Martina Siebert | Berlin State Library (original) (raw)

Papers by Martina Siebert

Making the Palace Machine Work - Mobilizing People, Objects, and Nature in the Qing Empire. Amsterdam University Press, 2021, 2021

The chapter explores the growing of lotus in water spaces under the control of the Imperial House... more The chapter explores the growing of lotus in water spaces under the control of the Imperial Household Department in and around Beijing. This seemingly minor organizational task with meagre financial incentive was nevertheless regulated to the detail and established dependencies of tenants and official, working tools and paper trails, the flows of money and an unpredictable nature. Together they built a functional sub-part of the court’s strive for presenting itself as economically efficient and reveal the undertaking as an ideologically efficacious spectacle in bureaucracy and in lotus covered lakes and moats around the Forbidden City.

Keywords
Qing Beijing, Westpark garden, lotus, interconnectedness, bureacracy

in: Boxes: A Field Guide. Edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi. Manchester: Mattering Press, 2020 (ISBN 9781912729012), pp 156-66 (Open Access), 2020

*Field guide entry* Box: caging, and facilitating handling (lightweight and with many holes); en... more *Field guide entry*
Box: caging, and facilitating handling (lightweight and with many holes); enhancing sound (while making the carrying pleasurable); controlling humid- ity and temperature to extend life (with time-honoured dignity in clay).
Size and shape: spherical and 5 cm in diameter, or tube-shaped and about 5 cm in diameter and 18 cm in height, or a round box of 16 cm in diameter and 14 cm in height.
Colour: according to the material, i.e. yellow (straw), white (bone or ivory), light to dark brown or middle grey (gourd, wood, clay).
Behaviour/Activity: hung on bedsides, used as decoration for garden parties, carried around in inside pockets, displayed on shelves, placed in the middle of an eagerly watching crowd.
Habitat: sleeping rooms, scholars’ studios, market places, gambling houses, museums. Distribution: Sinosphere, in the past also in Japan, but only for singing. Migration: from boxes with cricket residents to empty arts and cra objects in museums worldwide.
Status: survived a period of endangerment in the 1960s and 1970s, but with this exception has been thriving in the Sinosphere since the eighth century; has experienced various changes and adaptations in material and shape.
Keywords: caging , facilitating handling , being disposable, emanating dignity, being collectible, enhancing sound, controlling humidity and temperature, extending life, a racting interest

Download link: http://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729012

Animals Through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911. Ed. by Roel Sterxck, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer (CUP, 2018). Open Access, 2018

The chapter explores monographic writings on animals, noting the division between ‘remote’ animal... more The chapter explores monographic writings on animals, noting the division between ‘remote’ animals, which were constructed from other texts and hearsay, and ‘close’ animals, where a direct translation of actual observations into textual portrayals took place. As examples serve the pulu writings 譜錄 on tigers, goldfish, horses, cats, and ‚all animals’.
Taking writing on animals as an active process by which scholars explored physical and/or already textualized animals to fathom the morphological variability within an animal species or to carve out animals as multi-faceted beings, the chapter aims to bring Chinese versions of animal sciences into view without looking at them from a modern natural science perspective. The chapter starts with an overview of the development of pulu writing on animals throughout Chinese history in terms of numbers of titles and of species covered.

Download link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108551571.009

Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth, ed. by Elif Akçetin & Suraiya Faroqhi. Leiden: Brill, 2017

