Between 304 and 589 CE, China was divided into rivaling regimes occupying North and South China. While the north was controlled by a series of non-Han Chinese peoples, ultimately culminating in the Xianbei Northern Wei, the south was ruled by ruling houses of Han Chinese descent. In this companion episode to the interview ith Scott Pearce on the Northern Wei, Professor Andrew Chittick joins us to discuss the Southern Dynasties, from their development, to their society and culture, to their relationship with their northern neighbor, and finally to their legacy.

Contributors:

Andrew Chittick:

Andrew Chittick is the E. Leslie Peter Professor of East Asian Humanities and History at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL. His research focuses on the culture of early south China and maritime trade relations with Southeast Asia.  He is the author of numerous articles and two full-length books: Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison, 400-600 CE (SUNY Press, 2010) and The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History (Oxford University Press, 2020). The latter book introduces a ground-breaking new perspective on the history and political identity of what is now south China in the early medieval period (3rd-6th centuries CE), including its evolving ethnic identity, innovative military and economic systems, and engagement with broader Sino-Southeast Asian and Buddhist cultures. 

Yiming Ha:

Yiming Ha is the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA, his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his PhD from UCLA. He is also the book review editor for Ming Studies.

Credits:

Episode no. 22

Release date: May 9, 2025

Recording date: February 10, 2025

Recording location: St. Petersburg, FL/Los Angeles, CA

Images:

Stone pixiu 貔貅 (winged lion), from the tomb of Xiao Hui, a prince of Southern Liang (502-557), in Nanjing. (Image Source)

Greatest extent of the Liang Dynasty, one of the southern dynasties. (Image Source)

Liang Emperor Wu, who reigned the longest out of all the Southern Dynasty emperors, from 502 to 549. His reign saw the growing importance of Buddhism. (Image Source)

A scroll of tributary emperors paying homage to the Liang emperor. The Southern Dynasties oversaw a prosperous commercial economy, with trading networks spanning East and Southeast Asia. Song copy of the original Liang painting. (Image Source)

A Tang dynasty copy of Wang Xizhi's (303–361), Lantingji xu, one of the most famous pieces of calligraphy in Chinese history. The Southern Dynasties are known for their cultural production. (Image Source)

Selected References:

Chittick, Andrew. The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Dien, Albert E. Six Dynasties Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Dien, Albert E. and Keith N. Knapp, eds. The Cambridge History of China: Volume 2, The Six Dynasties, 220–589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Graff, David A. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300–900. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Lewis, Mark Edward. China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

More Swindles from the Late Ming is the companion piece to the Book of Swindles, a translation of a Late Ming text by Zhang Yingyu (fl. 1612–1617) which details various types of scams and swindles and how to guard against them. More Swindles from the Late Ming "presents sensational stories of scams that range from the ingenious to the absurd to the lurid, many featuring sorcery, sex, and extreme violence. Together, the two volumes represent the first complete translation into any language of a landmark Chinese anthology, making an essential contribution to the global literature of trickery and fraud." Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea, the translators, joins us to talk about these two books and their experience with the translatino.

More information on More Swindles from the Late Ming available on the publisher's website here.

Contributors:

Bruce Rusk

Bruce Rusk is an Associate Professor of Pre-modern and Early Modern China in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His main areas of research and teaching are the cultural history of China, especially the Ming (1368–1644) through mid-Qing (1644–1911) periods. Additionally, he also works on the history of textual studies, literary culture, writing systems, and connoisseurship. He has published widely and was the past present of the Society for Ming Studies.

Christopher Rea

Christopher Rea is a Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the modern Chinese-speaking world and his recent publications concern research methodology, cinema, comedy, celebrities, swindlers, cultural entrepreneurs, and the scholar-writers Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. He has published several books and numerous articles, and also hosts a free online course on Chinese novels.

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA, his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his PhD from UCLA. He is also the book review editor for Ming Studies.

