A podcast covering various aspects of Chinese history, from ancient to modern, through interviews with scholars.
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Cultural Production during the Ming-Qing Transition: A Conversation with Professor Lynn Struve
56:10
56:10
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The Ming-Qing transition was an extremely chaotic time in Chinese history. Millions died of warfare, pestilence, or starvation, and millions more were displaced. Yet despite all these issues, this was also a period of cultural production, which has often been overlooked as people focus on the wars, famine, and climate change that pervaded this peri…
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Professor Pamela Crossley on History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology
48:18
48:18
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The Qing Empire (1636-1912) ruled over one of the largest land empires in the world. Its territories encompassed not only what is considered today to be China proper and Manchuria, but also Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia. Its subjects were composed of people belonging to different identities, of which Manchu, Han, Mongol, Tibetan, and later Uighur b…
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The Maritime Kingdom of the Zheng Family: An Interview with Professor Xing Hang
54:26
54:26
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The fall of Beijing in 1644 did not immediately put an end to the Ming Dynasty. For almost half a century, Ming pretenders and loyalists in the south warred with the Manchus. One of the most prominent Ming loyalist factions was the Zheng family regime based in Fujian and Taiwan. Founded by the pirate-merchant Zheng Zhilong, the enterprise reached n…
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Professor Maura Dykstra on Her New Book ”Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State” (Governing China, Part 2)
37:38
37:38
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Professor Maura Dykstra of Caltech joins us today to talk about her new book titled Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State. According to the publisher, the book "investigates the administrative revolution of China’s eighteenth-century Qing state. It begins in the mid-seventeenth cent…
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The Ming Bureaucracy and its Practices: A Conversation with Professor Chelsea Wang (Governing China, Part 1)
48:29
48:29
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China has a long bureaucratic history and tradition, and the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was no exception. The Ming was one of the largest empires in the world at the time and it established a large and complex bureaucracy to govern it. In this episode, Professor. Chelsea Wang talks to us about some of the bureaucratic practices, which might seem stra…
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The Ming in the Southwest: Conquest, Rule, and Legacy
39:23
39:23
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In 1381, Ming armies marched into Yunnan and Guizhou and within a year had deposed the Mongol Yuan's Prince of Liang, who had been enfeoffed there by the Yuan court. The Hongwu's emperor's decision to annex Yunnan and Guizhou and establish Ming administration there was unusual, for before the Mongols conquered it in the mid-1250s, the area had neve…
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Professor Joanna Waley-Cohen on New Qing History
38:28
38:28
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Since the 1990s, the New Qing History school has loomed large in the study of the Qing dynasty. It has greatly informed not only the study of the Qing but study of other dynasties as well. Yet what exactly is New Qing History? What is "new" about it? How did it come into being? How was it received in China and the West? To answer these questions, w…
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Wang Yangming and the School of Mind: An Interview with Professor George L. Israel
55:58
55:58
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Wang Yangming 王陽明 (born Wang Shouren 王守仁, 1472-1529) is one of the most famous pre-modern Chinese intellectuals and the founder of the School of Mind (心學) of Neo-Confucianism, which was hugely influential in the later half of the Ming Dynasty. In addition to being philosopher, he was also an accomplished statesman, military leader, and calligrapher…
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Diplomacy, War, and Interstate Order in the Late 13th century East Asia: A Reconsideration of the Mongol Invasions of Japan
34:47
34:47
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The two Mongol-Yuan invasions of Japan (1274 and 1281) were important events in Japanese history. The two typhoons that destroyed the Mongol fleet, known as "divine wind," (shinpū 神風, better known today as kamikaze) would forever be etched into Japanese historical memory, directly influencing the so-called kamikaze suicide bombers of World War II. …
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Rediscovering and Reconnecting: The Intellectual Exchange of Hui Muslims in the 19th and 20th Centuries
56:41
56:41
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In the study of 19th and 20th century Chinese history, there is often focus on the intense Christian missionary activities happening in China. Yet at the same time, members of China's Hui (or Sino-Muslim) community were also beginning to reconnect with their co-religionists overseas. Armed with knowledge of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu and trained in …
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Sino-Japanese Diplomatic Encounters from the 1st to the 9th Century
45:30
45:30
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In this prequel to our first interview, UCLA Ph.D. student Greg Sattler talks about the diplomatic/tribute embassies that peoples and polities from the Japanese Archipelago dispatched to China from the 1st to the 9th centuries. While Japanese tribute embassies to China mainly evoke the missions that Japan dispatched to Tang China in the 8th and 9th…
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New Narratives on the Late Ming Military: An Interview with Professor Kenneth Swope
50:46
50:46
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For a long time, Ray Huang's influential book 1587: A Year of No Significance has colored our imagination of the Late Ming, painting the Ming as a state that was stagnant and in decline. Traditional historiography usually focuses on the poor finances of the Ming state, its inability to pay troops, its poor military performance against the peasant r…
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Feeding and Supplying the World’s Largest City: The Environmental Impact of Northern Song Kaifeng
41:58
41:58
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The Northern Song (960-1127) capital city of Kaifeng (also known as Bianjing or Dongjing) was the largest city in the medieval world. Its population surpassed the previous capitals of Chang'an and Luoyang and dwarfed contemporary world cities such as Baghdad and Constantinople. At its peak, Kaifeng boasted a population of well over a million people…
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The Mongol-Yuan Conquest of the Southern Song
34:27
34:27
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We hope everyone had a good Christmas! In this episode, Yiming Ha will give an introduction to the forty-four year war between the Mongol-Yuan and the Southern Song. This was one of the longest wars the Mongols had to fight against an adversary and the Southern Song was among the states that put up the longest resistance against the Mongols. This t…
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The Tributary System and Chosŏn-Ming Relations: A Conversation with Professor Sixiang Wang
46:43
46:43
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In our previous episodes, the term "tributary system" has come up a few times, yet we've never had the opportunity to explain what exactly it is. To better shed light on this topic, and as part of our exploration of Chinese diplomacy, we interviewed Professor Sixiang Wang, an Assistant Professor of Korean history at UCLA who specializes in the dipl…
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King Kwong Wong on Koryŏ Korea Under Mongol-Yuan Domination
36:46
36:46
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In 1231, Mongol forces invaded the Korean Peninsula, beginning almost three decades of warfare against the Koryŏ Kingdom. In 1258, the Koryŏ court finally surrendered and the kingdom became a part of the Mongol Empire. King Kwong Wong, an independent scholar who specializes in the relationship between the Mongol-Yuan and Koryŏ, joins us to give a b…
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New Perspectives on the Zheng He Voyages: A Conversation with Sean Cronan
36:16
36:16
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In this episode, Sean talks about some of the new scholarships and perspectives on the famous Zheng He voyages. Zheng He is widely known to history as the eunuch admiral who led several large-scale voyages to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. For many Chinese, the story of Zheng He and his travels to the Indian Ocean (鄭和下西洋) is often seen as a s…
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The Rise of Merchants: Maritime Sea Trade in East Asia in the 10th to 12th centuries
29:04
29:04
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29:04
In our very first episode, Greg talks about some aspects of his research on the growing role of Chinese merchants in the East Asian sea trade between the 10th to 12th centuries. Diplomacy from the 7th to 9th centuries was dominated by official embassies that neighboring states dispatched to the Sui-Tang courts, but after the fall of the Tang dynast…
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