Past Awards

The Culture of Language in Ming China traces the origins of the study of phonetic scripts designed for writing Chinese, as well as early proposals for language standardization that brought together seemingly unrelated communities, from Buddhist monks to opera librettists. Conventionally understood as a period of intellectual stagnation, the late Ming dynasty represented a pivotal moment in scholarly practices and literary production revolving around philological pursuits, which continue to resonate to the present day. The Culture of Language in Ming China is the first book to examine the broad body of Ming scholarly texts on language.

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons is a seventeenth-century novelistic account of the founding myth of the Lady of Linshui, the goddess of women, childbirth, and childhood, who is still venerated in places in Southeast Asia. The goddess’s story evolved from the life of Chen Jinggu in Ming Dynasty Hunan and has taken the form of vernacular short fiction, legends, plays, sutras, and stele inscriptions at temples where she is worshipped. This unabridged, annotated translation provides insights into late imperial Chinese religion, the lives of women in the period, and more broadly, the structure of families and local society.

The iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial writings and actions strongly influenced late-Ming print culture, commentarial and epistolary practice, discourses on authenticity and selfhood, attitudes toward friendship and masculinity, displays of filial piety, understandings of the public and private spheres, views toward women, and perspectives on Buddhism and the afterlife. In this edited volume, leading sinologists demonstrate the interrelatedness of seemingly discrete aspects of Li Zhi’s thought and emphasize the far-reaching impact of his ideas and actions.

Why did modern capitalism not arise in late imperial China? The preeminent historian Ying-shih Yü offers a magisterial examination of religious and cultural influences in the development of China’s early modern economy. The book traces how religious leaders developed the spiritual significance of labor and how merchants adopted this religious work ethic. Yü argues that China’s early modern mercantile spirit was restricted by the bureaucratic priority on social order, and rejects the premise that China needed an early capitalist stage of development. Now available in English, this landmark work has been influenced scholars in East Asia since its publication in 1987.

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.

Fir and Empire traces changes in China’s woodland environment in the early modern period, exploring how subtle shifts in policy enabled transformations in both forest ecology and forest oversight. Woodlands evolved from open-access, natural-growth environments to privately owned, largely anthropogenic ones. Developments as seemingly distinct as the Zheng He fleets, Beijing palaces, Single Whip Reforms, and the emergence of the Hakka diaspora all had roots in the transformation of South China’s forests.

Last translated into English nearly fifty years ago, the Hegel and Li bring significant new scholarship to the task of interpreting, translating, annotating, and introducing this new addition of Further Adventures on the Journey to the West, which can be seen as the culmination of the Ming novel. The text brings together selected materials from earlier fiction, with an original and highly imaginative new setting, the Monkey King’s own mind. By developing threads implicit in the parent novel, this sequel demonstrates its author’s sophistication, strong sense of moral commitments, and clear sense of humor as it parodies common human foibles.

Amid the turmoil of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition in seventeenth-century China, some intellectuals sought refuge in romantic memories from what they perceived as cataclysmic events. This volume presents two memoirs by famous men of letters, Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Convent by Mao Xiang (1611–93) and Miscellaneous Records of Plank Bridge by Yu Huai (1616–96), that recall times spent with courtesans. They evoke the courtesan world in the final decades of the Ming dynasty and the aftermath of its collapse.