Individual Research Projects

• Anne Gerritsen

  

  Ritual Objects and the Local Gazetteer

  The object depicted in this illustration described as a xiangzun (象尊), a ritual vessel made of bronze in the shape of an elephant. In the Cangxi (蒼溪) county gazetteer (Sichuan province) of 1783, this illustration forms part of a set of about twenty ritual implements, accompanied by detailed illustrations of where these should be placed and how they should be used on the occasion of various ritual performances. Local gazetteers almost always have maps, but on occasion, they also have extensive illustrations covering a variety of aspects of ritual. This project aims to bring the local gazetteer illustrations related to ritual implements into the discussion about ritual objects and performance. The images include not only ritual vessels in various shapes and sizes, but also a range of musical implements, diagrams about the placement of objects and the performance of ritual dance, and the correct postures with the feathered plume. The local gazetteer, as always, tries to place the rich information it contains in a local perspective, but at the same time, the standardized nature of these illustrations points to an empire-wide shared repertoire of images of ritual objects. This project seeks to use the analytical tools of LoGaRT to map the occurrence of ritual illustrations in the gazetteers and explore the circulation of this visual material during the late Ming and Qing dynasties.

• Ken Hammond

  

  Images of Urban Places in Early Modern Chinese Local Gazetteers

  Major changes took place in the organization and functioning of urban space in China from the 11th through the 17th centuries. The number of towns and cities increased dramatically, especially in the later Song dynasty and in the second half of the Ming. Local gazetteers contain many images of urban places, from villages and towns to county and prefectural cities. What can these images, including maps and other kinds of visual representations, tell us about Chinese urban places? Did the visualization of urban space change across this timeframe? What practices of selection and cartographic technique shaped the corpus of visual materials? Were there regional differences in how urban places were portrayed?  This research project examines a body of visual materials drawn from local gazetteers to discern patterns of representation and to assess the range and variation of specific features of images of towns and cities, in order to contribute to the further development of scholarly understanding of Chinese urban history.

• Shellen Wu

  

  Frontier Settlements and Modern State-Building in Late Imperial and Republican China

  Policy debates over frontiers took place during every imperial dynastic period in Chinese history. In the twentieth century, however, influences from abroad, including the importation of scientific disciplines and ideas about race and nationalism, combined with long running domestic concerns to form a potent new justification for territorial control over peripheral regions. In the transition from Qing to Republican China, geography remained a staple subject in primary and secondary schools, while commercial presses rolled out large numbers of gazetteers, atlas collections, and textbooks. Travel accounts, particularly of frontier areas, borrowed heavily from earlier Qing works, and a new genre dealing specifically with travel abroad also retained rhetorical conventions from earlier writings. In the clamor to adopt a “scientific” geography, few Chinese writers at the time or since recognized the persistence of imperial tropes and concerns in their writings. My research aims to draw out some of the underlying continuities between “traditional” Chinese geography and twentieth century developments, when Chinese geographers attempted to remake geography into a science. By examining local gazetteers, this study looks at how traditional compilations adapted to new knowledge and helped to shape a modern Chinese territoriality.

• Zhang Jiajing

  

  i

  Technology, Information, and Application: Western Technology in Gazetteer Maps from Late Qing and Republican China

  Traditional Chinese cartographic techniques are unique, and they started to be impacted by Western cartography in late Qing. During this time, Chinese maps began to make use of map projection, longitude and latitude, and also utilized Western hypsography methods in expressing the topography, such as the hachuring, hill shading method, and contouring method. Local gazetteers are major primary sources for the study of China’s local history, and they also have a large number of maps, which were normally made by the government. Considering maps as knowledge productions, this project will focus on the gazetteer maps that were drawn with Western technology in late Qing and Republican China to track the source of the cartography and geography knowledge. Using LoGaRT, this project will narrow down from different provincial Xiangtuzhi and Xianzhi and investigate the spread and application of Western cartography technology in folk, and pay attention to questions: the similarities and differences of the local gazetteers maps of different areas in the same historical period, the social reasons and the technical reasons for these differences, and whether geographic factors have an important influence on local gazetteers maps. It will then research the mapmaker and their conditions.