Ancient China

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Monastic Institutions and Social Networks in Late Imperial China and Inner Asia

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Speaker: Stacey Van Vleet (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley)
Topic: Monastic Medical Colleges in the Qing Administration of Inner Asia
Abstract: During the 18th century, as the Qing Empire expanded into Inner Asia through both alliance and war, a network of medical colleges (Tib. sman pa grwa tshang) emerged within Tibetan Buddhist monasteries across the region. Monastic medical colleges, deeply intertwined with claims of legitimate and benevolent rule, were often established through a combination of local initiative and imperial support. How might we characterize the place of these institutions within evolving structures of Qing imperial administration in Inner Asia? This talk will discuss patronage at monastic medical colleges by hereditary nobles and court-appointed banner officials in order to consider this question from imperial, regional, and local perspectives.

Speaker: Brenton Sullivan (Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Colgate University)
Topic: The Social Networks of Thu’u bkwan III (1737-1802) and Gung thang (1762-1823)
Abstract: Two Buddhist luminaries from eighteenth-century Amdo each composed hundreds of unique texts, comprising over 4,000 folios. What can we learn about their respective social networks by cataloging the contextual data found in the colophons of these texts? Thu’u bkwan III Blo bzang chos kyi nyi ma (1737-1802) and Gung thang Dkon mchog bstan pa’i nyi ma (1762-1823) hailed from two of the most influential monasteries in Amdo. They knew each other well. Gung thang even wrote the five hundred-folio biography of Thu’u bkwan. Clearly their social worlds overlapped, but where and to what extent? By systematically cataloging their interactions with others across Buddhist Asia, concrete and textured maps of relationships and dependency begin to appear. Read in conjunction with other historical sources we can begin to draw conclusions about the priorities of Buddhist lamas from Amdo at this time.

Moderator: Gray Tuttle (Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Columbia University)

This event is a part of the lecture series “China, Inner Asia, and the World: Mongol and Qing Empires in Comparative Perspectives” sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and the Modern Tibetan Studies Program.

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Talking About Inner Asia in China Today: The Reception of the New Qing History

Time: June 22, 2021, 10 AM – 11:30 AM EDT
Speaker: Mark C. Elliott (Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History & Vice Provost for International Affairs, Harvard University)

Moderator: Joanna Waley-Cohen (Julius Silver Professor of History, New York University & Provost, NYU Shanghai)

Abstract: The importance of taking Inner Asian historical subjectivity into account is widely recognized as a hallmark of the “New Qing History,” which, over the past twenty years, has led to the destabilization of a number of established Sinocentric narratives and tropes and has gained the scholarship associated with this approach considerable attention in greater China, not all of it favorable. Even as the increasing politicization of history in China over the last decade has called forth an unusually robust critical response, New Qing History appears to enjoy ever broader recognition as an important methodological turn, as evidenced in a marked growth in attention to Inner Asia on the part of many historians writing in Chinese. This talk examines the reception and response to the New Qing History since 2010 as well as its influence on the field in China in recent years.

Register for the Zoom link: https://reurl.cc/5rrjKM

This event is a part of the lecture series “China, Inner Asia, and the World: Mongol and Qing Empires in Comparative Perspectives” sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

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Illegible Cities: Translating Early Modern China

June 16, 3:00–4:30 PM EDT, 2021

Speaker: Carla Nappi, Andrew W. Mellon Chair in History, University of Pittsburgh

Moderator: Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Columbia University

The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. This talk will introduce Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities, a new book that tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Using a hybrid form that blends fiction and history, each chapter finds a particular translator conjured from the past to tell the story of a text (in Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more) that helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. The book explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian’s craft, and the talk will address questions of language and translation in China’s past, the use of fiction as a historian’s tool, and the ways that translation creates language.

Register for the Zoom link: https://reurl.cc/9Z2o5X

This event is a part of the lecture series “China, Inner Asia, and the World: Mongol and Qing Empires in Comparative Perspectives” sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. Event Contact Information: Ling-Wei Kung lk2627@columbia.edu

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