Exploration pack 2 (for both Wednesday and Friday) This week I focused on both the experience of Chinese laborers at the European front during World War 1, and on the Revolutionary movements in China following the collapse of the Qing dynasty. In particular I was struck by the unique experience that many Chinese laborers had […]
I am choosing to pass on this Show and Tell.
This week I focused mainly on the Boxer Rebellion and its characteristics, since it was the main event in the Basic Set this week. What I found most interesting about the Boxer Rebellion was the fact that it was not actually a Rebellion per se, rather this was a label applied to it by Western […]
For this assignment I picked one of the sources I used for my Show and Tell project on the Manchu banner system. This was Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labor. On one of the pages, there is a footnote giving more information on Manchu booi and how they were different from […]
Exploration Pack 2: Migration I thought this particular exploration pack was important because it highlights a phenomenon that is not usually discussed when looking at history, that is diasporic communities migrating to countries that are not in the West. When I think of Chinese migration, I typically think of eastward to the American West, California, […]
Exploration Pack 3 Both readings on the Taiping Rebellion offered a fascinating, albeit disturbing look into civilian life during the Taiping Rebellion. One of the ideas put forward that was most interesting was the psychological impact that comes from seeing corpses everywhere. The death toll of the rebellion was catastrophic, and because entire villages were […]
The Manchu conquest of the Ming dynasty was a result of a mixture of careful planning on the part of the Manchu, corruption and general degeneration of Ming rule and an inability to secure the borders of the empire, and military success on the part of the Manchu, which ushered in the dominion of a […]
Exploration Pack 2 One of the things that I found most fascinating this week was the attitudes that the Europeans had towards the Chinese people and the Chinese empire early on in their contact with them. My understanding of the relationship was that it was always an imperialist, oppressive European presence against a victimized Chinese […]
Exploration Pack 2: Conquest One of the things I found to be most interesting this week was the conflicting claims found in the reading “The Great Fall of China” and the account of the Yangzhou massacre by Wang Xiuchu. Both offer wildly different depictions of the Qing dynasty, which is made doubly interesting by the […]
This week, I thought that the most interesting concept we discussed was the meaning of the word “modern,” and the potential problems that can arise when applying it as a descriptor for nations past and present. The largest issue is that the word “modern” is defined in a Western context, and so while it can […]
