This essay examines the representation of young girls in Song dynasty literary and visual arts as period portrayals of an important human emotion: parental love. The literature on doting parents extends far back in Chinese history, but in Song times children become the focus of family manuals, pediatric manuals, and an expanding visual and material culture in which the imaginary lives of children in play are conveyed to readers and viewers. Girls are shown not only active in games with boys but engaged in guiding and supervising the play. Talented girls were praised and adored by Song dynasty parents. Children were portrayed as resolving conflicts among companions on their own, with little interference from adults. Song period art and literature adopted an indulgent attitude toward mischievous behaviors in boys and girls. There developed a conception of family increasingly based on affection rather than the authority of age.

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 18th century, the discovery of “A Letter to My Husband” (Jiwai shu), attributed to a woman named Yunzhen, caused great excitement in Beijing. Focusing on the question of how the mysterious letter captured the imagination of the literati, this article employs the strategy of contextualized reading to tease out social and cultural milieus and the textures of sentimentality of its readers. It suggests that the letter's resonating power rests on its dual nature: a self-expression of a talented and exemplary wife and a chronicle of the time when the entanglement of female talent, wifely virtue, marital love, and family tension became integral to the lives of the literati.

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.

The mobilization of women pursued by the Women's Advisory Committee (Funü zhidao weiyuanhui 婦女指導委員會) during the war against Japan (1937–1945) has mainly been associated with the wider war effort in the country and resistance to the enemy. This article takes a different viewpoint and argues that the programs implemented by women activists in this committee looked beyond the immediate wartime necessity and tried to secure also long-term gains for women. The mobilization transcended traditional gender roles of wives and mothers and paid particular attention to the involvement of middle- and lower-class women. This article examines women's activism and mobilization in the context of three main areas: first, the women's cadre training in the wartime capital Chongqing and in provinces and counties across China; second, the national economic production; and third, the literacy campaigns conducted among women factory workers. It concludes that women activists knowingly used the wartime crisis to provide fellow women with the tools for securing economic and social independence while addressing the wartime emergencies.

The “Niu–Li Factional Strife,” named after Niu Sengru (779–847) and Li Deyu (787–850), is an enduring theme in Tang history. Based on accounts of personal animosity, a narrative evolved in which Niu and Li have become the ringleaders of two factions that drew in almost all high-profile literati of the ninth century. This article revises traditional and modern narratives of the Strife by first showing that the scattered and contradictory evidence in the earliest sources does not bear out the model of a decades-long struggle between two factions. Second, it demonstrates how “Niu and Li” first arose as an emblem of Tang weakness and a rallying cry for unity within the bureaucracy under the Northern Song two centuries later. Finally, it shows how modern historians picked up the loose ends and remoulded them into a struggle between different classes against the backdrop of factious politics in Republican China.

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 Chanyuan Covenant of 1005 that ended decades of war between Song and Liao precipitated a new political model that, from the Song perspective, exchanged wealth, territory, and dynastic pride in return for peace along the northern frontier, civilian sovereignty over a long-dominant military class, and the replacement of a culture of arms with the love of books. That “Chanyuan Paradigm” survived the Qingli war of 1040–1044 with the Tangut Xi Xia, but was steadily overturned in the expansionist wars promoted by Shenzong and his sons from 1068 through the fall of the Northern Song in 1127. This article argues that the fragility of the Chanyuan-style peace did not stem from the aspirations of a revanchist emperor and his confidantes, but was rather the consequence of the intrinsic difficulties of maintaining peace in a world of new players, internecine political contests, and shifting geopolitical alliances that characterized the mid-eleventh century.

This article contributes to the hitherto limited scholarship on the Chinese federalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s by conducting a thorough investigation of its ideological underpinnings and political blueprints. It compares the federalist ideas, plans, and activism of three thinkers—Zhang Taiyan, Zhang Shizhao, and Chen Jiongming—who stood firmly against the centralist trajectory of state-building in China after 1911 and advocated the formation of a Chinese federation. It argues that Chinese federalists, instead of emulating Western models, critically engaged with a broad spectrum of ideologies—Daoism, Buddhism, social Darwinism, parliamentarianism, guild socialism, anarchism etc.—when formulating their federalist agendas. Emphasizing the Chinese tradition of self-government, which underwent reinterpretations during the late Qing and early Republican periods, this article examines the extent to which Chinese federalism presented an alternative to Western political modernity.

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.