Thursday, May 3rd: Mark Frank “A Land ‘Without History to Speak of’: The Rise (and Fall and Rise) of Xikang Province”

Mark Frank

PhD Candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

” A Land ‘Without History to Speak of’: The Rise (and Fall and Rise) of Xikang Province”

Thursday May 3rd, 4:00-6:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room [SSR 224]

Discussant: Kenneth Pomeranz, University Professor of Modern Chinese History and in the College, University of Chicago

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Mark Frank as he presents a draft of his dissertation chapter, titled “A Land ‘Without History to Speak of’: The Rise (and Fall and Rise) of Xikang Province.” He has provided the following abstract:

In 1939 the Republic of China fixed borders around the Kham region of eastern Tibet and declared it to be “Xikang Province”. This chapter chronicles the rise of that province as the hybrid outcome of an enduring political vision and a convoluted series of historical accidents. Sichuan officials first conceived of converting the Kham region into a province named Xikang (Kham-in-the-west) after the murder of a Qing imperial representative there in 1905, but their provincial project was derailed by the Chinese revolution of 1911. The notion of a potential Xikang Province circulated in Chinese discourse for decades, even as warlords battled the Tibetan army and each other for control of the Kham region. Chinese writers floated all manner of fantastical ideas about Xikang—that it was a vast virgin waste whose development would “benefit the country and enrich the people”; that it could be a springboard for the liberation of India from British rule, or a last bastion against Japanese invasion. The eventual founding of Xikang Province was a marriage of convenience between the wartime desires of the Nationalist government and those of the embattled warlord Liu Wenhui. In spite of very disparate notions of what Xikang should look like and what it meant for China, this essay contends that the fantasy of colonizing it with Han farmers persisted from the last years of the Qing through its eventual founding, and beyond.

 

Mark’s Paper can be found in the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu or Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu.

Thursday, February 15th: Dan Knorr, “A City of Springs: Local Geography and Imperial Presence in High Qing Jinan”

Dan Knorr

PhD Candidate, Department of History

    “A City of Springs: Local Geography and Imperial Presence in High Qing Jinan”

Thursday, February 15th, 4-6pm,

Social Sciences Tea Room [SSRB 201]

Discussant: Alex Jania [PhD Student, Department of History]

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Dan Knorr as he presents a draft of the first dissertation chapter, titled “A City of Springs: Local Geography and Imperial Presence in High Qing Jinan.” He has provided the following abstract:

Since the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) Jinan has been the capital of Shandong Province in eastern China. Despite its political preeminence in the late imperial period, the city boasted neither of the two most important cultural sites in the province: Mt. Tai, one of the five sacred peaks of China, and Qufu, the ancestral home of Confucius’ descendants. During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), visiting these sites were the primary objectives of the Kangxi (r. 1661-1722) and Qianlong (r. 1735-1796) emperors when they passed through Shandong on their eastern and southern tours. However, along the way, both emperors also visited Jinan and expressed their appreciation for the city’s scenery, including its three most famous sites: Baotu Spring, Thousand Buddha/Li Mountain, and Daming Lake. Their patronization of these sites was part of a larger imperial project of solidifying the patrimonial rule of the Manchu Qing Dynasty over the empire through “encompassing” the cultural values of Han elite. The imperial tours and their material legacies, such as steles and scroll paintings, intersected with a corpus of writings about these sites that was preserved and augmented through the successive compilation of local gazetteers (difang zhi). This included Jinan native Ren Hongyuan’s Baotuquan zhi (Records of Baotu Spring), which he compiled in the years between the Kangxi and Qianlong tours.

Focusing on writings about Baotu Spring and its connection to Jinan’s other famous sites, this chapter accomplishes three goals. First, it adds to our understanding of both writing about local sites and scenery and responses to the imperial tours in North China. As the economic and cultural heart of late imperial China, Jiangnan has understandably received considerable attention from scholars like Tobie Meyer-Fong and Michael Chang who have studied the relationship between cultural production and the consolidation of imperial authority under the Qing. This chapter demonstrates that similar processes also played out in northern China, whose beauty some writers even compared favorably to Jiangnan. However, texts about these sites demonstrate that this history was framed in terms of Jinan’s particular position in-between both the capital in Beijing and Jiangnan and the Grand Canal and Mt. Tai.

Second, this chapter demonstrates that local literature was, in fact, a translocal and political production. Compilations of writings about these sites often included and even gave prominence to the voices of writers who were not natives of Jinan. In many cases these writers were officials who worked in Jinan temporarily but left behind literary and architectural impressions on the landscape. Their writings occupied a privileged place in both officially-reviewed gazetteers and the privately-compiled Baotuquan zhi.

Finally, I examine the literary interventions of officials and emperors within the geographic context of Jinan. While the positioning of official yamens in the center of the city, which was itself surrounded by walls, suggests a spatially concentrated projection of imperial power, in fact official patronage and control spilled beyond the city’s walls to Baotu Spring and Thousand Buddha Mountain. Local writers did not, however, treat this as an unwanted imposition on indigenous space. Rather, as suggested above, it was a continuation of a long history of the local landscape – both material and discursive – being produced through the functioning of the state. What was different in the Qing Dynasty was the direct intervention of emperors themselves, which facilitated their personal knowledge of Jinan’s geography and people and the city’s claim to an even greater level of grandeur.

Dan’s Paper can be found at the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu or Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu

Thursday, November 2nd: Robert Burgos “Local Discourses of Identity and ‘Ruralness’ in the Yuri Region of Akita, Japan”

Robert Burgos

PhD Student, University of Chicago

“Local Discourses of Identity and ‘Ruralness’ in the Yuri Region of Akita, Japan”

Thursday, November 2nd, 4:00-6:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room [SSR 224]

Discussant: Dan Knorr, PhD Candidate, University of Chicago

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop as we welcome Robert Burgos, who will be presenting a work in progress titled “Local Discourses of Identity and ‘Ruralness’ in the Yuri Region of Akita, Japan.” This piece considers the development in the 1930s of a local historical discourse by amateur Yuri historians and its implications on the understanding of ‘rural’ community and identity formation in Japan through the 20th century.

Robert’s Paper can be found in the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu or Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu.

10/22 C. Patterson Giersch

Yunnan’s Cosmopolitan Villagers: Merchants and Rural Reform in Early Twentieth- Century China

Speaker: Dr. C. Patterson Giersch (Professor of History, Wellesley College, Wellesley)

Discussant: Alíz Horvath (PhD Student, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)

Date/Time: October 22, 4:00 to 6:00pm

Venue: John Hope Franklin Room (Social Science Research Building, 224)