Focusing on lists as a standard feature of pulu writing (譜錄) I argue in this article that their f... more Focusing on lists as a standard feature of pulu writing (譜錄) I argue in this article that their form represented a way of acquiring, possessing, and consuming things and beings “on paper.” Pulu lists often were written counterparts of actual storehouses, menageries and greenhouses—in other words, their authors recorded the things that they actually owned—but these lists could easily also extend beyond the actual to include the mythical, hearsay, and knowledge only existing in books. Seen from this angle, pulu shed new light on the Qing elites’ culture of consumption, which did not only involve the utilization or exchange of things in the traditional sense and as symbolic tokens of high culture, but also their textual recreation, ownership, and transmission. In this chapter I explore the virtual consumption of things on paper that was enabled by pulu lists and how their textual and pictorial representation were interlinked and translatable into each other. I argue that this interlinkage made the consumption of the physical thing substitutable with its painted or written version and to which the presentation as list of items or sequence of images added the character of a collection.
Among the wide range of pulu topics from bronce objects to crickets this article focuses on chrysanthemums and animals. Both topics experienced a height in the Qing. Chrysanthemums had been popular throughout imperial times, but received a new push when “foreign” chrysanthemums (洋菊) were introduced in the early eighteenth century; pulu on animals, on the other hand, had been rare before the Qing (except those on horses), but in the Qing the range of species widened remarkably. Moreover, both topics became the subjects of an array of works produced by private authors or commissioned by the Qing court, allow- ing historians to explore various agendas of writing and forms of consumption.

Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, D. Schäfer (Ed.), 2011

Throughout history, technology in China was considered to have a contemporary state and a past fr... more Throughout history, technology in China was considered to have a contemporary state and a past from which each individual status quo developed. Wuyuan encyclopedias were intended to provide references to established technologies and institutions, not to recount or document the latest developments. The construction and praise of ancient inventors establishes a linkage between one's own society and the past. This also holds true in our own society with "schoolbook" simplifications like "Stephenson invented the steam engine". Inventors and inventions had, and obviously still have, a twofold function: they built traditions with which a society can identify, and they overturn, change and renew traditions. The task of a thriving civilization has always been to find a balance between newness and tradition, and to incorporate newness into its traditions and value system. Chinese heurematographies were a slow but effective instrument situated right at the pivot of this equilibrium.

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 162: 171-196, 2012

Human-Animal relationships recently became an important issue in anthropological and historical s... more Human-Animal relationships recently became an important issue in anthropological and historical studies. They mostly confine to Western cultures. This article examines the scholarly approaches to this relationship in traditional China with a focus on the methods and concepts of ordering and classifying the abundance of animal species the Chinese scholars had read about or had personally encountered. In addition to morphological or biological principles such as ‘water birds’ or ‘animals with fur’, moral and other abilities of species were equally valid as organising principle. For example, classes appropriate for geese with good manners or a talking tortoise were established. The article outlines the full spectrum of classification schemes used and introduces the central works relevant to the question of animal taxonomy in China.

Über Himmel und Erde - Festschrift für Erling von Mende, hrsg. von Raimund Kolb und Martina Siebert. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006

The artificial hatching of duck and chicken eggs is one of the most remark- able agrarian techniq... more The artificial hatching of duck and chicken eggs is one of the most remark- able agrarian techniques of traditional China. It attracted the curiosity of China travellers and investigators of the 19th century, and in the 20th century was regarded as proof of the superiority of traditional China’s veterinary techniques and its exceptional knowledge of biology and embryo develop- ment. Today, almost every study on the history of biology in traditional China mentions the technique of artificial egg hatching, and the text entitled Buji 哺記, ‘Notes on Hatching’ written by Huang Baijia 黃百家 in 1674, is always used as the central reference. Huang Baijia’s text gives the most de- tailed traditional description of this agrarian technique and moreover records a direct biological observation of the embryo development inside the egg. However, in addition to these technical and ‘scientific’ levels or layers in Huang’s text exists a third one: a layer that contains the ‘intellectual diges- tion’ of the information contained in the former two. Here, Huang Baijia translates his newly acquired knowledge into the world-view of a traditional Chinese scholar. This last layer of the Buji uses nearly one half of the 1000 characters of the Buji-text but is completely ignored by researchers working in the history of science.
The aim of this essay is thus twofold: the first is to present the first com- plete translation of the ‘Notes on Hatching’ into a western language that also reflects the different levels of the text; the second is to embed the text into an overview of the technique and textual representation of artificial egg hatching in China as well as to offer some background information on the author Huang Baijia and the publication and reception of the Buji.

