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。     

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:     

Propaganda by the Book: Contextualizing and Reading the Zhejiang GMD’s 1929 Textbook Essentials for Propaganda Workers

The Nationalist Party (GMD) had been writing and issuing documents of many types for some years before Nanjing was established as the capital of the Republic of China in 1927/1928. From its earliest days, doctrines were advanced via cause-oriented newspapers and journals. Even more important, the Soviet-sponsored reorganization of the GMD in the early 1920s had yielded a far-reaching party propaganda operation tied to Sun Yat-sen’s notion of political tutelage. But how was propaganda to work in practice? And at whom was it to be aimed? This article seeks to address aspects of these questions by assessing a textbook for propaganda workers that was issued in the name of the GMD’s Zhejiang Provincial Executive Committee’s Propaganda Department in October 1929, half a year after the GMD’s foundational right-wing Third Party Congress. Although Essentials for Propaganda Workers does not fully operationalize Sun’s version of political tutelage, it can nonetheless be seen to reflect the central party’s efforts to implement tutelage and supervision, not only of the Chinese masses suggested by Sun’s program, but also of party propaganda workers in Zhejiang. In that regard, it reveals the astonishingly rapid ideological realignment of the GMD into an anti-Communist party, not only at the national level, which is well known, but also on the provincial and lower levels. Drawing on material from the GMD Archives in Taipei, this article addresses issues of party organization, control, mobilization, inner party dynamics, and message content in the GMD’s propaganda activities in Zhejiang province in the late 1920s. “Propaganda by the Book” adds to our knowledge of the organizational practices of both the central GMD in Nanjing and the Zhejiang provincial GMD as well as to the social history of Republican China’s official print culture.     

A Hierarchy of Geographies: A Skinnerian Model of Indochina’s Overseas Chinese Congrégations and Their Influence on French Colonialism

In Indochina, overseas Chinese were organized by dialect group into associations called congregations, which shared many of the functions of huiguan in China. The spread of overseas Chinese economic and social networks followed a Skinnerian model in which large urban con?régations wielded more political and economic authority than did smaller, rural con?régations. By examining the impacts of French colonialism upon overseas Chinese networks within Indochina and upon overseas connections with their Chinese native places, this paper proposes that the Skinnerian model of local-system hierarchy fits quite comfortably when applied to the world of French colonial Indochina and its overseas Chinese. Furthermore, it argues that French colonialism actually reinforced the Skinnerian hierarchy of politics and markets in ways that endured long after the collapse of Imperial China.     

New Chinese Military History, 1839–1951: What’s the Story?

Since 1990, New Chinese Military History in the West has remedied scholarly neglect of Chinese warfare and changed the usual stories of modern China. These studies disproved Orientalist assumptions of a unique “Chinese way of war” or a strategic culture that avoided aggressive confrontation. Scholars also challenge the assumption that Confucian immobility led to a clash of civilizations and decisive defeat in the Opium Wars, First Sino-Japanese War, and Boxer War of 1900. In fact, Qing officials were quick and successful in creating a new military regime. New military histories of the warlords, the Sino-Japanese Wars, and the Chinese Civil War show that developing new types of warfare was central in creating the new nation. All these wars split the country into factions that were supported by outside powers: they were internationalized civil wars. The article also asks how the choice of terms, labels, and categories shapes interpretations and political messages.