In the years 1803–1807, a dramatic triple murder case in Shouzhou, Anhui, convulsed officialdom in the Jiangnan region and drove the Jiaqing emperor to exasperation. At a time when many in power felt a sense of crisis as “High Qing” imperial ambitions receded, each stone turned over in this meandering investigation revealed another source of anxiety fitted to the age: incest, poisoning, negligent and corrupt officials, amoral and abusive local gentry, misbehaving yamen runners, pettifogging litigators, and, to top it all off, deadly serious rumors of a subversive opera. This article traces the investigations into both the murders and the theater rumor. What made the former so convoluted and vexing, while the latter was alarming yet easier to resolve? Surprisingly, the Imperial Household’s carefully cultivated relationship with the theater world of Jiangnan realized, in miniature, a level of state–society coordination Qing rulers wished for but which often escaped them elsewhere.

This article examines case studies and anecdotal narratives in which murderers used poisoned food as a weapon, and government officials used their epistemic authority to solve these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice. Drawn from Zheng Ke’s 鄭克 (fl. 1124–1149) legal compendium Tortoise and Mirror for Judging Cases (Zheyu guijian 折獄龜鑑) and Hong Mai’s 洪邁 (1123–1202) anecdote collection Record of the Listener (Yijian zhi 夷堅志), these narratives reflected the violent threat that poisoners posed to the preservation of gender, familial, social, and political hierarchies. In the Mirror’s legal realm, astute officials used abductive reasoning to expose poisoning plots, thereby restoring the moral fabric of society; in Hong Mai’s Record poisoners are punished by imperial judges as well as by retributive mechanisms of cosmic justice. These six selected case narratives illustrate the permeability of the boundaries that divide the conceptual categories of food, medicine, and poison, and the connections amongst medical, legal, and socio-moral systems of knowledge.

This study revisits the long-standing consensus that the number and nature of basic-level administrative units in imperial China remained static over two millennia. It argues that this view underestimates the size and sophistication of field administration during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). During this period, towns (zhen) emerged as administrative centers, undertaking roles akin to the predominantly rural counties but within urban settings. Through a systematic analysis of the administrative functions of towns, this article reveals that approximately 30 percent of the 1,891 towns documented in 1085 were staffed by imperial officials and played a crucial role in delivering urban public goods such as fire prevention and law enforcement. In doing so, they supported the Song state’s extraordinary reliance on commercial taxation. These findings prompt a reassessment of the prevailing view in Chinese urban history that a disconnect between administration and commerce began during the Tang-Song transition.

For much of imperial Chinese history, chroniclers and explorers understood a maritime land called Liuqiu to be the Ryūkyūs. In the early twentieth century, however, a new dynastic history claimed that Liuqiu was in fact Taiwan. This article explores how and why an uncontested and unambiguous understanding of Chinese maritime history was suddenly rewritten in the modern world, becoming the accepted interpretation and shaping twenty-first century geopolitics. While scholars have weighed the veracity of Liuqiu as either Taiwan or Ryūkyū, this article focuses on how the Liuqiu–Taiwan thesis was produced and transmitted, showing how scientific methodology, imperialism, and nationalism worked to reshape geographical history. The article further contributes to an understanding of the shaping of the borders and claims of the modern Chinese nation: whereas scholars have investigated late Qing and early Republican debates over the western frontier and ethnicities, this article shows that questions over Taiwan were just as important.

This paper explores how traditional Chinese vegetarian concerns were adapted to exploit new possibilities in the early twentieth century. Specifically, I examine attempts to promote the vegetarian diet through monosodium glutamate, ventures to manufacture vegan soap, and the emergence of a vibrant culture of urban vegetarian restaurants, all of which were actively supported by the socially conservative monk Yinguang 印光 (1862–1940).

Received scholarship by H.T. Huang and others has argued that the high incidence of lactose intolerance in East Asians discouraged the Chinese from adopting dairy on health grounds before the twentieth century. However, such wisdom overlooks Chinese medical literature that prescribes fresh dairy to treat chronic diarrhea. This essay considers what famed healer Sun Simiao (581–682) had to say about the uses of dairy products in treating digestive ailments. Towards this end, we consider the Essential Formulas Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold for Emergencies (Beiji qianjin yaofang 備急千金要方) and the Supplemental Formulas Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold (Qianjin yifang 千金翼方). We then compare the uses of dairy in the Sun corpus to both contemporary and earlier texts. Our analysis shows that Tang-dynasty (618–907) healers regarded milk products as generally good for the gut, and, in some cases, recommended using fresh dairy for cases of flux.

In this paper, I explore the millennium-long presence of the chickpea in premodern China by highlighting three key historical moments. The legume had its first rise to prominence as a cosmopolitan “Muslim Bean” in the Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) imperial diet. It then experienced a phase of obscurity, as the most renowned Chinese herbalist, Li Shizhen 李時珍 (1518–1593), conflated it with the pea. A disparate identity of the legume emerged around the same time, as the bean garnered attention from famine relief specialists, consequently transforming into a source of sustenance. The multiple lives of the chickpea were characterized with a common emphasis on its foreignness, drawing connections to various Eurasian cultures beyond China. The plant’s enduring presence, coupled with ongoing allusions to its alienness, makes it a perpetual foreigner in the broad expanse of the Chinese empire.