Scholars of Jin history have noted a flourishing literati culture after the mid-Jin period, but excavated tombs suggest a more complicated picture. The shi, referring to literati without official titles, constituted a prominent group in Northern Song tombs, as evidenced by their epitaphs, but this group appears to have nearly vanished from the Jin tombs. To search for traces of the shi, this article comprehensively examines the social elites’ tombs with burial inscriptions and ink writings, where the shi would most likely be laid to rest. It shows that the text and paratext of epitaphs, as well as the tombs that yielded them, contain direct information about the shi and their interactions with other officials and non-official elites. Analysis of ink writings suggests that the shi played a role in the advanced literary expression in the tombs of some non-literati local elites. Examining these traces of the shi in tombs allows us to reintegrate them into broader society, investigate their interactions with other elites, and attain a more holistic understanding of Jin elite society and culture.

The “Niu–Li Factional Strife,” named after Niu Sengru (779–847) and Li Deyu (787–850), is an enduring theme in Tang history. Based on accounts of personal animosity, a narrative evolved in which Niu and Li have become the ringleaders of two factions that drew in almost all high-profile literati of the ninth century. This article revises traditional and modern narratives of the Strife by first showing that the scattered and contradictory evidence in the earliest sources does not bear out the model of a decades-long struggle between two factions. Second, it demonstrates how “Niu and Li” first arose as an emblem of Tang weakness and a rallying cry for unity within the bureaucracy under the Northern Song two centuries later. Finally, it shows how modern historians picked up the loose ends and remoulded them into a struggle between different classes against the backdrop of factious politics in Republican China.

This study sheds light on the largely unknown trajectories of the emergence of Yuan non-Han ancestry in late Qing North China. Focusing on the case of a Yuan Mongol minister's enshrinement, the article argues that the commemoration of non-Han ancestries seems to have been aroused by the two-century-long imperial project of compiling the Gazetteers of the Great Qing Empire, over the course of which the state reiterated extensive surveys of local worthies, chaste women, and martyred loyal subjects, including those from previous dynasties. Importantly, the surveys coincided with the rise of epigraphic studies that featured exhaustive epigraphic fieldwork, which gave rise to the reinterpretation and replication of Yuan epigraphy, rendering Yuan steles one of the most adamant testimonies of ancestral claims. The ancestries classified during the Qing came to coexist with modern ethnic identities classified by the Ethnic Classification Project during the mid-twentieth century.

This article begins by examining the historiography of Shanxi piaohao and asking how modernist financial discourse gradually took shape over the past century. It then counters the persistent modernist discourse and its anachronistic application to the history of piaohao and the north Chinese interior from two aspects. First, how piaohao managed to build an empire-wide financial network and facilitated flows of capital and goods during the nineteenth century. Second, how family-centered capitalist and non-capitalist histories countered piaohao's unrealized path to modern Western-style banking. This article challenges the perceived universalism of the Western European economy and adopts a Braudelian emphasis on an essential feature of the history of capitalism in a global context—that is, capitalism's unlimited flexibility and capacity for change and adaptation, as seen throughout the history of the Shanxi merchants and piaohao firms, not confined to the singular future of transformation into modern Western-style banks.

This article contributes to the hitherto limited scholarship on the Chinese federalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s by conducting a thorough investigation of its ideological underpinnings and political blueprints. It compares the federalist ideas, plans, and activism of three thinkers—Zhang Taiyan, Zhang Shizhao, and Chen Jiongming—who stood firmly against the centralist trajectory of state-building in China after 1911 and advocated the formation of a Chinese federation. It argues that Chinese federalists, instead of emulating Western models, critically engaged with a broad spectrum of ideologies—Daoism, Buddhism, social Darwinism, parliamentarianism, guild socialism, anarchism etc.—when formulating their federalist agendas. Emphasizing the Chinese tradition of self-government, which underwent reinterpretations during the late Qing and early Republican periods, this article examines the extent to which Chinese federalism presented an alternative to Western political modernity.

Burials of eminent Quanzhen masters, particularly in the form of extravagant assembly-funerals, served as the initial step in the development of a Quanzhen-style ancestor worship. This ancestor worship functioned as the bedrock of a thriving Quanzhen lineage-building movement in thirteenth-century north China. Quanzhen Daoists attributed great significance to the physical remains of a lineage's founding master and commonly conducted multiple burials of the master. Each instance of reburial presented an opportunity for specific lineage members to assert their lineage identity, as well as ownership over the founding master's spiritual and material legacy. Lineage members commonly materialized their ancestor worship through a series of memorial objects established within a hosting monastery, including tombs, statues, portraits, memorial shrines, and commemorative steles. These lineage-building efforts strengthened dynamic networks of people, monasteries, and material culture, shaping regional interactions and transformations in north China under Mongol rule.