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China has a long history of wine-brewing. Traditional Chinese drinking games are a unique and mysterious part of the Chinese drinking culture. In this paper, we deal with the development of Chinese wine first, and then we take big events as reference to uncover the history of the traditional Chinese drinking games chronologically. After introducing the representative drinking games from each dynasty, it could help people understand the general development of the traditional Chinese drinking games. The results show: (1) the Chinese wine-brewing origins from the saccharomycetes, matures in Tang and Song Dynasties, and popularizes in Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties. (2) The first traditional Chinese drinking game is pitch-pot, and it emerges in the later of Spring and Autumn Period. Its system grows mature in the Tang Dynasty. The Qing Dynasty is a united period for the collection of traditional Chinese drinking games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late Qing dynasty, Chinese scholars have confronted the challenges of indigenisation: what are the limits of (Western) universalism, and how can social science, history, and anthropology become 'Chinese'? This article deals with a series of Chinese 'native anthropologies', from Republican‐era outlines of ethnology and anthropology, to current anthropologies of history, urban experience, and immorality. Rather than an assessment of the merits and flaws of indigenisation in these debates, I analyse the social practices of attention management that decided which scholars and texts became influential, and which ones were ignored. These practices of attention management include the grammars, media, and institutions, within which interaction networks were established and scholarly communities formed. What held the attention of many fellow anthropologists was the aura of the local conveyed: a sense of incommensurability based on the unlikely identification of the anthropologist with the subject of study and with the intended reader. The aura of the local, I argue, appeared precisely when new grammars (such as empiricism and social theory), media (e.g. academic journals, books), and institutions (universities, government offices) made it increasingly difficult for anthropologists to construct shared understandings with the people they studied and the readers they wrote for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of modern military historiography, the International China Expeditionary Force (CEF) of 1900-1 is a largely forgotten army. This is wholly undeserved. Based on British, German, Indian and United States Army and other records, this article examines its operations as an overseas counter-insurgency campaign. It also examines the problematic nature of Field Marshal von Waldersee's 'Supreme Command' and the complex relations between the various national contingents of this, the only active military alliance between the Crimean conflict and the First World War. Ultimately, the CEF was an interesting, if flawed, late nineteenth-century experiment in coalition warfare. But it was more than just that. It was also a microcosm that makes evident the problems of turn-of-the-century international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The are 12 pieces of biographies of Gao Gong written by authors in the Ming and Qing dynasties in which the attitude towards Gao Gong was positive, then negative and finally positive again. The final evaluation about Gao Gong is near the historical fact. To amend Gao Gong’s Biography in History of Ming Dynasty of Chinese Book Company edition, it is needed to abide the principle that the comment must come from the history and comprehensively analyze the historical materials. Meanwhile, an impartial principle must be followed and must not be prejudiced by first impressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at how globalization in the nineteenth century was inextricably entangled with localization in the Canton–Hong Kong–Macau nexus on the southern fringe of China by tracing the growth of its unique medical culture. It explains the 'glocalizing' process by tracing the development of this medical culture, which consists of knowledge construction and institution building, in the context of highly volatile epidemiological conditions aggravated by increasingly heavy inter-regional trade and migration. It traces the dynamic circulation of people, materials, ideas, and practices in this southern edge of China, which was traditionally connected to southeast Asia and shared ecological backdrops that produced similar epidemiological experiences. The Canton nexus in the nineteenth century saw the growth of native medical knowledge that focused less on theoretical innovation than on the efficacy of therapeutic strategies. These ideas were likely to have been informed or reinforced by new anatomical knowledge disseminated by Western medical missionaries on the ground early in the century. The medical culture in the region was also marked by the formation of a series of local institutions that were fusions of Western-style hospitals and native merchant-run charity halls where diseases were studied and treated, and new public health management negotiated and implemented by experts from different traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of 19th-century attempts to universalize history and international law, the purpose of this article is to show how the theory of an Ancient Chinese international law matured