Economics/Environment/Qing/Science and Technology/Teaching/Teaching selections

Songs about buildings and food

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Like me, you may have to teach about the economy and ecology of Late Imperial China. It is hard to make that lively. Poetry would help. Students love poetry. Thankfully, you don’t have to go looking for poems on the environment, Mark Elvin has found some for you.1

If you want something on irrigation (pg. 438)

Forth comes the Yellow River, out from its Dragon Gates,
And endless, endless, are the miles it flows with furious waves!
Now – to train its traveling surges not to overspill their course,
The current of the waters must be weakened near their source.
Once split apart in branch streams along the upper reaches,
The distributaries that lie downstream will then spread out in peace.

….
In the lands of the north, and the central plains,
Officials will govern the adits and the drains.
For the pattern of conduits they’ll lay down the rules,
So the land’s watered as water runs through!
…..
We’ll use water’s own requirements to fix the varying depths,
And follow the topography for the straight parts and the bends.
And when ten years have run their course, we shall proclaim the fruits:
How all along the River there are multiple branch loops,
Such that the terrain there has been turned to fertile acres,
And every last locality has abundant ears of grain.
The supplies of tax rice sent to Court, and cargoes, too, of millet,
Will have cut the costs of shipping grain down close to nonexistent.
So dense a channel network will make riding horses difficult,
And malfeasance won’t be simple for brigands or for miscreants. pg

As Elvin points out, you could hardly get a more grandiose vision of a megaproject today.

Needless to say, things can go wrong. I suppose a description of people trying to survive a flood on the Yellow river would fit better, but he has a good one on the breach of a sea-wall in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Pg 172

Some of the people used ropes, to tie themselves together,
Hoping this way to support each other, or give each other help.
How were they to know that, together, they’d be swept away and drowned?
Some of them sought to escape, boring holes in the rooves of their houses,
But their bodies, along with their reed-thatched shacks, were borne off
and tossed about.

Some clutched at beams and rafters, and let themselves go where these
went,
But the wind pounded and battered them, and scattered them east and west.
Some clambered to the tops of trees, where they floated for a time,
But snakes climbed up to the treetops, driven, too, by fear of dying.
Men, scared the snakes would bite their hands, of themselves released their
hold.
Men and snakes have gone, together, into the other world
The downpour ceased at dawn, but the storm did not let up
The people who had not been drowned congratulated each other
Then they saw a sand bank far away, among the rolling waves,
Where a thousand others called for help that their lives, too, might be saved.
The tide came in, then, with a swirl, and half of them went down.
With the second swirl the bank submerged and every one was drowned..

Their faces, two days later on, were still easy to recognize. Like mounds or hillocks, the washed-up corpses stacked themselves in piles.
By the third day, or the fourth, the skin and flesh were soggy-rotten,
One could smell the stench some thirty miles. It made one want to vomit.

You may also want to talk about the amount of labor that went into production, and Elvin. Mr. High-level equilibrium trap, has a nice section from Mr Shen’s Manual for Farmers.pg. 212

Opening up the ridges for wheat: It is best for the fields [ where rice has just
been grown] to be dry. If they are soggy, it is necessary to open them up [by
turning over the soil], and to wait until the backs of the ridges have dried
out before putting in the seeds. If the time for doing this has almost passed,
then steep the seeds [in water, and perhaps nutrients] in advance, so they
produce sprouts, and it is possible to wait until the ridges have dried out. It
is impermissible to stamp down a firm area that is still surrounded by damp
areas, as the colza and wheat will not be able to grow stalks, and are bound
to wither when spring comes, or, even if they do not die, will not flourish for
long.
When one is planting wheat, the covered reservoir [for liquid manure]
must be full, and the distribution of the seeds must be uniform. This work
must not be skimped; but one tells the women and the young serving-lads to
take life easily. For wheat, one waters it [with liquid manure] once at the
time of planting, and once again in the spring. If one puts on too much
fertilizer, there will, on the contrary, be no harvest …. If one sows the wheat
seeds in advance in the first ten days of the eighth moon, one waits until
winter to prepare the fields to which to transplant them. Each transplanting
clump contains five to six stalks. One applies liquid manure to them twice,
as is the standard practice, and also banks them up with cattle manure,
covering this over [with mud] shoveled out of the [adjacent small] ditch,
after which the stalks are strong and the wheat heavy, yielding a doubled
harvest.
Colza should be given twice as much liquid manure as wheat, and
perhaps also household garbage or cattle manure. One digs mud from the
adjacent ditch and once again applies liquid manure to force the blossoms.

And of course, then you will want to talk about nightsoil.

Whether one is planting wet-land fields or dry-land fields, supplementary
fertilizer is important. Human manure has a beneficial power, and cattle
manure has a long-lasting effect. One should not use one and neglect to use
the other. Making a contract with city residents to purchase their excrement
is of fundamental importance. Recently, however, the price of excrement
has become dear. The cost of human labor is high, and fetching it from the
city oneself wastes energy. Thieving is widespread. If it is not possible to rely
entirely on such a contract for excrement, then rearing sheep or pigs is a
convenient supplement …. For the food that a sheep eats in a year one
obtains a sufficiency of wool and lambs, while the expenditure is merely the
provision of grass [as fodder]. Without any effort one obtains a large quantity
of supplementary fertilizer . . .. For sheep though, if one has to hire
someone to chop the hay, then this can really waste one’s reserves to provide
this person’s rations during the slack season in winter and spring These
days sheep can eat nothing but withered leaves and dry grass Cattle
manure is best applied to dry-land fields, and pig’s manure to wet-land
fields . .. . To purchase human excrement one has to go to Hangzhou. It is
not possible to buy full loads [from the privies] along the levees.

