The Ming dynasty’s survival depended on locating and employing men with the ability to direct military forces, and contemporary observers were deeply concerned with the nexus of command, troop morale, and dynastic fighting capacity. This essay focuses on the years following the Tumu Crisis of 1449, a time when dynastic authorities were particularly alive to issues of military ability, and it draws on the perspectives of two men, the Minister of War, Yu Qian 于謙 (1398–1457), and another more junior official, Ye Sheng 葉盛 (1420–72). The essay offers a snapshot of how military ability was defined, cultivated, assessed, and rewarded. Further, it suggests that, read carefully, the writings of Ye Sheng and Yu Qian not only offer insight into the views of elite civil officials but also shed light, however faint and wavering, on military labor and working conditions for those who fought and commanded for a living.

Delving into fraternal succession, intermarriage practices, and levirate marriages of the Northern Qi dynasty (550–577), this article demonstrates that these practices served as pillars of stability for the imperial family. In this exploration, Empress Dowager Lou 婁太后 (501–562) emerges as the central figure behind these practices, playing a pivotal role in their implementation and wielding immense power as kingmaker. Starting from before the official reign of the Northern Qi, she personally chose her husband, laid the groundwork for him to become regent of the preceding Eastern Wei (534–550) court, and controlled the succession system to seat her own sons as emperors of the Northern Qi. Drawing on her Xianbei 鮮卑 roots, Empress Dowager Lou enforced an agenda of Inner Asian practices and politics in her pursuit to consolidate the rule and identity of the Northern Qi imperial family.

This article examines professional diviners employed by the Qing (1636–1912) government to assist in local administration. Known as yin-yang officers, these officials served among the technical and religious specialists embedded in prefectural and county governments across the empire. Although they held marginal or unranked positions within the formal bureaucracy, yin-yang officers played a vital role in both administrative and ritual life at the grassroots level. By tracing their training, sources of authority, and everyday responsibilities, this article sheds light on the Qing’s local technical and religious bureaucracy—an often-overlooked dimension of imperial statecraft that bridged ritual, cosmological knowledge, healing and divination, and official governance. It argues for the importance of examining imperial bureaucracy from below, showing how these unsalaried, low-level figures helped sustain the empire’s overstretched administrative apparatus well into the early twentieth century.

This article examines how statecraft (jingshi 經世) policies were implemented in the Late Qing period. It focuses on Dai Zhaochen, a prefect who served in Shandong and Guangdong in the 1860s. Dai was from a noted family of officials and had numerous “weak ties” with prominent jingshi officials. One of his handbooks, this paper shows, drew primarily on the Collected Statecraft Writings from the Qing Dynasty (Huangchao jingshi wenbian 皇朝經世文編). In office, Dai adapted policies from it and other collections, appealing to practicability and simplicity as the criteria for policymaking. More generally, he insisted that he was just a humble practitioner of the art of governance. The conclusion reflects on that disavowal, arguing that existing definitions of “statecraft” do not attend to Dai’s core concerns. I propose, therefore, that we stop seeking an essential definition of “statecraft” and instead pursue a broader socio-intellectual history of policy in the Qing.

How did one become an astronomer in imperial China? Where did one start? What texts did would-be astronomers study, and what criteria did they have to meet? Combining the regulation of the Yuan (1271–1368) Bureau of Astronomy with biographies of astronomers who worked in different sections of the Bureau, this paper explores the physical, technical, and literary skills required for this profession in late medieval China. It underscores the pivotal role of family in training astronomers and offers fresh insights into the relationship between bureaucracy and science in imperial China.

This is an essay about the high-Qing imperial house through the prism of a series of eleven munificent actions that subordinated the interests of the public exchequer to image-manufacture, monarchical self-assertion and monarchical self-positioning within the royal descent-line. Scrutiny of the edicts announcing the ten major revenue sacrifices (six universal land-tax remissions, four remissions of the tribute grain) and the famous freezing of the ding quotas shows an attenuation of public-policy content as acts of fiscal grace became accompaniments of personal life-cycle celebrations. The essay probes the edict at the midpoint of this transition to propose an interpretation of the Qianlong emperor’s rashness in proclaiming the one risky universal tax remission, that of 1745. It assesses Qianlong’s attempts to position himself as his munificent grandfather’s inheritor and draws on context and intercultural comparison to portray a young ruler preoccupied with self-actualization and self-differentiation from a father he somewhat resembled.

This article investigates tax disputes between Luyi County, Henan Province, and its two neighboring counties during the Qing. It shows that the Qing central government and the provincial authorities allowed local governments to use an expedient scheme called “equal sharing” to fulfill tax quotas on a particular type of farming land—the former princely estates of the Ming that became known as “renamed lands.” In Luyi local elites’ fight against the perceived unfair tax practice, local gazetteers played an important role as evidence in the disputes and as reminders of the unresolved issue for Luyi people. In the final analysis, this case study points to the Qing state’s flexibility in fulfilling the land tax quotas, while attempting to keep transaction costs low and revenue sources sustainable, both of which were ironically conditioned by its limited tax basis and therefore its limited administrative capacity.

