Fei HUANG | Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (original) (raw)
book by Fei HUANG
Leiden: Brill, 2018
In Reshaping the Frontier Landscape: Dongchuan in Eighteenth-century Southwest China, Fei HUANG e... more In Reshaping the Frontier Landscape: Dongchuan in Eighteenth-century Southwest China, Fei HUANG examines the process of reshaping the landscape of Dongchuan, a remote frontier city in Southwest China in the eighteenth century. Rich copper deposits transformed Dongchuan into one of the key outposts of the Qing dynasty, a nexus of encounters between various groups competing for power and space. The frontier landscape bears silent witness to the changes in its people’s daily lives and in their memories and imaginations. The literati, officials, itinerant merchants, commoners and the indigenous people who lived there shaped and reshaped the local landscape by their physical efforts and cultural representations. This book demonstrates how multiple landscape experiences developed among various people in dependencies, conflicts and negotiations in the imperial frontier.
Papers by Fei HUANG
Asian Review of World Histories 12 (2024) 170–185, 2024
This article examines sulfur manufacturing and refining methods in the early modern Chinese borde... more This article examines sulfur manufacturing and refining methods in the early modern Chinese borderlands in the context of global trade and tribute networks. The increasing demands for high-quality sulfur, crucial for gunpowder and mineral drugs, facilitated the further development of sulfur-production and-refining techniques. Constrained by limited local sulfur deposits, sulfur production in China proper relied primarily on domestic pyrite ores or pyritic nodules in coal mines, alongside imports from the Ryukyu Islands. This article focuses on case studies of various local practices in the natural sulfuric hot springs region of China's borderlands, particularly in Yunnan and Taiwan from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. It examines alternative methods of sulfur manufacturing that utilized geothermal resources at hot springs for various local and regional military and medical demands in global contexts. Keywords sulfur manufacturing-hot springs-early modern China-borderlands-Yunnan-Taiwan Sulfur is a nonmetallic, naturally occurring, soft, and easily flammable mineral. In its elemental form it appears as a pale, yellow, and brittle solid. In
《中国古代法律文献研究》 《中国古代法律文献研究》第十九辑 2024 年，第309~336 页, 2024
本文以明清时期位于川滇黔交界的东川府为例，从 清代方志编撰者对东川本土仪式空间的识别与定义所起的争论 中，讨论与其相关的明代东川土司袭替和与本土贵族女性先祖相 关的截然相反的历史记忆与书写。在清... more 本文以明清时期位于川滇黔交界的东川府为例，从 清代方志编撰者对东川本土仪式空间的识别与定义所起的争论 中，讨论与其相关的明代东川土司袭替和与本土贵族女性先祖相 关的截然相反的历史记忆与书写。在清代官方的修订版本重新命 名之后，东川府中的 “孟琰祠”是当地 “夷变汉”后诸姓家族后 裔的祖先堂，而修订之前的名称 “孟达祠”则出自本土族群视角 的 “汉变夷”叙事结构，并与东川禄氏土司的世系史有密切关 联。本文呈现了在官方与民间话语中，不同版本的禄氏土司世系 与袭替的历史叙述。为了符合各自不同的历史叙事目的，本土女 土司形象也在不同版本中大相径庭:从借王朝力量成为女性知府， 到与外来汉官私通产子，又成为效忠王朝的土酋之妻。本文的个 案展示出某些看似本土势力向王朝攀附的种种策略，只是符合王朝与官方视角的土司承袭记录，以及士大夫固有的谱牒文书书写 成例的展现。这些历史叙述不见得是边陲当地权力运行的实际情 形。相反，在本土其他群体的口耳相传之中，这些与外来王朝势 力结合的行为，反而会使其在本土社群中丧失优越地位。同时， 这些对土司世系与本土女性先祖的不同讲述，也透露出游移于边 地社群的汉与非汉之间的中间群体留下的历史痕迹，以及长时段 内西南地域不同人群与性别相遇之下糅杂混合的过往。
关键词:明清西南 土司袭替 女土司 跨族通婚
Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History Academia Sinica, 2024