Finally, you may want some stuff on Han people moving into “new” areas. We will do that with a reading from Bello. but Elvin has a nice bit on the joys of cinnabar mining, which also works for environmental degradation  pg 248

Old countrymen, between villages, live alone by the torrents’ banks,
With baling-pans and inlet pipes straining tailings and gathering
fragments.
But their toes are rotting away, though the water they stand in’s
transparent;
For all that their eyes are running with tears, even so their pupils are
damaged.
The ripples are everywhere reddened, on account of these activities,
And what they do stains their jacket sleeves the color of vermilion.
If by chance they happen to obtain the minutest scruple of cinnabar,
Even for something next to nothing, they forthwith become giddily
frivolous.

…

Stoves have been built just recently, and furnaces erected.
Milling rollers have been installed; so, too, have pounding pestles.
Our red dye, when it is pulverized, “is unalloyed and bright.” (Songs 154)
And sublimated, ore turns to rain, scattering sweat as it perspires.

and a thing on how weird the Miao are

With whinnying clangor the gongs are booming,
As bronze drums beat out their repetitive rhythms,
They summon the mediums in pell-mell confusion,
Tricked out as tigers in odd, motley, mimicry,
Dangling red aprons are tied round their belts,
In pleats bound on their brows hang blue-green silk tassels,
Back-country serfs who leap with forked gestures,
Menials from caves who cavort with arms brandished.
They pretend to be generals, play-act ferocity,
Then bow to their elders, loose hair in disorder.
Girls from the village wear clasps of mixed blossoms,
Lads from the hills tie their clothes on with straw,
From masts of bamboo there droop paper pennants.
The clay pots on display contain betel peppers.
With rowdy guffaws they offer a pig’s head,
And using a rope-hoist they roast roosters’ feathers.
Purple clouds of sweet smoke gust denser and denser,
The white raindrops spraying as charmed water’s sprinkled,
But the savages’ babbling is incomprehensible
As they get drunk, and stuffed, for their spirit’s epiphany.
I have heard that when teaching the vulgar behavior
One’s model for ritual’s that of the ancients:
A magnanimous face, and severe, sober vestments,
Obeisances courteous, and strict patterned steps.
One’s words given weight by fasting and abstinence,
One spreads out dried meat, and wine, pure and fragrant,
Showing utmost respect, with no breath of blasphemy
This it is brings good luck, this of reverence the basis.
Offerings otherwise offered delight not the spirits.
If the ritual is lost, they benefit nothing.
So one proffers Hippuris to monarch and ministers,
Greets the Farm God with clods, tapping on a clay drum.
How then can one cleanse these barbarians of their sooty moral grime,
And list them in the Zhou lineage so renowned in ancient rhyme? Pg 239

Elvin himself is aware of the problems with using poetry as a source (pg 437),but for teaching purposes these work pretty well, I hope

 

  1. Elvin, Mark. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. ↩

Posts

An Interactive Map of the Japanese Empire

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

In preparation for teaching my Japanese Empire module this fall at St Andrews Claude Code and I put together an online interactive map of the Japanese empire. I hope it may be useful to others as well. I made use of various GIS sources available online, but also georeferenced a number of historical maps and tweaked other datasets in consoltation with historical maps. An endless amount of work could be done improving it. I think that is all I have time for this round, but I’d like to add some nice features in the future that would allow for custom sets of layers for particular moments, a “slides” feature that allows you to jump from view to view when explaining something, among other features.

For now, here are some things I find useful with it: You can switch between two moments, 1930 and around December, 1942 to explore each moment. Mouse over anything for more information about it, and click on things to view the more detailed descriptions in the information pane. You can swap between two depictions of Japanese occupation in China (see my last entry). You can shift-select to draw an area you want to zoom in on. When you do pan or zoom about, the URL will update so you can share a link to a particular place. You can show cities, some events, and other labels. When you turn on “administrative” some places will reveal their provinces and prefectures etc. allowing you to explore those. Zooming in closely on islands in the Pacific will load somewhat more detailed shapes for them. Finally, the “Layers” pane offers a few more ways to customize what you see with extra layers, different map projections and

Interactive Map of the Japanese Empire
Interactive Map of the Japanese Empire

Interactive Map of the Japanese Empire

Sources: I’ve tried to keep track of the sources used for the maps here, and the code for the website is here.

Note: while building the website the clanker (Claude Code) added lots of descriptions to entities on the maps. Some may shudder at it, and I’m usually not a fan. However, many of them are not bad, and useful enough I decided to leave them in. There are undoubtedly some issues and hallucinations with them, and I’ve made a number of changes already. These descriptions will be gradually fact checked over the coming months. I welcome feedback.

Update: Added a few more features: 1) Added shaded relief topography optional layer. 2) Support for a few alternatives to the Mercator projection in the layers pane. 3) Taiwan administrative boundaries for 1930ish.

China/Japan/Maps/Sino-Japanese Wars

The Points and Lines of Japan’s North China Occupation, 1942

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 3 Comments

Anyone making a map of the Japanese occupation of China, or more generally of the wartime Japanese empire as a whole has a few ways they can go about it. The first and most common option is to depict the geographical expanse of Japanese control in the form of a mostly unbroken field of controlled territory as we see in Image 1 below, found in the Wikipedia entry for the empire of Japan. This approach has the advantage of simplicity and allows the viewer to consider a broader view of the scene without much clutter. The downside, however, is that it gives viewers who are less familiar with the reality of heavily contested military occupations like that of Japan in China the illusion that the war exists predominantly along the line where colors meet. It hides the reality of military occupations that are, for the most part, thin on the ground beyond a series of “points and lines” centered on larger settlements, strategically located garrisons, and the communication and transportation lines between them.

