealing with

and what I'm actually talking about. And then I will try my very best to come to a at least

preliminary conclusion of my finds so far. So I will just read a short introduction, which is only

a page, and then I will, you know, engage a bit more freely with you. So the Shaobingge or Bake

Cake Ballad is a collection of prognostications attributed to Liu Ji, chief advisor to Zhu Yuanzhang,

spanning the sixth centuries from the founding of the Ming to the end of the 19th century,

and the decades leading to the demise of the Qing at the beginning of the 20th century.

Hailed as a master narrative of prognosticative law, the Shaobingge has become one of the most

influential and controversial works of political prognostication in China. The predictions it

contains are imbued with elusive and obscure language that points to glyphomantic practices,

yet when deciphered they appear to be oddly accurate in the prognostication of future events.

The extant text in modern editions of the Shaobingge opens with a short preface,

followed by a dialogue between the emperor, the Hongwu Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang and Liu Ji,

featuring numerous annotations and explanatory remarks in which the letter, Liu Ji, reverts

to a cryptic and almost impenetrable parlance. In the course of his predictions, Liu Ji proceeds

chronologically from the end of the Hongwu Emperor's reign, that is 1398, and the subsequent

usurpation of the Yongle Emperor in 1402 until the end of the Ming and the establishment of the Qing

dynasty, followed by predictions of foreign invasions, wars and insurgencies that occurred

throughout the 19th century, as well as the downfall of the Qing and the restoration of the Ming

dynasty. So the Shaobingge itself is in its modern form, in its printed editions, is, as I said,

it has a short preface and then it is basically a dialogue between the emperor and Liu Ji. When

we look at its title, it's not really very an obvious title for such a text. The title originates

in an anecdote around the emperor Hongwu waiting for Liu Ji to visit him in audience, and while

he's waiting, he's trying to, you know, while away at the time, he's having a little snack,

and that little snack happens to be a Shaobing, so a little cake that you can even today find at

every, pretty much every food store in every Chinese city, and as, you know, courteous as he is,

he would put the Shaobing underneath a tea bowl or a plate, and at the moment Liu Ji arrives for

the audience. And so they start talking, and the emperor says to Liu Ji, well, so I've heard you're

a, you know, you're a polymath, you're a good Jomanser and a diviner and a mathematician and

a military strategist, and, you know, you pretty much have an answer to everything, but do you also

have an answer to what's underneath this tea bowl? And Liu Ji says, well, it used to look like the

sun, and now it looks like the crescent moon. So, you know, when you have this little round keg,

it looks a bit like it has the round shape of the sun. When you bite a piece out, it has a crescent

shape, and so the emperor is quite impressed and asked him, well, if you're so smart and since you,

you know, are this cleverly deduced what's underneath that bowl, can you tell me about the future of my

house and my dynasty? And this is how the whole text begins. When talking about the Shaobingguo,

we at first, when I started looking at it, expected it to actually stem from some time in the Ming

dynasty. Maybe not the Hongwu reign, but sometime later. But apparently, as it turns out, it originates