Conquest Dynasties Research Articles

The Northern Stronghold Sacrifice and the Political Legitimacy of Ethnic Minority Regimes in the Late Imperial China

Traditional Chinese state sacrificial ritual represented a symbolic system of integrating religious belief, divine authority, and political legitimacy. The Northern Stronghold (Beizhen 北鎮, i.e., Mount Yiwulü 醫巫閭山) was equal in status to the other four strongholds, which, moreover, served as a strategic military fortress and represented the earth virtue in the early state sacrifice system. In the late imperial era of China, and during the Yuan (1279–1368) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties in particular, the Northern Stronghold swiftly achieved prominence and eventually became an instrument used by minority ethnic groups, namely the Mongolians and Manchus, when elaborating upon the legitimacy of their political regimes. During the Yuan dynasty, the mountain spirits of the five strongholds (Wuzhen 五鎮) were formally invested as kings and, as a result, were accorded equivalent sacrifices in comparison to those given to the five sacred peaks (Wuyue 五嶽). Given that the Northern Stronghold was located near the northeast of Beijing, the Yuan government considered it the foundation of the state. Thereafter, the Northern Stronghold was regarded as the most important of the five stronghold mountains. In the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the Northern Stronghold Temple (Beizhenmiao 北鎮廟) was reconstructed as both a military fortress and religious site, while its representation as a significant site for a foreign conquest dynasty diminished and its significance as a bastion of anti-insurgent suppression emerged. By the Qing dynasty, the Northern Stronghold was regarded as an integral component of the geographic origin of the Manchu people and thereby assumed once again a position of substantial political significance. Several Qing emperors visited the Northern Stronghold and left poems and prose written in graceful Chinese to present their high respect and their mastery of Chinese culture. The history of the Northern Stronghold demonstrates how the ethnic minority regimes successfully utilized the traditional Chinese state sacrificial ritual to serve their political purpose.

Review: Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe

Review: <i>Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe</i>

A Study on the Actual Condition and Functional Change of the tributary system from the 10th to 12th Century

China s tributary system(朝貢·冊封體制) is a typical international relations system that existed in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia from the 3rd century B.C. to the end of the 19th century A.D. It was a conventional wisdom in Chinese history that from the establishment of the Zhou(周) Dynasty until the defeat in the Opium War at the end of the Qing(淸) Dynasty, the order centered around China was established under this tributary system. However, the international order in East Asia from the 10th century to the 12th century no longer has a unified ruling order based on tributes, and the conquest dynasty and Zhongyuan(中原) dynasty became bipolar systems in which power is balanced. The tributes of this period can be defined as diplomatic expressions in the pluralistic international order as a means of mutually beneficial reinforcement, not as a product of domination and submission. The reason why East Asian countries form the same cultural zone around China is not because they were subordinate to China, which was a powerful country under the tributary system, but because they recognized and accepted China s superior culture. Therefore, the tributary system should be regarded as being implemented simply because of the need between nations.

"Outside In: Power, Identity, and the Han Lineage of Jizhou," by Pamela Crossley

Reviewed by: "Outside In: Power, Identity, and the Han Lineage of Jizhou," by Pamela Crossley Shao-yun Yang and Ruth Dunnell Pamela Crossley, "Outside In: Power, Identity, and the Han Lineage of Jizhou," JSYS 43 (2013): 51–89. This article originated as a graduate seminar paper in 1981. While Crossley's research refocused on the Qing, she retained a strong interest in the Liao and presented a reconstructed and updated version of the paper at the conference "Perspectives on the Liao" in 2010, which was finally published in JSYS 43 (2013). "Outside In" is based on prosopographical analysis of the descendants of Han Zhigu 韓知古, who was taken as a teenager from the Tang prefecture of Jizhou 薊州 by Kitan raiders. Zhigu became a leading official in the Liao empire, entered the Kitan aristocracy via marriage, and fathered eleven sons, all of whom served in government or the military. Using excavated epitaphs of his male descendants, Crossley argues that despite their ancestry, they did not identify as Chinese or han 漢 and therefore were not "Kitanized" Chinese. Nor did they represent a "third culture," neither Kitan nor Chinese, as Wittfogel and Feng suggested in 1946. Rather, they were Kitan aristocrats pure and simple, members of a bicultural and bilingual elite that was not divided into discrete "cultural identities" based on ancestry.1 [End Page 230] The article's last section advances a provocative thesis, further elaborated in an essay published in 2016.1 In sum: in the Liao, han identity existed only at the level of dependent farmers, soldiers, laborers, and functionaries. The same could be said of other non-Kitan identities like Bohai/Parhae. Though Kitan identity straddled the elite/dependent divide, "[i]n practice, aristocracy was its own identity under the Liao," overriding Kitan identity. Because Liao aristocrats did not feel a strong sense of affinity for dependent Kitan subjects, Han Zhigu and his progeny did not undergo "Kitanization" so much as "aristocratization," acculturation into the dominant social status group.2 To our knowledge, Crossley's thesis has not had significant influence on studies of the "conquest dynasties" and the Chinese Middle Period more broadly. Yet it has important implications for ongoing debates over what identities now routinely (if imprecisely) translated as "Chinese" actually meant in premodern periods. Crossley's argument about han identity could be supplemented by evidence suggesting that Liao elites did appropriate other identities from classical Chinese discourse: namely, Zhongguo 中國 and Hua 華.3 Even the salience of han identity among the Song elite needs further investigation. Close reading of Song sources suggests that the elite preferred the prestigious classical identities Zhongguo, Hua, and Xia 夏, and used Han only to refer to non-elite registered subjects on the frontier or "Chinese" populations under Liao, Xia, and Jin rule. The key difference between the Liao and Song elites may not be the absence of han identity in the former but the absence of aristocratic and bicultural identities in the latter. Rather than assume an increasingly coherent "Han" identity as the norm in premodern Chinese history, we should view Hanren as a fluid category whose meaning and scope varied across political and geographical contexts before becoming "fixed," post-1911, as an official identity for all citizens of the Zhongguo state who did not identify with an ethnonym denoting "barbarian" origins. [End Page 231] Shao-yun Yang Denison University Ruth Dunnell Kenyon College (Emerita) Footnotes 1. Pamela Kyle Crossley, "Bohai/Parhae Identity and the Coherence of Dan gur under the Kitan/Liao Empire," International Journal of Korean History 21.1 (2016): 11–45. 2. Crossley, "Bohai/Parhae Identity," 14. 3. Pace certain colleagues in China who work on Liao history, we would argue that this is better understood as a case of ideological competition rather than cultural "Sinicization." Copyright © 2021 Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies

