Having conquered a vast multi-lingual domain, the Mongols needed to devise a means of communication with the population. In earlier Chinese dynasties, individuals had translated Buddhist texts, treaties, and commercial agreements, but the Mongols in China founded government agencies and recruited Chinese and non-Chinese interpreters and translators to provide these services. Attempting to unify his lands, Khubilai Khan, who founded the Yuan dynasty, commissioned ‘Phags-pa, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, to develop a written script that could be used for many languages. Despite repeated injunctions from the Yuan court, the script was used almost solely for such government issuances as paper money, seals, and paiza, objects which were markers of status or permission for a variety of activities or to ensure safe passage through the Mongol domains. Linguistic unity, via the ‘Phags-pa script or a lingua franca eluded the Mongols, although Persian and Turkic were employed for specific purposes. The succeeding Ming dynasty learned from the Mongols of the need for translators and interpreters and established colleges of translators and interpreters.

Established studies show that after the fall of the capital-based elites during the end of the Tang dynasty, the Northern Song literati became active in serving the central government. However, after the century-long Interregnum (878–978), during which literati from the South remained beyond the rule of the Central Plains dynasties, how did they establish a cooperative relationship with the emerging Song court? Taking Puyang in Fujian as an example, this article analyzes the writings of Puyang literati to illustrate how their narratives shaped political relationships between the center and periphery. It demonstrates how literati responded variously to specific political contexts, sometimes showcasing their own local identity and at other times extolling the rule of the Central Plains. The case of Puyang reveals that the challenging political environment of the Interregnum actually stimulated and accelerated cooperation between the Central Plains and the local literati through civil service examinations.

Southwest China is a region that has been perhaps uniquely shaped over the longue durée by mutual appropriations of status, authority, land, material culture, genealogies, and cultural-historical identities. Drawing on both ethnographic fieldwork and the official and unofficial Chinese and Nuosu-Yi textual evidence, in this article I offer a new view of how, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, native officials were shaped by their efforts at appropriating elements of officialdom (responsibility towards the court) and nativeness (adherence to local customs). My historical textual-cum-anthropological analysis builds on C. Patterson Giersch’s notion of the “middle grounds” between the Chinese state and its borderland peoples to reveal “further ways” of uncovering the history of their history. I show that mutual appropriations of officialdom and nativeness have led to specific forms of acculturation that are neither linear nor irreversible. Cultural hybridizations underpin the current Yi core identity and culture in Liangshan today.

The founding emperor of the Han envisioned the noble rank (lie hou) as a system rewarding “merit” (gong) that mainly referred to military achievements. However, the criteria for granting the noble rank changed considerably throughout the Han. This is reflected by the various categories of nobles in the Han shu tables: meritorious ministers (gongchen hou), the kings’ sons (wangzi hou), and the imperial affines and favorites (waiqi enze hou), as well as the new category of eunuch nobles (huanzhe hou) in the Eastern Han. This article argues that the Han shu tables should be read as one of the multiple narratives about the noble rank and merit during the Han rather than an objective statistical summary. Whereas the Han shu tables emphasize Gaozu’s original definition of merit, the imperial edicts granting the noble rank kept reinterpreting merit to serve the court’s contemporary needs. Recently excavated Han manuscripts provide a third way of viewing merit based on the length of service.

Resurrecting the lost voices of Chinese scouts, who served society in the early stage of China’s War of Resistance, this article examines the militarization and politicization of Chinese scouting. After 1927, international scouting adapted to the militant and quasi-fascist ideologies promoted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang or GMD). This, in turn, prompted a radicalization of the concept of citizenship among the scouts. The article illuminates this shift and reveals that the ultra-nationalistic sentiment cultivated by the GMD resulted in some scouts compelling ordinary people to behave patriotically. The scouts’ voluntary service worked hand in hand with the GMD’s authoritarian influence in Shanghai’s foreign concessions. They played a vanguard role in the early months of the war, working as kidnappers and intimidators for the GMD. The scouts’ violent and coercive tactics contradicted the long-held principles laid down by Robert Baden-Powell. Their actions outside of the civilian roles assigned to them disillusioned expatriate observers.

In the late twelfth century, four Chinese stonemasons migrated to Japan from the Chinese coastal city of Ningbo. They participated in the most important contemporary building project in Japan—the reconstruction of the prestigious Tōdaiji monastery in Nara following the Genpei War. Drawing on Chinese and Japanese textual records, archaeological evidence from the quarry sites, and the existing stone works, this study investigates the network that facilitated the movement of the artisans and their materials between China and Japan and sheds light on the relationship between artisans and religious monuments from a transnational perspective. This study explores how the migrant artisans’ expertise and connections enabled them to establish roots in a new society. Additionally, it examines the timing of the artisans’ migration within the broader context of Japan’s societal transformations, aiming to highlight the connectivity fostered by maritime networks in premodern East Asia.

In considering Huo Tao’s Family Admonitions, a text included in a lineage genealogy of the early sixteenth century, this article investigates its five constituent logics (Confucian propriety, bureaucratic division of responsibility, subsistence agriculture, wealth creation, and punitive patriarchy). It explains what sorts of expert abilities Huo considered necessary and what relations of authority (defined as power over others that they accept) those abilities entailed. Huo’s plan relies not only on the expertise of lineage members, but also on the abilities of hired workers and bondservants/slaves who held their positions for a long time. Their positions gave them authority in the workspace over the lineage members who outranked them legally, calling into question the utility of simple categories of “social status.” Because the text was later copied repeatedly into other lineages’ compilations, Huo’s plan must have made sense to Ming and Qing lineage leaders, so it may illuminate how they constructed relations of authority and social status.

In 1775, during the process of collecting books for the Siku quanshu project, an empire-wide literary inquisition was imposed on the deceased monk Jinshi Dangui (1614–80). As the curious case of censorship developed, the trials not only diminished a major Cantonese monastic community and an old bannermen family but also inspired several imperially commissioned historiographical projects. Exploring the historical significance of the Dangui case at the nexus of early Qing Buddhist networks, Qing imperial control, and the politics of historical memory, this study unravels a multi-layered story of the posthumous censorship of Monk Dangui. It cross-examines a broad range of sources including imperial archives, gazetteers, biji, personal records, and literary anthologies to reconstruct a remarkable moment in High Qing censorship and to present a history of a displaced Buddhist community during the Ming–Qing transition; both became obscured after the Qianlong reconstruction of the imperial order.

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.