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Specialist Lecture on Chinese History and Culture (7)

Abstract: During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the relaxation of the Ming sea ban, along with the arrival of the Europeans, generated a multipolar environment in East Asia. It revolved around the intra-Asian exchange centered upon Chinese silk and Japanese silver, and a nascent global flow of New World bullion to China and spices for Western Europe. The situation changed during the mid-seventeenth century amid mounting restrictions on overseas contacts from the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan and the consolidation and militarization of Chinese merchants under the Zheng family. By 1683, when the Qing forced the Zheng to surrender and occupied their bastion of Taiwan, China had achieved naval preeminence in the East Asian sea lanes. Other than a few outposts, the Europeans had largely withdrawn from the area north of island Southeast Asia, which remained under the hegemony of the Dutch East India Company. In 1684, the Qing court legalized private trade and travel abroad, prompting another wave of overseas migration. Authorities in China and across eastern maritime Asia enacted policies that kept the Qing merchants and immigrants separate from the earlier Ming loyalists. Additionally, both groups of Chinese were accorded significant political, economic, and legal privileges. This infrastructure, backed by Qing naval power, paved the way for the “Chinese century” in maritime Asia.

Specialist Lecture on Chinese History and Culture (6)

講座摘要:中國古典詩歌非常善於運用視覺畫面來進行情感表達。在這個時候，視覺畫面就類似一種鏡頭語言，它不需要對白旁白，就能使觀眾理解作者希望表達什麼。講座將選取經典詩作，分析其中的運鏡和剪輯技巧，以及這些鏡頭語言可以激發的心理效果。

Distinguished Lectures on Chinese Culture and Religion (5)

題目: 左江沿岸崖壁上駱越文明的投影——花山岩畫的科技與文化解讀 日期：10月13日 時間：下午4：30 - 6：00 語言：普通話 平臺：騰訊會議（VooV）   按此報名   講座簡介: 世界遺產「左江花山岩畫文化景觀」，綿延105公里，其中最大的單幅岩畫有8000平米。這一遺產有八個謎：何人、何時、出於什麼目的，投入如此巨大的人力物力，在懸崖峭壁之上繪製令人震撼的岩畫群？是用什麼顏料繪製千年不褪色？是怎樣畫上去的？為什麼人的圖像都是蛙形？岩畫中有數百面銅鼓，為什麼？為何這一世界遺產叫「文化景觀」？如今在廣西少數民族地區還有哪些岩畫遺風？

CIHK Day

盼望著，盼望著，新學期來了，金秋的腳步近了。 好朋友們，小夥伴們，暌違許久的香港孔子學院日又！來！啦！   2022年第六屆香港孔子學院日 時間：9月24日（週六）下午3點-5點 地點：PolyU 校園TU201   當日活動有古琴表演、漢服模特秀和宋代點茶小劇場~ 更為現場觀眾提供漢服體驗機會！ 豐富的傳統文化科普，多彩的傳統藝術表演，更有神秘嘉賓——國家級非遺大師空降現場！ 還有，還有… … 我們為大家準備了來自故宮博物館、國家博物館和敦煌博物館的文創美物！當日下午2：30開始入場，前50位報名的來賓可於簽到處抽獎，獎品先到先抽，抽完即止！ 錯過抽獎機會的好朋友也無需遺憾，現場還有香港孔院日主題相框、六藝手持拍照板，請盡情發揮創意，上傳你（您）的靚照，關注並@香港孔子學院的 Facebook或Instagram(cihk_polyu)，就有機會贏取精美禮品！ 還等什麼？！

Distinguished Lectures on Chinese Culture and Religion (4)

Focusing on tensions and links between national formation and international outlooks, this talk shows how classical world visions persist as China’s modernizers and revolutionaries adopted and revised the Western nation-state and cosmopolitanism. The concepts of tianxia (all under heaven) and datong (great harmony) have been updated into outlooks of global harmony that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as strategies of overcoming interstate conflict, national divides, and social fragmentation. The talk will delve into two debates: the embrace of the West vs. aspirations for a common world, and the difference between liberal cosmopolitanism and socialist internationalism.

