Frog in a Well

Books/China/Classics/English/General/Historiography/Song/Teaching

Lumpy Chinese History

Posted on January 12, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 7 Comments

There are a few places to go for archived syllabi — H-Net, ExEAS, I had a printed collection at one point, as well, then there’s the GMU Syllabus Finder — but not a lot of open discussion of course design. I’ve gotten help on sources, etc., from lists like H-Asia or by blogging questions (“bleg” means to “beg via blog” but it looks like “blech” to me so I won’t use it) and bothering old friends. But we need a more sustained discussion. So I’m going to inaugurate what I hope will be an ongoing series of posts here (and the other blogs about syllabi I’ve designed or am working on.

My only Asian history syllabus this semester is Hist 312: China I: Early China. It covers China up to about 1600: China II is Qing, including the Ming-Qing transition; China III is 20th century.

Early China is a great course: I keep toying with the idea of making it the one required Asian course for history majors, because the material is so fundamental, and it’s my best-attended China course by far. The problem, of course, is the richness and range of the material. This semester, though, I’m not even trying to make the semester “flow” because the history itself doesn’t. It’s episodic and inconsistent and the emphasis has to shift to make sense of things.

Continue reading →

Archives/Cultural/English/General/Japan/Libraries/Web Sites/幕末/明治/江戸

On-line Japanese history resources

Posted on January 10, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 8 Comments

While looking for a supplement to the anemic textbook offerings on Tokugawa Japan (none of the stuff is out of copyright, probably, which is why it’s not in the document set), I came across this great collection of links to history resources. (via Early Modern Resources) I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (quick document readings for world history students) but it’s a likely source for something especially visual materials.

Update (1/23/06): I didn’t think I’d find much in the David Rumsey Map collection, because it seemed to be heavily European maps, and I was right: a few interesting maps of Japan produced by Europeans, but not much compared to the wealth of material for Western historians. Then, as I was about to give up, I noticed the link to the Japan collection Yes, the UC Berkeley East Asian Library collection of historical Japanese maps (and a few other images) has been digitized and is available under Creative Commons license. There’s a lot of mid-to-late Tokugawa and Meiji era stuff, in particular: right up my alley.

Here’s a good illustration of the image quality and flexibility of the service: the very center of a 1710 map of the world:

China/General

Raise high the flag, whatever it stands for

Posted on January 9, 2006 by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

This is a Japan/Manchukuo propaganda poster showing the harmony between the Chinese, Japanese, and Manchurians. I found it on the Hoover website and am using on my East Asian History syllabus for the Spring. (You need a nice Pan-Asian image for that.) I like the image because it is kids, which neatly sidesteps the question of why the Chinese and the Manchurian have abandoned their native loyalties. It’s also hard to envision trying a 6-year old as a war criminal.

The thing that struck me is that Chinese (the one on the right) is holding the old 5-Color flag. This was declared the flag of the Republic after the 1911 revolution. Sun Yat-sen was never happy about this, since he preferred the Shining Sun flag (the current flag of the R.O.C. on Taiwan.) He was turned down on the grounds that Shining Sun was too closely tied to his party and gave the impression that the Republic was a party-state (which is of course why Sun liked it.) In 1921 Sun’s Guangzhou government declared the Shining Sun flag the official flag of the Republic, and after the Northern Expedition this was accepted by everyone.¹

Or was it? The Japanese apparently did not. Did they never accept the Shining Sun flag as the symbol of China? Or did they drop this recognition after 1931 or something? Or was the 5-Color flag just a symbol of the Chinese race to them, and they still recognized the Shining Sun as the symbol of the Nanjing state? The imagery is actually sort of odd, since the 5 colors in the Five Color flag were originally held to represent the 5 nationalities of China (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan and Hui.) Not many Tibetans in Manchukuo, so were the colors in the Manchukuo flag supposed to stand for something other than ethnicity? This site suggests that the four colors on the Manchuguo flag stood for red (bravery), blue (justice), white (purity) and black (determination), but it gives no references.

¹Above from Harrison The Making of the Republican Citizen

China/General/Hong Kong/Identity

Cantonese is Dying! (in L.A.)