In the early modern period, the waters of East and Southeast Asia saw a bustling maritime trade. To conduct this trade, ships needed competent sailors to safely travel between ports. Chinese sources name one person as particularly important: the huozhang 火長. The sources tell us that the huozhang were charged to use the compass and, employing sailing manuals, to guide ships in the correct direction. In this role, they had to work closely with other sailors, such as duogong 舵工 (steersmen). This article reconstructs the role and function of the navigating personnel on Chinese ships, as well as the tools they used to determine course in the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth century.

One difficulty in studying “astronomers” and “mathematicians” as distinct classes in ancient China is that the important ones were neither specialists nor professionals, but polymaths, with little to distinguish them from any other intellectual. Another difficulty, confounding any modern taxonomy, is the tight relationship between astronomy, mathematics, Classical exegesis, and ritual. This article uses the thousands of lost and extant works cataloged under discrete emic categories in the Hanshu, Suishu, and Jiu Tangshu bibliographic treatises to weigh the place of the sciences and their practitioners vis-à-vis other contemporary forms of knowledge and, using polymathy as a vector, to map the connectivity and clusters between fields. It presents numerous findings about relative anonymity, fame, productivity, and the fields in which “scientists” were most implicated, but its principal interest is in proposing a method to sidestep modern observer’s categories.

Having conquered a vast multi-lingual domain, the Mongols needed to devise a means of communication with the population. In earlier Chinese dynasties, individuals had translated Buddhist texts, treaties, and commercial agreements, but the Mongols in China founded government agencies and recruited Chinese and non-Chinese interpreters and translators to provide these services. Attempting to unify his lands, Khubilai Khan, who founded the Yuan dynasty, commissioned ‘Phags-pa, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, to develop a written script that could be used for many languages. Despite repeated injunctions from the Yuan court, the script was used almost solely for such government issuances as paper money, seals, and paiza, objects which were markers of status or permission for a variety of activities or to ensure safe passage through the Mongol domains. Linguistic unity, via the ‘Phags-pa script or a lingua franca eluded the Mongols, although Persian and Turkic were employed for specific purposes. The succeeding Ming dynasty learned from the Mongols of the need for translators and interpreters and established colleges of translators and interpreters.

Established studies show that after the fall of the capital-based elites during the end of the Tang dynasty, the Northern Song literati became active in serving the central government. However, after the century-long Interregnum (878–978), during which literati from the South remained beyond the rule of the Central Plains dynasties, how did they establish a cooperative relationship with the emerging Song court? Taking Puyang in Fujian as an example, this article analyzes the writings of Puyang literati to illustrate how their narratives shaped political relationships between the center and periphery. It demonstrates how literati responded variously to specific political contexts, sometimes showcasing their own local identity and at other times extolling the rule of the Central Plains. The case of Puyang reveals that the challenging political environment of the Interregnum actually stimulated and accelerated cooperation between the Central Plains and the local literati through civil service examinations.

Southwest China is a region that has been perhaps uniquely shaped over the longue durée by mutual appropriations of status, authority, land, material culture, genealogies, and cultural-historical identities. Drawing on both ethnographic fieldwork and the official and unofficial Chinese and Nuosu-Yi textual evidence, in this article I offer a new view of how, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, native officials were shaped by their efforts at appropriating elements of officialdom (responsibility towards the court) and nativeness (adherence to local customs). My historical textual-cum-anthropological analysis builds on C. Patterson Giersch’s notion of the “middle grounds” between the Chinese state and its borderland peoples to reveal “further ways” of uncovering the history of their history. I show that mutual appropriations of officialdom and nativeness have led to specific forms of acculturation that are neither linear nor irreversible. Cultural hybridizations underpin the current Yi core identity and culture in Liangshan today.

The founding emperor of the Han envisioned the noble rank (lie hou) as a system rewarding “merit” (gong) that mainly referred to military achievements. However, the criteria for granting the noble rank changed considerably throughout the Han. This is reflected by the various categories of nobles in the Han shu tables: meritorious ministers (gongchen hou), the kings’ sons (wangzi hou), and the imperial affines and favorites (waiqi enze hou), as well as the new category of eunuch nobles (huanzhe hou) in the Eastern Han. This article argues that the Han shu tables should be read as one of the multiple narratives about the noble rank and merit during the Han rather than an objective statistical summary. Whereas the Han shu tables emphasize Gaozu’s original definition of merit, the imperial edicts granting the noble rank kept reinterpreting merit to serve the court’s contemporary needs. Recently excavated Han manuscripts provide a third way of viewing merit based on the length of service.

Resurrecting the lost voices of Chinese scouts, who served society in the early stage of China’s War of Resistance, this article examines the militarization and politicization of Chinese scouting. After 1927, international scouting adapted to the militant and quasi-fascist ideologies promoted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang or GMD). This, in turn, prompted a radicalization of the concept of citizenship among the scouts. The article illuminates this shift and reveals that the ultra-nationalistic sentiment cultivated by the GMD resulted in some scouts compelling ordinary people to behave patriotically. The scouts’ voluntary service worked hand in hand with the GMD’s authoritarian influence in Shanghai’s foreign concessions. They played a vanguard role in the early months of the war, working as kidnappers and intimidators for the GMD. The scouts’ violent and coercive tactics contradicted the long-held principles laid down by Robert Baden-Powell. Their actions outside of the civilian roles assigned to them disillusioned expatriate observers.