Credits:

Episode no. 21

Release date: March 1, 2025

Recording date: January 9, 2025

Recording location: Vancouver, Canada/Los Angeles, CA

The Northern Wei was a nomadic conquest dynasty that existed in north China between 386 and 535 CE. It was founded by the Tuoba (Tabgach) clan of the Xianbei (Särpi) peoples, a nomadic-pastoralist people originating from the Mongolian steppes. The Northern Wei is particularly noted for unifying northern China in the first half of the fifth century, bringing an end to the chaotic Sixteen Kingdoms period that plagued China for almost a century. In addition to bringing relative peace to north China, the Northern Wei also saw the firm establishment of Buddhism. The culture, institutions, and practices of the Northern Wei would have a tremendous impact on China, for it was the precursor to two great Chinese dynasties - the Sui and the Tang. Professor Scott Pearce, an expert on the Northern Wei, joins us to talk about about this nomadic regime.

Contributors

Scott Pearce

Scott Pearce is a Professor of History at Western Washington University, specializing in the intersection of Chinese and Inner Asian histories in the medieval period with a particular focus on dynasties of Inner Asian origin that ruled northern China during the 4th through the 6th centuries CE. He recently completed a volume on the Northern Wei, a nomadic regime founded by Xianbei peoples, which ruled northern China from 386 to 535 CE. 

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA, his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his PhD from UCLA. He is also the book review editor for Ming Studies.

Credits:

Episode no. 20

Release date: January 25, 2025

Recording date: December 10, 2024

Recording location: Bellingham, WA/Los Angeles, CA

Images

Terracotta soldiers in Northern Wei uniform, from the tomb of Sima Jinglong (Image Source)

The Northern Wei, c. 500 CE (Image Source)

Another map of the Northern Wei, with major settlements marked (Image Source)

Figurines of Northern Wei court ladies (Image Source)

Buddhist sculptures and murals from the Mogao caves, dated to the Northern Wei (Image Source)

Select References:

Beckwith, Christopher I. “On the Chinese Names for Tibet, Tabghatch and the Turks.” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 14 (2005): 7–22.

Chen, Sanping. Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Pearce, Scott. Northern Wei (386-534): A New Form of Empire in East Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Shimunek, Andrew. Languages of Ancient Southern Mongolia and North China: A HistoricalComparative Study of the Serbi or Xianbei Branch of the Serbi-Mongolic Language Family. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017.

Zhang, Fan. “Cultural Encounters: Ethnic Complexity and Material Expression in Fifthcentury Pingcheng, China.” PhD diss., New York University, 2018.

The Qing, China's last imperial dynasty, ruled over one of the largest empires in Eurasia at the dawn of the 19th century. Throughout the preceding century, it expanded its reach into the northwest, southwest, Tibet, and gained hegemony over Mongolia. For a long time, traditional historiography has viewed the Qing as a land-based, agrarian power with minimal engagement with the seas. Even its successful conquest of Taiwan in 1683 was seen as a one-time affair. This, the traditional narrative goes, was the reason why the Qing lost to the British in the First Opium War. Scholars today have increasingly pushed back against this view, pointing out the Qing's liberalization of ocean-going trade and its development of a naval infrastructure. Joining me today is Ronald Po, author of Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire, who will talk about Qing maritime history and policy in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Contributors:

Ronald Po

Ronald Po is an Associate Professor in the Department of International History at LSE. He is a historian of late imperial China, with a focus on maritime history and global studies. His book, Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire, seeks to revise the view of China in this period as an exclusively continental power with little interest in the sea. Instead, the book argues that the Qing deliberately engaged with the ocean politically, militarily, and conceptually, and responded flexibly to challenges and extensive interaction on all frontiers - both land and sea - in the eighteenth century. Professor Po joins us today to talk about his research on Qing maritime history.

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA, his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his PhD from UCLA. He is also the book review editor for Ming Studies.

