(See English below)

Am 20. November 2025 ab 18 Uhr wird Prof. Joan Judge (York University) in einem Onlinevortrag mit dem Titel “New Conceptions: Modes of Knowing in Chinese Encyclopedias for Everyday Life” neue Perspektiven auf die alltägliche Nutzung medizinischer Praktiken im vormodernen China präsentieren. Neben gedruckten Materialien werden auch Handschriften aus der Sammlung Unschuld berücksichtigt.

Scholars have debated the epistemic status of the Comprehensive Compendia of Myriad Treasures (wanbao quanshu  萬寶全書), a genre of daily-use texts widely reproduced in China from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. This presentation seeks to deepen our understanding of both the content and the potential readership for these texts in the late imperial and Republican Chinese contexts. It does so by engaging in a close and contextualized examination of one section of the compendia that remained remarkably stable over the course of this period, the section on “Pregnancy” (Zhongzi men 種子門).

I first probe the sources for this section in an effort to determine the register of knowledge that it reproduced. This requires unraveling a complex amalgam of what could be characterized as works on bedchamber arts on the one hand, and scholarly medical treatises on the other. I then examine the different components of the section: its crude illustrations and mnemonic verses which both describe the development of the embryo, together with numerical calculations for determining the health and sex of the fetus, and recipes for managing the various ailments that might afflict the gestating woman.

Throughout this analysis, I use intratextual methods to attempt to determine who the potential users of the text might have been: who, for example, would have been best served by the illustrations, the poems, the recipes, or a combination of them. I will also use intertextual methods to search for the audience for the “Zhongzi men.” Here I will examine a hand-written gynecological manuscript from the Unschuld Collection that copied the contents of the section almost verbatim. This manuscript offers some sense of who read and valued the material on “Gestation” in the myriad treasures enough to use it as an authoritative source.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: [email protected].

Der Vortrag wird via Webex gestreamt. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem X-Account, Mastodon und BlueSky an.

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On 20 November 2025 from 6 pm, Prof. Joan Judge (York University) will  present an online lecture entitled ‘New Conceptions: Modes of Knowing in Chinese Encyclopedias for Everyday Life’ providing new perspectives on the everyday medical practices in pre-modern China. Besides printed materials manuscripts from the Unschuld Collection will also be considered.

Scholars have debated the epistemic status of the Comprehensive Compendia of Myriad Treasures (Wanbao quanshu  萬寶全書), a genre of daily-use texts widely reproduced in China from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. This presentation seeks to deepen our understanding of both the content and the potential readership for these texts in the late imperial and Republican Chinese contexts. It does so by engaging in a close and contextualized examination of one section of the compendia that remained remarkably stable over the course of this period, the section on “Pregnancy” (Zhongzi men 種子門).

I first probe the sources for this section in an effort to determine the register of knowledge that it reproduced. This requires unraveling a complex amalgam of what could be characterized as works on bedchamber arts on the one hand, and scholarly medical treatises on the other. I then examine the different components of the section: its crude illustrations and mnemonic verses which both describe the development of the embryo, together with numerical calculations for determining the health and sex of the fetus, and recipes for managing the various ailments that might afflict the gestating woman.

Throughout this analysis, I use intratextual methods to attempt to determine who the potential users of the text might have been: who, for example, would have been best served by the illustrations, the poems, the recipes, or a combination of them. I will also use intertextual methods to search for the audience for the “Zhongzi men.” Here I will examine a hand-written gynecological manuscript from the Unschuld Collection that copied the contents of the section almost verbatim. This manuscript offers some sense of who read and valued the material on “Gestation” in the myriad treasures enough to use it as an authoritative source.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: [email protected].

The lecture will also be streamed via Webex. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on X, Mastodon and BlueSky.

(See English below)

Frau Prof. Elisabeth Kaske (Universität Leipzig) wird uns am 27. März 2025 ab 18 Uhr eines ihrer aktuellen Forschungsthemen unter dem Titel “The plight of expectant officials through the lens of the daily Shenbao” im Rahmen eines neuen CrossAsia Talk vorstellen. Ihr Vortrag untersucht, wie die Shanghaier Zeitung Shenbao die prekäre Situation der “Erwartungsbeamten der späten Qing-Zeit kommentierte – ihre zunehmende Zahl durch den verkauf von Amtstiteln, ihre oft unsichere Beschäftigung und die wachsende Kritik an diesem System. Diese Analyse stützt Frau Kaske auf die digitale Auswertung der Shenbao-Archive und die damit verbundenen methodischen Herausforderungen.

