Scholars have long assumed that the opening of Shanghai as a treaty port in 1843, followed by the disruption caused by the Taiping Rebellion, led to an abrupt restructuring of China's internal organization and a fundamental change in its relation to the outside world. Looking at developments at Suzhou and Shanghai over the long nineteenth century in parallel, this study argues that this was in fact a far later and much more gradual process than we have heretofore appreciated, the decisive breaks occurring at least a half-century later than usually assumed.

In Qin and Han times, the establishment of a complex legal system that applied to every member of the empire brought about an unprecedented transformation of the husband–wife relationship, changing it from a bond largely determined by custom, ritual, and family concerns to one regulated by law. Laws recorded in the Zhangjiashan bamboo legal texts reveal that women's legal status in Qin and Han times was far higher and allowed for greater autonomy than previously imagined. Their increased legal standing may be traced to reduced household size, a policy set to counteract the mounting death toll and social chaos that followed Qin expansion and the transition from Qin to Han rule. I analyze exemplary cases to demonstrate how the small family system in conjunction with a legal order that empowered women as household heads created a new space for widows and wives to exercise their autonomy.

This article underscores the impact of the Qing dynasty’s war making capacity and organization on non-military areas. Following a brief account of the Qing military establishment and its major operations in the first half of the dynasty, i.e., 1640–1800, it explores several important examples of how Qing military institutions interacted with the civil bureaucracy and society at large. First, through the practice of appointing officials across the divide between the civil and military bureaucracies, military personnel penetrated into the domain of the civil state apparatus, quietly transforming the Qing government’s makeup. Second, Qing military costs deeply influenced the distribution of dynastic financial resources and general administration at all levels. Finally, the Qing’s wartime logistical system engaged both the civil bureaucracy and society, opening many opportunities for both civil bureaucracy personnel and the private sector, which in turn re-shaped the local socio-economic landscape.

This article explores the shoreline industries (oysters, salt, fish, lime) that emerged along the Laufaushan coast in Hong Kong's New Territories, in the period 1667 to 1978. The shoreline in question was controlled by a local security force, staffed by young men from a nearby lineage. The study draws on ethnographic research carried out by the author and local documents (of village and government origin) gathered on site.

This article presents a data-driven approach to the study of the social and political statuses of urban communities in modern Kunming. Such information is lacking in government maps and documents. Using data from a wide variety of sources, many unconventional, I subject them to critical evaluation and computational analysis to extract information that can be used to produce a land use map of sufficient detail and accuracy to allow scholars to address and even answer questions of a socio-political, economic and, indeed, humanistic nature. My method can also be applied to other Chinese cities and to cities elsewhere that lack accurate information.

After being recalled to Beijing in 1510 for evaluation and reassignment in the wake of his two-year exile to Guizhou and his period of service as a magistrate, Wang Yangming was assigned to a succession of posts at the capital that kept him there through 1512. During that short time, he remained disillusioned with the Ming court and high politics and chose to put his energies into fostering a philosophical movement. He believed that by restoring the “way of master-disciple relations and friendship,” he could help propagate the learning of the sages. To that end, he held jiangxue gatherings with colleagues and friends and carried on an active correspondence. In those venues, Wang Yangming engaged others with his ideas about the goal of sagehood, the obstacles to attaining it, and the methods for overcoming those obstacles. The following article reconstructs this critical period in Wang Yangming's philosophical development and the intellectual movement he sought to foster, as well as the status of his philosophy as of this point in time.

Tales of filial piety became a standard element of the annals-biography style of historiography early on. Starting from the Song shu 宋書, almost every dynastic history contains a chapter that is devoted to filial men. An early—but often neglected—precursor is Chapter 39 of Fan Ye's 范曄 (398–446) Hou Han shu 後漢書. Inspired by his predecessor Hua Qiao 華嶠 (?–293), Fan inserted a chapter on filial men. The chapter was therefore compiled in times when the recommendation system of the Han and especially the recommendation as “filial and incorruptible” (xiaolian 孝廉) had lost influence. This paper tries to shed some light on its origins, form, and content, and attempts to distinguish the most common motives that were used to describe filial (xiao 孝) behavior in this early stage of its historiographical representation.

This article has two main objectives. First, we aim to revisit debates about the structure of Song Dynasty faction lists and the relationship between eleventh- and twelfth century factional politics on the basis of a large-scale network analysis of co-occurrence ties reported in the prose collections of those contemporary to the events. Second, we aim to innovate methodologically by developing a series of approaches to compare historical networks of different sizes with regard to overall network metrics as well as the significance of particular attributes such as native and workplace in their makeup. The probabilistic and sampling methods developed here should be applicable for various kinds of historical network analysis. The corresponding data can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xtf-z3au.

The first known record of the Manchu origin myth is found in Qing documents dating from 1636. These documents provide an official account of the origin of the Aisin Gioro lineage, including the story of the ancestor Bukūri Yongšon, who is depicted as the Manchu primogenitor, from his birth to his ascension to the throne. This article argues that the Manchu origin myth reflected the dynamics of Manchu identity, which shifted from constructing a Manchu group to securing Manchu rule during the period from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. By tracing the development of this myth from its earliest version in the seventeenth century to four different versions that appeared by the mid-eighteenth century, written in both Manchu and Chinese, this article endeavors to shed new light on how the Manchus saw themselves, their ancestor, and their empire.