Credits:

Episode no. 19

Release date: September 21, 2024

Recording location: Amsterdam/Los Angeles, CA

References courtesy of Ronald Po

Images:

The Port of Canton (Guangzhou) in c. 1830, showing the factories of the foreign powers (Image Source)

View of Canton (Guangzhou) in c. 1665 with ships of the Dutch East India Company in the foreground (Image Source)

Chinese junk in Guangzhou, c. 1823 (Image Source)

The East India Company steamship Nemesis (right background) destroying war junks during the Second Battle of Chuenpi, 7 January 1841 (Image Source)

Select References:

Gang Zhao, The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684-1757 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).

Hans van de Ven, Breaking with the Past The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

John D. Wong, Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

John E. Wills, Jr., China and the Maritime Europe, 1500-1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 

Paul A. van Dyke, Whampoa and the Canton Trade Life and Death in a Chinese Port, 1700-1842 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020).

Schottenhammer, Angela, China and the Silk Roads (ca. 100 BCE to 1800 CE): Role and Content of Its Historical Access to the Outside World (Leiden: Brill, 2023).

Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

Xing Hang, Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c.1620-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Zheng Yangwen, China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

The Ming-Qing transition was an extremely chaotic time in Chinese history. Millions died of warfare, pestilence, or starvation, and millions more were displaced. Yet despite all these issues, this was also a period of cultural production, which has often been overlooked as people focus on the wars, famine, and climate change that pervaded this period. In this episode, I speak with Professor Lynn Struve about the literary pursuits of men and women and the overall intellectual landscape in the Late Ming and the Early Qing

Contributors

Lynn Struve

Lynn Struve is an emeritus professor of history and an emeritus professor of East Asian languages and cultures at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include traditional Chinese history, 17th century political and intellectual history, East-West comparative thought, and Chinese reference and source materials. Over the course of her career, she has published widely, particularly on the period of the Ming-Qing transition, and has received numerous awards. Her representative works include Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws, The Southern Ming, 1644-1662, The Ming-Qing Conflict: A Historiography and Source Guide, and, more recently, The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World, which was recently awarded best overall book in Ming studies published between 2019 and 2022 by the Society for Ming Studies.

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Credits

Episode no. 18

Release date: March 1, 2024

Recording location: Bloomington, IN/Los Angeles, CA

References compiled by Yiming Ha

Images

A portrait of the Kangxi emperor as a scholar, painted in 1699 when he was forty-five years of age. (Image Source)

An alternative portrait of the Kangxi emperor that Jonathan Spence used for his book on the Kangxi emperor. This portrait shows the pockmarks on his face, a result of his childhood survival of smallpox which devastated the Manchu population. (Image Source)

A portrait of Huang Zongxi (1610-1695), one of the great scholars of the Late Ming and Early Qing. Originally a prominent figure in the Ming loyalist movement, Huang retired from Ming loyalism but also refused to serve the Qing. Nonetheless, Huang made many contributions to scholarship by indirectly accommodating the Qing. (Image Source)

A late 18th/early 19th century portrait of Liu Rushi (1618-1664), one of the most famous courtesans of the 17th century and a prominent female scholar. (Image Source)

Select References

Brook, Timothy. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. 

Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-century China. Stanford University Press, 1994.

Struve, Lynn. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019.

Widmer, Ellen. The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.

Widmer, Ellen. The Inner Quarters and Beyond Women Writers from Ming Through Qing. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

The Qing Empire (1636-1912) ruled over one of the largest land empires in the world. Its territories encompassed not only what is considered today to be China proper and Manchuria, but also Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia. Its subjects were composed of people belonging to different identities, of which Manchu, Han, Mongol, Tibetan, and later Uighur became the most important groups. As an empire that was composed of a small conquering elite, how did the Qing manage these different identities as its empire expanded and stabilized? What changes occurred over time? What legacy did the Qing leave on the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China in terms of how they dealt with ethnic minorities? To help answer these question, we invite Professor Pamela Crossley to talk to us about how history and identity were constructed and weaved into Qing imperial ideology.

