I have written this essay to address what I regard as a pressing need among China historians for a stronger model of climate change and its impact on state and society during the imperial period. We have all become acutely conscious of climate change as an element of our own world, yet few of us have considered the impact of climate, particularly climate change, on our subjects of study. China is not without its climate historians, and yet the collective research is still in an early phase. Aware of this problem for some time, I published preliminary findings in the form of a chronological profile of climate anomalies through the Yuan and Ming dynasties in 2010. Burying my findings in a textbook has meant that the periodization offered there has captured the interest of some students but gone largely ignored by scholars in the field. Since then I have done further research and have revised some of those findings, and would now like to offer a fuller presentation of methods and findings.

Human activity has eliminated many of the natural lowland ecosystems of the Middle and Lower Yellow River Valley, and has modified the rest, making it difficult to understand what species are native to the region. As a step towards the reconstruction of these lost environments, this paper employs zooarchaeological and other evidence to identify the native mammals of the region. We provide basic ecological information about these animals and discuss controversial or difficult cases in more depth. Our goal is not only to study China's environmental history, but also to make clear that conventional understandings of species ranges are based on the distributions of animals in the modern period, when many had already been eliminated from large areas by human activity.

How did the Tang political elite evolve between the seventh and ninth centuries? Using network analysis and a large prosopographic database, this article approaches this question from four perspectives: the marriage network of political elites, the backgrounds of chief ministers, the composition of the capital elite during three time slices, and the makeup of the provincial elite. Despite important continuities in the elite marriage network's basic structure, there were also significant discontinuities. Between the seventh and eighth centuries, Luoyang emerged as a secondary political center, and Luoyang-based families—including so-called “marriage-ban” clans—acquired a renewed significance, partly at the expense of old southern clans, whose political significance declined over the course of the dynasty. In addition, the political divide between capital and provinces grew over time, culminating in the ninth century with capital-based men occupying nearly all significant provincial posts and provincials serving only locally and in second-tier offices.

We introduce the China Government Employee Database—Qing (CGED-Q), a new resource for the quantitative study of Qing officialdom. The CGED-Q details the backgrounds, characteristics and careers of Qing officials who served between 1760 and 1912, with nearly complete coverage of officials serving after 1830. We draw information on careers from the Roster of Government Personnel (jinshenlu), which in each quarterly edition listed approximately 12,500 regular civil offices and their holders in the central government and the provinces. Information about backgrounds and characteristics comes from such linked sources as lists of exam degree holders. In some years, information on military officials is also available. As of February 2020, the CGED-Q comprises 3,817,219 records, of which 3,354,897 are civil offices and the remainder are military. In this article we review the progress and prospects of the project, introduce the sources, transcription procedures, and constructed variables, and provide examples of results to showcase its potential.

DocuSky is a personal digital humanities platform for humanities scholars, which aims to become a platform on which a scholar can satisfy all her digital needs with no direct IT assistance. To this end, DocuSky provides tools for a scholar to download material from the Web and prepare (annotating, building metadata) her material, a one-click function to build a full-text searchable database, and tools for analysis and visualization. DocuSky advocates the separation of digital content and tools. Being an open platform, it encourages IT developers to build tools to suit scholars’ needs, and it has already incorporated several popular Web resources and external tools into its environment. Interoperability is ensured through the format DocuXML. In addition to describing the design principles of DocuSky, we will show its main features, together with several important tools and examples. DocuSky was originally developed for Sinological studies. We are enriching it to work in other languages.

Biographies constitute the main historical record of China. The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is an important project that tackles this vast biographical material with digital technologies. With both online and offline versions, CBDB is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis, as well as serving as biographical reference. Through the wide range of data it collects through mining historical texts and reference sources, CBDB offers multiple ways to examine the lives of past groups and individuals in Chinese history. The use of CBDB data for prosopographical and other types of analysis has generated important work that interprets Chinese history in new ways, and has also fostered new forms of digital humanities collaborations. This article introduces the history of the CBDB project and its methods for populating its biographical data. It also presents the ways that historians and other scholars could utilize its data for research and teaching.

The burial of war dead was a key element of displacement and community formation during wartime and postwar China and Taiwan, 1937–1955. Reckoning with the physical burial and spiritual pacification of civilian as well as military dead posed practical and epistemological problems for the tens of millions forced to migrate amid shifting political and military boundaries. Various populations of living and dead refugees became increasingly politicized on the national and international levels, affecting local rituals and family burials. The accumulation of unidentified or lost bodies raised the stakes for the incorporation of the known dead into local, translocal, or national communities. The moral imperative of families and lineages to reconstitute themselves in the aftermath of war was made concrete via the extensive networks of locally-identified charitable organizations who worked to transport coffins back “home” from China's interior. The Nationalist government, meanwhile, prioritized symbolic control over military heroes in ways that ignored or eschewed burial and family ritual. The KMT and those who fled with them to Taiwan in 1949 were then cut off from their national as well as family graves, and struggled to find ritual and practical methods of overcoming or temporarily ameliorating political boundaries, geographic distance, and the passage of time.

In ancient China, as elsewhere, states did not simply occupy a given territory but actively engaged in the production of space by transforming landscapes, moving populations, and enacting territorial hierarchies, thus creating “state spaces,” to borrow a term coined by James C. Scott. In the case of the early Chinese empires of Qin (221–207 BCE) and Han (202 BCE–220 CE), state-induced migration and settlement were key instruments of military control, administrative incorporation, economic intensification, and other processes connected with spatial distribution of state power. This article combines insights from transmitted texts, excavated documents, and archaeological evidence to explore factors and effects of migration in early Chinese empires, discussing the interconnection between state-organized resettlement and private migration as well as their embeddedness in the local geography. As the situation varies according to location, the present article introduces the approach and tests it on a case study, the Guanzhong metropolitan region.

Historians have long aspired to see beyond the rise and fall of dynasties to the longue durée and the major changes over time in Chinese society. The five empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated books discussed in this essay all share this goal. While they make distinct contributions, they have in common close attention to the relationships between the state, the elite, and local institutions between the late Tang and Qing periods. Reading them together encourages rethinking the state-and-society issues that historians have been debating for a generation. In this essay, after a brief summary of each book's major contributions, I suggest ways they help us conceptualize the long-term processes of continuity and change from the late Tang to the Qing.

This article gives an overview of the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), including its development, technical features, methodology, and examples of research applications by members of the Tu 圖 working group. The use of LoGaRT is illustrated with four brief introductions to projects that draw on visual materials from the local gazetteers, including ritual-related illustrations, city layout maps, and maps with western cartographic features. See the websites for more detailed information on LoGaRT and other research projects using it.1

In the past two decades, increasing attention has been paid to the significance of the fiscal capacity of the premodern state to promote or retard economic growth. In particular, scholarship on economic history has stressed the positive impact the emergence of the “fiscal state” had in enhancing economic growth in early modern Europe. Comparative studies have contrasted the administrative efficiency of the emerging European fiscal state with contemporary Asian empires (the Ottomans, Mughals, and the Ming and Qing empires in China). But the Ming-Qing state represents only one version of Chinese state formation under the Chinese empire. This article identifies four basic types of fiscal state that appeared between the Qin unification and the Ming-Qing era, analyzes their ideological foundations, and assesses their implications for economic growth.

The question of Chu's cultural affinity perplexed—and continues to perplex—traditional and modern scholars. Some view it as the cultural Other of the Zhou world, while others believe that this state fundamentally belonged to the Zhou cultural sphere. The difficulty in assessing Chu's cultural trajectory derives in not a small measure from the bias of traditional sources, all of which were composed or compiled in the northern and eastern parts of the Zhou world. Yet recently discovered Chu historical manuscripts allow us to overcome this “northeastern bias.” How much do the newly available texts display—if at all—a distinct Chu identity? Do they present an alternative version of Chu history? Who were their audience? By answering these questions I hope both to revisit the question of Chu's relations to the Zhou (“Chinese”) world, and to put forward novel understandings of the usages of history writing in preimperial China.

Systemic attention to military institutions sharpens our understanding of the Ming dynasty in comparative, global terms and yields a fuller perspective on the state and its role in people’s lives. First, the Ming dynasty devoted more resources, in absolute terms, to its military enterprise than any other contemporary power. It maintained enormous standing armies that drilled regularly, empire-wide logistical systems, welfare provisions for military dependents and retired or injured military personnel, and multi-tiered, standardized arms productions under state supervision. Western European states were just starting to achieve such capacity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Second, focused on civil administration, such as taxes, labor service, magistrates, land surveys, tithing communities, and mutual responsibility organizations, past scholarship has largely ignored how the state’s extensive military institutions both shaped society and served as resources that people used to advance their personal, family, and community interests.

