Communication, Empire, and Authority in the Qing Gazette

This dissertation studies the political and cultural roles of official information and political news in late imperial China. Using a wide-ranging selection of archival, library, and digitized sources from libraries and archives in East Asia, Europe, and the United States, this project investigates the production, regulation, and reading of the Peking Gazette (dibao, jingbao), a distinctive communications channel and news publication of the Qing Empire (1644-1912). Although court gazettes were composed of official documents and communications, the Qing state frequently contracted with commercial copyists and printers in publishing and distributing them. As this dissertation shows, even as the Qing state viewed information control and dissemination as a strategic concern, it also permitted the free circulation of a huge variety of timely political news. Readers including both officials and non-officials used the gazette in order to compare judicial rulings, assess military campaigns, and follow court politics and scandals. As the first full-length study of the Qing gazette, this project shows concretely that the gazette was a powerful factor in late imperial Chinese politics and culture, and analyzes the close relationship between information and imperial practice in the Qing Empire. By arguing that the ubiquitous gazette was the most important link between the Qing state and the densely connected information society of late imperial China, this project overturns assumptions that underestimate the importance of court gazettes and the extent of popular interest in political news in Chinese history. Through engagement with previously unstudied gazettes, manuscripts, and diaries, the project demonstrates that political news and information derived from court gazettes influenced both individual encounters with the state and, more broadly, the evolution of administrative practice in the Qing Empire. In so doing, this project connects scholarship in the emerging field of information history with work on Qing political institutions, print culture, and the history of newspapers. The project highlights the encounters of readers, publishers, and administrators with gazettes in order to illustrate the complexity and richness of information practices in a non-Western early modern context. In addition to demonstrating that court gazettes are important and underutilized sources for the study of Qing history, this project’s findings should encourage scholars of information and the state in other global contexts to investigate popular encounters with the state through the lens of news and information. In five thematic chapters, the project undertakes a multidimensional study of the role of the gazette in the Qing court, territorial bureaucracy, and empire. The first chapter explores the evolution of Qing information policy from the Qing conquest through the empire’s decline in the nineteenth century. The second chapter establishes a detailed history of the evolution of the gazette industry and its relationship to the growth of commercial publishing in late imperial Beijing. The third chapter provides evidence for how readers engaged with the gazette in their daily lives and careers. The fourth chapter examines how the gazette found a place in newspapers published in China and around the world, and posits that gazette information shaped the stories that could be read about China, especially in the nineteenth century. Finally, the fifth chapter looks at efforts to reconceive the gazette at the end of the Qing as representative of ongoing elite-led efforts to remake relationships between print and politics in a modernizing state

The Qing Invention of Nature: Environment and Identity in Northeast China and Mongolia, 1750-1850

This dissertation studies the nexus of empire, environment, and market that defined Qing China in 1750-1850, when unprecedented commercial expansion and a rush for natural resources – including furs, pharmaceuticals, and precious minerals – transformed the ecology of China and its borderlands. That boom, no less than today’s, had profound institutional, ideological, and environmental causes and consequences. Nature itself was redefined. In this thesis, I show that it was the activism, not the atavism, of early modern empire that produced “nature.” Wilderness as such was not a state of nature: it reflected the nature of the state. Imperial efforts to elaborate and preserve “pure” ethnic homelands during the boom were at the center of this process. Using archival materials from Northeast China and Mongolia as case studies, the dissertation reassesses the view that homesteaders transformed China’s frontiers from wilderness to breadbasket after 1850. I argue instead that, like the Russian East and American West, the Qing empire’s North was never a “primitive wilderness” – it only seemed so to late 19th century observers. Manchuria and Mongolia, in fact, had served local and global markets. The boom years of the 1700s in particular witnessed a surge in poaching, commercial licensing, and violent “purification” campaigns to restore the environment, stem migration, and promote “traditional” land-use patterns. Results were mixed; conservation succeeded in some territories, while others suffered dramatic environmental change: emptied of fur-bearing animals, stripped of wild pharmaceuticals, left bare around abandoned worker camps. Beginning with changes in material culture in the metropole, the dissertation follows the commodity chain to production sites in the frontier, providing a fresh look at the politics of resource production and nature protection in the Qing empire.East Asian Languages and Civilization

