Time: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm, Friday, February 16
Location: Room 1197, Buchanan Tower (1873 East Mall, Vancouver)
Speaker: Professor Bruce Rusk (UBC Asian Studies)
Host: UBC Department of History
Event Description:
This paper examines the early maritime power of the early Ming court (ca. 1400–1435) as imagined in early eighteenth century China. Although many records of the voyages of Zheng He and his successors across the southern and western seas were famously destroyed, knowledge of their undertakings and the extent of early-Ming maritime dominance remained widespread throughout the late imperial period. Both historical documents and fictionalized retellings created memories of a distinct mode of imperial power and of the goods that came along with it. These took on new meanings as a novel set of maritime and overland empires became interlocutors and competitors of the Qing state (1644–1911). This study examines how a group of well-known collectible objects, incense burners attributed to the court of the Xuande emperor (r. 1425–35), were reinterpreted as products of imperial capacity to command goods from overseas. A text now commonly used to authenticate the vessels, the Register of Vessels from the Xuande Court, is not a set of official documents from the Xuande reign, as it purports to be, but rather a forgery from about 1730. It invents a new backstory in which ingredients for the vessels’ copper alloy were brought from far-flung lands, making the incense burners, previously seen as simply the products of the court at the stable centre of the realm, into exotica emerging from an expansive imperium in a world of competing empires.
About the Speaker:
Bruce Rusk is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at UBC. He specializes in early modern China, especially the history of classical scholarship and issues of authenticity and authentication in material and textual cultures. He is the author of Critics and Commentators: The Book of Poems as Classic and Literature and recently co-translated, with Christopher Rea, The Book of Swindles by Zhang Yingyu (fl. 1617).