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Previous studies have established the use of various blue pigments, including both local and imported varieties, in the decoration of architecture in ancient China. However, the application of these pigments in local religious architecture has been understudied. In this study, the chemical analysis of ultramarine blue pigments was conducted on a mural painting retrieved from Yongle Taoist Temple in ancient China. The results showed that both imported and local pigments were used individually in the initial drawing period of the Yuan Dynasty (AD 1271–1368), whereas they were mixed in a later restoration in the Qing Dynasty (AD 1636–1912). Of particular significance, the analysis revealed the presence of lapis lazuli in a local religious relic of the Yuan Dynasty for the first time. Further analysis of the elemental proportions and associated minerals led to speculation about the origin of the lapis lazuli, which is believed to have come from Badakhshan, the northeastern region of Afghanistan, and been transported to Central China through the Silk Road. This finding shed light on the trade routes and usage of these pigments in the construction of religious architecture from the Yuan to the Qing dynasties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In practice, correction fluid to mask text errors has been continuously in demand since papers began to be predominantly used since the late fourth century AD in ancient China. However, research on the trajectory of correction fluid composition has been largely overlooked and has not been revealed currently. In this study, a multianalytical approach was used to investigate a thin whiteout layer, used as correction fluids applied in 1890, on a book page from the famous Imperial Encyclopedia (1726 bronze‐type repaint version). The results showed that the white layer was composed of hydrocerussite ((PbCO3)2·Pb (OH)2) in mixture with plant oil and a tiny portion of calcium carbonate, which had been applied to conceal the originally printed Chinese characters upon which they were rewritten in preparing photographic negatives for reprinting using photolithography. The analysis results also suggest that lead white was likely domestically made using a local lead ore source by the wet synthetic process. Considering the prolonged use of orpiment (As2S3) as a correction fluid ingredient in Chinese tradition, a trajectory to lead white suggests not only advances in pulping and papermaking technology but also a shift in cultural habits and aesthetic psychology in the late Qing Dynasty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research comprehensively examined multiple sources of historical records and the built heritages of flood control construction along the Yongding River surrounding the Marco Polo Bridge section from 1890 to 1899, including stone levees, brick levees, cement dams, distributary channels, steel bridges, and temples dedicated to flood control. We mapped all these construction heritage features by time and geographical location according to historical documents to reveal the cause and intention behind each site. The following new insights were gained. First, the human–river relationship transitioned from utilization to resistance throughout the history of the Yongding River. Second, the philosophy of flood control represented a balance between symptom suppression and condition treatment at the peak of water management in imperial China. Third, the cultural and religious attitudes of humans in regard to flood control gradually shifted from a belief in the supernatural to faith in the ability of humans. Finally, modern technology, materials, and technicians were gradually imported, and water construction was implemented during the late Qing Dynasty, indicating modernization of the human–river relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents some of the current methodological issues regarding the analysis and comprehension of educational policy transfer, with particular emphasis on the issue of structure and agency. It suggests some shortcomings of current educational policy transfer research in dealing with the complex interaction between structure and agency. To fill those voids, drawing from Archer's morphogenetic approach in educational policy transfer, an alternative framework of educational policy transfer is presented. A case from the author's current research on China's interest in Japanese vocational education during the late Qing Dynasty is given to explain the usage of this new interpretive framework. It is hoped that this new conceptual framework will aid in analysing educational policy transfer and open up a new methodological and theoretical space for future educational policy transfer research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the impact of a large‐scale censorship campaign in Qing China (1644–1911) on intellectuals' writings. Using a Difference‐in‐Difference approach and analysing 23,000 poems, the study reveals a significant decrease in the frequency of censored words in poems written by censored intellectuals. There was no room to circumvent censorship by adopting homophones, split words, and variant characters. The machine learning analyses uncover some indication that the censorship campaign influenced intellectuals' writing styles, with intellectuals shifting away from the censored poetry. The campaign created intense political pressures, leading to self‐censorship, but its long‐term impact on word choices was minimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floods had a massive impact on the development of ancient cities around the world and understanding this phenomenon constitutes an essential part of the history of long‐term and dynamic human–environment interactions. There remains, however, an enormous challenge in identifying records of ancient floods in urban environments due to various sedimentation and postdepositional processes that often remove, erase, and alter such environmental records. During archaeological excavations in the famous historic city of Kaifeng, we identified