Course syllabus

 

HISTORY 322: Emperors and Peasants: Society in Late Imperial China

SEMESTER 2, 2018

15 points

 

Teacher:

Melissa Inouye - m.inouye@auckland.ac.nz

 

Lectures and Tutorials:

LECTURES

Mondays 11 AM-12 PM, 104-G53 (Old Choral Hall, Room G53)

Wednesdays 1-2 PM, 201N-370 (Human Sciences North, Room 370)

 

TUTORIALS

222 Mon 1-2 PM, 104-G07 (Old Choral Hall, Room G07)

222 Tue 10-11 AM, 114-G15 (Commerce A, Room G15)

 
Teacher:

 Melissa Inouye - m.inouye@auckland.ac.nz

 

Overview:

When people think of “imperial China” or “traditional China” or “premodern China”, the images and tropes that come to mind are usually from the Ming-Qing periods. The history of this late imperial period is of critical importance because it encompasses a time when China was the most advanced civilization in the world, sets the stage for the tumultuous events of China’s “century of humiliation”, and establishes numerous precedents for the relationship between Chinese state and society and the formal and informal structures of everyday Chinese life.  

HISTORY 222 employs a dynamic, enlightening and highly entertaining pedagogy called "Reacting to the Past". In the “Reacting to the Past” coursework, students play a game structured around a particular moment in Ming history in 1587. (See a trailer for a 2015 222 tutorial here.) 

 Course outcomes:

By the end of the course, you should have improved your ability

• To find and analyse primary sources (i.e., first-hand accounts)
• To read and critique secondary sources (i.e., accounts written by historians)
• To gather primary and secondary sources together into a research essay shaped by your own original argument
• To listen to and evaluate the arguments and opinions of others
• To cite and reference in a manner appropriate to the genre of historical writing
• To read efficiently and retentively
• To write in polished and professional English

 

LECTURES

Mondays 11 AM-12 PM, 104-G53 (Old Choral Hall, Room G53)

Wednesdays 1-2 PM, 201N-370 (Human Sciences North, Room 370)

 

TUTORIALS

222 Mon 1-2 PM, 104-G07 (Old Choral Hall, Room G07)

222 Tue 10-11 AM, 114-G15 (Commerce A, Room G15)

322 Tue 12-1 PM, 114-G01 (Commerce A, Room G01)

322 Tue 1-2 PM, 114-G18 (Commerce A, Room G18)

 

OFFICE HOUR (in my office)

Arts 2, 434, Wednesdays, 12-1 PM

 

DIRECTED READING (in a seminar room) chrome://newtab/

Mondays, 12-1 PM, 206-314 (Arts 1, Room 314)

 

REQUIRED TEXTS (i.e. buy these or borrow these religiously from Short Loan):

            Reacting to the Past: The Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor Student Manual (Buy this.

Beyond the game information and the primary source texts within, which you will need for the Reacting to the Past game, the overview of Ming state and society is also comprehensive and accessible.)

            D.C. Lau, trans., The Analects (Harmondsworth, New York: Penguin Books, 1979). (Buy this.)

            Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). (Just

borrowing this Ray Huang text from Short Loan or reading it online should be fine.)

1. W. Mote, Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). (This is an

amazing and very rich book. If you like Chinese history, buy this book for easy access and future reference. If you don’t want to buy the book, plan on borrowing it frequently from Short Loan for review, reference, and additional exploration. Feel free to use this book as a source for the research essay.)

 

ASSESSMENT (100% Coursework)

When submitting coursework, do not include personal names – just ID number

 

322    

10% Class Participation

15% Abstract and Bibliography (800 words) August 3, 11:59 PM, to Canvas

40% Research Essay (2700 words), August 24, 11:59 PM, to Canvas

30% Reacting to the Past (RTTP) Coursework (1500 words)

5% Palace Examination (500 words), September 19, in class

            25% Memorial (1500 words), October 5, 11:59 PM, to Canvas

5% Qing History Quiz (500 words), October 17, in class

 

Participation Mark: Each tutorial, up to 10 points are awarded (5 points for showing up, additional points for good participation). At the end of the semester, these individual tutorial participation marks are averaged. Students should come to tutorial with a one-to-two sentence summary of the argument of each reading and should be prepared to offer their own responses to issues raised in the readings.

 

RTTP Participation Bonus: Students who participate actively in the RTTP game will receive high marks for tutorial participation. At the end of the game, members of the winning faction will receive an additional 10-point tutorial participation mark (it will be as if they came to an extra session of class and participated splendidly).

