2026-06-26 –, Room 204 PC Desk (Seats 30)
In the early modern period, the intensifying movements of materials, plants, and personnel generated a surge in cross-cultural knowledge making. Rather than viewing these exchanges as seamless transmissions of information, this panel investigates the productive tensions between material realities and their myriad textual representations. We interrogate how geography, botany, and craftsmanship were conceptualized through the lenses of creative imagination, philological traditions, and political visions, which created gaps between textual authority and empirical reality.
Starting from Northeast Asia, Sixiang Wang explores the eighteenth-century Korean shipwreck narrative Records of Drifting Across the Sea (1771), arguing that the “drifting records” function less as documentary accounts than political allegories to envision a specific interstate order. Shifting to botanical exchange, Yijun Wang traces the transmission of citrus varieties and nomenclature across China, Korea, and Japan, revealing how classical textual frameworks and philological traditions often obscure or distorted actual biological specimens in transcultural contexts. Finally, moving from East Asia to Central Asia, Yulian Wu investigates the Qing court’s perception of Hindustan jade and its mythical “water-grinding” technique, illustrating how imaginative interpretations of foreign craft technology served the epistemic purpose of empire-building. Together, this panel moves away from treating historical texts as transparent records of information. Instead, we center our discussion on the opacity and fluidity of transcultural exchanges, treating "misinformation" and "imagination" not as merely errors to be corrected, but as productive sites of inquiry for understanding the politics of knowledge making in early modern Asia.
knowledge making, trans-culture, shipwreck, citrus, jade
Political Tropes and Contrived Scenarios in Korean Shipwreck Narratives: “Drifting Records” as Maritime Allegories in Eighteenth-Century East Asia.
Abstract for Additional Participant 1:Shipwreck records from early modern East Asia illustrate how diverse cultural and social groups navigated linguistic and cultural differences. They offer glimpses into a maritime world beyond the ken of terrestrial states, capturing aspects of the past invisible in traditional, state-centered sources. At first glance, the 1771 Records of Drifting Across the Sea attributed to Chang Hanch'ŏl 張漢喆 (1744-?) appears to do all the above. However, as prior scholarship has noted, the text also includes highly contrived, even "novelistic," episodes. The narrative of a Korean castaway's journey to Japan, Vietnam, and beyond integrates widely circulating tropes about the maritime world. These features cast doubt on its reliability as a documentary account, but, as this paper argues, they suggest the possibility of reading it through the lens of intellectual history—as a political allegory envisioning and even advocating a particular configuration of a morally grounded regional interstate order.
Title for Additional Participant 2:Abrasives or Not: Jade Crafting Technique and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Qing China
Abstract for Additional Participant 2:“Hindustani jade,” recognized by the Qing court as a distinct category of artifacts, was especially admired by the Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799). These objects are known for their highly-polished surfaces and distinctive vegetal motifs. The emperor’s fascination with Hindustani jade was closely entangled with his belief in a superior “water-grinding” technique, which he considered more advanced than the sand-grinding methods used at the Qing court. Yet this technology appears to have been largely mythical. Situating this belief within actual jade-making practices in the Qing, this study uncovers the uncertainties and misunderstandings embedded in cross-cultural exchange. It asks how knowledge of Hindustani jade production was constructed, transmitted, and distorted across political boundaries. By examining nephrite craftsmanship, the paper highlights the Qing court’s fluid understanding of Hindustan, a region bordering its new frontier of Xinjiang, and illuminates the epistemic and material complexities of empire-building.
Title for Additional Participant 3:Dongting Orange in Jeju: Citrus Knowledge Across Borders in Early Modern East Asia
Abstract for Additional Participant 3:Jeju Island, as the Korean peninsula’s citrus production center, played a central role in East Asian citrus exchange. Chinese varieties introduced to Jeju became tributary items sent to the capital in the north, while Jeju varieties spread to Japan. Meanwhile, exiled yangban scholars wrote about citrus through the lens of Tang poetry and Song dynasty botanical texts, and Japanese honzōgaku scholars likewise classified Choson citrus using Chinese classics, creating layers of textual mediation that obscured botanical realities. Through the case study of the Dongting orange, this article examines the gap between book knowledge and physical specimens, asking whether scholars privileged classical authority over farmers' empirical expertise and whether commercial branding drove naming practices. This article aims to investigate the risks of reconstructing plant history from textual sources and the politics of knowledge production in transcultural contexts.
Title for Additional Participant 4:Jung Lee will serve as the discussant and chair of the panel
Yijun Wang is a historian of early modern China. Her research interests include history of technology, material culture, and gender. She received her BA from Tsinghua University (2010) and her MA (2015) and PhD (2019) from Columbia University. She joined the Department of History at NYU in 2019.
Wang's forthcoming book, The Tin Centuries: Technology and Statecraft in Qing China (University of Washington Press, 2026), tells the story of how a mundane metal linked miners and officials to both global capitalism and an emerging technocratic state. She is currently working on a new project on the long-durée global history of oranges centered on East Asia. The project offers a perspective for understanding plants, insects, and landscapes that became entangled with humans long before industrial agriculture, revealing patterns of smallholder agriculture, local knowledge, political economy, and human-nonhuman relationships that industrial monoculture has obscured.
forthcoming
forthcoming
forthcoming