records of two historical floods at the Shuntianmen site. Related stratums were carefully studied, from which dating and sediment samples were collected. These excavated stratums were also scanned to obtain digital data for modeling. Combining these data, we then applied three‐dimensional modeling to reconstruct the evolution of the natural and cultural landscape of the site since the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127 AD), which was not possible in previous studies due to the deep burial of archaeological strata. Our results indicate that the two floods occurred during the late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD) and the Qing Dynasty (1636–1912 AD), respectively. During the Northern Song Dynasty, Shuntianmen was an important part of Kaifeng, which was, at that time, the capital of China and one of the largest cities in the world. Later, during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, Shuntianmen became a suburban settlement situated along various traffic routes. During the Qing Dynasty, the area became a small village. Subsequently, the area was completely abandoned and deserted until modern Kaifeng, which was built at the same place. The evolution of the regional landscape is the direct result of the interaction between the natural environment and human activities, among which the precarious alluvial processes of the Yellow River were playing an increasingly vital role. Over the centuries, the Yellow River floods, warfare, and wind‐blown sand accumulation reduced the Kaifeng region from a prosperous capital to a comparatively deserted area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing insight from various museological concepts, such as "disciplinary museum" and "exhibition complex," I sketch a brief history of museums that first emerged in China during the mid‐nineteenth century. In this paper, the museums in China—from the late Qing dynasty (1850–1912) to the early Chinese economic reform period of the late 1970s and early 1980s—will be studied through a Foucauldian lens to further illuminate the nation's museum history. By studying four types of museums—China's first foreign museums, private museums, the Kuomintang museums, and the Chinese Communist Party museums—I explore how these institutions provided the public with different modes of consciousness and civil identity and how individuals respond to the cultural effects of museums. Whereas museums had been utilized as an instrument for different political parties, I aim to show how discourse has been radically transformed while these institutions represent the administrative mechanisms throughout different periods. I hope to initiate a discussion for future studies on how the contemporary museological phenomenon might be linked to the reminiscence of museums in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on historical records and crop harvest scores extracted from historical documents, this study reconstructed the spatial–temporal distribution and severities of floods in the Yangtze‐Huai River valley (YHRV) in 1823 and 1849. We also summarized the effects of the floods on society and identified government measures taken to cope with the floods in the context of the economic recession in the period of 1801–1850. The 1823 flood, which was caused by the heavy precipitation of the Meiyu period and typhoons, severely affected areas in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Meanwhile, the 1849 flood, triggered by long‐term, high‐intensity Meiyu precipitation in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, mainly affected areas along the Yangtze River. The 1849 disaster was more serious than the one in 1823. In the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the 1849 flood caused the worst agricultural failure of the period 1730–1852. To deal with the disasters, the Qing government took relief measures, such as exempting taxes in the affected areas, distributing grain stored in warehouses, and transferring grain to severely afflicted areas. These relief measures were supplemented by auxiliary measures, such as exempting commodity taxes on grain shipped to disaster areas and punishing officials who failed to provide adequate disaster relief. The flood disasters disrupted the water system of the Grand Canal and forced the Qing government to transport Cao rice by sea beginning in 1826. This laid the groundwork for the rise of coastal shipping in modern China. With the economic recession of the 19th century, Chinese society was not as resilient to floods as it was in the 18th century. Compared to droughts, floods are more difficult to deal with and pose greater threats to infrastructure and normal life and work in the cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climatic changes have played an important role in societal reorganizations. Particularly, the late 16th and early 17th century coincided with severely cold condition, extremely weak summer monsoon and widespread population decline in China. Here we present new speleothem oxygen isotope records across North and South China, which in concert with historical documents, allow us to characterize the "Late Ming Weak Monsoon Periods" (LMWMP) at an unprecedented annual temporal resolution. Our analysis suggests that as a weak summer monsoon event not seen for nearly 500 years in China, the LMWMP spatiotemporally coincided with the late Ming Dynasty peasant uprising (1627-1658 CE), and thus the transition from Ming to Qing Dynasty. This suggests a plausible role of climate change in shaping the important chapters of the Chinese history. In addition, both speleothem and historical documents reveal that the LMWMP appears to be a north to south time-transgressive event on decadal-timescale. Plain Language Summary This study presents two new speleothem paleoclimate records across northern and southern China, which in concert with the historical documents, allow us to characterize the Late Ming Weak Monsoon Periods (LMWMP) (1580-1660 CE). The records offer that the unprecedented, long-lasting aridity/weakening monsoon period was spatiotemporally