"City of Lotuses" by Stuart Sargent

Reviewed by: "City of Lotuses" by Stuart Sargent Michael Fuller Stuart Sargent, "City of Lotuses," JSYS 34 (1994): 165–204. As we commemorate the fifty years since the first Sung Studies Newsletter, Stuart Sargent's "City of Lotuses" wonderfully represents the literary scholarship published in the Journal. Sargent, in writing his essay—an analysis of a poem by Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101)—brings a depth of knowledge that addressed the broad readership of scholars from many disciplines who have joined in conversation through the forum of the journal. While "City of Lotuses" focuses on a centrally literary issue of the form of the poem, it also is philologically rigorous and deeply situated within Su Shi's literary, cultural, and historical contexts in a way that makes Sargent's arguments accessible to the larger community of scholars and students. The essay begins with the basic background information about and a reading of "City of Lotuses" ("Furong cheng shi" 芙蓉城詩), a poem that Su Shi wrote in 1078 while he was serving in Xuzhou. Su Shi explains briefly in his preface that one Wang Jiong recounted to him the story of Wang's journey to a City of Lotuses in the company of a "transcendent." Su Shi notes that he responded with the poem, written to reassert proper Confucian probity. The poem itself describes the transcendents' City of Lotuses, Wang's tryst with the immortal who brought him to the city, followed by their parting, his return, [End Page 222] and concludes with Su Shi's somewhat opaque coda of reflections on the events. What initially sparked Sargent's interest in the poem was the form: seven-character verse in which almost every line rhymes and couplet structure is weak. Sargent proposes that the poem appears to use "boliang form" (boliang ti 柏梁體) and, in the next section of the paper, explains the origin of the form, its subsequent history in the Tang and Song, as well as in Su Shi's collected poetry. One of the praiseworthy virtues of Sargent's approach is the judiciousness of his judgments: Su Shi may have been explicit in his use of the boliang style, but it is not completely certain (there are two lines in the poem that fall out of rhyme and into a couplet-structure.) But Sargent's account of the form is clear and innovative. Shifting from formal concerns, Sargent next explores the thematic elements in the poem. Various scholars have proposed political and moral readings of "City of Lotuses," and here once again Sargent is careful in weighing the evidence and cautious in drawing conclusions. Sargent's thoughtful, circumspect reading provides an important model for scholars in other disciplines who use poetry as evidence in their arguments. Sargent explores the circumstances of Su Shi's life in Xuzhou at the time—including contemporary political concerns—as well as broader range of arguments Su Shi proposes about searching for transcendence (Buddhist or Daoist) and appropriate gender relations. Sargent's essay importantly demonstrates both the importance of religious, social, and political history to the sensitive reading of poetry and, reciprocally, the contribution that careful reading of poetry can make to these disciplines as we collectively study the culture of China between the end of the Tang and the founding of the Ming. [End Page 223] Michael Fuller University of California, Irvine (Emeritus) Copyright © 2021 Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies

"Domesticated Landscapes of Li Gonglin: A View from the Anthropocene," by De-nin Lee

