404: Reshaping Sea and Hinterland: New Perspectives of Imperial China from the Southern Expanse

Organizer(s)

• JL

  Joey Low (he/him/his)

  Brandeis University, United States

Chair(s)

• AC

  Andrew Chittick (he/him/his)

  Eckerd College, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• JL

  Joey Low (he/him/his)

  Brandeis University, United States
• JL

  Jasmin Wai Tan Law (she/her/hers)

  University of California, Los Angeles, United States
• KH

  Kangni Huang (she/her/hers)

  University of Southern California, United States
• JS

  J. Travis Shutz (he/him/his)

  California State University, Los Angeles, United States

Discussant(s)

• 

  Xiaolin Duan (she/her/hers)

  North Carolina State University, United States

A growing trend in scholarship on the early modern southern expanse in China is that rather than being peripheral within the framework of imperial expansion, we should perceive it as globally and translocally connected in multiple networks. This panel offers new insights on southern China through the combined lenses of ocean and borderland, an alternative way of viewing history and literature. Joey Low investigates the economic and political strategies of native officials in the upper Tongking Gulf region, revealing how they collaborated with Cantonese merchants and leveraged the state to maintain transregional power in the early modern period. Jasmin Law repositions Guangdong during the Ming-Qing transition through the lens of local literati conceptualizations, emphasizing its cosmopolitan maritime identity and its role as a hub of local-oceanic knowledge and material exchange. Kangni Huang explores the writings of Yang Shen (1488-1559) during his exile in Yunnan, showcasing how literary texts transformed amorphous borderlands into spaces of historiographical and personal significance. Finally, J. Travis Shutz’s study of Nan’ao Island highlights the cyclical processes of imperial control, illicit trade, and local autonomy, situating South China within overlapping maritime networks that connected East Asia with Southeast Asia and beyond from the Song to Qing dynasties. Together, these papers reconsider South China as a fluid and contested space, where boundaries between land and sea, center and periphery, licit and illicit were constantly negotiated. Ultimately, we argue that the southern expanse featured a local-global connection, where multinodal forces reshaped identity, communications, state building, and port formation.

Presentations:

• Cantonese Collaboration and Native Official Trade in the Early Modern Upper Tongking Gulf Region
  

  Presenting Author: Joey Low (he/him/his) – Brandeis University
• From Littoral Landscapes to Oceanic Worlds: Reimagining Maritime Guangdong in the Ming-Qing Transition
  

  Presenting Author: Jasmin Wai Tan Law (she/her/hers) – University of California, Los Angeles
• Private History in Exile: Yang Shen’s Writings on Yunnan
  

  Presenting Author: Kangni Huang (she/her/hers) – University of Southern California
• Beyond Inner and Outer Harbors: Nan’ao Island as a Secondary Port
  

  Presenting Author: J. Travis Shutz (he/him/his) – California State University, Los Angeles