Posted on January 9, 2006 by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

A not-too well informed article from the L.A. Times lamenting the decline of lively, slang-filled Cantonese in favor of the polite and dignified Mandarin. Obviously written by someone who has never been to Beijing. Or Tianjin. Or a lot of other places. No doubt a lot of Cantonese speakers do regard the school-ish Mandarin they know as dull, but the analysis is not very strong in the article. The article blames the Mainland government for pushing Mandarin, although the focus is on Chinese in America, where the pushing is obviously of a different sort. Part of what is happening of course is that the new waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. are as likely to be Mandarin speakers as not. 20 years ago my Mandarin was almost useless in American Chinatowns (Actually, 20 years ago my Mandarin was almost useless anywhere.) Now I almost never hear Cantonese. The interesting thing to me is the difference between today and the survival of Cantonese (and Fujianese, etc.) in the past.

Mandarin obviously works better if you have a community of lots of Chinese from different places, which is more likely now with cheaper transport and closer contacts with China. (One of the people learning Mandarin in the article was doing so to be able to speak to his grandkids in China.) The strange thing is that for a very long time Cantonese worked just fine to hold together business networks and families and such. Now if you insist on staying in the Cantonese ghetto you are sacrificing a lot, and people are leaving.

Why the change? Part of it I suppose is velocity. People moving around a lot more and communicating cheaper and quicker make it harder for a minority dialect to maintain its kingdom. Part of it is probably a political change. Hong Kong is no longer the gateway to China in the same way it was, nor are the Cantonese particularly likely to be the interpreters of the West to China. China is all open now, and Canton no longer has a special position.

I suspect part of it is that family and provincial ties are also less important than they were in 1906. The idea of continuing your Chinese studies in school is no longer just fillial piety for Asian Americans, and of course that means Mandarin. Is there anything else driving this? I know the Singapore government has been pushing Mandarin for a long time. What’s happening in Australia? Even better, what is happening in Indonesia, where acting like a trans-national Chinese might not be a good idea.

General/Korea/Koryŏ/Religion

Bugs, beetles and worldviews

Posted on January 9, 2006 by Remco Breuker / 8 Comments

Having been temporarily expelled from my office because of the presence of beetles that merrily eat through the wooden ceiling beams, I had to think of an entry in the History of Koryŏ (Koryŏsa 高麗史) about a similar problem that plagued the pine trees of Kaesŏng. At first sight this entry may look obscure and hardly worth of any serious attention. But I think this passage is more than an anecdote; it offers a fascinating entry into the worldview(s) of Koryŏ. This is the concerned passage:

“In the fourth month of 1102 (the seventh year of the reign of Sukchong) insects were eating the pine trees, so Buddhist monks were mobilized to recite the Flower Garland Sutra (Hwaŏmgyŏng 華嚴經) for five days to stop this disaster. On the kyeyu day in the fifth month the king led some of his ministers in the palace in a celebration of a commemorative ritual for Sangje上帝 and the Five Emperors五帝. A prayer of repentance was directed at T’aejo 太祖, the sun and the moon and was only discontinued in the evening of the third night. On the pyŏngsul day of the sixth month, the ruler decreed that the ministers of state should perform rituals in honour of the spirits of the great mountains and streams of the east, west, south, north and the middle of the country, divided in three separate places of worship. He furthermore decreed that 2,000 monks should be gathered and split in four groups that would tour the mountains around the capital and in the provinces, while reciting the The Heart of the Prajna Paramita Sutra (panyagyŏng 般若經) to the insects to rescue them and stop disasters. In the end, 500 soldiers were mobilized to catch the insects on Pine Tree Peak (Songaksan松岳山).”

The appearance of insects in Kaesŏng’s sacred mountains, eating the pines that were considered essential to the well-being of the dynasty, was not to be taken lightly. Indeed, when this happened later in the dynasty “the people said that [the appearance of the insects in the pine trees] was the foreboding of the emergence of a new dynasty”. The significance attached to this omen, however, is perhaps of less immediate interest than the solutions that the Koryŏ court came up with in this case and in many other, comparable instances. First, it made Buddhist monks perform sutra recitations and in other instances elaborate rituals. When that did not prove to be effective, the king himself offered Daoist rituals to the Ultimate Being and the Five Emperors, to the founder of the dynasty and to the sun and the moon. Then, the spirits of the landscape, of Koryŏ’s mountains and streams were beseeched to intervene. Desperate, one can easily imagine, that the insects did not disappear, 2,000 monks were send out to preach to the pesky little bugs and when that did not work, soldiers were sent into the mountains to engage in close combat with the blasphemous insects. Other instances also record to mobilization of troops of shamans. Continue reading →