 

Standards for Submitted Work: All submitted assignments should be proofread and should be free of the Three Cardinal Sins (agreement problems, apostrophe problems, and run- ons/fragments).

 

!!!!VERY IMPORTANT!!!!

Communication Policy: All emails to the lecturer are to adhere to the following format if they wish to receive a reply:

 

Subject Line: “Respectful Memorial on the Matter of _____[insert subject here]________”

Salutation: “Begging Your Sagely Perusal:”

Body of the email: [Whatever the matter is. You may use a normal 21^st century professional tone.]

Closing: “Bowing deeply, _____[name]_____”

This is the actual format for upward bureaucratic communications during the Qing dynasty. Written communications that do not adhere to this format will not receive a reply other than a directive to please consult the course communication policy. If it cramps your style to put your questions about the course into Qing memorial format, you can always pose them to Dr Inouye directly before or after class, or during Directed Reading, tutorial, or office hours.

Lateness Policy: Work will be docked 2% out of the total possible marks per day late for up to a

maximum penalty of 30%. For example, an essay submitted two days late that receives 72/100 for content will be adjusted to a final mark of 68/100.

Extensions Policy: In every tutorial and in many lectures, attendance will be taken. Students with only one absence from these tutorial+lecture records are entitled to an automatic 72-hour extension for both the research essay and the written version of the RTTP memorial (though they are not exempt from any presentations they may need to make in the course of the RTTP game). No other extensions will be granted except for medical or mental health reasons substantiated by a note from a medical or mental health professional.

Referencing Policy: Referencing for all assignments, including short writing assignments, research essays, and RTTP coursework, should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 17^th Edition, Notes and Bibliography Style (see the Chicago Manual of Style 17^th edition Quick Cite guide online). This is the internationally recognized referencing style for academic writing on history.

 

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

1) Front-loaded work. By the last class on the last day you will have completed all the required work for the course. This should lessen your stress at the end of the term. However, this means that you have assignments due as early as Week 3 and the research essay is due in Week 6, before the mid-semester break. Hit the ground running!

2) The textbook (Mote) is for background reading. It is a valuable tool for orienting yourself but you are not responsible for every single fact/date/detail on every page. Use it as needed to feel like you have a working understanding of the context or the relevant questions we will discuss in tutorial.

3) Mutual responsibility. Instructors’ job is to teach. Students’ job is to learn. By structuring the course and the classroom and through my preparation of the material, instructors facilitate learning. Students’ active engagement (including constructive feedback when necessary) also facilitates learning. Students who don’t understand something after consulting the course outline or completing the assigned reading should please feel free to ask questions. Please come to all class and tutorial meetings.

 

SCHEDULE OF LECTURES AND TUTORIALS (lecturer reserves the right to adjust if needed)

Week 1

MING QING HISTORY and the 21^st CENTURY

July 16 Roadmap: Ming and Qing History and How This Course Will Change Your Life

*Mini-tutorial: How to find primary sources

DIRECTED READING: Week 2’s Kuhn  

NO TUTORIAL MEETING in WEEK ONE, but locate one primary source and one secondary source for the Source Analysis/Bibliography assignment. Be ready to report your findings in lecture on Wednesday (July 18). Optional: “Cinderella’s Dreams,” in Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding.

July 18 The Past is a Foreign Country (or is it?) Footbinding 101

*Mini-tutorial: The formula for secondary sources

 

Week 2

POWER AND MONEY

July 23 Emperors (Hongwu, Qianlong) and peasants

*Mini-tutorial: fitting together: the river, the umbrella, the chocolate chip cookie

DIRECTED READING: Week 3’s Mao

TUTORIAL: Mote, 541-582; Kuhn, “Political Crime and Bureaucratic Monarchy,” in Soulstealers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 187-222; Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life. Optional (especially read this if you are interested in government): Hucker, “The Ming Censorial Establishment,” The Censorial System of Ming China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 30-65.

July 25 Gentry (shen-shi 紳士) and Civil Service Examination Culture

*Mini-tutorial: how to come up with an original thesis

 

Week 3

POWER AND MONEY

July 30 Silver in the Ming

* Mini-tutorial: Avoiding the Three Cardinal Sins

TUTORIAL: A Primary Source Having to Do with Porcelain, Silk, or Opium (print it out and bring it to tutorial), 1700-1840, AND EITHER

• Timothy Brook, “A Dish of Fruit,” Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of a Global World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 54-83. (Global trade in the Ming, porcelain)
• OR Gregory Blue, “Opium for China: the British Connection,” Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 1-36. (All about opium, global trade, the British empire, the Qing)
• OR Mao Haijian, The Qing Empire and the Opium War: the Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 57-88. (All about the late Qing military. Very detailed. Written by a PRC historian)

August 1 Silver, Tea, and Opium in the Qing

Friday August 3 SOURCE ANALYSIS/ABSTRACT AND BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE by 11:59 PM on Canvas.

