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The roots of the genealogy writing tradition of the Chinese Sibe go back to the Qing Dynasty. This tradition has played a crucial role to create a genealogical community of the Sibe: genealogies were the material carriers of knowledge preserved about their ancestors and their past. However, many of the genealogies were lost during the turbulent time of the twentieth century, and although numerous Sibe clans embark on reproducing their own family trees, it is only the memory of the elderly they can most often draw on. This study is intended to present and highlight the significance a specific collection of genealogies compiled by a self-taught Sibe historian, offering valuable sources for conduct research on the history of the Qing-dynasty and the Sibe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that scholars should see environmental history not as a specialized subfield but as a research paradigm useful to all students of modern China. It first presents an expanded definition of an "historical actor" and encourages scholars to integrate a range of organic and inorganic Others into their cast of characters. The article then addresses the subject of the environment and time, proposing alternative ways of periodizing Chinese history, linked to the idea of the Anthropocene. In the final section the discussion turns to the problem of space, focusing on the ways that Qing history has reshaped our understanding of the relationship between the natural world, center and periphery, and state formation. Setting aside both declensionist and triumphalist narratives about China's past, this article suggests that the methods, concepts, and research agenda of environmental history can enrich the work of all students of Chinese history regardless of specialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chang Ping-Ying's book, "The Chinese Astronomical Bureau, 1620–1850: Lineages, Bureaucracy and Technical Expertise," explores the relationship between science and bureaucracy in premodern China. The book focuses on the Imperial Astronomical Bureau of the Qing dynasty and challenges the prevailing view that China's bureaucracy hindered scientific development. Chang highlights the role of hereditary astronomer families within the Bureau and their contributions to the history of mathematical sciences in the Qing dynasty. The book examines key events and transformations in Qing astronomy, shedding light on the careers and influence of these families. While the book has some limitations, it provides valuable insights into the study of low- and middle-level government officials who were important figures in premodern China's scientific community. [Extracted from the article]

This study examines how the availability of river transportation routes affected the effectiveness of the Qing artillery corps. The Yangzi River system and the Pearl River system guaranteed timely and stable artillery support for the Qing siege force in Jiangnan and Liangguang respectively. This was made possible by the Qing's large reserves of cannons and the sizeable water forces at several strategically important cities along the two rivers, which constituted a river-based artillery logistic system. In the mountainous and unpopulated areas of China, however, the Qing artillery corps faced considerable logistic difficulties. This put the besieging army in a strategic dilemma, i.e., whether to wait for the siege train indefinitely or to assault the city with cold weapons. To push further, this strategic dilemma posed by the terrain may explain why the Qing army, despite possessing the latest artillery technology, continued using cold weapons extensively until the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Opium Wars, traditional notions of China as encompassing "all under heaven" (tianxia 天下) and the "Sino-barbarian dichotomy" (huayi 華夷) could no longer be sustained. Under the pressure and intimidation of the Great Powers' advanced warships and fire power, the Qing government signed the unequal treaties and China was forced to adopt Western conceptual reasoning, discursive language, and rules of conduct. Western knowledge and lexicon was successively translated into Chinese, affecting transformations in local discourse and society. As part of this process, Japanese texts, which contained a great volume of Chinese characters, became an important medium for the transmission of Western epistemology. During the first Opium War between China and England, the cultural and political hegemony of the Great Powers were demonstrated through debates over interpretations of the Chinese character yi 夷. During the Late Qing, Chinese intellectuals drew on their foundations in traditional Chinese lexicon to understand and adopt the foreign-derived words zhongzu 種族 (race) and minzu 民族 (nation). This process reflects both shifts in how Chinese people regarded collective identity and the various presumptions underlying state-building visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until now most studies on commercial publishing in pre-modern China have focused on two areas in the south, Jiangnan and Fujian, where publishing centers had been clustered since the Song dynasty. Before the Qing dynasty, commercial publications for the whole country had been provided by the publishing centers located in those two areas. However, the landscape changed significantly in the Qing dynasty, as commercial publishing extended to places where there had existed no printing shops before, especially the northern provinces of China. Dongchang prefecture along the Great Canal in Shandong province rose to become an important regional publishing center during the Qing. The publications produced in Dongchang not only satisfied the needs of local readers but were sold throughout Shandong and in other provinces in the north. As an outstanding publishing center in the north, Dongchang prefecture is a useful window from which to observe the development of commercial