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Notice: The Chinese History Podcast is currently on a temporary hiatus. I am working to schedule new interviews and hope to have a new episode out soon!
Episodes | About Us | Support | Contact | Copyright and Fair Use
Notice: The Chinese History Podcast is currently on a temporary hiatus. I am working to schedule new interviews and hope to have a new episode out soon!
Saturday Sep 21, 2024
Saturday Sep 21, 2024
Saturday Sep 21, 2024
The Qing, China's last imperial dynasty, ruled over one of the largest empires in Eurasia at the dawn of the 19th century. Throughout the preceding century, it expanded its reach into the northwest, southwest, Tibet, and gained hegemony over Mongolia. For a long time, traditional historiography has viewed the Qing as a land-based, agrarian power with minimal engagement with the seas. Even its successful conquest of Taiwan in 1683 was seen as a one-time affair. This, the traditional narrative goes, was the reason why the Qing lost to the British in the First Opium War. Scholars today have increasingly pushed back against this view, pointing out the Qing's liberalization of ocean-going trade and its development of a naval infrastructure. Joining me today is Ronald Po, author of Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire, who will talk about Qing maritime history and policy in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Contributors:
Ronald Po
Ronald Po is an Associate Professor in the Department of International History at LSE. He is a historian of late imperial China, with a focus on maritime history and global studies. His book, Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire, seeks to revise the view of China in this period as an exclusively continental power with little interest in the sea. Instead, the book argues that the Qing deliberately engaged with the ocean politically, militarily, and conceptually, and responded flexibly to challenges and extensive interaction on all frontiers - both land and sea - in the eighteenth century. Professor Po joins us today to talk about his research on Qing maritime history.
Yiming Ha
The Chinese History Podcast is an educational show that aims to make academic content and newer research related to Chinese history more accessible to the general public without sacrificing the effort and quality that we as scholars put into and expect from our own research. It is designed for students, teachers, and anyone interested in Chinese history. We envision this podcast as collaborative space where scholars can share their research and stories through both interviews and lectures. Our aim is to provide content covering every aspect of Chinese history from ancient times to the modern period, including but not limited to political history, military history, economic history, social history, and cultural history. We especially strive to tie China into broader regional and international networks of exchange and interactions and to view China from a more Eurasian perspective. For the time being the majority of our content will focus primarily on premodern China, although it is our goal to expand into modern China in the near future.
Yiming Ha | Founder, Host, and Editor
Yiming Ha is the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA, his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his PhD from UCLA. He is also the book review editor for Ming Studies.
Credits:
Episode no. 19
Release date: September 21, 2024
Recording location: Amsterdam/Los Angeles, CA
References courtesy of Ronald Po
Images:
The Port of Canton (Guangzhou) in c. 1830, showing the factories of the foreign powers (Image Source)
View of Canton (Guangzhou) in c. 1665 with ships of the Dutch East India Company in the foreground (Image Source)
Chinese junk in Guangzhou, c. 1823 (Image Source)
The East India Company steamship Nemesis (right background) destroying war junks during the Second Battle of Chuenpi, 7 January 1841 (Image Source)
Select References:
Gang Zhao, The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684-1757 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).
Hans van de Ven, Breaking with the Past The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
John D. Wong, Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
John E. Wills, Jr., China and the Maritime Europe, 1500-1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
Paul A. van Dyke, Whampoa and the Canton Trade Life and Death in a Chinese Port, 1700-1842 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020).
Schottenhammer, Angela, China and the Silk Roads (ca. 100 BCE to 1800 CE): Role and Content of Its Historical Access to the Outside World (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Xing Hang, Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c.1620-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Zheng Yangwen, China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
Friday Mar 01, 2024
Friday Mar 01, 2024
The Ming-Qing transition was an extremely chaotic time in Chinese history. Millions died of warfare, pestilence, or starvation, and millions more were displaced. Yet despite all these issues, this was also a period of cultural production, which has often been overlooked as people focus on the wars, famine, and climate change that pervaded this period. In this episode, I speak with Professor Lynn Struve about the literary pursuits of men and women and the overall intellectual landscape in the Late Ming and the Early Qing
Contributors
Lynn Struve
Lynn Struve is an emeritus professor of history and an emeritus professor of East Asian languages and cultures at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include traditional Chinese history, 17th century political and intellectual history, East-West comparative thought, and Chinese reference and source materials. Over the course of her career, she has published widely, particularly on the period of the Ming-Qing transition, and has received numerous awards. Her representative works include Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws, The Southern Ming, 1644-1662, The Ming-Qing Conflict: A Historiography and Source Guide, and, more recently, The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World, which was recently awarded best overall book in Ming studies published between 2019 and 2022 by the Society for Ming Studies.
