A review of the Harvard Yenching Library Rare Books Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA. The Harvard-Yenching Library holds more than 1.3 million volumes. This review won’t bore readers with the details of each collection, which are introduced on the library’s website. Instead, my aim is to convince the reader to consider a visit to the library and its world-class rare book collection. Although most of the library’s holdings are listed in fully searchable catalogs, there are many discoveries awaiting even cursory exploration. Our persisting ignorance of the Harvard-Yenching...

A review of Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China: Disease, Healing, and the Body in Cross-cultural Translation (Second to Eighth Centuries C.E.), by C. Pierce Salguero. Pierce Salguero’s dissertation marks a significant departure from the norms of Chinese medical history, which has focused almost entirely on a received tradition that traces its origins back to the Huangdi neijing 黃帝內經. By introducing a discrete body of medical writings from the Buddhist Canon (Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經) and the Dunhuang 敦煌 manuscripts, Salguero brings to bear on these...

A review of Emergence and Development of Spiritual-Religious Groups in the People’s Republic of China after 1978, by Kristin Kupfer. December 2012 witnessed a seemingly curious case of convergence of Mayan civilization, Christianity, and Chinese popular religion. Many members of a group called “Church of the Almighty God,” believing the Mayan prophesy that the end of the world was imminent, began to organize mass demonstrations exhorting the Chinese people to repent their sins, to prepare for the coming apocalypse, and to overthrow the ruling Communist Party. What happened next was highly...

A review of The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier: State Building, National Integration and Socialist Transformation, Zeku (Tsékhok) County, 1953-1958, by Benno Ryan Weiner. In July 1958 as the revolutionary fervor of the Great Leap Forward swept across the People’s Republic of China, Zeku County in the Amdo region of cultural Tibet erupted in violence against efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to impose rapid collectivization on the pastoral communities of the grasslands. Rebellion also stirred the region at the beginning of the 1950s as “Liberation” first settled on the...

A review of Scenes from Yongning: Media Creation in China’s Na Villages, by Tami Blumenfield. Tami Blumenfield’s dissertation is a refreshing anthropological study of media production and presents pioneering work based on community-based participatory research. The author’s methodological approach to collaborative fieldwork — a form of “decolonization of research” as she calls it — makes this dissertation unique in the field of Chinese minority studies in particular. The dissertation’s main ambition is an ethnography of media production processes; it successfully contributes to a...

A review of Dissecting Modernity: Anatomy and Power in the Language of Science in China, by David Luesink. David Luesink’s dissertation is a brilliant analysis of the relationship between anatomical knowledge and power in China that contributes to the fields of both Science and Technology Studies and History. Luesink focuses on the transformative decade between 1910 — when disciples studied Confucian and medical classics in exclusive relationships with their masters — and 1920 — when professionally organized coteries of scientists and intellectuals controlled the terms of medical...

A review of The Dialectics of Virtuosity: Dance in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-2009, by Emily Elissa Wilcox. In this highly readable and intellectually provocative dissertation, Emily Wilcox makes a convincing and often surprising case for the intimacy of the relationship between the invention, codification and standardization of, on the one hand, specifically “Chinese” dance forms since the birth of the People’s Republic and of imaginings of Chinese culture and the Chinese nation-state on the other. She leavens this cogent historical and theoretical analysis of dance’s...

A review of Itineraries for a Republic: Tourism and Travel Culture in Modern China, 1866-1954, by Yajun Mo. This dissertation by Yajun Mo examines travel, travel writing, and travel photography in China from the final years of the Qing dynasty to the first years of the People’s Republic. Focusing on travel for leisure and exploration, rather than migration or settlement, Mo argues for the significant role played by travel writing and later photography in processes of nation-building and “worlding” China.  Written and visual accounts of travel overseas and across China’s borderlands by...

An Introduction to the Upton Sino-Foreign Archive (USFA), Concord, New Hampshire, USA. This is an introduction to the Upton Sino-Foreign Archive (USFA), a privately held non-institutional archive. For more than three decades, Steve Upton has enjoyed the hobby, in his spare time, of studying Sino-Foreign interaction in the period from the 1790s to the early 1950s, and of collecting unusual materials pertinent to that topic and extensively interviewing and corresponding with hundreds of foreign residents of pre-1950s China. He has taught a course, at Dartmouth’s ILEAD Institute, about the...

A review of the First Historical Archives of China 中國第一歷史檔案館 and the National Project for the Compilation of Qing History Library 國家清史纂修工程圖書館, Beijing, China. One always sits in the reading room of the First Historical Archives with a sense of accomplishment. Just being in that space is gratifying — the space where many of the great scholars of Chinese history have sat before, and where some of the richest sources of Qing history can be found. Indeed, to be among the archival catalogs at the edge of the Forbidden City has a certain mystique that can...