publishing and the book market in northern China in the Qing dynasty. This article investigates the origin, publications, readership, and distribution networks of printing shops in Dongchang prefecture. The author argues that rather than completely replacing the southern publishers in supplying books for readers in the north, the newly risen northern commercial publishers captured only a part of the market share. Some categories of books, such as new titles and high-end publications, still heavily relied on the southern publishers. In the Qing dynasty there was a notable trend towards stronger relationships between publishing centers and regional book markets. Hopefully this study will provide a more comprehensive landscape of commercial publishing in pre-modern China, and enhance our understanding of the development of book markets in the north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid-Tang through the Qing dynasty, poets employed the short-lyric form known as zhuzhici [bamboo branch lyrics] to write, first and foremost, about ordinary people going about their daily lives in China and elsewhere in the Sinosphere. This article explores how early developments in this genre prepared the ground for what later emerged as an arguably proto-ethnographic mode – that is, both poetry and accompanying prose annotations based on poets' direct observations of and even immersive "fieldwork" within discrete localities. I focus specifically on poems about "water labor," by which I mean those that describe and give voice to vocational groups and communities along lakes, levies, and channels of the Yangzi River basin. It was partly thanks to this history of reporting about local lives and conditions, I argue, that zhuzhici eventually came to adopt a more information-intensive and increasingly empirical orientation during the later stages of their development. Moreover, this mode of what might even be identified tentatively as affective or lyrical ethnography prefigures efforts by contemporary social scientists to recalibrate ethnography in spatially affective modes, and I conclude with some observations on how its example might inform future efforts in these directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of Qing domination over China, the Manchu rulers strictly controlled or even prohibited migration of Chinese people to the dynasty's Motherland (long xing zhi di 龍興之地). Only two brief phases are an exception, namely the mid Shunzhi to early Kangxi and Yongzheng periods. During the former, in 1653, a "Regulation for the repopulation and land reclamation of Liaodong" was promulgated, establishing alluring incentives for whoever managed to move a hundred or more people to the region east of the Liao river. Only fifteen years later, when the maneuver had just started to produce some results, the Qing court abolished it. In the long term, such a change of direction appears perfectly normal, considering that later on most of the lands would be assigned to the Eight Banners and the state would have striven to keep the Chinese out. Nevertheless, in the short term, the decision seemed to come out of the blue. An interesting debate on what might have determined the turnabout began in the early twentieth century, and some most recent contributions have been published in the 2000s; yet none of the thesis proposed so far is fully convincing. On the basis of sources that have not yet been taken into account, this paper further investigates into the matter and aims at demonstrating that the concerns which compelled the rulers to officially oppose immigration in the following decades already existed in the very first years of Kangxi reign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders the way in which a woman is remembered in her informal effigy portrait commissioned by her surviving husband, and the dynamic of its perception by its intended audience in late imperial China. Through a case study of a rare extant eighteenth-century example, the Lady Xiao Album, I examine how such a female effigy portrait was connected to her husband's mourning act that had largely become a recognizable social, cultural instance. The album highlights the theme of lamenting over Lady Xiao's premature death through the inclusion of extensive mourning literature by both her husband and his esteemed literati friends that focuses on the mourner rather than the mourned. Participating in this project, her main portrait is rendered in a manner that immortalises her as an idealized and romantic female without personal characterization. The portrait not only publicly announces her husband's remembrance of her, but also commemorates his mourning act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

They demonstrate the complexity of issues concerning the history of China's northern kingdoms, and open up new questions for further research. This special issue contains five articles researching the founding history of four northern dynasties: the Liao (907-1125), Jin (1115-1234), Yuan (1206-1368), and Qing (1616-1911). [Extracted from the article]

Throughout the history of East Asia, various polities in modern-day Korea, Japan, and Vietnam accepted investitures bestowed by the Chinese royal court. Many of these states also established their own vassal structures based on this tributary system. In light of this, it would be more accurate to describe the traditional international order of East Asia as a system of investitures and tributes, an "investiture-tribute system." The significance of this system is the royal court being revered by its tributaries, which acknowledge it as the superior power. Looking at the vassal relationship between the Ming [1368-1644] and Qing [1644-1911] courts and the states of Joseon 朝鮮, Ryukyu 琉球, and Vietnam under various names, it is clear that the tributary system was a basic mechanism that facilitated bilateral trade, cultural exchange, border control, and judicial cooperation. Moreover, when vassal states encountered threats to their national