Late Imperial China Research Articles

The Muslims of “All Under Heaven”

To what extent did Islam interact with the broader landscape of popular religion in late imperial China? This article provides a preliminary overview of the economic activities, routine rituals, and local spaces in which Muslims presented their beliefs and practices to non-Muslims and engaged with central and local state authorities. Through an examination of the links between mosques and popular shrines, official donations to Islamic institutions, and Muslim engagement with imperial law on the subject of butchery and sacrifices I attempt to move beyond the strict ethnic and religious categories that came to prominence in China and elsewhere during the twentieth century and suggest a framework for understanding Islam’s historical practice in the country.

How Social Cleavages Facilitate State Revenue Extraction: Evidence from Qing China

We analyze the conditions under which a country’s social structure facilitates or impedes the state’s mobilization of financial resources during civil conflict. Our argument emphasizes the ways in which the central state can divide and conquer social groups in order to empower the state. When social groups cannot solve their coordination problems, they are more likely to rely on the state to protect themselves. We test our theory in the context of the Taiping Rebellion – one of the largest and bloodiest internal conflicts documented in history – using fine-grained, archival data from late imperial China. We show that counties with more clans were more likely to donate to the central state rather than to private militia. Our findings highlight the importance of social structure in facilitating state war mobilization and help understand the Chinese state – a useful, yet understudied, counterpoint to the Euro-centric literature.

Social norms and (de-)financialization: Japan’s and China’s divergent paths in consumer credit

ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, American-led financialization promoting capital and labour mobility has influenced Asia, but the Japanese and Chinese trajectories in financialization of consumption (consumer credit development) have diverged, with the 1995–2013 contraction in Japan contrasting with the skyrocketing growth in China since 2010. I argue the divergence can be attributed to the varying levels of compatibility between American financial norms and their social norms, the different timings of their integration into the global economy (the influence of ‘embedded liberalism’ or neoliberalism), and the interests of key actors of each country. Anti-liberal Japanese elites reversed the financialization of consumption to preserve anti-capitalistic ‘industrious norms’ and strong attachments to intermediary organisations, which are the cornerstones of their dominance. In contrast, economic rationalism embedded in Chinese society since late imperial China, when capital and labour mobility was enhanced by removing fixed intermediary organisations considerably under autocracy, has facilitated China’s financialization of consumption.

The ritual incorporation and cross-cultural communication in Camau, Vietnam: a case study of the Tianhou cult

ABSTRACT Tianhou (天后) is a popular religious figure rooted in Fujian, China. Historically, she was continuously ‘standardised’ by late imperial China, making this character a standard symbol. In the late 17th century, Chinese immigrants propagated the Tianhou cult in Southern Vietnam, further developed, and made Tianhou the identity marker of their community. However, in Camau and other places of Southern Vietnam, this symbol became partially changed due to the process of localisation and cross-cultural exchange. The Chinese successfully incorporate Chinese Tianhou rituals with Vietnamese family rites (especially the worships of Kitchen God and ancestors) to gain both community consolidation and cross-ethnic integration. The illusionary incorporation effectively consolidates the ties between peoples and improves the position of the ethnic Chinese in the local society. This paper mainly applies the concept of ‘inventing tradition’ and Seligman’s and Weller’s (2012) viewpoint of the cultural interaction of notation, ritual and shared experience to generalise the nature and significance of liturgical transformation in the Tianhou cult among the ethnic Chinese in Camau. The study shows that cultural adaptation, as a means for survival and evolution, has been the goal of an endless struggle among the Chinese in contemporary Vietnam.

Domestic Law and Slavery in Late Imperial China: Glimpses from Lineage Registers

Over the past century, the late imperial Chinese nubi system has been the subject of numerous studies. Depicted as a highly exploitative mode of labor coercion, it has nonetheless been radically differentiated from slavery. In this article, I explore how nubi were conceptualized in late imperial China through the lens of lineages’ domestic regulations and admonitions. Nubi bondage was first and foremost a living experience of strong asymmetric dependency. However, as a de jure institution, its conceptual and normative dimensions do matter as they justified the enslavement of human beings and contributed to shaping household practices. Domestic regulations reveal a process that transformed outsiders into absolute inferiors. This consideration alone is an incentive to reconsider the alleged disqualification of nubi as a form of “slavery” and to engage broader comparisons with slavery in a more global perspective.