synchronized with the late Ming peasantry uprising (1627-1658 CE) and the fall of the Ming Dynasty. The comparisons with many regional paleoclimate records show that the severest drought during the LMWMP was timetransgressive on decadal-timescale: from northern China to the Jiang-Huai region. Mechanistically, solar activity may provide a centennial scale background of precipitation decreases for LMWMP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical practice of widow chastity in China is regarded as an outcome of traditional Confucian thought. This study examines how economic factors played key roles in the formation of this cultural tradition by studying the causality between technological progress in the cotton textile sector and the increase in the number of widow chastity cases between the Ming and Qing Dynasties. We find that the incidence of widow chastity increased significantly with rapid technological change in the cotton textile sector and increased demands for female labor. This result remains robust when the issues of widow chastity selection and alternative economic and cultural channels are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late Ming Dynasty Megadrought (LMDMD) (1637–1643) occurred at the end of Ming Dynasty and is the severest drought event in China in the last millennium. This unprecedented drought contributed significantly to the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in 1644, casting profound impacts on Chinese history. Here, the physical mechanism for the LMDMD is studied. Based on paleoclimate reconstructions, we hypothesize that this drought was initially triggered by a natural drought event starting in 1637 and was then intensified and extended by the tropical volcanic eruption at Mount Parker in 1641. This hypothesis is supported by the case study of the Community Earth System Model‐Last Millennium Experiment archive as well as sensitivity experiments with volcanic forcing superimposed on natural drought events. The volcano‐intensified drought was associated with a decreased land‐ocean thermal contrast, a negative soil moisture response, and a weakening and eastward retreating West Pacific Subtropical High. Plain Language Summary: The collapse of the Ming Dynasty at 1644 and, in turn, the historical transition from the Ming Dynasty to Qing Dynasty significantly changed the Chinese history into a long period of conservative policy. The collapse of Ming Dynasty at 1644 is greatly associated with the late Ming Dynasty Megadrought (LMDMD) (1637–1643). In this study, based on paleoclimate reconstructions and climate modeling, we show that the LMDMD is triggered by a natural drought event and is then intensified and extended by the strong volcanic eruption at Mt. Parker in 1641. This "superposition" mechanism of LMDMD and the spatiotemporal characteristics of this drought are reproduced by our volcanic sensitivity experiments with volcanic forcing superimposed on natural drought events, and the results demonstrate that the explosion of Mt. Parker at the end of a natural drought event amplified and extended the drought for 3 years, generating the megadrought. The volcano‐prolonged drought is associated with the failure of East Asia Summer Monsoon (EASM), which is caused directly by the decreasing land‐ocean thermal contrast after the volcanic eruption and indirectly by negative soil moisture feedback as well as weakening and eastward retreating of the West Pacific Subtropical High (WPSH). Key Points: The late Ming Dynasty Megadrought (LMDMD) is triggered by a natural drought event in 1637 and is then intensified and extended by the strong volcanic eruption in 1641Volcanic eruption superimposed on a drought triggered by internal variability can intensify drought conditions, such that the drought becomes severer than that triggered by internal variability or external forcing aloneThe intensification of LMDMD is related to the weakening of land‐ocean thermal contrast, the retreat of West Pacific Subtropical High, and the decrease of soil moisture after volcanic eruption [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a survey and critique of recent endeavours to establish statistical foundations for a chronology for the great divergence based upon trends and levels in relative wages. Our reading of the bibliography in Chinese labour history, together with a preliminary investigation into other primary sources, suggests that the Kuznetsian paradigm for empirical economics may not be viable for the construction of analytical narratives for the Chinese and other premodern imperial economies in South and West Asia. Nevertheless, two datasets currently in print will continue to be quoted to lend support to numerically grounded speculations for levels and trends in real wages and welfare for the families of wage-dependent urban workers in China over the eighteenth century. Statistical evidence for the Ming and Qing dynasties calibrated for the purposes of comparing real wage levels for wage-dependent labour between China and western Europe can, however, be placed on a spectrum for accuracy and inferential analysis that runs from 'unfounded guess work' to 'plausible conjectures'. The unwelcome contention of this article is that the data published and potentially available for China (and probably for India and the Ottoman Empire) stand close to the unfounded guess work end of that spectrum. Meanwhile, and as a speculative conclusion, we offer a conjecture that the 'real wages' for Qing China's tiny proletariat, whose income included high proportions of wages in kind, have remained as elusive as they were when the real wage debate began a decade ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes Qing Empire of 1644-1911 as a multiethnic empire ruled by the Manchu as an ethnic minority. It states that the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese nation is far from complete and uncontested. The succeeding Kuomintang (KMT) regime founded the Republic of China and grounded its territorial claims on the geographical coverage of the Qing Empire at its largest extent in the late eighteenth century.