Contributors

Pamela Crossley

Professor Pamela Crossley is the Charles and Elfriede Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth University. She specializes in the history of the Qing Empire and modern China, although her research interests also span Inner Asian history, global history, history of horsemanship in Eurasia, and imperial sources of modern identities. She is the author of eight books and numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles, and her book A Translucent Mirror is the winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies. Additionally, she has also written commentaries for major newspapers and magazines.

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Credits

Episode no. 17

Release date: March 3, 2023

Recording location: Hanover, NH/Los Angeles, CA

Transcript (by Yiming Ha and Greg Sattler)

Bibliography courtesy of Prof. Crossley

Images

Cover Image: A page of the Pentaglot Dictionary (Yuzhi wuti qing wenjian 御製五體清文鑑), a dictionary of the major languages of the Qing compiled towards the later reign of Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century. The five languages are Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Chagatai (now known as Uighur). (Image Source)

The Stele Commemorating the Victory over the Dzungars, erected by the Qianlong emperor either in the 1750s or 1760s to commemorate the Qing victory over the Dzungars in the Xinjiang region. The stele featured four languages. On the front side are inscriptions written in Classical Chinese (by the Qianlong emperor himself) and Manchu, while the reverse side features inscriptions in Mongolian and Tibetan. (Image Source)

The Capture of Tucheng, a painting commemorating a Qing victory during the Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan (1856-1873). Note the five colored banner that were flown by the Qing troops. The alternate version of this flag (with the colors rearranged) later became one of the early flags of the Republic of China, with each color representing an ethnic group. Red for the Han, yellow for the Manchus, blue for the Mongols, white for the Hui (Muslims), and black for the Tibetans. (Image Source)

References

Bovington, Goardner, "The History of the History of Xinjiang" in Twentieth-Century China, 26:.2 (April, 2001): 95-139.

Bulag, Uradyn The Mongols at China's Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (2002, Rowman & Littlefield)

Crossley, "The Cycle of Inevitability in Imperial and Republican Identities in China" in Aviel Roshwald, ed, The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism: Volume One: Patterns and Trajectories over the Longue Durée (2022, Cambridge), 301-328.

Crossley, Helen F. Siu, Donald S., Sutton, ed., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ehtnicity and Frontier in the Early Modern China (California, 2006)

Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imeprial Ideology (1999, California).

Elliott, Mark, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (2002, Californai)

Perdue, Peter. C, ."Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective: Frontier Administration in Eighteenth-Century China" in Journal of Early Modern History, 5:4  (2001,  282-304. 

Jonathan D. Spence, Treason by the Book (2002, Viking).

Wu, Hung, "Emperor's Masquerade: 'Costume portraits' of Yongzheng and Qianlong" in Smithsonian Libraries, 1995, p. 25-41.

The fall of Beijing in 1644 did not immediately put an end to the Ming Dynasty. For almost half a century, Ming pretenders and loyalists in the south warred with the Manchus. One of the most prominent Ming loyalist factions was the Zheng family regime based in Fujian and Taiwan. Founded by the pirate-merchant Zheng Zhilong, the enterprise reached new heights under his son Zheng Chenggong, better known as Koxinga, who is best known for driving the Dutch out of Taiwan. This regime carried out the pro-Ming, anti-Manchu banner until it was finally defeated by the Qing in 1683. Joining me to talk about this fascinating regime is Professor Xing Hang of Brandeis University. He will cover the history of the regime from its rise to its fall, how it became so powerful, how and why Koxinga took over Taiwan, as well as what Ming loyalism meant to the Zhengs. 

Contributors

Xing Hang

Professor Xing Hang is an Associate Professor of History at Brandeis University and a scholar of China and of the East Asian maritime world. His first project is about the Zheng organization in Taiwan, its role in seventeenth century East Asian maritime trade, and how it defined its legitimacy, and he has published extensively on the topic. His research on this topic has also greatly informed his more recent project, which is on Chinese communities in Southeast Asia from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first centuries. 

