Speaker: Huan Jin, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Emerging at the turn of the eleventh century out of contact with non-Han people, “tao” 套 (set/module) shows the productiveness of cross-cultural interactions. Rooted in empirical knowledge and everyday life that is not dominated by aristocrats and cultural elites, it is a category that introduces a way of thinking and doing that achieves efficiency without sacrificing functionality. Instead of concreteness and stability, “tao” is about malleability and adaptability. By the late Ming, commercial publishers further extended the flexibility of “tao” to organize knowledge for everyday needs in law, medicine, and communication. At the same time, “tao” began to carry negative connotations in criticism of literary and artistic creation, reflecting a desire for sincerity and originality that went beyond mere practicality, together with an underlying anxiety that convenience itself had gone too far.