Early Medieval China最新文献

{"title":"Mistaken Identities: Negotiating Passing and Replacement in Chinese Records of the Strange","authors":"Antje Richter","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240126","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThe large corpus of early medieval Chinese narratives now classified as records of the strange includes an abundance of stories of mistaken identity. This essay focuses on stories in which an animal successfully impersonates a human but is eventually found out. The questions I ask of these materials touch on issues of identity, privilege, and narrative: What does it take to pass as and replace a human, and possibly even a particular human? How are personal identity and privilege conceptualized, also across species and gender? How do narratives of initially mistaken and finally revealed “true” identity operate and what literary means do they employ? I propose that the political and social changes that shook early medieval China moved questions about ethnic, social, and personal identity to the center of thought, and that the literary conventions of records of the strange made the genre particularly suited to deliberating and negotiating these matters, especially in terms of access to privileged social spheres. Considering the literary sophistication with which records of the strange were usually composed, I also propose to include them more seriously in discussions of literary practice in early medieval China.Keywords: zhiguaianimalsidentitypassingimpersonation AcknowledgmentsI first presented on this topic in the panel “On the Human / Nonhuman / Posthuman in Medieval China” at the 97th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in March 2022. I would like to thank my co-panelists for their comments, especially Jack Chen, Karl Steel, and Xiaofei Tian. I am also grateful for the invaluable constructive feedback I received from an anonymous reader and from Xiaofei Tian in her role as editor of EMC. Last but not the least I would like to express thanks to the students in my graduate seminar on medieval prose in Spring 2022: I have learnt so much from all twelve of you. Li Sijia, Xinchang Li, Xiaoyue Luo, and Huiyao Yang deserve special mention.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 This was famously spelled out for foxes in a fragment of Xuanzhong ji 玄中記, generally ascribed to Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324), as preserved in Taiping guangji 太平廣記 (comp. 978) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 447.3652. As we will see below, there are alternative accounts of this particular ageing process. Animals other than foxes that acquire unusual abilities when they reach a high age are mentioned in the “Dui su” 對俗 chapter of the Baopuzi. See Baopuzi neipian jiaoshi 抱樸子內篇校釋, comp. Wang Ming 王明 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 3.41–42. For a typology of transformations, see Robert F. Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 251–55. See also Xiaofei Tian, “The Cultural Politics of Old Things in Mid-Tang China,” JAOS 140 (2020): 317–43.2 For research on animals in traditional China, see Chiara Bocci’s “Bibliographie zur Tierwelt im Alten ","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134911947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the</i> Shishuo xinyu","authors":"Graham Sanders","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240142","url":null,"abstract":"Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Qian, Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001).2 Albert E. Dien, “On the Name Shishuo xinyu,” Early Medieval China 20 (2014): 7–8; Graham Sanders, “A New Note on Shishuo xinyu,” Early Medieval China 20 (2014): 9–22.3 Graham Sanders, Words Well Put: Visions of Poetic Competence in the Chinese Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006).4 See Curie Virág, The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. viii.5 Xiaofei Tian, “From the Eastern Jin through the Early Tang (317–649),” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Vol. 1, To 1375, ed. Stephen Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 242.","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134911952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bringing Scholarship on The Early Medieval Period to a Broader Audience","authors":"Patricia Buckley Ebrey","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240141","url":null,"abstract":"Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Eventually, the set included fifteen “volumes,” but sixteen physical books, as volume 5 came out as two books.2 See Arthur Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) and Erik Zürcher, The Chinese Conquest of Buddhism (Leiden: Brill), both published in 1959.3 Albert E. Dien, “Yen Chih-t’ui (531-591+): A Buddho-Confucian,” in Confucian Personalities, ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 44–64; Hisayuki Miyakawa, “The Confucianization of South China,” in The Confucian Persuasion, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 21–46.4 Two notable conference volumes are State and Society in Early Medieval China, ed. Albert E. Dien (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), and Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600, ed. