Daily Life for the Common People of China, 1850 to 1950

In this exciting book, Ronald Suleski introduces daily life for the common people of China in the century from 1850 to 1950. They were semi-literate, yet they have left us written accounts of their hopes, fears, and values. They have left us the hand-written manuscripts (chaoben 抄本) now flooding the antiques markets in China. These documents represent a new and heretofore overlooked category of historical sources.
Suleski gives a detailed explanation of the interaction of chaoben with the lives of the people. He offers examples of why they were so important to the poor laboring masses: people wanted horoscopes predicting their future, information about the ghosts causing them headaches, a few written words to help them trade in the rural markets, and many more examples are given. The book contains a special appendix giving the first complete translation into English of a chaoben describing the ghosts and goblins that bedeviled the poor working classes.

Ronald Suleski (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1974) is currently Professor of History at Suffolk University, Boston, and Director of the Rosenberg Institute for East Asian Studies there. Among his books is Civil Government in Warlord China: Tradition, Modernization, and Manchuria (Lang Publishing, 2002).

"Suleski is to be commended for his collecting efforts, which have saved a great number of important texts that might otherwise have been relegated to the rubbish bin. In documenting and describing these materials he does a service to the field and highlights a corpus of texts that will doubtless be the source of continued research."
-Nathan Vedal, Washington University, in East Asian Publishing and Society, Vol 9 (2019) p. 191-203

"The volume's greatest worth lies in its novelty: Suleski is right to note that the study of chāoběn as a means of better understanding the lives of people is a scholarly methodology that 'almost does not exist.' Those with an interest in Chinese religion, especially the late Qīng and Republican period, have much to gain from it."
-Joseph Chadwin, University of Vienna, in Religious Studies Review, Vol 47 (2021), p. 125