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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20261109T160000
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SUMMARY:China Humanities Seminar featuring Yunxiao Xiao — Writing on Bamboo and Wood: Text Technologies in Early China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Yunxiao Xiao\, University of Washington \n\n\n\nThis talk explores how written information was organized\, edited\, and transmitted through the ancient media of bamboo and wood. Drawing on excavated manuscripts from the Warring States through the Han\, I examine three practices of bookmaking and information management before the age of paper: 1) designing layouts\, 2) editing and updating legal compilations\, and 3) transmitting literary texts within local scribal communities. \n\n\n\nFirst\, I consider tables and tabular formats\, showing how scribes drew on a repertoire of spatial strategies to organize administrative\, calendrical\, and mathematical information on the two-dimensional writing surface. I then turn to normative legal manuscripts that were physically scraped and rewritten as regulations changed\, revealing statutory texts not as finished records but as objects continually maintained and updated in use. Finally\, I examine correspondences among scribal hands in manuscripts from different tombs and ask what they might reveal about relationships among otherwise anonymous scribes and the local transmission of literary knowledge. \n\n\n\nTogether\, these cases illuminate the interplay between knowledge and media in early China. What we know about the past depends not only on what was written and happened to survive\, but also on how knowledge was materially produced\, organized\, revised\, and transmitted. From legal practice to literary classics\, this talk approaches early Chinese manuscripts as evidence for a broader history of ancient media and information. \n\n\n\nYunxiao Xiao (Ch. 肖芸曉) is a scholar of Chinese literature and cultural history specializing in paleographic texts from the late Warring States and Qin–Han periods. With research interests in epistemological practices and information technologies before the age of paper\, she explores the interplay between knowledge\, people\, and historical media. Her first book project\, The Crafts of the Hidden Hands: Scribal Culture and the Making of Texts in Early China\, examines the ordinary producers and practices behind the formation of Chinese classical knowledge and traces how early written culture in East Asia emerged and evolved. Building on her interest in the history of media\, information\, and technology\, her other projects explore how administrative data and scholarly information were represented\, organized\, controlled\, and manipulated on bamboo and wood in the Qin and Han empires. Before joining the University of Washington\, she earned her PhD from Princeton University (2024) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-featuring-yunxiao-xiao-writing-on-bamboo-and-wood-text-technologies-in-early-china/
LOCATION:Common Room\, 2 Divinity Ave.\, 2 Divinity Ave.\, Cambridge\, Massachusetts\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20261130T160000
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DTSTAMP:20261019T143835Z
CREATED:20260924T183650Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20261019T143835Z
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SUMMARY:China Humanities Seminar featuring Kerstin Storm — Old Age and Aging in Medieval Chinese Poetry
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Kerstin Storm\, University of Münster***Please note the different location for this talk in the series.***Perceptions of old age and aging in so-called traditional China are often reduced to two extremes: on the one hand\, respect for the elderly\, commonly associated with the Confucian cardinal virtue of filial piety\, and on the other the Daoist ideal of longevity. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the cultural and aesthetic conceptualization of the stages of life\, and of old age in particular\, in Chinese literary works. Poetry offers a remarkably diverse range of representations of the aging process. These include\, but are not limited to\, impassionate laments of both physical and mental decline as well as portrayals of perceived tranquility\, wisdom\, serenity\, or joy in later stages of life. This talk examines representations of old age in early medieval Chinese poetry. Moving beyond familiar stereotypes\, it explores the aesthetic variability of poetic responses to aging. By tracing literary traditions\, detecting intertextual connections\, and situating individual representations within their respective literary and historical contexts\, it seeks to illuminate a range of conceptions of\, and attitudes towards\, the later stages of life in early medieval and medieval China. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-featuring-kerstin-storm-old-age-and-aging-in-medieval-chinese-poetry/
LOCATION:CGIS South Room S354\, 1730 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
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