Reviewed by: "Domesticated Landscapes of Li Gonglin: A View from the Anthropocene," by De-nin Lee Foong Ping De-nin Lee, "Domesticated Landscapes of Li Gonglin: A View from the Anthropocene," JSYS 45 (2015): 139–74. If the grand peaks, valleys, and waterfalls of paradigmatic Song dynasty landscapes entreat viewers to appreciate high-minded retreat alongside travelers and recluses, what constitutes their "domestication"? Paintings that show knowledge of terrain and technology, that picture efficient agriculture and engineered waterways. Taking up perspectives from eco-art history and criticism, Lee takes special notice of motifs like rice fields, mulberry groves, newly-planted trees, and fish-stocked ponds, urging us to examine them as signs of anthropogenic change. Li Gonglin 李公麟, an artist of great range and invention, is not often studied as a landscapist. Lee conceives of a unique picture in his oeuvre from an eco-critical perspective. "The Lodge of Establishing Virtue" is one of the two opening scenes in Li's portrait of his estate, Mountain Villa (Shanzhuang tu 山莊圖), which stands out from the following sections, and indeed from the Song visual record of works by named artists. The scene was conceptualized in a manner outside of the landscape painter's typical brushwork-orientated repertoire. Robert Harrist underlined Li's use of mapmaking and printmaking conventions when discussing Mountain Villa's transformation of wilderness into a garden-estate. Pan Anyi's study of Li's Buddhist beliefs considered the painting in relation to a paradise. But nature is not only a pure muse for eremites. Some images imply ecological ruptures and the material impact of meeting human needs. Lee calls attention to our assumptions about landscape images—long informed by art, historical, philosophical, and literary discourse—as fundamentally representing a harmonious relationship between humans and nature. Her stated aim is to inflect images of leisure, such as Li Gonglin's, with implied labor. Within the cultural constant of seeking revelations of heavenly approval or disapproval in nature, the symbolism of cosmic harmony in landscapes was particularly useful for imperial purposes. Those picturing advanced technology also rendered power and legitimacy visible, pointing to capable and benevolent rule. Liu Heping has demonstrated the implications of paintings of mills and hydrological engineering. Pang Huiping's study of snow scenes has shown how this subject's meanings needed redirection at court during an actual period of cold climate. Domesticated landscapes counter notions of the pristine wilderness and the ideals that it entails, seeing instead evidence of environmental change and the parties responsible for it. Water-powered [End Page 232] machines redirected natural watercourses; harvesting timber to build dams and dykes for flood prevention fed cycles of erosion. Thus images of land-ownership represent limitations upon the land's ability to generate wealth and impositions upon ecology. With this lens, Lee understands a picture of tree cultivation as a possible reference to windbreaking fengshui forests that prevented erosion and filtered water. From this perspective, various parts of the productive ecology of a working estate might delineate amongst cultivated, soon-to-be cultivated, and uncultivated landscapes, and between the symbolic and mundane features and purposes of Li's estate. Of course, no single lens precludes any other. In an unexpected cross-disciplinary, cross-temporal move, Lee finds purchase in Xie Lingyun's 謝靈運 poems, where the estate is a site of spatial operations and "habituated practices" that problematize conventional oppositions of rustic and urban. Li Gonglin offers "visual cognates" of Xie's panoptic gaze. Li Gonglin's painting is indeed self-reflexive and complex in its juxtaposition of multiple visual conventions. The image itself calls for a correspondingly intersectional interpretive strategy, as Lee's essay proposes. [End Page 233] Foong Ping Seattle Art Museum Copyright © 2021 Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies

"Water Under a Bridge: Further Thoughts on the Qingming Scroll," by Julia Murray

Reviewed by: "Water Under a Bridge: Further Thoughts on the Qingming Scroll," by Julia Murray Patricia Ebrey Julia Murray, "Water Under a Bridge: Further Thoughts on the Qingming Scroll," JSYS 27 (1997): 99–107. Julia Murray, in this brief nine-page note, demonstrates the benefit of the multi-disciplinary nature of JSYS. She responds as an art historian to two articles by historians which offered contrasting conclusions on the date and subject of Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖. The heart of Murray's piece is her matter-of-fact identification of what would be beginners' errors to an art historian. One was to assume that the painter was expressing his personal feelings and convictions, which she labels as a romantic notion of the artist. Art was regularly made for patrons who hired artists to work for them and often chose the subject matter. A related error was to think that the painting could be dated accurately on the assumption that the artist wanted to capture every detail of the city as it existed at the time. A court artist working for the emperor would be savvy enough to know that the painting should show the city in all its glory and not draw attention to less flattering details. Another error, she suggests, was to pay little attention to the material basis of the painting and how it was made—it is not just a picture, to be analyzed for what it shows, but also a physical object. To her, such a large painting, done with such evident care, is more plausible as the work of an artist working for the court. Enjoy this clear, concise example of cross-disciplinary conversation. We may all love to marvel at the detail of this painting and push our students to tell [End Page 225] us what they see, but Julia Murray doesn't want us to forget that it is a work of art. In addition, she gives a master class in the reading of the documents attached to the painting, helping us see them as responses over time to an object whose meaning was not fixed. Patricia Ebrey University of Washington (Emerita) Copyright © 2021 Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies

A Retrospective and Assignment on the Study of Khitan(契丹)-Liao(遼) History in Korea

