China Humanities

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Soojung Han, Southwestern University Following the collapse of the Tang dynasty and before the rise of the Song dynasty, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907–979) is known to have been one of the most chaotic periods...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Cheng-hua Wang, Princeton University Focusing on landscape paintings in the handscroll format from the tenth to the twelfth century, this talk aims to present two structural innovations that took place in the late eleventh...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Charles Hartman, University of Albany (Emeritus) This lecture will introduce my recent book, Structures of Governance in Song Dynasty China 960-1279 CE (Cambridge, 2023). Together with its historiographical prelude, The Making of...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Meimei Zhang, Occidental College This paper examines the Song dynasty literati’s ming 銘 inscriptions on the qin 琴, a seven-string plucked instrument that is also known as zither or guqin. The tradition of inscribing musical...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Nicolas Standaert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) The Chinese gazette as a publicly available government publication was distributed in a variety of formats since the twelfth century. Little is known, however, about its...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Ariel Fox, University of Chicago This talk explores the way in which commercial identities are recast and recreated in the plays of the Suzhou circle, a group of collaborative playwrights active in the mid-seventeenth century. In...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Xin Wen, Princeton University Chang’an, the capital of the Tang dynasty (618–907), was the largest city in the medieval world. The walled area of the city measured 84 square kilometers and the population likely reached one...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Anne Feng, Boston University This paper investigates the relationship between Buddhist meditation and images in medieval China by reconsidering the development of Pure Land transformation tableaux in Dunhuang caves. Working...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Lu Kou, Columbia University For imperial officials, “work” – fulfilling duties in the office, traveling for business, or managing lawsuits, taxation, or infrastructure – was a common subject matter for poetic treatment. Yet...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Jeffrey Riegel, UC Berkeley, Emeritus Mengzi 2A2 consists of Master Meng’s answers to questions put to him by a follower named Gongsun Chou. The first few of these replies relate to bu dong xin, “unmoved heart,”—i.e., mental...