This paper explores the intense bond formed between two Qing women, Li Ti and Huang Xunying, as well as their double suicide. The sheer survival of the rich personal and family narratives (in both poetry and prose) surrounding their relationship and suicides represents a startling discovery. By actively resisting the restrictions imposed by the patriarchal family and social order and explicitly defining an unbreakable union marked by moral commitment to and spiritual connection with each other, Li Ti and Huang embody the concept of queerness in today’s usage. The two women’s double suicide, furthermore, posed an extreme form of social protest and an individual quest for freedom. Despite being historically conditioned and ideologically mediated, the excavated primary sources, such as Li Ti’s own poems, challenge not only the norms of their time and place, but also our scholarly consensus about women’s lives in China’s past.

After the political fragmentation of the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” period, the Northern Song consolidated much of the lands under these regional states into a larger polity in a process often described as “reunification.” But this “reunification,” judged against the domain of the Tang dynasty, was incomplete. The “Sixteen Prefectures” to the northeast were ceded to the Liao, and this became a vexing issue for Song emperors and officials. But the northeast was not the only region once under Tang rule that did not enter the Song domain. In this article, I discuss the area to the northwest of the Song, much of which was eventually governed by the Tangut Xia state. This area, roughly the modern provinces of Ningxia and Gansu, featured prominently in Northern Song political discussions, national geographical treatises, and national and regional maps. By analyzing the treatment of the northwest in these diverse genres of representation, I demonstrate a spectrum in the perceptions of the northwest. It was sometimes seen as little different from areas under Song rule; in other cases, it was treated as “beyond the sphere of civilization” (huawai). Such ambiguity is visualized in many Song cartographers who placed this area between two segments of the Great Wall. For Song emperors and officials, the northwest sat uncomfortably in their imaginations of the world, not easily dismissed and forgotten, yet irrecoverable.

Although the earliest political text from early China, namely the Canon of Documents, comprises speeches attributed to ancient kings, for most of the Eastern Zhou period (770–255 BCE) monarchs remained conspicuously silent. This article surveys the instances of the rulers’ speeches in major historical collections and a sample of philosophical texts from the Warring States period. I demonstrate that the rulers’ voice in these texts is overwhelmingly confined to short questions, approval of proposed policies, or other insignificant uttering. I argue that this silence was deliberately built into the texts by their composers, so as to preserve the intellectual authority in the hands of the educated elite. It was only with the imperial unification of 221 BCE and the dramatic change in the balance of power between the emperors and the intellectuals that the royal speech regained its prominence and political importance.

In 1853, a Taiping army infiltrated North China, threatening Beijing and the Qing dynasty itself. Though this army never reached Beijing, its northern siege had acute and lasting impacts on communities in the capital region (jifu 畿輔). Attention to the capital region invites reflection on the temporality and strategic nature of commemoration. Focusing on Cangzhou 滄州, I examine how capital region communities memorialized the northern chapter of the Taiping Civil War, even as for the rest of the empire, the war remained unfinished until 1864. In gazetteers, private histories, and commemorative records, local authors reframed ambiguous realities to write their localities into a story of northern victory, regardless of the fate of the south. The timeline for commemoration in Cangzhou was interrupted, not seamless, and took place over decades. Initially addressed to Beijing and elites along the Grand Canal, Cangzhou's commemorative project was later brought into the orbit of ascendant Tianjin.

The Qing dynasty enforced a policy of separate governance for the people of the Eight Banners, ruling that bannermen were neither to be administered under the regular civilian administrative system, nor listed on the civilian register. Institutionally and legally, the labels “Banner” (qi 旗) and “civilian” (min 民) marked a fundamental divide between different social groups in the Qing. However, in actual practice, the boundary between the two was less rigid. An ambiguous area existed within the seemingly strict legal and administrative regime, providing opportunists with an abundance of loopholes to exploit. Some changed their status from “civilian commoner” to “bannermen” to acquire land, while others moved from “bannermen” status to “civilian commoner” status to pursue promotion in the civil service. Shedding light on the everyday lives of these people, this article delves into the intricate Banner–civilian classification of the Qing dynasty, with a focus on the overlapping area between the parallel systems. It aims to rectify the conventional binary perspective that strictly dichotomizes Banner and civilian status. By doing so, it highlights the multifaceted nature and diversity inherent in Qing ethnic relations and local society.

In Republican China, the Factory Act was first promulgated in 1929, after almost thirty years of unregulated industrialization. Little academic effort has been made to comprehend its actual implementation. Some academics have dismissed it as completely useless, while others have credited it with various enhancements in working conditions. This article focuses on workplace health and safety issues and critically evaluates the implementation of the law to scrutinize its effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) in addressing workers’ life and death matters. This article aims to reassert the Factory Act in China's modern history of industrial development. It points out that despite its inadequate enforcement, the law was significant in laying the foundation for the national institutionalization of state responsibility to systematically monitor and regulate workplace health and safety and paving the way for further safety legislation. Nevertheless, the law fell short of safeguarding workers’ rights during industrial accidents.

