Cultural Production during the Ming-Qing Transition: A Conversation with Professor Lynn Struve

The Ming-Qing transition was an extremely chaotic time in Chinese history. Millions died of warfare, pestilence, or starvation, and millions more were displaced. Yet despite all these issues, this was also a period of cultural production, which has often been overlooked as people focus on the wars, famine, and climate change that pervaded this period. In this episode, I speak with Professor Lynn Struve about the literary pursuits of men and women and the overall intellectual landscape in the Late Ming and the Early Qing

Contributors

Lynn Struve

Lynn Struve is an emeritus professor of history and an emeritus professor of East Asian languages and cultures at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include traditional Chinese history, 17th century political and intellectual history, East-West comparative thought, and Chinese reference and source materials. Over the course of her career, she has published widely, particularly on the period of the Ming-Qing transition, and has received numerous awards. Her representative works include Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws, The Southern Ming, 1644-1662, The Ming-Qing Conflict: A Historiography and Source Guide, and, more recently, The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World, which was recently awarded best overall book in Ming studies published between 2019 and 2022 by the Society for Ming Studies.

Yiming Ha

Yiming Ha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA and his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Credits

Episode no. 18

Release date: March 1, 2024

Recording location: Bloomington, IN/Los Angeles, CA

References compiled by Yiming Ha

Images

A portrait of the Kangxi emperor as a scholar, painted in 1699 when he was forty-five years of age. (Image Source)

An alternative portrait of the Kangxi emperor that Jonathan Spence used for his book on the Kangxi emperor. This portrait shows the pockmarks on his face, a result of his childhood survival of smallpox which devastated the Manchu population. (Image Source)

A portrait of Huang Zongxi (1610-1695), one of the great scholars of the Late Ming and Early Qing. Originally a prominent figure in the Ming loyalist movement, Huang retired from Ming loyalism but also refused to serve the Qing. Nonetheless, Huang made many contributions to scholarship by indirectly accommodating the Qing. (Image Source)

A late 18th/early 19th century portrait of Liu Rushi (1618-1664), one of the most famous courtesans of the 17th century and a prominent female scholar. (Image Source)

Select References

Brook, Timothy. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. 

Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-century China. Stanford University Press, 1994.

Struve, Lynn. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019.

Widmer, Ellen. The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.

Widmer, Ellen. The Inner Quarters and Beyond Women Writers from Ming Through Qing. Leiden: Brill, 2010.