Chinese History in Geographical Perspective

The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial state’s persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former “outer zones” in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of “all-under-heaven” to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the twentieth century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived, promises to provide insight into the contested development of the geographical entity which we, today, call 'China.'

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Contested Terrain of a Geographical Entity Yongtao Du and Jeff Kyong-McClain Chapter 1: Early Modern Mapping at the Qing Court: Survey Maps from the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong Reign Periods Laura Hostetler Chapter 2: Kangxi’s Auspicious Empire: Rhetorics of Geographic Integration in the Early Qing Stephen Whiteman Chapter 3: De-civilizing Ming China’s Southern Border: Vietnam as Lost Province or Barbarian Culture Kathlene Baldanza Chapter 4: The Geography of Dragon Boat Racing in Late Imperial China Andrew Chittick Chapter 5: Writing Personalized Local History during the Late Ming and the Ming-Qing Transition: The Case of a Ming Loyalist Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang Chapter 6: An Ambush of Tigers: A Socio-Ecological History of the Ming-Qing Fujian Tiger Menace Luke Hambleton Chapter 7: The New Frontier: Zhuang Xueben and Xikang Province Yajun Mo Chapter 8: Native-Place Ties in Transnational Networks: Overseas Chinese Nationalism and Fujian’s Development, 1928-1941 Huei-Ying Kuo Chapter 9: A Preliminary Investigation of the Urban Morphology of Towns of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Gregory Rohlf Chapter 10: Spatial Analysis and GIS Modeling of Regional Religious Systems in China: Conceptualization and Initial Experiments Jiang Wu, Daoqin Tong, and Karl Ryavec Epilogue: What is a Geographical Perspective on China’s History? Peter K. Bol

About the Author :
Yongtao Du is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Oklahoma State University. His research interests include translocal practices in late imperial China and literati geographic consciousness in China during the Song through the Qing. He received a PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. Jeff Kyong-McClain is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His research explores the place of archeology in nation-building in modern China, Sino-Western interaction in China's borderlands, and urban transformations during the Republican era. He received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009.