Past Awards

In the first half of the eighteenth century, members of the Naqshbandi Sufi dynasty vied for influence in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang. The ensuing conflict saw the region incorporated into the expanding Qing imperium. Three decades afterward, Muḥammad Ṣadiq Kashghari was commissioned to write an account of these Naqshbandi Sufis and their downfall. Providing a rare local perspective on China’s expansion into Muslim borderlands, this translation sheds light on Xinjiang’s political and religious traditions and makes a foundational work of Inner Asian literature available to students and scholars.

This international conference seeks to foster dialogue between specialists of Korean and Vietnamese humanities. It will consist of eight panels, each featuring a pair of specialists, one working on Vietnam, the other working on Korea, who will give thematically-linked presentations on a common area of study: Pedagogy and Learning; Book History; Literacy and Poetic Culture; Political Legacies; Vernacular Culture; Popular Fiction; Environmental History; and Frontiers and Borders. It will also include a round-table on rare materials collections and digital source material. Several projects will be selected for publication in a special issue of a journal.

This musical performance of three arias from the opera Ghost Village accompanied a two-day symposium, The Sensorium of the Early-Modern Chinese Text, which took place from 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 was 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 aimed to foster an appreciation of late-imperial Chinese culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.