This article explores information management in the Qing government, and the challenges confronted by the Qing authorities, through the prism of imperial maps of Xinjiang. To ensure that newly gathered geographical knowledge of Xinjiang was usable for the emperor and senior officials, technocrats and artisans in the Imperial Household Department collaborated with the Jesuits and border officials to produce maps that materialized it. Because of their utility in military campaigns and everyday governance, these maps were carefully maintained by the Imperial Household Department, which discreetly distributed them to a small coterie of Manchu and Mongol statesmen. Nevertheless, information leakage from the lower echelons of the bureaucracy challenged the department's monopoly and popularized knowledge of Xinjiang among the Han literati.

By examining a series of events involving sightings of multicolored clouds and discoveries of colorful minerals in China's southwestern provinces, this article considers the political implications of natural manifestations of polychromy in the Yongzheng period. Through previously unexamined written and material correspondence between governor-general Ortai (1680–1745) and the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–35), I argue that physical occurrences of color, both above and below ground, were understood as signs of Heavenly approval of the emperor's governance at a time of questionable military expansion into the Southwest. I also consider how celestial phenomena and colorful stones were translated into design motifs and carved into exclusive items at the Qing court, positing that these objects were understood as signs of the Yongzheng emperor's political legitimacy and concrete evidence of Qing control over the remote reaches of the empire.

This article narrates the history of Belgian Sinology both before and since the birth of Sinology (1814) and of Belgium (1830). The overview also embraces a broader group of scholars by including Sinologists who were from Belgium but did not necessarily work there. The first part of the article focuses on Sinological practices by the early missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second part covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until the Open-Door Policy of the 1970s. This part combines a broad chronological perspective with the history of individual persons and institutions. It includes topics such as the development of oriental studies and studies of religion, the teaching of Chinese language for commercial reasons, and the establishment of Chinese and Oriental institutes within and outside the universities.

During the century of massive expansion of the Qin state in China (ca. 316–222 BCE), and the subsequent fifteen years of the empire (221–207 BCE), it is recorded that millions of persons were forcibly relocated and resettled throughout the empire and along its frontiers. For example, the historian Sima Qian (ca. 145–86 BCE) states that in just the years between 213 and 210 BCE, the First Emperor relocated more than a million people from interior counties of the empire to settle newly-conquered lands on the northern and southern frontiers. Yet this was only one type of forced resettlement carried out by the Qin. The Qin state also relocated thousands of aristocratic households from conquered states to the Qin capital of Xianyang, captured large numbers of non-Chinese peoples and assigned them to localities as slaves to open up agricultural land, exiled wealthy iron industrialists from the interior to the periphery, intentionally expelled the entire populations of conquered cities to replace them with amnestied criminals, and pooled and redirected the labor of convicts gathered from throughout the empire to labor on huge projects such as the First Emperor's tomb. This article seeks to analyze and categorize these various Qin forced resettlements to uncover the ideological and policy motivations behind them and the role they played in the larger project of Qin imperial expansion and colonization.

Much of our knowledge of women and warfare in medieval China comes from biographical/narrative genres of a retrospective nature. This article shifts the focus to an underutilized corpus: imperial documents conferring titles and rewards on women who commanded troops. I examine how the court described these women when it came to honor them, or even when it sought their support through real-time negotiation. In these cases, the recognition of women's achievements was conditioned not only by deep cultural/literary traditions but also by immediate political/military goals of the regime. As a result of the concrete political need to engage with female commanders, medieval Chinese courts deployed different approaches to eulogize them. My investigation shows that closer dialogue between gender studies and official document studies will lead to a more dynamic picture of how a patriarchal regime actually functioned in premodern China.

The way late imperial political elites in China positioned themselves in the tianxia—their life world—can be described as a balance between polity and locality, which was often accompanied by an enduring sense of local identity. This article argues that despite the fall of the tianxia concept in modern China, the age-old locality–polity relationship and the elite local identity did not disappear. Taking the flourishing local gazetteer production of the Republican era as a case, I suggest that instead of suppressing locality, the crisis of the polity and the coming of the nation-state in China brought it more to the foreground. The decline of locality in China's political culture occurred only after the communist takeover. The study makes use of the Local Gazetteer Research Tools (LoGaRT) developed by Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences.

