Walls and Gates, Windows and Mirrors: Urban Defences, Cultural Memory, and Security Theatre in Song Kaifeng

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-118
Author(s):  
Ari Daniel Levine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Open Approach ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Personal Security ◽  
Southern Song ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
City Walls

Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song (960-1127) dynasty, boasted sophisticated siege defence installations, which were ultimately breached by the Jurchen invasion of 1126-1127. According to both the archaeological and textual evidence, its concentric city walls and militarized gates with barbicans and bastions represented a crucial stage in the militarization of urban form in early-modern China, as well as a more open approach to planning. While Kaifeng’s urban defences evoked imperial majesty and personal security for Northern Song residents who described them, diasporic literati of the Southern Song (1127-1279) invoked the violation of this defensive perimeter as a metonym for the invasion of their lost homeland. The concept of security theatre explains how Northern Song Kaifeng’s city walls and gates could simultaneously function as efficacious siege defence installations and be perceived as symbolic defences.

Stages of Decline

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-378
Author(s):  
Ari Daniel Levine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
The Past ◽  
Southern Song ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Social Trauma ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The City

After the fall of the Northern Song [Formula: see text] (960–1127) capital of Kaifeng [Formula: see text] to Jurchen invaders in 1127, diasporic literati of the Southern Song dynasty [Formula: see text] (1127–1279) recreated and revisited its lost sites through textual commemoration, especially in memorabilia literature (biji [Formula: see text], lit. ‘brush notes’). As knowledge of the city passed from communicative memory into cultural memory, its decline and destruction became the focus of nostalgia and indignation for Yue Ke [Formula: see text] (1183–1234), the author of the Pillar Histories (Ting shi [Formula: see text]), a collection of counter-narratives of Northern Song history that expressed the shared experience of social trauma induced by dynastic collapse. Disconnected from their spatial context and even from historical fact, the city’s memory sites became stages for amoralistic declension narrative, in which the city’s destruction and occupation was assumed to have been instigated by the decadence of the imperial court of the passive Emperor Huizong [Formula: see text] (r. 1100–26) and his ‘nefarious ministers’. The most colourful elements of Yue’s ludic and fantastical narratives became the focus of his indignation, which encouraged his readers to denounce the traitors who had betrayed the empire by inviting the Jurchen invasion. In the Pillar Histories, Yue deployed textual imaginaries of nostalgia as forms of resistance by re-contesting the past events that led to dynastic collapse. By reconstructing the city in the cultural memory of his fellow diasporic literati, Yue was creating a vision of an ideal political, cultural and moral community that once existed at the dynasty’s inception, and might be reconstituted in the future, if and when Song subjects recaptured their lost homeland.

scholarly journals Sites of memory in the Irish landscape? Approaching ogham stones through memory studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1284-1304
Author(s):  
Sarah Künzler
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Archaeological Material ◽  
The World ◽  
Potential Benefits

The nexus between landscape, identity formation(s) and cultural memory has long been of interest to archaeology, cultural geography and various disciplines in the humanities. This article suggests that in medieval and early modern Irish texts, the depiction of monuments addresses precisely this complex relationship. On the basis of close readings of textual evidence and a critical engagement with Pierre Nora’s idea of lieux de mémoire, it will be argued that the cognitive interplay between literary-imagined and archaeological-material monuments enabled the medieval Irish literati to situate themselves within the world they inhabited both spatially and culturally. The article thus contributes substantially to our understanding of the material aspects of social remembrance and advocates the potential benefits of including the extremely rich Irish textual and archaeological sources into broader, interdisciplinary discussions.

Nexus of self-organization: the expansion of collective responsibility networks among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Yiying Pan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Local State ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Regional Diversity ◽  
Labor Relationship ◽  
The City

Abstract This article investigates the collective responsibility organizations among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing, when the city became one of the most important metropolises on the southwest Qing frontier. It also introduces two successive turning points in self-organization that were associated with two different classes of boatmen – skippers and sailors. First, in 1803, skippers gained the authority to institutionalize their organizations through their negotiations with the local state regarding official services and service fees. Second, when similar service and fiscal tensions emerged between skippers and sailors in the mid-nineteenth century, the skippers facilitated and supervised the institutionalization of collective responsibility organizations that were run by the sailors themselves. By contextualizing this expansion of collective responsibility organizations within the multilayered interactions between skippers and sailors, this article proposes that the perspective of interclass networks is crucial for deepening the study of state−society interactions, the capital−labor relationship, as well as the tension between imperial integration and regional diversity in early modern China.

Leading through ritual: Ceremony and emperorship in early modern China

Leadership ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gazi Islam ◽  
Macabe Keliher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Analogical Reasoning ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Historical Case Study ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Structural Aspects ◽  
Institutional Order

Ritual performance is well understood in organizational maintenance. Its role in leadership and processes of change, however, remains understudied. We argue that ritual addresses key challenges in institutionalizing leadership, particularly in fixing the relation between a charismatic leader and formal governance structures. Through a historical case study of the institutionalization of the emperor in Qing China (1636–1912), we argue that the shaping of collective understandings of the new emperor involved structural aspects of ritual that worked through analogical reasoning to internalize the figure of the leader through focusing attention, fixing memory, and emotionally investing members in the leader. We argue that data from the Qing dynasty Board of Rites show that ritual was explicitly designed to model the new institutional order, which Qing state-makers used to establish collective adherence to the emperorship. We further discuss the implications of this case for understanding the symbolic and performative nature of leadership as an institutional process.

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