The Vernacular World Of Pu Songling

Pu Songling (1640-1715) is known to the world for his Liaozhai zhiyi, which has come to represent the epitome of the Chinese classical tale. Yet there is also a large and lesser-known body of ballads, plays and songs attributed to him, transmitted through local manuscript and oral culture in Pu’s native Zichuan, Shandong. Presenting these works in the context of the locality’s textual culture, this dissertation reveals them to be informed by both literary tradition and the sights and sounds of a village world. The first chapter introduces the vernacular oeuvre attributed to Pu Songling and the sources of this study, mainly from the Ryōsai Bunko at Keio University. It tells the early 20th century story of the collection and the discovery of Pu’s vernacular works in China at the time, and analyzes aspects of Zichuan’s textual culture as discernable from the collection. The second chapter focuses on Pu’s Riyong suzi (Popular characters for daily use), a rhymed educational text in local language on the vocabularies of everyday life, belonging to a vibrant literature of vernacular primers. Riyong suzi mediated not only between standard script and local speech, but also the spheres of textual and living knowledge. The third chapter employs filial piety as a lens into the world of popular entertainment, focusing on ballads and plays attributed to Pu on the subject of the family. Comparing vernacular ballad against classical tale, it calls into question elements of these works which ostensibly make them “elite” or “popular,” while bringing to attention the ballads’ skillful evocations of a village world alive with oral exchanges and verbal duels. The final chapter is devoted to depictions of history in the play Monan qu (Song of tribulations) attributed to Pu and in drum ballads from Shandong. These vernacular engagements with local and dynastic history reveal a range of literati experiments with popular performance genres. Colloquial song and narrative formed a common, informal literary medium in the region, tied intimately to the classical tradition while providing alternative channels for diversion, dissent, and innovation

Directorate of education (Guo Zi Jian) and the Imperial University (Tai Xue) in the Northern Song (960-1127)-interaction between politics and education in middle period China

The Imperial University played a significant political role in China’s imperial past. When established in the ancient Zhou, its mission was predominantly to nurture prospective officials for eventual service in government. This marks the inseparability of education and politics from the very onset of the University’s founding. Nevertheless, its diminished success in producing officials under subsequent dynasties caused a comparable diminution in the political significance of the metropolitan school. Not until the Northern Song, founded by the Zhao clan, did signs emerge of a resurrection of sorts. Three major educational reforms were attempted in the reigns of Renzong, Shenzong, and Huizong (ca. 1040-1126). In each reform, the emperor and the reform proponents envisioned an expanding role of political significance for the Imperial University. This dissertation focuses on the evolution of the metropolitan educational institutions, namely the Directorate of Education and the Imperial University, in the Northern Song. By investigating the record of conduct and extant writings as pertains to the institutional settings of the Imperial University as well as wide range of biographical sources for Northern Song men, mainly staff, students, and graduates of the Imperial University, the author seeks to gain insights into how Song emperors and policy advocates perceived the Imperial University as a political institution, how the staff and teachers at the University performed their assigned roles, and how students and graduates of the Northern Song Imperial University contributed to the political life. After highlighting the role of the Imperial University in the previous dynasties, reviewing the secondary literatures in connection with education in Song China, as well as illustrating the sources and methodology to be used in the introductory chapter, a comprehensive survey of the development of the metropolitan schools covering the entire Northern Song then follows. This narrative history not only highlights the innovations in the educational institutions per se, but also sheds light on a range of political phenomena during various stages in the Northern Song: how aristocracy evolved into meritocracy; how the reformers and conservatives created myths for political sake; how emperor Shenzong strengthened its autocratic rule by way of a comprehensive regulatory framework; how scholar-officials rebuffed in defending the “genealogy of the way”; and how the scholarly vision in recruiting officials through a countrywide school network was realized. The conclusion contains an analytical discussion of the political role of the Imperial University in late Northern Song: a tool of control and indoctrination, as well as a channel to select morally upright officials. The central issue is how successful could the Directorate of Education and the Imperial University perform these political functions. Through this study, hopefully a fuller picture of this elitist educational institution during one of its most flourishing periods in Imperial China can be restored. It is also envisioned that the political impact could be re-emphasized in future studies of political institutions, a perspective which has often been ignored in recent Chinese and Western scholarships where social history is dominant

Making the State on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier: Chinese Expansion and Local Power in Batang, 1842-1939