Will you be doing research in/on China this Summer? Before you head off, be sure to brush up with our Fresh from the Archives series! And if you would like to contribute a new article, or submit an update for any of these institutions below, please contact us via archives@dissertationreviews.org. Academia Historica, Taipei (Nele Glang) Beijing Municipal Archives, Beijing (Arunabh Ghosh) Central Academy of Fine Arts Library, Beijing (Vivian Li) Chongqing Municipal Archives, Chongqing (Nicole Barnes) First Historical Archives of China, Beijing (Macabe Keliher) Foreign Ministry Archives of the...

A review of Constructing Tiananmen Square as a Realm of Memory: National Salvation, Revolutionary Tradition, and Political Modernity in Twentieth-Century China, by Tsung-Yi Pan. Tsung-Yi Pan’s dissertation is a history of Tiananmen Square from the late nineteenth century to the present, with special attention paid to the intersection of cultural memory and space. Building on the theoretical work of scholars such as Pierra Nora, Jan Assmann, and Alon Confino, this study considers Tiananmen Square as a site for the construction and contestation of collective memory. Collective memory has...

A review of the Fujian Provincial Archives 福建省档案馆, Fuzhou, China. I am currently in China doing research for a dissertation on the history of drug smuggling and maritime state-building in Fujian province during the late Qing and Republican periods (ca. 1830-1940). After spending the autumn in Beijing reading rooms, I chose to spend January in Fuzhou to test the waters at the Fujian provincial archives. I had spent a week there two years ago at an earlier stage in my graduate career and was able to access a few interesting criminal cases from the 1930s, but it was blisteringly hot and...

A review of From Bodhgayā to Lhasa to Beijing: The Life and Times of Śāriputra (c.1335-1426), Last Abbot of Bodhgayā, by Arthur McKeown. This dissertation closely examines the life of Śāriputra (c.1335-1426) to destabilize the various myths surrounding the decline of Indian Buddhism, as well as to explore the methods by which this charismatic individual transplanted and reformulated the symbolic power of the Indian seat of enlightenment, Vajrāsana, in his travels to Tibet and China. The Introduction examines the various theories of the decline of Buddhism, theories that attribute the...

A review of Divergent Visions of Serving the Great: The Emergence of Chosŏn-Qing Tributary Relations as a Politics of Representation, by Joshua Van Lieu. In this fascinating dissertation, Joshua Van Lieu examines the international ritual protocol between Chosŏn dynasty Korea and Qing dynasty China in the late-nineteenth century. Basing his study on close readings of Korean and Chinese sources, he argues that the larger geopolitical realities of Northeast Asia, mainly the impact of Western and Japanese imperialism, compelled Qing and Chosŏn officials to rethink not only the form but also the...

A review of Underground Empires: German Imperialism and the Introduction of Geology in China, 1860-1919, by Shellen Xiao Wu. After the German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term “die Seidenstrasse” (The Silk Road) in 1877, explorers forayed into Central Asia to uncover hidden treasures of ancient oases kingdoms, and scholars have studied the flow of goods and ideas across the Eurasian continent. Richthofen’s proclamation of China’s vast mineral deposits in 1882 has received relatively less scholarly attention, however. Shellen Wu examines how Richthofen’s geological...

A review of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, Bund Location  (上海市档案馆外滩新馆), Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. I recently spent five months (September 2012 – January 2013) at the Bund location of the Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) researching the Catholic Church and its affiliated charities, schools, orphanages, and hospitals in mid-twentieth-century Shanghai. I would highly recommend a visit to this location for anyone working on Chinese history since 1927, although there are documents that date from before the Nanjing Decade, particularly from the foreign...

A review of Creating the Kangxi Landscape: Bishu Shanzhuang and the Mediation of Qing Imperial Identity, by Stephen Hart Whiteman. Within the growing interdisciplinary field of Qing studies that explores China’s final imperial dynasty (1644-1911), art historians have just begun to challenge earlier scholarly conceptions that Qing art was unworthy of study. Currently, art historical scholarship on the Qing is largely concentrated in the “High Qing” period (1661-1799) of the successive reigns of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors. Studies of court art tend to focus on Qianlong (r....

A review of The Post Office and State Formation in Modern China, 1896-1949, by Lane Jeremy Harris. Despite the fact that China can boast one of the world’s longest recorded civilizations, remarkably few institutions have survived the wars, revolutions, rebellions, and political turmoil that have shaped the country in the twentieth century. Diplomats and journalists who are posted to mainland China for the first time often find to their surprise that their counterparts operate in institutions that are no older than the People’s Republic itself, or even younger. Yet there is one institution...

A review of Jiangsu Provincial Archives 江苏省档案馆, Nanjing, Jiangsu and Wuxi Municipal Archives 无锡市档案馆, Wuxi, Jiangsu. I’m writing this after a day spent in the Jiangsu Provincial Archives, my third visit in five years. While I’m happy to have come away with a few precious sheets of photocopies, I’m concerned at how anything that might be described as a personal file is suddenly inaccessible. Still, given the long and increasingly irate discussion that an elderly Chinese gentleman was having with the archivists about the need to seek permission from the work unit...

