Speaker: Prof. Lai Tsz Pang (Divinity School of Chung Chi College)
| Date: | 18 October 2013 (Fri) |
| Time: | 4:00pm |
| Venue: | Activities Room, 2/F, Art Museum East Wing, Institute of Chinese Studies, CUHK |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Qu mo zhuan (Story of Demon Banishing, 1895), written by a Chinese Christian Guo Zifu, was one of the 162 pieces of novels submitted for the 1895 fiction contest of “New Age Novels”, organized by John Fryer (1839-1928) in Shanghai with a view to tackling the social problems of opium-smoking, foot-binding and literary examination system. A multifarious and multi-religious celestial world is created in Qu mo zhuan, an ingenious adaptation of the biblical account of the eternal battle between the creator God and the fallen angel-turned-Devil who headed a huge battalion of demons with vivid Chinese characteristics, for instance, Dayan Gui (Demon of Opium) and Chanzu Gui (Demon of Foot-binding). This hybrid text provides an indigenized example of transforming the biblical narratives, particularly the displacement of demonic world, in the Chinese cultural and social contexts. arithmetic, subtracting the estimated total amount of local rice from the estimated total amount of rice consumption. In speaker’s opinion, this theory is built on the following two fallacious presuppositions: (i) there was only a single variety of rice, and (ii) rice was subsistence crop. The talk shall investigate the reasons why the population in central and southern China "chose" rice as their staple food, and by way of this investigation, the talk shows the real nature of the emergence of the long-distance rice market in the eighteenth century. |