and disseminated within one politics of history and helped generate another at the end of the Qing Dynasty. On the one hand, the middleman William Alexander Parsons Martin, who as part of his Christian mission and in order to make international law more acceptable to the Chinese, translated systematically international law into Chinese and attempted to universalize it by finding a proto-international law in Ancient China. On the other hand, Chinese scholars and officials sought to use Martin's theory to universalize Confucianism and rectify international law according to what they believed to be their own superior morality and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a wise choice for a backward country to explore overseas education bases to find the training for urgently needed talents. In 1900, the Qing government began actively sending students to study advanced technology in Japan. From that time, Tokyo Higher Technical School (THTS) became an indispensable overseas base for Chinese students studying abroad. Although the educational resources of THTS were not superior to those of the imperial universities, returning THTS graduates played a greater role in the industrial modernisation of China than the graduates from imperial universities. This article shows that the role of importers of technology is not only determined by the technology they have acquired, but also highly influenced by a variety of factors, such as opportunity and social demand, presenting a complex and changeable pattern in different contexts. For developing countries, the 'appropriateness' plays a more important role than the 'progressiveness' of the imported technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late eighteenth century, an advisor to the governor of China's Hunan province, Yan Ruyi, tendered a proposal to build fortifications in the west Hunan area of Pushi as, among other advantages, this would improve the regional geomancy (known in Chinese as fengshui). This essay explores why a reference to fengshui is found in a Qing dynasty defense report and, in this context, what relationship geomancy had to military arts in China's imperial history. As will be seen, Yan's readers would not have found the reference odd. Chinese fengshui and military arts share an environmental focus and key concepts (qi and shi), as well as a long history of the use of fengshui methods in intelligencegathering, sabotage, and walled fortification. This compatibility made geomantic considerations significant to both imperial military planning and "militarized" middle Qing culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks back at the historical conditions that fostered the rise of congshu, texts published in print as collections, as a scholarly medium in mid-Qing China by highlighting a case study of the serialized collection Zhaodai congshu (Collectanea of the Glorious Age), associated with the editorship of Zhang Chao.

Rendered in paintings and sung in lyric poetry, birds and flowers asserted the mandate of the emperor and defined an imperial aesthetic in eighteenth-century China. Whether it was a peacock from the west or a peony flower from the south, each represented an object-subject relationship that attracted the covetous gaze of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) court. This study focuses on images of the peony, historically regarded as the "King of Flowers," to probe the tremendous marshaling of labor and resources that put them to work as possessions. Through words and images, imperial artists used peonies to map critical nodes of the Qing Empire and form a visuality of conquered subjects: from the cultural heartland of Han Chinese scholars to European missionaries in the capital of Beijing, and finally to Buddhist devotees in Tibet. Meanwhile, the peonies that began their journey as ephemeral objects of southern Chinese gardens ultimately faded from memory along with their messages of loyal and dissent. Thus, although court artists used peonies to construct a totalizing image of the Qing as a global power, the biographies of these objects instead challenge the relationship between the Qing court and the things it possessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A network of seaside and hill resorts created by foreigners gradually took shape in China during the late Qing and Republican periods. Such places were both a touristic novelty in China and the focal point of a type of tourist experience that was modern in a variety of ways. This article examines tourist accounts, tourist guidance material, and other sources, in an attempt to understand the major habits, norms, perceptions, and meanings of tourism to the seaside and hill resorts as a new type of tourism in China, from its inception to the downfall of the Nationalist government in 1949. For this purpose, it explores three aspects that were central to resort tourism: its strong association with an idea of refuge, its identification as an ideal experience, and its important physical component. While the article aims at an overall analysis of this new element of tourist culture in China, it also seeks to locate it within the wider contexts of tourist culture and of the broad motivations and anxieties of this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the features of late imperial Chinese judiciary, the bureaucratic elements of the judicial system influencing criminal investigation and prosecution during Qing dynasty, and the examination of case records involving the homicide under King Qianlong's reign.