Scholars of Jin history have noted a flourishing literati culture after the mid-Jin period, but excavated tombs suggest a more complicated picture. The shi, referring to literati without official titles, constituted a prominent group in Northern Song tombs, as evidenced by their epitaphs, but this group appears to have nearly vanished from the Jin tombs. To search for traces of the shi, this article comprehensively examines the social elites’ tombs with burial inscriptions and ink writings, where the shi would most likely be laid to rest. It shows that the text and paratext of epitaphs, as well as the tombs that yielded them, contain direct information about the shi and their interactions with other officials and non-official elites. Analysis of ink writings suggests that the shi played a role in the advanced literary expression in the tombs of some non-literati local elites. Examining these traces of the shi in tombs allows us to reintegrate them into broader society, investigate their interactions with other elites, and attain a more holistic understanding of Jin elite society and culture.

The “Niu–Li Factional Strife,” named after Niu Sengru (779–847) and Li Deyu (787–850), is an enduring theme in Tang history. Based on accounts of personal animosity, a narrative evolved in which Niu and Li have become the ringleaders of two factions that drew in almost all high-profile literati of the ninth century. This article revises traditional and modern narratives of the Strife by first showing that the scattered and contradictory evidence in the earliest sources does not bear out the model of a decades-long struggle between two factions. Second, it demonstrates how “Niu and Li” first arose as an emblem of Tang weakness and a rallying cry for unity within the bureaucracy under the Northern Song two centuries later. Finally, it shows how modern historians picked up the loose ends and remoulded them into a struggle between different classes against the backdrop of factious politics in Republican China.

This study sheds light on the largely unknown trajectories of the emergence of Yuan non-Han ancestry in late Qing North China. Focusing on the case of a Yuan Mongol minister's enshrinement, the article argues that the commemoration of non-Han ancestries seems to have been aroused by the two-century-long imperial project of compiling the Gazetteers of the Great Qing Empire, over the course of which the state reiterated extensive surveys of local worthies, chaste women, and martyred loyal subjects, including those from previous dynasties. Importantly, the surveys coincided with the rise of epigraphic studies that featured exhaustive epigraphic fieldwork, which gave rise to the reinterpretation and replication of Yuan epigraphy, rendering Yuan steles one of the most adamant testimonies of ancestral claims. The ancestries classified during the Qing came to coexist with modern ethnic identities classified by the Ethnic Classification Project during the mid-twentieth century.

This article begins by examining the historiography of Shanxi piaohao and asking how modernist financial discourse gradually took shape over the past century. It then counters the persistent modernist discourse and its anachronistic application to the history of piaohao and the north Chinese interior from two aspects. First, how piaohao managed to build an empire-wide financial network and facilitated flows of capital and goods during the nineteenth century. Second, how family-centered capitalist and non-capitalist histories countered piaohao's unrealized path to modern Western-style banking. This article challenges the perceived universalism of the Western European economy and adopts a Braudelian emphasis on an essential feature of the history of capitalism in a global context—that is, capitalism's unlimited flexibility and capacity for change and adaptation, as seen throughout the history of the Shanxi merchants and piaohao firms, not confined to the singular future of transformation into modern Western-style banks.

This article contributes to the hitherto limited scholarship on the Chinese federalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s by conducting a thorough investigation of its ideological underpinnings and political blueprints. It compares the federalist ideas, plans, and activism of three thinkers—Zhang Taiyan, Zhang Shizhao, and Chen Jiongming—who stood firmly against the centralist trajectory of state-building in China after 1911 and advocated the formation of a Chinese federation. It argues that Chinese federalists, instead of emulating Western models, critically engaged with a broad spectrum of ideologies—Daoism, Buddhism, social Darwinism, parliamentarianism, guild socialism, anarchism etc.—when formulating their federalist agendas. Emphasizing the Chinese tradition of self-government, which underwent reinterpretations during the late Qing and early Republican periods, this article examines the extent to which Chinese federalism presented an alternative to Western political modernity.

Burials of eminent Quanzhen masters, particularly in the form of extravagant assembly-funerals, served as the initial step in the development of a Quanzhen-style ancestor worship. This ancestor worship functioned as the bedrock of a thriving Quanzhen lineage-building movement in thirteenth-century north China. Quanzhen Daoists attributed great significance to the physical remains of a lineage's founding master and commonly conducted multiple burials of the master. Each instance of reburial presented an opportunity for specific lineage members to assert their lineage identity, as well as ownership over the founding master's spiritual and material legacy. Lineage members commonly materialized their ancestor worship through a series of memorial objects established within a hosting monastery, including tombs, statues, portraits, memorial shrines, and commemorative steles. These lineage-building efforts strengthened dynamic networks of people, monasteries, and material culture, shaping regional interactions and transformations in north China under Mongol rule.