security, the Chinese government assisted them with diplomatic and military resources befitting its position as the imperial court. Yet, although the tributary system enabled a relationship in which the royal court enjoyed a position of superiority and its vassal states an inferior one, none of the vassal states formed an alliance that revolved around the Chinese empire. Hence, in the near-modern period, the system struggled to contend with both the great world powers that made use of the treaty system and the expansion of Japan in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the twenty first century rise of China and the ensuing shift in the world order, the shortcomings of the Western-based nation state system are becoming apparent, and the traditional concept of I Tianxia i is being reconsidered as a valuable conceptual alternative. It is normal for an ancient civilization to have thought of itself as the center of the world at some point, but only China incorporated this idea into its own name: I Zhongguo i , "the Middle Kingdom". Ma Rong examines how China went from being the Middle Kingdom at the center of its own I Tianxia i system to being a modern nation state in a Western dominated world. [Extracted from the article]

Beijing was an emerging legal publishing center in late imperial China and at least 60 commercial editions of law books were published there in the Qing. Beijing commercial publishers established close connections with the central government, which enabled them to obtain internal legal and administrative information and to print it for profit. Thanks to their close connections with other printing centers in places like Jiangnan and Jiangxi, Beijing publishers had convenient access to fine editions of legal books in the national book market. In the early 19th century when Jiangnan editions rose to dominance, Beijing publishers adjusted their publishing strategies by republishing Jiangnan editions and reducing the number of their own editions. During the Taiping war, Beijing publishers took the opportunity to expand their business. In the late Qing, Beijing was a flourishing legal printing center, selling a variety of legal books at affordable prices to readers who wanted to learn the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Qing dynasty, Liulichang became a prominent bookselling and publishing district in the imperial capital. Yet, most historical and scholarly writing on Liulichang has addressed only the antiquarian and rare book trade, and has neglected the prominence of commercial publishing of informational texts in Beijing. Commercial bookseller-printers formed a significant presence in Liulichang, and their research, publishing, and marketing practices were attuned to the changing dynamics of life in the capital. For clerks, merchants, and aspirant officials, Liulichang publishers offered books such as guidebooks, official directories, examination results, forensic handbooks, and administrative anthologies. Based on an examination of hundreds of books published in Liulichang and focusing on official directories (jinshen lu) and guidebooks, this paper demonstrates how publishers managed connections with the state, cultivated sources, recycled texts, and crafted printing practices. It argues that publishing practices in Liulichang became more standardized during the dynasty, both in reaction to the state's loosening of controls on publishing and to the growth in the market for informational texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jesuits' experience in China is usually analysed within the framework of Sino-Western relations. However, Jesuits' writings often evoked their experience in and knowledge about China in association with other parts of the non-European world, including India, South-East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and America. Based on a prosopographical analysis of China Jesuits' biographical data, we first demonstrate that the encounter with other non-European regions was an integral part of the China Jesuits' itineraries; for they all travelled through intermediate areas on their way to China, and some also did so on their way back to Europe. Secondly, relying mainly on examples drawn from French Jesuits' scholarship between the 1680s and the 1750s, we demonstrate how encounters with other non-European regions and the overseas interests of their home country shaped the Jesuits' scientific agenda as well as the way they understood things Chinese. Lastly, we illustrate how Jesuits keenly studied historical and contemporaneous accounts in Chinese and Manchu on the neighbouring regions of the Qing empire. We argue that the body of knowledge produced by the China Jesuits should be studied in a spatial framework that goes beyond the China-Europe dichotomy since it was, on one hand, filtered by the Jesuits' knowledge about other non-European regions and, on the other hand, concerned with a geographical area larger than the territory of China under the Ming and even the Qing dynasty. We also argue that, in the eighteenth century in particular, the China Jesuits' scholarship was configured by the spatial dynamics shaping the Society of Jesus, Bourbon France and Qing China; thereby, we contribute to a better understanding of both the French Jesuit and Qing networks, and the interconnections between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799, r. 1735-1795) published his imperial poetry collections at regular intervals during his reign. This article reconstructs the gradual process of routinization of these activities through a close reading of the collections' prefaces and postscripts. Understanding this process helps us to understand the subtlety of the intra-court communications between Qianlong and his officials, which contextualizes how Qianlong's intent was delivered, received, and actualized in courtly practice. This routinization process also had a certain influence upon Qianlong and his successors, and suggests a possible reason behind Qianlong's large