Image 1 – Wikipedia

A second approach the mapmaker might take does not so much aim to directly resolve the shortcomings mentioned above as to shift the focus of attention of the viewer away from the occupation and towards the active resistance against it. The map will show the maximum expanse of the occupation in a similar manner to the first approach, but then add areas where resistance is prominent, or base areas are well established. They might also, as in the case of Image 2, taken from the wonderful atlas of the Sino-Japanese War 《中国抗日战争史地图集》(p199), have two sections indicated: one for base areas and the other showing the broader territorial zone in which the resistance carries out its operations (游击区). The resistance is the foreground, and a map of this kind goes a long way towards dispelling the illusion of continuous occupation.

Image 2 – 中国抗日战争史地图集 p199

A third approach often found in military histories are maps with a sequence of arrows depicting troop movements, attacks and battles, or else a series of unit markers in specific places. These kinds of documents are, of course, also the sort of thing one can often find in the archival records of the militaries of the conflict itself. While this helps illustrate a narrative sequence of events or juxtapose the relative location of opposing armies, they are somewhat less useful for providing a spatial context for the experience of an occupation.

A fourth approach to visually depicting an actively contested military occupation takes one more step towards capturing its fragmented nature. By one means or another these maps will still embrace the useful visual metaphor of the extent of an occupation by indicating an area of control or administration, but also make it incredibly clear to the viewer that there are areas beyond the secure control of anyone. An example of this approach can be found in some of the maps in the monthly reports of the Japanese North China Area Army. In Image 3, a September, 1942 map on the state of Japanese military “pacification” in northern China, three areas are designated: blue “pacified” areas (治安地区), unmarked “semi-pacified” areas (準治安地区) , and red “un-pacified” areas (未治安地区).

Image 3 – 北支那方面軍占拠地域内治安概況 (1942.9) 『北支の治安戦＜2＞』

This map, which is included in an appendix to a famous 1968 Japan Defence Agency history of the war in North China, is of course a document seen from the perspective of the Japanese military at the time, but I have seen very similar mirrors of it at a more local scale in various Chinese Communist base area reports in the Shandong provincial archives. Despite the very partial nature of the occupation shown on this map, it is in fact depicting a moment of relative Japanese strength in 1942, showing the successful results of a number of counterinsurgency campaigns in North China over the preceding year or so.

The white areas on this map are optimistically described as “semi-pacified”, but preserving the unmarked open spaces help, I would argue, prepare a student of the Sino-Japanese war mentally for what they will encounter in the diaries, memoirs, and reports from the villages and countryside of many areas of wartime northern China: the agent of control in the area often amounted to, “whoever is passing through at the moment” or else, “whoever hangs about here the most.” This may be Japanese forces, their “puppet” Chinese allied forces, a particularly strong group of local bandits, some self-protection militia, a secret society militia, or resistance forces fighting under the orders or at least in the name of the Communists or Nationalists.

From the point of view of everyday life, depending on your luck, the worst place to be on this map may not necessarily have been under Japanese oppression in a blue area, or suffering the deprivations of some poorly supplied resistance base area, or even caught directly in a place where the two forces are facing off with each other at close quarters. Instead, those white spaces between were often a living nightmare, facing the unpredictable predations of the latest murderous counterinsurgency campaign of the Japanese, the raids and direct pillage of any number of other armed groups, and sometimes repeated taxation and confiscations from two or three different groups who have all told you that your village is under their control.1

To help explore the 1942 map a bit easier, I have georeferenced it and (using Claude Code), created an interactive version here:

Japanese North China Area Army Map — September 1942

Keep in mind the map is specifically for the North China Area Army monthly report, so it doesn’t give you a depiction of areas under occupation further south (or the occupation landscapes of Japanese occupied Manchuria, or parts of Japanese allied Mongolian forces).

Ultimately, however, even this type of map, whoever puts it together, is an abstraction that cannot but help obscure further complexity. It doesn’t depict, for example, the porous and interconnected nature of occupied and unoccupied areas. This is captured well in an old 1980 chapter by Lloyd E. Eastman:

The “front” that divided Japanese-occupied from unoccupied China was largely illusory…The front was therefore highly porous, permitting a more or less steady flow of people and goods from the side of one belligerent to the other. Postal service, for example, was maintained between the two areas virtually without interruption throughout the war. All hotels in Wan-hsien, on the upper course of the Yangtze, had “travel agents” to assist persons in the Nationalist area to reach Japanese-held Hankow…”2

  1. This is captured fairly well in a Shandong communist report on the financial burdens on village families subject to multiple taxes from multiple claimants I have written about in an older Frog in a Well post here (and here).  ↩

  2. Lloyd E. Eastman, “Facets of an Ambivalent Relationship: Smuggling, Puppets, and Atrocities during the War, 1937-1945” in Akira Iriye The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions, p275-6. My thanks to Yang Daqing for reminding me of this classic piece.  ↩

Economics/Taiwan/Teaching/visual culture

Land Reform on Taiwan

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

If, like me you have always wanted some good stats and a picture to explain land reform in Taiwan, here you go.  This is from this article,  which does a good job of describing the process. The poster is nice since it shows the rent reduction, the tiller getting the land, and then the ex-landlord going to the city to invest in industry. When you talk about land reform in China there are lots of good pictures and quotes and descriptions, whereas the stuff on Taiwan and Korea and Japan tends to be more…bloodless. Which of course it was, but it is nice to have some specifics and pictures to make it more clear what was happening.

Historiography/Theory

Want to AI proof your degree? Study History!

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Can AI do history?