MARKUS, a multilingual digital text annotation and analysis platform, allows historians and other researchers to construct datasets from primary sources available to them in full-text digital format. Originally designed for those working with pre-twentieth-century Chinese texts, MARKUS has developed into a multifunctional annotation platform that is particularly suited for the automated annotation, referencing, and visualization of named entities in modern and literary Chinese and premodern Korean texts, but many of its additional annotation features can be used to analyze and read texts in any language, as long as the electronic documents are encoded in the most common standard for language encoding, Unicode. Below I discuss the main goals and methodological features of MARKUS and the allied text comparison utility COMPARATIVUS. I will illustrate these with some examples of how MARKUS has been used in Chinese and Korean historical research.

This essay explores the non-luxury materialities through which most people experienced the world, argues for the possibilities of a geographically based view of Ming and Qing material history, and demonstrates some methods for approaching hard-to-find sources. It is my contention that not only will learning about and paying attention to such regional materialities open up new areas of research, but historians will also become better equipped to assess what we think we know about “China.” Here, I will concentrate on the geologically homogeneous region of the Greater North China Plain and focus on temple buildings, ritual vessels, and images of gods.

A brief introduction to historical Geographic Information Systems and the creation of the China Historical GIS. Introductions are given to the CHGIS datasets covering 221 BCE to 1911 and the many GIS datasets on nineteenth and twentieth century China created under the leadership of the late G. William Skinner.

The North China Famine of 1876–1879 has received some attention recently, but little of this work has focused on the north-western province of Shaanxi. This imbalance is reflected in the local histories that devote far more space to the documentation and commemoration of the Hui rebellion than to the famine. This paper argues that the drought of those years and the ensuing famine is historically much more significant than this biased documentation would suggest, and that the rebellion can only be fully understood by paying attention to the environmental and social conditions in which it unfolded. Further, the paper engages with Mike Davis’s argument that portrays the famine in China as part of a ‘late-Victorian holocaust.’ While persuasive, his focus on outside forces is problematic as it ignores the history of the Qing Empire as an expanding force in itself and inadvertently reinforces the victimization narrative that dominates modern Chinese historiography.

The widespread availability of digitized premodern textual sources – together with increasingly sophisticated means for their manipulation – has brought enormous practical benefits to scholars whose work relies upon reference to their contents. While great progress has been made with the construction of ever more comprehensive database systems and archives, far more remains not only possible but also realistically achievable in the near future. This paper discusses some of the key challenges faced, and progress made towards solving them, in the context of a widely used open digital platform attempting to expand the range of digitized sources available while simultaneously increasing the scope of meaningful tasks that can be performed with them computationally. This paper aims to suggest how seemingly simple human-mediated additions to the digitized historical record – when combined with the power of digital systems to repeatedly perform mechanical tasks at enormous scales – quickly lead to transformative changes in the feasible scope of computational analysis of premodern writing.

This article examines the early history and evolution of the concept of jiaohua (教化 “educational transformation”) as a reference to civilizing missions in China. It explores Ru (Confucian) concepts advocating the widespread education of the masses, showing how such concepts were linked to notions of ethnicity and moral attainment. Then it contextualizes the first uses of educational transformation in writings concerning statecraft. Xunzi emerges as a pivotal figure who helped adapt the statecraft rhetoric on educational transformation to the largely Ru goal of spreading a morally superior Huaxia culture among the masses and to peoples of other cultures. I then move beyond this conceptual history to examine a few civilizing missions in the Han era. My purpose is to link large-scale, civilizing missions in Chinese history with the early philosophical rhetoric and show how history was shaped by these underlying conceptual orientations.

This article engages critically with William Rowe's notion of an “alternative economic discourse” linking the market-consciousness shown in some aspects of Dong Wei's approach to famine relief in the Song dynasty to that which informed many subsistence-policy discussions and some aspects of bureaucratic practice during the high Qing. The longevity of the discursive tradition is shown to be understated if we start with Dong Wei, but it is also taken as an interpretative challenge. Comparison with the case of ancien régime France is used to suggest an alternative conceptualization that enables us to differentiate between (1) a mainstream tradition of conventionally accepted market-conscious prescriptions that were not perceived as challenging Confucian moralism, and (2) avant-garde departures. A review of the arguments used down the centuries to justify distributing famine relief in monetary form is used to pinpoint one such departure and to reflect on its significance in a multi-century perspective.