poetry production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the “playful eight-legged essay” as a form of literary parody and discusses its circulation in printed editions of The Story of the Western Wing and The Story of the Lute in late imperial China. The rise of the playful eight-legged essay was part of a philosophical and literary tradition of “game-playing,” and occurred in the context of publications that appropriated canonical genres for fashionable entertainment. Reading the playful compositions against the generic conventions of the standard examination essay, on the one hand, and the original drama commentary, on the other, the author explores the playful eight-legged essay as an increasingly autonomous mode of critical commentary that was independent from, yet still associated with, the dramatic text. Employing dramatic impersonation, the essays opened up a playful space for the staging of passion and extended the appeal of the original play by involving the reader in its imaginative performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vilified Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) of late Qing China remains a symbol of national humiliation and weakness in modern Chinese historiography. Scholars attribute Cixi's "rule behind the curtains" responsible for the ultimate decline of the Qing dynasty and its capitulatory peace with foreign powers. This article revisits the conditions that enabled Cixi's rise to power during the Tongzhi reign (1861-75) and argues that Hanlin academicians regarded her as a potentially capable regent upon whom they could count to manage state affairs in the best interests of the Tongzhi emperor. This article also argues that Cixi acquired her political vocabulary from her Hanlin lecturers who compiled a unique primer for their patroness - the Zhiping baojian (A precious mirror for governing the peace) - on female regency in China's imperial past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1911-1927 period represented a window of opportunity for the creation of a Chinese military structure with a professional officer corps. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Jiang Baili emerged as a rare military theorist who had intellectual status, a nuanced understanding of civil-military affairs, and both domestic and foreign military training. The failure of Jiang Baili to influence China's military development was mainly due to his individual difficulties in focusing his intellectual talents on real-world issues. After producing two seminal works in the 1910s, Jiang lived for another twenty years as a marginalized, increasingly eccentric military analyst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the practice of returning marked papers to rejected candidates in late imperial Chinese examinations. The practice--common from the sixteenth century to the abolition of imperial examinations in 1905--established a sense of personal communication between examiners and examinees and was an opportunity for rejected candidates to benefit from the examination system. The failed papers returned to their authors enabled them to make sense of their performance by interpreting, when not misconstruing, examiners' comments. The examiners sometimes praised the papers and blamed the decision to fail on other examiners. As a result, most rejected candidates tended not to challenge the examiners through official channels or take collective action against the examination system. Thus, in the late imperial examination system, the ways in which rejecting decisions could be negotiated and construed were no less important than the awarding of degrees to an extremely small proportion of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the chastity cult in China during the High Qing (c.1680-1830) era. It focuses on the physical characteristics and the cultural implications of chastity arches built in Huizhou (Anhui) during the eighteenth century. Using both written texts and evidence from extant arches, this article explores how these monumental objects served as a forum through which the ideology of female fidelity was constructed and perceived by different constituents including the Manchu court, wealthy Huizhou merchants, and resident commoners. These three groups had different attitudes toward the value of these chastity arches, and thus, this study reveals a dynamic and contradictory picture of how the chastity cult was contested and negotiated in the local community of Huizhou during the late imperial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes the rise of "early religious studies in China" with its apex in the 1920s within the heated debates on the role of religion in a modern Chinese society. While the most recent development of religious studies (zongjiaoxue) in China (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) is well known, its early emergence in the late Qing and Republican periods (ca. 1890-1949) has been a neglected topic. The author demonstrates first how antagonistic anti-religious and affirmative positions, received from Western modernization discourse and informed by the contested character of the concept of religion itself, led to the emergence of this new discipline in Republican China as a product of broader discourses on modernization. Secondly, the article evaluates the limited institutionalization of religious studies as a distinct " full" discipline in relation to the broader interdisciplinary " field" of research and public debates on religion. While the interdisciplinary character is typical of the field in general (also in the West), the limited degree of "full disciplinarity" depended on specific, local discursive and political factors of its time. As "religion" appears as an important modern discourse in East Asia, the early emergence of religious studies in China thereby reflects social, political, and intellectual transitions from Imperial to Republican China, and offers a unique perspective on Asian discourses on religious and secular