Someone sent me a link to this paper “Can LLMs Act as Historians? Evaluating Historical Research Capabilities of LLMs via the Chinese Imperial Examination”  Gao et. al. are trying to get LLM’s to demonstrate high order skills in historical reasoning, using a new benchmark ProHist-Bench. They determine, that no, they can’t. LLM’s still hallucinate, and more importantly, they answer questions wrong. My problem is not that they get questions wrong, but that the people doing this don’t seem to know what doing history is.

I suppose that part of the problem is defining what “doing history” actually is. AI can make music, if you define music as orderly sounds coming out of a box. If you define music as a form of art created by people, then obviously it can’t. What is doing history? Gao et. al. set their tasks as answering questions (some “easy” and some “hard”) about the exam system in Imperial China and writing exam essays in the proper baguwen 八股文 style.

Asking the AI to write a baguwen essay is actually kind of interesting. On the one hand, it is absolutely not the type of thing a real historian would want to do. On the other hand, it does seem like something an AI could do. More importantly, the civil service exam essay is a good example of what a “school” question is. The purpose of the civil service exams in Late Imperial China was to staff the bureaucracy with classically educated men who had demonstrated their literary skill and moral character through the exams, most notably through the 8-legged essay, which became the official format for exam essays in 1487.1 The exams also did other things, like create a common culture among those who took it, defining orthodox ideas, creating a class of exam “failures” looking for work etc.

The exams, and the baguwen in particular, were criticized by those who failed them in part because they did not work. Was this really the ideal way (or even an effective way) for men to prove that they had the knowledge of classical ideals and the moral character needed to serve the Son of Heaven in bringing order to the world? Was this not forcing the intellectual world in the direction of answering pointless questions in a poor format? This is actually a problem for any form of testing in education. You are trying to find something that is an efficient proxy for what you want. Answering multiple choice exam questions is not really a “task” that you will need to do in the REAL WORLD (as opposed to the unreal world of books and understanding in school) but if you can answer all those questions maybe you actually do understand whatever it is we want you to understand. Multiple choice questions are easy to grade, and it is easy to claim that the grading is objective (just like the baguwen). Exams work in the sense of providing quality control (they answered the multiple choice questions, they probably know something) and in the sense of encouraging students to study. The easiest way to be able to answer questions that make it seem like you have read and thought about Harrison’s Man Awakened from Dreams MIGHT be to read it and think about it.

Exams don’t work, however, if someone else takes the exam for you. This is why people cheated on the civil service exams, and this was why there was a whole industry of creating model exam essays so that people could give the impression of understanding without actually having to understand.

That is what AI does of course, and there are various ways to avoid that, just like the civil service exams tried to prevent both simple cheating and tried to come up with sets of questions and tasks that would select for the people they wanted. If you have students do an oral exam, or write the exam in class, then it is harder (but not impossible) to cheat, in the sense of giving the impression that you know something that you in fact do not. There are drawbacks to this, of course, such it being a lot more work for the faculty, and work that neither your bosses nor your students want you to do. Still, there is nothing really revolutionary about it. It is no different from downloading an essay from a cheating site, it’s just that now it is a curated, artisanal cheating essay that fits whatever prompt you were given. You can even get the AI to fix it in response you your commands.

But is answering exam questions really doing history, rather than an easily assessed proxy for it? The answer would seem to be “no”.

First, sources. Historians spend a lot of time thinking about sources. The authors give us a list of the things they have dumped into their LLM. If you look at the list they have a bunch of “ancient” things from the Qing (that may just be a translation error), which seem rather random to me (this is not my field). Then they have authoritative monographs and top-tier academic papers. These also seem pretty random. They are also all Chinese secondary sources, which probably skews them towards answering the very nuts and bolts sort of technical questions they are about to ask. The two English language sources are Elman’s A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000). Ok… and then Harrison’s The Man Awakened from Dreams (2005) Why ???? How are they looking for sources that will answer their questions, or adjusting their questions to what their sources can show? Got me there. There is really nothing here on the relationship between sources and interpretation, or even any understanding of what those things mean.

The questions themselves are also not great. Defining terms like “Zhujuan” 朱卷 (pg 30) or giving a short answer to “What were the characteristics of the imperial examination system in the Yuan Dynasty?” pg 27. These seem like tasks for an undergraduate exam written by a rather dull teacher, rather than a test for something with a brain the size of a planet. I think you could answer most of these with Willkinson. They are absolutely not something you could publish in a journal or put in your dissertation or your undergraduate honors thesis. I mention those things since those are the sort of goals you have for “doing history” when you get past the taking exams phase and get into actually doing history.

This is not really doing history. This is trying to get AI to answer exam questions. And failing. Why do that? I just don’t see how this is a first step into AI replacing real history.

I also looked at some of the other studies they cite, and they are not much better.  Hauser et.al. have created HiST-LLM) Their “benchmark shows that while LLMs possess some expert-level historical knowledge, there is considerable room for improvement.”

Here the only goal is answering multiple choice questions. There is a much larger “data set” but they seem to have very different things dumped into it with no idea what they are or what questions they could be used for. They are aware that

compiling such data poses several challenges. First, given the wide range of theoretical questions and approaches in history and archaeology, deciding which variables to record and whether they are best conceptualized as attributes [17] or events [18] and whether they  should be recorded as numerical or categorical already poses a challenge. Second, covering more than one or a few regions across different time periods is challenging since experts in history and archaeology specialize on particular regions and time periods. Therefore a comprehensive regional and temporal coverage requires engaging with multiple experts and academic resources. Third, most history and archaeology research focuses on recording well-established facts, but scarcely records that a vast amount of historical knowledge is inferred.

Again this does not seem connected to what historians actually do. History “focuses on recording well-established facts”? That is not even wrong.  The questions are bad, and the answers often wrong, in the sense that the AI sometimes gets it wrong and they sometimes grade it wrong.