Yiming Ha
Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Credits
Episode no. 18
Release date: March 1, 2024
Recording location: Bloomington, IN/Los Angeles, CA
References compiled by Yiming Ha
Images
A portrait of the Kangxi emperor as a scholar, painted in 1699 when he was forty-five years of age. (Image Source)
An alternative portrait of the Kangxi emperor that Jonathan Spence used for his book on the Kangxi emperor. This portrait shows the pockmarks on his face, a result of his childhood survival of smallpox which devastated the Manchu population. (Image Source)
A portrait of Huang Zongxi (1610-1695), one of the great scholars of the Late Ming and Early Qing. Originally a prominent figure in the Ming loyalist movement, Huang retired from Ming loyalism but also refused to serve the Qing. Nonetheless, Huang made many contributions to scholarship by indirectly accommodating the Qing. (Image Source)
A late 18th/early 19th century portrait of Liu Rushi (1618-1664), one of the most famous courtesans of the 17th century and a prominent female scholar. (Image Source)
Select References
Brook, Timothy. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-century China. Stanford University Press, 1994.
Struve, Lynn. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019.
Widmer, Ellen. The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
Widmer, Ellen. The Inner Quarters and Beyond Women Writers from Ming Through Qing. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Friday Mar 03, 2023
Friday Mar 03, 2023
Friday Mar 03, 2023
The Qing Empire (1636-1912) ruled over one of the largest land empires in the world. Its territories encompassed not only what is considered today to be China proper and Manchuria, but also Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia. Its subjects were composed of people belonging to different identities, of which Manchu, Han, Mongol, Tibetan, and later Uighur became the most important groups. As an empire that was composed of a small conquering elite, how did the Qing manage these different identities as its empire expanded and stabilized? What changes occurred over time? What legacy did the Qing leave on the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China in terms of how they dealt with ethnic minorities? To help answer these question, we invite Professor Pamela Crossley to talk to us about how history and identity were constructed and weaved into Qing imperial ideology.
Contributors
Pamela Crossley
Professor Pamela Crossley is the Charles and Elfriede Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth University. She specializes in the history of the Qing Empire and modern China, although her research interests also span Inner Asian history, global history, history of horsemanship in Eurasia, and imperial sources of modern identities. She is the author of eight books and numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles, and her book A Translucent Mirror is the winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies. Additionally, she has also written commentaries for major newspapers and magazines.
Yiming Ha
Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Credits
Episode no. 17
Release date: March 3, 2023
Recording location: Hanover, NH/Los Angeles, CA
Transcript (by Yiming Ha and Greg Sattler)
Bibliography courtesy of Prof. Crossley
Images
Cover Image: A page of the Pentaglot Dictionary (Yuzhi wuti qing wenjian 御製五體清文鑑), a dictionary of the major languages of the Qing compiled towards the later reign of Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century. The five languages are Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Chagatai (now known as Uighur). (Image Source)
The Stele Commemorating the Victory over the Dzungars, erected by the Qianlong emperor either in the 1750s or 1760s to commemorate the Qing victory over the Dzungars in the Xinjiang region. The stele featured four languages. On the front side are inscriptions written in Classical Chinese (by the Qianlong emperor himself) and Manchu, while the reverse side features inscriptions in Mongolian and Tibetan. (Image Source)
The Capture of Tucheng, a painting commemorating a Qing victory during the Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan (1856-1873). Note the five colored banner that were flown by the Qing troops. The alternate version of this flag (with the colors rearranged) later became one of the early flags of the Republic of China, with each color representing an ethnic group. Red for the Han, yellow for the Manchus, blue for the Mongols, white for the Hui (Muslims), and black for the Tibetans. (Image Source)
References
Bovington, Goardner, "The History of the History of Xinjiang" in Twentieth-Century China, 26:.2 (April, 2001): 95-139.
Bulag, Uradyn The Mongols at China's Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (2002, Rowman & Littlefield)
Crossley, "The Cycle of Inevitability in Imperial and Republican Identities in China" in Aviel Roshwald, ed, The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism: Volume One: Patterns and Trajectories over the Longue Durée (2022, Cambridge), 301-328.