A society and scholarly culture united in its use of one language dominates the general view of Late Imperial China’s sciences. Recent studies have suggested, however, that in the past, as in the present, multilingual practices might have been the norm. Asian-language historians have shown that Chinese script embraced many tongues, intonating the characters in different dialects and giving them new meanings in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. Rather than assuming that a hegemonic approach to language was a given in historical China, this essay suggests that we should ask why—or even if—this was the case, given that scientific knowledge was continuously transmitted to China from other learned traditions (Persian, Indian, European) and that new objects and practices entered Chinese learned discourse from diverse vernacular cultures that flourished on the local level throughout the empire. The essay discusses how to understand scientific and technological developments against changing views of Late Imperial China as a culture enmeshed in plurilingual practices. [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]

This article explores concubinage, a widespread form of quasi-marriage in Qing China (1644-1911), and its relationship with motherhood and social mobility. By examining legal codes and court records, this research challenges the academic paradigm, mainly based on literati writings, that portrays concubines as reproductive tools for their husband-masters and their husband-masters' wives. It shows that bearing or raising sons or daughters helped concubines achieve upward social mobility recognized and protected by law and that motherhood remained the major source of power and security for concubines in the Qing. After household divisions, concubine-mothers gained lifelong custodial rights of property, which formally consolidated concubine-mothers' upward mobility from daughters or widows in lower-class families to matriarchs in well-to-do households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an eighteenth-century French Jesuit's translation of the final chapter of the early Qing collection of vernacular stories Doupeng xianhua 豆棚閒話 (Idle Talks under the Bean Arbor), which became a "philosophical dialogue" of a "modern atheist Chinese philosopher." The trajectory of the text is examined by analyzing the layers of meaning superposed upon it by a succession of agencies: the original author Aina Jushi 艾衲居士, a Jiangnan literatus who philosophized on the fall of the Ming dynasty; Father François-Xavier Dentrecolles, the Jesuit missionary who translated the text with extensive commentaries of his own to make a case against atheism; the Parisian editor Jean-Baptiste Du Halde who published the translation in the landmark of Jesuit sinology, Description de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735); the engravers in Paris and the Hague who remolded its cosmological diagrams to conform to their own scientific and aesthetic standards; and finally, its European re-translators and readers, some of whom used it as a weapon against the Jesuits and the Catholic Church. The gains and losses of the Doupeng xianhua during this process are discussed, as well as the new light brought by the French translation on its circulation in Qing China. Finally, the challenge this atypical case poses to received narratives of the Sino-Western cultural exchange through the Jesuit mission is assessed. [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]

We employ a new, commodity-level dataset on the flow of goods between fifteen major treaty ports to estimate a general-equilibrium trade model for China in the late Qing era. The distribution of welfare effects depends critically on each port's productivity, China's economic geography as it influences trade costs, as well as the degree of regional diversity in production, which increases the potential gains from trade. We utilize this framework to quantify the size and distribution of welfare effects resulting from new technology and lower trade costs that emerged during the Treaty-Port Era. Our results suggest that the new trade with foreign countries led to significant changes in domestic trade relationships. There was a limit to how much could be gained through increased domestic trade, however, because differences in productivity across regions were relatively low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a quantitative history of the homicide rate in Qing China and investigates its social and economic drivers. Estimates based on historical archives indicate that this annual rate ranged between 0.35 and 1.47 per 100,000 inhabitants during the 1661–1898 period, a low level unmatched by Western Europe until the late 19th century. China's homicide rate rose steadily from 1661 to 1821 but declined gradually thereafter until the turn of the century. Although extreme, homicide represents a random sampling of the entire distribution of interpersonal violence; hence the homicide rate serves as a proxy for overall violence, and its rise implies a decline in personal security. We use national and cross-provincial panel data to show that population density, state capacity, local self-governance, interregional grain market integration, and grain price level (which captures crop failure and other survival distress) are all statistically significant drivers of the homicide rate in 18th- and 19th-century China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from a June 2-4, 2016 ancient history conference hosted by the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin university in Berlin, Germany. Topics of presentations delivered include the reactions of native North Americans to knowledge of ancient Roman and Greek cultures, Arabic construction of ancient history, and periodization of the Han, Ming, and Qing dynasties of China and their characterization as ancient versus modern.