In contrast with the abundant and coherent research on the history of hot or mineral springs in E... more In contrast with the abundant and coherent research on the history of hot or mineral springs in Europe, America, and their colonial regions, research on Chinese hot springs, both in the premodern and modern period, has remained largely neglected. The present article focuses on one of the most well-known hot spring resorts, Huaqing Hot Springs 華清池, and its surrounding landscape in the suburbs of Xi’an, which was recycled, selectively reused, and negotiated by different social groups from the tenth to nineteenth century. After the threat of Japanese invasion proved inevitable in 1932, Xi’an was selected as the auxiliary capital and renamed the “Western Capital” by the newly established Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government, which greatly stimulated the development of modern urban construction and city management, including the establishment of suburban landscape areas, protection of historical remains, and promotion of public health and tourism, among other important aspects. Meanwhile, the modern concept of commercialized spa treatment, sanatoria, and public bathhouses became fashionable for the emerging upper class and urban elites in Beijing, Shanghai, and other eastern coastal cities. In the early twentieth century, Huaqing Palace 華清宮, Mount Li, and the surrounding landscape were thus rebuilt as a landscape maintenance district and hot spring resort for the upper class. But it was also reconstructed with public bathhouses and a public park for the common visitors by new commercial organizations, namely travel agencies, and was represented as an ideological landscape within official narratives. Despite the changes, however, the previous usage of the hot springs and the local bathing customs from late imperial times were never eradicated. The modern reconstruction of Huaqing Hot Springs is closely related to both the transformation of the natural environment on the outskirts of the city and the personal sensory enjoyment and rehabilitation of different social classes. Taking Huaqing Hot Springs as a case study, this article discusses how diverse perceptions and activities from various social actors are involved in the acknowledgement, control, management, and consumption of the natural resources of the hot springs. Moreover, it further reviews the historical processes behind the interactions between hot spring spa treatment, public bathing, and suburban landscape reconstruction in the context of daily life within the urban transformation that was taking place in modern China.
Keywords: hot springs, spa resort, public bathing, urban planning of the
Western Capital, suburban landscape
中外論壇, 2023
筆者曾於 2016 年至 2017 年先後在“中央研究院”歷史語言研究所、香港中文大學歷史系、中國政法大學古 籍所，以專題報告的形式從不同角度發表本文的主要材料與觀點，並在此基礎上修訂成英文於 ... more 筆者曾於 2016 年至 2017 年先後在“中央研究院”歷史語言研究所、香港中文大學歷史系、中國政法大學古 籍所，以專題報告的形式從不同角度發表本文的主要材料與觀點，並在此基礎上修訂成英文於 2017 年正式 在 Journal of Asian History 雜誌上發表[Fei Huang, “Between Hills and Valleys: Contesting the Bazi Landscape, Society and Environment in Southwestern China (1700–1900)”, Journal of Asian History, 51 (2017) 2, pp.257-282]。 此次翻譯為中文出版，特別感謝趙晶教授玉成以及孫爍的精心翻譯。譯文經過筆者本人審校修訂，並改動 了一些中文慣用的表達方式、增補了部分關鍵史料原文與細節。其中疏漏錯誤之處，概由筆者自己承擔。
T'oung Pao,, 2023
Despite the long-standing interest in hot springs in China, this subject has remained understudie... more Despite the long-standing interest in hot springs in China, this subject has remained understudied. This article explores how the most famous hot springs in China, the Huaqing Hot Springs 華清池 at Mount Li 驪山, were selectively reused and negotiated by different social groups from the tenth to the nineteenth century. It retraces the historical process of reconstructions at the Huaqing Hot Springs by local officials, religious practitioners, literati, and local inhabitants after the Huaqing palaces were abandoned by the Tang central court. In the post-Tang life of the Huaqing Hot Springs, the long-term co-existence of activities between various social classes and across the gender divide are deeply rooted in the local everyday usage of the hot springs. This article reveals multiple transformations within continuity in reimaging and reconstructing the hot springs landscape in Chinese history.
