The Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot was the first to provide the European public with knowledge about Chinese music that surpassed by far all that had been known about Chinese music there before. However, a draft translation of a Chinese text on musical theory dating to the Qing dynasty that he had sent to Paris early in the 1750s seems to have gone through several hands without Amiot himself having received any feedback for many years. A book published by Pierre-Joseph Roussier in 1770, sent to him by the French king’s librarian, alerted Amiot to the fact that information drawn from his manuscript had been circulated, partly in a distorted manner and without mentioning him as the translator, among members of European academia. Several years later, Roussier was entrusted with editing Amiot’s Mémoire de la musique des Chinois as the sixth volume of the Mémoires concernant l’historie, les sciences, les art, les moeurs, les usages et c. des chinois, a work Amiot had spent more than twenty years preparing. At the focus of this study is the question of what role Roussier had played in receiving and transmitting knowledge on Chinese music provided by Amiot and how this role was perceived by Amiot himself and other early recipients of Roussier’s edition of Amiot’s text.

The Koryŏ capital of Kaegyŏng was an immensely important focal point of the multi-layered ritualized landscape of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392). As shown in the records of the Koryŏsa, Kaegyŏng was not simply a geographical location but a physical manifestation of an argument about power in the Koryŏ era. Focusing on the palace complex and the city walls, we argue that the ritual spaces of Kaegyŏng were ongoing arguments that simultaneously sought to affirm and persuade the Koryŏ people of the power and legitimacy of the king. As heterotopological spaces defined by the unique belief system of Koryŏ, specific locations like the inner palace, the ice house, and the city walls reaffirmed the physical, metaphysical, social, and economic power of the king in a deeply symbolic framework that encompassed diverse aspects of geomancy, Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. The pathways of power between the ritual space and the power of the king enabled the sacralization of space that, in turn, bestowed power on those who conducted the rituals in those spaces. As a result, Kaegyŏng itself reaffirmed the power of the Koryŏ rulers as it was incorporated into the ritual landscape of Koryŏ society.

Chinese religious culture changed considerably over time. The notion of gui, for instance, evolved from a term for often harmful ancestors to a more general term for ghosts. Ancestors changed from threatening creatures into a much more sedate form only in the early imperial period. When we study this complicated and evolving religious culture, we need to keep some methodological issues in mind. One is that we should rely primarily on excavated texts for our understanding of early Chinese religious culture, because they have not been tampered with after being put into the ground. Transmitted texts on the other hand have been edited, expanded and finalized during the early imperial period (starting with the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE). They can only be used as a source for earlier periods with great circumspection. In addition, we need to be much more careful in our use of existing translations, such as the late 19th century corpus created by the Scottish missionary James Legge. Generally, this article advocates the continued consultation of original Chinese texts in addition to the use of existing translations, even if these translations are of increasingly high quality. Every translation brings with it its own preconceptions, which therefore influences our analysis in all kinds of ways. Finally, we should leave behind old labels such as “popular” for those parts of religious culture that are strange to us, because they suggest a split between (some) elite philosophers and actual religious life that is not borne out by unprejudiced analysis.

This article explores how the traditional virtue of female chastity was reinterpreted, modified, and imbued with modern values by the revolutionists during the transitional period of late Qing. In most cases, chastity, especially when defined as a woman’s personal quality, was still highly appreciated. Meanwhile, Xu Tianxiao, an anti-Qing racialist, set the heroines who possessed both chastity and martial virtues as paradigms for his revolutionary propaganda, transforming a woman’s loyalty to her husband into her dedication to the nation. Xu Zihua, a chaste widow herself, took advantage of her identity to get involved in social and political affairs. She also explained two female students’ deeds of clearing their reputation by committing suicide as a defense of women’s rights to acquire new knowledge and enter the public realm. On the other hand, the praise of chastity was denounced as a form of oppression of women by the anarchist and feminist He Zhen. However, her views on chastity are somewhat contradictory because she still approved of the mutual loyalty between couples on the premise of equality and took chastity and virginity as criteria for judging that “equality”. Her denial of chastity is in fact a part of her general denial of almost all the conventional and modern notions, which was meant to pave the way for the anarchist revolution she admired.

While traditional historiography has portayed eunuchs in imperial China as avaricious and ambitious, a growing number of new studies set out to reverse the stereotypical and biased representations of eunuchs. Focusing on two recent monographs on eunuchs in Qing China, this review article aims to unveil the history of the hitherto lesser-known palace servants to present a more vivid and multi-faceted picture of this marginal yet important group. While most eunuchs in the Qing were relegated to a servile status and subjected to social marginalization, they still enjoyed certain imperial favor and obtained a degree of agency that allowed them to create a collective identity. Because of their proximity to the emperor, they also formed a significant part of the central, and most inaccessible, physical space of the Qing empire.