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 article discusses official and unofficial perspectives of torture in the Ming and Qing dynasties of China. Topics discussed include the difference between torture and torment, the practice of torture according to late imperial Chinese law being legal only when it was applied as part of a legal proceeding by a judicial official, and handbooks written to shed light on the role of torture in the judicial process.

The article discusses the Qing dynasty in the context of Chinese history. Topics discussed include modernization theory in respect of China, the assumption that modernity and Confucianism are incompatible, the divide between the modern and traditional period of Chinese history being the Opium War, and the reading of Manchu documents by scholars.

The article presents the historiography of Chinese capitalism, focusing on the study of the late Qing tea trade. Topics covered include the basic materials describing the tea merchants of Huizhou, China in the late Qing period, an exploration of how a form of abstract time regulated the tea production process, and an analysis on the use by labour overseers in Huizhou of incense sticks to regulate the efficient completion of tasks.

The significance of theSenzai Maru’s 1862 journey to Shanghai was great. From this opportunity, Japan not only learned from its neighbor the danger of closing off one’s borders and refusing to change, but also the importance of expanding its horizons and “learning from the world.” From these lessons, Japan transitioned from “expelling barbarians” toward “enlightenment,” from conservative to “reformist.” After successfully overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan’s Meiji reforms thrived. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contrary to the long-standing idea of a scientific failure in early modern China as compared to Europe, some recent work has emphasized the existence of a tradition of ‘evidential’ research in the natural sciences, antiquarianism, and geography, especially during the Sung, Ming, and Qing periods. This article seeks to develop this new perspective by offering a comparative history of the genres of travel writing and ethnography in early modern Europe and Ming/early Qing China. We argue that there were qualitative as well as quantitative differences in the way that these genres functioned in each cultural area. Even when we find apparent similarities, we note different chronological rhythms and a different position of these genres of travel writing within a wider cultural field—what we might term their ‘cultural relevance’. The specific nature of Chinese state imperialism—or, conversely, the particular nature of European overseas colonialism—played a role in determining the type of ethnographic approach that came to predominate in each cultural area. These parallels and differences suggest a fresh perspective on the cultural origins of the ‘great divergence’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1766 a set of chinoiserie tapestries produced by the Beauvais manufactory was presented to the Qianlong emperor on behalf of the French administration. Chinoiserie has conventionally been understood as a frivolous or superficial European response to China's material culture; viewed from this perspective, the tapestries would seem to be a most unsuitable gift for the emperor. Yet Qianlong not only received the hangings, but he had a European-style palace built to house them. This article examines the circumstances surrounding the French offering, the Chinese priests who brought the gift from France to Beijing, and the meanings the tapestries could communicate in a diplomatic context marked not by official contact between the French and the Qing, but through an informal diplomacy negotiated through objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, a bifurcated structure of authority in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet frustrated attempts by both the Lhasa and Beijing governments to assert their unquestioned control over a myriad polities in the borderlands between Sichuan and Tibet. A tenuous accommodation of this structure persisted from the early eighteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century when powerful globalizing norms—territoriality and sovereignty—transformed both the understanding and expectations of territorial rule held by Qing and, later, Republican Chinese officials. Absolutist conceptions of these norms prompted an ambitious endeavour to shatter the bifurcated structure and undermine the Dalai Lama's spiritual influence on Kham society. Infrontier imperialism is used to analyse the incomplete implementation of resulting acculturative and incorporative policies, inflected by these two norms, which challenged the monasteries’ indirect influence on the lay rulers of Kham, initiating a struggle for authority that persists to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As evolutionary theories were introduced into China, and the principle of evolution was established in the last years of the Qing dynasty, it became a pressing problem to fix the position of China in an evolutionary sequence. Many kinds of evolutionary orders emerged around the year 1900, among which the order from savage society to patriarchal society to militant society proposed by Yan Fu’s Shehui tongquan, translated from Edward Jenks's A Short History of Politics, was the most influential. To explain