The trade in indentured Chinese labor (the 'coolie trade') to the Americas was an exploitative labor-recruitment regime that resulted in the transportation of over 300,000 Chinese men to various work sites in the mid-to-late 19th century. As Chinese impacted either directly or indirectly by the trade attempted to process and comprehend the multiple violences they were witnessing and experiencing, there emerged what I have previously called 'conceptual vocabularies' related to the trade - new terminologies, worldviews, and sense of geopolitical/racial position - as evidenced in contemporary media and official reportage. The following discussion will identify how the traumatic translocation of coolie laborers, having already given rise to these vocabularies, could go on in later years to inspire a small burst of 'coolie fiction.' With origins in Shanghai's Anti-American Boycott of 1905, two such pieces of fiction - Bitter Society (1905) and Golden World (1907) (Ku shehui/Huangjin shijie 1985)- make use not just of the powerful latent vocabularies of the historic coolie trade but use the vari-directional travels of the coolie protagonists as spatial metaphors for the characters' awakening activist subjectivity. The outward journey under the oppressive management of foreign recruiters symbolized China's loss of autonomy and humiliating descent into semicoloniality; while the triumphant depiction of erstwhile laborers returning from abroad to lead activist efforts as depicted in each novel can be read as a plea to readers to stand together and reclaim whatever power they could - whether from Euro-American colonizers or from the 'corrupt' Manchu ruling apparatus - in order to effect China's own 'return' from its perilous state of semicoloniality. In making use of the coolie trade vocabularies and the coolie trajectories specifically, the novels simultaneously nod to a shared sense of past victimization and to the potential that such powerful public memory has to inspire social or political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern meteorological observations in South China from 1960 to 2009 show a strong correlation between winter temperatures and two snowfall parameters, the southern boundary of the snow and the number of snowy days. Based on this relationship, the variation in annual winter mean temperature in South China from 1736 to 2009 was reconstructed using data acquired from Chinese historical documents dating from the Qing dynasty, such as memos and local gazettes. The reconstructed time series were used to analyse variations in winter temperature in South China. Significant interannual and interdecadal changes were found. The maximum temperature difference between neighbouring years was 3.1 °C for 1958-2009 and 3.0 °C for 1736-1957, whereas the maximum temperature difference between adjacent decades was 0.8 °C for the 1960s-2000s and 0.6 °C for the 1740s-1950s. The 2000s was the warmest decade; the mean temperature was 1.6 °C higher than that of the 1870s, which was the coldest decade between the 1740s and the 2000s. The mean winter temperature was warmer in the 18th and 20th centuries and coldest in the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We construct 1912/18 Chinese provincial gross domestic product per capita from primary sources and project cross-sections for 1873 and 1893. The results fit the historical record. We hypothesise that regionally specific conflicts have a role to play in explaining differential growth rates, and that geography, governance, and sectoral structures explain relative income-level rankings. China's richest provinces matched Europe's poorest. A divergence did indeed occur, but our estimates show that at a broader economic level, it was perhaps not as dramatic as some of the literature implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's invention (or perhaps more accurately, its reinvention) of itself and the way it jealously guards its sovereignty (Hayton calls this "sovereignty fundamentalism") is indicative not of trumping the game, but instead of conformity with the Westphalian foundations of the international system. Bill Hayton starts his new book with a question that is on everyone's mind: what kind of country is China going to become? If it is the former, then it provides an answer to Hayton's question at the beginning of his book about the kind of country that China will become. [Extracted from the article]

