关键词: 扬州马氏兄弟, 收藏家, 文化资本, 士商互动, 儒学转向

Abstract:

During the most prosperous time of the Qing dynasty, the Ma brothers (Ma Yueguan and Ma Yuelu) originally from Anhui, then merchants in Yangzhou, excelled in textual criticism. Through their systematic connoisseurship of painting and calligraphy, they reconstructed their social identities, ultimately becoming “Renaissance men” who transcended scholar-merchant boundaries. Taking their collecting practices as a starting point and focusing on The Alchemist’s High-Transcendent Picture of the Forest Spring, this study uses iconographic analysis and close textual reading to reveal the dual strategies in their self-fashioning. While constructing literati identities through art authentication and collection, they skillfully navigated between Lu Jianzeng’s bureaucratic faction and Li E’s reclusive literati circles. By leveraging their cultural capital as collectors, they established a cross-institutional network of cultural power. The paradigm shift in Anhui merchants’ collecting practices during this period stemmed from Confucian secularization. Textual scholarship transformed connoisseurship from leisurely “playthings” to empirical research, and merchants’ awakening self-consciousness drove them to claim cultural authority through systematic collecting. The Ma brothers’ case illuminates three transformations: a shift from aesthetic indulgence to academic rigor in collecting, a structural change in scholar-merchant relations from dependency to parity, and a cognitive evolution from social stratification to value reorientation. These changes reflect the historical process of bidirectional cultural capital flow between scholars and merchants.

Key words: Ma Brothers of Yangzhou, Collector, Cultural Capital, Scholar-Merchant Interaction, Confucian Shift