Thammasat University students interested in political science, China, history, sociology, climate change, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 25 April 2024 Zoom webinar on Wet Guangzhou: Seasonality in a Southern Chinese City, 1820s-1880s.

The event, on Thursday, 25 April 2024 at 3:30pm Bangkok time, is organized by the Research Programmes for Lingnan Culture, Institute of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Guangzhou is the capital and largest city of Guangdong province in southern China.

Located on the Pearl River about 120 km north-northwest of Hong Kong and 145 km north of Macau, Guangzhou has a history of over 2,200 years and was a major terminus of the Silk Road.

The port of Guangzhou serves as transportation hub and Guangzhou is one of China’s three largest cities.

For a long time it was the only Chinese port accessible to most foreign traders.

Today, Guangzhou is home to many of China’s most prestigious universities, including Sun Yat-sen University, South China University of Technology, Jinan University, South China Normal University, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou University, Southern Medical University, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou Medical University, and Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine.

The TU Library collection includes many books about different aspects of life in Guangzhou.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13684709

The event webpage explains:

This presentation is part of a larger project on the rhythms of urban life in the southern Chinese port city of Guangzhou (Canton) during the nineteenth century. Analyzing wet-season disasters (flooding and storms), in contrast to dry-season disasters (fires), I hope to convey a sense of the lived experience of city residents and to understand both how life was changing over the course of this transformative century and how observers perceived these changes.

The speaker will be Professor Steven B. Miles, head of the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the editor-in-chief of the journal, Late Imperial China.

Books by Professor Miles are available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

A review of Professor Miles’ book The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century

Guangzhou appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in 2007.  Discussing the Xuehaitang Academy, founded in China to promote studies, it reads in part:

Although the work is centered on one institution in one province, Miles illuminates the multifaceted nature of Chinese academies as well as the transregional dynamics that contributed to the formation of Cantonese elite identity. An ambitious and well-researched foray into local history, Miles’s highly nuanced study alternatively addresses social, literary, cultural, and economic history. The centerpiece of this work is the scholarly and cultural competition between the urban sojourning elites of Guangzhou and the established elites of the Pearl River delta hinterland. Mobility and identity are key to Miles’s reconstruction of the social and cultural history of the Xuehaitang, but his study inevitably references social unrest, foreign imperialism, evidential research (kaozheng), economic commercialization, local self-government, and urban sojourning.

At the heart of the project is the ironic conclusion that, although the Xuehaitang was synonymous with elite identity and “cultural production” in Guangdong, many of the academy’s most prominent scholars were immigrants, or urban sojourners, in Guangzhou. Throughout the book Miles juxtaposes the competing sites of cultural production in Guangzhou and the Pearl River delta hinter land. Though sometimes qualified, the binary of urban, cosmopolitan elites versus the hinterland, insular elites is the recurring touchstone of his argument.

The Introduction acknowledges the importance of the Xuehaitang’s pivotal role in Guangzhou’s emergence as a center for “cultural production” in the nineteenth century while noting the transregional origins of the academy and its early adherents. The founding father of the Xuehaitang, Ruan Yuan (1764-1849), was the Jiangnan-born scholar official and apostle of evidential research who served as Governor of Guangdong (1817?1826). From its inception the academy was a magnet for Guangzhou’s “social upstarts and in-migrants.” Although not denying the centrality of the Xuehaitang, Miles delineates his consistent theme that two broadly defined groups of elites, the upstart sojourners and insular establishment, contested Cantonese cultural identity. He writes:

Through a combination of the credentialing offered by the Xuehaitang and the application of its scholarly and literary tools to the exploration of the local, social upstarts and immigrants who had no recourse to the economic and cultural resources of the established lineages in the delta hinterland managed to gain a near monopoly of elite Cantonese discourse about the local. (P. 17)

Interestingly, these outsiders produced many localist texts, which, Miles notes, “looked very different from the types of texts produced in the hinterland” (p. 19). To outsiders the Xuehaitang scholars’ creation of Cantonese elite identity “came to represent the accomplishment of the entire province of Guangdong” (p. 4) despite the opposition of  more deeply entrenched elites in the Pearl River delta. […]

Conceptually, the work would have benefited if the significance of competing Cantonese elite identities had been presented in a larger historical context. What did the struggle over identity tell us about nineteenth-century China? One also searches in vain for a theoretical framework for understanding competing elite identities. One is reminded of Philip Kuhn’s development, in his classic study of local militias, of a concept of national, provincial, and local elite based on power and prestige. Indeed, Miles provides a brief glimpse of the institutional differences between the Xuehaitang and academies of the hinterland that suggest important distinctions between “hinterland” and urban sojourning elites. The Rulin Academy in Jiujiang, for example, was a quasi-local government in addition to a scholarly academy but it also relied on official patronage. As Miles notes, Ruan Yuan supported the Rulin Academy when he issued a proclamation “effectively barring police, county agents, and most important tax collectors from the academy grounds” (p. 254). It would seem Ruan Yuan had different policies for different segments of the elite.

The Sea of Learning is a substantial contribution to the burgeoning body of local and cultural histories. Steven Miles’s thoroughly researched study illuminates an important arena of competition for elite identity in nineteenth-century China. Miles is to be commended for illuminating the complexity of the Chinese elite who, to varying degrees, were simultaneously scholars, politicians, literati, and entrepreneurs. Not surprisingly, given his effort to examine Chinese elites in full panoply, the endeavor sometimes falls short, but Miles’s work reminds us that identity, cultural production, politics, and economics were tightly interwoven in nineteenth-century China.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)