The perfect wife
Three things to use in class Epitaph for Mme Ren, titled Lady of Virtue (shuren) The Honorable Bao Deming, the Assistant Regional Military Commander for my prov...
Category: Ming
Teaching Late Imperial China
So, if the class makes1 I will be doing Late Imperial China in Spring. I was going to do a few weeks of basic stuff, do some Sanyan Stories, set up their resear...
Qing Taxation
Since I got a bit of flak for asking for Taisu Zhang’s The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics and Institutions for Christmas I t...
Books/Books and Articles/China-Japan/China-Korea/Choson/Historiography/Korea-Japan/Military/Ming/War/安土桃山
A thought on military and transnational history in lieu of a review
In that odd lull between end-of-semester grading and final exam grading, I finally got around to reading that interlibrary loan book that was due last Friday, K...
Teaching Late Imperial Chinese cultural history
Update So I think I have figured this one out, with a little help from my friends, both here and via e-mail. I will be using Tim Brook’s Troubled Empire t...
Zhou Confucianism? Ming Quality Control?
In an absolutely fascinating article on the modern petition redress system1 focusing on attempts by regional officials to prevent petitions from reaching a nati...
Ming Dynasty tax revolt
Historians write a lot about taxes, in part because we are often interested in states and what they do, and taxes are something that states do a lot of. Taxatio...
Pigs Again: Li Shizhen's Ming Dynasty Map
After my posting last year of “Pigs. Shit, and Chinese History,” Sigrid Schmalzer was kind enough to share this map which she drew based on the work...
Smoking in China
A good book answers your questions. A really good book answers questions you had not thought of yet. Apparently Tim Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat is a reall...
Ming Imperialism
I just found something interesting about the early Ming. It appears from the Ming Shi-lu that the Ming founder at first just sent envoys to various tributary st...
Dragon mountain again
A few days ago Jonathan and I were discussing Steven Owen’s review of Jonathan Spence’s new book. Jonathan was not that impressed with the review, a...
Return to Dragon Mountain
There is a long review of Jonathan Spence’s new book Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man in TNR. Just the fact that there is a long rev...
The uses of the past
I have been thinking about public history and the uses of the past a bit lately, and reading Craig Clunas’ Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social...
Keeping Halal in the Ming dynasty
As regular readers know, I am interested in the question of how people are defined as Chinese. One nice bit of data comes from Hans Kuhner. He is looking at a p...
A simple Miscellany
Ralph Luker‘s uncovering of the wonderful linguistic debunkings of 1421 by Bill Poser and friends (in two parts; note: Is Menzies just making up words in ...