Das Reich der Mitte – in Mitte. Studien Berliner Sinologen, ed. Florian C. Reiter. Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, , 2006

Books/Edited Volumes by Martina Siebert

Making the Palace Machine Work, 2021

Amsterdam University Press, 2021

This volume brings the studies of institutions, labour, and material cultures to bear on the hist... more This volume brings the studies of institutions, labour, and material cultures to bear on the history of science and technology by tracing the workings of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu) in the Qing court and empire. An enormous apparatus that employed 22,000 men and women at its heyday, the Department operated a "machine" with myriad moving parts. The first part of the book portrays the people who kept it running, from technical experts to menial servants, and scrutinises the paper trails they left behind. Part two uncovers the working principles of the machine by following the production chains of some of its most splendid products: gilded statues, jade, porcelain, and textiles. Part three tackles the most complex task of all, managing living organisms in nature, including lotus plants grown in imperial ponds in Beijing, fresh medicines sourced from disparate regions, and tribute elephants from Southeast Asia.
(the e-book is available as Open Access)

Keywords: interior decoration, refurbishing, servants, imperial family, bannermen careers, accounting, embroidery, imperial birthday, porcelain, fire gilding, transportation, jade, Xinjiang, classification of objects, lotus, Westpark, medicine supply, elephants ...

Stable JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1tfw0z6

Cambridge University Press, 2018

This volume opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. As environmental historians t... more This volume opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. As environmental historians turn their attention to expanded chronologies of natural change, something new can be said about human history through animals and about the globally diverse cultural and historical dynamics that have led to perceptions of animals as wild or cultures as civilized. This innovative collection of essays spanning Chinese history reveals how relations between past and present, lived and literary reality, have been central to how information about animals and the natural world has been processed and evaluated in China. Drawing on an extensive array of primary sources, ranging from ritual texts to poetry to veterinary science, this volume explores developments in the human-animal relationship through Chinese history and the ways in which the Chinese have thought about the world with and through animals. This title is also available as Open Access.

Access link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108551571

Wiesgaben: Harrassowitz (Opera Sinologica 17), 2006

Pulu, „Abhandlungen und Auflistungen“, sind monographische Schriften des traditionellen China, di... more Pulu, „Abhandlungen und Auflistungen“, sind monographische Schriften des traditionellen China, die sich auf ein konkretes ‚Objekt‘ gelehrter Aufmerksamkeit innerhalb eines Spektrums von materieller Kultur bis Naturkunde spezialisieren. Sie sind verschiedensten Themen gewidmet, von Bronzegefäßen, Tuschsteinen, Tee, Bambus, Orangen und Chrysanthemen bis hin zu Tigern, Vögeln, Goldfischen und Grillen. Erste Texte dieser schillernden Gattung entstanden bereits im 5. Jahrhundert. Einen Höhepunkt erreichte das Genre im 11. Jahrhundert, und es gewann in den nachfolgenden Jahrhunderten weiter an Popularität. Diese Arbeit ist die erste umfassende Bestandsaufnahme des pulu-Schrifttums. Auf der Grundlage von rund 1200 Titeln werden formale Typen herausgearbeitet und thematische Grenzen zu benachbarten Schriftgattungen des traditionellen China gezogen. Einzeluntersuchungen von Titeln verschiedenster Thematik veranschaulichen die Ergebnisse und analysieren die Rechtfertigungen gelehrter Autoren, sich mit diesen Marginalia zu beschäftigen sowie ihre Auseinandersetzung mit der stetig wachsenden pulu-Tradition. Ein Abriss der Geschichte der bibliographischen Klassifikationen im traditionellen China dient als Hintergrund, um die Odyssee der pulu durch die Ordnungssysteme des Wissens zu beleuchten und die Modifikationen herauszuarbeiten, die durch ihre Präsenz notwendig wurden.

Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006

Workshop Project by Martina Siebert

This workshop explores the inner and outer workings of the Chinese imperial palace with a focus o... more This workshop explores the inner and outer workings of the Chinese imperial palace with a focus on the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). It approaches the palace and its organization as a ‘machine’ with partly distinct, partly overlapping, interwoven and dependent functional parts that produced money, matter and identity for the court. Looking at the organisation and workflow of technologies, the transmission and codification of knowledge, and the coordination of profane, administrative and representative activities, the workshop examines how this range of activities conjointly formed this complex organization and made it work: agendas were drawn up, spaces and roles defined, and rules laid out. Participants investigate particular aspects of the working palace concentrating on either a material (such as jade, porcelain, silk) or a producing and controlling unit (regulations, medical treatment, interior decoration) of the ‘machine’.

Which knowledge spheres evolved within this administrative setting and how did they influence each other? How was planning structured by the materials used, and adapted to changing needs or outside influences? What kinds of small and big planning were involved -- what was important, what neglected, what ignored or “black-boxed”?

The exploratory workshop was convened by Paola Molino, at that time Alexander von Humboldt Postdo... more The exploratory workshop was convened by Paola Molino, at that time Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, in collaboration with Martina Siebert, Guy Burak, and Dagmar Riedel. The project's Final Report was written by Paola Molino, in collaboration with Martina Siebert, Guy Burak, and Dagmar Riedel and with contributions by Anne MacKinney, and submitted to the Forum Transregionale Studien in February 2017.

DH & Library by Martina Siebert

ABI Technik, 2019

Zusammenfassung Die Ostasienabteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin lizenziert für ihre Plattfor... more Zusammenfassung Die Ostasienabteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin lizenziert für ihre Plattform CrossAsia im Rahmen des FID Asien seit Jahren eine Vielzahl elektronischer Ressourcen aus und über Asien. Über das CrossAsia-ITR sollen diese Daten gesichert und verwaltet und für die Wissenschaft datenbankunabhängig bereitgestellt werden. Der Weg, die Vielfalt an Daten aus verschiedensten kommerziellen Datenbanken in möglichst standardisierter, strukturierter Form im Repositorium abzulegen, ist oft steinig. Hier müssen Fach- und IT-Abteilung eng zusammenarbeiten, um sowohl eine Sicherung und Repräsentation der Originale als auch eine weitgehende Standardisierung der Materialien zu erreichen.

This paper introduces a digital humanities project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of... more This paper introduces a digital humanities project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Max-‐Planck-‐Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, MPIWG) that aims to unlock the treasure chest of local knowledge written in the genre of Chinese local gazetteers for computer assisted analyses. In the past two decades, a great amount of historical documents have been digitized and put on the Web to enable easy access for scholars around the globe. In parallel, the amount of searchable full-‐text versions of historical texts has increased, which opens the possibility of text mining the contents for large scaled analyses. Many works in this direction have been proposed and got recognition, while they are also criticized for drawing conclusions from seemingly imprecise results due to the restriction that their algorithms have no knowledge about the meanings of the different pieces in a text (Jockers, 2013; Google Ngram Viewer; Chen et al., 2007). An alternative approach is thus to first " teach " computers what each pieces of a text means before asking computers to run automatic analyses. Such " teaching " is done by tagging, or called markup. Many digital humanities projects have been using TEI, a standard for text encoding based on XML, to tag their research materials (TEI; Flanders). In the Local Gazetteers Project, since the genre organizes knowledge in a very structural way, we are also using tagging to teach computers the meanings of texts in order to turn them into data tables to enable computer assisted analyses including GIS mapping. However, since the amount of texts is huge, we also propose a research data repository for scholars to collaborate in this project and to aggregate their results. What are the Chinese Local Gazetteers? The Chinese local gazetteers is a genre of texts that has been produced in China consistently from the 10 th century on to even today. Most of them are compiled by local officials as a major means to collect and aggregate historical, social, and geographical knowledge of an administrative region for governing purposes. There are at least 8,000 titles of pre-‐1949 local gazetteers still extant today. They cover almost every well-‐populated region in historical China. Despite being compiled by different officials for different regions, the local gazetteers have developed a pretty consistent structure of " describing " local knowledge. Most gazetteers contain the following chapters: history,