Blog Carnival/China-Japan/English/General/Japan/Korea-Japan

Frog In A Well Project wins Best Group History Blog

Posted on January 8, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

The Cliopatria Awards for best history blogging have been announced and the three Frog in a Well blogs have been selected the Best Group Blog

“After much thought, the judges chose the Frog in a Well project as a whole, rather than singling out any one of its constituent parts: not only do they feature overlapping personnel and a considerable degree of shared identity and purpose, all have been characterized by diverse contributors, strong historical content and consistently high quality writing. Both individually and as a whole, they represent a great achievement and a model to inspire and challenge in the future.”

Thanks, both to the judges and to all the bloggers who have made this such a great project to be part of. Special thanks, of course, to the creator and technical master (and a damn fine blogger) Konrad Lawson.

I’m really looking forward to the next year of Asian history blogging here!

Academia/Blogs and Carnivals/English/General/Korea/Korea-China/Korea-Japan

Frog In A Well Project wins Best Group History Blog

Posted on January 8, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 3 Comments

The Cliopatria Awards for best history blogging have been announced and the three Frog in a Well blogs have been selected the Best Group Blog

“After much thought, the judges chose the Frog in a Well project as a whole, rather than singling out any one of its constituent parts: not only do they feature overlapping personnel and a considerable degree of shared identity and purpose, all have been characterized by diverse contributors, strong historical content and consistently high quality writing. Both individually and as a whole, they represent a great achievement and a model to inspire and challenge in the future.”

I’m really looking forward to the next year of Asian history blogging here!

Blogs and Carnivals/China/China-Japan/China-Korea/English/General/Japan

Frog In A Well Project wins Best Group History Blog

Posted on January 8, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

The Cliopatria Awards for best history blogging have been announced and the three Frog in a Well blogs have been selected the Best Group Blog

“After much thought, the judges chose the Frog in a Well project as a whole, rather than singling out any one of its constituent parts: not only do they feature overlapping personnel and a considerable degree of shared identity and purpose, all have been characterized by diverse contributors, strong historical content and consistently high quality writing. Both individually and as a whole, they represent a great achievement and a model to inspire and challenge in the future.”

I’m really looking forward to the next year of Asian history blogging here!

China/China-Korea/English/General/War

1950 Gallup Poll on Chinese Troops in Korea

Posted on January 8, 2006 by K. M. Lawson / 0 Comment

While trying to track down two Gallup polls from 1947 and 1948 related to the role of the United Nations, I came across an interesting US Gallup poll from December 1950, soon after the Chinese enter the Korean War in November:

If the Chinese communists continue to send hundreds of thousands of troops into Korea, far outnumbering our forces there, what do you think we should do?

No specific suggestions – *%

Use the A-bomb (atom bomb), except on Russia:

Use a-bomb if necessary – 26

Take fight to Russia, attack – 2

Intensify fight against Red China, declare war (unspecified)–or on China, fight it out, call their bluff, bomb them to hell, stay in Korea, retreat only if necessary, give (General Douglas) MacArthur more power, follow his plan, increase our manpower too – 24

Strategic retreat: retreat to where we can make a better stand, retreat and attack again when stronger – 4

Withdraw completely, get out of Korea, withdraw and try something else, stop – 29

Negotiate: Try peace talk, meet Chinese delegates, make peace with them, call an armistice – 2

Do not use A-bomb (atom bomb), should only be used as a last resort – 1

Abide by U.N. (United Nations) decision, all nations should support U.N., make other U.N. nations do their share, get U.N. to sanction military action in Korea – 2

Miscellaneous – 4

Don’t know/No answer/Hard to say – 10

ORGANIZATION CONDUCTING SURVEY: GALLUP ORGANIZATION
POPULATION: National adult
NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 1,500
INTERVIEW METHOD: Personal
QUESTION NOTES: * = less than .5 percent Adds to more than 100% due to multiple responses
SURVEY NOTES: Sample size is approximate
BEGINNING DATE: December 3, 1950
ENDING DATE: December 8, 1950
SOURCE DOCUMENT: GALLUP POLL–A.I.P.O.
DATE OF RELEASE OF SOURCE DOCUMENT: December 1950

Note: I don’t have any more info on how the poll was done and the questions were asked.

