ABSTRACT
One night during the reign of Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty, a man walked out of his home to look for the baby he heard crying his backyard. The man was soon joined by his family and neighbors as they all searched, in vain, for the wailing child that screamed through their Shangdang hometown. The rise of commercialism, commodification, and connoisseurship in the late Ming and early–mid-Qing has been widely treated in recent years, and the story of ginseng could be written as one of many object histories in this expanding literature of the material and visual culture of early modern China. Scholarship on material culture reminds people that objects are physical things that exist in space. Less obvious is the fact that objects also exist in time: things are always in flux, and not just on the scale of centuries, but also in a moment.
