Establishing authority through scholarship: Ruan Yuan and the Xuehaitang academy

Studies of authority in late imperial China have often emphasized that a single individual, the emperor, held a monopoly on legitimate authority.1 While it was certainly the case that all formal political authority derived from the emperor, recent scholarship on local society has drawn attention to the practice of authority in arenas outside the court and bureaucracy. Some scholars, for example, have examined the exercise of authority according to customary laws or procedures among elites and middlemen in villages, and among clerks and runners in county yamen, or offices.² Other scholars have drawn attention to the exercise of moral or cultural authority among the literati, often in opposition to the emperor's claim to such authority.³ Likewise, studies of women in late imperial China have emphasized the role of patriarchal authority within the family and lineage.⁴ Refocusing attention away from the court toward local society, and away from exclusively political authority toward social, moral, and cultural authority, has greatly enriched our understanding of the dynamics of the practice of authority in late imperial China. This chapter attempts to further this trend by examining the practice of authority in scholarship, education, and, more broadly, cultural competition. Nevertheless, such an analysis can never completely be divorced from the notion of political authority. "The Chinese," R. Bin Wong reminds us, "more than any other state in the early modern world, made the principle of instruction ( jiao) basic to its conception of political rule.