Tracing the historical forces that have shaped the contemporary political landscape and ideological terrain in South Korea, Chapter 1 examines the ways in which the “right” and “left” have been constituted and understood. The definitions of ideological and political categories in Western milieus cannot be directly applied to the South Korean context, because the ways in which the left and right are understood are historical and social constructs that vary across time and geography. The unique historical and geopolitical context of the Korean peninsula – the division of the two Koreas and the Korean War, followed by three decades of authoritarianism – made anticommunism hegemonic and produced an extremely limited ideological setting for South Korean politics. This chapter argues that, due to the conservative hegemony and the right-leaning political environment in South Korea, the far right has been understood as representing mainstream conservatism, and centrists have been cast as the radical left. Thus, the distinction between the far right and mainstream conservativism within the right is blurred in South Korea.

Illuminating the collectively held sentiments and widely shared narratives of citizens in the Taegu-Kyǒngbuk and Gangnam regions, this chapter analyzes why these citizens have unwaveringly supported the conservative party and explains the spatial and popular basis of the right in South Korea. I argue that these citizens’ conservative political orientation and voting behaviors are shaped by the places where they interact daily with other members in their communities and cultivate a shared political identity. Using the two terms nostalgic loyalists and privileged materialists, I compare two primary conservative constituencies. The former share strong pride of place in Taegu-Kyǒngbuk as the hometown of the national modernizer Park Chung Hee and as the engine of rapid economic development during the Park Chung Hee regime, while the latter enjoy a sense of superiority and exclusivity deriving from living in Gangnam, a neighborhood that symbolizes wealth and cultured lifestyles.

In 1914 a new account of the revolt at Meerut appeared, authored by the erstwhile Mughal courtier Zahir Dehlvi. Dehlvi’s account, in Urdu, described a heated conversation between the rebel cavalrymen, fresh from Meerut, and the aged Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar – whom the cavalrymen wished to elevate as the symbolic leader of their revolt. According to Dehlvi, the emperor, appalled at the reports of indiscriminate killing of the British at Meerut, asked what had possessed the men to behave in such a barbaric manner. The soldiers told the emperor about the offensive cartridge episode and the subsequent court-martial and imprisonment of their brethren. They pointed in particular to the “reckless” gender-inversion taunts of local women, which acted like fuel on fire and drove the cavalrymen mad with a desire for manly revenge. Significantly, Dehlvi described the women not as prostitutes of the bazaar but as “the women whose men had been imprisoned.” The chapter also examines the process of Dehlvi’s coming into possession of the story and, further, describes his escape from Dehli and years of wandering before ultimately settling in Hyderabad in the Deccan.

Chapter 2 introduces the field site. It provides a historic overview of Heyang village and provides “a ‘guided tour’” of the village’s principal tourist area, the ancient heritage dwellings complex, guminju, a nationally recognized and protected heritage site. It takes a brief detour into the village’s history, stretching as far back as the Five Dynasties era (AD 907-960), the period in which the village was supposedly ‘founded’ by Zhu Qingyuan, a high-ranking gentry who fled the imperial court to avoid being embroiled in war. Revered as the apical ancestor of the Heyang Zhu Clan, the discussion of Zhu rejoins the twenty-first century, where these historic tales of ‘origins’ are told and sold as part of the ‘xiangchou Heyang’ tourism brand. The development of Heyang’s tourism industry is discussed to highlight its transformation from its fledgling grassroots iteration in the mid-1990s, to becoming a developmental priority for the county government in the 2010s.

Chapter 4 describes Heyang as a migrant sending community, built upon and even sustained by migrants’ homesickness. These migration patterns are deeply entangled with the local duck farming industry, and ’duck tales’ told by locals who have personally engaged in the industry at various stages of their lives are highlighted. Informants’ reflections on the significance of duck breeding reinforces the importance of cyclical migration through different stages of a rapidly transforming China. However, four recent ’returnees’ explain how this industry was proving to be unsustainable because of local, national, and global processes of change by the mid-2010s. They each returned to Heyang to work in the ‘Xiangchou Tourism’ industry as tour guides and security guards. Their stories provide insight into the complex emotions that underscore their respective returns to the hometown, ranging from comfort and familiarity to perpetual feelings of precarity due to lingering debts, unstable livelihoods, and uncertain futures.

Chapters 1 and 2 suggest that prostitutes not only had a significant presence in the north Indian military cantonment, especially in the hybrid space of the sadr bazaar, but exercised an outsized degree of social influence. This is confirmed by police records from north Indian cantonment towns, including Meerut, examined in this chapter. While the historical literature on colonial India to date has emphasized the official subjection, suppression, and immiseration of prostitutes, especially in the wake of the contagious disease acts of the 1860s, a survey of police records from the 1850s suggest that prostitutes possessed a secure place in the cantonment, and in the official mind, and were even deemed worthy of official protection from criminal persecution. These points are situated in the context of violent crime against women generally, in which the state took an active interest, as well as the officially disfavored slave traffic in girls and young women. The 1850s emerges as an extended moment of transition between the early-modern figure of the urbane tawāif (courtesan) and the marginalized, scandalous figure of the cantonment kasbi (prostitute).

On the afternoon of May 9, eighty-five skirmishers of the Bengal 3rd Light Cavalry were subjected to an “ironing parade”: In front of their comrades, they were stripped of their uniforms, placed in shackles, and marched off to jail. On the next day the revolt began. According to an official report, the spark for the violence was the haranguing of the remainder of the regiment on the previous night by local prostitutes (so-called frail ones) of the sadr bazaar, who challenged the soldiers’ manhood for not defying the British and freeing their brothers in arms. This chapter examines how the gender-inversion taunts of the prostitutes became a staple of “Mutiny historiography” and gradually found its way into the immensely popular “Mutiny fiction” of Flora Annie Steel, only to ricochet back into modern historical scholarship. The chapter also considers an important, competing set of depositions by sadr bazaar “Cashmerians” (high-status concubine-prostitutes), collected by the police superintendent for the North-Western Provinces, indicating that news of an impending revolt was circulating mere hours before the onset of violence.