10.05.2024

Lecture: Chun XU, "The Dujiangyan: Revisiting Chinese History in Maintenance and Repair"

On Tue, May 14, 2014, at 16:00, Dr. Chun XU will talk about "The Dujiangyan: Revisiting Chinese History in Maintenance and Repair"

Colloquium "History and Culture of China" Summer Semester 2024

"The Dujiangyan: Revisiting Chinese History in Maintenance and Repair" by Dr. Chun XU (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)

The Colloquium will be held on 14.05.2024 at 4:15 pm in room 30 of the Department of Chinese and Korean Studies in Tübingen, Wilhelmstraße 133.
You may also attend online via Zoom:
Meeting Link: https://zoom.us/j/94759700186?pwd=eE1rYWJRcFB0SlZ0aGFEN2NHbkoxdz09
Meeting ID: 947 5970 0186
Passcode: 501205

Abstract This talk re-examines the remarkable persistence, across two long millennia, of the Dujiangyan irrigation system, viewing it through the revealing lens of maintenance. This history of technology is based on three reflections: (1) the crucial yet often overlooked role played by successive cohorts of engineers and artisans in ensuring the continuity of the gabion technology; (2) a revisit of the practical function of corvée labor in system upkeep; (3) a technical analysis of the late imperial state's recurrent yet ultimately frustrated ambitions to replace the existing gabion works with masonry structures. By proceeding through this series of reflections, the talk serves to disclose how imperial governance was sustained, and indeed constituted, by provisional and contested interdependencies.
Bio Dr. Xu, Chun 徐淳 is a historian of late imperial China. He received his PhD in 2018 from Heidelberg University. Focusing on agriculture and water control, Chun studies the interplay between technology and political processes in Song, Yuan, and Ming times. His current book project, “Dragons and Commissioners,” is a study of the Ming Empire on the ground in its remotest province of Yunnan in which he explores how the study of technology in a predominantly agrarian society could reformulate perspectives on Ming China as a premodern empire. He is also working on a project that examines the epistemological and technological underpinnings of the eleventh-century reform in Song China.