한국학계의 거란-遼史 연구는 1950년대부터 시작되어 지금까지 명맥을 유지하고 있다. 하지만 70년이 되어가는 연구의 역사를 통틀어 연구자의 숫자는 10명도 되지 않는다. 이 소수의 연구자들이 한국학계의 거란-遼史 연구를 발전시켜 왔고, 연구를 위한 기본적인 토대를 형성하기 위해 각고의 노력을 다했다. 이에 본 논문에서는 한국학계의 거란-遼史의 연구 동향을 분석하여 정치사, 사회사, 제도사 등의 방면에서 일정한 성과를 이룩했음을 살펴보았다. 앞으로 이를 기반으로 더욱 폭넓고 상세한 연구가 진행되어야 할 것이다. 하지만 거란-遼史 연구의 발전을 향한 해외학계의 움직임과 비교한다면, 한국학계의 성과에는 부족함이 많이 남아 있다고 할 수 있다. 게다가 1990년대까지만 해도 관련 연구가 활발히 나오는 편이었으나 21세기에 들어서면 그 활발함이 이전과 같지는 못한 느낌이다. 사료의 부족, 『遼史』의 신뢰성에 대한 의문 등은 거란-遼史 연구에 늘 따라다니는 한계점이기 때문에 연구자들이 이 시기에 대해 관심을 보이지 않은 것이 하나의 원인이었을 것이다. 그러나 거란-遼史를 자세하게 이해하려는 연구자들의 수요는 큰 편이고, 유목제국 최초로 중원을 경영하면서 이중체제를 운영했다는 점 하나만으로도 연구의 가치는 충분하다. 새로운 사료의 발굴, 고고학 성과의 진전, 거란문자 해독 연구의 발전 등 세계적으로 연구의 발전은 지속적으로 진행되어 왔다. 이제 거란-遼史라는 역사학 연구에만 한정되지 않는 ‘거란학’이라는 분야가 점점 형성되고 있는 단계라고도 볼 수 있을 것이다. 이른바 최초의 ‘정복왕조’로서 거란-遼가 가지고 있는 역사적 의미는 상당히 중요하고, 아직도 이를 해명하기 위해 밝혀야 할 수많은 과제가 남아 있다. 앞으로 한국학계에서도 거란-遼史를 포함한 거란학의 발전을 위한 연구가 더욱 활발하게 이루어질 수 있기를 바란다.The study of Khitan-Liao history in Korea has been in existence since the 1950s. However, the number of researchers is not even ten in the history of research that has been going on for 70 years. Few researchers have developed the research on the Khitan-Liao history of Korean academia and have made effort to form a basic foundation for research. In this article, I analyzed the research trends of Khitan-Liao history in Korean academia and found that researchers achieved certain results in terms of political history, social history, and institutional history. Based on this, further and more detailed researches should be conducted. But, when compared with the movement of overseas academic community toward the development of the study of Khitan-Liao history, there are many deficiencies in Korean academic achievements. In addition, until the 1990s, related research was actively coming out, but in the 21st century, it is unlikely that the activity is the same as before. The lack of resource and the question of the reliability of Liao History(『遼史』) were one of the reasons why researchers did not show interest in this period. However, the demand of researchers who want to understand the history of Khitan-Liao is very large, and the fact that it operated the dual system for the first time is the value of the research. The development of research has been continuing, including the discovery of new resources, the advancement of archaeological achievements, and the development of research on deciphering Khitan scripts. Now it can be said that the field of ‘Khitan Studies’, which is not limited only to the study of history, is increasingly being formed. The historical significance of Khitan-Liao as the so-called ‘the first conquest dynasty’ is very important, and there are still many challenges that need to be clarified to explain it. In the future, I hope that the Korean scholarship will be actively pursued for the development of ‘Khitan Studies’, including the history of Khitan-Liao.

Editorial Note

Editorial Note Ari Daniel Levine These articles began as papers for the Second Conference on Middle Period Chinese Humanities, held at Leiden University in September 2017. Those who attended the conference were in an especially fortunate position to see the future of the field taking shape. Emerging and junior scholars were presenting exciting new research, in both English and Chinese, which was shifting established paradigms and demonstrating innovative techniques. The conference captured an important moment within the field: both a generational transition and a geographic shift away from coastal American universities towards research centers in Asia and Europe. Eight papers stood out as especially innovative and intriguing. Written by scholars based at institutions in Taiwan, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, as well as the United States, they are indicative of the growth and evolution of the field. We decided to experiment with a new collaborative editorial model, in which senior scholars would work alongside the Editor in order to mentor the authors through the time-intensive process of turning conference papers into journal articles. I am grateful to Beverly Bossler, Valerie Hansen, Charles Hartman, and Richard von Glahn for their service as Associate Editors, providing expert advice as the authors continued to refine their research questions and to revise their pieces for publication. Several of the authors in this volume of JSYS are publishing their work for the first time, and some for the first time in English, and their professionalism and dedication has been commendable. We have organized the papers into four thematic sections of two articles, which naturally dovetailed from the beginning, but converged even further during the revision and editing process. The articles in the first section, "Bureau cratic Institutions and Information Networks," present a dynamic view of the Song bureaucracy by tracing flows of personnel and information through complex and shifting channels. The second section, "Social Networks and Elite Identity," contributes new research on the local networks and institutional practices that enabled Southern Song and Yuan literati to politically mobilize their allies at court as well as to engage in ad hoc collective support for their penurious peers. The authors of the third section, "New Sources of Geographic Knowledge," explain how Chinese tomb inscriptions [End Page xv] from the Liao and the only surviving township gazetteer from the Song present authoritative visions of space and place for the elites who commissioned them. Fourth and finally, "Market Cultures of Production and Consumption" features two investigations of the cultural dimensions of commercialization during the Song, when the production of copper and the consumption of fake and forged goods represented anxieties as well as providing opportunities for literati and the court. Each of the associate editors has written an introduction that frames the two articles in their section, explaining how and why these papers, and their authors, advance the frontiers of research in the history of Middle-Period China by finding new answers to new questions. For all of us, working on this volume has been an exceptional learning experience, and I am delighted and grateful to have shared it with such collegial collaborators. ADL June 2019 [End Page xvi] Copyright © 2019 Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies

Characteristics of the Yuan dynasty: Reflections on several issues from Mongol Yuan history

This article discusses the special position the Yuan dynasty (1260-1368) occupied in Chinese history. Of all the dynasties, the Yuan established by the Mongols showed its peculiarity. To borrow Karl Wittfogel’s term, the Yuan was a typical “conquest dynasty.” The historical significance of the Yuan and its predecessor—the Mongol empire (1206-1259) lay in two areas. One was that it ended the conflicts of various ethnic groups on the Mongolian steppe. The other was that it revived the idea of “patrimonialism” in the course of Chinese history. But Yuan’s rule did not last long, which was attributed to its slow “Sinicization.” Nonetheless, the Yuan exerted a great impact on the development of Chinese history, deserving more studies of the extent and depth of the impact.

Loyal Souls Come Home: Manifest Loyalty Shrines and the Decentering of War Commemoration in the Qing Empire (1724–1803)

Loyal Souls Come HomeManifest Loyalty Shrines and the Decentering of War Commemoration in the Qing Empire (1724–1803)* James Bonk (bio) The Manifest Loyalty shrine (Zhaozhongci), a large complex holding spirit tablets of all Qing war dead (zhenwang guanbing), was established by the Yongzheng emperor in 1724 on a property north of Chongwen gate in Beijing (Figure 1). With the military campaigns of the Qianlong reign (1736–95), the number of tablets in the shrine grew steadily. By the mid-1790s, the shrine held more than fifty thousand tablets. The White Lotus War (1796–1804), a conflict involving tens of thousands of troops in central China, led to a surge in the number of tablets. In the first five years of the war, nearly sixty thousand more tablets crowded the shrine's already overburdened tables and shelves.1 In 1802, the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820) responded to the overcrowding with an order to build Manifest Loyalty shrines in all prefectural seats (fucheng) of the empire. The new shrines, he directed, were to hold tablets of the war dead in their native places (yuanji). [End Page 61] The Beijing shrine would be restricted to the tablets of bannermen and high-ranking Han civil and military officials.2 By enshrining the dead in their native places, the emperor proclaimed, "not only would loyal souls return to their native lands (gu tu), fellow villagers and kinsmen [of the dead] would join together as an audience, gaining a greater understanding of the excellence of the dynasty's principles and clarity of its favor, and would therefore be even more inspired [to act with loyalty]."3 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Manifest Loyalty shrine, Huacheng si, and Tangzi. From Qianlong Jingcheng quan tu vol. 10 (1750, rept. 1940). The Chongwen gate, not pictured on the map, is south on the main thoroughfare east of the temple and shrine. The Jiaqing emperor's decision raises a question—were these new shrines simply the product of a pragmatic decision to avoid overcrowding at the shrine in Beijing, or did they signal a broader change in the nature of war commemoration in the early nineteenth century? In her book The Culture of War in China, Joanna Waley-Cohen characterized the eighteenth century as a time of cultural "militarization."4 According [End Page 62] to Waley-Cohen, the Qianlong emperor oversaw the development of a spectacular, "multi-layered" culture of war that both celebrated the empire's westward expansion and promoted Manchu martial values.5 Unfortunately, Waley-Cohen's thorough survey of war-related ritual and cultural production under the Qianlong emperor left unanswered the question of how this culture of war evolved in the nineteenth century. The present study argues that the building of prefectural Manifest Loyalty shrines was part of a shift in the Qing culture of war in the early nineteenth century. As a conquest dynasty that staked its authority on military superiority, the Qing crafted war commemoration in the eighteenth century to enhance the martial image of the Eight Banners while downplaying the military role of the largely Han Green Standards (lüying). The most ostentatious honors for accomplishments on the battlefield, such as the portraits of eminent generals hung in the Pavilion of Purple Light (Ziguang ge), were rarely given to Green Standard officers.6 State efforts to promote an image of banner military power were accompanied by a suppression of Chinese writing on military topics. Matthew Mosca has noted that Qianlong's ban on "virtually all recent Chinese works on military strategy" had the effect of "warning the literati off the topic."7 The Manifest Loyalty shrine in Beijing was, as I discuss below, unusual in its mission to enshrine the dead of both the Green Standards and banners. However, in many ways it resembled other elements of the eighteenth-century culture of war. It was controlled by the central government and intentionally banner-centered. Though tablets of the Green Standard dead far outnumbered those of bannermen overall, the tablets of banner generals dominated the main halls of the shrine.8 [End Page 63] In the early nineteenth century central government control over the commemoration of war...