Journal of Asian History, 2023
Knowledge about hot springs can be a key way of understanding how the interrelationship between n... more Knowledge about hot springs can be a key way of understanding how the interrelationship between nature and the human body operates both locally and globally. Based on the historical records from epistemological, geographical, ritual, medical, and literary perspectives, and in the global context of early modern Sino-Western exchanges, this article elaborates on some of the ways in which hot springs have been imagined and reconfigured within China and beyond. Each of these perspectives provides some hints of how knowledge about hot springs has been shaped, transmitted, circulated, and translated through encounters between highly structured forms of knowledge and bodily knowledge articulated by both intellectual elites and non-elite groups locally and globally. These multiple fields of knowledge concerning nature and the human body serve as an important but subtle undercurrent to understandings of customs, health, and pleasure within the everyday life of premodern Chinese society and its environment.
The present-day provinces of southwest China, Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, share a harsh, inhospi... more The present-day provinces of southwest China, Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, share a harsh, inhospitable terrain. Therefore almost all settlements in the Southwest developed on bazi land. Bazi 壩子 is a common term in Southwest China used to refer to the flat, fertile valleys in the interior of mountainous regions. In Yunnan Province there are around 1,800 such valleys, varying in size from a couple to several hundred square kilometers, but they comprise only 6 percent of the total land area. As the only areas suitable to concentrated settlement, wet-rice agriculture and local market centers, the bazi lands form the hubs of interactions between the past and present, the indigenous and the foreign. They are areas in which different groups competed and still vie for power and space in the Southwest.
Bazi lands in northeastern Yunnan between 1700 and 1900 are the subjects of the case study presented in this article. For centuries, the region of present-day northeastern Yunnan, which was rich in mineral resources, had been the political centre of indigenous communities, but eventually it was incorporated in the compass of the Chinese state like other parts of the Southwest. In the eighteenth century, the Qing state eliminated the indigenous chieftaincies and established new government centres in the bazi area, just at a time when, drawn by the flourishing mining business, increasing numbers of Han Chinese migrants from other parts of China were pouring into the area to find work and settle. Following the decline of the mining business in the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century this image of a once bustling region was transformed into a bleak picture of a dilapidated frontier land. The aim of this paper is to rethink how the dynamic relationship between the environment and the various groups was contextualised by the social, economic and cultural conditions in the southwest frontier of late imperial China.
Late Imperial China, Dec 2014
In Dongchuan, now in northeastern Yunnan, the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century overthrew ind... more In Dongchuan, now in northeastern Yunnan, the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century overthrew indigenous regimes to gain control over the area’s rich copper deposits, and then created new cities and landscapes both physically and in literary representations. After Qing officials had built walled cities and established governing institutions, several key local literati-officials identified a set of ten views in the vicinity of the walled city of Dongchuan.
In this lecture Dr Fei HUANG not only will point out the symbolic ideological meaning of civilization in cultural representation of the ten views, but will further explore the landscape in a social process to present the layers of selecting the ten views and how they were experienced locally. Regardless of the actual locations of the ten scenic spots, the descriptions of the ten views follow existing literary conventions, leaving the impression of a “civilized” Han Chinese world in an area that used to be considered a wild frontier region. More importantly, the basis for the selection of the ten views in the context of geographical descriptions in local gazetteers reflects economic interests in the daily life of Dongchuan. In addition, the selection of ten views also drew on an indigenous repertoire of meaning. Presenting the ten views as an imperial landscape therefore was not simply imposed by literati-officials but was part of an ongoing cultural process whereby they used conventional literary formats while engaging with their external surroundings encountered in the eighteenth-century Chinese Southwest frontier.