Question:
During the time frame from 1568 CE to 1603 CE, was the characteristic ’Mutilation’, associated with the cults and rituals held by people of the ’Japan – Azuchi-Momoyama’ polity, present, inferred present, inferred absent, or absent?
Options:
A: Present, B: Inferred Present, C: Inferred Absent, D: Absent
Reasoning and evidence:
The high casualty rate of the Joseon and Ming forces, and the large number of ears collected during the campaign was enough to build a large mound near Hideyoshi’s Great Buddha, called the Mimizuka (“Mound of Ears”).
Answer:
A

Or

Question:
The characteristic ’Shields’ is categorized under ’Armor’. Was it present, inferred present, inferred absent, or absent for the polity called ’Latium – Bronze Age’, during the time frame from 1800 BCE to 900 BCE?
Options:
A: Present, B: Inferred Present, C: Inferred Absent, D: Absent
Reasoning and evidence:
Weapons, statuettes, and “double shields” found in male burials suspected to infer elite military or religious status.
Answer:
A

I think the first answer is wrong if they mean that “mutilation” was part of religious rituals in Azuchi-Momoyama based on the ear mound. The second one is, I think correct, but why is that a question worth asking and answering? If the goal of AI is to help students cheat on tests written by an AI, this may be of some use, but I can’t see any way that it can lead to doing history.  You can’t get the right answers if you ask the wrong questions.

  1. Elman Civil Examinations and Meritocracy p.57  ↩

Law/Posts/Qing/Teaching/Teaching selections

Fornication and the public sphere

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

So, if like me you are teaching some version of World History 2-Modern Boogalloo, you will probably want to talk about the early modern rise of the public sphere  and talk about how it creates a space (physical, like a coffee or teahouse or more abstractly like cheap prints in the vernacular) where a new public can talk about scandal, politics, ethics and buying insurance. You may also want to talk about how this is not just something happening in Europe. How to do this? Fornication!

I assume you will talk a bit about how the spread of popular literacy happened first in East Asia. If you wanted to give a good example of the spread of knowledge about official matters you could draw on Zhang Ting. Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China.1 which has a lot on the growing ease of getting a hold of copies of the Qing code, which were was increasingly being privately printed.2

Zhang  also has plenty on the litigation handbooks that were being published in the Ming and after. Most notable is Thunder that Startles Heaven 驚天雷 , which went through many editions in the Qing. You can show them a page from it, and, if they are studying  Chinese, discuss how crummy some popular prints were.3

More importantly, thanks to Zhang Ting, you can talk about how the manuals popularized legal knowledge by, for example through question and answer sections and rhyming songs 歌訣 Here is an example that both explains Chinese law and ideas about behavior.

Fanjian zongkan ge  犯姦總括歌

Comprehensive Rhymed Song of [the laws relating to] Fornication

-Men and women committing fornication with consent, each shall be punished with eighty strokes of the heavy bamboo. Nannü hejian zhe, ge gai zhang bashi. 男女和姦者, 各該杖八十

-For a married woman committing fornication with consent, the punishment will be increased to ninety strokes of the heavy bamboo.

-For diaojian that seducing women to go outside [their home to fornicate], the punishment is one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo.

-Rape tarnishes the woman’s reputation; the rapist shall be punished with strangulation.

-For attempted rape, the punishment shall be one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo and exile to three thousand li.4

Besides getting them to memorize the song, you can talk about how this popularizes understandings of law. I suppose if this was a China class you could head off to talking about gender roles with Matthew Sommer5, or litigation experts with Melissa Macauley6

For a world history class it is maybe best to compare China to the mémoires judiciaires  in France and the growing public nature of litigation. Sarah Maza Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France.7 is the best source, and you can talk about the scandalous Affair of the Diamond Necklace Maza will help you talk about the content of the mémoires and what they show about popular ideas about justice. This is nice if your French is not up to reading them yourself. 

These are not really parallel cases, of course. The French stuff is studied in part because it leads into the de-legitimization of the French state. The Chinese stuff is not Causes Célèbres, although I suppose knowledge of the grubby nature of the law did not make the state look any better. Still, they are both cases of publicizing knowledge of what was once a state mater, and both cases where you can actually look at how popularizing knowledge led to a broader public knowledge of how the law works led to public opinion criticizing the state, with the yamen runners filling the role of Marie Antoinette. 

 

  1. University of Washington Press, 2020  ↩

  2. Zhang, Ting. Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China. University of Washington Press, 2020 pg 42  ↩

  3. Image from Legalizing Space in China  ↩

  4. Zhang, Ting. Circulating the Code Pp121, 126-7  ↩

  5. Sommer, Matthew H. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. 1st edition. Stanford University Press, 2002.  ↩

  6. Macauley, Melissa. Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. 1st edition. Stanford University Press, 1998.

     ↩

  7. University of California Press, 1993. ↩

Culture/Japan/Korea-Japan/Posts/Teaching/Teaching selections

Kings in All but Name

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

If you are looking for a good new book to help you teach pre-Onin War Japan may I recommend Thomas Conlan’s Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569?1

I should  perhaps mention that I don’t really teach this. The closest I come (now that we no longer have Rice Paddies ) is the bit before the three unifiers in my Early Modern Japan class. In the past I have done this with Mary Elizabeth Berry’s  The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto.2 and the two Eiko Ikegami books The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan.3 and Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture.4 Needless to say I don’t have the students read those, since they are too long and complex for this part of the class. I do have them read a bit of them and then steal a lot from all three of them. All of them work well  in that they make good points and have lots of cool examples you can draw on in class to engage their interest and make yourself look smart.