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001).5 One could even go back earlier, to the Nan-Pei Ch’ao Studies group, which issued a newsletter beginning in 1977. Its first issue was a directory of scholars who responded to its query in the Association of Asian Studies newsletter asking for their addresses, research interests, and publications, and thus offers a time capsule on the field at that time.6 This is true even of recent volumes, such as CHC 5.2 (2015), which has chapters by Robert Hymes, Charles Hartman, and Joseph McDermott and Shiba Yoshinobu that ranged from 116 to 139 pages in length.7 Readers who would prefer to read a survey of the period in which a single scholar attempts to bring all the strands together can turn to Mark Lewis, China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).8 Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 78.2 (2018): 477–90.9 Journal of Asian Studies 47.2 (1988): 344.10 Journal of Asian Studies 55 (1996): 146–49.11 Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 46 (2016): 225–37.12 Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 77.1 (2017): 175–83.13 To give an example, I was confused by the differences in the discussion of Chen Yinke’s analysis of the relative contribution of the Western Wei/Northern Zhou versus the Eastern Wei/Northern Qi to the Tang on pages 11–12 and 235, so checked the index for Chen Yinke. It lists pages 11–12, 13, and 76, but there is no reference to Chen Yinke on page 76, and the passage on page 235 is not listed in the index. So I did a search of the Cambridge Histories online via my university library. Searching “Yinke,” if the box “search within full text” was checked, I got only two hits, to the introduction and chapter 10. To see the passages required opening the chapter and doing a search of it. By contrast, one could easily search through the e-book and get forty references, almost all in footnotes, but also ","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134912154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nonhuman Self-cultivators in Early Medieval China: Re-reading a Story Type","authors":"Robert Ford Campany","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240127","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractHistorians of literature are well acquainted with early medieval stories of shapeshifting animals and other beings seducing unsuspecting men and women. This paper re-reads such narratives from the shapeshifters’ point of view. This requires escaping the customary disciplinary boundaries and viewing these creatures’ depictions against the backdrop of concurrently circulating “arts of the bedchamber” (fangzhong zhi shu 房中之術), one of several classes of techniques for “nurturing life” (yangsheng 養生). I argue that the shapeshifters’ actions make sense when understood within the framework of this mode of self-cultivation. This in turn implies a view of nonhumans as selves striving to realize aims—among them health, longevity, the acquisition of enhanced capabilities, and, ultimately, metamorphosis into higher species on the ladder of beings. The tales emerged, then, in a culture to some extent shaped by a worldview of the sort often termed “animistic,” one that saw nonhuman beings as co-participants with humans in self-transformational projects grounded in a common cosmology.Keywords: animismshapeshiftersself-cultivationbedchamber artsanecdotal literature AcknowledgmentsMy thanks to participants in the Harvard-Yale symposium “The Margins of the Human in Medieval China” (spring 2022), organized by Lucas Bender and Xiaofei Tian, and the 14th Annual Chinese Medieval Studies Workshop hosted by Wendy Swartz at Rutgers University and sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation; Xiaofei Tian; and an anonymous reviewer for their comments. This paper represents an early piece of a larger research project.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Small Gods (London: Gollancz, 1992), 6.2 How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 73–74.3 Zhuangzi jijie 莊子集解, ed. Wang Xianqian 王先謙 and Liu Wu 劉武 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 41–42, adapting the translations in A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 72–73, and Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 63–65.4 Xinji Soushen ji xinji Soushen houji 新輯搜神記新輯搜神後記, comp. Li Jianguo 李劍國, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 2:6.535–36. Space limitations preclude listing all the loci where this and similar tales are attested (often with interesting variant readings) in Tang and Song anthologies. Stories featuring foxes are relatively well known, but other animal species as well as insects, spiders, and even household objects also figure in stories of this type, as we will see. As Roel Sterckx states, “Fox demons and fox possession were known at least as early as the third century B.C.E.” Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002], 256n111; see also 35. On early recipes for countering fox possession, see Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Litera","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134911783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fu Poetry along the Silk Roads: Third-Century Chinese Writings on Exotica","authors":"Qiulei Hu","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240143","url":null,"abstract":"Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 For Milburn’s article, see Early Medieval China 22 (2016): 26–44.","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134912149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Animality, Humanity, and Divine Power: Exploring Implicit Cannibalism in Medieval Weretiger Stories","authors":"Manling Luo","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240136","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThis paper examines representations of implicit cannibalism, in terms of a man in tiger form preying on human(s), in three stories from medieval China. The descriptions of the circumstances of the protagonist’s transformations into a tiger and back, and what he faces after his return to human society, show overlaps and divergences in the visions of the relationships among weretigers, human victims, and divine forces. Each