2011
Ming Provincial Courts Conference
Colgate University, 2011
Principal Investigator(s): David Robinson, Colgate UniversityThe Geiss Hsu Foundation fully-supported and conducted the Ming Provincial Courts Conference, held at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. Nine scholars from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, China, and the United States presented papers and discussed the courts of imperial clansmen outside Beijing. Participants drew attention to their patronage of painting, religion, scholarship, as well as the courts’ social, economic, and military dimensions. Some papers delivered at the conference were published in Ming Studies Volume 12, Issue 65.
2010
Ming Taizu’s Ideas on Statecraft and Their Implementation
Edited by Chu Hung-lam
The Chinese University Press, 2010
Featuring eleven original papers presented at Ming Taizu and His Times, an international conference hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and supported by the Geiss Hsu Foundation, the book is one of the most substantial collections of essays on the Ming founder. It offers new interpretations on Ming Taizu, the challenges he faced, the resources he drew upon, and his successes and failures in meeting those difficulties. The collection as a whole opens the ways for a reconsideration and reevaluation of the founder of the Ming Dynasty.
2010
The Map and Music of Matteo Ricci (Lecture and Interactive Performance)
University of Minnesota and the Institute for Advanced Study, 2010
Inspired by the James Ford Bell Trust’s acquisition of the 1602 world map by Matteo Ricci, Ming historian Ann Waltner, in collaboration with with iSacabuche!, an early music ensemble based at Indiana University, presented a rich program that included a lecture about the map, a demonstration of Baroque and Chinese instruments, and a multi-media performance reanimating the pivotal cultural exchange between Italian Jesuits and Chinese literati in seventeenth-century China. This program combined music composed by Huang Ruo and dramatic readings visually framed by a projected digitized version of the world map that Matteo Ricci created and presented to the Wanli Emperor.
2008
Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–1644)
Edited by David M. Robinson
Harvard University Asia Center, 2008
This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation, processes driven by immediate personal imperatives, mediated through social, political, and cultural interaction.
2008
Local Administration in Ming China: The Changing Roles of Magistrates, Prefects, and Provincial Officials
By Thomas G. Nimick
University of Minnesota, 2008
The most detailed account of local Ming government available in English, Local Administration in Ming China traces the origins and evolution of the lowest level of administrative offices over the course of the dynasty. It starts with the Ming founder’s experiments with using members of the local elite to collect taxes and goes on to the increased reliance on magistrates and prefects sent out from the center. The story concludes with the fiscal problems at the end of the dynasty.
2008
Long Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder Across Six Centuries of East Asian History
Edited by Sarah Schneewind
University of Minnesota, 2008
The founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Zhu Yuanzhang, was one of the most colorful rulers in China’s long imperial history. His rise from poverty, participation in a millenarian movement, expulsion of the Mongols, unification of the empire, three decades of tumultuous rule, paranoia, and bloody purges are all the stuff of legend. Long Live the Emperor! brings together twenty essays examining how his stormy career has been interpreted in politics, the arts, outside of China, and in our own time.
2006
Ming Taizu and His Times
Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006
Principal Investigator(s): Chu Hung-lam, Chinese University of Hong KongThis conference examined the personality and career of Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming dynasty, posthumously known as Ming Taizu. Many political and social institutions as well as governmental practices introduced during his reign influenced the five remaining centuries of imperial China. Historians from China, England, France, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States presented papers. A selection of them were published in 2010 by the Chinese University Press as Ming Taizu’s Ideas on Statecraft and Their Implementation.
2006
Proceedings of the International Conference on Ming Taizu and His Times
Edited by Chu Hung-lam
Centre for Chinese History, Department of History, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006
This bound, photocopied, bilingual volume records the proceedings of the international conference held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in March 2006. Supported by the Geiss Hsu Foundation, the conference examined the personality and career of Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming Dynasty. It features 31 thematically-related articles, eleven of which were later published by the Chinese University Press as Ming Taizu’s Ideas on Statecraft and Their Implementation.