Daily Life for the Common People of China, 1850 to 1950

Ronald Suleski (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1974) is currently Professor of History at Suffolk University, Boston, and Director of the Rosenberg Institute for East Asian Studies there. Among his books is Civil Government in Warlord China: Tradition, Modernization, and Manchuria (Lang Publishing, 2002).

"Suleski is to be commended for his collecting efforts, which have saved a great number of important texts that might otherwise have been relegated to the rubbish bin. In documenting and describing these materials he does a service to the field and highlights a corpus of texts that will doubtless be the source of continued research."-Nathan Vedal, Washington University, in East Asian Publishing and Society, Vol 9 (2019) p. 191-203"The volume's greatest worth lies in its novelty: Suleski is right to note that the study of chāoběn as a means of better understanding the lives of people is a scholarly methodology that 'almost does not exist.' Those with an interest in Chinese religion, especially the late Qīng and Republican period, have much to gain from it."-Joseph Chadwin, University of Vienna, in Religious Studies Review, Vol 47 (2021), p. 125

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Contextualizing Chaoben: On the Popular Manuscript Culture of the Late Qing and Republican Period in China2 Apologia in Chaoben3 Written in the Margins: Reading into Texts4 Teacher Xu: Entering a Classroom in Late Qing China5 A Qing Dynasty Astrologer’s Predictions for the Future6 Constructing the Family in Republican China: Shandong 19447 Mr. Bai and Mr. Qian Earn Their Living: Considering Two Hand-written Notebooks of Matching Couplets from China in the Late Qing and Early Republic8 The Troublesome Ghosts: Part 19 The Troublesome Ghosts: Part 210 Concluding RemarksAppendix A. A List of Chaoben in the Author’s Personal Collection Used in This StudyAppendix B. Various Categories of Chaoben Not Discussed in the TextAppendix C. Korean and Japanese ChaobenAppendix D. Full Translation of Fifty Days to Encounter the Five SpiritsBibliographyIndex