Past Awards

Asia for Educators will create a series of recorded presentations and related professional development resources to expose secondary and non-specialist undergraduate-level teachers and their students to the Ming dynasty, and to introduce them to the narrative classics of Chinese literature. These presentations, given by experts in the field, will include background information on the period in which the work was written, a short biography of the author, and suggested excerpts to read in class.

GHF funded ten scholarships to allow scholars of books and printing in the Ming dynasty to attend the Rare Book School (RBS), a world-leading institute for the study of written, printed, and born digital materials. Affiliated with the University of Virginia, RBS is a mainstay of education for rare book librarians and scholars of the history of the book. The RBS course week includes 30 hours of hands-on instruction in interpreting the material forms of textural artifacts, as well as academic lectures, discussion forums, demonstrations, and exhibitions on topics pertinent to the book in the Asian world.

As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally. By treating learning as the subject, it broadens our perspective, going beyond a history of ideas to investigate the social practices and networks of kinship and collegiality with which literati defined themselves in local, regional, and national contexts.

An award from Geiss Hsu Foundation will make possible a manuscript review workshop for Laws of the Land: Fengshui and Administration in Qing China by Tristan G. Brown. Laws of the Land examines fengshui’s role in late imperial China as a discourse for articulating legal claims pertinent to the relationship between humans and their environments. Brown will invite two scholars working in Ming-Qing studies in the areas of cultural history, environmental history, or the history of science to read and comment on a draft of the work.

The China Biographical Database project (CBDB) has opened the beta version of its crowdsourcing platform to a project for identifying Ming dynasty social associations, which is currently devoted to Ming dynasty letters. The GHF award supported the hiring of graduate students in China in Ming literature and history to review the more than 4,000 existing identifications writers of Ming dynasty letters and to add new ones.

University of Washington Press created open-access editions of ten books on the Ming dynasty, including four that were previously supported by GHF. The set includes six scholarly monographs, two translations, a biography, and an edited collection from a range of fields, from literature and philosophy to social, political, and environmental history. The project aims to bring these important resources and scholarship to a larger audience in the US and internationally; to facilitate their use in courses; and to help foster and support a broad community of scholars who can use these works as a basis for new lines of research. The books are:

• Vignettes from the Late Ming: A Hsiao-p’in Anthology, translated by Yang Ye (1999)
• Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle by Shih-shan Henry Tsai (2001)
• The Story of Han Xiangzi: The Alchemical Adventures of a Daoist Immortal by Erzeng Yang, translated by Philip Clart (2007)
• The Mandate of Heaven and The Great Ming Code by Yonglin Jiang (2011)
• The Scholar and the State: Fiction as Political Discourse in Late Imperial China by Liangyan Ge (2014)
• Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China by Andrew Schonebaum (2016)
• Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China by Ying Zhang (2016)*
• Symptoms of an Unruly Age: Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity by Rivi Handler-Spitz (2017)*
• Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China by Ian M. Miller (2020)*
• The Objectionable Li Zhi: Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China, edited by Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee and Haun Saussy (2021)*

*GHF previously supported the print editions of these titles

Porcelain for the Emperor explores one key to China’s extraordinary production and export of fine porcelain during the early modern period: the role of specialist officials in producing the technological knowledge and distinctive artistic forms that were essential to the cultural policies of the Chinese state in the early Qing dynasty. Through a detailed study of porcelain manufacture loosely structured around the career of the potter who supervised ceramic production for the Qing dynasty court, the book shows how these imperial technocrats engaged in fiscal management, technical experimentation, and design to organize rationalized manufacturing in a precapitalist, preindustrial society.

The National Humanities Center will create five self-paced, asynchronous professional development modules that integrate current scholarship, model source analysis, and support curriculum development for teaching about the Ming dynasty. Organized as volumes in the Humanities in Class TeacherNotes collection, this project will allow pre-collegiate and non-expert collegiate level educators to acquire in-depth subject knowledge. Teachers who complete the modules earn professional credits, and may create and publish classroom-ready instructional resources that will be made openly available for other educators to use.