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This article analyzes the instrumentalization of "China" in contacts between the Ming and Qing dynasties and Siam-Ayutthaya. It focuses both on the state-to-state relations and those between various members of the Siamese and the imperial societies. "China" and "Chinese-ness" stood for forms of ascribed identity within the Sinocentric world, for a form of social distinction, and for one of many identities assumed in the games of political loyalty. For the Ming and Qing empires, inclusion of a foreign land within "China" was conducted through the ritual and administrative fictions that situated Ayutthaya within a hierarchy vis-à-vis the imperial capital. Beyond the state's discourses, participation in a vaguely defined Chinese culture were means of building social networks within the merchant and official communities in Ayutthaya. For the junkmen that connected Ayutthaya and South China, multiple Chinese identities were instrumentalized and inflected according to the needs and necessities of the moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 20th Century, the Taft administration and the Qing Empire developed a working relationship that went beyond transactional “Dollar Diplomacy” to include military engagement. Military and official visits, arms contracts, and opportunities for military education signaled a shift away from both President Theodore Roosevelt’s pro-Japanese policies and the Qing Empire’s isolation from the international order. The massacre of over three hundred Chinese at Torreon, Mexico in May 1911 inadvertently assisted this rapprochement, which presented the Qing Dynasty with an opportunity to demonstrate power and influence when it dispatched the cruiser Hai Qi to the Caribbean. The swift response to the massacre shows that Qing diplomats were capable of using an integrated and mutually reinforcing set of legal, diplomatic, and military tools to attain their political objectives. The incident also demonstrates that the Taft administration was willing to allow a foreign military vessel to coerce Mexico for monetary gain in a direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine. The Qing Empire’s very effective use of gunboat diplomacy revealed a highly competent Chinese government, as well as how u.s. officials arranged a sophisticated rapprochement with Imperial China in the 1909-1912 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature, the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ orHuangyu quanlan tu皇輿全覽圖, is mostly referred to as ‘the Jesuit atlas of China’. The reason is that this early eighteenth-century atlas of all Qing China’s territories plus Korea and Tibet is assumed to have resulted from European missionaries importing European cartographic practices. In this essay, I argue that this view is outdated and can no longer be sustained. By revisiting the background of the missionaries’ involvement in cartographic exchanges between Asia and Europe, the techniques used for surveying Qing territories and the production of the resulting atlases, I show that the mapping project behind the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ is best understood as a creative answer to the unique needs of Qing frontier management and imperial control, made possible by the integration, in mensurational and in representational terms, of European and East Asian cartographic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1735, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville had produced forty-one maps of the Qing Empire, or China, a process significantly more complex than scholars have hitherto appreciated. A close study of d’Anville’s maps and their originals has revealed their relationship with the different versions of a Chinese atlas, the first of which was completed early in 1718, the outcome of nearly a decade of collaborative surveying between officials of the Qing Empire and European missionaries. The precise origins of some of the maps are identified for the first time, and the network behind the remarkable intercontinental exchange of cartographical material that allowed d’Anville to produce his China maps is also discussed, thereby illustrating the central role of the French Jesuits, as well as the connection with St Petersburg. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]