The qing court had a love-hate relationship with popular drama. From the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) to the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), several Qing rulers were renowned for their doting patronage of popular opera, yet the state was far from sanguine about drama's social effects, viewing public theaters with great suspicion. Theaters, in the eyes of the authorities, were notorious hangouts for ruffians, slackers, gamblers, and insurgents, providing these roustabouts with the ideal environment in which to scheme and swindle. In addition to waging campaigns to censor and weed out “seditious passages” from popular dramas (Guy 1987, 92), emperors throughout the Qing dynasty issued dozens of edicts regulating the construction, location, and clientele of commercial theaters. In rural areas, especially in times of unrest, local authorities often canceled scheduled performances for fear that such occasions offered gangs and secret societies prime opportunities for stirring up trouble (Mackerras 1972, 37). Urban theaters were no safer. According to popular lore, even the Kangxi emperor was cheated by hoodlums when he ventured into a public theater during one of his legendary outings disguised as a commoner (Liao 1997, 80). Yet in spite of their reputation for breeding disorder and moral vice, commercial theaters—commonly known as teahouses (chayuan)—increasingly thrived, and in this new social space, the genre of Peking opera came into full flower during the last century of the Qing dynasty.

In the last two decades of the Qing dynasty, installment publication became the dominant mode of presentation for Chinese fiction, as it had been for European and Japanese literature for more than half a century. Whether printed daily as one feature in a newspaper, weekly in literary supplements, or monthly in the fiction journals that took off in the early 1900s, Chinese vernacular fiction of this period appeared in parts over time, just as the works of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Jippensha Ikku, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and even Henry James did (Link 1981; Lee and Nathan 1985; Chen 1988). As early as 1892, Shanghai author Han Bangqing praised the installment form for heightening suspense and forcing the reader to imagine what might happen next; by 1910 “addiction” to installment fiction could be understood as an aesthetic experience, and the popularity of the format would only increase in the decades to follow. This article seeks to trace the rise of the installment form in late Qing and early Republican China, investigate its ties with the contemporaneous cultural production of Shanghai as a metropolitan media center, and demonstrate the effects of its associated aesthetic.

Much of the work in the relatively new field of Theravāda Buddhist ethics has been directed toward critiquing the Weberian characterization of Buddhism as primarily “mystical” and oriented away from social, political, and domestic attention toward the world. Ancient Buddhism, Max Weber wrote, “is a specifically unpolitical and anti-political-status religion, more precisely, a religious ‘technology’ of wandering and of intellectually-schooled mendicant monks” (1996, 206). It is a tradition lacking “a concept of neighborly love,” a sense of social responsibility or “any bridge to any actively conceptualized ‘social’ conduct,” and “almost all beginnings of a methodical lay morality” (208, 213, 218). Even though Buddhism developed some formulations of a lay-oriented social ethics in order to accommodate the sponsorship of rulers beginning with Aśoka, Weber argued, it remained in its various forms throughout Asia a fundamentally mystical and magical (or nonrational) religious tradition, exhibiting a “devaluation of the world” characteristic of mysticism (330–43).

Two and a half thousand years ago, long before Lakshman Sena ruled Bengal, there was a monster who came out of its cave every night and ate people. The people could not kill him because they feared him so much. They finally put a plan together and made a mirror. When the monster came out that night and saw his reflection, he was so startled to see another creature as big and powerful as himself that he lashed out at the mirror, shattering the glass. But, each broken piece reflected himself back at him. As he turned, these creatures seemed to surround him. He felt they had multiplied. So in his fear and rage, he hit his head and wept himself to death. The people came back the next morning and saw the splintered glass and the dead monster. Now, how to tell all the other villages the news that they could live without fear? So, the same man who had come up with the scheme to kill the monster was asked to devise a second plan. A big leaf was used to paint the picture of the monster. This image was circulated from village to village, and the man was packed off to tell the story. Wherever he told the tale, they gave him rice and, of course, food to eat. Soon it transformed his livelihood. He no longer cultivated land. Then they wanted new stories, so he went to the Ramayana and Mahabharata and added songs to storytelling and pictures on cloth.

It is widely believed that the Allahabad Kumbh Mela is an ancient religious festival or that it is “ageless”, that its roots lie obscured in time immemorial. Editorials and articles in the press at mela time (every twelve years) lyrically emphasize the continuity of the pilgrimage throughout India's past, find inspiration in its durability and changeless character, and marvel at the anachronism of an ancient festival thriving in the modern world (“The Kumbh Mela”, Pioneer, 17 February 1918; “Editorial”, Leader, 16 January 1942; “Pilgrim's Process”, Times of India, 24 January 2001). There is no better example of this than the oft-quoted section of Jawaharlal Nehru's will and testament, in which the avowedly secular modernist explains his desire to have a portion of his ashes scattered at the triveni sangam, the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers and the site of the Kumbh in Allahabad:

I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people. … She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. … And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from that past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that it has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India. That chain I would not break, for I treasure it and seek inspiration from it.

(2000, 612–13)