This article begins with biographical sketches of the Ming thinker Luo Rufang 羅汝芳 (js. 1553, 1515–1588), which take place in the Jiajing reign (1522–1566). This time period marks the first high tide of Wang Yangming's philosophy. As a lecturer, Luo Rufang headed discussion gatherings (jiangxue 講學) and implemented community compacts (xiangyue 鄉約), all of which derived inspiration from Wang Yangming. Although Luo could confidently instill Confucian values in his audience, behind his endorsement of moral learning lay a personal history of doubt, struggle, and search for authority. To uncover the personal search for meaning and moral authority, Luo is an excellent example. A selection of conversations Luo had with his students and followers reveal his personal struggles, which can be aligned with his biography. Luo's quest for sagehood is less abstract; it is a personal reflection on which sage ought to be followed.

In the late 18th century, the discovery of “A Letter to My Husband” (Jiwai shu), attributed to a woman named Yunzhen, caused great excitement in Beijing. Focusing on the question of how the mysterious letter captured the imagination of the literati, this article employs the strategy of contextualized reading to tease out social and cultural milieus and the textures of sentimentality of its readers. It suggests that the letter's resonating power rests on its dual nature: a self-expression of a talented and exemplary wife and a chronicle of the time when the entanglement of female talent, wifely virtue, marital love, and family tension became integral to the lives of the literati.

The Chanyuan Covenant of 1005 that ended decades of war between Song and Liao precipitated a new political model that, from the Song perspective, exchanged wealth, territory, and dynastic pride in return for peace along the northern frontier, civilian sovereignty over a long-dominant military class, and the replacement of a culture of arms with the love of books. That “Chanyuan Paradigm” survived the Qingli war of 1040–1044 with the Tangut Xi Xia, but was steadily overturned in the expansionist wars promoted by Shenzong and his sons from 1068 through the fall of the Northern Song in 1127. This article argues that the fragility of the Chanyuan-style peace did not stem from the aspirations of a revanchist emperor and his confidantes, but was rather the consequence of the intrinsic difficulties of maintaining peace in a world of new players, internecine political contests, and shifting geopolitical alliances that characterized the mid-eleventh century.

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.

The mobilization of women pursued by the Women's Advisory Committee (Funü zhidao weiyuanhui 婦女指導委員會) during the war against Japan (1937–1945) has mainly been associated with the wider war effort in the country and resistance to the enemy. This article takes a different viewpoint and argues that the programs implemented by women activists in this committee looked beyond the immediate wartime necessity and tried to secure also long-term gains for women. The mobilization transcended traditional gender roles of wives and mothers and paid particular attention to the involvement of middle- and lower-class women. This article examines women's activism and mobilization in the context of three main areas: first, the women's cadre training in the wartime capital Chongqing and in provinces and counties across China; second, the national economic production; and third, the literacy campaigns conducted among women factory workers. It concludes that women activists knowingly used the wartime crisis to provide fellow women with the tools for securing economic and social independence while addressing the wartime emergencies.

This article traces the spread of a norm of confidentiality within elite political culture during the Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Instead of an emphasis on secrecy within military and administrative contexts, it explores discussions of “leaking” (xie 泄/洩 or lou 漏) and characterizations of “confidentiality” (zhou 周 and mi 密) in idealized representations of political action. While Warring States texts drew upon a medical language of qi circulation to fashion a model of a perfectly leakproof ruler, by Western Han attention had shifted from rulers to officials. This valorization of official confidentiality was connected to institutional developments, especially proscriptions against leaking from privileged spaces at the imperial court, visible in sources from the late Western Han. In this final period there arose a celebrated norm of circumspection, shared by rulers and officials alike, that in theory would allow all parties to evade disaster.

This essay examines the representation of young girls in Song dynasty literary and visual arts as period portrayals of an important human emotion: parental love. The literature on doting parents extends far back in Chinese history, but in Song times children become the focus of family manuals, pediatric manuals, and an expanding visual and material culture in which the imaginary lives of children in play are conveyed to readers and viewers. Girls are shown not only active in games with boys but engaged in guiding and supervising the play. Talented girls were praised and adored by Song dynasty parents. Children were portrayed as resolving conflicts among companions on their own, with little interference from adults. Song period art and literature adopted an indulgent attitude toward mischievous behaviors in boys and girls. There developed a conception of family increasingly based on affection rather than the authority of age.

The Ming court launched its famous expeditions overseas in the early fifteenth century and suddenly terminated these voyages after 1436. This article attempts to reassess the driving force of this event and its termination in the context of the Ming's domestic financial system, revealing that both the initiation and the cessation of Zheng He's voyages could be explained by the political and fiscal tension between emperors and bureaucrats. This article will also discuss how the cessation of Zheng He's voyages contributed to the onset of private sailings after the mid-fifteenth century.