Introduction
Relevant Talks and Conference Presentations
2025. “The Supernatural Hairpin in Three Chuanqi Romantic Plays of the late Ming and Early Qing,” for the panel “Things that Connect: New Approaches to Material Culture and Women in Late Imperial China,” AAS-in-Asia, Kathmandu, Nepal, June 3rd.
2025. 斷釵之斷、嶺南之南：淺析湯貽汾《斷釵吟》之婦女題詩. Lingnan University, Feb 16.
2024 斷釵、可分離性、婦女題詩：湯貽汾《斷釵吟》詩集淺析. Chinese University of Hong Kong, April 9.
2024 “Hairpin in Borderland: Women’s Poetry and the Inscription Community in Poems on the Broken Hairpin,” AAS, Seattle, March.
2023 悼釵、悼母、徵詩：楊貽汾《斷釵圖》題詩析論, Academia Sinica, December.
2023 “The Hairpin, Women’s Poetry, and Detachability in Early Nineteenth Century China,” “Personal and Family Narratives in Late Imperial China,” University of Hong Kong, June 23-24.
Relevant Publications
“What Hangs On a Hairpin: Inalienable Possession and Language Exchange in Two Marriage Romances,” Ming Studies, vol. 84, (September 2021).
This paper discusses the figuration of the purple jade hairpin as inalienable possession in the Tang author Jiang Fang’s (792–835) marriage romance “Huo Xiaoyu’s story” and the Ming playwright Tang Xianzu’s (1550–1616) dramatic adaptation of the story, The Purple Hairpins (1595). Examining how the hairpin’s materiality and symbolism intersects with the tradition of classical poetry and marriage laws, the paper shows opposing poetics—the critical and the lyrical—of the two marriage romances. Whereas the selling of the hairpin in the Tang romance indicates the loss of Huo Xiaoyu’s identity and the culture of romance—a true social order of exogamy based upon language exchange, the circulation of her hairpins in The Purple Hairpins authenticates her identity and the culture of romance.
read it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0147037X.2021.1896866.
Yuanfei Wang 