Contrasting Cosmographies for the Development of Science in Pre-Industrial Europe and Late Imperial China

After two decades of heuristic debate on the Great Divergence the consensus view is that polities and economies of the West began their transitions to modern industrial market economies at least two centuries before Imperial China. Furthermore, Europe’s earlier transition and China’s retardation can be plausibly attributed in some significant (but, alas, unmeasurable degree) to historically observable and explicable differences in their beliefs and institutions for the discovery and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge. This essay has been designed as a bibliographical survey and critique of recently published literatures for political, economic, social, intellectual, religious and cultural histories and, above all, from the history of science that might (as Joseph Needham hoped) help to explain divergence in the contrasting histories promoting and restraining the accumulation of such knowledge in early modern Europe and Imperial China.

The Politics of Premodernity

90 A & Q Hudson, Mark J. 2014. “Placing Asia in the Anthropocene: Histories, Vulnerabilities, Response.” Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 4: 941–­ 62. Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519: 171–­ 82. Mikhail, Alan. 2016. “Enlightenment Anthropocene.” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 49, no. 2: 211–­ 31. Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–­ 1850. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2013. “Teleology, Discontinuity and World History: Periodization and Some Creation Myths of Modernity.” Asian Review of World Histories 1, no. 2: 189–­ 226. Ruddiman, William F. 2003. “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago.” Climatic Change 61: 261–­ 93. Ruddiman, William F. 2007. “The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis: Challenges and Responses.” Reviews of Geophysics 45: RG4001. Smail, Daniel Lord, and Andrew Shryock, eds. 2011. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smail, Daniel Lord, and Andrew Shryock. 2013. “History and the ‘Pre.’” American Historical Review 118, no. 3: 709–­ 737. Smith, Bruce D., and Melinda A. Zeder. 2013. “The Onset of the Anthropocene .” Anthropocene 4: 8–­ 13. Symes, Carol. 2011. “When We Talk about Modernity.” AmericanHistorical Review 116, no. 3: 715–­ 26. The Politics of Premodernity Tamara Sears In September 2017, the British Museum inadvertently sparked a social media backlash on Twitter when, in responding to a query about how to design exhibition labels to maximize accessibility, the curator, Jane Porter, replied that “Asian names can be confusing, so we have to be careful about using too many.” Facing a horde of hostile comments pointing out the imperial legacies and cultures of looting upon which museum collections were built, Porter quickly qualified her response by pointing to the fact that “dynasties & gods have different names in various Asian A & Q 91 languages.” For example, she noted that the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy is “known by different names in different regions: Avalokitesvara in India, Guanyin in China, Kwanum in Korea and Kannon in Japan” (@British Museum, September 13, 2017). In addition to provoking accusations of racism and calls to decolonize museums, this incident draws attention to the challenges of presenting premodern histories of Asia to present-­ day audiences.1 Issues of intelligibility and accessibility are often solved through processes of simplification that homogenize regions and flatten history. In this case, the homogenization of terminology failed to convey a sense for the complex historical movements of Buddhism as it traveled across Asia and became transformed, in the process of transmission, from the male Indic Avalokitesvara into the female goddesses known by other names in China, Korea, and Japan (Yü 2001). The desire to make legible premodern Asia through positivist universalisms reinforces presentist modes of popular thinking that are anything but benign. In a recent opinion piece published in Hyperallergic, Michelle Wang (2020) calls attention to the CDC’s decision to grace the cover of the May 2020 issue of its journal Emerging Infectious Diseases with an image of a distinctively Chinese textile depicting a leopard standing in a forest populated by bats. In addition to reinforcing the racialization of COVID-­19 and stoking dangerous anti-­Asian sentiment in an era of intensifying xenophobia, this use of imagery constituted an act of gross historical misappropriation. Dateable to the eighteenth century, the textile was originally created as a rank badge for a government official serving during the height of the Qing dynasty. Wang’s critique is aimed at the disingenuous association between late imperial China and the current crisis that is exacerbated by the journal’s cover feature in which the issue’s editors maintain that the many birds and animals depicted on rank badges may serve as “zoonotic reservoirs capable of transmitting viral pathogens” and that bats in particular can be associated with the SARS coronavirus.2 Wang points out that bats in Qing China were associated not with disease but rather with auspiciousness and good fortune. Although beyond the scope of Wang’s critique, it is also notable that the era from which this rank badge hails sits at the edge...

