2020
Performing “Ghost Village” at the Symposium “Sensorium of the Early Modern Chinese Text” (Performance)
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, 2021
Principal Investigator(s): Ariel Fox, University of Chicago; Paize Keulemans, Princeton University; Suyoung Son, Cornell UniversityThis musical performance of three arias from the opera Ghost Village will accompany a two-day symposium, The Sensorium of the Early-Modern Chinese Text, scheduled for October 23-25 at the University of Chicago. Ghost Village is based on one of the stories from Strange Tales of the Liaozhai by the early Qing dynasty author, Pu Songling (1640-1715). The opera is a collaboration between Chen Yao, of the Central Conservatory in Beijing, and Judith Zeitlin, of the University of Chicago. Open to the public, the project aims to foster an appreciation of late-imperial Chinese culture.
2020
The Culture of Language in Ming China
By Nathan Vedal
Columbia University Press, forthcoming March 2022

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.
2020
The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons: A Seventeenth-Century Novel
Translated by Kristin Ingrid Fryklund, with an introduction by Mark Edward Lewis and Brigitte Baptandier
University of Washington Press, February 2021

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.
2020
The Objectionable Li Zhi: Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China
Edited by Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, and Haun Saussy
University of Washington Press, January 2021

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.
2020
The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China by Ying-shih Yü
Translated by Yim-tze Kwong and edited by Hoyt Cleveland Tillman
Columbia University Press, March 2021

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.
2020
Writing Pirates: Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China
By Yuanfei Wang
University of Michigan Press, 2021

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.
2019
A Chinese-English Dictionary of Ming Government Official Titles (Online Dictionary)
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).
2019
Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China
By Ian Miller
University of Washington Press, 2020

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.