Distinguished Lectures on Chinese Culture and Religion (3)

Abstract (based on the abstract of Chapter 1) In this CIHK webinar, we will discuss the material conditions of and historical background to the use of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic in writing-mediated brush conversation between literati of Sinitic engaged in cross-border communication within Sinographic East Asia or the Sinographic cosmopolis, which corresponds with today’s China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan (including Okinawa, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom) and Vietnam. Compared with speech as a modality of communication, real-time writing-mediated interaction between talking humans, synchronously face-to-face, seems uncommon. In any society, speaking is premised on one condition: the interlocutors must have at least one shared spoken language at their disposal, but even then, there are circumstances under which speaking is either physically not feasible or socially inappropriate. Could writing function as an alternative modality of communication when speaking is not an option due to the absence of a shared spoken language, as in cross-border communication settings? Whereas real-time writing-mediated face-to-face interaction is rare where a regional lingua franca was known to exist (e.g., Latin and Arabic), there is ample historical evidence of literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic from different parts of Sinographic East Asia conducting ‘silent conversation’, synchronously and interactively in writing mode using brush, ink, and paper. Such a pattern of writing-assisted interaction is still practiced and observable in pen-assisted conversation – pen-talk – between Chinese and Japanese speakers today, thanks to the pragma-linguistic affordance of morphographic, non-phonographic sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters and Japanese kanji). We will outline the historical spread of Classical Chinese or Sinitic texts from the ‘center’ to the ‘peripheries’, and the historical background to the acquisition of literacy in Sinitic by the people there. Their shared knowledge of Sinitic helps explain why, for well over a thousand years until the 1900s, literati from these places were able to speak their mind by engaging in ‘Sinitic brush-talk’ 漢文筆談 in cross-border communication.

Specialist Lecture on Chinese History and Culture (5)

Property and Financial Management of Manchu Imperial Princesses in Qing China, 1617–1911 During the Qing period (1644–1911), the property right of Women who married Manchu imperial family members were protected by Qing laws, but not the one of Manchu imperial princesses. Those Qing imperial princesses did not own full ownership of their property, only occupancy, use, and income rights, but not act of disposition. Their offspring did not have rights to inherit the estate from their mothers. This lecture draws on Qing sources in Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese and focuses on the human dowry of the Qing imperial princesses who married Mongol princes to explore the ownership of their property and how their property were used, managed, and transferred. In the end, this paper will show how the expenditure on patronage of Tibetan Buddhism played an important role in the Qing policies toward the Mongols.

Specialist Lecture on Chinese History and Culture (4)

內容簡介： 有關《穆天子傳》周穆王西行地理的研究多矣，然自古未有定論。本研究以顧頡剛的實據地理與神話地理二重結構為理論框架，結合傳世文獻、出土資料與地理實查資料，重探《穆傳》的地理空間。針對有實據之部的地理，本研究強調以當代資料作為地理重構的依據，並發現其主要以戰國早期的晉南及其鄰近地區為核心。針對神話空間，則著重分析其「理性化」的創作思維及其反映的歷史地理脈絡，包含其領土型態、中國觀、世界觀以及交通地理背景。基於上述的歷史地理重構與分析，本研究進一步探討《穆傳》的體裁、國家主體、成書年代、資料依據、作者與讀者以及文本性質，期許對於這部高度爭議的奇書帶來新的認識。

Specialist Lecture on Chinese History and Culture (3)

Abstract The transformation of literary language from classical Chinese to the vernacular from the late Qing to early Republican period in China had a profound impact on the Chinese women’s literary expressions. This lecture will analyze the vernacular writing on vernacular newspapers in the late Qing Dynasty, the evolution of women’s textbooks, and the generation of gender concepts. Tracing the historical development of women’s education and social customs at different periods, this lecture will examine how the changes in vocabulary, grammar and composition concepts influenced women’s own gendered expressions and the popular ideas of gendered identities in modern China.

Specialist Lecture on Chinese History and Culture (2)

Abstract The Islamic World, the regions where Muslim communities form the majority, stretches from Southeast Asia to North Africa, encompassing a large number of nations and cultures which have been shaped variously by the one faith they share. This is particularly evident in their music: on the one hand, there is a significant controversy surrounding the permissibility of music in Islam, leading some communities to ban music and musical instruments; yet, at the same time, there are many practices in Islam, such as the call to prayer and the recitation of the Qur’an, that have an undeniably musical quality even though they are not nominally called ‘music’; furthermore, we know that most Muslim communities have their own hugely popular musical traditions that animate different public and private occasions, some of which have even attracted a global following for the spirituality that many perceive in them.   In this lecture, we shall explore the idea of ‘Music in the Islamic World’ through understanding the status of music in Islam, surveying music traditions & instruments in different parts of the Islamic world, and exploring their connections and specificities in terms of both the musical contents as well as the social context where music is made. Audio-visual examples will be supplanted by live performance of musical instruments from the Middle East and Central Asia.