Conlan’s book is perfect for this. He is looking away from Kyoto, at the Ouchi of Yamagata who were involved in national politics but also local power struggles and international trade ( see, Japan is not so isolated.) They were good enough at it that there are a lot of records on them, and (this being Japan) a ton of secondary stuff. He has been working on this project since 1995, so he has gone through all of it and there is a ton of interesting stuff in here.

For that reason, it is not a very good book club book. Besides costing $120.00 in print and $109 on Kindle, it assumes you know a lot 5 about the history of the period and its politics and culture and cultural politics. There is surprisingly little fighting in this book about a family of warlords by a military historian. The various leaders of the family run together a bit, so the book does not really work as a “behind the music” rise and fall thing.  There is also maybe not quite enough on things like why patronizing shrines or writing poems on landscape paintings was important for undergrads to grasp these things on their own. On the other hand, if you can explain these things, and want cool examples, Conlan has you covered. If you want to talk about the importance of genealogy for elite clans and how flexible it could be, you can talk about the Ouchi’s supposed descent from the mythical Korean King Imseong (tying them to Korea ethnicity, kingship,  and trade) and how they transitioned to claiming descent from the North Star Myoken Great Bodhisattva.

If you want to explain the importance of foreign trade, you could point out that a single tribute ship could turn a profit of 1,800 kanmon. This would be the equivalent of the tax revenue of a province, or the price to buy a lucrative estate outright. One kanmon would buy you an ox, or half a horse.6 If you want to dig deeper, Conlan and his footnotes will help you explain the improvements in copper mining in Japan, and the role of the Ouchi in sending raw copper to the continent, bringing coins back, and establishing the value of coins.

Establishing the value of currency is something you would expect a sovereign to do, and the book has a lot on the Ouchi and their relationship with the Ashikaga shoguns and the capital more generally. The most spectacular is their attempt to steal the Ise shrines. These were burned in 1486-7, and since the Ashikaga could not afford to rebuild them, Ouchi Yoshioki brought the kami of the imperial line to Yamaguchi.7

There is actually quite a lot in here about religion, since connections with shrines/temples and monks were a key part of politics. This is often hard to explain to students. Since there is a lot in here about how the Ouchi “patronized” ….Buddhists and Shinto8. It is rather obviously tied to geography. This battle flag not only has the Ouchi mon, it lists the shines they are associated with, and thus the areas they are connected to.

Even better, if you like teaching with images, is this.

This is a copy of the Tripitaka, the Buddhist Canon that the Ouchi got from Korea, gifted to a Japanese temple, and then provided financial support for it to be recited twice a year both for the benefit of the listed patrons9 and for the benefit of the entire realm. Patronizing religion, foreign connections, usurping the role of the capital.. this book has it all.

 

 

  1. Oxford University Press, 2024. ↩

  2. University of California Press, 1997. ↩

  3. Harvard University Press, 1995  ↩

  4. Cambridge University Press, 2005. ↩

  5. Well, not a lot a lot. I understood it.  ↩

  6. pg. 251 I assume lots of people who teach this could come up with their own examples, but I found it useful.   ↩

  7. pg.374  ↩

  8. I will explain all that in a later class. Just relax.  ↩

  9. Ouchi and others  ↩

Aviation/Politics/Propaganda/Republican

Fun with graphics in Chinese history

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

If you do Republican period Chinese history you know that the various versions of the Chinese state loved graphical representations of data. (This may be something they picked up from the Japanese, who seem to have done a lot of this as well.)

These are often, to my mind, weirdly hybrid things, since I am usually finding them in government reports and collections of statistics presumably aimed at other bureaucrats, but a lot of them seem aimed at jazzing things up for a general audience. Here are a couple examples from 空軍抗戰三周年紀念專冊 (The Air Force in the First Three Years of the War of Resistance)1

The first is pretty straightforward, the number of Japanese planes that bombed China (upper left), the number of bombs dropped, total dead and wounded and amount of property damage. Each category is split into three years (1937,38,39, see upper right) with lines to connect it all

This is fairly legible, in the sense that it does not take long to figure out what the image is trying to represent, especially since you can find this data in more traditional tables. This might work as a public-facing poster.

Some are harder to figure out, particularly in this book, which is pulling from a lot of other sources. So you can get things like this that show the number of Japanese POWs, (presumably flyers) divided by year and officers vs. enlisted. These are just those under the control of one unit, but what that unit is is not clear. The numbers don’t match up with earlier numbers of total POWs. Still it is a graphic representation of the declining number of POWs they were taking. So maybe trying to puzzle this out might be worth it. I have no idea how doing it graphically like this is supposed to make it easier to understand.

Then you get the fun ones. This is a table of large and small achievements, which are not defined anywhere. Is it worth digging out what these things are? Probably not, in the sense that it would be a lot of work for not much information you could use. I just like the creativity someone put into the graphics for the bars. I assume the far right big achievement is shooting down a plane? (12 in total). Only one traitor was caught, but I like the little eyeglasses graphic. I have no idea what 工作努力(literally it is diligent work) refers to, maybe good staff work? It is the largest category, 104 awards, and seems to be represented  by an impressive bar graph with a flag on it.2 Someone knows what really matters. 🙂

ss

  1. which I found here  ↩

  2. or maybe a windsock?  ↩

Geography/Japan/Social History/Teaching/Teaching selections

Teaching Japan with maps

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

At some point in the future, you may find yourself having to explain a lot of Japanese history  n a big hurry in order to get to the class you are actually teaching.1 This is a really good book, and also really good if you want to do a lot of visual stuff.

Heian was of course the center of the Chinese-based state model that was established in Japan, and there are lots of pictures for this, but Stavros has a nice one that you can use to explain the orderly “Chinese” pattern that was being established. You can also explain how the Buddhist temples that rulers wanted to keep out located around the capital, along with the residences of the retired emperors.