This article provides a contextual analysis of an enigmatic object—dubbed the “Confucius Dressing Mirror” (Kongzi yijing 孔子衣鏡)—recently unearthed from the tomb of Liu He 劉賀 (Marquis of Haihun 海昏侯, d. 59 BCE) in 2015. I raise questions about the prevailing identification of this object as a “dressing mirror” and a “lived object,” used by Liu He for moral self-cultivation or political self-preservation in his volatile life as the deposed ninth emperor of Han. Instead, I treat the object as an assemblage and analyze its complete material composition and physical placement in Liu He's tomb in the broader context of funerary material culture and burial practice in early imperial China. I propose that the entombed object can be considered as a composite talisman to protect the deceased against baleful and harmful influences in the tomb and in his afterlife. Methodologically, this article stresses the importance of contextual analysis in shedding light on the traditional conceptual categories such as “lived object” (shengqi 生器) and “funerary objects” (mingqi 明器) in actual funerary ritual processes.

This article explores the shoreline industries (oysters, salt, fish, lime) that emerged along the Laufaushan coast in Hong Kong's New Territories, in the period 1667 to 1978. The shoreline in question was controlled by a local security force, staffed by young men from a nearby lineage. The study draws on ethnographic research carried out by the author and local documents (of village and government origin) gathered on site.

This article underscores the impact of the Qing dynasty’s war making capacity and organization on non-military areas. Following a brief account of the Qing military establishment and its major operations in the first half of the dynasty, i.e., 1640–1800, it explores several important examples of how Qing military institutions interacted with the civil bureaucracy and society at large. First, through the practice of appointing officials across the divide between the civil and military bureaucracies, military personnel penetrated into the domain of the civil state apparatus, quietly transforming the Qing government’s makeup. Second, Qing military costs deeply influenced the distribution of dynastic financial resources and general administration at all levels. Finally, the Qing’s wartime logistical system engaged both the civil bureaucracy and society, opening many opportunities for both civil bureaucracy personnel and the private sector, which in turn re-shaped the local socio-economic landscape.

The mobilization of women pursued by the Women's Advisory Committee (Funü zhidao weiyuanhui 婦女指導委員會) during the war against Japan (1937–1945) has mainly been associated with the wider war effort in the country and resistance to the enemy. This article takes a different viewpoint and argues that the programs implemented by women activists in this committee looked beyond the immediate wartime necessity and tried to secure also long-term gains for women. The mobilization transcended traditional gender roles of wives and mothers and paid particular attention to the involvement of middle- and lower-class women. This article examines women's activism and mobilization in the context of three main areas: first, the women's cadre training in the wartime capital Chongqing and in provinces and counties across China; second, the national economic production; and third, the literacy campaigns conducted among women factory workers. It concludes that women activists knowingly used the wartime crisis to provide fellow women with the tools for securing economic and social independence while addressing the wartime emergencies.

This is a case study of Han Qi (1008–1075), one of the most influential statesmen in the Northern Song. Drawing on his funerary biographical work and other writing, it places at the forefront Han's family life and relationships, especially his role as a brother, uncle, and family head. The goal of the study is threefold: first, to establish Han as a “family man,” in contrast to his conventional image as an outstanding political figure; second, to illustrate how seemingly random occurrences shaped Han's life and fortune in significant ways. Finally, this essay aims to enrich scholarly understanding of family preservation in the Northern Song. For many years, the possibility of the Hans failing in this regard remained a source of anxiety for Han Qi. This fear shaped his interaction with members of the younger generations in tangible ways and created noticeable undertones in his writing on family matters.

Chinese conservatism is often reduced to a cultural movement the main concern of which is the preservation of traditional culture. This article proposes a new framework with which to analyze modern Chinese conservatism. It identifies late Qing culturalist nationalism, which incorporates traditional culture into concrete political reforms inspired by modern Western politics, as the origin of conservatism in the Republican era. Conservatism in this period was a reaction against New Culture activists’ denial of the political utility of this culturalist nationalism and constituted a response to World War I, leading some to question the merits of Western civilization. As a result, tradition no longer unitarily evoked the cultural elements corresponding to modern Western politics. Adopting a typological approach in order to distinguish different types of conservatism by differentiating various political implications of traditional culture, it divides the Chinese conservatism of the Republican era into four typologies: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarian conservatism.

This article makes visible the complex social position of a previously overlooked class of Southern Song artists: freelance painters, who worked for the imperial court on a temporary, as-needed basis, but who have been mischaracterized as permanent, official “court painters” by post-Song historiographers. Through an analysis of the careers of freelance painters such as Chen Qingbo and Li Dong, I posit a hybrid class of adjunct-artists, who made their livings by operating fan shops in the capital's streets but at times also contracted with the court. How did the emperor exploit contingent artists while simultaneously allowing market agents (guilds and brokers) to protect their benefits? How did the freelance painters increase their profits by developing entrepreneurial relations with the court and by competing with other freelancers in a fierce market? By exploring how the Southern Song court mobilized non-court painters through consensual contracts, this article differentiates freelancers from court painters, thereby dismantling long-held myths about the Southern Song painting academy.