modernities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended to explain the changes in the activities of the Imperial Academy of Medicine during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). By tracing its precedents and comparing their functions, I will explain its role during the Qing dynasty. Furthermore, the seemingly hidebound institutional codes in fact reveal interesting information about the dynamics of the Academy. Through examining the impacts of the regulations on personnel and their careers, we are able to explain the very different requirements of the Qing rulers for their medical service. Up until the Ming period (1368-1644) there was an institutional boundary between medical services for the palace and those for the state, even though they shared the same personnel. The Qing was the first dynasty in which even this unclear line disappeared. In this sense, the Qing Academy did not simply copy the tradition of its predecessors. Instead, the services for the emperor's individual needs became more and more central to its mission. Thus, the common people's rather critical perceptions of the bureau were largely true. In spite of its increased emphasis on serving the imperial household, the Qing Academy retained its connections with the government. As an alien regime, the Manchu court's concern for the security of its rulers was much higher than during the previous dynasty. To meet the needs of the new regime, the device of the Qing Academy emphasized fostering elites rather than selecting them. Now the Academy not only provided medical education to the junior members as in earlier periods, but also shaped them in behavior. This affected both the organization of the Imperial Medical Academy, and the strategies of the physicians employed in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the management of provincial finance during the years (1746-1748) of the Qianlong emperor's first universal tax remission as a window through which to peer inquisitively at the fiscal system of the high-Qing era. How did that system work at provincial level, and how can we use the copious statistical data in archival sources to address questions that are hard to answer precisely because of that system's routine operating procedures? This article moves from a naive question - how did provincial governments cope when the Qianlong emperor munificently cancelled their staple source of income for a year? - to a re-examination of the Chinese realm's strategic geography, a methodology for measuring the fiscal health of individual provinces, and a demonstration of the organizational competence of the high-Qing Board of Revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stemming from an examination of the zinc industry in early modern China, this article centers on a detailed survey of coal, the primary source of energy for processing zinc. On the basis of Qing archival documents, this article investigates the previously unknown spatial relationship of zinc ore deposits, coal mines, and zinc smelters; provides quantitative evidence of coal use by estimating the annual consumption of coal in processing zinc; offers a new perspective on the general use of coal in Qing China; and compares the coal-fuel efficiency problem in early European and Chinese zinc production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In works that have profoundly influenced contemporary views of China's economic growth relative to the Europe's in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, Jan De Vries has concluded that "the East Asian industrious revolution is very much a supply-side phenomenon", while Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong among others have concluded that consumer restraint was a characteristic of eighteenth century society. These views are not supported by economic behaviour in Qing Yangzhou, where middle-brow writings show a marked attention to household décor and a high level of interest in material goods, including imports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Qing court adjudicated illicit sex cases involving imperial clansmen, a clear distinction was made between the nature of the crime and the applicability of punishment. This distinction reveals an imbalance in the way law was normalized in Qing China. Definitions of illicit sexual behavior reflected a relatively uniform standard that applied to different social statuses and ethnicities, while punishment for offenders was often differentiated and proved to be much more closely related to social standing. Thus, in terms of their behavior, imperial clansmen were generally subject to the same legal liability as the rest of the population, but when it came to punishment their status was emphasized, and consequently they often enjoyed special legal privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the Heming ji (Collection of singing in harmony), which comprises the sometimes surprisingly intimate poetic exchanges between the woman intellectual Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851) and her husband Hao Yixing (1757-1829), both renowned in their lifetimes as classical "evidential research" (kaozheng) scholars. The paper seeks to demonstrate the transformation of the cult of qing (romantic love) in the High Qing period. It argues that, as the centrality of courtesans in literati culture died out with the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, gentry women came to represent the positive cultural values of qing through the increasingly fashionable idea and practice of companionate marriage. In this process, the cult of qing that characterized the subversive late Ming literati culture, of which courtesan culture was an important part, was not obliterated by the High Qing classical revival as is often assumed; rather, it was domesticated, ritualized, transformed into conjugal love, and arguably, integrated into the High Qing "familistic moralism." The paper also explores how the concept of qing, in the narrow sense of