Past Awards

Localizing Learning is the first work to look at the history of learning during the Song, Yuan, and Ming periods through a local case study, that of Wuzhou (Jinhua Prefecture in Ming and Qing). It is also the first work to apply geographic information system (GIS) mapping and network analysis to a prefecture-level population. It is significant in that it spans the fields of intellectual history, literary and cultural studies, and social and political history of China. It combines close readings of texts with the analysis of extensive datasets on social and kinship associations among literati. By treating learning as the subject, this book broadens our perspective and deepens our understanding of China across five centuries.

GHF issued a project award to the National Humanities Center (NHC) in support of a Geiss Hsu Foundation Fellowship for Johan Elverskog for the 2021–2022 academic year. The award allows the selected scholar to intensively pursue a book-length project at the Center in the company of a stimulating intellectual community while receiving the exemplary research support for which the NHC is known. During the fellowship year, Dr. Elverskog, Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, will work on a project examining the history of Uighur Buddhism from 800 to 1800 CE.

University of Washington Press will create open-access editions of ten books on the Ming dynasty, including four that were previously supported by GHF. The set includes six scholarly monographs, two translations, a biography, and an edited collection from a range of fields, from literature and philosophy to social, political, and environmental history. The project aims to bring these important resources and scholarship to a larger audience in the US and internationally; to facilitate their use in courses; and to help foster and support a broad community of scholars who can use these works as a basis for new lines of research. The books are:

• Vignettes from the Late Ming: A Hsiao-p’in Anthology, translated by Yang Ye (1999)
• Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle by Shih-shan Henry Tsai (2001)
• The Story of Han Xiangzi: The Alchemical Adventures of a Daoist Immortal by Erzeng Yang, translated by Philip Clart (2007)
• The Mandate of Heaven and The Great Ming Code by Yonglin Jiang (2011)
• The Scholar and the State: Fiction as Political Discourse in Late Imperial China by Liangyan Ge (2014)
• Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China by Andrew Schonebaum (2016)
• Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China by Ying Zhang (2016)*
• Symptoms of an Unruly Age: Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity by Rivi Handler-Spitz (2017)*
• Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China by Ian M. Miller (2020)*
• The Objectionable Li Zhi: Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China, edited by Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee and Haun Saussy (2021)*

*GHF previously supported the print editions of these titles

The Aura of Confucius is a ground-breaking study that reconstructs the remarkable history of Kongzhai, a shrine founded on the belief that Confucius’ descendants buried the sage’s robe and cap a millennium after his death and far from his home in Qufu, Shandong. Improbably located on the outskirts of modern Shanghai, Kongzhai featured architecture, visual images, and physical artifacts that created a ‘Little Queli,’ a surrogate for the temple, cemetery, and Kong descendants’ mansion in Qufu. Although Kongzhai gained recognition from the Kangxi emperor, its fortunes declined with modernization, and it was finally destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Unlike other sites, Kongzhai has not been rebuilt and its history is officially forgotten, despite the Confucian revival in contemporary China.

From the mid-sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese intellectuals attended more to dreams and dreaming than in any other period of Chinese history. Taking the approach of cultural history, this ambitious yet accessible work aims both to describe the most salient aspects of this “dream arc” and to explain its trajectory in time through the writings, arts, and practices of well-known thinkers, religionists, litterateurs, memoirists, painters, doctors, and political figures of late Ming and early Qing times. The work makes a contribution to the history of how people have understood human consciousness in various times and cultures. GHF supported the open-access version of this book.

The award will help fund educational activities related to a performance at the University of Minnesota of a new, shorter, semi-staged version of the English-language opera Dream of the Red Chamber, of which a fully-staged version premiered in 2016. These educational activities include workshops with the composer, librettist, conductor, director, and choreographer that will illuminate the textual and musical transformations of the opera, and will utilize local resources, such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s holdings of Chinese art and opera costumes. Other projects include a course on the novel and its adaptations, and seminars on related topics.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, members of the Naqshbandi Sufi dynasty vied for influence in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang. The ensuing conflict saw the region incorporated into the expanding Qing imperium. Three decades afterward, Muḥammad Ṣadiq Kashghari was commissioned to write an account of these Naqshbandi Sufis and their downfall. Providing a rare local perspective on China’s expansion into Muslim borderlands, this translation sheds light on Xinjiang’s political and religious traditions and makes a foundational work of Inner Asian literature available to students and scholars.

This international conference seeks to foster dialogue between specialists of Korean and Vietnamese humanities. It will consist of eight panels, each featuring a pair of specialists, one working on Vietnam, the other working on Korea, who will give thematically-linked presentations on a common area of study: Pedagogy and Learning; Book History; Literacy and Poetic Culture; Political Legacies; Vernacular Culture; Popular Fiction; Environmental History; and Frontiers and Borders. It will also include a round-table on rare materials collections and digital source material. Several projects will be selected for publication in a special issue of a journal.