Silver Mines and Mobile Miners in the Southwestern Borderlands of the Qing Empire

AbstractThis article explores mining as the motor of temporary and permanent migration into the Far Southwest of Ming and Qing China. It focuses on the workforce of borderland silver mines, specifically on travel routes and the geography of recruitment. Durations and costs of the journeys reflect the existence of efficiently organized networks. The men who set out for the mines did so in the expectation of making money and returning home with handsome gains. This provides insights into the sizeable and profitable non-agrarian sector in the late imperial economy.

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What Is This “Chinese” in Overseas Chinese? Sojourn Work and the Place of China's Minority Nationalities in Extraterritorial Chinese-ness

The Journal of Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021911812000113 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 71 (2) ◽

pp. 423-446 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Chris Vasantkumar

Keyword(s):

Chinese Diaspora ◽

Overseas Chinese ◽

Chinese Community ◽

Qing Empire ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Chinese Nationalism ◽

Chinese Nation ◽

Imperial Expansion ◽

History Of ◽

Multiethnic Populations

This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the “sojourn work” that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to project the People's Republic of China's multiethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its national borders. The second highlights the importance of the early Chinese nation-state in the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The final case foregrounds the late imperial routes of nascent Chinese nationalism to argue that, in contrast to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese “diaspora,” national and transnational modes of Chinese community emerged together from the ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need to question the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas) Chinese-ness.

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Christianity and Empire: The Catholic Mission in Late Imperial China

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/stc.2018.1 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 54 ◽

pp. 208-224

Author(s):

R. Po-chia Hsia

Keyword(s):

Qing Empire ◽

Late Imperial China ◽

Christianity In China ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Opium War ◽

Matteo Ricci ◽

Global Christianity ◽

Imperial China ◽

Catholic Mission ◽

Chinese Rites Controversy

Reflecting on the theme of ‘Empire and Christianity’, this article compares two periods in the Catholic mission to China. The first period, between 1583 and 1800, was characterized by the accommodation of European missionaries to the laws, culture and customs of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The work of the Jesuits, in particular, demonstrated a method of evangelization in which Christian teachings could be accommodated to the political realities of Late Imperial China as exemplified by the work of Matteo Ricci, Ferdinand Verbiest, Tomas Pereira, Joachim Gerbillon and many generations of Jesuits and missionaries of other religious orders. The Chinese Rites Controversy, however, disrupted this accommodation between Christianity and empire in China. Despite tacit toleration in the capital, Christianity was outlawed after 1705. After the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, Catholicism in China became increasingly indigenized. In 1842, after the defeat of the Qing empire by the British in the First Opium War, the prohibition of Christianity was lifted. Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries entered China, backed by Western diplomatic and military power. This led to the confrontation between China and Christianity, culminating in the 1900 Boxer Uprising. A concerted effort to indigenize Christianity in the early twentieth century ultimately failed, resulting in the separation of Christianity in China from global Christianity after 1950.

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

International Journal of Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s1479591420000509 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-22

Author(s):

Pablo A. Blitstein

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Economy ◽

Human Life ◽

Qing Empire ◽

Late Imperial China ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

The Social ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The One

Abstract In 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.

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Reinventing Licentiousness

10.7591/cornell/9781501752971.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Y. Yvon Wang

Keyword(s):

Intellectual History ◽

Cultural Change ◽

Qing Empire ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Period ◽

History Of ◽

The One ◽

Definition Of ◽

And Control ◽

Globalized World

This book navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic — a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime. The book draws on previously untapped archives to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world. The book emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed “proper” sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, the book's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.

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An Art of Transformation

Archives of Asian Art ◽

10.1215/00666637-7162228 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 68 (2) ◽

pp. 133-156 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ellen Huang

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Modern China ◽

Qing Empire ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Genealogical Analysis ◽

Physical Transformation ◽

Material Practice ◽

Early Modern China ◽

Qianlong Emperor

Abstract This article examines the phenomenon of yaobian 窯變, or kiln transformations, in late imperial and early modern China as material epistemology and material practice. By providing a genealogical analysis of documentations of yaobian in late imperial texts spanning the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries, the article relates their supernatural connotations to the production of Qing-period Jingdezhen Jun-style wares, variously known as flambé wares or kiln transmutation glazes. The article advances that the significance of such eighteenth-century yaobian porcelain wares lies in their very inexplicability of craftsmanship and ability to index both physical transformation as well as infinite formal transformation for the Qing empire, particularly during the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736–1795).

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