Chinese elites of the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) were, like many writers elsewhere in the early modern era, obsessed with the ideal of authenticity (zhen). This showed nowhere more clearly than in their appreciation of folksongs. Supposedly composed by lower class people in the “streets and alleyways,” folksongs represented a form of poetic utterance free of the literary constraints that stifled elite writing. Praised and cited across a wide spectrum of literary opinion, folksongs appeared in collections by Yang Shen (Gujin fengyao,1543), Li Kaixian (Shijing yanci, c. 1557), Feng Menglong (Guazhi’er, c. 1601 and Shan’ge, c. 1604) and in that of the Ming loyalist Qu Dajun (Yuege, 1687). Many modern commentators have regarded recorded examples of Ming folksongs with suspicion, balking at their claims to authenticity by pointing to their very textual existence as evidence of elite reworking. These modern criticisms are premised on an ideal of authenticity, prevalent throughout early modern and modern Western folkloristics, that demands accurate representation of the material at its origin: authenticity is assessed by how well a reproduction of something matches its presumed source. In contrast, late Ming understanding of authenticity is premised on a different kind of ideal, which sees authenticity as a quality validated by the affective potency of its qing (emotion), not the purity of its origin. Both kinds of “authenticity” ask the same question: could a written version of oral folksongs be truly authentic? But they locate the agentic acts of poetic composition in different sites and processes, and thereby validate the “authenticity” of those compositions differently. Understanding these differences is crucial to seeing how and why they inscribe the value of non-elite literary production—and by extension how and whether lower-class voices could come to have social meaning in early modernity.

Early modern European views—such as those of the Grimm Brothers and Johann Herder—saw the “folk” as transmitters of a largely unchanged ancient tradition, confining them to a primitive past outside of modernity and assigning creativity solely to the activities of individual elite authorship. The emerging mid- to late-Ming view was the opposite: it saw creative expression as lodged distinctively in the “folk,” who enjoyed more intimate and unimpeded access to their qing/emotion, but transmission of literary production into the future was historically understood almost solely as an activity of textualization requiring elite intervention. Only when these views shifted, to incorporate recognition that oral as much as textual modes could contribute to the perdurance of literary production, did late Ming elites such as Feng Menglong come to value accurate representation of source material as an important element in the transmission of their qing. But this accuracy was premised on a relationship between words and the emotions they evoke, not on a claim about from whose mouth or brush a song originated. At this point, folksong collecting by late Ming elites began to resemble more an act of inclusion rather than an activity of appropriation: premised on a self-reflexive recognition that non-elites had a capacity to transmit poetry that rivalled their own, Chinese elites were forced to confront non-elite experiences as topics and provocations to poetic qing, and thus as key contributors to the world-making capacity of literature.