Chinese Secret Societies and Popular Religions Revisited: An Introduction

It has been over forty years since Jean Chesneaux published his edited volume Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China,and some twenty years since David Ownby and Mary Somers Heidhues published their edited volume Secret Societies Reconsidered.     

The Qing,the Manchus,and Footbinding: Sources and Assumptions under Scrutiny

Two sets of assumptions surrounding the Manchus and footbinding have crept into the historiography of the Qing period. A first set of assumptions claims that the Manchus attempted to ban footbinding among civilian Han on repeated occasions after the conquest but failed due to women’s resistance. Moreover, Qing attempts to ban footbinding made binding into a politically charged ethnic marker that embodied for Han anti-Manchu and anti-Qing sentiments and caused the bans to backfire and footbinding to spread further. A second set of assumptions claims that the overwhelming cultural allure and popularity of footbinding proved irresistible to banner women, who, thwarted by banner regulations forbidding the practice, covertly imitated footbinding by wearing platform shoes that hid natural feet and created an illusion of smallness. This paper scrutinizes the evidence put forward by Qing historians for the first of these two sets of assumptions. The claims are found to be unsubstantiated and evidence is offered that contradicts them. I argue that the weight of evidence shows that there was no prohibition on footbinding imposed in 1645 or at any time during the Manchu conquest, and that a 1664 proposal to ban footbinding was withdrawn before it could be implemented, for reasons misunderstood by historians of footbinding. Therefore there could have been no “resistance” by Han women or men to a ban on footbinding, and claims that footbinding became a politically charged ethnic marker of anti-Qing sentiment in the seventeenth century are groundless. With regard to the second set of assumptions, I provide evidence in a separate paper to be published elsewhere that banner women had distinctive roles and fashions uninfluenced by the culture of footbinding, and that in Beijing and the Northeast Manchu styles were emulated by Han, not vice versa.     

Recalling the War in China： The Dahoufang Project in Chongqing and the Restoration of a Legacy

This article presents a rare inside view of a unique project currently underway in China to study and preserve the memory of possibly the single most seminal event in Chinese modern history, the War of Resistance against Japan （1937-45）. The article introduces a multi-faceted program to preserve the wartime cultural heritage; the work is ongoing in the thriving western metropolis of Chongqing, once China＇s bomb-torn wartime capital and international Allied command center. It describes how, seven decades after World War II, scholars, cultural workers, government experts, and artists in China are joining hands in an unprecedented, all-encompassing project to record, restore, and recount the extraordinary legacy of China＇s War of Resistance in its local, as well as national and global contexts.     

Bao Shichen and Agrarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century China

Known primarily for his reformist proposals in the areas of military affairs, foreign policy, the salt monopoly, and the grain tribute system, the influential early nineteenth-century literatus Bao Shichen 包世臣 (1775–1855) also made throughout his life numerous suggestions regarding the improvement of agricultural practice and of rural life. Contrary to the arguments of his older contemporary Hong Liangji that the empire was facing an imminent demographic and provisioning crisis, Bao argued that there was ample possibility for increasing crop yields, and improving popular livelihoods, if a more rational approach was taken to cropping decisions, farm labor allocation, agricultural commercialization, and local-level social organization. Bao was fond of quantification, and, far more than Hong, employed statistical analysis (albeit crude) to bolster his arguments. Fundamentally committed to increasing the power and wealth of the imperial state in the face of threats both foreign and domestic, Bao was highly optimistic that this could be achieved simultaneously with fulfilling his other basic commitment, relieving what he saw as widespread popular immiseration.     

Goble,Andrew Edmund,Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan： Buddhist Healing,Chinese Knowledge,Islamic Formulas,and Wounds of War

This PhD thesis deals with the infamous plundering of the Imperial garden Yuanmingyuan in the wake of the British-French capture expedition of 1860. The approach and the strategies of the British and French actors involved are described from a micro-perspective. In the nineteenth century, plundering took center stage in a number of actions by colonial armies worldwide, as discussed by the author, Ines Eben v. Racknitz.     

The Huatou Revolution,Pure Land Practices,and Dahui’s Chan Discourse on the Moment of Death

Song-dynasty Chan depended for its place in society and its financial resources on lay patrons. Educated gentleman-officials (shidafu) were the wealthiest and most powerful of men. From the time of Dahui Zonggao in the Southern Song, Linji teachers shifted from elaborate comments on gongan in periodic sermons to a new method of gongan inspection termed “critical phrase” (kan huatou). Scholars have argued that Dahui’s invention of huatou practice was primarily related to internal Chan rivalries for elite patrons. I argue that Dahui’s motive was also connected to a rivalry with Pure Land Buddhism over the making of appeals to lay followers among scholar-officials. Dahui was aware and tried to communicate the usefulness of huatou in addressing the elite laity’s doubts about birth and death, and in particular their anxieties about facing the decisive moment of death. Therefore, he developed a gongan discourse that is related to anticipation of dying by harnessing the power of doubt to create an experience of spiritual awakening.     

冈仁波齐——玛旁雍错 神圣之山与圣洁之湖

各个宗教纷纷都基于今天我们不得详知的考虑,把自己神谱中的至尊神祗都安排到这座并不宽阔的山上,也许今天在我们看来,会稍显拥挤。不过,既然“全体天使能够在一个针尖上舞蹈”,在不可思议的神话地理中,这座山巅上也许存在着一个肉眼所不能见的托勒密式的多重天国。至少有四种重要的亚洲宗教,视冈仁波齐为至关重要之地。     

1999年在布列亚河谷布金泉-1 遗址上的考察

1997年布列亚河考古考察已开始对位于布列亚河右岸、巴希列沃村上游11公里、布列亚水力发电站淹没区内的布金泉-1遗址进行考察.[译者简介]裘石,男,1939年5月生,1963年毕业于吉林大学历史系,现为北方文物杂志社研究馆员,邮编150008.     

八世纪早期的唐墓壁画

近几十年来最为杰出的考古发现之一就是唐墓壁,它们为研究唐代人物绘画提供了大量的资料.……     

Teacher Kevin：17 Years in Qinghai

While Kevin Stuart was in the hospital recovering from an emergency appendectomy, all sixty of his first year students came to visit. Gathered around his bedside, they burst into song: