At the turn of the eighteenth century, a polychrome revolution swept over Qing court arts, which saw the number of enamel colors to be applied over a porcelain surface increasing from fewer than ten, to a virtually unlimited amount. Previous research has attributed this phenomen…
In this dissertation, I explore topics related to migration studies, with a focus on Chinese migration, as China has a long history of both domestic and international migration, with China having the third largest diaspora in the world.
This project works to disassemble a tragedy into its parts, both in terms of stagecraft & composition by staging the biography of The Dowager Empress Cixi as an exhibition. This is a text written in lieu of a physical exhibition that could not happen, in preparation for one that…
This dissertation was mainly based upon the Manchu and Chinese criminal archives related to the Qing period Huijiang, a Muslim frontier where the main population were Huiren, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group, collected in the First Historical Archives in Beijing. It discusses how …
During the reign of Yongzheng (r. 1722-1735), the emperor initiated a radical frontier policy to consolidate and transform Yunnan, the province located in the far southwest of China that borders with the Southeast Asian countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. The Qing expansion o…
Defying our usual image of the late Qing as a victim of internal decline and diplomatic ineffectiveness, the empire exhibited surprising rigor in Kham Tibet in its last decade, suppressing monasteries, removing hereditary chieftains and fashioning localities in the image of Chin…
In March of 1872, George Leslie Mackay became the first Canada Presbyterian Missionary to Taiwan. Many have claimed that he was the most successful Protestant missionary of all time. In the twenty-nine years he worked in Northern Taiwan, Mackay oversaw the building of sixty chap…
The banquet music used in the Manchu court of eighteenth-century Qing dynasty China reflects how the Manchus viewed themselves as rulers of a Chinese-majority society. In an effort to explain how and why the Manchus adopted the Chinese traditions of banquet music, the dissertati…
In the imperial court of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), various types of rituals were conducted regularly, and music was an inseparable component of most rituals. The Qing rulers were not Han Chinese, but Manchu, an ethnic group from the northeast. When they assumed rulership, th…
lCang-skya Rol-pa'i-rdo-rje was the highest Buddhist priest at the Qing court during the Qianlong reign (1736-1795). In a period when Qing emperors were engaged in the problems concurrent with territorial expansion, he served as a mediator between the Sino-Manchu court and the T…
This dissertation examines the life of Chankya Rolpai Dorje (Lcang skya rol pa'i rdo rje), an 18th-century Tibetan Buddhist lama who played a pivotal historical role in mid-Qing dynasty Tibetan-Manchu relations. A Tibetanized Mongol from the Kokonor region of today's northwest C…