love between man and woman, was expanded into this couple's shared passion and ambition to serve the state and empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late 1800s, internal rebellion and European imperialism transformed existing patterns of taxation, resource distribution, and government spending in China. Continual preparation for war led to an enormous growth in the state's extractive capacity, and indirect commercial taxes supplanted the system of direct agrarian levies established in the early Qing era. Authorities earmarked the majority of these new resources for military spending in eastern China in an effort to amass the sinews of politico-economic power. Together these changes laid the initial foundation for the military-fiscal state in modern China, a transformation that parallels the experience of early modern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on female editorship and sexual politics in late Ming and early Qing China, using Hua suo shi, an anthology edited by the courtesan poet Xue Susu, as a case study. It traces textual production and transmission, and reconstructs the literary and cultural contexts of this work to explore the courtesans editorial gaze and representation of gender through a close reading of it. The analysis of its two main themes--women as commodities, and women as agents--shows how the courtesan editor re-imagined China's cultural landscape from her point of view. New examples of female agency are discovered in analyzing the cultural process of editing as a "web of discourses," providing a window on the emergence of a new female editorial voice in early modern Chinas cultural discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-seventeenth century, the Qing empire of China reacted to piracy and rebellion by forcibly depopulating the coast and burning its shoreline into wasteland for twenty years. As unique as the scale and brutality of this response may be in maritime history, the Qing state was not inherently isolationist or anti-maritime. Its underlying imperatives were shared by other early modern states: a desire to establish sovereignty, impose subjecthood, and constrain the mobility of peripheral populations. This artide places the Qing Coastal Depopulation of 1661-1683 in the context of fifty years of maritime militarization, invasion, and civil war in the coastal province of Fujian. It portrays the Depopulation as not just a military act to combat pirates or the powerful sealord Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), but also an act of social engineering to subjugate the coastal population by removing it behind an artificial land boundary. At the same time, the article shows that the Qing state's practice of "outsourcing" coastal control to regional lords helps to account for the policy's longevity and some of its severest abuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practice of dual translation (heyi) in the late Qing, focusing in particular on Quanti xinlun, a physiological treatise compiled by Benjamin Hobson (1816-1873) and his Chinese assistants. It argues that, owing to the considerable latitude allowed to Hobson's Chinese partners, the intellectual syncretism of the translation was a direct consequence of the Chinese agency at play in intercultural exchange. The collaborative process in the making of Quanti xinlun is also explored, and two passages in which the "Sinicization" of western physiology is most obvious are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the main lines of relations between the Qing and two neighbors, Đai Việt (Vietnam) and Siam (Thailand), ca. 1700-1820. It argues that the tribute system was not a "fossil" of Qing pretensions and meaningless ceremonies but a functional matrix for adjustment to changing realities. It cites archival sources in Beijing and Taipei that will repay further detailed study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All pirates had reputations for violence and terror, but in Asia people also depicted them as bloodthirsty demons who practiced cannibalism and human sacrifices. But how deserved were those reputations? Here I examine the images, nature, and meanings of pirate violence in the South China Sea between the fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pirates consciously used violence and brutality to obtain money and goods, to seek vengeance against their enemies, and to instill fear in anyone who might resist them. In this article I focus on what I call the cultural construction of violence with Chinese characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1801, with Heshen recently deposed and the Jiaqing emperor having assumed his personal rule, a young household tutor named Bao Shichen wrote an ambitious essay-Shuochu (On Wealth)-laying out the reforms he believed would set the Qing empire back on the path to political strength and economic prosperity. Although Bao would go on to achieve celebrity as a reformist advisor to high-ranking policy-makers, this particular work, in which he presents his most comprehensive statement on political economy, remained unpublished for more than a century. In the final decade of the Qing it was rediscovered and published by Liu Shipei and his associates in the National Essence (guocui) movement, hailed as a prescient document anticipating current political trends and presenting strong similarities to Western political practice. The present article explores the content of this work in detail, arguing that, despite its relatively cautious tone, it does indeed offer a bold and somewhat populist revision of the unwritten constitution that governed the Qing empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of a forgery case in the Board of Revenue shows how the huge increase in the legal sale of offices and titles in early nineteenth-century China overstretched the bureaucratic structures that managed it and exposed the weakness of official control over subaltern clerical personnel. The case allows a glimpse into the