This dissertation analyzes the process of state building by Qing imperial representatives and Republican state officials in Batang, a predominantly ethnic Tibetan region located in southwestern Sichuan Province. Utilizing Chinese provincial and national level archival materials and Tibetan language works, as well as French and American missionary records and publications, it explores how Chinese state expansion evolved in response to local power and has three primary arguments. First, by the mid-nineteenth century, Batang had developed an identifiable structure of local governance in which native chieftains, monastic leaders, and imperial officials shared power and successfully fostered peace in the region for over a century. Second, the arrival of French missionaries in Batang precipitated a gradual expansion of imperial authority in the region, culminating in radical Qing military intervention that permanently altered local understandings of power. While short-lived, centrally-mandated reforms initiated soon thereafter further integrated Batang into the Qing Empire, thereby demonstrating the viability of New Policy reforms and challenging the idea that the late Qing was a failed state. Finally, I posit that despite almost two decades of political, economic, and social upheaval in the post-Qing period, Nationalist officials' ability to repel central Tibetan attempts to assert their authority over Batang while effectively denying multiple movements for autonomous self-rule by local Batang political activists who were also Nationalist Party representatives directly contributed to Batang's incorporation into the Nationalist state. This analysis of Batang's transition from an imperial domain of the Qing Empire to a county in the newly created province of Xikang in 1939 highlights China's desultory and still incomplete transition from empire to nation

Dialogic education, historical thinking and epistemic beliefs: a design-based research study of teaching in Taiwanese classrooms

The study reported in this dissertation explored: (1) teachers’ use of dialogue to facilitate students’ historical thinking and (2) the trajectory of historical personal epistemology through a design-based approach. Empirical evidence emerging in previous decades has acknowledged that good quality classroom dialogue could have a positive impact on students’ learning. Through dialogic teaching, it has been argued that teachers could probe and promote students’ higher thinking skills. However, how dialogue is being used in history classes as well as the cultural context of dialogic education in East Asia was a salient gap in current research. The first research aim was to explore both teachers’ and students’ epistemic beliefs regarding the domain of history, which has been largely neglected in this field of study. The aim of this research was also to propose a new perspective on dialogic education that might not only bridge the dichotomy of the monologic and dialogic forms of teaching, but also address the pedagogical dilemma in history education raised by the latest Taiwanese national curriculum reform. Finally, another major aim of the research was to design a teacher professional development programme to change teachers’ epistemic beliefs and their teaching practice towards dialogic history education for promoting historical thinking. Adopting the notion of design-based research, a teaching professional programme was designed and administered throughout the one-academic year to 7 high school teachers. Three students of each participating teacher were chosen for semi-structured interviews to explore their personal epistemology, which were later analysed with an innovative discourse analysis method: Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). Data concerning classroom dialogue was collected from monthly class observations and then analysed with a reconceptualised coding framework adapted from the Teacher’s Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA, Hennessy, et al., 2021) and an observational instrument for historical thinking (Gestsdóttir, et al., 2018). In regard to personal epistemology, the findings reported a mixture of results with only a few students seeing a significant change in their epistemic beliefs after the programme. However, a pattern-based model for analysing historical epistemic beliefs reported from this study, has been generated resulting in four major patterns of beliefs being identified. In terms of classroom dialogue, the results found a positive increase in teachers’ use of dialogue. A hybrid form of dialogue informed by current dialogic theories synthesised with Confucianism and Taoism allowed dialogue to transgress away from the dichotomy of structural forms of monologue and dialogue was also put forward and characterised from the analysis. The contributions of this present study are discussed in terms of theoretical, methodological and practical uses

European luxury consumption in China: government action, state capacity and consumer behavior (1680-1840)