Investiture of King and Bestowment of Robe and Crown in the Early to Middle of Goryeo Dynasty

Abstract King and Crown Prince's Gwanbok (冠服) written in『Goryeosa』Yeobokji was the bestowment of robesand crowns by the Son of Heaven who yielded hegemony over East Asia. It designated the King andCrown Prince of Goryeo as real and authentic as well as confirmed the political status of Goryeo in EastAsia. In『Goryeosa』Yeobokji, the King's Gwanbok is of higher stature than the adornments of the King's ri-tual robes (祭服) and court robes (朝服) which held a domestic political significance. In East Asia, bestow-ment of voiture (車) and robe (服) usually appeared in the multistate system. In the 10 th century, the LaterJin (後晋) spread the idea of investiture and bestowment to Khitan (契丹). The Liao (遼) or Khitan and theJin (金), the Conquest Dynasties, endeavored to establish the legitimacy of the Son of Heaven by imitatingSinocentrism by means of investiture and bestowment. In the reign of XingZong (興宗) and DaoZong (道宗)of Liao, the ritual of investiture and bestowment for Goryeo was in the making, adding titles and bestow-ments in the occasion of the elevation of Emperor Liao's honorific title. King Munjong (文宗) of Goryeoreached 9-bestowment which symbolized the first of the feudal lords in East Asia. This exceptional respectfor Goryeo went on to Jin's investiture and bestowment. From then, 9-bestowment was defined as an interna-tional decorum (禮) toward Goryeo. This historical study of Gwanbok (冠服) of『Goryeosa』, indicates: First,the King's Ceremonial Robe with Nine-symbol Design were designated from the early to middle of the Go-ryeo Dynasty by investiture and bestowment from the Conquest Dynasties. Second, the bestowed King'sRobe and Crown had simultaneous functions for domestic order and international order. Goryeo did not followideological Sinocentrism but followed practical interest by accepting Confucian Li (禮) philosophy passed onthrough the Conquest Dynasties.Key words:『Goryeosa』Yeobokji, Bestowal of robe and crown, King of Goryeo, Investiture, 9-Bestow-ment;『고려사(高麗史)』여복지(輿服志), 관복(冠服) 사여, 고려 국왕(高麗國王), 책봉(冊封),구석례(九錫禮)

Heritage management in Korea and Japan: the politics of antiquity and identity

AcknowledgmentsPreface: Critical Perspectives on Archaeology, Heritage, and TourismConventionsAbbreviations 1. Ranking Korean Properties: Heritage Administration, South Gate, and Salvaging Buried Remains 2. Collecting Japan's Curios: World Fairs, Imperial Tombs, and Preservation Laws 3. Tracing Japan's Lineage: Art, Architecture, and Conquest Dynasties 4. Searching for the Missing Link: Prehistory, Ethnology, and Racial Discourse 5. Excavating Korea's Past: Colonialists, Archaeologists, and Nostalgic Ruins 6. Rediscovering the Homelands: Travel Myths, Images, and the Narrative of Return Conclusion Contested Ownership: The Plunder and the Return of Cultural Treasures Tables Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China by Linda Cooke Johnson (review)

