Past Awards

The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported the publication of this volume of 29 essays derived from lectures and papers presented at the Ming China: Courts and Contacts, 1400–1450 conference, held in 2014 in conjunction with the Ming: 50 Years that Changed China exhibition at the British Museum.

In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing examinations to obtain a civil service position. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power and moral legitimacy, but changing circumstances forced many to seek alternative careers. Politically engaged but excluded from traditional bureaucratic roles, creative writers authored critiques of state power in the form of fiction, showing that as the literati class grappled with its own increasing marginalization, they began to imagine possibilities for a new political order.

This book is the definitive study of imperial Chinese local gazetteers, one of the most important sources for premodern Chinese studies. Methodologically innovative, it represents a major contribution to the history of books, publishing, reading, and society. By examining how gazetteers were read, Joseph R. Dennis illustrates their significance in local societies and national discourses. His analysis of how gazetteers were initiated and produced reconceptualizes the geography of imperial Chinese publishing.

Ancient Chinese halls are celebrated for their majestic rooflines. However, the visual impact of these structures comes chiefly from their ceramic ornament. Clarence Eng cogently argues that these important ceramics be studied in their own right. He introduces the aesthetics, history and technology of Chinese architectural ceramics, demonstrates that similar levels of skilled expertise were applied both to glazed and unglazed ornament, and describes their contribution to structures designed primarily to delight the viewer, such as screen walls and pagodas.

The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported a second performance of Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music, presented at Best Buy Theater at the University of Minnesota on May 5, 2014. The concert featured music, words, and images to explore the 1602 map of the world in Chinese made by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci while he was in China. The Baroque instruments and voices of the musical group ¡Sacabuche! were joined by Chinese instruments.

Complementing the British Museum’s exhibition, Ming: 50 Years that Changed China, this major conference brought together more than 30 Ming scholars from across the globe, who presented new perspectives and research papers about the Ming spanning 1400–1450. Focusing on the aftermath of the Zhu Yuanzhang’s overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, the conference examined the role of China’s imperial and provincial princely courts, and discussed China’s relations and exchanges with other parts of the world.

Held at St. John’s College and the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, the conference explored the different types of biography in East Asian countries from 1400 to 1900. Presenters challenged the traditional position maintained by past studies that the biography in China and Korea was simply a means to compartmentalize individual lives into pre-established moral categories. Papers and panel discussions examined the ways in which various standard biographies, public or private, treated their subjects. Ming Studies published a summary of the conference (2013, issue 68), and the research presented was collected in Representing Lives in China: Forms of Biography in the Ming-Qing Period, 1368-1911 (Cornell University East Asia Program, 2018).

Conference program: https://geissfoundation.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/JPGFWeb-3D-1a-ConfBioSchdl-16Feb14.pdf
Publication: https://eap.einaudi.cornell.edu/publication/new-representing-lives-china-forms-biography-ming-qing-period-1368-1911

Screen of Kings is the first book in any language to examine the cultural role of the regional aristocracy or ‘kings’ – relatives of the emperors – in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644). Through an investigation of their patronage of architecture, calligraphy, painting and other art forms, and through examination of the contents of their splendid and recently excavated tombs, this innovative study puts the aristocracy back at the heart of accounts of China’s cultural and artistic histories, from which they have until very recently been excluded.