Seminars

China’s ancient history and the myths of common ancestors have played a crucial role in shaping contemporary Chinese national identity. This talk examines the revival of ancestral cults—particularly the veneration of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi)—in distinctly new forms in today’s China. It explores key themes such as intangible cultural heritage, religious revival, history-making, the construction of locality, and national identity. Drawing on case studies and fieldwork in Henan, the talk analyzes how local governments and cultural actors strategically brand “Yellow Emperor culture” to engage in interregional heritage competition and craft distinctive local identities. It argues that the resurgence of Yellow Emperor worship—a legendary ancestral figure—has been driven by the forces of nationalism, a grassroots search for tradition, and religious revitalization. This revival also entails the active search for and reinterpretation of historical narratives, contributing to the ongoing construction of history in the present. Ultimately, the talk contends that global heritage discourses offer legitimizing frameworks that enable diverse localities in China to assert their cultural distinctiveness. In doing so, they foster new forms of cultural and religious expression that actively contribute to the construction of national identity in contemporary China

This talk explores how collective action shaped social complexity in two of early China’s prominent late Neolithic centers: Liangzhu and Shijiahe. Both sites, dating to around 5500 BP, achieved large-scale urbanism and undertook extensive public works, yet they diverged significantly in political organization, ritual practice, and elite infrastructure. Drawing on recent archaeological findings, I argue that while Liangzhu reflects a model in which elite control and symbolic monopolies were central to power, Shijiahe presents a more decentralized structure characterized by inclusive ritual practices and minimal elite materialization. By analyzing construction methods, labor organization, and ritual distribution, I suggest that collective action could generate contrasting trajectories of governance and social cohesion. These two cases demonstrate the multilinear nature of social development and highlight how ritual and labor mobilization functioned both as instruments of elite authority and as expressions of communal agency.

The political history of the Spring and Autumn period (722–481 BCE) was marked by two overarching, seemingly inverse trends. On one hand, the hundreds of polities comprising the fragmented multi-state order of the era competed, conquered, and were gradually consolidated into a handful of larger territorial constructs. In that process, powerful, unifying hegemons (five following traditional historiography) successively rose to fill the power vacuum left in the wake of the Zhou royal house’s decline. On the other hand, peering under the veneer we see a picture of increasing disintegration as elite lineages constantly split and segmented into cadet branches that provoked intense intra-state discord often more destructive than the wars between states. In time, the lineage would grow increasingly segregated from the state as the traditional Zhou lineage system broke down. The goal of this seminar is to unpack and explore the ebbs and flows of centripetal and centrifugal impulses involved in these two interdependent trends, and reassess or challenge this narrative of the fundamental shift in the organizational principles of early Chinese state and society in the Spring and Autumn period. The wide range of associated social and political developments of the era will be introduced for discussion through a set of heuristic dichotomies including patriarch-monarch, warrior-soldier, and shaman-bureaucrat. While I will draw as examples mainly on textual and archaeological evidence from the state of Qi, it is hoped that incorporating participants’ expertise on other states, regions, or periods will shed additional light on regional variabilities or alternative processes of socio-political change in early China.

Musical culture serves as a lens through which we can view the vast demographic, religious, social, and political transformations that took place during the Period of Division (220-589 CE). Over these nearly four centuries, diverse musical pieces, theories, instruments, and customs flourished, influenced both by internal non-Han cultures and external channels such as the Silk Road. These changes reshaped musical ensembles, sonority, iconography, and philosophies. At the same time, traditional debates, rooted in the intellectual traditions of dynastic solidification through the cultural pillars of music and ritual, continued in the vein of their Han predecessors. These debates now bore the burden of signaling stability amidst a precarious environment. This lecture will argue that debates over court music extended beyond a mere selection of pieces or ensembles; experts employed music theory to reflect the political ideologies they supported. I will focus on a significant dispute within the Northern Zhou (557-581 CE) regarding the number and arrangement of ritual bells. This debate marked a moment of transformation where the old became new, and the new became old. This discussion is particularly intriguing given the current lack of archaeological evidence of large bells from the Period of Division.

Commonly known as the patriarchal family structure, the aristocratic society of the Western Zhou dynasty was composed of many families that originated from the royal house and the heirs of other early founders. With the increasing discovery of bronze inscriptions and cemeteries, some details have come to contradict what researchers previously understood about the principles governing aristocratic lineages and families. The naming conventions of sons—often referred to and distinguished by Bo, Zhong, Shu, and Ji—did not always correspond to their familial status. This talk will examine the practices of addressing fathers and ancestors in worship, as well as the patterns of lineage cemeteries, to explore the potential variations in lineage structures that supported the royal house and the political arena during the Western Zhou period, alongside its chronological transformations.

