Chinese History in Geographical Perspective

by Yongtao Du (Editor), Jeff Kyong-McClain (Editor), Kathlene Baldanza (Contribution by), Peter K. Bol (Contribution by), Andrew Chittick (Contribution by)

Overview

The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial state’s persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former “outer zones” in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of “all-under-heaven” to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the twentieth century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived, promises to provide insight into the contested development of the geographical entity which we, today, call 'China.'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739172308
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	01/30/2013
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Yongtao Du is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Oklahoma State University. His research interests include translocal practices in late imperial China and literati geographic consciousness in China during the Song through the Qing. He received a PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006.

Jeff Kyong-McClain is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His research explores the place of archeology in nation-building in modern China, Sino-Western interaction in China's borderlands, and urban transformations during the Republican era. He received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Contested Terrain of a Geographical Entity
Yongtao Du and Jeff Kyong-McClain

Chapter 1: Early Modern Mapping at the Qing Court: Survey Maps from the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong Reign Periods
Laura Hostetler

Chapter 2: Kangxi’s Auspicious Empire: Rhetorics of Geographic
Integration in the Early Qing
Stephen Whiteman

Chapter 3: De-civilizing Ming China’s Southern Border: Vietnam as
Lost Province or Barbarian Culture
Kathlene Baldanza

Chapter 4: The Geography of Dragon Boat Racing in
Late Imperial China
Andrew Chittick

Chapter 5: Writing Personalized Local History during the Late Ming and the Ming-Qing Transition: The Case of a Ming Loyalist
Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang

Chapter 6: An Ambush of Tigers: A Socio-Ecological History of the Ming-Qing Fujian Tiger Menace
Luke Hambleton

Chapter 7: The New Frontier: Zhuang Xueben and Xikang Province
Yajun Mo

Chapter 8: Native-Place Ties in Transnational Networks: Overseas Chinese Nationalism and Fujian’s Development, 1928-1941
Huei-Ying Kuo

Chapter 9: A Preliminary Investigation of the Urban Morphology of Towns of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau
Gregory Rohlf

Chapter 10: Spatial Analysis and GIS Modeling of Regional Religious Systems in China: Conceptualization and Initial Experiments
Jiang Wu, Daoqin Tong, and Karl Ryavec

Epilogue: What is a Geographical Perspective on China’s History?
Peter K. Bol