31 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan SpenceThe Death of Woman Wang
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
PrefaceChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
Jonathan D. Spence explains why he chose to write about an obscure, rural part of 17th-century China and summarizes the primary sources he used to research the book. His goal is to explore a topic that is “both rural and local” (xi), the sort of history that often goes ignored. Further, it is a story that is ‘“small’ […] in the context of the overall historical record” but “[t]o the people actually involved […] of absolute, fatal importance” (xi).
Sources on local, rural Chinese history of this era are scarce since the premodern Chinese usually did not preserve local records (xii). Spence’s primary sources are:
- The Local History of T’an-ch’eng (1673) by Feng K’o-ts’an, which, like other local Chinese histories of the time, was “compiled by members of the educated gentry elite” (xii). It includes biographies of local notable individuals (both men and women); accounts of natural disasters, bandit attacks, and army activities; and details about local geography, demographics, and towns and cities (xii-xiii).
- Huang Liu-hung’s memoir and handbook (1690s), by the magistrate of T’an-ch’eng from 1670 to 1672. Like most magistrates of the period, Huang Liu-hung wrote a handbook and memoir to guide other officials (xiii-xiv).
- The writings of P’u Sung-ling (1670s), a famous Chinese writer who lived near T’an-ch’eng. Spence says he uses P’u Sung-ling’s writings to explore “the realms of loneliness, sensuality, and dreams that were also a part of T’an-ch’eng” (xiv). This source lets Spence “come near to expressing what might have been in the mind of woman Wang as she slept before death” (xv).
Preface Analysis
Spence’s preface answers two questions: why he wrote The Death of Woman Wang, and how he wrote it. Spence did not want to write a history about elites, or a nation-wide history of China focused on statistics and broad trends. Instead, The Death of Woman Wang is what historians call a microhistory: a type of history that focuses on individuals, communities, or events that are not well known or considered historically significant in a traditional sense. Such microhistories can provide insights that might be lacking in other kinds of history. In this case, microhistory helps reconstruct the possible experiences of a group that often went unheard: women. As Spence writes, “I would guess there were many women like [Wang], as there must have been many counties like T’an-ch’eng, passively suffering, paying their taxes, yet receiving little in return” (xv).
Spence also lists his main sources. Discussion of sources is important for any historian, but it is especially crucial here because there are few sources for premodern, rural China compared to Europe:
One cannot generally find the equivalents of the coroners’ inquests, guild proceedings, and meticulous land-tenancy records, or the parish registers of births, marriages, and deaths that have enabled such remarkably close and detailed readings to be drawn of Europe in the later Middle Ages (xii).
Nevertheless, Spence’s sources provide not only historical fact but, in the case of P’u Sung-ling, a cultural and emotional background to Wang’s story.
