Ever since Mencius divided mankind into the rulers and the ruled, the feeders and the fed, analysts of Chinese society have delighted in the use of paired antithetical categories. North and south, centre and provinces, city and countryside, aristocrats and bureaucrats, elite culture and popular culture – matching concepts like these reach to all parts of the subject and still run through the routine discourse of historians, in China and out of it. Yet students of China's past and present also know that close scrutiny makes those great categories blur and dissolve into complexity as their boundaries lose definition. Contact with specific situations in even a limited area usually brings out a welter of phenomena showing little obvious coherence. There is, in short, a fundamental tension between schematic simplicity and focused intimacy. That tension will shape our study of Kuang-i chi at every point.

Flawed oppositions

We have already seen Ku K'uang's preface take a thematic interest in the bridging of alien categories – human and non-human, dead and living, male and female. For him the cases cited in his preface, gleaned from a heritage of older literature, were visible signs of a material cosmos in process of constant mutation. But although that underlying cosmic process might offer to other eyes a scene of total, random complexity, Ku K'uang's way of representing it, equally in herited from past cosmologists, is shaped by the same familiar discourse of matching oppositions.