Western Sichuan Tea House: As A Public Space Generation And Changes

To Chengdu residents in the Western Sichuan Province, teahouses are representative of their unique way of life. Contributing to "collective memory", these teahouses convey very rich clues about local culture, which is incomparable by teahouses in other provinces. For this reason, any study focusing on the social and cultural aspects of Western Sichuan Province in the past 100 years should not neglect the role of teahouses. Moreover, rather than equating teahouses as dining places, we should view them as public spaces for public lives, making out their relationship to and deviation from traditional public spaces such as ancestral halls, temples, guild hall, secret society such as paoge. What happens in teahouse belongs to the category of what Habermas terms "associating activities" . Judging from the point of view of anthropology, teahouses, as public places and the locales of associating, play a positive role in the social lives of Western Sichuan.Bearing this objective in mind, I choose several teahouses in Chengdu city and its neighboring towns as fieldwork spot. Based on participant observation and historical studies of these teahouses, my thesis will explore the process that in late Qing Dynasty teahouses evolve into public places and the kind of changes that they have gone through. I will also analyze how teahouses, as outgrowths of traditional public places, differ from their predecessors. My investigations will lead to the conclusion that teahouses at Western Sichuan Province are conductive to social integration and provide a possible formula for the remedy of many modern traumas.At Western Sichuan Province, teahouses are important places for public lives, providing the ground for people of different ethnic origins and social classes to get together, entertaining themselves, exchanging information, conducting business dealings and resolving public disputes. And the very concept of "public space" helps to bridge a link between teahouses and more traditional public spaces such as temples, ancestral halls and guild hall so as to view them in the long history of public spaces since their emergence in late Qing Dynasty.My thesis contains four parts: preface, text, conclusion and bibliography. In the preface, I deal with the significance of this topic and survey recent publications regarding this field while making clear some key concepts and major research methods that will be applied in this paper. In contemporary society, the traditional association spaces such as temples and guild halls become less significant in social integration. Teahouses, therefore, take up the vacancy left out by their predecessors through responding to changing social economic conditions and adopting new forms so as to maintain the proper operation of local communities. On the other hand, in a time when state apparatus and big industries increasingly intervene into people's lives, teahouses provide a countering force. Viewed from this perspective, we will come to understand the attitudes of local government and city elitists to teahouses, and the interrelationship between teahouses and bureaucratic system. Besides, we will learn to appreciate the role of teahouse and work out a possible solution for modern trauma.The text is divided into four parts. In the first chapter titled "The History of Teahouses in Western Sichuan Province", I trace the development of teahouses in Western Sichuan. By way of quoting from historical documents, townspeople's and visitors' narration as well as indigenous writers' literary works, I want to present the evolution of teahouses in Western Sichuan. Toordinary people at Western Sichuan, patronizing teahouses is a natural habit, part of their daily routine, formed through ages. It now belongs to the category of "habit-memory". The act of going to teahouses is a formed habit, a way to keep traditional modes of behavior, from which one obtains his or her identity. This personal inclination and habit are not acquired through rules or regulations but rather through being with those who behav...