Archives/English/US-Japan

1946 Survey Question about the Character of the Japanese People

Posted on January 7, 2006 by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

While looking for some old Gallup polls in Lexis-Nexis, I came across the following poll question from May of 1946. Some readers may find either the results or the answer options interesting:

Which of the following statements comes closest to describing how you feel, on the whole, about the people who live in Japan?

The Japanese people will always want to go to war to make themselves as powerful as possible – 35%

The Japanese people may not like war, but they have shown that they are too easily led into war by powerful leaders – 39

The Japanese people do not like war. If they could have the same chance as people in other countries, they would become good citizens of the world – 19

Don’t know – 7

ORGANIZATION CONDUCTING SURVEY: NATIONAL OPINION RESEARCH CENTER
POPULATION: National adult
NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 2,589
INTERVIEW METHOD: Personal
BEGINNING DATE: May 1946
ENDING DATE: May 1946
SOURCE DOCUMENT: MINORITIES, UNITED NATIONS
DATE OF RELEASE OF SOURCE DOCUMENT: May 1946
QUESTION ID: USNORC.460241, R11B

China/English/General/Historiography/Maoist era (1949-1976)/Post-Mao

Gang of Four is Gone

Posted on January 6, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Yao Wenyuan, the last surviving member of the Gang of Four — the others were Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, and Zhang Chunqiao — has died (Xinhua report here).

A former propaganda official and Shanghai journalist, Yao wrote the article in 1966 that signalled the start of the Cultural Revolution. During the revolution, hundreds of thousands of people died, many of them committing suicide after being harassed by Mao’s Red Guards, the shock troops of the revolution.

A month after Mao’s death in 1976, the Gang of Four was arrested, marking the end of the Cultural Revolution. Yao was convicted of trying to gain power by persecuting officials and members of the public and spent 20 years in prison.

As for the others, Jiang reportedly committed suicide in jail in 1991, Wang died in 1992 and Zhang died in May last year.

As usual, this raises the question of the interpretation of the Mao legacy. I have yet to finish Chang/Halliday (honestly, I haven’t gotten past chapter three, because I didn’t take it with me over break) but I’ve been struggling with the question of how to handle it in the next iteration of my 20c course. If I assign it, I’m going to be spending the entire semester arguing with it. If I don’t, it’s the elephant in the living room….

China/General

Katrina Gulliver: Self-introduction

Posted on January 6, 2006 by katrina / 3 Comments

I have just realised that despite posting a couple of times here, I have not actually introduced myself properly to the Frog in a Well community! So belatedly, here goes: I am a PhD student at Cambridge, doing research on China and Southeast Asia. My topic has drifted somewhat, suffering the slings and arrows of new publications altering the state of the literature. Broadly, I address Western perceptions of ‘the East’, specifically I am using women’s writing, c.1880-1930. I also keep a blog (http://www.katrinagulliver.com/commentary.html).

Right now I am at the AHA in Philadelphia, if any other Frog in a Well contributors are about!!

General/Japan

Japan’s Elites, Update

Posted on January 6, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Last summer, I responded to a request for scholarly opinion on the “leaders” of Japan from 1840-1920. Ms. Kim has now completed compiling responses and doing her own research and reports back her list (roughly in chronological order):

Abe Masahiro (1819-1857)
Ii Naosuke (1815-1860)
Kujo Hisatada (1798-1871)
Okubo Toshimichi (1830-1878)
Saigo Takamori (1828-1877)
Tokugawa Nariaki (1800-1860)
Yoshida Shoin (1830-1859)
Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901)
Ito Hirobumi (1841-1909)
Iwakura Tomomi (1825-1883)
Kido Takayoshi, also known as Koin (1833-1877)
Okuma Shigenobu (1838-1922)
Sakamoto Ryoma (1835-1867)
Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931)
Inoue Kaoru (1835-1915)
Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840-1900)
Matsukata Masayoshi (1835-1924)
Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922)
Hara Takashi (1856-1921)
Katsura Taro (1847-1913)
Matsukata Masayoshi (1835-1924)

There’s a few names on there that aren’t on my list: Kujo Hisatada is a pretty good addition for the early period, where I was pretty stumped; Sakamoto Ryoma was left off my list because I was paying too much attention to the chronological boundaries, I think; Kuroda Kiyotaka doesn’t seem more important to me than Saigo Tsugumichi, or Mori Arinori, who were on my list, and the Meiji Emperor seems like a pretty serious omission.