 

Week 4

THE 99.9%

August 6 Poets and Peasants: Women in Late Imperial China

DIRECTED READING: Week 5’s Menegon

TUTORIAL: William Theodore De Bary and Irene Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), “Women’s Education,” 819-836 AND Grace Fong, “Female Hands: Embroidery as a Knowledge Field in Women’s Everyday Life in Late Imperial and Early Republican China,” Late Imperial China 25 (2004), 1-58 OR Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China.

August 8 Yellow Water: Barges, Barge-Pullers, and Locks of the Grand Canal

* Mini-tutorial: Citations

 

Week 5

ALIENS

August 13 The Lord of Heaven in Chinese Society

DIRECTED READING: Week 7’s Angle, “Wang Yangming as a Virtue Ethicist”

TUTORIAL Mote, 743-775 AND “Edicts of Toleration and Expulsion” (on Canvas) AND ALSO EITHER Jonathan Spence, “The Road to Emmaus,” The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin, 1984, 128-161), OR Eugenio Menegon, “Becoming Local,” Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 59-91.

August 15 China’s Borders (North, South, East, West)

 

Week 6

NEW TERRITORIES

August 20 The Voyages of Zheng He under the Yongle Emperor

DIRECTED READING: Research essay peer editing workshop

TUTORIAL Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, “On Relationships: Confucius and As-If Rituals,” The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 23-53. Optional: Philip Snow, “Chinese Columbus,” in The Star Raft (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988).

August 22 Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and introduction to the RTTP game

Friday 24 August RESEARCH ESSAY DUE by 11:59 PM, Canvas

 

Monday 27 August START OF MID-SEMESTER BREAK

Suggestion: Read the Analects, the RTTP game manual, and the Wang Yangming readings over mid-semester break (you may need extra time to digest them)

 

Week 7

RIGHT AND WRONG

September 10 Elite and Popular Morality in the Ming

DIRECTED READING: Analects

TUTORIAL Analects AND De Bary and Bloom, “Wang Yangming,” 842-855 AND Stephen Angle, “Wang Yangming as a Virtue Ethicist,” in John Makeham, ed., The Dao Companion to Neo-Confucian Philosophy (New York: Springer, 2010), 315-335.

September 12 RTTP I: Role Assignments, Confucian Re-orientation

 

Week 8

THE IMPERIAL WAY

September 17 RTTP II: Discussion of the Analects

DIRECTED READING: Huang, 1587

TUTORIAL RTTP III: Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 1-74.

September 19 RTTP IV: Palace Examination and Introduction to Court Protocol – GAME IS ON!

 

Week 9

STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL

September 24 RTTP V: Court Discussions 

TUTORIAL RTTP VI: Emperor and FGS Respond

DIRECTED READING: Wang Yangming’s memorial AS a rhetorical framework (in RTTP game manual)

September 26 RTTP VII: NO CLASS. Factions free to scheme.

 

Week 10

STRANGE STORIES

October 1 RTTP VIII: Final Memorial Presentations and Results

DIRECTED READING: Week 11’s reading on Kangxi

TUTORIAL: Wu (trans. Waley) Monkey (excerpts) OR Owen (trans.), “Strange Stories”

October 3 Ming Qing print culture

October 5 222/322 POLISHED FINAL VERSIONS OF MEMORIALS DUE by 11:59 on Canvas

 

Week 11

THE QING’S “SPLENDID AGE”

October 8 Three Great Emperors

DIRECTED READING: Week 12’s Chang, Kwong, and Saussy

TUTORIAL Mote, 856-886 (Kangxi) OR 887-911 (Yongzheng) OR 912-948 (Qianlong) AND E.N. Anderson, “Agriculture, Population, and Environment in Late Imperial China,” in T.J. Liu et al, eds., Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan: 2016), 31-58.

October 10 The Qing Legal System: Justice, Love, and Torture

 

Week 12

THE QING’S “SPLENDID AGE”

October 15 Too Much Success: The Qing Population Problem

DIRECTED READING: Writing Exercises (Qing Quiz Prep)

TUTORIAL Mote 949-973; Owen (trans.), “Qing Poetry”, in Chang, Kwong, and Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China 430-443.