Reviewed by: Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China by Linda Cooke Johnson Beverly Bossler Linda Cooke Johnson . Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011. Pp. xxxiii + 251. $52.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0824834043. With Women of the Conquest Dynasties, Linda Cooke Johnson has provided the field with a wealth of detailed information about women under the Northern Dynasties of the Liao (905-1124) and Jin (1115-1234). Johnson bases her study above all on portraits, both textual and material, of women from the Liao and Jin periods. In addition to examining biographies recorded in the "Virtuous Women" sections of the standard histories and epitaphs found in inscription collections, she provides innovative readings of tomb iconography drawn from archeological excavations. Her research demonstrates that expectations of women under the conquest dynasties often differed in significant ways from those we associate with the roughly contemporaneous Song dynasty. The book is organized into an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion. The chapters treat the topics of "Womanly Ideals in the Liao and Jin Periods"; "Liao Women's Daily Lives"; "Jin Women's Daily Lives"; "Sexuality and Marriage"; "Widowhood and Chastity"; "Warrior Women"; and "Private Affairs." A number of central themes run through the book as a whole: the importance of military and political activities in the lives of Liao and Jin court women; the high incidence of (and admiration for) literacy and education in those same women; the persistent significance of steppe customs like the levirate and "following in death" (compulsory widow suicide); and the relative sexual freedom enjoyed by women in Liao and Jin society. A few individuals loom particularly large in Johnson's discussion. The first empress of the Liao dynasty, best known to history as the Empress Dowager Yingtian (878-953), played a critical role in the establishment of the Liao as a patrilineal dynasty. When others wanted to maintain Kitan tradition, according to which the succession should have devolved to the founder's brothers or younger kinsmen, Yingtian devised a plan to ambush and assassinate them. According to accounts in the standard histories, she also routinely advised [End Page 445] her husband on military plans, frequently accompanied him on campaigns, and on several occasions led troops to protect his interests. Most famously, at her husband's death she dramatically declined to observe the custom of "following in death," instead cutting off her right hand and throwing it into his grave. She then proceeded to live for another thirty years, continuing to play an active role in political and military affairs: she successfully manipulated the imperial succession once and attempted to do so a second time. Another figure who features prominently in Johnson's chapters is the Empress Dowager Chengtian (954-1009), wife of the fifth Liao emperor Jingzong (r. 969-982). Like Yingtian, this empress was known for helping her husband in the management of government affairs, and she more or less ruled in his name during his frequent illnesses. When the emperor died on a hunting trip, the twenty-eight year old Chengtian took over as regent for her young son. By most accounts she ruled ably and effectively, dominating the court (and her son) for more than twenty-five years. She, too, was known for taking to the field as a military leader and was a notable presence at the Liao attack on the Song that led to the Treaty of Chanyuan in 1004. But Chengtian is also a remarkable figure, in Johnson's view, for her long-term romantic affair with one of her chief ministers. The affair is mentioned in a Northern Song diplomatic record and repeated in historical accounts composed in the Southern Song and after, but, as Johnson notes (156), many historians have written off these rumors as efforts by Song writers to discredit the Liao and its powerful female ruler. Johnson, however, argues for the historical plausibility of the affair. The Song accounts indicate that the empress and the minister had been betrothed to one another in their childhood, and Johnson suggests that this prior betrothal, in combination with what she sees...

Linda Cooke Johnson. Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China.

Linda Cooke Johnson. Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China.

Women of the conquest dynasties: gender and identity in Liao and Jin China

Women of the conquest dynasties: gender and identity in Liao and Jin China

Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China by Linda Cooke Johnson (review)

Reviewed by: Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China by Linda Cooke Johnson Jennifer W. Jay (bio) Linda Cooke Johnson. Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011. 254 pp. Hardcover $52.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3404-3. The women in Johnson’s concise study lived in present day Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and the prefectures in the Beijing region under the Kitan Liao (916-1125) and its conqueror, the Jurchen Jin (1127–1234), that expanded the Liao territory southward to north of the Huai river. The two dynastic changes brought a transformative acculturation to the multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural population of North China from the tenth to the early part of the thirteenth centuries. Solidly anchored on archaeological data, dynastic histories, paintings, and travelogues, the seven chapters are conceptualized with clarity, from which emerges a comparative study of the women from the Kitan 契丹, Jurchen 女真, haner 漢兒 \n (blended Chinese), and Han 漢 or nanren 南人 (Chinese/southern residents) constituencies. Two dozen illustrations add a visual dimension to the complexities of minority and majority women as they reconfigured cultural identities and made adjustments going through the passages of life. The first chapter searches the dynastic histories for records of empresses and princesses, in addition to lienü 烈女 (exemplary) biographies, epitaphs, and inscriptions, to identify and contextualize the womanly ideals during the two centuries of Liao rule and a century of Jin administration. The indigenous Chinese dynasties prescribed for their women Confucian ethics such as sacrifice, chastity, filial piety, and education of sons. The praiseworthy women of the Liao and the Jin added wise counsel, military acts, and hunting activities that, according to Johnson, gave women greater agency. One of the five Liao biographies was on a Han woman who was married into the imperial clan and who supported Chinese culture. The other four biographies showcased Kitan nationals, three of whom committed suicide to follow their husbands in death. Twelve Jin biographies focused on Jurchen women, and another ten were drawn from Bohai (the conquered Korean state of Parhae), haner, and Han ethnicities. These women were familiar with Confucian classics and Chinese culture; they provided moral guidance to posterity and fought like men to defend their charges or committed suicide to defend their honor. The next two chapters reconstruct the daily lives and material culture of women living under the Liao and Jin. For the Liao period, the strongest evidence comes from tomb burials. The largest tombs belonged to the Yelü imperial clan and the Xiao clan, from which the Kitan emperors and princes exclusively chose consorts. Burial goods and wall paintings depicting the pastoral lifestyle, equestrian culture, and the mobile yurts lend support to the womanly ideals praised in the lienü biographies. Scenes of Kitan women on horses riding astride with their brothers, or walking freely on the streets, sharply contrast with the life of Han girls who were separated from male playmates at the age of six. Kitan women looked [End Page 100] after the home and herds when men were at war. The many single burials for Kitan women indicate their relative positions of strength in Kitan society. The smaller tombs belonged to the haner, such as the Hann and Zhang collaborator families who accepted some Kitan customs and practices. The Kitan attire and hairstyle of the men, the children, and the servants indicate that they adopted Kitan culture at a quicker pace than did the women, who wore Chinese silks and sported Chinese hairstyles. Johnson tells us that they were preservers of Han culture and probably continued to speak Chinese, inspired, as they were, by the story of Cai Wenji, a poetess who remained loyal to the Han dynasty. In 207, she left her Xiongnu husband and their children to return to the Han capital of Chang’an. To the Han and haner, she was a preserver of Han culture, but the Kitans and Jurchens represented her in military attire manifesting the martial and heroic ideals of exemplary women. In the Jin period, the outcome of Shizong’s (1161–1190) fundamentalist, nativist campaign against sinicization can be seen in one of the few...

