Past Awards

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.

The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported the development of the University of Irvine Libraries’ crowd-translation system for Ming government official titles. A critical reference tool for scholars of the Ming dynasty in China, this online reference uses an Application Programming Interface (API) to synchronize crowd-sourced translations. It includes 3,245 entries arranged in tiers related to the hierarchy of government offices. Each lists the official title in traditional Chinese, followed by its pinyin, English translation, and alternative title names (including abbreviations, colloquial names, and commonly-known names).

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.

This two-day conference aims to be the inaugural meeting of a regional forum to promote scholarly interaction and to support emerging scholars of late imperial China working in the southeastern United States. By establishing these formal gatherings, the organizers hope to provide intellectual benefits to the scholars and graduate students in the region, to enrich their own scholarship and teaching, and to engage broader interest in studies of the Ming.

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.

Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming-Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic texts and performances against Qing sartorial regulations, Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule in seventeenth-century China, revealing not just how political and ethnic conflicts shaped theatrical costuming, but also the ways in which costuming enabled different modes of identity negotiation during the dynastic transition.