Throughout he talks about the importance of inside and outside, keeping the major temples and the warriors out of the capital. This never worked well, but but you can see signs of in in this map, which shows how the residences of Ashikaga generals were kept on the outskirts.

He actually has quite a bit on how the shogun respected the rights of the court far longer than you might expect, from Kamakura bans on horsemanship and archery practice on the site of the old imperial palace (pg. 88) to Ashikaga deference to court ideals and spatial patterns. (Chapter 5)

The long decline of the Chinese based system led to the city shifting to the east, with the elite area of Kamigyo in the north, and the more commercial and common area of Shimogyo in the south.

This newly commercialized city was concentrated in the South, which is where the sake brewers and oil sellers were concentrated, as well as the neighborhoods with enough corporate identity to do a float for the Gion Festival.

Here is a somewhat more detailed commerce map, along with a map of the brewer-lenders and their shrine affiliations

from Suzanne Gay.2 If you want to get into the weeds of urban commerce and money lending she is your scholar.

If you want to explain how the wards changed as they went from bureaucratically defined areas to commercial streets, Stavros has both an explanation and a diagram.

 

Of course you will probably want some quotes on the destruction of the Onin War, and Stavros has you covered.

Holding aged parents in their arms, pulling along wives and children behind them, the townspeople fled the city in a roar of cries. And none was left to fight the blaze. The fires burned over one hundred blocks, from Nijo in the south to Goryo in the north, from Odoneri in the west to Muromachi in the east. About 30,000 residences- of aristocrats, military men, great and small alike-went up in flames. Everything is now ruined.

Across our charred land, all human traces have been extinguished. For blocks on end, birds are the sole sign of life.

Like hornets’ nests, the sanctuaries of the eastern and western hills have all been burned and crushed.

The Capital of Flowers of myriad ages is now a lair of foxes and wolves.

It’s too bad that Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace is too early for this, but I suppose you could use it 🙂

Stavros has both a nice map of the walled districts of what was left of the post-Onin city

and illustrations of the walls and guardhouses

So if you want to run through a lot of Japanese history, and do it with images, this is a good book.

  1. I will be doing that this Spring for HIST 436 Early Modern Japan (1500-1800) )

    One way to do some of this is to focus on the city that becomes Kyoto, which not only mattered  a lot but was where almost all the sources come from. A really good source on this is Matthew Stavros Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’s Premodern Capital. (Hawaii, 2016 ). ((You could follow this up with Alice Y. Tseng Modern Kyoto  ↩

  2. Gay, Suzanne Marie. The Money Lenders of Medieval Kyoto University of Hawaii Press, 2001. pg. 42, 60   ↩

Qing/Social History/Teaching

Passing the Exams-All in the Family edition

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

There is a long history of talking about the Ladder of Success in Imperial China, and if the Chinese bureaucracy really was a Career Open to Talent. This was also one of the few topics where you had enough data to actually do some vaguely social science type stuff, which made it a very popular topic for a long time.

If you want a nice summary of a lot of this literature you can look at “Kin Networks and Exam Degree Attainment in 19th Century China: An Analysis Based on Tongnianchilu” by  Cameron Campbell, Qin XUE, Shengbin WEI Preprint available here 

They also answer the question. 🙂 Specifically, the question Ho Ping-ti asked a long time ago. How many exam passers were “new men”, from families that did not have a history of exam passing?

With modern methods you can get better data. The authors tell us that the Tongnian Chilu (同年齒錄) and Mingjing Tongpu (明經通譜). contain self-reported information for 950,927 relatives of 34,313 19th century degree holders.

If you1 code in all the data you can get pretty good statistics on how many exam passers had relatives who passed the exams. Ready? Here it is.

As you can see, the Jinshi (which was the degree you really needed to get a job and have a career at this point) group reported only 28.4 % without any kin with degrees2 This is less than the 32.9% who had 10 or more relatives with degrees.(It is not clear to me if they count relatives who had purchased a degree, although given that the data is self-reported I would guess that they are all treated the same. )

The Juren (who might get a job) and Gongsheng (future schoolteachers) report radically different numbers. So this seems a pretty clear set of evidence that the lower ranks of exam passers had men from “lower” families, but at the top those with ink in their veins predominated.

Now just add some stuff on buying degrees, and you are all set to teach about this.

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/s2u3w_v1

 

 

  1. Or the people you hire with grant money  ↩

  2. The article talks about how they define kin and how the lower degree winners reported fewer kin in general, perhaps skewing the results  ↩

Colonial Taiwan/Imperialism/Teaching

The 1895 Taiwan Republic and dodgy images

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

If you want to teach about the rapid spread of “modern” ideas in China after the Sino-Japanese war, the 1895 Taiwan Republic is good to talk about. Basically, when Taiwan was supposed to be handed over to the Japanese under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, there were attempts to create a Republic on Taiwan. 1 There was at least some rhetoric about modern ideas of popular sovereignty.  ” An official seal has been cut, …it will be publicly presented with all respect by the notables and people of the whole of Formosa”2 although they also did not deny Chinese sovereignty. They issued postage stamps!

“

There was a picture of them in Dianshizhai huabao

The images that really interest me are below, however

These are apparently both in the collection of the British Museum, but without any attribution. The first has a red stamp in the lower right that suggests it may have been from the Hong Kong Ribao. Both claim to have been done by someone called Wu Wenyi, but I can’t find anything on him. The second one is particularly interesting, since Liu Yongfu (who led the Black Flags in the Sino-French war) is in it. He was actually there, and it makes a nice way to bring in the role of the Black Flags/Triads/Gowned Brothers in Chinese nationalism. There are also some aborigines. I don’t think there actually was any non-Han involvement in this, which makes me think the pictures might be later. (They certainly -look- at bit later) It would be interesting if they were already being that multi-ethnic in 1895. You could do a lot more with them in class with better attributions for the last two.

