EIHS Lecture: Broken Bonds: Fugitive Bannermen, Civic virtue, and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China

In 1670, the Kangxi Emperor promulgated the Sacred Edict, a hortatory edict consisting of sixteen apothegms that enjoined his Chinese subjects to observe a variety of Confucian virtues. The Edict was the subject of a vast commentarial literature and was revered as a sacred text right through the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1912. This talk takes a closer look at the long-neglected thirteenth apothegm of the Edict, which admonished against “shielding fugitive bannermen,” and inquires what it can tell us about political loyalty, displaced imperial subjects, and inter-ethnic relations in late imperial China.

Pär Cassel is an associate professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 2006. He is strongly committed to multi-lingual and multi-archival research and is especially interested in historical problems where international relations, jurisprudence, institutional history, and linguistics intersect. He has published on East Asian treaty ports, extraterritoriality and international law in China and Japan, Sino-Japanese relations, Manjuristics, and the history of Sinology. His most recent academic publication explores Confucian responses to Western imperialism and Japan’s policy of “National Seclusion” in the 1830s.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.