The Tiger and its Association with Protection and Prosperity in Late Imperial China

由 於 生 性 兇 猛 ， 老 虎 在 中 國 動 物 傳 說 中 一 直 佔 據 著 特 殊 地 位 。 因 它 們 可 以 鎮 宅 驅 邪 、 招 財 進 寶 ， 而 深 受 人 們 喜 愛 。 鑒 於 上 述 兩 種 能 力 ， 老 虎 在 18 世 紀 至 20 世 紀 初 期 ， 成 為 了 木 刻 版 畫 的 常 見 圖 案 。 本 文 選 取 了 部 分 老 虎 題 材 版 畫 進 行 介 紹 ， 並 對 此 類 版 畫 的 用 途 加 以 探 討 。 其 中 涉 及 作 為 張 道 陵 和 趙 公 明 坐 騎 的 老 虎 ， 前 者 是 擅 長 驅 邪 的 天 師 ， 後 者 則 是 掌 管 財 富 的 武 神 。 本 文 考 察 了 老 虎 是 如 何 成 為 守 衛 家 宅 和 財 富 的 象 征 。 通 過 對 老 虎 的 圖 像 學 分 析 ， 揭 露 了 版 畫 研 究 中 普 遍 忽 視 的 兩 點 生 產 特 性 。 其 一 ， 版 畫 匠 人 和 店 家 都 在 有 意 識 地 迎 合 當 地 偏 好 。 其 二 ， 版 畫 作 坊 並 不 排 斥 對 既 定 圖 案 進 行 改 動 。 上 述 兩 點 ， 無 疑 都 是 為 了 取 悅 客 人 ， 從 而 增 加 版 畫 銷 量 。

Zhu, Jing: Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands. Gender and Representation in Late Imperial and Republican China

Zhu, Jing: Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands. Gender and Representation in Late Imperial and Republican China

Jerim League during the Late Qing Reforms (1907–1911) as a Case Study of Late Imperial China's Frontier Policy and Inter-Ethnic Administration

Jerim League during the Late Qing Reforms (1907–1911) as a Case Study of Late Imperial China's Frontier Policy and Inter-Ethnic Administration

Jenny Huangfu Day. Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China.

J<scp>enny</scp> H<scp>uangfu</scp> D<scp>ay</scp>. <i>Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China</i>.

BECOMING GUANYIN: ARTISTIC DEVOTION OF BUDDHIST WOMEN IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA. By YuhangLi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 299. Paper, $65.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 46, Issue 4 p. 532-532 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Gender and Sexuality Studies BECOMING GUANYIN: ARTISTIC DEVOTION OF BUDDHIST WOMEN IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA. By Yuhang Li. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 299. Paper, $65.00. First published: 09 January 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.14921Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume46, Issue4December 2020Pages 532-532 RelatedInformation

Dangerous Women or Women in Danger? Women and Properties of Extinct Households in Late Imperial China

Over its evolution, imperial China’s legal tradition has produced as series of laws and regulations on the issue of vacant successions, which were supplemented by a host of local practices or “customs”. This body of legal and customary rules had a profound impact on the rights of women to ownership, in a context in which there existed a profound cultural bias in favor of men. Even though social status and the role played in the family circle did account for some differentiation, fundamentally, it was all but impossible for women to be treated on an equal footing with men, especially with regard to assets’ inheritance. In fact, in the eyes of male family members, widows, daughters and daughters-in-law were often considered as threats to the integrity of a household’s properties. As numerous Qing dynasty judicial cases show, these “dangerous women” –especially widows– were regularly confronted to all sorts of pressures from the families to which they belonged, which could end up jeopardizing their material and physical well-being. Confronted with this category of “endangered women”, in time state authorities devised legal tools and highly symbolic gestures in order to provide some form of protection for them.

Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China, by Jenny Huangfu Day

Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China, by Jenny Huangfu Day

The First Islamic Classic in Chinese: Wang Daiyu’s by Sachiko Murata

Reviewed by: The First Islamic Classic in Chinese: Wang Daiyu’s by Sachiko Murata Cuma Ozkan Sachiko Murata, trans., The First Islamic Classic in Chinese: Wang Daiyu’s Real Commentary on the True Teaching. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017, vii, 273 pp. US$23.95 (pb). ISBN 978-1-4384-6508-1 Sachiko Murata has previously contributed to the research on Islam in Late Imperial China, especially by translating seminal texts from the Han Kītab collection (Islamic writings in Chinese) into English. In her Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light, she translated Wang Daiyu’s 王岱輿 (ca. 1570–ca. 1660) Great Learning of Islam (Qingzhen daxue 清真大學) and Liu Zhi’s 劉智 (ca. 1660–ca. 1739) translation of Jami’s Lawa’ih into Chinese as Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm (Zhenjing zhaowei 真境昭微), as well as produced a synopsis of Wang Daiyu’s Real Commentary on the True Teaching (Zhengjiao zhenquan 正教真詮) by translating snippets from each chapter.1 In the Sage Learning of Liu Zhi, she translated and annotated Nature and Principle in Islam (Tianfang xingli 天方性理).2 In this book, she translates the full forty chapters of Wang’s Zhengjiao zhenquan, which is the first Islamic text written in China, together with the author’s “Self-Narrative” (zixu 自敘) and a “Record of Questions and Answers” (wenda jiyan 問答紀言). Murata bases her translation on the 1657 edition of the text, but she also notes the differences between the editions of 1642, 1873, 1904, and 1922 (pp. 32–33), finding that they mostly have to do with typographical errors or the use of synonymous words. The Zhengjiao zhenquan consists of two sections of twenty chapters each, in which Wang explains the “spiritual and ethical underpinnings” of Islamic beliefs and practices while providing a “social and spiritual rationale” for them (p. 3). The first section of the work mainly introduces Islamic theology and cosmology explaining the attributes of Allah, Islamic creation, prophethood in Islam, and the relationship between human beings and God. Wang also explains deviant views that mischaracterize God in chapters titled “Similarity to the Real” (sizhen 似真), “Changing the Real” (yizhen 易真), and “Darkening the Real” (meizhen 昧真). The chapter “The Outstanding Differences” (jiongyi 迥異) presents the differences between Islam and the other religions in seven aspects, asserting the superiority of Islam over Chinese religions. The chapter “Huihui 回回,” the Chinese term for Muslims at that time, which Murata translates as “the Returning Returners,” explains the meaning of huihui as a return of body to its origin in two ways and a return of heart to its origin in two ways. The chapter “Husband and Wife” (fufu 夫婦) is unusual in the first section in that it deals with practical topics of marriage, celibacy, and a wife’s obedience to her husband. The first section ends with the chapter on the first pillar of Islam, the profession of faith (shahadah) where Wang explains the necessity of a creator (the “Real Lord” in the text) and prophets. The second section mainly introduces Islamic practices, showing their similarities to and differences from those of Chinese religions. It starts with the five pillars of Islam, which Wang refers to as “The Five Constants” (wu chang 五常), alluding to the Confucian concept. This section also includes topics such as filial piety, friendship, animal sacrifice, vegetarianism, gambling, drinking alcohol, usury, and hoarding. [End Page 307] Nevertheless, Zhengjiao zhenquan provides not a manual of Islamic beliefs and practices but a rationale for their superiority. Wang’s position in the text is often “polemical,” defending Islamic beliefs and practices against Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism (p. 5). Wang also presents Islam as the only true teaching and shows inconsistencies and fallacies in the beliefs and practices of Chinese religions. Wang often quotes from a wide range of Chinese sources and uses metaphors intelligible to the Chinese audience to demonstrate that Islamic beliefs and practices conform to Chinese antiquity. Yet, he does not abstain from boldly criticizing some Chinese beliefs and practices to show the superiority of Islam. With regards to fengshui 風水, he notes that “the teaching of Islam takes the method of yin and yang as incoherent and regards the clarity of knowledge as shallow . . . The foolish people of the world talk happily about...

