This summer, history department faculty and graduate students are busy researching, presenting at conferences, writing and more! Here’s a glimpse of what they’ve been up to.
Professor Jane Hathaway writes of her recent adventures.
In May, I spent two and a half weeks in China, visiting Beijing, Xi’an, and Luoyang. The idea of making the trip was planted in my brain by Yan Yan, a visiting scholar from Xi’an, southwest of Beijing, who sat in on my “Intellectual and Social Movements in the Muslim World” course in spring 2015. I was particularly curious about Xi’an because it has the largest Muslim population in China outside of Xinjiang province. Xi’an’s Muslims, in contrast to those of Xinjiang, are not Uighur but ethnic Chinese; they are called Hui to differentiate them from the non-Muslim Han population.
Xi’an, known at the time as Chang’an, was also the capital of the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.), which looms large in my “Global History to 1500” course. In general, this trip greatly reinforced my ability to cover China in world history courses.
The Great Mosque of Xi’an
With Yan Yan in front of Xi’an’s Bell Tower
I put the trip together over several months, with the help of History Dept. colleagues Ying Zhang and Chris Reed. I was on my own for the most part, although I joined a Great Wall tour and a Forbidden City/Temple of Heaven tour in Beijing, and was shown around Xi’an and vicinity by Yan Yan and her family. One day in Xi’an, as well, Chris Reed’s Ph.D. student Yi (“Fred”) Shan took me to the Forest of Stelae (Beilin), a collection of historic stone inscriptions and sculpture, and the Great Goose Pagoda, built by the Tang to house the Buddhist scriptures that the monk Xuanzang brought back from India in 645 C.E.
I saw a large number of historical sites, including the famous Terra Cotta Warriors that guarded the tomb of China’s first emperor, the authoritarian Qin Shi Huang Di (r. 221-210 B.C.E.); the Longmen Grottoes, man-made caves near Luoyang in which hundreds of statues of Buddha and various bodhisattvas were carved, mainly under the Northern Wei (386-534 C.E.) and Tang dynasties; Xi’an’s Great Mosque, dating from the eighth century; and Dongyue Miao, a Daoist temple in Beijing, originally built in 1322, that features mannequin-filled booths depicting the 76 departments of the Daoist heaven, including the Jaundice Department, the Department of Mammal Births, and the Document-Signing Department.
The Zhihua Buddhist Temple (Beijing), with the Galaxy Soho shopping/office complex in the
Background
I learned a great deal about China’s past and how that past is viewed today. In Xi’an, I was struck by the reverence for the Tang dynasty, which is always referred to as “the prosperous Tang dynasty” or “the flourishing Tang dynasty.” The Huaqing Palace Heritage Site, east of Xi’an, regularly stages “reconstructed” Tang dances and a nightly show depicting the career of the famous Tang dynasty concubine Yang Guifei (719-56), for whom the Xuanzong Emperor constructed bathing pools in the area’s hot springs.
I also learned that I had been presenting an obsolete narrative of the origins of Chinese civilization. I had been presenting the Shang dynasty (ca. 1750-1045 B.C.E.) as the first dynasty in Chinese history that can be definitively documented historically (without being shrouded in mythology), even though it was obvious that the foundational elements of Chinese civilization were well-established by the time the Shang emerged. However, the Shaanxi Provincial Museum in Xi’an and the Luoyang Museum clearly show that there is no doubt about the historicity of the earlier Xia dynasty (2000-1600 B.C.E.). In these museums, furthermore, the Western Zhou dynasty (1046-771 B.C.E.) comes across as far more fundamental to China’s civilizational development than the Shang.
In Beijing, I was struck by how much the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-96) of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) contributed to the city’s infrastructural development. In this respect, he resembled the Ottoman Chief Eunuch el-Hajj Beshir Agha (term 1717-46). And speaking of eunuchs…On Fred Shan’s advice, I tracked down the Zhihua Buddhist temple, founded, or at least reconstructed, in 1577 by the Ming dynasty eunuch Zheng Zhen. Like their Ottoman counterparts, at least some of the Ming eunuchs founded religious structures.
In late June, I traveled to England, arriving three days after the Brexit vote passed. Though the U.K. was in crisis and both major political parties were imploding, there was no outward sign of crisis to the untrained eye. I attended a conference on “The Ottomans and Entertainment” at the University of Cambridge’s Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, housed in charming Newnham College. My paper concerned the Chief Harem Eunuch’s role in organizing court entertainments, above all to commemorate the weddings of princesses, the circumcisions of princes, and, beginning in the eighteenth century, the blooming of tulips in April. I was also interested in how the Chief Eunuch was depicted in written accounts and miniature paintings of these celebrations. As I had many times before, I used the court painter Levni’s illustrations for Vehbi’s chronicle of the 1720 circumcision celebrations, in which el-Hajj Beshir Agha appears in no fewer than nine miniatures. Shortly before I left for England, however, I actually read Vehbi’s text and discovered a discrepancy between it and the miniatures: Beshir Agha is much better represented in the pictures than he is in the text, and in fact, Levni places him literally front and center in several key illustrations. This indicates that Beshir, like earlier Chief Eunuchs, was close to the court painters without necessarily being close to the court chronicler.
Chairing a panel at Cambridge, with OSU History Ph.D. (2002) Yücel Yanıkdağ (U. of
Richmond)
Beshir Agha leading the princes to the circumcision room, from Levni’s 1720 Festival Book
Professor Jennifer Siegel gave a talk on “Money, Power, and Diplomacy in Late Imperial Russia” at an international conference entitled “La Russie, champ d’expérimentation?” held June 9-10th at the Fondation Singer-Polignac in Paris. Video of her presentation is available at https://vimeo.com/170179308. (Please note that the first few minutes of the video are in French. The remainder is in English.)
On Saturday 4th June, Professor Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Ohio State History Professor Geoffrey Parker led a graduate student workshop at the Scottish Centre for Global History at the University of Dundee on ‘Writing Global History and Its Challenges’. During the workshop they explored a range of methodological issues with respect to Global History.
Along with our own Professor Alice Conklin, graduate students and academic staff from the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh and St. Andrews attended the workshop. Read more at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/…/writing-global-history-and-its-ch…
Professor Alice Conklin gave the keynote address at “Connected Histories, Mirrored Empires: British and French Imperialism from the 17th through the 20th Centuries”, an international conference held May 28-30th at Hong Kong University.
