This special issue, “On Their Own Terms: Experts in Imperial China,” examines various kinds of expertise from Han times into the twentieth century from the angle of practitioners themselves, and sometimes even on their own terms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In the final decades of its existence, the Qing imperial state sought to unify and standardize policies of frontier management. In this context, mapping and surveying practices developed as socio-technological discourses that transformed how Qing authorities asserted their territorial claims in the Eastern Himalayas. Most scholarship on the history of Qing-era frontier management has tended to focus on Chinese nation-building practices. However, this article foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocutors of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors.

How did military surveyors establish authoritative ideas about their own expertise? This article focuses on the late-Qing surveys of the Dzayul river basin commissioned by Zhao Erfeng and carried out by his subordinate officials Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu. Between 1910 and 1911, Zhao Erfeng ordered new surveys of the regions located at the north-easternmost tip of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, to demarcate the Qing Tibetan dominions and Chinese territory from that of British India. The surveyors Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu, mapped the route of the Dzayul River which flowed into British Indian territory through the Mishmi hills into Assam as the Lohit. These surveys largely claimed that natural features marked the “natural” or “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. By dissembling the various strands that informed this archive of Qing colonial knowledge, I investigate the processes by which state-produced narratives created new kinds of citational practices to designate who could be recognized as an “expert” of the mountainous geography of Tibet and the trans-Himalayan regions.