Administering wealth: the concept of “economy” and the epistemic foundations of nationalism in late-imperial China (late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century)

AbstractIn this paper, I will focus on the emergence and uses of political economy in late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century China. I will discuss how the concept of “economy” came to be conceived as an autonomous sphere of human life, with its own rules and its own order, and how the production of “wealth” was conceptually divorced from ethics, politics, and administration. For this purpose, I will focus on a group which played a key role in reshaping the social and political discourse of the empire: a group of nationalist reformers who wanted to transform the Qing empire into a constitutional monarchy. I will explore how these reformers brought together two different sets of traditions – the Chinese imperial traditions of literati statecraft on the one hand, and mostly British, French, and German traditions of political economy on the other – and how they used them to naturalize a particular idea of what the “Chinese nation” was and should be.

Lucky to have a sister: The effects of unmarried sister on brother outcomes in late imperial China

This paper addresses the family free-rider problem by investigating the effects of unmarried sisters on brothers' outcomes based on historical population register data from the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN). The results show that the presence of an unmarried sister increases the probability of her brother to have another birth / obtain an official student title. An unmarried sister represents a family public good provider since she is a temporary member, and a self-interested brother has economic motivations to compete for and free ride on his sister's unpaid housework. This paper provides an economic explanation rooted in an individual motivation that may help us to further understand the impacts of family structure.

Cartography and orientalism in late imperial China

The Opium wars epitomize a crucial moment in Chinese history, a turning point that globally affected all countries involved, the Qing dynasty and the Western powers, which witnessed radical political, economic and social changes both internally and in their international relations. Recognizing that orientalism with its corollary of studies, researches, travel impressions, beliefs, stories, and popular gossips about China and the Orient in general, is a pervasive form of knowledge which has a political nature, means agreeing on the fact that the Western knowledge upon the Orient has been an agency for the action that has followed, namely imperialism and colonialism, which in turn led to the Opium wars. Geography became the scientific side of such knowledge. As a matter of fact, the moment in which geography embraced the cold geometries of cartography, it turned into a tremendous support to the knowledge process pertaining to the Orientalism. A process driven by mere political and commercial interests, and deceitfully expressed in the popular culture of those Western societies and countries which supported and had colonies in the Far East.

Scholars in Disguise: The Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucian Reappraisal of the Merchant Class in Late Ming

The phenomenon of the rise of merchants in late imperial China has been well examined in many studies, in which Confucian literati are shown to have made various adaptations to the new social reality. Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) School of Mind-Heart in particular, incorporated this development into its philosophical worldview so that the Confucian sagehood was deemed to be within the reach of merchants. However, the opposing Cheng-Zhu School of Principle has hitherto escaped focused investigation. This paper seeks to fill the lacuna by studying the writings of a Cheng-Zhu partisan, Li Guangjin (1549–1623), whose generous reappraisal of the merchants extended to the female agents as well. His obsession with scholarly pedigree and his belief in the efficacy of the transformative power of Confucian culture indicated that he never perceived the merchants as true merchants, but as scholars in disguise. He was daring to criticize and rework the authoritative writings of Sima Qian on money-makers for his own evaluation of men and women in trade. But his patriarchal views and support of the state cult of chastity nonetheless underscored his identity as an orthodox Cheng-Zhu Confucian.

Serving and Working for Others

Abstract Over the past decades, “wage labor” has been a lingering issue in studies on the development patterns of late imperial China. The legal reconfiguration of the category of “hired laborers” (gugong 僱工) between 1588 and 1788, in particular, has been foregrounded as a salient manifestation of the “incipient capitalism” going hand in hand with the emergence of a “free” labor market and with the decline of bound labor. Questioning the preconception that the mere appearance of labor relations mediated by means of wages would suffice to prove the existence of “free labor,” this article proposes to revisit the issue of “hired labor” in late imperial China. It approaches this issue from a conceptual standpoint, as a first step toward an overdue reassessment of the significance of wages in labor relations and their impact on the status of workers. The first section endeavors to sketch out a general conceptualization of gugong from the Great Ming Code and from Ming and Qing legal exegesis. The second section focuses on the study of the legal redefinition of gugong between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and looks for the social and legal implications of being hired. By doing so, it also explores changes in the Chinese conception of the notion of “service” and its relationship with what we would name “servitude.”