708: Between the Land and the Word: Place-Making as a Mode of Knowing in Late Imperial China

Organizer(s)

• 

  Jian Zhang (he/him/his)

  University of Michigan, United States

Chair(s)

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  Xiaolin Duan (she/her/hers)

  North Carolina State University, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• 

  Jian Zhang (he/him/his)

  University of Michigan, United States
• 

  Xiaolin Duan (she/her/hers)

  North Carolina State University, United States
• SL

  Sunkyu Lee (she/her/hers)

  KU Leuven, Belgium
• EW

  Eloise Wright (she/her/hers)

  History
  Ashoka University, India

Discussant(s)

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  Ruth Mostern (she/her/hers)

  History
  University of Pittsburgh, United States

Place is not merely a site where knowledge is produced, but a mode of knowing itself. The making of a place—whether through gazetteer entries, ethnographic compilations, city wall maps, or travel reports—consists in inscribing on the surface of the land an identity that makes it possible to configure the surrounding features into a coherent landscape. More than selecting a pre-existing site and describing what is already there, it is a discursive act that renders the physical landscape legible by creating geographic identities and ordering the features brought into relation with those identities. The papers in this panel explore the epistemic practice of place-making in late imperial China. Jian Zhang discusses how compilers of the 1342 gazetteer of Ningbo advanced knowledge of hydraulic structures in the region by investigating the continuous movement of water across county boundaries. Xiaolin Duan reveals that maps and books circulating between Ming China and Spanish Mexico nurtured a transcontinental concept of terroir, with place names encoding knowledge about ecological features, manufacturing techniques, and artistic skills. Sunkyu Lee examines city wall maps (chengtu) from county-level gazetteers of multiple regions in Ming-Qing China to show that while masonry was integrated into the cityscape in response to social, material, and environmental changes, knowledge about this craft of building was woven into urban identity. Finally, Eloise Wright compares official and unofficial writings about Yunnan in the late imperial period to highlight how their contrasting categories of textual selection configured and re-configured knowledge of Yunnan as a "province." Although the cartographic gaze from an imperial center ever flitted over hydraulic structures, productive regions, defensible walls, and remote frontiers, these papers resist the universalist epistemology of that lofty center. Instead, their critical analysis of place-making reveals situated knowledges and creates space for plural ways of knowing—everyday, vernacular, local, and global. This panel thus invites scholars interested in space and place to explore how knowledge is generated through the situated, material, and historically layered conditions of locality.

Presentations:

• A Virtuous Cycle of Water: The Hydrological Turn in the 1342 Gazetteer of Ningbo
  

  Presenting Author: Jian Zhang (he/him/his) – University of Michigan
• Circulating Knowledges: Place Names and Global Imagination in Early Modern Sino-Spanish Exchanges
  

  Presenting Author: Xiaolin Duan (she/her/hers) – North Carolina State University
• Mapping City Walls and Making Urban Space in Ming-Qing China
  

  Presenting Author: Sunkyu Lee (she/her/hers) – KU Leuven
• What Makes a Frontier Province? Genre Questions in the Southwest Borderlands of Late Imperial China
  

  Presenting Author: Eloise Wright (she/her/hers) – Ashoka University