  1. There is not much scholarship on this. Lamley, Harry J.  “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History”. The Journal of Asian Studies. (August 1968). 27 (4): 739–762 is the only academic treatment I have found. Niki Alsford Transitions to Modernity in Taiwan The Spirit of 1895 and the Cession of Formosa to Japan Routledge 2017 looks at attempts to get the British to take over the island, although I have not seen it  ↩

  2. Davidson, James W. (1903). The Island of Formosa, Past and Present : history, people, resources, and commercial prospects : tea, camphor, sugar, gold, coal, sulphur, economical plants, and other productions. London and New York: Macmillan & co, pp. 279–80 via wikipedia  ↩

Posts/Qing

Qing state capacity

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

The Qing was quite the Early Modern state, with considerable ability to do things and collect information about how well it was doing. The disastrously expensive campaigns to put down the White Lotus Rebellions 1794-1804 are usually cited as the turning point where the Qing’s ability to both make China legible and control what was going on began to decline rapidly.

If you have to teach about this, and need a couple of good quotes about the problems the Qing had with understanding what was going on, controlling its own subordinates and paying for it all, then   Dai Yingcong and Wang Wensheng have you covered.

Raising militias was always problematic for Chinese states, and Dai has a good quote about this from a memorial sent to the Qianlong emperor.

When local officials hastily recruited [militiamen], believing the more the merrier, they let numerous homeless drifters, elderly, and youngsters fill the ranks. In addition, the sectarian bandits have developed extensive networks by teaching [their religion] from one place to another, which are difficult to detect. Therefore, it is impossible to ensure that there are no people in the militias who are wavering and to distinguish the good from the bad ones, as the latter may disguise themselves. . . . Even innocent villagers have gotten used to killing months after having taken up spears and bows and abandoned their own professions, and take pleasure in receiving stipends and food rations. Their superiors can award and encourage them but cannot discipline them. [I am] afraid that they may cause more trouble after the campaign ends if they are not resettled properly at the slightest negligence.

Qianlong replies :

“Mingliang’s opinions are right. But now we’re relying on the militias to put down the bandits. If we revealed a hint of our doubt of them, they would be suspicious and fearful, which would be serious. . . . Let’s try to deal with [the militias] when we win the campaign completely.”1

Once recruited they were expensive and hard to control, as the Jiaqing emperor pointed out.

“Once joining the state army, the have to obey detailed military rules. While as鄉勇 xiangyong, they are free to come and go. Moreover, they are often better paid than rank and file soldiers.”2

They were indeed quite expensive, getting 2-3 taels a month where regular soldier got only one.

Here is a nice graph from Dai Yingcong (pg. 375) showing the decline of Qing silver reserves.

Jiaqing was aware of the crazy expenses for militias “rewards” for good soldiers, food etc. but

“As long as the rebellion is put down in a speedy manner, I can grant these dubious requests for funds and resources. All in all, it is better to to spend more to wrap up this campaign quickly than to cut costly outlays and risk dragging it on too long”…most “military spending has been dispersed in the society, so there is no need to worry too much about it”3

So the courts ability to control its people and even to control its own military was declining. The emperors were aware of this, but willing to let things ride.
There is obviously a lot more in these two books, but if you (or I) are looking for a couple good quotes to explain the problem and the reaction….here they are.

 

  1. Dai, Yingcong. The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China. 1st edition. University of Washington Press, 2019. pg 344 ↩

  2. Wang, Wensheng. White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire. Harvard Univ Pr, 2014. p 142 ↩

  3. Wang, Wensheng. White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire. Harvard Univ Pr, 2014. p 144  ↩

Japan/Japanese

Oh thank heaven

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

So apparently 7-11s are becoming a tourist stop in Japan. This actually makes perfect sense to me. I have not done any time in Japan, but I have spent a lot of time in 7-11 and other convenience stores in Taiwan and Mainland (Lawsons). There are lots of jokes about Americans who go somewhere and want to see McDonalds, but a proper Asian 7-11 is quite different. Even back as far as my student days the ones in Taiwan were interesting. I think they were one of the first places that had a register that automatically had you pay sales tax, which mom and pop stores did not. You might think that paying taxes would not be a big draw, but the receipt also doubled as a lottery ticket, which you could not get at a mom and pop. The amount of semi-prepared food (and microwaves and stuff to heat it) just keeps growing and  you can do your banking, pick up a package, get train tickets and do a lot of other stuff there. If you think about it they are basically becoming like the old post office (the ones outside the U.S. with a bank inside and a place to check on the state of your pension and such), the local place where you can get in touch with the system. And grab a snickers and a beer while you are there.

This actually goes back a bit. I talked to a student a few years back who was going on one of those summer study tours to Japan. They had to do a research project of some sort to justify the credits, and they picked a study of the architecture and uses of Japanese convenience stores. The professor agreed that it was a good topic, but also pointed out that this student had the best spoken Japanese in the whole group, and was letting their distaste for talking to strange humans to push them into a topic that would mean they did not have to talk to anyone.

That, of course, is one of the attractions of places like this. If you want to get stuff done without talking to people, a proper convenience store works really well. Get your morning baozi from a proper place and you may have to talk to someone. Get them from 7-11 and they will not be as good, but you can avoid that annoying human contact.

Bonus pictures

H-mart convenience store in the Philippines

 

 

Hello Kitty 7-11 in Taiwan

 

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