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Credits

Episode no. 16

Release date: November 28, 2022

Recording location: Boston, MA/Los Angeles, CA 

Transcript (proofread and punctuated by Lina Nie)

Bibliography courtesy of Prof. Hang

Images

Cover Image: Painting of Zheng Zhiling (in green robes) and his son Zheng Chenggong by Dutch painter Pieter van der Aa (Image Source)

17th century portrait of Zheng Chenggong, also known as Koxinga (Image Source)

Maximum extent of Koxinga's territories in the late 1650s/early 1660s. Red shows areas under his direct control, while orange shows his area of influence. (Image Source)

Birth rock of Koxinga, in Hirado, Japan. (Image Source)

Koxinga worshipped in a temple in Tainan. (Image Source)

References

Professor Maura Dykstra of Caltech joins us today to talk about her new book titled Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State. According to the publisher, the book "investigates the administrative revolution of China’s eighteenth-century Qing state. It begins in the mid-seventeenth century with what seemed, at the time, to be straightforward policies to clean up the bureaucracy: a regulation about deadlines here, a requirement about reporting standards there. Over the course of a hundred years, the central court continued to demand more information from the provinces about local administrative activities. By the middle of the eighteenth century, unprecedented amounts of data about local offices throughout the empire existed.

The result of this information coup was a growing discourse of crisis and decline. Gathering data to ensure that officials were doing their jobs properly, it turned out, repeatedly exposed new issues requiring new forms of scrutiny. Slowly but surely, the thicket of imperial routines and standards binding together local offices, provincial superiors, and central ministries shifted the very epistemological foundations of the state. A vicious cycle arose whereby reporting protocols implemented to solve problems uncovered more problems, necessitating the collection of more information. At the very moment that the Qing knew more about itself than ever before, the central court became certain that it had entered an age of decline."

Contributors

Maura Dykstra

Professor Maura Dykstra is an Assistant Professor of History at Caltech. As a historian of Late Imperial China, her research interests are on bureaucratic, economic, and legal institutions of empire and their implications for political and social interactions in quotidian contexts. Professor Dykstra received her PhD from UCLA and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In addition, she has held numerous residential fellowships and visiting positions in Europe and Asia. Starting in Fall of 2023, Professor Dykstra will begin a new position as Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Yale University.

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Credits

Episode No. 15

Release date: September 20, 2022

Recording location: Los Angeles, CA

Transcript

Bibliography courtesy of Professor Dykstra

Images

Cover Image: Cover of Professor Dykstra's book, which can be purchased directly from the publisher or from Amazon.

China has a long bureaucratic history and tradition, and the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was no exception. The Ming was one of the largest empires in the world at the time and it established a large and complex bureaucracy to govern it. In this episode, Professor. Chelsea Wang talks to us about some of the bureaucratic practices, which might seem strange to us today, that the Ming employed to keep the empire running. 

Governing China is a new series that explores the various bureaucratic institutions and administrative policies that the various Chinese dynasties employed to govern their empires. 

Contributors

Chelsea Wang

Professor Chelsea Wang is an Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. As a historian of late imperial China, Professor Wang’s research focuses on the intersection between communication and governance in premodern empires. Her current manuscript project is titled Logistics of Empire: Governance and Spatial Friction in Ming China, 1368-1644, and it examines how the Ming dynasty maintained control over its vast territories using certain administrative practices that modern observers often find counterintuitive and strange. 