A review of Gender, Justice and the Geopolitics of Undocumented North Korean Migration, by Eunyoung Choi. Most reports on North Korean defectors tell the story of a victimized people, downtrodden by a terrible regime who search for a better life, only to be exploited again in China. Eunyoung Choi’s Gender, Justice, and Geopolitics of Undocumented North Korean Migration offers a different version of this now familiar story. The tale begins in a similar fashion: undocumented North Korean migrants face great odds to cross the border in search of survival. Arriving in China, they fall to prey...

A review of Central Academy of Fine Arts Library (Zhongyang meishu xueyuan tushuguan, 中央美术学院图书馆), Beijing, China. As one of the most prestigious art academies in China and the academic home of prominent modern and contemporary artists such as Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, Zhang Huan, and Xu Bing since its establishment in 1950, the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) has had a constant presence during my graduate training in Chinese modern art. CAFA resulted from the merger of the department of fine arts at North China University (华北大学) and the National Art School in Beiping...

A review of Dead Bodies and Forensic Science: Cultures of Expertise in China, 1800-1949, by Daniel Asen. Hidden modesty bones, putrid flesh, and silver needles are among the things Daniel Asen brings to life in this sophisticated study of conflicting regimes of forensic expertise in Qing and Republican China. At the core of this topic is an odd configuration of social forces. At a time when most intellectuals and state reformers scorned inherited knowledge, Republican coroners who relied on Qing forensic practices—for instance the recording of visible wounds on charts derived from the...

A review of Protecting the National Body: Gender and Public Health in Southwest China during the War with Japan, 1937-1945, by Nicole Elizabeth Barnes. Nicole Barnes’ dissertation, Protecting the National Body, is an ambitious and engaging study that tells three previously untold stories: the importance of the war years for the formation of China’s hybrid and indigenized medical system; the centrality of the Sick (Wo)man of Asia to biomedical projects disciplining Chinese bodies into citizens; and the centrality of China (and Sichuan province in particular) to the global advancement of...

A review of Nadun: Ritual and the Dynamics of Cultural Diversity in Northwest China’s Hehuang Region, by Gerald Roche. Gerald Roche’s dissertation, “Nadun: Ritual and the Dynamics of Cultural Diversity in Northwest China’s Hehuang Region,” is an insightful study into the major annual ritual of the Sanchuan Mangghuer of Northeastern Qinghai Province. This study, however, is more than simply a close reading of a harvest ritual in Western China, but an in-depth examination of both the practices of the ritual itself and the local ontologies and ideologies that inform and surround it. In...

A review of the Oriental Manuscripts Reading Room of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France. I am a PhD candidate in Chinese religion at Princeton University’s Department of Religion currently writing up my dissertation on apocalyptic interpretations of the future descent of Maitreya Buddha from the fall of the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) to the middle of the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). My project makes use of canonical scriptures, apocryphal texts discovered at Dunhuang, imperial and Buddhist historiographical records, as well as visual evidence in the form of Buddhist stelae,...

Eastern Turki materials in European Archives Part II of II: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Berlin, Germany and Bibliothek der Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen – Anhalt, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Halle, Germany In a previous post, I began introducing archives I recently visited while putting the finishing touches on a book manuscript about pilgrimage and manuscript culture in Chinese Turkestan. Both of the remaining archives, which I will describe here, are important to the study of Chinese Turkestan...

A review of Responding to the World: Contemporary Chinese Art, Exhibitions, and Criticism in the 1990s, by Peggy Wang. Peggy Wang’s dissertation, which addresses the production and interpretation of contemporary art within China during the 1990s, is conceptualized within a meaningful framework: how different sectors of the Chinese art world responded to new opportunities and pressures coming from the world (more accurately the Western-dominated international art world) against the backdrop of globalization. Indeed, responding to the world was definitely a major driving force of so many...

A review of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America. The US National Library of Medicine (NLM) is located in the National Institute of Health (NIH) campus, Bethesda, Maryland, part of the Washington DC Metropolitan Area (Visitor & Researcher Information). As the largest medical library in the world, it is a must-visit place for students of history of medicine. In 2012, I spent three months in this library for my dissertation project: global networks and the making of tropical medicine in twentieth-century China. Compared to my past fieldwork...

A review of Transformation of the Water Regime: State, Society and Ecology of the Jianghan Plain in Late Imperial and Modern China, by Yan Gao. In late imperial and modern China, hydraulic systems regularly became sites of conflict among various parties over the control of natural resources. In her dissertation, Yan Gao brings attention to how three entities—the state, local society, and the environment—all played roles in the contentious transformations of the water regime of the Jianghan Plain, a flood-prone region of marshes, lakes, and rivers along the middle reaches of the Yangzi River...