October 17 Telling Stories (last lecture) and Qing Quiz, in class

 

 

ASSIGNMENTS

322 ABSTRACT AND BIBLIOGRAPHY (800 words, including bibliographic entries)

August 3, 11:59 PM, on Canvas

• You must find at least 3 primary sources and 5 high-quality research sources (i.e. published in an academic journal or monograph, a survey text, or an online resource hosted by an academic institution). List them in a bibliography in the Chicago Manual of Style 16^th Edition Notes and Bibliography style (notice that the style for a footnote is different from an entry in a bibliography).
• Write an abstract for your research paper in which you set out the [draft] argument, evidence, and significance of your paper. (Argument = thesis statement; evidence = primary and secondary sources that support the thesis; significance = the “so what” of the essay

 

RESEARCH ESSAY (222: 1700 words; 322: 2700 words)

August 24, 11:59 PM, on Canvas

Using at least eight (8) sources, primary (at least 3) and secondary (at least 5), address one of the two questions below. The essay should have an argument that is supported by evidence from these primary and secondary sources (and that shows awareness of the bias that shapes all sources).

 

1. Find a foreign account of Ming or Qing China (such as Catholic missionaries, various Western traders, or Korean emissaries). What did your chosen foreign observer in Ming and Qing China find most impressive or admirable about Chinese society? What did this observer find most lacking, jarring, or lamentable? What do this observer’s impressions of Chinese society tell us about the wider historical context? Your essay should deal with each of these issues. Your thesis statement should summarize your position on these three issues in an articulate and original way.

 

1. [With the instructor’s blessing] Pick one aspect of material culture (i.e. a “thing”, not a person) in everyday life that you find illuminated in the primary sources (for instance, stone bridges, tea, hairpins, peacock feathers, coffins, etc.). Provide numerous examples of the significance of this object in everyday life and demonstrate how understanding this aspect of material culture ties in to larger narratives about major shifts or developments in Ming and/or Qing social and cultural history. Note: In order for this essay to be successful, it is important to focus very narrowly on a specific aspect of everyday life and to tie this to a narrative that is one or two orders of magnitude larger (but not too broad). Please do not try to write an essay about “the status of women in the Ming” or “the decline of the Qing”.

 

The marking rubric for the research essay is included below. Please leave yourself enough time to properly attend to the tasks of proofreading and formatting references. Please feel free to come to office hours for help with finding and analyzing sources, developing and focusing your argument, etc.

 

PALACE EXAMINATION (500 words)

September 19, in class

The format of this quiz replicates the type of learning tested in the imperial civil service examination and traditional Chinese attempts to guarantee fairness. It is also a way for the Emperor and First Grand Secretary to become acquainted with the interests and expertise of the Grand Secretaries early on in the game. Below is the text of the actual examination.

 

1. Write from memory any three analects from the text of Confucius (6 points).
2. Be sure to identify book and number for each of the three analects (3 points).
3. After writing out the three analects, compose a thoughtful eight-line essay [eight lines of text, not eight sentences] that provides commentary on an analect you find especially meaningful. This commentary must explain the significance of the particular analect to some contemporary issue you believe deserves His Majesty’s attention (6 points).
4. Your calligraphy should be neat and elegant (3 points).

 

MEMORIAL (1300 words 222/1500 words 322)

October 5, 11:59 PM, on Canvas

The Emperor seeks your opinion on an important question of statecraft. Provide a thorough response in which you propose a policy solution to the challenge at hand. This response should draw on at least three quotes from the Analects and reference at least one historical (i.e. pre-1587) precedent. You must also take a clear, firm stand at the end of the memorial on the issue of which of the Emperor’s two sons should succeed to the throne. The prose of the memorial itself should reflect the authentic tone, content, and style of Ming memorials and should be free of anachronistic terminology, concepts, and symbols (i.e. do not appeal to “the divine right of kings” or “human rights,” etc.). To be able to write in an authentic style requires careful research, which you should document in footnotes. In addition to these parameters outlined above, a memorial must also draw on at least four high-quality research sources (a journal article, chapter, or monograph published by an academic press, not Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica, etc.) and the footnotes that document these sources should be in Chicago 16^th Notes and Bibliography style.

 

Memorials will be marked by the same criteria as the research essay, except for the fact that the “Organization” and “Writing” columns will be combined into one and the fourth column will be “Authenticity.” A memorial with perfect marks for “Authenticity” will be indistinguishable from an actual Ming memorial.