Yan Fu’s purpose in translating this work, the political and intellectual situation of China and the works he had read but had not translated should also be taken into consideration, besides his expositions through the preface, comments and translation of this work. In Shehui tongquan, Yan Fu labelled China as “patriarchal as well as militant,” and on many occasions expressed the wish for China to rise above patriarchal society and enter militant society. His label of Confucius as “Sage of patriarchal society” shook the position of Confucianism in China. Meanwhile, Yan Fu criticized the tendencies of conservatism, xenophobia and anti- Manchuism in contemporary China. His criticism of conservatism and xenophobia was widely accepted and occasioned no debate, while his criticism of anti- Manchuism became involved in the debate between the revolutionary party and the constitutional party. Zhang Taiyan refuted Yan from the aspect of understanding “nationalism” correctly. There were also some faults in Zhang's refutation. However, his opinions that there are differences between social science and natural science, and that the particularity of China should be taken into consideration in studying Chinese society, were very insightful. Yan Fu’s introduction of a social evolutionary sequence, and his location of Chinese society therein, were influential among intellectuals until the 1920s and 1930s, around which time it was replaced by a five stage theory. But the pattern of analysing Chinese society from general truth or general rules did not change. Actually, Herbert Spencer had once refuted Auguste Comte’s practice of taking different forms of society as different stages in the evolutionary series, but he himself also accepted the existence of a principle of evolution, and used “universal,” “general,” and “special” to differentiate them, in a way that is not completely clear. Yan Fu’s works were often aimed at specific occasions rather than something unchanging. It should be noted that, in his late years, especially after the breakout of the First World War, Yan experienced a re-valuation of eastern and western cultures, as well as of “militant society,” and reaffirmed the value of traditional Chinese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the origin of the term “Han traitor” (汉奸 Han jian) in history. It finds that the term was largely absent during most of the history in imperial China. Its first appearance occurred in the early Qing dynasty, or the later seventh century. Yet its meaning was rather different—“Han traitor” then meant those Han Chinese unwilling to follow the Qing policy in establishing rule over the Miao minority group in South China. Yet from the mid-nineteenth century when China suffered from the imperialist aggression, the term began to register a strong nationalist tone. It was used by the nationalists to refer first to those Chinese who supported the Qing dynasty and then to those who collaborated with the Japanese in World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a historical study, this article attempts to objectively describe the state of modern China, its territories, and its peoples, and the process by which they came into being, focusing on how Chinese academic circles participated in reconstructing the historical narrative on “China” and the “Chinese people” in the 1920s and 1930s. It narrates a historical process: how mainstream Chinese academic circles participated in the movement to reconstruct “China” and the “Chinese people” after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, under the impetus of the historical, political, and social context of modern China. To a certain extent, their efforts to absorb the “four borderlands” into “China” may have hastened the rise of modern China, with its unique territories and peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The Great Qing Imperial Post Office was set up in 1896, soon after the First Sino-Japanese War. It provided the first national postal service for the general public in the whole of Chinese history, and was a symbol of China's increasing engagement with the rest of the globe. Much of the preparation for the launch was carried out by the high-ranking foreign staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an influential institution established after the first Opium War.With a mission to promote modernization and project Qing power, the Imperial Post Office was established with a centrally controlled set of unified methods and procedures, and its success was rooted in integration with the new railway network, a strategy at the heart of its ambitious plans for expansion. This article explores the history of this postal expansion through railways, the use of which allowed its creators to plan networks in an integrated way—from urban centres on the coasts and great rivers through to China's interior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper inspects three versions of the Jingming zongjiao lu (Record of the Lineage and Teachings of [the School of] Purity and Brightness). It introduces the many different scriptures contained in this compendium and explores its relationships to the Ming-dynasty Daozang (Daoist Canon) to offer a deeper understanding of the key sources of this school in the Ming and Qing dynasties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the frustrated Westernizing efforts of Yung Wing and the recalled students of the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States (1872–1881). It does so in response to recent scholarship (in both the Chinese and the English languages) which affirms the ‘transformative role’ of the returnees in late Qing reform and modernization. On the basis of a variety of sources, this article suggests, instead, that for those patriotic students returning to the Middle Kingdom, eager to bring about a fundamental change in its political system and rejuvenation of its civilization, disillusionment was often inevitable, and the choice—short of revolution—became one of either marginalization or co-option by the autocratic state. Despite all their achievements, China's earliest students of the West ultimately failed to set the country upon a new modernizing course—a failure that pointed, beyond itself, to an emerging (and subsequently persistent) pattern in the troubled relationship between the new, Westernized elite and the state in modern China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 introduces English-language scholars to The Compilation of Chinese Medicine Periodicals from the Late Qing and Republican Periods, a valuable new scholarly resource edited by Wang Youpeng. Compilation projects like this one have been a major field of scholarship in China from imperial times and serve the purpose of both preserving and selecting texts from around the empire. The medical journals included in this compilation took advantage of the newly available technology of print capitalism in Shanghai to respond to the challenge posed by a rapidly organizing Western medicine that sought to regulate and abolish Chinese medical practitioners. This article is a translation of Wang Youpeng's introduction to The Compilation and was first published in the China Reader's Journal (Zhonghua dushu bao) in August 2012. Wang argues that Chinese medical journals of this period are one of the best sources for observing the changing nature of medical practice and education during the late Qing and Republican eras so crucial to the development of medicine and science in China. The Compilation is a massive primary source not only for understanding the modern transformation of Chinese medicine from a private to a public endeavor, but also the larger role of medicine in Chinese society, seen through published documents on the battle between proponents and enemies of Chinese medicine. Literature specialists will be interested in the many short stories on medicine by important Chinese writers like Bing Xin. Ultimately, Wang argues, The Compilation should stimulate a multitude of new research projects. Given its importance in bringing together these journals from repositories all over China, we might add that research libraries and specialists may consider acquiring this substantive source and the separate index and abstracted table of contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study is presented of ten scenic views of the landscape of the frontier district of Dongchuan, Yunnan Province in Southwest China during the 18th century, including the impact of the Chinese Qing Dynasty's policy of having Han Chinese settle the area's impact on the landscape. An overview of Dongchuan's indigenous people's relations with the Han Chinese is provided.

The article discusses the use of false accusation (wugao) in Sichuan Province, China during the late Qing Dynasty, including its relationship with the legal culture at the time and magistrates' willingness to hear legal cases of malicious accusation. An overview of the Chinese tenant farmer Chen Bingtang's malicious accusation lawsuit case in court regarding the death of his son is provided.

This article explores how the Qing (1644–1912) scholar Xie Qinggao (1765–1821) examined Europe in his Hailu and shows in what ways this work contributed to China's (re-)discovery of the Western world in the long eighteenth century. In his Hailu, which is usually translated as the Records of the Sea, Xie conjured up both factual and fanciful images of the Far West from the 1780s to the 1790s with a specific focus on Portugal, the Dutch Republic and England. In his highly vivid descriptions, Xie delineated some, in his eyes, characteristically Western customs, economies and religions with particular attention to the growth of these maritime countries (Chin. haiguo) and their expansions overseas. Despite its idiosyncrasies and a number of obscure details, Xie's study opened a new chapter in the Chinese understanding of Europe. Thanks to his work, some Chinese realised the need to revise their conventional understanding of Europe and to rediscover a continent located far beyond their tianxia worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, Chinese officials prohibited the presence of foreign women in China. While, many Chinese regulations concerning foreign merchants and missionaries were not enforced, this rule xuas. In 1830 and again in the 1840s, in the aftermath of the first Opium War, clusters of British and American families traveled up the Pearl River to the factories that housed visiting merchants in Canton (Guangzhou). On both occasions, trouble ensued. But the conflicts may not have been all they seemed. This article suggests that fordgn women did have the potential to be a problem in China, less because of inherent cultural differences than because both Chinese officials and Western merchants used Western women to embody a boundary betiueen peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Qing emperors, who ruled over