Early Modern

Madeleine Zelin

Madeleine Zelin

Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Office: 914 IAB
Office Hours: W 10 AM – 12 PM.  Students can sign up here.

Phone: (212) 854-2592
Email: mhz1@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University (’70)
PhD: University of California, Berkeley (’79)

Classes Taught

HSEA GU4880 History of Modern China
HSEA GU4884 Merchants, Markets and the State
HSEA GR8888 Colloquium on Chinese Legal History

Research Interests

Modern Chinese Legal and Economic History, Comparative History of Law and the Economy

Madeleine Zelin has, since her Ph.D. work at the University of California at Berkeley, taken an iconoclastic approach to the complex forces shaping modern China. Professor Zelin’s recent research has focused on legal history, the role of law in the Chinese economy and the interface between law, culture and the market in early modern China. She has written on state handling of economic disputes as well as the role of Chambers of Commerce as new sites for economic mediation. Her chapter on “Economic Freedom in Late Imperial China” (in William Kirby, ed., Realms of Freedom in Modern China, Stanford, 2004) challenges the assumption that the politically autocratic late Ming and Qing imperial regimes were restrictive in their handling of the private economy. Her latest book, The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Enterprise in Early Modern China, is a study of an advanced industrial community in southern Sichuan from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and provides new insights into the role of customary legal and business practices in China’s early modern economic development. It has been awarded the Fairbank Prize (American Historical Association), Alan Sharlin Memorial Award (Social Science History Association) and the Humanities Prize of the International Conference on Asian Studies (ICAS). As part of her commitment to mentoring younger scholars in legal and economic history of East Asia Professor Zelin serves as co-director of the first AAS New Directions Workshop: Economic History of Asia and is a founding board member of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. She is currently completing a book on China’s earliest company and bankruptcy law reforms at the onset of the twentieth century.

Selected Publications

Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600‐1980 (co-editor, Pickering and Chatto, 2015)

The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch’ing China (University of California, 1984)

Zhaohua Yang

YangZhaohuaZhaohua Yang

Sheng Yen Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhism

Office: Room 307, 80 Claremont
Office Hours: M 6-6:45pm, R 5:30-6:45 PM; email for appointment confirmation
Phone: (212) 851-4147
Email: zy2200@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Stanford University (’13)

Classes Taught

RELI UN2405 Chinese Religious Traditions

RELI GU4307 Interactions of Buddhism and Daoism in China
CHNS GR9333 Readings in Chinese Religion

Research Interests

Zhaohua Yang received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. He specializes in tantric or esoteric Buddhism in middle-period China. His research interests also include indigenous scriptures, the interactions between Buddhism and Daoism, and religions on the Silk Road. In addition to his training in pre-modern Dunhuang and Japanese manuscripts, he has done extensive fieldwork in Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and the US. He is finishing his first book manuscript, Devouring Impurities: Myth, Ritual and Talisman in the Cult of Ucchuṣma in Tang China (618-907), which explores Chinese responses to antinomian tantric practices as seen through a Dunhuang manuscript on this fierce god. His next project, tentatively titled Performing Yoga: Transformations of Buddhist Ritual in Late Imperial China (960-1450), studies the evolution from Yoga in esoteric Buddhism to Yoga as a monastic category in institutional Buddhism.

Selected Publications

Devouring Impurities: The Rise of the Cult of Ucchuṣma in Tang China (forthcoming)

Gray Tuttle

Gray Tuttle

Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies

Office: 401 Kent Hall
Office Hours: On leave fall 2021
Phone: (212) 854-4096
Email: gwt2102@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Princeton University (’91)
MA: Harvard University (’96)
PhD: Harvard University (’02)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1365 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Tibet
EARL GU4310 Life Writing in Tibetan Buddhism
HSEA GU4720 20th Century Tibetan History

Research Interests

Tibetan History & Religion

Gray Tuttle studies modern Tibetan history, from the 1600s to the 1950s. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire is central to all his research. In his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005), he examined the failure of nationalism and race-based ideology to maintain the Tibetan territory of the former Qing empire as integral to the Chinese nation-state. Instead, he argues, a new sense of pan-Asian Buddhism was critical to Chinese efforts to hold onto Tibetan regions (one quarter of China’s current territory). His current research project, “Amdo Tibet, Middle Ground between Lhasa and Beijing (1578-1865),” is a historical analysis of the economic and cultural relations between China and Tibet in the early modern periods (16th – 19th centuries) when the intellectual and economic centers of Tibet shifted to the east, to Amdo — a Tibetan cultural region the size of France in northwestern China. Deploying Richard White’s concept of the “Middle Ground” in the context of two mature civilizations — Tibetan and Chinese — encountering one another, this book will examine how this contact led to three dramatic areas of growth that defined early modern Tibet: 1) the advent of mass monastic education, 2) the bureaucratization of reincarnate lamas’ charisma and 3) the development of modern conceptions of geography that reshaped the way Tibet was imagined. Recently he has turned to increasingly large data sets in an effort to ask and answer new questions about Tibetan history. In an effort to ask and answer new questions about Tibetan history, Gray has turned to increasingly large data sets over the course of his career. Starting with a database of over 1000 Amdo monasteries with dozens of fields of data (GIS location, foundation data, number of monks, rooms, livestock, etc), led to building datasets on 100s of incarnation series and monastic colleges as well, which have shaped the direction of the Amdo history book project in significant ways. Lately, with a research assistant, Gray has worked with larger datasets and the statistical computing and graphing programming language called “R” to examine existing data on Tibetan (mostly monk’s) longevity in comparison with Chinese monks, Chinese literati, and Europeans in history. Future plans include working with even larger datasets by examining the hydrology of the Tibetan plateau with climate scientists, to see if new perspectives of the large arcs of Tibetan history might be reframed by a deeper understanding of climate data.

Selected Publications

“An Unknown Tradition of Han Chinese Conversion to Tibetan Buddhism: Han Chinese Incarnate Lamas and Parishoners of Tibetan Buddhist Temples in Amdo, Zangxue xuekan/Journal of Tibetology (2014)

Sources of Tibetan Tradition (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

The Tibetan History Reader (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia, 2005)