Programa de Doctorado en Historia y Estudios Humanísticos: Europa, América, Arte y LenguasLínea de Investigación: Historia y Estudios Humanísticos: Europa, América, Arte y GeografíaClave Programa: DHHCódigo Línea: 121Commercial intercourse and cultural exchanges between China and Europe have been taking place for centuries. Without a global perspective, studies might be unilateral. The purpose of this thesis is to examine foreign trade and European import consumption in a specific period of early modern China, covering the period from the gradual opening but restricted maritime trade since the late 17th century to the outbreak of the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century. This thesis focuses on European luxury goods that entered China, especially clocks, wine and other handicrafts during this period. Being an important part of world trade, European luxury goods is closely related to the fields of global history, economic history and consumer studies. This study aims to give a detailed description and analysis of real consumption situation of that period by cross-referencing various sources - official edicts, memorials, imperial household records, local chronicles, etc. Also to have the situation of China’s foreign trade concretely and comprehensively displayed with researches on operation of China’s four major customs and the volume of import and export trade. Based on the Qing Emperors’ preference, the thesis also analyzes typical luxury consumption of the upper class in the Qing Dynasty, including the royal family, nobles, officials, merchants and intellectuals, in order to conduct comprehensive research on how these luxury consumption habits affected the formation of the imported goods market, the imitation industry and other local corresponding industries. The study of import and consumption of European luxury goods in China is not to enumerate historical statistics, but to reveal more factors and features of that time. The thesis focuses on finding more relevance in the issue of consumption, rather than production under the political situation of the time, and gives a comparative study from a global historical perspective. Supported by the existing researches in both Eurocentric and Sinocentric approaches, this study aims to reveal new perspectives on the theme of Euro-China trade in the early modern period. It is hoped that this study could serve as a complement to studies of the early modern China in a global historical context and examines the role of China as a consumer market in the global economy.China y Europa han mantenido las relaciones comerciales y los intercambios culturales durante siglos. Los estudios al respecto resultarán unilaterales si no se llevan a cabo desde una perspectiva global. Esta tesis tiene como objetivo examinar el comercio exterior y el consumo de las importaciones europeas en un periodo concreto de China en época moderna, que abarca desde la apertura gradual pero restringida del comercio marítimo desde finales del siglo XVII hasta el estallido de las Guerras del Opio a mediados del siglo XIX. Esta tesis se centra en el estudio los productos de lujo europeos que entraron en China durante este periodo, especialmente relojes, vino y otras artesanías. Como una parte importante del comercio mundial, los artículos de lujo europeos están estrechamente relacionados con la historia global, económica, así como los estudios de consumo. Este estudio pretende ofrecer una descripción y un análisis detallados de la situación real del consumo de ese periodo mediante el cruce de varias fuentes: edictos oficiales, memoriales, registros de la familia imperial, crónicas locales, etc. También se pretende mostrar de forma concreta y exhaustiva la situación del comercio exterior de China de aquel periodo con investigaciones sobre el funcionamiento de las cuatro principales aduanas de China y el volumen del comercio de importación y exportación. Basándose en las preferencias de los emperadores Qing, la tesis también analiza el consumo de lujo típico de la clase alta de la dinastía Qing. A esa clase pertenecen la familia real, los nobles, los funcionarios, los comerciantes y los intelectuales. El análisis al respecto se desarrolla con el fin de llevar a cabo una investigación exhaustiva sobre cómo estos hábitos de consumo de lujo afectaron a la formación del mercado de bienes importados, la de la industria de la imitación y la de otras industrias locales correspondientes. En el estudio de la importación y del consumo de bienes de lujo europeos en China no se va a enumerar las estadísticas históricas, sino se revelarán más factores y características de aquella época. La tesis pretende poner de manifiesto, bajo el contexto político de aquella época, la pertinencia en el tema del consumo, en lugar del de la producción, y ofrece un estudio comparativo desde una perspectiva histórica global. Apoyándose en las investigaciones en que se aplican la metodología tanto eurocéntrica o la sinocéntrica, este estudio pretende adoptar nuevas perspectivas sobre el tema del comercio euro-chino en época moderna. Se espera que este estudio pueda servir de complemento a los estudios sobre la China moderna temprana en un contexto histórico global y que examine el papel de China como mercado de consumo en la economía global.Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla. Departamento de Geografía, Historia y Filosofí

The Veins of the Earth: Property, Environment, and Cosmology in Nanbu County, 1865-1942