In the late twelfth century, four Chinese stonemasons migrated to Japan from the Chinese coastal city of Ningbo. They participated in the most important contemporary building project in Japan—the reconstruction of the prestigious Tōdaiji monastery in Nara following the Genpei War. Drawing on Chinese and Japanese textual records, archaeological evidence from the quarry sites, and the existing stone works, this study investigates the network that facilitated the movement of the artisans and their materials between China and Japan and sheds light on the relationship between artisans and religious monuments from a transnational perspective. This study explores how the migrant artisans’ expertise and connections enabled them to establish roots in a new society. Additionally, it examines the timing of the artisans’ migration within the broader context of Japan’s societal transformations, aiming to highlight the connectivity fostered by maritime networks in premodern East Asia.

In considering Huo Tao’s Family Admonitions, a text included in a lineage genealogy of the early sixteenth century, this article investigates its five constituent logics (Confucian propriety, bureaucratic division of responsibility, subsistence agriculture, wealth creation, and punitive patriarchy). It explains what sorts of expert abilities Huo considered necessary and what relations of authority (defined as power over others that they accept) those abilities entailed. Huo’s plan relies not only on the expertise of lineage members, but also on the abilities of hired workers and bondservants/slaves who held their positions for a long time. Their positions gave them authority in the workspace over the lineage members who outranked them legally, calling into question the utility of simple categories of “social status.” Because the text was later copied repeatedly into other lineages’ compilations, Huo’s plan must have made sense to Ming and Qing lineage leaders, so it may illuminate how they constructed relations of authority and social status.

In 1775, during the process of collecting books for the Siku quanshu project, an empire-wide literary inquisition was imposed on the deceased monk Jinshi Dangui (1614–80). As the curious case of censorship developed, the trials not only diminished a major Cantonese monastic community and an old bannermen family but also inspired several imperially commissioned historiographical projects. Exploring the historical significance of the Dangui case at the nexus of early Qing Buddhist networks, Qing imperial control, and the politics of historical memory, this study unravels a multi-layered story of the posthumous censorship of Monk Dangui. It cross-examines a broad range of sources including imperial archives, gazetteers, biji, personal records, and literary anthologies to reconstruct a remarkable moment in High Qing censorship and to present a history of a displaced Buddhist community during the Ming–Qing transition; both became obscured after the Qianlong reconstruction of the imperial order.

This paper explores the intense bond formed between two Qing women, Li Ti and Huang Xunying, as well as their double suicide. The sheer survival of the rich personal and family narratives (in both poetry and prose) surrounding their relationship and suicides represents a startling discovery. By actively resisting the restrictions imposed by the patriarchal family and social order and explicitly defining an unbreakable union marked by moral commitment to and spiritual connection with each other, Li Ti and Huang embody the concept of queerness in today’s usage. The two women’s double suicide, furthermore, posed an extreme form of social protest and an individual quest for freedom. Despite being historically conditioned and ideologically mediated, the excavated primary sources, such as Li Ti’s own poems, challenge not only the norms of their time and place, but also our scholarly consensus about women’s lives in China’s past.

After the political fragmentation of the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” period, the Northern Song consolidated much of the lands under these regional states into a larger polity in a process often described as “reunification.” But this “reunification,” judged against the domain of the Tang dynasty, was incomplete. The “Sixteen Prefectures” to the northeast were ceded to the Liao, and this became a vexing issue for Song emperors and officials. But the northeast was not the only region once under Tang rule that did not enter the Song domain. In this article, I discuss the area to the northwest of the Song, much of which was eventually governed by the Tangut Xia state. This area, roughly the modern provinces of Ningxia and Gansu, featured prominently in Northern Song political discussions, national geographical treatises, and national and regional maps. By analyzing the treatment of the northwest in these diverse genres of representation, I demonstrate a spectrum in the perceptions of the northwest. It was sometimes seen as little different from areas under Song rule; in other cases, it was treated as “beyond the sphere of civilization” (huawai). Such ambiguity is visualized in many Song cartographers who placed this area between two segments of the Great Wall. For Song emperors and officials, the northwest sat uncomfortably in their imaginations of the world, not easily dismissed and forgotten, yet irrecoverable.

Although the earliest political text from early China, namely the Canon of Documents, comprises speeches attributed to ancient kings, for most of the Eastern Zhou period (770–255 BCE) monarchs remained conspicuously silent. This article surveys the instances of the rulers’ speeches in major historical collections and a sample of philosophical texts from the Warring States period. I demonstrate that the rulers’ voice in these texts is overwhelmingly confined to short questions, approval of proposed policies, or other insignificant uttering. I argue that this silence was deliberately built into the texts by their composers, so as to preserve the intellectual authority in the hands of the educated elite. It was only with the imperial unification of 221 BCE and the dramatic change in the balance of power between the emperors and the intellectuals that the royal speech regained its prominence and political importance.