Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition : East Asia from Ming to Qing

Asian Interactions and Comparisons

by Lynn A. Struve

Time is basic to human consciousness and action, yet paradoxically historians rarely ask how it is understood, manipulated, recorded, or lived. Cataclysmic events in particular disrupt and realign the dynamics of temporality among people. For historians, the temporal effects of such events on large polities such as empires—the power projections of which always involve the dictation of time—are especially significant. This important and intriguing volume is an investigation of precisely such temporal effects, focusing on the northern and eastern regions of the Asian subcontinent in the seventeenth century, when the polity at the core of East Asian civilization, Ming-dynasty China, collapsed and was replaced by the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty. The consequences of this change were far-reaching for the temporal sensibility and historical outlook of not only the Chinese and Manchus, but also peoples directly affected by their respective the Koreans and the Mongols. At the same time, to the southeast in China European missionaries were groping for compromises between the temporal demands of the Confucian and Catholic worlds. Through wholly original research, the six contributors to this volume reveal the evolution of the historical consciousness of the Manchus as their conquest gained momentum; the desperate search of the newly subjected northern Chinese to understand their situation through multiple, intersecting historical analogies; the ritual controversies and ambivalences of temporal notation that ensued among Koreans, at heart loyal to the Ming and inimical to their new overlord, the Manchu-Qing; the subtle but profound changes, reflected in temporal representations, that the Mongols underwent in understanding their own history and culture as partners in the Qing imperium; the adjustments worked out by Chinese Christian converts who needed to live by both the natively traditional and the Dominican liturgical calendars; and, in a peculiar folk practice, the investment of one date with religious significance to commemorate covertly the Ming under Qing rule. With such fascinating, richly documented studies, Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition not only expands our knowledge of a turning point in Asian history, but also suggests how a new perspective on the dynamics of social time in universal time can heighten our understanding of the human condition past and present.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2005

Reviews

[Shelby · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Part 2 is better than part 1.