During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) in Nanbu County, land was not only measured in quantitative dimensions, but also assessed through cosmological principles. These understandings of land often framed property claims while shaping rural geographies in the county under study. Drawing on 700 cases from the Nanbu Archive, this dissertation makes two related claims. First, in the mountainous periphery of Northern Sichuan, situated knowledge of land pervaded contracts, genealogies, stone inscriptions, and official handbooks. This information, composed of vernacular place-names, localized land boundaries, expressions of patrimonial merit and status, and cosmological dimensions of property, was often immediately understandable only to the members of a lineage or community, but could be interpreted by the state if needed. One type of situated information was geomantic information, which regularly entered the magistrate’s court. Local officials engaged this information in legal practice and took geomantic claims or documentation into consideration during litigation. Sites holding great geomantic significance, such as ancient trees, graves, and temples, were often identified by locals as the landmarks or borders of private estates, market towns, or the county itself; these understandings were regularly woven into the administrative documents of the state. During the Qing, such interpretations were even extended to a local shrine of a Muslim (Qadiri) saint. Through routine engagement with these interpretations of the earth throughout the increasing landed commercialization of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — in processing lawsuits, the Nanbu yamen (state administrative office) ordered landscapes concerning geomancy to be officially illustrated more than any other genre of claim — the Qing state legitimated highly situated knowledge of the land within the local property regime while upholding geomantic information as a binding mechanism for the regulation of common lands and resource access. The dissertation’s second point is that, while it is well-known that the early decades of the twentieth century saw increased state penetration into local society across China, Nanbu maintained a remarkable degree of continuity with its imperial heritage. Land surveyors working in the early twentieth century struggled to extract structured knowledge of land from the layered territorialities of the county’s terrains that had persisted from the Qing. This process was highly negotiated and often interpretive, rather than based on precise statistical surveying or the clear directives of a hegemonic state. Through exploring the legal, environmental, and religious dimensions of a single county’s terrains in the late imperial period, this study identifies situated geomantic information as one of the key arenas for the projection of — and limitations on — state power in the county in relation to the property system. The dissertation also provides the first English-language history of Nanbu, a county with a remarkably complete administrative and legal archive from 1656 to 1951

Agriculture And Development In An Age Of Empire: Institutions, Associations, And Market Networks In Korea, 1876-1945

From the late nineteenth century, successive periods of domestic reform (1860s–1910) and Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) fundamentally altered the relationship between the Korean state, the population, and the economy. Through a focus on agriculture—the largest industry at the time—this dissertation examines multiple efforts to reorient agricultural production to meet new expectations of the rural economy. In particular, this dissertation focuses on the expansion of the state through a series of semi-governmental organizations—known as associations (Ko. chohap; Ja. kumiai)—which mediated interaction between farmers, government officials, and local and international markets. In the process, the associations not only introduced new agricultural technologies and reordered trading relationships but also influenced the ways in which farmers produced for the market, be it through the enforcement of quality standards on farmers’ crops or the issuing of loans against future production. This dissertation uses a wide range of primary sources written in Korean, Japanese, and Classical Chinese—from official government publications to local organizational records and previously unexamined farmers diaries—to detail the varied ways in which government officials and rural residents alike projected onto the work of the new associations their own visions of what constituted development within the rural economy. Chapter One examines the changing significance of the economy to the Korean government in the late nineteenth century. Chapter Two uses the diary of a single farmer to explore in-depth his economic worldview and the factors he considered important in his everyday life. Chapter Three traces colonial agricultural policies toward rice and cotton, and the government’s reliance upon semi-governmental organizations to implement its major policies. Chapter Four examines the activities of the new associations in the context of existing agricultural organizations, and Chapter Five questions the ideas of development that underpinned both Korean and colonial efforts to reform the rural economy. Overall, this dissertation places the semi-governmental organizations at the heart of a new rural economic order. Though established under colonial rule, the activities of the associations fit within a broader history of rural economic organization which shaped farmers’ interactions with the associations beyond their immediate political objectives

Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia

With essays by Monica Bethe, Mary M Dusenbury, Shih-shan Susan Huang, Ikumi Kaminishi, Guolong Lai, Richard Laursen, Liu Jian and Zhao Feng, Chika Mouri, Park Ah-rim, Hillary Pedersen, Lisa Shekede and Su Bomin, Sim Yeon-ok and Lee Seonyong, Tanaka Yoko, and Zhao Feng and Long BoColor was a critical element in East Asian life and thought, but its importance has been largely overlooked in Western scholarship. This interdisciplinary volume explores the fascinating roles that color played in the society, politics, thought, art, and ritual practices of ancient and medieval East Asia (ca. 1600 B.C.E.–ca. 1400 C.E.). While the Western world has always linked color with the spectrum of light, in East Asian civilizations colors were associated with the specific plant or mineral substances from which they were derived. Many of these substances served as potent medicines and elixirs, and their transformative powers were extended to the dyes and pigments they produced. Generously illustrated, this groundbreaking publication constitutes the first inclusive study of color in East Asia. It is the outcome of years of collaboration between chemists, conservators, archaeologists, historians of art and literature, and scholars of Buddhism and Daoism from the United States, East Asia, and Europe