80. On the decreased attraction for the official career in certain circles of late Ming, see Lynn’s “Antipathy to Officialdom.”

81. Seokwon Choi, Fashioning the Reclusive Persona.

82. Nakatani, “Body, Sentiment, and Voice in Ming Self-Encomia,” 73–79.

83. Ibid., 80–86.

84. Ibid., 87–88.

85. Ibid., 89, 93.

86. Ying Zou, “Cross-dressing,” 127. For painting, see Barnhardt, “The ‘Wild and Heterodox Schools’ of Ming Painting,” 365–396, and Bentley, The Figurative Works of Chen Hongshou.

87. The concept of essential desires is prior to the cult of qing. On “essential desires” (qingyu 情欲), common to all humans (ren jie you zhi 人皆有之), see Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy, 63–66. This concept of wisdom can be compared to the Greek metis, a combination of wisdom, cunning and prudence.

88. Counterculture circles are those large or small comunities that shared unconventional ideas and offered alternatives to the orthodoxy of the School of Principle. For instance, the intellectuals at the Taizhou school and in the Gong’an circle developed a culture in which the self could be autonomous and independent of traditional authority and social conventions. Among them include thinkers like Li Zhi, writers like Feng Menglong or Tang Xianzu, literati like the Yuan brothers, and artists like the painter and calligrapher Dong Qichang 董其昌 (1555–1636).

89. Ying Zou, “Cross-dressing,” 173–174.

90. Rendering qing with “love” may be a dangerous simplification, easy to be criticized, owing to the concurrent polysemy of both terms “qing” and “love.” However, it would be frustrating to use the Chinese term qing, and this would be the case for many other characters, approximately rendered with “heart-mind,” “energy,” “principle,” and so forth. Moreover, if we consider the main topic of Feng Menglong’s work, it seems rather reasonable to opt for this translation, as qing has an analogous even if not identical meaning. For the main Ming-Qing writers, several studies have been done in the last decades by scholars such as Hanan, Hegel, Plaks, McMahon, Epstein, Martin Huang, and many others. See also Santangelo and Boros, The Culture of Love, 7, 18, 60–61, 126, 438–439.

91. Shan’ge, Preface.

92. See Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 83.