This talk, deriving from one chapter of my current book project, examines an innovative mortuary practice developed during the Northern Wei period. Rather than concealing corpses in coffins, which was the predominant way of burying the dead in early China, residents at Northern Wei capital Pingcheng experimented with something unconventional— exposing the body on a funerary bed and placing the bed inside an architectonic chamber. I argue that this new way of burying the dead is a performative enactment of the idealized portraiture of the deceased, functioning as a token of status. I address the issue of materiality in funerary architecture by examining the skeuomorphic transformation from wood to stone as the dominant material to produce the funerary bed-and-chamber set. Lastly, this talk investigates the identities of the tomb occupants. I suggest that this new mortuary practice, which first appeared in a Xianbei woman’s tomb, later became widely adopted by Pingcheng residents of different ethnicities, contributing to forming a shared identity in the capital.

In this talk, drawing on a chapter from my current book project, I argue that a common goal of various philosophies of governance in early China was the elimination of luck and favor (xing 幸). This concern for the elimination of luck was a relatively straightforward statement of a widespread notion of what we might call “justice”: people should get what they deserve. That is, people should not be shown any special favor and their ability to game their luck or curry such favor through various sorts of machinations should be limited to the greatest degree possible. As an ideal, this is not much contested in early sources. How to achieve the ideal was, of course, hotly contested. While we see few texts that openly advertise giving people what they do not deserve, we do see imperial practices and rhetorical gestures that implicitly mark the importance of favor. For the purposes of this talk, I want to focus on the claims that good rule requires the elimination of luck and favor. I also examine the way so-called undeserved favors were institutionalized and the different ways in which people came to think about and criticize these institutions and practices.

Yao, Shun, and Yu have long been revered as the quintessential sage kings, not only in China but also throughout premodern East Asia, including Korea and Japan. This study examines the process by which the cultural memory of these sage kings was established in Shanxi from the Warring States period to the 19th century. Shanxi, known as a historical stage of Yao, Shun, and Yu, preserves the most significant traces of their legacy. I begin by analyzing pre-Qin texts to explore how the cultural memory of Yao, Shun, and Yu emerged in the region. Then, I focus on the historical sites associated with these sage kings as recorded in major geographical texts. This examination will reveal the fluidity of cultural memory, “an ongoing, ever-evolving process of renewed acts of both erasure and remembrance.”

This study identifies two textual strata in the “Zhao shijia” of the Shi ji: the “wo 我 stratum” and the “legendary stratum.” While the “wo stratum” points to the existence of Zhao local historical records, the “legendary stratum” reveals an interpretive framework that guides the chapter's presentation of the Zhao history toward the central concern and anxiety over the succession of lineage and power. The series of prophetic dreams and supernatural encounters that were emplotted in the narrative of Zhao history comprise this “legendary stratum” and point toward a key figure, King Wuling of Zhao, during whose time the Zhao state reached its pinnacle of power and prosperity. Accounts that are clearly fabrications, such as the story of the orphan of Zhao and later prophecies of the decline of the Zhao, show hidden connections to the personal experience of Sima Qian and to possible political dissent and discourses criticizing Emperor Wu of Han. In identifying such fabricated “empty writing” hidden in the chapter's framework of interpretive emplotment, this article aims to offer one way to read the Shi ji's account for the hereditary house of Zhao that follows a coherent pattern on the meta-level of historical narrative.

This talk, based on the manuscript of the same title, examines the artistic tradition of Southwest China in the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 C.E.), with a focus on the geographical area of present-day Sichuan province. The ‘ancient art of Sichuan’ exhibits notable differences from the artistic traditions in other parts of the Han Empire. Pictorial brick tiles, decorated stone sarcophagi and memorial stelae are introduced in the talk to highlight some of the socio-economic, political and cultural influences that illustrate how the Southwest, which, far from being a ‘barbarian’ uncivilized border region as early historiography largely suggests, had a distinct, vibrant and sophisticated regional heritage visibly reflected in its art.

The Warring States and Qin-Han period marked the establishment of the county and commandery system, during which the local administrative centers gradually shifted from counties to commanderies, moving from decentralization to centralization. This talk will examine the changes in the relationship between the central and local authorities and within the regional administration during different stages from the Warring States to the early Han dynasty. It will reveal the time points and political mechanisms behind the formation of phenomena such as the dominance of commanderies, the concentration of power to the county court, the division of county magistrates and prefects, and the allocating of specific duties to officials during the Han dynasty.