Bao Shichen

Bao Shichen was a calligrapher and reformist scholar in the early nineteenth century. Under the Qing administration, Bao made numerous important suggestions regarding the areas of military affairs, laws and politics, the grain tribute system, the salt monopoly, and the improvement of agricultural practice. He was born in a country village in the Jing district, Anhui, in 1775. His father eked out a meagre living by teaching village boys. In his youth, Bao lived in Nanjing for several years and studied military tactics and administrative methods. He also helped his father to suppress the Lin Shuangwen rebellion. When his father was ill, he brought him home and took care of him by himself. He also rented a land to farm and sold vegetables and fruits for money. After his father passed away, Bao used his paternal connections to get a commander position in leading the White Lotus campaigns in the northwest. Throughout his life, Bao had experienced thirteen failures to pass the highest level of the civil service examination, and therefore did not obtain a formal official position until his late years with the help of friends. He died in 1855, on the road that flee from the Taiping Rebellion. Bao was a leading figure in jinshi, or statecraft scholarship, an informal movement of Confucians that published tracts on real problems facing 19th century China. His writings owed much to the scholarship of Hong Liangji, who had campaigned against the widespread corruption under emperor Qianlong. In 1801, Bao wrote an essay Shuochu (On Wealth) to list his ambitious thoughts on the reforms that could help Qing empire to regain its political power and become prosperous again. He believed in the theory of "agriculture first", that agriculture is paramount for achieving prosperity in the country, and he also put down his ideas on agrarian policy in an essay Random notes from the year 1820. In 1820s and 1830s, Bao did a considerable amount of work on the reforms of the Grain Tribute Administration and the Liang-Huai Salt Administration. He advocated large scale institutional reforms, such as getting rid of the Grand Council to improve administrational efficiency, allowing the court to consult the literati, giving farmers low gentry degrees based on their agricultural technique, and reconsolidating the baojia system. However, Bao's reputation is earned mostly for being a calligrapher and historian of calligraphy. He wrote a book Yizhou Shuangji (Two Oars for the Boat of Art) in 1844 on Wei style character formation. Bao's appreciation of the new aesthetic led others to value contemporary experiments in bei styles by such calligraphers as Deng Shiru. Bao's calligraphy, still in the style of informal brush-written models, dominates this painting, not only in the form of a long inscription but also in the emblematic use of a conventional image rendered in simply brushed ink line and wash. Bao was also known in the late Qing to be an anti-foreign patriot and an extreme hardliner in the opium debates and the first Anglo-Chinese war of 1839-42. ³ In China, Bao Shichen is well-known as an anti-foreign-capitalist advocate.