Past Awards

Since 2021, GHF has supported an open access collection of books published by the University of Washington Press on the Ming dynasty and adjacent periods and territories. This award will allow the Press to add two of their most significant and most often used books in Ming studies to the collection, bringing these resources to a larger audience, facilitating their use in courses, and fostering new avenues for scholarly research.

This project will build an open-access public platform, based on Large Language Models and Private Knowledge Bases, with which scholars can explore the collected writings of 325 individuals from the late Yuan to the early Qing found in the Siku quanshu. The user interface will allow researchers and the interested public to investigate topics in Ming history and culture. They will be able to call up documents and have them punctuated, analyzed, and translated, and they will be able to discover who else spoke to those topics.

Xu Xiake stands as China’s most distinguished traveler and travel writer, whose extensive journeys through Ming-dynasty China offer a unique window into the era’s geography, history, and cultural traditions. This new, fully annotated English translation includes maps and illustrations, allowing readers to follow Xu’s routes. It will be indispensable for scholars of Chinese history, geography, and travel writing and will bring Xu Xiake’s extraordinary journeys to a broader audience. The award from GHF will support print and open-access editions.

University of Washington Press will add three titles to the collection of UW Press / Geiss Hsu Foundation Open Access Books: Jiang Yonglin’s translation of The Great Ming Code / Da Ming lü, first published in 2005; the annotated translation of Further Adventures on the Journey to the West, prepared by Qiancheng Li and Robert Hegel and published in 2020; and the 2021 annotated edition of The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons, translated by Kristin Ingrid Fryklund, with an introduction and notes by Mark Edward Lewis and Brigitte Baptandier.

Bringing together a rich trove of sources, Three Impeachments traces the process of impeachment, review, condemnation, and restoration to provide unique insights into the Kangxi golden age. Part I reveals that the highly lauded accomplishments of the Kangxi emperor were not his alone, but the result of collaboration between Manchu elite, the newly formed Chinese Martial Banner Army, and Chinese scholars. Part II, which focuses on Guo Xi’s impeachments, sheds new light on dynastic history and political agency.

Bandits in Print reexamines Ming vernacular literature and print culture through the influential Ming novelShuihu zhuan (The Water Margin). Moving away from ultimately unanswerable questions about authorship and urtext, Scott Gregory focuses on the editor-publishers who decided the shape the novel would take as they crafted their print editions. By placing each edition firmly within its own socio-historical context, Bandits in Print shows that in the Ming dynasty, a novel like The Water Margin was not so much as a single literary work but a complex family of print editions, each with its own meaning.

Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in the Chinese tradition. From poetry, letters, and diaries to statements in legal proceedings, these engaging and readable works provide vivid details of life as it was lived from the pre-imperial period to the nineteenth century. With an introduction and list of additional readings for each selection, this volume is ideal for undergraduate courses on Chinese history, literature, religion, and women and family.

The University of Washington Press will add two titles to the collection of Geiss Foundation Open Access Books: The Interweaving of Rituals by Nicolas Standaert (2008) and Many Faces of Mulian (2017) by Rostislav Berezkin. These works illuminate the development over time of important social, cultural, religious, and literary trends that took root in the Ming; making them freely available facilitates their use in courses, fosters new lines of scholarship, and brings them to a wider audience in the U.S. and abroad.