Published October 3, 2021

Valerie Hansen teaches Chinese and world history at Yale, where she is professor of history. She is the author, most recently, of The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began. In the course of writing The Year 1000, she traveled to some twenty different countries and was a visiting scholar at Xiamen University in China, University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and the Collège de France in Paris.

Having lived in China for six plus years, Valerie has visited at least 300 temples, climbed the Great Wall multiple times (once during a lightning storm), and posed next to the Terracotta Warriors eleven times. (All this in the company of her husband and three children)

Her other books include: The Silk Road: A New History, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1279, and Voyages in World History (co-authored with Kenneth R. Curtis). Recorded April 8, 2021.

Show Notes

02:00 When the future feels especially unpredictable, the study of history can provide guidance

04:20 How to get a job with a PhD in history

05:40 Why is Chinese so difficult?

12:02 How to study Chinese history when your government won't let you go to China

16:29 If you want to study medieval Chinese history you need to speak Japanese

20:47 The true history of China according to the Japanese

22:54 Japan is to Tang China as America is to Tudor England

25:50 Why the dynastic paradigm may not be the most helpful to the historian of China

29:10 Maybe we should stop using the word China altogether

31:50 A language is a dialect with an army

34:48 The many different Chinas

37:57 The Chinese have always been selectively cosmopolitan

44:14 The farther back you go in the past, the less of the role of modern ideology and the more freedom accorded the historian

48:07 On being a non-Chinese historian of China

51:04 Does ancient Chinese history provide a framework for understanding China's great power ambitions today?

In Notes from Utopia, the Tropicalist discusses:

• the one time in Asia when history was written by its losers

In the Postscript, hosts Jesse and Madhavi discuss:

• the current movement underway in much of the world to “decolonize” history and what that means exactly

Links:

• Valerie Hansen's author website
• A Vietnamese history of the Vietnam War
• Chineseness as a nebulous concept
• Why it is important to study Chinese history
• How does history influence Chinese thought and culture today?
• More on Naito Torajiro
• A history of the Russian embassy to China
• The difference between a language and a dialect
• China worries about how study in Taiwan might affect its students

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