From demon to deity : Kang Wang in thirteenth-century Jizhou and beyond

This essay discusses the cult of a deity known as Kang Wang, worshipped throughout Jizhou in thirteenth-century Jiangxi. The identity of this deity remains to some extent mysterious; many different identifying stories for Kang Wang coexist. Underneath these guises, however, his origins as a fearsome and unnamed demon shine through. I argue that the various representations of Kang Wang must be understood as resulting from the very different agendas of the authors who created those identities, but they all share one aim: covering up the demonic roots of the deity. Providing a name and place of origin for the deity should be seen as attempts to exert authority over this demonic force

The tale of Lady Tan: negotiating place between Central and local in Song-Yuan-Ming China

This paper explores the story of Lady Tan across genres from biographical record to temple inscription and marvellous tale, highlighting different representations of ‘the local’ in these stories: the loss of local belonging for some, inscribing the morals of a local community for others. Focusing on this tale, this essay argues that locality and belonging were contested constructs, especially during the Song-Yuan-Ming transitional period. Ex-ploring how literati understood themselves in relation to their localities contributes to our understanding of literati identities and the meaning of ‘the local’, in a period with ‘weak central government’, or as a repeating pattern of centralisation and localisation. It reveals the complexities in-volved in giving meaning to locality and negotiating belonging. In Ji'an prefecture, the centralising policies of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors were felt locally and affected how literati positioned themselves between central government and local community. This focus on literati writings from a single prefecture suggests that a close reading of the negotiations that form part of constructing locality and belonging in Ji'an can reveal the potential for a complex interplay between central government and local communities throughout China

The many guises of Xiaoluan : the legacy of a girl poet in late Imperial China

Recent scholarship on women and gender has illustrated the prominent role played by women in the late-imperial Chinese literary establishment. Women wrote poetry, and often their ventures were dependent on the support of men who appreciated their poetic talents. This article discusses the ways in which the work of one woman poet (Ye Xiaoluan, 1616-1632) was transmitted. It argues that Xiaoluan's legacy was largely shaped by the ideals and desires of male literati. The process of recreating Xiaoluan's image to fit with constantly changing needs and desires, reminiscent of the continual recreation of the Greek poet Sappho, should form an important element of our understanding of Xiaoluan. The various guises of Xiaoluan suggest that her poetry was rarely central to her reception. Given the focus of much current scholarship on Chinese "woman writers," this article argues for broader awareness of the changing contexts in which their legacies came into bein

Domesticating goods from overseas : global material culture in the early modern Netherlands

This essay is based on the notion that the early modern world was shaped by connections that stretched across geographical, political and cultural boundaries. The mobility of early modern people, ideas and things, and the networks they created and relied on, facilitated flows of material and immaterial interactions. Within that early modern connected world, material culture played a key role. Goods ranging from treasured, unique objects to commodities traded in vast quantities always accumulate layers of meanings as they move through time and space. By looking at a number of things in circulation in the early modern Netherlands, we can identify them as both ‘global’, in the sense of having travelled across long distances, having accumulated associations with the exotic, and as ‘local’, part of the cultural practices we have come to think of as Dutch. Methodologically, this essay combines a close reading of the idealized representations of things in domestic spaces we encounter in paintings with an analysis of the materiality, design and historical trajectories of the things themselves. Tracing global and local aspects of design as it appears in idealized representations and in early modern Dutch historical objects, I argue that embodied experiences play key roles in the domestication of goods from overseas. I seek to show that through vision and touch, and the proximity of objects to bodies in domestic environments, goods from all over the world become part of the material culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. As exotic goods and materials become part of the domestic environment, global goods gain local meanings, and simultaneously bestow new layers of meaning on the material culture of the early modern Netherlands

'A place full of trade' : placing an early modern Chinese town in global cultural history

This article focuses on the history of Wuchengzhen 吳城鎮, a small town in the inland province of Jiangxi. It explores the history of the town between 1500 and 1850 in terms of both its local significance as an entrepot for trade in grain and tea and its global connections to early modern Europe, by way of the trade in porcelain. The question this paper explores concerns the juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the idea gained from global historians, that during the early modern period, globally traded commodities like tea and porcelain situate a small town like this in a globalized, perhaps even unified or homogenous, world, and on the other hand, the insight gained from cultural historians, that no two people would ever see, or assign meaning to, this small town in the same way. Drawing on this insight, the history of Wuchengzhen is explored on the basis of different textual (administrative records, local gazetteers, merchant manuals) and visual sources (maps and visual depictions of the town), exploring the ways in which the different meanings of the town are constructed in each. The combination of global and cultural history places Wuchengzhen on our map of the early modern world

Friendship through fourteenth-century fissures : Dai Liang, Wu Sidao and Ding Henian

This essay analyzes one set of male bonds—the relationships between three men in the Yuan-Ming transition—to understand the range of meanings assigned to the practice of friendship in the fourteenth century. Through the exchange of writings, the three men constructed a friendship based on shared cultural ideas that was more valuable to them than the ethnic, regional, and political differences between them. At a time when the violence and disruptions associated with the Yuan-Ming transition and the lack of access to examinations and the civil service created a crisis in masculinity, these friendships allowed them to create a space where masculine values could be shared and expressed

Catherine Jami (dir.), Individual Itineraries and the Spatial Dynamics of Knowledge: Science, Technology and Medicine in China, 17th-20th Centuries

Perhaps this book does not have the catchiest of titles: it is long, dense and descriptive. But it does include all the important words that capture exactly what this book is about. It covers science, technology and medicine in China during the previous four centuries, and, by looking at individual itineraries of actors, ideas and objects, demonstrates that “a spatial approach to knowledge is both fruitful and necessary, for China as for the rest of the world” (p. 18). While the word “global”..