Chinese History in Geographical Perspective [Hardcover]

This volume treats China first and foremost as an evolving and imagined geographical entity. The contributors explore Chinas last five hundred years of history using geography as a lens through which to approach such issues as sports, ethnography, cartography, religion, elite and popular culture, transnational networking, urban planning, and politics.The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial states persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former outer zones in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of all-under-heaven to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the twentieth century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived, promises to provide insight into the contested development of the geographical entity which we, today, call 'China.'Introduction: The Contested Terrain of a Geographical EntityYongtao Du and Jeff Kyong-McClainChapter 1: Early Modern Mapping at the Qing Court: Survey Mapsfrom the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong Reign PeriodsLaura HostetlerChapter 2: Kangxis Auspicious Empire: Rhetorics of GeographicIntegration in the Early QingStephen WhitemanChapter 3: De-civilizing Ming Chinas Southern Border: Vietnam asLost Province or Barbarian CultureKathlene BaldanzaChapter 4: The Geography of Dragon Boat Racing inLate Imperial ChinaAndrew ChittickChapter 5: Writing Personalized Local History during the Late Mingand the Ming-Qing Transition: The Case of a Ming LoyalistXiaoquan Raphael ZhangChapter 6: An Ambush of Tigers: A Socio-Ecological History of the Ming-Qing Fujian Tiger MenaceLul£Z