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Abstract: I suspect this issue of HJAS is the first in the journal's long history to feature an extensive discussion of slag deposits and gangue heaps. We venture into this unfamiliar territory to highlight how an innovative coupling of humanistic and scientific research methods can challenge established historical narratives. Yuda Yang 杨煜达 and Nanny Kim present compelling evidence that silver mining occurred on a significantly greater scale than previously known during the Ming and Qing periods. They focus on mines in Yunnan and across contemporary borders into Myanmar and Vietnam during the period between about 1400 and 1850, which they reckon produced between 20,000 and 50,000 metric tons of silver destined to make its ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: details: Shō o tokashi gin to namari zu 鎔礁結銀與鉛圖, in "Gokin" 五金, in Sō Ōsei [Song Yingxing] 宋應星, Tenkō kaibutsu 天工開物, ed. Eda Masuhide 江田益 英, 18 kan 卷 in 3 sec. (maki 卷) in 9 vols. (Osaka: Kanseidō, 1771), v. 7, sec. 3 (ge 下), m. 14, pp. 8b–9a.On the cover of this issue of HJAS, we feature an illustration from Tiangong kaiwu 天工開物 (The exploitation of the works of nature), an extensive overview of Chinese technology whose author, Song Yingxing 宋應星 (1587–ca. 1665), has been lauded as the "Diderot of China" for his encyclopedic ambitions.1 Published in 1637, on the eve of the Ming's collapse, the book remained all but unknown in China until 1926, when the geologist Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 (1887–1936) brought it back from ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Silver is the great unknown in late imperial China's monetary and economic history. In the commercialized economy, silver served as a high-value money, yet traditional written sources on origins and amounts of silver in circulation in China are scarce. Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) records rarely touch on the topic. Since the imperial states never recognized silver as an official currency until the final years of the Qing, silver money was not a subject of government attention, and physiocratic ideology viewed the exploitation of underground resources as harmful to agriculture.1 Brief and generally negative mentions of silver mines have suggested the reliance of late imperial China on overseas trade for ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Like the clerics of all religions, Daoists presented their religion both to their adepts and disciples and also to a general audience. In the late imperial period (the fourteenth to early twentieth century), as in the present day, such presentation took various oral and written forms, including sermons, hagiographies, comprehensive encyclopedias, histories, apologetics, and primers. Among the latter, we may further identify "catechisms," defined here—not in the Christian sense, but in a comparative one—as concise introductions to the history of the religion, its main gods, and its ideology. In this article, I focus on one particular type of catechism, a family of texts often entitled "Daojiao yuanliu" 道教源流 (Origins ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 647, an envoy from gapi 伽毘 (Kapiśi), a kingdom in present-day eastern Afghanistan, offered to the Tang (618–907) court a plant called yujin xiang 鬱金香 (lit. fragrant gold aromatic; terminology discussed below). The leaves of the plant resemble those of Ophiopogon (maimendong 麥門冬), a genus of grass-like indigenous herbs. It flowers in the ninth month of the year, with the shape of hibiscus (furong 芙蓉). The flowers are a purplish-blue color, and their fragrance can be smelled over tens of paces. The plant flowers but does not fruit, so to grow it, one must take the root.This passage comes from Institutional History of Tang (Tang huiyao 唐會要; 961), in a section listing a host of foreign kingdoms that presented their ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Historians seem to have come full circle since the early 1970s. Quantitative history was then at the height of its popularity, bolstered by the conviction by some that statistics and numerical analysis could resolve any historical question. In the subsequent 1980s and 1990s, faith in the power of quantification fell by the wayside across the history discipline. But computation has since recovered its appeal. The rise in popularity of the digital humanities (DH) since the early 2000s is readily apparent in the frequency with which one encounters the word "digital" in scholarly publications, and in the many new periodicals in multiple languages dedicated to DH.1 Recently, several journals have even devoted special ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the last few years, Taiwan's critical role in the escalating geopolitical conflicts has brought it into the spotlight of mainstream global media, which in turn has contributed to increasing the visibility of Taiwan studies in Western academia. Embedded in the China studies field for most of the Cold War, the study of Taiwan began drifting away after the People's Republic of China (PRC) opened its doors in the late twentieth century and made obsolete the academic practice of using Taiwan as a substitute for "China proper." Institution building, however, takes time. It was not until 2018 that a reputable English-language journal dedicated to the study of Taiwan, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, was ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Just how much credence can we place in the two extant eighth-century histories of Japan, Kojiki 古事記 (Records of ancient matters) and Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (The chronicles of Japan)' There are many outstanding questions relating to the nature of their sources, their connections with continental historiography, and the process of their compilation. In his new book, John Bentley seeks to "merge linguistics with history" (p. x) to advance our understanding of these two foundational works of Japanese historical writing. Can Bentley's avowed "focus on the mechanics of writing" (p. 1) and the linguistic evidence he adduces really produce new insights'Bentley first directs our attention to writing, the technology that made ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: During the 1980s, Kim Chinse 金鎭世 of Seoul National University announced an ambitious plan to introduce the Korean public to all one hundred and eighty volumes of The Pledge at the Banquet of Moon-Gazing Pavilion (Wanwŏl hoemaeng yŏn 玩月會盟宴, hereafter The Pledge), Chosŏn Korea's longest vernacular novel, roughly five times the length of China's Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Ch. Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志 演義).1 It was only then that most contemporary Koreans learned of the existence of lineage novels (kamun sosŏl 家門小說), whose original audience was elite women of the late Chosŏn. Ksenia Chizhova's Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea is a long-anticipated and welcome response to Kim's pioneering efforts.As the first ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This thought-provoking first book by Jonathan Felt can be read, in part, as a sequel to The Construction of Space in Early China by his mentor, Mark Edward Lewis.1 Lewis argued that the emergence of the idea of a unitary "world empire" in early China necessitated the devaluing of regional cultures and identities and that the collapse of the Eastern Han empire into three successor states stimulated a revival of regional consciousness. Felt picks up this story and takes it through the early medieval period and the Sui–Tang reunification. He uses geographical writings, a genre that flourished in the early medieval period, as his main sources and analyzes them using a conceptual framework from another of his teachers ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Yoshikuni Igarashi entices readers to enter the cultural imaginary of late 1960s and early 1970s Japan in his Japan: 1972. As in his first book Bodies of Memory (2000), Igarashi structures his narrative around incisive close readings of significant cultural works as a means of exploring the imagination and aspirations of artists, audiences, and citizens.1 1972 signals a point when robust economic growth was teetering on the brink, and the hopeful social movements of the 1960s were subsiding. Accompanying these changes was the "somber realization that consumer culture and its attendant effects had taken a tight hold on Japanese society" (p. 4). Igarashi's study diverges from anglophone scholarly trends that ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Cinema and the Cultural Cold War is an engaging contradiction in that it is at once straightforward in its account and enigmatic in its theoretical positioning. The author so assiduously pursues the singular story of "the constitution of the first postwar pan-Asian cinema network during the two decades after the Korean War armistice in July 1953" (p. 4) that the narrative closure that history achieves may seem to foreclose a critical response. However, it is precisely the apparent exhaustiveness of one side of the story that Sangjoon Lee presents that should elicit certain interventions.This history is divided into two parts. "The First Network" begins and ends with The Asia Foundation (TAF), a purportedly ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Steeped in statistics and teeming with tables and charts, Hoyt Long's The Value in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age is a powerful demonstration of the value and interest of quantitative methods for literary study. Crucially, Long does not present these methods as a replacement for the slow, repeated, intensive reading of texts in all their singularity and complexity that we know and love as "close reading." Indeed, one of the great strengths of Long's book is the way it interdigitates quantitative with qualitative methods to treat questions that are of perennial interest to scholars of literature: How can literary style be described and defined' What biases are inscribed in the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Mark R. Mullins' Yasukuni Fundamentalism offers a compelling analysis of the role of religion in Japanese political life from the Occupation era (1945–1952) to the present. This work engages with the long shadow of State Shinto, which can be understood as the emperor-centric nationalist ideology (or civil religion) that the imperial Japanese government promoted prior to 1945 through patriotic education, the military, and Shinto shrines—the military-operated Yasukuni Shrine 靖國神社 in particular. As Mullins' work shows, the issues surrounding the role of Shinto in public life remain among the most contentious topics in Japanese society today.To grasp the scale of the issues raised in this work, it is helpful to know ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Éric Trombert, known to many as the author of careful studies on the material culture of medieval Dunhuang and Turfan, has offered us a capstone book, the title of which may be translated into English as "The sword and the plow: The conquest of the western regions by Chinese soldiers and peasants: the history of a failure." The "west" at the center of the book is a wide geographical area that roughly coincides with the modern Chinese provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. The "Chinese" soldiers and peasants who advanced into this area were sent and overseen by a wide variety of regimes, most of them based in the Wei 渭 River valley or the central plains. The book points to the reign of Emperor Wu 武 of Western ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In this book, David Wang focuses on Chinese-language fiction since the turn of the twenty-first century, incorporating elements of speculative fiction to address issues that have historically concerned Chinese writers and that Western philosophers in the past century have seen as significant in narrative. Wang devotes a chapter each to three themes in speculative imagination that he terms transgression (chap. 2), transmigration (chap. 3), and transillumination (chap. 4). Transgression involves stories of terrestrial or extraterrestrial aliens "whose (accidental) intrusions from outside Chinese horizons brings about a crisis of territoriality" (p. 33) as "deviant voices that contest the legal, ethical, and cognitive ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan is a fascinating and multilayered book. On the one hand, it provides an account of the massive—and for many extremely traumatic—migration that took place around the time of the end of the Chinese Civil War, when around one million people left the Chinese mainland for Taiwan. On the other hand, the book explores how those who experienced this ordeal and their descendants, typically labelled waishengren 外省人, or "mainlanders," dealt with their traumatic memories and the situation they found themselves in after coming to Taiwan. In accounting for these experiences, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang criticizes the mainstream historiography of the Chinese ... Read More PubDate: 2024-03-29T00:00:00-05:00
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