Review by Martina Siebert

Eighteenth-century Studies, 2007

Making the Palace Machine Work - Mobilizing People, Objects, and Nature in the Qing Empire. Amsterdam University Press, 2021, 2021

Keywords
Qing Beijing, Westpark garden, lotus, interconnectedness, bureacracy

in: Boxes: A Field Guide. Edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi. Manchester: Mattering Press, 2020 (ISBN 9781912729012), pp 156-66 (Open Access), 2020

Download link: http://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729012

Animals Through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911. Ed. by Roel Sterxck, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer (CUP, 2018). Open Access, 2018

Download link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108551571.009

Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth, ed. by Elif Akçetin & Suraiya Faroqhi. Leiden: Brill, 2017

Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, D. Schäfer (Ed.), 2011

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 162: 171-196, 2012

Über Himmel und Erde - Festschrift für Erling von Mende, hrsg. von Raimund Kolb und Martina Siebert. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006

Das Reich der Mitte – in Mitte. Studien Berliner Sinologen, ed. Florian C. Reiter. Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, , 2006

Making the Palace Machine Work, 2021

Amsterdam University Press, 2021

Stable JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1tfw0z6

Cambridge University Press, 2018

Access link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108551571

Wiesgaben: Harrassowitz (Opera Sinologica 17), 2006

Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006

ABI Technik, 2019

It all began with a serendipitous crossing of the paths of four scholars working on the transmiss... more It all began with a serendipitous crossing of the paths of four scholars working on the transmission of knowledge and the history of science in European, Middle Eastern, and East Asian societies. We all share an abiding interest in the composition of finding aids between 1400 and 1800, when the transformation of feudal societies into territorial states prompted the ruling elites to invest into the construction of imperial libraries and archives, whose design projected transregional connections and supranational ambitions to the world at large. Although new cataloging principles emerged for the collections housed within these new physical spaces, their compilers did not explicitly break with the already recognized knowledge traditions, attempting rather to harmonize the established authoritative epistemes into new classificatory regimes. The finding aids of early modern societies are fascinating objects in their own right: As artifacts they are primarily paper tools and, yet, their written contents can also be understood as a graphic representation of ideas. Therefore, we made finding aids the workshop's focus, and invited colleagues – from historians to practicing librarians and catalogers – to reflect on catalogs within their own disciplines. On the one hand, we asked how catalogs were employed as instruments for transforming collection's idiosyncrasies in a possible or impossible library's order. On the other hand, we inquired how cataloging ventures were expressions of a ruler's sophistication through the effective control of precious, rare assets. In the daily business of doing research cataloges are usually experienced as humble tools and inevitable intermediaries that operate as transparent, and thus seemingly neutral interfaces between readers and written texts. We proposed to invert this logic and look at them as if they had suddenly changed into unexplored territories.

The workshop All you can do with catalogs will explore shifts in the classification of knowledge ... more The workshop All you can do with catalogs will explore shifts in the classification of knowledge in the pre-modern world, by examining the evolution of finding aids, such as catalogs, indexes, card files, and bibliographies, in a global and comparative perspective. Its seminal idea arises from the organizers’ shared interest in the history of manuscript cultures and libraries in Eurasia, comprising the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires, as well as large powerful states in Iran, the Indian Subcontinent, and China. Its chronological framework is broadly defined as the period between 1400 and 1800, during which the accumulation and systematization of knowledge resulted mainly from tension between local, political, and scholarly agendas vis-à-vis the limitations of long-distance communication across Eurasia. In this context, the analysis of synchronic epistemologies and similar organization systems within different political and technological configurations is what triggers mostly our curiosity towards a “connected history” of bibliographies. Whether and to what extent cross-cultural relations at this time played a direct influence on information management is also one of the questions underpinning the workshop.

Press release 10.2014 (translated by Wu Xiujie from the German original)