This paper examines the cultural history of a special divinatory practice in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912): the physiognomy of written characters (sinographs), in which the physical characteristics of written characters are used to ascertain information about the life of the one who writes them. This research particularly focusses on the practitioners of this divinatory technique: their identity, their sociality, and their performance. For practitioners of character physiognomy, a written character can foreshadow a person’s fortune because of the cosmology of ubiquitous association, in which sinographs are seen as meaningful pictorial symbols that function as replicas of the material world as well as cosmic extensions of the human body. This conceptualization of written characters should be understood in terms of the specific socio-historical context in which the practitioners made contact with their clients. By investigating important manuals of character physiognomy and anecdotal writings this paper shows how social interactions play a crucial role in practitioner’s interpretation of a sinograph. This paper also focuses on prognostic theories included in manuals such as Cheng Xing’s 程省 Esoteric Documents on Fathoming Characters (Cezi midie 測字秘牒) and physiognomic verses included in the Qing dynasty Imperial Anthology of Books in the Past and Present (Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成) to see how diviners’ knowledge on this technique is represented.

This paper explores the relationship between dreams and political legitimacy as mediated through the role of dream interpreters. Through the lens of dream narrative examples culled from a late-Ming dream encyclopedia, I examine the different ways in which political legitimacy was conveyed, promoted, and even removed through dreams, interpreted by diviners who bound symbolic reality to political reality and as such wielded considerable political power. The 1562 Guidelines for Dreams (夢占逸旨), reprinted in full in the 1636 An Explication of the Profundities in the Forest of Dreams (夢林玄解; hereafter Forest of Dreams), was an essential vehicle for the transmission of ideas about dreams during the Ming. Literatus compiler Chen Shiyuan and the compilers of earlier texts upon which Chen drew, selected certain records that reflected ideas about dream divination and the role of the dream diviner. In some dream divination examples, dream diviners deliberately reframed the dream in ways that either supported or undermined legitimacy. In others, the dreamers served as diviners and offered their own legitimizing divination argument. Some examples show the diviner as lying to the dreamer in order to promote a particular agenda. Taken together, these examples show that dream diviners themselves had a certain buy-in to a particular system of knowledge, which reveals shared assumptions about dreams, divinatory practice, and legitimacy. Dreams sometimes revealed a moral truth, which was open to interpretation, but only by diviners.