State bureaucrats became an object of ridicule in many literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, think of Gogol or Kafka or Li Boyuan’s Officialdom Exposed. However, they are not normally an object of compassion. This talk explores how the Shanghai daily newspaper Shenbao treated a very specific group of officials, namely the expectant officials of late Qing China.
Their numbers had become inflated by the widespread sale of official rank since the 1850s. Although they sported official titles like “magistrate” or “prefect” or “circuit intendant,” their employment situation was often precarious, with the luckier ones employed in newly established provincial bureaus. By the early 1900s, this system of parallel bureaucracies became increasingly seen as an aberration, as one commentator put it: “Foreigner are telling jokes that talent in China is defined exclusively as ‘expectant circuit intendant’. When I heard this, it makes me sweat.” (Shenbao 1907/02/22)
Wang Juan has argued that ridicule of the officialdom was a product of the tabloid press which only emerged after the failed reform movement of 1898. Before the disaster of defeat in the Sino-Japanese War gave rise to a public sphere in the late 1890s, Shenbao was (almost) the only Chinese language newspaper that commented publicly on government affairs. What was the stance of the newspaper towards the problem of expectant officials? When was it recognized as a problem? What were the solutions? When and how did a problem-solving attitude shift to ridicule and exasperation?
I have used Shenbao to gauge the changing perception of the expectant officials through almost forty years of Shenbao publishing from 1872 to 1911. Shenbao is entirely digitized. CrossAsia currently holds two versions of the Shenbao corpus. In addition, I have used the HistText corpus established by Christian Henriot and his team. However, the use of these corpuses poses methodological problems. The search “expectant official” yields a huge amount of results. Moreover, we need to distinguish journalistic comment from the memorials collected in the reprints of the Peking Gazette and from news items, which in all of these corpuses cannot be entirely mechanized. This exploratory talk from the perspective of a user of these corpuses will discuss the problems, possible solutions and tentative results.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: [email protected].

Der Vortrag wird darüber hinaus via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem X-Account an.

—

Prof. Elisabeth Kaske (Leipzig University) will present one of her current research topics entitled ‘The plight of expectant officials through the lens of the daily Shenbao’ in a new CrossAsia Talk on 27 March 2025 from 6 pm. Her talk will examine how the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao commented on the precarious situation of the ‘expectant officials of the late Qing period – their increasing numbers through the sale of official titles, their often insecure employment and the growing criticism of this system. Ms Kaske bases this analysis on the digital analysis of the Shenbao archives and the methodological challenges associated with it.

State bureaucrats became an object of ridicule in many literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, think of Gogol or Kafka or Li Boyuan’s Officialdom Exposed. However, they are not normally an object of compassion. This talk explores how the Shanghai daily newspaper Shenbao treated a very specific group of officials, namely the expectant officials of late Qing China.
Their numbers had become inflated by the widespread sale of official rank since the 1850s. Although they sported official titles like “magistrate” or “prefect” or “circuit intendant,” their employment situation was often precarious, with the luckier ones employed in newly established provincial bureaus. By the early 1900s, this system of parallel bureaucracies became increasingly seen as an aberration, as one commentator put it: “Foreigner are telling jokes that talent in China is defined exclusively as ‘expectant circuit intendant’. When I heard this, it makes me sweat.” (Shenbao 1907/02/22)
Wang Juan has argued that ridicule of the officialdom was a product of the tabloid press which only emerged after the failed reform movement of 1898. Before the disaster of defeat in the Sino-Japanese War gave rise to a public sphere in the late 1890s, Shenbao was (almost) the only Chinese language newspaper that commented publicly on government affairs. What was the stance of the newspaper towards the problem of expectant officials? When was it recognized as a problem? What were the solutions? When and how did a problem-solving attitude shift to ridicule and exasperation?
I have used Shenbao to gauge the changing perception of the expectant officials through almost forty years of Shenbao publishing from 1872 to 1911. Shenbao is entirely digitized. CrossAsia currently holds two versions of the Shenbao corpus. In addition, I have used the HistText corpus established by Christian Henriot and his team. However, the use of these corpuses poses methodological problems. The search “expectant official” yields a huge amount of results. Moreover, we need to distinguish journalistic comment from the memorials collected in the reprints of the Peking Gazette and from news items, which in all of these corpuses cannot be entirely mechanized. This exploratory talk from the perspective of a user of these corpuses will discuss the problems, possible solutions and tentative results.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: [email protected].

The lecture will also be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on X.

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.