Crossley, Helen F. Siu, Donald S., Sutton, ed., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ehtnicity and Frontier in the Early Modern China (California, 2006)
Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imeprial Ideology (1999, California).
Elliott, Mark, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (2002, Californai)
Perdue, Peter. C, ."Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective: Frontier Administration in Eighteenth-Century China" in Journal of Early Modern History, 5:4 (2001, 282-304.
Jonathan D. Spence, Treason by the Book (2002, Viking).
Wu, Hung, "Emperor's Masquerade: 'Costume portraits' of Yongzheng and Qianlong" in Smithsonian Libraries, 1995, p. 25-41.
Monday Nov 28, 2022
Monday Nov 28, 2022
The fall of Beijing in 1644 did not immediately put an end to the Ming Dynasty. For almost half a century, Ming pretenders and loyalists in the south warred with the Manchus. One of the most prominent Ming loyalist factions was the Zheng family regime based in Fujian and Taiwan. Founded by the pirate-merchant Zheng Zhilong, the enterprise reached new heights under his son Zheng Chenggong, better known as Koxinga, who is best known for driving the Dutch out of Taiwan. This regime carried out the pro-Ming, anti-Manchu banner until it was finally defeated by the Qing in 1683. Joining me to talk about this fascinating regime is Professor Xing Hang of Brandeis University. He will cover the history of the regime from its rise to its fall, how it became so powerful, how and why Koxinga took over Taiwan, as well as what Ming loyalism meant to the Zhengs.
Contributors
Xing Hang
Professor Xing Hang is an Associate Professor of History at Brandeis University and a scholar of China and of the East Asian maritime world. His first project is about the Zheng organization in Taiwan, its role in seventeenth century East Asian maritime trade, and how it defined its legitimacy, and he has published extensively on the topic. His research on this topic has also greatly informed his more recent project, which is on Chinese communities in Southeast Asia from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first centuries.
Yiming Ha
Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Credits
Episode no. 16
Release date: November 28, 2022
Recording location: Boston, MA/Los Angeles, CA
Transcript (proofread and punctuated by Lina Nie)
Bibliography courtesy of Prof. Hang
Images
Cover Image: Painting of Zheng Zhiling (in green robes) and his son Zheng Chenggong by Dutch painter Pieter van der Aa (Image Source)
17th century portrait of Zheng Chenggong, also known as Koxinga (Image Source)
Maximum extent of Koxinga's territories in the late 1650s/early 1660s. Red shows areas under his direct control, while orange shows his area of influence. (Image Source)
Birth rock of Koxinga, in Hirado, Japan. (Image Source)
Koxinga worshipped in a temple in Tainan. (Image Source)
References
Tuesday Sep 20, 2022
Tuesday Sep 20, 2022
Professor Maura Dykstra of Caltech joins us today to talk about her new book titled Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State. According to the publisher, the book "investigates the administrative revolution of China’s eighteenth-century Qing state. It begins in the mid-seventeenth century with what seemed, at the time, to be straightforward policies to clean up the bureaucracy: a regulation about deadlines here, a requirement about reporting standards there. Over the course of a hundred years, the central court continued to demand more information from the provinces about local administrative activities. By the middle of the eighteenth century, unprecedented amounts of data about local offices throughout the empire existed.
The result of this information coup was a growing discourse of crisis and decline. Gathering data to ensure that officials were doing their jobs properly, it turned out, repeatedly exposed new issues requiring new forms of scrutiny. Slowly but surely, the thicket of imperial routines and standards binding together local offices, provincial superiors, and central ministries shifted the very epistemological foundations of the state. A vicious cycle arose whereby reporting protocols implemented to solve problems uncovered more problems, necessitating the collection of more information. At the very moment that the Qing knew more about itself than ever before, the central court became certain that it had entered an age of decline."
Contributors
Maura Dykstra
Professor Maura Dykstra is an Assistant Professor of History at Caltech. As a historian of Late Imperial China, her research interests are on bureaucratic, economic, and legal institutions of empire and their implications for political and social interactions in quotidian contexts. Professor Dykstra received her PhD from UCLA and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In addition, she has held numerous residential fellowships and visiting positions in Europe and Asia. Starting in Fall of 2023, Professor Dykstra will begin a new position as Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Yale University.
Yiming Ha
Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Credits
Episode No. 15
Release date: September 20, 2022
Recording location: Los Angeles, CA
Bibliography courtesy of Professor Dykstra
Images
Cover Image: Cover of Professor Dykstra's book, which can be purchased directly from the publisher or from Amazon.