The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AI

This book describes the transformation of Ch'ing governance from monarchical rule to ministerial administration, presenting a wholly new account of the Grand Council's founding and rise to dominance. This period has been viewed as an era of intensified government centralization and increasing autocracy, but Bartlett persuasively demonstrates that this characterization must be modified in the light of her findings.
Bartlett identifies the inner-outer court dichotomy often studied in earlier dynasties but never before in the Ch'ing—as the key framework for understanding Grand Council development. She conclusively shows how the council arose from the Yung-cheng Emperor's attempt to enhance his own power by establishing several small subordinate (and not at all grand) inner-court staffs to bypass the outer-court bureaucracy. A single centralizing and managing body worthy of the title "grand" came into being only after Yung-cheng's death. As a result of the council's first century of growth, imperial power was subtly undermined even though it continued in force. Bartlett argues that it was the council's consolidated power as much as the strength of the monarchy that enabled the Ch'ing dynasty to achieve greatness in its middle years—defeating the Mongols and enlarging its territories—and at the end prolonged its life in spite of foreign incursions, internal rebellions, and infant emperors.
The Grand Council is the only high privy council of inperial China for which substantial documentation survives. For this book Bartlett traveled to both Taipei and Beijing to consult the newly available archival sources in both Chinese and Manchu necessary for her research. Her feat of archival reconstruction is a tremendous service to the entire field. Her findings on the Grand Council's patterns of growth, particularly such factors as inner-court informality and secrecy, the far-flung eighteenth-century military campaigns, the tripling of paperwork, and the manipulation of communications, will be useful to scholars studying similar phenomena in other periods and contexts, as Bartlett suggests in connection with the rise of the Ming grand secretaries.
Monarchs and Ministers offers a lively and fresh account of eighteenth-century Chinese political history that will engage the general reader as well as China specialists in many fields.

C. Patterson Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest through comparative frontier history and a pioneering use of indigenous sources. He focuses on the Tai domains of China's Yunnan frontier, part of the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.
Patterns of acculturation were multi-directional. Both Qing and Tai created a hybrid frontier government that was tested as Burma and Siam extended influence into the region. As Qing and Chinese migrants gained greater political and economic control in borderland communities, indigenes adopted select Chinese ways. Chinese language was useful for trade, and relations with imperial officials were eased by wearing the queue and donning imperial robes. But indigenous culture and livelihoods persisted, and Tai aristocrats adopted rituals and symbols of the Burmese and Siamese courts.
Qing conquest and Chinese migration did not lead to simple patterns of incorporation and assimilation. Chinese economic and cultural influences were profound, but did not entirely undermine indigenous practices. These legacies, which would shape and complicate twentieth-century Chinese state building, hold an important key to understanding modern China.

C. Patterson Giersch is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor in Asian Studies and Professor of History, Wellesley College.

Critically exploring medical thought in a cultural milieu with no discernible influence from the European Enlightenment, "Being Human" reveals an otherwise unnoticed intersection of early modern sensibilities and religious values in traditional Tibetan medicine. It further studies the adaptation of Buddhist concepts and values to medical concerns and suggests important dimensions of Buddhism's role in the development of Asian and global civilization.
Through its unique focus and sophisticated reading of source materials, " Being Human" adds a crucial chapter in the larger historiography of science and religion. The book opens with the bold achievements in Tibetan medical illustration, commentary, and institution building during the period of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, then looks back to the work of earlier thinkers, tracing a strategically astute dialectic between scriptural and empirical authority on questions of history and the nature of human anatomy. It follows key differences between medicine and Buddhism in attitudes toward gender and sex and the moral character of the physician, who had to serve both the patient's and the practitioner's well-being. "Being Human" ultimately finds that Tibetan medical scholars absorbed ethical and epistemological categories from Buddhism yet shied away from ideal systems and absolutes, instead embracing the imperfectability of the human condition.

