Pagodas, polities, period and place: a data led exploration of the regional and chronological context of Liao dynasty architecture

The Liao dynasty (907-1125) was a dominant force in the political landscape of East Asia for a period of over two centuries. Despite this, when placed within the framework of Chinese history, the Liao polity and its associated architecture are forced to the periphery. This study aims to re-centre the Liao by exploring the pagodas constructed under this polity within a wider regional and chronological framework. To achieve this end, extant pagodas from China, North Korea, South Korea and Japan were recorded together in a database for the first time. The HEAP (Historical East Asian Pagoda) Database logs the date, location and feature set of each pagoda it contains and provides a means to compare Liao examples to those from other polities, places and periods. Through analysis and visualisations of this data, the Liao are identified as a polity that produced unique pagoda designs and a distinct visual style. While Liao pagodas played a major role in the wider design trends of the period, it is the influence they had at a more local level that may be of most significance, potentially making us rethink the way we frame and construct histories of architecture in China and East Asia

Tranßcripting: playful subversion with Chinese characters

This article discusses a relatively under-explored phenomenon that we call Tranßcripting - writing, designing and digitally generating new scripts with elements from different scriptal and semiotic systems. The data are drawn from examples of such scripts created by multilingual Chinese users in everyday online social interaction. We analyse the dynamic processes of how such scripts are created that transcend language boundaries as well as transforming the subjectivities of the writer and the reader. We are particularly interested in the playful subversiveness of such practices, and discuss it against the background of uni-scriptal language ideology in China. We are also interested in the methodological challenges of researching such practices, including the challenge of drawing distinctions between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘unordinary’. We analyse the data from a translanguaging perspective

Tranßcripting: playful subversion with Chinese characters

This article discusses a relatively under-explored phenomenon that we call Tranßcripting – writing, designing and digitally generating new scripts with elements from different scriptal and semiotic systems. The data are drawn from examples of such scripts created by multilingual Chinese users in everyday online social interaction. We analyse the dynamic processes of how such scripts are created that transcend language boundaries as well as transforming the subjectivities of the writer and the reader. We are particularly interested in the playful subversiveness of such practices, and discuss it against the background of uni-scriptal language ideology in China. We are also interested in the methodological challenges of researching such practices, including the challenge of drawing distinctions between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘unordinary’. We analyse the data from a translanguaging perspective

Representations of the Han during the Late Qing and Early Republican Period

This dissertation examines the discourses of race, nation and ethnicity in late Qing and early republican China, focusing primarily on representations of the Han. It argues that the competing and changing representations of the Han in this period formed an integral part of the process of modern Chinese nation building. The empirical basis of the dissertation consists of three layers: intellectuals discourses, school textbooks and dictionaries. These layers constituted interconnected layers of discourses that were involved in the broader process of Chinese nation-building. The dissertation demonstrates that intellectuals discourses played a central role in constructing new notions of Chinese identity and the role of the Han, and thereby also in producing different templates or for Chinese nation-building during the late Qing and early republican period. After the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911, these modern perceptions of Chinese national identity were endorsed by the ruling elites and were gradually disseminated and popularised further by means of school textbooks and dictionaries. Taken together, the examination of discourses on the Han in these three types of sources therefore offers an account of how early Chinese nationalist ideas were produced among the elites and then disseminated among the broader population

The Bayer Collection: a preliminary catalogue of the manuscripts and books of Professor Theophilus Siegfried Bayer, acquired and augmented by the Reverend Dr Heinrich Walther Gerdes, now preserved in the Hunterian Library of the University of Glasgow

This is the first attempt to provide the scholarly world with a complete, detailed catalogue of all the material, preserved in the Hunterian Library of the University of Glasgow, which formerly belonged to Professor Theophilus Siegfried Bayer and, subsequently, Dr Heinrich Walther Gerdes. As such it provides not only greatly enhanced descriptions of items already known from the work of Young and Aitken,1 and Henri Cordier,2 but also many more items discovered, and progressively described from the 1980s until now

Forging the Imperial Nation: Imperialism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Boundaries in China's Longue Duree.

In this dissertation, I study the dynamics of ethnic group boundaries in China, emphasizing its continuity through changes from the pre-imperial times to the present day. I distinguish the imperial, patrimonial pattern of ethnic relations, to which China belongs as a case, from the colonial and national type in which ethno-racial boundary-making tends to function as a source of social inequality and political discrimination. Further, I depict the post-imperial Chinese state as the ‘imperial nation,’ enshrining the traditional Sinic ideals of statehood and nationhood together with the patrimonial structures of ethno-territorial governance, albeit with reconfigurations in a national form. The current imperial nation of China is to some degree the prison-house of nation, which symbolizes the fundamental contradiction of being in the midst of the empire-nation continuum in the age of nation-states. Yet, like most non-colonial world-empires, it is modeled not on ethnic exclusion but on the trans-ethnic inclusion underscoring its multiethnic unity. Therefore, I critically examine several misunderstandings and misconceptions in that scholarship which interprets Chinese realities through the lenses of racism, internal colonialism, and Oriental Orientalism. I illustrate ethnicity in China as an imagined category associated with the state-making process and examine how the macro-level structure has affected the individual’s ethnic self-identity. I identify three major characteristics, which constitute major chapters of this study. First, I discuss the ethnic boundary-making process in both cognitive and institutional dimensions. Despite the enduring evidence of Sinocentric prejudice, the various Chinese states have institutionalized ethnic categories not so much to discriminate against non-Han groups as to protect and privilege them compared with the Han peoples. Second, I trace the ethnic boundary-clearing characteristic in the construction of national self-imagery. The conception of common descent as the primordial foundation of Chinese genealogical nationalism has not identified one particular group at the expense of others, but has been employed to integrate diverse ethnicities within one big family, often portrayed as descendants of the mythical Yellow Emperor. Lastly, I demonstrate the porous nature of ethnic boundaries at the individual level, based on the analysis of the Eight Banner household registers as an empirical case of boundary-crossing.Ph.D.SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89783/1/bhlee_1.pd