story in its own way explores the fluid boundaries between animality and humanity and the limits of human agency and power vis-à-vis divine forces. Such thematizations reveal the development of a communal discourse on the place of humans in a cosmos imagined as hierarchical. The social identities of the featured characters and other details further reveal ways in which the stories convey the interests and concerns of low-level scholar-officials in medieval China.Keywords: human-tiger transformationimplicit cannibalismanimalityhumanitydivine power AcknowledgmentsThis essay has benefited from insightful comments and suggestions from Heather Blair, Robert F. Campany, Robert E. Hegel, Michelle Moyd, Anya Peterson Royce, Lynn Struve, Xiaofei Tian, and Sarah Van der Laan, as well as an anonymous reviewer. I presented different versions at the symposium on “Margins of the Human in Medieval China” organized by Lucas Bender and Xiaofei Tian, the Global Medieval Studies colloquium at Rutgers University hosted by Jessey Choo and Sarah Novacich, and at an Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference panel organized by Xiaofei Tian. I thank the organizers and participants for their valuable feedback.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 For overviews, see Cary Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 564–75; Anna Peterson, “Review: Religious Studies and the Animal Turn,” History of Religions 56.2 (2016): 232–45.2 For a few examples, see Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer eds., Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Huaiyu Chen, In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023); Madeline K. Spring, Animal Allegories in T’ang China (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1993).3 Fox is a good example. See Rania Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003); Xiaofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).4 K. C. Chang, “The Animal in Shang and Chou Bronze Art,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41.2 (1981): 527–54; Hou-mei Sung, Decoded Messages: The Symbolic Language of Chinese Animal Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 137–70; Charles E. Hammond, “An Excursion in Tiger Lore,” Asia Major 4.","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134911781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lore and Verse: Poems on History in Early Medieval China","authors":"Fusheng Wu","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240144","url":null,"abstract":"without a critical discussion of primary sources. There is, unfortunately, a remarkable lack of editorial work throughout the book. When a text is quoted more than once, the translation is often inconsistent, sometimes at crucial points. The decision to italicize terms in pinyin romanization seems rather random and causes confusion in many places. For instance, on p. 105, the book title Han shu is not italicized, whereas in the next sentence Hou Han shu is. Careless errors abound, damaging the scholarly credibility of the book. Just to cite a few examples: Ehuang娥皇 and Nüying女英 are described as “the daughters of Shun舜 and also the wives of Yao堯” (p. 63); the journal Early Medieval China, in which the author’s own article is published, is given as “Journal of EarlyMedieval Chinese” in the Bibliography (p. 150); the writer Xiahou Zhan’s夏侯湛 surname is spelled as Xiaohou twice (p. 59). This book is a reminder that much remains to be done about literary representations of objects, ideas, and cultures that were deemed “foreign” in early medieval China. One question is why such writings reached great popularity in the third century, when the Han and Roman empires on both ends of the Silk Roads were in fragmentation or decline. Contrary to the common assumption that diplomatic activities along the Silk Road were in hiatus after the fall of Tang, Xin Wen’s The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the fragmentation of empire incentivized, rather than prevented, diplomatic activities. Does this theory apply to the third century? Was there an increased need for competing courts and regimes to glorify and amplify the symbolic meaning of foreign tributes as claim for legitimacy? Kong observes in thirdcentury writings on exotica a general tendency to downplay the foreign roots of the objects to integrate them into Chinese culture. If it is true, how did these efforts of “Sinicization” reflect the writers’ attitudes toward foreign kingdoms and foreign peoples? Are there more nuanced views of objects from different regions and with different cultural and religious associations than those vaguely citing the importance of “truth, beauty, and goodness”? Kong’s book offers a starting point for more thorough and in-depth investigations.","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134911951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Diverging Conceptions of Apotheosis in Fourth-Century CE Upper Purity Daoism","authors":"J. E. E. Pettit","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240128","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThis article examines evidence from hagiographies that emerged from the Upper Purity (Shangqing) Daoist lineage in the late fourth century CE to investigate the attitudes of early medieval writers towards human beings gaining status as gods and goddesses. Whereas previous scholars tend to treat these texts as part of a single movement, this article demonstrates that there are complex and conflicting accounts of how humans attain divine status. Most notably, these authors hold different views concerning whether Daoist adepts acquire celestial titles when they are initiated or if they must first finish their cultivation. By comparing and contrasting the hagiographies of three Daoist saints (Pei Xuanren 裴玄仁, Wang Zideng 王子登, Wei Huacun 魏華存), this article asks how such stories might have informed and influenced the mental worlds of the readers who encountered and perhaps even lived out these narratives.Keywords: Daoismhagiographygodhoodapotheosis Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Henri Maspero, Taoism and Chinese Religion, trans. Frank A. Kierman Jr. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 364–65; Yoshioka Yoshitoyo 吉岡義豐, Dōkyō kyōten shiron 道教経典史論 (Tokyo: Dōkyō kankōkai, 1955), 61–63.2 Jurong was a town halfway between Mt. Mao and the Eastern Jin 東晉 (318–420) capital Jiankang 建康 (present-day Nanjing).3 The texts of this tradition are also called the Upper Clarity or Shangqing texts. See Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 275–302.4 Matthew Wells, “The Revelation of Hagiographies in Early Daoism: A Case Study of the Traditions of Lord Pei,” Asia Major 33.2 (2020): 1–24.5 Michel Strickmann, “Saintly Fools and Chinese Masters,” Asia Major 7.1 (1994): 42.6 Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Ancestors and Anxiety (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 144.7 Chao-jan Chang 張超然, “Chuanshou yu jiaocai: Qingling zhenren Peijun zhuan” 傳授與教材: 清靈真人裴君傳中的五靈法, Huaren zongjiao yanjiu 華人宗教研究 1 (2013): 113–15.8 Robert F. Campany, Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 223.9 John Kieschnick, Buddhist Historiography in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 10.10 White Water (Baishui 白水) is a mythical river flowing from the Kunlun Mountains. According to Wang Yi’s 王逸 (fl. 2nd c.) commentary to the Li sao 離騷, the Huainanzi 淮南子 states that drinking from Whitewater will impart immortality. See Qu Yuan ji jiao zhu 屈原集校注, ed. Jin Kaicheng 金開誠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1999), 201. Zhengtong daozang 正統道藏 1016, 1.3b. Hereafter texts from Zhengtong daozang will be cited as DZ according to their number in Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1393–440. Thomas E. Smith, Declarations of the Perfected, Part One: Setting Scripts and Images into Mot","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134911949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"Xiaofei Tian","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2023.2240125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2023.2240125","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134912148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor's Note","authors":"Xiaofei Tian","doi":"10.1080/15299104.2022.2101764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15299104.2022.2101764","url":null,"abstract":"This issue marks the formal transition in the editorship of Early Medieval China. In keeping with the tradition, I as the new editor wish to pay tribute to the former editors of the journal: Victor Cunrui Xiong (Vols. 1–5, 1994–1999), Cynthia Chennault (Vols. 6–16, 2000–2010), and J. Michael Farmer (Vols. 17– 26, 2011–2019), as well as Matthew Wells who served as Assistant Editor in the last few years of Michael Farmer’s tenure. They made great efforts and did excellent work to nurture and guide this journal, which today still remains the only journal in the English language dedicated to the study of the historical period known as early medieval China. It is a privilege and honor for me to take up the torch. In 1994 Dennis Grafflin, then President of the Early Medieval China Group, wrote the “Foreword” for the inaugural issue of Early Medieval China. It was spelled as “Forward” in the issue, and the pun turned out to be prophetic, as the field has indeed moved forward enormously since three decades ago. In archeology, art, history, literature, and religious studies, we have seen manymonographs, edited volumes, articles, doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, translations, conferences, workshops, and exhibitions. We also witness a much-improved gender balance, as there are more woman scholars who are active and visible in the field. All these developments have contributed to the vibrancy, diversity, and richness of the larger field of medieval China studies. This issue, featuring articles and book reviews by veterans of the field, mid-career scholars, and scholars of the younger generation, showcases the continuing growth of the field. Meow Hui Goh addresses the concerns about deception, sincerity, voice, and affect in literary writings by examining three cases of fabricating letters as a war strategy; Qiaomei Tang explores the high political stakes of a thorny legal and ritual problem of “two principal wives” under shifting geopolitical conditions; Charles Holcombe analyzes group identity formation and perception in the interactions of Chinese and non-Chinese peoples in the borderland; and Lu Kou discusses the politics of court music and the creation of an “audible empire” in the early years of the Sui dynasty. Together, the articles consider questions of ethnicity, identity, legitimacy, and the meaning and significance of wen in dynastic transition and empire building. They attest to the importance of paying close attention to primary sources that cut across modern disciplinary divisions and envisioning history in its totality of contemporary beliefs and social conditions beyond its textual traces. I came from an editor’s family; my father had edited a literature journal for many years. Yet, only after working as an editor myself did I realize the amount of work and care going into a journal issue. It is also teamwork: I thank our new social media editor, the Editorial Board, and the EMCG President, Treasurer, and Board of Directors for their ","PeriodicalId":41624,"journal":{"name":"Early Medieval China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42508056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}