2 - Proposing a History of Kongzhai

Summary

No single source contains a reliable and complete reconstruction of Kongzhai’s history. Every presentation was shaped by the author or compiler’s agenda, whether that be simply to place Kongzhai appropriately within the history of its surrounding region or, more ambitiously, to glorify it as a pilgrimage destination for morally engaged Confucian literati and Kong descendants. Differences of purpose or emphasis lie behind the many discrepancies among accounts of Kongzhai in regional administrative gazetteers and the specialized Gazetteer of Kongzhai. Every version of the latter offered considerably more detail than any of the official compilations, but even its documents sometimes contradicted one another. The disagreements among extant sources make it extremely difficult to construct a linear chronicle of Kongzhai’s evolution. Nonetheless, in the present chapter I make the attempt, relying mainly on evidence that multiple sources corroborate, and reserving my analytical deconstruction of these accounts for Part II. My chronological narrative provides a framework for examining Kongzhai’s accumulation of relics and forms of visual art, whose individual histories, features, and connotations are the subject of Chapter 3. For the reader’s convenient reference, a comprehensive Timeline in the Appendix charts the most important events from antiquity to the present.