The project will address the functional changes of tingbu 亭部 from police and postage to administration of the scattered settlements and hamlets within the commune district. A thorough discussion of the settlement aggregation and living habits in relation with the natural environment and population mobility will uncover more details on the indigenous culture and the living customs of the Linxiang communities. The manuscripts of Wuyi Square reflected that the economic prosperity and population mobility of the Linxiang City, from simply an administrative headquarter to a commercial and political metropolitan city. The project will analyze how Changsha became a consuming center as well as a wholesale market with the influx of population from the hinterland of Xiang River and its neighboring commanderies. The social community of Linxiang city was more complex in the Eastern Han period. Hired workers were the common social group in society. Private waged labors and their families relied on monthly wages for their living. This project will pay attention to the life of labors, such as jiuren 僦人, jinzu 津卒, unregistered people, vagrants, clients and outsiders, who were the major parts of the social groups in Linxiang community. With the concrete cases studies as the examples, this project aims at a comprehensive picture of the social life and the local community of Linxiang people. Project objectives are as follows. 1) To analyze the administrative functions of xiang and ting over li and qiu, and to discuss the settlement aggregation and living habits in relation with the natural environment and population mobility to uncover the indigenous culture and Linxiang living customs. 2) To analyze the impacts of population growth and economic prosperity on social life of the Linxiang community, special focus on monthly labors, unregistered people, vagrants and outsiders of the local society. 3) To evaluate the impacts of water navigation of Xiang River and its tributaries on the commercial growth and population mobility to Linxiang County and Changsha Commandery.

Inspired by work on the history of letter-writing in Europe and America, I would like to explore if the popular participation in letter-writing ultimately changed its character. My hypothesis is as follows: 

At the beginning of the period of letter-writing explosion, letters were dictated by a standard format that had continued from much earlier times. Political revolution challenged the foundations on which those formats had depended, but as in Europe and America, new formats appeared in letter-writing that represented a new social etiquette, and the manuals were used for didactic purposes to impart on letter-writers the new etiquette.

A question that arises where etiquette dictated a medium of expression that was opened to individual expression is how individuality might be expressed, especially in its extreme forms in the expression of intimacy. Chinese letter-writing manuals of the late Qing and Republic left no place for intimacy. Expressions of intimacy were relegated, therefore, to poetry, magazine articles, short essays, and the novels, sometimes published in the form of letters. It might be presumed that intimate letters were indeed written, if only rarely, but their writers would have learned to write them, not from the manuals, but from the popular press.

This project will collect and examine the vast body of letter-writing manuals published in the late Qing and Republic and compare their styles and contents with samples of real-life and published letters. By examining changes in the manuals through time and how they might have corresponded to real-life letters, I shall test the hypothesis as stated.

Just as it appears to build states, war is the only devastating force apart from natural disasters that could bring apocalyptic scenarios to human societies. War terrifies people, but people keep making war. The leaders decide whether or not and where to go to war, but the ordinary soldiers have to do the fighting and endure hardships and sufferings during and after the campaigns. Studying what the ordinary soldiers experienced in the processes of preparing and conducting war will contribute to the study of a wide range of topics in the fields of military, social, and cultural history. While the study of the operation of warfare as well as the daily lives of soldiers and their combat experiences in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome has increasingly expanded in depth and breadth in recent decades, research in similar topics about China still lags far behind. Yet, ancient China is important for its long and continuous history of warfare and also the varied development in certain aspects of war from that in western Eurasia. The Chinese cases therefore offer a trove of information to facilitate our understanding of world history of warfare. This project aims to synthesize historical materials, including received textual and non-textual sources and recent archaeological findings relevant to soldiers, armies, and warfare, to depict facets of the daily operation of military campaigns and fighting experiences of soldiers in early and early medieval China, with a particular focus on the late third century BCE to the sixth century CE. This project also brings together materials of military history from outside China. Based on a comparative perspective, stories from other earlier and contemporary civilizations will provide important insights into the soldiers’ lives in early and early medieval China. While this project will provide references for historians across various fields, as history of war is always a popular genre of reading, it will also interest the general public.

The inquiry will probe how the BPW’s operations aligned environmental development/betterment to the decolonization process in order to support the CG’s aspiration of constructing a modern nation in the lead-in to national independence. Accordingly, the project shall assess the achievements of the BPW in terms of both infrastructure and institution building. In doing this BPW staff will be examined. By researching their education and careers the study will thus reveal Filipino agency in the formation of the soon-to-be independent republic. Additionally, the study will evaluate the influence of President Manuel Quezon. Whilst it is known Quezon sought to promote social justice through, for instance, agrarian reform, new housing schemes, and urban planning projects, little is presently known about the creation and proliferation of his administration’s environmental management strategy. Likewise, by focusing on an important public office, i.e. the BPW, the investigation will uncover in what ways, or not, the CG conformed to the principles of American-styled democracy implanted by the colonial administration from 1916 in preparing Filipinos for self-rule.

The study, in opening a new window to comprehend the American Empire, will present original insights of the association between societal progress, governance by native persons, and environmental management. In focusing upon a relatively unstudied era of the Philippines’ past, and in discussing national initiatives alongside local involvements to develop rural and urban environments, the project will be of interest to scholars interested in Philippine society’s evolution and the development of colonial and new postcolonial capitals in Asia, e.g. Putrajaya (Malaysia), Naypyidaw (Myanmar) and Islamabad (Pakistan).

This project aims at carrying out research in the Chinese modernists’ reading, criticism, translation and reinterpretation of the European war literature from the transcultural and trans-historical perspective respectively. It will focus on three major Chinese modernist “writers-translators-editors,” namely Shi Zhecun, Ye Lingfeng and Dai Wangshu who introduced and translated over 200 works in the European war literature from five countries and in four languages. By examining their criticism and translations, this project will examine how they reinterpret the war literature written by European writers from different political views, including those of humanists and pacifists (e.g. Romain Rolland), socialists (e.g. Henri Barbusse), anti-fascists (e.g. Heinrich Mann), communists (e.g. Rafael Alberti, Pyotr Pavlenko, Yuri Libedinsky) and fellow-traveler writers (e.g. Vsevolod Ivanov). It will also investigate how they use the translation of the war literature to fulfil their purposes in the anti-Japanese resistance movement in Hong Kong, a movement that struggled to survive under the immense pressure from the pro-Japanese “Peace Movement” and the severe political censorship imposed by the British colonial government.

This project will bring forward an important but long-neglected chapter for the study of the Chinese Anti-Japanese war literature and shed new light on the relation between the study and the European ideological trends. It will extend the research scope to cover the Chinese reception of the European war literature and its literary and political ideas by adding the contribution from modernist writers. It will also deepen our understanding of the transcultural and hybrid nature of the Chinese literary modernity in time of war.