China from 1644 to 1911, managed to bring large parts of Inner Asia under their control and extended the territory of China to an unprecedented degree. This paper maintains that the political technique of patronage with its formalized language, its emphasis on gift exchange and expressions of courtesy is a useful concept for explaining the integration of Inner Asian confederations into the empire. By re-interpreting the obligations of gift exchange, the Qing transformed the network of personal relationships, which had to be reinforced and consolidated permanently, into a system with clearly defined rules. In this process of formalization, the Lifanyuan, the Court for the Administration of the Outer Regions, played a key role. While in the early years of the dynasty, it was responsible for collecting and disseminating information concerning the various patronage relationships with Inner Asian leaders, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its efforts were directed at standardizing and streamlining the contacts between ethnic minorities and the state. Through the Lifanyuan, the rules and principles of patronage were maintained in a modified form even in the later part of the dynasty, when the Qing exercised control in the outer regions more directly. The paper provides an explanation for the longevity and cohesiveness of the multi-ethnic Qing Empire. Based on recently published Manchu and Mongol language archival material and the Maussian concept of gift exchange, the study sheds new light on the changing self-conception of the Qing emperors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chen Qubin was an activist during the 1911 Revolution and an important essayist, thinker, and poet. This article details the highlights of his life and career in that era, offering a comprehensive discussion and analysis of how Chen changed from a traditional member of the literati to a committed revolutionary against the Qing dynasty. Though not so atypical of the time, the author argues, Chen's career path was par excellence for his generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Amherst embassy to China has long been viewed as a major diplomatic failure in Britain's early relations with China. This article concentrates on the greatly overlooked aspect of the Amherst mission: the delegation's discoveries in China after the official proceedings were concluded. Since the embassy was given unprecedented freedom of movement during its four-month return journey from Beijing to Canton, British observers were able to explore the interior of China and to communicate more fully with the Chinese government and people than ever before. As a consequence, the Amherst embassy not only provided valuable first-hand observations which increased and improved Britain's knowledge of China, but developed the view that the Qing government was the chief obstacle to the progress of Chinese civilization and to the general welfare of the Chinese people. These important perceptions laid the foundation for future changes in Sino- British relations and led, indirectly, to the outbreak of the Opium War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the tradition of silk birthing hanging gifts from the Ming and Qing dynasties in China from 1368 to 1911, with details on the practice of conserving shattered hangings. Topics include details on the presence of hangings at the Hong Kong Museum of History, details on the different precious materials, dyes, and threads present in silk hangings, details on the effect of storage conditions on deterioration of silk hangings, and details on the use of adhesive treatment to reinforce the painted silk.

Recent studies in Sinology have shown that Qing dynasty editors acted as philologists. This paper argues that the identification of their philological methods and editorial choices suggests that their choices were not totally neutral and may have significantly shaped the way modern historians interpreted specific works edited by mathematicians of that dynasty. A case study of the re-edition in 1798 of a Song dynasty treatise, the Yigu yanduan (1259), by a Qing dynasty mathematician will illustrate this point. At the end of the eighteenth century, Li Rui (1773–1817) was asked to prepare an edition of the mathematical works written by Li Ye (1192–1279) for a private collection. Li Rui was a talented mathematician, but he was also a meticulous editor and trained philologist. He adopted his editorial model from the preparation of the imperial encyclopaedia, the Siku quanshu, but Li Rui also made some corrections to the text in an effort to restore an older version of Li Ye's treatises that had been lost. Convinced of the Chinese origin of algebra, Li Rui used philological techniques to recover the lost materials and to restore the roots of “Chinese mathematics.” The Yigu yanduan contains two algebraic procedures to set up quadratic equations, one from the procedure of Celestial Source (tian yuan shu) and the other from the Section of Pieces [of Areas] (tiao duan). Curiously, the second procedure has not yet attracted the attention of scholars so far, although Li Rui's edition is the one typically used by twentieth-century historians of mathematics. Today, the Celestial Source characterizes “Chinese algebra.” However, the specific concerns of Li Rui about the procedure of Celestial Source, combined with his editorial methods, contributed to this perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]