Abstract: In the fifteenth century, the rise of Dongbuhanhu presented a significant political and military challenge for Ming China along its Sichuan-Tibetan frontier. The tributary system played a pivotal role in Dongbuhanhu's development, functioning in different ways at various stages of the polity's rise. From the 1410s to 1430s, Dongbuhanhu employed the tributary system to gain recognition from the Ming, thus consolidating its secular and religious authority. In the 1440s, control over tributary routes became a central element in the power struggle between Dongbuhanhu and Zagu, transforming the system into a strategic tool for geopolitical competition. During the 1450s, the tributary system not only facilitated Dongbuhanhu's accumulation of material wealth but also provided the polity a political framework to establish a hierarchical order in frontier regions. By examining the practical implications of the tributary system in the frontier region, this article traces specific ways through which frontier societies took advantage of imperial policies to negotiate with state authorities for their own interests.
Abstract: This article examines a distinctive subset of Qing-dynasty biographies of exemplary women that foreground forensic-style description alongside supernatural revelation. Tracing this practice to Ming precedents, especially Gui Youguang's writings, the article argues that the combined staging of the maimed female body and miraculous occurrences constituted a deliberate narrative strategy for resolving juridical and moral ambiguity surrounding women killed while resisting sexual violation. Through close textual analysis and contextualization within Qing forensic practice, judicial debates, and religious culture, the article demonstrates that graphic attention to bodily wounds functioned as a form of para-juridical evidence, transforming the injured corpse into legible proof of resistance and moral integrity. Divine dreams and posthumous miracles, meanwhile, operated as supplementary modes of validation, compensating for the perceived insufficiency of formal legal adjudication. In this sense, bodily spectacle and miracle worked in tandem not to undermine Confucian norms prescribed by the nei–wai (inner–outer) divide, but to reaffirm them through their strategic suspension under conditions of inconclusive bureaucratic and judicial judgment. Situated at the intersection of history, law, and literature, the examples studied here reveal the uneasy interweaving of moral judgment, legal reasoning, and narrative sensation in Qing biographical writing.
Abstract: This paper examines the pivotal yet largely invisible role of Han-Chinese secretaries known as zhongshu 中書 (7b) in the everyday administration of the Qing empire. It is generally believed that the influence of the Grand Secretaries significantly waned with the development of the palace memorial ( zouzhe 奏折)system in the eighteenth century, which allowed senior officials to bypass the Grand Secretariat and communicate directly with the emperor. A low-ranking secretary at the Grand Secretariat thus was viewed as a sinecure with dim career prospects. Examining zhongshu's responsibilities and activities, I argue that despite their obscurity they were actually the backbone of the Qing central administration, indispensable to the daily operation of the imperial bureaucracy. Moreover, zhongshu were remarkably well connected and informed, which prepared them for higher positions and more important assignments after their Grand Secretariat career. In this sense, the post of zhongshu not only offered aspirating degree-holders promising paths to climb the ladder of success but also trained them to be capable bureaucrats on behalf of the Qing empire.
Abstract: Between 1867 and 1872, a scholar-clerk in Jiangxi Province composed an inventory of scientific and mathematical books. The list records not only their contents, but also the paths they had traced into the scholar's possession. Thus, the inventory preserves a record of how scientific information moved through inland China in the years immediately following the Taiping Rebellion. Analyzing both the physical and metaphorical aspects of this movement, this article argues that scientific knowledge and practice were promoted and constrained by material conditions. The inventory suggests the rarity of certain scientific-mathematical volumes, and underlines that foreign books translated in Shanghai did not circulate easily, even to provincial capitals. In addition to this material movement, information also moved through different representational languages in different texts, for instance through the translation of mathematics from physical forms (counting rod, abacus) to symbolic ones (abstract notation). As illustrated by the scholar's commentaries, material conditions informed intellectual trends. Finally, the inventory shows the continued importance of manuscripts, even in the age of woodblock and moveable type print. The methods of replication of scientific texts shaped what could be known, and in what manner.
