Emotional Worlds in Zhuang Border Manuscripts

Good afternoon. My paper is titled Emotional Worlds in Zhuang Border Manuscripts. I look at handwritten ritual and teaching books that cannot be explained through only one national or linguistic frame. My focus today is simple: how do these manuscripts make belonging, memory, and authority visible?

I am not asking whether these books are simply Chinese or Vietnamese. I am asking how they connect several textual and historical worlds. My argument has two parts. First, emotionality is a public relationship, not only a private feeling. Second, cultural rhythm describes how those relationships are kept, changed, and activated again through copying, ritual use, storage, and later annotation.

The accepted abstract was based on 139 Zhuang manuscripts, including 40 texts explicitly linked to Vietnam. I keep those figures unchanged. Since then, I have completed a detailed working catalogue of 77 records. These 77 records are not necessarily 77 separate books, and the Guangxi material is still incomplete. So this catalogue gives me better detail, but it is not yet a closed statistical sample.

Here, emotionality means a relationship that a text makes public and repeatable. A ritual book may connect the living with the dead, descendants with ancestors, or a later reader with an older manuscript. Recitation, offerings, copying, and glossing make these relationships actionable. I am therefore not trying to recover a copyist’s private feelings. I am asking what kinds of attachment the text authorizes.

Cultural rhythm is not just a metaphor for change. In plain language, it means that different layers of a manuscript can change at different speeds while remaining connected through practice. An old place formula may remain beside a later copying date and an even later Vietnamese note. I study five operations: maintenance, persistence, differentiation, re-anchoring, and reactivation. These operations give the concept something we can actually observe and test.

To avoid overclaiming, I use four layers of evidence. I begin with the wording on the page. Then I identify the person, date, place, and writing layer. Next, I ask what the feature does in that passage. Only after that do I interpret it. This rule is important: if one link is missing, the claim must become smaller. A place name is not automatically a migration route, and a later note is not the original copying layer.

This slide shows the present shape of the catalogue. We have 43 date formulas, at least 19 relatively secure years, 19 Vietnamese annotation cases, and at least 20 Nôm cases. The categories overlap. The point is not to claim a final percentage. The point is to see which patterns recur across the collection and which claims still depend on one exceptional example.

Dates and places show several historical horizons, but they do not draw a travel route by themselves. One manuscript combines a cyclical date, an older Đại Nam and Tuyên Quang address, and a Guangxi place name. If those details were written at the same time, 1856 is a stronger date than 1916. But if the address was copied from an older model, that conclusion becomes weaker. So I keep two columns: the manuscript’s exact wording and my conditional historical reconstruction.

A much firmer case comes from Lu Huangju. The colophon reads the third year of Khải Định, cyclical wuwu, in the first ten days of the fifth lunar month: 1918. The two books were copied by the same person at the same time, but their contents are different. This is no longer a hypothesis based only on a shared seal or custody. It lets me study a practitioner’s repertoire: different books kept available for different ritual tasks.

For character comparison, an isolated visual resemblance is not enough. I compare five things: structure, reading and tone, meaning, position in the passage, and distribution across texts. Dictionaries provide possible readings, but the manuscript context must make the final decision. The same Chinese-character resource can work as a full loan, a sound element, or a meaning element. So shared form does not automatically prove shared origin or a direction of transmission.

The clearest controlled comparison is between two Three Thousand texts dated 1906 and 1917. Their content and order are the same, but some Han–Nôm correspondences are different. This gives us two measurable questions: how much of the structure is retained, and where do local replacements occur? The teaching sequence stays stable while some reading solutions change. This is cultural rhythm in a form that can be counted, compared, and challenged by other researchers.

Later Vietnamese notes are also important evidence. In several books, blue writing gives pronunciations for older Zhuang graphs. This shows reactivation: a later reader made an inherited text pronounceable again. But the limit is equally important. A Vietnamese gloss proves later engagement with the book. It does not prove that the original book was copied in Vietnam or that it followed a particular route.

The manuscript Song Shengmu Xiao’er Yong brings us closest to emotionality. Its ritual world includes the Holy Mother, the Flower Goddess, a child, the dead, and the transformation of the soul. The text does not simply describe grief. It gives the family and the ritual specialist a sequence of actions in response to loss. Emotionality here is organized care. I cannot claim that every participant felt the same emotion, but I can show how the manuscript made care and transformation ritually possible.

This 1918 book by Lu Huangju contains many Sawndip forms and ritual sections that I cannot yet classify as entirely Daoist; some may belong to Zhuang Mo traditions. In a passage I provisionally identify as Eight Holy Mothers Become Immortals, repeated Holy Mother formulas stand beside Han Zhongli, Zhang Guolao, Lü Dongbin, and other Eight-Immortal names, often written non-standardly. The secure claim is not that these male figures literally became women. It is that a familiar pantheon was re-framed through Holy Mother language. The grammar and ritual function still need line-by-line study.

The manuscripts also connect surnames with ancestral places. In the current catalogue, Jiangxia appears five times, while Yanmen and Longxi each appear once. The wider archive also includes Hejian. These formulas may connect a local practitioner with ancestry, prestige, and a longer historical imagination. But they do not by themselves prove biological descent or a migration route from the Central Plains. My claim is narrower: ancestral geography authorizes belonging.

Across these cases, five mechanisms recur. Books are maintained as a useful repertoire. Textual frames persist through repeated use. Different scripts and genres do different jobs. Dates, places, and ancestors re-anchor a text. Later notes reactivate it for a new reader. Together, these mechanisms connect small philological details with a larger question: how does a community keep relationships available across time?

This model must remain testable. Similar graphs may be created independently. Shared formulas may come from a common template rather than direct copying. A place name may belong to a later layer. A shared surname may refer to another person. The cultural-rhythm argument becomes stronger only when several kinds of evidence cluster together: sequence, handwriting, material layer, date, repeated formula, and ritual function. The unfinished Guangxi catalogue will provide an important comparison.

For Global South scholarship, these manuscripts are not incomplete copies of a national canon. They are knowledge worlds made by ordinary practitioners. My starting point remains Chinese and Zhuang scholarship on writing and local cultural categories. International theories of emotion, rhythm, and material life help me test the mechanism. They do not replace the concepts closest to the archive. This allows the research to remain locally grounded and internationally comparable.

To conclude, these manuscripts make emotional worlds by organizing relationships. Cultural rhythm explains how some forms remain active while other layers change. Dates, places, scripts, annotations, and ancestry become meaningful only when their evidentiary limits remain visible. Thank you very much.