Janet Gyatso is Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard University

Based entirely on unpublished primary sources, Tsering Shakya's groundbreaking history of modern Tibet shatters the popular conception of the country as an isolated Shangri-la unaffected by broader international developments. Shakya gives a balanced, blow-by-blow account of Tibet's ongoing struggle to maintain its independence and safeguard its cultural identity while being sandwiched between the heavyweights of Asian geopolitics: Britain, India, China, and the United States. With thorough documentation, Shakya details the Chinese depredations of Tibet, and reveals the failures of the Tibetan leadership's divided strategies. Rising above the simplistic dualism so often found in accounts of Tibet's contested recent history, The Dragon in the Land of Snows lucidly depicts the tragedy that has befallen Tibet and identifies the conflicting forces that continue to shape the aspirations of the Tibetan people today.

Tsering Shakya is an associate Professor at the University of British Columbia

Volume 1:

In an ambitious effort to overcome the extreme fragmentation of early Southeast Asian historiography, this study connects Southeast Asia to world history. Victor Lieberman argues that over a thousand years, each of mainland Southeast Asia's great lowland corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration punctuated by recurrent collapse. These trajectories were synchronized not only between corridors, but most curiously, between the mainland as a whole, much of Europe, and other sectors of Eurasia. Lieberman describes in detail the nature of mainland consolidation and dissects the mix of endogenous and external factors responsible.

Volume 2:

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia’s premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

Victor B. Lieberman

This dissertation reinterprets Tibetan history by focusing on the Tibetan Buddhist state's military history, challenging the notion of a peaceful Tibet and exploring how the Ganden Podrang regime used warfare to expand its territory and consolidate power. The author analyzes the Ganden Podrang's military reforms, examining the army's organization, training, and weaponry. The dissertation also investigates the Ganden Podrang's conflicts with neighboring states like Bhutan and Ladakh, highlighting the role of figures like Polhané in shaping Tibet's military strategy. The dissertation concludes by exploring the potential of Big Data to provide new perspectives on Tibetan military history, drawing on archival sources, digital mapping, and statistical analysis.

In 1644, the Manchus, a relatively unknown people inhabiting China’s rude northeastern frontier, overthrew the Ming, Asia’s mightiest rulers, and established the Qing dynasty, which endured to 1912. From this event arises one of Chinese history’s great conundrums: How did a barely literate alien people manage to remain in power for nearly 300 years over a highly cultured population that was vastly superior in number? This problem has fascinated scholars for almost a century, but until now no one has approached the question from the Manchu point of view.

This book, the first in any language to be based mainly on Manchu documents, supplies a radically new perspective on the formative period of the modern Chinese nation. Drawing on recent critical notions of ethnicity, the author explores the evolution of the “Eight Banners,” a unique Manchu system of social and military organization that was instrumental in the conquest of the Ming.

The author argues that as rulers of China the Manchu conquerors had to behave like Confucian monarchs, but that as a non-Han minority they faced other, more complex considerations as well. Their power derived not only from the acceptance of orthodox Chinese notions of legitimacy, but also, the author suggests, from Manchu “ethnic sovereignty,” which depended on the sustained coherence of the conquerors.

When, in the early 1700s, this coherence was threatened by rapid acculturation and the prospective loss of Manchu distinctiveness, the Qing court, always insecure, desperately urged its minions to uphold the traditions of an idealized “Manchu Way.” However, the author shows that it was not this appeal but rather the articulation of a broader identity grounded in the realities of Eight Banner life that succeeded in preserving Manchu ethnicity, and the Qing dynasty along with it, into the twentieth century.

Mark C. Elliott is Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard University.

Tonio Andrade is professor of history at Emory University and the author of Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West (Princeton) and How Taiwan Became Chinese.

A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global history
The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind?
Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons helped Europeans establish global hegemony. Yet the inhabitants of what is today China not only invented guns and bombs but also, as Andrade shows, continued to innovate in gunpowder technology through the early 1700s—much longer than previously thought. Why, then, did China become so vulnerable? Andrade argues that one significant reason is that it was out of practice fighting wars, having enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace, since 1760. Indeed, he demonstrates that China—like Europe—was a powerful military innovator, particularly during times of great warfare, such as the violent century starting after the Opium War, when the Chinese once again quickly modernized their forces. Today, China is simply returning to its old position as one of the world's great military powers.
By showing that China’s military dynamism was deeper, longer lasting, and more quickly recovered than previously understood, The Gunpowder Age challenges long-standing explanations of the so-called Great Divergence between the West and Asia.

Summary

Keywords:

Peking Temple, Ming Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, Religious Organization, Urban Society, Social History, Religious History