course by Fei HUANG
Book Reviews by Fei HUANG
Leiden: Brill, 2018
In Reshaping the Frontier Landscape: Dongchuan in Eighteenth-century Southwest China, Fei HUANG e... more In Reshaping the Frontier Landscape: Dongchuan in Eighteenth-century Southwest China, Fei HUANG examines the process of reshaping the landscape of Dongchuan, a remote frontier city in Southwest China in the eighteenth century. Rich copper deposits transformed Dongchuan into one of the key outposts of the Qing dynasty, a nexus of encounters between various groups competing for power and space. The frontier landscape bears silent witness to the changes in its people’s daily lives and in their memories and imaginations. The literati, officials, itinerant merchants, commoners and the indigenous people who lived there shaped and reshaped the local landscape by their physical efforts and cultural representations. This book demonstrates how multiple landscape experiences developed among various people in dependencies, conflicts and negotiations in the imperial frontier.
Asian Review of World Histories 12 (2024) 170–185, 2024
This article examines sulfur manufacturing and refining methods in the early modern Chinese borde... more This article examines sulfur manufacturing and refining methods in the early modern Chinese borderlands in the context of global trade and tribute networks. The increasing demands for high-quality sulfur, crucial for gunpowder and mineral drugs, facilitated the further development of sulfur-production and-refining techniques. Constrained by limited local sulfur deposits, sulfur production in China proper relied primarily on domestic pyrite ores or pyritic nodules in coal mines, alongside imports from the Ryukyu Islands. This article focuses on case studies of various local practices in the natural sulfuric hot springs region of China's borderlands, particularly in Yunnan and Taiwan from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. It examines alternative methods of sulfur manufacturing that utilized geothermal resources at hot springs for various local and regional military and medical demands in global contexts. Keywords sulfur manufacturing-hot springs-early modern China-borderlands-Yunnan-Taiwan Sulfur is a nonmetallic, naturally occurring, soft, and easily flammable mineral. In its elemental form it appears as a pale, yellow, and brittle solid. In
《中国古代法律文献研究》 《中国古代法律文献研究》第十九辑 2024 年，第309~336 页, 2024
本文以明清时期位于川滇黔交界的东川府为例，从 清代方志编撰者对东川本土仪式空间的识别与定义所起的争论 中，讨论与其相关的明代东川土司袭替和与本土贵族女性先祖相 关的截然相反的历史记忆与书写。在清... more 本文以明清时期位于川滇黔交界的东川府为例，从 清代方志编撰者对东川本土仪式空间的识别与定义所起的争论 中，讨论与其相关的明代东川土司袭替和与本土贵族女性先祖相 关的截然相反的历史记忆与书写。在清代官方的修订版本重新命 名之后，东川府中的 “孟琰祠”是当地 “夷变汉”后诸姓家族后 裔的祖先堂，而修订之前的名称 “孟达祠”则出自本土族群视角 的 “汉变夷”叙事结构，并与东川禄氏土司的世系史有密切关 联。本文呈现了在官方与民间话语中，不同版本的禄氏土司世系 与袭替的历史叙述。为了符合各自不同的历史叙事目的，本土女 土司形象也在不同版本中大相径庭:从借王朝力量成为女性知府， 到与外来汉官私通产子，又成为效忠王朝的土酋之妻。本文的个 案展示出某些看似本土势力向王朝攀附的种种策略，只是符合王朝与官方视角的土司承袭记录，以及士大夫固有的谱牒文书书写 成例的展现。这些历史叙述不见得是边陲当地权力运行的实际情 形。相反，在本土其他群体的口耳相传之中，这些与外来王朝势 力结合的行为，反而会使其在本土社群中丧失优越地位。同时， 这些对土司世系与本土女性先祖的不同讲述，也透露出游移于边 地社群的汉与非汉之间的中间群体留下的历史痕迹，以及长时段 内西南地域不同人群与性别相遇之下糅杂混合的过往。
关键词:明清西南 土司袭替 女土司 跨族通婚
Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History Academia Sinica, 2024
