The event is sponsored by the Liu Institute's Chinese Working Group.
Reservation is required for Rea's lecture by Monday, January 20, 2025.
Why, in certain times and places, have humans been obsessed with con artists? In China, for example, the swindle story has experienced bursts of popularity during the late Ming, the early Republican era, the early Mao era, and during the last thirty years. And comparable works exist around the world. What, for example, do Zhang Yingyu’s Book of Swindles (Ming China, 1617), Richard King’s The New Cheats of London Exposed (Georgian England, 1792), and P.T. Barnum’s The Humbugs of the World (Reconstruction-era United States, 1867) have in common—and how do they differ? Swindle stories clearly serve a double purpose: they teach techniques for navigating perilous social environments, and they entertain. But theirs authors tend to frame these narratives within a questionable claim: that ours is an age of unprecedented peril. Focusing on the example of China, this talk will highlight one thread running through cultural history with some resonance for our time: appreciation of the con artist’s ingenuity.
Christopher Rea is professor of Asian studies and former director of the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia. He is author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015; paperback, 2025), which was awarded the 2017 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (post-1900 China), Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 (Columbia, 2021), and, with Tom Mullaney, Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (Chicago, 2022), which has been translated into six language. He has also edited several books on modern Chinese culture, including China’s Literary Cosmopolitans (2015), Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts (2011), and, with Nicolai Volland, The Business of Culture (2015). With Bruce Rusk, he translated The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection (Columbia, 2017) and More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery (Columbia, 2024); the original work, said to be China’s first collection of stories about fraud, celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2017.