During the Tang period (618–907), war and the preparations for war significantly influenced the shape of the Chinese empire and the lives of its people. That influence can be found on at least four levels. The first of these is the state’s demand for military service, which imposed a variety of burdens upon a significant percentage of the population. The second is the state’s demand for cash, fabric, grain and other financial and material resources to meet the needs of the military establishment, a demand that affected the whole of the taxpaying population. Third is the loss and destruction caused directly by warfare, especially massive internal conflicts such as the rebellions of An Lushan and Huang Chao. Fourth, and most far-reaching and diffuse, is the range of cultural reactions to military affairs, from the emphatic embrace of martial attitudes and behaviors to their emphatic rejection.

People routinely refer to the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong as two subjects that are “sensitive” to write and even talk about in today's People's Republic of China (PRC). This is true, but not all “sensitive” events and individuals are created equal—or handled the same way by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When it comes to the June 4th Massacre, another “sensitive” event, and Liu Xiaobo, another “sensitive” figure, all public and even some relatively private forms of discussion are blocked. The goal is to make them both forgotten, as Louisa Lim argues in her important, aptly titled 2014 Oxford book, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. The CCP's aim with the Cultural Revolution and Mao, by contrast, is not to blot out but control memory, not stop but steer the direction and constrain the scope of research, discussion, and commemoration. Last year, when the fiftieth anniversary of the first Red Guard rallies passed, there was, tellingly, muted discussion in all parts of the PRC other than Hong Kong but, equally tellingly, not a complete June 4th anniversary style blackout. Mainland bookstores stock novels dealing with the Cultural Revolution but not June 4th, and texts by and biographies of Mao but not Liu. And so on.

What would Chinese history look like with things taking the center stage? Our present understanding of this history is animated primarily by literate people in pursuit of examination degrees and sons, and often filtered through such modern social science categories as culture, ethnicity, and gender. In this introduction, I put the set of five articles in the special issue in conversation with recent research to identify new analytic categories and research strategies that accord agency to things, remap the parameters of Chinese history, and ponder the new directions afforded by the study of material cultures.

Instead of assuming “warlords” as a homogeneous counter-force to the May Fourth enlightenment while imagining Chinese intellectuals as a natural alliance for the “anti-warlordism” National Revolution, this article examines the prevailing idea exchange and political collaboration between Chen Jiongming, the Cantonese military strongman, and the May Fourth intellectual within and beyond regional borders. Between 1919 and 1922, Chen Jiongming not only fostered his anarcho-federalist blueprint, but also garnered support from prominent thinkers hailing from across different ideological camps such as Liang Bingxian, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi. Focusing on the ideological and intellectual aspects of warlord rule, this article attempts to situate the study of warlordism against the backdrop of the Chinese enlightenment, to downplay the differences between the man of guns and the man of letters, and thereby to redefine, re-characterize, and reappraise “warlords” as active agents—the initiators—of China's renewals during this formative period.

This article explores the understudied issue of urban problems in pre-modern China and examines the responses to the negative impact of urban development on life in the populous city of Kaifeng in the Northern Song (960–1127). Although writers, painters, and historians have portrayed the capital city's splendor for centuries, various urban problems emerged as medieval China became a more urbanized society. This article investigates Ouyang Xiu's (1007–1072) accounts of how extreme weather conditions adversely affected the lives of Kaifeng residents. These experiences, which he discussed in letters and poems, are associated with longer trends that result in climatic anomalies and disasters in the city. Ouyang Xiu also complained about living costs and medical services in Kaifeng. These reflect the difficulties in maintaining good urban provisions and services in a city of this scale.

The study of ethnicity has long been shaped by a conflict between two broad positions, one of which may be called the circumstantialist or instrumentalist position, and the other the primordialist or affectivist position. The primordialists view ethnic sentiments as something existing prior to and not dependent on goal-oriented behavior and hence not subject to calculation. The circumstantialists, however, view ethnicity as a product of particular circumstances in which contingent groups, usually at the behest of elites within those groups, broaden and reconceptualize their particular group interests as being derived from a common primordial substance, thus generating ethnicity. These circumstantialist or instrumentalist arguments as a rule assume that the particular circumstances where such group redefinitions and extensions prove useful are either unique to, or at least much more common in, the modern age. Thus the circumstantialist approach usually implies a modernist one.

This essay takes a close look at Maura Dykstra's monograph Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine (Harvard Asia Center, 2022). It analyzes the book's multitude of problems, such as its flawed conception, numerous factual blunders, failure to engage existing scholarship, problematic choice of primary sources, and dubious citation practices. Most significantly, this essay aims to provide ample evidence to demonstrate how the book systematically misrepresents the majority of its primary sources to support an untenable thesis. It argues that the book's central claims are ungrounded in evidence.

This article investigates the formation of the Shatan scholarly group and the contribution of its leader, Zheng Zhen. Zheng benefitted from a vigorous trans-regional cultural network of returned local scholars such as Li Xun and Mo Yuchou and prominent scholar-officials from outside such as Cheng Enze and He Changling. Zheng Zhen remained true to the approaches and research topics of evidential research, i.e., historical philology and exegesis of pre-Qin classics, bibliography, and an inquiry into ancient institutions and technology, in an era when the general intellectual trend turned toward statecraft studies and the politicized Modern Text School, promoted by scholars like Gong Zizhen and Kang Youwei. The contribution of the Shatan group, Zheng Zhen in particular, embodies the rise of evidential research, a passion for facts, as well as concerns about society. More importantly, it prompts us to rethink Guizhou as an active agent in the late Qing Chinese cultural landscape.