The Making of a Frontier Landscape: The \"Ten Views of Dongchuan\" in 18th century Southwest China

Lecture by Dr Fei HUANG (University of Tübingen)

In Dongchuan, now in northeastern Yunnan, the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century overthrew indigenous regimes to gain control over the area’s rich copper deposits, and then created new cities and landscapes both physically and in literary representations. After Qing officials had built walled cities and established governing institutions, several key local literati-officials identified a set of ten views in the vicinity of the walled city of Dongchuan.

In this lecture Dr Fei HUANG not only will point out the symbolic ideological meaning of civilization in cultural representation of the ten views, but will further explore the landscape in a social process to present the layers of selecting the ten views and how they were experienced locally. Regardless of the actual locations of the ten scenic spots, the descriptions of the ten views follow existing literary conventions, leaving the impression of a “civilized” Han Chinese world in an area that used to be considered a wild frontier region. More importantly, the basis for the selection of the ten views in the context of geographical descriptions in local gazetteers reflects economic interests in the daily life of Dongchuan. In addition, the selection of ten views also drew on an indigenous repertoire of meaning. Presenting the ten views as an imperial landscape therefore was not simply imposed by literati-officials but was part of an ongoing cultural process whereby they used conventional literary formats while engaging with their external surroundings encountered in the eighteenth-century Chinese Southwest frontier.

About the speaker

Fei HUANG was appointed W1 Junior Professor for Chinese History and Society at the Institute of Chinese and Korean Studies of Tübingen University in 2014. She earned her PhD in Chinese Studies at Leiden University in 2012. Before she joined Tübingen, she worked as a Teaching Associate and Visiting Scholar in The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2012-2013). In December 2013, she was selected an Academia Sinica Postdoctoral scholar in Taipei. She was one of only two fellows to be awarded this additional distinguished fellowship in the field of Humanities and Social Science. Her research interests concentrate on landscape studies, material culture studies, historical anthropology, art history and cultural geography in late imperial China.

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