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.

University of Washington Press created 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

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.

Born to a powerful family and educated at a prominent monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699-1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity to play a central role in the reconstruction of her religious community. Alison Melnick Dyer employs literary and historical analysis, centered on a biography written by the nun’s disciple, to consider how privilege influences individual authority, how authoritative Buddhist women have negotiated their positions and situations, and how the lives of historical Buddhist women are (and are not) memorialized by their communities.

The Foundation supported the print and open-access versions of Writing Pirates, which connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called “Japanese pirates” raided southeast coastal China. Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings, histories, and fiction of the period jointly narrate pirates and China’s Orient in maritime Asia. Wang shows that the late Ming discourses of pirates and the sea simultaneously entailed imperialistic and personal narratives of the “other”: foreigners, renegades, migrants, and marginalized authors. At the center of the discourses, early modern concepts of empire, race, and authenticity were intensively negotiated.