This article uses a case study of the Qin Empire to explore the ecology of an agrarian political system, analysis that has become possible because of the archaeological excavation of Qin administrative documents. Qin's power derived from photosynthesis, and its empire mobilized this energy and used it to conquer territory and expand its productivity. The state's power was based on its ability to extract taxes in grain from its subjects, store it in granaries, and then use it to feed laborers working on state projects. Grain and most other taxable materials were too bulky to move very far, so the government relied on a subcontinent-wide system of information gathering and processing that allowed officials at the capital to make decisions about local resource use. Qin's centralized bureaucratic system became the standard model of political organization in China, so it offers clues into the effects subsequent empires would have on their environments.

Several cultural features found by archaeologists at the First Emperor of Qin's necropolis did not have roots in East Asian cultures but were inspired by cultural exchange with the civilizations of West Asia along the various “Silk Roads.” Examples considered in this article include terracotta figures of soldiers and horses, long-pole acrobatics, terraced architecture for tombs, bronze chariots, bar-shaped bricks, and technology for casting and repairing bronze statuary. Within Qin culture more broadly, there are several other cultural features which were probably brought from West Asia, including iron metallurgy, gold-working, trough-form pan tiles for roofing, stone inscriptions and stone sculpture, elliptical cocoon-form flasks, and possibly the transmission of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Furthermore, non-material elements of political and economic culture from the Persian Empire and Hellenistic kingdoms were also brought eastward alongside these materials. They were part of a coherent system that inspired the political and cultural revolutions of the First Emperor.

In this article, I advance a recent epigraphic approach to historical study by foregrounding steles as a medium that functions both to communicate information and project authority publicly. Scholars taking this approach have explored distinctive genres of steles to transform our understanding of north China under Mongol rule. Through a case study, I show how a set of steles installed in the fifteenth-century rural world of north China transmitted authority and power not just through the content of their inscriptions but also through other written and unwritten information they stored. I give particular attention to the ways in which the inscriptions were materialized and visualized. In doing so, I argue that emphasizing the public communication function of steles challenges us to think beyond primary sources strictly in terms of their textual value to reflect more broadly on modes of transmission and the power dynamics contained within them.

By examining a series of events involving sightings of multicolored clouds and discoveries of colorful minerals in China's southwestern provinces, this article considers the political implications of natural manifestations of polychromy in the Yongzheng period. Through previously unexamined written and material correspondence between governor-general Ortai (1680–1745) and the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–35), I argue that physical occurrences of color, both above and below ground, were understood as signs of Heavenly approval of the emperor's governance at a time of questionable military expansion into the Southwest. I also consider how celestial phenomena and colorful stones were translated into design motifs and carved into exclusive items at the Qing court, positing that these objects were understood as signs of the Yongzheng emperor's political legitimacy and concrete evidence of Qing control over the remote reaches of the empire.

The way late imperial political elites in China positioned themselves in the tianxia—their life world—can be described as a balance between polity and locality, which was often accompanied by an enduring sense of local identity. This article argues that despite the fall of the tianxia concept in modern China, the age-old locality–polity relationship and the elite local identity did not disappear. Taking the flourishing local gazetteer production of the Republican era as a case, I suggest that instead of suppressing locality, the crisis of the polity and the coming of the nation-state in China brought it more to the foreground. The decline of locality in China's political culture occurred only after the communist takeover. The study makes use of the Local Gazetteer Research Tools (LoGaRT) developed by Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences.

As one of the most influential CCP campaigns that dramatically transformed the Chinese pre-revolutionary society, the early 1950s land reform has not been fully explored in the case of China's ethnic periphery. This article sheds light on the CCP's land reform and its impact on China's ethnic frontier by examining the official policies, implementation, and the reactions of the southern Muslim community in Yunnan between 1949 and 1958. Drawing on county government work team reports and the Party's land reform policy and evaluation records, it argues that although southern Yunnan Muslims were able to selectively internalize some Communist secular ideologies to cope with social and political changes that land reform brought about, the inconsistency between the Party's freedom of religion policy on paper and its local implementation failed to mitigate the ideological discord between Maoist revolutionaries’ atheist worldview and Muslim villagers’ religiosity. This jeopardized the possibility of reconciliation between the class-struggle-focused radical state and the community life of its religious subjects.

The widely acclaimed Capital and Ideology, though an important contribution to the inequality debates, is limited by its use of secondary sources and fiscal state framework in its historical analysis of China. Its arguments for a Confucian trifunctional society with property rights sacralized by nobles’ and scholars’ regalian functions, and persistently low and stagnant taxation in premodern China overly simplify the historical reality. Using primary Chinese sources, this article highlights the major oversimplifications. The information and issues presented here are also worth considering for similar social and fiscal studies of premodern China.