Past Awards

From the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, Neo-Confucian ideology sought to reinforce the seclusion of women within the domestic sphere, while flourishing lay Buddhism increasingly fueled their passion for visiting temples and going on distant pilgrimages. Xu Ma explores this cultural tension to reveal how religious spaces—physical, imagined, and embodied—emerged as a “third social space” that both sustained and subverted the Confucian binaries of inside and outside, public and private. By blending gender studies, spatial theory, and literary analysis, Boundaries and Bodhisattvas demonstrates how women’s bodies and hearts reconfigured both Confucian gender paradigms and the broader religious landscape of late imperial China.

This special issue of CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature presents innovative and substantive studies of Ming drama, its adaptations, and early song suites related to Ming urban culture. Grounded in solid research and situated within their cultural and historical contexts, the contributions revolve around the theme of “Emotion, Entertainment, and History in Chinese Drama and Song.” Written by recent doctoral graduates and Ph.D. candidates, the research articles demonstrate innovative scholarship on complex subjects and bring fresh perspectives to the fields.

This collection makes the Ming the starting point for a wide-ranging analysis of statecraft ideas and practices in early modern and modern China. It emerged from a GHF-sponsored conference held at the University of British Columbia and features thirteen papers that link Ming or Ming-adjacent themes to modern and contemporary governance issues. Overall, the volume enables scholars and a broader audience to rethink the Ming through the lens of its pivotal role in shaping Chinese governance, and to reconsider statecraft through extensive engagement with Ming history.

Mapping the Ming World examines how seventeenth-century China reconceptualized its place in a rapidly transforming global order. At the center of the book is a striking and historically consequential map printed in 1644, immediately following the fall of Beijing and the death of the last Ming emperor. This extraordinary artifact places a diagram of the Chinese state at its core, surrounded by visual elements drawn from Renaissance-style world maps. The result is a bold fusion of spatial traditions that reshaped geographic thinking across East Asia while profoundly shaping European understandings of China for generations. By using a single map as a point of entry into broader questions of identity, empire, and world order, Mapping the Ming World offers a fresh and compelling contribution to the global history of cartography.

The Book of China is the most substantial description of East Asia in any west Eurasian language before the era of European maritime empires. Written in 1516 in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, by Ali Akbar Khatayi, a merchant and professional cultural broker who had visited Beijing around 1506, The Book of China offers a view from the civically-entangled space of China’s Inner Asian frontier, a rare record of how merchants of the medieval Silk Road and Central Asian Muslims perceived Chinese culture at this pivotal moment. This volume includes a translation of the original Persian text and of the preface added by the Ottoman translator who gave it the title “Lawbook of China and Cathay,” annotations based on Classical Chinese, Persian, and Ottoman sources, and a critical introduction.

Tin was everywhere in early modern China—lining tea chests, shaping religious vessels, alloyed into coins. Yet beneath this ordinary metal lies a story of migration, technology, and governance that paved the way for China’s entry into global capitalism. The Tin Centuries uncovers how tin connected miners in Yunnan and Southeast Asia, entrepreneurs and traders across oceans, and Qing officials confronting unprecedented demands on natural resources. By following tin’s movement from mountains and islands to imperial mintage and treasuries, The Tin Centuries reframes the history of technology, migration, and empire. It reveals how a seemingly humble metal reflected the changing trajectory of Qing statecraft and foreshadowed China’s path toward modernity within an expanding global economy.

Observing the Unseen explores perspectives in early-modern China around such questions as, how did people understand invisible or puzzling aspects of their natural world? How were things investigated and envisioned when they lacked visual context, either because they were everywhere (water, wind, life) or nowhere (dragons, the future)? Schonebaum pursues these topics by examining “practical” literature; local and court histories, gazetteers, and newspapers; and “entertainment” literature. The result is an enlightening sweep through early-modern imaginings and beliefs.

This book is the first study in any language that treats the entire cultural constellation of the more than 100 surviving handscroll paintings with the title Qingming shanghe (Up the River during Qingming), which span six hundred years, from the early twelfth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. The book not only examines the production contexts of different versions in the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties, but also explores the cultural imaginings that the name Qingming shanghe could evoke. Furthermore, it takes a deeper dive into the artistic, political, and sociocultural realms that these paintings helped shape.