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Credits

Episode No. 14

Release date: August 21, 2022

Recording location: Vancouver, Canada/Los Angeles, CA

Transcript

Bibliography courtesy of Professor Wang

Images

Cover Image: Section of a Ming officials' handbook showing a map of territorial government offices in

Structure of the Ming bureaucracy (Image Source)

Conceptual map of the Ming territorial bureaucracy (Image by Professor Wang)

Deadlines for newly appointed officials to arrive at their locations of service. The red star indicates the location of Beijing, the imperial capital (Image by Professor Wang. Please do not cite or circulate without permission)

A memorial reproduced in a Ming literary collection. This memorial, written by the controversial Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng and addressed to the Wanli emperor, contains information about Zhang's speed of travel when he returned to Huguang province to bury his recently deceased father (Image Courtesy of Harvard-Yenching Library's Digital Collections)

Section of a Ming officials' handbook showing information about individual administrative units in Zhejiang province. The text contains information about each prefecture's tax quota, subordinate counties, distance from Beijing, and arrival deadlines for officials traveling from Beijing (Image Courtesy of Harvard-Yenching Library's Digital Collections)

References

Dardess, John W. Ming China, 1368-1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.

In 1381, Ming armies marched into Yunnan and Guizhou and within a year had deposed the Mongol Yuan's Prince of Liang, who had been enfeoffed there by the Yuan court. The Hongwu's emperor's decision to annex Yunnan and Guizhou and establish Ming administration there was unusual, for before the Mongols conquered it in the mid-1250s, the area had never been under the control of a China-based empire. It was more Southeast Asian in character than it was Chinese in character. Yet for decades, the scholarly community has neglected the study of the southwest. In this episode, Sean Cronan will discuss the Ming's rule in the region, how the early Ming court reshaped the interstate environment of Southwest China and Upper Mainland Southeast Asia, as well as some of the legacies that the early Ming left on the region.

Contributors

Sean Cronan

Sean Cronan is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on East and Southeast Asian diplomatic encounters from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries, tracing the development of new shared diplomatic norms following the Mongol conquests of Eurasia, as well as how rulers and scholar-officials in the Ming (1368- 1644) and Qing Dynasties (1644-1911) institutionalized and challenged these new norms. He explores how ideas of multipolarity, regime legitimacy, and the makeup of the interstate order came under debate throughout the Mongol Empire, Ming China, the Qing Empire, Chosŏn Korea, Dai Viet (Northern Vietnam), Japan, the Ayutthaya Kingdom of Thailand, the Pagan Kingdom of Burma, and beyond. He works with sources in Chinese (literary Sinitic), Japanese, Thai, Burmese, Manchu, and Dutch.

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Credits

Episode No. 13

Release date: July 31, 2022

Recording location: Los Angeles/Berkeley, CA

Transcript

Bibliography courtesy of Sean Cronan

Images

Cover Image: A Buddhist monastery in Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna), located in Yunnan at the border with Laos and Myanmar. Note the distinct Southeast Asian style architecture. In Ming times this area was called Cheli 車里 and a native official ruled here on behalf of the Ming court. Today it is classified as an autonomous region for the Dai/Tai ethnic group. (Image Source)

https://i.imgur.com/tn3BrKI.jpg

A 1636 Ming map of Yunnan, from the Zhifang dayitong zhi 職方大一統志. Due to the large file size, it cannot be uploaded here. Please click on the link above to view it. The yellow rectangle denotes the location of Kunming, the prefectural seat of Yunnan. Red squares represent major settlements.

Map of the Möeng Maaw Empire at its greatest extent in 1398. . Areas in red were either governed by a Sa clan appointee or had long been conquered and integrated into the Maaw administrative structure. Areas in yellow were seized by more recent conquest or held only loosely. Map courtesy of Sean Cronan. Please do not cite or circulate.

A Yuan seal granted to the native official of Cheli. (Image Source)

References

Daniels, Christian. “The Mongol-Yuan in Yunnan and ProtoTai/Tai Polities during the 13th-14th

Daniels, Christian and Jianxiong Ma, eds. The Transformation of Yunnan in Ming China: from the

Fernquest, Jon. “Crucible of War: Burma and the Ming in the Tai Frontier Zone (1382-1454).”

Giersch, Charles Patterson. Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan

Herman, John E. Amid the Clouds and Mist China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.

Robinson, David M. In the Shadow of the Mongol Empire: Ming China and Eurasia. Cambridge:

Yang, Bin. Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Second Century BCE to