Local Knowledge: An Akuapem Twi History of Asante

In 2003 Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I's eighty-nine page manuscript ‘The History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself’ of 1907 was published in an annotated scholarly edition alongside a selection of allied texts. The same publisher is to produce a related volume containing the four hundred and fifty pages of Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II's ‘History of Ashanti’ written in the 1940s (and edited by myself). Both of these texts are written in English. However, the huge range of sources on the Asante past recorded in Akan Twi have yet to receive equal attention and treatment. This short paper introduces and contextualises one source of this kind that was researched in Asante between 1902-1910 and finished in written form in Akan Twi in 1915.The Akuapem (Akwapim) kingdom is located less than thirty miles northeast of Ghana's capital at Accra. It has always been and remains a small polity. It comprises only seventeen historic towns scattered among hills on two parallel ridges about fifteen hundred feet above sea level. There are more towns today, many created by the cocoa economy of the early twentieth century, but Akuapem remains a compact entity. It is a Twi-speaking Akan kingdom, but an unusual one in that it is ethnically diverse.Patrilineal Guan-speaking farmers settled on the Akuapem ridges in the early decades of the seventeenth century. They were oppressed by the matrilineal Twi-speaking Akan of the nearby Akwamu kingdom. To end this situation the Guan recruited other Akan Twi speakers as allies. These were military adventurers from the Akyem Abuakwa polity to the west. The Akyem incomers succeeded against the Akwamu but stayed on to establish their own conquest dynasty in 1733.

Remembering Sung I

As far as I know,the first gathering for the purpose of advancing Song studies on either shore of the Atlantic took place in the spring of 1961 at the annual Association for Asian Studies meeting in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. The atmosphere was quite informal, so I do not believe anyone took minutes. Despite the efforts of the AAS Secretariat, I have been unable to obtain documentation,for their copies of the AAS Newsletter do not go back that far. At the time I do not think we proclaimed this occasion as Sung I. Quite likely it acquired that designation only after plans were afoot for Sung II,which—after several delays—finally took place in Germany in 1971. Alas, all but one of the six people I recall as fellow participants are now deceased and the only co-survivor, Jonathan Mirsky,has no recollection of the event! Can my memory be so faulty? Well, regardless, for better or worse, my account has to rely solely on my sagging memory with all its quirks, flying solo as it were with minimal instrumentation hoping not to crash . • • Jonathan Mirsky,who was to become the well known expert on contem porary China and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books,was at the time working on the Tang. He was there (if indeed he was) because in 1961 there were neither enough Song or conquest dynasties scholars to lend credibility to our championship of Song studies nor was the number sufficient to convince the profession of the probability of our ever reaching critical mass. To be sure, the profession itself was so much smaller at the time. As I recall all too well,in i960, there were two openings in Chinese history in the whole country (at the University of Iowa and at Swarthmore College). Thus, half a dozen was hardly an impressive number but it did amount at that time to not quite 1 percent of the 640 attendees at the 1961 meeting.1 Our number was small but the world was young and full of promise. We had a sense that just as the Song marked a new stage of Chinese history we

:Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period.(The New Middle Ages.)

Traditional Chinese historians have perpetuated the truism that the decline and fall of the Song dynasty was the foreordained result of an excess of civilism (wen) and a dearth of militarism (wu). Or, in modern textbook terms, the dynastic founders centralized military authority and created a dependent scholar-official elite, thereby producing a resurgence of the humanistic arts and civil governance while undermining their empire's long-term survival and territorial integrity. According to the consensus view of the penultimate generation of historians, Song monarchs and ministers responded to border threats from conquest dynasties with diplomatic and defensive strategies rather than with interventionist military solutions, which generally ended in debacle. Moreover, this wen/wu dyad was mapped onto ethno-cultural and political boundaries, so that traditional historians conflated Song “China” with civilism and civilization while equating rival “barbarian” polities with militarism. Surrounded, truncated, and ultimately occupied by conquest states of increasing threat-level—the Khitan Liao (907–1125), the Tangut Xi Xia (1038–1227), the Jurchen Jin (1115–1234), and the Mongol Yuan (1279–1368)—the Song Empire occupied a delicate geopolitical position from its inception to its collapse. To survive in a multi-polar world, the Song court was forced to acknowledge rival power centers as sovereign equals, blurring the sino-centric certainties of Tang diplomatic culture. Starting with the Treaty of Chanyuan of 1005, Song monarchs bought peace with indemnities and entered into fictive kinship arrangements with Tangut, Khitan, and Jurchen rulers, thereby undermining imperial claims to ideological legitimacy and universal sovereignty.