Thammasat University students interested in China, history, sociology, anthropology, astronomy, astrology, architecture, cosmology, geography, topography, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 10 September Zoom book talk on Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China.
The event, on Tuesday, 10 September 2024 at 8am Bangkok time, is presented by the School of Humanities, the University of Hong Kong (HKU).
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://hku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-Ym6Z02sTG26iR-O1Kq89Q#/registration
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of feng shui.
The event website explains:
Event Details
Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series
Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China
Professor Tristan Brown
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912).
Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines.
Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.
About the Speaker
Tristan G. Brown is assistant professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
With any questions or for further information, students may write to
whip@hku.hk
According to the publisher’s description of Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China,
Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912).
Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines.
Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.
TU students may access this book through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
A review of Assistant Professor Brown’s book posted online earlier this year stated in part:
In Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China, historian Tristan G. Brown breaks new ground by contextualizing fengshui (風水, lit. “wind and water”) in China’s legal landscape during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). Through analyzing numerous fengshui-related judicial cases (including maps) based in Nanbu as well as Ba County, Sichuan Province (the latter now located in Chongqing) and drawing on a wide range of primary materials including archival sources from Beijing and Taipei, he convincingly reveals that fengshui, having been invoked in imperial law for centuries, impacted Qing administrators’ decision-making processes in coping with demographic, social, economic, and political changes. Fengshui played such roles because it was deeply enmeshed in elites’ and commoners’ lives—a reality that became globally recognized when the industrial extraction of resources from the land began to sweep the country at the turn of twentieth century.
Brown’s work is a timely product of a deep dive into China’s local archive wealth, based on his own archival research in Sichuan in the early to mid-2010s. It contributes to the growing academic literature on legal culture in late imperial China along with a thriving trend in local archival research and publishing within Ming-Qing China studies. The significance of this book, however, goes much beyond a regional study of Northern Sichuan (which was at various points during the Qing dynasty some combination of a frontier, a periphery, and a hinterland). Sichuan did not have the highest rates of fengshui litigation in the empire; parts of Jiangnan and southeast China had even higher caseloads. Yet, as Brown points out, Sichuan court records reveal fengshui practices “in real-time,” with locals presenting arguments with the help of litigation masters and geomancers, as well as officials weighing claims against their prior knowledge (p. 16). Brown’s sharpness in capturing these extraordinary conversations, arguments, and debates led him to develop an authentically distinctive approach to fengshui’s history and Chinese law.
Diverging from modernization narratives singularly defined by imperialism, scientism, or materialism, Brown unearths a hitherto neglected, and largely misinterpreted, history of fengshui in late imperial China. Critical toward both Orientalists’ misunderstanding of fengshui as superstition (in contrast to “Western science”) and toward the popular “modernization” narratives of China that view “Confucian traditions” as static or timeless, Brown examines fengshui as “an arena where today’s categories of law, religion, science, and economy seamlessly intersected in China” (p. 191). This insight challenges commonly held binaries such as tradition/modernity, religion/science, superstition/rationality, and culture/nature. He invites scholars to question the conceptual and disciplinary boundaries rooted in Western natural and social sciences. In other words, Brown takes fengshui seriously and asks how Qing history may be read differently when we do so. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)