The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium is pleased to host Yung-chang Tung, Ph.D. candidate of Chinese History at Harvard University for our final spring text reading.

"Fiscal Concerns Behind the Suppression of a Local Cult in the Thirteenth Century"

In early thirteenth-century China, the Song government faced serious fiscal crisis while attempting to support its wars with the Jurchen and Mongol regimes. As the military situation deteriorated, the Song court requested the local governments to exhaust all means to extract resources from the local society. While contemporary historians are aware of the fiscal crisis in the Song dynasty, the ways in which this crisis influenced local society has yet been fully investigated. In this session, the speaker will use one example to show how local officials responded to the financial pressures from the court, and how this financial effort led to further problems in the locality. There will be an introduction focusing on the political and social context of a county, Liyang, which is in southeast China, followed by a close reading of a text about the destruction of a local cult. Together we will decipher the financial concerns in the disguise of religious problems in the local society.

More about the Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC): 

CCCC is a reading group for students and scholars with interest in premodern Sinographic text.

All are welcome, at any level of experience with classical Chinese.

At each session, one participant presents a text in classical Chinese. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, and work together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

Presentations include works of all sorts, from the earliest times to the twentieth century.

No preparation required: all texts will be distributed at the meeting.

contact: eap-guwen@cornell.edu