In contrast with the abundant and coherent research on the history of hot or mineral springs in E... more In contrast with the abundant and coherent research on the history of hot or mineral springs in Europe, America, and their colonial regions, research on Chinese hot springs, both in the premodern and modern period, has remained largely neglected. The present article focuses on one of the most well-known hot spring resorts, Huaqing Hot Springs 華清池, and its surrounding landscape in the suburbs of Xi’an, which was recycled, selectively reused, and negotiated by different social groups from the tenth to nineteenth century. After the threat of Japanese invasion proved inevitable in 1932, Xi’an was selected as the auxiliary capital and renamed the “Western Capital” by the newly established Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government, which greatly stimulated the development of modern urban construction and city management, including the establishment of suburban landscape areas, protection of historical remains, and promotion of public health and tourism, among other important aspects. Meanwhile, the modern concept of commercialized spa treatment, sanatoria, and public bathhouses became fashionable for the emerging upper class and urban elites in Beijing, Shanghai, and other eastern coastal cities. In the early twentieth century, Huaqing Palace 華清宮, Mount Li, and the surrounding landscape were thus rebuilt as a landscape maintenance district and hot spring resort for the upper class. But it was also reconstructed with public bathhouses and a public park for the common visitors by new commercial organizations, namely travel agencies, and was represented as an ideological landscape within official narratives. Despite the changes, however, the previous usage of the hot springs and the local bathing customs from late imperial times were never eradicated. The modern reconstruction of Huaqing Hot Springs is closely related to both the transformation of the natural environment on the outskirts of the city and the personal sensory enjoyment and rehabilitation of different social classes. Taking Huaqing Hot Springs as a case study, this article discusses how diverse perceptions and activities from various social actors are involved in the acknowledgement, control, management, and consumption of the natural resources of the hot springs. Moreover, it further reviews the historical processes behind the interactions between hot spring spa treatment, public bathing, and suburban landscape reconstruction in the context of daily life within the urban transformation that was taking place in modern China.
Keywords: hot springs, spa resort, public bathing, urban planning of the
Western Capital, suburban landscape
中外論壇, 2023
筆者曾於 2016 年至 2017 年先後在“中央研究院”歷史語言研究所、香港中文大學歷史系、中國政法大學古 籍所，以專題報告的形式從不同角度發表本文的主要材料與觀點，並在此基礎上修訂成英文於 ... more 筆者曾於 2016 年至 2017 年先後在“中央研究院”歷史語言研究所、香港中文大學歷史系、中國政法大學古 籍所，以專題報告的形式從不同角度發表本文的主要材料與觀點，並在此基礎上修訂成英文於 2017 年正式 在 Journal of Asian History 雜誌上發表[Fei Huang, “Between Hills and Valleys: Contesting the Bazi Landscape, Society and Environment in Southwestern China (1700–1900)”, Journal of Asian History, 51 (2017) 2, pp.257-282]。 此次翻譯為中文出版，特別感謝趙晶教授玉成以及孫爍的精心翻譯。譯文經過筆者本人審校修訂，並改動 了一些中文慣用的表達方式、增補了部分關鍵史料原文與細節。其中疏漏錯誤之處，概由筆者自己承擔。
T'oung Pao,, 2023
Despite the long-standing interest in hot springs in China, this subject has remained understudie... more Despite the long-standing interest in hot springs in China, this subject has remained understudied. This article explores how the most famous hot springs in China, the Huaqing Hot Springs 華清池 at Mount Li 驪山, were selectively reused and negotiated by different social groups from the tenth to the nineteenth century. It retraces the historical process of reconstructions at the Huaqing Hot Springs by local officials, religious practitioners, literati, and local inhabitants after the Huaqing palaces were abandoned by the Tang central court. In the post-Tang life of the Huaqing Hot Springs, the long-term co-existence of activities between various social classes and across the gender divide are deeply rooted in the local everyday usage of the hot springs. This article reveals multiple transformations within continuity in reimaging and reconstructing the hot springs landscape in Chinese history.
