Fei HUANG examines the process of landscape making in Dongchuan, the key copper-mining region in Southwest China in the eighteenth century. This book demonstrates how multiple landscape experiences developed among various people in dependencies, conflicts and negotiations in the imperial frontier.

This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.

This volume provides a practical introduction to spatial history through the lens of the different primary sources that historians use. It is informed by a range of analytical perspectives and conveys a sense of the various facets of spatial history in a tangible, case-study based manner. The chapter authors hail from a variety of fields, including early modern and modern history, architectural history, historical anthropology, economic and social history, as well as historical and human geography, highlighting the way in which spatial history provides a common forum that facilitates discussion across disciplines. The geographical scope of the volume takes readers on a journey through central, western, and east central Europe, to Russia, the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, and East Asia, as well as North and South America, and New Zealand. Divided into three parts, the book covers particular types of sources, different kinds of space, and specific concepts, tools and approaches, offering the reader a thorough understanding of how sources can be used within spatial history specifically but also the different ways of looking at history more broadly. Very much focusing on doing spatial history, this is an accessible guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate students within modern history and its related fields.

A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynasty Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912). Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines. Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.

In this book, Xin Conan-Wu presents a radically revisionist argument on Zhu Xi’s (1130–1200) Neo-Confucian philosophy of education. Via analyses of unfamiliar landscapes and the poems of the White-Deer Grotto Academy, Yuelu Academy, and Wuyi Retreat, Conan-Wu argues that when praxis speaks for orthodoxy, the eclipsed pedagogue casts a liberal light on the enshrined philosopher. Neo-Confucian senses of the gaze and place engendered Zhu Xi’s natural pedagogy and mapped the environment of his academies. This book cross-examines the textual traces and their innate vision, the physical sites and their transhistorical milieux, the Eight Views and Nine Bends and their afterlives in China and Korea. It unfurls an academy education, mutually reinforced by classical learning and self-cultivation, and sustained by a lure of the Supreme Joy of Confucian sagehood.

Essays in New Perspectives on Yenching University, 1916·1952 reevaluate the experience of China's preeminent Christian university in an era of nationalism and revolution. Although the university was denounced by the Chinese Communists and critics as an elitist and imperialist enterprise irrelevant to China's real needs, the essays demonstrate that Yenching's emphasis on biculturalism, cultural exchange, and a broad liberal education combined with professional expertise ultimately are compatible with nation-building and a modern Chinese identity. They show that the university fostered transnational exchanges of knowledge, changed the lives of students and faculty, and responded to the pressures of nationalism, war, and revolution. Topics include efforts to make Christianity relevant to China's needs; promotion of professional expertise, gender relationships and coeducation; the liberal arts; Sino-American cultural interactions; and Yenching's ambiguous response to Chinese nationalism, Japanese invasion, and revolution.