Past Awards

On the eve of the sixteenth-century economic transformation and the age of exploration that was to propel China into the modern world, the scholar-official Lu Rong (1436-94) recorded his observations of contemporary society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden. Within its genre, Bean Garden is unusual in its author’s willingness to express admiration, frustration, and outrage toward his subjects. Mark Halperin has selected about a quarter of the pieces from the original work, arranging them in topical categories that provide a richly textured first-hand observation of late imperial China designed for course use with undergraduates.

The Southeast US Scholars and Friends of Late Imperial China (SEUSS-FLIC) will hold an in-person conference at Vanderbilt University in conjunction with a slate of virtual panels organized by the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Panels will explore the ways in which China’s late imperial period created the foundation for China’s identity today, and address issues in Chinese history, literature, and culture in the context of global connections and comparisons. The conference aims to forge connections between scholars from institutions within driving distance of Nashville, Tennessee, who may encounter barriers to attending other regional and national conferences.

China Made explores one key to China’s extraordinary production and export of fine porcelain during the early modern period: the role of specialist officials in producing the technological knowledge and distinctive artistic forms that were essential to the cultural policies of the Chinese state in the early Qing dynasty. Through a detailed study of porcelain manufacture loosely structured around the career of the potter who supervised ceramic production for the Qing dynasty court, the book shows how these imperial technocrats engaged in fiscal management, technical experimentation, and design to organize rationalized manufacturing in a precapitalist, preindustrial society.

GHF made an award to the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) to support travel to the 2022 annual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii for as many as 15 scholars specializing in Ming studies and Ming-adjacent research. The goal of the travel grants is to encourage greater participation in the annual conference by scholars specializing in early modern China, who have been underrepresented at recent conferences. Priority will be given to contingent or part-time faculty, students, and independent scholars.

Asia for Educators will create a series of recorded presentations and related professional development resources to expose secondary and non-specialist undergraduate-level teachers and their students to the Ming dynasty, and to introduce them to the narrative classics of Chinese literature. These presentations, given by experts in the field, will include background information on the period in which the work was written, a short biography of the author, and suggested excerpts to read in class.

GHF funded ten scholarships to allow scholars of books and printing in the Ming dynasty to attend the Rare Book School (RBS), a world-leading institute for the study of written, printed, and born digital materials. Affiliated with the University of Virginia, RBS is a mainstay of education for rare book librarians and scholars of the history of the book. The RBS course week includes 30 hours of hands-on instruction in interpreting the material forms of textural artifacts, as well as academic lectures, discussion forums, demonstrations, and exhibitions on topics pertinent to the book in the Asian world.

As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally. By treating learning as the subject, it broadens our perspective, going beyond a history of ideas to investigate the social practices and networks of kinship and collegiality with which literati defined themselves in local, regional, and national contexts.

An award from Geiss Hsu Foundation will make possible a manuscript review workshop for Laws of the Land: Fengshui and Administration in Qing China by Tristan G. Brown. Laws of the Land examines fengshui’s role in late imperial China as a discourse for articulating legal claims pertinent to the relationship between humans and their environments. Brown will invite two scholars working in Ming-Qing studies in the areas of cultural history, environmental history, or the history of science to read and comment on a draft of the work.