Journal of Asian History, 2023
Knowledge about hot springs can be a key way of understanding how the interrelationship between n... more Knowledge about hot springs can be a key way of understanding how the interrelationship between nature and the human body operates both locally and globally. Based on the historical records from epistemological, geographical, ritual, medical, and literary perspectives, and in the global context of early modern Sino-Western exchanges, this article elaborates on some of the ways in which hot springs have been imagined and reconfigured within China and beyond. Each of these perspectives provides some hints of how knowledge about hot springs has been shaped, transmitted, circulated, and translated through encounters between highly structured forms of knowledge and bodily knowledge articulated by both intellectual elites and non-elite groups locally and globally. These multiple fields of knowledge concerning nature and the human body serve as an important but subtle undercurrent to understandings of customs, health, and pleasure within the everyday life of premodern Chinese society and its environment.
The present-day provinces of southwest China, Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, share a harsh, inhospi... more The present-day provinces of southwest China, Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, share a harsh, inhospitable terrain. Therefore almost all settlements in the Southwest developed on bazi land. Bazi 壩子 is a common term in Southwest China used to refer to the flat, fertile valleys in the interior of mountainous regions. In Yunnan Province there are around 1,800 such valleys, varying in size from a couple to several hundred square kilometers, but they comprise only 6 percent of the total land area. As the only areas suitable to concentrated settlement, wet-rice agriculture and local market centers, the bazi lands form the hubs of interactions between the past and present, the indigenous and the foreign. They are areas in which different groups competed and still vie for power and space in the Southwest.
Bazi lands in northeastern Yunnan between 1700 and 1900 are the subjects of the case study presented in this article. For centuries, the region of present-day northeastern Yunnan, which was rich in mineral resources, had been the political centre of indigenous communities, but eventually it was incorporated in the compass of the Chinese state like other parts of the Southwest. In the eighteenth century, the Qing state eliminated the indigenous chieftaincies and established new government centres in the bazi area, just at a time when, drawn by the flourishing mining business, increasing numbers of Han Chinese migrants from other parts of China were pouring into the area to find work and settle. Following the decline of the mining business in the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century this image of a once bustling region was transformed into a bleak picture of a dilapidated frontier land. The aim of this paper is to rethink how the dynamic relationship between the environment and the various groups was contextualised by the social, economic and cultural conditions in the southwest frontier of late imperial China.
Late Imperial China, Dec 2014
In Dongchuan, now in northeastern Yunnan, the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century overthrew ind... more In Dongchuan, now in northeastern Yunnan, the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century overthrew indigenous regimes to gain control over the area’s rich copper deposits, and then created new cities and landscapes both physically and in literary representations. After Qing officials had built walled cities and established governing institutions, several key local literati-officials identified a set of ten views in the vicinity of the walled city of Dongchuan.
In this lecture Dr Fei HUANG not only will point out the symbolic ideological meaning of civilization in cultural representation of the ten views, but will further explore the landscape in a social process to present the layers of selecting the ten views and how they were experienced locally. Regardless of the actual locations of the ten scenic spots, the descriptions of the ten views follow existing literary conventions, leaving the impression of a “civilized” Han Chinese world in an area that used to be considered a wild frontier region. More importantly, the basis for the selection of the ten views in the context of geographical descriptions in local gazetteers reflects economic interests in the daily life of Dongchuan. In addition, the selection of ten views also drew on an indigenous repertoire of meaning. Presenting the ten views as an imperial landscape therefore was not simply imposed by literati-officials but was part of an ongoing cultural process whereby they used conventional literary formats while engaging with their external surroundings encountered in the eighteenth-century Chinese Southwest frontier.