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Localizing Learning
As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally. The book is set in one locality, Wuzhou (later Jinhua), a prefecture in China’s Zhejiang province, from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. Its main actors are literati of the Song, Yuan, and Ming, who created a local tradition of learning as a...
Famine Relief in Warlord China
Famine Relief in Warlord China is a reexamination of disaster responses during the greatest ecological crisis of the pre-Nationalist Chinese republic. In 1920–1921, drought and ensuing famine devastated more than 300 counties in five northern provinces, leading to some 500,000 deaths. Long credited to international intervention, the relief effort, Pierre Fuller shows, actually began from within Chinese social circles. Indigenous action from the household to the national level, modeled after Qing-era relief protocol, sustained the lives of millions of the destitute in Beijing, in the surrounding districts of Zhili (Hebei) Province, and along the migrant and refugee trail in Manchuria, all b...
The Rise and Fall of Imperial China
How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building. Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a...
Navigating Semi-colonialism
"China’s status in the world of expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been under dispute. Its unequal relations with multiple powers, secured through a system of treaties rather than through colonization, has invited debate over the degree and significance of outside control and local sovereignty. Navigating Semi-Colonialism examines steam navigation—introduced by foreign powers to Chinese waters in the mid-nineteenth century—as a constitutive element of the treaty system to illuminate both conceptual and concrete aspects of this regime, arguing for the specificity of China’s experience, its continuities with colonialism in other contexts...
Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality
"In the late 1800s, as Japanese leaders mulled over the usefulness of religion in modernizing their country, they chose to invite Unitarian missionaries to Japan. This book spotlights one facet of debates sparked by the subsequent encounter between Unitarianism and Buddhism—an intersection that has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Focusing on the cascade of events triggered by the missionary presence of the American Unitarian Association on Japanese soil between 1887 and 1922, Michel Mohr’s study sheds new light on this formative time in Japanese religious and intellectual history. Drawing on the wealth of information contained in correspondence sent and received by Un...
Assembling Shinto
"During the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, several precursors of what is now commonly known as Shinto came together for the first time. By focusing on Mt. Miwa in present-day Nara Prefecture and examining the worship of indigenous deities (kami) that emerged in its proximity, this book serves as a case study of the key stages of “assemblage” through which this formative process took shape. Previously unknown rituals, texts, and icons featuring kami, all of which were invented in medieval Japan under the strong influence of esoteric Buddhism, are evaluated using evidence from local and translocal ritual and pilgrimage networks, changing land ownership patterns, and a range of relig...
Becoming Taiwanese
"What does it mean to be Taiwanese? This question sits at the heart of Taiwan’s modern history and its place in the world. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly focus on Taiwan after 1987, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early twentieth century, in the place that served as the crucible for the formation of new identities: the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung). Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese offers new insights into ethnic identity formation. Evan Dawley examines how people from China’s southeastern c...
Confucian Academies in East Asia
The fifteen studies presented inConfucian Academies in East Asia offer insight into the history and legacy of these unique institutions of knowledge and education. The contributions analyze origins, spread and development of Confucian academies across China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan from multiple perspectives. This edited volume is one of the first attempts to understand Confucian academies as a complex transnational, intellectual, and cultural phenomena that played an essential role in various areas of East Asian education, philosophy, religious practice, local economy, print industry, and even archery. The broad chronological range of essays allows it to demonstrate the role of Confucian ...
Printing Landmarks
Printing Landmarks tells the story of the late Tokugawa period’s most distinctive form of popular geography: meisho zue. Beginning with the publication of Miyako meisho zue in 1780, these monumental books deployed lovingly detailed illustrations and informative prose to showcase famous places (meisho) in ways that transcended the limited scope, quality, and reliability of earlier guidebooks and gazetteers. Putting into spellbinding print countless landmarks of cultural significance, the makers of meisho zue created an opportunity for readers to experience places located all over the Japanese archipelago. In this groundbreaking multidisciplinary study, Robert Goree draws on diverse archival...
Burying Autumn
"“Autumn wind, autumn rain, fill my heart with sorrow”—these were the last words of Qiu Jin (1875–1907), written before she was beheaded for plotting to overthrow the Qing empire. Eventually, she would be celebrated as a Republican martyr and China’s first feminist, her last words committed to memory by schoolchildren. Yet during her lifetime she was often seen as eccentric, even deviant; in her death, and still more in the forced abandonment of her remains, the authorities had wanted her to disappear into historical oblivion. Burying Autumn tells the story of the enduring friendship between Qiu Jin and her sworn-sisters Wu Zhiying and Xu Zihua, who braved political persecution to ...