The idea of the nation has been considered to have delivered political modernity from its native Europe to the rest of the world. The same applies, though more implicitly, to those paradoxes inherent to the nationalist ideology - that between universalism and national particularity and that between liberal nationalism and imperialism. This article seeks to complicate these theses by looking at the interpretations of nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism provided by Liang Qichao, one of the most influential Chinese intellectuals in early twentieth century, during his exile in Japan when increasingly exposed to the encounter between worlds. This reading also engages with the wider debates on modernity/modernities in non- Western societies through showing that neither the 'consumers of modernity' approach nor the 'creative adaptations' approach can be easily applied here. I argue that the various tensions, contingencies and historical situatedness in Liang's accounts of the nation-state structure represent and constitute the paradox of the structure itself. They also shed light on contemporary debates about the limits of our political imagination in the misnamed 'global politics' beyond the false opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history associated with health care in late Qing Dynasty and Republican China which come up with the influences against the forces of a long medical tradition, cultural pride, and xenophobia.

In the Forum’s first case study of a learned woman’s experiences, Harriet Zurndorfer surveys the nature of learned culture in China, concluding with the intellectual context in which her subject had to function at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. She describes how Wang Zhaoyuan became an accepted scholar and her subsequent reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse why Taiwanese families during the Ch'ing Dynasty still held communal assets vested in worship associations ( chi ssu kung yeh) even after the division of family assets. Our analysis shows that worship associations benefitted the living as well as the dead. Although the high cost of managing common assets meant the associations were established infrequently, they arose often in a response to clan feuds and served as martial-style corporations for the protection of family property before the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty-eight porcelain samples in Guan ware style from the collections of the Palace Museum in Beijing were analysed using non-destructive ED-XRF. These included 40 vessels that were traditionally ascribed as Guan wares of the Song Dynasty, and 18 vessels traditionally ascribed as imitation Guan wares, made during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The purposes of this study were: (1) to cross-check the traditional identification of these wares with the new classification based on their chemical compositions; and (2) to carry out a provenance study of the authentic Song Guan wares-that is, to compare the chemical compositions of the authentic Song Guan wares with those of the shards unearthed from the known Guan ware kilns of the Song Dynasty. This study shows that: (1) the chemical compositions of the glaze are significantly different between the Song Guan wares and the imitation wares-among the 58 wares tested, seven are likely to have been misidentified by the traditional method; and (2) the glaze compositions of the authentic Song Guan wares themselves are not homogeneous, and they can be divided into three groups. The provenance of these groups was briefly investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at developments in Western historiography of eighteenth-century China since the millennium. The opening of archives in the PRC and the development of online resources have facilitated new areas of study and continued the trend away from institutional and intellectual history and towards social and cultural history. Among the significant developments is the emergence of the 'new Qing history'. The main debates and themes all have resonance in Western historical studies, but Eurocentric paradigms have invariably been rejected or significantly revised in order to construct culturally specific modes of analysis. These new interpretations are gradually filtering into mainstream writings and comparative studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe but far behind that in the leading economies in north-western Europe. Real wages stagnated in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rose slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, with little cumulative change for 200 years. The income disparities of the early twentieth century were due to long-run stagnation in China combined with industrialization in Japan and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A database of holy dreams, assembled from Jesuit reports of the 17th century, forms the basis for qualitative and quantitative analyses, the results of which are compared with a second database of holy dreams drawn from Buddhist sources of the 17th and 18th centuries. The comparative analysis of religious images, doctrines, and the social history of dreams allows for some tentative observations on the psychology of Christian conversion and the sociology of Christian community formation in late Ming and early Qing China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]