mostly hidden world of metropolitan clerks and the operation of a little known department in the Board of Revenue, the Contribution Office. It also demonstrates how the illegal sale of fake official ranks allowed the clerks to participate in the legal purchase of offices and thus to free themselves from the predicament of their clerical position. While legal venality contributed to general corruption in the Qing bureaucracy, it also leveled to a certain extent the differences between a professional yet suppressed class of bureaucrats and their amateurish yet socially esteemed scholar-literati superiors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empress Dowager Cixi ( 1835-1908) is one of the most significant and controversial political figures in modern Chinese history, yet her comprehensive engagement with court art, a symbolic realm of sovereignty in China, remains understudied and is therefore deserving of close analysis. To examine her patronage of art, this paper scrutinizes Cixi's involvement in the Wanchun yuan (Garden of ten thousand springs) reconstruction project and argues that it not only exemplifies her strategy of asserting political power through art but also provides a rare glimpse of how a patrons creation and decoration of space can be read as a self-portrait. The author contends that, on the one hand, Cixi utilized the location and scale of her own palace the Tiandi yijiachun (Spring united between Heaven and Earth) as a symbol of her continuous power struggle with Qing imperial tradition; and, on the other hand, that the palaces layout and interior décor also suggest Cixi's feminine and religious identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues against the common perception that the Qing court theatre was a closed cultural institution. It suggests that this theatre developed in conjunction with popular performance traditions outside the court that were stimulated by Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). Through close readings of a set of ceremonial dramas (yidian xi) commissioned by the Empress for the birthday celebrations of imperial family members, this essay explores the aesthetic transition from ritual to entertainment in this particular genre. It shows how as Empress Dowager Cixi indulged in her personal fantasies, the court theatre altered. These new plays initiated a paradigm shift from choreographed pageantry to an actor-centered stage, and as such indicate Cixi's important role in the transformation of ceremonial court theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay commences with an overview of recent revisionist scholarship about Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) who in her lifetime and thereafter gained a reputation as a formidable opponent of the modernization process in late Qing China. It reviews both past and present studies about the Empress's political behavior, considers her changing image in more recent historical writing in and outside China, and then focuses on her interest in art and material culture. Discussion of the Empress's involvement in drama, garden and palace decoration, fashion, and photography introduces the four articles in this journal issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes historical Chinese and Tibetan documents in order to assess various perspectives and consequences of the British invasion of Tibet in 1904 under colonel Francis Younghusband, focusing on the invasion's effect on Chinese attitudes towards Tibet. The documents illustrate the Tibetan government's communication with China and Tibet's disregard of Chinese authority due to a lack of support during the invasion. The Buddhist structure of the Tibetan government is discussed and Tibet's motivation to defend Buddhism from foreign religion is described. Relations between China's Qing dynasty and Tibet are highlighted and it is concluded that the documents analyzed suggest China's lack of resistance to the invasion was used to strategically assert power in Tibet.

In the early 1760s, Jesuit missionaries serving as court artists in Peking were instructed by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-96) to produce a set of sixteen sketches in celebration of his recent victories over the Mongols and the Turkic Muslims in the region of present-day Xinjiang. The designs that were to be engraved on copper plates and printed in Europe were dispatched from Canton to Paris where the work was executed. Yet it was not until 1777, over a decade after the Qianlong emperor had initiated the project that his order was fully realized and the sixteen original designs, the sixteen copper plates, and 200 prints drawn from each plate, had all arrived in Beijing. This paper explores the politics behind the execution of this unique set of prints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Numerous Ming Chinese took refuge in Choson Korea during the early seventeenth century. Despite the supposed sinocentrism of Choso's elites, refugees from China were treated as belonging to the category of submitting-foreigner (hyanghwain), a protected but distinctly humble social status that had been used primarily as a tool for settling Japanese and Jurchen from Choson's frontiers. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Choson court considered it incongruous to include Ming Chinese descendants in that category. Chinese lineages were thus distinguished from other submitting-foreigners and reclassified according to the considerably more prestigious category of imperial subjects. This paper explores this change, seeing it as part of a trend in the Qing Empire and indeed in Eurasia as a whole in which identity and subjecthood became increasingly bureaucratized, and loyalties treated as absolute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Confucian world view in China was based on the concept of the Celestial Empire of China and embodied in the Tributary System. The Chinese view could not fit into the equal international relationship asserted among European countries. In the mid-19th century, especially after the Opium Wars, international law embarked on a furious collision with Chinese traditional Confucianism. Threatened by forces of Western powers, the Qing government had no choice but to come to compromise with the Western powers. Consequently, the Confucian world order based on the Celestial Empire of China collapsed and Chinese officials and scholars began to learn, accept and apply international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the woman poet Li Shuyi's (1817-?) poetry collection Shuyinglou mingshu baiyong (One hundred poems on famous women from Shying Tower). Through a reconstruction of Li Shuyi's life, a reading of her self-preface, and an analysis of her poems, this study aims to demonstrate how a woman author's perception of her own ill fate leads to her becoming a conscious writing subject, and how this self-realization motivates her to produce a gendered writing project. It argues that Li Shuyi articulates in her project her intervention into representations of women's images from her individual perspective on women's history, and her aims for immortality through writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the relevant traditional historiography, this article argues that early modern Sino-Western conflicts are to a great extent attributable to the sustained contestation between China and the Western empires (particularly Britain) over their competing claims to sovereignty in China. The article shows that the Western empires' demand for extraterritoriality and natural rights to freely trade, travel, and proselytize in China originated in their assumption of universal sovereignty in the non-Christian world. The early Sino-Western encounter illustrates how the discourses of sovereign equality and universal justice, as two origin myths of modern international law and diplomacy, were constructed, deployed, challenged, and adapted in the course of Western expansion in the age of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1800 cotton cloth was China's most important domestic trade commodity after grain. This paper reviews the history of cotton textile production in the Jiangnan region (or Lower Yangzi River area) where it thrived from 1300 to 1830, and discusses the factors contributing to its commercialization. It reveals the impact of the Ming and Qing governments in its institutionalization, and how the social organization of the industry was framed around the household economy and women's labor. This essay also documents the problems that cotton production and marketing encountered by the end of the eighteenth century, and demonstrates how the recent debates about the 'great divergence' and the nature of the Chinese political economy resonate in the history of China's cotton textile enter-prise. Finally, it shows how in the first decades of the nineteenth century, empire-wide demographic and environmental constraints brought economic stasis to Jiangnan's cotton industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers an essay on provincial government written by the Yongzheng Emperor of China shortly after his ascension to the throne in 1723. The essay treats provincial governors' role in personnel, financial and military matters and the problems of China's southwest. It reflects the emperor's dissatisfaction with policies in each of these areas, which were all to be the focus of reforming efforts during his reign. But perhaps more important, it expresses the Emperor's new concern with the value of administrative efficacy. The essay argues that this was a fundamental innovation in the political theology of the Chinese state. Although practical ideas for reform often came from governors themselves, who were closer to the problems than the Emperor and more familiar with the details of solution, imperial leadership created a climate in which reform ideas would be welcomed and implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of women as alleged sources for Qing dynasty zhiguai (tales of the strange) collections, particularly Ji Yun's (1724-1805) Yuewei caotang biji (Jottings from the Cottage of Close Scrutiny). Tracing circulation of narratives across both single-sex and mixed-sex networks sheds light on those networks, and on shared or divergent lore and interpretations as tales are cooperatively assembled. The absence or presence of female narrators or listeners in tales focused on women's behavior also reveals differing articulations of vice and virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youxian shi (poetry on roaming as a transcendent) has long been a conventional poetic genre in Chinese literature. It has been the common conception that youxian poetry was most popular from the Wei dynasty (220-265) through the Tang dynasty (618-907), and up until now, scholarly studies on the genre seemed to focus exclusively on Tang and pre-Tang periods. This gives the impression that after the Tang nothing of interest was written in this particular genre. Consequently, very little scholarly attention has been given to the youxian poems composed in post-Tang periods. This article examines youxian poems by Qing (1644-1911) women, specifically those poems entitled Nü youxian (roaming as a female transcendent). With the increasing consciousness of "self," the rise of groups of women writers, and the popularity of women's culture in late imperial China, youxian poems provided a unique literary space for women's poetic and autobiographical voices, certainly deserving more scholarly attention. I argue that by presenting female transcendents or women pursuing transcendence at the center of a poem and re-inscribing the traditional literary images, the poets created a stronger female subjectivity that reflected women's desires in their intellectual and spiritual lives. I also propose that nü youxian was a new subgenre of youxian poetry, emerging only in the context of the efflorescence of women's poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]