Let’s face it: if we got through a survey of Japanese history and our students knew who all these people were, we’d be doing OK, I think. Of course, there’s no cultural figures here, etc….

Books and Articles/General/Intellectual/Japan

Berry on Early Modern Information

Posted on January 4, 2006 by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

I admit that I’m a great admirer of Berry, but this is going to be fun. My own thoughts about Early modern Japan as an intellectual renaissance are going to have to be tested against this scholarship.

The University of California Press is pleased to announce the publication of:

Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period

Mary Elizabeth Berry is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of _The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto_ (California, 1994) and _Hideyoshi_ (1982).

“In _Japan in Print_, Mary Elizabeth Berry crisply condenses a remarkable amount of primary research on difficult and little-known materials, and it interprets those materials in a highly original framework.”-Karen E. Wigen, author of _The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920_

A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous time. After 1600, self-appointed investigators used the model of the land and cartographic surveys of the newly unified state to observe and order subjects such as agronomy, medicine, gastronomy, commerce, travel, and entertainment. They subsequently circulated their findings through a variety of commercially printed texts: maps, gazetteers, family encyclopedias, urban directories, travel guides, official personnel rosters, and instruction manuals for everything from farming to lovemaking. In this original and gracefully written book, Mary Elizabeth Berry considers the social processes that drove the information explosion of the 1600s. Inviting readers to examine the contours and
meanings of this transformation, Berry provides a fascinating account of the conversion of the public from an object of state surveillance into a subject of self-knowledge.

Full information about the book, including the table of contents, is available online: http://go.ucpress.edu/Berry

The use of maps and visual materials in Culture of Civil War gives us some hints about the direction she’s likely going here. I love my job.

China/General

Why you could not be the Son of Heaven

Posted on January 3, 2006 by Alan Baumler / 5 Comments

Late last night I found myself watching TV, and there was the World’s Strongest Man competition, taped in Chengdu last October. Apparently the competition consists of very large men carrying very large things around and puffing a lot. As it was in China they added a special event, the “ding carry” I can’t find a picture of the one they used on the web, but they had a large bronze ding (the three-legged kind) and the contestants had to see how far they could carry it.

A man with no neck explained to the audience that a ding (鼎) is an ancient symbol of China. Actually, it is much more than that. It is one of the forms of bronze ritual vessels that were used to make sacrifices to the ancestors. Yu the Great made a set called the Nine Bronze Tripods which had the names of all the dangerous creatures in the world on them, and thus gave the owner, the Son of Heaven, the ability to control nature. They became a symbol of the authority of the Son of Heaven, and both the Shang and Zhou kings held on to them as symbols of their position. As the authority of the Zhou kings declined various feudal lords tried to get their mitts on them. On one occasion the Tripods ran away from an evil usurper (hey, they have legs.) When the First Emperor tried to drag them out of the Yellow River a dragon cut the rope and they fell back in, never to be recovered. Chiang Kai-shek put them on his currency.

One interesting aspect of this is that the weight of these ding were a topic of some importance in the Warring States period. There was a story (In the Zuo, I think. 20 minutes of searching did not find it) about one of the feudal rulers asking how much the Nine Tripods weighed and how hard it would be to move them. He was told they were too heavy for him to move. The answer, it turns out, is that a ding weighs 175 kg. And to be the Son of Heaven you need muscles like this.

This is Manusz Pudzoanow of Poland the eventual champion. He carried the ding 90 meters, and I think he could have gone further.

The other interesting thing, of course, was that the event was in China. Apparently the assimilation of China to the modern world of sport and spectacle is proceeding apace. If China had managed to get an event like this 15 years ago they would have held it in Beijing and lots of bigwigs would have turned up. Now it only rates Chengdu.