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where humans are concerned, it is given a fundamental moral content, rather than that of nature in general; (2) xing also has a broader meaning for it may include anything which pertains to human development and human achievement. Another question that should be more deeply investigated is the marginality or relevance of the influence of European missionaries on the Chinese concept of “nature” as developed in the late imperial period. See for instance a comment made by Dong Han 董含 (1628–?) on Verbiest’s Qiongli Xue 窮理學 (“The Learning of Making a Thorough Inquiry into Principles” or “Cursus Philosophicus”), where the Chinese scholar, after mentioning the heterodox theories of Zhu Fangdan 朱方旦 (executed in 1682), notes “[…] he (Verbiest) explains the soul (linghun 靈魂) as ‘nature’ (xing 性) and states that all knowledge and memory is not located in the heart, but in the brains (謂一切知識記憶，不在於心，而在頭腦之内). As such statements are entirely uncanonical and their purport the utmost of irritating error, [the Emperor] gave order to burn the book immediately.” Chunxiang Zhuibi 蓴鄉贅筆 (Writings from Chun Village), 3: 23, translated and quoted by Dudink and Standaert, “Ferdinand Verbiest’s Qiongli xue (1683),” 15.
10. See the first chapter on personal autonomy.
11. On the aristocratic aesthetic sensibility of the Chinese gardens’ culture and their “private” cult, see Clunas, Fruitful Sites, Handlin, “Gardens,” and Wai-yee Li, “Gardens and Illusions.”
12. Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China, 58–59. Touching on the Jin Ping Mei’s “insistence on scrutinising the private desires of the individual” and “the heightened consciousness of si 私” (lit. the private/privacy), Huang notes that “[this] is also the first full-length novel devoted to depicting the private lives of its major characters and their ‘private desires’” (86–87). On the rhetoric of sentiments, indirect sentimental education, and the growing interest in exploring the self and the life of emotions see Lowry, Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th-Century China, esp. 55–67.
13. McDougall and Hansson, Chinese Concepts of Privacy, 19; and Silber, “Privacy in Dream of the Red Chamber,” 55–78.
14. Hegel and Hessney, Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature.
15. See the “Introduction” of Munro’s Individualism and Holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist Values, 1–32, and “The Family Network,”in the same volume, 259–292; and de Bary “Neo-Confucian Individualism and Holism,” 331–358. The volume offers a comparison of modern Western